Journey to the Stone Country (13 page)

Annabelle looked at him, her mind still back in the scrub with Dougald and Bo and his father and the old days. She was remembering the way the ringers came out of the scrub and tailed the bawling cattle to the yards. Scarcely a voice raised. The occasional lazy crack of a stockwhip or a mild voice urging a reluctant beast. It was true as Bo told it. They were like moon shadows from another place, another time, as if they belonged in the scrub and could not be who they were when they were out of it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said absently. ‘I don’t think mum and dad had special chairs.’

He laughed. ‘This one’s your dad’s, for sure,’ he said. ‘She’s more bowed and worn down than that feller you’re sitting in. I remember he smoked a pipe, your dad. All this tight woven cane down the side here’s filled up with tobacco ash.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘I’d better be slipping along. I promised my sister I’d take her to the pool at four to see her kid swim. They’re doin the interschool races tonight. He’s eleven. They’re expecting him to get into the final.’

She walked with him to the Pajero.

He leaned out. ‘See you Monday morning.’

‘What time?’

‘Daybreak.’

She stood and watched him back down the sideway. The white cat came and pressed itself against her leg and stood with her. When he’d gone she turned and went inside the house. She cleared the lunch table and washed the dishes, standing at the sink looking out at the lemon tree. She laughed and said aloud, ‘What do you think of Bo Rennie now, mum?’

Zigzag

W
HEN
B
O CALLED FOR ANNABELLE ON
M
ONDAY MORNING AT FOUR
-thirty she was showered and dressed and ready to go. The eastern sky was still silver with the last of night. The cat came out and watched them leave. Bo said, ‘Mister White’s gonna take care of the place for you.’ They left Zamia Street behind and headed south along the Bruce Highway towards the Burdekin River bridge. The wooded heights of Mount Stuart on their right hand, the timber-tops gold and crimson in the light of the rising sun. Carcasses of roadkilled wallabies sprawled along the verges, as if they were the victims of a night assault by stealthy assassins. Merle Haggard singing,
I’m gonna break every heart I can, I’ll be a fine dumb fool of a man,
the tempo of the guitar syncopating with the road rhythm of the speeding Pajero.

Annabelle looked out through the sidewindow, watching the scrub going by. She turned and looked at Bo, the excitement of travelling catching at her heart.

He grinned. ‘On this old highway again, Annabellebeck.’

It was four hours later when Bo pulled off the tar and parked alongside Arner’s white truck on the patch of scuffed kikuyu grass outside Dougald’s weatherboard in Maryvale. Woodsmoke curling from the stovepipe on the roof, the front door standing open to the morning behind the flyscreen. They stepped down from the Pajero and Annabelle followed Bo onto the verandah. He pulled aside the flywire and stood by to let her go in ahead of him. Arner and Trace were sitting up at the table eating eggs and bacon and sausages. Dougald standing over by the stove cooking. A smell of bacon and coffee and frying meat. Cartoons loud on the teevee. Trace’s white hardhat sitting on the middle pool trophy.

Everyone murmured their hellos and Bo pushed aside the old newspapers and magazines and made room at the table. He went back into the kitchen with Dougald and fetched knives and forks. Annabelle took off her sunglasses. She set her grey felt hat on its crown on the papers and put the sunglasses inside it.

Trace was watching her. ‘Your hair looks nice.’

Annabelle put her hand to her hair and ruffled it. ‘Thanks. I went to Susan’s hairdresser.’

Trace kept looking at her.

Annabelle and Bo sat at the table across from Arner and Trace.

Bo rolled a smoke.

Dougald turned from the stove and waved the alligator tongs at the frying pan in his hand. ‘You want a piece of steak with yours, Annabelle?’

‘No thank you, Dougald,’ Annabelle said.

‘There’s plenty of food,’ Dougald reassured her solemnly, his voice slow and heavy, as if some deep concern weighed upon his thoughts.

Annabelle looked at him. She would like to have said something, but his manner distanced him. Their gazes locked for an instant of uncertain inquiry. ‘I’m right thanks, Dougald,’ she said. ‘An egg and a rasher of bacon will be fine.’

Dougald turned back to the stove. ‘Bo and Arner’ll eat it.’ He dished up, then came over and set a plate of food in front of Bo and another in front of Annabelle. His blood-flow monitor bulged under his shirt above the waistband of his pants, as if he was wired to a concealed tape recorder. He forked a piece of steak from the pan and set it on Arner’s plate. Arner murmured his thanks.

