The Untold Read online

  AMY EINHORN BOOKS

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2012 by Courtney Collins

  First edition: Allen & Unwin 2012

  First American edition: Amy Einhorn Books 2014

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  “Amy Einhorn Books” and the “ae” logo are registered trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Random House Group Limited for permission to reprint lines from “Tonight I Can Write,” from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, published by Vintage Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collins, Courtney.

  [The Burial]

  The untold / Courtney Collins.—First American Edition.

  p. cm.

  Previously published by: Sydney : Allen & Unwin 2012, as The Burial.

  ISBN 978-0-698-13867-4

  1. Hickman, Elizabeth Jessie, b. 1890—Fiction. 2. Australia—History— 20th century—Fiction. 3. Biographical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.O4527B87 2014 2013036915

  813'.6—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my mother, with love

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  DISCLAIMER

  PRELUDE TO DEATH

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  PART V

  PART VI

  PART VII

  THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The truth of the heavens is the stars unyoked from their constellations and traversing it like escaped horses.

  —JEAN GIRAUDOUX, Sodom and Gomorrah

  This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

  —PABLO NERUDA, “Tonight I Can Write”

  How could we ever keep love a-burning day after day if it wasn’t that we, and they, surrounded it with magic tricks . . .

  —HARRY HOUDINI

  This is a work of fiction—inspired by art, music, literature and the landscape, as much as by the life and times

  of Jessie Hickman herself.

  PRELUDE TO DEATH

  WHO HASN’T HEARD of Harry Houdini? The Big Bamboozler. The Great Escapologist. The Loneliest Man in the World.

  IT IS 1910. Harry Houdini, the World’s Wonder, the Only and Original, is up to his armpits in mud. Intractable fingers of sea grass and kelp surge around him. With his eyes open, he can see movement and murky shadows.

  He knows that above him twenty thousand people—stevedores, clerks, women in hats—anticipate his death. They line Queens Bridge three deep. Past Flinders Street Station, all the way to Princes Bridge, they crane their necks and jostle for a view. Some have fallen over, tripped on hems and the clerk’s pointed shoe, to see him, the World’s Wonder, dive into the Yarra, handcuffed and wrapped in chains.

  Slapped by sea grass, shrinking from shadows, Houdini brings his wrists to his mouth. With his teeth he pulls out a pin, one from each handcuff. The cuffs fall free and sink farther down.

  Houdini grabs at the weeds around him to anchor himself. They are loose and rootless, like slack rope. It is as if the river has no base—just layers and layers of sediment floating upon one another.

  He tucks up his short legs and digs his knees into the sludge. His knee scrapes against some rock or reef and he reaches down to follow its seam. He runs his hand over a moss-covered thing, smooth becoming fibrous, until his fingers catch in the familiar loops of a chain. The chain is thick and he follows its links until his hands hit up against a leg iron. And though he is running out of breath and he has yet to free himself from the locks around his neck, his hands seize around the thing within the leg iron. It breaks off. An ankle? A foot? Certainly not rock.

  The thing is a thing of limbs.

  Houdini gags. He takes in water. The taste is rotten. The thing of limbs is so eaten away by fish that Houdini’s grasp has freed it. He is still clutching part of its brittle remains when the larger part of the body floats up and over him. It is the bluntest of shadows.

  Houdini beats into the sediment with his legs, stirring up a cloud of silt and other undiscovered things. He swims upwards at an angle, away from the cloud, away from the body, and reaches into his swimsuit for a key. He is just below the surface, veiled by murky water, when he finally frees himself from the locks around his neck. He breaks the surface and raises the locks above his head. Twenty thousand people cheer.

  His wet curls conceal his face from the crowd as he turns in the water, searching for the body, the bloated mass. The river reveals nothing but ripples moving unevenly out to sea.

  Houdini treads water, waiting for a boat. His chest aches. The rowers move too slowly, their oars striking and slicing the water in a rhythm that does not match the urgency he feels. He coughs and spits as they grow nearer. Finally, one of the rowers reaches down to him while the other balances the boat.

  You swallow the river, Mr. Houdini?

  Houdini does not answer. He grips the man’s arm and hauls himself up and into the boat.

  Houdini is silent as the two men row him back to shore. His eyes continue to search the surface of the water but there is no sign of the bloated body and he cannot think of how to explain it or who to tell.

  I

  If the dirt could speak, whose story would it tell? Would it favor the ones who have knelt upon it, whose fingers have split turning it over with their hands? Those who, in the evening, would collapse weeping and bleeding into it as if the dirt were their mother? Or would it favor those who seek to be far, far from it, like birds screeching tearless through the sky?

