Carpentaria (37 page)

With a little scratch under his salt-laden hair which was forever itchy, Bala estimated that his own gear would last awhile, and all he had to decide to do was to run away. The old skeleton man? Well! He would leave him. He could live or he could die. Most probably he would die soon. The child thought the man would probably die when the next high tide came rushing in with a storm. Either today, he thought, or tomorrow. It did not matter, for he would die. And if not by the sea plucking him right off the beach; well, he would die when the bad men returned. Bala felt cold. He could already feel the presence of the other men sneaking along the bush line when it became dark. If the old man was just sitting out on the beach like a sitting duck; well! they would sneak up until they captured him. He thought of his Mother again and he felt scared and wanted to run. She had warned him to leave no signs for the bad men, and here was old Malbu with his boat tilted on its side, like a big shiny beacon. Its storm-scoured underbelly would be seen from the sea, and if they came flying in a helicopter again, Bala knew they would see it easily from the air.

‘You want some duck?’ Bala finally asked.

‘What duck?’

‘I’ve got a duck if you want it.’

‘Well! Alright, you get it then and we can cook it together if you like.’

‘I’ll get the duck if you promise to help me make you another camp.’

‘And what about your Father, will he come there too?’

‘Maybe, I’ll have to ask him and see what he thinks.’

‘Did he tell you I take fish from the ocean and make them dance in thin air? I bet he didn’t tell you I am the best fisherman that ever breathed, or that I can talk to the birds for company, and I follow the tracks made by the stars so I never get lost, and sometimes, I go away fishing and never come back until people forget my name?’

‘He told me you make your family cry and if you know all of those things then how come you got lost?’

‘You go and get the duck.’

Bala stalked off, straight back up over the sand dune, and disappeared into the bush. On his way, the child thought about the possibility of finding a wondrous old man in someone like Malbu. Was it true he could follow tracks made by stars? He must have lost his power to make people cry.

Malbu reminded Bala of a lot of things. One night, when he was out in the boat fishing, his father told him, if you know the stars you can always find your way home. Since that time he always looked at the vast network of stars at night. He was already teaching himself so that by the time he grew up he would know how to travel in the skies. But as for mixed-up Malbu, who got washed up in the bad storm that carried off half the beach, threw up dead fish, and stranded dugongs to dry out and die on the sand, Bala believed he was lucky to be alive.

Of course he did not know what he was going to do about Malbu, since he thought Malbu was an idiot. If he knew his way by the stars like a magic person, he should have been able to drive storms away too, shouldn’t he? At least the old man was too stupid to be one of the bad men. If he had been sent by the bad people he would not have mentioned his Mother because he would have known she was dead. All of his questions came with quick answers. If Malbu was his grandfather it did not matter because his Dad said they had to be alone, and his grandfather made his family cry.

All he wanted was for his father to come back so he could tell him what had happened. He wished he never found the old man who made him think too much. He wished the old man had not come at all, because up to now, he had been alright just looking after himself. It had been pretty easy because all he had to do was what his Mother had told him – keep out of the way of anyone. Now, angry with himself, he located and tried to frighten as many roosting birds as he could find, while lamenting how he now had to get food and water not only for himself, but carry it all back for the old Malbu too.

The pandanus bulalula palms and she-oak trees closed in behind the boy with a swish, as though the bush wished to conceal him as he walked through the yellow green grasses that stood a metre tall. His feet were hardened like any bush animal’s to tolerate the scorching ground littered with burrs, and he passed on, upsetting nothing, completely unnoticed by the peewee birds and crows resting in the silent melaleuca trees and paperbark woodland, decorated for Christmas with bouquets of red mistletoe flowers and the sleepy olive vines of wild medicine and maloga beans.

