Journey to the Stone Country (18 page)

Annabelle observed the two young people gathering firewood together, their graceful forms moving among the drooping foliage of the trees, back and forth between shadows and sunbeams, their voices sudden and brief, a quick uncertain laugh then silence, and she thought how easy it was for them, their existence uncluttered and without ambivalence. Out in the sunlight beyond them, Mathew Hearn’s mare trailed her reins and lipped the sweet green couch grass. At the crack of a stick she raised her head and gazed into the shadows at the young man and the girl, her ears working. They came back with armfuls of kindling and firewood and chose for their hearth a natural hollow in the rock. They crouched together to set their fire, he sitting back on his heels when they had arranged the sticks and watching while Trace bent low and touched the flame to the silky grass heads. Together they watched the curl of blue smoke rise through the sticks and ascend into the trees, the smell of burning gumleaves suddenly in the still air. A yellow flame leaping up through the laid sticks. ‘It’s going!’ Trace exclaimed with delight. ‘I lit it!’ The young man and woman looked at each other and laughed. And in their laughter it seemed to Annabelle it was to be enough for them that they had struck this fire, and for the moment they would ask for no more, but would be content. As if they could believe their actions served some more worthy power than their own desires.

When they looked up together and saw her watching them, she smiled.

‘It’s going,’ Trace said and she turned to the young man. ‘Uncle Bo thinks he’s the only one who knows how to light a fire.’

Mathew Hearn said, ‘Yeah, that’s my dad too.’

Trace and Mathew Hearn had set the billy among the burning sticks some while ago when the young man’s horse whinnied. They all looked up. Bo was picking his way towards them across the rocks, his fishing rod in one hand, the bucket of tackle and bait in the other. He came up and set the rod against a tree and put the bucket down.

Mathew Hearn stood up. ‘G’day Bo. How are you?.’

‘Well, I’m good Mathew. How are you?’

They shook hands, as if they had arranged this meeting here among the trees by the river in order that some formality might be transacted between them.

‘Yeah, I’m pretty good.’ Bo nodded at the fire, ‘I smelled that little fire and reckoned it must be smoko time.’

Annabelle said, ‘Trace lit the fire.’

Bo looked at the fire and then at Trace.

Trace said, ‘Did you catch any fish, Uncle Bo?’

‘Nope. Them fish decided to ignore me.’ He went over and looked into the billy. ‘She’s boiling. Who’s making this tea?’

Trace scrambled up and took the packet of Bushells across and tipped a quantity of tea leaves into the palm of her hand and tossed them into the boiling water.

‘Pick her out!’ Bo instructed sharply. ‘Quick there!’ He reached impatiently and grabbed a stick from their stock of firewood. He slipped the end of the stick into the billy handle and lifted the billy off the fire. ‘Get her off the fire there!’

Trace exchanged a look with Mathew.

Annabelle held out a plastic cup of chilled cola from the coolpot and a thick slice of dark fruitcake. ‘Could you take this to Arner?’

Trace took the things from her and carried them over to Arner. She came back and sat with them.

‘You having tea, Mathew, or would you like a cola with Trace?’

‘I’ll have tea, thank you.’

Bo motioned down the river, ‘Three cows and calves been tracking up the bank down there, Mathew.’ He looked at Mathew. ‘Me and Dougald would have built ourselves a trap yard for them.’

‘They’d be cleanskins, I suppose?’ Mathew asked, deeply interested but uncertain of the way forward with this new knowledge.

‘As clean as God made them. There’s been no one running cattle around here for more than twenty years. They’d be the descendants of them that me and Dougald let slip going through at Mount Cauley that time. Them cows and calves would be whoever’s could put a brand on them now, that’s for sure. I don’t think anyone would be disputing their ownership if someone landed them up in the saleyards in Mackay one of these days.’ Bo drank his tea and chewed the cake. ‘Getting them there would be kind of interesting though. This is good cake.’

Mathew asked, ‘Where do you think would be a good place for a trap yard, Bo?’

Bo said, ‘No good having a trap yard without a bunch of coachers.’

‘If I trapped them I could drive them up the road to Zigzag.’

‘You let these little ladies out of a yard and you’ll never see them again. The only way for these cows out of a yard is into the back of a stock float and down to the Mackay meatworks the same day. Now I don’t know how you would propose to do that.’ He gestured dismissively in a general way. ‘With this abundance of feed and water they’d be laughing at your trap yard.’