  This must be the longing of the dirt, for the ones who are suspended in flight.

  Down here I have come to know two things: birds fall down and dirt can wait. Eventually, teeth and skin and twists of bone will all be given up to it. And one day those who seek to be high up and far from it will find themselves planted like a gnarly root in its dark, tight soil. Just as I have.

  This must be the lesson of the dirt.

  MORNING OF MY BIRTH. My mother was digging. Soot-covered and bloody. If you could not see her, you would have surely smelt her in this dark. I was trussed to her in a torn-up sheet. Rain and wind scoured us from both sides, but she went on digging. Her heart was in my ear. I pushed my face into the fan of her ribs and tasted her. She tasted of rust and death.

  In the wind, in the s
quall, I became an encumbrance. She set me on the ground beside her horse. Cold on my back and wet, I could see my breath breathe out. Beside me, her horse was sinking into the mud. I watched him with one eye as he tried to recover his hooves. I knew if he trod on me he would surely flatten my head like a plate.

  Morning of my birth, there were no stars in the sky. My mother went on digging. A pile of dirt rose around her until it was just her arms, her shoulders, her hair, sweeping in and out of the dark while her horse coughed and whined above me.

  When she finally arched herself out of the hole in the ground she looked like the wrecked figurehead on a ship’s bow. Hopeful as I was, I thought we might take off again, although I knew there was no boat or raft to carry us, only Houdini, her spooked horse. And from where we had come, there was no returning.

  She stood above me, her hair willowy strips, the rain as heavy as stones. Finally, she stooped to pick me up and I felt her hand beneath my back. She brought me to her chest, kissed my muddied head. Again, I pushed my face into the bony hollow of her chest and breathed my mother in.

  MORNING OF MY BIRTH, my mother buried me in a hole that was two feet deep. Strong though she was, she was weak from my birth, and as she dug, the wind filled the hole with leaves and the rain collapsed it with mud so all that was left was a wet and spindly bed.

  When the sun inched awkwardly up she lowered me into the grave. Then, lying prone on the earth, she stroked my head and sang to me. I had never, in my short life, heard her sing. She sang to me until the song got caught in her throat. Even as she bawled and spluttered, her open hand covered my body like the warmest blanket.

  I had an instinct then to take her song and sing it back to her, and I opened my mouth wide to make a sound, but instead of air there was only fluid and as I gasped I felt my lungs fold in. In that first light of morning my body contorted and I saw my own fingers reaching up to her, desperate things.

  She held them and I felt them still and I felt them collapse. And then she said, Sh, sh, my darling. And then she slit my throat.

  I SHOULD NOT HAVE SEEN the sky turn pink or the day seep in. I should not have seen my mother’s pale arms sweep out and heap wet earth upon me or the screeching white birds fan out over her head.

  But I did.

  Soon it was light enough to see the birds stripping bark with their beaks and the morning was full of the sound of their screeching. My mother stood on my grave, packing down the dirt with her feet. She slid across the smooth river rocks and plunged her arms into the water. Blood, ash and dirt ran down as dark estuaries to her wrists. She turned her hands over in the water until they were clean, until she could see the loops and whorls of her skin magnified.

  She said, Could I cut off my own hands? And in saying that, she did not sound like my mother at all.

  The knife at her belt still had my blood on it. She set the blade at an angle to her wrist but, although she may have doubted it herself, it was not in my mother to cut off her hands or to kill herself. Her hands trembled with her own wish to live and she dropped the knife into the river. She went after it like she was going after a fish but she did not catch it. Instead, she brought up a lump of sand and scrubbed her palms until they were pink and raw. Then she held them up to the sun and said, Ghost hands, as the sun seemed to pass straight through them.

  My mother raised herself from the edge of the river, sloped over rocks, back to my grave. She sank down on all fours and smoothed over the dirt with her arms and the backs of her hands, erasing her footprints. Back and back she crawled, canceling her tracks and the tracks of her horse, scraping and roughing the earth until she hit water.

  She stood knee-deep in the river next to her horse, surveying the ground to be sure she had vanished all traces. To any other observer, they would have appeared as fixed and haunted as two swamped trees.

  But my mother was not one to linger.

  It was the thought of my father that impelled her then.

  What if he’s not dead? she said. But there was no one or nothing that could answer back except her own unease, and she pulled herself up onto her horse and turned it into the river. Then they pounded against the current, away from me, away from my grave.

