Beyond the Black Stump (25 page)

Stanton wrinkled up his brow. “But what’s all that got to do with your mother, though?”

“Uncle Tom always wanted the Mauser,” she explained. “He should have had it in the first place—Daddy admits that—because Uncle Tom was senior to Daddy in the I.R.A. But the General was dying, and I suppose he gave it to the first man he saw. So when Ma changed over, Daddy gave Uncle Tom the Mauser.”

He stopped dead in his tracks. “You don’t mean that,
honey? You don’t mean that your uncle swapped your mother for an old pistol?”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that myself, Stan. But I think perhaps it eased hard feelings when Daddy gave him the Mauser. There were just the three great Irish generals in the Troubles—Edmund Pearse, Rory O’Connor, and Shamus O’Brian, and Uncle Tom always says that O’Brian was the greatest of them all. The Mauser means an awful lot to them.”

“I guess it would,” he said. They walked on in silence for a few minutes, the geologist thinking very deeply. Here in the Lunatic an eccentricity that verged on lunacy made good sense. When a woman transferred her affections from one brother to another there was nothing much that anyone could do about it. Sensible brothers, used to getting on together in a district hundreds of miles from any civilisation, would not go gunning for each other over a thing like that. Stanton Laird was now beginning to appreciate Pat Regan, to appreciate the depth of sincerity and good feeling that lay in the old Irishman. In such a situation a right-thinking man would willingly part with his dearest possession to ease the hurt pride of his brother, and a right-thinking brother would recognise the sacrifice, and be mollified. The dearest possession happened to have been an old German pistol. It might equally well have been, on Laragh Station, a Rolls Royce motor car or the Countess; the personal sacrifice involved would have been the value of the gift. Still, it wasn’t the sort of story about his mother-in-law that he’d like to have talked about back home in Oregon. No reason why it ever should be, though.

David Cope, at Lucinda Station, heard the news from Ted next day. Ted was the head cook in the Americans’ camp, and he was the only one at the oil rig who thought his time well spent if it was spent in reading a book. He had fallen into the habit of visiting the young Englishman once or twice a week, driving over in one of the jeeps. Usually these visits were for social courtesy and he would usually take with him an enormous peach pie or an angel cake, together with a tin or two of cream to liven up the somewhat pedestrian cooking of the Lucinda gins. Actually he went to return a book and to borrow another one, as well as for a change from the oil rig.

Ted was now David’s only contact with the Americans.
As Mollie’s intimacy with Stanton Laird had ripened he had found the company of the oil men increasingly distasteful and it was now nearly two months since he had visited the rig to see their movies or for any other reason. Moreover, Lucinda was by now in a bad way for lack of rain. The Lunatic lies at the southern edge of the monsoon, the summer rains of North Australia. Usually the country got eight or ten inches of winter rain in June and July, and most years it could look for a few inches of summer rain from the monsoon in January and February. Lucinda with its few bores, however, was a marginal station; unless it got the summer rains it was difficult to carry any stock through from the end of the winter rains in August to the beginning of the next year’s winter rains in June. That year, for the first time in David’s tenure of Lucinda Station, the summer rains had failed. Altogether they had totalled less than an inch, and that in three separate falls that had evaporated practically as soon as they touched the hot earth. Lucinda Station was in the grip of a drought, a drought that had hardly affected Laragh with its rather better rainfall and its many bores.

David was now trucking water to his sheep. He had plenty of water running still from his two bores, but the feed around these bores had long been eaten out. He had, however, an old three-ton truck and a thousand-gallon tank, with a number of portable troughs. He did not dare to put more than five hundred gallons in the tank when driving across rough country, for the truck was his lifeline; if he broke a spring and put it out of action for a week all his sheep would die. He had about four thousand sheep, diminishing in number every day, and his aim was to take two gallons of water to each sheep each day, a total of sixteen journeys every day. He had moved his sheep out from the water progressively into country where there was still feed for them till now they were eight or ten miles from his bores, so that to reach his target he now had to drive three hundred miles a day. To fill his tank at the bore took nearly half an hour, and a quarter of an hour to empty it at the other end, so that it was now only just theoretically possible for him to carry two gallons per sheep if the truck were to run unceasingly for twenty hours a day. Actually, he was falling far behind his target for a variety of practical reasons, and he was now delivering less than a gallon
and a half each day to each sheep. They were helping him, however, because the deaths were mounting rapidly.

