Thirst for Adventure

Chapter 20

At first she thought of him as just a boy who was helping her through her pain and illness. Later, as she silently watched him, she had decided that he was a farmboy, good at practicalities, good with his hands. But it was those same hands that brought her to the realisation that there was something more to him. The hands that had lifted her and supported her were firm and steady, but also gentle. There was a maturity about them that she had not expected from one who looked so young. As they began to talk she was surprised by the intelligence of his quiet comments, and she began to recognise the laughing liveliness in his eyes. When, much later, they made love, it was again his hands that she remembered afterwards. He had the hands of a ploughboy but he used them like an artist.

Leo had a perceptiveness that at times threw Adious into a confusion of thought and led her to reorganise large areas of her mind. He seemed to see patterns different from those other people saw. He jumped across constraints of language and thinking. One night, when he sliced some pumpkin for the evening meal, he carved each slice, with a few deft twists of his knife, into the shape of a butterfly and announced that the tea-time vegetable would be steamed butterflies. Where Adious saw a snail that threatened the vegetables, Leo saw its silver path and identified it as a mirror of the constellations in the sky. When frantic ants spilled from a burning log in the fireplace he would grab the log with a piece of sacking that he kept for the purpose and race outside with it. He hated to kill anything, or even to contribute to the death of anything, except the fish they needed for their own food supplies. In consequence there was soon a pile of half-burnt logs outside the door, and cobwebs in all the corners of the hut.

Leo was fascinated by the endless paradoxes that he saw around him. In particular he was interested in

the contradictions between apparent and real freedom. He watched the clouds, with their seemingly random movement through the heavens. Yet he knew they were really at the mercy of the wind. The river was defined and limited by its own banks, and the birds, whose effortless flights symbolised freedom, were on the end of an intangible cord that led to their nests and their mates and their young. For the first time Leo became fully aware of the paradox of his own situation and started to understand the nature of his parents’ commitment to their farm and to their son. There were days when he became giddy with homesickness, and on those days he would spend hours cradling Jessie in his arms and singing softly to her.

Leo began to write poems, especially on the cold winter evenings in front of the fire. He did not know how the urge to write them had come upon him, nor did he know whence the poems came. He was writing them before he really knew that it was happening. It was some weeks before he wondered how and when he had begun. He was reminded of the way in which he had gradually eased into puberty: one day he had realised that hair had been growing on his body for a while, but he could not remember when it had started. He wrote:

Skin like rain, but more.

Eyes like clouds, but more.

Hair like nightfall.

The rest is you.

After a dream, he wrote:

Rain slips

Across the glass

In endless downpour.

It drums against the door

When winter falls.

Birds beat

Their lonely way

Against the clouds, on course.

Towards an unknown source

When winter falls.

We sit

And laugh and talk,

Listen to the wind squalls.

The building creaks and calls

When winter falls.

He was aware that he did not always understand what he had written. And Adious, although she was stirred and moved by the poems, was too wise to ask him what they meant.

He wrote:

your yellow yearning fall across the sun

did you plummet, cold hard stone

or were we with you

so you were held?

flying not falling.

He wrote a love poem to Adious and gave it to her on a grey and lifeless night, when they were sick of each other and of the hard winter in the valley. She read it by the fire as the coals burned a second time in her glowing face:

Loving you is all I want to be,

There is, you see, no other world but this,

The one implanted lightly by your kiss.

Loving you is all I want to say.

No other way: let one be lost in two.

I’m happy just to live my life in you.

Loving you is how it all began,

My guardian. And that’s the mystery:

How ties that bound were ties that set me free.

All I want to be is loving you.

A world for two, where nothing else is known

And all the rest is left to sleep alone.

Chapter Nineteen

When Spring came Leo and Adious were fit but lean and hungry. Jessie was the plumpest of the three of them, a serene and dreamy baby who rarely cried but chortled and kicked her little legs at the daily pleasures of life in the valley. But her life there was due to be interrupted. Leo had decided to resume his journey, to make towards his parents’ home and bring his quest to a finish. Adious and Jessie were to travel with him as far as Conroy, a large town where Adious’ aunt lived, not far from Random. At a later date they would either come on and join Leo in Random, or he would pick them up and the three of them would return to the valley, to take up more permanent residence there.

Leo went away for two days to negotiate with neighbouring farmers for the care of the sheep and the harvesting of their crops and vegetables. Leo and Adious would take little with them, as the handcart was too slow and awkward to tow. So the preparation for the trip did not take long. In the event, though, it was several weeks before they actually left: the weather remained unstable and both were a little reluctant to leave their safe and secure hut for the perils of the road. Leo in particular was somewhat perplexed how he would explain a wife and child — which, for all practical purposes Adious and Jessie were — to his parents.

