Peter Carey - Bliss

When Harry had done the first tree Daze gathered some rocks and came and stood behind him. He nodded his sharp, inquisitive face and offered Harry two rocks.

'Go on,' he said.

Harry began to shake his head, stepping backwards, colouring.

'Go on,' Daze said.

Harry nodded. This time he used the proper words, the formal words, as they are known. His face burned bright red, but his eyes were bright.

'You have grown large and powerful. I have to cut you. I know you have knowledge in you from what happens around you. I am sorry, but I need your strength and power. I will give you these stones, but I must cut you down. These stones and my thoughts will make sure another tree will take your place:

Thus, with their stones, they moved from tree to tree. A small wind came and stirred the upper branches. Clive arrived with the old Clydesdale. Paul Bees came rubbing sleep from his eyes and yawning. Margot arrived too, and then Honey Barbara who remained standing at a distance with her arms folded across her chest.

'Stand around the tree,' Daze suggested.

They joined hands around the tree and Daze said some of the words with Harry.

When it was time to chop the first tree they were all very quiet and it seemed to Harry that when he began to chop, the wood, famous for its hardness, was soft and yielding. Huge chips flew through the bush. (Later, when the logs had been snigged down to the site, Harry barked the logs and the flesh of the wood was yellow and slippery like a skinned animal.)

When the first tree fell, Daze walked back to where Honey Barbara was standing.

'Well... ' he said.

'Well what?' Honey Barbara said.

'That was really amazing.'

'I came to work,' Honey Barbara said, 'not to get involved in this Hippy mumbo-jumbo.'

And to show she meant business she took one end of the cross-cut saw that Margot had placed across the fallen tree. 'Come on, Margot,' she said, 'or did you only come for the mumbo-jumbo too.'

Honey Barbara worked hard all day. She did not talk to Harry once and every time he passed her, she looked the other way.

The man with the clenched whiskered face wore suit trousers and a suit jacket which could never, in even the most bizarre time, have been part of the same suit. Heavy work boots showed beneath the trousers and there was string where once there may have been proper black laces. Above the right-hand boot was a white sockless ankle that something, perhaps a bush rat, had gnawed at before passing on to something else. This man (Jerusalem John by name) was lying in the sunlight on Daze's open verandah. A cheap thriller was sticking out of his jacket pocket. A couple of flies laid their eggs on his gnawed ankle and he was, of course, perfectly dead.

It was still early enough in the day for one half of the valley to be in sunlight and the other in shadow, but up here on the ridge there was no shortage of sunshine. The trees, incorrectly known as wattles, glistened and two big king parrots swung around the branches of the one that grew over Daze's forever unfinished house, noisily eating the blossoms and dropping the hard wood casings on to the tin roof.

Honey Barbara, sitting with the others beside the rusting metal pipe which Daze had converted into a fireplace and boiler, did not need to be told what those small pinging noises on the roof were and, in her mind's eyes, she could see the red and green birds clearly against the bright blue sky. It had not been a good year for honey. Perhaps she might get a bit of a flow out of these wattles.

Daze was there, of course, fussing about washing cups. Paul Bees squatted on his big heels with his back to the fire and Crystal had moved a small three-legged child's stool to be close to him. She wore a long crushed-velvet dress on to which she had fastidiously stitched tiny shells. She wore wooden beads around her neck (the remnants of Paul's failed abacus) and the crystals from which she took her name were arranged, just two of them, in her jet-black hair.

Clive was there wearing, as usual, nothing but his boots. Richard was there, and Dani. Assorted children were sent outside occasionally where they could be seen squatting around the dead man. No meeting had been called. The gathering was prompted by the mysterious workings of the bush telegraph.

'What does he know about trees anyway?' Honey Barbara said to Daze. 'He doesn't know anything. You don't know him like I know him. He's only into saving his neck. He doesn't believe in anything.'

Daze didn't say anything, which irritated her even more.

'He knows good stories,' Paul Bees said, 'that's the point.'

'You call yourself an anarchist!' she said to her father. 'You people will follow anyone. You're all so bored that when someone new comes along you practically rape them. So the man's got nice stories. They're not his stories anyway. They're his father's. He even stole his stories.'

'I don't see that that matters,' Richard said.

'I think,' Dani said, 'that it's O.K., so long as he wants to tell a story.'

Honey Barbara groaned quietly.

Clive was leaning against a bushpole with his arms folded above his furry bear's belly. 'I don't see why we don't do what we did for little Billy.'

'What was that?' Crystal asked.

'We dug a fucking big hole: Clive said, and it was difficult not to believe that he was relishing it. 'We dug a fucking big hole and we buried the bugger.'

'We dig a hole for a person the same way we dig a hole for a shit bucket,' Paul said.

'Well, that's right, isn't it?' Clive said. 'It's the same. All goes back into the soil. I don't want any of you lot doing OMs over me.'

'I think we should do something better for Jerusalem John than we'd do for a bucket of shit,' Paul insisted.

'He's dead, mate,' Clive said. 'It won't worry him one way or the other.'

Jerusalem John was not really their responsibility at all. He had made it his business in life to be no one's responsibility. He was an old hermit, a loner, who lived at the bottom of the gully that ran between Bog Onion and the Ananda Marga. He shot wallabies and read thrillers and the only thing that flushed him out were bushfires where, suddenly, you would find him stumbling out of the smoke to stand beside you with his wet sack or his hoe. No one would have found him but Richard had heard his fox terrier howling.

'You should have left him in the hut,' Clive said, 'and we could have just burnt it all down. Nothing in the place worth saving. The tin's rotted.'

'I think we should get Harry to tell a story.'

'You people are full of shit,' Honey Barbara said, standing up and rubbing her bee-keeper's biceps angrily. 'You're going to let him get control of you. You elevate him into something he's not.'

'We're not elevating him into anything. He knows stories. He knows stories for trees…'

'He doesn't know shit about trees,' Honey Barbara said. 'You ask him to tell you the difference between a red stringy and a yellow, get him to show you a narrow-leaved ironbark, get him to tell you how old the buds on any of them are. He doesn't know. He can't do it.'

But she knew she had made too much noise, gone on too long, and the only effect her speech was having was to annoy everyone except Clive who looked like he agreed with her. She was being negative, uncool, ungenerous, and there was no doubt that she had made them decide to ask Harry Joy to tell the story for the burial of Jerusalem John.

The next five years should have been the richest and happiest period of Harry's life, not only in Hell, but in any life he could remember. He built his hut above the creek on high stumps of tallow wood. He learned how to use a saw and chisel, and hammer in a six-inch nail. He built a fireplace from rocks and suspended a wide verandah over the creek and inside this new house you could tell, the way his silk shirts had become cushions around the walls, that this dry-looking man still loved his comfort.