“That time you almost died,” said Arthur.
They were struggling against the Barranugli Road.
“When you might have, but didn’t,” Arthur gulped.
“No! The point is: I didn’t, I didn’t!”
Waldo had perhaps shrieked. The two blue dogs sank their heads between their shoulders.
Waldo had shrunk inside his oilskin, which was so stiff it could have continued standing on its own.
“People die,” he said, “usually in one of two ways. They are either removed against their will, or their will removes them.”
“What about our father?”
Waldo did not want to think about that.
“That was certainly different,” he admitted. “In the past,” he stammered, “I think some people simply died.”
“Oh dear, this walk is pointless!” Arthur began to mutter. “Can’t you see? What are we doing? Can’t we turn?”
“Yes,” said Waldo. “It is pointless.”
So they turned, and the two old dogs were at once joyful. They tossed their sterns in the air, and cavorted a little. Their tongues lolled on their grinning teeth. One of the dogs farted, and turned to smell whether it was he.
The two brothers walking hand in hand back back up along the Barranugli Road did not pause to consider who was who. They took it for granted it had been decided for them at birth, and at least Waldo had begun to suspect it might not be possible for one of them to die without the other.
His father’s was the first death Waldo literally had to face — for that matter, the only one, as Mother was taken to the home and at the end he was able to avoid her death-mask. So the first remained the only occasion, which was probably why he had always been disinclined to remember. He was the first to discover, though not the first to announce, for the obvious reason that Waldo had always recoiled from explosions, and what is the announcement of death but the unpleasantest of all explosions?
It was early morning too, which made it worse, the light that gentler dandelion before the metal starts to clang. Arthur was down milking the cow. He had to milk, separate, and grab his breakfast before leaving for the store. Waldo by then was working at Sydney Municipal Library, and had decided on his type. He was the neat, the conscientious type, tie knotted rather small, the expanding arm-bands restraining the sleeves of his poplin shirt (white). Mostly, as on the morning, he would go outside, walk round the house neither fast nor slow once or twice, or into what they called the Orchard, before putting on his coat. His usually nondescript hair glittered with sunlight, and the brilliantine, of which the normally too synthetic scent was oddly convincing amongst the real smells of early morning. Reality is so often less convincing, unless involvement such as Waldo was at that moment experiencing translates it into a work of art. There were many sensations, many sights he felt he might transfer to a notebook if only they would grow more distinct. (Waldo by this period had written several articles, there was the fragment of a novel, and he had joined the Fellowship of Australian Writers.) He had already written in his notebook: Death is the last of the chemical actions, and although, like all great truths, it sounded familiar, he had no reason to believe it was the fruit of someone else’s mind.
Then, on that morning of dew and light, Waldo Brown found himself looking through the window, into the room in which their father kept his nights, dark still, with the reek of saltpetre from the papers the old man used to burn on account of the asthma he developed in the years preceding his retirement. George Brown, as the boys referred to him in fun, was stuck at the table where usually he sat out the darkness. His knees were most irregularly, not to say uglily, placed. He had laid his head on the table, where, it seemed, he had not been able to get it lower. So his outstretched hand was protesting, if not his other dangling one.
It would not at first trickle through Waldo Brown’s mind that their father was dead. It was too much an outrage against habit. But facts are facts. And Waldo Brown respected facts as much as he respected habit. Suddenly, that which would not trickle, gushed.
Immediately Waldo went away — he had to — deeper into the garden, where the prairie-grass pierced the serge trousers he had pressed that night under the mattress. He stood picking off a leaf or two, waiting for somebody else to handle an intolerable situation.
In the circumstances, as he stood picking at the quince leaves, it was a minor shock to notice the hairs on his man’s wrist, when he had shrunk up inside his man’s body. Without the reminder of his wrist the boy inside him might have remained in possession. And Miss Huxtable, of intellectual doubts, had asked him only that Tuesday his opinion of Sheila Kaye-Smith. He had given it, too, in sternest terms.
It made him look over his shoulder, wondering whether he would ever be accepted again, at the Library where he was a man strutting, or by his family, who must by now have known the worst. Or had realized and forgotten. That was the virtue of families, their willingness or determination to forget.
When the morning, that golden vacuum, was filled even quicker than he had expected.
Arthur, apparently, had come up from the milking, gone through the house to ask or tell something, then run through the hall in a slither of linoleum, and erupted onto the veranda. There he stood, in front of the still quivering fly-screen door, under the classical pediment which their father had demanded, and where Arthur himself, years ago, had conceived his first tragedy. Now this one was actual. The greasy old rag with which he washed the cow’s tits twitched where his fingers ended.
He was bellowing.
“Our father,” he bellowed, “our father is dead!” His eyes were swivelling, his crop of orange hair stared. “Waldo?” he cried, looking at his brother coming up the path, quickly, wirily, to share their grief.
Arthur’s annunciation, blared out in brass despair, had freed Waldo. They were wringing the grief out of each other on the wormy old veranda. If he knew of his defection Waldo believed his brother would never refer to it — Arthur was too dependent on him — but could he be sure of their mother? With Arthur supporting him, physically at least, Waldo wondered.
He heard her fumbling through the house, breaking it open, flinging back the frail doors, to arrive at the disaster of her life, forgetting that her marriage had been just this. He dreaded that she might burst too precipitately into that dark room and call for him to confirm that what had happened had truly happened.
But when she came, pushing against the rusty gauze, she was in possession of something they might not be able to grasp, and he resented that too. What had happened had no connexion, finally, with her children. What had happened had happened already many times, and only concerned her.
So their mother appeared to ignore them. Although she wore the rather frowsy dressing-gown, which bacon fat had spotted, and spilt porridge hardened on, she was clothed essentially in grief. She could still have been soothing his withered leg. Which she had accepted in the beginning out of pity. Which had now been taken from her by force. So her arms hung. So she went on down the steps, her red-roughened chest ending where the secrecy of white breast began.
Waldo followed her because she was technically their mother. Whereas their mother crossed Terminus Road because she was their father’s widow.
Mrs Poulter could have been expecting Mrs Brown. She came down quickly out of her house. Mrs Poulter was already a woman filling out, and prepared to pounce heavily on possible disaster.
Mrs Poulter said: “Oh dear, don’t tell me! If there is anything I can do!”
She had begun to whimper. If she did not embrace Mrs Brown it was because she was afraid to. Mrs Brown was too erect and cold.