Black Juice Read online

  So many words! I’m stuck somewhere in the first third of the thing, murmuring the wrong words over and over. I’m not a words person by any imagining—I like places where it’s unwise to speak, in a hide beside the grazing field with the deer coming in from all around, among ferns watching a boudoir-bird darting and doubting at my snare. I like to walk in of an evening with a brace of cedar doves, lay them by the pot and go to wash. That way Mum keeps quiet; that’s her thanks, her silence. Now there’s a wordswoman. Talk you into a hole, my mum would. And she’s always right, as well. Wears a person out.

  So. I’m here at the summit. Not that it feels like I’ve arrived, when I have to stagger and throw myself against the ground to keep from blowing away. ‘You must stand for part of it,’ Mum said, ‘but you might have to start off sitting.’

  So I get seated, with the robe ends tucked under me, and my face into the wind, so I don’t eat hair, and I start the gobbledygook.

  I’m fine until I get to the first list. One Father’s name dangles off my lips and I can’t remember the next. Then comes the wind and smacks me over backwards with what feels like rocks in my face, a clump of snow-slop. ‘They won’t want you to do this,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t ever think things want to change. It’s a battle to make it happen. Now start at the top again.’

  So I go back to the head of the Father list and I have another stab at it. Trouble is, our Fathers only had about three different names—then they’d add ‘the Seventh’, or ‘the Strong’ or ‘with the Askance Eye’. It’s a beggar to remember.

  But, surprise, I do in the end. And then it’s Beasts, which was a list I knew anyway; everyone gets taught the animals when they’re little, just for fun. Then come the Mothers—another hard one, all those old witches with their sharp tongues coming out of their sharp brains. And then the Herbage—quite a lot of people know the plants, too, and I knew all of it except the herbs for beauty, which Mum taught me last night. There’s only a few of them; I don’t know why I didn’t learn them before. ‘Useful to know for your wife,’ Mum grumped, ‘or for when you’re going after a wife.’ Wife? I think of a wife, sometimes. A kind and quiet wife, not Deep, nothing fancy. A wife like me, except rather more beautiful, thanks.

  I carve the words out of the icy air with my snow-blown lips. Amazing—I’m getting it all out! It’s like Mum’s here, coughing and scowling at me in the lamplight, propped up on one elbow. That look on her face stands for no carry-on, no wandering away. ‘Put your whole brain to it, boy!’ she said, and now I see what she means. Even that part of my brain that’s usually there at one side, knocking the rest into line and stopping me moaning against what I have to do, even that part’s in on the job, passing me the words, worrying ahead for the next ones.

  Now the lists are over and I’m into the wild stuff. Get up, boy! says my phantom mum. You can’t command the wind and weather when you’re huddled on your bum, however fancy the robe you wear. So I struggle up, shouting words that I mumbled, embarrassed, in front of Mum last night. They sounded powerfully pompous in our rough little home, but they suit this strong weather. They’re something to throw at the wind; words seem like nothing, but they’re tiny, fancy, people’s things. Who cares whether they do anything? What else can we put up against the wind except our tininess and fanciness? What else can the wind put up against us but its big, dumb, howling brute-strength? So there!, I tell it with my miniature mouth, my tiny frozen pipe of a throat, my stumbling tongue (and even the stumbling is good, for the wind never stumbles, never goes back and rights itself, don’t you see?). All you’ve got is your noise—and I’ve got noise, too! And mine’s a thing of beauty!

  On through the verse I go. I’m moving through all the world now, crop and town and ocean and sandhill, river and forest, rock and mist and tarn, describing the springtime we need for each. (‘Miss one and I’ll lob you,’ said Mum. ‘Better to say some twice than miss one.’) I can’t even hear the words, except in my head; my ears are full of the hooting and tearing of the wind. A gust nearly thumps me over the edge, and I fall to my hands and knees. The wind drags on the robe, grinding me backwards across the Top’s top. I throw myself flat, still shouting; if I keep on, I might get through this alive. But the wind is trying to tell me otherwise. Shut up and I’ll stop, it says, pounding me with hail-rocks. Stop now and I’ll let you go.