Bo nipped the lighted end off his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger and stuck the cigarette to the edge of the table beside his plate, pressing the damp end into the wood. He turned to Arner, ‘You got that truck all packed? Me and Annabelle are heading out as soon as we’ve eaten this. We’re not gonna be hanging around.’

Arner did not look up from his meal. ‘She’s packed,’ he replied softly, withdrawn from them and aloof. They all looked at him, except Trace, and she looked at Annabelle. It was as if they waited for a disclosure from the silent young man. They watched him cut his steak with the knife, an absorbed attention in his actions, as if cutting the steak required from him the orderly procedure of a priestly office. His hair freshly shorn close to his scalp, his Spanish grandee’s beard chiselled to an even centimetre. The smoky morning of the room setting highlights to the bronze at his temples and cheekbones.

Bo looked at him wonderingly and shook his head. ‘Well I just hope she’s loaded.’

Trace smiled at Annabelle and gave a little shrug, the soft rounding of her shoulders and breasts moulding the faded green cotton of her T-shirt.

‘Won any more trophies?’ Annabelle asked her.

Trace gazed at Annabelle, her dark eyes bright with some excess of emotion. She shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I got the Burranbah hardhat,’ she said and grinned, abashed by Annabelle’s admiration.

Dougald came over and pushed aside the papers and set his plate on the table. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite Bo.

Bo looked at Dougald’s plate. ‘What’s that you got there, old mate?’ he asked disapprovingly.

Dougald shifted uneasily, gazing unhappily at the milky gruel on his plate. ‘Them doctors reckon I’ve got to give the eggs and bacon a miss.’ He looked at Bo, hoping to be let off lightly.

Bo said in a tone of considerable affront, ‘Well that bloody porridge isn’t gonna do you any good. A man can’t live on porridge.’

‘It’s semolina.’

‘Semolina
is
porridge!’ Bo said. ‘How’s that gonna help you?’

Annabelle’s mobile sounded the opening four notes of
O patria
mia
. She got up from the table and went out onto the verandah to answer it. She realised she didn’t care if it was Steven.

They ate in silence, the murmur of Annabelle’s voice from the verandah, Disney animals shouting on the teevee.

Bo asked, ‘Did you talk to Les?’

Trace got up and carried her plate into the kitchen. Arner lifted his head and watched his sister.

Dougald spooned the grey semolina into his mouth. ‘There’s that feller from the Department of Natural Resources. Les reckons he’ll be coming in the helicopter too.’

‘Who else?’ Bo asked.

‘Tom Glasson. He’s a bigwig with Folson and Harbin.’

‘Who are they?’

‘The principal contractors for the dam.’ Dougald spooned more semolina. ‘He seems like a good bloke.’ He nodded at the mobile that lay on the table. ‘I had a talk to him the other day.’

‘Steve Punaru going down there?’

‘No. Just Les.’

Bo pushed his plate away and unstuck the cigarette from the table and lit it. ‘Did Les say when they was goin in?’

Dougald shook his head. ‘I don’t think he knew.’ He gestured at the pile of papers beside Bo. ‘There’s a fax from him in there somewhere if you want to have a look for it.’

Arner pushed back his chair and belched softly. He got up and went over and sat on the couch in front of the teevee, pointing the remote, skipping through the channels.

Annabelle came in and sat at the table. ‘That was Elizabeth.’

Dougald pushed the plate of semolina aside. He had eaten barely half of it.

Bo said, ‘Them bloody doctors are no good to you, old mate. You ought to come down to Ranna with us and get yourself a good dose of cumby cumby.’

Annabelle collected their dirty plates and cutlery and carried them out to the kitchen. She cleaned off the plates and put them in the sink and ran the hot water.

The two men sat looking at each other across the table, Bo drawing on his cigarette, his eyes half closed, Dougald watching him as if he read in his friend’s features the maturing of some deep thought concerning their way forward. They might have slipped quietly into their past, these two, ringers once again and seated crosslegged at the fragrant sandalwood campfire out in the lonely scrubs of Deception or the Conway Tableland, the uneasy cattle settled for the night, the tock-tock of the packhorse bell from the sweetpick down by the waterhole. Watching each other’s eyes in the firelight, waiting for a sign to mature from the darkness. Alert against that anxiety of a time when the stars will no longer stand in the firmament to guide them over the hollow ground, where a man of little knowledge might easily fall and never regain his feet. Recalling the low singing of Grandma Rennie against such a fate for her children, saving her sons and daughters on the long journey to the head of Verbena Creek and the springs of Bulgonunna, the stone ground of the old people where the labyrinth of the generations is set out. Not to abandon the language of the stones. Not to permit the knowledge to drift from her children’s hearts, out among the mute ghosts of the irrecoverable past.

