Valley of Dying Stars
(A short story inspired by Herefordshire folklore and the old tradition of wassailing.)
Valley of Dying Stars
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
–T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
I
Quill stirs to the smell of freshly turned soil and the sulphuric reek of spent gunpowder. He has no sense of time, can only remember running flat-strap, rifle flopping around awkwardly in front of his chest, before colliding with something hidden by the dark. He wonders if it was a tree stump. He remembers that the landscape is studded with them, imagines their charcoaled wood as cloves pressed into the creamy fat of a Christmas ham.
Uncertain if he’s conscious, he scrapes a gritty crust from his eyes and perceives stars and constellations as bright and bonzer as any he’s seen in his 21 years. Quill isn’t shocked when Orion, the great hunter, assumes the form of his father and he watches intently as the Old Man draws his bow and shoots a flaming arrow high into the firmament. He tracks the arrow as it arcs across the sky, illuminating passing stars with light that is more red, more blue, yellow and green than he has ever seen before. Then, he sees the stars cascade in a celestial waterfall that showers the earth with colour, leaving a black and empty sky in its wake.
A distant thunderclap rouses Quill from his reverie. Then another. And another. He hoists his stocky frame to a sitting position and looks to the horizon, sees flashes of lightning not more than a mile or two away, but the sky, now relit with stars, confuses him. It can’t be a storm. Details begin to surface. Australian 2nd Division, 26th Battalion. Mouquet Farm. Pozières. Shit! The bloody thunder and lightning is shelling.
Quill cowers and slashes his gaze from side to side, seeking some kind of bearing in the landscape. His best guess is that he fell in No Man’s Land. Pain sears into his right shoulder. He fumbles about on his tunic, searching, and adjacent to the strap of his webbing he feels damp fabric and a little further up, below his collar bone, a crater in his flesh roughly the size of a shilling. It feels tacky with congealed blood. No tree. No collision. Shot.
II
The Red Cross nurse, uniformed in white and grey and red, hovers over Quill like a seagull eyeing off a beachgoer’s picnic. She takes Quill’s left wrist in her hands, faces his open palm toward the casualty tent’s calico roof and presses her first two fingers across the largest of Quill’s faint green veins.
“How are you feeling, corporal?”
Quill licks his lips. Swallows.
“Fit enough to bog into a few tins of Bully, nurse.”
The nurse grins. “The Poms found you half-alive in No Man’s Land, patched you up, evacuated you to the nearest Aid Post.” She sits Quill up, unbuttons his pyjama shirt and examines the wound on his shoulder. “You lost a lot of blood but the worry now is infection. So far, so good, by the look of it.” She buttons him back up. “I’ll organise some breakfast.”
Quill mimics one of his Cockney compatriots. “Bacon and eggs, if you please, miss.”
“Sadly, I can’t promise that, corporal, but I’m sure we can rustle up some porridge. And I’ll get you something for the pain.”
Quill, feeling an audacious rush, places a hand on her forearm and looks directly into her eyes, which are bluer and more beautiful than the glistening shallows at Gallipoli. “Thankyou,” he says. “Can I ask your name?”
The nurse blushes. “We’re not meant to fraternise,” she says, but leans in and whispers, “Katherine. I generally go by Kitty.”
“I’m Edward Quill. Everyone, including my own mum, just calls me Quill.”
Kitty covers her mouth to stifle a giggle, reminds him that his name is on a board at the foot of his bed. “Let’s see about that porridge.”
Quill, smitten but sore, wonders why he was spared when his mates, better, braver men than him, lay snuffed out in the mud at the bottom of a trench or dangling from a roll of barbed wire like foxes strung from a chook pen fence, a macabre warning to their kin. He feels an odd mix of guilt and good fortune, vowing that if he can get home in one piece, he’ll ask Kitty to a dance.
III
In the year following the Armistice, Quill is repatriated to Brisbane and discharged. He writes to Kitty, invites her to a dance. After a picnic spent watching putt-putt boats sail up and down the Brisbane River the pair become sweethearts and six months later, with Quill working as a carpenter building tin-and-timber Queenslanders and Kitty nursing at the Mater Hospital, they marry in a spring ceremony conducted by her father, a Baptist minister. To the question do you take Katherine? Quill retorts with “bloody oath I do.” His mother releases an audible gasp.
