Travellers May Still Return Page 14

  After the funeral my mother, in a moment of clarity, affirmed matter-of-factly that my father was Danny’s father, whom I had known as a poetical unpractical rascally man long dead of an apparent aneurism, whose wife had quickly developed cancer and followed him. Small explosions in my skull for days, with unstable knickknacks falling from neural shelves and furniture items rearranging themselves. Fifty years ago my parents and Danny’s had been close friends, but Danny and I were not almost cousins. We were brothers. Danny is childless, but he travelled a little, then came home to convert his barn and breed horses. Danny and I are brothers, but does he know? I will never ask him. Nor have I told Emma, for some reason.

  When we were kids, the route between my place and Danny’s was a green tunnel in summer and the light at the end was yellow, his house at the top of its hill a faded wooden beacon.

  I can’t think about Danny without feeling anger and sadness.

  When he left on his travels I was green, envious, lovesick, bereft, pathetic, because I could only stay home and listen to farmers’ talk about the valley and the friable soil, the effect of salt on grapes. When he returned I could hardly look at him. When he returned to us, he was an unpredictable man who would disappear for weeks at a time, appearing at his parents’ house half-starved, half-wild, to be only grudgingly taken in. He had no experience of tending vines. He knew of horses and about the sea. I only knew how to sit with aunts and uncles and tell them back the stories they’d told me. Summer nights when the highway was quiet, farmers met around a barbecue to plan the season and compare lives. I wandered among them collecting tales. Danny renovated his barn, tamed ponies, buried our father and then his mother. His wildness was locked away but you could sense it in him. When we were young men I wanted to see his secret valley, but when I asked he refused to take me with him across the plain to the mountains. And then Annie died and I began to dream up stories too complicated for any uncle or aunt to tell.

  Danny has a wicked appetite.

  Apocat feels sorry for me.

  Winters, his barn was filled with ponies and horses and their foals; summers, Danny took the herd to the new corral by his broken cabin on a bench in the hills and left the homestead to mice and spiders. He preferred the company of ponies and horses to ours, though Tom and I drove out to see him once or twice. At his cabin we drank good wine, sang and told stories. When each of Tom’s girls was born, Danny rode in to visit the family; he was welcome there. But he did not come to see Emma and me, even when Annie died, and we seldom spoke, except at Tom’s from time to time.

  Danny is a troubled man, Emma says, not right. A wife would have settled him into something like the rest of us, but it’s too late now.

  She broke her arm riding with him. She was drunk. This adventure continues to disturb me; I still feel a mixture of envy and admiration and excitement: a shaft of light piercing my own arm, just below the left shoulder, a bolt, nail, spear, arrow, sliver, and I fight sleeplessly with a ghost in our bed, listening to my wife’s groans every time she tries to turn, as if a message from Danny is leeching through her, from far away, from the sea, from brandy, and I have been infected and must spend my night-time trying to read infection’s signs around the village. And signs there are, not the least being Danny’s illness and exile, James hanged, Abi’s trouble, and no babies born since Tom’s granddaughter last fall, and only Lucy and Abi with child, my biggest story rising, and great change lapping at the door and everything threatening to tumble with the rising ocean that when it ebbs will leave only islands and a sea.

  A rainbow spanned the dump. I was there spying on the three kids. What are they? What do they think? What’s in them that’s dangerous and tricky enough to ride out massive change? I sang Danny’s adventures to my son. If a member of the audience warps the players by recording their acts, then praise or criticism of a player warps the witness. Once I held such things in memory, but now I have to write it down. I’m easily confounded by the children. Also I’m afraid in the attempt to settle everything I will miss the depths from which all arises. For me it is depth not height will tell the final truth, so my head is always down and I leave for others the sky.

  My wife’s pain from her broken arm and Danny’s pain from his cancer, what do they signify? I wake in the dark to her moaning. I thought she was improving, but she is cocooned and ailing. It’s so black. Where is the sun that has jurisdiction over human affairs? Where are the drugs to imbibe and get confused?

