Blood and Old Belief: A Verse Novel

Blood and Old Belief A VERSE NOVEL

PAUL HETHERINGTON

PANDANUS POETRY

Blood and Old Belief

Other poetry collections by Paul Hetherington

Mapping Wildwood Road (1990) Acts Themselves Trivial (1991) The Dancing Scorpion (1993) Shadow Swimmer (1995) Canvas Light (1998) Stepping Away: Selected Poems (2001)

Blood and Old Belief A VERSE NOVEL

Paul Hetherington

PANDANUS BOOKS Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Cover painting: Katrine Hill Ian Wroth, watercolour

© Paul Hetherington 2003

This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Typeset in Weiss 11.5pt on 15pt by Pandanus Books and printed by XXX, Canberra. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Hetherington, Paul, 1958–. Blood and Old Belief: a verse novel ISBN 1 74076 023 9. I. Title A821.3 Published by Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Phone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420

www.pandanusbooks.com.au Production: Ian Templeman, Duncan Beard and Emily Brissenden

For my father

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone who assisted and encouraged me during the writing of Blood and Old Belief. The Board and expert staff of Pandanus Books contributed to the book in many ways, and Ian Wroth generously gave permission to use his painting, Katrine Hill, as the cover illustration. I owe a debt of gratitude to the ACT Cultural Council and artsACT for providing a grant to help me write this work.

One Crow-sounds in this place, a rocky ford that water pulses over, frothing, on the Lachlan River in the better seasons, and ironbarks that wander on the ancient hillsides, stringybarks and cypress blackening horizons in the western country; river oaks and red gums near the river beds. ❧ Rocks that welter on this dry, disgorging soil, last year’s flooded weed clinging like dry bones on their wire fence. They’d dig the soil again but what can planting do when all activity is useless—like this blue that signals heat and drought.

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Two Sun flames thin clouds, a riverbed winds down from blue and crowded hills. In the valley patchworked paddocks overlay a territory crossed by hazy, high-tossed air. One small property is stalked by gullies where the drought has moved over the last year, and turned the racing river to a stream that dawdles through a rocky bed. Jack, who farms this, husbands hope like the empty, flying clouds. His ancestors have ploughed the land, believing it their own to change— if not for drought, he’d now replant the vineyard that supplied the fruit for local wines, to ease his debt. ❧

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Jack’s wife, Cecilia, is locked into old uncertainties, her fondness for her family mixed with a distrust of soil that’s unlike rich Italian loam from which she grew her early strength. She keeps a fervent, eager love for Katherine, her dark-haired child, faithful to a Christ with crown of thorns—the driven man of sorrow— believing Resurrection holds hope for her redemption, that she will one day free her life. ❧ Katherine’s sixteen, gangly tall, tutored by the shelves of books from her father’s aunt’s dark house— and she’s doubtful, as if her blood is tainted by anxiety, some legacy of ancestry. Years of growing towards the body of the woman that she must be in loneliness has chastened her. And friends are yet to satisfy a deep and unresolved new wish to test the currency of love.

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Three: Katherine Her mother’s breath tickles in her ear carrying shapes of other, distant worlds, historical episodes and gossip— stories of old Popes, unruly kings, bitter schisms, and the death of saints; how her neighbour’s always-wayward son had rung the town’s bell late one moonless night ‘to startle and wake up five hundred souls’; how Mrs Hutchings wore a skirt to church ‘that did not even reach unstockinged knees’. These words brush past her with a soft affection, like moths in light. She loosens her long arms from the sheets, embracing breath and talk. Words work within her, like a yeast in dough until each one means ‘prosperousness’ which is the word she most adores. She stifles her physical hunger and her restlessness, remembering that she is growing tall. ❧

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Her cat cuffs a clothes peg, summer overflows from an empty terracotta pot outside the flywire door. She drops her hands into this capsule of heated air, as clothes jostle on the line, and takes a path slender as a child’s arm that runs next to the hedgerow. She enters the free air beyond the garden, stooping through a gap in the latticed wire towards the pale field, a stand of trees crouching in its shadow near a dam, leans on trunks that sigh into her ear, forgetting her daylight ways of hot routine and old fixation, until a voice calls out. ❧ For her the night is subtlety of sound; she sits on her bed near the open window, legs tucked under her nightdress, listening, leaning into the rhythm of her breath. The night is the swiftness of owls, flurry of insects caught in light, wing-beat, shrub-scurry, a distant laughter of others. She makes a night diary, many pages of longhand, intricate, slow pictures—the night noises a brief code for a cinema of mind. Sometimes she sings quietly, or murmurs as in a trance, signs each page ‘Night Watcher’.

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Four: Cecilia Cecilia remembers ancestors in all she makes: lacy decorations, pasta thick with sauce, fish cooked in soup, and a subtle embroidery of love that sews her daughter’s life with images of rock-strewn slopes and verdant, close-cropped grass and slow cows hung with winking glints of dew— this Italy her state of absent mind. ❧

In love with days; in love with light; with trees that green this old, scarred land; in love with Jack who seems my place and being in this land, who comes and goes and seems like permanence. ❧

My daughter’s wild; I love her most, refuse her trying-on of turns. I keep her straight; she holds me every night, a bodied kiss and longing, arms about me that I bless. ❧

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Far from Lazio and her mother’s talk Cecilia gathers in a doubtful harvest. She has seen her language fade, her breath lose its eager, childish eloquence— words that were like mint leaves on her tongue, and words that her conviction told in prayer, that were as strong as upright, hewn handles. These have been replaced and pushed aside by a skewing, harsher utterance. Yet she maintains fond images of past preserved in thought, as in a tight-sealed jar, her mind a keeping-place of ancestry, holding back her loss and tensed dismay until disappointment seems a radiance in her deep and steady, watchful eyes.

