Sooner or Later or Never Never

by Gary Jennings

Among the thousands of submissions I read for F&SF over the years, the rarest bird was the genuinely funny, laugh-out-loud story. Which is why the story you are about to read has stuck in my mind. There must to something to that often-invoked quote: “Death is easy; comedy is hard.”
Gary Jennings was a bestselling novelist known for his well-researched historical novels about the Aztecs (Azte, 1980, Aztec Autum, 1998), Marco Polo (The Journeye, 1984), and the circus (Spangl , 1987).
In the 1970s Gary wrote a series of stories for F&SF about Crispin Mobey, a zealous missionary whose enthusiasm is matched only by his ineptitude. I once described him as “the Inspector Clouseau of missionaries,” which delighted Gary. The stories were collected in a book, The Lively Lives of Crispin Mobe, published under the pseudonym Gabriel Quyth.
“Sooner or Later or Never Never” was the first and most hilarious story in this series, in which Mobey journeys to the outback of Australia with a truckload of beads and a cockeyed plan to bring water to the desert.
—Ed Ferman

Copyright © 1972 by Gary Jennings

Reprinted with permission of McIntosh & Otis, Inc.

“The Anula tribe of Northern Australia associate the dollar-bird with rain, and call it the rain-bird. A man who has the bird for his totem can make rain at a certain pool. He catches a snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under water for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the side of the creek. Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake. After that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow; sooner or later the rain will fall.”

—Sir James Frazer

The Golden Bough

—

The Rt. Rev. Orville Dismey

Dean of Missionary Vocations

Southern Primitive Protestant College

Grobian, Virginia

—

Most Reverend Sir:

It has been quite a long time since we parted, but the attached Frazer quotation should help you to remember me—Crispin Mobey, your erstwhile student at dear old SoPrim. Since it occurred to me that you may have heard only a sketchy account of my activities in Australia, this letter will constitute my full report.

For instance, I should like to refute anything you may have heard from the Primitive Protestant Pacific Synod about my mission to the Anula tribe having been less than an unqualified success. If I helped a little to wean the Anulas away from heathen sorceries—and I did—I feel I have brought them that much closer to the True Word, and my mission was worth its cost.

It was also, for me, the realization of a lifelong dream. Even as a boy in Dreer, Virginia, I saw myself as a future missionary to the backward and unenlightened corners of the world, and comported myself in keeping with that vision. Among the rougher hewn young men of Dreer I often heard myself referred to, in a sort of awe, as “that Christly young Mobey.” In all humility, I deplored being set on such a pedestal.

But it wasn’t until I entered the hallowed halls of Southern Primitive College that my previously vague aspirations found their focus. It was during my senior year at dear old SoPrim that I came upon Sir James Frazer’s twelve-volume anthropological compendium, The Golden Bough, with its account of the poor deluded Anula tribe. I investigated, and discovered to my joy that there still was such a tribe in Australia, that it was just as pitiably devoid of Salvation as it had been when Frazer wrote about it, and that no Primitive Protestant mission had ever been sent to minister to these poor unsaved souls. Unquestionably (I said to myself) the time, the need, and the man had here conjoined. And I began agitating for a Board of Missions assignment to the overlooked Anulas.

This did not come easily. The Regents complained that I was dismally near failing even such basic ecclesiastic subjects as Offertory Management, Histrionics, and Nasal Singing. But you came to my rescue, Dean Dismey. I remember how you argued, “Admittedly, Mobey’s academic grades tend toward Z. But let us in mercy write a Z for zeal, rather than zero, and grant his application. It would be criminal, gentlemen, if we did not send Crispin Mobey to the Outback of Australia.”

(And I believe this report on my mission will demonstrate that your faith in me, Dean Dismey, was not misplaced. I will say, modestly, that during my travels Down Under, I was often referred to as “the very picture of a missionary.”)

I would have been perfectly willing to work my passage to Australia, to claw my way unaided into the Outback, and to live as primitively as my flock while I taught them The Word. Instead, I was surprised to discover that I had at my disposal a generous allocation from the Overseas Mission Fund; overgenerous, in fact, as all I intended to take with me was some beads.

“Beads!” exclaimed the Mission Board bursar, when I presented my requisition. “You want the entire allocation in glass beads?”

I tried to explain to him what I had learned from my research. The Australian aborigines, I had been given to understand, are the most primitive of all the peoples living on earth. An actual remnant of the Stone Age, these poor creatures never even got far enough up the scale of evolution to develop the bow and arrow.

“My dear boy,” the bursar said gently. “Beads went out with Stanley and Livingstone. You’ll want an electric golf cart for the chief. Lampshades for his wives—they wear them for hats, you know.”

“The Anulas never heard of golf, and they don’t wear hats. They don’t wear anything.”

“All the best missionaries,” the bursar said rather stiffly, “swear by lampshades.”

“The Anulas are practically cavemen,” I insisted. “They don’t even have spoons. They have no written language. I’ve got to educate them from ape on up. I’m just taking the beads to catch their fancy, to show I’m a friend.”

“Snuff is always appreciated,” he tried as a last resort.

“Beads,” I said firmly.

As you have no doubt deduced from the invoices, my allocation bought a tremendous lot of colored glass beads. I really should have waited to buy them in Australia and avoided the excessive transportation bill; they filled one entire cargo hold of the ship which took me from Norfolk that June day.

Arriving at Sydney, I transferred the beads to a warehouse on the Woolloomooloo docks, and went to report immediately to PrimPro BisPac Shagnasty (as Bishop Shagnasty likes to style himself; he was a Navy chaplain during the war). I found that august gentleman, after some search and inquiry, at the local clubhouse of the English-Speaking Union. “A fortress, a refuge,” he called it, “among the Aussies. Will you join me in one of these delicious Stingarees?”

I declined the drink and launched into the story behind my visit.

“Going to the Anulas, eh? In the Northern Territory?” He nodded judiciously. “Excellent choice. Virgin territory. You’ll find good fishing.”

A splendid metaphor. “That’s what I came for, sir,” I said enthusiastically.

“Yes,” he mused. “I lost a Royal Coachman up there on the River Roper, three years back.”

“Mercy me!” I exclaimed, aghast. “I had no idea the poor heathens were hostile! And one of the Queen’s own chauf—!”

“No, no, no! A trout fly!” He stared at me. “I begin to understand,” he said after a moment, “why they sent you to the Outback. I trust you’re leaving for the North immediately.”

“I want to learn the native language before I get started,” I said. “The Berlitz people in Richmond told me I could study Anula at their branch school here in Sydney.”

Next day, when I located the Berlitz office, I discovered to my chagrin that I would have to learn German first. Their only teacher of the Anula language was a melancholy defrocked priest of some German Catholic order—a former missionary himself—and he spoke no English.

It took me a restless and anxious three months of tutorage in the German tongue (while storage charges piled up on my beads) before I could start learning Anula from the ex-priest, Herr Krapp. As you can imagine, Dean Dismey, I was on guard against any subtle Papist propaganda he might try to sneak into my instruction. But the only thing I found odd was that Herr Krapp’s stock of Anula seemed to consist mainly of phases of endearment. And he frequently muttered almost heartbrokenly, in his own language, “Ach, das liebenswerte schwarze Madchen!” and licked his chops.

