Rosewood Dreaming 12

Part 4


CALLING UP THE SPIRITS


Chapter 31


FLYING HOME


All this Anna is reliving, gazing down at the crust of inland Australia from the plane window, an epidermis of copper corroded and blistered by salt and sun, pitted opal and jade by precious waterholes, metamorphosing as she gazes to a jumble of colossal bones, some of the giant petrified vertebrae intact, connected, others scattered as if fractured by titanic forces long ago.

As the plane passes above the continent and Anna continues gazing down, she fancies she discerns the form of a vast primordial mother, her belly striated with stretch marks from horizon to horizon, cicatriced with rock ridges exposed to sun and sand and wind, watercourses looping through the dry flesh like giant arteries, or like the umbilical cord that anchors and sustains the child. A gargantuan mother, too immense to comprehend…

Anna is flying home, not for the first time nor the last, cradling an icon of her childhood home in her mind - Rosewood, which is no longer there, obliterated by housing estates that made a wealthy man of the local councillor who bought the drought-stricken farm, once he had managed to change the sub-division by-laws. Anna has found the wider world almost indescribably different from the one in which she grew up, a foreign country, and has developed other ways of seeing, to survive. Yet the profound impact of her isolated childhood is still a reference point, a kind of primary vision that is brought to bear on life.
 
She wonders how she will find Jeannie, who has allowed the years to mellow her, although the customary barbed tongue is given free rein from time to time. There have been changes of course, significant shifts of perception on both sides. Anna has noticed that Jeannie no longer shies away from herself: not the woman she might have been, but the one she has   become. She is not reluctant to look that woman in the face and acknowledge her as something owned, something won. Anna senses an acceptance in her mother which is neither victory nor defeat, but proof of unglamorous valour that must be conceded.

She had already discerned this different, less defensive frame of mind  on a previous visit. She thought it had to do with the rapprochement Jeannie had reached with herself, but at the same time there was the old, underlying awareness that even here it was not exactly a question of choice. Unless she chose, in a final act of self-abnegation, to reject what she had become. But she was too much of a warrior at heart for that; an embattled and depleted veteran of many campaigns, but ultimately a survivor who rejected the role of victim. So much of her life had been made at Rosewood, too much to unmake or remake, so there it was, and regrets were beside the point at this late stage.

These days, Jeannie spent the early morning hours, every morning, on her front patio with a mug of tea, watching the rays from the rising sun suffuse her garden with colour and warmth. It was too far south for mango trees, and hibiscus weren't at home here either, but there was a plum tree in her yard, and a massive Norfolk Island pine, and plenty of azaleas. No poincianas. Wild birds still sought her out in time of drought. Anna wondered how they knew they would find pails of water on her mother's lawn, but somehow they knew where to come, and she never failed them.

Characteristically acerbic, she was nevertheless as much at peace as ever she’d be, asking no more (but also no less) than to do as she pleased, when she pleased, accompanied at all times by a pugnacious, exceedingly possessive black kelpie cross, which Anna regarded as a familiar. Jeannie no longer questioned the meaning of her existence, but she clung to life with such tenacity that every small mundane action seemed to count for something. Rosewood was gone, as was Old Vance. Her children were far away, and for the most part that was a relief. At long last they were out of her hair. Now she owned every day she could wrest from the closing circle of her life. Every breath seemed like a minor victory.

The old rosewood veneer sideboard that had belonged to Aimee Vance occupied pride of place in the new suburban living room, but Jeannie never talked about Rosewood, and her children came to understand she didn’t wish to be reminded of it. The place had almost cost her her sanity, and leaving it had cost her Jack.

Suspended above the land of her birth, Anna reflects that Jeannie may have been right to challenge Old Vance’s vision. It was true that his dream had been flawed, in that it had seemingly failed to recognise what was in the land, but had tried instead to dream into the land what was not there. Anna remembers how her grandfather had tried to integrate his vision of Polynesia with that of Rosewood. She now suspects that he had sought to impose his vision without fully perceiving that the land had its own identity, its own integrity.
 
