The sun walks down, p.27
The Sun Walks Down, page 27
SIXTH DAY
When George Axam wakes to the sound of rain, he sits up in his bed furious at everything: the weather, God, shearers, sheep, his exasperating brother, and the twistedness of his sheets. He suspects, as he always does when inconvenienced by rain, that the natives have brought it on to spite him. These are the only circumstances under which George would indulge such suspicions; he would never attribute to native magic a stretch of warm, dry, windless days for shearing.
George is a man who likes to make plans and keep them. He runs Thalassa like clockwork, or aspires to. He believes—passionately—in the Seven-Day Week, just as he believes in the British monarchy and Greenwich Mean Time: that is, as absolute verities. The difficulty, for George, lies in convincing most of his workers that days are counted in sevens, that the seventh day is the only one on which no work is done (unless it’s a particularly busy time, such as shearing), and that these groups of seven days—these weeks—continue one after another with no interruption for weather, animal migration, personal preference, social gathering, or religious observance other than Christmas and Easter (days on which, lamentably, sheep must still be watched and cows still milked). It’s inevitable, in this remote spot, that many of George’s shepherds and station hands are Aboriginal; and he does prefer these employees, generally, to his white ones, who tend to be unsavoury characters on the run from something further south. He’s come to understand that there are differences between, for example, a Nukunu man and a Yadliawarda man—though he would be unable to articulate those differences. Regardless, these people are simply not reliable when it comes to the Seven-Day Week.
That’s why, when he finds his plans disrupted—even by a natural event like rain—George tends to feel that the natives are responsible. He thinks of them as disposed to laziness (they are, for example, disinclined to engage in hard physical labour during the hottest part of a hot day). This morning, he imagines that they’ll be pleased to have a rainy day off, and that the atmosphere at the camp by the ration depot will be festive. George feels, as he often does, the loneliness of carrying this huge pastoral enterprise on his shoulders. He misses his wife. If Ellen weren’t in Adelaide, but here, in bed, beside him, he would lay his head on her milky breast and feel the warmth of her breath in his hair.
George springs up, dresses, and looks in on his mother, who is sipping coffee in bed. This greeting is a morning ritual, largely rote, though George would be disconcerted if it stopped—it would be as if a number had fallen off a clockface. Mother, as usual, is fussing about all the wrong things. Apparently, Nancy delivered news with the coffee: Sergeant Foster arrived overnight, along with an unusual caravan including the Reverend Daniels, the sister of the missing boy, and a native tracker with a grievous wound. George dislikes hearing any news about Thalassa second-hand.
‘You’ve noticed, I presume, the rain?’ he says, which prompts his mother to ask him if a coat made of possum fur would keep off rain as effectively as an umbrella, and, come to think of it, does he know the whereabouts of one of those?
‘Of one of what?’ asks George.
‘Of an umbrella.’
George says, ‘Mother, can’t this wait? It’s rather a busy day.’ And that’s quite enough filial duty for the morning.
He closes his mother’s door and heads towards the kitchen, running through the rainy yard. When he arrives, the first person he sees is a young white girl eating a soft-boiled egg at the kitchen table. She’s curved one arm around her eggcup and is scooping furiously at the egg with a long spoon. Then he sees Tal, who’s also sitting—his elbows are on the table, and he’s resting his head on his hands in such a way that the back of his neck is visible, bound in its red handkerchief. Nancy is singing as she sweeps the room. It doesn’t occur to George that Tal might be in bad humour (the result, perhaps, of a fruitless night at cards) and that Nancy is singing in an effort to make Tal laugh—that would be evidence of impulses unconnected to George and George’s concerns. He sees only a man doing nothing when there’s a lot to do, and a woman in a good mood when she should be in a bad one.
Nancy stops singing and says, ‘Morning, Mister George.’
‘Nancy,’ George says, ‘is there such a thing as an umbrella in this house?’
‘Could be Mrs Ellen left one umbrella. What for?’
George pauses. ‘I believe it’s raining.’
Nancy laughs and says, ‘So you wear a hat.’
It’s true that George has never once used an umbrella at Thalassa—would, in fact, be ashamed to do so. Umbrellas are for town. He could explain that his mother asked after it, but why should he have to? ‘A house this size should have at least one umbrella in it.’