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Five: Katherine Katherine’s hair falls across her face. She flicks it back, lifts kindling she has cut, stacks it on a pile that’s shoulder high. Sweat beads on her face, runs down her arms. She looks towards a magpie in a tree that’s tall as a century—a gum with bark that falls in strips and long, striated tears. She splits a log, and splits the smaller half, and splits that piece again, and stops to stare. The sun stares too, and in the distance this farm and other farms merge into land that’s like a blanket many times repaired. ❧

My lifeline curves across my palm and seems a gully when I fold my hand, as if a clumsy napkin— a callused hand that seems to frown or opens lightly, like a smile, then shows off usefulness, as tool that guides my pen and writes of me. My mother’s hands are much like this— hands which toiled—and this connects us. I now repeat her in my flesh, her toil a shadow on my life, her breath regathered in my mouth, her wrong convictions shaped and changed in my hidden thought and wish. ❧ 8

Ancestors’ songs weren’t written down— my parents made new versions, sung with gusto and in memory— some pretty songs, and silky tunes cast in patterns, like brocade. I write simpler words, cannot express my feeling. All words seem misfiring only, my target missed, words telling versions of themselves, rewriting what I would remember. As wind hurries through the pine my words could easily be blown like fallen needles, cast-off leaves.

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Six: Cecilia Cecilia recalls how her wedding cake stood on three high tiers in frosted white, and how her veil caressed her shaded face, and how the light gathered on the wall next to the church—she thought it seemed a sign of the Lord’s beneficence—and how Jack’s awkward charm and earnest, stumbling vows— ‘I do, and will,’ and ‘Let me carry you’— were a heady pleasure; how their love blossomed early—like the orchard’s trees, full of scent, in their wedding’s season. ❧ Early on her nearest neighbours brought cakes and scones, cheering her with care, but their visits slowly dropped away as she grew older, spending time instead alone, or chasing after Katherine. She soon heard of seasons turned to dust, of hands that sifted soil for withered seeds, of other seasons melting into water, years of aching toil turned to a flood that slid across the whole expanse of land— at first she’d thought this simply history.

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Seven: Jack Jack thought his father harsh— both angry and remote. In contrast he has tried to show a generous love towards Cecilia and to Katherine— even through these dry and doubtful, dust-choked months; even as black moods begin to move in him. ❧

She won’t understand that things will change again, that good years will return once this drought is through; that what we’ve made will last despite the wind and dust if we can hold on tight to a deepened love. She has lost her trust and cries in bed at night and stares towards the heat that hammers at our door.

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Eight: Cecilia So many years ago she offered up her being for embrace by one she knew was laconic, strong and young, giving him her body as considered sacrifice— she made an immolation of a life, rising, phoenix-like, into this farm, learning marriage, recasting older thought into a view of necessity and right, and patterns of a new Australian light. ❧

This language troubles. Though I’ve learnt its ways, when I would speak from in my truer heart I only have old, broken bones of words; rough sayings that cling to my awkward tongue and jag and clog my searching, clumsy mouth— a darker language that I cannot use because its ancient words refuse my life. From Italy, I grow Australian; grow in paddocks, from out of steep, clear hills. My daughter speaks in accents all her own like her father, coarse patternings of thought that puzzle and always nag; that will not change. ❧

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‘What do you think?’ My daughter asks me this, and I say different things, but privately I cannot always tell what my thoughts are. I ask her what she thinks in turn. She says, ‘I think of what I’ll do when I leave school— maybe I’ll be a teacher far away— and holidays and my diary and books,’ or else she says, ‘nothing much today’ and walks away as if I do not ask. I cannot see into her closer thoughts but she is like me in her deeper part. And like him too, her father, strong in will.

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Nine: Katherine We visit father’s old aunt, Flora, in her chair, who rocks and chews through conversations, gesturing and smiling with a man called Jim who died at least ten years ago. Our vineyard’s planted in her talk: how she stepped the rows, how marked the drier ground, and how new vines looked when they had freshly greened; how she tied and watered them, small grapes rising into colour. I tuck her blanket, kiss her skin that tastes of age and medicine— a sour leaf; a world undone. ❧

In my great-aunt’s cedar bookcase— my gift when I was only ten— are tightly jammed old books in rows with a staining gauze of dust that’s fine as thought, or greying light— histories of Rome and Greece, brittle novels of silly love, and two massive dictionaries, and Russian plays, and Sherlock Holmes and an ancient family Bible.

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To read them is like secret thought transporting and releasing me from all told words and daily habit, all pressing heat and draining light. ❧ Katherine reads among the attic’s dust, writes letters in ornate, invented script. She will wait five minutes more, to feel this solitude upon her like a shawl. She breathes the yellow scent of pine the window bathes her with; intoxicant and balm. At dinner she is silent and absorbed, remembering her privacy of pleasure, accepting pasta from her worried mother. ‘Tell me where you were.’ She will not answer. ❧

‘Katherine, meaning pure,’ my mother used to say when I was young. ‘Katherine, meaning pure,’ as she combed her fingers through my hair— a loving phrase I can’t forget. Now it’s always ‘Do your duty— and do it now or not at all.’ But ‘not at all’ is not allowed.

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Ten: Cecilia I cannot understand a drought this bad and cannot make my prayers into the tools to dig us from this godless, stupid debt, and Jack just says that we’ve ‘been due’ for years. ❧

I search for the alternatives to this but nothing is alternative, and love demands that I take proper care of them and heed his judgement—even when he’s wrong.

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Eleven: Jack Sometimes I can’t bear the struggle with her mood or her sharp defiance: ‘Do not talk with me, I cannot stand your words.’ Some days I’d let go of every nourished hope. I pray that she will turn towards me once again— we can both survive if she will hold her nerve.

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Twelve: Cecilia Cecilia is swallowed by new grief— news of her mother’s death in Lazio. Her sense of loss erupts, as if a sea has cast its darkest currents into light and thrown the strangest flotsam into air; or like the sudden visit of some stranger carrying bleak pain across the gap of thirty years; across that long divide estranging continents—a whole landscape of surging hurt and remnant memory. A shadow-figure visits her dark dreams bent over with her mother’s peasant dress, but looking up at her, the face is blurred just like a child’s unfocused photograph. ❧

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The land seems to exhale as evening, a tightening drawstring bag, now closes down. And now there’s pricks of small and scattered light and crickets chirruping, and a pall of grainy dusk. Sadness has arrived as a constriction in the air—she’s caught by all her ways of knowing unsuccess. First she heard the news by distant phone, and then by letter scrawled from weathered hills that she has kept as an unbroken dream. She had known loss, but loss like this, in loosening the drought-affected grip of this country’s life, now threatens her with the fraying of every love and bond.