Not that her grandfather had shown any lack of respect for ‘his’ land. On the contrary, it had meant more to him than people, that much was obvious. He had loved Rosewood with more passion than prudence. The same could scarcely be said of those who had taken possession of it since, turning it into a tract of ugly though expensive suburbia, motivated purely by greed, their lust for money. Blood money all of it, Anna reflects bitterly.

It must also be admitted, she could see now, that when Jeannie had suggested returning the land to its original inhabitants, she had been motivated more by her rejection of what Rosewood stood for in her mind than by considerations of whose the land was by rights.

Old Vance’s other blind spot, she thought, had been to expect other people to live his dream. Being inside it himself, he failed to perceive that it did not have the same resonance and intensity for those around him, especially Jeannie, for whom it had become increasingly a threat, anathema… It was an old story, first brought to her notice through Stevenson’s tale of the House of Eld, about people with passionate, irreconcilable beliefs… Her grandfather’s freedom had meant bondage for those closest to him; Jeannie’s idea of freedom carried the kind of charge that could topple empires. Given the run of history, Anna wondered what role her mother would have chosen... oppressor or liberator... Red Queen or Bernadette Devlin... monster or martyr. Benevolent tyrant, perhaps, even a female version of Old Vance, but more likely an awesome practitioner of the so-called ‘black arts’, to be crossed or trifled with only at one’s peril: at all events a woman who would not submit to male domination. Not that this was anything new or unnatural. But in the stronghold of Vance beliefs it had seemed a threat and a heresy.

Nor had her grandfather’s dilemma, whether or not he perceived it as such, been an unusual one. The dilemma of how to live one’s dream without compromising others was a situation every dreamer faced.
 
Anna had spent half her life under the spell of her grandfather’s version of the House of Eld. She still carried the faint marks of its fetters, but now she wanted more than anything to step outside its emotional confines and move on. She longed for spiritual nakedness, transparency, clarity, not the Wood of Eld, not ambiguities, false semblances…

If only the plane could fly beyond the bounds of family gravity, the ghosts of battles still refought on that old killing-field, the heart. Stevenson had painfully transposed his emaciated frame all the way from Scotland to Vailima, in Samoa, only to write the lines:

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors today and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!

Anna had experienced the same journey, in reverse. Rosewood had travelled with her to the northern hemisphere, halfway round the world. And back. Now that the site had been effaced, she wanted the dream’s dominion to fade, to relinquish its hold on her consciousness, leaving her intact, clear-eyed, awake.

*  *  *

As the plane draws closer to its destination, Anna’s thoughts jump tracks to her final meeting with Jack at the hospital, her mind denying what her instinct had tried to tell her: that she was witnessing Jack’s leavetaking.

There had been a rainbow in the sky that day, so clearly defined and so intense that Anna had seized on it as a sign that Jack would recover. There had been no rain, although the sky seemed brooding and expectant, only the rainbow arching over cobalt hills and khaki river, spanning the country town where Jack and Jeannie had settled.
 
Anna had gone to the hospital in the early evening as dusk was falling, meaning to tell Jack about the rainbow, even if he didn’t seem to hear or comprehend. But he had been conscious when she approached his bed, almost as if he had been expecting her. ‘Ah, Anna’, he said, his eyes clearing as he focused. ‘It’s you.’

A nurse had just brought supper, and so anxious was Anna to reassure herself of Jack’s recovery that she began to feed him spoonfuls of the soup and forgot the rainbow. ‘No’, he said after the first few sips. ‘No more. It’s enough.’

He closed his eyes, but his brows knitted and his features contorted as if he were reliving some keen and private anguish. She stroked away the creases between his brows with her fingertips, and when he appeared to fall into a light sleep she left, running to tell Jeannie the news of his progress.

