1915 (8 page)

A wasp's nest high on a lamp chain held Walter's
attention for a minute, and the creeping heat that advanced from outside cradled him. Then he heard Mr Fox talking a kind of sense — and he understood. For as we are taken, said the minister, and destroyed, so we shall glimpse the destination.

Walter clenched one hand in the other and bent his head as if in prayer.

Mr Fox returned tø the Christmas scene but it sounded merely everyday. He rattled through its moral as if the thing he really believed in was lightning, and it had cracked once to show a black torrent and glistening rocks and bobbing white faces: and that was that. He seemed to have discovered something for himself in the sermon, and now he could feel it slipping away. But he squared up to his obligations and presented a sensible gift to a parish that had more than once addressed veiled queries about his capacity to the moderator. He called the nativity a light, the star over all our dark nights no matter how gloomy. This is what Christmas means when we recall it in our worst hours, as we should — as, if we are to find the Lord, we must. For He is the Shelter in the storm, the Lamp in the depth of night, the Beacon on the dangerous shore.

There was more of this, but the Christ part meant nothing to Walter — though heads nodded wisely and booted feet scraped on the gritty boards in agreement. He watched a line of dust motes climbing to the bare window pane — pollen-coloured swirling atoms held to the shape of a plank. Again through the glass he saw the dense cross-hatching of pine needles, and suddenly the tree moved. The needles shook as if a current of air were striking the tree continuously in one place. Wind? But wind moved around, wind went everywhere: then a glimmer of white appeared among the green. It
grasped a small branch and pulled it aside. Douggie's face peered down, a white disc that had floated up from Bible class and was now suspended bodiless in the branches. Then the face and hand just as suddenly disappeared, and the tree was still.

All this time Billy had been asleep. As the congregation made its finishing up noises a dream flew from him in which his mother — to be buried in the small graveyard outside — thanked him for his concern and said, “God will speak to me in his sauce bottle.”

He woke infuriated.

Mr Fox removed his glasses and slipped them away through a rent in his cassock.

“Therefore,
Rejoice!
”

The word travelled slowly this time and padded on the hot underside of the roof.

After a pause he uttered a low whispered “Amen”.

The organ in the corner gasped with relief.

 

After the service Walter posed with one foot propped on a pine root.

“I saw you up the tree.”

“What tree?” Douggie adopted the “at ease” position of a well-behaved Great Public Schoolboy.

“This tree.”

“I didn't climb a tree.”

“You did.”

“I didn't.”

“You did, you little liar.”

“Don't call me a bloody liar.”

“You're a liar. And don't swear.”

“
Bloody
. I'm not a liar.”

“Who's a liar?” asked Billy. He approached Douggie from behind. “You've got pine needles stuck in your hair.”

“Dunno how I got those.”

“You'll be at the Bindogundra hop, won't you? Aunty Bea and Uncle Len will be there” — he lowered his voice to exclude Douggie — “but a short leash never worried Ethel.”

Walter glanced at Ethel who was perched on a shaded ledge of the tankstand: she fluttered a hand, made to get down, but was intercepted by Duncan Grieve who blocked her with a massive palm resting on the tank's rust-streaked corrugations.

“He treats her with respect,” observed Billy, sneezing and flinging a string of snot to the grass — the rest was carried into his pocket. “Nothing turns off a good sport quicker.”

All this talk about Ethel made it hard to bring up the name of May Armitage. Walter opened his mouth to ask but Billy elbowed him — “Just watch her.”

Though Ethel rolled her eyes at Walter and had butted his hip at the show, and, he supposed, would do with him all those things Billy promised she would, still he felt she disliked him. But he said: “I wouldn't miss it for the world.”

“He's already got a girl,” intruded Douggie.

“Oh yeah?”

“Scamper!” Walter raised an arm to threaten his brother who sauntered off, but called back, “The girl on the train,” then ran.

“Who?”

“No-one.”

“Go on,” Billy taunted. “Just the kid talking, eh? Or did you make it up to impress him?” He searched for
his cigarette papers and finished off a laugh by hawking drily — nothing came out. “The harvest always gets me like this.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and stuck a dampened corner of cigarette paper to his lower lip, letting it dangle while he rubbed a leathery strip of tobacco until it expanded into a ball.

“Well?” he mumbled.

Until he spoke Walter had no idea what might come out. He intended denying everything.

“Ar,” he confessed, “Douggie meant the Reilly girl. We bumped into her at the station the other night. You know what kids are like.”

