Rosewood Dreaming 6

Part 2


THE FENCELESS FOOT OF A DREAM


Chapter 16


TOUCH-ME-NOT


Probably everyone except Old Vance wanted in some way to escape from Rosewood, but like the characters in Stevenson’s story of the House of Eld, one of Old Vance's favourite tales, they were somehow wedded to their fetters. Anna increasingly sought refuge in stories. The printed word and its power to evoke worlds became as addictive as opium to her.

Every Saturday morning she and her grandfather would go into town with Jack to exchange their library books at the School of Arts. Old Vance had an appetite for travel books, so copies of Thor Heyerdahl’s ‘Kon-Tiki Expedition’ and James Michener’s ‘Tales of the South Pacific’ briefly appeared at Rosewood, reminding Old Vance of that dreamer, young Vance, who had once set sail for Tahiti.
 
Sometimes he brought home the favourites of his youth, including the travel writings of R. L. Stevenson and other tales of adventurous journeys, which he would reread with a rueful smile before offering them to Anna. At such times it crossed his mind that one never quite seemed to coincide with one’s true contemporaries, one’s spiritual kin. How he would have loved to correspond with Gauguin and Stevenson! He wondered if Gauguin had known of Stevenson, if the mystique of Vailima had survived the seven years separating Stevenson’s death from Gauguin’s arrival in Tahiti. Surely the schooners plying the South Pacific had carried cargoes of tales as well as merchandise. Theirs had been a grand time to be alive. They had found their way to paradise before the dream could fade.

His brother Benjamin was of the same order, one of Old Vance’s elite company, according to his lights, but he only saw Benjamin once in a blue moon, in fact would be lucky to see him ever again. With Benjamin it was all Africa, Africa! Old Vance understood his brother worshipped different gods. However, they were true brethren in essence. Something in their souls hungered for the bizarre and the beautiful, and would not be appeased with less.

Anna took after her grandfather. She read insatiably for the glimpses books gave her of other worlds, a habit which Jeannie was quick to find fault with. Too much imagination, Anna, that’s your problem or one of them. Don’t let it run away with you, or you’ll be sorry one of these days... But Anna, seduced by a stronger magic, was impervious to such warnings. Stories were a cubby-house, a private world. Words could turn into other things, could become windows, doorways, wings, an effortless means of escape from domestic conflict and confusion to ideal places, companions and relationships.

Strangely, the characters in stories often seemed more real to her than her siblings, who seemed to inhabit a different world from Anna. They did not share her passion for books, nor did they show any urge to wander off on solitary forays into the wilderness, exploring and trying to understand its mysteries and complexities. Anna's younger sisters would gather as witnesses at times of crisis, like the chorus in an ancient play that had not yet found a voice. But in the scenarios of alternative lives that she liked to construct for herself, she either left them out or gave them walk-on roles. In one of her imaginary lives, Anna was adopted, or perhaps Jeannie's love-child and therefore only tangentially related to the others.
      
Arriving home from the library every Saturday, Anna would be too impatient to sit at the table while lunch was consumed. Instead she would hastily pile slices of bread, cheese, windsor sausage, whatever was served, on a plate and retreat to the bedroom she shared with Nettie, occupying the middle section of what had formerly been the front veranda. Sprawled on her bed she would nibble the food without taking her eyes from the text, reading curled on her left side, her right, flat on her back, on her stomach, a gawky child whose grey eyes devoured page after page until daylight failed.

When dusk fell, she would wait impatiently for Jeannie to light the lamps, deaf to her mother’s habitual warning: Anna, you’ll ruin your eyes! The lamplight was always too dim to see well, the lamp-glass always smoke-smudged, even though Jeannie polished them all from time to time. Nevertheless, stories and lamplight kept sombre messengers at bay, who seemed to hover in the shadows as evening fell, harbingers of a kind of melancholy that preyed on lonely farms and isolated people leading straitened lives.
 