Bo said, ‘You remember old grandfather Beck?’

Dougald smiled slowly, remembering.

‘He had them real cattleman’s eyes.’

Dougald nodded. ‘Squatters’ eyes, Grandma used to call them.’

‘If you wasn’t grass and you wasn’t cattle, there was that instinct in him to get rid of you off the country.’

Dougald laughed throatily. ‘They reckon old grandpa Beck got rid of a few.’

‘Don’t you go telling Annabelle that,’ Bo teased, raising his voice.

‘Don’t tell me what?’ Annabelle called, the rattling of the dishes pausing.

The two men chuckled. Bo pushed his chair back and stood. ‘We’d better be slipping along if we’re gonna make that Ranna homestead before dark.’

Dougald didn’t get up. He gazed into Bo’s eyes. ‘You don’t want to go down there into that wild country if it looks like rain. You won’t get back over them gullies.’

‘Arner’s got the winch. We’ll get back.’

They assembled on the verandah and said their farewells. Bo and Annabelle led off in the Pajero, Arner and Trace following in the white truck, the steady beat of the bass thumping from the cabin, the fierce voice of the black man crying forth his bitter desire for revenge.

Dougald stood at his front door watching the departure until the two vehicles turned onto the highway at the T-junction and disappeared from his sight. He stood a moment longer, gazing upon the quiet morning, then he turned and gripped the doorjamb with his hand, steadying himself. He went back inside the house and closed the door on the day. He reached for the remote and switched off the teevee. He sat at the table in the halflight staring at the mobile, his large hands resting on the tabletop, a tremor in the swollen fingers, the flesh soft and grey, the strength gone, his breathing audible as the stillness of the house settled upon him.

Two kilometres west of Maryvale, Bo turned off the highway onto a minor road, cutting south between Milton’s Lookout and Mount de Moleyns and heading for the Pioneer River. They crossed the river at Mariah and turned west for Finch Hatton along the valley road. Annabelle screwed around in her seat and looked back. ‘They’re coming,’ she said.

‘They’d better be comin.’ Bo handed her his packet of Drum.

She rolled a smoke for him.

They crossed the Pioneer again where it narrows to little more than a brook just after Nanyima, the valley squeezing up between the ranges, the wide acres of cane fields dropping behind. Thirty kilometres farther the valley pinched down to a tight gullet ahead of them. They dropped abruptly out of the sunlight into the forest shade, beginning the steep climb up the escarpment into the ranges, the road dirt now, a narrow switchback, ochre dust lifting behind them and powdering the overhanging foliage of the trees.

Bo wrestled the wheel. ‘They still coming?’

She twisted around and looked back. The white truck came around the corner below them, emerging from their dust like some implacable pursuer, Arner at the wheel, his features impassive through the trembling leafshadows on the windscreen, his sunglasses like two black holes in the carapace of a helmet, his sister beside him, the beautiful enigmatic maiden of all men’s dreams. ‘Y . . . ep. They’re coming,’ Annabelle said, staying twisted around, watching the white truck looming through the dust pall.

Later in the morning the two vehicles breasted the scarp and came out of the forest onto a high plateau of desolate stone ridges. Bo picked up the pipeline road coming down from the Eungella Dam, the white line of the pipe cutting through the tangle of broken country. The ridges dry, littered with shattered upturned strata of sedimentary rocks like the old bones of the world exposed, the forest open and sparse, the trees small, twisted and hungry in their growth. There were no hamlets, no habitations and no road signs. In this maze of hard country they crossed the watershed of the Broken River and turned northwest along the ridge, passing the cold waters of the Eungella Dam on their right hand and leaving the pipeline behind.

The track they followed now was little more than wheel ruts cutting back and forth, seeking a passage through the tumbled rocks and broken timber. They ascended the incline of the ridge through a tract of country where prehistoric grasstrees and cycads stood in isolation among bloodwoods and stunted hickory, petrified sentinels from the age before man, their shaggy topknots and skirts trembling in the mountain breeze as if they would flee at the sight of the oncoming vehicles.