Orphaned Leaves

by Christopher Holt

  Brandt turns to Aubergine once more. “Your children are so happy. I would like to know if there is anything I can do to help you.”

  “Just make sure you come again,” she says.

  “You can depend upon it,” says Brandt.

  Milo and Brandt ride to the alpine gate, and, in the dappled twilight of the whispering bush, they stop to let the horses drink at a mountain spring.

  “Aubergine’s doing well,” says Brandt.

  “You gave her the opportunity and the school was your idea.”

  “No, it was something that was needed and you helped make it happen, Milo. You’re changing lives. I’ve started to see things in a different light.”

  “What things?”

  “Oh, odd things – about what’s important; of course, I speak only for myself.”

  They mount up and Brandt turns to Milo. “Now let’s have some of your amazing bush tea, and I’ll tell you about last night. I don’t think we’ll be hearing anymore of those Norsemen who cut up Magdalena.”

  23

  Below the tree line, the first autumn snow has arrived in feathery wafers and a medley of footprints marks the regular route taken by the Aboriginal children from the Cone to their school. Aubergine and her pupils offer Brandt some welcome respite from a farmer’s loneliness, and he enjoys being with them and helping out as an impromptu handyman.

  “Congratulations, Otto,” she says one afternoon as they watch the pupils leave for home. “You’ve learnt the proper name of every child in the school, which is no mean feat.”

  Brandt is putting up timber braces for another book shelf. “You’ve got so many new books, I’m not sure I can keep pace with you.”

  “With Peggy, you mean; Lord knows where she gets them from, they’re not all her ex-library books either. Some are brand new – look at this one.” She holds up Blinky Bill, still in its perfect dust jacket. “I think she just goes out and buys them from her own pocket.

  “I must get some of the children to read to you. Most of the older ones should be fluent by the end of the year. In this day and age, they should all be able to read – just to survive. Believe me, I know.”

  “From your time in South Africa, you mean?”

  “To the whites, people like us were just shadows – invisible; we picked their grapes, nursed their children, washed their clothes and cooked their meals. Education for a person with pigmented skin? Even the Education Minister called it ‘schooling for servitude’ – at least he was honest. But then I ask myself, is Australia so different? Am I really doing the children in this school a service?”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Really? What happens when they leave this little sanctuary, all ‘half-caste’ children with their ‘half-caste’ teacher? Oh yes, I’ll do all I can to make them ready for high school, academically, that is. But socially – here in ‘white’ Australia? Tell me Otto, will it turn out well? Tell me the truth.”

  “High school will be a shock for them, but what would happen to them if you weren’t here? Just by teaching them to read, you are opening the windows of their minds. How will everything turn out? The only thing I can say is that you are an amazing teacher – and you never know where your influence will stop.”

  “Thank you, Otto, but what of the other children whom they call the ‘full-bloods’? What will happen to them? No, don’t try to answer.” She goes over to the teacher’s alcove. “Have you time for a coffee?”

  “I’ve always time for a coffee.”

  She lights a spirit stove and settles an aged black kettle over the flames. It’s just Bushell’s Coffee and Chicory mixed with condensed milk, but as long as Brandt thinks of it as a separate beverage in its own right and makes no comparisons at all with European coffee, he can find Aubergine’s ersatz brew quite addictive.

  They take their cups outside and sit on one of the five benches that Brandt has set out in a half circle on the grass, each a rough-hewn plank resting on two squat fire logs and secured by wood bolts.

  Aubergine refuses one of Brandt’s cigarettes and he puts the silver case back in his pocket unopened. As the subtle blues and greens of the bush are waning with the late sun, eight kangaroos emerge from the forest and start cropping the new grass at its edge. One is hopping on one leg, attempting to keep the weight off the other while trying not to overbalance.

  “It’s wounded,” says Brandt. “It might have been knocked down on the road.” He remembers how he felt when he had to kill the snake on the way to St Edmund’s Mission and glances across at his Land Rover where in the back he has stowed Alan’s new.22 rifle.

