Carpentaria

Then came a violent electrical storm when the rain ruined the day anyway—as the town’s sceptics said it would. A taut occasion, despite these dramatic interventions; enough time for the now-deposed State Premier to complete the ceremony of officially changing the name of the river from that of a long deceased Imperial Queen to ‘Normal’s River’. Traditional people gathered up for the event mumbled, Ngabarn, Ngabarn, Mandagi, and so did Normal in a very loud and sour-sounding voice over the loudspeaker in his extremely short thankyou address, although those who knew a fruit salad full of abuse in the local language knew he was not saying Thank you! Thank you! and belly-laughed themselves silly because the river only had one name from the beginning of time. It was called Wangala.

Angel Day always claimed the spot […] was the best place they had ever lived, because all she had to do was walk across the road to the rubbish dump, and there she could get anything her heart desire—for free. She thought the dump was magnificent, as anyone dirt poor would. The way she talked, you would have thought she was a very rich woman, and it was nothing for her to walk back and forth to the dump two dozen times a day to cart back pieces of sheet iron, jerry cans, bits of car bodies, lengths of rope, logs, plastic, discarded curtains, and old clothing. […] Diligently, she undertook the chore of checking for leaks, making alterations, choosing the right bits and pieces from her pile of accumulated junk which she leant, tied or stitched to the original blankets, until she ended up with an igloo made of rubbish.

Everyone began picking up weapons the ancient way, arming themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on. People and children were running around, picking up lumps of wood, iron bars, or else brown beer bottles picked up and broken at the neck. […]

You see, all the alliances had to be weighed up then and there on the spot. People who had been getting on well, living side by side for decades, started to recall tribal battles from the ancient past. It was unbelievable, but Angel Day was standing there oblivious, hugging her statue, and telling people to get off the land. There were little black flies swarming all over her face but she took no notice.

No one imagined Norm Phantom rushing out, carrying the fatted calf on his shoulders as soon as he got the news that his son was coming home. There was no use for some angelic child rushing to tell the patriarch, See, the prodigal son was coming, walking if you please, through the spinifex, over the rise. ‘Yep! Time will tell,’ Mozzie sarcastically quipped. ‘And pigs have wings.’ Will would reach Desperance in his own good time, so let the light burn in the house where a fully grown man only had time to recognize six of his seven children. The house with a slogan: A man gets sick of running for his kids—I run for none of the buggers now. ‘It’s like that is it?’ Mozzie mouthed the words, remembering asking Norm when he heard news of the rift between father and son. What did he say back?

See! Well none of that. That never happened to Norm and he passed all of that on to Will. So! Will has a good way with nature, and all of the natural things, except he is not too good with human nature. That boy was in one hell of rush to throw fuel on man-made adversaries. If it had anything to do with mankind, he had the knack to rub it hard, right up the wrong way. His father was like that too. And if you thought the falling out with his father was not a good thing—you are wrong about that. It was a blessing compared to what he had gone around accomplishing in his life to date. Oh! Poor me—what a history. This lad was writing memory with a firestick that made lightning look dull.

It was just no use trying to feel remorse or letting others carry their war, his war, an inheritance that belonged to him, as much as he belonged to it. He could only give a clinical glance at the proudly worn combatant scars of his relatives when they boasted of the battles in the middle of Desperance. Will carried no scars, only the dark brown birthmark straight down his left leg. The old people recorded the reappearance of familiar old family scars in the newborn, so that four hundred years worth of events could be remembered in stories of ground battles, sea battles, and not forgetting the air battles either, they claimed. […]

They said Will’s scar came from such a battle that took place in the skies with sea eagle spirits over the Gulf sea, long before he was born.

Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library chock-a-block full of stories of the old country stored in their heads. Their lives were lived out by trading stories for other stories. They called it decorum—the good information, intelligence, etiquette of the what to do, how to behave for knowing how to live like a proper human being, alongside spirits for neighbors in dreams. In the local stories handed down through the generations, the sea woman was a death angel. She appeared from nowhere in her endless search to take men back to her dark, empty world in the deep waters at the bottom of the ocean. Norm knew what this world looked like because he saw it in his dreams.

