To the Islands (11 page)

They saw by the hospital a little bunch of keening women, their heads bent and covered, and from the gate Helen appeared and came running up the road, her skirt flapping and her smooth hair ruffled by the wind.

As she came up: ‘What’s wrong?’ they demanded, and she stopped, panting a little, and stiff with apprehension around the lips.

‘They say Rex is killed,’ she said, breathless.

That shocked them, they looked at one another. ‘How? Where?’ they wanted to know.

‘I can’t stop. Come with me. They may be wrong, they were about Dicky, remember?’ She broke away again, and they ran with her. ‘It’s at the new building.’

‘How’d it happen?’ Dixon asked.

‘They say a sheet of iron—blew down and—hit him. Oh—terrible if I were late...’

‘He shouldn’t have been out,’ Gunn said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ In front of them was the building, and under a tree a group of squatting men with their heads bowed. They had not known how to take this death, whether to mourn as white men or as black. Though two older men had wounded themselves on the forehead with stones and were quietly moaning, the blood running down, the others were still and silent.

‘Over there,’ Dixon said. He hung back from her as she approached the body and knelt beside it. Dust lay over the clothes and had crusted thickly on the bloody forehead.

She unbuttoned the scarlet shirt and put her hand to the brown breast. As she held it there she was not looking at the man, Gunn saw, but at something far away or perhaps invisible, and with such passion that he was startled and found her unfamiliar. It was as though she were willing life to push down and pierce through her fingers into the heart beneath them, or as if by concentration she could absorb death into herself and there overcome it. He heard Dixon breathing lightly beside him, and glancing up saw his eyes were fixed on her with puzzled awe.

She said in a toneless voice and without moving: ‘He’s alive.’

Dixon moved back and cleared his throat. After a pause: ‘Thank God for that,’ he said sincerely.

She had lifted, very tenderly, the head. ‘He’ll have to be moved gently. It’s dangerous. Would you get some men and go for the stretcher, Terry?’

‘Like a shot,’ he promised. He went quickly away towards the mourners, shouting: ‘He’s okay, boys. He’s alive. We just want the stretcher.’

They got to their feet and looked at him. There was a silence. Then they began to make comments to one another, then jokes. In a minute bursts of laughter were drifting over from the trees.

Gunn said quietly: ‘After a decent interval they’ll begin to celebrate.’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s the sheet of iron, over there, by the trees. It must have dropped pretty sharply and been blown along the ground.’

She was watching the quiet dark face. ‘I suppose so.’

‘You looked—different, just then. We both noticed it. Like a doctor. Or a mother.’

She turned to him for an instant her rapt face, and said in the same remote voice: ‘Please, Bob, don’t say anything. He’s so nearly dead. And this is, really, my first child.’

Before dark Justin and Heriot entered the hills, passing a wide pool at the mouth of a gorge and directing the horses along the flat shelves of rock above it. Beyond the pool, glimmering greyly among spidery pandanus, the stream broke over rapids, the cliffs above grew steadily huger, until there was only a narrow echoing chasm with a strip of grey sky over it and deep shadow filled with the rush of water all around. Great boulders, cast down from the crumbling cliffs, lay across the rock platforms, and the horses slithered and snorted, sliding past chunks of stone twice as high as themselves. In the stillness that overlaid and crushed all sounds of horses and water, Heriot sang softly and interminably to himself.

Then the stream took a bend and widened into another pool between cliffs vaster and more silent than those the men had passed. There Justin pulled up, Heriot following him. A stone, kicked from Albert Creek’s hoof, rolled and dropped with a sound that the cliffs threw back as a gunshot.

‘We better camp here,’ Justin said, half-whispering for fear of the echo, ‘it going to rain pretty soon. We stay dry here.’

Very slowly Heriot dismounted, and went and sat down under the overhang of the rock. There was a flutter of sound as bats burst from some cranny behind him and skittered out across the grey water. He did not move, he sat quietly in the dirt, his arms folded round the rifle.

Justin came over and dumped his blankets and bags, went back and unsaddled. Heriot said nothing, had no direction to give, was willing to be managed by Justin for the rest of his life. He watched the broad face of the man bent over his bundles.

‘I brought hopples, too,’ Justin said proudly. ‘Out of you office.’ He held up the hobble chains and jingled them.