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Thirteen: Jack Hope because she speaks; hope because she wears her bright, pleated dress despite the silent weeks that have seemed a second death. I leave to fence a paddock, renewal glints on leaves, polishes the water, is warmth that wraps my bones, even as I drive an unwilling tractor far away from her. The promise of gentler words than those she’s used to me for three unsmiling weeks lights the wayward morning like a change of season.

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Fourteen: Cecilia In this closing, quick and tight-held grief my husband and my daughter have no place; and saving words are now impossible— to speak of proper things; to make this right. Mother, you were every deepest dream, and speaking-out of love and worshipped name; and being within being. Now in death you have left me stiffened-through with pain. ❧

This place is emptied out, like Katherine’s bucket tipped towards the well, and light is now the faintest gloss or glow—there’s no way past the shutting door that faces to our future. In smallest gestures mother showed her love; now monstrous arms could not force the breath back into being; or any drama dress her up again. Yet childish songs intrude into the shrilling noise of thought— songs she sang, that guided growing up and taught our pride and birthright. These repeat. ❧

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Katherine’s more distant, though I ask only what I need, and what she owes as daughter in this family. I hold my love of her at arm’s length, so she’ll see that being older brings unswerving duty. She’s too much in her room, and too caught up in looking at herself; won’t know my needs unless I say them plainly—then she fights.

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Fifteen: Jack Jack’s anger builds as Cecilia mourns. He shouts at her and slams the flywire door, searching for some contact. She is lost like a child that pain has overwhelmed sitting in a yard. Nothing works to quell the inward-spilling focus of her grief, her dark and curt replies. ‘I cannot talk,’ she says when staring down her husband’s eyes. ❧ He holds the spoon as tightly as a vice then lets it gently down into a cup, the blue-white porcelain as fine as light, Dresden-made a hundred years ago. Katherine stands near, afraid to raise the deep of his emotion, that shudders now like an explosion’s aftermath. He asks for the milk jug from the humming fridge, and smiles tightly. She hands the jug to him in which there is a small half-inch of cream. ❧

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I hold my anger back; fear sees anger build until my shouting clears me; and then I watch it build— and all for nothing; all for loss of twenty years of work that’s so much dirt— I cannot judge its worth. Although I love my daughter I’ll lose Katherine too— because of arguments and silence that bewilders, and nights of both, as if a second self runs after and always overtakes me.

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Sixteen: Katherine I walk through summer’s pale heat that’s blackened hillside shrubs and grass, charred the flesh of wallabies, scattered bones through burnt-out gullies. Three horses in a paddock look my way. I sit for hours peeling stalks of wheat, these fingers nimbler than I knew, while unexpected voices speak in grating accents from the past— old figures standing as mirage to claim again the lots they fenced and dug, and turned to rocky pasture. ❧ Under a thick-leaved, shady bough in a spring-fed waterhole, near light that’s like a shard of sun, Katherine dives beneath the glare and pulsing clouds that coalesce, smudging the water’s shine, and walks for seconds, as if on the moon, in looping steps, in pirouette, dancing over a trail of weed, then surfacing, the heat and air harsh and sudden in her throat. ❧

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The stare of afternoon subsides under willows. In cool water she’s free from her anxiety. Her forebears swam here too; she has a drawing and a diary, found in the old homestead, jammed into a hidden corner. She’s rebound the diary with glue of flour-and-water and rough muslin. It describes ‘exquisite pleasure’ through a day very much like this. A looping feminine hand writes out a life and recipes in private code, that says, ‘At last T. has arrived. Our lives will soon be damned or saved.’ The entries end without revealing what was then begun or changed. ❧ Katherine unfolds Tim’s pencilled note gathered from a cracked, unsteady stump at the Gully Paddock’s farthest edge, flattening its creases with her hands: ‘I’ll meet you just behind the broken tree early in the afternoon tomorrow.’ ❧

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She sat astride the muscular, long back of the tamest bull, held by adult hands, securely precarious, no Europa ever more frightened, ever more beguiled, the paddock bouncing slightly with his walk, the sky a blue of indistinct regard, and a voice somewhere, ‘Have you got her tight?’ Still she remembers this, still she thrills and frightens and absolves herself of fear, and as the bull begins to stumble forward into a canter, she can smell his breath as a faint aroma, and the steady hands that let her go feel large as emptiness.

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Seventeen: Jack As a headache camps within my lightless mind and as I pull on socks, I remember Kate yelling, only three, from the rocky pool pointing where the river ran to streaky shallows. I stooped and found a rock, just about fist-sized which I gave as gift and as a small surprise— it seemed to catch the light within its fractured grain. I would take it now from her cradling hands and place it in clear water to see if something deep within us all might change. ❧

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I hold myself to soil— it promises that life will shoot again, although earth and stalk of wheat crumble in my fingers. The clumps of teased-out thistle keep their stubborn force. This summer Cecilia has nearly died within me, won’t see this pulse I hold, this plumped-up grain of love.

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Eighteen: Cecilia Musing, Cecilia brushes a curtain’s crease, dusts, and measures the sherry bottle’s level with her eye, while daylight starts to darken. She watches Katherine coming from the well hauling a bucket, unwraps streaky bacon, stirs tomato sauce that’s on the stove, imagines that this air might hold a blessing— sees and feels it in the light and warmth not so different from Italian light. Old thoughts occupy: her mother’s hands dark with grape juice; her mother’s twisting skirt and bosom’s warmth, rising with every breath; and knotty hills climbing near their farm; and words her mother often said: ‘One day you will leave this,’ a repeating charm or hopeful mantra to banish poverty. ❧

Hold me mother, cradle me with care. I separated but am tied to you. Rise within me, stand within me now— not in dreams from which I wake too soon, but in my touch and breath, in florid life. Our conversation is reduced to prayer that fails to find its target or reply while this stone life of mine cannot unroll.

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Nineteen: Jack Drought stands on the land and its staring dry unmakes the settled world, sucking all that grows, draining every creek, thickening the drift of the river’s water; roots reaching at the sky from dark, fallen trunks; skulls and skeletons lying in the dust, while creeks are sand and stone that glimmer like road-metal. ❧ Fat lambs in a stall sold at a good price; reaping and binding hay; sinking a deep, straight bore; wheat trucks queued in line next to local silos; carting lucerne hay; bagging chaff—Jack dreams that his working life is gathered in a pile that’s tinder-dry, on which a lighted match is thrown.