Jeannie kept her lonely vigil that night, the years they’d spent together coursing through her mind. Theirs had been a harsh life, no one understood how harsh as well as Jack. He was her truest witness, and she his. Some time after midnight his breathing became shallower. Clasping his hand, Jeannie felt his pulse flutter, like the last leaf parting from a drought-stricken tree. Then  Jack exhaled in a sigh that wrenched her to her depths. His pulse had ceased.

Anna realised now that, in spite of her many rebellions against Jack's and Jeannie's authority, in Jack’s mind there had been no differences to reconcile. He had accepted Anna long before she had come to recognise and accept him, just as he had accepted Jeannie, Old Vance, and others he loved, without question. He hadn’t needed to be told about the rainbow, but the child in her wept inconsolably for something she had meant to share with him, a parting gift, then had not.

She realised something else as well - a fundamental truth about her parents, whose inescapable, irreconcilable differences had chafed like fetters against the love they also shared. Their natures were so diametrically opposed that, in a way, each had represented a reproach to the other. For some people, as for Jeannie, self-sacrifice meant self-denial, and could  ultimately lead only to self-destruction, bitterness, a deep and abiding sense of injustice. For others, such as Jack, some miraculous, unsuspected wellspring of the spirit could transform self-sacrifice into a form of unassuming self-expression. Jack, sustained by his vision of a stainless universe, was seemingly incapable of rancour.

Not infrequently since that time, Jack has appeared to Anna in dreams, wordless and yet so intensely present that she believes they must have met in a no-man’s-land of the spirit.


Chapter 32


REVENANT

…and time that is continuous, in the head forever…


A woman driving a borrowed red utility parks on the narrow, unsealed road outside the sagging, padlocked gate. The sign that had once been attached to the gate, lettered in blue and brown with the names:

                ROSEWOOD
               H. H. & J. Vance

lies on the ground, its flaking inscription unreadable.

Climbing over the wooden gate her grandfather so proudly made, she makes her way up the rutted, overgrown drive like a somnambulist, there but not there. She recognises the trees, their generations. Flanking the drive, the pines her father planted, relatively late, only a few years before he and Jeannie sold up and left. Now the pine trees murmur in a breath of breeze, like the ones where the Stempels used to live on an east-facing slope of the mountain.

The poincianas loom about the house, brandishing a few late plumes of blossom here and there among their ferny canopy. Jeannie’s flowers, Anna thinks, recalling childhood’s heraldry, the fallen petals like fresh drops of blood. The sombre mango trees beyond, her grandfather’s lofty palms… As she approaches the house, she senses that it is empty. The garden is untended, there are no animals nor signs of habitation.

She skirts around towards the kitchen stairs, the gooseflesh rising on her skin, half expecting Jack or Jeannie to appear, or one of the dogs to start barking. There is nothing, nobody. This is her first visit since they left, the first time she has seen Rosewood in years. Traces of them are everywhere, she sees. They didn’t have the time or the will to clear the things from under the house – the swing shaped like a carpenter’s horse where she used to sit and rock with her sisters, the old iron bed discarded by Jack and Jeannie, a host of other shabby and familiar things.

The pothos, with its giant leaves, and other vines shin up the trees, and there are Jeannie’s pot-plants, shaded by the tankstand, catching the drips of water that have kept them alive. Red balsam, begonia and maiden-hair, she notices; even some Eucharist lilies in an old-fashioned terracotta urn that go back to her grandfather’s time.

Behind the house is a citrus orchard that hadn’t been there in Anna’s  childhood. Jack planted it after Old Vance died, in a sudden resurgence of energy before the onset of chronic moroseness that eclipsed his later years. Jack the Chagall bridegroom, with his wedding wreath of orange blossom. Fitting, she thinks. There are hard, green, immature oranges on some of the trees.

Strange to think of Jack’s and Jeannie’s lives continuing somewhere else. Their presence here at Rosewood is still so palpable, it seems more real than the life they now lead, comfortably retired in a country town in another state: Jeannie’s passion and her rages, Jack’s patience and quietude seeming to echo and eddy in the very air. Anna half expects to turn the corner and come upon Old Vance dozing in his striped canvas chair.

