Journey to the Stone Country (8 page)

It was a little after noon.

The day was windless and warm.

A tall man came from inside the house. He stood in the deep shadow of the open doorway, holding the flywire back with one hand and watching them get out and stretch their limbs in the sun. The tall man didn’t greet them. He was slow of movement, heavy in the body and downcast in his expression, as if he was reluctant to be drawn from his dark house into the bright day. The dwelling stood on a narrow strip of land between the tarmac and a steep decline to the flat green of the canefields, the forested escarpment of the Highlands a distant backdrop. The glossy foliage of a mango tree shading the verandah, one of its thick branches chainsawed to make way for the satellite dish on the tin roof. A refrigerator and an exercise bike alongside each other on the verandah by the door. An old lemon tree off to one side, its branches bowed with the weight of big yellow lemons. Fallen fruit littering the ground. No neighbouring house but a vacant block scraped by a dozerblade, green shoots of lantana and scotch thistle poking up through the scrape. A tilted
FOR SALE
board fronting the road.

Bo stood by the back door of the Pajero rolling a smoke, his hat tipped back, strands of hair plastered to his forehead above the reddened indentation of his hatband. Susan was sitting up in the back untangling herself from the blanket.

‘You made good time,’ the man said from the doorway. He stood watching Susan climb out of the Pajero, as if he intended asking her a question, but he said nothing and turned and went back inside the house. An orange Ford 500 drove by along the road, the bass thumping, young people waving and yelling from the windows. Trace reached her white hardhat out the cabin of the truck and held it aloft, as if it were a trophy from the wilderness.

Bo lit his smoke.

Trace jumped down from the truck and went inside the house. Arner eased himself out from behind the wheel and followed her, stepping deliberately across the kikuyu patch.

Bo watched him. ‘You gonna take your gear in?’

Arner took hold of the verandah post, paused, then hauled himself up the two steps onto the boards. He stood breathing. ‘I’ll get it later.’ His voice was husky and low, as if he confided some shy knowledge of himself that he was unwilling to speak of openly to others. He stepped across the verandah and pulled open the flywire door. He ducked his head and went into the house.

Bo turned to Susan as she came around the back of the Pajero. ‘We should take in them maps for Dougald to have a look at?’

‘I’ll get them.’

He waited for her, Annabelle standing beside him. The two women followed him up the steps and into the house.

The tall man was sitting at a darkstained pine table on the far side of the room by the kitchen area, his elbows on the wood, his arms resting along the tabletop. He was gazing solemnly at the palms of his hands, which were large and pale and soft looking, with lines like ingrained coal stains traversing the pallor. The skin of his face was puffy and grey, the flesh hanging in slack folds from the square block of his skull.

The tabletop was covered with newspapers and magazines, sauce bottles and a teapot, a plastic packet of sugar, breakfast cereal and dirtied bowls and plates, cutlery lying about. Arner was sitting in a big old green club lounge, his back to the table. He was pointing the remote and thumbing through the channels on a teevee against the wall. Trophies on the teevee, the sound off. A dozen more trophies spread around the room on tables and shelves. Hung on the wall between the windows, an arrangement of plaques and photographs. Trace with a pool cue in one hand and a trophy in the other at the centre of each photo, a wide grin on her face. Smiling young people gathered around her holding up beer glasses.

Susan went over and sat opposite the man at the table. She laid the rolled mine maps and her report in front of him. ‘How are you, Dougald?’

‘Yeah, pretty good Sue.’

She looked up. ‘This is Annabelle Küen. She’s been helping us. Annabelle, meet Dougald Gnapun.’

He didn’t get up or offer his hand but turned and nodded to her.

Bo said, ‘William Beck’s youngest daughter.’

Dougald Gnapun paused then and gave her a searching look. ‘So you come back up this way?’ he said. He turned back to Susan without waiting for a response from Annabelle. ‘You get it done?’

‘There’s a section the other side of the Isaac left to do. It’ll take us a couple of days. We’ll go back and finish it off after I’ve been out to Charters Towers. I can’t leave that job any longer. And I’ve got to spend a few days catching up in the office.’

Dougald said evenly, ‘Les Marra was here.’

Susan waited, ‘
And
?’ She looked at Annabelle. ‘Mr bloody trouble.’

Dougald examined his open palms. ‘Yeah,’ he said, delivering his information in a flat tone, ‘Him and Steve was at a meeting in Brisbane.’