‘Maybe half one umbrella,’ Nancy says.
George has not forgotten that, between the ages of three and ten, he would gladly have laid down his life for Nancy; but it’s necessary, on occasion, to check the familiarity he allows her. So he says, sternly, ‘Enough nonsense. Look about for an umbrella, Nancy. I want one.’ Now he turns to Tal, who is bothersome, in that he’s indispensable and knows it; this gives him a confidence that George detests, but has never managed to quash. ‘And you can come with me to the sheds. Damned if I know what you’re hanging about here for.’
Tal raises his head from his hands. ‘There’s a boy lost,’ he says, and stands. He’s taller than George, but this doesn’t signify—George rarely looks directly at his face. ‘And that Ramindjeri fellow’s leg is bad. He can’t get up.’ He walks past George to the door of the kitchen and, addressing Nancy, says, ‘That boy there, eh, that lost one. I’ll go up and find him.’ Then he steps into the rain, which has eased slightly, and crosses the kitchen yard without looking back.
George calls after him, ‘If you don’t work, you don’t eat.’ This isn’t entirely true—not where Tal is concerned, anyway—but George often wishes that it were. He’s tired of the arrogance of certain Aboriginal men. Not just Tal—he’s also thinking of Nancy’s brother, Billy, who returned to Thalassa when Otho Baumann left and acted as if he expected to be reinstalled as darling of the place.
Nancy hums the tune she was singing earlier. When George glares at her, she stops and says, ‘You still want that umbrella?’
‘It’s still raining, isn’t it?’
The girl eating the egg says, ‘Hardly.’ He’d forgotten about her; he wouldn’t have said ‘damned’ otherwise. He has no idea who she is and, although strangers pass through Thalassa all the time, the mystery of her identity—along with the untimely rain—feels emblematic of a slight, but telling, slip in his authority. A shirtless boy appears at the door to shout at Nancy that Billy needs vinegar in the stable. Having shouted, the boy spots George, opens his eyes wide, and darts away. So Billy is here as well—a fact with which, notes George, his mother didn’t see fit to acquaint him.
‘Nancy,’ he says, ‘I won’t have Billy interfering with the kitchen.’
Nancy looks hurt by this, which wrenches George’s hidden heart. She says, without defiance, ‘He’s looking out for that tracker. The one busted his leg.’
‘That’s as may be,’ says George, ‘but unless Billy deigns to live and work here, he can’t treat this kitchen as his own.’ He shakes his head and heaves a sigh. ‘Get me the vinegar. I’m going past the stable—I’ll take it to him.’
Nancy sets the broom aside and leaves the kitchen, heading for the storeroom where the vinegar is kept. George, alone now with the girl and her shielded egg, says, ‘And who might you be?’
‘Cissy Wallace, sir,’ she replies, and George says, ‘Ah, the sister.’ It strikes George that she is almost too old to be alone with. Nancy returns with a jar of vinegar. As soon as George leaves the kitchen, she sings as loudly as before.
George stops at the stable on his way to the woolshed, delighted, as he always is, by the way his horses nicker in greeting from their stalls. Their mangers are almost empty, so he calls for one of the stable boys. The stable is yet another part of Thalassa in need of his attention: it’s much larger than it ought to be, now that they’re no longer breeding ponies. George has been known to curse his father for having built so big, only to abandon all of it; he then invariably regrets being unfaithful to his father’s memory. What memory? George has three distinct recollections of Henry Axam. He recalls a dazzling man with a prominent—but neat—moustache, who shook a newspaper and winked across the breakfast table. He remembers an instance in which Papa watched as Billy bowled a cricket ball at little George, and George, swinging his bat, missed. And he remembers a picnic at his father’s absurd Greek temple, when one of the children in attendance pointed at Billy in his cricket whites, gave George a sly look, and said, ‘Is that your brother?’ At the time, George was unsure of whom, exactly, this was meant to insult: George for having a native brother, or Billy for being related to a useless boy like himself, who could neither bowl nor bat.
