Carpentaria (54 page)

All three boys were wrapped in new, red tartan blankets bound with rope. Inside the blankets, Fishman had covered each of the boys with bunches of a leafy aromatic herb that grew wild in flat clumps over the red land. The strong tangy odour, similar to mint, spilled into the air to drown the smell of death. It was a strange sight of brightness and drab. Most of the men were still wearing Gurfurritt good quality uniforms and boots. Long ago they had ripped off the long sleeves on the shirts, trimmed the long trousers to become shorts, immediately after they had finished up working for the mine. The lads with the smiling Bob Marley T-shirts carried the Fishman’s faithful port. The handle of the old brown fifties suitcase had a long stick threaded through it and they carried it ceremoniously, because it was an honour to carry the Fishman’s port.

The port contained little. A few rolls of wire, a bit of a canvas, a butcher’s knife, a Swiss army pocketknife, spare matches, spare torch batteries, a small radio, a notebook and pen, and a can of Coke he had forgotten to drink. Several men carried black billycans containing any personal belongings worth carting around. They walked through one narrow valley after another, and along a spring-fed river lined with dropping paperbark trees. The going was slow in the valleys where the heavy humidity caused them to perspire badly, and it ran off them like water. The men knew what they had been told. They would carry the boys far into the hills to a cave where their journey would end, and the boys would begin their own journey, and when their destination was reached, they would live in a state of harmonious coalescence with their ancestors.

The journey continued for many hours without rest, until at last, the Fishman stopped. He told the men to wait behind, ‘Settle yourselves a while,’ he said, pointing to a fairytale grove of gidgee trees where the air was so still, you could swear you heard the daydreams of lazy lizards sunning themselves on the branches. This was the first real break in over eighteen hours of moving west, away from the lagoon. The men watched Mozzie go on alone, until he disappeared into the hills where the only things living were dingoes and marsupials. Down onto the ground, he crawled on his belly into a smelly dingo’s lair hidden by grassy tussocks, turpentine scrubs and wild banana vines. From the distance, the men began to hear an echo of bell-like voices wafting down the strange grim faces of the hills.

‘How could dingoes make such a sound?’ Certainly, it was more than one voice.

‘Sounds like cats caterwauling somewhere.’ They listened, some asking, expecting more trouble, what could be happening now?

‘Listen! Strange words? Listen!’

‘Smell that?’

‘It’s all the dingoes around here.’

‘Stop ya cavilling. It’s him. Mozzie’s speaking a different tongue, a dead language, talking to his passed-away relatives. Tribespeople were shot here.’

For a long time they stood waiting. Time passed. They sat down and waited, and more time passed. They dozed off under a weak shade. They woke up hungry from waiting. These were good men consumed with thoughts of how long they must wait until, one by one, everyone started to relax again. They stretched out long fit arms and legs, comforted by the resounding echoes of Mozzie’s voice. Finally, he ended. A long silence emanated from the grim hills, and the men rose to their feet, and craned their necks towards the cave, trying to see if something had happened.

Some of the men threw glances at Will Phantom, seeing what he was going to do, whether he was going to help the Fishman or something. Noise or silence, nothing had bothered Will Phantom. He was still sitting like a sad statue, staring off into space. Small colourful finches bobbed around the ground at his feet, drawing in those who watched them, until, someone who had not been paying attention to the finches, suddenly said, ‘Look at that.’ Two small green-feathered birds, no bigger than mice, jumped from twig to twig in the nearby grass. Rare birds. Rare find. Night parrots. The reward was discussed, but no one was interested. When Will heard their voices, he raised his head towards the kingfisher he heard flying overhead, and with the other raised eyebrows following his, they watched its flight path, heading north towards the coast.

Soon enough Fishman was heard coming back. He came gently swishing and swashing, pushing aside the twiggy scrub with his stick. It was time to go, he announced in a dignified voice. The boys were carried up, and passed through the dingo’s lair into the red-ochre-walled cave. The solemn young men went into the place where only the old people had gone before. Once inside, past the dingo’s entrance, the cave opened out to the one large room of towering red walls. On the floor of the cave lay a heavy coating of dust which when moved by their footsteps, flew into the stale air like red powder, revealing its antiquity. They saw small pieces of animal bones, old broken glass, rusted match tins, ancient stone tools – grinding stones, spearheads, axe heads, all perfectly executed in their manufacture. The ceiling left evidence of fires, of those who had come and cooked and slept beside a fire, back, back and further back in time, one hundred thousand years of dreams, ascending in smoke that rose to the ceiling and stayed there in a dense cover of soot.

