Scarring Wood
A. S. Patric
1.
There’s a picture. A photograph with crenulated white borders. I hide it because, what’s within it, I don’t want to see. I don’t want anyone to see it. So it stays hidden for weeks and months. Then I go out behind the garage and make a little fire out of paper and bits of wood. Only then do I go to my hiding place. Pull out the photograph. Put the picture into the fire. I watch it fold. Melt rather than burn. Feel the toss of my heart at the idea that perhaps it won’t just burn to ashes. Like it won’t be destroyed, and it will remain as something that might be found. I run to the front of the house and get the local paper out of our mail box, and throw pieces of that on my fire to feed it. Eventually the photograph disintegrates, and I stir around the ashes, mixing it with the ash of wood and paper. I even throw some dirt over the area. I carry the matches back into the house, and put them back into the drawer they came from in the kitchen.
2.
There’s a tree out in the country that’s part of this story. The tree stands between some low rocky hills out in Kaniva. It’s the only one for some distance. Near it there was a two room farmhouse, with a kitchen and a bedroom/living area. What survives of it is a black chimney rising out of the ground. My grandfather raised his three daughters there. One son came along ten years after the youngest girl. But Victor married late, a woman twenty years younger, and might have been in his fifties by the time that boy came along.
By all accounts Victor was a gambler, card player, with a keen mind they say, but mostly wasted out in those low hills, with a farm he could never be bothered with. It was hard ground to make work though, even for the most zealous farmer.
The tree near his shack didn’t mean much to anybody. All Victor knew was that his grandfather had planted it when Aborigines still came around curiously. He hardly ever looked at it, but when he did it was usually winter and it looked like so much kindling and firewood. He’d glance over at it like he was looking for a sign of gratitude.
The tree was covered in snow once. A few times it bore Christmas decorations. It carried a tyre at the end of a rope for close to three decades. Then just a rope. The frayed end turning in the wind like the long chord of a woman’s braided hair.
3.
I’ve been screaming. It started as panicked crying, but it had gathered more and more fear and pain, building into a crescendo. And there are names for it, though I don’t know them yet. But I know something’s wrong. Wrong like a nightmare. Like everything ending. Summoning punishment. And relentless. So my mouth is open, screaming, until I run out of sound, and I’ve started choking, and I don’t know why I just can’t breathe. My mouth open, and nothing more, until the surprise of my mother taking me to the basin and running cold water into the palm of her hand and bathing my face. Feeling shock with every stroke.
4.
His father had died young, summoned by the Empire to fight a war in South Africa. It’s possible my great-grandfather never actually saw his baby Victor. The date of his landing in Cape Town is uncertain. But it didn’t make that much difference. Gone for good and only a map on the wall in the empty schoolhouse to show Victor where to.
He grew up with an idea that his mother, the wife of this forgotten war hero, would stay true to that marriage no matter the years rolling up entire decades into a crushing mountain of nothing. So when he came home one day from a losing streak and saw signs that his mother had found a lover, he took hold of an axe nearby and went to the bed of the faithless widow.
He might have swung it and killed her there and then. But he needed to test his rage with words first, and finding that it was true, Victor raised the axe. He could already feel it through the wooden handle like a taste on the tongue before the blade has actually cut — the split of her skull in two halves — like an apple. Perfect and bloodless in his mind. He could even see the gleaming black seeds.
He wasn’t drunk anymore. His eyes hurt from the candles they used to play their card games. The smoke of cigarettes and cigars made his voice so hoarse, just what he was shouting, wasn’t clear. So it wasn’t easy to find his startled target. He never would have expected a woman in her late fifties, already missing half her teeth, to move with lithe speed—towards the wall and the slight gap between the bed—to drop into that space. He didn’t expect that when he moved to pull it aside, the old woman could spring to her feet, and would be able to throw up the narrow iron cot and its thin mattress, like it was made out of cardboard. She sent him reeling into a chest of drawers. Going forward he kicked over her chamber pot. He stumbled to his hands and knees, palms in piss; piss soaking into his pants.
For a moment he was blind with killing fury. He wanted to put his forehead through the hard dirt floor of his run down cottage. Wanted to drive his forehead down like a pick-axe into stubborn soil. Wanted to slam his head down into ground even if he spilled out his brains. He could almost feel it done, feel it ‘accomplished’ is the word that comes to his mind, but the rattle of his brain against the bone of his skull scares him; because death wasn’t certain; because it was at least as much a lie as life.
