Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (2 page)

‘Those darn crows have finished up,' he said. ‘Been the rark rark rark since January. Had dozens of them up near us . . . feeding on the heath currant. The mother hates them, she collects the currants. To tell you boys the truth I don't mind the crows so much but she's always bellyaching about it.
Bloody ravens bloody ravens
. I get sick of that.'

Darren and Noel listened as Ron negotiated the surface of the road and the night whooshed past them.

‘You had that nankeen heron in your pine trees, Noely? Eh? I spot it in the swamp in the afternoons. Just waking up, I reckon. Makes a fella like me look sociable . . . which reminds me, after that rain last week the snails were all over the mouth. Like billy-o on the sedge there. Out of their shells drinkin' on the wet. But only for a couple of hours. Caught six bumper whiting next morning. Almost as good as cliff-worms, those snails.'

‘You have to be quick,' Darren said.

‘Not quick, just there,' Ron replied.

They turned off west into the Poorool Road with three wallabies standing beside the dam on the high corner watching them pass. Ron began half humming, half singing the once famous song ‘Shenandoah'.

‘Road's crook,' he said as they lurched over the holes in the dip beside the pine plantation. He resumed humming.

They headed up the incline and onto the first of the two Poorool saddles. When they'd reached the highest point they rolled down the other side in neutral and climbed the next one. The ute clattered and moaned. At the top and along a little way, Ron stopped at the fence of a cleared paddock sloping gently away from them and seawards. They were a good twenty miles inland by then. All three of them looked out for signs of first light over a faraway ocean. There were none.

Ron wound down his window and Noel did the same. The crisp air of the higher altitude entered the cabin. Darren fished in his shirt pocket for his smokes and Ron leant under the driver's seat and pulled out three stubbies of Melbourne Bitter from a BYO bag. He handed one each to the boys and opened one for himself.

As the years had passed and people had died or moved on, Ron McCoy felt more at ease with these two men in their thirties than he did with most people his own age. At least they knew the landmarks and could talk of the same people. Ron could reminisce if he chose, almost as if he was with Wally and Norm, and the boys would remember some of the events he spoke of and be curious about those they didn't. In the middle of the night something uncanny would slip into the clean air between them, and the old man would speak to Darren and Noel as if they were his contemporaries. ‘Remember when Fred Ayling broke his leg in that coupe on the Gentle Annie,' he'd say, as if Darren and Noel had been members of the party which carried Fred down the difficult ridge on the messmate and calico stretcher in 1959. Or: ‘Was it Pat Burns who first showed us that currawong and 44-gallon drum trick? That was at Booligal that time, wasn't it? Or was it the Womboin? Blowed if I can remember.'

Noel was content to preserve the illusion, he found it pleasurable to be addressed as if he was his dead father. But Darren was often blunt. He'd say, in his high-pitched voice, ‘I was two years
old in 1969, Ron!' or ‘It's not Dad you're talking to, Ron.' Or even: ‘I never went on that trip to Booligal, they wouldn't let me out of kindergarten.'

Ron feigned not to notice but of course that wasn't the case. He would continue talking. It was enough that Darren knew what the word ‘Booligal' meant for his question not to require a u-turn or an apology.

Despite his jokes, it was pleasurable also for Darren to hear Ron speak, to hear his father's name mentioned again as if he was crowded in with them in the cabin of the ute. When Norm Traherne had been alive he was always talking about Ron when his friend wasn't there. It was ‘Ron reckons this' and ‘Ron says that'. Now the tables were turned. Darren loved listening to the clipped yarns in which his dad invariably played a major part. He felt at home when Ron spoke, the old man's normally shy tongue loosened by the dark hour and the respect Darren and Noel had for him, his nous about the bush and ocean spilling into them like stars out of the onyx night.

Looking out through the windscreen, Ron took a sip of his stubby and said, ‘Bit dark for ducks.'

The boys nodded and waited. It was confusing. If it had been eels he wanted to get, or illegal firewood, it would have made sense. But not ducks. Sunrise was not until five thirty. You couldn't have fired a shot before six. They were both thinking a similar thing. Maybe he just wanted some company.