‘What’s going on, Dougald? Just tell me the bad news,’ Susan said.

He looked at her and shrugged, his manner apologetic. ‘They’ve signed the agreement with the government and that company. They’re going ahead with a dam on Ranna Creek.’

‘And I suppose he expects me to drop everything and survey Ranna?’

Dougald said, ‘It’ll have to be done before the summer. She’s not a good place to get into after rain.’

‘Well I can’t do it,’ Susan said. ‘He’s asking the impossible.’ She said accusingly, ‘You’ve known about this for ages, haven’t you?’

‘Well, I think everyone’s known for years that the government’s been planning a dam on the Ranna,’ Dougald said.

‘It’s not fair!’ Susan looked at Bo. ‘Say something Bo.’

Bo said evenly, ‘Les Marra’s a smart feller. He’s doin it for the young people. But I never seen no good come of the way him and Steve operates.’ He turned away and stepped into the kitchen area and opened the refrigerator. ‘We’d better have a feed, old mate, before we all die of hunger.’

Dougald gazed across the table at Susan. ‘I’ve got no food here,’ he said.

Bo made an annoyed clucking sound and shut the refrigerator door. ‘I’ll go down the shop and get something. You all want fish and chips?’

Annabelle said, ‘I’ll come with you.’

Dougald looked at them. ‘You fellers camping here tonight?’

Bo shook his head. ‘We’ll get going. Susan’s gotta be back in Townsville.’

Bo and Dougald looked at each other. Neither spoke.

After some little while Dougald said, ‘Plenty of feed out there in that Isaac River country I’ll bet?’

‘Oh yes.’

The two men evidently found something of themselves in what they saw in the other. Their years together on the Isaac harboured within them.

Bo said, ‘That boxforest country’s all been poisoned.’

Dougald looked down at his hands. He touched Susan’s report as if he proposed examining it. ‘That was all sweet winter country through there. Them dead trees would let in the frosts and dry it up.’

‘She’s all African buffel grass and Brahmans. There’s not a blade of native pick left, except on the ridges.’

Dougald narrowed his eyes, considering the planes of his palms as if he considered the fine cattle country of his youth. ‘On Picardy too?’

‘Oh yes, Picardy, all that downs country been poisoned,’ Bo said.

There was a silence.

Bo said, ‘Me and Annabelle’ll go and get us something to eat.’

No one moved.

The sound came up on the teevee. They turned and looked. It was a rugby game. Arner switched channels. They looked away.

‘It would have been easier finding them scarred trees of the old people with the timber dead,’ Dougald said and laughed softly. It was a mirthless laugh, however, a listless resignation in his voice, almost self-mocking, as if he wished them to understand it was the least of his duties to inquire after the progress of the mine survey. ‘Find many scarred trees?’

‘No,’ Bo said. ‘We didn’t find much of anything. Just campsites.’

Annabelle said, ‘I found an interesting stone.’

They all turned and looked at her.

She said, ‘I’ll get it.’ She went out to the Pajero and opened the back door. The stone was in the grocery bin. She had wrapped it in a tea towel. As she lifted the heavy stone cylinder from the bin it came to her that she would leave it with Dougald Gnapun and be rid of it.

Inside the house the three of them waited for her. Something uncomfortable in their apprehension of her return. While they waited they watched the teevee. A car blew its horn out in the road. Trace came out of her room and ran out of the house. There was the sound of a door slamming and the car driving off, the bass thumping.

Susan said, ‘You got down to Brisbane all right yourself then, Dougald?’

‘Yeah. I come back yesterday.’

‘What did the doctors say?’

Dougald straightened, pressing his hand to his left side above the waistband of his trousers. ‘They’re doing some tests.’ He looked down at his large hand, covering his side like a wound-dressing. ‘I’ve got this monitor thing taped to me.’ He tugged his shirt aside to let them see.

They both looked at the black box taped to his yellow skin with a silvery membrane.

Bo said, ‘We’ll be able to keep track of you now, old mate, with that GPS thing of Susan’s.’

They laughed.

Annabelle came in through the flywire and they turned and watched her approach.

She came up to the table and with both hands she laid the stone on the crumpled newspapers in front of Dougald, a sense of ceremony in her action, as if the stone were her offering to him, the price, perhaps, of her admittance to his trust.