As Norm watched the boy tramp over the rise, he considered following him into the hinterlands of the island. The moment passed. He had no courage to explore its unfamiliar territory. Instead, listening to the crows culk and chuckle to each other, he understood they were talking to each other over vast distances. Perhaps they had the whole island under surveillance. Their sounds only emphasised how much he did not know. How to interpret his feeling of the presence of the many spirits which belonged to this place? The crowding over the sand dune made him feel as though he had arrived on the outskirts of a town, full of anxiety and anticipation. Yet, in reality, the landscape gave the impression of being a dead country. Something that belonged to no countrymen. He felt incapable of deciphering between authentic vision and what he had falsely created for his own benefit.

He sensed that only the sea claimed this land. Inside the bush, whatever powers – dangerous, malevolent – were crowding on the other side of the sand dune, he believed had originated from the sea. Terrible truths tumbled from his mind. The night sounds of souls divesting themselves, were possessed, without shame, with a yearning for the roar of the ocean. Underneath him he felt the sand was full of the sea’s malevolent powers. A poisonous country sapping his strength. More and more he dreaded its hinterland. Things had to be different. This was not his destiny.

Norm thought it was just like Will to have made a pact with the devil spirits so as to settle his family on such a place. Nobody else would have thought of such a haven. With no other logical explanation for his being dumped by the sea in the same place, Norm assumed he was being punished for Will’s dalliance. In his imagination, a man thrown off course in a storm that should have killed him, should have at least been allowed to end up anywhere. There was the whole world for goodness’ sake. Why the same place as Will? Well! So far, with his son Bala, so far.

Thinking about Bala, Norm grew more positive about his own circumstances. How could he explain Bala? It occurred to him that Bala was in the realm of God’s providence. And he suddenly realised why. Of course. His fingers snapped automatically: an action of forgotten years which even surprised him at his age. He knew it. He would have to look after the boy, because the boy was alone, there was no Will and no Mother either. He now understood why the child kept coming by himself and avoided answering any requests to bring his father. He saw the child’s face looking out to sea, something of Will in his face, something unexplainable, the look of fortitude which only belonged in the faces and eyes of seasoned soldiers.

So, where were his parents? Why was the child alone? He wished he could be wrong even though he knew differently. He felt the truth in his bones. Anxious again with the disturbance of thunder, he half expected something terrible was going to happen to them. In a flash, Norm saw a large hawk swooping down, talons, hooks, before these snapped through his back. Through sickening eyes he saw the sea underneath spin by until his release: a fall into a bloodied nest. The vision vanished.

Norm surveyed the seascape, closely examining every bump in the ocean, out past the birds wading in the distance of the outgoing tide, to the breakers and beyond: anything that showed signs of moving. His eyes scoured from one end of the beach to the other. The skies were growing fuller with thick clouds quickly passing over the coastline, punctured by flights of birds returning to the rookeries. It would not be too long before it started to rain again. Norm was in two minds whether to wait on the beach for the boy to return, or to start moving the boat up over the sand dune before the storm arrived.

Bird squalls calling up the rain could be heard coming out of the clouds, as well as the occasional throaty sound similar to an old man clearing his throat. It was the channel-billed cuckoo heralding its arrival from its long flight overseas:
And people died useless deaths. People who were fishing people, people who grew crops, people who had families and told each other stories.
Norm shook his head. He had heard the stories a thousand times. He had to concentrate on the bird squalls warning of the drop of pressure in the atmosphere. Somewhere out at sea a swell was building and might turn into a tidal surge. Norm expected the incoming tide would be affected by the winds and the power of the storm. It would bring in the surge and it was going to be high.

Still, the wise weather birds hovered stationary in the air like beacons out over the tidal flat. Their heads turned in the direction of the oncoming storm. All he could do was wait for their judgement. One by one, the birds dropped from their hovering positions, noisily signalling squalls to the others below, and took flight. This meant one hell of a storm was heading directly towards the coastline. Anxiously, Norm scanned the rise hoping the boy would appear. ‘Why did he not see the clouds running inland?’ The skinny-legged foraging birds were lifting off the tidal flats and quickly returning inland. Soon, they were joined by other birds flying back from places further offshore.

