Each day they emerged from the tents more raggedy. They ate and drank from dwindling supplies and they carried on, because Vincent was right. Their heads, if not lost, were turned at least. They had become insatiable and slavering, unable to go back, unable to think of, speak of, or look for anything but the promise of gold. It had bitten into them, whether they were paid their weekly wage or incentivised to find more, it didn’t matter. It had burrowed its way under the skin and into the bloodstream of every last one of them, so that all they could do was work those inside bends where the river might slow enough, or score the fissures of obstacle rocks, their eyes searing the water’s surface and every flicker of light underneath, as hopeful and as desperate as ever.
Now, if the selling of the Cassidy land and the burning down of the homestead were historic moments for the townsfolk, if they were victories overseen by the Good Lord in the guise of righteousness, then the plundering of its topsoil and the peeling back of its earth was just the same, and so most of them turned out on that second Monday of December to watch the dozers and trucks arrive. They drove out first thing. They brought food and blankets, some fold-up chairs, binoculars and cameras. They found places to watch; between the fence-posts, on vantage points of risen land, on Coronation Point, or on the arc of the road itself as the convoys shimmered across the eastern lands, looming and rattling until they shuddered past on a cold, metallic wind.
Old Mr Parker had sold five hundred improvised flags and they were raised as the vehicles were positioned and waved as the first ripping and plunging began. People cheered the grind and the churn, the mounding up of soil. They tried to get closer, to watch and listen to the savagery of the machines, to the butchering of the land by loaders and skidders with back-fill blades and boom-swings. To them, it was the brutal removal of cankerous skin. It was the exodus of black, unwelcome spirits in twists of smoke that seared of whatever it was that evil smelled like.
Vincent stood on the homestead site with Doug’s estimations in his hand, Lester on one side, and Ted on the other. Lester, cold and unshaven, Ted, straight-backed, minus only his charger and his shiny bugle.
Apart from where they were, the best view across the Cassidy land was had, not by any of those gathered townsfolk with hampers and flasks, but by Ruth Anderson at her bedroom window. Ruth was aware of the dozers before most. She knew of the skid-steer and the knuckle boom because Vincent had told her they were coming when he sat, in the mild disarray of the kitchen the previous week, and tried to break bread with her.
The two milky ducklings were at school, the husband working farmland to the north of the town as he had done for the last quarter of a century. She was lost to him those last few weeks. He’d tried all kinds to get her back; homilies, parables, sermons. He’d tried putting the crucifix back in the porch-way but she’d taken it down within the hour. He couldn’t speak to her. He dared not touch her anymore. She was as though suddenly and overwhelmingly complex, given to thoughts and ways that no longer moved in simple and unambiguous lines. Food was not always on the old oak table. Beds were often unmade, the sheets unpressed. The name of Dr Stone and his medication had been mentioned by him more than once.
“I cannot say with any accuracy, Mrs Anderson,” Vincent had said, “how far the seams may go. Such a thing is not yet knowable. But what I do know is that if they come this far, this is not your land and I’ll take it if I have to. I can speak to the letting agency. I can put them in the picture. I can listen to what you have to say but ultimately your choice in the matter may be dissolved because the Cassidy land is now my land. I am not haranguing you, Mrs Anderson. This is an offer, not a threat. If it comes to it, you can take whatever price I pay and buy elsewhere. I am not a callous man. I will pay for your removal and make compensation. And I know that you would put the future of the town before your own.”
Ruth sat at the table and watched him get up to leave. She saw him stop in the doorway, turn and say, “I know that you are a woman of faith, and that there are times when the voice and the reassurance of that faith is not so clearly heard, but it is there nonetheless.”
“This is not the Lord I know,” she said.
She watched most of the people drift away as the dozers and trucks started to wind up for the day. She saw them climb into cars or walk in clusters past the house, go up the paths to Coronation Point or on through the woods. She could see them slow down to look over for the missing cross and the gentle blow of the white sheets, for her husband kicking off his boots in the porch-way and for the dainty, pale hands of the ducklings holding baskets of apple-sheen, palms and sprigs.
