Travellers May Still Return Page 9

  “A hundred generations before The Origin of the Species,” she said, “Maori facial tattoos were mapping battle paths through English landscapes.” She screwed up her face and giggled. “We’re talking to Charles Darwin.”

  “So, we will live with you,” he said. “Hopefully, we will stay a year and get involved in all you do.”

  They seemed immune to the hot sun. They seemed on the edge of laughter. Were they serious? Who on earth had their teachers been? They didn’t even know their way into each other, though they were randy. That showed in the shirts and shorts, in the way they did everything backwards, their fingers and lips trembling. Her glassy-eyed spouting, his lanky acerbity. They were know-it-all dragons from some ecstatic future hunting a big bang they’d misplaced in the clutter of procedural notes. That’s not me, by the way, that’s them. It must be contagious. At last they left and I went inside and lay on the cool tiles in the glass room to calm the shooting pains in my back.

  All August I have watched them bounce through our village, ranting about naturalistic explanations, redundant vernacular, chasing their manifest signifiers.

  “Abi’s terrified,” says Kata.

  “What have young girls to do with fear?” Apocat rustles her heels in the scattered reeds. She leans against the tree, shuts her eyes.

  Kata snaps her fingers. “She is a seedpod! A seedpod! Are you listening?”

  Apocat groans. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “And nothing will touch Daniel’s rage.”

  Apocat rubs her spine into rough bark. When she cracks her eyelids to the low red sun, she spies the slinking three-legged dog. “All men dream of such girls. What do you make of that dog, Kata?”

  Kata stretches her neck and squawks. “That dog’s sending more signals than a bucketful of snakes.”

  “Yes. It’s hungry . . . ”

  “For goodness’ sake.” Kata leans forward and shouts: “The days are getting shorter. The ditch must be crossed.”

  “I don’t know . . . ” Apocat sighs. “I don’t know.”

  “By the dead and the living.”

  “Oh, my feet hurt.” Apocat pulls off and flexes each of her worn-out sandals. “These must be fixed.”

  3.

  The four kids wander the edge of town along the river path until it dips below the bank. They emerge, climb up to the hall, and join the ethnographers on the red carpet outside their tent. The young woman brews tea and they all sit together.

  “You figuring us out yet?” says James.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do in your tent?”

  “The usual things,” the man says.

  “Cook, clean and collate,” says the woman, smiling brightly.

  “We think it’s crazy,” says Gee, “what you’re doing.”

  They sip their tea in silence. The carpet fits into the centre of a rectangle of dead grass. Vultures wheel high above.

  “We don’t really understand,” says Harry.

  Abi says, “I looked it up. You compare people.”

  “Peoples,” the guy corrects. “We are socio-cultural anthropologists. Aren’t we?”

  “Not really,” his partner says. “We’re students.”

  “What will you be when you grow up?” says James.

  They all laugh.

  Our village is young but there was an earlier village. And one before that. People have lived here by the river for a long time. They say the plain to the north is sacred. When Danny and I turned eighteen we were supposed to go travelling together, to see the world. We’d been friends through school, since we were small. We had compared the arrowheads and small flint tools we’d found. We’d saved for years for our travels. But after graduation he had a girlfriend and I didn’t and that divided us, and when Danny bought a motorcycle, expecting me to do the same, I was already buying land — a tumbledown house on a piece of bench above the river where I planned to catalogue all the flora and fauna within sight of the windows — and I used my savings as a down payment and with my parents’ help began to fix the crumbling shell into this house Emma and I live in now. Danny and his girl rode his motorcycle away and she came back alone a few months later. By the time he returned, we were in our mid twenties and I was married, with two children, and he was wild, rabid, and had rotten teeth. We met on occasion, but could barely tolerate each other.

  Abi answers the door and leads Gee up to her room.

  “Your house smells so weird,” Gee says. “It smells like something died.”

  “No it doesn’t.”

  “So what’s the deal with Harry? Are you guys dating or what?”

  “He’s just a friend. Nothing’s going on. What about you and James?”

  “He’s so depressed. No way. No thanks.”

  They sit in Abi’s room, crosslegged on the floor, trading song lyrics. Abi’s mother appears with a plate of cookies and two glasses of milk.

  “Thanks, Lucy,” Gee says. “How’s the baby?”

  Lucy folds her hands over her belly. “About ready,” she says. “You enjoying the dress shop?”

  “Oh yes, very much,” says Gee.

  “You’ll be back at school in a couple of weeks. Grade 10! Looking forward to it?”

  “Oh yes, I can’t wait to see all my friends.”

  When the door closes, Gee turns to Abi. “I’d kill my mother if she walked into my room with cookies and milk. What are we, six?” She bites into her cookie, then waves her hand in the air. “So, what about those guys?”

  “In the tent?”

  “Yeah. Are they, like, together?”

  “He’s smart isn’t he?”

  “Who cares?”

  “I suppose I do,” says Abi. “I don’t think he’s as smart as she is.”

  “I mean they are together, obviously, but . . . ” Gee rolls onto her back. “You see him checking us out?”

