Tuesday, March 6, 2007

When The Pie Was Opened

"For though one may sing a song for sixpence, it is the very being of songs that they may be sung for nothing and are so sung when there are singers and no sixpences. The Lord is a singer; the work of creation is a song -the morning stars sang together. And in a song all things must sing. The very words must be musical, the mere syllables. For all is music that is bound. To be free, in the sense of 'being on the loose', is alone ugly -deprived of being- like a jellyfish coming undone, disintegrating."
Eric Gill ~f rom "In a Strange Land"



When The Pie Was Opened


Peter stood off from the patch of strawberries. It was a blue spring afternoon. He stretched. Arched his back, sore from bending to hoe. He propped against the hoe. He turned his back to the low sun. His face set away from the close hump of Mount Dandenong. Melbourne was west behind it. Peter gazed east to the freedom of the mountains.

He looked down. Across his acres of young chestnuts. He sought out the new shoots on the permaculture plantations with his hopeful eye. One day he would break his dependance on the city. He believed the trees would enable subsistence.

A shot! Like cannonfire! The hailguns at Sucklings, the wholesale nurserymen out the back, misfired over the valley. The volley went quiet. But his ears had tuned into the battle. Peter heard the distant boom of a scare gun from Carassi's berry paddocks. He looked across his own patch of strawberries. The two acre patch was his struggle to provide his family with some income for the next four months. Battling yes, but Peter was proud of his husbandry.

The plants had thrown up vigorous growth. The glossy black plastic mulch in which the plants grew shimmered as each gust tousled loose billows. The strawberry plants were covered by a profusion of white flowers with honeyed centres like promises of harvest. The leaves were triple-formed, like clover, and Peter hoped their season would be rich and satisfying. Even bonus, like the lacy scalloped crenations around the edge of the leaves. The luxuriant leaves sheltered sprays of young fruit at various stages of ripeness. Tiny wizened hardgreen things with seeds jammed across the skin. Marblesize white knobs. And juicy white berries with pink blooms on the most-sunned side.

Peter expected a bumper crop. The signs were all there. Soon the first fruits: fat, red 'Specials' would hang from each bush. There was a profound pleasure to be had just looking at the way the huge berries would fill out, leaving the golden seeds indented in lustrous dimples over the pregnant belly of the berry. The firstfruits were a treat. Fresh. Like a flash of sweet memory. Flavoursome and delicious. Aha! Grower's privilege! Peter had eaten the first few red already. And he had savoured the lustre of summering light as it glazed red around each rim of those berry seed dimples, as if each one was his whole patch.

Peter loved to garden. He knew he could coax nature to produce. The skill he enjoyed was tuning in to the life of things and reading the lines of the land so it joined in with what he hoped to grow.

Peter's hope, what he dreamed of, was abundant life. Cornucopia. He had seen a full colour picture entitled 'Cornucopia' on the cover of an old copy of 'Back To Eden' magazine. A curved goat's horn was turned on its side, spilling out an array of ripe fruit and grains: yellow corncobs, peaches, ears of wheat, apples, figs, blackspike barley, pears, rye heads, berries, walnuts, grapes, filberts, cumquats and cherries.

Peter thought he would make the land into an ample provision. He would work in harmony with the land to produce plenty. He wanted to tolerate all of life. He had planted fifty different sorts of fruit trees, nuts and berries on his land. He strove to make it an idyllic place so he could raise his children in natural abundance.

Peter kicked at the hoed-off weeds. Prince- of-Wales feather and wild radish. Good stuff for compost. He still hadn't worked out a way to make broadacre compost.

Anicia, five, and Theo, three, Peter's two oldest, played along between the rows of strawberries. They had piled up the weeds Peter had just hoed. Anicia stood on top of the heap singing out:
I'm the King of the Castle!
And you're the Dirdy Wraskul!"

But Theo was too busy making 'roads' in the fresh-hoed chocolate soil.

Peter went close to the children. He enjoyed being with them. Believing in their innocence. He wished he had been able to live as fantastically when he was a kid.

As he looked down Theo's 'roads' towards the other end of the strawberry patch Peter saw blackbirds flitting about between the rows. The birds kept down among the bushes. Peter's heart filled up then. He sang for the kids:

"Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye
Four & twenty blackbirds baked in a pie;
When the pie was opened the birds began to sing
Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king..."

Anicia sat listening. "Sing more, Daddy," she said.

"Not till you shoo the blackbirds off, Honey!"

But Peter was mindful of his yoke. Always yearning to be free. He resented all the little kings in suburban 'cwastles'.

"What blackbirds?" Anicia said.

"Look!" Peter said, pointing. "See them. Looking for ripe strawberries,
wanting them red ripe so they can peck, peck, and gobble them up."

"Will they?" Anicia said.

"Sure Nici! Now run down and shoo them away. Maybe they'll learn."