She looked out again at the tossed sea of riven earth. And then she went to the bedside, and knelt, next to the wooden cabinet with its napkin of lace, her elbows on the spring of the bed, her eyes closed, her hands clasped together. And she waited for that voice of reassurance, that guidance she’d known all her life and needed then more than ever. She listened out for its mumble of kindness, for the words that would take her by the hand. But she heard nothing.
And, in the days that followed, when she could barely go to the side of the house that faced the ravaged land, she listened for the voice in all the ordinary things, in the washing of clothes, in the simple preparation and offering up of food. She looked for it in those first flurries of snow that fell on the uprooted soil, that covered the crags of Rupture Hill like a crown of thorns and that lined the ridges towards the monks’ head of Blessings Point. But it wasn’t there either.
In spite of the relish he felt to see the dozers and trucks tearing at the land like beasts, Vincent’s plans stayed resolutely time-lined. So long for the preparation, so long for the excavation, and so long for the tracks to be marked out and the routes to be transcribed from pencilled line to scored earth. And even when the land got flatter, when the sections were cut and took shape, when the diggers themselves had rested and prepared and were keening like hounds on a leash to be let loose, still Vincent was composed. He was holding his course, he told them. His was the hand on the tiller, cool and unshaking. Have faith, he said. And they did.
The days moved into weeks. Christmas and New Year came and went in a fizz of celebration. The mood was upbeat. Everyone felt good about themselves. Not just the panners and the diggers or straight-backed Ted and his primped and prodigal Lily, or Harry in his bar or Steve in his steak-house. Not just Doug Sketchings and the most wrapped gifts his house had ever seen, or the two ledger-men who treated their squeaky wives to an hour of unpronounceable cocktails. No, this was the town at its peak where everyone felt like they belonged, as if they were part of something bigger, something hopeful and grand, and if you asked them, they’d tell you, they were ready to go.
Everywhere was busy; the feed-store with its farmhands ticking off those long winter lists, stocking up and piling high their flatbeds. The hardware store full of panners and diggers buying up equipment and discounted tools they’d need for the days to come, buying belts and pouches to hold them all, buying ribbed-sole boots, knee-pads and thick, bolstered gloves. Old Mr Parker went more leftfield than ever. Instead of the obvious woollen hats, the thermal undergear, the wraparound scarves he could shift with ease, he went with something of his own devising; the small, plastic container he called the termite tub.
He’d heard, from reliable sources, that termites carried gold, that they burrowed so far down they absorbed it until it came out naturally. So, his two-fold idea was that if you followed the termites, you’d find the gold, and then, if you filled the tub, you’d have enough termite shit, eventually, to make a healthy dollar or two. Whatever, people believed him, and bought his containers just as they’d bought all his other homespun inventions over the years, and off they went looking for bugs.
Everyone, that was, apart from Ruth Anderson and her missing faith, Dr Abraham Stone, with one drawer full of redundant pills and the other empty of cheques, and, of course, Delilah Morris, who’d made her way quietly back into the town and kept herself to herself,
who didn’t feel like she belonged because she’d been away or because of Rita’s snubs, or because of the painted X she’d scrubbed off with turpentine, but because, in the midst of all that colour and noise and the fizz of celebration, she knew things about Madeline that others didn’t.
The day the diggers were set free to go with their tools and their termite tubs, climb onto the backs of trucks to head out, and tear at the Cassidy land was a cool, January one with a chance of light snowfall. The panners had gone already, an hour after sunrise, crunching their way through the frost in those ribbed-sole boots still smelling of leather, the first group over to the river-stretch close to the town, the second on with their tents past the rough terrain and up into the foothills where, in that very first week, they would split again.
That same morning Vincent and Lester had a cooked breakfast together at the hotel during which Lester tried, and failed, with one eye on his fatty intake, to tell Vincent of his three possibilities; all short cons, the ex-marine at the rail station, the art dealer, or any of the victims of the gambling scam that he and Vincent and Madeline had trailed across the north of the country some five or six years ago. They were all possible.