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He starts awake and cries. Then lying in the night, hearing Cecilia breathe in her distant sleep, all perspective shifts; all memory’s unreal, and crisis holds his thought in its dreamless thrall.

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Twenty: Katherine The engines snore and smoke and hammer on Field Day, all their painted metal and shovelled coal and steam and diesel in dressed-up show, the grind of pistons like a headache, and the owners proud as Punch. There’s a stall in which a boy sells lollies wrapped with coloured foil; a merry-go-round with leaning animals; a tent with beer, dust a fine mist in the air. Her mother hustles, her father waits to shoot small metal ducks in lines, yells to someone in the crowd. ❧ Death, for Katherine, is a ghostly train, or dark merry-go-round that doesn’t end, carrying figures through a huddling dusk in a place of hills and churning smoke. Or she imagines it a shrinking man who becomes a child again, and curls away from his busy life, thin as a leaf. She knows that it is growing while she grows, as something to complete her, at the back of all that’s energetic in her being, thinking of her great-aunt in her chair,

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small streams of words, and a bony hand flapping slightly as if signalling that there is something else to say at last. ❧

Last week I read my great-aunt’s Bible and saw my father’s family tree written carefully at its front, and Flora and my father’s father had Elspeth written next to them while underneath her name, another— was this her child, called Emily? ❧

If I was born before I was I’d be ancestor to this life— faint hints and guesses trail me with troubled rumours of old years that promise to explain just how our family die was thrown and cast— what circumstance has called our luck. These murmurs of our past persist and in them something undisturbed— inklings of our scripted souls. ‘But let go,’ they seem to say, ‘do not get to know our world.’

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Twenty-one: Cecilia Cecilia quickly pushes Katherine back: ‘Leave me to make dinner—don’t intrude.’ ‘I only want to help,’ her daughter says as Jack ushers her quickly from the room. A television shouts the daily news. ❧

The vineyard was Jack’s latest, wildest dream to make the money to recast our lives. The new vines tasted sweet and strong and full and promised a small vintage we could use to learn this trade. They were a first good year, although not many. Now I cannot sleep. I think of my young mother treading grapes for our home-made wine, lifting her skirts, letting me sip the juice that frothed and churned. ❧

My daughter, with her accusation, fights as if, somehow, I am her enemy: ‘You are silent and you’re much too mean,’ as if the years I cared and comforted amount to nothing; and this new despair is beyond her childish sympathy. Certainly it’s true—that I have failed to be what she’d insist her mother be. ❧

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I remember how she used to be— how she gathered flowers for her hair and wove them tightly into yellow crowns, queening both of us; and earlier we took her for a walk one summer’s midnight, and then she pirouetted under stars so brightly luminous they seemed to show the watching face of God, and night air breathed on all of us with a humid scent. Also her first communion, dressed in white with my mother’s lace, and candlelight— her sweetness was an angel’s. I believed that if we had been martyred on that day we would have risen straight to heaven’s gate.

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Twenty-two: Katherine On the path towards the hills Katherine and Tim walk out into the cracking land, to find silence like a long embrace, and conversation, casual as any store-bought cotton blouse. ❧

The friendship that I have with Tim has been a part of home and land: a river splashing over rocks, and gullies that fell near to water overrun with blackberries— we furnished hideouts, and we trekked a thousand kilometres a year, and talked the world into its places— as if our words and names made true the lounging, jutting cliffs of rocks and all the paddocks, that from high on the escarpment, seemed to fall into the tricky haze of distance; as if our words made us more real simply by being spoken out each pressing year, so childhood slowed from innocence to self-assessment, still close—yet lately changed. ❧

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And now we climb the rocks to see how a line of smoke fans out into the higher air, that shows the distant township’s trace; we talk of living there, of letting go— what’s possible seems narrowed here, and thinner with each passing week. ❧

Tim talks of cars, his loose, soft shirt half untucked. He kicks the soil and runs to chase a wayward cow. How can we truly speak of lives that are so close; our properties like awkward twins on either side of a river that subsides? He’s like a brother and a friend all rolled together, but he falls into silence, coughs, then hums repeating tunes—where once we laughed and said our first and simplest thoughts. Something’s clumsy now we’ve grown; something moves within us both that makes me blush and want to keep myself apart, and yet be close.

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Twenty-three: Cecilia From my life, I live an echo’s distance, saying badly my once-practised words. I pack big jars with tight, small apricots stewed in juice; make lasagne rich with the herbs, wine and garlic; still I do these things that are my habit and my way. But all the time I’m lost in daily things, my tongue too clumsy for my pushing thought which chases me—with pictures of the past, and pictures of dressed hopes I cannot speak. My daughter makes me cry, forgetting me, wanting the shiny new, the polished hope, our pasts a failure, banished in her eye. ❧

As for Tim, I will not have him near. He takes Katherine—disobeying me— into the paddocks; up into the hills. They are far too young. From him she learns so much rudeness, questioning her life, saying she will leave—as if we are specks of dust she’ll brush from off her shoes.

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Twenty-four: Katherine I’ve trapped a spider in a glass— it crawls around the downturned rim; evening trails into my room. Sent in here as punishment I watch my curtains jerk and drag in the heavy, gusting breeze. ❧ In dreams of grandeur Katherine paces through a white-washed mansion; through a drawing-room where servants nod obeisance as she passes; through long, windowed corridors that lead to small courtyards, fruit trees espaliered on trellises, and lines of standard roses with blooms of white and pink and reddish blue. She unlocks a gate with iron lattice, follows a curling path that brings her to the old homestead surrounded by a lawn as once it must have been when it was new, in which a woman sings a favourite song— and here she’s welcome, taking off her shawl. ❧

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Another dream keeps the closed illusion that childhood and innocence remain; that rows of oaks, and willows trailing water— from which she hangs, dangling her long feet— will forever be her place and landscape. She has this dream even when awake, even when her father’s growing anger recasts words he’s always used to her in ways she cannot meet, and cannot answer.

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Twenty-five: Jack I touched Cecilia’s tears with fingertips, and held her open face in hands, and knew her loss as if it grew in me, was mine, and moved to her in slow, complete and free caress. I wrapped and held her like the child that years ago we made and held and loved. For those few unwatched minutes I touched and kissed her tears.

