Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The (9 page)

Teaching gave him boundaries and a discipline. He became narrow and exact, but seemed at times to glimpse a large adventurous self by finding forty pairs of eyes focused on him. It shocked him then to find he was not liked. ‘Bilgewater', spoken with contempt, struck him like a blow in the face. He had always been sure of being popular. He shifted schools, working his way south, worked at finding a self he could be happy with; and managed some steps on that way by being noisy, being rough and rude – drinking too much, saying what he thought (even when he had not thought at all), and bending rules to suit himself. He won some popularity with his pupils and did not mind his nickname any more. Disapproval from parents and fellow teachers were winnings too.

Marriage seemed to settle him down. Rosalind was her name. She worked at the cosmetics counter in a department store, and was flawless, beautifully smooth, fantastically coloured; and patient and good-natured as well. ‘She's apples,' Ros would say, meaning everything was all right (even when she had to change direction to make it so).

To please Lex, Ros became a tramper. They spent part of their honeymoon walking the Routeburn Track. They pitched their tent by the river on the flats and in that dark square metre were naked and ecstatic and warm and dreamless all through the night. Lex left Ros sleeping – unmade–up she was so cold and pale – and crept out in the dawn to wash in the river. The icy water found out all his bones. He stood thigh-deep and soaped himself, then went in
deeper, belly, chest and head, in a shocking plunge. Pain thinned him to a shiver, reduced his brain to a cold, smooth stone, and he had never been so complete in himself. Shrunken, wrapped in his towel, he squatted on the pebbles under the bank and looked at the cumulus of bush all around, the falls slanting down in leaps and runs, the grassy plain in the north branch, ending in a dead moraine, and Mt Somnus white and bare at the head of the valley. A mosquito hum of pleasure and arrival came from his throat. Ros came creeping down in his shirt and he washed her, quick and noisy, then rubbed her candy-pink with his rough towel, and they ran back to their tent to be warm. Happy time. Why, later on, should he remember Somnus rather than her, and hold the image of mountain rather than of naked girl in the river – and think of words like ‘still', ‘remote', ‘absolutely simple' instead of others he might have found to bring back memories of love and sex?

Lex was a man who had started in half a dozen ways but not found it in his power to follow one. By the time Rosalind came along he had shed too much of himself to make a husband, he was very small and thin, and stillness, remoteness, simplicity beckoned him. None of this was clear at the time. For several years his life took on an ordinary appearance.

The Clearwaters came to Saxton, where Lex taught at the boys' school for a while, then shifted to the girls', arriving at the same time as Norma Sangster. They lived in town and Ros kept on working. She was nine years younger than Lex and there was no hurry to have babies. They sailed a small boat and went tramping and had friends who were mostly hers. Lex enjoyed saying outrageous things, attacking religion, the royal family, the National party, the Labour party – anything the people he found himself with believed in. He wasn't very good in argument but had a talent for extravagant statement and came to be looked on as a character. Ros learned to talk a little bit and be less obliging.

One day they went walking in the hills behind the town. Their destination was an old copper mine but after only half an hour they heard a sound that Ros took for a child crying. They stood and listened.

‘It's some sort of bird,' Lex said. He walked back down the track and two steps down a bank and pushed a hole in the wall of scrub. He found an eye on him; was penetrated, shot through by it. He fell
back half a step and put down his hand to keep his balance.

‘What is it?' Ros said at his shoulder.

‘A goat. Hold on.' He slid into the hollow and looked more closely. The animal jerked its legs frantically. ‘Someone's tied the poor little bugger up. There's twine round his legs.'

‘Isn't that cruel. Bring it up here, Lex.'

He made a sling of his arms and carried the goat on to the track. Its legs were tied in pairs, left with left and right with right.

‘It would have died there,' Ros cried.

‘They're probably coming back for it. What'll we do?'

‘Untie it first.'

They unpicked the knots and freed the goat and Ros sat by the track holding it on her breast. ‘It's just a baby. It's hardly weaned. Feel its heart.'

