Journey to the Stone Country (14 page)

In the blue haze of distance to the northwest the valley of the Bowen River spread out below them, a broad pastureland where herds of white Brahman cattle grazed the sweet natural grasses of the uplands and fertile riverflats. To their northeast another country, intimidating and vast, the folded ranges of Salitros and the Massey Gorge, a forested wilderness without dwellings or roads, no smoke or sign of habitation across the wide and undulating landscape of iridescent hills that lay glittering in the morning sun below them. Bo’s indicating hand going out, ‘Ranna’s way over in there.’

She looked and wondered at the beauty and mystery of her own country.

They had been driving along the crest of the ridgeline for some time when they came to a fork in the track. The left branching northwest through the open forest, descending the easy gradient of a spur into the Bowen valley. At this dividing of the way a wooden board was nailed to a dead tree, an arrow crudely carved in the grey and weathered timber of the board pointing down the spur, the word
BLENHEIM
in letters of faded carmine, as if the Duke of Marlborough’s decisive battleground really lay that way, the lost resting place of ten thousand defeated Frenchmen. Bo slowed and engaged the four-wheel drive, dropping the Pajero into low gear. He took the right-hand track towards Salitros and the Massey Gorge. They eased over the ground at a walking pace, lurching and swaying over a steep and narrow way littered with boulders and scored by deep washouts, the Broken River Range standing between them now and a view of the Bowen valley.

Bo eased the Pajero up a steep pinch, leaning forward hugging the wheel to his chest, lifting himself in his seat to see the ground ahead over the rearing bonnet. A makeshift gate stood closed across the track fifty metres before the crest of the pinch. Bo said, ‘Get ready to get the gate.’ The Pajero came to a stop, standing on its tail, blue sky and treetops through the windscreen, the washed-out track falling away steeply beside them.

Annabelle opened the door and got out. She stepped around in front of the bonnet, clutching the bull bar to keep her balance. She stooped to unhasp the gate. The gate was five barred, put together from crooked tree limbs, grey corkwood and sally wattle, iron coachbolts drilled through at the joints, the hasp a length of galvanised plainwire doubled back on itself and looped over the strainer post. A tin sign on the gate, painted in blue in a childish hand, made the modest claim,
ZIGZAG STATION
. Annabelle lifted the gate aside and stood back to let the Pajero through. Bo moved on up the gradient to the crest and parked. Annabelle waited while Arner brought the truck on. As the truck eased past, Trace leaned from the window, ‘Why thank you ever so kindly my dear,’ she said in a mincing English voice. She put her hand to her mouth and stifled a laugh.

Annabelle gave a bow. ‘It is my pleasure, milady.’ She fastened the gate and walked on up the track past the truck to where Bo was waiting. She climbed into the cabin and they moved off.

‘That was never there,’ Bo said. He lit his smoke and shook out the match. ‘How’s that boy of Dougald’s doing back there?’

She twisted around and looked. ‘He’s doing good. Trace seems pretty relaxed with his driving.’

‘Oh, that young lady knows about relaxing.’ Bo pointed to one side of the track, a quick gesture with his hand to where an outcrop of tumbled basalt formed shadowed caves and recesses in the hillside. ‘Old man dog watching us.’

Annabelle looked. ‘Where?’

‘He’s slipped away there.’

Annabelle felt that she was entering a country out of which the legends of her own past had arisen. She looked at Bo, wondering how he must be feeling, returning after an absence of more than twenty years, so great a portion of his life lying between this moment and the time when he and Dougald rode these ridges as young men. He was concentrating on the driving and did not look back at her.

An hour later they came over a rise and saw below them, a hundred metres distant, a cluster of buildings and yards set unexpectedly in a wide dusty clearing on the forested hillside. A bunched pack of dogs of all colours galloping up the road to meet the vehicles, barking and leaping and snapping at each other. Two white-painted weatherboard houses, a long machinery shed roofed in ripple-iron, smaller outbuildings straddling the road. Stockyards and a vegetable garden off among the shade trees, a sprinkler standpipe tick-ticking a thin spray of water across a raggedy crop of greens, the droplets catching the sun. Windrows of shattered trees and uplifted boulders lying along the limits of the clearing. A raw look of newness and struggle about the settlement, as if it had not yet achieved permanency and might be pulled down and towed away again at any time, leaving the wilderness to heal itself. A young man in a cowboy hat was operating a battered yellow bulldozer, pushing rocks and tree branches and domestic rubbish ahead of the blade, blue smoke surging from the stack, a haze of dust drifting back over the clearing behind him in the leafy sunlight.