He had plenty of fuel and tyres for the truck, and Jackie, his half-caste overseer, was a good driver; they shared the work between them. So far as possible they avoided the hottest part of the day because there are limits to human endurance, and because the evaporation from the troughs was greatest then. They had fallen into a routine whereby Jackie started driving at about three in the afternoon and went on till midnight, when he would take over from David and the stockmen any movement of the sheep on to fresh feed that might be going on. David would commence to move the sheep on to fresh pasture at sunset and then take over the truck from Jackie at midnight, continuing to cart water till about nine o’clock in the morning, when he would eat something and get what sleep he could in the heat of the day in the torrid little house that was Lucinda homestead. He had been living like this for a month, and he was getting very thin and haggard. And his sheep were dying on him all the time.

Ted knew his routine, and timed his visit for about half past four in the afternoon, when David would have finished sleeping and would be preparing for the night’s work. He drove up in the oil rig jeep, and David left his meal and came out to meet him.

“Hi-yah, fellow,” said the cook. “I just stopped by to see if you were still alive enough to eat a piece of cake.”

The Englishman grinned. “Just about,” he said. “I don’t suppose I’ll be next week, if this goes on.”

The American got out of his jeep. “Any sign of it letting up?”

David shook his head. “Not a hope. June the 10th—that’s the first date we can expect a rain. Nine weeks to go.”

“How’re the goddam stock holding out?”

“Lost about three hundred last week. Jackie says more, but I don’t think it was.”

The American wagged his head. “Jeez! I guess you won’t have many left by June the 10th.”

David said, “It gets easier as they die off, because there aren’t so many to water. I think we’ll probably get through with about two thousand, or a little under.”

“Out of four thousand you started with?”

“That’s right.”

“Quite a loss.”

“I know,” said David. “We’ll be back to where we started. It’s a pity, because we’d been doing pretty well and I was planning that we’d sink another bore or two. But now we’ll have to wait a bit for that.”

The other wagged his head in sympathy. “That’s kind of tough.”

They turned to the house. “Come on in. I’m just going to have tea before going out to work.”

“I guess I won’t stay,” the American said. “I got a lot of guys back at the rig ’ll want their chow.”

“Well, come on in and have a drink. I’ve got some whisky.”

“You have? Oh brother!”

While David got the whisky and the glasses, Ted said, “I brought back
The Cruel Sea
. Those guys in the North Atlantic certainly had it tough. Mind if I take another book?”

David said, “Go ahead and take your pick. In the bedroom.”

Ted went through into the bedroom, glanced at the framed portrait photograph of Mollie that still stood upon the chest of drawers, and stood looking absently at the row of titles. He stood there so long in thought that David came in to look for him, carrying a whisky bottle and a glass in one hand, and a gin bottle full of cold water from the refrigerator in the other. “Here you are.”

The American took the whisky and poured three fingers into the glass. He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “She your girl?”

David shook his head. “She doesn’t think so.”

“Uh-huh. You heard the news?”

“What news?”

“I don’t know if it’s true, brother. But they’re saying at the rig she’s going to marry Stan Laird.”

David nodded slowly. “It’s probably true enough.” He had been expecting nothing else, but when the news finally came it was painful just the same, because it meant the end of hope. He said mechanically, “I suppose I’d better take that down.” He reached for the portrait.

Ted said, “I wouldn’t do that yet, fellow. Not until she’s married.”

“Do you know when that ’ll be?”

“He’s going to the States in June. I guess it might be then.”

“He’s going whether there’s any oil here or not?”

The other poured a little water on the whisky and downed half of it. “There’s no goddam oil here. This is a dry hole, a busted flush.”