By the end of September Herr Krapp had taught me all he knew, and there was no reason for me to delay any longer my start for the Outback. I hired two drivers and two trucks to carry my beads and myself. Besides my missionary’s KampKit (a scaled-down revival tent), my luggage consisted only of my New Testament, my spectacles, my German-English dictionary, a one-volume edition of The Golden Bough, and my textbook of the native language, Die Gliederung der australischen Sprachen, by W. Schmidt.

Then I went to bid farewell to Bishop Shagnasty. I found him again, or still, at the English-Speaking Union refreshment stand.

“Back from the bush, eh?” he greeted me. “Have a Stingaree. How are all the little blackfellows?”

I tried to explain that I hadn’t gone yet, but he interrupted me to introduce me to a military-looking gentleman nearby.

“Major Mashworm is a Deputy Protector of the Aborigines. He’ll be interested to hear how you found his little black wards, as he never seems to get any farther Outback than right here.”

I shook hands with Major Mashworm and explained that I hadn’t yet seen his little black wards, but expected to shortly.

“Ah, another Yank,” he said as soon as I opened my mouth.

“Sir!” I said, bridling. “I am a Southerner!”

“Quite so, quite so,” he said, as if it made no difference. “And are you circumcised?”

“Sir!” I gasped. “I am a Christian!”

“Too right. Well, if you expect to get anywhere with a myall abo tribe, you’ll have to be circumcised or they don’t accept you as a full-grown bloke. The abo witch doctor will do it for you, if necessary, but I fancy you’d rather have it done in hospital. The native ceremony also involves knocking out one or two of your teeth, and then you have to squat out in the bush, twirling a bullroarer, until you’re jake again.”

Had I heard about this when I first heard of the Anulas, my zeal might have been less. But having come this far, I saw nothing for it but to submit to the operation. Still, someone might have told me earlier; I could have been healing while I was studying languages. As it was, I couldn’t delay my start North. So I had the operation done that very night at Sydney Mercy—by an incredulous doctor and two sniggering nurses—and got my little caravan on the road immediately afterward.

The trip was sheer agony, not to say a marathon embarrassment. Convalescence involved wearing a cumbersome contraption that was a cross between a splint and a truss, and which was well-nigh impossible to conceal even beneath a mackintosh several sizes too large for me. I won’t dwell on the numerous humiliations that beset me at rest stops along the way. But you can get some idea, reverend sir, if you imagine yourself in my tender condition, driving in a badly sprung war-relic truck, along a practically nonexistent road, all the way from Richmond to the Grand Canyon.

Everything in the vast interior of Australia is known roughly as the Outback. But the Northern Territory, where I was going, is even out back of the Outback, and is known to the Aussies as the Never Never. The territory is the size of Alaska, but has exactly as many people in it as my hometown of Dreer, Virginia. The Anula tribal grounds are situated in the far north of this Never Never, on the Barkly Tableland between the bush country and the tropical swamps of the Gulf of Carpentaria—a horrible 2,500 miles from my starting point at Sydney.

The city of Cloncurry (pop. 1,955) was our last real glimpse of humankind. By way of illustrating what I mean, the next town we touched, Dobbyn, had a population of about zero. And the last town with a name in all that Never Never wilderness, Brunette Downs, had a population of minus something.

That was where my drivers left me, as agreed from the start. It was the last possible place they might contrive to hitchhike a ride back toward civilization. They showed me the direction I should take from there, and I proceeded on my pilgrim’s progress into the unknown, driving one of the trucks myself and parking the other in Brunette Downs for the time being.

My drivers said I would eventually come upon an Experimental Agricultural Station, where the resident agents would have the latest word on where to find the nomadic Anulas. But I arrived there late one afternoon to find the station deserted, except for a few languid kangaroos and one shriveled, whiskery little desert rat who came running and whooping a strange cry of welcome.

“Cooee! What cheer? What cheer? Gawdstrewth, it’s bonzer to see a bloody newchum buggering barstid out here, dinkum it is!”

(Lest this outburst has horrified you, Dean Dismey, allow me to explain. At first, I blushed at the apparent blasphemies and obscenities commonly employed by the Australians, from Major Mashworm on down. Then I realized that they use such locutions as casually and innocently as punctuation. And, their “Strine” dialect being what it is, I never knew when to blush at their real deliberate cuss words, because I couldn’t tell which they were. Therefore, rather than try here to censor or euphemize every sentence uttered, I shall report conversations verbatim and without comment.)

“Set your arse a spell, cobber! The billy’s on the boil. We’ll split a pannikin and have a real shivoo, what say?”

“How do you do?” I managed to get in.

“What-o, a Yank!” he exclaimed in surprise.

“Sir,” I said with dignity, “I am a Virginian.”

“Strewth? Well, if you’re looking to lose it, you’ve come to one helluva place for gash. There ain’t a blooming sheila inside three hundred mile, unless you’re aiming to go combo with the Black Velvet.”

This made no sense whatever, so to change the subject I introduced myself.

“Garn! A narky Bush Brother? Should of known, when you announced you was cherry. Now I’ll have to bag me bloody langwidge.”

If he “bagged” his language, it was to no noticeable degree. He repeated one obscene-sounding proposal several times before I interpreted it as an invitation to have a cup of tea (“go snacks on Betty Lee”) with him. While we drank the tea, brewed over a twig fire, he told me about himself. At least I suppose that’s what he told me, though all I got out of it was that his name was McCubby.

“Been doing a walkabout in the woop-woop, fossicking for wolfram. But my cuddy went bush with the brumbies and I found meself in a prebloodydicament. So I humped my bluey in here to the Speriment Station, hoping I’d strike a stock muster, a squatter, anybody, even a dingo-barstid jonnop. But no go, and I was bloody well down on my bone when you showed your dial.”

“What do you do out here?” I asked.

“I toldjer, I was fossicking for wolfram.”

“Well, you’ve got so many unfamiliar animals here in Australia,” I said apologetically. “I never heard of a wolf ram.”

He peered at me suspiciously and said, “Wolfram is tungsten ore. Fossicking is prospecting.”

“Speaking of Australian fauna,” I said, “can you tell me what a dollar-bird is?”

(The dollar-bird, you will recall, sir, is the totem agent mentioned in Frazer’s account of the rain-making ceremony. I had come this far without being able to find out just what a dollar-bird was.)

“It ain’t no fawn, Rev,” said McCubby. “And you can be glad it ain’t. That was a dollar-bird which just took a dump on your titfer.”

“What?”

“I keep forgetting you’re a newchum,” he sighed. “Your titfer is your hat. A dollar-bird just flew over and let fly.”

I took off my hat and wiped at it with a tuft of dry grass.

“The dollar-bird,” McCubby said pedantically, “is so called because of a silvery-colored circular patch on its spread wings.”

“Thank you,” I said, and started to explain how the bird had inspired my mission to the aborigines—

“To the abos! Strike me blind!” blurted McCubby. “And here I thought you was out to preach at the buggering snoozers up at Darwin. I presoom the whole rest of the world is already gone Christian, then, if Gawd’s scraping the barrel for blackfellow converts.”

“Why, no,” I said. “But the abos have as much right as anybody else to learn the True Word. To learn that their heathen gods are delusive devils tempting them to hell fire.”

“They’re looking forward to hell fire, Rev,” said McCubby, “as an improvement on the Never Never. Ain’t they got enough grief without you have to inflict religion on ‘em?”