Billy rolled his cigarette with great care. “I should have guessed you'd like that one.” After he'd licked the glued edge, which was when most people looked up, his eyes remained hidden.

“It was only hello.”

“Who knows who she'd go for, eh? But you'd be near enough her type for starters.” Billy struck a match which popped and hissed. With the cigarette wedged in his mouth he now looked Walter in the eye: “The educated type,” he enunciated. The cigarette waved around as he spoke, and the corners of his mouth gave a twitch that converted to a smile. “She'd always be looking for what she could say about a bloke to her friends, don't you think?”

Billy had spent a lot of time thinking about her.

Walter lied again, to throw him off the trail:

“She mentioned blokes in Sydney.”

“She knows her onions, that one does.”

“I got the impression she had some bloke down there she was especially sweet on.”

“All the same, you'd do all right with her,” Billy persisted — though he was suddenly tired of putting
things on a plate for Walter and then having him hold off. He decided he'd like to punch him instead — and hard — so he laughed.

“What's so funny?”

“You couldn't guess.” Billy looked around for his father, and it was easy for Walter to see everything: all the old resentment from years ago. “We're off to sit with Mum. See you at Blacky's.”

“Merry Christmas” Walter called.

“It'd better be.”

To avoid a three hour ride before dawn on Boxing Day they spent the night at the Reids. Billy had ridden across from Bindogundra and when Walter got there was lying on his stomach on a camp bed on the veranda with his boots off and a wet towel draped over his head for the heat. His hands dangled from the end of the bed holding something — a stone — swaying it in blunt arcs which now and then scraped the floor.

After freeing Peapod and lugging the saddle to the veranda Walter asked for a look.

The stone was grey and slightly carrot-shaped. Billy rolled it between his palms, examined it as if for the first time, tapped its thick middle, then handed it across. “An Abo thing I found by the creek.”

Walter rotated the stone and followed a vein of lighter colouring which petered out towards one end. Then, wetting it with spit, he noticed dozens of faint marks tilted this way and that, numerous small deliberate scratches.

“What about these marks?”

“Yeah, Abo writing.”

When Walter had finished Billy held the stone tight in his hand and thought about his mother, who was now unconscious, and had kissed them both that afternoon with great weariness: it had been goodbye, he was certain. Yet she had managed to say: “Go to the
Reids'”, and his father had nodded, holding her yellow hand.

Blacky and Ned were still asleep on the veranda on the other side of the house when Mrs Pepper, who was to cook for the harvest, arrived at dusk with her husband. They unloaded boxes of food from their dray and a pot of stew ready for that night. Then Mrs Pepper set about gathering up the empty beer bottles from the dining room and the drained rum bottles from beside the beds where the Reids and their departed cronies had let them fall after their Christmas dinner. Old Pepper leaned on a veranda post until his wife brought out a pot of tea, then he sat on Walter's bed. “Queer,” he said, examining the stone by lamplight. Mr Pepper blamed the Aborigine for not being a military fighter like the Maori. “Of course, they're a blacker race here,” he explained, returning the stone to Billy. “And the professors at the university — you'd know all about this, Wally — they definitely put 'em low in the scale of black races.”

No-one spoke up for the departed blacks, but Billy gripped the mysterious stone and mourned his mother angrily, for nothing in his world was able to offer the kind of consolation he demanded.

Blacky was up at four thirty to feed the horses. Walter woke to hear the lick and munch of a massive mouth and peered into the gloom to see the head of Flower, who had followed Blacky on his return to the house, elongated by her nose bag to the snout of something prehistoric.

At breakfast Paul Scott arrived, and the remaining helpers, the Lutheran Schulers, turned up just as the hot clamp of the sun finished its drying out of the wheat. It was the best moment of the day — as it turned out, the
best for Walter in the entire harvest, for things were soon to turn sour. The horses champed away at a last minute feed, rigged powerfully in their leather collars and iron hames. The trace chains hung slack, but in a minute they'd clank and stiffen, and the clatter and swish of machinery would eat its way across the yellow and blue haze. But nothing could happen until Blacky surged back from his look at the wheat — there he was, giving his signal, a scarecrow in white shirt and stained waistcoat — and with his shout everything began.

Walter would be alone until the first harvester arrived ready to unload at the bagging point. He squatted, nibbled a straw, and spat. Old Pepper had fixed on the idea that he was a “scholar”, but his only contact with the university he was supposed to know all about was a fading ambition, which the old-timer had picked up God knows when from his parents. At tea the night before when Walter ambled in, Mr Pepper had drawn attention to his “scholar's stoop”. This had given Billy the chance to make a crack:

“What does he know?”