Anicia ran down singing out: "Be off blackbirds! Be off!"

Theo ran after her, mimicking the chant. The blackbirds scatted into the lucerne hedge. Peter watched them unconcerned.

He went back to hoeing. He was his own scarecrow. He was his own weedicide as well. Flatweed chop. Capeweed chop. Thistle chop. Dock...

Hoeing was hard work. But honest! Far more laborious than using a spray. But he wanted his integrity. He was growing the strawberries for organic sale. He was glad he did it by hand. The caring touch. And he could watch the patch.

Peter loved birds. Especially the wild birds. Maybe it was the idea of flight. Wings. But the damn introduced blackbirds did nuisance his hopes. He worked out there each morning from dawn on. He was a living scarecrow to habituate the birds to other feeding grounds. He thought it was working. Three weeks thus far. Seven days a week.

He knew the blackbirds had got a bit thick. They bred in the hedges and undergrowth, and in a place of rampant plants what would you expect? Peter had reafforested the farm since he'd taken over. The shrubs meant more blackbirds than ever when he'd hoped for more native birds. He was committed to planting. Blackbirds don't like deep native forests, but the woodlots and windbreaks were too thin.

Actually, blackbirds were plague.

Back when Peter's Dad had the farm, outright war was declared against blackbirds. Trees where blackbirds nested were checked each week and the nests ripped down. The children were encouraged in the pillage.

"Blackbirds! Bloomin' Pommie imports!" his father used to say, as he wrung the fledgling necks. "Poms takin' over th' countree!"

True. Like rabbits. Like blackberries. Blackbirds were brought in by the Acclimatization Societies to make this country like home.They soon became noxious pests. As boys, Peter and his brothers had often pulled down the rough cups of mud, drygrass and bark, and smashed the speckled aqua eggs. But now no-one violated the blackbirds from their breeding.

Peter had not done it since he was fifteen. The memory was a pain.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
He had been picking raspberries with a whole gang of pickers. During the morning Peter pulled a blackbird's nest from Shelley and Jan's row. He had broken the eggs. The smashed eggs had foetal babies in them. A whole lot of teenage pickers hoyed along to take a look. Three of the girls went off in disgust, as if to be sick. Shelley said that Peter was a murderer.

At mug'n'billy time Peter's Dad had explained his rules about blackbird control. Most pickers kept a distance from him. 'Clean-Hands' Horry, the old plonko farm help, had growled about "Bleedin' Hearts who doan 'ave a clue about th' 'Bloodin' what life's gotta 'ave ta keep strivin'."

None of the young pickers from town had an inkling of what he was talking about. They rabbit-twitched noses as if sniffing something beneath them. It left Peter feeling guilty for reasons he couldn't fathom. He left quick smart to bury the foetal birds out of sight. And mind, he hoped.

During that afternoon, two pickers, Otto and Stephen, found another blackbird's nest in their row. The boys pulled the nest down and three nudepink nestlings fell on the cultivation. They turned to a cruel game. Tossing the fat chicks high up into the air for the other to catch. Stephen called out "Fly Birdie! Fly!" and it became a chant to attract the girls.

"Fly Birdie! Fly before Peter gets you!" Otto said.

Peter felt like wringing their necks. He hated sadism. The taunt got under his skin.

"Don't!" he said. "It's cruel!"

That only made them go harder. Juggling two nestlings catch to catch at once. Otto tossed one at Peter as he pushed through the next row-wall of the six-foot-high raspberry canes. Peter fumbled, but caught the farflung bladder of bird in his left hand.

The nestling's fat stomach burst. Blood and gore spilt over his hand.

"No crueller than you. Look at what you do!" Otto said. "Only these ones have hatched."

The barb hooked in Peter. He wanted to clear himself of the cruelty. A disgust churned his belly. He wanted never to pull out blackbirds' nests again. It only allowed for cruelty.

He dropped the gasping pink blob and crushed all life out of it under his boot. He ran over and grabbed the other two throating pink blobs. They were mottled with blue thumbprints and pricked with red weepholes.

Peter was sobbing tears as he pulverized the hatch into the cultivation. He shuddered with scarce-controlled passion.

"You could've killed them instantly!" Peter's voice was breaking as his contempt struck out.

"What are ya?" Otto sneered. "Lily-livered sook!"

Peter shut up. He went down on his knees to gouge his hands into the soft cultivation. A grave opened under his doggedness. He buried all three pancakes of spilt flesh deep. He wrung the gore off his hands by washing them in soil.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Peter had heard so many easy fixes to the blackbird problem. He had a sad tolerance of other people's choices. Rick Luckmold who grew ten acres of strawberries had the fascist solution.

"No garden. No shrubs. No trees. No blackbirds" Luckmold said.

"No shade. No song. No windbreak. No flight" Peter said.