  “Awake?”

  “Yes,” Emma says. Then, after a pause, “Can’t you sleep?”

  “The wall gives me no peace,” I say.

  “Poor sausage,” she says, yawning. “And how much of our savings have you spent on those slabs?”

  “Nothing. Not a cent.”

  “And the truck to bring them in?”

  “Don’t worry about money.”

  “Sure.”

  We get up before it’s properly light and dress and go down to the kitchen and I fill Polly’s water basin and she waddles over and drinks it dry in moments. It is her liver. Much water: much peeing. A green sign of her imminent end.

  “I’m worried about the dog,” I say.

  We make coffee and spike it and take our mugs to the window and sit looking out.

  “Apocat says we must touch our enemy.”

  Emma rolls her eyes. “Oh yes?”

  “Her answer to the consortium.”

  “Ah,” says Emma. “But what does it mean?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  I sit with Emma and we watch figures on the horizon hills: exactly like white horses, like white horses on the sea. I say I plan to import sand from the plain, lay a path beside the stone hedge, a sandy path to follow the wall’s curve. Make a coastal walk through sand piled against a wall.

  “We’re supposed to live life, not storify it.”

  “Can’t I do both?”

  “Maybe not.”

  But it’s useful dreaming. The wall begins at the corner of our house and runs in an imperceptible curve toward the western grape hills where my undisputed mother completes her days. It will end when I end. The sand walk is still an idea. I count the stones already laid and estimate how many years it represents. Stones help me live. Dust helps me sleep. My wall is for wind to find.

  “What about Abi?” says Emma.

  “Oh. I forgot to ask. How is she?”

  “That girl has the weight of the world on her, but she is eating like a horse.”

  “That’s good.”

  “She’s practically living in Danny’s barn.”

  “She’s safe there.”

  “Danny’s dying,” Emma says.

  “Yes, maybe he is.”

  “I’ve a feeling he won’t come back.”

  “Sure he will.”

  “So. What do you think, Charles? Was it Danny or James?”

  “Might be either.”

  I know it was probably Danny. He and Abi rode north last summer, before James died. We watched them trot out together mornings, easy in their saddles, not talking, craggy cowboy and young girl, a sight to see getting smaller then vanishing beyond the cultivated hills, and vulnerable to speculation, our witnessing buoying them into the old seabed where, I suppose, they navigated the scattered stones and boulders, and their horses reunited with ghosts of their wild counterparts. And I saw it ring a change in Emma, the way they rode through the tall grasses, horses steaming, toward the mountains, because one day she too went riding with Danny — small, smaller, vanishing — got drunk, fell, broke her humerus, came home broken, changed, et cetera. What kind of apprenticeships are nurtured out there?

  Last night, I cooked dinner for my mother, then washed her feet as she crooned to herself something she’d learned as a girl: “ . . . take down her combination and perform the operation, it’s only human nature after all.”

  “What is the meaning of that?” I asked.

  “Oh, you’ll find o
ut, tulip,” she said. “When you’re a man.” After clipping her claws, I patted dry her toes and asked if she wanted a drink.

  “That wife of yours,” she said, “is everything all right between you?”

  “Of course.”

  “But she won’t have another baby, will she?”

  “Mom.” I sipped my wine. “She’s too old.”

  “No harm in asking.”

  “No point.”

  “Everybody’s always fucking the wrong people,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Danny’s going to make millions,” she said. “I hope you’ve thought it all out, Charles.”

  “Thought what out?”

  “Never mind. Come and see the pigeons roosting.”

  I left my parents’ house drunk on Dad’s wine, and at home made love to my wife.

  IV

  15.

  “It’s fatal to leave the ethnographer out,” he said.

  “Fatal?” she said. “Come on. This village is devolving. Having no witness is hardly fatal. Anyway, it’s done. We won’t nail the funding.”

