Carpentaria (12 page)

Of course everyone got into the rush to say something after that.
You accusen me then, Elias?
Everyone started screaming and shouting, taking his criticisms personally, and all pointing a travesty-of-justice finger at Elias.
Jesus, didn’t he know they were the mainstream, and if anyone thought different, they must be the one with the problem?
But the act of a community closing in on itself was not an isolated act particular to Desperance alone. Go anywhere, and it was the same, same, same.

If only the town could see the power of words at work, if it could have, just for one instance, imagined what it was like to throw words around nilly-pilly, like string to create a confusion, a pile of twists and turns, all jumbled up in a bowl like spaghetti. This was what the strings of accusations did to Elias Smith who was thrown out like dishwater by all those good Smith families of Desperance. Could he have had the time on his hands to have caused all of the town’s recent misfortunes?

Could Elias be blamed for Y. Pedigree’s dog being driven over yesterday while it was running aimlessly on the main road in broad daylight, and through no fault of anyone’s, except it being a pure bred inbred born without a brain?
You know who we are talking about.
Or, could Elias take the blame for I. Damage’s husband whispering about warped sexual encounters to a disinterested brothel girl long distance from the corner public payphone on a hot summer’s night, and I. Damage not knowing how to speak about infidelity? Or, for A. Clone’s family,
You know who we are talking about
, with nothing on the table to chuck out anyhow because the social security cheque didn’t last when every last cent of it was gambled away on pension day? Or last night’s public on-again, off-again love affair of the conservative U. Torrent fuel attendant with the equally conservative B. Easy?
Soo! You know who we are talking about?
Of course you do but who speaks against the prevailing view of Elias?

Mrs C. Caucus, the local diva from down at the It’s Flaming Hot Fish fish and chip shop, saved others from speaking reams by saying with a wink of an eye and a ‘Ho! Ho!’ through her side lip, ‘You know who?’ She might well have been slapping the newspaper-wrapped bundle of fried local produce on the counter in front of you. Then adding for good measure, ‘Darling, you’d need to blame a much higher authority making them decisions, than him (Elias), my lovie – if you know what I mean, if I can point to the ups and above for a hint.’

But who? Who was claiming responsibility for burning the Shire Council office’s records of floods and fires unprecedented in one hundred years of impeccable recorded history of natural and other calamities in the local vicinity? A valuable record, now a flake of ash. Or, Sallyanne Smith’s Book of Books? An arsonist! A water diviner! No one rang up, left a message, or came forth to claim the responsibility. No one. And Elias Smith could be all of these things. Perhaps, in the fullness of time the world would agree with Desperance. Their verdict that night was that the rest of the world should have Elias Smith. He was asked to leave town by the morning.

Surely, then, on this day of all days, it was another God-given miracle that Elias Smith could wake up with a precious mind so free of worry, it weighed less than a chookie fowl’s feather.

Light feathers did fall outside of Elias Smith’s place, as he awoke to a beautiful dawn filled with trilling calls from flocks of sandpipers lifting off the mudflats to fly in swirls around and around his tin hut.

‘These little brown speckled birds are the
Limicola falcinellus
,’ the new schoolteacher remarked at the beginning of his first class for the morning. He explained that the birds ‘were catching an unusual collision of winds heading from north and south.’ He wrote it down in the class journal. This act of writing down was significant since the loss of the town’s records in the fires. It would be the first statement for the new history of the town that would not be based on suspended reality. But the occasion was lost in the classroom of mostly missing students. Those few children present leaned their heads on their elbows and would soon be drifting away in their own dream world. Poor kids! Assailed with threats to get off to school. So little sleep last night. Birds were so common to these parts that no one took any notice of them except Danny Real, the young schoolteacher with bubbling enthusiasm for the local nature, who had only been in Desperance since the beginning of the year, and it was still the Wet season.

Everything was new for young lean Danny from Brisbane with wire hair, who was early to bed and early to rise. He had heard some of the gossip in the classroom about Elias, but he did not go in for what he had judged was a circus. He was an educated man and a kangaroo court being held down at the pub confirmed his belief that country people were just hicks and cretins. What would he know? Danny was an outsider. The teacher chatted on about how the birds had glided on unusual breezes, blowing out to sea, south to north, flying on a silver lining. He was just relaying what he had seen as the only other resident to be awake so early in the morning, when he went searching the grasses for nests. He was new so he could not have noticed that there were other thoughts floating in the vicinity, far above the local grasses of the flat plains.