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Twenty-six: Cecilia He came to me and took me up in hands and once more I was carried by his love— once more, like years ago, his tenderness absorbed me, seemed to carry me to him as if I lived in flesh that was his flesh; as if his hands were feeling with my skin, and nerves were all exposed, and all was touch— my life, my love, consumed in knowing him. But soon it vanished. That hour after us was no-time, and it weighed like all of earth— was dry, was black explosion of the thought. To take me on those wings, to let me fly— this is a sin and fall I won’t forgive.

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Twenty-seven: Jack Machinery will run through night and drought and cold— always it responds. But Cecilia is like a jammed cross-threaded bolt. I ask her in my way, through touching her, but weeks go past without the bond of knowing, that we had— every time she flinches. On each new-made morning I hope that things will turn to what they were; they don’t. There’s snow in her, I’m cold. I work from hazy light when the moon’s still up, to dying, staring dusk. I hope, and cannot say what I hope. I wait. The fire in our stove is lit by Katherine now. It smokes, sometimes it dies. ❧

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I held my daughter tight when she was only five on the bull’s tense back, and everything I knew seemed caught within this act— her life, my pride, her mother’s anxiety and fear, and I wouldn’t halt our game even when the bull began to canter forward. Running next to her I stumbled and let go for just an instant—she squealed, began to teeter towards the bull’s clipped horns, and then I grabbed again her tiny, lovely frame and had my breath restored. My terror and her squeal, her mother’s panicked call, return to haunt me now, to name a recklessness— a wish to take a chance— all leading towards this, drought’s tight, unyielding grip.

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Twenty-eight: Katherine The orchard’s rows of heavy trees seem to turn towards the sun. Katherine slowly walks among them, picks an apricot and peach. The evening’s a wave of heat, then haziness, while nearby a homestead waits where no-one’s lived for years. She walks towards it, scared of something silent in the dark. ❧ She pauses in collecting fallen fruit, shoos away the clacking geese, looks at sky through leaf and branch. The bruised fruit softens in her hand. She sucks and spits. Remembering herself, she sits and writes. Gathers herself in words, scores them out, gathers herself again. The sky so large, the shadowing of trees so small a haven, turns a black stone in her hand, walks towards the homestead where the pictures are that she believes must be her ancestors. She hides this thought, knowing the photographs have been left to vanish in a place no-one except her enters. The dark gaze is only hers as secret and as whisper. ❧

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Now my great-aunt’s quiet words one day when I had stayed to kiss her wrinkled cheek, return again: ‘You’re the image of Elsie’s child— poor Emily who died so young. Please have my books, and when you’re grown undo the wrongs that have been done.’ ❧ The old homestead is made of a hewn frame, rough iron that clangs in wind, split bricks of earth once smoothed and closely pressed, that gape and bulge. Inside it’s laid with objects, long disused: a leather harness, crazy with twisted stiffness, coiling wire, saddles that smell of age. Katherine wanders through it, lifting strands of grey and fibrous hay. Two photographs sit in tarnished frames, pock-marked with mould. The faces are unnamed, but the woman looks as if at distance, and a child stares— a mirror-image of her own dark glance. She murmurs her feelings to the photographs, joining her loneliness with their neglect, riding the broken saddle into her dreams.

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Twenty-nine: Jack

Jack shelters under willows near the creek, their dense cascade of underwater roots like the flowing scarlet-orange hair of some woman who has drowned. He walks where property line and creek line join and part, hemmed with river stones and trailing shadow near a group of boulders. Here he waits while midday glares with thirsty yellow heat. Old dreams welter in his troubled mind. ❧

In keeping myself apart I suffer change until I lose the names of days. Dragging a bag of wheat I bang and twist a knee and, waiting for pain to slow, I see the wide, brown river that was boyhood’s pleasure— pushing a twine-tied raft in water like a million rushing threads of light and darkness joined. I paddle towards the further bank. So many days I did this with hope for something strong

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beyond the sheds of wheat and slow, resisting cows. The river water fostered gleaming stands of trees and turning, silken movement, tasting of other land. Still that river finds its ancient way in me and holds its pulsing light of flow and icy morning. ❧

Still she shook and sobbed; I reached to touch, but now I could not do it, walked outside along the drive. My daughter’s shadow started hissing in quiet anger, once more cursing me. I had no words and walked to where the shallow dam sat amid the landscape like a dull, accusing eye.

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Thirty: Cecilia I drink the wine that’s blood and old belief— it flushes me with feeling and old love. I drink and watch the afternoon stoop down in veils of shady light, as if in prayer. I push the curtain back, and watch the sun funnel from the sky. I smooth my dress and wipe the benches, wash the dusty cloth. All seems watched, as if God’s staring eye lights up the house and radiates the crops. I’d wipe them clean of earth, too, if I could, wipe quite clean the dusty, dirty world of all its rough and blemished wear and soil and make it shine, and hold it at my heart— cleansed, it would at last be Godly-strong and I its matron, gathering it in arms.

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Thirty-one: Katherine Katherine lifts the bread bin’s lid and finds the crusty loaf. She gouges with her fingers into the moistness, pulling free a handful, pushing it into her mouth, and the taste shivers in her as a small ecstasy. ❧

My boisterous dogs bound after me— we chase the road and follow gullies in search of rabbits, better temper. Bluey yaps and runs in circles like a tiny willy willy, barks and digs as if for life. Red, who’s spotted like a calf dawdles, looks like he might die, then rubs himself on me, and whines and finds a stick he’d have me throw. I pick it up and run with it. ❧

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Straggle of creeper climbing the eucalypt, tangle of grass and weed. She piles clothes, shakes her towel, and bathes in shaded sun as she has done for years, on this same ground— while all her younger selves seem gathered here, lying near her, chewing stalks of grass, whispering to her of who she is, shadows and precursors of herself, old longings and old habits in their dress. The sun examines her with its bright stare as she remembers how the rushing creek would push against a broken, fallen branch, glossing leafy clusters with its weight— she feels fluid, dreams of a future life pushing underneath her dark-tanned skin. ❧

This, my zone and known place— my private pool of water, kept despite the drought, yielding me only an unhappy comfort. If Tim could swim with me, we’d be untroubled, drenched, content—at last.

