The Tree In Changing Light Page 8

  Simple to state the bright idea in complete form to our old friend and mentor, Professor Maurie Weinberg: he would hang his backpack in a tree and return the next day to find if it was still there. Once tested, inescapable, implications would follow. What a lost diamond the idea was, a chip of eternity shining.

  ‘Backpack?’ asked Weinberg querulously from under his wild eyebrows.

  Burton thrust the tattered object across the professor’s desk.

  ‘This is all very well,’ said Weinberg. ‘But it’s about your health, mate.’

  ‘My health!’

  Weinberg wasn’t prepared for the energetic way Burton leapt from the chair, a grin of self-justification slitting his taut, narrow face, and almost joyfully held his left wrist with the fingers of his right hand timing his pulse.

  ‘Feel it!’ Burton triumphantly cried. And so Weinberg felt Burton’s pulse rate, and yes, it was amazingly slow. ‘Fit as a fiddle,’ Burton cried, and indeed when the professor put his hand on his colleague’s shoulder he felt muscular strength and hardness of a rare sort. All the interior tautness Burton had developed over the years seemed to have layered itself and flowed outwards developing him physically, while ordinary understanding retreated inside him to the smallness of a nut.

  When Weinberg conveyed to Burton the results of a Senate sub-committee ruling, standing him down, he asked Burton to hand in his door swipe card and to sign forms settling a twelve month leave of absence. ‘A monthly doctor’s report,’ suggested Weinberg, ‘might be useful.’ This was a false hope, of course, as Weinberg had already begun filling Burton’s post and discussing pensioning-off requirements with Sophie, who told him about Burton attacking her Tupperware containers without re-heating them, sometimes spooning them up while they were still half frozen.

  My understanding of our old friend was narrowing fast. Burton strode through Randwick side streets avoiding his usual zig-zag of careful routing. At his back I could feel his life rolling up like a carpet going into storage. Urgency and excitement shook from him in waves, evident in his loping jog, his wild arms, his jerky head movements. He climbed fences and short-cutted through yards. The idea waited for him at the park centre, surrounded by a kind of glimmering, fluttering edge. It was now something seen in the eye as much as caught in the mind.

  And now it is evening, twilight, phantasmal, as I picture Burton climbing the old fig tree to string his backpack from a branch. He finds it remarkable the way the sights and sounds of the world spread under him, dissolving dividing lines without any mental consideration needed. His intention this first night has been to hang his pack and get home before dark. But the interest and fulfilment is extraordinary and he reclines on a great branch, one leg propped up loafingly as he absorbs the changes. A cone of light comes around through the trees and flounces across the grass, then leaps into adjoining trees, hovers, drops to the ground and exploratively shrinks away. After ten minutes it comes around again. The light shines from a small truck that circles the drive but finally loses interest. Burton sees figures carrying sacks walking purposefully through the dark and disappearing under trees, and he understands them as fellow spirits, outside theories and paradigms, as souls sifting their priorities in gifted splendour. Then he feels it is safe to get down. It is wonderful in the park at night walking through smells of dampness and hearing nightbirds splash in the ponds and shriek in the paperbark trees. Burton feels his footfalls rippling out through this fresh new world. A kind of rumbling border surrounds the acreage—the whole of the city generating conflict and interplay, burning electricity oblivious to the meaning of waste. Meantime from inside the park a bubble of peace rises into the clear, cool sky.

  Burton is happy naming simple things as they make grabs for his attention. Leaf. Dog. Possum. Rat. Euphorically he dances on the damp asphalt until he reaches the Woollahra gates. There he turns back and looks in under the trees and smiles to himself remembering the contents of his pack. The book of Leonard Cohen lyrics, all old half-grasped feeling and melody. Nibbles of nuts. Keys. Money. Credit cards. He barely understands their function any more, except that by forfeiting them to the night he makes a bargain, and he is no longer ours.

