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BRANTO WE DREAM
I wrote a poem called 'Branto' to make my father feel better. He was a Sydney detective who often said he felt like an ant, travelling backwards and forwards on the old red suburban trains from Town Hall and Central Station to Liverpool. He kept dwelling on his childhood in the New South Wales outback, where he could go barefoot in the sun that was young to him and be with his koori mates and his first dog. My mother said, 'all you write about is dogs, drunks and sunsets.' But there was something simple about sitting on the bonnet of an old bomb Holden, out under the big river gums that sucked up the desert sun, as much as they sucked up the desert rivers. Out here the miles upon miles of land dust was carried long distances by the wind that had no reason to stop. It was a wild dry wind flicked up locally like big black flies, by the wagging tails of camp and town dogs. As an adolescent I went to the bush often, was partial to a shot of Bundaberg rum, a bit of poker and on the weekend a good cone of hash, to make the big land smile.
'Branto I'll never see you again, but one day we'll meet I know, like an icy morning dew, like a red rose in the snow.' I tried to recreate my father's lost happiness and handed it to him on a piece of paper or in a little book as solid as a bible, the shape and size of a human heart. The poem might have had an effect on him or it might not have. He was often drunk and I don't know whether he was waiting for someone to rescue him from this existence or just from his pointless life in the western suburbs. He spoke to the birds while having a roll-ya-own on the backstep of the Neta red brick veneer in Rose Street in Liverpool. He might have said, 'it's so painful here, I'll just have a quick drink.' But he waited on the same train platforms for the next thirty years until he was so inebriated that he thought that all of Sydney had turned into a lonely cloud. He probably didn't read the poem, but he read the title 'Branto' and it got him all far away into his inner space again. There was somewhere inside him where he could still live and where the only thing that lay ahead of him was as big as a desert sky or faith.
Dad always said, 'I'll have to paint that one day.' He stored it down in the backyard shed. It was a print of a boy who had wandered off into the North American wilderness with bare feet and his imagination. He was sitting by himself along a grassy ridge eating a red skinned apple and absorbed in a boy's book. His dog was with him and the breeze was through his open shirt. In the sky above his head cowboys and Indians were frozen in time, endlessly engaged in some artist's impression of a midwest conflict. It was boy's stuff. Dad liked boy's stuff and when I asked him what movies he liked, he replied 'war movies and westerns with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne.' Mum said, 'Yaak!' preferring musicals and soppy love stories. She called dad, 'Gunna-Man.' Dad was always going to do it. He was gunna buy the tiny paint brushes, coloured inks and good quality art paper when he had time. He was gunna paint the boy in the picture onto it. He was gunna do a lot of things, most of which were stored down in the dusty back shed for safe-keeping. In the end he did none of it.
My father was day-dreaming in the backyard again. He was looking into a mirror of what he wanted his life to be. There were plenty of open-ended possibilities and adventures in that drawing. Apart from where the imagination is taken, through the pages of a book and those extreme territories of the mind, there was the vast blue sky and the tiny boy relaxing on the edge of a ridge. There were clouds so high up and free floating and the warm bright sun on his legs. It was a big wide dawn in North America. It was like the childhood in the morning of all our lives. It was a place where happy endings were still possible and where life had just begun. He might never have painted that boy, but he wanted to and that was the main thing. He carried it with him wherever he moved and I like to think that it kept him alive inside the house of his heart, even while the shadowy and violent world around him crept by all the doors and windows. It was my father who was going to paint the boy in the picture but never did and my father who first taught me to dream.
I never liked Martin Heggity when I met him. He looked ten times worse than Alfred Hitchock. He was a monster as big as a truck. It took two men to lift him off the bench seat out at the Collerina tennis club and three more to pull him out of a fibro wall that he had fallen into. All he did was guzzle food and grog with an appetite the size of Hell. Dad said, 'I don't talk to him. He roots children and kills birds.' Once there were all these pretty birds his neighbour had tamed. He was a gentle man who kept to himself the older he got. But children and animals loved him. One night 'Alfred' came over and cut all the bird's legs off. He left them sitting in the grass all night bleeding their ends out in a mixture of sinews and purple blood. The next day the yard stank of something worse than death by nature. It was the only thing in the world the old man had, then someone knew about it and that was the end of that. But Martin was wealthy and prone to arse-lickers and the town was small and owned by a few, so people kept the silence and the cruelty continued.