  The wind doesn’t know my mother.

  I’m glad of the words of that last verse; they save my life. They fill my mind and stop me thinking, How can a living soul get through this? They give me a thread to cling to as the storm beats its sodden laundry on me. I get to the end and there is so much strife and thrashing weight against my back, I start the verse again, yelling it into the rock, wrapping my arms around my head against the beating.

  Mindless minutes pass. I hang on, I shout, I wait for the wind’s fingernail to lever me off the Top like a scaly-bug egg off a leaf. If I move, it’ll only happen sooner: that sickening lift, that awful drop into nothing, that crash, those last seeping few seconds of smashed pain. I’ve seen a raddle-cat’s face in between the two hard bashes it takes to stave in its skull; I think I have an idea; I think I know what’s in store.

  At least I got the thing done. And done right, hey.

  Oof! This is the gust that will do it. No—this, this is the one. This one’s got the lift, this one’s got the fingernails—that’s right, under the forearms, under the shoulders, flip me up, toss me in the boiling storm, then let me drop—

  IT’S THE ROBE THAT SAVES ME. Saves my head being stove in like a cat’s, anyway.

  I wake up rather elegant, in a cradle of rock. The breeze taps my face with a robe-corner. A lazy blueness, from a whole nother age, is spread all above me. A pair of keo-birds twindle slowly up into it, higher and higher to dots, and then gone.

  Lovely quiet. I don’t want to move.

  But things start moving without me. Feels like a new arm, stiff and not quite set in its glue. A lump of a leg, gone dead from lying so funny so long. And then very nervously my head, heavy as a river-rock. Everything hurts, from skin through innards to my aching cold bones.

  I’m sitting up, though I don’t remember deciding to. The robe is soaked, heavy as plate-armour. I crawl out of it, and fold it after a fashion. The breeze, bright and brisk and icy, is trying to pretend it’s not embarrassed about all that carry-on last night. If last night it was; I feel as if I lay there through a full round of seasons, and woke in a whole new life.

  I glance down through the clouds and there’s Gankly town, embroidered red on its green vale. Gankly’s north of Beardy, and the cairn and our home are south. Clutching the lumpish robe to my chest, like an old madman all his worldly goods, I slide and scramble around the mountain.

  Even weighted with those stones, the pack has been dragged right across the cairn’s clearing. I empty the stones, and stuff the robe in, and lift the whole soggy bundle onto my back.

  It’s a long, long way down—and quiet, the cautious, damaged quiet that comes after a big blow. I walk alone through the warming world; I step over wet black branches torn to the ground by the wind; I leap from side to side of the brook that yesterday was my dry path upward. All these months the Top’s been without colour, but now the winter grass is flushing greenish-gold before my eyes, the rocks are flecked violet and blood-red and patched with bronze lichen, and the sky is a deep, cloudless blue. I did it. I took hold of the mighty millstone of the seasons, and moved it, grinding and squeaking, onward in its circle. I hauled the words out of my memory one by one, and they stilled the winds, and brought this spring.

  ‘Cuff?’ I call, when I get home. In the shed, her muffled bark is immediate and mad, and she throws herself about in her box. But no person comes to door or window of the house. Everything is too quiet.

  I prepare myself to find Mum and Flor, calm as calm. Everything dies. Look at those Langhorne girls. Look at every deer and cat and bird and fish that ever I hooked or trapped. It’s no big thing. I’ve been so a
lone these last hours, I can’t imagine the aloneness ending, can’t imagine other people, their speech, their eyes. That’s marvellous stuff, lost to me now.

  On the driest grass I can find, I spread out the robe. It’s still a feast for the eyes, even after all the feasting I’ve done on the way down. It’s a different kind of feast, not grown by itself from seed or spore, but worked by people, for people’s reasons, for people’s use.