[Norm] looked over the water and saw the […] gropers swimming together […] As each group moved upwards, they surfaced loudly in volumes of water, raising their bodies high out of the sea […] The creatures did not stop when they reached the highest level they could before falling back into the sea. Norm wiped their salty spray from his face, as he studied them swimming through the ocean of air, to ascend into the sky world of the Milky Way. They became specks in the sky until they were so far away in the distance, they were a cloudy blur in the celestial heavens of stars and spirits.

[…] He knew at once Elias was up there with them. Gone thank goodness in another form than the old hunched-back dead man who would have gone off to heaven carrying the basket cases of Desperance along with him.

‘My Mum,’ whispered Bala. ‘Well! Her name was Hope and me Dad is Will Phantom.’

Norm stopped eating. He placed the fish back into the bucket. He looked hard at the boy. He did not know Will had a child but then, why would he know anything? Who told him anything anymore? Of all the things Will had to go and do to the family. ‘I am going to kill that bastard when I see him.’ Yes, Norm decided on the spot, Will had gone too far this time. The old hostilities jumped from his heart into his head. Instantly, there was no sign of Will in the child anymore. Only the family resemblances from the other side stood out, clear as day, he was surprised he had not seen it straightaway. […] He was staring at the child as though he was looking Old Midnight in the face.

Thinking about Bala, Norm grew more positive about his own circumstances. How could he explain Bala? It occurred to him that Bala was in the realm of God’s providence. And he suddenly realized why. Of course. His fingers snapped automatically: an action of forgotten years which surprised even him at his age. He knew it. He would have to look after the boy because the boy was alone, there was no Will and no Mother either. He now understood why the child kept coming by himself and avoided answering any requests to bring his father. He saw the child’s face looking out to sea, something of Will in his face, something unexplainable, the look of fortitude which belonged in the faces and eyes of seasoned soldiers.

Looking past reality, Valance saw another landscape transposed on his mind, a perfect world he had temporarily created, although it did happen. The hinterland people were saying, ‘Yes sir, listen to the bell, the angelus bell, Angelus Domini,’ and walking like pilgrims, like the holy folk would, coming into town.

Praise men of ambition who strive for newfangled ideas like reconciliation in old Australia, for Valance with his pricked conscience used every opportunity as town clerk, to make town campers feel like they were a part of the broader community. Even though Gordie was not their neighborhood watch, Valance considered the community service was available for all folks. Yet, the longer the bell rang, the more people on both sides of the Pricklebush wars were declaring from their respective sides of town, how they were going to destroy that bell once and for all one day, as soon as they got the chance.

‘You mob,’ old Midnight said, following Will in his readiness to cast off, ‘talk all the time about some kind of new, contemporary world. New world—Blah! to that. What contemporary world? It’s the same world as I live in, and before that, and before that. No such thing as a contemporary world.’ Why should someone old like himself comprehend Uptown having reason enough for killing and burning amongst their own jellyfish white people? ‘I understand our mob having a go at each other,’ he said, referring to the old wars. ‘We got to fight each other until one day we might git sick and tired of it.’ What he really meant, Will knew, was that one side must give up and go away. It was ultimate solution that neither side could resolve. Which would be the loser? It was the only way the fighting of the last four hundred years would finish.

People say when a humble man really listened and looked past the obvious, then he might fly with music into the unknown. Norm’s voice rolled on like waves themselves pouring out of the tales of what he had seen at sea and his fathers before him. So, Will’s ear by the wall heard it was alright to die a lonely death at sea because a cyclone will always show you the way home. Those lost souls lying down there in their lonely watery grave, many fathoms deep, were thrown up from under the sand, like seaweed plucked from the floor of the sea in a giant waterspout of the ancestral serpent.

Somewhere, as he walked, Norm realized that he could only hear his own feet slurping through the mud, and he knew that she was gone. He almost paused, almost stopped to look around, but he walked on. He wanted to call after her—demand she come back. Tell her she was stupid. He nearly let his temper fly. Every muscle in his body ordered him go after her and drag her back. But each time he turned to go back, he was blinded by the sun. The intensity of its white light hitting the water, reflected back in his eyes as though a shield had been put up between him and Hope, forced him to turn back toward the land.

[…] He knew he could not interfere with other people’s dreams. […]

It was at this point he started to believe in her […]