After Vincent had finished up, picked up the surveys and maps and driven out with Ted to check on the unleashed men, Lester went to his room, lay on the bed and, with the thrum of his lower arm, tried to go back to those towns and street-corner bars and remember the people; the ex-marine with the prosthetic arm and the scar, the loud-shirted lover of European art and, vaguely, somewhere, sitting in a corner bar, a middle-aged seller of encyclopaedias.
Most were easily fooled, he remembered. Many took only weeks or days. There was always a flaw in them, a weak spot somewhere. Often, they couldn’t stomach being a nobody who mattered to no-one. Life had cut them adrift, and they knew it. It had not panned out, and they were stuck with themselves and whatever failings that beat into them like blows to the gut. They were often inadequate men, resentful men, shrouded in loneliness or despair, and yet, in spite of being bedevilled by those inadequacies and resentments, they all had this thing in common without which Vincent and Lester had nothing. They all believed, even with the shit that lay around them, with the proof of alimony payments and empty pockets and the reflection in every mirror they looked into that told them time was not looking after them, that they had one last shot left inside them. And who better to give it to them than Vincent Clay and his foolproof system.
He felt no mercy for those people. You have a choice of your own volition and what you do with it is your own call. If you fuck it up, you fuck it up. Period. Life is one good aim and shot. You deal with it or you don’t and if you don’t, you deserve whatever you get. There was no such thing as fairness, no place for bellyaches and gripes or wishing it had gone otherwise because there was only what was, what is and what will be. The rest was powder and smoke.
Dr Abraham Stone wasn’t like that. He didn’t fit the profile. He was neither resentful nor inadequate, nor was there a sorry tale to tell. Dr Stone’s flaw was simple. He was arrogant. He believed himself to be better than most, which was why he sat at his walnut desk on that morning with a semi-incredulous frown on his face. In front of him were three letters. The first, arrived in the last hour, was a termination of the agreement between himself and the pharmaceutical company in the east. He had failed them, was what they said. He had not delivered. The numbers were not sustainable. The second was the anonymous invitation, sent two months ago, to invest in a number of medical research projects, the long-term efficacy of which he saw not in terms of their ethical value or their pioneering spirit but in the purely financial returns he was guaranteed. He had measured out his drawers. He had looked at the growing imbalance between cheques and pills and, with the only element of that profile that he did fit, the desperate last shot, he’d sent his money. His wife didn’t know. He hadn’t sat her down and told her just how legitimate and bona fide the projects were. He hadn’t explained how much of an opportunity they represented. There was no mention of their philanthropic nature or that they’d be headed up by eminent, if unnamed, physicians. And there was no discussion about the money sent, about the loans he’d taken out from Smithson’s or the life-savings he’d gone deeply into.
He’d heard nothing. There was no acknowledgement of any of the investments, no confirmation of receipt of the cheques or when or where or by whom they’d been cashed, and no reply to any of his enquiries. The third letter was a bank statement and an accompanying letter.
And, as he sat there, with the family photograph still propped on the desk, he started to feel like those other men felt, that acid riddle of foolishness somewhere in the gut, the sense, as a brief flurry of snow gusted past, of the kind of stupidity that leaked into the system and couldn’t get out. He opened the drawer below the empty one and looked down at the snub-nosed pistol.
Lester tried to sit up, a sudden pain to his chest, a pincered grip that got his breath and rolled him onto his side, pushing his face into the pillow. His hands made fists, his knees shot up, the sweat gathered quickly on his sternum and brow. It ran in rivulets down his cheeks so that he tasted it on his lips. It matted in his chest hair in a mix of cigar smoke, whisky and bacon salt.