  “His girlfriend, or whatever she is, is really pretty.”

  “She’s one of those smart bitches — you can tell. He’s not really into her, you can tell. What are they really doing here?”

  “Like they said, research. She said it’s a PhD thesis.”

  “About this shit place? I don’t buy it. Hey, wanna go hang out down there?” She holds her fingers laced above her face and squints. “I got some weed.”

  Abi leans against the bed and stares out the window. “In a little while, maybe.”

  “I like your room,” says Gee. “But what’s that colour?” she points at the wall.

  “Eggshell.”

  “Eggshell?”

  “We’re more interesting than our parents,” says Abi.

  “No doubt.”

  “I really want to live someplace else. I don’t think I can wait.”

  “Yeah. I hate this place. Me and James both.”

  Danny wasn’t the first to try the world. Once upon a time, villagers travelled to France and China and India and America and Brazil and Africa and Australia and Japan and many came back, though not all. Villagers journeyed with Bodhidharma’s thoughts and returned with new bodies and souls; stopped a night on the banks of the Nile on the way home from Jerusalem and shared water with Mohammed; met Lao Tzu on the tenth week of his self-exile and brought home new ideas and precious-fangled tools. We have been monks and saints. We have been profligate and fruitful. Hearts stopped in wars, and from every death sprouted a dozen sons and daughters. Most of us stayed here, growing grapes for trade and small crops for ourselves, and there was a golden time. Now more and more go away, fewer and fewer children are born; entropy is upon us, the end of a cycle, and we are half-metal and nearly complete. Ambition and loss to the utmost.

  Abi and Gee run downstairs and out, down to the river and along.

  “James is working,” says Gee. “Where’s Harry?”

  “At the diner,” says Abi. “He works and sleeps, never does anything else.”

  Gee rolls a joint and they get stoned, then paddle off a sandbar into the green water
.

  “Yeah, me and James think they have kinky sex, that couple.”

  “So what?”

  “Probably have kinky sex all the time.”

  “Why is it green?” says Abi.

  “It’s poisonous,” says Gee. “My dad says they’re dumping waste upriver, those mines?”

  “No, it’s from the trees.”

  “From the light,” says Gee. “The light is green.”

  “I think the water’s green first,” says Abi.

  “Reflected from the trees,” says Gee. “You think he’s good looking?”

  “Who?”

  “Harry.”

  “Kinda not. He’s not bad.”

  “He’s so dumb.”

  “He’s just shy.”

  “So critical and straight all the time.”

  “Do you believe in yourself, Gee?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  Abi hikes up through the brush to the dead grass of the hall land. She stands in green light and looks at the blue tent, and at the tent reflected in the hall’s big glass windows.

  Everything green, green and quiet, except for the man, who is wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He waves. Abi goes over and they chat. He offers her a cup of tea. They sit on the carpet in front of the tent. They both know this is like the other time, the time not mentioned, that time.

  “How d’you know what’s important and what’s not?” she asks.

  “We don’t,” he says. Beautiful dark neck in the white shirt. Dark muscular arms. He is teasing her. He wants her to guess, to keep asking questions. Lean and restless. Amber eyes, almost. Hazel-brown. A bony man, big knees.

  “You just record everything?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then what?”

  “Transcribe, study, think. Look for inconsistencies.”

  “Inconsistencies?”

  “Yeah.”

  They sit in the hot sun, flies circling their cups. She feels him looking at her. Sweat trickles down her back. The woman is away from the tent, just like the other time. Harry and James are at work. Gee is down by the river. There’s only a little shade and her legs are burning. Long and brown. Where he is looking.

  When Danny and I were thirty the farmers were competing to produce the perfect grape, and Apocat and Kata were noticing the absence of songbirds. That’s when I started publishing.

  Danny’s parents are dead and my father’s dead and Mother despairs of anything new, and Danny and I are approaching sixty. My father was a stone and remembered every detail of the past (my failures, et cetera), and my mother, sand, remembers nothing, but follows precisely every bird’s chirp and trill, and every breeze-blown leaf and feather outside her windows.

  The threadbare streets seem even more desolate now, with that couple wandering around. How is it all connected? How will it all play out? I go too fast. Before packing up my tools, I need to think back to Danny’s homecoming thirty-five years ago.

  He’d been living on the sea, a sailor, had alien ways of speaking and couldn’t stop talking about a lover, a married woman who said she would give up everything for him, but in the end could not leave her children. It took him a long time to settle. His parents wanted him to live at home with them, but he refused. He acquired a couple of horses, slept in his father’s cabin outside the village and refused to work with his father and uncles, would not discuss grape growing and wine making, spent all his waking hours on the reserve or riding with the landrace ponies that were then pushing at the walls of our vineyards. He talked about the sea and the woman and horses, though nobody but me really listened. He said that the sea respected him, but women hated him and only horses loved him, the ponies who were exiles like him, of course, inbred and selected over centuries — and he would go on for hours about a lost valley beyond the pass, cut off from the world, isolated from humans.

  Apocat and Kata were young women just settled in town, with nothing to do but cut their eyes at this young pungent strange altered village man.