She contemplates entering the house, although the doors bear rusty padlocks, but is chilled by the prospect of emptiness. The casement windows of her grandfather’s old room, the louvres of her own still have glass in them, but they repel her now, blank eyes devoid of life, of welcome. It is safer, saner here outside, beneath the trees which brood in their green shadows as they always have.
 
Everything is here except the people, but it is a crucial difference: all those whom this house once sheltered scattered, leading separate lives. The shambling, shabby farmhouse, once so familiar, now seems alien. It doesn’t want to be disturbed. Anna feels like an intruder. Nobody knows she is here, and it is almost like trespassing somewhere infinitely private, when she no longer has that right.

She stands, prolonging the moments before her departure, overcome by crushing, soundless breakers of confused emotion, every emotion she has ever experienced coursing through her, leaving her dazed, disoriented, shaken. Images from the life at Rosewood simultaneously burning like vitriol, healing like balm, incarnated in her flesh: excoriating, iconoclastic memories, and gentle ones…

   
Jack in his late sixties, stooped and spare of form, placing his spring crop of strawberries one by one into cardboard containers with infinite pride and care. (The bandicoots had somehow been outwitted that year.) Jack saving seeds from particularly fine specimens of pawpaws, rock-melons, tomatoes, sowing them with hope in his heart that they would germinate and flourish. Jack veiled in black, a hierophant tending his bees, hovering in a screen of smoke among the white hives, removing the wire-strung frames clogged with wax and honey. Later, in the ‘honey-house’, a quaint and dumpy square bee-box of corrugated iron that squatted sturdily on three-foot stumps, Jack would perform more complex rituals. With an extractor he would free the heavy honey, so that it flowed in the gauze-filtered light like a stream of precious amber. Anna would sit in the hush, looking on as he worked, her palate cloying with lumps of waxy honeycomb tasting and smelling of the bush in bloom. Later Jack would decant the honey into jars to which he had added his signature in the form of a label, pristine white with his name in blue, arching above blue-stencilled hives…

Jeannie, her boots and clothes splashed with blood, the blade of the axe in her hand dripping gore, the executioner’s block on the woodheap saturated with darkening stains. The stench of burning offal from the fire under the clothes copper, the nauseating odour of wet feathers where they dunked the carcases prior to plucking them: rituals preceding Christmas, Easter. Anna’s sisters in frenzied, shrill cicada heat beneath the flame-red parasols of poincianas, their small, deft hands scooping out entrails while she looked on: haruspices whose oracles foretold uncertain futures.

Jeannie’s features set in a mask, her arms daubed with gore to the elbows, the steam from the copper a rising miasma, her green eyes glittering strangely, tendrils of hair plastered flat to her brow to resemble a latter-day Medea, capable of the unspeakable, bright petals like drops of blood at her feet…

Humid summers before rain when the mangoes ripened and flocks of gaudy, rowdy lorikeets arrived to gorge on them. Anna and her sisters competing for the fruit, shying green mangoes at ripe ones like sequestered hearts nestling among protective leaves, pouncing on them as they fell and stripping them to feast on the succulent, pollen-coloured flesh. Clustering around the bore-tap, sluicing sticky juice and sap from faces and arms, where it trickled in bright runnels to drip off at the elbows…

Mushroom-gathering sorties after the first rains of January, a delicious conspiracy between Anna and her grandfather, squelching across the paddocks in their rubber boots to the flats beyond the briskly-flowing creek, which both of them could just manage to ford at its narrowest point. Come evening in the farmhouse kitchen, the two of them salivating at the aroma of mushrooms grilling, dabbed with butter, on the cast-iron stove, Anna and Old Vance sharing their spoils, since no one else in the family could be persuaded to partake, for fear of poisoning…

