East of Outback (34 page)

“Thank God. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

Mary Aileen stood apart, watching. Moments ago Mum had been sober, even grim. Now she bubbled. Papa had gone to some lengths to find out about the death toll from the flu epidemic. They each in their own way conveyed their love for Colin and Hannah.

But isn’t love supposed to cement a family together? she thought. Why is ours torn asunder? Do I even know these two people? They’re Mum and Papa, of course—but I hardly know them.
Confusion knotted her thoughts like the tiny twists in her needlepoint wool sometimes knotted.

Quietly, she went to the shed to fetch Edan for dinner.

______

Colin stretched out under a crooked little mallee tree because its lacy foliage cast the only feeble shade around. He ached, bone weary. He still coughed a lot. Would he never get over this?

Hannah lay curled up ten feet away. “Colin? Do you think you should be able to tell a Christian by looking at him?”

“What do you mean? They turn purple or something?”

“You know what I mean. The way they act.”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“Those people in Griffith. Lots of them weren’t Christians—I mean really genuine committed-to-Jesus-Christ Christians, at least not the way Mrs. Slotemaker defines the term. But they did that for us out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“True.”

“And then there’s Mrs. Colfax. All I can remember about her is her face. All drawn and sour. She became absolutely livid when I told her I was leaving there and coming to Griffith to you.”

“Livid. Isn’t that a little strong?”

“No. She railed at me about my Christian duty. And then Sister Jane told me to leave, that the Colfaxes didn’t really need me anymore. Mrs. Colfax claims to be a Christian, but she didn’t act like one. She certainly never smiled or said anything positive.”

“Mmm.” Colin felt himself fading.

“So? Did I owe a Christian duty there? Did I shirk my duty as a Christian by leaving before I ought because Mrs. Colfax, who talks like a Christian but doesn’t act like one, said so? Or was I right to leave on the personal advice of Sister Jane, who acts like a Christian, but doesn’t profess to have any personal relationship to Jesus Christ? You see how confusing it can be? What were my responsibilities, really, Colin?”

Colin wasn’t sure he’d got all that, but he certainly didn’t want her to repeat it. In fact, he doubted she could. A sudden thought popped into his head. “There’s a shell sorter in Broome, an Aboriginal fellow. He sits in the middle of a huge pile of shells and sorts them by size; tossing the big ones in one bin, the little ones in another.”

“And?”

“Well, he said that sorting the obvious ones—the real big ones and the real little ones—was no trouble. It was all the sizes in between that were hard to sort. You don’t have an obvious question there, Hannah, you have one of the muddled ones in the middle, without a clear answer.”

“What you’re saying is, you don’t know the answer.”

“That, too.”

She moved around, struggling for a comfortable position under the tree. “Colin? You know why God blessed us in Griffith?”

There were several ways he could answer, but none of the answers would be to her liking. Rather than argue he simply said, “Why?”

“Because I was talking to you about Jesus.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. We were talking about what you had to do to become a Christian. I think what I should do is talk about Jesus more. When I didn’t, our pockets had holes in them, when I did speak of Him, we were blessed. See what I mean?”

“So all you have to do is keep talking and we’ll get rich?”

“That’s blasphemous, Colin! You’re deliberately twisting what I say. I don’t mean I should do it to bribe God into blessing us. I mean I should do it because it’s the right thing to do. I’m supposed to speak of Him. You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, but that doesn’t mean I believe you.”

“Stubborn old drongo. You realize, don’t you, that being honest and upright gets you rewards here on earth, but you need Jesus to get to heaven.”

“Rewards?” He snorted. “If I wasn’t so honest, I’d have sold a pearl in Broome for a fortune. I could have gone home in style.” His words carried an overtone of arrogance, but his heart wondered if maybe—just maybe—she might be right.

“You didn’t want to go home then. It just would’ve been more to trickle out of your pocket with the hole in it.”

He heard pages whisper. She had that Bible out again. She had this burning desire to talk about Jesus. Did that mean she was going to read the Bible out loud from here to Sydney? He opened his mouth to ask her not to.

Too late. “Page ten-seventy-four, Ephesians three, verse four. ‘But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,’ Five. . . .”

