Bliss (42 page)

Clive was there wearing, as usual, nothing but his boots. Richard was there, and Dani. Assorted children were sent outside occasionally where they could be seen squatting around the dead man. No meeting had been called. The gathering was prompted by the mysterious workings of the bush telegraph.

'What does he know about trees anyway?' Honey Barbara said to Daze. 'He doesn't know anything. You don't know him like I know him. He's only into saving his neck. He doesn't believe in anything.'

Daze didn't say anything, which irritated her even more.

'He knows good stories,' Paul Bees said, 'that's the point.'

'You call yourself an anarchist!' she said to her father. 'You people will follow anyone. You're all so bored that when someone new comes along you practically rape them. So the man's got nice stories. They're not his stories anyway. They're his father's. He even stole his
stories.'

'I don't see that that matters,' Richard said.

'I think,' Dani said, 'that it's O.K., so long as he
wants
to tell a story.'

Honey Barbara groaned quietly.

Clive was leaning against a bushpole with his arms folded above his furry bear's belly. 'I don't see why we don't do what we did for little Billy.'

'What was that?' Crystal asked.

'We dug a fucking big hole: Clive said, and it was difficult not to believe that he was relishing it. 'We dug a fucking big hole and we buried the bugger.'

'We dig a hole for a person the same way we dig a hole for a shit bucket,' Paul said.

'Well, that's right, isn't it?' Clive said. 'It's the same. All goes back into the soil. I don't want any of you lot doing OMs over me.'

'I think we should do something better for Jerusalem John than we'd do for a bucket of shit,' Paul insisted.

'He's dead, mate,' Clive said. 'It won't worry him one way or the other.'

Jerusalem John was not really their responsibility at all. He had made it his business in life to be no one's responsibility. He was an old hermit, a loner, who lived at the bottom of the gully that ran between Bog Onion and the Ananda Marga. He shot wallabies and read thrillers and the only thing that flushed him out were bushfires where, suddenly, you would find him stumbling out of the smoke to stand beside you with his wet sack or his hoe. No one would have found him but Richard had heard his fox terrier howling.

'You should have left him in the hut,' Clive said, 'and we could have just burnt it all down. Nothing in the place worth saving. The tin's rotted.'

'I think we should get Harry to tell a story.'

'You people are full of shit,' Honey Barbara said, standing up and rubbing her bee-keeper's biceps angrily. 'You're going to let him get control of you. You elevate him into something he's not.'

'We're not elevating him into anything. He knows stories. He knows stories for trees…'

'He doesn't know shit about trees,' Honey Barbara said. 'You ask him to tell you the difference between a red stringy and a yellow, get him to show you a narrow-leaved ironbark, get him to tell you how old the buds on any of them are. He doesn't know. He can't do it.'

But she knew she had made too much noise, gone on too long, and the only effect her speech was having was to annoy everyone except Clive who looked like he agreed with her. She was being negative, uncool, ungenerous, and there was no doubt that she had made them decide to ask Harry Joy to tell the story for the burial of Jerusalem John.

The next five years should have been the richest and happiest period of Harry's life, not only in Hell, but in any life he could remember. He built his hut above the creek on high stumps of tallow wood. He learned how to use a saw and chisel, and hammer in a six-inch nail. He built a fireplace from rocks and suspended a wide verandah over the creek and inside this new house you could tell, the way his silk shirts had become cushions around the walls, that this dry-looking man still loved his comfort.

He had many friends. He was not only liked, he was also necessary. He could dig a decent-sized hole for a tree; he could tell a story for a funeral and a story for a birth. When they sat around the fire at night he could tell a long story just for fun, in the same way Richard might play his old accordion and Dani her Jew's harp. He never thought of what he did as original. It wasn't either. He told Vance's old stories, but told them better because he now understood them. He retold the stories of Bog Onion Road. And when he told stories about the trees and the spirits of the forest he was only dramatizing things that people already knew, shaping them just as you pick up rocks scattered on the ground to make a cairn. He was merely sewing together the bright patchworks of lives, legends, myths, beliefs, hearsay into a splendid cloak that gave a richer glow to all their lives. He knew when it was right to tell one story and not another. He knew how a story could give strength or hope. He knew stories, important stories, so sad he could hardly tell them for weeping.

And also he gave value to a story so that it was something of worth, as important, in its way, as a strong house or a good dam. He insisted that the story was not his, and not theirs either. You must give something, he told the children, a sapphire or blue bread made from cedar ash. And what began as a game ended as a ritual.

They were the refugees of a broken culture who had only the flotsam of belief and ceremony to cling to or, sometimes, the looted relics from other people's temples. Harry cut new wood grown on their soil and built something solid they all felt comfortable with. They were hungry for ceremony and story. There was no embarrassment in these new constructions.

He did not become a leader or a strange man with a long white robe, not a shaman, a magician or a priest. He was a bushman. He was a bushman in the way he stood with one leg out and the back of his wrist propped on his hip. He dug holes, used flooded gum trees to out-grow and conquer the groundsel weed; he won Clive's respect by the energy with which he helped at the mill, where they cut packing-case timber from blackbutt and sold it to pineapple farmers in the world outside.

Yet the more he gained pleasure from his relationship with the people of Bog Onion (and the more he came to appreciate that Hell was a place of the most subtle construction which, on balance, he preferred to his other life), the more Honey Barbara's coldness towards him ate at his heart.

It came to dominate both their lives like a yellow cloud of smog that lay across an otherwise unpolluted sky.