  “I wouldn’t,” Aubergine says, as if reading his mind. “I think she will heal – otherwise, she would have gone into the shade to die. She wouldn’t be afraid to die; wild animals live deeper within the Creation than we do. But, in any case, just look at her nibbling away; she’s young and strong, probably the next time you see her she’ll have a joey in that pouch. She’s not taking herself too seriously. Do you see any signs of self-pity?”

  “No, not at all.”

  Despite her brown skin, Aubergine’s eyes are slate blue, and Brandt ponders who it was that planted the seeds of white blood in her black ancestor. Himmler would have said that it was the source of her intelligence. Brandt would annihilate that thought, if only he could. He no longer wants any part in Himmler’s eugenics nor the obscenity of ‘racial hygiene’, yet they still lurk in his mind, dark and indelible, polluting his best intentions.

  “I’d better get back,” he says. “I’ve got to check over the stockyards before dark.”

  “It’s always good to see you, Otto, and thanks so much for the shelves.” He smiles and strides off to his ute.

  The stockyards are only two hundred yards downstream from the school. He has replaced the wooden rails with galvanised steel piping, but has to make sure that there is nothing protruding to injure his first stock of store cattle, which Milo has promised to help him muster next week.

  Actually, Brandt should have inspected the yards this afternoon instead of going up to see Aubergine. His visits to the school have become so frequent that he fears he is neglecting the farm.

  Milo assures him he’s not; he says there are no vital tasks to be done at the moment, anyway. Brandt’s consultancy work on the Snowy Scheme brings in ample money to spare on the chalet project, so he can donate more to the school. Thanks to Milo’s cheerful team of roustabouts, Brandt has set up a generator for the Aboriginal community, two water tanks and some long-drop latrines. He suggests to Milo that they include a hot water system and two shower blocks as well.

  Milo disagrees. “The school’s one thing, the Cone is another. The Cone is their home and it’s as private to them as yours is to you. However good your motives, if you interfere too much you’ll drive them away. They have an honour code, just like we do, and if they feel they’re being patronised, they’ll go.”

  “But where would they go to?”

  “They’ll just go. This is a very big country. I know what I’m talking about on this one, Otto.”

  *

  Despite Milo telling him there’s not much needing to be done on the farm during winter, Brandt devotes his hours to a Calvinistic regime of work without end, only easing when Alan comes home at weekends.

  The boy’s life in Tumut is a galaxy away from his own. Alan chatters incessantly about Peggy, how she encourages him to think about theology, philosophy, psychology and politics – all the things his school doesn’t have time to teach. Peggy takes him to the amateur dramatics at St Mary’s Church Hall and the latest films at the Montreal Picture House. She encourages him to read the Sydney Morning Herald and to help her with the daily crossword. She even teaches him how to cook a very passable roast dinner.

  But, even at weekends, Brandt doesn’t see as much of him as he used to. Just last Saturday Alan couldn’t wait to
ride over to Tumbledown to help Milo and Tom to release thousands of fingerling trout in his higher dams.

  Once Brandt would have resented this, but not now. A change is coming. He believes that his part in Alan’s life is being eased away from him by the stronger pull of a family life that the boy has never known. Brandt tells himself he is in no position to provide this for Alan because he is becoming increasingly obsessed by his glacial terror of the Apparition. It is taking over his life, Peggy had been perfectly right to question his withdrawn behaviour.

  He has decided that the psychological explanations for his mental state are thoroughly unconvincing. A reawakened terror of the supernatural has become a snapping dog at his heels, never letting him rest, spurring him on to labour even harder on the farm and to take on yet more draining hours on the Snowy Scheme.

  He no longer finds the time or occasion to be the father to Alan that he knows he should be. He has never accepted Tom’s invitation to take him fly fishing; instead, Tom goes off alone with Alan, returning just before dark with half a dozen rainbow trout and some crayfish.

