Coral Hull: Prose: I Will Never Live In Mosman: The Scarecrow

I MACKENZIE KNIGHT I A CHILD OF WRATH A GOD OF LOVE I FALLEN ANGELS EXPOSED I

CORAL HULL: I WILL NEVER LIVE IN MOSMAN
THE SCARECROW

He was the loneliest man the property had ever seen. The clouds raced away from him when he tried to follow them. Even the trees could see themselves slowly growing their centuries in his eyes. During the summer months that moved through the surrounding tablelands like slow brown serpents, he was partial to extended daydreams on his front porch. He sat there, just like his grandfather had, but he was even more lonely than that. He was silver with rest, childless. On his more active days, he was determined to make a go of the farm that never flourished. Then he is on his tractor clearing the paddocks of the great thunder-headed rocks. Giant natives that bury themselves into the earth amongst the stringybarks and casuarinas. They are rocks that were born inside the earth and won't budge for an old farm. These rocks have kept his family busy for generations. Some days they speak amongst themselves, amazed by their own resilience. The smallest rocks are never found, until the paddock is washed thin by rain, leaving behind their bald heads. In her later and more restful years, his mother had hand picked the smaller rocks from the frosty paddocks, gently loading them into the back of a trailer, as though they were as placid as baby rabbits. Yet weeks later the families of rocks would be back, trembling up through the terrain like big hard weeds.

The scarecrow mannikin had been erected before the blue mountain backdrop, but no crops ever planted. Her gaze had sapped the place of its energy and appeared to invite rather than repel many birds, who sought the multitudes of summer insects in the failed orchard. The scarecrow was the beginning of his masterplan, then did not continue beyond a daydream. In her own mind, the scarecrow was a prisoner to a life without purpose, yet she desired to protect the establishment. He reassured her that she should relax until the real crops were planted. But he could not create a stillness inside her heart of rustling straw. For even a scarecrow is not without her own psyche that wanders. She had been having the bad dreams all night, and was pleased when the dawn came and the frosty paddocks had finally started to thaw. She was the protector of nothing. The black crows haunted her shoulders, picked at her hair, wished that her eyes were real. She wished that they were real, even if they were as dead as her heart and lived on in the hungry intentions of the black birds, even if only for a moment. Then the thought faded and she forgot about her eyes altogether. She forgot about the grief that could have been cried out, had she been a real woman with consciousness. It was all rustle and nothingness inside her hollow head of straw. Summer was the long moving hours of the fruit fly and her main time of business. During autumn she saw all the sky cry and the very light lonely grey rain that lived only for a moment and settled into the valley. It lived as it fell, like thousands of tears. Do you care about me? 'Do you think I do?' Yes. Bitch. Yes.

If you turned the scarecrow's porcelain head into your palms and looked into her glassy eyes, you could see where the people had lived on this land 20,000 years ago. She was absorbing history in her dry and dusty overalls. She was ready for scrying. The heavy stick that connected her head to her torso was growing up out of the dry rocky ground like a flower that never bent. Her determination to be at one with the sky was unwavering, like a ladder planted into the ground and ever ascending. This was her perfect stance, even when the wind blew hard across the backs of the brown horses and when the sheep wandered over to the dam in the home paddock on a neighbouring farm and even when the frost settled its overnight sheet in the wooden desire of her crotch. He meanwhile was speaking of his limitations, without the appropriate actions to follow up on the words. This time he said that he would offer her a landscape of love. 'I can offer you the gently undulating hills, not the precipices, the slow drizzle, rather than the storms.' But she only looked past him, mute and intent on saving those rotten summer crops, her ragged blazing shoulder uncried upon by a man like this one, for what appeared to be many farmyard centuries. Her self preservation was essential to who she was now, her odd and frayed complexity. Even on a day without birds she was as watchful as the dawn. There were also the big gales, rabbits in the cottage garden and many rushing foxes after dark.

She was frightened of red foxes, an over-protector of a rotten paddock. Some days it was as if her very soul had gone to seed. He is calm and tries to get close to her. She doesn't let him. She knows that he leaves her to stand out there for days at a time, the crows on her shoulders without shade, her glass eyes staring straight through them until the birds ark, ark away to another range, flying all that way to the highest trees, to tell the other crows of maps and territories with that intelligence known only to crows. Aaaarrrrk, she creaked. 'It's only the wind,' he reassured her. 'There are no foxes in it.' Yet often it sounds like many foxes brushing past her narrow wooden legs, a determined and unrelenting force, where she could not bend down to attend to them. As far as she could tell she was giving birth to the farm's foxes in the dark. Always the foxes just out of her vision. Foxes intent upon the chickens. And perhaps even foxes being perpetually born from within her own insides, without her consent or understanding. Meanwhile, there were many deaths out on the farm, slipping through his fingers. He was growing tired of counting the disappearances. She understood the daily worry of the bitch. Every day the sun disappeared behind the tablelands and her eyes grew dark and sorrowful for them both. Having no concept of time, she didn't seem to remember that the sun had set many times before. All she saw was the lengthening shadows, everything darkening always, the sound of rabbits and born-again foxes. 'The sun will be back in the morning,' he reassured her. But she believed no one, until she felt it in her own heart.