Jimmy Premussi, who Peter knew since primary school, told Peter to: "Put some wheat inta neat Phosdrin ta soak overnight. Then shake a few grains on toppa each fence post, like. All ya 'aff ta do is stan' back an' watch. One peck an dey drop dead."

Peter imagined kids dying of curiosity for a taste of wheat. Wild native parrots, finches, thrushes, honeyeaters and maggies would turn up their claws. He hated innocents being victims. But Jimmy's wife's brother Nicko, fresh out from Italy, had a peasant recipe which Peter half admired.

"I pot merli! Uccelletti!" Nicko said, patting his rifle.

How they could bear to pluck and gut such mites Peter hadn't an iota. At least it had an ecological flavour to it. The idea made him wonder what blackbird tasted like. Even Cara's cat wouldn't eat them.

Most bigger farmers used the gas-fired scare guns to startle the birds off. Every Silvan spring was pocked with gunfire like a war zone, as if there was a half-baked invasion of foreigners at war with equally foreign rebels. Peter imagined Napoleon in Russia and the 1812 Overture.

Strawberry fields forever! Peter had always been puzzled by that Beatles song. The booms of scareguns moved the birds about every quarterhour to the next quarter. Blase' birds respected no man's land.

He believed blackbirds did more good than harm. They polished off earwigs, leafhoppers, wireworms, cockshafers and grubs. And they took bugs all year, while the damage to strawberries was only for a month or two. And Peter loved the blackbird's late-winter warble. He could forgive them some depradations as he listened to their evening calls. He twigged to sing that other Beatles song.

"Blackbird singing at break of day
Spread your tiny wings and fly away
All my love."

He'd hate for that song to be silenced.

So he was religiously up from his bed each daybreak to scarecrow around the strawberry patch. Though weary, he had his integrity. Jimmy nicknamed him 'Birdfeather Friend'. Cara, Peter's wife, proudly told women friends that he was a 'growaholic'. But Peter was stoic.

He hoed on. The weeds wilted behind the labourer. Pimpernel chop. Chickweed chop. Sorrel chop. Damn soursob. Then Peter had finished the row. He'd reached the other end where Anicia and Theo were playing.

"Daddy! You said you'd sing more" Anicia said.

"The king was in his counting house, counting out his money
The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey;
The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes
When along came a blackbird and pecked off her nose."

"Now you go over to the house with Theo" Peter said. "Mummy'll want you to set the table for tea."

Another week went by Peter the living scarecrow. Hoeing, irrigating, and cutting runners away from the plants. Then heaps of strawberries were red. A flush freckled the rows. The big day loomed. The next day would be the first picking. Peter expected scarcity prices. Probably the highest he would get for the season. He needed the money to pay back-tax.

That night Cara wanted to watch the movie on TV. 'The Captains and The Kings'.

"Peter, don't go to bed early for once" Cara said. "Stay up with me and watch the movie.

"Oh I don't know" Peter said, thinking Cara wanting company meant a good lovemaking after.

"Don't be so conscientious. Enjoy yourself." Cara patted the couch beside where she was curled up.

Peter stayed up and watched TV.

It was a Yank show. Peter was bored by the billionaire always on the phone talking about money. His wife unsatisfied in the lap of luxury. Dinner parties with caviar and exotic fruits. Servants to do all the work in the mansion. The wayward son seduces the new cook. She is sacked when she shows pregnant.

Peter wished for something less glitzy. The glamour was lost on him. Why couldn't they tell stories of simple humanity? He wished he hadn't stayed up, but then he enjoyed the time with Cara.

He overslept. He woke angry with a start. He flashed out of bed dressing as went. Outside, dozens of blackbirds snickered out of the strawberries. Cackling derisions. Some birds snuck in among the leaves at the other end of the patch.

Peter ran amok, a bootless terror down the rows, waving his arms and yelling:
"We're taking over! Sing! We're taking over! Sing!
Peck-a little! Peck-a-little! Peck-Off Ya Bastards !"

White slashes gaped in all the red berries Peter could see. He flapped down along the hedge shaking his fist at the air. He'd gouge beak holes in them. Blackbirds gloated in at the garden end of the patch as soon as he was off.

Furious! Peter went pale with purpose. He thumbnailed the largest pecked strawberries off the stalks like they were necks. He hit both berried handfuls on the kitchen table in a ruinous break of wild billiards.

"Breakfast? Peck the lot!" Peter said. "Now it's my shot!"

Cara watched Peter's back as he turned his arm behind the washhouse door. The gun came out to attention in his left hand. His other hand rifled the top shelf for hollowpoints. The door hinge squeaked as the slugs grooved into the magazine.

Peter reverted along the hedges. He'd show them instinct! Crack! Feathers puffed out into the gentle air. Sweet harmony!

