Best Australian Short Stories

by Douglas Stewart

  I filled my waterbag at your tank and tied it between the bars of my bike, and you strapped your twenty-two along the top bar, and we got off in the early morning, with our bags full of good food and the long day ahead of us.

  “Now be careful!” your mother said. “I’m sure I don’t know what you want to go away out there for. You’ll tire yourselves out for nothing, and get home about midnight, I suppose, with every one worried to death about what’s happened to you.”

  “Aw, we’ll be all right,” you said. “We’ve pushed our bikes further than that in the bush. We know how to look after ourselves.”

  Then we were off, pedalling side by side through the streets of the town, and though I couldn’t tell what you’re thinking now, even if it was worth a million, I knew then, all right. You were feeling like me—impatient and patronizing towards women who didn’t know why a man wanted to pedal so far and tire himself out for nothing. I was feeling impatient with the town, and with my humdrum work at Simpson’s, too. I was thinking that it was better to be setting out for the Brown Lakes with you than it would have been with Darky Green or Sid Wilson or even Larry Summerville, though I used to knock about with him so much in town.

  The day started right.

  Up Parson’s Hill we stood on the pedals, and we both began to sweat. When we got to the top we had a spell, and I was mighty glad to find that you could do with a breather, too. We squatted on a couple of big rocks on top of the hill, with the whole town spread out on one side of us and the endless stretch of bush, with the ribbon of road running through it, on the other. In the town the chimneys were dribbling smoke, and in the scrub Jackson’s dairy was huddled and some cows were milling and mooing in a yard, but nothing else stirred for miles. It was pretty flat country except for Parson’s Hill.

  I remember looking at you then and feeling nervous, just for a moment, wondering if I’d be able to hold my own all tight on the long ride. You had thick, strong legs when you were a kid, as brown and powerful-looking as a grown man’s. Anyway, I had no need to get the wind up, and my fear was only momentary, because, though I was skinny and light, I knew from experience that I could push a bike with the best of ’em.

  We coasted down the hill and then settled down to a good steady bat that rolled the miles out behind us. For the first fifteen of them the road was broad and straight to the old diggings, and the surface wasn’t too bad. As we went, the trees at the roadside pulled their shadows in towards themselves, the sun rose high and fierce, and we were soon sweating again. But it wasn’t the breathless, uncomfortable sweat that had poured out of us at the top of Parson’s Hill. It was a good flow of lubricant for our moving muscles, a sweat that cooled and refreshed on the skin.

  While we pedalled that easy fifteen miles we talked. We could ride abreast, and we must have averaged about two words to the yard. We both said things we wouldn’t ever put into words when there was any one around—even the best of the mob like Larry Summerville. What we said then wasn’t of much consequence, pretty silly, really, I suppose, but we got it out of us along with our good sweat, and it mixed with the sunlight and the air we were breathing, to form part of the pattern of a good day.

  After the old diggings the track was bad. For twenty miles it wound between rock outcrops, and where there weren’t stones there was sand. It was narrow, too, and whenever a car passed us, full of men and beer and shotguns, we cursed the dust and wobbled and sometimes took to the bush and fell off. But we enjoyed it, every minute of it. At Wrigley’s Soak you shook your fist at the road and roared all the bad language you knew into the quiet bush in a fine fluent stream. I cursed and swore, too, and we called ourselves fools, but we wouldn’t have been anywhere else for quids. We ate your mother’s apple-pies and filled the waterbag from the soak. The bag was still nearly full of good tank water, but we emptied that out because the weedy, strong soak water seemed to us to be the stuff to keep life and energy in proper bushrnen and pioneers.

  From there on it was hard work getting through the sand and stones and double-gees, and it was single-file riding and we didn’t talk much. You made the pace and you put your back into it. I could see you wanted to shake me off in the rough going, and for a mile or so my muscles ached and I hated you. But then I found that I could keep up all right and didn’t have to burst myself, and I felt a sort of patronizing affection for you as you strained away in front with your big muscles bulging. When we came out among the Brown Lakes we were tired, but we felt we’d done something. We felt good.