“Religion is a sap,” I said, quoting William Penn, “to penetrate the farthest boughs of the living tree.”

“Looks to me like you’re bringing the Bingis a whole bloody cathedral,” said McCubby. “What kind of swag you got in the lorry, anyway?”

“Beads,” I said. “Nothing but beads.”

“Beans, eh?” he said, cocking an eye at the huge truck. “You must be more than meejum fond of flute fruit.”

Before I could correct his misapprehension, he stepped to the rear of the vehicle and unlatched both gate doors. The entire van was loaded to the ceiling with beads, dumped in loose for convenience. Of course he was instantly engulfed in a seething avalanche, while several more tons of the beads inundated about an acre of the local flatlands, and rivulets and droplets of them went twinkling off to form a diminishing nimbus around the main mass. After a while, the mound behind the truck heaved and blasphemed and McCubby’s whiskery head emerged.

“Look what you’ve done,” I said, justifiably exasperated.

“Oh my word,” he said softly. “First time beans ever dumped me.”

He picked up one of the things, tried his teeth on it and said, “These would constipate a cassowary, Rev.” He took a closer look at it and staggered through the pile toward me, dribbling beads from every fold of his clothes. “Somebody has give you the sweet but-all, son,” he confided. “These ain’t beans. They’re glass.”

I’m afraid I snapped at him. “I know it! They’re for the natives!”

He looked at me, expressionless. He turned, still expressionless, and looked slowly around the glittering expanse that spread seemingly to the horizon in all directions.

“What religion did you say you’re magging?” he asked cautiously.

I ignored him. “Well,” I sighed. “No sense trying to pick them all up before nightfall. Mind if I camp here till morning?”

I was awakened several times during the night by a hideous crunching noise from the perimeter of our glass desert, but, since McCubby didn’t stir, I tried not to let it perturb me.

We arose at sunup, our whole part of the world gleaming “like the buggering Land of Hoz,” as McCubby put it. After breakfast I began the Herculean task of regathering my stock, with a rusty shovel I found in a tumbledown station outbuilding. McCubby left me for a while, to go slithering across the beads to their outer reaches. He came back beaming happily, with an armload of bloody scraps of fur.

“Dingo scalps,” he chortled. “Worth a quid apiece in bounties. Rev, you may have spragged the curse of this whole blunny continent. Out there’s just heaped with the corpses of dingos, rabbits and dunnikan rats what tried to make a meal off your bijous. Oh my word!”

He was so pleased at the sudden windfall that he hunted up another shovel and pitched in to help me scoop beads. It was night again by the time we had the truck loaded, and, at that, half its content was topsoil. The territory around the Experimental Station still looked like Disneyland.

“Oh, well,” I said philosophically. “Good thing I’ve got another truckful waiting at Brunette Downs.”

McCubby started, stared at me, and went off muttering in his beard.

The next morning I finally set forth on the last lap of my mission of mercy. McCubby told me he had encountered the Anula tribe on his trek in to the station. They were camped in a certain swale of acacia trees, he said, scratching for witchetty grubs and irriakura bulbs, the only available food in this dry season.

And it was there I found them, just at sundown. The whole tribe couldn’t have numbered more than seventy-five souls, each of them uglier than the next. Had I not known of their crying need of me, I might have backtracked. The men were great broad-shouldered fellows, coppery-black, with even blacker beards and hair bushed around their low foreheads, sullen eyes and bone-pierced flat noses. The women had more hair and no beards, and limp, empty breasts that hung down their fronts like a couple of pinned-on medals. The men wore only a horsehair rope around their middles, in which they stuck their boomerangs, music sticks, feather charms, and the like. The women wore nagas, fig newton-sized aprons of paperbark. The children wore drool.

They looked up dully as I brought the truck to a halt. There was no evidence either of welcome or hostility. I climbed onto the truck hood, waved my arms and called out in their language, “My children, come unto me! I bring tidings of great joy!”

A few of the tots crept closer and picked their noses at me. The women went back to footing around the acacias with their yamsticks. The men simply continued to do nothing. They’re all bashful, I thought; nobody wants to be first.

So I strode boldly into their midst and took a wizened, white-bearded oldster by the arm. I leaned into the truck cab, opened the little hatch that gave access to the van, and plunged the old gaffer’s resisting hand inside. It came out grasping a fistful of dirt and one green bead, at which he blinked in perplexity.

As I had hoped, curiosity brought the rest of the tribe around. “Plenty for everybody, my children!” I shouted in their language. Pulling and hauling, I forced them one by one up to the cab. They each obediently reached through the hatch, took one bead apiece and drifted back to their occupations as if thankful the ceremony was over.

“What’s the matter?” I asked one shy young girl, the last of the procession and the only one who had taken two beads. “Doesn’t anybody like the pretty-pretties?” She flinched guiltily, put back one of the beads and scurried away.

I was flabbergasted at the lack of enthusiasm. As of now, the Anulas had one tiny bead apiece, and I had about six hundred billion.

Beginning to suspect what was amiss, I went and stood among them and listened to their furtive, secretive talk. I couldn’t understand a word! Horrors, I thought. Unless we could communicate, I had no hope of making them accept the beads ... or me ... or The Gospel. Could I have stumbled on the wrong tribe? Or were they deliberately misunderstanding me and talking in gibberish?

There was one way to find out, and that without more ado. I turned the truck around and drove pell-mell back for the station, hoping mightily that McCubby hadn’t left yet.

He hadn’t. The wild dogs were still committing suicide en masse by dining on my beads, and McCubby wasn’t about to leave until the bounty business petered out. I reached the station at sunrise again, when he was out collecting the night’s scalps. I leapt from the truck and blurted out my problem.

“I don’t understand them and they don’t understand me. You claim you know most of the abo tongues. What am I doing wrong?” I reeled off a sentence and asked anxiously, “Did you understand that?”

“Too right,” he said. “You offered me thirty pfennig to get my black arse in bed with you. Cheap barstid,” he added.

A little rattled, I pleaded, “Never mind what the words said. Is my pronunciation bad or something?”

“Oh, no. You’re mooshing perfect Pitjantjatjara.”

“What?”

“A considerably different langwidge from Anula. Anula has nine noun classes. Singular, dual, trial, and plural are expressed by perfixes in its pronouns. Transitive werbs incorporate the object pronouns. The werbs show many tenses and moods and also a separate negative conjugation.”

“What?”

“On the other hand, in Pitjantjatjara, the suffixes indicating the personal pronouns may be appended to the first inflected word in the sentence, not merely to the werb root.”

“What?”

“I don’t like to bulsh on your linguistic accomplishments, cobber. But Pitjantjatjara, although it has four declensions and four conjugations, is alleged to be the simplest of all the bloody Australoid langwidges.”

I was speechless.

“How much,” McCubby asked at last, “is thirty pfennig in shillings and pence?”

“Maybe,” I murmured thoughtfully, “I’d better go and minister to the Pitjantjatjara tribe instead, as long as I know their language.”

McCubby shrugged. “They live way the hell the other side of the Great Sandy. And they’re no myall rootdiggers like these Anulas. They’re all upjumped stockriders and donahs now, on the merino stations around Shark Bay. Also, them boongs would prob’ly wind up converting you, and that’s the dinkum oil. They’re staunch Catholics.”

Well, that figured. And I was beginning to suspect why Herr Krapp had been defrocked.

