The Golden Soak

by Innes, Hammond;

  I was still thinking about this and the strange effect it had on me when we reached the Highway. It was a red gravel road and it hadn’t had a grader over it for a long time so that it was badly ribbed. We hit the bulldust in less than a mile, the Land-Rover sliding and slithering on the fine-ground surface, bucking across the truck ruts like a boat in a lumpy sea.

  It was like that most of the four miles to Lynn Peak, the turn-off to the homestead marked by a sign that read:

  SHORT OF PETROL?

  THIRSTY? HUNGRY?

  The Andersons welcome you to Lynn Peak Homestead

  → ONLY 400 YARDS. →

  It was just after seven, and as we drove down the track she said, ‘Andie’s a bit of a mystery. They say he jumped ship at Fremantle, but it’s just a story – nobody knows really. His wife’s from Port Hedland. She’s half Italian. They’ve a couple of kids now, and when she isn’t looking after them, she’s dishing out pasta to the drivers who pull in here for a break. It’s a funny thing …’ She was talking quickly as though to cover our parting. ‘Ten years ago you wouldn’t have got any self-respecting Aussie eating pasta. Steak ’n chips and half a dozen stubbies – that was the staple diet for the roustabouts and jackaroos, all the odds and sods who bummed their way through the North West. Now you’d think they were half Italian themselves the way they roll in here. Pasta – they love it!’ She suddenly laughed. ‘Mebbe it’s Maria they love.’

  We were swinging into the yard then and she blew the horn as she braked to a stop beside the house. It was a poor place, built almost entirely of tin with a flyscreened verandah and chickens scuffing in the dust beside the petrol pump. A small, energetic man appeared, about forty with baldish head, and she introduced me. She didn’t get out. She just stayed there behind the wheel talking to him till I had got my suitcase out of the back. ‘I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.’ She said it brightly, a quick smile and that was all. She didn’t stop to say goodbye; just waved her hand, her face set in that bright artificial smile as she turned the Land-Rover and went roaring off in a cloud of dust.

  I stood and watched the dust settle behind her, sorry to see her go. I felt suddenly alone, knowing I’d lost the only person who cared a damn what happened to me.

  ‘So you’re wanting a ride up to Nullagine?’

  I turned to find Andie staring at me curiously, his eyes crinkled against the sun’s glare.

  ‘What are the chances?’ I asked him.

  ‘Och, somebody’ll be through. In time. It’s early yet.’ He turned towards the house. ‘Janet said to feed you, so come on in and we can breakfast together.’

  Three

  GOLDEN SOAK

  ONE

  I was lucky. The first vehicle into Lynn Peak that morning was a Holden driven by a lone prospector from Leonora. He had driven through the night, heading for the Comet Mine at Marble Bar, and he was only too glad to give me a lift provided I took the wheel and let him get some sleep. He was a lean, taciturn man, dressed in khaki trousers and a white shirt turned ochre by the dust, his eyes red-rimmed below the peaked cap and his thin face grey with stubble. He was fast asleep before I had driven half a dozen miles.

  We were heading north, the sun behind us and flat-topped hills of red rock moving in from the right. Even if he’d been awake conversation would have been impossible. The car was an old one and the noise of its rattling, the machine-gun clatter of wheelspun gravel, was incessant. It isolated me, and once I got the feel of riding the dirt at speed, I began to think over what Andie had told me about the two men in the Toyota. Both of them were from Nullagine. Phil Westrop was a newcomer who’d been driving a bulldozer at the Grafton Downs Tin Mine for a couple of months. The other was a black by the name of Wolli. And he had spelt it out for me in that thick Glaswegian accent of his, explaining that the man was supposed to have been born at Jarra Jarra, in the black quarters there, and named after Weedi Wolli Creek. ‘He’s a drunk. But he wasna drunk when, they pulled in here for petrol yesterday morning. The shakes, yes, but he was just plain scared in my opeenion.’

  Was this the black man Kadek had referred to in his letter as Wally? I was wondering about that when I hit a dry creek bed, my head bumping the roof. And why was Westrop so interested in Golden Soak? Stopping for petrol at Lynn Peak, when he could have filled up before leaving Nullagine, was just an excuse to pump Andie for information about the mine. ‘Ah dinna ken much aboot him, just met him a few times over a drink at the Conglomerate. An ex-army sergeant invalided out after being blown up by a Viet-Cong mine.’ The harsh voice had gone rambling on as I ploughed my way through a plateful of bacon and eggs for which he had charged me an exorbitant two dollars fifty. Six years in Australia hadn’t softened the accent. ‘There’s some say it was a bomb planted in a brothel in Saigon, but they wouldna say that to his face. He’s tough, that laddie.’

  I was still thinking about Westrop when I ran into my first stretch of bulldust and almost lost control, no feel to the steering, the back tyres spinning and the car lurching wildly. Ahead, round the red shoulder of a hill, loomed a cloud of dust like an explosion, and in the straight beyond, the dust cloud hung in the sky for more than a mile, a glint of glass reflected at its snout. It was the first of the day’s traffic a big refrigerated container truck throwing gravel at me as it thundered past. And then I was into the red cloud that folin its wake, a sepia opaqueness of nil visibility with dust pouring into the car, filling my mouth, clogging my nostrils.

