It’s a mystery, he said after a while. The bigger the mystery, the more it means.
Jodie’s mother died of leukaemia when Jodie was nineteen. Jimmy Bigelow survived her for another twenty-eight years. He did not take himself seriously and came to believe the world was essentially comic. He enjoyed the company of others and found in his life—or in this way of looking at life—much at which he and others marvelled. There was a growing industry of memory all around him, yet he recalled less and less. Some jokes, some stories, the taste of a duck egg Darky Gardiner gave him, the hope. The goodness. He remembered when they went to bury little Wat Cooney. He remembered how Wat loved everyone; how he was always waiting at the cookhouse until the last man made it in, no matter how late, keeping some food for him, making sure, no matter how little there was, every man was fed something. Looking over his grave, no one had wanted to be the first to throw a sod. He did not remember that Wat Cooney had died during the march north to Three Pagoda Pass, nor any of the march’s attendant cruelties. For him, such things were not the truth of it.
His sons corrected his memories more and more. What the hell did they know? Apparently a lot more than him. Historians, journalists, documentary makers, even his own bloody family pointing out errors, inconsistencies, lapses, and straight-out contradictions in his varying accounts. Who was he meant to be? The Encyclopaedia bloody Britannica? He was there. That was all. When he played ‘Without a Song’ on his cassette player that too was a mystery, because for a moment he saw a man standing on a tree stump singing, and he felt all those things he otherwise didn’t feel; he understood all those things he otherwise didn’t understand. His words and memories were nothing. Everything was in him. Could they not see that? Could they not just let him be?
His mind slowly distilled his memory of the POW camps into something beautiful. It was as if he were squeezing out the humiliation of being a slave, drop by drop. First he forgot the horror of it all, later the violence done to them by the Japanese. In his old age he could honestly say he could recall no acts of violence. The things that might bring it back—books, documentaries, historians—he avoided. Then his memory of the sickness and the wretched deaths, the cholera and the beri-beri and the pellagra, that too went; even the mud went, and later so too the memory of the hunger. And finally one afternoon he realised he could remember none of his time as a POW at all. His mind was still good; he knew he had once been a POW as he knew he had once been a foetus. But of that experience nothing remained. What did was an irrevocable idea of human goodness, as undeniable as it was beautiful. At the age of ninety-four he was finally a free man.
Thereafter he took great pleasure in wind, in the sound of rain. He marvelled at the feeling of dawn on a hot day. He exalted in the smiles of strangers. He worked at habits and friendship, seeing in them the only alternative to what he felt the alternative was. He cultivated a flock of vivid green, blue and red rosella parrots that came to his yard for the food and water he laid out for them. Then came the wrens and the bullying honeyeaters, the gossiping firetails and the occasional scarlet robin, the bright blue wrens with their dun-coloured harems, the shimmering cranky fantail, the cuckoo shrikes and silvereyes and chirruping pardalotes. He would sometimes sit on a bench seat on his verandah for hours watching the birds feed, bathe, rest, preen and play. And in the mystery of their flight and beauty, in their inexplicable arrivals and departures, he felt he saw his life.
After he died at the old-age home, falling off the top of a flight of stairs from where he was feeding birds, Jodie found her father’s bugle in his wardrobe. It was old and filthy and badly dented. Instead of a proper cord there was a knotted piece of red rag. She sold it in a garage sale.
Sometimes his laugh would come back to her at an unexpected moment—in a supermarket aisle as she looked for dishwashing powder, as she browsed a celebrity magazine in a dentist’s waiting room. At such times she would remember him unable to smack her, hand trembling above her, and hear him saying— That’s all I know. That’s about all anyone needs to know.
And her once more asking, What does that music mean?
And the world around her, the supermarket aisle and its shelves, the dentist’s waiting room and its tub chairs, the garage sale and her father’s bric-a-brac on two trestle tables in front of her and a voice saying, You take five for it? And, as she passed it over, the battered bugle trembling with no answer.
Rightio, she thought she heard it say, as a stranger took hold of it. Or was it her? Rightio.
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