Journey to the Stone Country (38 page)

Old cowpats, grey and dry as papier-mâché, scattered between the tussocks where cattle had camped beneath the yellowbox trees summers past. The familiar smell of the dry bush through her open window, stirring recollections of riding along this road with her father. Only it had not been this road, but another road that she had travelled with her father then. A road in her childhood. That old road of her memory was somewhere else. It possessed no reality. The return had already erased it. She did not know what Bo intended and she did not ask him. It was not her country after all, but it was the nearest to any place she might lay a claim to.

Some while later Bo gestured over to the left. ‘Mount Bulgonunna,’ he said.

She leaned past him to look. Through a cleft in the forest the soft rounding of the hill in the blue shimmer of distance. The recumbent figure. Then it was gone, the sacred mountain of the Jangga.

‘That’s the only place you can see her from along this road. Them two humps lines up from down here like I showed you in them diagrams.’ His hand snaking out, sketching the hill in the air, Bulgonunna in his mind, in his heart. To be cursed by the old people, the most terrible outcome of life. They were traversing a patch of country bare of grass. Bo embraced the wheel and relit the stump of his cigarette, waving his hand, an encompassing gesture. ‘We’ve come around in a big half-circle since the Collinsville road. Now you’re looking back at her.’

She waited but he offered no more.

The country had begun to close in again, patches of lancewood and bendee scrub intruding onto the open savanna, the yellowbox trees less frequent, smaller and more hard grown now.

They came without warning to the site of the old Verbena homestead. Bo slowed the Pajero. The first sign a glossy green tree a hundred metres back off the track, fat, dark and as big as a three-storey house, its foliage solid against the transparent blues and greys of the slim native trees.

Bo said, ‘Grandma’s tamarind tree.’

Beyond the green tree a broken creekbank and on the other side of the creek a ripple-iron house set on low stumps.

‘That must be the tin house them Heffernan’s put up. One of them thirty-year floods will go over the top of her down there.’ He turned off the track, ignoring the ripple-iron house, and drove in past the tamarind tree. Sheets of twisted ripple-iron and shattered pieces of white fibro-cement lying scattered on the bare ground, the rusted skeleton of a truck, stripped and shot up, a buckled kerosene refrigerator, its door hanging open, panels punctured by bullet holes. A scene of sudden violent destruction, not the quiet decay and neglect of decades they had come upon at Ranna. Here the destruction could have been little more than a day’s work.

Bo drove in alongside where a house had once stood. He pulled up on a claypan beside a solitary yellowbox tree and switched off the motor. He did not get out but sat rolling a cigarette. The anxiety of the drive seemed to drain out of him, as if his fear had been that he would find no trace of himself here, his urgent rendezvous after all with that person he had always believed to be himself, the eternal, elusive
self
figured in the intricate tracings of his complicated destiny. He lit the cigarette and leaned on the wheel, smoking and gazing at the scene before them. He said, ‘I was born in that house.’ Speaking as if the house still stood, smoke issuing from its chimney, Grandma Rennie in the kitchen cooking dinner. ‘We was always hungry when we was kids.’

A woodstove lay on its face, tipped from the brick stump of a toppled chimney, circular black holes staring blindly into the grass where the two hotplates had fallen out. The only structure still upright at the site was a pole and wire archway over what had once evidently been the garden gate. A native splitjack vine inhabiting the arch, sealing off entry with its viciously curved wait-a-while thorns and cluster of dull green leathery leaves.

‘Looks like them Heffernans shot her up and run the dozer over everything before they pulled out.’ He turned and spat out the sidewindow. There was no emotion in his voice.

The buckled and twisted remains of the house were half-concealed by a growth of scrubby corkwood bushes and grey rattlepod. The destruction had clearly taken place some years before. Annabelle wondered if the destroying departing Heffernans had spared the arch as a sign, like barbarians leaving the severed heads of their enemies spiked on the gate of the destroyed city, a derisive welcome to returning survivors. ‘They didn’t doze the archway,’ she observed.

Bo gestured with his hand. ‘Grandma had a rose bush growing over that arch.’ He held up his thumb and forefinger a couple of centimetres apart. ‘That bush had little pink and white flowers that come out twice a year. You could smell them roses in the kitchen at night. She was proud of that bush. It thrived for her like no other rose bush ever did out here. Sweet as roses, she used to say. And when it wasn’t roses it was lemon flowers. That’s the lemon tree. It looks like them Heffernans spared her.’

