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The whip cut the air all around her with a whine.
. . He said he would
kill her, and now was the time.
WHIP THREAT
By MOLLIE GILLEN
There was the tree, and there was the river, and there was the sunlight. You would think there was peace too, and you would be right - peace and quiet and something to warm the heart.
And yet a thing happened. Once, in Hungary, when I was cold, even in my bones, even my heart, I swore that one day I would lie in the sun and never be cold again, never in my life. In those days, and in that October, the sun was a word that some of us remembered and whispered about-as if it were a god, when we hid in the cellars and the cold ruined buildings, and afterward at night in the woods and the marshes when we fled.
When the end came and some of us had escaped and we were free, all I wanted of freedom was to be warm and to be alone. So I chose to come to Australia, the land they say is "down under," where the stars above are different and the Southern Cross blazes like fire.
I did not care where I worked. One place was like another, and people were people and meant nothing to me, none of them, any more. I said I would be a nursemaid to children when they asked me my choice. The children will grow up to be people too someday. But when they are small they do not matter. You do not worry about a baby tiger. If it growls and snarls and shows little white pointed teeth, you just laugh and roll it onto its back and tickle its soft striped fur. When it is a big tiger, you put iron bars around it and do not go near.
They sent me to this place, It could have been any other place. The train came from Sydney a long way into the country. I woke up once in the night and looked out across moon-whitened hills as the train rushed through the darkness. There were no lights from houses, and I was glad it was an empty land; everywhere in the country I left the air is heavy with the ghosts of human passions.
At a place called Murringo I changed to a small, slow train that ambled lazily all day. between paddocks where the short grass grew sun-faded and sometimes a kangaroo hopped. The train stopped at wooden platforms and time stopped too. There was no hurry- for me, no hurry at an. In years I am young, but my youth was consumed in a furnace of bitterness and fear, and those I loved were taken from me. No matter what I did with my life, there would be so many years to live, so many months, so many minutes. I did not care what I did with the years or the months or the minutes-put children to bed, wash dishes, sit in the compartment of a train, what did I care? The dark-brown leather of the seat was hot to touch, and dust layover it like a pink veil. About a mile away you could follow the line of the river by the river gums that bunched along its banks.
I did not know why we stopped. It was the same at every stop. Sometimes there were men's voices, and sometimes milk cans rattled, and sometimes there was silence. Then the train would move with a jerk again, like the ending of a dream.
We came to Grubbendilly. It is a small town. The wooden houses sit low along the streets, and the roads are thickly rutted with soft pink dust. The house where the children are was at the end of a road, where the road ran down among the river gums to the water.
I was glad it was at the end of a road. When my day to be free came every week, I would walk down the dirt track to the river away from the town. In the town the people gathered, people in cars and people on horseback from the sheep stations outside the town. I do not like people. I walked by the river, away from the town.
The river is called the Burramudgee. It is a strange river. There is not much water in it except when it is in flood. Then it comes roaring, carrying trees and branches, spilling through the bush. This I have not seen, but I know the story is true. The bush is scarred by the river. I would not be afraid. It is only men who can do hurt.
The water is a strange color, the color of citron, a kind of pale green, powdered with yellow light. After rain it rushes more strongly, and the color is the color of tea with milk in it. Sometimes the banks are high, like cliffs of mud. Sometimes they are very low, and if the river goes round a bend, there is a little beach of fine brown sand.
Away from the town the river runs through a valley with high walls of golden sandstone. Between the river and the golden walls lies a tangle of bush. It is of no use, this land, the people say. It is broken up into narrow rocky gullies, and the ground is baked iron-hard by the sun.
I walked up the river bank. It is hard to walk along the bank. Fallen trees lie twisted and tormented, flung by the demon river, and the ground is gouged out in billabongs by the flood waters.
The river curved round a bend, and a little beach thurst a spearhead into the water. Behind it was the tree. It was a blue gum with low spreading branches, and a satin-smooth trunk from which the bark had fallen away, thick and corded like the neck of a giant. I lay on the sand, and the sand was hot under my body. The sun covered me with cloth of gold. I was warm all through. I came alive again.