  ‘I started reciting “Deep Well”, the lines where spirit

  trees writhed in cool white limbs and budgerigar …’

  I SEE the fettlers’ train snaking through the sandhills. The iron tracks straighten, the train gathers speed entrancing a man who hangs from the rattling window frame going farther with each jump of the rails into his dream of Australia, with a sense of always returning.

  He can’t let go adjectives from his mind—the red-purpled land, the blood-deep desert—the red fire beetles winking from the firebox as day goes down and the train goes racing for the dark mountains across the desert floor.

  Bearded figures, Italian prisoners of war, stand up from the rails and get out of the way. Ranked beside the train they call out greetings. The man leans out shouting, Come sta! And the blurred faces call back, Bene! Bene! And he looks back at them receding, filled with emotion at their shared exile and the way the desert receives them.

  He leaves the railway camp making emotional farewells to the boozers and brawlers sharing his loneliness—getting away early in cold starlight, out to the road which recedes in perspective, and where the looped wires of the overland telegraph line are highlighted before the burnt-red coming day. His heart is raked by the cry of black cockatoos. He longs for words of barbarous beauty equivalent to the bird calls. A tall, strong-shouldered man with a mop of Shelleyan hair, eyes rolling like a confused stallion’s, with a swaying gait, he was trained to the saddle in stock camps since boyhood and in boyhood was taken by the ringers in those camps and thrown on a blanket and raped.

  Far north, he wakes in a shack on the banks of the Roper River, props himself on an elbow and lets morning light fill his head through gaps in the walls. Flame of blossom strikes him, crimson flowers of mistletoe falling like a woman’s hair—but he asks, was ever woman as beautiful as this gum, standing with smooth white limbs against the pure opal sky?

  At night the tree is a dark cloud and he listens to cicadas drumming. She is the girl of a scattered tribe, the dark cloud holding a secret of the land. She is one of the people he sees, and humbly bows to, his mortal vision so intense it would drag him into another state of being if he wasn’t a human being and thus held like a spirit in a rock.

  They are tall, long-haired visitors in their own country standing off and holding spears. He sees them from the windows of the workers’ train; sees them in a wrecked homestead where they providentially find shelter from the wind, their campfire burning like a star at rest among ruins of the fallen stone. He wants to find his own country as they do when they come in and spread their mission blankets on the ground beneath the dark acacia and bauhinia trees, surrounded by children and dogs, carrying dilly-bags and bundles of possessions tied up in strips of some old coloured dress. He wants, and he longs, and he craves: but he cannot have what they have in smouldering ash and fume behind the trees, because the thin-grassed ridges of their land are their home wherever they camp, but can be his only in passing passion.

  By the riverbank and around the lagoon his words are leaves from the paperbark trees falling on water. Words are his join between what is not, and what can never be. When sunlight enters his shack in the morning it falls across his bed in the pattern of fig and palm leaves. The sun, he says, won’t grant him rest. His feelings tempt by becoming half mythological, appearing in recurrent shapes—birds, shadows, stars, fires, trees—exciting him and wrenching him into love which is always heightened, and gaining him a certain celebrity and notoriety when he comes down to Adelaide like a wild man, a snorting primitive, one who has got there before the rest. But never mind that.

  As yet unapproachable hills rise out of the dawn. Anthills stand ever away in the scrub and the dry grass. Brumbies come out of the purple ranges and feed in the reeds of the billabong where Birwain mourned Nerida
, dived in and was changed to reeds. Would that he could be changed to reeds and spears of reeds, he roars, that fringe the lilies opening far out among their floating leaves!

  Everything he witnesses has a moment of perfection: the tea-tree petals slipping into his billy-can as he dips, and say, for example, a wondrous commingling of birdsong at dawn and the vague forms of trees filling the opening of his tent. One bird keeps singing, the rain of the rest ceases and the one voice of all sings purely on, but sings in ending. This never happens again, though he camps in the same place—everything happens with such perfection and then is celebrated and then mourned. His verbs pierce, his nouns hammer, his adverbs splash the brow, his adjectives pour their red, vermilion, and their crimson flush. Look where it takes him. All comes down to boots and shirts and hat flung on the floor, telling their tale of jobs, unrest, and change.