Now a broken awning creaks, a poinciana blossom falls and settles, scarlet, with one cream petal flecked with ruby, like an orchid. Or like the droplets sprayed by the beheading of a chicken. Emerging from her reverie, the world created in her head, a private world that she has shaped herself and cannot share, Anna sees the light is less intense than when she first arrived. There is a chill undercurrent in the air beneath the trees. She takes a few faltering steps like someone groping for an exit. Absently, she picks up the pot with the Eucharist lilies and makes her way blindly to the overgrown drive. There is a lacquery rattle from the traveller’s palms’ great paddle leaves, a pungency in her nostrils of grass and weeds. A few ibises fossick in the house paddock, travellers arrived from India. Once there used to be hundreds of them, foraging patiently and methodically with long, curved bills, side by side with the munching, gently-tinkling Jersey cattle.

A horse looks at her quizzically as she closes the garden gate. She hadn’t noticed horses when she entered. There are three of them watching her now. She wonders whose they can be. The sun has begun its descent to the mountain’s shoulder, the light is fading fast in the undertow of a tide that has turned. The cold, thin edge of darkness in the pine trees makes her shiver.

For the last time Anna is leaving Rosewood, seedbed of hopes and hurts, fears and dreams and heartaches: Old Vance’s, Jack’s and Jeannie’s, Anna’s, her siblings’. This was where the threads of their lives had interwoven most densely, knotted, snarled, made patterns that had later frayed and unravelled, in this exotic garden of Old Vance’s making, where he alone seemed not to see the nameless fears and phantoms lurking…

Or perhaps in fact he had. Like Gauguin, writing from Tahiti: ‘Here, near my house, in complete silence, I dream of violent harmonies in the fragrances of nature which intoxicate me.’

Old Vance had understood such relationships. He had perceived them as part of some cosmic design, whose initiates included men like Gauguin and Stevenson. The messages and signs they left were like threads in a labyrinth, the legacy of one dreamer to another, affirming realities that others barely glimpsed or guessed at. One didn’t need to have lived in the same time and place to breathe their air. His garden, however, was a different kind of creation. It had given him delight to dream it into being, but who would be the true heirs to his most cherished possession?

Anna, pursuing her own dream of studying art, had stumbled across the letters of Paul Gauguin with a strange frisson of excitement. In an unexpected way they offered her a key to her locked-away childhood, her grandfather’s garden. She read them as one would read private correspondence, as if Gauguin were disclosing a secret lore known to himself and Harry Vance, bearing truths her grandfather had wished her to inherit.

‘A delight from I know not what mystic terror that I divine, going back to time immemorial; at other times, the odour of joy, which I find in the present; animal figures of statuesque rigidity, some indefinable antiquity, some august quality, some religious feeling in their rare immobility. In dreaming eyes there is the troubled surface of an insoluble enigma,’ one letter read.

She thinks of Gauguin’s ‘Self-Portrait’, the one with an apple and serpent, and feels her pores contract with a sense of deja-vu. Before leaving Rosewood, she had taped a reproduction of it to her wardrobe door. The portrait had fascinated her with its bold self-revelation and at the same time its enigmatic quality, a self-knowledge confessed to but not shared, inaccessible to others.

Harry Vance, too, had been something of an enigma. There had always been more to him than met the eye. But he had taken most of the store of experience garnered during his nine and a half earthly decades with him, destroying letters, photographs and documents over the years until little remained to contradict his preferred version of events. The reasons for this culling had been difficult to fathom. Anna remembered having seen a whole album of old-fashioned sepia photographs taken somewhere in Polynesia – probably Tahiti – which she had first been shown as a little girl.

When she had asked to see the pictures again a few years later, he had denied any knowledge of their existence. Yet she retained such clear images of the people in the photographs, Europeans in tropical white, the ladies wearing long white gowns, seated in wicker chairs under parasols, the gentlemen standing, dignified in moustaches and white topees.