I loved this place. I came here every time I could. No one else came here; it was my place. In all the world, it was my place, and I loved it. I had been tossed here and there in the fury and wash of war and riot like a piece of driftwood, and at last a wave of destiny had flung me onto this beach, half a world away from my birthplace and my own country.
I lay face down on the sand and stretched my arms wide and clung to my piece of the world.
Coming alive again brought pain, as a limb that has been numbed hurts when the blood starts flowing once more. I could be hurt again now that my heart had found a treasure.
I asked the father of my little tigers how I might own that piece of land. He scratched his head, looking at me oddly.
"I don't know," he said. "I suppose you could buy it. I don't know if anyone ever owned it. Some kids used to camp along that way before the war, I remember. It isn't worth much."
It was worth much to me. He went to find out for me. He said things I did not understand well. "A piece of land," he said, "that reverted to the crown because of unpaid taxes. They don't want a lot for it. If you like," he said, "and if you want it that much, I'll buy it for you. You can pay me back out of your wages."
I am not used to kindness. I am not fair-there is no enchantment in the blackness of my hair and my dark, shadowed eyes. It was a kind thing that he did for one who had no charm. So the land became mine, and I went there every moment I was free. Someone had owned it before me and had not cared enough to keep paying the taxes that were demanded for it. I could not understand such a person-to have that piece of land and let it go. I knew every small inch of it, from where it ran back to meet the golden cliffs, through its narrow gullies and its iron-hard earth, down to the spearhead of brown sand thrusting into the yellow- green water.
Out of the moss-cool gullies I would come up and lie in the sun again, on the sand, under the great gum tree. The long thin leaves, curved like scimitars, hang downward on the gum trees, not like the leaves in my own land, and the sun comes through them more easily. The bush in Australia is a place of light, because you can always look up and see the sun and the sky through the leaves.
This is an empty land, and I was glad. There is no welcome in it, only tolerance, which was all I asked.
Along the bank of the river away from the beach the land rose sharply until it was a small cliff. Upon the top of this cliff I found a shack made of the trunks of young gums, with the bark hanging in tatters, and roofed over with rusted sheets of iron. There were no walls, just four posts and an iron roof. A rough table and benches stood nearby under a coolibah tree and near a fireplace of blackened stones, falling apart. I would sit here sometimes and look at the shack and wonder who had come here once and why, having found this place, did they ever leave. I thought, Someday I will make a shelter here too, and sleep here and live here-a new shelter, down near the beach, where no person has lived and dreamed before me.
No one came to my beach, because the town had its own swimming place, and the way through the bush was rough. The weeks and months went by, and I tended my tigers and dreamed on my beach and was warm and happy. Then an afternoon came when I went to my beach again. I put on my swimming suit and swam in the river and lay on my sand beneath the tree with my face turned sideways, cradled on my arms, and went to sleep. The warm wind blew over me like silk and dried the drops of water that lay on my skin, and when I awakened I could see that a man sat on the sand nearby.
He was sitting away from me about ten feet. His knees were drawn up near his chest, encircled by his arms, and his legs were as brown and smooth as the chestnuts I played with when I was a child.
I moved my head a little on my arms and I could see his mouth. His lips were thin and tight with anger. He said, "So you are awake at last. I was waiting for you to wake up. What are you doing here on this beach?"
I moved my head back a little and I could see his whole face. His brows were drawn together over furious eyes narrowed to long golden slits, but in his anger his face was calm and controlled. He was hard, like steel, like a whip. His face was shaded by a straw hat under which his dark hair sprang in front, and little splinters of sunlight freckled his face through the woven straw.
My heart beat in my throat, where the skin is soft between the bones. My nerves were tight in my body with shock of seeing one beside me, when I thought to be alone.
He curved his mouth into something that might have been a smile if his eyes had not denied it. He made a small sound deep in his throat, that might have been a laugh if he had been amused. He said, "Frightened? It wouldn't be much use to run. You wouldn't get far."
I would not run. The time was long past when I would run from a man. You could run and run, with the scream of fear in your heart and your mouth dry, and what would be the use? You would feel the reaching hands, and the hot laughter would come, and the thick voice. And then, what is it when you are caught? A nothing, a moment withdrawn, a thing of no matter. They are wrong who feel dishonored. I could pity them when they took me, the soldiers from a foreign land, and sought for something none of them would find. For they never caught my heart. My heart was free of their defiling.