My next move was obvious: to hire McCubby as my interpreter to the Anulas. At first he balked. My expense fund was so depleted by now that I couldn’t offer enough to tempt him away from his booming business here in dingo scalps. But finally I thought to offer him all the beads in the second truck—”Enough to kill every dingo in the Outback.” So he rolled up his swag and took the wheel (I was dead tired of driving), and we headed again for the Anula country.

On the way, I told McCubby how I intended to introduce the blackfellows to modern Primitive Protestantism. I read aloud to him Sir James Frazer’s paragraph on rainmaking, which concludes, “‘After that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow....’”

“All he does!” McCubby snorted.

“‘Sooner or later the rain will fall.’“ I closed the book. “And that’s where I step in. If the rain doesn’t fall, the natives can plainly see that their sorcery doesn’t work, and I can turn their clearer eyes toward Christianity. If the rain should fall, I simply explain that they were actually praying to the true, Protestant God without realizing it, and the rain-bird had nothing to do with it.”

“And how do you cozen ‘em into doing this rain-bird corroboree?”

“Heavens, they’re probably doing it all the time. The good Lord knows they need rain. This whole country is burned crisp as paper.”

“If it do come on to rain,” McCubby muttered darkly, “my word, I’ll fall down on me knees.” What that signified, I (unfortunately) didn’t surmise at the time.

The reception at the Anula camp was rather different this time. The abos swarmed to greet McCubby; three of the younger females in particular appeared to rejoice at his arrival.

“Ah, me cheeky little blackgins,” he said affectionately. Then, after a colloquy with the tribe’s elders, he said to me, “They want to offer you a lubra, too, Rev.”

A lubra is a female, and I had expected this hospitality, knowing it to be a custom of the Anulas. I asked McCubby to explain my religious reasons for declining and went to work to set up my tent on a knoll overlooking the native camp. As I crawled into it, McCubby asked, “Going to plow the deep so early?”

“I just want to take off my clothes,” I said. “When in Rome, you know. See if you can borrow one of those waist strings for me.”

“A nood missionary?” he said, scandalized.

“Our church teaches that the body is nothing,” I said, “but a machine to carry the soul around. Besides, I feel a true missionary should not set himself above his flock in matters of dress and social deportment.”

“A true missionary,” McCubby said drily, “ain’t got the crocodile hide of these Bingis.” But he brought me the horsehair rope. I tied it around my waist and stuck into it my New Testament, my pocket comb, and my spectacles case.

When I was ready, I felt very vulnerable and vaguely vulgar. For one as modest and introverted as I, it was painful to think of stepping out there—especially in view of the females—in my stark white nakedness. But after all, I consoled myself, I wasn’t quite as stark as my flock. On the Sydney doctor’s orders, I would have to wear my bandage contrivance for another week.

I scrambled out of the tent and stood up, dancing delicately as the ground stubble jabbed my bare feet. My, all those white eyeballs in all those black faces! McCubby was staring just as intently and unbelievingly as everyone else. He worked his mouth for a while before he spoke.

“Crikey! No wonder you’re Virginian, poor cove.”

The abos began to crowd around the point and babble and measure the apparatus as if they contemplated getting copies to wear. Finally, a trifle annoyed, I asked my still-goggling interpreter why they were making so much fuss.

“They think you’re either bragging or humbugging. Dinkum, so do I.”

So I told him about my operation, that I had endured it because it was an Anula custom. McCubby repeated this to the mob. The blackfellows nodded knowingly at each other, jabbered even more furiously, and came one by one to pat me on the head.

“Ah, they approve, do they?” I said with great satisfaction.

“They think you’re crazy as a kookaburra,” McCubby said flatly. “It’s supposed to bring good luck to fondle a zany.”

“What?”

“If you’ll take a pike at the men of your flock,” he suggested, “you’ll note that the custom of circumbloodycision must of went out of style some time back.”

I looked, and it was so. I found myself mentally composing some un-Christian remarks to make to Major Mashworm. So, to elevate my thoughts, I proposed that we try again to distribute my gift of beads. I don’t know what McCubby told the blackfellows, but the whole tribe trooped off eagerly to the truck and came back with a double handful of beads apiece. Several of them made two or more trips. I was pleased.

The brief tropical dusk was on us now; the Anulas’ cooking fires began to twinkle among the acacias. I wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything more today; so McCubby and I set our own billy on a fire. We had just settled down to our tucker when one of the abos came up smiling and handed me a slab of bark heaped with some kind of native food. Whatever it was, it quivered disgustingly, and, looking at it, so did I.

“Emu fat,” said McCubby. “Their favorite delicacy. It’s in return for them beads.”

I was ever so delighted, but the dish was nauseatingly difficult to get down. It was like eating a bowlful of lips.

“I’d wolf the stuff if I was you,” McCubby advised, after a visit to the natives’ fires. “They’re likely to come and take it back, when they give up on the beads.”

“What?”

“They’ve been boiling ‘em for two hours, now, and it seems they still taste gritty.”

“They’re eating the beads?”

He saw my consternation and said, almost kindly, “Rev, all these boongs live for is to eat for to live for to eat. They don’t have houses and they don’t wear pockets, so they got no use for propitty. They know they’re ugly as the backside of a wombat, so they got no use for pretties. In this crook country, finding food is cruel hard. If anything new comes along, they try it for food, in hopes.”

I was too weary even to worry; I crept into my tent desiring only to “plow the deep,” in McCubby’s phrase. As it turned out, though, I got precious little sleep. I had to keep evicting a procession of young black girls who, I presume, had a childish desire to sleep under canvas for a change.

I arose quite late in the morning, to find all the Anulas still huddled, groaning, in their wagga rugs. “You won’t see any rain-debbil corroboree today,” McCubby told me. “Them rumbustious beads has got ‘em all just about keck-livered.”

Now I was worried. Suppose they all died like the dingos!

“I wouldn’t do this for any ruggerlugs but you, Rev,” said McCubby, digging into his swag. “But I’ll squander some of my lollies on ‘em.”

“What?”

“Chawnklit. It’s what I use for trading and bribing the Bingis. They like it a buggering sight better than beads.”

“But that’s Ex-Lax!” I exclaimed when he brought it out.

“That’s what they like about it. A pleasure at both ends.”

The events of the rest of that day are indescribable. But the setting sun picked bright glints from little heaps of beads here and there throughout the rolling land in the locality. And I was having troubles of my own; I had begun to itch intolerably, all over. McCubby wasn’t surprised.

“Meat ants,” he theorized, “or sugar ants, white ants, buffalo flies, marsh flies, blow flies. We also got anopheles mosquitoes. I tell you, Rev, missionaries ain’t got the hide for cavorting bare arse.” Not too regretfully, I abandoned my idea of living as primitively as my horny-skinned flock and went back to wearing clothes.

That day was not an entire waste, however. I reminded McCubby that we required a pool of water for the upcoming ritual, and he led me to the Anulas’ tribal oasis.

“T’ain’t much of a billabong in the Dry,” he admitted. The waterhole was respectably wide and deep, but it contained only a scummy, fetid expanse of mud, through which meandered a sullen greenish trickle of water, the thickness of a lead pencil. “But come the Wet and it’d faze Noah. Anyhow, I figure it must be the one in your Golden Bow-Wow. It’s the only water inside a hundred mile.”