He was listening for blackbird song. Crack! A warm pillow flopped through the twigs. Gentle tolerance! Crack! A winged orangebeak squeaked into the litter. Soft light dreamed the morning alive. Crack! Down floated like vapour. Peter kept the silence. Crack! A body danced through the branches. He blended into the foliage. Crack! His limbs hugged the trees from which he stalked life.

Peter decided his property was a decisive charge. His gun meant control of vermin. He hated to maim, a marksman in his being. Let every shot be death! Crack! Missing only made quarry gunshy and that prolonged the heartache. Crack! The introduced pests made muffled bumps in the plantations. Peter didn't need to be naturalized.

He mouthed his toast as if he'd choke. Cara wrote a list for shopping.

"Why I ever put up with 'em I doan know. Fancy lettin' B'blackbirds control me life!"

"It was listening to your heart, Peter" Cara said.

"False heart! It'd never let ya make a livin'."

Peter worked the morning sowing beans. He took the gun with him. He shot six more blackbirds by lunch. He picked the ruined strawberries, stalks off, for jam. He'd brew it that night after dark. He wasn't going to let blackbirds send his work to waste. You had t' be tough to survive.

Peter snatched up the goodies the way he'd decided the world was. He took them to the scales. The gun on Peter's shoulder made Cara uneasy with him.

"Twelv'nahalf kilograms!" he announced. "A black lot a' jam!"

Cara went to the gaping swingdoor of the shed and squinted out for the children.

"Oh well! You let them ripen" she said.

Peter pushed by her, intent on getting the buckets of strawberries to the house. Cara shaded her eyes to see down the earth track beside the hedge of cherry-laurel.

"What have you got?" she called out.

Peter stopped and put both buckets on the gravel. He squinted to see Anicia and Theo coming out of the thicket carrying the old enamel milking bucket between them. The kids ran as Peter stepped to meet them.

"Wook Daddy!" Theo said. "Pick birdies!"

Theo tripped and fell. Anicia stumbled. The upset bucket spilt out a heap of blackbird corpses. Dozens. Bloody feathers, skewed wings, stiff claws and dull eyes greeted him.

Peter went down on his knees. He sobbed tears. Anicia tried to comfort him with a hug. Theo nestled his head against Peter's shoulder.

What a cornucopia! The travesty took Peter in a fit of loathing.

He bucked up to a stand, arm-wristing the kids back. He swung the rifle off his back and clicked the magazine loose. Slugs thumbed off the magazine-ram. Bullets plopped to the ground, sowing dying puffs in pocks of dust. He upended the rifle, gripped it by the barrel end. As he lunged towards the farm implements he clubbed it back to strike. It came down on the plough in an almighty blow. The stock splintered and flew. The barrel looped in unlikely planes. The lock sprung to a crumple of metal feathers. He heaved the twisted neck of iron into the hedge.

"The killing's done!" Peter said.

He sat down with the weeping kids. He handed the bird corpses back to the bucket. Peter touched Theo on the head. He gave Anicia his hankie.

"Come Anicia, Theo" Peter said. "Let's bury the birds. We'll dig holes for fig trees and put the birds deep. They'll make the trees grow better."

"Then we'll get figs as well" Anicia said.

"We have to break the blackbird eggs from now on" Peter said.

Cara looked at him. She touched his shoulder as she went towards the house with the strawberries.

Three figures shaped digging and planting silhouettes in the fading light.

Peter sat on the ground at the top of the paddock and looked at the sky. An orange glow haloed the clouds as the sun set behind Mount Dandenong. The mountaintop TV towers were aglow in golden light.

Melbourne bred the buyers for his strawberries. What did they know about living with nature? They were polluted with idiot box dreams.

Peter yearned for a radiance where freedom might hatch. The mountains east and opposite hung above low clouds in the sunset-glowing mirror-image of dawn.

Little Theo toddled off towards the house.

"Tell Mummy we'll be in in a minute" Peter said.

Anicia sat out with Peter. She funnelled the dust through her cupped hand to build little conical pyramids on the track. Peter ran his fingers through her hair.

"Sing the song of sixpence, Daddy."

And Peter sang.





1988 © Wayne David Knoll

Friday, March 2, 2007

The Gift Of Hands

[ A Little Pentecostal Horror Story ]

Valma nursed the dog. Its head was on her leg as she glanced back, up towards the kitchen window. Barney, her brother, expected her to be doing the dishes. She had sneaked out to give a hand to the dog Barney had damned. The terrier's face had gone bald, and its brown eyes braved into Valma's with a water of mercy. Its lids were bare and scabby like a reptile's. If she bathed the mange rashes gently, the dog wouldn't whine. Barney would never know she was easing its pain.

The pong of Dettol in the orange plastic dish bit up Valma's nose as she took pains to compress the Wettex sponge. She could dip and massage the liquor up without a splash. Barney would leave her the run of the woodyard and go off to his prayer meeting without dragging her along if he thought she'd gone up to the milk bar for a carton.