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Thirty-two: Jack The beehives drone, and mice scurry away from light as Jack lifts heavy sheets of corrugated iron— first last year’s flood, now this; first crops that floated on a brown, engorging tide, and kicking, drowning sheep and pigs that flailed about within a shallow sea. First death by water, rain a slippery, skating curse that sucked the new, cleared land free of its best soil; now death by choking dust, by rents of exposed ground, by pale, wheezing air. ❧ Jack wonders what he’s done to see his hopes transparent and all the thinking silenced that every prosperous year had gathered. Pale death has washed this coloured hope as white as river quartz. ❧

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‘Katrine’, I used to say, ‘Come with me; we’ll go running on the hills, diving in the dam.’ Katrine, her childish name, which she’s since disowned— ‘I’m Katherine, now, or Kate— I’m nearly grown up.’ Katrine Hill, I call the stretch of rising land where we’d search for stones; where we’d hide-and-seek; where a steady rain would make small rivulets that ran towards a homestead she’d built from mud and sticks. So much for that—both dust and time itself have choked our foolish innocence. ❧

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The old plum tree’s entangled with twigs and purple leaves; skeleton weed surrounds it; the meagre fruit were small that we have mostly stewed. So much seems near dying I wonder if our mood’s affecting what we keep and what we would possess— dispute has dislocated all that we’ve both blessed. Solitude, the plum tree, some sense of who we are— nothing is distinct or wholly of itself as if the floating sky has changed its place with us and we are only visions or distant, obscure dreams that some grounded watcher imagines in the clouds.

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Thirty-three: Cecilia Blame falls on me from heaven. But what’s failed, what right is spoiled, what clumsiness has marred the kneeling form of my belief? What blame should ruin a faith that’s kept the shape of truth and fear of punishment by God? I’ve paid in prayers my husband hasn’t ever said, in rules my daughter breaks without respect. But payment’s poor without a just relief— twist seventeen years away from us, suck out the marrow in the words we gave to praise and they are vanished snow in drought and heat. ❧

Still I hope for change, for cool relief, but now mirage is all the land can show, poor, sparse paddocks flooded with a blue that’s just a glinting haziness; a light of false belief to will the lie of land to settle suddenly with water, lapping where old rocks are clumped in rough communion and soil a mask to hide the face of stone— and there I’d swim and kneel, I’d pray and rest. But the truth is heat and searching wind, and this is what demands my own assertion— that change must come. If I can keep belief. ❧

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Now Jack retreats into the silences I knew when first we courted, which I lifted, kindling his dryness like a weight of sticks to flame with sappy, crackling energy. I cannot any more raise up his spirit, can hardly tell now if I care for him, my lightless mind like a grey ground water, or slow disgust at where he’s taken us. He does not travel there, and when we’re close he’s ash, I’m moisture, both on the same ground. ❧

And what is love, knowing what we know, when years of seeming care were false belief, and knowledge that we carried like a cross was like a puffball in an autumn gale? How to say this ‘love’; how to refine it? All that was sure has shifted—this word ‘love’ is only word; is only an insistence that murmurs smoothly on the kissing tongue and hisses with dissatisfaction later. Love is not the bed and it will never keep the promises made in its sweet name— it shifts and then shows empty, like the air.

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Thirty-four: Katherine Tim held Katherine’s arm until the track thinned, and showed a small bay opening where the river turned, between a boulder and old eucalypts that stood as high as forty metres, where the water slowed. ❧

I think I love this boy, his body tight with energy. He is a skip of sand across the paddock as evening chases him towards the soft horizon, gentle words his chief, his loveliest caress. ❧ She keeps his glance in mind, his talk oddly quiet and rhythmical, gestures that seem to grow within his large hands and spread throughout his casual, animated body. He turns to speak, his dark, grey eyes, observant, kindly and still shy. She holds her pale hand to him to show the small seeds she has found.

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Thirty-five: Jack Jack holds the tractor’s wheel and rolls it forward, positions it, then jams it into place, begins to tighten nuts. The sheep crowd round, a noisy, pushy audience. He’s here largely out of habit, and to forget how what he wanted will not happen now. He thinks of his daughter, wonders at how she’s grown away from him so fast— he’d hold her, swing her round, and ride her high on his shoulders, but all that’s in the past. He’d speak to her of how his days unfold but there’s no point. Two scrawny crows seem to fall from the sky, onto a branch of a eucalypt. The wheel is on, he starts the tractor’s engine, scaring off the sheep. ❧ One by one he lifts the bales of hay into the ute and stacks them side by side, takes them to the paddocks. Katherine strews and spills the hay in a straggling line, thinking the sky might be an upturned lake. He wonders if her looking will bring a cloud, sees the earth that’s cracked and crazed with drought, points to where he’d hoped to plant more vines. ❧

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I knew Cecilia like wind and teeming rain— she was daily weather, slow breeze and turbulence, slant sun through blown curtain, hot noon and reverence, and she was tender feeling, strong and sure at night in our marriage bed. Now she’s lost to me as if a vagrant came and slyly took her with him down the narrow road. ❧

Salt rises in the land and poisons what I plant and leaves its crystal death lying in the sun. It creeps towards the creek from the distant paddocks— a nought or negative in answer to our farm.

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Thirty-six: Cecilia No easy words between the three of us. He is closed like a fist, my daughter’s closed, and I cannot reverse the thrust of this with anger or with weeping. He mocks me with ‘all the failure of our stupid lives’ but does not answer any one concern— what I loved in him is nearly gone. ❧

In this no-place and blank-staring place; this place that is all loss, but dry of tears; I play the roles I have, still unconnected to my gestures, as if a practised ghost haunts my moving hands and speaks my words— they read me as the person they have loved but this shadow of being-put-aside names and recognises none of them. ❧

Where is virtue? In my half-blind eyes every good is shown to be untrue— as good-for-show, as good-to-say-these-words, as good-to-get-results, as good-for-nought. And there’s no other good—though good was all within the habit of my mother’s life. I brought it here, this is my confession, and have let it fail, I can’t say how.