And the irony was this; that, in those moments when he felt like he was dissolving, like he was noiselessly falling apart from the inside out, he wished that it had gone otherwise, that he could just get to the door and shout something, that if he could’ve gathered himself and made his way through the soft-falling snow to get to his appointment with Dr Stone and explain the scale of his pain, things might’ve been different. At some point, too, the callous doctor may’ve leant forward and offered up a reason for his surliness and furrows, for the discarding of every one of those sugar-coated cylinders into a dumpster and for why there was a snub-nosed pistol, barrel-down, on the desk. He may’ve shown Lester the bank statement, may’ve index-fingered the termination, the failure, the lack of delivery. He may’ve even pushed that anonymous letter across the desk for Lester to look at and make slow, incremental connections to the other anonymous and persuasive letters he and Vincent had read that would make him stand and walk like the reliable and devoted Lazarus he was, out to his master who, right then, was walking over the land, high with anticipation, with Ted and his silver, monogrammed hip-flask. But he didn’t.
The two men walked and drove most of the day, going from one site to the next, from the diggers to the panners and back. Vincent monitored. He followed the routes across the upheaved land and stood on as many vantage points as he could to oversee and check. He carried binoculars, duplicated maps, zoomed, and zoomed again sections of land marked like meat. And when he wasn’t being hawk-eyed and fastidious, when Ted, a panting mix of crimson and bronze, either held that silver teat to his lips or talked of Lily and his lawns and the age of his balustrades, he figured his plans.
He was not a paterfamilias. He was not a philanthropist, a benefactor or Samaritan. He was not an altruist or a substitute giver of balm. He had no concern for the well-being of the town or any of the people in it beyond that glorious moment when he would pick up his treasure and leave. He would have no fondness or nostalgia, would sell up the land as soon as he could. Ted would buy it back, either for himself or for the Agency. He would build stables and paddocks and parlours for Lily. He would have his portrait commissioned, done in oils, framed and hung in the hallway. He would be the king of Mission, wearing a golden crown.
The snowfall came in the early afternoon and stayed an hour. Some of the diggers used it to rest, to watch it slip out of the slit pillows of cloud from the backs of covered trucks or under the caterer’s awnings, their faces keen still, pinched with cold. Some held up the termite tubs they’d later spill out and sift through on paper-lined tables. Some sent back for more. Some used the time to put ice-bags on swollen hands and feet, to mend cracked skin, and some stayed on the land, not stopping to eat or drink or repair, but using the give of the snow-padded c
rust to heel the shovel and break into the hardness of the earth.
By the end of the first day, though, those diggers, the panners who’d worked from first light both sides of the river, and those upriver men who’d gone into the perils of the foothills, had found only occasional and moderate amounts. They expected more, was the truth. They expected every day to be a Eureka day. They expected every trawled strip and stretch, every dragged and surfaced pan, to hold something at least.
By the second, third and fourth some of the panners had crossed the river, trying the bends on the northern sides and then ditching their superstitions at the pontoon bridges to go where the burial grounds banked down into the water. The Snipe boys pushed on and found gulleys and crooks a mile or so on where silt and black sand had gathered. Each morning they rose and packed and headed out, but every time when they twisted down to look at the swaying bowl of the pan, they saw only stone and shale. On the fourth day they gathered up their tents and moved higher still, picking their way along tracks of dead-ends and drops, setting up in the near-dark behind a ridge of cannonball boulders where every crack was one the wind could howl through like a banshee. The diggers, as each day passed, simply stared down at the bedrock, at the mean and riddled grains.
By the last day of the week, the panners had hacked at and loosened the riverbank into a mulch of rock and mud-slides, and the muddied diggers, the men of missing fingers, the men of dough and clay and expedient prayer went back into town beaten and confused. They had next to nothing.
For the Snipe boys, the words between them lessened with every hour that blew by. Thoughts gusted away. Any talk of going back, of taking what morsels and dust they had and giving up was snapped shut before it started. They were no longer turned, but lost. They were not neighbourhood men any more. They were not sons or brothers. They were but bags of flesh and bones with pans for hands.
Mission Page 23