And the walls, they screamed at you with the cryptic, painted spirits of the Dreamtime. And inside the walls, was the movement of spirits, moving further and further forward, so the surface appeared to be falling into the frightened eyes of the Fishman’s men. They all stood there inside, crowded like that. Old Fishman was in another world, crying and talking the dead language, walking around, gently pushing past anyone standing in his way. His staff pounded on the living wall, and the men looked away, down at the dusty floor, before seeing the Fishman moving forward through a narrow opening inside the resting spirit’s body. The entrance must have been there already, but it was impossible to have noticed it, because the cave seemed so crowded and occupied with relics from other times. The song cycles’ arias of devotion that had droned on in this place for days and days like locusts before rain, which came from forever in the old, musty air inside, were heard now. The men felt the sound lingering inside their heads.

So, it was with astonishment and awe, these men gaped at what they had been shown, and allowed themselves to be taken into the powerful spirituality, which was somehow the same, but much older than the ornate cathedrals made with stone, or the monasteries and places of worship to relics of bones and other bits and pieces of sanctified saints of old Europe and the Holy Land.

Like some old wizard, Fishman turned back, to indicate with a wave of his stick that the men should follow him. The sombre procession continued onwards into the depths of the creature of the underworld’s belly, into the people’s past. The Fishman kept the march moving, undaunted, and waved his staff left and right, as they proceeded down into the labyrinth of strange corridors in the dimly lit cave, where essential rays of light came tapering down like roots of trees, those of the desert fig tree, or the fat bottle trees, all twisting their roots through cracks in the rocks in search of the cool moisture far, far below. They moved past bones of the deceased laid to rest on rock ledges, or hemmed into crevices. Others leant against the wall in a sitting position, as though they had brought themselves to their final resting place to die.

Using the Eveready torch, kept jammed inside his trouser belt, the Fishman led the way. Behind him, the men followed, carefully watching their steps in the darkness, trying not to slip over the wet rocks in the calcite world of dripping limestone. Inside these chambers, it was a world of cymbals and chimes, children’s music reaching further on, deeper into kilometres of underground watercourses feeding the spring-fed paradise far above in the world of sunshine. Finally, their dark, shadowy figures came to a full stop behind the dull light of the torch.

‘Well! This is it,’ announced Fishman. The men, bunched up behind him, were stunned by what they saw in front of them. On the other side of the small opening, the torch shone across a large underground sea. The open sea was so large rippling waves skimmed across the surface. A breeze filled the darkness. In the ray of torchlight, silvery white seagulls with scotopic eyes that could see in the darkness, were piercing the green water. The birds were feeding on a species of fish the men said they had never seen before.

Shallow shafts glowed intermittently from dim faraway lights which were the stars of this world. The men listened to Mozzie’s gravelly, inharmonious voice continuing his nocturne. Perhaps it pleased the spirits that at least somebody had come along to demonstrate his pietism to the old world.

There did not seem to be any other side to this water world.
What’s this place?
each had thought. The zealots were simple people, and they found it difficult to adjust to this world which Mozzie had kept from them. Once they had familiarised themselves to the darkness, and explored further, they found a jetty. Glow-worms lit its edge.

All along the stone-carved mooring were well-constructed paperbark canoes resting, it seemed, from antiquity. Each craft was covered in gull droppings and cobwebs. From the bow, a grass rope moored the craft to another cobwebbed rope appearing snakelike up through the water. No one would have been able to guess how long the boats of the dead-language people had been floating there. Many, many centuries, perhaps. The men’s recent grand feelings of having saved their traditional domain had now been completely eaten away to a bundle of raw nerves.
What if we invoke the dead being in this place
? someone whispered, and it must have been heard by everyone, for they were all startled, as though the question had been screamed at them. No one uttered a word.

