by Lucy Walker
She watched Hal racing towards the forest. His horse went over the fence like a bird. He swerved and rode gently towards the gate. He leaned down and swung it open for Kate. Darkie was not a hurdler.
Kate looked at Hal. There was so much to love about him. His brown chest gleaming through the unbuttoned shirt, his wide-awake hat still sporting three cockatoo feathers. The snake belt that looked like a snake curled round his waist; his heavy leather boots; the beautiful leather in the short leggings; the way he swung his foot in the stirrup as he waited for her to ride through the gate. The straightness of his long back; the way he held his reins near his solar plexus.
Then she looked at his face. It was closed, almost secretive. It was not the face she had seen above her in the passage when they kissed.
Something cold enveloped her heart.
‘I won’t look at his face,’ she thought. ‘I’ll just pretend he is not moody; that he really is an Australian version of the Valkyrie … coming riding across the heavens. A knight in khaki pants! Not forgetting the military boots and the snake belt!’
She burst out laughing.
‘What now?’
‘I was thinking of you …’
His eyebrows arched.
‘Oh, beautifully. I was thinking of you as a knight of the Valkyrie.’
He squared his shoulders a little.
‘He’s vain,’ Kate thought. And then said, ‘Oh damn!’ out aloud.
‘What this time?’
‘I’m trying to spoil my own day,’ said Kate. ‘Come on. Let’s gallop.’
There were seven or eight men at the dam. It was a white and yellow hole in what seemed the middle of the forest. A wire fence had been taken down for about fifty yards and the dam was being dug so that it would service two paddocks. Neither of the paddocks was cleared and the forest and undergrowth stood as it had stood from the beginning of the world. The hand of man had never touched it.
‘Where does the water come from for the dam?’ Kate asked.
‘It’s a soak,’ Hal explained. ‘There’s water in that white clay below the sand.’
When the two riders had appeared it had been a signal for stop-work, tea and a smoke-oh. Everyone was troubled with sand flies. They bit the men’s faces and hands. Kate kept her leather gloves on but had to keep her hand to her face.
They sat around a fire and each man had his own billycan on the coals. When one of these billies boiled the man whom Kate had met as ‘Mick’ and who had driven out from Blackwood in the big car on the day of her arrival, leaned forward, and with a short thick stick lifted the billycan off the fire. He had in his hand a small square of leather. He gripped the rim of the billy with this and lifted it to his mouth. He drank slowly and with a loud sucking sound.
Kate gazed at him spellbound. The men, who had been watching the amazement on her face, gave a shout of laughter.
Kate shook her head.
‘I’ve heard about it,’ she said. ‘But I never believed it.’
‘Believed they drank the tea boiling from the billy?’ said Hal.
‘Have you got a mouth of cast iron, Mick?’ Kate asked.
‘Nope,’ he said, wiping the back of his hand across it. ‘I guess I learned that from the old-timers on the inland cattle routes. A man wasn’t fit to drove cattle if he couldn’t drink tea boiling … along the Canning route anyways.’
‘Can you all do that?’ Kate asked, looking round the circle.
‘No blinkin’ fear,’ said Bill. ‘I give mine one full minute.’ He took his billy from the fire and blew on it. He then swilled it a little before lifting it up. It was a pint billy and he drained it in one draught.
Kate’s eyes travelled the course of the tea down his gullet into his stomach.
Bill expanded his chest for exhibition.
‘Not even smoking,’ he said.
Kate shook her head.
‘Wonders will never cease.’
Over Hal’s shoulder she could see two horsemen coming through the forest. They were Burns and Alan Castillon.
‘Well, if it ain’t the little lady from pommy-land,’ said Burns.
Alan Castillon tipped the edge of his wide-brimmed hat but he didn’t speak. He swung a leg over his horse and hitched it to a tree.
Way up between the trees and along the wire fence Kate saw Bellew riding in his queer bolt-upright style, his hat pulled down over his eyes. From the distance it seemed as if he rode noiselessly, a ghost in the bush.