  ‘Wind the window up for chrissakes!’ And by the time I’d done that he was fast asleep again.

  The dust cleared and we were into country that was like a miniature Arizona, all small red buttes and dry as a desert. I was driving fast on gravel again and wondering how Westrop had known about me. According to Andie, he’d not only known my name, but what I did. And he had asked a lot of questions: Why had a mining consultant been called in? Was Golden Soak for sale and had I inspected it yet? Had anybody been down there since the disaster? ‘What he was after I have no idea, but he was after something, that’s for sure, and I told Ed to watch it when he came in for the stores yesterday. He’d never heard of Westrop. Wolli he’d known all his life, of course.’

  And yet, when Janet had asked her father who the men were, he hadn’t answered her. I was remembering the look on his face as he’d stood there at the entrance to the adit, the axe gripped in his hands. Another truck thundered by, stones clattering on the windscreen and dust seeping in even though I’d closed the window. Christ! it was hot. I’d left the red butte country now, and after I’d crossed the dry bed of the Shaw River, I was into a world of small hills like tumuli, the road dipping and rising endlessly, the rattle of the Holden on the ridged surface permeating my whole body.

  To hell with Ed Garrety, I thought. Jarra Jarra was behind me now and no concern of mine. The road stretching ahead led to Nullagine and the prospect of something that might be more rewarding. But thinking of McIlroy, dreaming of his Monster in the heat, my mind came back inevitably to Golden Soak and what Andie had told me of the disaster that had happened there in 1939. I had been questioning him about the disappearance of Big Bill Garrety’s partner, but all he had been able to tell me was what I already knew, that the closing of the bank’s doors had coincided with the collapse of a speculative boom in West Australian mining shares and that McIlroy was supposed to have been speculating with money deposited by the bank’s customers. It was all hearsay, of course, and the people who really knew about it were the people who’d got their fingers burnt, and they weren’t the ones to gossip. But he was sure about the disaster. Big Bill. Garrety had hired a bunch of out-of-work miners to drive a cross-cut into a badly faulted area of high grade ore. ‘No doot the man was desperate, but it was plain bluidy murder from what they tell me.’ Several men had been killed, a lot more injured. ‘I dinna ken how many.’ And he didn’t know whether the mine had been flooded then or later. But he was quite certain that the disaster had happened after the cra
sh. ‘Sure it had been closed, but when a man’s that desperate for money –’ He had shrugged. ‘Ed’s a fool not to sell. I told him so. That mine’s got a jinx on it.’

  I was trying to remember what exactly the Journal had said about the cave-in, but the sweat was caking salt on my forehead, the glare blinding and I found it difficult to concentrate, heat exhaustion building up and the rush of air through the open window oven-hot. Everywhere along that road there were anthills so big they looked like primitive adobe dwellings. And the hills throbbing in the heat, my eyes tired. Soon all I could think of was the dryness in my mouth, my need of a cold beer. And then at last we were on tarmac, coming down into Nullagine, and my companion woke.

  It wasn’t much of a place, a huddle of houses roasting on the slope of a hill and the verandahed hotel at the corner where the road turned to the right. I stopped by the petrol pump. ‘Can I offer you a drink?’ I asked him as I got stiffly out. But he shook his head, rubbing his eyes and stretching. ‘No, I got to get on.’ He moved over into the driving seat, watched me till I’d got my case out of the boot, and then, with a nod and a slight lift of the hand, he drove on.

  I went into the bar and is was comfortingly dark after the glare outside. I hesitated a moment, accustoming my eyes to the change of light. There were only three men there, two locals and an aborigine. They turned their heads to stare at me, their movements economical of effort and no words spoken. A youngster appeared behind the bar counter that ran the length of the room. He was fair-haired and had an English accent. I ordered a beer and drank it fast, feeling dehydrated, dirty, sweaty, utterly drained. ‘Anywhere I can get a wash?’ I asked him.

  ‘The wash-house is across the road.’

  I turned and saw a small building like a dilapidated public lavatory beyond the sun-glare of the tarmac. I ordered another beer and drank it slowly, brushing away the flies and taking stock of the aborigine. He wore a blue shirt and blue jeans and his wide-nostrilled features were black as jet under the broad-brimmed hat. ‘Your name Wolli, by any chance?’ I asked him.

  He stared at me, the whites of his eyes yellow, the pupils dark brown, his face expressionless.

  ‘Yuh give him a beer, mate, an’ he’ll talk,’ one of the locals said, a small man with a ferrety face and narrow eyes. ‘But his name ain’t Wolli. It’s Macpherson. That right innit?’

  ‘Arrhh.’ The big lips spread in a tentative grin.

  ‘You know where Wolli is, Mac?’

  The black shook his head vaguely, his eyes on me, hopeful of that beer.

  ‘Yuh want Wolli,’ the little man said to me, ‘yuh better ask Prophecy. She’s in there playing cards.’ He nodded to the open hatch at the end of the bar. ‘She got nothing to do all day now but play cards an’ get drunk.’