He sees the belt slung over the back of a chair as he struggles to his feet. How could a man forget his belt like that? Why does he take it out? How does he pull up his pants and forget it? Because he couldn’t forget. Because he didn’t forget. He wanted Victor to know that his mother had been fucked tonight, like a whore, working from a shack. He groans as he wraps his fingers around the axe again, and lifts it. Like a split apple he mutters again, feeling it between the halves of his own brain.
5.
Between her knees—I’m pressed firmly between them—at the hips. What did I do? It’s always hard to remember. One thing turns into another, and there’s a kind of build up, and it’s hard to say how it all ebbs and flows. If I ever thought it was a kind of madness (or if not that, not insanity, then some strange driven perversion of the mind) I know I was wrong. If I’m honest. It’s easier to think that, pressed between hard, unyielding knees. But sometimes you look around at the world, and I mean beyond suburban reality, to what we do for profit and power, what we condone every day, and look at history and all it’s worse and worse, and it just goes to say, it’s not beyond the pale, out of this world, something strange at all. And it’s harder to say what’s mad when you look at things, and what’s a perversion of the mind, because, here, her anger is spent, and my arms are welted with it and the belt she used to inflict it. So she looks calm and speaks evenly, stop crying. Slapping my face. Stop crying. Again calm. Again even. Slapping the other side. Stop crying. Slapping with a solid hand. Slapping again, until my head rocks around. Stop crying. That even, steady voice. And I do. I stop crying, and later, wonder if there’s something from a mother’s blood and the way it runs with earth nearer the root than a man’s ever does, that whispers of long waterless winters, and hard, unforgiving ground.
6.
She ran outside, in her nightdress, and looked around, knowing the nearest cottage was a half hour walk across dead cold country. She’d climbed that oak tree once as a lark with her dead husband when she was still not eighteen, and when she passed it, not knowing where to go, or what to do, her own son staggering behind her with an axe in his hand, she caught the bottom branch in a leap she wouldn’t have thought herself capable of, and pulled herself up. She climbed up as high as she dared go. She knew it wasn’t the alcohol or losses at cards really. That just made it possible for him to act on his righteous fury. It amazed her, that streak of fire from God’s right hand, because she’d only ever seen it before in her dead husband, and he couldn’t have learned it from him. And it wasn’t that he was a violent man or that he was mad, at least not any more than a lot of people out here in the middle of nothing and nowhere. Even when he was ranting more animal than man, she knew the problem was genius. He had been given a mind capable of inventing electricity, but it was thrown in a place of dirt and wood. He’d taught himself how to read and write because when the old school teacher had died it had taken over ten years to get someone in from Melbourne City to replace her. The problem was the genius in his brain turned to poison.
7.
We both lie on the couch, so maybe we watched a film late and rolled along past the credits into sleep—though that never happened—not usually. My mother sleeps, and I can hear it in her breath that she’s dreaming, like I just was, and I can feel that she’s sleeping in the intense warmth of her body below the blanket that covers us. I have my arm around her, and my palm on the flesh of her belly, but flesh so thick it’s more like the crust of the world than just skin draping bones, more like the thickness that separates the lips of God, which in the end, is like nothing else at all. She sleeps, and I don’t want her to wake up. I want to sleep, but only as far away as an eyelid, so that dreams won’t take me anywhere else.
8.
My grandfather stood below, shouting up at his mother. His cursing always was appalling. Inventive in its profanity. But he had an axe and wanted to use it. When it struck into the cold hard oak it turned his arms to jelly. He was forced to use the axe on the upper branches. In the end, he threw it up at the woman, and brought her down to the ground. She could have died instantly in the fall but she didn’t. He carried her back into the house, but doctors were far off and she died from an infection caused by her broken bones a week later. The purest agony. One that followed her into dreams, pulled her out, and showed her how many tools has torment, how many faces suffering. Minute to minute, fracturing any movement, breaking breath like glass. Pain that dulled only when she began to actually die, cursing him and his name every sleepless minute, and with her dying whisper, cursing him, again.
9.