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The world revolves through sin, through every darkness; desire must be its deep unholiness— I’d pluck that out of heart and greedy eye. My own hazed eye must now become my God’s— I’ll see for Him or He will see for me— I’ll stand amongst this land and, as the birds fly up against the sun, I’ll see the glory— despite this ploughing and this grit of soil under each fingernail, and on our flesh— I’ll find the part that I would cleanse and bless.

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Thirty-seven: Katherine I write a portrait of myself in my notebook, night by night, but nothing that I say rings true— how to write of leaving this, with all I’ve ever loved let go; of how my parents hate and stare? I have no part to clearly speak, no sentences that I can form. Lies, like leeches, cling to words sucking at my struggling thought. ❧

As I sit on the well’s worn rim the running film within my mind will not be still. I pull at heads of dry and snapping grass, a strange slow tune nagging in my ears from a movie I saw when young. It persists in black-and-white, its voices against the weatherboard of an old church hall that leans into a still and pressing night. Time seems to tip towards me—past and future spills into this day, and seems a rush and fall of years in which I vanish. Yet the day is clear, and I will haul this rope, filling my bucket to its brim. ❧ 63

Summer presses the house, cicadas cry their shrill alarm, a magpie glides towards the heavy trees in the orchard, every leaf drooping on the shadowed boughs. In other summers Tim and I climbed the sky’s blue summit, growing older, dawdling with conversation. He pushed me from our swaying branch so I fell into the pool one day when summer seemed to gather both of us into its heat, when we felt wild and strange.

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Thirty-eight: Cecilia Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee—and with my hope and will— blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus—though the fruit of thy womb outshines my own womb’s fruit. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. ❧

Yes, our bread is broken and our wine is served. I pray for him and for the lovely daughter I would have her be. My hope must lift to wet this thirsty ground with Mary’s weeping— Jack’s silence is the mark of all that’s wrong but God will bless us, as the Book has said. ❧

Renewal in the flame, my single prayer— that we will rise from this again, will shine, and shed our hatreds, and will see ourselves in light as haloed as this silent dusk.

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Thirty-nine: Jack I once thought she believed in all that I believed; that in my hope she lived; that we both looked upon the same, strong face of care, our histories, though marred, relieved by what we shared. And once our difference seemed only to allow a closeness; separate ways joined in recognition— and this was a true love. Once this was my life, and all that ever mattered was gathered in this truth— each daily chore, each planting, each touch, and all discussion. Once this was a life and now it is a shadow, like someone else has lived in my skin and clothes and spoken out my words and used my given name and then has walked away. This water’s just a trickle that I look in and see my own face, like a stranger’s, looking back at me.

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Forty: Katherine Her mother stands at the open door: ‘Come back inside and help me with the scraps— I will not have you wandering away with all your childish, stupid insolence.’ But Katherine is out of sight, the hens cluck and fossick as she watches them. ❧

By the water, searching grass, I am alone again, and free from all the loss that’s gathering. My mother yells and would demand the mucking-out that I refuse, would make me be the child I was and stop my gaze from glancing up to any friends or any change; would make my face look into hers with my cast-off adoration so love won’t fail and circumstance will not force out further words that no-one should have spoken. ❧

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No knowledge of them’s true—they’ve gutted trust like intestines from a sheep. The aching night sleeps heavily. I lie awake and hear their snores, would cast my line of snagging thought away from all this ceaseless doubt, but sleep won’t come. The night exhales dreams on all but me, awake— an owl hoots twice, the river sings. ❧

Crab apples are like clustered globes, the possum shakes the branch it climbs. Years have vanished in a life which now deserts me, just as I would grow into its shape and course, and which I hold like someone’s gift— for safe-keeping, not for long— a life that seems an orphaning, this land my knowledge-place and love. How will I shape my words without its accents on my tongue? ❧

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She takes the knife and scores the leather satchel in careful rows across the damaged end, slides the closed blade back into her pocket, pulls the length of thong through every hole until it’s tight against her pushing hand, closes the satchel’s flap, steps out into the chill, dark water that skims across her knees. She wades outwards towards a sandy delta under a casuarina tree that sighs. The breeze catches light. Against the darkness her body seems a slowly rippling fire.

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Forty-one: Cecilia Cecilia sees Jack outside the house, throwing wood and corrugated iron into a pile, cleaning up the yard in violent gestures, never looking up. She hears his recent words—‘I cannot stand your silence and remoteness. Are you ill? And can’t you see how Katherine’s distraught? And how have you forgotten that we loved? It’s so unfair. It’s so bloody unfair.’ She hears her own voice, shrill with pent-up rage— ‘Leave me, you unrighteous man, alone.’ ❧

What is this quarter-part of self that rises; this bitter dough in me; this bloodshot eye seeing all as parade and empty puff; this bruise of thought, discolouring all love? At church I sit on polished pew, with prayer that’s clumsier than callused hands, and wish for faith to cleanse me now, and wash me free of darkened tides that run and run through me.

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Forty-two: Katherine Such a narrow view—these hills that jag with vines like hieroglyphs, the valley leaning into haze, fruit bats skirting the old house, beams of moonlight like a paint washing colour out, the dark where the ground dips into hollow; a creek bed turning on itself. In my book are sketchy thoughts which I carry to the dam with candle and my favourite blanket, night drenched with stars, as I try stories and some poems, thoughts a pooled reflection, knowing that little holds in these cupped hands. ❧

Yesterday he said to her: ‘Keep faith in what we have, my love— we’ll get through this and make the farm a great success; we’ll plant those vines in rows across the upper paddocks.’ Last night they argued for two hours. She said she blamed herself for his ill-judgement and inadequacy; that she should never have left home;

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that she had let her mother down by travelling so far; that hurt was all she knew, would ever know. He said this was unfair. He said she should never kill their love, and walked about the room and threw two cups onto the wooden floor— and two hours passed. Finally he slammed the door, did not return until the dawn. Wet with dew he lit the stove and shook his head as if puzzled, and pushed past with eyes like river stones. I held his sleeve until he pulled away. ❧

He taught me words—my mother too— but his seemed pure Australian. He always smiled as he spoke, having a teacher’s gentleness. Tonight I said that ‘pain’ had won, that other words seemed insincere. He banged the table and stood up.