Perhaps if they had been left alone, if well-meaning people who loved them both had not continually tried to help them, had not carried their not-quite-accurate messages from Honey Barbara's hut in the morning sunlight to Harry's hut in the shaded east, perhaps if they had just left it alone it would have sorted itself out in its own good time. But it was like a mosquito bite which is scratched and then scratched again until some organism hidden in otherwise benevolent soil can enter the broken skin and turn that mild irritation into a raging tropical ulcer with an inch-wide pus-filled centre reaching down as far as the bone, and there is no natural way to heal it, and only a trip into town to the hospital with all the attendant antibiotics and expense will effect a cure.

She had begun by being irritated at his lack of consideration in arriving at Bog Onion without being asked, but his own guilty confessions to Paul Bees had naturally leaked out on to the gossip circuit and they had come to fuel her indignation. She painted a big sign on the Cadillac which read: STOLEN BY HARRY JOY FROM HIS 'FRIENDS'.

She did herself a disservice. For, as anybody could see, Harry Joy was pretty much like anybody else, having his fair share of stupidities and conceits but also some reserves of kindness and love. For the most part he talked about the same things anyone else did: the state of the vegetable garden, how well the hens were laying, whether there would be a good wet and, although Honey Barbara mightn't like it, he could now tell the state of development of a swamp mahogany bud, whether it was one or two or even three years from blossoming, and by a series of questions and cross-questions and simple observ-ation he had learned as much about trees as anyone in Bog Onion.

It is also possible that the sore might have cured faster if Harry Joy had not continued to love Honey Barbara, but he did, and she knew he did because he kept telling people that he did. No matter what she said about him, no matter what gossip reached his ears (and she made sure that there was plenty to gossip about) he refused to speak badly of her. He spoke of her only with admiration and when she heard about it, it made her angry – it seemed a trick, to make people side with him against her. When Daze came to discuss 'these negative feelings you keep projecting on to Harry' she told him to fuck off and get out.

Sometimes she found Harry standing quietly on the edge of the clearing where her hut stood, the same hut which was still portrayed on the wall of the bedroom in the deserted house at Palm Avenue. She tried to ignore him. He would leave some infantile present: a pumpkin, a wallaby, a handful of ironbark blossom he may or may not have climbed a tall tree to pick.

'You make it worse,' she told him once, and then regretted it because he drew strength and confidence from anything she said to him.

There was a story she had heard that he had killed Bettina. He made her nervous. He skulked around in the bush by her hut. She heard him thumping around out there. 'A man who believes he is in Hell,' she told Crystal, 'is capable of any-thing.' She went down to Jerusalem John's and took the lock from the door. She fitted it to her own door (the only lock in Bog Onion) and kept it snibbed at night.

It is curious, but hardly surprising, that Honey Barbara, who spent the greater part of her time outdoors, on the road, her head out the window looking for new blossoms, carrying hives with aching arms through the bush, never walked a hundred yards into the bush around her own house. Sometimes her bees ventured in there when the blood wood were on, but the blood wood were not on in April. The only thing on in April was the groundsel weed which produced an inferior grade of honey of use for nothing much but the rather medicinal mead that Paul made each year. But then, one April, the bees began returning heavy laden and the hives were filling; not a heavy flow, but it was good honey, not groundsel.

Investigating this discrepancy she walked through the bush behind her house and found it planted densely with silver-leaved ironbark which was now in blossom. But there was also yellow box, a famous honey tree, and bottle brush and ti-tree and, if she had cared to walk amongst the so-called timber trees in the bottom thirty acres she would have found amongst the tallow woods and blood woods, stands of young trees carefully planned to provide blossom all year round.

It did not happen as Harry Joy had often (so very often) imagined it. Because there is his beloved Honey Barbara, her two hands around an ironbark trying to uproot it, whilst all the time her bees (whom one might guess, fancifully, to be in some confusion about their mistress's behaviour) feasted on a nectar which was far too good to be wasted making Paul Bees drunk at night.

He was sitting out on his verandah catching the late sunshine when she came into his house. He knew who it was. He had been waiting for two weeks. There was no one in the world who walked like Honey Barbara and when she strode across the bare boards of the living room he imagined he could hear the talcum dust of Bog Onion Road on her beautiful feet and that the whole of his house vibrated subtly with the rhythm of her body. He did not dare stand up. He rubbed his palms together as farmers sometimes do when they have to shake hands with people they imagine to be somehow cleaner.

He was clean-shaven that year and his face showed all the lines of his forty-five years, many lines around the eyes, and around the comers of the mouth. His brown eyes looked up towards the doorway and he brushed his bare chest on which the scar of his initiation still stood, a pink ridge across a honey-brown terrain.

She stood at the doorway. She wore an old pair of khaki shorts and a loose white shirt tied at the waist. Her hair was short, cut as gracelessly as his. She was five years older than when he had known her and the only marring of her beauty was the suggestion of a tightness in the comers of her pale lips and for this scar he recognized his own responsibility.

'I am not going to waste my whole life,' she began and his heart sank so sickeningly he had a sensation not dissimilar to suddenly losing sight. 'I am not going to waste my whole life hating you.'

He stopped breathing, waiting.

She also began to brush. She brushed her knee. She smoothed her cheeks. She squatted on the floor by the door jamb.

'You are forty-five,' she said. 'I am thirty-two. We're getting too old for this nonsense.'

She leaned forward and held out her hand and took his, loosening it, releasing his palm from the closed trap of his nails.

'If you ever steal my Cadillac,' she smiled (her moist eyes searching his face for signs), 'I'll cut your bloody balls off.'

It was so quiet they could hear a pitta bird down in the rain forest, rustling its bright feathers through the rotting leaves.

And now there is not much more to say about these lives, not, at least, in a book that will be sold mainly in cities and to strangers at that. There were days, nights, meals, storms, fires, trees, bees, many things that were tedious, repetitive, as expected as peas uncurling through red soil.