I wondered how, if Frazer’s hero had been desperate enough to try conjuring up a rain, he had been provided with a pool to do it at. But I muttered, “Well, dam it, that’s all.”

“Rev, I’m surprised at your intemperate bloody langwidge!”

I explained. We would throw up a temporary dam across the lower end of the billabong. By the time the Anulas recovered from their gastrointestinal malfunctions, the water should have attained a level sufficient to our purpose. So that’s what we did, McCubby and I: hauled and stacked up stones, and chinked their interstices with mud, which the fierce sun baked to an adobe-like cement. We knocked off at nightfall, and the water was already as high as our ankles.

I awoke the next morning to a tumult of whoops, shrills and clangor from the direction of the Anulas’ camp. Ah, thought I, stretching complacently; they’ve discovered their new and improved waterworks and are celebrating. Then McCubby thrust his bristly head through my tent flap and announced excitedly, “War’s bin declared!”

“Not with America?” I gasped—his report had sounded rather accusatory—but he had as suddenly withdrawn. I dragged on my boots and joined him on the knoll, and realized he had meant a tribal war.

There were about twice as many blacks down there as I had remembered, and every one of them was ululating loud enough for two more. They milled about, whacking at one another with spears and yam-sticks, flinging stones and boomerangs, and jabbing brands from the cooking fires into each other’s frizzy hair.

“It’s their neighbor tribe, the Bingbingas,” said McCubby. “They live downstream on the creek, and this sunup they found their water turned off. They’re blaming the Anulas for deliberate mass murder, so as to take over their yam grounds. If this ain’t a fair cow!”

“We must do something!”

McCubby rummaged in his swag and brought out a toy-like pistol. “This is only a pipsqueak .22,” he said. “But they ought to nick off home when they see white man’s weapons.”

We pelted together down the slope and into the fray, McCubby ferociously pop-popping his little revolver in the air, and I brandishing my New Testament to proclaim that Right was on our side. Sure enough, the invading Bingbingas fell back from this new onslaught. They separated out of the confusion and withdrew carrying their wounded. We chased them to the top of a nearby hill, from which vantage they shook their fists and shouted taunts and insults for a while before retiring, defeated, in the direction of their home grounds.

McCubby circulated through the Anula camp, dusting athlete’s-foot powder—the only medicament he carried—on the more seriously wounded. There were few casualties, actually, and most of these had suffered only bloody noses, lumped skulls or superficial depilations where hair or whiskers had been yanked out. I played battlefield chaplain as best I could in dumb show, pantomiming spiritual comfort at them. One good thing. All the Anulas appeared to have recovered utterly from their bead-diet prostration. This early-morning exercise had helped.

When things had calmed down, and after some breakfast tucker and tea, I dispatched McCubby to search through the tribe for an unoccupied male of the clan that claimed the dollar-bird for its kobong, or totem. He did find a young man of that persuasion and, overcoming his stubborn unwillingness, brought him to me.

“This is Yartatgurk,” said McCubby.

Yartatgurk walked with a limp, courtesy of a stiff Bingbinga kick in the shin, and was bushily bearded only on the left side of his face, courtesy of a Bingbinga firebrand. The rest of the tribe came and squatted down expectantly around the three of us, as if eager to see what new and individual treat I had in store for their young man.

“Now we must recapitulate the procedure,” I said, and began to read The Golden Bough’s description of the ceremony, McCubby translating phrase by phrase. At the conclusion, young Yartatgurk stood up abruptly and, despite his limp, commenced a vigorous heel-and-toe toward the far horizon. All the other Anulas began muttering among themselves and tapping their foreheads with a forefinger.

When McCubby fetched the struggling Yartatgurk back, I said, “Surely, they all must be familiar with the ceremony.”

“They say, if you’re so buggering thirsty as to go through all that taradiddle, it’d’ve been just as easy to lug an artesian drill in here as all them beads. Too right!”

“That’s not the point,” I said. “According to Frazer, the belief is that long ago the dollar-bird had a snake for a mate. The snake lived in a pool and used to make rain by spitting up into the sky until a rainbow and clouds appeared and rain fell.”

This, translated, sent the Anulas into a regular frenzy of chattering and head-tapping.

“They say,” McCubby interpreted, “you show them a bird mating with a snake and they’ll get you all the water you want, if they have to hump the bloody Carpentaria Gulf down here by hand.”

This was depressing. “I’m quite sure a reputable anthropologist like Frazer wouldn’t lie about their tribal beliefs.”

“If he’s any kin to the Frazer I used to cobber with—old Blazer Frazer—he’d lie about which is his left and right hand.”

“Well,” I said unquenchably, “I’ve come twelve thousand miles to repudiate this custom, and I won’t be put off. Now tell Yartatgurk to stop that screeching, and let’s get on with it.”

McCubby managed, by giving Yartatgurk a large slab of Ex-Lax, to convince him that the ceremony—idiotic as he might ignorantly think it—wasn’t going to hurt him. The three of us went first to check on the billabong, and found it gratifyingly abrim with repulsive brown water, wide and deep enough to have submerged our truck. From there, we headed into the endless savanna.

“First,” I said, “we need a snake. A live one.”

McCubby scratched in his whiskers. “That might be a wowser, Rev. The boongs have et most of the snakes within hunting range. And they sprag ‘em from a cautious distance, with boomerang or spear. The wipers out here in the Never Never, you don’t want to meet ‘em alive.”

“Why?”

“Well, we got the tiger snake and the death adder, which their wenom has been measured twenty times as wicked as the bloody cobra’s. Then there’s the taipan, and I’ve seen meself a horse die five minutes after it nipped him. Then there’s—”

He broke off to make a grab for Yartatgurk, who was trying to sneak away. McCubby pointed into the bush and sent the blackfellow horizonward with explicit instructions. Yartatgurk limped off, looking about him nervously and sucking moodily on his chunk of chocolate. McCubby didn’t look any too happy himself, as we followed after the native at a distance. “I wish it was your buggering Frazer we was sending on this chase,” he muttered spitefully.

“Oh, come,” I said encouragingly. “There must be some nonpoisonous variety that will serve our purpose.”

“Won’t help our purpose none if we tread on one of the others first,” growled McCubby. “If this ain’t the most nincompoop—”

There was a sudden commotion out ahead of us, where we had last seen Yartatgurk creeping, hunched over, through the tussocky grass.

“He’s got one!” I shouted, as the blackfellow rose up into view with a strangled cry. He was silhouetted against the sky, toiling desperately with something huge and lashing, a fearsome sight to behold.

“Dash me rags!” breathed McCubby, in awed surprise. “I ain’t never seen a Queensland python this far west before.”

“A python!”

“Too bloody right,” said McCubby, in unfeigned admiration. “Twenty feet if he’s a hinch.”

I gaped at the lunging, Laocoön-like tableau before us. Yartatgurk was almost invisible inside the writhing coils, but he was clearly audible. I wondered momentarily if we might not have bitten off more than we could chew, but I sternly laid that specter of uncertainty. Manifestly, the good Lord was following Frazer’s script.

“Yartatgurk is inquiring,” McCubby said quietly, “who we’re rooting for.”

“Do you suppose we’ll spoil the magic if we lend a hand?”

“We’ll spoil the blackfellow if we don’t. Look there.”

“Mercy on us, he’s spouting blood!”

“T’ain’t blood. If you’d just et a quarter of a pound of Hex-Lax and then got hugged by a python, you’d spout, too.”