He put his hand on the white patch on the goat's shoulder and felt its heart whacking under its ribs; then stood off and watched it and felt his own heart beating hard. It was not the animal's fear or babiness that moved him but its yellow hard unblinking eye and coffin-shaped pupil, black as soot.

‘What are we going to do with you?' Ros crooned.

‘There's no wild goats up here. I reckon it's a tame one someone's pinched.' He pulled some leaves from a bush and offered them but the goat would not eat. ‘It'll pee on you in a minute.'

‘Can we take it home, Lex?'

‘Put it down and see what it does.'

The goat was kicking with its hind legs. Ros put it on the track and it went to the corner in a dozen bounds and was gone.

‘Why couldn't we have kept it?'

Lex ran to the corner. The goat was standing on the track twenty yards ahead. It set off when it saw him, veering from one hedge of scrub to the other.

‘It's tame all right. It doesn't want to go into the bush.'

‘It'll starve out here.'

‘No it won't, there's plenty to eat. But if I can catch it you can have it.'

They followed the goat up into the hills, out of scrub into beech forest. Sometimes it got so far ahead they would not see it for several bends of the track, but then its black coat with the patch of white shone in sunlight sliding through the canopy, and Lex said,
‘We'll get him. He's bound to tire.' Ros tried bleating to lure it but the goat kept on trotting and pausing on the track. At last a tramper coming down forced it into the bush. They saw it scampering down to a gully where a sound of running water could be heard.

‘Now we've lost him.'

‘No fear we haven't. You follow him down. Try and keep him in sight. I'll circle back from up ahead.'

Then for several hours they hunted the goat. It went ahead, always just in sight, as though it meant to lead them to a goal. Now and then it bleated in fright. ‘Cry you little bugger, you're not getting away.'

‘Lex, it's terrified. Let it go.'

‘No fear.' His knees were bleeding from a fall on stones. A twig had jabbed the corner of his mouth and torn it open. He felt no elation in the chase but felt a cord that tied him to the goat and was only frightened it would break. ‘You don't need to come, you wait here.' He left Ros and ran up the creek. The goat was too exhausted to climb. He trapped it at last by a waterfall; lunged at it and caught its hind leg, and lay half submerged in a pool, dragging it down, feeling it kick. He stood up waist deep; gathered it close, held it hard, until it stopped fighting. ‘It's all right. I've got you. We're mates now, OK?'

That is how Lex Clearwater found goats. He took the animal – a female – home and tethered it in the backyard, where Ros treated it as a pet. Lex seemed to take little notice of it. He walked by and said, ‘Howdy, pal,' and now and then fed it a handful of grass. No one knew he looked in its eyes and tried to know its perpetual now, which he saw as a kind of life in life, and death from everything outside the range of its senses. He knew that humans could not have that and stay human, and did not want it for himself except in flashes; was scared of it; and tried to like the goat (named Debbie by Ros) instead of know it; and ended up entranced by its mystery, obsessed with it. He spent his time openly with it then, and would not call it Debbie but mate or pal. (None of his goats has a name.) Ros said, ‘He's gone bonkers over that goat.' She was pregnant and impatient with him now.

Against her will he bought a piece of land up the valley. He fenced it with hurricane wire and bought half a dozen feral goats.
The house appalled Ros. He spent some money doing it up but she warned him, ‘I won't live here.'

‘Come on love, there's money in goats. In a couple of years I'll knock it down and build a mansion for you.' He tried to amuse her with goat myth and goat lore. ‘There's a goat in Valhalla that's got pure mead running from its udders. If I can breed a few like that one, eh?' When he nursed a sick goat in the house he told her that in medieval times people believed a billy-goat's breath would fill the house and keep plague germs out. Ros slammed the bedroom door and turned the key.

