The Mary Smokes Boys (5 page)

Grey watched bitterly at the edge of the fray, his face stinging, while Eccleston took a final beating.

Eccleston went to Tanner’s truck and asked for the twenty dollars he was given at the start of the night and Tanner gave it.

“Though you didn’t earn it.”

Grey met Eccleston leaning against the shed.

Eccleston stammered, adrenalin still shaking his voice: “That bastard Bates’s got too big for me.”

He felt for the twenty-dollar note in his coat pocket. He showed Grey and shook his head. Cars were disbanding onto the dirt road and highway. Eccleston put on his coat. They saw Possum Gallanani leap up to the cabin of Tanner’s bodytruck.

“You were right after all, boss.”

To which Tanner said nothing. Eccleston stopped and stared back at the truck. Possum jumped down and got in a dented Kingswood with a half-dozen other Aborigines and Tanner drove his truck into the shed.

A gigantic Aboriginal woman was called to tend Eccleston’s face. She flushed the wound clean then dabbed it with methylated spirits. She held a needle over a lighter flame and made three stitches with nylon fishing line and covered them with paper tape.

“Who’d Pos put his money on, Auntie?”

“Pos dosen av any money, boy!”

“Who’d Tanner put his money on?”

“How would I know?”

Once the cut was stitched Grey pulled Eccleston’s coat sleeve.

“Let’s go, Ook.”

“Tanner knew I was gonna get beaten tonight.”

Grey was settled now that the fights were over. The violence
in his heart was burnt out, replaced by fatigue and the ache in his face where the Bates boy had backhanded him, and he wanted nothing but to leave.

“Maybe not.”

“Did you hear who Pos bet on?”

“No.”

“Tanner bet against me, North.”

“Maybe not. What Pos said might have meant anything.”

“He bet against me.”

“What difference does it make now?”

 

THEY WALKED BACK to Eccleston’s house and took a drum of tar and rolled the drum to the southernmost fence and poured the tar into the hayed-off grass along the fenceline and even into the rushes and scant trickle of Mary Smokes Creek. Eccleston knelt on the bank and struck a match and shielded it from the wind and lit the grass. It was all Tanner’s country to the brink of Eccleston’s houseyard, but the southwest wind that blew tonight would take the fire into Tanner’s horse paddocks.

The boys watched the tar vapours flashing and the wind throw fire across the grass and throw sparks in the air and then the creek and fenceline were burning in a cross.

They heard Tanner’s horses bolting and whinnying in the dark. A black horse cleared a fence in panic and bolted into the woods; another got caught in the wire that ripped its legs before the horse pulled the section down and followed its mate. The boys watched the creek, fire skipping along the banks. Then they watched the water on fire.

Grey stood beside Eccleston until sirens sounded on the road. The boys ran to the north, into the gallery woods of Mary Smokes Creek and out of sight.

AFTER A FEW HOURS SLEEP THE SUN ROSE ON BLACKENED earth. Grey remembered the night as though it was a dream. But when he walked down to the creek and saw the banks were cinder and ash he knew it was true. Red eucalypt leaves fell into the ash that rose and drifted and fell as black snow. Iridescent coagula of unburnt tar floated on the water. Tanner’s country was a black swathe.

In the glowing afternoon Eccleston came rapping at the door, yelling to come quick and that they were after him.

“Who’s after you?”

“You’ve gotta help me, North.”

Grey saw that the badly-stitched cut under Eccleston’s left eye was weeping. Deep bruises had come into his face.

“If they get me this time they’re gonna send me to Borallon.” Borallon was the district remand home for boys. “I can’t go back to the house. They’re in there waitin for me.”

Grey walked to the back veranda and put his head around a post and saw a police car parked in Eccleston’s drive and a policeman leaning in Eccleston’s doorway. The policeman went inside.

“How’d you get here?”

“When I saw em pull up, I ran. I lost em in the woods and followed the creek north. I went to Possum’s but he wasn’t there, and there was no food in his humpy. Then I walked back to here through the grass. And now they’re sittin there waitin for me.”