  The house is dark, and smells of dead fire and the nettlepulp for the coughs. Flor lies very still, his mouth open, his eyes slits of white. He’s got the red quilt over him, that we only use for guests; Mum must have struggled to get it onto him, being so sick herself. My little brother, always so thin and pale and smiley. He turned the seasons beautifully for us last year. He did what I did, and I don’t know how. I remember it rained on and on, and Mum paced up and down and swore as she peered out the window waiting for him. I remember the little drowned rat that came home in the end, his eyes brilliant with what he’d done, all the fear and seriousness gone from his skinny, joyful frame.

  I go over to him, for it’s not often in your life you get a good close private look at a dead person; there are always funeral people about, making it rude to stare. I have a good long stare at Flor, long enough for Cuff to stop bothering to bark. Still as a log, still as a stone … and then there’s a tremor of eyelashes, a glimmer on the eye-whites. I put my face closer and feel the warmth off him. A soft snore comes from the other room and I startle, and nearly laugh out loud. The two of them, both still here! Instead of struggling like before, Flor breathes deeply and silently—now I see the rise and fall of his chest under the motionless quilt.

  ‘You great, soppy fool,’ I mutter to myself, sniffing back the sudden tears. ‘All they needed was bed-rest, and a bit of nettle.’

  Mum is curled up like a possum, her face away from me. I go in, around the bed, with some half-baked notion in my head of waking her, of telling her, of claiming from her some kind of a blessing.

  But then I go right off the idea. Her sleeping face is like punched-down bread dough; it’s as creased as the rock of Beard’s Top, and as polished, with the sweat of her broken fever. She’s a sick little old lady—for now, at least. Before she wakes and starts pelting me with accusing questions and making me wish I’d never gone to all the bother. She needs sleep more than anything else. And the spring will come, whether she believes I brought it or not.

  The shed smells of dog-pee and wood-damp. It’s dark, and I find Cuff’s box by following her scratching and whining, the brush of her nose on the splintery wood.

  ‘Cuff, Cuff, my girl!’ I whisper.

  She throws herself against my side of the box and barks twice.

  ‘Shall we go up to Highfields, shall we?’ I murmur, feeling along the bench for the jemmy I left there. ‘Shall we get ourselves a snow-hare, you and me, and put it in the pot for the invalids? I think we shall, girl. I think we shall.’

  And murmuring so, I ease up the box lid. Before the last nail’s free, Cuff pours out the opening into my arms, all tongue and toenails. Then she’s in the shed doorway, looking back, her raised paw saying, When you’re quite ready… And beyond her is all the dampness and the dazzle of the first day of spring.

  acknowledgements

  The author acknowledges the following sources of ideas, images and references for these stories:

  * Jack Dunbar for the title black juice

  * Adrian Denyer for the cat bringing home a different creature every night (‘Perpetual Light’)

  * Louis Creagh for hugging the elephant’s leg (‘Sweet Pippit’)

  * Janice Dancey for the phrase ‘hairy story’ (‘Wooden Bride’)

  * the Linstead family of Perth for the word ‘bonty’ (‘Singing My Sister Down’)

  * National Geographic for the picture of a woman skinning monkeys (‘Yowlinin’)

  * the SBS program ‘Global Village’ for tar-pits (‘Singing My Sister Down’) and for children making mud-jeeps (‘House of the Many’)

  * Paddy Doran, Mike Waterson and The House Band for the song ‘Seven Yellow Gypsies’ from their album October Song © 1998 Green Linnet Records Inc. (‘My Lord’s Man’)

  * Years 5 and 6 of 1999, Geelong Grammar School, at workshops with whom ‘Yowlinin’ and ‘Rite of Spring’ were begun

  * the magazine Modern Bride, the misreading of whose title gave rise to ‘Wooden Bride’

  Thanks to Eva Mills, Jodie Webster and Rosalind Price for editorial help with this collection, and to Rowena Lindquist, Marianne de Pierres, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Maxine McArthur for their valuable input at the inaugural wRiters On the Road (ROR) workshop at Montville, Queensland, in October 2001.