Each day a stranger approached and passed her. It was always him, but she didn't remember anything. The night had washed away her past. She said, bitch. There he was, the bitch moving by her, on his way to tend the cows. He was tired today and it was as if his head hung a little lower as she said the word. Bitch. The area where the scarecrow stood always seemed to drain him. Just like his ancestors before him, his hands would grow hard and calloused, his spine bent with picking and lifting, his fair-skinned face fertilised with cancer. The landscape was not particularly kind to a moving physical body. It was always trying to capture it in a net of stillness. So that once very still it would be willing to give up its nutrients, and the place would readily absorb it. The farm wasted nothing. He would have to think of leveling out the uneven ground, removing the rocks that made the paths unstable, getting rid of the dead orchards and putting the scarecrow in the shed to keep her out of the winter weather. She picked up on this thought from the same stranger who had been there the day before. Bitch. She hollered. Bitch. Somewhere from behind her own entrapment she recognised that he was shrinking and concerned. Yet the only connection she had was through the word, that he had called the cows five minutes ago, before even that memory was lost. Now she called out after him as he called out to the cows every day. After sunset he would return to the stone cottage that worried its drafty openings and cracks with brown house mice, and the next morning on the way to the black cows, he would approach her as a stranger again.

She couldn't seem to get beyond her own straw and porcelain. On days without him she sought the distant tablelands where the black birds went. Her mind went forth and her heart stayed back, drowning in the grain that filled her body. She was fearful of the day when the grain would become sand and she would drown in a landscape as big as a desert. She pictured all the stumpy trees and bearded dragons disappearing down that same hole. As if the landscape was an endless stretch of dry cotton tablecloth and all the tree glasses and all the lake plates being sucked into a gigantic void that had captured many Australian farms. What would become of her fragile crafted face? Her eyes that never turned upwards for the birds, their claws, shit and inquiring beaks. Her eyes were glass. They would die the slow death of glass in sand. She was fearful that without his rebuilding of her being in the shed each spring, her eyes would be the only thing left and then she would think through them, like erosion thinks through the ridges and gullies. It would be a slow and endless pouring of herself as unstable as the movement of mud. Who owns the rain? The moving river on the earth does until the sky takes it back into itself. The rainy weather was handed back and forth between the sheets of thunder and lightning, like a big crowd of strangers that passed around her uncried tears.

He tried to reassure her but it was useless. Each time the sun sank it was as though she transformed in the dark. And the next day she brought with her the mood of cold granite boulders and her mind was filled with the garble of flying foxes, that depleted her energy and all her mental resources. He thought of shaking her again, but the last time his own hardness had been the only response to her stiff movements. She was a lot taller than him and although he had constructed her, she was highly ungrateful. She seemed to only rob him of energy. This was on his bad days. Most days he stood behind her overalls empty of buttocks and gently viewed his farm over her ragged shoulders, in order to see the landscape that he hoped she could see and explain it to her. He also wanted to tell her more about where they lived together. But each day he had to repeat the same phrases after the night had ruined her thoughts again. So while the lesson became longer, it lacked development. She seemed to understand with her silence, but it invariably weakened him. If he had wanted to collect and store love into her, it would have been like gathering all his stones into a basket with holes in the bottom of it. The exchange would merely involve an endless falling of sensation, an unhealthy shift in what had already been established and his precious gemstone emotions speeding off through her to nowhere.

On one very bad day he fell asleep on his front porch and dreamed of himself inflicting harm and violence. During this dream he went to kill her with an axe. He couldn't do it. He imagines knowing her mother, knocking her down, building a bonfire. But it would be like murder out here and he wished he had never made her live again this spring. He is almost the perfect gentleman but he suffers from frustration on occasion. Any thinking dying farm is bound to test the courage and can seem to grow stronger as you become weaker. The farm will absorb you if you don't remain on top of it. He agreed that he was in the wrong and that for the scarecrow mannikin there was a lot of making up to do on this occasion. Sometimes he just got tired. For now they are perfectly stuck with each other and lately she had started to cough and he heard her coughing all night out there in the big frosts. He finally left to go into Kandos, in order to gain a new perspective on the surrounding district. It was good to see that a world existed beyond and separate from the farm and that life went beyond all he knew and dreamt about. He would remove the plastic roses from his mother's plot in Mudgee and replace them with something from a local field. He might even drop in at the local for a game of darts and a few shandies on the way home. All week he had been moving rocks from one part of the paddock to another and it appears the land had overcome him.

The paddock is the hardest thing in the world to control. The farm is big paddocks and long days, or as long as the sun will stay still, but it only continues and the bands of light control the work areas and bring the peace of rest in the early dusk. If it wasn't for the weather and the sunset, he might not know when to slow down and watch the paddocks from the great distance of his mind on the porch. All night, the rabbits working in the English cottage garden around the house, and the foxes brushing past her pole, and the flying foxes, garbled messages inside her head, so that she thought that the whole land was talking when it wasn't, and most of all the weeds working themselves into the soil, digging deeper into where they lived as much as him and pushing their heads up like children, bursting into the frozen air and knowing the sun would soon shine on their tender crowns and buds. The weeds knew more than the scarecrow mannikin and on some days, they knew more than even her. He was fed up. The constant work of being tied to the land, the weeds up overnight. She hadn't known what hit her when the wind came up and blew her down in the early hours of the morning. Her body wasn't really alive. It was all inside her head. It was the same head that had melted in the flames of his recent daydream and where she had fallen the foxes had been and she had worn the same overalls she was born in and where she had sunk into the soil there was the new sensation of worms and beetles, that stretched quietly away from her closed mouth and never returned. Her eyes were mud, in the heart of a stranger, who tended the cows. He didn't find her until later that day. That afternoon the animals stayed away from the area, the orchards grew knotted and gnarly, but overall the property seemed to take care of itself.

    

This website is part of my personal testimony that has been guided by The Holy Spirit and written in Jesus' name.

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