We fought our way into the squirming tangle and finally managed to peel the creature loose from Yartatgurk. It took the utmost strength of all three of us to straighten it out and prevent its coiling again. Yartatgurk had turned almost as white as I, but he bravely hung onto the python’s tail—being lashed and tumbled about, sometimes high off the ground—while McCubby, at its head, and I, grasping its barrel-like middle, manhandled it toward the billabong.

By the time we made it to the pool bank, all three of us were being whipped through the air, back and forth past each other, and occasionally colliding.

“Now,” I managed to gasp out, between the snake’s convulsions. “He’s got to—hold it under—oof!— the water...”

“I don’t think,” said McCubby, on my left, “he’s likely to agree,” said McCubby, from behind me. “When I yell go,” said McCubby, on my right, “dowse him and the snake both,” said McCubby, from overhead. “Cooee!— GO!!!”

At the command, he and I simultaneously swung our portions of the python out over the water and let go. It and the wretched Yartatgurk, flapping helplessly along like the tail of a kite, disappeared with a mighty splash. Instantly the billabong was roiled into a hissing brown froth.

“Pythons,” panted McCubby, when he could get his breath, “hates water worse’n cats do.”

The entire Anula tribe, I now noticed, had come down to cluster on the opposite side of the billabong, and were attentively following the proceedings with eyes like boiled onions.

“Was you to ask me,” said McCubby, when we had rested a while, “I’d be hard put to say who was holding who under.”

“I guess it’s been long enough,” I decreed.

We waded waist-deep into the pool and, after being knocked about a bit, managed to grab hold of the slithery loops and haul the reptile back onto the bank. Yartatgurk, we were pleased to see, came along clenched in a coil of the python’s tail.

Somewhere along about here, our handmade dam collapsed. Its mud chinking had been gradually eroded as the water backed up behind it during the night and morning. Now the agitation of the billabong toppled the weakened structure, and all the collected water drained out with a swoosh. This would probably gratify the thirsty Bingbingas downstream, I reflected, if it didn’t drown them all in that first grand flood-wave.

The submersion had taken some of the fight out of the snake, but not a great deal. McCubby and I sustained numerous bruises and contusions during this stage of the struggle, while we fought to immobilize the forepart of the thing. Yartatgurk was not much help to us, as he had gone quite limp and, clutched by the freely thrashing tail of the serpent, was being batted like a bludgeon against the surrounding trees and terrain.

“It’s time for him to kill it,” I shouted to McCubby.

As the blackfellow whisked to and fro past us, McCubby listened to his barely audible mumblings and finally reported, “He says nothing would give him greater pleasure.”

Our fantastic battle went on for a while longer, until it became apparent that Yartatgurk wasn’t up to killing the monster anytime soon, and I called to McCubby to inquire what to do next.

“I’ll hang on best I can,” he bellowed back, between curses and grunts. “You run for my swag. Get my pistol. Shoot the bugger.”

I went, but with misgivings. I feared that we white men—perhaps unconsciously flaunting our superiority—were taking too much of a hand in this ceremony and, by our meddling, might botch whatever mystical significance it held for the natives.

I came back at a run, gripping the revolver in both hands. The python appeared to have recovered from its watery ordeal and was flailing more energetically than ever, occasionally keeping both men in the air simultaneously. In all that confusing uproar, and in my own excitement, nervousness, and unfamiliarity with the weapon, I took quaking aim and shot Yartatgurk in the foot.

He did not make any outright complaint (though I think he might have, if he could have), but his eyes were eloquent. I could almost have wept at their glazed expression of disappointment in me. This was a chastening thing to see, but I suppose even the most divinely inspired spiritual leader encounters it at least once in his career. None of us is perfect.

Meanwhile McCubby had disengaged himself from the melee. He snatched the pistol from me and emptied it into the serpent’s ugly head. For a long time, then, he and I leaned against each other and panted wearily, while the blackfellow and the python lay side by side and twitched.

Yartatgurk’s injury, I am relieved to say, was not a serious one. Actually, he had suffered more from his stay underwater. McCubby pumped his flaccid arms up and down, disgorging quite an astonishing quantity of water, mud, weeds and polliwogs, while I bound up the hole in his foot with a strip torn from my own bandages.

A .22, it seems, fires a triflingly small pellet, and this one had passed cleanly through Yartatgurk’s foot without so much as nicking a tendon. As the lead did not remain in the wound, and as it bled freely, there appeared to be little cause for agonizing—though this he did, at great and vociferous length, when he regained consciousness.

I decided to let the fellow enjoy a short rest and the commiserations of his clucking tribemates. Besides, I was by now so implicated in the ceremony that I figured a little more intervention could do no harm. So I went myself to perform the next step in the rite: to set up the “mimic rainbow” of grass over the defunct snake.

After fumbling unsuccessfully at this project for a considerable while, I came back and said despairingly to McCubby, “Every time I try to bend the grass into a bow it just crumbles into powder.”

“Whajjer expect,” he said with some acerbity, “after eight buggery months of drought?”

Here was another verity—like the dried-up billabong—which I couldn’t reconcile with Frazer’s account. If the grass was dry enough to warrant rainmaking, it was too dry to be bent.

Then I had an inspiration and went to look at the muck of our recent dam-site pool. As I’d hoped, there was a sparse growth of grass there, nicely waterlogged by its night’s immersion. I plucked all I could find and tied it into a frazzled rainbow with my bootlaces. This horseshoe-shaped object I propped up around the dead python’s neck, making him look as jaunty as a racehorse in the winner’s circle.

Feeling very pleased with myself, I returned to McCubby. He, like the Anulas, was sympathetically regarding Yartatgurk, who I gathered was relating the whole history of his wounded foot from the day it was born.

“Now tell him,” I said, “all he has to do is sing.”

For the first time, McCubby seemed disinclined to relay my instructions. He gave me a long look. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and took a contemplative turn up and down the billabong bank, muttering to himself. Finally he shrugged, gave a sort of bleak little laugh, and knelt down to interrupt the nattering Yartatgurk.

As McCubby outlined the next and final step, Yartatgurk’s face gradually assumed the expression of a hamstrung horse being asked to perform its own coup de grace. After what seemed to me an unnecessarily long colloquy between the two, McCubby said:

“Yartatgurk begs to be excused, Rev. He says he’s just had too much to think about, these past few days. First he had to meditate on the nature of them beads you fed him. Then he had to mull over the Bingbingas’ burning of his beard, which cost him three years to cultivate and got glazed off in three winks. Then there was being half squoze to a pulp, and then three-quarters drownded, and then nine-tenths bludged to death, and then having his hoof punctuated. He says his poor inferior black brain is just so full of meat for study that it’s clean druv out the words of all the songs.”

“He doesn’t have to sing words,” I said. “I gather that any sprightly tune will do, crooned heavenward in a properly beseeching manner.”

There was a short silence.

“In all this empty woop-woop,” said McCubby under his breath, “one-eighth of a human bean to a square mile, and you have to be the one-eighth I cobber up with.”

“McCubby,” I said patiently, “this is the most important part of the entire ritual.”

“Ah, well. Here goes the last of me Hex-lax.”

He handed the chocolate to the blackfellow and launched into a long and seductive argument. At last, with a red-eyed glare at me, and so suddenly that I and the Anulas all jumped, Yartatgurk barked viciously into a clamorous chant. The other natives looked slightly uneasy and began to drift back toward camp.