Eventually Noel said, ‘Nice night, though.'

Ron nodded, took another sip.

‘What do you reckon about them sealing the roads, Ron?' Noel asked, after a long silence.

‘They're running out of gravel,' Darren said.

‘Either that or the price is too high,' said Ron.

‘You don't reckon it's just dickheads complaining about the dust?'

‘Could be. Could be public liability the same as them cutting down all the pines,' Ron said.

‘I don't like it,' Noel told them.

‘Ah, I don't know,' Ron said. ‘It's hard on the vehicles.'

Noel looked out the window. That was exactly what his father would have said.

‘You know they used to get the gravel out the front of my place,' Ron told them. ‘When the war broke out, it was blokes digging the gravel out there that told us. I used to stand off and watch them. Straight down into the cliff they went. Had to stop in the end, though. Got a bit dangerous. The whole bloody cliff-face could've caved in.'

‘But they wouldn't have got enough up there to do all the roads, would they?' Darren asked.

‘Not many roads then, boy. The Ocean Road of course, but there weren't many others. The Old Breheny Road's always just been clay so they didn't have to do that. Probably only a handful of others. Mostly old bullock ruts.'

Their eyes had adjusted to the night now. They could see a huddle of sheep across the paddock beside them, standing out in the open, as still as hardwood.

Noel knew there was no point mentioning the changing aesthetic of the roads to Ron. It wouldn't be that kind of change that Ron would object to, if he did object, it would more likely be that the town was getting too crowded with people and regulations, like a suburb.

Looking down through the chute of the treed gullies towards the sea, there was still no sign of light. Ron leant under the driver's seat again and pulled out three more stubbies. Darren picked up an empty cartridge shell from the dashboard and turned it in his fingers, trying to figure why it was that Ron had brought them out there. Maybe he was finally losing it, he thought disturbingly.

Beside him Noel was thinking that loneliness wasn't a crime.

Ron could feel the boys becoming unsettled but chose to ignore it for the time being. They could put up with it. He just needed to sit a little, to drink with them some more. Soon enough Darren would push him, wanting to know what the hell he was up to. But timing was always something he'd felt confident with. So he talked about ducks, to reassure them that he hadn't lost the scent.

‘No-one was a better shot than your old man,' he told Darren. ‘Except his old man.'

‘Grandma wasn't bad either, when she was younger,' said Darren.

‘True. Rhyll used to shoot cormorants from a tent on the estuary when she first turned up, I remember that. There was a bounty on 'em then. Fishermen reckoned they were eating too much. It was fair game on cormorants for a bit. And your Grandma Rhyll used to prop there in front of the tent with a bottle of muscat and have a great old shot. Then send your old man out into the water to get 'em when they fell.'

Darren slipped the empty cartridge onto the index finger of his right hand and began tapping the dashboard, delighted at the thought of his grandma doing that.

‘Nowadays of course,' Ron went on, ‘if you pinged a cormorant you'd have the wallopers on your back. In even time. Nah, they're gamey anyway but we used to shoot plovers if there weren't any ducks. Good feed, plovers. Surprising amount of meat on the breast.'

A wind had begun to pick up outside the ute now, they could hear it occasionally thrumming the grille and soughing through the trees opposite. Ron used it as his cue that it was time to move along. He started the engine and let it idle.

‘What now?' Darren asked him as Ron turned the ute around and brought it to a standstill on the road, facing back the way they'd come.

Pressing the accelerator ever so gently, his wonky left headlight coming and going as they moved slowly forward, Ron kept his eyes on the road ahead and didn't answer. They slid down off the height of the saddle and back out of the wind.

‘Don't worry,' he said eventually, ‘I'm not slippin'. Even Rhyll couldn't shoot ducks in this light.'