Mathew frowned into the fire.

Bo said, ‘We can take a look down that way later. Have a bit of a poke around and see what’s what. Them cows are sure to have picked out a nice little nursery somewhere to plant their calves during the heat.’ He looked up and smiled at the young man. ‘Just a look, Mathew. For interest. Them calves could be your best bet, if you’re quick enough.’

‘That sounds good.’ Mathew did not know how he might express his gratitude and he stared at Bo a moment then gazed around, looking beyond the trees and out onto the flat where his mare cropped the sweet grass. ‘What a place!’ he said, his hunger and his admiration for this soft country with its spring-fed streams and sweet natural pastureland. ‘Uninhabited?’ It was both a question and a statement of disbelief. He looked from Bo to Annabelle as if this were the greatest mystery to him, that such country could lie fallow of human occupation while he and his father attempted to hammer an existence from the rocks and dry ridges of the escarpment.

‘That’s the way it goes,’ Bo said, matter-of-fact. ‘Them old Birri people was here till the Bigges chased them out. Now the Bigges is gone and there’s nobody. She’s all gonna be drowned soon.’ He rolled a cigarette. ‘That’s the way it goes. Round and round. You gotta be there when it’s your turn.’

Mathew and Trace watched him; wondering, perhaps, what it was that they were to receive from him, from the generation of their fathers and mothers: little more than coded signals, the mystery of how things had come to stand the way they stood. They stared at him, waiting, as if they imagined he must know the decipherment of the code and would choose to disclose it to them. An elder wisdom. But Bo smoked his cigarette and sucked his tea from the lip of his mug and squinted into the fire and said nothing. Then he looked up into the expectant gaze of young Mathew Hearn, and there was a truculence in his eyes that made the young man look away as if he had been challenged.

When Annabelle left them later Bo was dozing under a tree, his hat tipped over his eyes, boots crossed at the ankles, three mugs of tea and the fruitcake all eaten, a chewed cigarette butt extinguished between his nicotined fingers. Annabelle watched him sleeping. He seemed to hold a key to all their fates. But it seemed also that they must wait for it. He would not be hurried. Perhaps he did not even know he held such a key and was untroubled by his possession of it. She did not think she was being entirely fanciful. Too many aspects of her past and present life were linked in him for her to dismiss her thought as fantasy. She was prepared, rather, to believe it the perception of intuition, that delicate mode of thought in which the spirit of fantasy is partner to the certainty of an inner logic. She stood up. Arner was still sitting motionless against the casuarina, sleeping or watching, it was hard to tell which, maybe waiting for the day of atonement. Mathew and Trace sitting cross-legged across from each other on the rock, feeding sticks into the embers of their fire and conversing in low voices, looking up at each other or gazing into the coals, as if they hoped to glimpse in this communion with fire the pathway to their future; or perhaps they did glimpse it.

Annabelle made her way among the festooned rivergums to the couch grass flat where Mathew’s mare grazed. She walked back up the track through the ribbon grass. A thin blue smoke drifted from the kitchen chimney and already the track through the grass seemed their own well-trodden pad. She took some frozen steaks and sausages out of the freezer in the back of Arner’s truck and set them to defrost on a plate in the kitchen and she fed the range fire with pieces of wood. She cleaned up the kitchen some more then went and stood in the doorway, looking through the collapsing pergola at the side door of the main house, grasshoppers snipping around in the dry weeds and grass. The day was hot and still now on the dorsal of the rise. Isolated white clouds standing sentinel above the distant blue of the ranges. She decided to explore the main house.