There’s no sign of Billy in the stable. George, looking about with his jar of vinegar, hears footsteps overhead in the hayloft, then a shout. A trapdoor opens in the ceiling and hay rains down into a stall. The hay dust glitters in a shaft of light. Watching it, George has the feeling—as he often does immediately before shearing starts—that a man with more authority is about to come striding in, barking orders. George isn’t sure if he craves or fears this man. Either way, he never comes, and George must pretend to be him. George hears a groan coming from the harness room, the door of which has been propped open with a stool, against his strict instructions.
Yes, a cot has been made up in the harness room and a man lies on it, covered by a blanket. George, peering in, remains half hidden in the doorway. He sees Billy, looking robust and wiry as he always does, poking at the fire in the cast-iron stove that George prefers never to light. A chair beside the stove has been draped with one of those fur cloaks the natives sometimes wear down south—presumably it’s drying. The man on the cot groans again and Billy crosses to him, pressing at his forehead with a cloth. It’s done, notes George, with uncommon gentleness, as if Billy loved this man above all else. Is that your brother? George can imagine, for a moment, how Billy might have been when Papa drowned: the sorrow and care he might have demonstrated. As he often does in Billy’s presence, George feels a deep complaint, an undertow of grief. It’s insufferable, so he presses it back down.
Billy looks up and his face is relaxed until he sees George in the doorway; then it neutralises. George holds up the jar of vinegar and places it on a table by the door. He nods at Billy. Billy nods back. They are civil and careful with one another. George stays for no more than three seconds, nods again, and backs away.
The boy had grown older overnight. He didn’t notice this at first; he was tired and wet, the stolen blanket was heavy and smelled of piddle, and although he knew that the road outside Wilparra would lead him into town—the lady god had said so, yesterday—he had no sense of how long the journey would take. He was afraid to stop in case the gods caught up with him.
The road ran alongside a creek in which the boy saw shallow puddles of water. The rain wasn’t as heavy now as it had been when he left Wilparra, but the boy knew to keep out of creek beds even in light rain—his father had warned him about the sudden rivers that could come pouring from the ranges. Even so, he climbed down into the creek to drink and take a rest. He was hidden from the road by the steep bank of the creek, and sheltered from the rain by the knotty, exposed roots of a red gum, and he slept without quite meaning to. He woke, hungry, when a pigeon flew down to drink from the deepest of the creek bed’s puddles. The boy leaned across the water and cupped his hands over the bird, which began to hop and squawk and spread its wings.
The boy thought his hands looked bigger than they had yesterday. They were large enough that, if he wanted to, he could hold the bird down in the puddle until it drowned. Then he could build a fire, pluck and clean the bird, use his knife to gut it, and roast it on the fire. He couldn’t have done all this if he were still the age he’d been yesterday. The boy had not, until this precise moment with the bird, understood or believed in time. The chime of his mother’s mantel clock was only music; how could it divide one day from another when every day was the same as yesterday, and would be the same tomorrow? And the sun was always shining, here or in some other place. But the boy looked at his hands holding down the pigeon’s wings, and time presented itself to him. It said: then, and now. Before you were lost, and after. He could not have put into words this feeling that he had stepped aside from himself and was now just watching. The pigeon beat its bronze wings in the water. When the boy withdrew his hands, the bird skipped on its scaly feet, shook itself, and flew away.
The boy wondered if his mother would recognise him now that he was older. He climbed the bank, looked up and down the road, and saw that horses had passed while he was asleep: probably the gods’. So they were ahead of him, could reach Mam first, and if they did, what might they say to her? They might say that he had liked drawing with the god, had liked the god’s stories of monkeys wearing hats, had liked the peaceful the way the lady combed his hair since she only had one head to comb and could take her time; they might tell Mam that he was their boy now, and that he wanted to go and live with them on the sun. And Mam might believe them. She might not care. She might say, ‘Yes, take him,’ and turn away to churn the butter.
So the boy needed to reach Mam before the gods did. This didn’t seem likely, but he might manage it. The gods might get lost or fall asleep, their horses might run away. He followed the road, but kept to one side of it, darting from one damp clump of mulga to another—after all, the gods might have set a trap and be waiting for him up ahead. He watched himself stumbling in the rain. He’d gone a little way before he realised that he’d left his blanket by the creek, but there was no time to go back.
