The Narrow Road to the Deep North(130)
Dorrigo Evans looked downwards, and though he could see nothing, it reminded him that few had that one key to survival, boots. Holding a lantern at ankle height, he walked slowly along the first row, looking at the bare feet, some badly infected, some swollen with beri-beri, some with stinking ulcers so large and vile that they were like angry craters eating almost to the bone.
He stopped at one: a severe, untreated ulcer that had left a thin strip of intact skin down the outer side of the calf, the rest of the leg being a huge ulcer from which poured offensive, greyish pus. Sloughing tendons and fasciae were exposed, the muscles were tunnelled and separated by gaping sinuses, between which he could glimpse a raw tibial bone that looked as if a dog had gnawed it. The bone, too, was starting to rot and break off into flakes. He lifted his gaze to see a pale, wasted child. No, Chum Fahey could not go.
Report to hospital when parade has ended, said Dorrigo Evans.
The next man was Harry Dowling. Dorrigo had successfully removed his appendix three months ago, a triumph in such circumstances of which he was proud. And now Dowling seemed in not the worst shape. He had shoes and his ulcers were only mild. Dorrigo looked up at him, put his hand on his shoulder.
Harry, he said, as gently as he could, as though waking a child.
I am become a carrion monster.
The next in line was Ray Hale, whom they had managed to bring through cholera. He too Dorrigo touched on the shoulder.
Ray, he said.
Thou art come unto a feast of death.
Ray, he said.
Dread Charon, frightful and foul.
And so Dorrigo continued on, up and down the lines of those he had tried to save and now had to pick, touching, naming, condemning those men he thought might best cope, the men who had the best chance of not dying, who would most likely die nevertheless.
At its end, Dorrigo Evans stepped back and dropped his head in shame. He thought of Jack Rainbow, whom he had made to suffer so, Darky Gardiner, whose prolonged death he could only watch. And now these hundred men.
And when he looked up, there stood around him a circle of the men he had condemned. He expected the men to curse him, to turn away and revile him, for everyone understood it was to be a death march. Jimmy Bigelow stepped forward.
Look after yourself, Colonel, he said, and put out his hand to shake Dorrigo’s. Thanks for everything.
You too, Jimmy, Dorrigo Evans said.
And, one by one, the rest of the hundred men shook his hand and thanked him.
When it was done, he walked off into the jungle at the side of the parade ground and wept.
17
WE’RE NOT SURE what he knows, a nurse said. She had seen his dog-black eyes glistening with a life of their own under the neon tubes of the ward. I think he hears me, though, she said. I do.
Broken as he was, he could recognise that it was a fine room he had been given, looking out on giant fig trees with their flying roots and lush greenery. But he did not feel at home. It did not feel his place. It was not the island of his birth. The birds cried differently at dawn, harsh, happy calls of green parrots and gang-gang parrots. Not the soft, smaller, more complex trilling of birdsong, of the wrens and honeyeaters and silvereyes of his island home, the fetching return call of the jo-witty, all the birds he now wished to fly and sing with. It was not a road rolling from the cup of a woman’s waist over a pewter sea to a rising moon.
For my purpose holds, he whispered—
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
What’s he saying? asked one nurse.
He’s raving, said a second. Better get a doctor. It’s the morphine or the end, one or the other, or both. Some say nothing, some give up on breathing, some rave.
As politicians, journalists and shock jocks competed in their ever wilder panegyrics of a man they had never understood, he was dreaming of just one day: of Darky Gardiner and Jack Rainbow, of Tiny Middleton. Mick Green. Jackie Mirorski and Gyppo Nolan. Little Lenny going home to Mum in the Mallee. Of one hundred men shaking his hand. One thousand others, names recalled, names forgotten, a sea of faces. Amie, amante, amour.
Life piled on life, he mumbled, every word now a revelation, as if it had been written for him, a poem his life and his life a poem.
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
—something more . . . something more . . . he had lost some lines somewhere and he no longer knew what the poem was or who had written it, so totally now was the poem him. This grey spirit, he thought despondently, or was he remembering?—yes, that was it—
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
And he felt shame and he felt loss and he felt his life had only ever been shame and loss, it was as though the light was now going, his mother was calling out, Boy! Boy! But he could not find her, he was returning to hell and it was a hell he would never escape.