The kerosene lamps were doused early at Rosewood, due to Old Vance's phobia about the fire-hazard they posed. In fact the homestead fires that had claimed many lives in remote places were usually on account of the malfunctioning of kerosene fridges, but after nine o’clock it was moonlight or no light. Unlike Jeannie, Anna took no solace from lying wakeful in darkness. She needed light and stories to keep all kinds of monsters at bay, and protested bitterly at Jeannie’s peremptory orders to stop reading.

Having little in common with her siblings, Anna had turned out a loner, seeking an outlet in books and the wilderness that still made up the greater part of the property. She loved the bush most of all after rain, when every leaf seemed to open its pores and exude subtle, slightly astringent, water-distilled fragrances, and the air in her nostrils tingled with ozone. Whenever it had rained for several days, Anna and Old Vance would exchange conspiratorial glances as baskets, billy-cans and rubber boots were brought out in readiness, then, sniffing the air eagerly, they would head for the flats beyond the creek where the best field mushrooms grew.

The more congested the farmhouse became, the more adventurous Anna grew in her forays along the creek and across the paddocks, her ears attuned to every sound, eyes vigilant for basking snakes. She found the awesome solitude of the Rosewood bushland challenging and oddly satisfying, even though she had to be constantly on the alert for intruders, human or animal, and had to resort to subterfuge to ‘give them the slip at the house’, as she expressed it to herself.

But her absence was never queried, since Jack and Jeannie were too preoccupied with the endless round of chores that made up their days, and her sisters, being younger, were less inclined to stray. Rosewood stretched its silken web invisibly, and Anna came to know its every filament. While fearing Jeannie’s rage if she were unaccounted for, she loved the relative tranquillity and space too much to forgo it.

Her foul-weather retreat was the old galvanised iron and slab-built barn that had once doubled as a milking-shed. Now a new dairy had been built, funded by money from family in Sydney, and the old shed was used to store all kinds of paraphernalia from the days at "Rydalmere", the bigger, more productive property that had been sold to buy Rosewood. The harsher, simpler life at Rosewood meant that most of it went unused.

So the net from a tennis court sagged under layers of dust and cobwebs, buggy traces and all kinds of harness drooped from their pegs, and the ploughshares of horse-drawn ploughs corroded high and dry on the walls, along with hanks of rusting horseshoes in many sizes. As well, there were old saddles oozing stuffing, stockwhips that Old Vance still occasionally used, leather yokes for dray-horses and sets of blinkers, stirrup irons and other items Anna couldn’t name. Wooden yokes shaped to fit human necks and shoulders dated back to Old Vance’s earliest venture, a banana plantation in northern New South Wales.

The mute objects could have become passwords to all kinds of stories, she realised, but Jack and Old Vance always seemed too preoccupied to be approached with questions. It was left to Anna to make of the fragments what she would, always keeping a weather-eye on the carpet snakes that coiled on the roof-joists, replete with mice that lived on the stock-feed stored on the dirt floor below. Bales of lucerne freshened the musty air with their scent of sun-dried herbs and paddocks under cultivation. Anna sometimes used them as a bench to sit on while she read.
      
On the rare occasions that a friend from school was allowed to visit Rosewood, Anna would show her the honey-house where Jack kept his beekeeping gear, a small tin shed squatting on low stumps between the cattle yards and the paddocks; the maidenhair fern and lilly pilly trees along the creek-bank; the yabby-hole which was the special preserve of Aunt Lily’s boys; the lagoon fed by the creek where you could see sky-blue waterlilies, wild ducks and geese, and where the grove of native fig trees grew.

She would take her guest back via the windmill to show her the special sensitive plant that grew there and closed its leaves when you touched it. Her grandfather had told her it was a kind of Indian mimosa called ‘touch-me-not’. In India, people believed that when it was mixed with other special ingredients and fed to elephants, it made them docile and easy for their riders to control.

