the narrow road to the deep north author

His mother swung Dorrigo up onto the kitchen table where the lamp light fell strongest and, avoiding Jackie Maguire’s strange gaze, lifted her son’s thumb into the light. He had been trying to wrest the rock free from an outcrop to build a fort for a game he was playing when another, larger rock dropped onto his thumb, causing a large and throbbing blood blister beneath the nail. Rock to gravel to dust to mud to rock and so the world goes, as his mother used to say when he demanded reasons or explanation as to how the world got to be this way or that.

In his old age Dorrigo Evans never knew if he had read this or had himself made it up. He just stared into the flames.Ī happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all. One man’s feeling is not always equal to all life is. Tom said nothing of the war, of the Germans, of the gas and the tanks and the trenches they had heard about. That night Tom came home they burnt the Kaiser on a bonfire.

He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings. When they feared the weakness it bespoke. And he would remember a time when people were ashamed of crying. Dorrigo Evans would live long enough to see all these changes. Feeling became fashionable and emotion became a theatre in which people were players who no longer knew who they were off the stage. Later, crying became simply affirmation of feeling, and feeling the only compass in life. Watching his brother, Dorrigo Evans had wondered what it was that would make a grown man cry. He had swung his kitbag onto the hot dust of the siding and abruptly burst into tears. He had seen a grown man cry only once before, a scene of astonishment when his brother Tom returned from the Great War in France and got off the train. He was nine, had come inside to have his mother look at a blood blister on his thumb, and had little else to compare it to. Its slowing rhythm reminded him of a rabbit’s hind legs thumping the ground as it is strangled by a snare, the only sound he had ever heard that was similar. Only his crying was fixed in Dorrigo Evans’ memory. Jackie Maguire was an old man, maybe forty, perhaps older, and he was trying to brush the tears away from his pockmarked face with the back of his hand. Jackie Maguire was sitting in the Evanses’ small dark kitchen, crying. Shadows came later in the form of a forearm rising up, its black outline leaping in the greasy light of a kerosene lantern. Over and over.īless you, his mother says as she holds him and lets him go. Like entering the sea and returning to the beach. Blinding light and him toddling back and forth, in and out of its transcendent welcome, into the arms of women. Why at the beginning of things is there always light? Dorrigo Evans’ earliest memories were of sun flooding a church hall in which he sat with his mother and grandmother.

The narrow road to the deep north author