The couple honeymoon in a borrowed Noosa beach-shack. Quill pushes open a casement window, funnelling a tangy seabreeze into the tongue-and-groove lined bedroom. He lies naked on the bed beside Kitty, props himself on one elbow, and glides the index finger of his free hand down the gully of his bride’s spine and up the mound of her bum. He suggests that as newlyweds, they would be eligible to take up the government’s offer of a soldier settler block.
“There’s a scheme going at Stanthorpe, down near the border. Place called Pikedale. Blokes are growing apples, grapes, tomatoes. The brass have even extended the rail line to get fruit to market, set up a cannery for the seconds. I reckon the cold would do me good.”
Kitty rolls onto her side to face him, skin lustrous in the moonlight. “How could we afford it?”
“The government’s dishing out loans, 625 quid…two and half year’s wages. Plenty to buy a block, get some trees planted. Maybe enough left over for a house. ”
“I never imagined I’d be a farmer’s wife, Quill. What about my nursing?”
Quill speculates. “I’m sure there’d be a need for nurses, with all those diggers about. It could be beaut, Kitty, the making of us.”
Kitty offers him a half smile, then a frown. “How cold does it get down there?”
“Cold enough to snow every few years. Cold enough for goose pimples,” says Quill with a grin, wrapping an arm around Kitty’s back and kissing her on the neck until she flinches and squeals, the skin on her upper arm and bare thighs going tingly with delight.
IV
Quill and Kitty are allocated a block of twelve acres, carved from the large grazing property Pikedale Station. Their plot encompasses a shallow valley. The majority of the land is recently cleared of scrub, leaving a ragged border of stringybark trees and granite boulders on the periphery, and at the centre is a decades-old apple tree, a remnant of the original station orchard.
To Quill the landscape looks like it’s hard up for rations. It doesn’t take long for more experienced settlers to warn him that frost can settle on any night of the year and an entire crop can be lost to a single freeze. If you’re really unlucky, they say, a summer hailstorm can strip the foliage from your trees and mangle the ripening fruit. No place for a thriving fruit orchard, a former lieutenant assures him.
Never one to be deterred, Quill back-pockets his doubts and prepares the land for a spring planting. He spaces the tree sites generously, accounting for the diameter of mature canopies, and divides the plot into four quadrants with the old apple at their junction. He allocates one block for apples, another two for pears and stonefruit, and a fourth for tomatoes and other small crops, anticipating the need for an income until the trees reach bearing age.
On a blustery August night, weary after a day spent grafting apple scions to well rooted saplings, Quill sits pensively by the fireplace in the couple’s gappy tin hut.
“I’m not sure I should have bought you here, love. It’s a lot bloody tougher than what I imagined. Be hard to make a go of it.”
Kitty, wrapped in blanket, places a fresh chunk of wattle on the fire and sits on her husband’s lap. “I could have married a Major-General, even a surgeon, Edward Quill. But I chose you. You’re one lucky cobber.”
Quills watches the fire dance as it consumes new fuel. He is entranced and within minutes his consciousness wanders, flashing with images of men in his battalion streaming up ladders to go over the top, men pummelled by machine gun fire as they quake on the parapet. The stench of rat-infested trenches fills his nostrils and and his ears ring with the distorted booms of exploding shells. He imagines himself as a maimed corpse laying prone in the No Man’s Land mud, dozens of his countrymen screaming in agony around him.
V
During his recovery in France, Quill saw other servicemen develop the thousand yard stare, withdraw completely into some dark, interior place. He knew then that he teetered on the brink of an abyss, but guessed that the symptoms would be relieved upon leaving the battlefield and returning home. Now, with a patch of land and a wife to care for, he feels the shock of war seeping into his soul like creosote blackening a fence post.