The slightest touch would make the ferny leaves snap shut dramatically. Anna would hover, delaying the moment of contact, keeping her friend in suspense. Like the frangipani, the plant was one of her personal totems, not to be trifled with, easily bruised. She regarded the demonstration of the ‘touch-me-not’ as a special privilege, the highlight of her private tour of Rosewood, and was always disappointed and a little hurt if her visitors failed to be suitably impressed by it. It went without saying that they were permitted only to look, never to touch. Anna considered herself the sole custodian. Strangers could not be trusted with something so sensitive.


Chapter 17


THE HOUSE OF ELD


One day Anna was summoned to her grandfather’s room, his den overlooking the front garden, where he nodded permission for her to sit on a footstool and placed a book with faded binding in her hands. ‘I want you to have this,’ he told her gruffly. ‘It was given to me as a young man.’

Seeing the questioning look on her face, he added, by way of explanation: ‘Stevenson. Robert Louis. Fine writer, mark my words. I remember him visiting Sydney when I was a lad. The name didn't mean much to me then, it was the man himself impressed me. My parents were great ones for hosting social occasions, so there was some kind of soiree in his honour, and I can still recall the way the atmosphere changed when he entered the room. It was like a charge of electricity. Later, reading his books, I thought that here was a man with a nomad soul, whose god was freedom. Those were times to be alive, and names to conjure with! Stevenson, Gauguin, the South Pacific…' Old Vance sighed, returning to the present. Anna was dismissed as abruptly as she'd been summoned, with one last word of advice.
   
'Read The House of Eld. It’s one of his best, and food for thought, I believe you’ll find.’

Anna sat on the swing strung from a branch of a mango tree, poring over the story. It seemed to her such a sombre tale that she wondered why her grandfather wanted her to read it.
It told of a boy, Jack, who lived in a place where people all wore leg-irons as some kind of religious duty. When Jack saw that the travellers passing through moved freely and unfettered, he asked his uncle why he and his kind had to wear irons on their legs.

‘My dear boy,’ said his uncle, the catechist, ‘do not complain about your fetter, for it is the only thing that makes life worth living. None are happy, none are good, none are respectable, that are not gyved like us. And I must tell you, besides, it is very dangerous talk. If you grumble of your iron, you will have no luck; if ever you take it off, you will be instantly smitten by a thunderbolt.’

And when Jack persisted in doubting the wisdom of wearing leg-irons, his uncle reproached him further. ‘Ah!’ cried his uncle, ‘do not envy the heathen! Theirs is a sad lot! Ah, poor souls, if they but knew the joys of being fettered! Poor souls, my heart yearns for them. But the truth is they are vile, odious, insolent, ill-conditioned, stinking brutes, not truly human – for what is a man without a fetter? – and you cannot be too particular not to touch or speak with them!’

It happened one day that Jack met a boy in the woods who had removed his iron, and who told Jack that the threat of the thunderbolt was an old wives’ tale. Jack began to question the travellers who walked the roads so freely. The wearing of gyves (they said) was no command of Jupiter’s. It was the contrivance of a white-faced thing, a sorcerer, that dwelt in that country in the Wood of Eld. He was one like Glaucus that could change his shape, yet he could always be told; for when he was crossed, he gobbled like a turkey. He had three lives; but the third smiting would make an end of him indeed; and with that his house of sorcery would vanish, the gyves fall, and the villagers take hands and dance like children.

Jack began to believe that it was his duty to free his people. There was in that village a sword of heavenly forgery, beaten upon Vulcan’s anvil. It was never used but in the temple, and then the flat of it only; and it hung on a nail by the catechist’s chimney. Early one night, Jack rose, and took the sword, and was gone out of the house and village in the darkness. He set out, asking the way to the Wood of Eld and the house of sorcery. And having entered the house, where nothing was quite as it appeared, Jack was approached by a semblance of his uncle.

‘It was very well done,’ said his uncle, ‘to take the sword and come yourself into the House of Eld; a good thought and a brave deed. But now you are satisfied; and we may go home to dinner arm in arm.’

‘Oh dear, no!’ said Jack. ‘I am not satisfied yet.’