The old weighbridge shed where the terrier lay was half soaked through as drizzle blew in the torn ruin of wall on the west. Gathered water blew across in spills as corrugated iron flapped in each gust of wind. Valma knelt upwind of the dog to protect it from the wet with her body. The dog got no care except what Valma gave. Barney would have no vet to the dog, just as he condemned all doctors to Valma. He wanted them all to get healing by 'faith'.

Valma ground her teeth. She resented fifteen years' cooking and cleaning she'd done for their Dad and Barney since she failed at school. She took her release in little things she nurtured in secret. The appeal in the water of the dog's eye took her out to a place in her mind's eye, the special place in the reedbeds, beside the firedam where she went as a child, while her Dad and Barney were chainsawing wood on Boxtopper Hill.

***

Light reflected perfectly off the black brine of the firedam. Dead gumleaves steeped it black. Through the surface Valma could see that the pool drank another world which was a mirror of her world, but down, into a liquid of treetrunks that waved to leafbunches hanging from a sky in the depths. The happy world below overshadowing gumtrees caught Valma yearning to know that world. She saw the treetrunks as outstretched arms drawn towards a vanishing point in that bottomless world. Leafbunches rocked her in the vision. The waterskin scudded with wind-puffs. Songs of the pobblebonks lifted from the reeds and vibrated across the surface tension of the water in chorus with the song birds. Live things relaxed broadly to radiate, to float above the bottomless world.
***

Valma drank the vanishing pool like faith. And something in the eye of the dying dog put her in a place where the pain and love in her own eyes could rest. She hated the bully in Barney. He could shrug off suffering. He said the dog had to suffer, snarling himself. She had hated him like that as a child when he broke the reflections in the firedam by bombing it with stones.

The new-warmed water Valma compressed into the raw scabby groin of the dog caused it to flinch. A pink erection, unblemished and glossy, came out from the scabby sheath of its penis. Blushing pink herself, Valma was taken back to the night of receiving the 'gift' of laying on of hands. Barney had come home with 'the gift'. Said his hernia was healed. Said he had spoken tongues of the Baptism in the Holy Ghost. Then Barney had her go there last spring.

***

Four men and two women 'deacons' selected for the special prayer meeting leaned from a circle of green moulded-plastic chairs in the backroom of the Clarion Full-Gospel Chapel. A two-bar electric heater reddened the chill in the gap where a seventh chair would have completed the circle. The naked electric globe brazened the room with glare. Khaki paint peeled off the ceiling in biscuits. The brittle cream kalsomine on regency-scroll lining boards was relieved high up by one game-dice of a window, which gave glance to a townlot of stars. Valma sat on a child's seat, as she would have in Sunday School.

Brother Hodboldt, in his Estate Agent's department store suit, let his collar gape, as his tie hung loose, and the Hush Puppy suedes scuffed the chairlegs. Sister Orenshaw bulged out of her lurid pink trackydaks, saying her feet were cold even in the sheepskin moccasins. Giant Galey wore the black boats of his shoes like Noah in his ark. Brother Jim Tremain hadn't changed out of the green uniform of his petrol tanker with the BP logo on the breast pocket. Barney slumped in his Tasmanian Bluey coat, holding his Blundstone boots to attention. And "Sister" Valma kept her fawn street cardigan buttoned over her calf-length grey woollen, looking down at her sensible shoes.

" Blessed Lord, we are few. But you promise." Giant Galey raised his voice to God.

The split tongue on a lining board on the back wall reverberated in the power of his performance.

" Where two or three are gathered in Your Name...Your Holy Holy Name. Glory Glory Glory. That Thou wilt be in the midst. "

" Yes Lord ! Blessed Redeemer ! " Barney drawled.

" Hallelujah Jesus ! " Sister Orenshaw sung out.

" Jesus ! Blessed be Thy Name ! Oh Lord ! Come among us ! Visit us !
Come tonight with Thy Power ! Let loose Your Holy Ghost ! "

" Amen Lord. " Brother Tremain whispered.

" Oh Lord ! We beseech Thee. Your child, Your simple child, Valma, is here before You, here with her need... "I Command the evil eye to be removed from her, removed from this Your daughter, Oh Lord ! "

" We claim her, Jesus ! " Barney said.

" The hand of man has been upon her, Lord. The finger of Satan has touched her. The teachers got to her. Doctoring and science and weakness have meddled with her head, Lord."

" Yes Father ! Yes Lord ! " Barney and Tremain said.

" Let Thy hand shake her, Lord! In the Name of Jesus Christ ! " Giant Galey pistoned Valma's chair forward with his right arm until she sat in the centre of the circle. Five more hands were placed on her. Her head swam and her shoulders went loose with pressure.

" Bind these Demons in Your child, Lord. Bind the blind voices of men, and have them cast into the bottomless pit. WE CLAIM THY HEALING LORD ! "

" YES Jesus ! " The chorus babbled.