A putrid rotten egg, innocuously dropped one morning in the chook house, is enough to push Quill over the edge. Determined to fight the darkness he redoubles his efforts on the farm, goes at the work like a kelpie, but at night he seeks comfort in the sweet oblivion offered by grog. Too skint to drink at the local hotel with his fellow ex-servicemen-cum-farmers, he starts making strong apple cider with fruit scrumped from the district’s more established orchards.
Quill seeths with quiet, bitter anger, quarrels with Kitty for the first time since their wedding.
“I can get you help, love,” she says with an earnestness that turns Quill’s stomach. “I know of a doctor in Brisbane who has treated men with shell shock. Most recover wonderfully well. There’s no need to turn sour.”
Quill’s face contorts into a snarl. “Piss off Kitty,” he hisses. “I’m not about to sour and I don’t need your bloody help. In fact, you know what you can do…stick your help fair up your pretty, little, arse.”
Kitty’s lips tighten. Quill has never spoken to her with such disregard. Her eyes glaze with tears. She swipes at her cheeks with the back of her wrist. “In that case, Edward Quill, you are to leave this house and you had best not return until you can speak to your loving wife with respect.”
Quill cackles and fobs her off, flops into his chair by the fire. Kitty thumps a closed fist onto the cottage’s makeshift dining table. “Get out! Now!”
Stung by her determination, Quill erupts from his chair and busts through the front door, makes for the refuge of his cider shed. In the shed’s gloom he pulls the cork on a half-fermented demijohn of scrumpy, lifts the spout to his lips and starts to down the crotchety liquid in big, determined gulps.
VI
With a gallon of cider in his guts, Quill staggers toward the old apple tree with a tankard in hand and drops on a patch of rough wallaby grass near its trunk. He finds the Southern Cross, tries to focus on the point where the two axes meet but his mind is scrambled. Drifting in and out of consciousness he has a vision of the cross suddenly ablaze, its stars falling to earth and settling among his young orchard trees. He watches the trees incinerate and imagines his dream of a happy life with Kitty smoulder on their grey and gutless soil.
Wails and groans rise from his innards and he claws fistfuls of dirt, hurling it in sandy puffs at the apple tree. Then, a voice.
“What would you presume to know of death, Edward Quill? I am bound to the pang of it each autumn, leaves fallen at my feet, limbs bare, haggard.”
Quill arcs his head, assuming Kitty is speaking to him, but when he sees no trace of his wife, or of anyone else in the vicinity, he decides the speaker is a ghost.
“What can you tell me of life? Can you speak of the spring, of rebirth, the eruption of blossom and swelling of fruit?
At the mention of fruit Quill is staggered to realise that the voice must be coming from the knobbly old apple tree. That, or the cider has bettered him.
“My kind is older and shrewder than you would believe. I make food from the sun, give air freely to your lungs, but you toil summer-long, Quill, stalked always by hunger. The land is not your servant. You are its husband.”
“I want nothing more than to be a good husband, to the land and to Kitty,” Quill says faithfully in reply, shocked that he’s speaking with a tree. “But I’m not sure how to escape the darkness.”
“Offer me a gift, and I will assist you in return,” says the apple tree.
“A gift? Like what? All I got, mate, is this half-empty tankard of cider.” Quill shuffles to the tree’s base and without a second thought, pours the remaining amber liquid around the base of the tree. He lifts his tankard in salute. “To your health, old apple tree!”
For a few minutes he hears nothing in reply, concludes that he’s as pissed as a vicar and lays down under the tree to sleep it off.
Before he is about to doze the tree speaks again. Quill listens with as much concentration as his addled mind can muster. “You must sink your roots deep, Quill, as I have. Look to the sun, not the stars, for they are already dead.”
Not a man to talk in riddles he scoffs, passes out, slumbers beneath the tree until woken by parrots squawking madly in the branches overhead. Famished, thirsty, Quill gets to his feet, tucks his soiled shirt into his trousers and with a throb pounding in his temples, begins walking the gravel track home to the cottage. He watches a fruity glow rise over the eastern ridge of the farm and brims with a new sense of resolve.
Beautiful, Justin 🍎 🌳 🍎 !
Evocative, heartbreaking and hopeful in turn. Thank you.