  “I’ve got the funding.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “True.”

  “We need a year.”

  “I’ve got us a year.” He gave her a shrug. “And new parameters.”

  “Which are? What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t tell you yet.”

  “It’s academic anyway. You screwed up.”

  “So to speak.”

  “You made a mess, my friend!”

  “Okay, but let’s be clear what’s us and what’s our work.”

  “That’s not funny. You contaminated our research.”

  “Let’s not run in circles. I have the funding. We have a new sponsor. You’ll be the point person. They trust you. And, please, no talk about Maori facial tattoos.”

  The ethnographers’ second visit coincided with the start of spring and the first town hall meeting. While she met with the council and sat in on committees, he walked around the village alone, kicking his heels. They were guest speakers at a preliminary hearing at the hall, but she did the talking. They stayed a month in their tent on the common ground while worry in the town accelerated toward panic. Apocat and Kata invited him into their house to acquaint him with vernal customs and taboos.

  I sit at dawn by the wall wondering about all this. My dreams are violent (of Abi and Danny in his barn, she radiant, Danny radioactive) and all is rising, the sun over the village, teens by the river, shut-ins like my mother responding to news accounts of revolution and mayhem. I climb onto the wall and see, off in the distance, animals acting strangely, vicious oceans and rebels, reactors on fire, queer humans roaming the land, drifters and criminals released from jails and sanatoria hunting for refuge or their next cup of coffee. Abi will have her baby in a month, more or less, and what does it matter who is responsible? Already spring seems far removed from winter.

  “What are you doing up there!” Emma calls out of the window.

  “Looking for miners.”

  “You’ll fall and break your back!”

  Ashamed, I spread my arms as if to exclaim how fresh the air is on the raw top of my wall, then climb down and Emma brings out breakfast and we recline in the lee, eating cereal out of blue bowls. Black coffee in yellow mugs wait beside us on a warm flat stone while I ponder blue bowl, yellow mug, and where the stone will fit.

  “It’s important that we get in touch with everyone,” Emma says. “No one must be left out.”

  “Some might prefer exclusion.”

  She makes an irritated sound. “Did you hear that howling?” she says.

  “What howling?”

  “It was howling. Very early.”

  “Coyotes?”

  “I do not think it was coyotes.”

  “What then?”

  “You do know James’s folk have had to sell? You do know what’s going on here, Charles? Some person was howling.”

  “Sometimes we cannot do otherwise.”

  She picks up the bowls with her good hand and hurries back inside.

  Emma and I had a baby girl and boy but we lost her and he went away. That old hurtful news is loose again. Global catastrophe pales, our beautiful village pales. That what I did to protect my child was not sufficient, that George blames me for his sister’s death; soon what we have lost and have yet to lose will be too much to bear. Coffee and a pipe filled with fresh tobacco, pungent, wafting, are a narrow path. The wall keeps chaos at bay but only for now. My disequilibrium must invent a new story, a fulcrum for the see-saw; name the children astride the ends Disaster and Exile. We must know the paternity of Abi’s baby, otherwise it’s secrets or immaculate conception and something truly spontaneous in the wings. I’m still suffering from my dad’s confession; and why is it his? My mother should confess too, her statement of fact gives me no peace. I must get out and talk to the neighbours.

  I still talk to Emma, of course, but our intercourse has more innuendo and less substance these days. We are growing old. I cannot ask her, Do Danny and I look alike? She diagnoses in me a minor depression. At noon I feel her watching from the house and feel pathetically reassured that my life has a witness, though I won’t look back at her. We do not wear conviction on our sleeves, and I think we are not convinced of anything any more, except that we are afraid, then content, then afraid.

  “Lunch time,” she shouts. “In a minute,” I say, and she replies, “If you don’t come in now, you can make your own lunch.”

  “That’s fine.”