It doesn’t matter what the crime was. You can only imagine something trivial. Something that couldn’t warrant the punishment no matter what happened, so you would go to the other extreme and imagine someone spilt coffee on his jacket, hung as it was on the back of a chair. Perhaps it was his only one, because he certainly didn’t have money to spare. Even money that couldn’t be spared, went as easily as the slick gloss of playing cards on the thumb. Which made it worse. Worse in winter holes in shoes and worse when tatters and threads let in all the cold and worse when girls did not complain. In any case, outside the warm little two room cottage, it’s winter. Water outside has crystallized, so when you walked across grass it would crackle beneath the soles. Every breath plumes out into vast clouds of steam, but only at the start. When the trembling comes perhaps breathing isn’t as warm, and then there’s not much steam in the breath at all. If we approach from the road, we would travel for about five minutes along a path to the cottage, between two unused fields. There are no lights anywhere but that which struggles out around the two shuttered windows. A few stars above revealed occasionally through a break in the clouds. The gibbous moon peeking down now and then as those black clouds move across. And if we continue, move over the low fence, made out of planks of wood mostly missing, we would come to the wooden door of the cottage, and find the light warmly glowing at its edges. On the doorstep the huddled bodies — stripped naked and thin to the bones — of his three girls. Rhonda, Millie and Muriel. They can hear him inside talking in that warm, enthusiastic way they loved. Talking to two of his friends. Two men the girls saw every week, who had children they talked to.
10.
Victor died of a cold. He was old enough that it didn’t seem absurd when we heard about it. I suppose we thought he was going to pull through. He’d always had chest problems—pleurisy, pneumonia, bronchitis and asthma. Years before my mother rushed out to Kaniva because it looked like he was going to die, and brought him back to a Melbourne hospital. In a photograph, he’s in bed, but half raised as if he’s saying something. He doesn’t care about the photographer. It’s not clear to whom he’s speaking though. To his right a friend sits quietly, looking at him. On the other side, but at the tucked in corner of the bed down at his feet, my mother, turned around to look at the photographer. Victor casts his voice between them, his left hand raised, but the bones in his exposed chest speak of both the illness and the tenacity. It’s my mother’s face that is interesting. She’s turned her head to the left, towards the photographer. In the face of his daughter, is fear, clearly, but it isn’t simply worried fear—her father close to death. It is a more familiar fear that had begun early, perhaps even before she began to form words for such a thing as fear. When Victor died, she may have cried, and her face might have found the entire range of grief expressions, but deeper than all those, there is the bleached white expression in the photograph.
11.
There’s the moment when it looks like the photo won’t burn. The boy stands within it — his mouth open, his eyes closed — as though he can feel the flames beyond the plastic border. He is screaming, naked, and there’s shame in the boy a few years older at the sight of his own penis in that photograph. It’s the nakedness that is the clearest cause for destruction. But it’s a densely packed reason, more like blood in his brain unable to cool or flow than thoughts or words. The decision made him, rather than the other way around. It wasn’t a mystery though, this photo, not like the hospital room when they were turned around looking at different people on the walls behind. There might have been a reason for the punishment, but not for who takes a photo like this one, or why.
12.
That oak still stands out there in Kaniva. It won’t reveal who planted it. It doesn’t appear to suggest that it’s a mystery, but that if it wasn’t always and ever where it stands, then time before it can’t matter, might as well never have happened. If a swing was hung from one of its limbs, the rope and tyre long gone, then only the groove in the branch where children swung means anything. Only that groove will tell you how many times a child swung, and how high some of them managed to go. That groove will tell us all we need to know. Why should words scratched on paper mean any more? If we walked around that oak, we would be overwhelmed by its silence, and walk away with our whispering thoughts trailing up into the air like puffs of smoke from a cigarette. But it is not nothing in its silence. It spells itself out in the roots that brawl through rocky ground and shove aside slabs of stone. Its sentences are written out in the air, and it may not be for a man to read, but he’d have to be blind not to see it was the great poem of love written to the sun. In its bark we may have carved our initials because we knew the names they referred to would one day be long forgotten, but here maybe would be a bit of memory. But then you might run, because if you start listening to trees you might find that they’ll tell you about how grooves have been cut into your own body despite flesh being so good at hiding these traces of children swinging through, screaming up into the branches, or names being carved where scars don’t ever reach. In the bones are sentences that spell out the names of those who planted trees and those who brought and brandished axes to wailing mothers, and that, in the blood, is another kind of poem, written for the soil, but not so simple as the sun, and not as easy as love.
13.
Victor was well known in the region as a man who taught children to read; that he put a passion into them for words and thought. He was widely known as a man of wisdom and was occasionally brought in to settle disputes between bickering neighbours. He had the shire build a monument to the Boer war, so that it wouldn’t easily be forgotten, what our ancestors have done.