So I lay there and did not move. He looked at me with contempt and rejection, his eyes running down the length of my body lying there, as though I had offered myself to him and he had found me not worth the taking. I was not afraid. Only it is a shock to wake and find one with you, silently, when you were alone.
He said, "Don't worry-I wouldn't touch you. No woman born could tempt me any more-least of all one like you. Tell me why you came here. And then get away fast."
I got to my feet. "I will dress first," I said, and he looked at me and said nothing. I went back into the bush, where a young gum tree stood spreading wide and low like a shrub, leafy from the ground to its pointed top. All the tips of its branches were ruby red with new young leaves. Locusts split the air with the sound of summer. The spicy scent of boronia made the air fragrant, and a thin creeping of little purple flowers lay along the ground. It is my land, I thought. I looked at the arrogance of his back, sitting there.
"It is my land," I told him. "Because I wished for peace and to be warm, I bought this piece of land. It is you who must go."
The leap of his anger brought him to his feet in one movement. He stood taller than I by six inches, and I am not short. Anger was dark in his eyes, and his fingers curled tightly in his palms.
"That," he said thinly, "is not true. This land has been mine for ten years, and I shall give it up to no one. Now get going."
"If you owned it," I told him and I felt a throbbing in my temples, "you did not care enough to keep the taxes paid. Therefore you have lost it, and it is mine."
He took a step forward, and I thought he would strike me. But the blazing anger was not this time for me. "Damn her to hell," he said slowly. "This, too. . . ."
He turned and looked back at the bush a long time. His shoulders were smooth, like mahogany polished. He wore nothing but khaki shorts, belted close to his hips, and the straw hat through which the sun marked his face. "All right," he said at last. "This is the way it is going to be. You will go and you will not come back. Your money will be returned to you. You are a stranger here; this is not your land, and it never will be." He looked at me and laughed. His thoughts were naked in his face. "Another outcast-another of the unwanted ones."
"This is my land," I said. It was hard to speak. "I will not stay away."
"Do not come back." he said evenly. "If you come here again, I will kill you."
Did he think I would live and let my land go? When my day came again to be free I walked through the bush to my beach. He stood under the gum tree and watched me come. He had a stock whip in his hand.
"So," he said, and his eyes were cold as ice. "There was something in your face that said you would be here."
He cracked the stock whip from twenty feet away, and the sand spat upward in a long thin line. All around me he cracked it, and the little green budgerigars fluttered up from the small bushes, and the magpies squawked in the coolibahs, back in the bush. It cut the air around me with a whine like that of bullets. I felt the wind of it fan my cheeks and I did not move.
He threw the whip away. He smiled, and it was not a good thing to see. "You have courage," he said, "but you shall go, all the same, or I will kill you. I have killed before and not cared."
He came toward me, over the sand, and then I saw that he limped and I laughed.
He seized me and bore me down to the sand, his hands on my throat. The sand was warm against my back, and I looked up past his head into the blue sky. There were many ways I might have died that would have been worse than this. But I have seen killers. His eyes were not the eyes of a killer.
He made a small noise of disgust and pushed me from him, sitting up with his elbows on his knees and running his fingers through his black hair, with his breath coming fast.
"Blast you, blast you!" he said, his voice thick in his throat. "Can't you stay away from here? Any place but this? Always, no matter what happened, I had this to come back to. Before the war," he said, "before Korea, when I was jackarooing on a station near here, I bought this land."
"It is not yours," I said. I put my hand to my throat. Why should I care that he had lost it?
"Nevertheless," he said, "I shall stay." I had a thought. It was not a good thought, but one does not always, have good thoughts; and it was a way, when I needed a way. And he had been the first to speak of killing.
In the house there was a plague of mice that year. They gathered the crumbs from under the nursery table while we sat watching, and one had run across my bare foot in my room. We soaked grains of wheat in poison and had scattered them for the mice.