When the baby was two years old she left him. Ros was a grown-up person now, her softness and her silliness were gone and her bitterness had pauses in which she saw she must get herself and her baby away or not survive. One windy spring day the child was toddling round the edge of the lawn. The goat that had been Debbie was tethered on her rope. She did not like running with the herd and Lex gave in to her and kept her by the house. A gust of wind flipped a cardboard box across the lawn and the goat was spooked. She ran in a half-circle at the stretch of her rope, which caught the child Andrew on his chest and dragged him screaming through a patch of gorse. It was enough for Ros. She calmed and cuddled the child through the night, and packed her things and left in a taxi the next day. She went north to live and brings her child up in Auckland now – has a good job, lives without a permanent man, says she's all right thank you, getting by; doesn't say ‘She's apples' any more. The divorce was fairly quick. Now and then she sends Lex a letter meant to hurt him, with photos of Andrew by himself. She sends him nasty clippings about goats. (One arrives with Sandra today. Lex does not pick his mail up any more.)

Lex gave up the idea of making money from goats. He had milked the does now and then but not sold the milk; had made a bit of cheese and given it away to people who mostly threw it out. After Ros left him he stopped pretending and let the goats run where they wanted inside the fence and breed how they would. He gave up drenching and treating for lice and the death-rate in the herd was high; but Lex looked on that as natural, he grieved and did not worry. He gave up reading books on goat husbandry, turned away from the word goat on any page. There was no understanding goats, or any animals, in that way. The goat as
production unit, the goat as symbol of this and that – he turned away. ‘Even when we're just looking we colonize animals,' he said to a class. ‘We can't see them as themselves, as goats, or fish, or birds, but have to give them meanings useful to us. Even the Maoris did it. Look at, say, the saddleback. Those brown feathers on his back, that's not a natural mark, oh no, that's scorch marks from the god Maui after his battle with the sun. Why can't we leave animals alone?'

‘I don't know what you're on about, sir,' a girl complained.

No one knew what Lex was on about. He was not exactly sure himself and he stopped explaining to other people. He drew away from people and spent all his free time with his goats. He felt that somewhere in him was a goat consciousness and he must strip away layers of then and there and why and how and live with goats in their perpetual now and look out from that pupil and that eye. At times he realized he wasn't any longer right in the head; agreed with Ros that he was bananas, and with Sandra he was round the twist. It did not worry him. Few things worried Lex any more. He wanted just to go where he was going and had a longing for that unknown place.

Before Lex can take her back to bed Sandra remembers his mail. There's a rates bill and a letter and she flips them across the table. Lex pushes them aside. He knows Ros's handwriting and doesn't open her letters any more.

‘Who's it from?'

‘Only Ros.'

‘Only? That was your wife.' Sandra is pleased and angry in equal parts. ‘Aren't you going to see what she says?'

Lex shrugs. The letter contains something meant to hurt him, he knows that; but he doesn't stop Sandra from tearing it open. She unfolds a page from a newspaper. Lex looks away.

‘Ha,' Sandra says after a moment. ‘ “Those land-army tarts who handle my parts.” How gross.'

He has to look. The photograph fills a quarter of the page: a man holds a doe up and open by its hind legs while a woman in overalls inserts a funnel. ‘… in Heather's right hand is the duck-billed speculum which has a light attached. She holds the pistolette containing semen in her left hand.'

‘Enough to put you off sex,' Sandra says. ‘Hey, come on, it's only science, the economy would collapse without frozen semen.'

But Lex heaves the table back and lurches outside. He jumps off the porch and runs bent over into the dark. She follows him and hears him being sick behind her car.

‘Lex. You're a funny bugger, Lex.' She tries to put her arm round his shoulder but he knocks her away, sends her reeling, and runs between the shed and the house. Sandra hears the fence squeal as he climbs. She hears the crunch and slide of shale as he goes up the hill, and gets her torch from the car and tries to find him. But Lex has gone too far for the beam, and she calls out, ‘Lex, are you all right?'

He reaches the bracken and takes hold. It's magical: at the prickly touch his rage subsides. He hears goats moving in the brittle growth and sees one dimly, greyish white.

‘Well stuff you, Lex,' Sandra yells. Her torch beam slides weakly over the hill and then goes out. He sees her walk into the house and come back with her bag and drive down to the road. The glow of her car-lights moves under the hill. Soon she's in sight again by the golf course. A stretch of river gleams as she passes and part of a hillside lights up.