‘Where’s Will Phantom? Where is he? Land Rights! Is he here?’ the Fishman suddenly demanded, as if he had no time left in the world, as if they had to get going, high-tailing it out of the place. Will appeared from the darkness, and moved to the Fishman’s side. The old man’s face glowed like a peaceful beacon. Will began helping by pulling in a canoe, positioning it beside the flat rock harbour, holding it steady so the Fishman could place his son inside. Others started to help, just enough, so Fishman could perform the ritual of placing the children himself. It was his responsibility. Will joined the three canoes in a line, one behind the other, with the rope. He was surprised to find the rope was still as supple and strong as the day it was made, possibly thousands of years ago. Did it take aunties, grannies, mothers, sisters, sitting together working the reedy grass in a day of clear blue skies with sunlight on their hands as they talked about living things around them? This was what he said to the Fishman as they stood side by side looking at the canoes, rocking steady like cradles, ready to take the journey across the sea into perpetual night.

The old man said he was thinking it was about time to go, to take the boys across, ‘I got to make sure they learn the language so they can get on.’ Will said that was right, it was time to go, and he gently tossed the rope he was holding, let it fall out in the water, instead of giving it to the hand held out to receive it.

‘You did everything, and they are going in peace now,’ Will said, with a protective arm steadying the old man, and both watched, as the three canoes moved away from the mooring in the swiftly moving current. Silently, the men stepped forward to pay their respects to the canoes drifting silently into the darkness, before turning to walk away. Up ahead, they heard the cavern echoing with the Fishman’s voice bouncing from wall to wall, penetrating their blood, saying his goodbyes to his sons. Wishing them well in their new world.
Be good boys
. He would put his own affairs in order, then he would be coming back to them, very soon. ‘Luke Fishman, Tristrum Fishman, and you too, Aaron Ho Kum.’ He explained he had adopted this dead boy as his own flesh and blood forever, brother to Luke and Tristrum.

Only Will heard it, while leading the Fishman away, when he looked back over his shoulder. ‘Hear it? Listen!’ He heard a droning sound, and imagined the sound was converging from many different directions. The sound he heard, was as if someone a long way off was playing a stanza on the didgeridoo, then, others responded with their own version of the melody which went droning on as one long prophetic oratorio. Fishman said he had heard it too. ‘Listen!’ He dug his elbow into Will’s ribs. Will looked back and in the blackness, using his eyes like a cat, he saw the seagulls gathering together like a glittering, silvery cloud over the canoes. He saw how the beating of scores of wings could create its own air currents until the waters rippled and splashed into small groups of white capping waves. In the company of the cloud, the canoes moved away, navigating the routes to the spirit world, across the sea.

‘Is it the spirits of the old people? Coming to take them home?’ Fishman asked, knowing Will could see far through the darkness.

‘Yes,’ said Will, while he kept the old man moving along in the direction of the others ahead. Soon, he would have to take the lead and navigate through the maze like a bush animal, retracing its steps.

There was trouble at the entrance. Will cautioned the men to stay back. Through the caverns came the amplified howling of dingoes, resounding from wall to wall, bouncing through them, running down the streams of waters under their feet.

‘Wait here, and I will see what’s happening. Keep an eye on the old man.’

Will moved ahead. He would be a fool to rush forward, tricked into taking the wrong direction into the maze by the reverberating sound. He judged that the entrance to the first cavern had to be much further away than the sound indicated. After fifteen minutes of navigating by memory alone, he not only heard the plaintive howls, but smelt the overpowering stench of the small den laced with urine markings. He edged his way forwards, as near as he dared to go. He did not want his scent to be picked up by the dingoes, since he knew it would frighten them out of the den.

Then he heard the sound of droning engines. He panicked, believing he was surrounded by men who were not dead, who had known exactly where to find him. He felt suddenly trapped in the catastrophic darkness, and compelled to burst through the lair and run, to rush outside like a savage animal. When they had heard the helicopter coming, the dingoes had taken refuge in the lair. Then, as it started to hover close to the entrance, sending clouds of dust inside, they had backed themselves into a frightened pack against the wall, and started to howl. Their sharp ears were unable to tolerate the vibrating noise of the helicopter at close range. As Will watched them, almost lying on top of one another, he knew very soon they would run.