  I roll a rock and right it tight in place. Fear’s true enough — we flap our wings but do not try to fly — and the death of one’s child is endless; our life is flawed by it; but insanity is beside the point.

  Danny or James or, of course, the ethnologist.

  I prowl the unfinished stone hedge, outside then inside. This wall is in service to no animal; this step after step circuit is vital to nothing; that a sand track will soon follow the wall, my footfalls growing softer and softer, advances no theory. Even so, nothing must interrupt my counting the stones in the possibility. Possibility of what? New evidence. Evidence of what? Not anxiety’s geology. Not what’s beneath the fear of learning death. These stones are ordinary stones but when you pass middle age eternity arrives, death without death. Dare I approach that shadow? Such thoughts. Death of a village, of a daughter is written somewhere, but I can’t find the writing. Spring storms cannot blow away what I have done, and yet when my body steps bright from bed into a long parabolic view of the tree-lined street, neighbours leaning on their spades, I find it all so fragile I almost forget what Abi has to deal with, or my brother’s last days, and on such mornings each stone loses its singularity as soon as it is placed. These are exceptional times. I’ve lost the thread of the story, replaced it with this rambling attempt to cover ground, replaced that with tears at such a transcendent image, and Emma curses from the open window those who wish to divide the villagers from the village, and beyond the wall clouds mass over the plain. I climb up again, weeping like a child, and see horse shadows, a goshawk — that’s all I want to see — and pray for Danny’s safe return.

  Pollen fills the air and a haze rolls down to the river where Apocat and Kata are walking for the first time this year to their tree. No sign of Double Mountain, but the blue sky presses down, impossibly clean, and tomorrow the volcano will be undeniable.

  “Are you ever coming in?” Emma asks.

  “If George stayed in touch,” I say, “things would be easier between us. If we knew where he was, say.”

  She sighs. “We agreed this was pointless.”

  “Yes. But.”

  “Your damned wall.”

  “This cursed wall.”

  She runs a finger along the tight crack between two stones. “We had our school.”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Do you want to know what happened with Danny?”

  “You told me.”
/>   “Not exactly.”

  “No?”

  “I felt so young, Charles, when I was riding with Danny toward the mountains. Just for a moment. I felt brand new. And . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “A kind of ecstasy. Both of us.”

  “I thought you were going to say you . . . ”

  “I forgave myself.”

  “Did you forgive yourself, Emma?”

  “That’s why I fell.”

  Emma leaves my side with a grunt and Polly follows her. I’m not sure what it is about truth. Clearly it promises to give us the perspective we want. I can recall Emma’s face, such brightness, when we got married, her eyes when we met, the way her body stiffened when we lost Annie; these truths (if indeed they are separate) are as familiar as the view from this wall, yet there are new gaps in the landscape where names and paternities have come unstuck and been washed away by rain. How do I proceed? Lao Tzu left his home, stepped into the unknown; Jesus left disciples; Adi Sankara escaped the crocodile: they all vouchsafed the gatekeeper their discoveries. The wall advances stone by stone, dividing our house from the village. Birds visit, their chorus a deafening language I’ve never learnt. Our scientists are back, and other strangers, geophysicists as well . . . How can I not have known what Emma had not told me? How can Emma not know what I have not told her?

  The air wet, green, distances submarine. Apocat and Kata say the black dog is a trick of the light and a portent. Angle of perception and the dog’s tail confound the eyes, put its number of legs in question. Is that a dog? Is that a dog lacking a leg? A leg absent from birth? Has there been an accident? The apparition comes and goes and seems to thrive among the vines, shooting out on foraging missions, scuffling designs in the dirt. Polly does not even bark any more. A fleeting black something with three legs. A wildness attached to the village, and to Apocat and Kata, appearing in advance of the two women as if cognizant of their purpose and schedule, their route to the tree by the river and their path home, a wildness whose pattern is now discernable, that presages a new deviation.