There is a small black and white photo of dad on the river bank out along the Culgoa, his young brown body and holding Branto by a short rope, and them both sharing that wild look that comes from weeks and months on end of river talk. It was the only time I saw my father with that hope, a special part inside himself that had also placed itself at the mercy of visitations. Martin made a pass at my father, and my father walked off the job at his property. Then he killed my father's dog. It was done in a real nasty way. It was done by someone who understands how fragile the life of a dog is and who takes advantage of it, their own small victory outshining everything they crush, in a rage brighter than midday. It made him weak and powerful at the same time. He knew just how to kill a dog. I asked dad, 'how did he do it?' My father had just given his car away and had nothing left. He said to me half drunk, 'he put a rope around his neck and tied him to the back of his car. Then he drove that car up and down the main street until Branto died.
Did Branto think of my father who was unable to rescue him, or did he think agony, the raw scrape of his bloody paws and skin burnt off like skidding rubber on bitumen. And then his wasted skinless body, perpetually turning through itself, like someone was squeezing the innards out of pig sausages and churning them into their hands. Did Branto die from strangulation or loss of blood or did the car tyres back over him a few more times snapping his blue spotted back like sticks, his broad chest now lifeless. Years after Branto was rolled and dragged into a pulp down the main street of Brewarrina, I wept for him whom I couldn't save and for my father who couldn't be saved from that pain. I stood looking down Rose Street late into the dusk for answers, or for something to call back Branto, so that he wouldn't have died in this way. The basketball and cricket bat collected dew in the buffalo grass. If I could have been there for Branto, my father's whole life would have been different. Meanwhile my own psyche was being murdered in segments.
It would have been long before my father knew that Branto died in this way and long before his dog had died at all. But Branto was dead and now we both knew. Nothing had answered any of us in a mystical sense, except for the gossip through the lips of a local drunk who knew what had happened. My father had never owned anything, but he'd loved the dog. It was the only thing in the world that he had, then someone knew about it and that was the end of that. What a strange place we are living in, that skin could be dragged along a road, until it was torn off and death arrived as a friend, offering peace when there was nothing left to give. When Branto stopped moving, it was as if part of the town had suddenly lost its breath. The acquaintence said, 'it was so quiet that you could have heard a gun barrel being cocked.' The main street of Brewarrina was like a smooth oval stone that had settled on the bottom of a slow brown river, where Branto had dived with my father many summers ago. It was like the surface settling into what it once was, but with the secret knowledge and with no sign of the dog.
What a strange place we are living in, that we could watch Martin struggle in the flames at Glandore many years later, his arse falling through the fibro wall of the huts like a demolition and that we could have him slowly burn, our hearts as empty as blackened unused chimneys, all summer recycling the birds and spiders. For when I thought of him burning.' I said, 'good, let him burn.' I knew that I had no soul for him left in me. I knew that he had won and the thing in the universe that had propelled him to drag Branto up and down the road in his car had also won, because in the same way that he had killed the dog, I would now have the fire kill him. When my father went quiet on the phone, I asked, 'when did you find out?' He said, 'Oh, a few years ago. His best mate told me. Martin was there. He just kept looking at me crying. He's dead now. The flames got him. He burnt in Hell.' There was no angel inside us. A long time ago there had been the gentle singing inside for angels and I believe my father and I had left our hearts out for them in complete trust, like one would feed the nectar-eating birds by planting native trees.
Now I stared at the leftover parts of me never visited. It was like looking out into a winter landscape from upstairs in a cold house. I hoped the angels would come into me but they didn't. They didn't come into my father's heart to feed him and they left Branto in a crumpled heap in the gutter in Brewarrina, even though he was loved by someone. Now there is no house for angels inside me. Or is it that the rooms have grown so vast that no angel has come the distance? We dream of other worlds, so that we live in two worlds. It's like when we close one eye we live in the day world and when we close the other we live in the night world. My father says he dreams in the day. 'I dream of flying all the time, but when I go too high it scares me. I dream of criminals chasing me. They want to murder me. But when they try and drag my legs into the underworld, my wings carry me away. I climb cliffs. I go right around the side and they are five miles down.' In this way he had became his own angel of his dreams, the most important thing in this world to someone.