Her voice droned on. It should be quite easy to block out, she read in such a monotone. Why did Colin keep listening? The words burned like fire in his thoughts.

“‘ . . . toward us through Jesus Christ.’ Eight. ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.’ Colin! That’s one of the verses Mrs. Slotemaker showed me. She says it’s the hardest thing in the world to accept a gift you don’t think you’ve earned. But that’s what salvation is. You don’t deserve it, but God wants to give it to you anyway.”

Mrs. Slotemaker. Colin was getting a bit bored with hearing about Mrs. Slotemaker. Hannah continued with her reading as Colin’s sleepy mind skipped through other meadows.
It’s the hardest thing in the world to accept a gift you don’t think you’ve earned
. He thought back to the day he insisted Dizzy keep the dun horse Colin had paid for. Dizzy was sure he should pay something for it. Colin was equally sure it was a gift, mate to mate. Old Diz had as much trouble accepting a valued gift as Colin would, were the situation reversed.

And then the affair in Griffith. The first reaction both Colin and Hannah shared was,
We can’t accept this; we don’t deserve it
. Maybe this Mrs. Slotemaker had the right idea after all.

They hit the track again an hour later. It took all Colin’s strength to fling his pack up over the saddle. “You should see what the Bible says about being weak all the time.”

“All right, I will. I know you’re teasing, but I will.” From then on, Hannah had her Bible out every time they stopped, scanning its pages. To Colin’s relief, she didn’t always read it out loud.

Four days out from Griffith, they stopped at a little crossroads pub for a real meal and private rooms with real beds. Colin relished the temporary comfort.

He knew what the answer might be, but he asked anyway at the bar, “What are the rabbiting prospects out here?”

The barman shook his head negatively. “The two largest stations east of here hire their own rabbiters, then sub-let them out to others. Smaller farmers organized a drive a few weeks ago; killed nearly four hundred thousand. Still plenty of rabbits out there, but they wouldn’t have set up the drive if they could afford an exterminator, aye?”

“How about ratting? We’ve done that too.”

“Possibly in Bathhurst.”

Bathhurst. Colin and Hannah would be as good as home by then. He’d be content with what jingled in his pocket now and just pray there’d be no more holes.

He paused halfway up the flight of stairs to his room. What was he just thinking?
Pray
there’d be no more holes? What was that book again? Haggai? He’d never really prayed before. Hannah was getting to him.

They were late getting started the next morning. No matter. They were making very slow progress this journey. The initial enthusiasm for travel seemed to be waning. Colin recalled their excitement when they went on the track with the shearers, and the trip north to reduce the Slotemaker and Barnes rabbit populations. Now travel, once so invigorating, had become a burden.

They came to a curious Y in the road. The official track angled southeast, no doubt to serve some station on the way to the railway town of Young. But the locals obviously left the road at this point and proceeded directly east.

“Which way do we go, Colin?”

“It’s not a difficult choice—every five miles we cut off the track is another two hours of travel saved, as slow as we’re going.”

“But we got directions at the pub.”

“Right. They said to cross the first north-south railway spur line. It goes up to Forbes. We want to continue on to the second, in Young. It’ll take us into Cowra and Bath-hurst.”

“Bathhurst. We’ve been there. That’s practically home, by railway.”

“Sorry to see the end come?”

“I guess not. Not anymore. Especially seeing you so weak yet. Besides, I’ve had enough adventuring.” She paused. “And I’m still looking for passages about weakness for you in the Bible.”

They struck out due east along the defined tire tracks and hoofmarks of the locals. Within half a mile they crossed a gibber plain, a flat paved as tight as asphalt with dark, even pebbles. The horse stumbled frequently. If they hit much of this stuff, Colin was going to have to give up some of his precious money and shoe her.

The wind, fitful before, picked up strength. It churned and swirled, sending willi-willis dancing across the flat land far ahead.

“Colin! Look behind us.”

He turned to see a dark, churning, gray-brown wall that filled half the sky He stared, his mouth agape. “It’s coming this way, too. Or else it’s growing.”

“Fire? Smoke? We’re safe out here on the gibbers, aren’t we?”