Could every cloud have a silver lining?
Thus it does, it does, Elias had mused to himself as he listened to the words in the quiet of the morning, spoken somewhere as daybreak spread over the flat lands, now with the season turning from the Wet, a metre above sea level. For some time he stood and looked around the treeless view in all directions. Often, during his long residency in Desperance, he wondered whether others in the town woke up in the morning thinking exactly the same thoughts as the day before. Not that he really expected other people to have the same thoughts as him, although such notions would now seem an agreeable proposition, but just say, to wake up thinking the same things as you did the day before and before that, was what interested Elias. He wondered if the world could be as though someone had struck a button twice to give the town’s residents their instructions for the day. First, telling him who he was in this flat world in which he had been living and secondly, that the day was good.

A short memory was sometimes better than a long one or having no memory at all and this was what Elias Smith thought on the day he left Desperance for good.

L
ooking straight out of the window, way across numerous heaps of storm-given driftwood stacked for firewood, over the pungent-smelling salty flats towards the water’s edge, Norm Phantom watched his friend Elias Smith. The first thing Norm thought about Elias dressed in his long dark olive trench coat as he headed out to sea, was how he looked even more other-worldly, like a fugitive from another time, as though he fished in an icy sea, instead of the tropics.

There he was: Elias, pulling behind him a bit of green tin, an excuse to float on water named
Choice. Who sails in a boat called
Choice
?
Norm Phantom watched and mumbled this question solemnly to himself, just as he had done every time he saw Elias towing his boat. Sometimes, he looked on the scene of reckless endeavour in total puzzlement, but mostly, in resigned endearment for his friend, he had regarded it as the finest sign of peace in paradise. Who was he, Norm Phantom, to say what another man should do? What business was it of his how each man designs to be at sea?

Now, for the first time, Norm thought the old grey-green boat resembled a sea coffin, not the piece of tin Elias liked to float around in at sea. He listened to the sea murmuring to Elias,
slaap, slaap
. Even flocks of white cockatoos flying in a cloud along the beach like an angel with flapping wings, raucously cried for him. The noise chased away schools of sardines, while Elias’s abandoned butcher bird sitting outside Norm’s window sang for its feed of fish. The bird’s tune rang out across the grey woodpiles like a flute.

Norm knew before Elias could begin his journey, he would slowly lug the boat over a kilometre of muddy shallows towards the inky sea. Out there, the sea joined heavy rain clouds spreading to the basin of the Gulf from a weak trough sitting over Cape York. In front of Elias the
yidimil
star of the morning hung low in the sky above the dark sea, looking down at the town. Norm looked at the star in the way men looked at a woman who causes trouble in their families. He spat. The stories Norm knew about the morning star would make your hair stand on end like a porcupine. He and Elias had spent hours at sea discussing the skies. ‘She is Venus,’ Elias said, smiling at his knowledge of stars which the sea had restored to his memory, while telling Norm excitedly, ‘who is also the beautiful Aphrodite born of the sea.’ Out at sea, she pulled heartbroken sailors and fishing men to her beauty where they were lost forever. ‘She is a harlot then,’ Norm laughed. Elias responded with silence.

Back then, in the good times, neither man spoke to the other again of stars or fish, neither the next day or any day following while they were at sea. Their fishing became a silent business of intense matter-of-fact concentration so spooky, it even scared the fish away. The very spirits that plagued the Gulf seas would not have known these two men were in the vicinity. The small tin boat had become a tanker, and when they returned from the sea, both men parted company in silence.

‘And yours?’ Norm simply asked one night of Elias’s heart, continuing the conversation a year later when they met at sea while fishing at the same black-blue cod hole. Both were alone, the fish not biting, and all that was left was the sphere of honesty, which felt as close as all of the stars of our galaxy passing above in the Milky Way. ‘And yours?’ he remembered Elias had replied absentmindedly, concentrating on the line, ‘And yours?’

‘Elias always believed in his own stories,’ Norm said through his eyes, while his jaws tightened with a sense of resignation, while he continued to look out the window at the dragonflies – blue, red, green – flying around Elias’s boat. Norm knew Elias. Knew when Elias would have seen the star which had stolen his heart, hanging in the sky waiting, and full of confidence, prepared to follow her signal. Norm remained at the window, resigned to watch, understanding the wishes of his friend’s heart, yet believing in the complete opposite to Elias –
She only comes for death.