On my way home from the river I found an empty bottle. I took it home in my pocket. I went out to the shed and looked at the poison on a high shelf. A little at a time, I thought, so that it may not be missed. Afterwards I will leave the bottle in his shack. Who will know but that he kept it there for a purpose of his own? He has little use for life.
They said in the town that he was a derelict of war, one who had been spoiled and embittered by fate. They said he had trusted a woman before he went to Korea, leaving his money and his love with her, and she had betrayed him. They said he had spent years in hospitals and suffered much. But they said - they who had not suffered-that he was a waster, no good, a man who went down before the arrows of fortune.
Something had drained away our heart's blood, his and mine. I am a derelict of another war.
He would sit on the beach and watch me as I came and went. There was a wariness between us. I could feel his gaze measuring me. Smoke rose thinly through the straggling trees on the high bank, but I did not go any more to the top of the bank. Sometimes I would dive off a fallen tree and swim, watching out for the branches that reached under the water to snare a victim, and lie on the sand, and sometimes climb down the cool gullies, gathering maidenhair fern and flannelflowers. And at home I gathered the poison in the bottle, a little at a time.
"Why do you not work, like a man?" I taunted him. "And not lie around in idleness, of no use in the world at all?" If he would be angered and leave, he would save his life.
He would not be shamed. He grinned at me. "Because I have no use for the world," he said. "What has the world done for me? I owe nothing to anyone. I am on my own and I'll do as I please."
I looked long at him. I thought of the bottle in my closet, ready for him now. But he could have saved himself.
The day came when I carried the bottle to the beach. He came down from the high bank, limping, and a parakeet made a rainbow arc in the tree above him. I had brought a shovel to dig postholes for my shelter, but the ground was like iron, not like the earth in my country. He sat and mocked me.
"Your muscles are weak with soft living," he said. "Rest a while, and I will make a cup of tea for your ladyship."
My face said nothing, but my thoughts were like bees among yellow wattle blossom. Why did he offer me friendship suddenly? I took a hatchet and went back into the bush and cut down four straight young saplings for my posts. When I had cut them, I rested, leaning against a tree. A kookaburra laughed, somewhere down the river, and a willy-wagtail flicked his tail on a waratah bush nearby. The bush was full of little friendly noises. There are no big noises in the bush.
The bottle was in my pocket. Why was he friendly? He called to me, "I have boiled a billy. You have earned a cup of tea." I could see his brown face streaked with the sunlight that fell through the trees. I went up the bank slowly, seeing that his eyes were mocking still. "Why do you offer me tea?" I asked him.
"To ruin your reputation," he said. His glance skimmed over me. "In the town they will talk if we stay alone in the bush together, and you will be sent away from here in disgrace."
The wattle was in bloom, and the air was like honey. Some of the gold from a thousand fluffy balls brushed off on my arm as I pushed between the trees. He had tidied up the shack. He had hung green netting to keep out mosquitoes, and through it I could see a cot, neatly made, and there were books in a box. The fireplace was sturdy again, and the earth swept clean around the table and benches. He had cut away the young gums along the edge of the bank, to lay open the view before his eyes. It was a view to warm the heart.
In the sky a flock of galahs wheeled suddenly in a rush of pink and gray, their calls coming like an echo out of space. I could see the river below me and the gentle rise of the bush away from the distant bank to the purple shadows under the cliff wall. I could have cried, just because of the way the world was in this place I had found. The day was too beautiful for death.
I took the bottle from the pocket of my shorts and set it on the table. On his way to the fireplace he turned, with a mug in his hand.
"What is that?" he asked.
"It is poison for the mice," I said. He was very still.
"To poison you," I said. "So I could have my land and my peace." I sat down on the bench. I was very tired. Something had emptied out of me. In the silence a locust whirred upward with a papery rustle of wings.
"My heaven!" he said. After a long time he asked, "Why did you tell me?"
"I don't know." I did not know, except that I have seen men die of poison and I did not hate this man. I am not a killer. I wanted only to be left alone.
We drank our tea. It tasted of wood smoke, strong and hot. We did not talk much. Only he looked at me often and shook his head and kept his face tight and withdrawn. Australians wear a guarded look always, and yet something in his face was vulnerable, something his eyes could not hide now, nor his tight lips hold back-something beyond his understanding, outside his picturing of life.