‘How!’ cried his uncle. ‘Are you not warmed by the fire? Does not this food sustain you?’

‘I see the food to be wholesome,’ said Jack; ‘and still it is no proof that a man should wear a gyve on his right leg.’

Now at this the appearance of his uncle gobbled like a turkey. ‘Jupiter!’ cried Jack, ‘Is this the sorcerer?’

His hand held back and his heart failed him for the love he bore his uncle; but he heaved up the sword and smote the appearance on the head; and it cried out aloud with the voice of his uncle; and fell to the ground; and a little bloodless white thing fled from the room.’

Jack was conscience-stricken, yet his resolve remained unshaken. ‘If the gyves are to fall,’ said he, ‘I must go through with this, and when I get home I shall find my uncle dancing.’

Jack went in pursuit, but encountered the semblance of his father, who ordered him home by sunset, whereupon all would be forgiven.

‘God knows,’ said Jack, ‘I fear your anger; but yet your anger does not prove that a man should wear a gyve on his right leg.’ And at that the appearance of his father gobbled like a turkey.

‘Ah, heaven,’ cried Jack, ‘the sorcerer again!’

The blood ran backward in his body and his joints rebelled against him for the love he bore his father; but he heaved up his sword, and plunged it in the heart of the appearance; and the appearance cried out aloud with the voice of his father; and fell to the ground; and a little bloodless white thing fled from the room.

The cry rang in Jack’s ears, and his soul was darkened; but now rage came to him. ‘I have done what I dared not think upon,’ said he. ‘I will go to an end with it, or perish. And when I get home, I pray God this may be a dream, and I may find my father dancing.’
 
Again in pursuit of the bloodless white thing that had fled as before, Jack met instead the semblance of his mother, weeping and reproaching him for what he had done, and beseeching him to return home by bed-time, before he did more harm to those dear to her, for he had struck down her brother and her husband, Jack’s own father.

‘Dear mother, it is not these that I have smitten,’ said Jack; ‘it was but the enchanter in their shape. And even if I had, it would not prove that a man should wear a gyve on his right leg.’

And at this the appearance gobbled like a turkey. He never knew how he did that; but he swung the sword on the one side, and clove the appearance through the midst; and it cried out aloud with the voice of his mother; and fell to the ground; and with the fall of it, the house was gone from over Jack’s head, and he stood alone in the woods, and the gyve was loosened from his leg.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘the enchanter is now dead, and the fetter gone.’ But the cries rang in his soul, and the day was like night to him. ‘This has been a sore business,’ said he. ‘Let me get forth out of the wood, and see the good that I have done to others.’...

As he left the wood behind and walked along the highway, Jack met folk returning from the field. They no longer wore fetters on their right legs, but now they all had fetters on the left.
 
Jack asked them what it signified; and they said, ‘that was the new wear, for the old was found to be a superstition.’ Then he looked at them nearly; and there was a new ulcer on the left ankle, and the old one on the right was not yet healed...

And when he was home, there lay his uncle smitten on the head, and his father pierced through the heart, and his mother cloven through the midst. And he sat in the lone house and wept beside the bodies.

Anna kept returning to the lines with which the story closed:

            Old is the tree and the fruit good,
            Very old and thick the wood.
            Woodman, is your courage stout?
            Beware! the root is wrapped about
            Your mother’s heart, your father’s bones;
            And like the mandrake comes with groans.

The warning and the meaning and the rhythmic words were like a spell, something her grandfather understood and wanted her to share. The verse had an uncanny power, eerie as an incantation.

                * * *

Old Vance referred to the story only once. ‘Have you read The House of Eld?’ he asked Anna one Saturday morning at breakfast.

‘Yes,’ said Anna shyly, ‘but...’

‘But what?’
 
‘It is such a sad, strange story...’

‘Not if you think about it, Anna, not if you think about it...'

Thinking about it made Anna uneasy, intensifying her sense that somehow Rosewood and Old Vance held her entire family in thrall, an unbreakable, invisible thread binding them all in a common fate.