“I’d been away from home for eight years. I hadn’t written a letter — kept putting it off, and a blundering fool of a fellow that got down the day before me told the old folks that he’d heard I was dead.”
The opening paragraph succinctly sums up in less than 50 words everything that is important to know about the story. It provides backstory, a glimpse into the character of the protagonist and the event which makes the story worth telling. This economy of word use is extremely important considering the entire thing is conveyed using just 500 words.
Here he took a pull at his water-bag.
“When I got home they were all in mourning for me. It was night, and the girl that opened the door screamed and fainted away like a shot.”
He lit his pipe.
What follows immediately upon the opening paragraph is another display of Lawson’s truly astounding control of the efficiency of his word in choice in relation his tale. For the most part, this is a first-person narrative; everything of value about what actually occurred when he showed up surprisingly alive to a family recently convinced he was dead is related through dialogue by Mitchell to his traveling companion during a conversation after the events. The authorial intrusion into this dialogue is extremely important, however, as the consistent tone serves to create an otherwise unspoken insight into the personality of Mitchell. While his dialogue is actually rather flat and to the point, the imagery so described is unquestionably one dominated by an intense display of heightened emotions. The descriptive prose of the author is equally flat and to the point, but contrasts sharply precisely by revealing that Mitchell is alienated from his family when it comes to displays of emotional extremes.
“The girls came rushing down. Mother was so pumped out that she couldn’t get up. They thought at first I was a ghost, and then they all tried to get holt of me at once — nearly smothered me. Look at that pup! You want to carry a tank of water on a dry stretch when you’ve got a pup that drinks as much as two men.”
This is a key excerpt from the story. Mitchell is continuing his monologue recalling a night in which emotions ran just about the entire gamut from despair to shock to joy using the same just-the-facts approach to storytelling that remains consistent throughout. While in the midst of relating to his listener just how heightened emotions were running he suddenly breaks off and comments upon something happening in the moment: their shepherding dog companion thirstily drinking water. And what is most notable about this paragraph representing an unbroken stream of consciousness monologue on the part of Mitchell? Despite a monologue that will ultimately convey to his listener such details as a woman fainting, women screaming, men crying and even the realization that old sweetheart whom he thought had forgotten all about him revealing that she still holds tender feeling toward…the only sight that warrants an exclamation point indicating a significant rise in the intensity of his own emotions is that of a dog drinking a lot of water.
They shouldered the swags, with the pup on top of Mitchell’s, took up their billies and water-bags, turned their unshaven faces to the wide, hazy distance, and left the timber behind them.
The narrator gets the last word in the story and it should be taken as a recap of everything that has been related through Mitchell’s dialogue. The relation of this story took place in the spare shade of the small trees that are a defining character of the Australian landscape the two men are about to leave behind as they move from the edge of the plain and into the harshness of its long shade-free reality. For Mitchell, his sojourn back home was just a stop in the shade and nothing to get more excited about in the living than in the telling.