He lifted his head and looked at me keenly, turning the empty mug around in his fingers. "You have finished your tea," he said. There was an odd twist to his lips. "Did you not think when you drank," he said, "that I too might have thought of poison-for you?"
The blood left my head and rushed back, drumming past my ears and drowning out the bush sounds. My whole body felt cold, and I could not move. My mouth was open, and I could not speak.
He laughed, but there was a new note in his laughter, and he pushed away the mug. "You," he said, "and me. We have no armor against treachery. Though we have seen the worst in man, it has not taught us distrust. Your life might have been forfeit to your faith just now. We are both fools," he said bitterly, "you and I."
We sat there in silence while the locusts shrilled and the wings of birds made a rushing in the air. After a while he said, "I had planned to buy a farm when the war ended, but a lot of things happened. This was all I had left."
When I went down to the beach again, going back to the town, I saw that my four postholes had been dug while I cut my trees in the bush. I did not sleep at all that night. Here was a thing to think about.
In my room, in a secret place, I had one treasure, all I had saved from the vandals, from the years of the war and the trouble-the earrings of my grandmother. I am hot supposed to own a treasure; and it was foolishness, perhaps, but my grandmother had worn them in her ears. And what could they buy me now that I did not already have?
I held them in the palm of my hand; they sparkled in the light. It was as if I held a handful of tiny stars. They will help to buy a farm for this man, I thought; and he will go away, and I shall have my peace again-my beach, my quiet bush, the scent of boronia and the distant tinkle of the bellbird.
She would have been glad, my little grandmother. I was very young when the trouble began and the vandals came to our land, but I remember my grandmother in the garden of her chateau, smiling to me with a sadness in her smile, when I was ten years old.
She took the earrings from her ears that day and put them in my hand. "They are small," she said. "You may lose everything else. I see only hardship and suffering for our country in the years to come. I am afraid I will have little to leave you, my dear, of your inheritance. Hide them and keep them if you can, but not at too great a cost." She sighed then. "I am glad to be old and I never thought to be glad. Times are changing, and the world moves too fast for me. But I have known love and beauty. You may yet live to know them too."
Our chateau was a very small one. I used to think it was built of dreams and legends. It was always a happy place. The apple trees in springtime made it young and delicate, like a bride, though it was old with the burden of centuries. Many years later I saw that our chateau was made only of broken stones and splintered wood and gray dust. And my grandmother stayed there-under the broken stones.
The earrings were precious to me and rich with memories, and I kept them when perhaps they might have brought me warmth and food and comfort. I sewed them inside the buttons of my coat, and my coat soon was ragged and stained so that no one thought it worth the taking. I liked sometimes to remember them and to think of my grandmother standing in the doorway of our chateau with the afternoon sun on her white hair and the jewels like drops of water in the lobes of her ears; and though I knew that love and beauty were a dream, yet I liked to touch the buttons of my coat and remember. There are times when memories are warmer than fire and more nourishing than food.
Now they winked at me from the palm of my hand, and I thought, They shall give me what I want at last. My little grandmother had, after all, an inheritance of land to leave me. I have my land. This man shall have his farm. He will go away and leave me, and I will be alone and at peace.
I clipped the earrings into my ears and walked through the bush to my beach. Was it a sin to take joy in their beauty this one time only? I might have worn them at balls, in long halls glittering with chandeliers and mirrors, and many would have envied me. But only the magpies turned on me their bright beady eyes, and white cockatoos raised yellow crests as I passed.
He came limping down the hill, little pebbles rolling under his feet, and I stood on the sand, waiting. There is a magic in jewels. A woman can feel beautiful wearing them and proud for a moment. I lifted my head high and stood before him for that little moment of pride. But he stopped, and his eyes went hard, and his lips twisted. He put his hands on his hips.
"I might have known," he said tightly. "Just like the rest-no different. Flaunting your charms, trying to soften me."
He was wrong. What charms? My hair, black like the night? My eyes, empty and shadowed? My skin, burned by the sun? I held the earrings in my hand, offering them to him. "There are these," I said, looking for words, "my grandmother's jewels."
