Turning Back the Sun(31)

Rayner went into the waiting room, where Leszek”s last patient, a balloon-faced woman holding crutches, asked at once, “Did they have it, doctor?”

He controlled his irritation. “The disease has no connection with the natives. That”s all nonsense. We haven”t diagnosed a single case among them.”

All the same, his anxiety had deepened. The epidemic was spreading. Even a long-term prisoner in the town jail had developed it. And the water supply analysis from the state laboratories had supplied no clue.

He walked out into the street. The natives had gone barely fifty meters along the pavement, the father”s hand weighing on his daughter”s shoulder. Something about their backs as they moved—the weakened stoop of the man, the girl”s innocent slenderness—made them unbearably vulnerable. Rayner heard himself sigh with exasperation as he followed them. The girl was carrying a bag and a rolled-up quilt. He called out in a voice still harsh with annoyance, “If you settle near here I can keep an eye on you. There”s a piece of parkland just above the river.”

They turned and stared.

He touched the old man”s arm. “I”ll need to check on you during the next three weeks. If you stay above the river, you shouldn”t be disturbed. Have you got any food, any money?”

“We got all those things,” the man said. “We going upriver, but if you want maybe we stay here a little, eh. You show us the place.”

Rayner took them back along the street behind the clinic. Passersby stared in hostility, and he imagined how they would talk. Mutely he hated the old man for moving so slowly. Then he was ashamed at his own shame, and glowered back at the passersby, suppressing their stares.

In the scrubland between the clinic and his home grew a copse of bloodwood trees and acacia, concealed from the road and the river. But as he led the natives across it they were all flagrantly exposed, and he knew people must be watching.

Then the copse pulled a screen round them. The girl spread the quilt under a tree and took a wooden mixing bowl and some medicine grass out of the bag. Her father sat down, and seemed content. She knelt beside him. Rayner said, “If you start feeling worse, you get back to the clinic. I”ll come and see you some days, to check your blood.”

The man”s head turned slowly, levelly, viewing the copse. His far-focused eyes and flared nostrils seemed to be listening to it, Rayner thought, deciding on it. He said, “This okay, this place. We can stay.”

“You”ll stay three weeks?” Rayner crouched beside him.

“Well, maybe. But we need to go back. Back to some place where our people passing through. I thinking about my daughter. She needs marry.” The girl was soaking the medicine grass with a gourd of water. “But okay we stay here some.”

Rayner wondered where his people were, his clan, his vanished family. The natives seemed to splinter and coalesce mysteriously, almost at random. “Just don”t go into the middle of town too often. Things have got worse between the blacks and whites. A lot of rumors going about.”

“I seen the way people look.”

“And don”t camp by the river at night. The army patrols it.”

The old man took off his headband and laid it on the quilt, releasing his hair to circle him like a huge, disordered ruff. “I seen the army, three trucks out in the bush. Gangs of blackfellers too, got hunting spears in the old way. And some got guns.”

Rayner had heard of these groups: as many as fifteen or twenty men, armed as if for raiding. The soldiers never seemed to find them, but last week they had surprised a native breaking into a house on the outskirts, and had shot him dead. Most of the townspeople had shown open satisfaction at this, imagining that something had at last been done.

Back in the capital, Rayner remembered, people had talked about the sanctity of individual life. But here a human life was a negotiable unit. There were too many poor ones to pretend that they deeply mattered.

“These groups all over the bush,” the old man said. “Some there, some here. One party come to the ancestor place, where we was. Our people think that if you camp round the ancestors, you get strong.” “What are these groups doing?”

“They just living, mostly. But some afraid of the soldiers, and maybe some just bad in the head and want to kill whitefeller, and the drought make them silly. Yes, lots of fellers got spears now, just to help themselves, or to make revenge, see. Is everything changed. Everyone talking and getting scared.” But he spoke as if such things were already receding from him in his age and sickness, growing meaningless. “I reckon this country going back to the old times. I remember when white soldiers and blackfellers shooting all over the bush. But that now sixty years ago, when I a long way very little. I never think I see that again.”

Rayner glanced up at the bald sky. “Perhaps the rains will come.”

But the old man said, “I reckon the sky dried out now. Is too late for rains. We had one year like this when I was a boy. Water holes emptied, and dead cattle all over the bush. Some fellers went mad, started killing.” His breathing had grown heavy again. “I reckon we got that kind of year.”

Rayner stood up. The girl had already mulched the grass and was pouring its liquid back into the gourd. She did not seem to notice when he said goodbye, but her father gazed up at him with an expression which might have been gratitude, and lifted his hand in a half-salute. Looking back from the copse”s edge, Rayner saw them seated side by side as if on silent picnic, embalmed in the noon glare, motionless. Above them the sky and the bloodwood trees were drained of color. The two natives could have been at prayer. They reminded Rayner of the painted scarp of their own ancestors, whose faded figures seemed to inhabit some primitive Eden.