In this country, where legends and ghosts live side by side in the very air, inside the Pricklebush home no man, love-forlorn or not, sets to sea while the morning star shines above their fishing boats waiting for them. Have you considered he might already be dead? Norm was surprised at the thought. No, he could not be sure as he watched Elias. Imagine if he was actually watching Elias’s spirit. Norm was able to look out his window in the morning and see in the mist, the spirit of dead men pulling their own coffins. Men whom people had heard saying goodbye to themselves as soon as the curlew called. Norm dispelled such morbid thoughts, though he remained fatalistic in his realisation that once his friend followed the star, she would pull him away forever. And that was the truth.

‘I suppose I should go down there and bid him farewell,’ Norm mumbled, firmly telling himself it was the decent thing to do – for a friend. Eh! That was right: regardless of whether that someone was pretending to be dead or was really dead. But he could not move. The muscles in his legs tightened like his jaws, as though he was pulling the boat himself, yet, he knew he could not go. The town, driven by its own paralysis, determined the fathom of where its law dropped – and Uptown was watching hard from their houses too, to make sure nothing was interfering with their law.

What was a good law or bad law, huh? Nobody, particularly Pricklebush, could just go out there, and say things to Elias, such as –
Don’t go!
The Pricklebush knew how rights were miniscule. How could anybody, even somebody like Norm Phantom, interfere with the boundaries of someone’s fate? You want to be called a troublemaker, Norm? Everyone was pleased enough to accept his or her own fate from the natural flowing dominating law of white governance. Who was thinking himself too good to say, say among the black community, whether an individual was going to receive a box full of life’s jewels or an empty box? Norm found he was telling Elias all of these things from the window, yet they were pulling the boat across the slimy mud, side by side, as they had done for ages. Then a funny thought occurred to him
.
‘You know, I am doing all of the talking as usual.’ He looked across at Elias, perspiration running down his golden face as he looked back at his boat, and Norm realised there would be no conversation between them again and was weighed down by the heaviness of his heart, while knowing what he had always known, that Elias belonged to another world.

Gulf people have something to say about fish: their Norm Phantom was the big man of the sea. Regardless of the isolation of country people, because talk reaches out and grabs people’s attention everywhere, all nature of people strolled into the Fisherman’s Hotel just to clap their eyes on the sea man of Carpentaria. In sea men’s circles, yarns of Norm Phantom of Desperance were imagined far more than the truth. This was the only man they knew who lived in the world of marine splendour, riding the troughs on God Almighty seas, surviving cyclones one after another, following a fish to where other fishing men had perished just for the sake of it, and once in a while, returning to port to check on the family, before leaving the very next dawn. What a man! An asset to the town, an asset to his race, mind you.

Yet a pure person can burn with pain. Oh! Goodness God, helplessness was a terrible thing at times. Norm stayed transfixed by the window, he was like glue, he hardly believed it possible that he was losing the only other person in the Gulf waters of Carpentaria whose sea skills matched his own. But Norm stayed inside anyway, watching Elias go.

Then, something strange snapped in Norm Phantom’s mean heart. It might have been the combination of the butcher bird’s song, the dragonflies, the significance of a crisis having dawned on him, or seeing the nesting swallows that shat everywhere fly out of his roof – because what he decided to do instead of going out and stopping Elias, was a much more over-the-top gesture for his loss. For people who never wanted to see the sight of Elias again, who wanted to wipe his memory from here, there and everywhere, he would be a consistent reminder of their law – the good and the bad. A forgetting people would be hit in the face with Elias. They would wish life to be normal again, and wish without luck to celebrate the stories worth remembering, but it would never be the same, because when they thought of Norm Phantom and the sea, they would think of Elias. So!
Norm Phantom does not fish anymore
. What kind of story would that be? In this way, Norm decided to destroy his legend. He felt pleased: this was sacrifice. This was the retribution the town deserved. By crossing the margin, fudging acceptability, he knew he would end all sense of hope his life gave to others. Erasure! A total unconditional response for someone who had no heart to call Elias to come back.