It was the meagreness of the remains that impressed Annabelle. The scene putting her in mind of abandoned vandalised settlements along back roads that she had come across many times. Ruins that looked like rubbish tips. Nothing of the European ideal of the picturesque. None of Rose Macaulay’s magisterial meditation on the pleasure of ruins. A poignancy in these poor remains that made Annabelle feel protective of them, and of her country, a little tug of patriotism against the sneers of outsiders who would not understand. The rich layers of sacrifice and suffering that spoke to her through this poverty of remains, the contradictions, the loves and hatreds. She was jealous of her sense of the place, the terrible complexity that she knew would resist simplification or resolution or any final understanding. Unlike at Ranna, here there had been no attempt to found a landed dynasty according to the old model, a new European aristocracy of the Antipodes. At Verbena Station the future had evidently been envisaged, if the future had been envisaged at all, as a modest continuation of the present. She thought how impossible it would be to ever resurrect the grand days of Ranna, when for a brief moment in this country’s history such stations had risen as the centres of power in the land. But Verbena could be rebuilt and station life resumed as it had been in Grandma Rennie’s day without too much difficulty.

Bo made a casual gesture. ‘We held our big dances under this old yellowbox. The men wore suits and the women wore dresses. I waltzed my first waltz with a young lady under this tree, your old dad sitting over there looking on, watching us kick up the dust.’ He sucked a last drag from the butt and tossed it out the side-window. ‘Grandma always wore her pearls on dance nights. She never allowed no drinking. Us boys would have a bottle of rum planted in that old bluegum stump down by the waterhole.’ He seemed cheered by these memories.

She turned and looked at him.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They come from all over to Grandma’s dances. Fifty people waltzing and foxtrotting and jigging around till the cold dawn sobered us all up. Some of them would stay a week. Only leave when dad put them to work. Plenty of fights too, when the rum ran out.’ He opened his door and stepped down. He went to the back of the Pajero and took out the spade and the axe. Arner’s truck came down the road, pulling in and parking nose-in to the tamarind tree, as if Arner had known where to go and had picked out his campsite beforehand.

They worked silently together without a pause for the remainder of the afternoon constructing a galley. She scavenged sheets of ripple-iron from where they were scattered under the trees while Bo cut lancewood poles. They set the poles in the ground and wired the ripple-iron on to make a roof, as if they proposed a permanent settlement. When they’d done, they backed the Pajero in against the high side of their shelter. Together they righted the heavy cast iron stove and Annabelle helped him drag it over and set it up under the shelter opposite the Pajero. They sat the stove on pillars of bricks from the toppled chimney and Annabelle searched out the missing hotplates in among the rattlepod and put them back in the empty sockets.

She helped him without comment or question. Bo Rennie at home going about his chores, was how she permitted herself to think of it, putting the old things back to their proper uses, as if he had come home and found everything in order, just strayed a little from where it had been in his grandmother’s day. He seemed at peace with himself and content simply to be there, venturing no appraisal of his emotions or his plans. A fine precarious edge to their arrival that she was determined not to hazard with questions.

They gathered wood together and Bo lit a fire in the old stove. Annabelle put on a billy of teawater to boil, fragrant smoke curling up through the yellowbox. They stood together in silence looking at their fire, waiting for the water to boil, the sun gone and a chill in the evening air now, the sky streaked with pink and purple, flights of birds going over high up, a stillness settled over everything.

Bo said, ‘That old stove of Grandma’s smells just the same.’

She turned to him as if she would speak, but she said nothing.

He looked at her, hesitating, then he reached and took her hand in his, something of apology in his gesture and of sorrow in his voice. ‘Old Panya’s just filled with hatred,’ he said. ‘She can’t help herself. You don’t want to blame her too much. She never had what Grandma had.’

They stood a moment, holding hands, looking at each other, then he drew her gently to him and they held each other in a close embrace, neither speaking.

