The Mango Tree , livre ebook

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111 pages

English

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Jamie watches the Queensland town beneath him from the sheltered branches of the mango tree. Through days of shimmering heat choked with red dust to days of rainstorms bringing mud to the mangroves, everything is as it should be - the sights and sounds and smells are as familiar to him as the everlasting childhood in which they appear. Then everything changes overnight when he falls in love. A tender, fumbling first love that flowed and ebbed just as suddenly. And in its wake came death, the sudden shocking death of someone he loved.

Ronald McKie "...is a true professional... a super word-handler... This is a novel which bears the mark of the craftsman who is master of the language." - from the report of judges of the Miles Franklin Award, 1974.

Sujets

Historical

Fiction

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Publié par	ETT Imprint
Date de parution	01 juin 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781922698001
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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This edition published by ETT Imprint 2021

First published in 1974 William Collins
Reprinted 1975, 1978, 1987,1988, 1989, 1999, 2003
First electronic edition ETT Imprint 2021

© 1991, 2021 Estate of Ronald McKie

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 as amended, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or communicated in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, whether in existence at the date of publication or yet to be invented without prior written permission. All inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-875892-05-1(pbk)
ISBN 978-1-922698-00-1 (ebk)

Designed by Hanna Gotlieb
Cover design by Tom Thompson

For Anne
CHAPTER 1
A black wind from across the mountains brought dust and grass seeds and a melancholy crying. It cuffed the long leaves of the mango tree, threw powdered cane trash against the windows. It spread dark stains on the river and the stains travelled with the tides until they were absorbed or taken to sea.
After three days the wind stopped and into the silence came another, sticky with salt and stinking of weed, but cool and soft from the southern marches of the Coral Sea, so that in the piccaninny daylight of that Christmas Eve, as the men left the scrub that clamped the town against the river and came down the long street, their flannels stained a darker grey, their boots fresh-blacked with dew, the morning was still and cloudless and splashed with birds.
Some of the drivers sat their carts and drays, legs free beside the shafts, while others walked against their sweating horses or beside their whispering loads. And one, a tall youth with copper hair and a face too long and old for his body, carried his axe across his shoulder.
Then the men began to sing, and the crude voices fell against the buildings and argued over the river, so that even the magpies stopped their squabbling and the swallows, peering from their brown mud nests on the Water Tower, took fright and wing. The men sang, as they had in earlier days when the bullock teams arrived from the south over tracks cut by wagon wheels. And from that time, when the town was a mining camp, singing had become a ritual, a memory of deliverance and rejoicing, on Christmas Eve.
Now the town stirred in its sleep, until windows squealed and faces were framed in opening doorways as the men came nearer. The dogs emerged first to howl and mill and frighten the horses. The children followed, in nightdresses and striped pyjamas, tangled hair and pigtails, and with the dogs they shrilled beside the wheels that kicked a muslin dust into the still air. Parents followed, flannelette gowns over night clothes and one or two of the very old in night caps, to wave and call, though most stayed within the modesty of half-opened windows and verandah shutters on which the dust lay like brown paste.
Then the sun, climbing at last above the high crater of the Mount that Cook had seen and Flinders had charted, fired the scarlet tips of the swaying loads, polished the marching faces, flickered on silver buckles, on revolving hubs, on the brasses swaying like orders broom the damp collars of the horses.
When the drays reached the old water trough, hollowed from an ironbark log, where the shops began, the singing stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. There the shopkeepers and their helpers waited. The grocers in white shirts with rolled sleeves, held up with rubber armless, and long white aprons clamped at the back with long pins tipped with brass hearts and anchors and stars; the butchers in their tartan woollen aprons and blue and white striped shirts with cut-off sleeves; the drapers in black suits and high collars, their coats off and starched cuffs turned back from their wrists. Even the barber, his whalebone comb, without which he would have felt undressed, above his right ear, and the undertaker, since business was slack this Christmas Eve, were there to decorate the town, part of the custom that traced back sixty years to when the gold petered out and the first German settlement was built and the first sugar planted.