“Just dust, I’d say. We’ll know soon. It’ll be on us shortly.”

Max’s Lady raised her head and began moving about uneasily, sidling, pushing into Colin as he led her along.

Hannah pushed in close against him, too. “Colin, I’m so frightened! It looks—” She shuddered. Static electricity made her bobbed hair float out from her head. With the whole gibber plain to walk in, she pressed so close against him he could feel her breathing. Frightened wasn’t the word. She was terrified.

So was he.

The wind shifted, whistled, stilled, then came from new directions. The gray swirl closed around them, blotting out the blue sky, driving the sun into hiding, erasing every feature more than twenty feet away.

Colin stopped the nervous horse. “We’re going to have to camp right here and wait it out. We can’t see; we’ll just travel in circles if we keep going.” The thick, gritty dust exacerbated his cough. Soon he was hacking so hard that his eyes watered.

He unsaddled the horse and put her on the lead line. With no tree or stake to tie her to, he put a noose in the line and looped it over his arm. Hannah curled up with her bag, but between the darkness and wind she couldn’t drag her Bible out.

Dirt scudded swiftly across the gibbers a foot or two off the ground. Dust made breathing so difficult that Hannah put her handkerchief over her nose and mouth. Soon, that didn’t serve and her nose and eyes watered and ran as much as Colin’s. They resorted to covering their faces with shirttails and skirt hem.

That evening, with a bit of a lull in the storm, Colin opened two cans from their meager stock. They ate cold beans and corned beef straight from the cans, mixed with dust and grit.

“It can’t get much worse than this,” Colin grumbled.

But he was wrong. Sometime during the night, while Colin slept, the noose around his arm slipped off and the mare wandered away.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SEVEN

B
USHED

If Colin’s mouth got any drier, he was sure his tongue would choke him. Hannah was showing the effects of the dust and heat, too. He glanced at their shadow for the hundredth time, making certain they continued east.

Hannah stopped suddenly. “Give me your swag.”

Colin let the pack slide off his shoulder into the thick dust. “What do you need?”

“Nothing.” She sat down beside it. From her own traveling bag she pulled out a couple of items and her Bible, stuffing them into Colin’s swag.

“Hannah, I’m sorry; I’m not sure I can carry all that.”

“I’m sure you can’t. You’ve been stumbling about like a blind man, resting every few minutes.” She stood up and swung his swag across her own shoulder. “There’s nothing left in my bag we can’t do without. On we go.”

“Now, wait a minute! I’m not letting my little sister carry my swag! How would that look?”

“To whom?” She started off across the hot, dry dirt.

Good point. They’d not seen a living soul in three days, two of those days spent huddled on the ground, hunched against the flying, stinging dust.

He stared a moment at her traveling bag, lying there open in the burning sand. He cupped his brow and gazed out across the invisible wasteland behind them. Somewhere out there lay his saddle too, abandoned yesterday. Would it also soon be buried by this raging dust?

The whipped sand, at the mercy of the wind, had settled into deep dunes and drifts across the flats. It was hard to tell how deep. It was harder to tell what the land had looked like before the storm.

Hannah had gone on ahead, and it took Colin several minutes at a taxing pace to catch up to her. He felt terrible when he reached her, almost nauseous. She slogged along, staring straight ahead. Determination hardened her dirty face into a mask. It didn’t look like Hannah.

They crossed one gentle, rolling rise after another, devoid of grass or any sign of life.

“Do you suppose the mare is still alive, Colin?”

“Yair. She’s charmed. She was charmed hundreds of feet under the ground and she was charmed in Griffith. I can’t see that wearing off.”

“But there’s nothing for her to eat, and she won’t find water either. She’s never been out here before.”

“Horses can smell water. Dizzy says cattle smell it better, but horses can find it. He told me about horses in Texas smelling it below ground and digging to it in the washes. Gullies.”

She didn’t look convinced. “All the same I think we better pray about her very hard.”

Colin wasn’t completely convinced either. Still, the mare was indeed charmed. Anyone who led her through the tunnels from the Southern Star and the Hard Yakka into the Perseverance would agree. Pray for her? Well, actually, why not.