‘Good,’ Heriot murmured.

The white teeth grinned, and the man rose and went to the horses, leading them down to the edge of the water where there was a bank of silt. When he came back Heriot had not moved, still held the rifle clutched to his chest. ‘You like you tucker now, brother?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Heriot said, wearily. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I make a fire and we have a cup of tea, eh?’

‘If you like.’

He watched the dark figure gathering wood and piling it, and tossed his box of matches when Justin’s hands demanded. As the wood crackled, the light came like an explosion, hurting his eyes, so that he turned and looked at the flame-washed rock behind him, patterned with the ochre and charcoal drawings of natives. He saw rock wallabies, crocodiles, goannas, little priapic men. Recurrent everywhere was the symbol of
lumiri
, the rainbow serpent.

‘Is this place sacred?’ he asked dully.

‘No. Plenty old people camp here. Women, too.’

‘Lumiri
can take you to the sky, is that right?’

‘Might be,’ Justin said noncommittally, crouched over his fire.

Heriot stood up, spread out his blanket and lay down on it, the rifle beside him, he whistled two notes, and the cliffs threw them back clear and pure. He executed a brief phrase and received it back again. With a kind of desperate concentration he applied himself, to composing a duet for his whistle and the echo, involving a pleasant use of counterpoint.

Later, when the quart-pot boiled, he sat propped on one elbow and drank tea, and then lay down again by his rifle. Justin came and spread his blanket and lay beside him, listening to the white man’s slow breathing. At last he said: ‘Brother?’

‘Yes?’

‘I take that gun away if you sleepy.’

‘No. Leave it.’

‘Brother—’

‘Yes?’

‘You going to say prayer?’

A strange tearing noise came back from the cliffs. The horses, down at the edge of the dark water, were drinking.

‘I know a prayer,’ Heriot said into his blanket. ‘A very old prayer.’ He whispered it to the ground.

‘Fittingly is now my coming

Into this world with tears and cry;

Little and poor is my having,

Brittle and soon y-fallen from high;

Sharp and strong is my dying,

I ne wot whither shall I;

Foul and stinking is my rotting—

On me, Jesu, thou have mercy.’

The rain shattered on the roof with tireless tropical zeal, eager to have the job done and over, violently intent. If it could deliver three inches in an hour or two, that would be raining, it could rest then until the morning.

Dixon, rising wet and gasping from the darkness like a fish, fetched up at the hospital door and leaned in, looking for Helen, who was marooned on an island of lamplight in a dark room. In the shadow, vaguely, he could see the humped whiteness of Rex’s bed. She had put out the electric light and sat removed from him, reading from a solid blue book.

‘Helen,’ he whispered to her.

She looked up, not seeing him at first, then came quietly out with her book to the veranda. The iron roof roared with rain.

‘Is something wrong, Terry?’

‘No—least, I hope not. You seen Heriot?’

‘Not all day.’

‘I took your telegram over there to send to the doctor, but it was too late for the sched, and the old man wasn’t there. I felt the wireless and it was cold. I don’t think he listened in.’

‘Is it working?’

‘I’ll check up later. The thing is, he wasn’t at church either. Ways haven’t seen him, nor’s anyone else, and when I went over to his house his bed had been pulled to bits and the blankets taken. Looked like he’d shot through.’

She was deeply silent. ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘aren’t you surprised?’

‘Terry—I don’t know anything.’

‘Where would he go, on a day like this? Any day, come to that.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Aren’t you scared he might have been knocked down by something, like Rex was? I am.’

She was clutching her book unhappily to herself as Gunn came leaping and dripping on to the veranda. ‘The Wet’s over,’ he said bitterly. ‘Get an eyeful of the Dry.’

‘You seen Heriot?’ Dixon asked.

Gunn shook his head with a shower of drops, and the silence came down on them again. ‘Come into the dispensary,’ Helen said, to break it.

The yellow-lit room was airless, a feeling of damp lay on chairs and table and skin, and moths were mad with light. ‘Better out there, really,’ Gunn said.

Dixon wiped his face. ‘Well, what are we going to do about the old man? Can’t just forget about him.’

Gunn said: ‘You knew he’d gone, didn’t you, Helen?’