She went around the tangle of the collapsing pergola and tried the house door. It stuck. She kicked it and it gave an inch. She put her shoulder to it and scraped it back. Feeling like a thief, and a little that her entry into the house might in some subtle manner betray her allegiance with Bo, she stepped over the threshold. She was in a small vestibule. Men’s battered hats and stiff wet-weather gear hanging from pegs like the blackened skins of carcasses, old boots and a broken whip coiled to one side on the floor. A set of spurs. The floor was stone flags split from the river. A layer of desiccated gumleaves and pale shoots of ribbon grass, a drift of black bead-droppings left by possums or rats or other small creatures. A brown-painted door facing her. She tried the handle. The door opened into a dimlit passage, a breath of cool air on her face. Doors leading off to right and left. The first door to the right was open. She stepped along the passage and stood in the open doorway looking in. A dining table in the centre of the room, the light coming from two French windows, an impression of sunlit shrubbery and European trees through the gaping shutters out beyond the verandah, as if there were a tended garden there. The brownstained timber ceiling sagging in the centre of the room above the table, the grooved ceiling boards split and gaping, straw and grass and leaves and other debris poking through and coned onto the table below, like the dribblings of an hourglass. The silence of the long departed dead. Deep and unbroken until this moment of her entry, as if she were a tomb robber and would inherit their curse. The Bigges of Ranna Station. A vanished race, Bo had said, slipping the irony in among the Hearns like a slim stiletto. She had never met the Bigges, but theirs had been a name of substance often mentioned by her parents when she was a child. They had been people of her own class.

Eight balloon-backed chairs were set around the sides of the table, a stately carver at either end. A long sideboard with a tall oil lamp, the long-necked globe intact. The black grate of an ornate Victorian hearth. Above the hearth, suspended from a brass length of picture-rail, an oil painting of highland cattle grazing hills of purple heather, no sign of habitations. An unfenced pastureland of infinite extent. The pastoralist’s dream. In the far corner of the room beside the French window the neat round entrance of a well-used rabbit burrow, the pale soil spilled across the threadbare rug, the smooth trodden pad of the rabbits, a careless scattering of their droppings. Annabelle did not cross the threshold. There was the close acidic smell of animals and chaff. She turned and tried the door facing across the passage.

The door opened on to a twin of the dining room. Two French windows facing the back verandah. Through the windows she recognised the silhouette of a squatter’s chair, identical to her grandfather’s old chair on the verandah at Zamia Street. A low table beside it. Out beyond the wildgrown garden the riverflat and then the dark line of giant rivergums and casuarinas. In the corner of the room between the window and the fireplace, an upright piano. An oak pedestal desk angled half-towards the French doors, half-towards a wall of books. Annabelle went in and stood in front of the books. She reached and tugged at a volume,
Chambers
Information for the People
. The spine cracked and a piece came away in her hand. Beneath the spine the exposed galleries of termites, like a pale wound, the pallid bodies of the insects dripping to the floor. She brushed her hand along the books. They were mortared firmly into place by termite workings. No one was ever going to read any of these books again. It was a façade of spines, gilt lettering glittering in the half-light. She leaned to read the titles:
Noble
Thoughts in Noble Language
, Southgate;
Village Tales
, Miss Mitford. A set of uniformly bound volumes,
The Essays of Thomas Carlyle
;
Beeton’s
Shilling Bible Dictionary
;
Essays Civil and Moral
, Bacon;
N.S.W. Royal
Commission, Conservation of Water, 1886
. Beside this an imposing volume, a blind-stamped gilt harp on the spine,
The Administration of Ireland
. E. V. Lucas’
The Open Road, a little book for wayfarers
. W. G. Spence’s
Australia’s Awakening
set like a solid green brick between the slim grey covers of
A Guide Book for Prospectors in New South Wales
and the faded cerise cloth of Curran’s
Geology of Sydney
. She carefully tried to prise out a small volume,
Yabba Yabba, stories and verses of Australia
. A piece of the book broke away in her fingers like dry biscuit. She crumbled it, the pale flakes drifting to the floor.

She heard Bo clear his throat and spit, then his step in the passage. ‘You in there, Annabellebeck?’

‘In here,’ she called.

Bo came in and stood with her, looking around the room. ‘Old Nellie always was a great lady,’ he said. ‘What d’you think this room would have been used for?’

‘The master’s study, I’d say.’

‘Old George Bigges.’

‘And his father’s before him, I should think. How on earth did they get all this stuff down here? That piano must weigh a ton.’

‘Everything that’s down here that wasn’t down here before the Bigges come must have been brought in by that road we come in by. Strapped to a bullock dray. There was no other way in them days and still isn’t except around by Mount Cauley. And this didn’t come by that road. They thought nothing of it them old folks. They’d be on the road for a year or more.’ He gestured at an upholstered divan with a footstool. ‘Them famous generations of Nellie’s she was always telling me and Dougald about would have humped all this stuff up with them from Victoria when they first settled here. Maybe brought it from England before that too. They was always well-to-do people, them Bigges. They come up here intending to live like princes, not beggars.’