Kate poured some tea from a big billy into the small pint billy beside her. She got up and walked along the wire fence, kicking aside the brambles and prickly bushes with her leggings. Bellew had got off his horse and was stooping to examine the wire where the men had cut it to make the dam.
‘Will you have some tea, Bellew?’ she smiled down at him.
His reply was indistinguishable, but he held up his hand. Kate felt as if she had to be careful handing the billy to him: careful as she would be to a child. Her face was close to his and she could see his eyes. They were pale grey, barely discernible between his half-closed lids. He did not look at her. She smiled and then went back to the fire.
‘You won’t make no grade with Bellew, miss,’ Mick said. ‘He’s screwy.’
‘Screwy, nuts!’ Bill said. ‘He just don’t like company. He just don’t like talking. All them boundary riders are the same. I’ve met plenty of ’em. They get outa the way of it. Then they finds out you can live without words and words is only a waste of time. They do all their living in their heads.’
‘I call that screwy, anyway,’ Mick said.
Hal was holding conference with Burns and Alan Castillon about fifty yards away.
‘What’s Hal up to, miss?’ This was Bill changing the subject.
Kate shrugged her shoulders.
‘Can’t be anything too mischievous or he wouldn’t have brought me along.’
The men laughed. They liked Kate. She was a good sport.
They went on talking to one another in their slow drawling voices. Kate, sitting on a fallen log listening to them, thought how much their voices belonged to the bush all around. They were soft and sing-song. Then when suddenly or unexpectedly raised they crackled like a boot unexpectedly treading on dry sticks in the undergrowth.
She had bother keeping the midges from her face. The men continuously rubbed their hands.
Presently they finished their cigarettes and went back to the digging. They worked methodically and rhythmically. Now and again someone straightened a back and made a crack at another.
‘Supposin’ we was one of them coves from over Pardelup way … we’d resent diggin’. We’d reckon we’re just the same as convicts. And when I think that, I get to thinkin’ “What’s the difference anyway?” ’
‘Trouble with you when you start thinkin’ you start thinkin’ stupid.’
‘I’m thinkin’ clean. That’s something out of the bag, anyway.’
‘Ladies present!’
‘What’s the difference between them convicts over Pardelup way and us anyway?’
‘You get paid,’ Hal said, coming up.
‘So do they, Hal. An’ they get their food and clothes thrown in.’
‘Okay. You’re just the same as a convict. They’re government slaves and you’re wage slaves. A difference in words only.’
Mick straightened himself and scratched his head. He gazed at Hal admiringly.
‘You sure have got a clever way of putting things, Hal,’ he said.
‘That’s why Bellew went silent,’ Bill said. ‘He couldn’t beat Hal here on words. So he guv up.’
Kate watched Alan Castillon riding off through the bush. She still didn’t like him, and didn’t know why. She began to wonder how she could go about doing something for Peg. She wondered if she could enlist Beatrix’s help.
‘Me and Beatrix and fashion magazines between us could do something about Peg,’ she thought. Peg had a good figure, if she only carried herself properly. And good
features. Something could always be done about skin!
Kate itched to get to work on Peg.
Burns had joined Hal in sinking a post at the side of the dam. She listened to their desultory, drawling conversation for a little while and then went to watch Bellew joining small pieces of wire to the cut ends of the fence wire.
‘I suppose that’s to provide leverage when you join the wires together after they’ve finished the dam,’ she suggested. A smile flitted quickly across his face. He did not look up. Kate took that as assent.
Presently he got on his horse again and went off along the fence. Kate watched him go. There was something strange and sad about him and yet she dared not be sorry for him. Maybe one could envy him.
She offered to help sink fence posts, but when the offer was derisively refused she went for a walk.
Everywhere the forest was the same. Great black-trunked trees stood in thick nests of bramble, creeper and prickly undergrowth. It was so silent it was hard to believe anything ever lived there. Yet when she put her foot down near a fallen trunk a quick sibilant hiss and a slither of sound told her where Hal’s snake belt came from. She was thankful for high leggings.