Bo said, ‘It’s Zig and Zag all right. Looks like they’ve decided on breeding dogs ahead of bullocks.’ He turned and spat out the sidewindow, the dogs snapping at the tyres. ‘I don’t blame them. This is dog country,’ he said. They pulled up beside the first weatherboard house. The house was enclosed within a timber verandah all of forty feet deep. Bo thumbed his hat back and sat looking, rolling a smoke. ‘Look at that verandah, will you?’ He turned to Annabelle. ‘You ever seen a verandah that big?’

‘No I haven’t.’

They sat looking. One or two of the dogs sniffed the wheels and lifted their legs, most losing interest and sitting off scratching and nipping at themselves or lying in the dust panting, pink tongues lapping the air and dripping drool. Bo lit his cigarette and opened the door and stepped down. Dogs gathering around his legs, snuffling at his jeans. They had open wounds on their legs and bare, scarified patches of mange along their backs. A one-eyed yellow brindle bitch stood up and set her front legs on Bo’s shirt, begging to be patted, her nipples pink, raw looking and distended with milk. Bo pushed the bitch away with a slow patient gesture and she sat aside and scratched behind her ear, eyeing him lovingly. A big black pig wandered over from the machinery shed, the dogs mobbing it, licking its snout and yapping at it. The pig came on, grunting and snuffling around the Pajero. A man came out of the house. He stepped across the verandah. A woman coming along behind him.

The man came up and took Bo’s offered hand. He introduced himself as John Hearn. ‘So you’re Bo Rennie?’ he said. ‘They said in town you’d be coming by.’ He looked into Bo’s eyes, an air of respectful expectation in his manner. He was tall and lean and weathered, his workclothes dusty and oilstained from tinkering with machinery. His chin cleanshaved, his eyes pale blue, filled with friendly curiosity and interest, his manner alert and kindly. He stepped up and took Annabelle’s hand. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Annabelle.’ He turned to the woman. ‘This is my wife, Ruth.’

Ruth Hearn was a big handsome woman, her gaze direct and open, a watchfulness about her, as if she was making a mental note of her husband’s performance and giving him points out of ten in her mind.

John Hearn said, ‘And that’s Mathew, our eldest.’ He pointed at the bulldozer, his gaze lingering on his son, as if just to watch his boy being a man was pleasure enough for him. He jerked his head. ‘The other two are inside with their schoolteacher.’

Ruth Hearn said, ‘It’s not easy to get children to stick to their schooling out here.’ She touched the worn seat of one of the motorbikes leaning by the corner post of the verandah. ‘They’d rather be out on their ponies or riding around on these things all day.’ She turned to Bo, ‘You’ll come in and have a drink of tea, Bo?’

Bo said, ‘A drink of tea sounds good to me, Ruth.’

The woman laughed. It was an exclamation of pleasure. She turned to Annabelle, ‘We don’t get many visitors up this far, Annabelle.’

John Hearn said, ‘You fellers are the first.’

They all laughed.

‘This road doesn’t go anywhere from here except down the spur to old Ranna. They tell me there’s been no one at the house down there for more than twenty years, Bo? Is that right?’

‘Probably is, John,’ Bo said.

They followed John Hearn into the shade of the broad verandah. Bo turned and lifted his hand, motioning to Arner and Trace, who had not yet stepped down from the truck. He turned back to his host and gestured at the assemblage of tables, stools, bookshelves and other large heavy pieces of furniture in various stages of construction that lay about on the verandah. ‘You making these, John?’

John Hearn ran his hand over the lacquered surface of a three-legged table crudely fashioned from the branched stump of a mango tree, the wood yellow and wavy-grained. ‘What do you think of it?’ He looked up at Bo as if he awaited a valuable and knowing appraisal of his work.

Ruth Hearn stood looking on, a frown narrowing her eyes, her arms folded across her shirt, her gaze on her husband.

Bo gripped the thick timber of the tabletop with his thumb and fingers and tried it. ‘There’s a bit of weight there,’ he said, impressed.

‘Too heavy, you think?’

‘I didn’t say
too
heavy, John.’

‘No, you didn’t, but you think people would have trouble moving it around? Is that what you meant?’

