The old men talked to me, or at least the two of them did. We propped Ern up in the shade, and he listened; he was forced to, really, and even though he must have wanted to have his say, we could make no sense of his groaning and spitting, his gnashing of teeth. Uncle Will and Uncle Jack suggested this or that. Occasionally, one of them took up a tool himself. But really, they saw it as my initiative, and my job. Under their erratic and shifting direction I repaired the roof, and re-mortared the walls although quite often, when, say, the gaps between the stones provided an interesting pattern of light, or fluted the air in a pleasing way we left the walls as I had altered them.
‘When Uncle Sandy died...’ and here Uncle Will digressed, by way of characterisation, you might say. ‘He was your great-grandmother’s brother, and he was born at Dubitj River, and went to the world war and was going to marry a white woman, but ... I ran away to live with him. I went all that way to live with him.’ Uncle Will was leaning against one internal wall, and the sun shone through the roof and between the stones of the wall so that he sat among grids and planes of light. He looked across at Ern, who we had propped in a corner, but I knew he was not seeing my grandfather...
‘Uncle Sandy was in the main street, up in a little town among hills. It was a long way from here, he’d got so far away. He had tried to get back to Gebalup but, well, there was always trouble for him. It was hard enough just to get a ticket for a train, let alone get off and walk through some towns. Uncle Sandy was not someone who liked to feel shame, or to have to slink about. So he didn’t get out very much when I went to live with him. He was sick, and I suppose, having made a habit of keeping his distance, he had no one to help him. He was trapped.
‘He was such a brave man, you know,’ said Uncle Will. And it was right in town there, the place he would’ve least liked, that Sandy Two collapsed. The police came rushing. They were first—maybe they’d even been following the man and his nephew—and it was as if it was a big joke for them. Someone walking past tut-tutted, muttered, ‘Take him to a cell to sleep it off.’
Uncle Will was on his knees beside Uncle Sandy who was fast becoming a corpse, and the police were standing around talking to passers-by. Uncle Will told them off, shouting at them even from down on his knees like that.
‘I was just a boy, really, you know,’ muttered Uncle Will, shaking his head. And then, surprising me, he suddenly said, ‘I hate myself, know that?’ The thought seemed to come from nowhere. ‘I hate myself. I should have been like that more often, more angry.’
We both looked at Ern, toppling very slowly to one side, as if in an extreme slow motion. We caught him before he fell, and stuffed him in a chair to keep him upright.
‘Should have been more like him maybe.’ Uncle Will indicated Ern. ‘Have things to aim at. Something. But, I can’t hate him, even knowing what he’s done. I’m too soft.’
Will said he watched them drag Uncle Sandy away, drag the body away. Will remembered the soles of Uncle Sandy’s shoes, how each had a hole in it, and together they reminded him of a pair of eyes, staring at him as they retreated.
Then Will got up and bolted.
He came into the post office the next morning, intending to send a telegram to Harriette. He thought, just send it to the post office at Gebalup.
There was a policeman, and he said that Will need not worry about the funeral arrangements, that the Aborigines Department would sort everything all out and had it in hand.
Uncle Will said he wanted to say no, that they did not want the Aborigines Department having anything to do with this funeral whatsoever. But he didn’t. He just didn’t know.
And he didn’t send the telegram because it occurred to him that to do so would be to provide a target for the Aborigines Department to aim at, and that target could be his mother, sisters...
‘What happened, see, is that I have always tried to keep away from Aboriginals because I knew the people would try to bring me under the Aborigines Act. And they took your children, hunted you down, moved you for no reason.
‘I didn’t want any “assistance” from them. All I wanted was for them to leave me alone, and to be free of them.
‘It has made me very lonely, all my life.’
I felt reassured somehow, hearing him say this, looking at him ... Of course we feel very lonely. Look at us, stuck out in the sky like branches from which the rest of the tree has been cut and carted away.