Anna understood now that in his own way her grandfather had sacrificed to his gods and remained true to his dream. She believed that he had known himself, although he had not seen fit to impart that knowledge to others. But perhaps, like Gauguin, he had glimpsed his own soul, naked. His serpent of temptation, his Rosewood dream, if tamer than the painter’s, had been no less voracious a presence in his life, colonising his energies, taking possession of his mind, more insidious than any demon lover, more desired…

Like Old Vance, Anna could not imagine a world without dreaming. It seemed to her that without such roots the spirit becomes homeless, and that in order to become free, it must first recognise and acknowledge its place of genesis. Harry Vance had believed that what mattered in the end was the dreaming, and this had sustained him and seen him through. This was why he hadn’t needed company, society; why he had winnowed away the accretions of years that had no part in the dream. If he had sometimes allowed his dream to make him selfish, blind to others’ needs, that was one person’s shortcoming, it could not sully the act of dreaming. When a dream had veracity it transcended the solely personal to enter another dimension, the timeless company of visionaries.

Flanked by the pines her father had planted, Anna enters a state in which she has ceased to exist as Anna and has become part of the dream going on in this place that has claimed her from the beginning. Rosewood was just one name of many signifying her dreaming-site, part of a web of meaning encoded deeper than language and thought. Like a migratory ibis she’d leave and return, her bones told her so, as did the quickening in her veins. Birthright, she now understood, could not be recorded on titles and maps. It was written in the bark of trees, the grass, the stars, the heart. It was the leap of recognition in the blood, the spirit keening…

Gazing back at the deepening blue-green shade of the poincianas, their scarlet-splashed canopies catching the last of the lowering sun, it is almost as if she has stepped into one of the Gauguin canvases that captivated the youthful Harry Vance. Unconscious of this irony, Anna is struck instead by the cold, clear certainty that the fate of Old Vance’s vanished photographs will shortly be the fate of Rosewood. It too would disappear, grow fainter in memory, until one day it would be as if it had never existed. Those who remembered would have nobody to tell, nobody who understood what Rosewood had meant, since all that remained would be meaningless to the uninitiated, and so considered worthless. They would look, and see nothing of what she knew. Each of the people closest to her in her childhood had seen a different Rosewood, in any case; or rather, the same Rosewood, but through different eyes.

For a long moment Anna stands on the weed-choked drive, her face and her whole being still turned towards Rosewood, seeing with hallucinatory clarity both what is visibly, tangibly there and what is not, but once was. Like the old Cossack gazing out to sea, she is aware that she is a vessel for all she has known and loved. Her childhood at Rosewood, the lives and dreams and sorrows of the Vances, the fate of this earth, are as much a part of her as she is of them.

Slowly, by an effort of will, she turns to face the mountain and the dusty road. Cradling the pot of lilies in one arm, she climbs over the padlocked gate. Moving like a figure in a dreamlike state, she places the mossy terracotta vessel carefully on the utility's cabin floor. Her camera dangles from her shoulder, uselessly. How can you hope to photograph a garden of the mind?


* * *



EPILOGUE


Jeannie and the Birds


It started long ago, back at the farm.
In times of drought, the feathered refugees
came flying east, out of the parching
heartlands of the dying beasts, collapsing
in the dried-up creek, where she would find
the dead, the verdant plumage piled
upon the vivid red, and rush for pails of precious
water, dearly bought but gladly spared.

Now they have come again, to her suburban nest,
out of the rainless furnace of the wilderness.
First, two herons, honking greetings, urgently
take precedence, dipping their undulating necks
towards the pitcher's cool recess; then magpies,
butcher birds and doves, the meekest last,
each to a separate vessel matched to height
and beak. They drink and feed, and drink
before they leave. She rises with the sun,
and fills receptacles and waits.
When they are almost drained,
her work is done, she feels replete.

Secretly she hopes one day they'll come,
the herons or the doves, and take her spirit with them
when her earthly life has run its lease, back to the winged
dominions of the air, where spirits breathe...



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