Annabelle cooked spaghetti with Italian sauce from a tin and the three of them ate their meal sitting close around the glowing stove on kerosene tins scavenged from the strew of rubbish, the black sky shimmering with stars, a frost setting, dingoes howling back and forth deep in the scrubs. After they had eaten their meal they put more sticks on the fire and sat watching the blaze.

Bo smoked a cigarette, glancing at Arner from time to time. After a long silence he said into the stillness, ‘The old people done their share of killings too. Them days is over. If we don’t live together now we gonna do it all again in years to come. The way my Grandma seen it, brothers and sisters don’t kill each other. And that’s the way she lived. There was white kids from among them strays come with us to the playgrounds that time. She didn’t care who you was. She might have sung them fellers with Panya that time when she was still a young woman, but that wasn’t the way she lived her life. I seen the way Grandma lived her life.’

Arner sitting like a bronze Buddha in the firelight.

Bo stayed quiet a while, rolling a fresh smoke and frowning. He lit the cigarette and looked at Arner. An impatience in his voice now. ‘You don’t want to go listenin to that hatred stuff, Arner. If we don’t all live together we gonna come unstuck again in the future just like we did in the past.’

Arner stirred, easing his broad buttocks on the narrow kerosene tin, as if he proposed getting up.

Bo said in an angry voice, ‘All that thousand-year talk, that’s nothing! You hear what I’m saying?’

Arner turned his head slowly and looked at him. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured.

Bo waited. ‘That all you gonna say?’

Arner looked into the fire, uncomfortable, saying nothing.

‘This old Verbena Station’s gonna do for Mathew and Trace and their kids. You know that? For you too. Me and Annabelle is proposing to get it back for you fellers. We’re gonna see to that.’ He waited.

Arner was as still as stone.

Bo examined him with a long searching look. ‘What did that old Panya have to say to you? That old woman try and convince you to get on side with her and Les? You never gonna speak up for yourself? How am I supposed to know what you’re thinkin?’ Bo waited again but still Arner said nothing. ‘You not plannin on going against me and Annabelle are you?’

Arner’s head drooped and he gazed unhappily at the ground between his feet.

Annabelle wanted to reach out and put her arms around him. She wanted to silence Bo. She wanted to tell him Arner worshipped him. She watched them both and said nothing.

Arner slowly lifted his head and looked at Bo, his eyes glinting sorrowfully in the firelight. ‘I wouldn’t go against you, uncle Bo,’ he murmured, his voice sad and filled with emotion.

Bo said, ‘Shit!’ and stood up. He walked out of the firelight into the darkness. They heard him cursing and trampling about.

Annabelle said, ‘He didn’t mean it, Arner.’

Arner looked at her.

‘He loves you,’ she said. ‘He does it for you and Trace, not for himself.’

Arner’s big eyes glinted in the firelight, watching her.

Bo came back and tossed down an armful of wood. He picked up the billy and looked into it. ‘I’ll make us a drink of tea.’ He stepped out of the light again and tossed the dregs from the billy and filled it from the water container at the back of the Pajero. They watched him put the billy on the stove to boil. He stood close over the stove, rolling a cigarette.

A mopoke was calling out in the bendee.

Arner stood up and murmured, ‘Goodnight.’ He stepped out of the firelight into the darkness.

Bo turned from the stove and gazed after him. ‘Goodnight, Arner.’

Annabelle thought he might follow him, but he just stood gazing into the dark towards the tamarind tree. ‘That boy’s no different from his dad,’ he said. ‘That’s what the old Dougald would have done. Just get up and leave without saying nothin. Him and my old feller was the same. I used to wish I was just like them, but I’m not.’

She pointed, ‘The water’s boiling.’

She watched him making the tea, his familiar action of tossing a handful of leaves into the billy and lifting it off the fire.

He set the billy to one side on the iron and stood looking at her. ‘It’s good to be home,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ The landscape of the Suttor. The secret region of her heart that she had never shared with Steven but which she had shared with this man all her life. She would wait until the morning to tell him that she had decided not to go with him to the playgrounds of the old people. It was not necessary to know everything. She realised she had once believed in something called objective inquiry, the right to know everything. It was not necessary to understand. Understanding was the least of it. She would give the cylindrical stone to Arner to take back for her to the stone people. He and Bo could go together. It was their story, not hers. She would wait for them here at the Verbena camp.