'Yes, should be good.'
'Bush poles?'
'Yeah, bush poles. I'm going to try shingles.'
'Hard to cut,' she said, squinting at him.
'Might try anyway.'
'Yeah, you should try.'
'We should have a talk sometime,' he said. 'You should come over.'
She started the engine. 'Yeah,' she said vaguely.
'I miss you,' he said.
But she was already concentrating on the next section of road, trying to keep the speed down so she wouldn't crack the sump on the crossing at the bottom. She did not have time to think about her feelings, but the bees knew, as they always did, and droned unhappily around the entrance to their hives.
It is a measure of how well Harry had adapted to life at Bog Onion that the hut which was planned for the late spring did not finally get under way until after the wet. There was no desperate rush and the subject of the hut, its design, materials, siting and so on, became the medium through which he came to know his neighbours and make new friendships.
He had become used to waking early, but on the morning he was to drop the five tallow woods he had marked out for his house, he got up even earlier. There was something he wanted to do before Daze and Clive arrived with the horse to snig the logs out of the forest. He did not make tea. He did not fill the bush shower on the verandah, or do anything to make a noise because the thing he wanted to do was something he felt shy about, a small thing perhaps, but more important than he would have cared to admit; he might so easily have been laughed at.
He slipped into his shorts and pulled a dirty singlet on. Then he took the dirty singlet off and rummaged in the canvas bag which contained his few things. He took out a clean white singlet and put it on.
The axe was already sharp. He had sharpened it last night while he and Paul had sat on the verandah. He had sharpened it slowly, enjoying the sound. You could shave your arm with that axe and Paul, having examined it, declared it too sharp. Harry was learning confidence in his own ways. He left it sharp.
He did not wear shoes. There were none to be had and his feet had made up for the lack and grown their own thick soles. It is not hard to see the changes six months of hard work, clean air and less food have made to the man. It is a pleasure to watch him as he descends the steps of the hut and walks into the rain forest, a svelte shadow amongst the tangled roots and creepers. He had never ceased to see where he lived and, having begun with the aesthetic of a whip bird to whom the rain forest is shelter and cannot be left except nervously, he had, as the months passed, developed a more relaxed view in which gratitude to the trees and people of Bog Onion was not his sole emotion but had become blended with wonder and made volatile with some lighter spirit.
He nodded briefly (no one was there to see him) to the monsteriosa. No one could tell him with any confidence whether the monsteriosa was a native of the rain forest or an interloper but he felt he understood the way it wrapped its roots around the white blotched trunk of a cedar. Each morn-ing when he passed through the rain forest he nodded his head briefly and compressed his lips and sometimes you might hear a small tsk of appreciation, a sound as light as a twig dropping, signifying, perhaps, the surprise he felt in being there at all.
He walked up the steps formed by tree roots, stooped to walk through the lantana hedge and emerged at the big burnt logs (like half-spent conversations) where they sometimes sat at night when the rain forest became too oppressive. They had lit some big fires here and told some good stories, and around this fire he had found himself remembering things he had not even known he knew.
He tried to talk to Paul about the trees but in the end, he thought, he had become boring and he felt that Paul would rather hear about other things, some story of Vance's, the episode with Alice Dalton, what an expensive whore house was like, what Milanos looked like, what the menu said, how much a glass of French wine would have cost. (Alright, Paul said, a bottle then – how much is a bottle?)
Paul Bees, however, was not at all bored by trees. He did not doubt that trees had spirits, that there was a collective spirit of the forest, but he could talk about these things with anybody, and Harry Joy had much more astonishing things to tell, for instance: how a television commercial was made and how much it cost.
Harry did not talk about trees and the forest as much as he would have liked, but nothing could stop him thinking about them. He had done what Honey Barbara had once told him to (back in the days when she still spoke to him), which was to place his arms around a big tallow wood when the wind blows and feel its strength and put his face against its rough bark. He could not walk through the bush now without feeling beneath his feet the whole interlinked network of roots, some thicker than his leg, some as fine as the hair on his arm, the great towers of trunks, the columns of the forest, the channels between the world of the roots and the canopy of the forest which was not only alive with blossoms and leaves but which – sometimes he could almost feel it – breathed continually, interchanging carbon dioxide for the oxygen he would breathe in. All of this was new to him. He would walk through the forest, not in a calm way, but in the slightly agitated manner of someone feeling too many things at once.
He had planted peas and watched them grow. Could this corny, ordinary human act really be so earth- shattering to a man, that at the age of forty he is reduced to open-mouthed amazement by the sight of a pea he has planted uncurling through the soil?
Everybody has pointed this out to everybody else before. They have made films about it and called them 'Miracle of life' and so on. He may even have seen them, but when Harry Joy squatted on his haunches and contemplated a pea growing it did not matter a damn to him (it did not even occur to him) that his experience was not new. He was not interested in newness. When he was by himself he could say and think what he wished, and he was by himself the greater amount of the day. He could touch the deep rough scaled bark of a blood wood like someone else might stroke a cat, speaking not to be literally understood.
'When you talk about trees,' Paul Bees said, pouring water into the pot, 'it sounds like you want a fuck.'
Which, in a rough and ready bush-carpentered sort of way, described Harry Joy's tone rather well.
He chose a certain route up the ridge so that he skirted the edge of Paul's small banana plantation which was still too young to bear any fruit. Then into some scrubby untidy bush which gave way to more lantana scrub and it was here, below Crystal's house, amongst the rusting Peugots, that the Cadillac waited for him, like a great dull beast, a stinking stranded whale he could not forget no matter how much he might like to ignore this painful reminder of his disgraceful past.
He had a new happiness at Bog Onion Road but he also had a new burden: he had done bad things in Hell. The guilt he felt about his past was the worst of the pains he now carried, but not the only one, for he had, if not daily, at least weekly, the reminder of Honey Barbara's hostility towards him. The Cadillac also reminded him of that pain.
'You stole it, didn't you?' she said to him on the day he came to her door.
'Stole what?'
'That car. That American thing.' She stood at the door naked but there was no invitation. Behind her he could see the shape of a body lying in her bed.
'Yes,' he said.
'How could I ever trust you?' she said.
There were dry leaves around the ground below her step. He touched them with his toe – the dry leaves and hard woody cases that had once held blossom – and he turned away without looking up. He had gone back to his holes in the road even though it was a rest day.
He had gained his burdens so quickly that the load was sometimes almost too much and he could physically stagger beneath them as if someone had dumped a bag of fertilizer too heavily on to his back. He felt some guilt, some remorse, about almost everybody he had known in Palm Avenue and although his work with the trees had begun as Honey Barbara had correctly guessed as a fearful response to his new environ-ment, it had slowly become different, and from his fear, through his fear, he had discovered love and with his love he was trying to make amends.
He skirted around Crystal's house (where, living alone, she was making plans for the return of Paul Bees) and entered the big bush beyond it. On the edge of this bush there was only a little scrub, some groundsel, odd straggling lantana (yellow-flowered here) and then a patch of bracken, and beyond that: tallow wood, blood wood, red stringybark, blackbutt, and the forest floor luxuriant with great black-boys, their thick black trunks hidden by their shining tussock-like crowns. This hillside had been cleared some thirty or forty years before but there were still