  These days, while the sisters track Danny’s advancing illness, I wonder how far village fortunes will dip before we rise from our beds into a new equilibrium. It’s unthinkable, death; Danny, if I know him, will not slip so easily toward his own. Death, I suppose, is always a new darkness, always interesting. A month ago my wife Emma tried, under Danny’s regime, to ride a young mustang and fell and broke her arm, almost her back. She was drunk, a painful, other story. I said that. She could have died.

  “Something stinks!” Kata screeches.

  “What?” says Apocat.

  “I said something stinks.”

  “The sea, is it again? I’m all stuffed up. It’s all this dust.”

  “No, not the sea. But you had a bad dream last night. You said thick ice covered everything and it was the end of our village.”

  “Did I, Kata? I’m afraid I don’t remember.”

  To expect the weavers by the river to solve the village’s future is futile. My wife’s arm is mending but she can’t sleep the night through without being woken by pain.

  True of me, too, what Abi said. I don’t believe in myself either. I loved hearing my name spoken by my parents, though seldom heard it. Danny was a beautiful youth and he made sense of me, but I was bullied by the kids at school, who called me stupid, moron, goofy. I looked in a mirror and wanted no part of me. Not that ugly boy, not that shame-filled boy. There were days so bleak they felt like the end of time, though buds were on the trees. As a young man I wanted the outsider’s task, exile, and to find something beyond the village and be worshiped for the discovery. I probably gave Danny the idea of escape, we surely talked about it, but I never had the nerve to go, though I did manage a few years at university. I know dislocation is the great maker of selves. The attempt to tell stories has given me inklings.

  Every story is beginningless and it’s not necessary to know the end, just the meanders. Abi stands in a nine-month loop, between dark and first light, but I won’t choose and order each moment. I have given up that kind of telling. Simply, I wait for backache to subside and hope Danny and Abi make a flammable thing and the next spark will burn us all up, not tear us apart. That is wishful.

  4.

  Abi meets Gee after school on the first day back. They stand in the dirt playground next to the swings. This is storm darkness at the end of summer.

  “He is a bug,” says Gee.

  “James?”

  “He is an insect.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s talking crazy. Like, he wants us to run away, and has no money and no idea of where to go or what to do. He wants me to go with him.”

  “Why? Has something happened?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Like, is something wrong?”

  “He’s just a bug.”

  Tom’s grapes took the prize every year, no beats missed, as his family grew, and his house was open each fall to a wide circle of cousins, friends, fellow growers, their envious faces flushed and astonished with that year’s dark majestic wine.

  I remember the windows and doors thrown wide to cloying fermenting fruit, children playing in and out of the deep yellow light, shouts as transient as quick bodies, and it all felt glorious and eternal. A full house, turbulent and joyful, never feels desolate. Our house, by contrast, has been dark with passing storms, gut-wrench thunder, increasing loneliness, when Annie died, when George went away, when we stood, cowed. Or is that how my memory shades it?

  Low sun throws rippling shadows from the river across our rooms. Emma’s touch everywhere.

  I don’t know what the young campers are thinking, but they have infiltrated and contaminated us. Let me embroider the epoch. We are at the end of the familiar path. Long past the last frozen age and nearly at global cooking. Both poles, north and south, fill with life. Summer and winter bracket the story of stories. Ice sheets melting at an astounding rate. Thousand-mile tracts of silent tai
ga. Equatorial tribal wars. The Beagle was decommissioned and broken up and now the last pod of killer whales flows through a marine valley between islands. Danny lingers on the lane behind Abi’s house; he sits his fuming horse and those islands fuss with clouds and lurid colour. Let them glow, our pillages, the forest raids, the shy ponies, our light-long thrusts clear of winter’s invasive cells! Let them glow! We are whole and pristine the autumn we are nineteen and go to sea and discover our origin!

  Four seasons. Four kids. Four suits to the deck. Four routes to the crossroad. Let’s see how artfully we can carry the story between us, despite our own plights. My wife’s knitting bones, my plans, your unknown participation. I must talk to Kata and Apocat, but tell them what? Ask them what?

  “It’s not that I begrudge you your work on that wall,” says Emma, “but there are a thousand more important tasks.”

  “It goes on as before.”

  “What does?”

  “This.”

  “What?”

  “Taste the air.”

  “What?”

  “Smoke!”

  “Ah. Fall.”

  “There’s something else, Apo . . . ”

  Apocat shifts her buttocks into the dust between tree roots. “I’m listening.”

  Kata hisses. “Appetite. After nearly forty years.”

  Apocat sniffs the air. “Certainly. You are right. There’s hunger.”

  “Something is on the way,” says Kata. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right, love, but . . . I don’t know. Sea? Pancakes? Sea?”

  “Yes, yes. Something deep and rotten,” says Kata. “Sulphurous.”

  “Is it winter coming?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  All summer Apocat and Kata wove baskets by the river, day in day out. Every summer they weave baskets. Their baskets find their way into the houses. Every child in the village has slept in a river basket, opened its eyes to light through green curving reeds.