Yet, why not call Elias? Norm had plenty of voice for calling out to the whole world when he wanted to. He possessed such an enormous voice, the pitch of it could reverberate up and down the spinal cord, damage the central nervous system, and afterwards, vibrate straight up the road to the town and hit the bell so hard, it would start ringing its ear-piercing peal. This was how Norm Phantom reached whoever was in earshot when he wanted something like, ‘Could you pass the butter, please?’ Who, what, jumped up straight and listened and replied in shock: ‘What? Who? What? Is he calling me?’ Norm Phantom could have used those lungs of his to call Elias back. He could have roared at the whole town. But, ‘Oh! no, can’t do that,’ he would have said, even to Elias as he walked away. ‘One day you might listen now! You know the limits. You can’t go upsetting the white people.’ Protocol! Elias. Such an important piece of information, Elias, for harmonious living.

Many, many times Norm stretched this deep voice down to the elusive shoreline from the very same window, yelling at any one of his seven kids to get back to the house – ‘What kind of idiot are you? Get in here! Can’t you see a storm’s coming?’ Always the world responded. The sea lady bowed submissively, momentarily, she let him say his piece over the roar of her song. If his children did not listen quick enough, she suddenly drew up the wind, overtaking them in complete surprise as she threw her waves higher in chastisement, slapping his children in stinging blows across their arms and legs, enclosing her arms around their brown bodies and forcing them to ride in the rips before throwing them face first, back on the dry sand
.
‘What are you fucking well doing?’ You should have heard Norm roar at the sea and the kids when that happened.

Never mind! Why speak up for Norm Phantom? The big, hard-nosed Westside man of house number one had closed the book himself. What did it matter to him? He had not contributed to the decision made by the ‘good people’ of Uptown. Westside always said,
We are just plain, simple, Aboriginal people, never been born white, and proud of the fact
. Norm always said,
We were not like the local mafia
, which made Elias laugh. He could not become involved, jump any invisible wall of separation, break it down with an axe, just because he, Norm Phantom, should say so.

Everything was changing. The town was a different place to the way it was when Elias had first plopped like a giant cowry shell on the beach.

Desperance had become a boom town with a more sophisticated outlook now, because it belonged totally to the big mine. When the mine came along with all of its big equipment, big ideas, big dollars from the bank – Well! Why not? Every bit of Uptown humanity went for it – lock, stock and barrel. The mine bought off the lot of them, including those dogs over Eastside. They would be getting their just deserts, Westside told those traitors who ran down to the mine crawling on their stomachs for a job. They were all doing deals.

Norm remembered he had told Elias that there was no point getting involved. But Elias let himself be bought off for a few lousy dollars. Just to guard the town from what? What next? Norm had asked him. Norm told him many times what would happen once someone owned you. But Elias, poor, no-memory Elias had forgotten about the fish in the sea. He thought he was on top of the world. No time for fishing, he told Norm, then watched the back of his friend set to sea after Norm had told him it had come as a shock to hear Elias had agreed to take on the job of guarding the town. Nobody could have tried more to warn him of the consequences. Norm said he knew things he could not say because of what the mine had done to his family. Remember who your friends are Elias, Norm had told him enough about being the guard, although he was mindful that when a man spoke in Desperance, who knew where his words ended up and how they might come flying back to hit him one day.

The old people in the Pricklebush growled more now about how their words were being stolen by the bad people –
Spies from the mine going around in the bush
, horrible devils that the gigantic yellow mining equipment scraped out of the big open-cut holes. Everyone talked about seeing the spy agents scratching about in the bush. Eyewitnesses saw strange men near the river. They were seen everywhere, all wearing thin wires on their heads, driving around the dirt tracks, looking at nothing. People said they wanted to know what those strangers were up to in their bush. You want to know? They were picking up the sounds of who knows what, explained the old people.

The children did some research in the storybooks for the old people about white men who wore wire on their heads. This was the start of the old people becoming
scientify
, talking technical talk.
Your words
, the old people had explained,
were important now
. Your words could end up being a thousand miles up in the sky riding on a satellite disc, zapping across the world on invisible beams.
Don’t even worry thinking about what beams are
, they said in their stories.
Beams are things you could never even dream of
. It was some kind of gadget that can take away all your myall words, transcribe what you say in better language so people can understand what you are talking about. And then the beam flies on orbiting through space, straight to the boardrooms of rich multinational mining people in Holland, Germany, the USA, even ‘Mother’ England, or who knows where, to listen to you, before you have even had a chance to end your sentence.
So, watch what you are saying
.
That’s why
, they said,
a man had to stay quiet like a mouse while he snuck around getting his cheese in the big people’s house
. Uptown, hmm, hmm! This was what they called belonging to the mining company who owned speed, and orbit too.