As some of the draymen unloaded, others piled the freshcut gum-branches in damp heaps along the street where the shopkeepers, mindful of the traditional division of labour on this day, carried them to the footpaths. There they sorted and tied them, with yellow hemp twine, to the posts that supported the curving roofs protecting their customers and their windows from the sun. Soon the covered ways on either side of Boola Street were leafy tunnels and the antiseptic smell of bruised leaves and torn bark drifted into the shops and homes to cool and cleanse the town.
Only when the street was dressed in its Christmas greenery, as far down as the shops of Chinatown, and the men had stabled their horses, did the owners of the Royal and the Commercial, and the seedy Imperial where the canecutters from the south packed five to a room in the season, set a combined keg on a trestle in the centre of the street and serve free, but only to those who had cut and carried and tied, a glass of rum with a beer chaser as a breakfast of thanksgiving.
Magpies were squabbling with a butcher-bird in the silky oaks along River Street when Jamie went home. He cleaned his axe, brushing the edge with the stone as Scanlon had taught him, and propped it in a corner of the toolshed. Then he entered the sprawling white house, with its tall chimneys and verandahs on three sides, in gardens that lost themselves in the river.
As he showered and changed his clothes he could tell by the muted sounds – the far slam of the pan on the black range, the oven door kicked shut as the hot plates were taken out – that breakfast was almost ready. He gave a last stab to his hair with the military brushes his grandmother had given him on his last birthday and went along the dim hall to the dining room.
She was already seated. He kissed her on her witch’s head.
‘The Huns have a gun that’ll throw a shell thirty miles. Jackie Winn saw it in the paper.’
‘So I read.’ Dry as quinces. ‘But I won’t have war at the breakfast table.’ She looked over her spectacles. ‘You didn’t touch that gut rot?’
He shook his head. ‘It stinks.’
‘Good. You can have a glass of ale – only one mind you – before those heathens arrive.’
‘Oh, Gran ... I’ll be seventeen next year,’
‘That’s what concerns me. Mother, bless her departed soul, called it the devil’s year.’
He questioned with his eyes.
‘The year of temptation.’
He grinned. ‘You sound just like Preacher Jones. I bet you did some tempting when you were a girl.’
‘I daresay,’ she said. ‘At least I knew what the shearers had in mind.’
They were laughing as Pearl brought in the food.
The shops opened an hour earlier that one day of the year, and already the farmers were moving into town. From down river where the mangroves grew thirty feet above the mud, from upstream beyond the second rapids where the cattle hills began, from near Black Scrub where the flying foxes camped in millions, from farms along a coast of golden bays and tumbled basalt where the breadfruit trees were spiders on the headlands. And from further out, Tara and Emu Creek and Nut Hill where the tribes had gathered under truce not so long ago when the trees were bearing to share, in suspended enmity, nature’s gifts. And further still. From the muttering tea-tree swamps beyond Saxony where the black and white swans and green, duck and black duck and teal anchored at dusk among a mulch of frogs and rotting bark and weed, and the bronze-wings and cockatoos and white Torres pigeons, on their annual migration from New Guinea, made Chinese ideographs among the trees.
The heavy wagons, inherited from southern Germany, came in early. Their horse teams wore white sunhats, held on by their ears which fitted through slits in the stiff canvas. The hats, which were decorated for Christmas by the children with nasturtiums and mignonette and purple bougainvillaea, gave the horses demure expressions. Jamie thought they looked like shy girls at their first party.
The squat springless wagons, some blue, some red with flowers painted on them, had splayed sides and high wheels with spokes – thicker than a man’s arm – that churned the dust and shimmering air of summer, and under the tailboards ran the dogs, their tongues long pink straps almost touching the ground.
The wagons carried the scrubbed and starched farmers and their families, the men stifling in black off-the-peg suits and broad hats and greased boots, the women in long muslins and wide straws, the little girls with shining faces and pigtails yellow as the sea-snakes that bred in the rock pools along the coast.
The rains had come early and would return. The cutting and crushing was finished. The dust, brick red in some areas, chocolate in others, and as white and fine as flour in the Hungry Country to the south, stained the air over all the roads and tracks leading into town.
The farmers came mostly in the big wagons, but others were in drays and spring carts and Buckboards and glistening sulkies sporting high whips and polished lamps and oiled harness. They came on horseback wearing green saddle-twist trousers, white shirts and stained hats, on Indian motor cycles, on push bikes and even on foot. And through the unnatural crush, since on weekdays one could travel for miles in any direction without meeting a soul, came a rare Delage or a Talbot, their drivers in motoring coats, caps and goggles and wearing long gauntlets, their women passengers in dust coats and bells tied over their hats and under their chins, and all proudly superior as they passed the horse vehicles.
By noon, when the town band, sweating in blue serge and gold braid, their Guards caps bearing big bras