When Colts Ran (4 page)

‘A dead body,' Colts so very needlessly stated. His gaze, like a wary fly resisting its need, came and went but never too close.

Veronica spoke a prayer for the dead, in the same breath thinking such inert, angled limbs could never be imagined but needed to be studied in this lonely place, nose wrinkled against the stench. She wanted pencils she didn't have on her, and lucky for her shame. ‘Hallowed be thy name, thy will be done . . .'

Colts stepped away from Veronica's side and peered closer over the bank. ‘Ashes to ashes, that is for sure,' said the trembling boy. Dead men were a separate matter from the fine singing soldiers of human memory Dunc Buckler wrote about, yodelling and chucking grenades at Huns.

Veronica had no answer except to hope, as Colts once expressed it – a small boy longing for a mother's love – that they would all gather in heaven.

It was what he'd said one day, she insisted on reminding him, reducing them all to tears. ‘Such a wise little man, so beautiful.'

‘That's bunkum and bull, and you know it,' said Colts.

‘You were seven, dear, almost eight, the age of divine reason in a child, and what can I say?' She reached for his hand. ‘That you were wrong? You were not wrong. Heaven is a memory and a promise.'

‘Bloody palaver,' he spat.

‘Buckler's words,' corrected Veronica. ‘What are yours?'

Colts had the motorbike running when Veronica came back. They had not unpacked. Now he switched the engine off and watched as Veronica stacked dry thistles and parched leaves under the caravan and hauled dead branches over and struck a match.

‘What are you doin'?'

‘Making a fire.'

‘You're not going to burn it?'

He tried too late to stop her.

‘That's ours!'

The flames drove him back with his arms crossed over his face. The fire wouldn't spread because there was no grass to burn, just bare dirt everywhere, although dirt itself might explode from the emotion he put into watching.

‘Wait till I tell him!'

Veronica danced around the burning caravan waving her hat. ‘Tell him, if you can find him,' she said.

The caravan speared through with sparks, flame spiralling at first and then going straight up and making a chimney roar.

Colts walked down the track away from the blaze, looking back to check on the caravan as he'd done when they last left, making sure the roof was still there, a sentimental tactic stamping images to recall when he was stuck back at school. The difference now was a smoking curve held by spindly uprights getting charred black and wrapped in sheets of flame. The corrugations rose like an aeroplane wing, wafting but never taking off. Through stacks of heat he saw Veronica going to the bike, and so he kept walking, turning his shoulder on her until she caught up.

He climbed into the sidecar and wedged himself steady with cushions. It was soon dark as she drove. The headlight flounced ahead like a dying torchbeam but always finding a tree or a bush.

‘Can't you go faster?' Colts urged, but only because he didn't want her to know he hated being taken away like this, dependent, stunned. She kept stealing glances at him, easing her shoulders around and angling her neck as they drove, and wondered about a feeling, if it was true motherliness, which she had never strongly had. The boy had not screamed and threatened her so much as treated her, not coldly, but reservedly, saving passionate attachment for the real mother he barely knew and who awaited him six feet under, and giving his male ardour to that heroic goat, Dunc Buckler.

The ingratitude of children she was feeling anyway. That, at least, was an authentic touch of the parental fate.

In Colts's mind the triangular paddock by the river wasn't how they had left it, destroyed. The caravan was replaced by a shining turnout on four pneumatic tyres inflated hard, with new wood and bright copper nails, and those horses, Old George and Mrs Dinah, displayed freckled lips and foaming spittle as they had when hauling loads, great with leaning life and hoofs biting forward.

Just by Veronica lighting the fire and destroying the lot, the horses returned with their immortality intact. Colts wondered if Veronica knew the mare of the couple still wore a perky straw hat. And she did. And she did.

Later that night a town slept, tin roofs shining under a zinc moon, silent except for dogs jerking on chains and drunks under a tree on the track to the blacks' camp there, the riverbank plunging down a clay slide to cracked mud and smoky camp fires.

They went over the rattling-board bridge and slept by the roadside a mile out, returning next morning for Veronica to wash and groom herself on the riverbank, to bargain for rationed petrol at the town garage and speak to the police.