  There was a time when Brandt used to hug the boy on Fridays when he returned from Tumut and on Sundays when he went back. Now they only shake hands. On one occasion, he even had to stop himself from giving Alan a perfunctory salute.

  It is only when Alan has gone back to Tumut on Sunday nights that, with the help of Bell’s whisky, Brandt begins to wonder how all this is affecting the boy. They had been getting on so well – quite like father and son – especially after their Sydney holiday. Much as Alan must love Peggy and Milo, will the boy ever forget that it was he, Otto Brandt, who saved him from Father Walsh? Probably not, no, emphatically not, it must be the whisky talking… and, yet, perhaps from an objective point of view, it would be as well for Brandt to fade away out of his life altogether.

  Then what? If he were totally alone in the world, he now knows exactly what he would do. He would return to Germany and hand himself into the Allies who would interrogate him, try him and sentence him to hang, probably in Poland.

  It would amaze the court that he plead guilty, probably on every one of the charges. The Americans would send in their psychiatrist. The papers would be full of old photos of him in uniform. The newsreels would drag out footage of the camps.

  He’d be held in solitary confinement and the gaolers would spit into his food. No doubt they would make a film of his execution, probably in Poland.

  It is not to be. Alan, Milo, Peggy, his Snowy Scheme men, the bush fire volunteer team – what a burden they have all so innocently put upon him. Atonement, if it is still possible, cannot be through his surrender to the gallows. He is sentenced to live, to be a father to Alan and safeguard his inheritance, to work alongside Milo, to volunteer with the firefighters, to share his expertise with the Snowy Scheme men – all what the Australians call ‘mateship’; not a bad word, when you come to think of it.

  He’ll make Garigo a model farm with its own chalet; a unique and special corner of the Snowy Mountain country. Yes, his life must have only one purpose: duty. In a nutshell, his duty to the boy whom he rescued and his duty to the world the boy will inherit.

  And so, duty must become everything.

  Of course, duty is something he is already familiar with, duty to the Reich – to the Volk – despite where that led him.

  At Garigo, duty means felling dead trees, fencing new paddocks, cattle dipping, chiselling gold from the creek – although it’s already averaging an income of two hundred pounds a month. Some of the gold he is banking for Aubergine’s school. She will have a library with a set of encyclopaedias, proper sports equipment and a sixteen-millimetre film projector.

  But he must become more precise about his duties.

  Duty.

  He will turn Garigo into a model rural property that is diverse, innovative and prosperous; the best of its kind, something Alan can be proud of.

  Duty.

  He must finish the chalet this year. Because it is a business partnership, Milo provides the labour force and half the materials, but the architectural features are Brandt’s; they emerge from his deep subconscious, some might say his soul.

  Duty.

  ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ Whoever first said that was a genius. To look after his tools and equipment, to do things properly, to set himself priorities and not deviate from them.

  Duty.

  To restore the Chevrolet on the ridge and also Fuller’s old tractor. Two duties really, he supposes.

  Duty.

  Giving to charity. He already gives to charity, not as much as he would like – tithing would be his ideal, but he does his best. There isn’t a charity in New South Wales existing for the benefit of combat veterans, war widows and especially for children that has not received a cheque from Otto Brandt of Garigo Homestead.

  Duty.

  Like Milo, he will show appreciation and gratitude for the natural world. He will plant proper Australian trees and shrubs to welcome the native animals and birds.

  Duty.

  He already attends evening training sessions of the Bushfire Emergency Service, arriving early and leaving late. There is talk of a volunteer mountain rescue patrol. Yes, he’ll join that too.

  But, in his aloneness, duty is a cold thing.

  He doesn’t believe he will live much longer. . The world around him seems less substantial than it used to be, and he is fading with it. He is certain that, without him, Alan will be happier and more secure with Milo and Peggy. Brandt does not resent this, nor want to fight against it, for it is the nearest thing he has to atonement.

