Chapter 39
25 November 1920
Dear Diary,
All things in their season, Mum used to say. I wish I could tell her about this. I hope she knew that there would be so much good as well as pain. The land has its seasons, and so do people. We’ve had the season of war. Now, finally, it is as though we are getting our season of peace. It is blossom time at last, and the season of fruit to come.
Sandy drove her back to Rock Farm in the cart a week later, lying propped between pillows, with Mrs Mack and Kirsty in case she needed anything. Snow King stayed in his stall at the Macks’. One hock was badly swollen, though Andy told her it would mend.
‘Do you think it will?’ she’d asked Sandy.
He’d just smiled and said, ‘Hope so.’ Sandy’s smile seemed always ready now, a gift to her each time she saw it. I make him happy, she thought. And then: I always did.
It had been a week of pain, worse even than when she’d first been hurt, not even able to feel her toes apart from the pins and needles. But at last there was a little movement, and then some more. She’d need the bathchair for weeks, or even months. But once again she had hope.
And Sandy. He glanced back and grinned at her, then nodded towards a young wallaby peering at them from the hop bush, as though hoping this strange many-headed cart-beast would keep to the track. She smiled to show she’d seen.
It was good hope too: a strong rope that tethered her to the future. Nicholas had told her bad things would happen, and they had. He’d promised good things too. Sandy was one good thing, but there would be more. Perhaps walking again was one of them, and Sandy finding a farm to buy on a mountain for them both.
They neared the Rock now. Bessie flickered her ears and hesitated, just for a second, till Sandy flicked the reins. She plodded on.
No mist on the Rock today. But there would be tomorrow, maybe, or the day after. And somehow she knew, with a certainty as strong as the mountains, that next time Nicholas would be there.
The cart rounded the bend for home. Andy was standing on the verandah, waiting for them. Joey waved his hat and ran down to the gate towards them.
She hoped the boys hadn’t made too much of a mess while she’d been gone.
Dirty saucepans and dishes were piled in the washing-up bucket. The porridge pan was so crusted she knew they’d used it over and over without cleaning it, so the porridge had cooked on. The kitchen table needed scrubbing and scrubbing again. She managed that from her bathchair, while Kirsty cleaned the floor and lit the copper to boil water for the washing. It took a whole day to get the house straight again: a cake in the food safe, a stew on the stove.
The sun shone as if it had never met a snow cloud the morning she asked Andy to wheel her down to the Rock, so she could watch the valley and feel the sun.
‘You’re as bad as Dad,’ he said, as he settled her into her chair after he’d lifted her down the stairs. ‘Remember how he’d be sitting there when Mum drove the cart back with us from church?’
‘He said he did all the praying he needed on the mountain, not within four walls.’
Andy began to push her out the gate. ‘He told me once that after sitting there he knew things were going to be all right. Didn’t say what things, mind you. But he looked happy.’
Suddenly Flinty remembered the day Dad had died. ‘Won’t tell you to care for the place,’ he whispered, as he lay there in the bed. ‘I know you do.’ And then the final whisper: ‘Give my love to the mountains.’
Had an older Flinty been a ghost for Dad, like Nicholas was hers? Maybe Dad had even built his house here because he’d met her on the Rock or perhaps he’d even met his granddaughter, if there was a granddaughter among the children Nicholas had sort of told her she would have.
And maybe she’d never know. We live in a world of perhapses, said Sister Burrows. She’d been lucky to have some certainties to guide her too.
‘You’ll be all right here, Sis?’
Flinty nodded.
She listened to Andy’s footsteps, striding up the hill. Almost at once she heard new steps; hesitant and uneven, and the thud of sticks too.
She wheeled her chair around as Nicholas had turned in his bathchair a year back.
He didn’t seem surprised. He’s known I’d be crippled all along, she thought. That was why he gave me roses. Not for love, but as you’d take flowers to someone who was sick.
Then he smiled, and she thought, Maybe a little bit of both. For there were many kinds of love — more, perhaps, than there were roses.
He looked younger than when she’d seen him last, even leaning on his sticks. Or maybe I’ve grown much older, she thought, and he has lost the look of pain.
He looked happy too, a deep happiness that wasn’t just from seeing her.
‘Good morning, Miss Flinty McAlpine.’ He stopped, using two metal sticks to keep his balance.
‘How are your new legs?’
‘Magnificent. I’d bend down and lift my jeans up to show you, but I’m still not that steady yet.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘I will be though. It’s going well. My whole life is going well, Flinty McAlpine.’
‘Maybe you should just call me Flinty.’
He grinned. ‘I’ll call you Flinty at dinner tonight, shall I?’
She looked at his blue eyes. All at once so much became clear.
An old woman had invited an injured soldier to stay at their house in the mountains. A schoolfriend of her grandson. She bet that the older Flinty had been the one to invite him.
The sixty-seven-year-old Flinty had sent the soldier down onto the Rock, to gaze over the valley, to meet herself, fifty years before.
Would she have had the courage to muster the brumbies, to write the book for Kirsty, to make that desperate bold dash down the mountainside, even to wait out the agony on her back, if it hadn’t been for this man?