" Let Your daughter receive the Gift, Lord. Comfort her with the tongue of Your Holy Ghost. Speak now. Let the tongue free. In the Name of Jesus. Renounce the Evil. Your daughter, Oh Lord. "

" Oh Jesusss! Jeeeeesssssuuuuussss! By Your stripes she is healed. "

" Purge her with Fire, Lord. Lay Your Hand upon her. Touch her! "
Giant Galey placed his sweaty mitt across Valma's forehead. Crying out with a great "JEEEESSSUUUSSS !" he thrust her off the chair so that she sprawled on the floor, still in the grasp of the circle. Valma knelt compliantly, putty under the heavy arms of the elders.

" Light.. Oh Light ! I'm coming in ! " Valma moaned.

Valma could feel the force of conflicting wills to mould her, as the ten 'Holy' hands kneaded her head, back and shoulders. Hands of mixed touch roughed her sprawled body. She yielded to the compass of the circle, letting what would be, be. But listening to the flow. Her head boiled with steam. She let the urge to hit out pass. Her heart waited for The Holy Touch. But her heart was not touched.....

Valma hated the idea of unbelief as much as she hated the hellfire of the hands. She feared they didn't see her as right with God. She knew grace. She knew the song God played out in Jesus' pain. She saw that Forgiveness in the lovewater of the bottomless firedam. She knew God's trunk was a real body of spirit with one face of earth. She knew her flesh, her marrow, held in a love, gave her a touching substantiality, which they held in contempt, as if God wasn't in it. But somehow their fears planted a fear in her, and she imagined that some witchery might have grown a demon in her. The 'Clarions' assumed the right to fear the way she saw things. Their insistence held her in doubt.

Valma writhed under the weight of their tense prayer. Brother Hodboldt had his hand on her buttock. Brother Tremain fingered the curve of her left breast under the cover of her armpit. With each invocation for God to heal his "Daughter", Brother Hodboldt's hand drove further down into the cleave of her groin.

She felt out of grace under their hands. Unclean! Even while she wanted to be touched clean. She lifted her arms for God, throwing back her arms and thrusting her breasts forward, rising up as she knelt on clenched knees. She sung out an animal cry. A sense of ecstasy flooded her as she shivered to shrug off their hands.

" Oh Spirit is washing me ! " She called.

" Oh Lord Jesus Christ ! Let me come ! I come ! "

" Oh Yes ! To Glory ! "

Valma got up. She even danced the clammy parsnips of her legs. She jigged past the do-it-yourself priesthood of the circle. They watched her sidelong while keeping eyes closed in prayer. Their faces pointed in to God in the flooring boards at the centre of the plastic circle.

" Glory ! Jesus ! Hallelujah ! "

" Jesus ! I am the Bridesmaid with the lamp ! " Valma sang.

" Oh Master, the stars of Your Glory, the moon of Your Right Hand !
I am a traveller in Your firmament, Lord. Coming, coming out ! "

Valma danced through the hall. She breathed out, breathed deep as she swung out of the scrutiny of Clarions. She spun faster, through the front porch into a release. The slime of lust was on her like a bushfire cracking the skins off native seeds. She doubted if she could ever lose the horror and humiliation she felt about sex since the time when she was thirteen when Barney had groped her mummies and forced his finger up her front bottom. Sometimes he clumped onto her bed in the night and pressed her down under the sheet until his hardness burst. Once he rolled off and shouted "Whore !" at her.

Her baptism was to freedom, so Valma lit out across the backblocks on the goat-tethering side of town. She wanted to get out of the beam of narrow-focussed headlights so she could see the stars. She shadowed through the hill gardens towards the carless street of old bluestone churches. The constellation of the Southern Cross winked over the cruxes of the fir-tree tops. The starlight glistened on the backs of her hands. Veils of mist drifted through upright bars of budding birch trees. Flower tassels dangled from the walnut trees, dripping glistening droplets. The streetlight hummed in the air-moisture on the corner of Church Street.

Valma searched through the raised crosses and steeples to where the townhall tower pointed upward for the stars she called The Saucepan. All the roofpeaks of the town were bathed in moonlight.

Grace didn't make her less lonely. She moved down to Main Street. She stepped past the Post Office and shops. She turned the corner towards the tourist cafes. She passed the shut door of the chocolate shop. She window-shopped at the Good Samaritan store. She crossed the street. A spotlight on an awning verandah shone down to a plywood figure of a woman who carried the sandwichboard: 'Tonight's Films: Omega Club.'

Valma read Omega as a sign. The God she knew was real to her was the Alpha and Omega: the beginning and the end. There would be something inside for her, where she had never been before. Could God be here even ?

