Tell Them How It Happened

Our world changed the day the ghostmen came ashore.

We had grown hungry in the days before their arrival. Our fishing nets had been coming up empty and unusual rain had driven the land creatures from their feeding grounds, leaving us with nothing to hunt. You know all too well how it feels to go without food, my son; but back then, hunger was a rare thing. We served Nature, protected and preserved Her, and in return She gave us all that we needed. So when food became scarce, we thought we were being punished for something we had done wrong. It wasn’t until later that we realised the scarcity of food was not a punishment, but a warning — a warning to flee.

Darraloo was the first of our clan to witness the ghostmen. He came running back to camp on the morning of their arrival, panicked as a rabbit with a dingo on its heels, yelling of a strange object on the horizon. We heard him before we saw him, and the fear in his voice made us all nervous; we were already on our feet with spears in hand when he reached us.

“Visitors!” Darraloo panted, with a wild look in his eye. It made me shiver to see this brave man so disturbed. “Visitors! On the water! Coming toward shore!”

It made no sense to stand around and ask questions of him when the shore was mere paces away. I took off alongside my brothers, through the bush and toward the water — but not before speaking words of reassurance to your mother, who was also at camp, clutching your tiny body to her breast.

I’ll never forget the expression on her face in that moment, my son. She looked frightened like everybody else, but also sad, as though she already knew what was coming. I always said that she was an elder in a young woman’s body, your mother. Quiet but clever. Wise. But I’ll speak more of her later.

My brothers and I saw the visitors as soon as we broke through the treeline. I’m not ashamed to admit that the sight of them shot fresh fear into my heart; for there, coming through the mouth of the bay, was a watercraft unlike any I had seen before. It was so large, and so bizarre in its design, that I doubted whether it had been made by the hands of men. It was many, many times longer than our own canoes, and equal in height to a well-grown tree! And it was an object of two parts: a dark brown base that sat upon the water, and a sand-coloured structure that stretched above the base. I could not fathom how an object so large was able to stay afloat.

Darraloo didn’t understand it, either. “Impossible!” he insisted, no less anxious than before. “It must be the work of magic men.”

“Or the work of Nature,” another of the men suggested. “Perhaps it is unoccupied. A gift.”

The suggestion aroused gasps of excitement among us — gave us reason to be less scared, more hopeful. But that hope vanished when someone pointed out that there was movement aboard. As the watercraft approached and became more detailed to my eye, I saw for myself that a great many people were scurrying around on its base. From afar they looked small as ants, but I knew they were men like us.

Or were they? Before long I noticed something about the watercraft’s occupants that made my stomach turn. They were concealing their nakedness, leaving only their face and forearms exposed to the sun — and their exposed skin was horribly, unnaturally pale.

The others noticed this too. A new sense of panic took hold of us. You must understand, my son, that although we had never seen white-skinned men before this moment, we had long speculated about their existence. In our stories we referred to them as ghostmen; and whenever we told these stories around the fire at night, the children held tight to their mothers and slept uneasily afterward. The mere thought of them was something to be feared.

Fear makes men behave strangely. Before we knew it our spears were raised and we were bellowing threats across the water. My worry was that the ghostmen would attempt to land on the stretch of shore on which we stood. To my relief, they didn’t; it soon became apparent that the craft was turning, heading instead for a destination deeper inside the bay.

As the craft passed our position, I was finally able to appreciate it in all of its detail. I realised the sand-coloured structure above the base was not a single object, but rather a number of giant sheets, wide and thin like leaves, suspended between tall, rigid stalks that resembled tree trunks. These sheets strained and slackened in the wind, making creaking and groaning noises that we could hear from the water’s edge. We could also hear the shouts of the ghostmen, uttered in a tongue that made no sense to us. Many of them were staring at us from the craft.

We watched the craft as it moved past us and continued into the bay. We continued to cry out and brandish our spears, hoping to frighten them — though whether we succeeded, I cannot say; their milk-coloured faces were unreadable. It travelled a long distance from us before stopping within a stone’s throw of land. Soon after the ghostmen disembarked and paddled to shore in smaller crafts that were similar in size and shape to our own canoes. With them they brought strange items of all shapes and sizes.