When details were given, the circumstances of the swagman explained, the long-faced sergeant said: ‘I knew this was on the cards with that gent. I'll have to mention the fire you lit, Mrs Buckler. There might of been things of his in it.'

‘There weren't things though.'

The Sarge lowered his voice.

‘You must have had a reason for it.'

‘Does the name Molyneaux mean anything to you?'

The Sarge angled his head. ‘Yes. But he's deceased.'

‘Mine's out this way working – a friend, an associate of my husband, a pale sort of young fellow, book-keeping on stations.'

‘The Molyneaux I knew was Joe Mole, as we called him – the little skipper.'

‘That was Des Molyneaux's father,' Veronica nodded.

‘A brave man. There must be good in the younger version, then?'

‘He keeps in touch by mail,' said Veronica emphatically, ‘and doesn't always sign what he writes, leaving no return address.'

‘That swaggie, the returned man, Major Buckler's caretaker –' said the Sarge. ‘A sad case, came from a good family.'

‘There was a steel plate in his head,' said Colts.

‘Messines or Kemmel, I believe,' agreed the Sarge.

Then the Sarge's wife said, ‘There's a postie in Broken Hill called Molyneaux.'

‘Postie is a good one,' said Veronica.

‘He delivers to my sister and plays the harmonica if she's feeling off.'

‘That's him,' said Veronica, ‘purveyor of questionable emotions.'

All she wanted was for Molyneaux to look her in the eye, confirm his queasy truth with bold assertion – ‘making a run', ‘released from ties' – and then she would seek counsel of an Adelaide lawyer, an old friend, and find her way forward in the changed condition of her time on earth.

The police wife invited them through to the residence and gave them mugs of tea, thick-lipped government cups on heavy saucers with Anzac biscuits baked to toffee hardness.

Veronica asked for a road report.

‘Same conditions as always,' said the Sarge. ‘Dry. Not even a trickle, never a lick to lay the dust. The world's gone off its lid, you dunno what's coming next, only drought's a cert.'

The road west humped across ancient floodplains, making for slow going on corrugations through sand drifts. Up ahead a purple cloud hung in the empty sky. Most strange: it wandered north and south as Veronica tightened a handkerchief over her mouth and raised an umbrella against the naked heat. They crept forward, the motorbike steering crabwise in the dust. Sand trickled into Colts's boots and the front forks flummoxed in ruts. At some point the cloud made a decision, packed itself into an anvil shape, turned thick blue, swelled. Up ahead a wall of rain descended with a perfect sheen and roaring, and they couldn't run or retreat as it approached with its arms out.

Their cheeks turned white, their noses red, as rain gulped down their collars, wet their ankles, irritated their noses. They stood with the bike helplessly humble, submitting to a drenching for ten minutes. When the cloudburst stopped it left a departing drumming in the ears.

Everything was soaked, including the matches Veronica searched for in a box held under her chin until she found a few dry heads and took a Players from a tin of dry twenties.

Colts tugged at the handlebars while she puffed and he calculated filching one for himself from her stash. The sun came out but the bike was stuck. Sheeting leftover water created foaming rapids of grit. Near by the hump where they stopped it ran into cracks in the ground and disappeared with a hurried chuckle.

Veronica draped blankets over the handlebars. Colts, after sitting sidesaddle, fist under chin and brooding, tried walking but stilts of mud on his Niblicks toppled him. He used a pocket knife, paring slices of muck from the soles. With the boots hung around his neck, he rolled up his trouser legs and picked his way along the claggy track barefootedly.

‘Where are you off to?' said Veronica – a funny old question, as there was nowhere to go except the far horizon.

‘I'm looking for something,' said Colts, mud squeezing up between his toes, the firm consistency extruding narrow, sausage-like rolls.

‘Not someone?' she said. Buckler was a presence between them: deflated to one, overblown to the other. She thought she smelt goats and made an association with the forthrightness of Buckler's sweat.