“Is that right?”

“I guess so. They’re going on drilling for a while, but all we got so far is gas, and not so much of that.”

“Isn’t the gas any good?”

“Sure it’s good, if you can use it. Lay a pipe twelve miles and you could heat this house with it, if you want it any hotter. Light the street lamps of a town with it, if you had a town with any streets. No, it’s a busted flush, if you ask me.”

David said heavily, “Well, Stan Laird’s a good sort of chap.” He turned back to the living-room, and poured himself a whisky. He did not usually drink when he was alone, but in the circumstances it was both theatrical and comforting.

The American picked a book at random from the shelf, and followed him. “Sure, Stan Laird’s a good guy, as good as they come. They don’t come any better.” He downed the last half of his drink. “Too good for me, I guess. Drive me nuts to live with him.” He turned to the door, showing the book. “I’ll take this one, if I may. So long, boss, ’n thanks for the shot. Be seeing you!”

He went off in his jeep, and David sat in dejection with his whisky. The gin came and laid the table, and put down a sodden mess of overcooked mutton before him with a couple of tinned potatoes on the side and a slather of tinned carrots. Her duty finished, she withdrew and went away to the stockmen’s quarters to nurse her youngest child at her capacious breasts, and David sat picking at the unappetising meal in the great heat, and drinking the whisky. Once a tear trickled down his nose and he brushed it away irritably, because it was babyish to cry. Stan Laird was an older man, a better man, and a man who could provide a good home for a wife, which David knew that he could not. There were times when a chap had to keep his chin up and show what he was made of, and this was one of them. Self-pity never did anyone any good, and God knew that he had
nothing to give away at this time, with all the bloody sheep dying like flies.

He had sent his three stockmen out to the sheep with Jackie an hour before, and now he followed them in the jeep, driving across country over the red earth in and out of the brown clumps of spinifex and the desiccated, scattered trees. It was time, he thought, to take stock of his plans. With Mollie at his side he would have battled on for ever to make something of Lucinda; it would have been their property, their challenge to meet side by side. Clive Anderson, the bus operator in Perth who had gambled the small capital required for the venture, was fed up with his unprofitable investment. If he had married Mollie the Regans might quite probably have bought Clive out; Lucinda then would have been their very own. He would never have asked them for help, whether married to Mollie or not, because in the Lunatic a man stood or fell on his own feet, but inevitably the association would have helped him to success. If this truck broke down now all his sheep would die in a few days, but with Mollie at his side in such a catastrophe a truck would have materialised, un-asked for, from Laragh. It was not for this he would have married her, but without her he could view the prospects of success at Lucinda Station more objectively, and the prospects were not good.

Two days later he went over to Laragh in his jeep to fetch the mail. He had missed fetching it the week before through pressure of work and because he was expecting nothing but personal letters; he took time off to go this time because he wanted to hear for himself that Mollie was engaged, to kill the nattering of hope that lingered on from Ted’s information.

Mollie saw his jeep coming in the distance as they sat on the verandah studying the letters brought by Spinifex Joe, and went out to meet him. She was troubled and uneasy about David, the more so for the reports of his drought troubles that had drifted into Laragh. It is bad manners to go upon a neighbour’s property unless you are invited, so that the Regans had no direct knowledge of his difficulties, but there was some movement of the stockmen’s coloured wives from station to station, and some information of affairs at Lucinda had reached Laragh from the oil rig. With the comprehensive knowledge of the country that they had, the
Regans were very well aware of what David was up against. As Mollie went out to meet the jeep, she was hating herself for what she had to tell him, at this time.

He parked behind the big diesel semi-trailer so that they were screened by it from the verandah and could talk for a few minutes in some privacy. She was shocked by the change in his appearance since she had seen him last. “Morning, David,” she said awkwardly.

He smiled, a little wryly. “Morning,” he said. “I hear I’ve got to congratulate you.”

She nodded, relieved that she had not had to tell him. “That’s right. I came out to tell you, David.” She hesitated. “I thought you ought to know.”