Our clan moved to a hill to gain a better view of their activities. The women and children came with us. I recall your mother’s quiet presence beside me as we watched the ghostmen unloading their supplies on our land. I recall you whimpering in her arms, and her placing a soothing kiss on your little forehead.

***

To begin with, we did not intend to approach the ghostmen. We wanted to wait for them to approach us — it was our land, after all, granted to us by Nature, and as the visitors they were obliged to seek our permission to enter. They had seen us from their craft; they knew we were here. We hoped they would come to us before nightfall.

Our attitude changed when they began felling trees. We watched, first with shock and then with increasing anger, as they cut down Nature’s shelter and it replaced it with their own. It was then that we realised that they were not going to respect Nature, and that we therefore had to intervene on Her behalf.

We approached the ghostmen with noble intentions, my son. Though we were prepared for violence, we were not seeking it. As our clan walked as one to their camp, we sincerely believed that we could make them understand the offence they were causing to Nature — and that once they understood the follow of their ways, they would agree to behave in a more civilised manner.

My heart was racing when we reached the perimeter of their camp. We came to a halt, we men in front and the women and children behind us, and waited for the ghostmen to approach us. And approach they did, after a moment of hesitation. They stopped before us; we stared each other down, a few paces apart, tense and silent.

Eventually, sensing that the ghostmen did not wish us harm, we laid our spears down. They did the same with their own curious weapons. They smiled, and we smiled back. Our fears eased. After another moment of hesitation, we moved in and embraced each other.

No blood was spilled that afternoon or evening. We exchanged gifts with them, even let them hold our children — including you, my son. You were in the arms of a ghostman that day.

The peacefulness of the encounter gave us hope that we could in time persuade the ghostmen to treat Nature with the respect She deserves.

It was an ignorant belief, my son — for only a matter of days later, the ghostmen’s curse took hold.

***

They spared none of us from their dark magic. It struck some sooner than others, but in the end we all suffered. We felt as though we were burning, although there was no hint of smoke coming from any of us; then, as the burning began to ease, our skin erupted with blisters that itched and stung like bug bites. They were everywhere: our chest, our arms, our face.

You suffered the curse at the same time as your mother and I. You screamed like a dying animal through the day and night. Your mother was quiet but no less in pain; I saw it in her glistening eyes, in the way she relentless twitched and squirmed, never able to find comfort. As the days passed her movements became weaker, and her words became slurred beyond recognition.

Toward the end, there was only one thing she said that made sense to me: your name. She uttered it over and over and over again throughout her last night, once for every star in the sky. I was weak too — for much of the night, barely conscious — but I did everything I could to comfort her: wiped the sweat from her brow, even though more sweat would appear as soon as I did, and squeezed her hand, even though she lacked the strength to squeeze it back.

In the depth of the morning, as the first hint of colour was appearing in the sky, I passed out. When I awoke the sky had brightened and your mother was still and silent beside me. Her face had finally dried. She had rejoined Nature.

I thought that you and I would follow her, my son. Your voice was hoarse from crying, your beautiful black skin spoiled by the mark of the ghostmen. But unlike so many of our people, and for reasons I can’t explain, we survived. Shortly after your mother died, we began to slowly regain strength. Your crying lessened. Our shivering eased and the blisters began to scab over and flake away, leaving behind the scars we still bear today. You regained your appetite and began feeding from the breast of one of the women who had lost her own child to the curse. It was then that I allowed myself to believe that you might actually see boyhood.

And you did, my son. It’s the one thing I’m grateful for.

I know that all of this is painful for you to hear, but you need to hear it. You need to understand what happened to our people. If you understand what happened to us, perhaps you can understand why we are in this situation. Why we’re always hungry, on the move, afraid.

If you can understand what happened to us, you can understand why we hate the ghostmen.

Above all, I want you to know that we were once a proud people. Our limbs were strong and our bellies content. By night we shared stories and danced around the fire, howling with joy, expressing gratitude to Nature for all She had given us. It’s hard to believe, but that was once how we lived.

I dream that in your lifetime, things will return to the way they were — but until then, you need to keep our story alive. Tell it to the other children when they’re old enough to hear it — and to your own children, when you’re old enough to have them. Our culture lives in all of us, my son. We are responsible for its survival.

So when people ask how you got your scars, my son, tell them what I’ve just told you. Tell them how it happened.