  But he makes a prayer: morning so beautiful that the breathing trees spread their boughs against the moving sea in adoration.

  Then he is back in the siding shed transfixed by stars, and the train comes with its blinding light. Nailed boots disturb his meditation. Into the day with the birds talking into his ears he goes, curlew, wagtail, lorikeet, thrush and wren his outriders.

  But mostly it’s the budgerigars that he follows, those small parrots no bigger than a newborn baby’s fist, hundreds to a flock, thousands, tens of thousands and then millions darkening the sky. They capture and mirror the torments of his mind, the unfinished and seeking self-taught brain so elegiac and overactive. They come in a flash, particled, as he sees them, throated with a shrill fierce cry, writhing and deployed in banners of bird-smoke and streaming into the grey mulga scrub and then soaring as if from a blaze of fire. They come into the trees at Deep Well, into the trees he calls spirit-trees alive with birds clustering them—Deep Well where the fettlers’ car travelled towards the cool blue rising wave that was the Ooraminna Range, where, choosing to be a fettler, he worked to lay red gum sleepers, lined and spiked the rails with adze and hammer, shovel and bar.

  He was past sixty the time I met him. I was in my twenties. He was the poet, leonine, sitting with his big white dog and saying nothing; fidgety, self-conscious, bursting with ego and feigning indifference. I could see it in the way he breathed, held himself, and almost snorted with self-willed invisibility and frightened me with his self-importance.

  I had heard he was foolish and made difficulties, lived in his feelings too much, exploded. But when I spoke to him he stood and opened his hands with ease and acceptance, slouched a little into the storytelling mode of the country as I struggled to say what his writing meant to me. I started reciting ‘Deep Well’, lines where the spirit trees writhed in cool white limbs and budgerigar, and it fell away into a mumble, I got the words wrong—but did it matter? As I spoke my praise he opened like a desert flower and uncrinkled a thousand curious petals.

  ‘Her dejection was so deep it became a style of wit, as when

  she saw a beautiful tree as a living ghost of death …’

  LYING AWAKE at night she heard the whistle of a train travelling north. It was wartime and the trains were shrouded, loaded with guns. Through a dream of orchards they made a disturbing animal cry.

  She listened as the black frost closed in, the walls creaked, the fire making the only warmth. Outside there was southern weather blowing the trees all one way to her. The hard inquiring wind struck to the bone and whined division.

  Except how hardy trees were in Australia, how suited to what was spiritually strange, how beautiful in their hidden statements! Low trees, blue-leaved and olive, on outcropping granite; a clean, lean, hungry country.

  She came from a wealthy landowning family. Their holdings spread through two states with boundaries superimposed on a country of ghosts. The song was gone, the dance was secret with the dead dancers, the hunters were gone, the painted bodies a dream. That was how she saw it, passing through on horseback. Her grandfather had surprised a painted warrior standing at the edge of a forest. Just as far back was old Dan spinning stories into a blanket against the winter.

  The road beneath the giant original trees swept on and would not wait.

  When she saw a First War soldier’s farm a cruel blessing met her eyes. The soldier asked for nothing but the luck to live. But every attempt to cultivate was a silent scream. The ploughland vapoured with the dust of dreams.

  That man was a dreamer and the land was poor. His eyes let the whole gold day pass in a stare, walking the turning furrow. The love she saw in him affected her, though. It was between a man with searching eyes and a woman whose body answered to his arms. It was between the passing light and the enduring earth.

  She was half spirit already, but rooted in obdurate reality. A brand of failure and a brand of ecstasy shaped her alphabet. Standing in the night, she said, we are like a tree—every leaf a star.

  When the dreaming soldier and his wife were gone the trees were still there. They held their arms up to the light.

  Her pessimism was the humility of the seed. Beauty gilded her dismay. ‘Come back to the kind flesh, to love and simple sight. Let us forget awhile that we create the night.’ Soon enough we would turn to minerals, crumble to ash. It was a dour thought expressed at a time of birth and new life.

