The Bell of the World by Gregory Day

Author:Gregory Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Lounge
Published: 2023-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

XI

IT WAS THE bell-less-ness that I noticed first, even before I noticed the half-burnt hawker’s cart. Was every petal horn and bauble of the spring, every tea-tree icing bloom and trackside hazel cloud listening out to it? This was how indeed it seemed to me as our spring cart trundled in – and how I gave thanks for the music. Life often comes like the tide, oftentimes hurling against the cliff of sense, hence our call for a peace, a truce, a silence which, even when Death winks at us from the stars, will never be. For transformation itself is in the nature of sound.

The hawker knows this, as he is always on the move. That motion-cry, the sound of the world’s wheels, and all its wares bumping and knocking about against gravity, the sound of life, he knows that, and plies his trade like the Bee, or if he doesn’t he must perish. You cannot return to the same district with the identical pots and pans, and yet there must always be the staples upon which our nourishment relies. And so it goes. Perpetually.

Uncle Ferny had not requested that Pascal chock his wheels at our homestead, only to call in, say hello to Red Whiskered Joe, and drop off what we had bought. The blown-glass funnel, the calico and cochineal. But stay it seems he had, even amidst the local chagrin at the lack of bells. Where a bullock dray’s wheels are stone-like spheres of iron-rimmed hardwood creaking in iron axles, the hawker’s wheels are spoked and full of air, as spritely, by comparison, as a spring lamb to a woolbound hogget. And now, from all we saw as we rippled over the old Coach Road bridge and passed through our gate, this lamb had had its throat cut. Or half cut, as it lay there charred, indeed half cooked, under the large mimosa tree by the house dam.

So even the sweet bell of the world is often marred by human pain. For this was a commercial chariot half dead, and nothing else was burnt around. The pasture was not ash but green and lush, the coins of the leaves of the trees all shone, these trees that name the Ngangahook Run, and thus, I thought, as I alighted from the box seat, they need their bloody bell to cancel all the evidence of Man’s catastrophe, in this case to redeem the violence that had befallen Pascal’s cart. Ring that bell to out-sound the violence, to out-peal stupidity, to out-ring what the locals here call the blues. The blues we make. Mistakes, mishaps, our errors, wrong steps. To retint these blues with the gold of an Ideal. When all along such gold lies all around.

Red Whiskered Joe came down the steps, a brown cotton kerchief around his neck for the sweat, which also pearled on his rufus chest-hair where the top buttons of his shirt were undone. He’d been ploughing the furrows, forking hay, chopping wood, butchering a Wiltshire

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.