  You mightn’t be able to remember that day even if I reminded you of it, but surely you sometimes remember the Brown Lakes? It was a public holiday in town, and the news that there was good shooting out there must have got around. Every one who owned a shotgun and could get a ride in a car seemed to be there, and the ducks were being kept on the move. Most of the crowd had come out the previous night, and there were camps all round the two- mile stretch of shallow, rusty inland water. There were parties at all the outlying waterholes and claypans, too, booming away and keeping the weary, puzzled birds on the wing most of the time. It was hard shooting, and pretty cruel shooting, too, but we were blood-thirsty enough for it.

  “Cripes!” I said, excited. “Y’ never get a sitting shot. We’ll never pot one of those with a rifle.”

  “We’ll give ’em a fright, anyway, you said, getting the twenty-two off your bike. “We won’t get ’em if we don’t try, that’s sure.”

  But then a chap came across from one of the camps and put an end to that. “You kids can’t shoot here with a rifle,” he said. “You’ll murder someone. Can’t you see there’s more people than ducks?”

  That nearly spoiled the day properly, but when he said we could tag along with his crowd it made it perfect. If you don’t remember all the tramping and wading and excitement of that day, you ought to remember when he gave us each a shot out of his double-barrelled gun, anyway. I can tell you I shoved the butt hard against the muscles of my shoulder as I’d always been told to do with a gun that kicked. And I don’t mind admitting now that I shut my eyes when I pulled the trigger. Any duck was safe from me that wasn’t pretty unlucky. I was content enough and proud enough to find myself still standing upright after I’d done the job.

  That was all good, exciting and strenuous, the whole day of it, pedalling and tramping and eating and shooting and yarning as we did. But do you remember going home? Do you remember the first five miles after we’d reached the good road, when we were dog weary and pedalling slowly, but not too tired to talk? It was cooler then, just beginning to get dark, and we got on to talking about girls. We were full of curiosity about girls, but we were sentimental and frightened and respectful too. We were decent kids underneath all the bluff we had to put up to convince the mob that we were tough and ruthless. When there was just the two of us, after such a fine day, it was different, and that day you said things you haven’t lived up to, if that leery dial of yours means anything. Perhaps I’ve fallen short of a few of the things I said myself.

  It was a hard ride back, with all the cars that had been around the lake on the road together going home, and one of them bumped us into the bush about every half mile in the bad section and the air was thick with red dust; but it was all right. We were young and tough and full of illusions. We reckoned war was heroic and business was romantic, and that the world never meant us any more harm than we meant it. It was a good day. But it was after dark, after the last car had passed us on its way to town, when we had our lamps lit, and I had three punctures in a mile, and then the back tube pulled in half, that it was best of all for me. It was ridiculous and childish and unfair to our parents and altogether mad, but it was deeply satisfying.

  I wonder if you remember? It was six or seven miles from town where the case got hopeless and we decided that my bike was unrideable. We’d been working, patching the tube in the yellow light of our lamps, with the bush shadowy and cool and, dark all around and the crickets mocking us in a chorus, and we’d be
en cursing our luck and really enjoying the bit of an adventure not too far from home.

  “Well, that’s that!” I said. “You’d better ride on to town to let ’em know we’re all right. walk and wheel the bike, and if my dad’s home he can drive out in the car to meet me.”

  “Gosh, no!” you said. “Here, you go on, on my grid, an’ I’ll do the walking.”

  “Don’t be silly!” I said. “Your bike’s all right. Hop on and ride it!”

  “Look,” you pointed out, “you don’t know for sure if your dad’ll be home. You might have to walk all the way. I don’t mind that. I’m as fresh as a daisy.”

  “Who do you think isn’t?” I demanded indignantly. “If you think I can’t keep up with you, ridin’ or walkin’, you’ve got another think comin’.”

  “Aw, I didn’t mean it that way,” you said. “Only we’re in this together. I’m not going to leave you out here just because you had a bit of bad luck any one might have had. I’ll toss you for it if you like.”