Colts couldn't tell her it was really those horses he was still looking for. At first they were blobs of mirage, then long-leggedly they broke off and he could almost see their blinkers. They fell back again into what looked like a four-wheeled mustering cart, a cook's turnout. But, shading his eyes to be sure, the sight fell back even farther into the wavering broken horizon and Colts was almost blinded. Thus a vision became real and he found himself bringing it to earth. Could be his whole life would be dedicated to a job of search and answer in the outdoor light.

There was a stand of mallee nearby, its shade like strips of metal where bark lay curled and black. There Veronica pugged around as Colts grew small. She gathered dead twigs and made a fire, using a dry page from her sketchpad to get it going. Feeding the flames with damp, dappled leaves until one took, she sneaked a look over her shoulder and noticed the motorbike had more of a lean, but didn't worry too much about that until a kind of sucking collapse came, and the bike slewed into the table drain. Though she wrestled to hold it steady and called for Colts, the angle increased and the motor sank in mud, ribbed cylinder vanes the gills of a suffocated fish.

Colts heard her but thought she was singing hymns, which she often did satirically: ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me . . .' They always put her in good humour; there was nothing more definite when it came to promise than the worn old earth.

Veronica returned to her fire to dry her boots. As a young wife she had taken this very road west with Buckler to homesteads where she sat on sunset-blazed verandahs and sketched and painted while he politicked.

During those honeymoon years, in the dingo-howling dark of bush camps, Buckler had limbed from his stretcher and stripped off his singlet and undershorts. Dunc her darling dented soldier, he'd stood in the dim tent nakedly brushing off sandgrains and imaginary fleas, catching a lone mosquito in his fist and doing a meticulous dry wash, no hurry at all, careless of her watching as he gazed down his pale trunk and sun-reddened extremities and wrinkled penis with an expression of detachment. Yes, she would have to say she still loved his indifferent, corporeal, tangible being, his form and representation of male embodiment. Given the chance she would keep him around the way she saved bottles and jars holding form. Then look for the slit of light from his eyes looking her way, and hold him off in order to have him whole.

Buckler had continued over the New South Wales border and into South Australia for his rendezvous with Birdy Pringle that time, when the decision was made to better their lives by taking on the two orphans, Faye and Kingsley. It had been the Bucklers or Birdy by the toss of a coin, which Buckler made sure was double-headed. It was all so strangely wonderful to look back on, it brought her to tears.

Now in that bare width of country Veronica blinked, aware of Colts standing nearby and behind him a mob of goats. They pattered in the mud with a startled whisper and when she turned, touching her lips and smiling, they gazed back at her. Every dappled colour of the yellow earth and of the blue cloud-scattered sky was in their coats, streaked browns and blue-greys, black-shellacked hides and washing-day whites as they propped, snobbishly eyeing her, all of maybe half a hundred balanced between curiosity and flight. Goats' heads lifted, their tufty beards angled, their haughty eyes gazing.

‘Kingsley Colts,' she breathed, ‘what have you brought me?'

‘Brought? I followed them.'

‘They've made a goatherd of you, then.'

‘Like fun they have, they're hers.' Colts indicated a blob of haze. ‘You won't believe it, she's coming over to help with the bike.'

‘She?'

It seemed amazing in the circumstances, unless you knew amazement really, how it came in everyday moments. Two women owning the deserted country stripped of men and left in charge of the half-hatched.

A structure on four wheels lurched closer. It might have been the original of Buckler's horse-drawn caravan taken back to its primal sketch of converted dray with curved iron roof on tree-branch struts, only lacking two children, a boy and a girl, large-eyed with small hopeful faces peering over the side-boards.

‘Who is she?' said Veronica as the contraption lurched in. A tray shelf held sacks and drums, and what looked like an old garden seat, plump with pillows, in the driver position.

‘Some old dame,' said Colts. ‘Struth. I'll tell you what, hold your honker.'

The woman wore a heavy unbuttoned overcoat steaming from the recent downpour, her sagging breasts in a yellow, mudstained dress. On her head was a straw hat, a piece of sodden vanity. Two fat-pinched bloodshot eyes, a spread blue nose, stained teeth bared in a grin.

‘Where's the mon?' was her almost incomprehensible greeting.