“I’ll hide you.”

“No good. They’ll be round here searchin before the day’s out. Get me some food so I can last a couple a days in the hills–till they get tired a waitin.”

Grey went to the pantry and took a block of cheese, two cans of salmon and a half-loaf of linseed bread. He put these in his rucksack along with a canteen, a bedroll, a pair of metal mugs and a jar of leaf tea.

 

THEY HURRIED OUT Grey’s front door and crossed the road and walked directly west to a stretch of obscuring timber that would take them into town. The walked through the timber then crossed the road again and walked onto the creek. They followed the creek north. They walked behind the town to the northern outskirts then met a road that went into the mountains. They hitched a ride with a young woman in a late-model car who had been visiting her parents’ farm near Toogoolawah and was headed back to the city through the range.

They decided that the police might be patrolling the mountain road. They rode with the woman to the foothills and then went cross country on foot. They walked through fallen cattle yards and dry creeks and gullies and stands of red and white cedar that few men ever saw. They got as far as sweet-smelling Mount Glorious where ancient hoop and bunya pines stood together with black booyongs, tallowwoods and strangler figs, and the air was no more the dry brown air of the flat, but crisp mountain air.

A timber truck picked them up on a dirt road. The driver was mystified when the boys told him they did not want to go all the way to the city but instead wanted to be dropped just short of it at Jolly’s Lookout over Samford Valley. They reckoned the entrance to the city was the first place the authorities would come looking for them once they realized they had left town. For all the boys knew, the great wind gap that cradled the sprawling northwestern suburbs of Brisbane was crawling
with policemen anticipating the arrival of two juvenile arsonists. Though looking down at the edge of the city, the vast spillway of light, they began to sense their insignificance, the city’s profound unconcern.

 

AT JOLLY’S LOOKOUT there was cleared ground and plenty of dead wood to make a fire. They ate nearly all their food that night. Eccleston walked into the forest and brought back a shirtful of sandpaper figs.

“Careful of the sap,” he said. “It’s poison.”

Grey cut thick slices of cheese with his knife and they toasted the bread and cheese in the flames then wrapped the salmon up inside. They made a billy of the empty salmon tin and Grey filled it with water from his canteen and threw in a handful of black tea and pushed it into the fire with a stick. They drank tea sitting side by side on the bedroll and looked down at the smoky valley, the gleaming of Samford’s scattered lights and, in the east, the tendrils of the big city.

Grey remembered the long, redundant outskirts he had driven through after his mother’s death. Motels, car yards, prisons and highways made up the beautiful ribbons of light he could see tonight. He wondered if their tranquil embrace would ever touch Mary Smokes. He lay down to sleep and watched them twinkling.

 

IN THE NIGHT a wild dog howled and the boys woke.

“You hear that?’ said Grey.

“It’s just a dog.”

“I know. I was just wonderin if you were awake, that’s all.”

Their fire was gone to coals. Grey sat up and blew on the embers and shifted a half-burnt log to the middle of the fire with his boot. The log was charred enough not to give a flame visible from the road. The dog howled again, long and mournful, and Eccleston sat up too. A night wind channelled east along the
road and tore ash from the ends of the logs in the fire. The boys pulled their coats tight across their shoulders.

“I don’t want to go to Borallon.” Eccleston said. He lit a cigarette in the coals.

“We burnt some country,” said Grey. “Set loose some horses. Eventually they’ll forget about it. The police can’t spend all their time answerin to Tanner.”

He watched a truck approach and pass on the mountain road below their camp.

“Tanner deals in good horses,” said Eccleston. “Who knows what the ones we spooked were worth. They were probably all through the hills by this mornin, cut to pieces, feet busted up on rocks.”

“I doubt it,” said Grey. “We’ll be all right.” Though he did not know.

“It’s what I’ve done before though too.” Eccleston sighed. “They’ll add it up against me.”

He told Grey about the night Possum was beaten half to death by a bikie gang in a watch-house while two policemen looked on. He said the police in this country were all crooked. “I hate coppers, Grey. You know, at Borallon even the teachers are coppers. Even the priest is a copper!”