When Cissy finishes her egg in the Thalassa kitchen, Nancy offers her a second one. Cissy refuses it; she has never in her life eaten more than one egg at a time, and doesn’t intend to start now. Then Nancy asks if Cissy wants a job to do and Cissy says yes, because if she’s stuck at Thalassa, waiting for Sergeant Foster to speak to her and for June to be reshod, then she’d prefer to be occupied with something useful. So, on Nancy’s instructions, Cissy sets out to collect the lamps from all the Thalassa bedrooms. She goes into the main part of the house and begins to march in and out of rooms, up and down hallways, refusing to look with any interest at anything. The house swims around her, vaguely full of glints and glosses: brass, wood, marble, china. It ticks with clocks. The floors are clotted with Turkey carpets. She will ignore this house as well as she’s able, and she’ll be useful—but only as it suits her.
There are so many bedrooms, and each has its own peculiar smell and oppressive wardrobe. In one room, the minister lies sleeping on a bed with his limp hair stuck to his forehead; Cissy is thoroughly sick of his face. In the final bedroom, Cissy finds Mrs Axam. She’s sitting, dressed, in front of a mirrored dressing table, brushing out her hair. Her long, skinny dog lies at her feet and is indifferent to Cissy’s arrival. Judging it best not to look at Mrs Axam, Cissy walks to the mantel shelf, where she’s spotted a dirty lamp. She’s poised and ready for the possibility that Mrs Axam will notice and question her, but Mrs Axam continues to sit in front of the mirror, no longer brushing her hair. Cissy can see from the corner of her eye that Mrs Axam isn’t moving at all, just holding the bright brush against her shoulder. So Cissy dares to look at her directly, and she sees that Mrs Axam isn’t aware of this room, or of Cissy in it—she’s listening to some other part of the house, some part Cissy can’t conceive of, with the air of someone entirely consumed by an idea. This interests Cissy, though she doesn’t know what the idea could be. Mrs Axam interests Cissy—there, she’ll admit it. Once, when a horse fell in an Adelaide street, Mrs Axam jumped from her own carriage and sat on the horse’s head in order to keep it calm beneath her skirts while it was taken out of harness. Everyone in Fairly knows this story, which is among the most impressive Cissy has ever heard.
Cissy, interested in Mrs Axam, clears her throat. If Mrs Axam is startled, she doesn’t show it—she simply returns to brushing her hair and looks at Cissy in the mirror. Cissy has the curious feeling that her mother is at stake: that every move she makes in this house, right or wrong, will reflect well or badly on her mother.
‘Good morning,’ Mrs Axam says. ‘I think you must be Cecily Wallace.’
‘Yes, madam.’ Cissy finds herself making a curtsy, which she immediately—but invisibly—renounces.
‘I’m truly sorry, dear, about your brother. And Nancy tells me you were extremely brave with Mr Daniels. Wasn’t that clever of you.’
Cissy, unsure of the merits of cleverness, says, ‘I’m here to fetch your lamp.’
‘Is that so?’ says Mrs Axam. ‘I suppose Nancy is keeping you busy. You might stay here, then, and brush my hair for me. As you can see, I have only one useful hand.’
Cissy takes Mrs Axam’s hairbrush. It’s heavy and silver, and the silky bristles are looped with hair. Mam keeps a cleaner brush. Cissy tugs at the hair in the bristles and a mat of it comes out, brush-shaped.
‘You’re quite right,’ says Mrs Axam. ‘Disgraceful.’ She puts her hand out for the hair, and Cissy gives it to her. ‘Now, I prefer firm, even strokes, all the way from top to bottom.’
Cissy brushes Mrs Axam’s hair in much the same way she would brush the coats of her father’s Shires. She has to stop herself from making the hissing noise she does when grooming the horses—her father taught her this trick, which stops dust from their coats from getting into her mouth. Cissy can see Mrs Axam’s pearly scalp through her thin white hair.
‘Good,’ says Mrs Axam. ‘Nice, firm strokes. How old are you, Cecily?’
‘Fifteen, madam.’
‘Yes, I’m told you were very brave indeed with Mr Daniels,’ she says again, then pauses. Cissy passes the brush through Mrs Axam’s hair. ‘There was another man brought in with you—a native tracker. Yes?’