Mr Pepper considered the brown depths of his teacup. “I believe in an education. It can change a man's fortune without half-killing him. Why, you tell 'im, Wally.”

“I don't know anything.”

“Modest,” nodded the old man, and swung round to confirm the virtue with his wife, who was checking the stew for the Reids — who'd woken with fearful bad tempers and immediately disappeared down to the yards. Mrs Pepper said nothing. Sometimes even her silence healed things, but not now.

“What I know isn't much use around here. Besides,”
Walter insisted, “the more you know, the more you realize you've got to learn.”

“Do tell,” sneered Billy.

Walter had meant to make a gift to Billy's point of view. Out here on the plains there existed only the equality of hands. But he had sounded merely priggish.

Billy mopped his plate with bread and swigged his remaining tea. “No pudding for me,” he told Mrs Pepper.

Her husband now addressed Walter with a sharpened curiosity. “Look here, what happened to Ian Gillen's boy, eh? At twenty-five or thereabouts he's got nineteen thousand acres producing like his father never could.”

“His Dad had the money to start with.”

“Science, that's what done it,” said Mr Pepper, and nothing would shift him. Suddenly Billy appeared to be holding everything against Walter, as if he had been getting away without scars, and would have to be wounded to make things equal. If it came to a fight, Walter's only weapon, words, would be next to useless. Billy's weapons, sharpened on rough experience, could do their work swiftly.

Even now, as Billy cajoled the horses from his high seat on a harvester, something was building up. Walter had no sense of a special quality which he had held over Billy to cause all this: as far as he could see it was himself, the accidental
he
that all his life had shaped, which had mysteriously become a point of contention. Two hares dashed by his boots, and the painted shells of quail scuttled from the path of approaching horses: all the disturbed life of the wheat paddocks flew out again as it had when Walter felt worst about Mrs Mackenzie, barely two weeks before. But now, instead
of brooding, he stretched, gave a wave to the Schulers, and adjusted his hat for the job ahead.

 

The morning's work soon took over. Dust and chaff flew, Blacky shouted — you could hear him a mile off — Paul Scott and Eric Schuler swore and grunted as they hefted the granite-hard wheat bags onto the wagon. Blacky and Ned and Billy drove the harvesters, wheeling up to the bare apron of paddock where the bags sat ready, checking harness while Walter and Otto Schuler clipped empty bags to the bins and opened the shutes, guiding the dry torrent of wheat downwards. Then they took the bags by the ears and lugged them aside and got on with the sewing: six high-armed stitches, a ram of the funnel, and the wrinkled top of the bag swelled with extra wheat — then the final stitches, and the next bag and the next.

It seemed the Peppers would never arrive with morning tea, but at last their dray crept around the stubbled edge of the paddock and stopped under the lone tree on the fence.

For a few minutes no-one but Mrs Pepper spoke, and she said only “tea”, “sugar”, “buns” — these were yellow rock-cakes — and clicked the tin billy on the enamel mugs as they were held out for more. Then everyone had their breath back, and spoke at once. Finally Blacky's voice overrode the rest:

“Nobody,” he said, “is working hard enough.”

Otto and the other Schulers stared humourlessly across the rims of their mugs. Walter sensed that Blacky was working around the half-circle of reclining men to take a crack at him, so he waited while the
Lutherans were reassured by Blacky's wink and his “never mind”, and a poke in the stomach for Otto, and then he was forced to take it on the chin.

“I think young Wally's tired himself in town.”

“That'd be right,” sniggered Ned.

“Wally,” crooned Mrs Pepper, “a sweetheart?” Mrs Pepper habitually wore her hair coiled in a black and silver pile and had the energy of someone much younger: it was this — the breath of delight in others' lives — that kept her young. She pounced on Walter and poured him a fresh mug of tea, and urged another bun. The dry crumbs refused to go down when he swallowed.

“Well?”

“There's the daughter of a certain publican in Forbes, Mrs P, and she and Wally I understand are very thick.” Blacky used his white mug as a pointer, though to Walter's eyes it butted the air like a fist.

“Whatsername,” slurred Ned, and snapped his fingers as if he'd stated something.

Walter shot Billy a hot look which said: if you wanted to, you could stop this silly carry-on. But while Billy wasn't smiling and laughing like the rest, it was plain that he wanted things to get worse.

“Yeah, I hear Wally's ‘in love'.”