So, for a time we were all working on that old house. The two old men told me I was doing fine, and what I should do next. I don’t believe their hearts were in it, just then, but they encouraged me for my own sake, I suppose. They thought I seemed interested in the job.
In fact, I felt very insecure. I didn’t know who to trust. After all, I remembered what my father had told me of Uncle Will, how he had kept right away from even his own mother.
I knew that I had been uplifted. I knew I’d been ill. But what about these old men, how did they see themselves, how did they see me? And how could they be so, so ... So kind to Ern. So kind. They knew how he was, surely. I could not bring myself to tell them what I knew about him.
So what was it made me, with a mortar in one hand and a small trowel in the other, tremble so? I hoped it was only fatigue.
I kept telling myself that I had been given another chance, and that I too had to seize every opportunity. The way it was, I had nothing. This place still seemed strange to me. My grandfather had reassured me, told me he knew me, told me my place. I knew, already, the bullshit of that.
He’d be all right. He was comfortable enough. Plenty to drink. Books. Radio. He was gunna die soon.
But what about those other two old fellas? And me?
From up on the verandah I could see the sea. I saw the swell rippling right to left on the horizon, continuing its way around the planet. Closer in I saw how the headland to my right caught it, and swung it around to break on the island.
Each time I turned from the slow, irregular, and fragmentary exposure of the wall’s rigid pattern of blocks, I would see a white blossom appear at the right-hand tip of the island, as if from that thin line where sea met sky met land. All day, blooming and dying, blooming and dying.
I turned to it more and more often, eventually letting my tools fall and resigning myself to the rise and fall of that distant rhythm. I was thinking of what I was learning about my family.
I was feeling light-headed, of course, and so made a little commentary of what I was doing, and what I intended doing, and that seemed to settle me. But as I turned the corner of the house a gust of wind blew me against the wall. My head bumped the eaves, and then I was beside the roof and heading ... well, further up. Who knows where?
The cuff of my trousers caught on the guttering, and there I was; uplifted and spread out to the wind, which whistled through me, and in and out of orifices, singing some spiteful tune.
I could not concentrate on any sort of story, no narrative. My trousers ripped a little more.
Desperately I tried to get some words flowing through my head. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck I gotta I gotta gotta I must must must I will will will oh will will Uncle Will what he had said and my father and what I guessed, remembered, imagined?
I got a hand to the guttering.
I was worried that someone might see. An embarrassment, such an abuse of reason. I was a freak.
I worked my way, hand over hand, around the guttering to the other side of the house where I found some shelter, from the wind at least. In relative quiet, and safe from such a buffeting I began to ease myself to the ground.
But suddenly, there I was again, spread out against the sky like a banner.
Uncle Will came hobbling as fast as he was able in response to my cries for help. He stiffly ascended the ladder, reached out his hand...
And then he was suddenly up in the air with me, with the guttering in one hand, and a kite-like me in the other.
Uncle Jack’s turn. And for some reason, which I could not comprehend at the time, he was able to get hold of Will, and was both weighty and strong enough to pull the two of us in like spent fish.
Will’s eyes were wide. ‘I thought that had all stopped,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time since I...’
They suggested I remain inside the house.
‘You can write? That helps?’ They looked at one another quizzically. I would have to return to writing. It apparently helped knot and tie me down. Even now, writing, my hands stay easily at the keyboard and I loop my legs to settle in the chair.
If I am to be so light, well, so be it. But let me at least learn how to adopt a certain weightiness of manner, and not always approach things with levity.
I am serious when I complain of the time it took to develop these small calluses on the tops of my toes so I might hook them under the sill and hover at the window, watching that island and how the sun and the wind shifts, and the sea’s coat changes.
I remained there, throbbing.
I had listened to my grandfather roar.
Now it was the voices of these other two old men, and Uncle Jack, tapping me on the chest (as, more and more, others would later do). ‘You feel it in your heart? Say it like you feel it.’