Uncle Boy was quiet. He drew pictures all the time and got drunk. One day he fell over and bunged up his other leg and ended up in a wheelchair. He drank himself to death and his ulcer burst and killed him. I wonder what my uncle was really like? I never met him. I only know that we all dream on my dad's side. Dad said, 'after Boy fell out of the tree he wasn't the same again. He used to have nightmares all the time about four figure eights crushing him. He had those nightmares for years and nobody helped him. Now I fall asleep with a night light and dream all day with my eyes open.' When my father went to Dubbo hospital to visit Boy, he had just woken up without his leg. He said, 'get me a bottle of rum or fuck off.' So dad fucked off. He said, 'Boy was a quiet drunk during the daylight hours, but at night he went down to the public park having it off with all the gins. He crawled down the street on his hands and knees to get to them.' I said, 'I didn't know he drank gin.' Dad said, 'no, I mean aboriginal women.' I said, 'don't be racist.' He said, 'I'm not. That's just what they're called. Boy loved 'em all anyway. Ask all your cousins.'
I wanted a lover who would stroke and kiss my little toe if I broke it and not just say, 'gross' and change the subject. Is this asking for too much? Sometimes we get broken in the world and can't be ignored or overlooked. Mum used to say, 'he sat and picked his toenails dreaming of the bush.' But so what? When we are stuck for years in the factory, do we really have to concentrate on the machinery? Will it hurt us too much if we go beyond the present? If we move backwards into the past and forwards into the future? Mum cried over drowned trees and waterbirds on a still lake at Wellington in New South Wales. God only knows what was happening inside her. Dad was a genius at nocturnal aviation. He said, 'I flap my arms really hard like a duck and run and take off the ground, then once in the air I glide. I ask everybody to come and join me. I fly all over the fucking place.' I said, 'if I see you flying in one of my dreams, I'm gonna throw pies to make you laugh.' He said, 'if I see you in one of my fucking dreams I'm gonna get drunk.'
I said, 'do you get those ones where you think you're awake and you see spiders crawling on the pillow? I woke up standing in my own bedroom and I knew it was just a dream, because now it was dark, so I couldn't have seen the spiders!' He said, 'Uncle Coggy was frightened of spiders too. He said they were chasing him all the time.' I asked, 'is the whole fucking family crazy? Who else is having all these dreams?' But he didn't know. I said, 'it's not normal. I'm in and out of two worlds all the time. There is no rest. I can't sleep with anyone because I toss and turn and lash out at them in my sleep. If they touch me I can't go into the dream and I get very cranky.' Dad said, 'the other thing is that you sleep with your eyes open. You'd scare them half to death! Remember that time the wind blew through the screen in the caravan at Dubbo and straight into your eyes. You never even blinked and you were asleep. It was fucken weird. I waited for a mosquito to land on them. You can't protect your eyes when you're asleep. They're like clear pools of liquid glass. A mosquito would love that.'
Branto we dream. But now my dad has cancer and there is no going back. He dreamed of death and it was the biggest dream yet. When I found him wandering down the corridor at the hostel, I thought, that is not my father. It was a thin crippled man who walked as if life had dragged him back into it. 'Dad,' I called out and he turned around as if a church had spoken. I wasn't there for him as he was dying with the Minister who stood by his bed at the Dubbo hospital. He wouldn't let me go near him. Mum said, 'he didn't want you to see him like that.' When he turned around his eyes were burnt out. They were normally green, but they had turned bright and more distant as if a permanent dream now lived inside them. It was as if he was still burning long after the heat rays had stopped. 'They burnt out all my guts, bladder and bowel, but they think they've got it all now.' He talked of how many people had died this week. Later on, he shat himself for the first time in his life. The shit ran down his trouser legs and onto his ankle and shoe. That's the first time I've ever done that,' he said, 'I never even did it as a child.' My father walked towards me as if emerging from a dream, where everything was burnt. I waited on the edge like a servant of love. He walked through the apocalypse of himself in order to reach me.
'I live to fulfil my dreams.' I turned to Iain as flighty as a giant horse. 'If there's no such thing as a dream coming true, then what have I got to live for? My father is a dreamer. Am I just the same as him?' 'It's all right,' he placed his hand on my shoulder. He was the type of man who would be home gently making the pot of black tea, while you ravaged yourself trying to save the dream of a better world and came home ragged and thanked by no-one with the arse out of your trousers. 'My father lived for dreams because that's all he had to live for.' The land was formed through a dream and remains a dream, a distant place where people slow down and their minds wander off. My father's flying mind had been high above the water falling into valleys and the granite boulders and away down into the snaky brown rivers and through the open woody eucalypt forests and above the low rocky basalt ranges. But still he hadn't arrived at the deep blue sea. He woke from his flying dream where he didn't know whether he was laughing or crying, but he guessed it had been both. 'I had another dream just then,' he'd said, 'and it all seemed so real.' |