  Death is not a simple exit.

  When my mother cut my throat she thought she was saving me from some protracted death. But in truth she would have done better to burn me down to ashes with my father than to plant me in the dirt. For it is in the dirt I discovered I have eyes to see and ears to hear, and I can see and hear beyond logical distance and beyond logical time. And with all of these peculiar senses the dirt has brought to life, I wonder if, in our wish to live, my mother and I may not be made of something the same. And then who is there to blame but nature?

  When my mother set me down in my grave, the dirt came through like some surrogate mother. It gave me rich feed—food and words and company. It kept me warm and it kept me safe. But still, my mother is my mother. And even with this most generous succor, all that the dirt could muster, I have clung to the simple idea of her returning.

  But over time, this simple need for her to return to me, to pick me up and hold me, has sprouted like the most unruly seed and I have found myself tormented and longing for all and everything around her.

  Forward and back I have tracked her.

  Morning of my birth, my mother tried to put me to sleep in the same way you might put to sleep a pup expelled from its own mother too soon. Any legged creature born two months premature out here did not stand a chance and although my mother suffered to think it, she believed that neither did I.

  Beneath the downy fur that covered me, she could see her pup turn blue. And despite her forcing air into my lungs with the explosions of her breath and then the prizing of her thumbs between my ribs as if she might untangle me from death herself, life did not spew forth. I was growing bluer than the sky.

  There’s a slow rattle in death and she’d heard it before, all kinds of creatures gurgling their way through their final agony. When it sounded from me, she could bear to hear it no more. Death, she thought, was a waiting river, signaling itself in the rising of that sound. She would not wait for its slow claim on me. She was my mother. She would deliver me to it herself.

  But right behind that twisted cave of my chest, it was her breath, her thumbs, her love that snagged me and I could not give in to this thing of death. Not yet. Not completely.

  THIS IS HOW WE DIFFER, my mother and I:

  I do not know death as a river. I know it as a magic hall of mirrors and within it there is a door and the door opens both ways.

  My mother pitched her horse against the river. After the rain the current was strong and the water was unknowable. She searched for the split tree she had taken as a marker but through her tiredness the trees all looked the same and then, in narrowing her eyes to see them better, they looked more and more like men than trees, all leaning into the river.

  She could not let them find her.

  The water was suddenly deep, deeper than she recalled it, and her heart rose inside her as Houdini’s hooves scraped and slipped against the river stones. She did not let go of his reins. She urged him on and squeezed her thighs against his sides and tilted her hips forward until at last, with a great surge, his hooves found land.

  They had crossed the river.

  There was more daylight than my mother wished for, and on this side of the bank their tracks were still visible. The rain had softened them, but they held their form.

  She stepped Houdini carefully over them, slow and pained, until the impressions of his hooves forward and back were so close it was impossible to tell which direction they had set off in first.

  The forest floor was a webbed mess of fallen branches and ferns and they galloped over it at full pelt. Their tracks would only matter again when she reached the boundary of Fitz’s land.

  SHE RODE OUT into Fitz’s clearing and an
gled Houdini along the fence line until they reached the first gate. He was shying and even if she had wanted him to, he would go no farther than the gate.

  She swung herself down and unbuckled the saddlebag. Pulling out Fitz’s boots, she drained them of water, then walked towards the upper gate barefoot. The long grass was a carpet flattened by rain. She walked past livestock which shifted around her in a silent stupor. From the beginning of the upper gate, there were no trees; Fitz had cleared them all.

  There was still smoke rising from the house. Only part of it had tumbled, only part of the roof collapsed. Half looked like it was sliding into a hole while the other half was perfectly intact.

  She slid her feet into Fitz’s boots, which were heavy—and even heavier wet. The leather against her toe was cracked, a monument to Fitz, to his kicking. Her skin was smarting within them and her bruised hip pained her as she walked. She was thinking that a bruise should not outlast a man. A boot may last, but the bruises he made should vanish with him.

  Please be dead, she said. And it was not the first time she had said it.

  She pressed her weight into the boots and stepped inside the house. The kettle was still sitting on the stove amid remnants of the chimney.

  She moved farther into the remains of the house and felt heat rising into her feet.

  Fitz? she yelled.

  She pulled up the hatch to the cellar. She could not remember closing it. The boards were creaking and parts of the house were still hissing with flame and damp as she leaned into the mouth of the cellar and searched out the form of him. There was not enough light to see but for small lit patches splattered against broken glass. She held on to the edge of the hatch.

  Fitz, you fucker, she called. Where are you?