‘Yes, I went to his office, and then to his house. I noticed the same things Terry noticed.’

‘Anything else? You’re probably more observant than we are.’

She hesitated. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘The top rifle from the rack in the office was gone. It’s always been there. Always.’

Dixon’s puzzled eyes went from her to Gunn, who had stiffened in his chair. ‘What is all this?’ he asked loudly. ‘What’s the secret?’

Gunn said quietly and quickly: ‘Just a minute, Terry, we’re working things out. You cleaned the wound, Helen. The one on the forehead.’

‘Yes.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Ragged,’ she said. ‘Fairly deep.’

Dixon shifted impatiently. ‘So what?’

‘It wasn’t the iron,’ Gunn said. ‘Couldn’t have been. It didn’t look right to begin with. If the wind was strong enough to carry it on so far after hitting him it would have carried it over his head in the first place. And the wound didn’t look right either, as far as you could see it. If the iron had hit him flat on you’d expect his nose to be broken and not so much blood on the forehead. And if it had hit him with a corner or edge—well, God knows what it would have done, but it would have been worse than it was.’

‘It was a stone,’ Helen said flatly. ‘I’m sure of it.’

Dixon said abruptly: ‘I get what you mean.’

They turned to him, astonished by the change in his voice, his face. No longer an awkward, good-natured man to whom it was not necessary to pay attention, he had hardened and grown and taken on an air of sardonic decision.

Helen said: ‘But we don’t
know,
Terry...’

‘You’ve got no doubts about it. That old—he tried to kill Rex and then went out and shot himself.’

‘We can’t be sure,’ Gunn protested. ‘We could be wrong about the wound.’

‘Just because he hated Rex.’

‘He was a good man,’ Helen said sharply.

‘Ah, a good man, all right. At least he knew what he ought to get for it.’

Over the sound of rain: ‘Terry,’ Helen cried out, ‘you must listen to us. He wasn’t a bad man. If he tried to kill Rex, it wouldn’t have been because he hated him, it would have been because he thought the mission was in danger from him.’

‘He might have kidded himself.’

‘Terry, you believe in God.’

‘Yeah.’

‘If you could bring people back from death, would you refuse?’

He looked at her with his farseeing eyes. ‘No.’

‘We’ve saved Rex. But I can’t save Mr Heriot, you and Bob are the only ones who can do that.’

‘Not if he’s shot himself.’

‘But he took blankets, he can’t have meant to do it straightaway, if he meant it at all. There’s always a chance, Terry—’

‘But he tried to kill someone. He doesn’t deserve being saved.’

She had the thick medical book held tightly in her lap, and her voice went on, quickly and passionately in the stifling room: ‘I don’t believe in heaven and hell, but I believe in sin, and sins that aren’t wiped out on the earth stay on the earth forever echoing and echoing among the people left behind. We’re trying to wipe out the sin of the white men who massacred these people’s relations, but we can’t ever quite do it, because we’re not the same white men. And Mr Heriot has to come back, he’s the only one who can wipe out his hatred of Rex. They’ll come to see that as hating and rejecting all of them.’

She stopped then, looking down at her hands, and Gunn broke in quietly. ‘We drive people to it,’ he said. ‘The white men at the massacre thought they were protecting property, and Mr Heriot thought he was protecting the mission. Things we asked them to protect. We can pay reparations to people we hurt in our wars, but we don’t ever quite pay back the people we force to hurt them. But with Heriot we can try, Terry, or I will. All you need to do is keep quiet about it, now you know everything.’

Dixon rubbed his hands on his knees, his head bent. ‘You can talk,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’

‘Two people have killed one another,’ Helen said, ‘but we have this chance to bring them back and reconcile them. That’s heaven. But if we fail, their hate will go on spreading and growing forever, and that’s hell, Terry.’

‘I believe you,’ he said at last. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Don’t let anyone know about Rex, let them think it was the iron. No one else will see the wound.’

‘Aren’t you going to get the doctor plane for him?’

‘He’s out of danger, and the airstrip’s unserviceable. It’ll be a marsh after this rain.’

‘How do we stop Father Way from working out why Heriot’s shot off?’

‘They had a quarrel this morning, Mrs Way told me a little bit she heard of it from him. It’d be easy for me to convince him Mr Heriot was on the verge of suicide.’