When she went back to the dam it was knock-off time again and they ate lunch, accompanied by billies of boiling tea.
Hal threw gum nuts into the fire.
‘Could you find your way home, Kate?’
‘If you tell me how,’ she said uncertainly. ‘I’d have to follow a fence. I’d never find my way through the forest tracks.’
Hal began to draw a design in rectangles in the clay at the edge of the dam.
‘There’s Appleton, and here we are …’
Kate memorised the drawing in her head. ‘Looks as if I’m being sent home,’ she said ruefully. ‘Am I in disgrace?’
‘I’ve got to see Alan Castillon over at the ten-mile,’ Hal said. ‘If you think you’ll get lost I’ll send Bill home with you.’
‘I’ll be all right. I have to follow two fences, find a gate in the middle of the second and ride back to the joining fence and follow that to the gate, go through the gate and keep on in the same direction. The next joining fence will carry me to the back paddock of Appleton.’
‘You’ll be all right when you come to the ring-bark, miss,’ said Bill. ‘Homestead’s just over the hill.’
‘Thank you,’ said Kate. She didn’t tell them she really did feel a little nervous.
Five miles of forest would be nothing to an Australian girl born in it. Distances in this fabulous country were just in the backyard of Appleton. They wouldn’t realise how different was her own sense of distance. They didn’t mean to be selfish about letting her go alone. They simply never thought of the forest paddocks as being anything but their back yard.
As she rode off she wondered what Hal had to do with Alan Castillon. It was quite clear that he had arranged to meet him at the dam and that during their talk there they made a further arrangement for the afternoon. It boded ill, she thought. The only redeeming feature was the fact that everyone knew what they were up to.
‘It can’t be anything very serious,’ she thought. ‘Bill and Mick were making a joke about it. Men’s talk! I suppose that’s why Hal didn’t tell me.’
The men all seemed so easy-going, so simple. There was no evil in any of them.
Kate seemed a long time getting to the first gate. She supposed it was because there was no track and she had to walk her horse. At the gate was a horse pad leading off into the forest.
‘This is the way we came,’ she thought. ‘But I mustn’t be tempted to follow tracks. The fences are safe. They all lead somewhere. And even if one did get lost on a fence line sooner or later Bellew would find one.’
She thought about what she would do if she got lost.
‘Cut the top wire,’ she thought. ‘Somewhere or other Bellew would feel the slackness and follow through to find the break.’
Then she remembered she’d nothing with which to cut the wire.
‘Oh well,’ she thought. ‘I just can’t afford to get lost.’
She had been thinking and then wondered if in her preoccupation she had passed a joining fence.
She rode on for some time and came to a right-angled turn. There was no joining fence or gate.
‘Pause for thought,’ Kate said, feeling very much like Alice in Wonderland, with Alice’s propensity for talking to herself but without her assurance.
‘Have I over-ridden the spot marked X, or do I turn the corner and keep on going till I come to a gate?’
To her right, a track!
Kate looked at it longingly.
‘One has got to come to Australia to realise how tantalising is a track compared with a fence. A track is a whip-poor-will, however, not to be trusted to carry one home. Whereas a fence joins other fences and sooner or later joins the fence that takes one home.’
She followed the fence for about a mile and there was no gate. She came back to the right-angled turn and looked longingly at the track.
‘I’ll just try it as far as that rise. I’ll come back to the fence.’
She crossed the intervening fifty yards of bush and galloped up the track. At the top of the rise she saw the ring-barked forest. ‘Oh!’
Kate reined in.
Never had she seen anything so desolate. Down into the valley and up the slope of the far hill stretched the line of white spectral trees. Some lay prone on the ground, some lay, half fallen against their stronger, but nevertheless dead, brothers. The branches lifted still, white, leafless fingers to the sky, calling upon heaven to witness the murder done in this graveyard of giants.