He would not listen. "Baubles!" he said hotly, in disgust. "And you set store by such things-even now! Even after- why did I think, for even a moment _"
He took them and flung them, with one sweep of his arm, into the river. Like fireflies, like little suns, they arched and were gone.
My knees were weak, and I crouched on the sand. I do not cry. I have watched death with dry eyes. Nothing could make me cry, and yet I wept, the tears streaming. Was it for my memories? Was it for my lost solitude? Was it for his scorn and disbelief and the hurt in his eyes?
He said, standing over me, hands on hips, "You are a fool. Stop your sniveling. I will get them for you, since they mean so much."
He walked along the trunk of the fallen tree and dived in cleanly. The river rippled in circles, lapping the sand. He came up, flinging water from his hair, and went down again. He came up again, blinking, gulping in air.
"I think I see them," he called and went under. He did not come up.
The surface of the water swelled and heaved and bubbled, but it stayed unbroken. I sat and watched it. He is caught on the snag, I thought. He is gone. My land and my solitude are mine again.
When I first swam in the rive they told me I must watch out for the snag. What is this snag, I asked, a monster that lurks in deep places to snatch his prey, to pull down unwary swimmers? They laughed at me. A snag is a tree, they said, uprooted and submerged in the river, and its branches will entangle you and hold you to drown.
He was caught by the snag, and I was free of him. I would never see him again. He was gone by his own doing-and it was nothing to me that the river would take him; it was nothing to me.
I went into the water, groping for him, seeing dimly in the green light the branches that reached out for me too. I could not find him. I came up for breath and went down again, feeling my hair float like seaweed around my head.
A long branch was caught beneath his belt. My fingers clawed and fumbled. Pain tore across my chest and sparks of fire flashed in my eyes. I freed him and he floated limp beside me. I do not know how we came to the beach again. But after a while I saw that he lay beside me on the sand. When his eyes were closed he looked young, and his lips were not tight, but very sweet and gentle. Once, long ago, he must have been a dreamer.
I could not help him up to his shack. I brought him a blanket before I went home and covered him as he lay. He said a very strange thing. He did not move, but he opened his eyes and he said very faintly, "I always intended to marry a blonde."
What did I care what his woman was?
A week went by before I went to my beach the next time, and he was gone. His shack was empty. I sat under the gum tree, leaning against the smooth trunk, and thought about many things. It was very silent. An ant labored in the sand, dragging a dead fly to the ant heap. He did not see the deadly sloping sides of an ant lion's trap.
Why should I care if the ant lion captured him? I took a twig and tried to lift him to the path, but he was a soldier ant and did not know I would save him. He reared back and defied me, grasping the twig with his sharp red pincers. Ants are like people sometimes. I flicked the twig and swung him away from danger. You will only die some other way, little ant, I thought. I did not stay long. Today my beach was a lonely place. It had no welcome for me-only tolerance, and tolerance is a lonely thing, like the gray light between the dark and the daylight.
He came to the house after another week had passed, dressed like the men in the town, but his white shirt open at the neck showed the brown firm skin and the fine black hair. I did not know he would look like that, with light lying in the hollows of his dark curling hair. Something sang inside me, and I could not meet his eyes.
"I had things to do in the town," he said. "We will make a civil marriage," he said. "We have had little reason to look for God among men, you and I. Afterward we will take our marriage before God in our own way. For now we know," he said, his eyes searching mine, "one place at least where He may be found."
He touched my hand. "If we are brave," he said, smiling, "nothing can reach through to spoil the dream that is in our , hearts. You and I never quite learned to hate. The beauty of the world is too much for us."
So now I am sitting here, on the bench beside his shack. What the future will be, I do not know. He will speak to me of that later perhaps, when the moon rides the night sky and the mopokes begin to call across the bush and the Cross swings low over the treetops. But now he is tying a boat to the fallen tree, whistling. Though he limps, he is strong. He can do a man's work. I am strong too- I learned in a hard school.
He is crossing the sand, he is coming up the hill, he is smiling to me, and his face shines in the evening sun. I am smiling, too, but I cannot keep my lips from trembling. THE END
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