He glanced at it uneasily and looked away.

The tapered cylinder of stone lay on the table before them.

They waited.

Annabelle said, ‘We recorded its position and took a photo.’

Susan and Bo watching Dougald.

Annabelle looked at Susan. ‘Susan thought we’d better take it, in case it got damaged when the contractors came through . . . Or maybe got lost,’ she added.

Dougald looked up at her, a slow ironic smile turning the corners of his thick lips, the whites of his eyes yellow, richly shot with purple veins. ‘Lost?’ he enquired of her, and chuckled throatily. ‘Well I think it’s
been
lost.’

She sensed an antagonism and suspected him of wishing to ridicule her. ‘In the subsidence, I mean, when the longwall goes under that area,’ she explained and touched the stone with her fingers encouragingly, easing it closer to Dougald. Needing to defend herself. To display a little of her knowledge. To show him she was not simply a boorish academic from the south who knew nothing of the arrangements of his old people. ‘It was on its own. There was no associated material. What do you think? It didn’t come out of a campsite.’ Her resolve, however, was wavering and she decided she must ask him the question boldly or submit to defeat in the face of his silence. ‘What is it, do you suppose?’

Dougald glanced up at Bo. ‘I probably shouldn’t even be looking at it,’ he said. He hauled himself up out of his chair and turned to Bo, turning his back on the stone. ‘Get us a couple of potato cakes, will you mate.’

Annabelle stared at the stone lying on the table where she had set it down among Dougald Gnapun’s domestic litter. She saw suddenly how it must be a private thing, unnaturally exposed and naked, an embarrassment that could not decently be talked about. She longed to snatch it up and hide it from them. She knew she had made a dreadful mistake. She looked at Susan. Susan shrugged and made a face that was impossible to decipher.

‘You want fish too?’ Bo asked.

‘Two pieces of flake.’ Dougald reached for his back pocket. ‘You need money?’

‘We got money.’

Dougald took his hand away from his back pocket and stepped across the room to the bathroom. He turned at the door and stood looking back at them. ‘All that sweet boxforest country poisoned, eh?’ He seemed to be struggling to imagine the country so changed.

‘She’s killed, old mate.’

Dougald went into the bathroom and closed the door.

Bo said, ‘We’ll go down the shop.’

Susan said, ‘Get me a piece of flake and a serve of chips. I’d better have a talk to Dougald about this Ranna Dam business.’

Bo said, ‘They will dam it sooner or later. They gotta have the water for Bowen and Mackay.’ He turned to go, gesturing at the stone. ‘Maybe we should take it along with us.’

Annabelle picked up the stone. Once again she was impressed by its unexpected weight, as if it called attention to itself. She thought of the Italian adjective
pesante
, and the French verb,
appesantir
. There was an English word too, but she could not think of it. The stone was not simply heavy. There was, she decided, a
gravitas
in the weight of it. So it was the Latin. The English word
gravity,
she decided, would not quite do. Perhaps the poets had been too free with it in the past. A significance beyond mere weight. The unusual heaviness of the stone, she decided, was a counterbalance to its form. There was a satisfaction in the thought that the form and weight of the stone were related in a subtle aesthetic balance. She realised that the maker of the stone could have arrived at such a balance only by a conscious exercise of the highest level of aesthetic craftsmanship. In other words, the stone was a work of art. It was a sculpture. The idea thrilled her. She carried the stone cradled in the crook of her arm, her other hand supporting her wrist, as if she were delivering an artillery shell to its gun. Her discovery of the stone’s aesthetic gravitas was something she would not attempt to discuss with Susan or Bo. She could see their disbelief if she were to try, their sense of her ignorance of these things and their own greater familiarity. Beginner’s luck, Susan had said when she found it. But Annabelle knew it was more than that. There was a relation. It was not her stone. It would never be her stone. It did not belong to her. She was not claiming ownership, but understanding. She was convinced she had understood something true and significant about the stone, something that the person who had made it would have been pleased to have her acknowledge and would themselves have understood. She felt the gravitas of her own intelligence conveyed to the creator of the grave and beautiful stone. She smiled at this conceit. She realised she had not felt free to think for years. For years, at the university and with Steven at home, she had been bound to think. It was not the same thing. She reached the door before Bo and held it for him. Her percipience buttressed her against the shame of having laid the stone in front of Dougald Gnapun. She possessed her own secret.