  When we tossed I won, but I wouldn’t take your bike. I felt pretty heroic about it, and the excitement of our crazy argument had driven all the fatigue out of my bones. I was wide awake and determined, and I was depending on you, too. In the first place I’d quite expected that you’d ride on and I’d walk to town; but once the argument started you’d have disappointed me, Dick, if you’d given way. I reckoned mates had to stick together. I was stupid enough for anything, with just a few miles between us and home, but we were only kids and that was how I felt. When you stuck out and we eventually set off on the tramp along the dark, silent road wheeling our bikes, it was the perfect end to a perfect day for me. I was elated, full of talk and friendship and not giving a damn about our parents worrying their heads off at home when we finished up with that seven-mile walk on the day we pedalled out to the Brown Lakes.

  You didn’t disappoint me then, but would you now? I must be afraid you would, or I’d have said it aloud, told you all I remembered about it instead of just thinking it as we sit here over our beer. That day—practically the whole of that day—you and I were pretty much the same; but we’re different now. You’d probably think I was mad. The years we haven’t seen each other, that we’ve both spent chasing the hopes we had that day, have done a lot to us. You don’t look my kind now, Dick. You’re thick and fat and dressed up and stamped with prosperity and anxiety, but even so you might be a better man than I am. I don’t know. I only know that you’re different.

  But perhaps I’m wrong. You’ve been silent for a long time now, just sitting there staring at your beer while I’ve been remembering all this, and for all I know you might have been thinking about the day we pedalled out to the Brown Lakes too.

  D. E. Charlwood

  THE PILGRIMAGE YEAR

  ALL my early life we went at Christmas to Grandmother Warden’s. Fifteen or twenty of the family used to arrive on Christmas Eve and the last would not leave until the New Year. My father was something of an exception to this he seldom stayed more than two days, mainly because his mother-in-law’s dominating habits were more than he could tolerate. He once said within my hearing that he was damned if he’d have the old lady tapping her stick at him. “She might have been a pioneer, but her own family were glad to stay away from her.” And to this my mother could make no convincing denial. And yet I am not sure it was a valid criticism.

  Grandmother Warden lived in one of those Otway valleys where farmers see only sky and walls of grass and cows grazing perpendicularly above the chimneys, and a few white trunks of trees, dead and ghostly reminders of the original forest. In her old age she grew azaleas there and rhododendrons, and lived as a matriarch, even when there was only Uncle Silas left to rule. She was, I suppose, more than a matriarch. She ruled the entire district.

  She never saw Melbourne; in fact, she only once saw Warrnambool—this after she had been shipwrecked east of there in the Schomberg in 1855. She stayed thereabouts for a time, more or less where the sea had left her, then as the Otway country opened, she moved into it until she came to this valley. I suppose its depth and its forest were a check even to such determination as hers. There was also a man in her odyssey, a grandfather I never knew. He first went into the valley on foot, then he took her in on a horse- drawn sledge and built her a but in the clearing he had made. And there was another woman, not in the valley, but in Melbourne, an older sister known to us as Great-aunt Elizabeth. The two women never spoke to one another; at least, not in my lifetime, nor in my mother’s.

  My mother and seven aunts and uncles had been born in the valley, most of them without doctor or midwife—a circumstance in those days to be expected. Except for Uncle Silas they all left the valley—my mother to marry a local postmaster.

  Our drives to the valley I remember well. Away from the Otways the country would be summer-white; but in the afternoon we would leave it behind and climb into the forest and smell the cool scent of undergrowth at the car windows. So it was all the way up the range, the air growing cooler, the forest heavier and more mysterious the higher we went. On its other side the hills were bare and green and descended in prodigious leaps to the sea, the far, pale-blue, apparently motionless sea. Sheep and cattle grazed on ledge-like tracks there, balanced precariously.

  The farm was four or five hundred yards off the road. As I opened the gate I would feel that one false move might send the car plunging, like the horseman in the sky, to the valley floor. Down there I could hear dogs barking and Uncle Silas calling the cows, and the creek running, even though its movement was scarcely perceptible to the eye. I used to look directly on to the house and its rising smoke and gathered treetops, and, read the name faintly painted on the iron roof—Warden Vale.