From far out at sea, the big, black frigate birds flew in, travelling at great speed. He estimated they were flying at one hundred miles an hour. They were getting out of the way. The low clouds of densely-packed white birds flying towards him as they made their way inland had assumed the supernatural appearance of the spirits. Norm had never seen anything so spectacular or beautiful as this flight of the ancestral beings of the sea. Their flight was so low, each time one of these clouds came towards him, Norm had to bend over to avoid a collision.

Weighing up demons, Norm was convinced that the spirits lording over the sea were a much worse fate to relive again, than the devil woman and her cronies living in the bush. So, placing a length of rope around the top end of the empty boat, he dragged it up over the sand dune. He knew the last straw, a moaning wind, or even a lesser howling wind, would be sufficient to pick up the boat like a toy and throw it around the beach.

With the boat settled amongst the pandanus, he returned to the beach to collect the remainder of his fishing gear and the oars. He looked for the boy. The clouds were even more ominous with lightning shooting spears that exploded back and forth across the skies. Norm dragged the boat further inland where the bush was denser, and its hanging branches closed like doors behind him. He tied the boat against a large eucalyptus and stacked all of the containers inside. He made a place for himself and the boy to shelter out of the winds behind the secured boat. Every now and then he went back down to the beach to wait for the boy to come, but still there was no sign of him. Perhaps the boy had decided not to come back. It was hard to tell. The wind was now howling in from the sea and the flying sand was cutting into his body. Norm knew he had to take cover. Maybe his father was around after all, and took the kid off some place else. As long as he was safe, thought Norm. He headed for cover, struggling over the sand dune, until he reached the boat.

Bala was in the swamp when the storm struck the coastline. He had heard the birds coming back to the rookeries, but having made spears from the spearwood trees in the swamp, he was intent on stalking a group of ducks. At first, the wind made the waters ripple, and then it blew faster until the slender trees were bending to ground level. Water poured down the sides of every rise, down from the low hills, through the gullies and into the swamp, and very quickly the knee-deep water was up to the level of his neck. The boy struggled to keep his head above water and stay afloat in the deeper waters that were pouring through the swamp in a flood. The swamp soon became a wide river roaring though the bush as it found its ancient path down to the coast to join the sea.

Meanwhile, the tidal surge had overtaken the mudflats, as its grey waters moved in faster and deeper to drown the mangroves and slap itself against the sand dune. When it could go no further, the waters poured back to the sea, forming a wave that grew as it came rushing back to force itself against the sandbank, and again reaching its pinnacle, retreated. Each time this happened, millions of tons of sand were carried back in the roll. As Norm listened to the deafening roar of the sea stripping into the sand dune, he knew the sea would eat its way through the sandbank and tear into the bush.

The boy had quickly lost his foothold in the flooding, and the
dumularra
floodwaters hurried him swiftly away through the bush. Rushed along with everything else, he saw branches, trees, hollow logs – the boa constrictor snake hanging off the top of a platform of leaf litter. He had lost the duck he had caught. He reached out for tree branches, but no sooner had he gripped a hand full of leaves or a branch his weight and the speed of the flooding waters pulled him away.

The jackhammer waves tore further into the sandbank. Norm, forcing his way through slapping branches bent over by the sheer force of the oncoming wind and rain beating into his face, unable to see further than a few metres ahead, struggled to crawl up to the top of the sand dune. He looked down at the clawing waters and saw nothing else. He knew that the other side of the wall had been torn down and at any moment, if he did not move fast, the rest would topple. He rolled down the dune and ran.

The lashing rain tore at his hands as he worked as quick as he could to untie the boat. Panicking, he roped the plastic water containers, while pouring out enough of the stored water to decrease the weight inside the dinghy. He hauled the loaded boat through the wet eucalyptus and melaleuca bush, in his desperate bid to find higher ground.

Soon, he realised he was struggling to stay in front of the little boat as it slid easily over the wet leaves. Hurried by the gale force of the tailwind, both he and the dinghy flew through the flattened bush side by side. Broken branches and snapped trees bustled past, sometimes crashing over them, before stumbling on. Each of these flying objects resembled the
yinbirras
. These were fairy-like people the good storytellers told about the strange Yanngunyi tribe whose true home was beyond the sea.