“Go on,” breathed Ned with thick wonder.

“Oh, he told a friend of mine all about it,” said Blacky, “and a very touching tale it was too. The only thing is” — and here he spoke to Mrs Pepper alone — “the lass herself ain't sure it's mutual.”

“Stanley Reid!” admonished the woman, realizing too late what had happened. Walter gave Blacky a hard stare, and from the corner of his eye saw Billy slip from the dray and head back to his horses.

“A barmaid is a wonderful talker,” observed Blacky to the world. He poured his tea-leaves clot by clot to the ground and rested his mug upside down on the dray.

The Schulers seemed barely aware of what had happened. They nodded to each other and thanked Mrs Pepper with pleasureless smiles. For the rest of the day, though, Walter took refuge in their company. He was wild at himself for not hitting back straight away, yet any attempt at redress would have been hopeless — he felt himself floundering at the centre of a ring of raised and mocking eyebrows.

Still, at dusk, when he and Billy sat on the veranda after their wash, he tried to wrest things back.

“What's Blacky been saying, eh?”

But Billy merely shrugged, sneezed, and cursed the wheat dust.

At tea-time Eddie Harkness rolled up to the front of the house driving his father's “Hudson 33”, a motor car as sleek as a dressed plank.

The inspection called for several lamps to be lit, and a rag to wipe clean the inquisitive paw marks of old Pepper.

“Who wants a run to town?” Eddie beamed, showing his white teeth, and exhausted as they were, Blacky, Ned and Billy piled in, leaving Mrs Pepper's apple pie untasted in the kitchen.

“What about you?” asked Eddie as he fiddled with his expensive gloves. His father owned the general store. Eddie took what he wanted.

“I'm buggered,” said Walter.

Off they went shouting and singing — someone yodelled “Ta-ta my bonnie Maggie darling” down at the gate, and Walter knew he was the cause of the
laughter that followed. The acetylene headlamps peered weakly back as the car swung around and negotiated the dry creek.

With its owners gone the house seemed friendly. When the table was cleared and the dishes washed and stacked away, and her old man gone outside to fetch wood, Mrs Pepper apologized for getting things wrong at morning tea.

“It wasn't you,” said Walter, staring at the stains on the bare wood table: cigarette burns, the brown rings of hot saucepans, dark clouds of liquid drifting down the years.

“You're not like the others, I can see that now.”

“Aren't I.” It was a dull statement, not a question.

“They're just a mob of no-goods.” She spoke with fire. “I could tell you things about Blacky Reid that ought to hang him.”

It appeared she was serious.

“Take Ned,” she continued, “he's not lazy, but he's got no purpose. Which is the worst? He's Blacky's dog.”

“Why do you help them out?”

“For his sake,” she nodded to the thump, thump coming from behind the kitchen wall as her husband stacked wood. “You're a hard worker too,” she smiled, “but you've got something better than this life on your mind.”

“No,” contended Walter, but he couldn't work out what to say. Would Mrs Pepper understand dreams — the “maybe” of not ever shifting, but scrutinizing the life that swirled under motionless things? Walter mistrusted his own convictions.

And Frances — he wasn't going to talk about her.

“I
know
Martha Bryant,” said Mrs Pepper, referring
to the barmaid at the Royal. “She was married to a parson, did you know? But ran off with a train driver. Doesn't
everyone
know?” Mrs Pepper gave Walter the kind of look she might have reserved for Rip Van Winkle. “Then she came home to Parkes. Her dad was the straightest man in town, Eris Bryant the saddler. Trust Martha to shame him: she was bold, even as a kiddie.”

Mrs Pepper then seemed to change the subject, but really it was the same story: “You're the type of boy who doesn't want to hurt people.”

Walter nodded sleepily, she had him exactly.

“But you will, and you do.”

“No —”

“You see,” Mrs Pepper insisted, “you have an independent mind.”

The solid-armed woman had turned florid in the practice of her intelligence. “And it's not just that you seem to have a certain attitude. You
do
have it.”

She let the pronouncement sink in. A nightbird shrieked across the silent paddocks, and suddenly the house seemed not free of the Reids at all: inside and out it reeked of their ownership. Slowly Walter saw what Mrs Pepper was saying, and the injustice of it pricked him.

“You mean Blacky might have been getting back at
me?
” He scraped his chair signalling offence, but she restrained him with a rough hand.

She held on. “I can see what's happening between you and your friends. They're taking something from you after you took something from them.”

“What?”

“I don't know.” She poured herself a fresh cup.