“My word, you’re hearing something that not many white coves ever do,” said McCubby. “The age-old Anula death song.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “He’s not going to die.”

“Not him. You.”

I shook my head reprovingly and said, “I’ve no time for levity. I must get to work on the sermon I’ll preach at the conclusion of all this.”

As you can appreciate, Dean Dismey, I had set myself quite a task. I had to be ready with two versions, depending on whether the rainmaking was or was not successful. But the sermons had certain similarities—for example, in both of them I referred to Prayer as “a Checkbook on the Bank of God.” And this, of course, posed the problem of explaining a checkbook in terms that an Outback aborigine could comprehend.

While I worked in the seclusion of my tent, I yet kept an ear cocked to Yartatgurk’s conscientious keening. As night came down, he began to get hoarse, and several times seemed on the verge of flagging in his endeavor. Each time, I would lay aside my pencil and go down to wave encouragingly at him across the billabong. And each time, this indication of my continued interest did not fail to inspire him to a redoubled output of chanting.

The rest of the Anulas remained quietly in their camp this night, without any moans of indigestion, combat fatigue, or other distress. I was grateful that no extraneous clamor disturbed my concentration on the sermons, and even remarked on it to McCubby:

“The natives seem restful tonight.”

“T’ain’t often the poor buggers come the bounce on a bellyful of good python meat.”

I cried, “They’ve eaten the ceremonial snake?!”

“Don’t matter,” he said consolingly. “The whole skelington is still down there under your wicker wicket.”

Oh, well, I thought. There was nothing I could do about it now. And, as McCubby implied, the skeleton ought to represent as potent a symbol as the entire carcass.

It was well after midnight, and I had just finished the notes for my next day’s services, when a deputation of tribal elders came calling.

“They say you’d oblige ‘em, Rev, either to hurry up and die as warranted, or else to placate Yartatgurk someway. They can’t git to sleep with him caterwauling.”

“Tell them,” I said, with a magisterial wave of my hand, “it will all soon be over.”

I knew not how truly I had spoken, until I was violently awakened some hours later by my tent folding up like an umbrella—thwack!— and disappearing into the darkness.

Then, just as violently, the darkness was riven and utterly abolished by the most brilliant, writhing, forking, jagging, snarling cascade of lightning I ever hope to see. It was instantly succeeded by an even blacker darkness, the acrid stench of ozone, and a roiling cannonade of thunder that simply picked up the whole Never Never land and shook it like a blanket.

When I could hear again, I discerned McCubby’s voice, whimpering in stark horror out of the darkness, “Gawd strike me blind.” It seemed more than likely. I was admonishing him to temper his impiety with prudence, when a second cosmic uproar, even more impressive than the first, raged through the echoing dome of heaven.

I had not yet recovered from its numbing fury when a wind like a driving piston took me in the back, balled me up, and sent me tumbling end over end across the countryside. I caromed painfully off numerous eucalyptuses and acacias and unidentifiable other obstacles until I collided with another human body. We grabbed onto each other, but kept on traveling until the wind died for a moment.

By great good fortune, it was McCubby I had encountered—though I must say he seemed unaware of any good fortune in this. “What in buggery have you gone and done?” he demanded, in a quaver.

“What hath God wrought?” I corrected him. Oh, it would make an ineradicable impression on the Anulas, when I explained that this was not really the doing of their dollar-bird. “Now,” I couldn’t help exclaiming, “if it will only pour down rain!”

The words were no sooner spoken than McCubby and I were flattened again. The rain had come down like God’s boot-heel. It continued mercilessly to stamp on my back, grinding me into the solid earth so that I could barely expand my chest to breathe. This, I thought in my agony, is really more than I meant to ask for.

After an incalculable while, I was able to inch my mouth over beside McCubby’s ear and bellow loud enough for him to hear, “We’ve got to find my sermon notes before the rain ruins them!”

“Your bloody notes are in Fiji by now!” he shouted back. “And so will we be if we don’t do a bleeding bunk in a bleeding hurry!”

I tried to remonstrate that we couldn’t leave the Anulas now, when everything was proceeding so well, and when I had such a God-given opportunity to make a splendid conversion of the whole tribe.

“Can’t you get it through your googly skull?” he bellowed. “This is the Cockeye Bob—come early and worse than I ever seen it! This whole land will be underwater, and us with it, if we don’t get blew a thousand mile and tore to rags in the bush!”

“But my entire mission will have been in vain,” I protested, between the peals of thunder. “And the poor Anulas deprived of—”

“Bugger the bloody black barstids!” he howled. “They waved mummuk hours ago. We got to get to the lorry—if it ain’t flew away. Make the high ground by the Speriment Station.”

Clinging fast together, we were just able to blunder our way through what seemed a solid wall of water. The lightning and thunder were simultaneous now, blinding and deafening us at the same time. Torn-off branches, uprooted bushes and trees of increasingly larger size careened like dark meteors across the Never Never land. Once we ducked the weirdest missile of all—the eerily airborne skeleton of Yartatgurk’s python, still sporting its natty grass collar.

I thought it odd that we encountered none of the blackfellows. But we did find the truck at last, jostling anxiously on its springs and squeaking in every rivet as if for help. Wind-blasted water streamed up its weather side and smoked off its top like the spindrift from a hurricane sea. I really think that only the dead weight of the remaining beads, which still filled three-quarters of the van, prevented the truck’s being overturned.

McCubby and I fought our way to the lee door and opened it, to have it nearly blown off the hinges as the wind clawed at it. The inside of the cab was no quieter than outdoors, what with the thunder still head-splittingly audible and the rain practically denting the metal, but the stiller air inside was easier to breathe.

When he stopped panting, McCubby wrung another minor cloudburst out of his whiskers and then started the engine. I laid a restraining hand on his arm. “We can’t abandon the Anulas to this,” I said. “Could we dump the beads and crowd in the women and pickaninnies?”

“I toldjer, they all took a ball of chalk hours ago!”

“Does that mean they’ve gone?”

“Soon as you sacked out. They were well clear of the low ground by the time the Cockeye Bob came down.”

“Hm,” I said, a little hurt. “Rather ungrateful of them, to desert their spiritual adviser without notice.”

“Oh, they’re grateful, Rev,” McCubby hastened to assure me. “That’s why they waved mummuk—you made ‘em wealthy. My word, they’re reg’lar plutes now. Nicked off to Darwin, to peddle that python skin to a shoe-manufactory.”

I could only wheeze, “The Lord works in mysterious ways....”

“Anyhow, that was the reason they guv me,” said McCubby, as the truck began to roll. “But now I suspicion they smelled the blow coming and bunked out, like bandicoots before a bush fire.”

“Without warning us?”

“Well, that Yartatgurk had put the debbil-debbil on you with that death-song of his.” After a moment, McCubby added darkly, “I didn’t savvy the boong bugger had narked me, too.”

With that, he headed the truck for the Experimental Station. Neither the windshield wipers nor the headlights were of any use. There was no road, and the faint track we’d followed coming out here was now obliterated. The air was still thick with flying debris. The truck jolted now and then to the resounding blow of a hurtling eucalyptus bole, or chunk of rock, or kangaroo, for all I know. Miraculously, none of them came through the windshield.