  24

  Throughout the winter, Brandt has been keeping a store of logs in one of the spare bedrooms because he no longer ventures outside after dark, not since that night when he had returned late from a consultation on the Eucumbene Tunnel. As he drove up to the house, he saw the figure on the veranda. He spent the night in the locked Land Rover, curled up, cramped and almost freezing to death.

  She is subtle, only a lithe shadow among the trees. She doesn’t leave footprints, not even a thread of wool on a thorn, but she is here and she is watching him, and, for the first time, Brandt longs for his old cabin at Island Bend.

  When November brings the warm weather, the work on the farm trebles. Despite Brandt’s protestations, for he is concerned that he is exploiting the boy, Alan just loves to be working on the farm. Whenever he’s home for the weekend, he’s brushing down the horses, polishing their saddles, mucking out the two stables and refilling the forty-four-gallon drums with oats and wheat. By eight o’clock on Saturday mornings, he’s on the roof clearing out any sticks or leaves from the gutters that might block the water flow to the main tanks or, in a dry spell, become a bushfire hazard. Alan has made the orchard his own project, hoeing out the thistles and the wild lantana, and cutting back the blackberries.

  Despite his earlier lapses, Brandt is now making a renewed effort to be a father to Alan, and has taken Miss Bartlett’s and Peggy’s advice to heart. Alan has his own horse, a saddler called Czarina, which he now rides like the wind. For pocket money, he goes mustering with Milo’s stockmen wearing his wide Akubra hat; a broad, studded belt; ‘laccy-sided’, brown boots; and his Akubra hat. Brandt has taught him to drive the Land Rover around the property and Alan takes it through the bush down to the creek to load up smooth stones for the new chalet.

  Each week, Brandt keeps himself up to date with Alan’s progress in Tumut. His prime concern is that the abuse he received at the hands of Walsh is still causing problems. Peggy reports that the nightmares and bed-wetting incidents are thankfully much rarer, but now he’s developed a preoccupation with cleanliness; he showers twice a day and is always washing his hands.

  Peggy has been teaching him to play the piano and he practises every evening, with the understanding that if he does, Brandt will allow him to g
o flying again with Milo. When Brandt finally gives his assent Milo is over the moon.

  “Alan ought to be learning these sort of things, you know. He’s becoming what you might call a ‘wild colonial boy’ and good on him too. Remember only last year, he was that frightened little coot you brought down from Walsh’s hellhole? Look at him now, quite the young man, and look how he’s filling out. Why not forget all your tunnelling on the Snowy Scheme for a moment, and let’s also forget about getting your school going and your improvements on the farm? Why not give yourself a bit of credit? What you’ve done for that little tyke is worth more than all that put together.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let him down – and there’s another thing: tell Alan I haven’t forgotten my promise to take you both down the Murrumbidgee on the dinghy. I reckon we should go pretty soon; there’ll still be plenty of meltwater to keep the river on the go, though it’s too cold for us to swim.”

  Alan, of course, is thrilled at the prospect of the trip, and he pesters Brandt until a date is set for the big day.

  Two weeks later they launch Milo’s rubber dinghy near the bridge on the Shannons Flat Road. Milo’s plan is to float down to the Murrumbidgee until they reach the Numeralla confluence by mid-afternoon.

  With his shirt hanging loose over his belt, Brandt passes the lunches, life jackets, oars and other watery paraphernalia down to Milo, who is already on board, while Alan holds on to the tow line.

  “Are you sure you won’t come too, Peggy?” Alan asks, though Peggy, standing on the grassy bank in her long dress and carrying her red handbag, looks flamboyantly ill-equipped for rafting.

  “I’d love to, Alan,” she says unconvincingly, “but someone has to drive the trailer to pick you up afterwards. And, anyway, as I don’t know Cooma all that well, I thought I’d take a look at the town while you’re all on the river. But I have entrusted you with Chaucer.” As if to confirm this, the big dog splashes into the water behind Alan, who is waiting to release the line and climb aboard to join Brandt and Milo.