‘Well they
would
have trouble moving it around if they wanted to move it around,’ Bo said, considering his words. ‘Once you had it set in your house, well then you wouldn’t be wanting to move it around.’ He looked at John Hearn. ‘Would you? What do you think Annabelle? She’s a good sort of a table.’

Arner and Trace came up and stood off a little, observing the older people.

Bo turned to them. He introduced them to John and Ruth Hearn. They all said their hellos and Arner and Trace followed Ruth Hearn across the verandah and into the house.

‘It’s for sale,’ John Hearn explained, lingering behind with Bo and Annabelle, looking over his work.

‘It’s great,’ Annabelle said.

He turned to her eagerly. ‘You think there’s a market for it in the city?’

‘I’m sure there would be.’

‘Well that’s what I’m hoping. I’ve heard these bush tables have brought anywhere up to a thousand dollars in Brisbane.’

‘I wouldn’t doubt it,’ Annabelle said. She reached and touched a tall notched branch bedded in a dark lacquered stump. ‘What’s this?’

‘That’s a CD holder.’

‘A CD holder,’ she echoed him wonderingly.

He grinned at them. ‘Let’s go in and have that drink of tea.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Bo said. He squeezed off the burning end of his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, and they followed John Hearn into the kitchen of his house. Ruth was buttering bread. She looked up from the bench and gestured behind her with the knife. ‘Go on through,’ she encouraged them, pointing the way. They entered a small low-ceilinged room.

Annabelle had an impression in the halflight of lace and faded furnishings, settees and deep old armchairs too big for the room, a china cabinet backed against the far wall, its glass shelves crammed with a collection of family knick-knacks, stones, seashells and holiday mementos. Hanging from the picture-rail were framed photographs of unsmiling Hearn ancestors in their Sunday best, posed at weddings and christenings. Beside these, coloured prints of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and another of the Matterhorn. A small porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece, modest and blushing, her child cradled in her arms.

‘Keep going there,’ John Hearn urged her. ‘Right on through.’

Annabelle went through the door, passing beneath an emblem of the crucified Christ.

Arner and Trace were sitting up at a table beside each other on a long timber bench built against the far wall, their backs to a row of windows giving on to the verandah, a view of the sunlit bush beyond. The bulldozer coming back through the glittering trees, its blade raised like the mandible of a giant beetle advancing upon its prey.

John Hearn followed them in. They stood by the table. The tabletop was an immense irregular slab of timber twelve centimetres thick, four metres in length and a good three metres wide at its deepest.

Bo laid the flat of his hand on the table. ‘This the main section of that old mango trunk then?’

‘This is her,’ John Hearn confirmed, touching the tabletop with pride.

‘She’s some table.’

‘Incredible,’ Annabelle said. She looked around the room. ‘How did you get it in here?’

‘We took those windows out.’ John gestured at the row of windows behind Arner and Trace. ‘Lifted her through here on the point of the tree-pusher before I put the verandah on.’

‘With the dozer?’

‘That’s it, Annabelle. With the dozer.’

They stood admiring the table.

‘The South Island of New Zealand,’ Annabelle said, her head on one side.

Ruth Hearn came in.

Her husband said, ‘Ruth? Did you hear that?’

‘I heard it.’ Ruth Hearn put down a plate of sliced bread and butter and another plate with a dozen or so Anzac biscuits on it. ‘Madagascar,’ she said and smiled at Annabelle. ‘John’ll get the atlas.’

John got up and went out.

‘Sit down, Bo. You too, Annabelle,’ Ruth told them.

Bo took off his hat and put it on the table and he and Annabelle sat beside each other.

John came in and laid an old Jacaranda school atlas in front of them. He opened the atlas at the map of Africa. Ruth stood behind him, looking over, her hand resting on her husband’s shoulder. John traced around the island of Madagascar with his forefinger. His fingernail was split and blackened. ‘The straight eastern side,’ he said. ‘Here.’ He looked down and ran his hand along the edge of the table in front of them, ‘And the bulge in the middle on the western side.’ He pointed across at Arner. ‘Beside Arner there.’

Annabelle said, ‘Madagascar, eh? Who thought of that?’

John turned the pages. ‘The South Island of New Zealand has the bulge at the bottom.’ They looked. He was right.

Ruth Hearn went out.

Bo looked at Annabelle and grinned. ‘Now that’s something you didn’t know.’