“I hate em too,” Grey said. More than once Bill North had come home from public bars with wounds he claimed were inflicted by police. Grey shifted closer to the heat in the coals. “But the priest can’t be a cop.”

Eccleston smiled sadly.

“I spose not.”

“I wonder if they’re chasin us–those blokes who were at your house?”

“Maybe. But it’s late. And cept for that truck before, nothin’s gone by on this road.”

“They’ve probably left off for the night,” Grey said. “Anyhow, we’ve got a start on em.”

“Yeah. We’ve got a start on em.”

Eccleston sighed and closed his eyes.

“You know, North, it seems like someone has always been huntin me. Always.” Then he sniffled. Grey did not know if it was tears or the cold. Eccleston threw his cigarette into the coals.

Grey looked back toward the road that disappeared into the wood, looking for something that may or may not have been there.

“I’ll stay with you, Ook.”

Eccleston smiled and stared into the fire.

The only sound outside the fire was the hushing of the forest, the mountain wind rolling down into the valley.

Grey took a mouthful of water and passed the canteen.

“Where are we going tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

The wild dog had settled and the boys lay down again to sleep.

Grey lay facing east with his eyes open. The city seemed an impossible place. They had nowhere to go in the city.

 

IT WAS COLD and the sky had begun to pale in the east when two policemen came and chased the boys down where they ran into the woods. The policemen dragged them into awaiting car.

 

 

SUNLIGHT POURED DOWN HIGH CREEK BEDS AND THROUGH gaps in the trees. The forest twinkled with late afternoon light and chimed with birdsong. They climbed crude stairs of granite and fig tree roots up into the heathland and walked to the lookout atop Mount Tibberoowuccum. The boys sat for hours and watched clouds and the shadows of clouds float across the hills until the western plains where the clouds were blown away.

A smoky dusk gathered over them. Then the stars came. Lights were studded in the range and scattered sparely across the west. It did not matter that Mary Smokes was out of sight. Once he could see the D’Aguilar range Eccleston felt he was in
his own country. He looked through a wind gap where his thoughts travelled to the town he grew up in.

A lonely firework was launched from the backyard of a house in the north, they wondered for what obscure celebration.

“How long you got left?’ said Grey.

“Year’n a half. The end of school.”

“What will they do about tonight?”

“Nothin I can’t handle.”

It was the third time Eccleston had gone walkabout to this nearest wild country to the boys’ home. He did not mind the work they gave him at Borallon as a punishment. The boys stood in silence looking west, and there was something in their silence up here on the mountain that said they would play truant from the world all their lives. “My wild brother” they said to each other without a word.

IN TIME NYALL THIEBAUD AND PAUL OFFENBACH LEFT town. No new boys came to take their places. Grey North, Matt Thiebaud, Raughrie Norman and the returned Gordon Eccleston, who had left school for good and made his way shooting foxes and ringing, were the last Mary Smokes boys.

When Irene was six years old, Bill North took work as a boundary rider out west on the Jimbour Plain. The work offered him solitude and escape. People said he was a strange man and that you needed to be for that work; and that was the way of the country: the young moved into the city, and the lost and old moved further west or into rooms above public bars to be forgotten among ghosts. If more than a fortnight separated jobs, Bill North returned. But his spells at home were broken by long months, and his children were as strangers to him.

All Irene’s love was reserved for her brother. She would wait in the house or on the stairs for him to return from work at Jake Naprasnic’s and nights with the boys. Sometimes she waited until very late, long after Grandma Finnain had gone to bed.

Slow-burning grief and weariness worked on their grandmother. She grew frail and her indifference to the world became complete. She was as anachronistic as the painted photographs that sat in piles on the floor of her room. She was less strict with Irene than she had been with Grey and did not ever force her to bed, even when Irene began school. She knew her granddaughter would not be settled until she heard Grey’s boots on the stairs,
and the old woman often went to sleep leaving her sitting up by the window in the living room.