  Her dejection was so deep it became a style of wit, as when she saw a beautiful tree as a living ghost of death.

  I remember how she walked in old age. Not very far, riddled with too much knowledge of what she would find when she got there, yet stolidly hopeful—as if there was light remaining below the horizon, and if she could get a little closer she could bring it up once more with a disparaging sigh.

  ‘Where’s home, Ulysses? Cuckolded by lewd time he never found again the girl he sailed from, but at his fireside met the islands waiting, and died there, twice a stranger.’

  After the war she was hauled back from those big statements, back to the cell, the protein, the biochemical chain of which she was part. God walked through all her ages, but here she was a young woman again, passionate and afraid. A child grew from the seed she held in her. She was the earth, the root, the stem, the link.

  Life began in darkness; eternity beckoned with images born in darkness. It was a faith she expressed as darkness raged like fire, spilling out life that would one day crumble and be gone back into the leafless, tongueless realm of rebirth.

  A tree grew from a rocky crevice. Out of the torn earth’s mouth came the old cry of praise. So whatever the tree was, counted. Whatever the bird was, was perfect in the bird.

  Poets were born with a stone in their hands, staring and listening until they died still holding it, leaving their words escaping it.

  She was torn and beleaguered by people trying to turn her into the ways of other people. She longed to fuse her passions into one clear stone, and be simple to herself as the bird was to the bird.

  The natural history of the earth sounded a deep gong against the vanity of existence, and she saw our faces drowning in the river. She held the invisible wand, and could not save us. To know us turned to death, and yet not save us. Only to cry to us and not to save us. Knowing that no-one but ourselves could save us—that was the wound, more than the wound anyone could deal her.

  She moved through a countryside of ringbarked trees and bare hills scoured with erosion gullies. These were the hills her father stripped, crouched like shoulders naked and abandoned. She drank from the scant creeks and ate sour cherries from abandoned trees.

  It was too painful and she dreamed of the wounded hills bandaged in snow. She willed her thoughts to stand like trees after the departure of the last leaf and the last bird.

  Unexpectedly up through a wrecked landscape ran a boy with a rifle and a black dog running behind. His heart foretold a rainbow. The boy believed he could do anything, break branches, swim rivers, outstare spiders until the rain came down in mattocks. He caught the rainbow in his hands, hung it on his shoulder, and made his way home.

  Whatever creat
ed the world would not change until time was done, the white-ant would love the tree, and the strangler-fig had a woman’s arms.

  After she named all the trees in the forest and gathered the flowers she still reached for the one truth from which they all grew. Getting a medical reprieve of some kind she rejoiced in the grey city streets, and said, you with your mask of false smiles, you smelling of facts and factories, you watch out. One crack in a wall can spread, one seed can grow.

  On the track down from her house to the river she set marker pegs on a route where human footsteps would do least damage. Her visitors went carefully, feeling themselves accomplices in the devastation of the earth.

  She walked along clutching a stick, striking the earth now and again like a conductor just a moment behind the orchestra, or like a composer whose notes have assembled all in front of her.

  ‘Here were the essentials we carried with us to Sheep

  Camp from the storage room at Jeremy’s farm, starting a

  new phase of life …’

  ARRIVED IN the evening with the car chaotically packed to the limit. Edged through the lower gate. Then up the ridge to the camping saddle at eight hundred metres, tent pitched just on dark. Shabbat candles and whisky. The blessings. Seven kangaroos watching. Half moon through the tent flap later.

  Watched the candles burn down—blinked awake as they guttered—came awake again and they were black, smoky. Sparks from the campfire drifted up. Away below was the inky lake of night-time Australia. Rolled over and rolled back into sleep.

  Misty morning. Wombat trudging the fenceline, horny-skinned as an old dog—mauled, tufted, dozy, moving in lumbering bounds as it got away and sheltered under a low tussock. ‘It’s all right, old timer. Stay,’ and I found myself down on my knees, elbows in the dirt, imploring.