Gradually we inched upward from the low country, along the gently rising slope of a plateau. When we achieved its level top, we knew we were safe from the rising waters. And when we nosed down its farther slope, the rackety violence of the weather abated somewhat, cut off from us by the intervening highland.

As the noise subsided behind us, I broke the silence to ask McCubby what would become of the Anulas now. I ventured the hope that they would spend their new-found wealth on implements and appliances to raise their living standards. “Perhaps build a rustic church,” I mused, “and engage a circuit preacher....”

McCubby snorted. “Wealth to them, Rev, is a couple of quid, which is all they’ll get for that skin. And they’ll blow it all in one cranky shivoo. Buy a few bottles of the cheapest plonk they can find, and stay shikkered for a week. Wake up sober in the Compound calaboose, most likely, with the jumping Joe Blakes for comp’ny.”

This was most discouraging. It appeared that I had accomplished nothing whatsoever by my coming, and I said so.

“Why, they’ll never forget you, Rev,” McCubby said through clenched teeth. “No more will every other bloke in the territory that you caught with his knickers down. Here you’ve brought on the Wet nearly two months early, and brought it with a vengeance. Prob’ly drownded every jum-buck in the Never Never, washed out the railroad per-way, bankrupted every ringer, flooded out the peanut farmers and the cotton planters—”

“Please,” I implored. “Don’t go on.”

There was another long and gloomy silence. Then McCubby took pity on me. He lifted my spirits somewhat—and encapsulated my mission—with a sort of subjunctive consolation.

“If you came out here,” he said, “mainly to break the Bingis of conjuring up heathen debbil-debbils to make rain, well, you can bet your best Bible they’ll never do that again.”

And on that optimistic note, I shall hasten this history toward its happy conclusion.

Several days later, McCubby and I arrived at Brunette Downs. He had the truckloads of beads transferred into a caravan of Land Rovers and headed Outback once more. I doubt not at all that he has since become a multimillionaire “plute” by cornering the market in dingo scalps. I was able to engage another driver, and the two of us returned the rented trucks to Sydney.

By the time I got back to the city, I was absolutely penniless, and looking picturesquely, not to say revoltingly, squalid. I hied myself at once to the English-Speaking Union in search of PrimPro BisPac Shagnasty. It was my intention to apply for some temporary underling job in the Sydney church organization and to beg a small salary advance. But it became immediately apparent, when I found Bishop Shagnasty, that he was in no charitable mood.

“I keep getting these dunning letters,” he said peevishly, “from the Port of Sydney Authority. A freight consignment of some sort is there in your name. I can’t sign for it, can’t even find out what it is, but they keep sending me fantastic bills for its storage.”

I said I was just as much in the dark as he, but the Bishop interrupted:

“I wouldn’t advise that you hang about here, Mobey. Deputy Protector Mashworm may come in at any minute, and he’s after your hide. He’s already flayed a goodly portion of mine.”

“Mine, too,” I couldn’t forbear muttering.

“He keeps getting letters of reproach from the Resident Commissioner of the Northern Territory, inquiring why in blazes you were ever let loose to corrupt the blackfellows. Seems a whole tribe descended en masse on Darwin, got vilely intoxicated and tore up half the city before they could be corralled. When they were sober enough to be questioned, they said a new young Bush Brother—unmistakably you—had provided the money for their binge.”

I tried to bleat an explanation, but he overrode me.

“That wasn’t all. One of the blacks claimed the Bush Brother had shot and wounded him. Others said that the missionary had provoked an intertribal war. Still others claimed he danced naked before them and then fed them poison, but that part wasn’t too clear.”

I whinnied again, and was again overridden.

“I don’t know exactly what you did up there, Mobey, and frankly I don’t care to be told. I would be everlastingly grateful, though, for one word from you.”

“What’s that, your reverence?” I asked huskily.

He stuck out his hand. “Good-bye.”

Having not much else to do, I drifted down to the Woolloomooloo docks to inquire about this mysterious freight consignment. It turned out to have been sent by dear old SoPrim’s Overseas Mission Board and consisted of one Westinghouse two-seater electric golf cart, seven gross of Lightolier lampshades—that’s 1,008 lampshades—and a number of cartons of Old Crone Brand burley snuff.

I was too benumbed and disheartened, by this time, even to evince surprise. I signed a receipt and was given a voucher. I carried the voucher to the sailors’ low quarter of the town, where I was approached by shifty-eyed men. One of them, the master of a rusty trawler engaged in smuggling Capitalist luxuries to the underadvantaged Communists of Red China, bought my entire consignment, sight unseen. I have no doubt that I was bilked on the transaction, but I was satisfied to be able to pay off the accumulated storage fees on the stuff and have enough left over to buy steerage passage on the first tramp ship leaving for the good old U.S.A.

The only landfall in this country was New York, so that’s where I debarked, about a fortnight ago. Hence the postmark on this letter, because I am still here. I was penniless again by the time I landed. But through fortuitous coincidence I visited the local Natural History Museum (because admission was free) at just the time they were preparing a new aborigine tableau in the Australian wing. When I mentioned my recent stay among the Anulas, I was at once engaged as a technical consultant.

The salary was modest, but I managed to put away a bit, in hopes of soon returning to Virginia and to dear old Southern Primitive, to find out what my next mission was to be. Just recently, however, I have discovered that a mission calls me right here.

The artist painting the backdrop of the aborigine tableau—an Italian chap, I take him to be; he is called Daddio—has introduced me to what he calls his “in-group”: habitants of an homogeneous village within the very confines of New York City. He led me into a dim, smoky cellar room (a “pad”) full of these people—bearded, smelly, inarticulate—and I felt almost transported back to the abos.

Daddio nudged me and whispered, “Go on, say it. Loud, and just the way I coached you, man.”

So I declaimed to the room at large the peculiar introduction he had made me rehearse in advance: “I am Crispin Mobey, boy Bush Brother! I have just been circumcised and I learned my Pitjantjatjara from a defrocked priest named Krapp!”

The people in the room, who had been desultorily chatting among themselves, were instantly silent. Then one said, in a hushed and reverent murmur: “This Mobey is so far in we’re out....”

“Like all of a sudden,” breathed another, “Howl is the square root of Peale....”

A lank-haired girl arose from a squat and scrawled on the wall with her green eyebrow pencil, “Leary, no. Larry Welk, si.”

“Naked Lunch is, like, Easter brunch,” said someone else.

“Like, man,” said several people at once, “our leader has been taken to us!”

None of this conveyed any more to me than had the arcane utterances of McCubby and Yartatgurk. But I have been accepted here as I never was even among the Anulas. Nowadays they wait with bearded lips agape for my tritest pronouncement and listen, as avidly as no other congregation I have ever known, to my most recondite sermons. (The one about Prayer being a Checkbook, etc., I have recited on several occasions in the tribe’s coffeehouses, to an accompaniment of tribal string music.)

And so, Dean Dismey, I have been divinely guided—all unwittingly but unswervingly—to the second mission of my career. The more I learn of these villagers and their poor deluded idolatries, the more I feel certain that, sooner or later, I can be of Help.

I have applied to the mission headquarters of the local synod of the Primitive Protestant Church for proper accreditation and have taken the liberty of listing you, reverend sir, and Bishop Shagnasty as references. Any good word that you may be kind enough to vouchsafe in my behalf will be more than appreciated by.

Yours for Humility Rampant, Crispin Mobey