They drove back through the potholes in the dip, up the side of the first saddle once more, along a sharp section of laid blue metal. Apart from the bumpy ride, Darren and Noel were now as still in expectation as the sheep had been in the paddock where they had been parked. It wasn't until the incline levelled that Ron spoke again.

‘I've told Sweet William and I'll tell you too and then I don't have to speak any more about it. I'm selling half my father's block.'

Noel and Darren were confused for a moment. The term Ron used had them wondering, as if there might have been some other piece of land that Ron and Min owned other than their home. Their thoughts circled, until by elimination they realised it was the clifftop Ron was talking about.

‘I've got a buyer, I reckon, and the mother and I don't need all that land anymore. We could do with the money. She's a bit crook. And being sick costs.

‘Anyway, I'm sellin' the headland side from that boundary to the woodpile. Half the block, it is. None of the graves are on it. Dad's on the house side and so are the dogs. So's the bench he built for the soldiers. Public land, the actual cliff edge. Like a riverbank. Anyway, it's the half of our block I'm concerned with. I'm selling it.'

Fifteen minutes later, shuddering back along the Dray Road beside the quarry, no-one in the cabin of the ute had uttered a word. He'd said what he had to say and Darren and Noel felt unqualified to speak. It was a gulf of time that silenced them. A whole lifetime of things as they were. From long before they were even born. A
lifetime of looking after something your father gave you. And then doing away with it in order to care for your mother. Both Darren and Noel were more affected by all the trouble Ron had taken to tell them the news than by the news itself.

In a clifftop life of weatherchange only three or four things had ever seriously altered for Ron McCoy. And this was one of them. The ute rolled down off the final ridge, out of the charry bush and back onto the outskirts of their riverflat. Ron flicked the radio back on. A man was reading scorelines from the soccer in England. As they came out of trees and into the clearing, the morning light was finally spangling upward from the sea. The two young men were both deep in thought, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, their eyes wide open.

T
here was a bench in the clearing on the cliff made of mountain ash and his father had built it for the men he'd known but could know no more. Well, they were boys actually, boys he'd grown up with in Winchelsea who, unlike him, had not been diagnosed as colour blind, and who went away to war, destined never to swim under the bluestone bridge which crossed the river of their home town ever again.

Len McCoy built the bench with judgement and care, sourcing the timber himself on the bush ridge out near the duck ponds, milling it by hand once it had dried on the long noggings down the eastern side of the house, and fixing it deep into the ground with concrete footings so as to withstand the Bass Strait winds which came in a direct line to them from the South Pole. He had intended to leave it then as it was, to silver in the weather, a mute testimonial to a tragedy beyond words, until his wife Min suggested he carve a note of its purpose in the timber, an eloquent phrase of memorial that would speak to those who might sit on
the bench opposite the Two Pointer rocks, long after they'd passed on.

She dug amongst her things and in a leather-bound book which her father had read aloud from when she and her sister Elsie were small,
The Gift of Poetry
, and which he'd subsequently given Min to take when she decided to move out of the city to Mangowak and marry Len, she found some lines she thought struck a perfect note, blending a sense of the beauty of life with her own defiant anti-nationalist attitude to the war:

Young men are for living not for dying
For laughing and working, loving and crying
Each man's thought is his own country and home
True friendship's the highest goal to attain

Len McCoy didn't say what he thought of the lines Min had chosen, on such an issue he would always defer to her, but immediately he began drawing up the template in grey-lead so that he could carve the words into the bench. It took him three full days of the utmost concentration to finish what in the end was a reasonable job, legible and quite evenly set, and luckily he had a fine brace of light winter northerlies to do it in. Below the lines from the La Branca poem which Min had chosen was added: ‘FOR THE FALLEN OF THE GREAT WAR 1914–1918'.

By finishing the bench and the inscription, Min knew that her husband had done himself a great favour, assuaging the guilt that he carried with him always, that so many had died and that he had stayed behind, seeing blue for green and never seeing red at all. At least now he had said his piece in a permanent fashion, and although the words of the La Branca poem were an integral part of his bench, it was in actions rather than words that a man like Len McCoy could express himself.