Before they left Adious made a last sad pilgrimage to Jared’s grave, laying on it the first wild rosebuds of the Spring. She stayed there some hours, and when she returned her mood was one of melancholy. Leo kept his distance and allowed her time to shed her sadness gradually.

The journey began. Leo stepped out with a fine vigour, sad to be leaving the valley, but excited to be on the road again, with fresh sights in the offing. It took him only a few moments to realise, however, that this was going to be a very different kind of walking. Despite the extra weight he carried he was too fast for Adious, who had Jessie in a pouch on her back. It took Leo several days to adjust, and even then there were times when he was so frustrated that he had to run ahead, or take an extravagant detour through a paddock.

The weather was good, but erratic, and they slept under bridges the first few nights because of threatening clouds. Jessie was fascinated by the whole exercise and gazed in speechless astonishment at each fresh sight they came upon. She was able to sit up comfortably now, and could even move around a little. It was one of Leo’ constant delights to be able to bring little oddities to her from the fields and forests — objects that she could play with or eat or both. He brought her flowers and coloured stones, feathers and insects. If he could have brought her a wisp of mist from a cloud, he would have. The two of them, the young man and the baby, were deeply in love with each other.

After three days’ walking they camped by a stream in a place so pleasant that they decided to stay there a full day. Adious was not used to doing so much walking and was developing blisters on both feet. They spent most of the day sleeping, eating blackberries and looking for birds’ eggs, which were there in abundance. Around mid-afternoon, Leo’ attention was caught by a deep silence that suddenly seemed to engulf the whole clearing. He looked across at where Jessie slept in the sun. Curled up snugly next to her, nestled into the warmth of her body, was a snake about as long as Leo was tall. It was black and thick and menacing even in its somnolence.

Leo’ heart began to race. Moisture broke out on his palms at the same time as it drained away from his mouth. He needed no time to assess the dilemma. Indeed he seemed never to have thought so coolly and clearly. If he approached the snake, or made any movement to startle it, it was likely to bite Jessie. Yet if he waited too long, Jessie would wake up, and would kick about or cry out, which would also invite an attack. And then there was the further complication of Adious who was somewhere upstream. She might come back at any moment and unwittingly provoke the snake.

For five long minutes Leo sat and sweated. Several times the baby stirred and moved. Several times the snake restlessly rearranged its coils. In that short time Leo came to appreciate another of the grim complexities of life: the fact that no-one can refuse to be involved. Not to act is as deliberate as the decision to act. A small bird flew suddenly out of a thicket of blackberries and the snake lifted its sleepy head and followed the flight of the bird with vague interest. This reaction gave Leo an idea. What if he could make enough of a disturbance to make the snake uneasy, but not enough to panic it? He thought he could hear Adious singing to herself in the distance, and the danger posed by her possible approach forced him to act quickly. He picked up a stone and threw it against some rocks on the other side of the stream. The clatter it made caused the snake to raise its head sharply. Leo waited a minute and threw another stone in about the same place. The snake stirred and uncoiled half of its length. Leo threw a third stone but it fell in grass and made no sound. Just then Adious called out, ‘Leo! Leo!’ The snake, for the first time, separated itself from the baby’s body. Leo threw another stone and the snake glided off a few feet. Leo leapt out of cover at it and the snake, startled, slithered quickly away and was gone, like black lightning in the grass.

The boy bent over and put his hands on his knees. He shook uncontrollably for a few seconds. But Jessie was awake now, and gurgling, and he could hear Adious coming towards their clearing. As so often, the ordinary and the commonplace filled the available space, and there was no time to dwell on the heroic. He picked up the baby and went to meet her mother.

Chapter Twenty

Their slow journey took them along the top of a steep escarpment, giving spectacular views for many miles. Under gigantic skies swept with vast clouds the two small specks moved steadily westwards. The weather had held, and they were all brown and healthy. Jessie’s lively eyes were testimony to their lifestyle. Water, soaking from the ground in numerous green crevices, was plentiful. In the distance the sun gleamed on lakes and dams scattered like mirrors across the countryside. A dreamy brown river, lined with trees, dawdled away from them in ever-widening bends.

It had been three days since they had seen any other people — two women on horses, riding hard, as though on an urgent errand. Leo and Adious had stood politely aside on the narrow track but had received neither acknowledgement nor thanks for their gesture.