That, Kate thought, was exactly what it looked like. A graveyard. The white, bark-stripped trees were the bones of a past mightiness.
How terrible had been the end of these trees, and what terrible witness they bore to the iniquity of man against the earth.
She rode down the slope and up the far hill. She had a sense as of desecrating a cemetery.
She had forgotten Hal’s instruction about getting home and only remembered that Bill or Mick had said that Appleton lay over a rise beyond the ring-barked forest.
There was something eerie in the awful silence. Her horse hoofs were deadened by the carpet of stripped bark. Nothing, not even a lizard or snake, seemed to live in the charnel chill of this dead forest.
At the top of the rise Kate rode through a narrow wood of sapling jarrah trees. She looked down the far side into a valley of apple orchard.
This was not Appleton. She had come, an uninvited guest, to Rick Benallen’s place.
‘Somewhere I took a wrong turn.’ Wrong?
She was on the far side of the valley from where she had seen the house on the day she had ridden out with Rick and Hal. Her fateful first day in Blackwood.
About twenty yards over the rise was a wooden fence with a toprail. Kate slid off Darkie, hitched her horse to the fence and climbed the rail. She tucked her feet in as she had seen the men sitting around the fence at Arundel.
She sat brooding over Allandale.
‘I must ask someone, someday, why all the place names begin with “A”.’
She had been frightened alone in the forest. She had been awestruck and grieved at the ring-bark. For days, without daring to put words to it, she had been longing for a shoulder on which to cry, for a heart on which to impale herself. For a home upon which unexpectedly and happily to come. And she had come to Allandale.
‘What am I?’ she asked herself unhappily. ‘Just a flirt? Just someone who has got to have a sweetheart at any price?
Wasn’t I in love with Hal this morning? Or was I just in love with someone I wanted him to be?’
She sat for a long time watching the sun declining down the western sky and the trees casting long, cold shadows.
‘I can’t help it if I get home late. I’ve got to sort myself out. I’ve got to face the fact that Hal doesn’t really love me and though I love the person I thought he was I don’t
love him as he really is. But is he really like the way I’m finding him? What should I do when Hal neglects me? Pack up and go home with a salvaged pride? That’s what the heroines do in books. But I’m not in a book and I’m not a heroine. I’m an ordinary not too bad-looking girl on a holiday. I’ve taken a plunge in the matrimonial stakes and drawn a blank. Do I try again or do I just have a good holiday and go away and cut my losses? And why am I sitting on Rick Benallen’s back fence … and not wanting to go away at all?’
On the slopes of the far hill a horseman had emerged from the forest at full gallop. He was racing down the track towards the homestead.
‘That could be Rick …’ Kate thought. ‘And what does my heart do about that?’ She put her hand on her heart as if expecting it to tap out an answer.
The horseman had pulled up in the yards of the house below. He did not dismount. It occurred to Kate, if he had good eyesight, he would notice a foreign body sitting on the back fence of his orchard.
Down below, the horse reared a little and then took the yard fences. He came up between the rows of apple orchard. He cleared another fence and then came on towards her.
‘Well,’ said Rick. ‘So it’s Kate?’
Kate’s eyes searched his face. She was trying to find something that would make her heart jab her the way it used to do when she first met Hal.
‘Anything wrong, Kate?’
‘Nothing wrong, something strange. I think my heart’s stopped.’
‘Stopped?’ He gave a shout of laughter. ‘It’s only numb, Kate. I’ve known that to happen to people before.’
He swung a leg over the horse and climbed up on the fence beside her. He rolled them both a cigarette.
‘Has it ever happened to you, Rick?’
‘Yes.’
He was poking the tobacco down in the cigarette with a match. He lit it, then handed it to Kate. There was something intimate and comforting about the way he lit her cigarettes and then handed them to her. He’d done it from the very first … almost as if she belonged. As if he had a right. But he hadn’t!
She shook her head. ‘I mustn’t think that way,’ she thought.
‘Do you want me to tell you about it, Kate?’
She inhaled slowly.