Valma went upstairs, bravely to heaven or hell. The shiny wood of the steps raised her to a hall where she came out under one wing of a twelve-foot tall, black-painted, steel sculpture of a brolga. Her dancing bird! Valma knew brolgas since she saw them as a girl, when a pair stayed three weeks on the Deep Spring creekflats. The steel bird turned its neck crooked, sheltering its head under one wing, while its legs were poised in dancing steps towards iron tables and chairs where people sat in couples and cliques over soupbowls and plates of lasagne.

Her long hair fell like mountain scree. Her woollen was out among boutique similarity. She knew no salon vogue. She cringed back from taking a seat. She turned up a ticket under the shadow of the brolga. She read a price: $4500. She sunk into herself a while then. Who could afford such? What people had such space? She stepped over to the gallery wall in a blindness of eyewater.

Framed paintings were in front of Valma, but even as her eyes focussed, all she could make out of the smears of blood-red and pulpy-blue spills was the memory of bruises. Strands of brushwork, that Valma saw as sinews, made her grasp the tendons of her houseworked hands. She shuddered, wanting some touch to redeem these ugly choices of people.

Spotlights dazzled her as they reflected off framed glass. Valma was curious to see out of the dazzle. A suite of frames bore the sign: 'Gracie Lynch: The Gift'. The artist's first name struck Valma. 'The Gift' would be some special grace for herself.

The first frame made Valma blush a moment. A woman was pictured naked, in reclining pose, beside a bed of flowering purple flag-irises, at the brink of a pond where a large wading bird (was it a brolga?) turned its gaze on the woman as if aware of a need. Valma relaxed from her blush when she saw how the nakedness of the woman was full of grace. Innocent. The woman was freed to be natural, even freed to a pure sexual desire.

In the second frame the brolga extended its flight feathers, like an outstretched hand, above the nude, who lay legs apart, while it offered her a flowerspike of the purple flag. Valma enjoyed the loveliness of the woman and her sex, seeing her like a flag flower, the buds of that one were breaking into open petals down the stem, a breakwave of deep colour.

Valma's eyes widened. Her quick glance at the single fallen breast feather in the third frame flashed as her attention was grabbed by the large central frame of the suite.

The nude had taken flight with the huge pinion feathers of the brolga's wings unfurled from her shoulderblades. Her hair was blown to a body of life and she was kissing a handsome naked man who was poised to join her steps. Her nipples were erect and purple. Above the man's dance-swung leg, the tip of his penis swelled into magenta against the taught muscles of his thigh. Valma gazed with candid sparkle at the burning pools of desire in the man's eyes. A sense of her naked self as being desirable came over her.

Valma began to laugh as a stream of heart came to her. The next frame showed a single flag iris stem fallen, its floral envelope of deep purple buds unfurled from the labial pollenbud. Valma felt spring in her ankles that she had never known as she saw what came next. The woman in the penultimate frame was still nude, her ripe belly bulging into a full pregnancy.

The last frame showed the man, who Valma saw as her Jesus, standing naked still, but holding up the naked woman who was lifted in an abandoned embrace, her legs encircling his waist. The wings of the brolga, like God, Valma thought, were spread above the couple in flight while the woman's arms were thrown around the man's neck.

But Valma laughed alone. She looked about the Omega Club finding no-one to share the elation in her. People were collected in closed bodies, and as the lights dimmed, a man with a polished caring manner and a reefer jacket with a red bowtie, ushered her to an empty table and asked for the ticket price. She gave him three of the seven dollars he asked for, that being all the milk money she had. He put a program in her hand and said she could watch two of the three films.

The projector clicked incessantly as a film called 'LIfe at The Top' was screened. It was a documentary about flat-dwellers in the Government high-rise in the city. Valma thought the only relief from the stark prison those poor inmates had was pigeons who flew from window-ledge to ledge to accept a peck of bread.

During interval Valma tried to share with a couple who sat at the table behind her.

" You are welcome to sit here. You can see better ! "

The women turned and whispered together. Valma felt excluded. They were a couple in some way that she didn't know about. After some minutes they did move to sit with her, but even then they did not speak.

" I'm Valma " she said.

" Kerry ! " said one with dyeblack hair crewcut on the sides.

" Angie ! " said the one with the pierced nostril, who immediately went into confab with Kerry.

" Sad for the people in the flats " Valma said.

" Why ? " Pierced Nostril asked .

" Oh I couldn't live boxed up like that ! " Valma said. " It's so up in the air and out of touch with things. "

But the only answer was a snort of that pierced nose.

The next film began: 'An Ordinary Woman'. The soundtrack kept blurring into gibberish, and Valma thought of Barney's tongues. She was glad she had country which was full of wild song. She would hate to lose her breadth of views. But a person could die without people. Valma only knew her dream Jesus as a man who understood.