She didn’t know. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t know in 1969 or 1970 either.
It didn’t matter. Those things had happened. He was here, and so was she.
He reached for her hand. ‘Happy, Flinty?’
‘Yes. Are you?’
He nodded. ‘I’ve met a girl.’
‘One who looks at your face, not your legs?’
‘She’s seen my legs now too.’
‘Are you going to marry her?’
‘If she says yes.’
Flinty nodded. She didn’t ask if this woman in the future was her granddaughter. She didn’t ask about her children either, whether they were well and safe and happy in this land that was the future. There was time enough to come to know all that.
With life came loss. The war and the years since had taught her that. There’d be sadness in her life to come, as well as happiness. Even the most blessed lives had both. She’d live them as they came.
He still held her hand. Such warm fingers for a ghost. He examined her ring. ‘So Sandy has proposed. I didn’t like to ask you…the older you…exactly when that happened. You’ll be a bit formidable, you know. But kind.’
‘And happy?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Not happily-ever-after happy, perhaps. But you have had the most fulfilled life of anyone I know.’
‘Then…’ She hesitated, not knowing how much he’d tell her, or even how much she wanted to know.
‘You’ll be walking again by Christmas,’ he said. ‘You’ll walk down the aisle too. There’s something else as well. I’m supposed to show you this.’
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a newspaper cutting, held in a strange soft transparent cover. The newspaper cutting was yellowed and brittle at the edges.
She read the headline: The Girl from Snowy River Saves the Valley.
‘A journalist came up for the fishing two days ago in your time. One of the White boys told him about your ride. His article will be in The Sydney Morning Herald tomorrow — the same day an editor at Angus and Robertson picks up a couple of grubby exercise books. He’ll be about to throw them i
n the bin when he’ll recognise your name. So he’ll begin to read, and when he’s read the first sentence he’ll keep on reading.’
‘They…they’ll publish my story?’ she whispered.
‘And many more. I reckon even in my time you’re still a long way from ending your writing career.’
‘And what about Rock Farm? Can books make enough money for us to live here?’
He shook his head, grinning. ‘I’m obeying instructions. You’ll find out, Flinty McAlpine.’
She grinned back, still dazed, still supremely happy. Because he had already answered her, even if he didn’t realise it; had told her that the older Flinty still lived here, that he would see her tonight, at dinner. Maybe she and Sandy bought Rock Farm next year. Maybe they had to wait five years to do it.
Her life would be here, where she belonged. But there was one question she had to ask.
‘What about Snow King? Please! Have I crippled him too?’
The grin faded a little. ‘I think you know the answer to that already, even if you haven’t admitted it to yourself.’
He was right. ‘He won’t ever race now,’ she said softly. ‘Yes. I knew it.’ She put her chin up. ‘But he’ll have sons and daughters. They’ll be champions, and their children will be too.’
All at once she knew something else as well. ‘We’re not going to meet again, are we? Not like this, as we are today.’
He shook his head. ‘You told me we don’t — the older you told me, I mean. Today is goodbye, you said.’
She wondered if she’d meet other ghosts, perhaps, here on the Rock. She also wondered what the older Flinty might have decided not to tell him.
Suddenly she had an image of Mum and Dad, sitting on this Rock as they had done so often at sunset, smiling at glimpses of their children and grandchildren, their daughter faintly heard through the mist. But those thoughts she’d keep for later.
Just now, there was only him.
‘Be happy,’ she said.
‘I will. You’ve been a good friend, Flinty, both then and now.’ He hesitated, then smiled. ‘Not sure I’d have made it without you.’
‘You would have.’
‘Well, maybe. And so would you.’
They smiled at each other.
‘Nicky?’
The young woman sounded a bit like Kirsty. But this wasn’t a voice from 1920. This voice was calling him.
He looked back, out of the mist, towards the house. ‘I have to go.’
‘Does she know about me?’
‘You’ll find out,’ he said. ‘See you in fifty years, Flinty my dear.’ He bent forwards and kissed her on the forehead. This kiss was cold, not warm. For the first time she saw him dissolve into mist in front of her, knew that she was vanishing for him too.
She listened, hoping to hear his voice again, or the voice that might be her granddaughter’s, and was the girl he loved. But there was only birdsong, and the distant beat of horse hooves.
Sandy, cantering up the mountain. Smiling, she rolled the chair out of the mist onto the track to meet him, to tell him about ghosts, and love, and what a ghost had said would happen tomorrow when an editor down in Sydney picked up a tattered exercise book.
Above her the snow-streaked mountain gleamed its too-hard white light.
Epilogue
21 DECEMBER 1926
The cicadas gave their first morning buzz from the gum trees beyond the garden. The sky was clear blue above the sunrise red above the ridges. It would be hot today.
Flinty shut the front door, then tucked the cotton bunny-rug Mrs Mack had crocheted around Nicola. She gazed at the shiny green car as she carried the baby down the steps. ‘Are you sure that thing will get us back up the mountain?’
‘Of course,’ said Andy easily. ‘It got me up here yesterday.’ The ends of his moustache had been newly waxed. They shone, just like the car.