  In the year of the “pilgrimage”, as it came to be called, I was fifteen. On the evening of Boxing Day we had seated ourselves at the dining-room table, twelve or fifteen of us, my grandmother at the head, and Uncle John opposite her. My grandmother was at this time nearly ninety-four, and only then beginning to have the transparent appearance of age. Her hair was no more than steel-grey, and her eye was still quick to detect every reaction in those about her. As we waited to begin tea she said, “I have it in mind that you will take me—you, John—back to Curdie’s River. I want to see the Schomberg Rock again while there’s time.”

  Here it was she had been wrecked as a girl of eighteen.

  Uncle John, who was a craggy, amiable man, looked from under his eyebrows. “But, Mater, this is really quite preposterous—” “I shall now say grace,” said my grandmother.

  Bowing her head and folding her hands, she enunciated carefully, “Bless this food for our use and ourselves for thy service, O Lord, our stren and our Redeemer.”

  “Amen,” we said.

  “But it’s quite three hours away—”

  “It used to be as many days,” said Grandmother Warden, “and no comfortable days at that.”

  “But you were a deal younger.”

  “Stop ‘but-ing’ and eat your tea.”

  And Uncle John, who was a leading grazier in the Upper Chetwynd country and had been a major in the war, ate his meal like a child.

  “We’ll leave in the morning directly after breakfast,” said my grandmother.

  My aunts and uncles murmured their assent without another protest.

  Such was Grandmother Warden. Sitting at the head of the table, she was a replica of Victoria Regina, body erect, hair parted at the centre and drawn back, expression unamused. I suppose in her day Victoria-like wives had ruled half the homes of the country, even in places as remote as this. In her presence I often felt that my cousins and I lacked some intangible grace which might have been ours had we been born “at Home”, or even educated there. There was that faint smile of hers, something between pride and dismay, as if she had said, “It’s an experiment really, raising colonials. They’re not quite what one would like; but, after all, what can one do?” And yet it was she who had borne the impact of the new world: the wr
eck, the journey, the forest. And fires she had known, fire on fire, and then the accident which had killed my grandfather. She had found him in the forest where he had been felling timber. A tree had pinned him, but he was conscious still and able to tell her what she must do, now that she was alone. She had dug under him all that night, she and Uncle John. But he was dead long before they ended. Remembering these things, I could never be intolerant of her.

  “Judith, you could come with us, and you, boy, too.”

  “Thank you,” we said.

  Judith I must describe. She was about my own age, daughter of a city uncle, but a girl with more of her grandmother’s spirit than any of us, more audacity, more assurance and poise. Even at this age she could be all fire and hostility, or all graciousness. She had for years been Grandmother Warden’s confidante: Judith it was who attended the old lady like a maid-in-waiting at her ninetieth birthday celebrations; before Judith I believe she showed more of her underlying feelings than she did before anyone. I remember Judith at this time as having her grandmother’s quick, imperious eye, even though she was only fifteen. Her hair she wore in a single plait, brushed out at the end and brought over her shoulder.

  I had been elected to go on the journey simply because Grandmother Warden had long made a kind of secretary of me, requiring me to record any memories she cared to dictate, or to peruse documents relating to local history, or even to write to public libraries; for she had an obsession with Otway history.

  Such was our introduction to the “pilgrimage”. Through the dining-room window, as we sat there at the table, we could see the forest on the other side of the creek. It had never been pushed farther back, and it rose now in a wall above the running water, dense, brooding, and oddly menacing.

  Next morning we breakfasted in the kitchen, the four of us who were to go. When I came in, Grandmother Warden was alone and had already started her slice of toast and two cups of tea. She wore the white linen dress with fine black lines which she had worn on all the festive occasions I could remember. By her chair was her silver-topped stick, which was never far from her reach. When we had spoken she said to me, “And you wonder too why I should go?”