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Forty-three: Cecilia Where is my place and world; what is my land? My scouring eye sees nothing of it here. Even what’s solid maintains a strange mirage concealing the gaping absence at its core; even my daily things that are to hand— the saucepans stacked, the cutlery laid out, the dishcloths bleached and washed and folded up, the broom and dustpan on the kitchen floor— despite this surface, nothing’s underneath that will remain; that time does not sweep out like dirty rubbish, once a love demands to see the proof of what was so long promised. ❧

My level force secures what is true despite my husband’s failure to know me; my level understanding balances the wishing anguish of these tipping days; my constancy enables what is spoiled to be made useful, though it’s disarranged. I hold my thinking steady, as I see all the backward-turning near to me— in spite of angry words and ugly feeling I will not let them empty me of God.

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Forty-four: Katherine My sleep is fraught with wakefulness as if an ancient demon lives— crawled from my great-aunt’s old books— to complicate each shifting thought. And dreams, that carried old delight, are overrun with gross nightmares that pace upon my prone and tense unresting form. And every word of argument and shrill abuse repeats until they seem a madness.

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Forty-five: Cecilia I have imagined this: a scarlet flame that split the sky, an explosion and a glow as if a sun was being opened high above our farm, although the night was deep, and they were scorched in terrible bright pain. I imagined how I let them go, left everything that I had always done for every pushing week and month and year, and then I was uplifted to the sky upon a beam of light, and I looked down. ❧

I’m full of new conclusion and He bends to take me up, to breathe His fire on me. I wait now, all this world an ugliness and shine and lean towards His rushing breath.

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Forty-six: Jack In the quiet extreme of arid, stifling fields and blowing orange clouds of wearing grit and sand, I almost disappear. She’s left the life I gave as if shrugging off the very skin she’d grown; as if my strong affection could not irrigate either flesh or blood— she’s splashed off and doused every trace of love. ❧

This finishes a life that dared cross boundaries to meet in difference— and I had not believed that this could be mistaken. Love’s broken, like the hayshed in the ancient yard and memory recounts such love as history— or marathon that had no message at its end.

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Forty-seven: Katherine My father bent near our old well, replacing loose stones at the rim, easing them gently into place. The sun was an eye that watched us both. I spoke at last. He would not speak. ❧

I hold the doubtful photographs that I would question, my forebears standing in this place’s shadow. I tip the bucket up and wait; trees vanish into silhouette, night paints my form until I vanish. ❧

I’d speak of how we gave away the very best of what we were in such a hurry; how our pain was like a poison in a dam spreading through our weedy lives— that was our dying. And I’d speak without the eyes that look behind at what we had: plain, daily love that shared small pleasures. But to give my words to this, I’d have to make it into fable— a story in a picture-book no-one would believe.

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Forty-eight: Jack Losing my lovely daughter unhooks my seeing eye. Unlocking her from me opens wounds that spread through my body—pain that sucks my bone and flesh far into my feet until my body’s numb. Undo this supple cord, break my will in her— I’m emptied of all softness. In her I saw myself made whole and newly free.

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Forty-nine: Katherine My father’s story is so very brief as if a life might be two minutes worth— ‘Elsie defied her parents and ran away, returned, unmarried and ill-used, pregnant with a child that she called Emily. Yes, for a few years she lived in the old home— we did the best we could to nurse her through, but she drowned with her young child when I was still at school. My father hated her— would not say her name. Flora cherished her?— yes, I think that’s true— but its a sorry story which needn’t be revived.’ ❧

Tim and I walk through the land that’s dying in the drought. He holds my unsteady, trailing hand and tells me that we’ll run away to the city, start a life.

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Fifty: Cecilia I will not be distracted or seduced. My body sucks the pain out of my soul, my damaged heart encircled by His crown of bloody thorns. Oh, Sacred Heart of Jesus, I offer my body’s sacrifice to you. ❧

I’ll reach Your arms by walking out— I’ll climb these hills at night, jump into the sun. The sun allows my seeing though it holds our farm at nothing. This is truest grace, to face the ruin standing. I’ll stand in face of sun and space and dawn and lose their petty hatreds, completed, free of change— a wife again. ❧

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For an hour she follows the way she knows, crosses paddocks to where a final fence meets a climbing hill and jutting rocks, stunted, scrappy trees, and screeching birds. She keeps climbing through the blank, dark hours and never turns. She has a goal in mind that’s four long hours off—the jagged top of the steepest hill on which the sun sits like judgement, every early morning.

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Fifty-one Katherine takes the rifle into paddocks through the long, intrusive glare of sun that’s shut out by a rolling thundercloud just as she stops in the dirt. Old tin cans are sitting like small faces on a fence. The dark sky scowls and lowers, thunder claps its hands of warning over her, and claps, and slow rain’s fired down that stings her skin and punctures the dust of unploughed ground. She aims and fires. The thunder rolls again, and now a slash of lightning near the hills. The rain is slow as stamping, reluctant horses facing a hurdle and, once more, she aims with close anger building, about nothing except the press of feeling she keeps in. She walks forward, the rifle against her shoulder, squinting along the sight—at the pale green can that’s corrugated—nearly trips, and fires, the bullet disappears into the ground. Thunder once again. She starts to cry and knocks the green can flying in the rain. ❧

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One by one the search parties come back. One by one they state where they have been; how they have not found her. Katherine holds Tim in a tight embrace. Her puffy eyes see little, and eventually she sleeps. Jack stands in the yard looking at his hands that close on nothing except themselves and air. He stares at distance, listening to the breeze, watching the storm’s quick, jagged play of light amid the grainy, humid evening.

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Biographical Note

Paul Hetherington lives in Canberra. His poems have appeared in numerous Australian and international journals and magazines and have been widely anthologised. He has published six previous volumes of poetry, most recently Stepping Away: Selected Poems. He won the 1996 Australian Capital Territory Book of the Year Award (for Shadow Swimmer) and the 1997 ANUTECH Poetry Prize, and was awarded a 2002 Chief Minister’s ACT Creative Arts Fellowship. He is currently Director of the Publications and Events Branch at the National Library of Australia and editor of the monthly magazine National Library of Australia News (since 1990). He was editor of volume two of The Diaries of Donald Friend, published by the National Library, and founding editor of the quarterly humanities journal Voices (1991–97). He is a former editor of the monthly multi-arts magazine Fremantle Arts Review and a former Poetry Editor for the Canberra Times.

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