‘Yes, but it’s got to carry us all back after Christmas.’ And all the Gibber’s Creek dresses that Kirsty ‘just had to have’, she thought, and the new suitcases that Joey would need for university next year. Her first book had paid off the debt for Rock Farm. Her most recent one was paying for all they wanted. Not a fortune, but enough.
‘Motorcars are stronger than you think,’ said Andy. He winked at her.
Flinty grinned as Andy absently took out his hanky to polish a fingerprint off the gleaming door. The car even had a vase with rosebuds on the dashboard.
But it wasn’t a horse. You can’t love a car, she thought, glancing up at the paddock behind the house where a grey foal tried to dance with a butterfly.
She looked back at Andy. Well, maybe you could love a car, a bit. But a car would never push its heart and lungs to breaking point because it loved you back.
Sandy opened the car door for her. ‘Come on, love. The chooks will have gone back to bed before we even set out.’
Flinty slipped into the front passenger’s seat with Nicola. Sandy checked the luggage strapped on the car once more, then crammed himself into the back with Kirsty and Joey.
‘You’ve got the books for Drinkwater?’ Flinty asked Kirsty.
‘Under my feet with the nappies,’ said Kirsty.
‘And I’ve got the Thermos and ginger cake and sandwiches,’ said Joey.
Sandy smiled at her. ‘Stop fussing, love. We’ve got everything.’
She grinned back. They had.
Andy turned the crank. The motor caught. He climbed into the driver’s seat and did complicated things with levers. The car gave a sort of burp, then began to rumble, surprisingly smoothly, down the track.
Fog covered the Rock like a tablecloth this morning, but the car didn’t hesitate as it chugged past. Cars didn’t see ghosts either. Not like a horse.
She turned her head as they passed the Rock, just as the rising sunlight slid down into the shadow of the valley.
And she saw him. A horse, black as the mountain cliffs, rearing against the sun-red sky, and on his back a rider in blue trousers and a sky-blue shirt.
He looked older. Of course he looked older. His face was at peace. What remained of his legs were thrust into strange high stirrups. The horse lowered its forelegs as its rider took off his hat and saluted the rising sun. Just for a second she saw joy, the exultation of a rider at one with his horse and bush and sky.
The mist shimmered and they were gone.
Had he seen her too?
It didn’t matter. He knew her past…and her future, what her life would be. He’d said that she’d be happy.
Now she knew that he was happy too.
She looked back at Sandy, saw his questioning look, nodded and gave him a reassuring smile. The green car bumped its way down the mountain, through the twisting valley and along the dusty track above the glinting river, down towards the plains.
Author’s Notes
This is a book about war. Officially World War I ended on 11 November 1918, but that was only when the battles ceased. The war itself would be a shadow changing the lives of many generations. The years immediately after were as strange and disturbing as those of the war itself, to the men and the families and especially to small communities, where so many had been lost, or returned with wounds and nightmares that few would speak of.
In those days it was felt best to ‘just get on with life’ and not dwell on the past. It is only now, as the diaries and letters from World War I are published by the participants’ descendants, that we can hear the voices of those who were there.
The Girl from Snowy River is fiction. Many of the incidents referred to in it, such as the Snowy River enlistment march, are based on real events, but no character in this book is based on a real person. You may find echoes, though, not just from the bush poets and old songs, but from my life and others’. This is the place to say, perhaps, that I have never met a ghost from the future, nor known an ex-serviceman crippled after the Vietnam War.
WHO WAS THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER?
Banjo Paterson may have w
ritten his poem as homage to the Snowy River riders generally, or it may be based on the feats of a single person. Contenders include stockman Jack Riley (1841–1914), who lived at Tom Grogan, participated in brumby running and is buried in the Corryong cemetery, or young Charlie McKeahnie, who made the ride described by Mr Clancy in this book. Bush poet Barcroft Boake wrote a poem about the ride, ‘On the Range’, in which the brumby dies running into a rocky outcrop, and it’s believed that Paterson was told that version of the story. McKeahnie was killed in a riding accident in 1895 and is buried in the Old Adaminaby cemetery, on the shores of Lake Eucumbene. Paterson himself claimed that ‘the man’ was a composite of many bold mountain riders.
THE POEMS REFERRED TO IN THIS BOOK
These include, of course, Banjo Paterson’s iconic ‘The Man from Snowy River’, as well as ‘Clancy of The Overflow’ and Henry Lawson’s ‘Andy’s Gone with Cattle’, but you will find references to a dozen or so less well-known poems from that era. I will leave to the reader the pleasures of reading the bush poems that this book is based on. Three of them appear over the following pages, but you might also look at the song ‘The Snowy River Men’ and the poems ‘Black Swans’, ‘Do You Think That I Do Not Know’ and many others. (I am deliberately not giving even the songwriter’s and poets’ names, so as not to deprive you of the joy you will find in many more works if you choose to hunt for them.)
‘The Man from Snowy River’ by AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864–1941)
There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses — he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.
All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far
Had mustered at the homestead overnight,
For the bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,
The Girl from Snowy River Page 26