Barley Patch by Gerald Murnane Read Free Book Online Page B

dining-room and the living-room. The outer arms each comprised mostly bedrooms. The long arm from which the three shorter arms projected comprised kitchen, pantries, storerooms, and the manager’s quarters. I seem to recall that Mary and some of her tribe spent much time in the yard behind this arm of the house.
    The persons living in the homestead numbered perhaps ten, many of them being members of what would be called nowadays an extended family. I forgot long ago whatever I might have read about most of them. I remember today that one of them was named Ambrose Mahon. I remember also a great deal about Huldah.
    As I approach yet again in my mind the three-pronged building that I first read about in the early 1950s, I keep my eyes fixed on the windows of the nearest room in the prong or wing at my left. Behind those windows, the blinds are always drawn. The nearest to me of the rooms in the wing on my left is the furthest room along the corridor for someone standing inside that wing and also the most remote room in the house from the main living areas. The door to that room is always locked, just as the blinds are always drawn in the windows. In the dim, locked room lives Huldah, one of the several siblings of the older generation of the family who live at Kinie Ger. Huldah has lived in her room since she was a child. Her siblings, presumably, know why she hides from the world and perhaps even visit her in secret late at night. The younger persons at Kinie Ger have never seen Huldah and can only guess at her story. They mostly guess that Huldah has some hideous disfigurement that she wants to keep hidden from the world or else that she has an illness of the mind that causes her to live her life in secret.
    From the moment when I first read about Huldah, she was for me the chief character of The Glass Spear . I often disregarded the facts of the novel, so to call them, and thought of her as a young woman of marriageable age rather than the middle-aged person she surely was. Given that the version of myself who stepped easily into the scenery of books of fiction was a young man of marriageable age, it was inevitable that I would spend much of my time as a hanger-on at Kinie Ger in trying to attract the attention of the unseen Huldah. I did what little I could think of doing. I walked past her windows several times each day, always with a book in my hands as a sign that the world in which Kinie Ger stood among vistas of arid grasslands with trees in the distance—that world was not for me the only possible world. When I had tired of so walking, I would sit with an opened book in front of me in the living-room, in the central wing of the house. I was far from Huldah’s room, but one of her trusted siblings might have reported to the hidden young woman that the newcomer who had found his way across pages of text into the dim rooms of a remote homestead was a reader; that even in a place I had only read about, I still read about other places.
    If it had been possible, the trusted sibling might have reported also that I was a writer. The sibling could not have told Huldah that he or she had seen me writing for hour after hour during some or another hot afternoon at the table of the living-room. As a child, I supposed that my sort of writing could be done only in secret. However, I am able to report that my having read about Huldah and her locked room in a fictional homestead drove me to begin to write the first piece of prose fiction that I can remember having written. As I recall, I wrote during 1950 or 1951 the first few hundred words of a story set on a large rural property in inland Tasmania. Most of what I wrote described the homestead on the property and some of the persons who lived there. I wrote in secret and I hid the finished pages each morning before I left for school. I hid the pages under a loose corner of the frayed linoleum in my bedroom, but after I had written the first few hundred words my mother found them.