Couples were ordering cappuccinos. The waiter flourished bottles of proud red wine to the party at doubled tables. Valma decided to leave. She couldn't say she was disappointed in the company. She took comfort in an acceptance of 'The Gift', for it rang the bells of her dreams. The next film was to be 'The Singer And The Dancer'. She was a singer too. She went out quietly. Once outside she ambled along, singing:

" Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days, all the days of my life. "

She found herself passing Hodboldt's package home. She stalled, struck by a garden of flag-irises. Purple. Next thing she was at the door and Brother Hodboldt had come to her knock in his pyjamas.

" Come out and pray with me, Brother. "

Hodboldt stepped into the backyard. Valma went ahead of him to be near the purple flags.

Hodboldt said his leg dragged. Valma reached out and touched the inside of his leg with her fingertips. Hodboldt stopped and looked intently at Valma. Suddenly he lost all restraint. He grasped her and took her in his embrace, lifting her skirt as he laid her on the dew. Valma paid regard to him with tender caresses as if he was her man Jesus.

A week later Valma told Hodboldt she loved the flag-irises. He gave her some tubers that had been left out in a polystyrene box. She planted them by the driveway. The late-started blooms flowered at Christmas on short thick stems, but Valma loved them as if the swelling buds were her own. Once, Barney backed his truck onto the garden, but Valma had stood him off by bashing his guard with the spadehead.

***
Barney had kept his cramps to himself since then, though wracked by suspicions and a desire to bully. With Barney out, Valma had the freedom to do the chores her way. The dog was his, and he was in a fury if Valma so much as patted it. After dishes Valma decided to cross Barney for pity. She lit the Tilley lantern and went out with warm towels to the dying dog.

Valma touched the dog with relief. She knew she was touched with the eyes of the dog's thanks. She held the creature lightly as Barney's jeep flew into the yard and slewed to jerk-stop.

Barney hollered at her being there. Door slam and heavy boot-thumps brought him into the lantern circle, bursting full.

" You ! Scarlet whore ! Damn'd if you'll put your charms on my dog ! "

" Barney ! But for mercy ! "

" Witchery more like! Blasphemy ! You mock. "

" No Barney ! "

" You faker ! You put spells on the dog. Harbouring demons! "

" Your dog is dying, Barney. Let it go easy ! "

" Dyin' ! Then I'll end its misery ! "

Barney gripped the dog by the skin of its neck and swung it across the chopping block. One hand seized fast, held the animal like one of his Sunday chooks, stretching its neck over the brink. The other hand crabbed around wildly to seize on the axe.

" No ! " Valma screamed. She put up her hand to stay his strike.

The dog writhed at her scream. The axe came down awry onto the solid bar of Barney's wrist. The calloused hand fell like a claw onto the chips. Barney's wrist spurted with triple hoses of blood.

The dog was clubbed aside. Litres of blood covered the animal and the wood.

" Almighty God ! Satanic witch ! " Barney rasped.

Words slurred as he ogled the hose of his wrist pouring out. His tongue swelled out of his mouth and lolled hoarse.

Valma reached out dumbly across the spill and lifted the severed hand. She held it off from the wrist as if she would apply it back on. Barney touched the meat together as if he could be rejoined.

Her eyes locked onto Barney's as he wilted to his knees. Her eyes spoke a flow of tears in which he began to swim. He collapsed as he acknowledged her eyes.

" I'm going to die, Valma. I've done my last strike ! "

Valma nodded, tongue-tied in her tears. Barney knelt by the clubbed dog as it wheezed a final breath and went silent. Valma knelt beside him. She touched his neck as he bled years, losing will. She ran her fingers through his hair as she had done when he was a boy. The light ran out with his tears.

Barney rolled forward till his head propped his flesh on all fours. Life went out of him as his blood congealed in pools.

And Valma arched herself up as the twig of contractions caught her belly. And then the flood of waters gushed out as the baby inside her readied for birth.


1988 © Wayne David Knoll

About Me

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I am a 4th-to-6th generation Australian of Silesian (Prusso-Polish), Welsh, Schwabian-Württemberg German, yeoman English, Scots, & Cornish stock; all free settlers who emigrated between 1848-1893 as colonial pioneers. I am the 2nd of 7 brothers and a sister raised on the income off 23 acres. I therefore belong to an Australian Peasantry which historians claim doesn't exist. I began to have outbreaks of poetry in 1975 when training for a Diploma of Mission Theology in Melbourne. I've since done a BA in Literature and Professional Writing and Post-graduate Honours in Australian History. My poem chapbook 'Compost of Dreams' was published in 1994. I have built a house of trees and mud-bricks, worked forests, lived as a new-pioneer, fathered-n-raised two sons and a daughter, and am now a proud grandfather. I have worked as truck fresh-food farmer, a freelance foliage-provider, been a member of a travelling Christian Arts troupe, worked as duty officer and conflict resolutionist with homeless alcoholic men, been editor/publisher of a Journal of Literature for Christian Pilgrimage, a frontier researcher, done poetry in performance seminars in schools and public events.