  Through the hatch I could see there was a sort of saloon bar with rickety tables and a dart board. The drivers of the two trucks I’d seen parked at the side of the hotel were sitting there, wolfing down steak and chips, and at another table was a big gipsy-looking woman with greying hair and a hard, tough, lively face lined with wrinkles. She was alone, drinking whisky and playing patience, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

  ‘If a fly craps, Prophecy knows about it. She knows everything goes on here.’ The little man leaned towards the hatch. ‘Don’t yuh, Prophecy?’

  ‘Yuh shut yer bleedin’ face, Alfie.’ She moved a card, slowly and with deliberation, without looking up. After that there was silence as though the expenditure of that amount of energy was enough for the day.

  I finished my beer and went across the road to the wash-house. The men’s section had a wash-basin, lavatory and shower. Flies crawled on the bare concrete. But it was quite clean, and though the water from the tank on the roof was almost too hot to stand under, I felt a lot fresher when I returned to the hotel. The woman called Prophecy was still sitting with the cards laid out and the whisky beside her. ‘Mind if I join you?’ I asked.

  ‘Please yerself.’ The beady eyes in the sun-wrinkled face watched me curiously as I pulled up a chair and sat down facing her. ‘Fresh out from the Old Country, arntyuh?’ And when I nodded, she said, ‘Thought so. And you’re looking for Wolli – yuh a mining man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She turned up a red ten, placed it slowly on the jack of spades and moved across four cards headed by the nine of clubs. ‘Yuh brought me luck that time. Yuh reckon you’re a lucky man?’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed it,’ I said.

  She looked at me sharply. ‘Golden Soak never had no luck – not since I come to live in this dump.’ I stared at her and she gave her cackling laugh. ‘Yuh like me to tell your fortune?’ The cackling ended in a smoker’s cough. ‘No, yuh wouldn’t, would yuh? They don’t call me Prophecy for nuthin’. I might be too right, eh?’ Her eyes watched me, sharp as a bird’s. ‘Yuh don’t want Wolli. Wolli’s a bum. It’s that gin sister of his you want. She got second sight where gold’s concerned.’ And then she was telling me how this aborigine girl had found gold on a claim she’d pegged over towards Bamboo Springs. ‘Set me up for life, she did. Better’n a dowser any day. Yuh go and see Little Brighteyes. Yuh won’t get any sense out of Wolli.’

  Talking to Prophecy was like panning for gold in the muddy waters of a creek in spate. Her real name was Felicity Clark. She had been born in Leytonstone, north-east London, and had come out to Australia with her husband in 1946. He had been badly shot up in the battle for the Falaise Gap and doctors advised him to move to a drier climate. ‘So we picked on the Bar and Christ that was dry enough. The air was so thin Nobby couldn’t hardly breathe in the dry with half his lung shot away.’ He had died five years ago leaving her with a Land-Rover and a caravan and not much else. ‘A fella don’t make his fortune working on the roads, an’ all the dust – it’s a wonder he lasted as long as he did.’

  From Marble Bar they had moved to Nullagine and when he wasn’t driving his grader he had spent his time fossicking around old prospects. ‘Always reckoned he’d strike it lucky one day. Might’ve done, too, if he’d lived. Knew a lot Nobby did, and when he kicked the bucket I just sort of carried on, living bush and pegging the odd claim.’ She had a small pension and when Wolli had gone into trouble, stealing tools from a mining outfit up near Bonnie Creek, she had taken his sister Martha to live with her in the caravan. ‘Reck’n it was the best thing I ever done. She knew things about this country I’d never’ve nutted out for myself –’bout plants an’ animals an’ how to live bush. Never knew a girl with such sharp eyes, and then by Jesus if she doesn’t spot the glitter on a claim of mine. I’d never’ve seen it meself, not in a million years. But she spotted it. That’s when I began calling her Little Brighteyes. Wouldn’t take any money, not a penny, but she’s got a bangle I bet no other gin’s got from Darwin right down to Esperance.’

  All this was mixed up with a spate of gossip about local people and their affairs. She forgot about the cards. She even forgot about her drink. I was somebody new to whom she could tell her story all over again. And I was fresh out from England. I think that was important to her. She wasn’t homesick. She had been out here too long. But there was an undercurrent of nostalgia. And I sat there and let her words wash over me, remembering what I thought was relevant as I drank another beer and had some food. Then, when I had finished my steak and chips, she said, ‘Okay, we’ll go and see if Little Brighteyes is home. She’s shacked up with a man from Grafton Downs, so weekdays she don’t know what to do with herself.’ And she added, ‘Martha can tell you a thing or two about Golden Soak. But she won’t go near the place, not her – not even for Wolli.’

  ‘How did you know I was interested in Golden Soak?’ I asked her.

  She had got to her feet and she stood looking down at me, a big, tough woman, her eyes bright as beads. ‘Emilio was delivering stuff here coupla days back. Wasn’t it you that wired Ed Garrety’s girl to meet you?’ She was smiling, the creases in her dark face deepening. ‘There ain’t much to talk about here in Nullag
ine, an’ yuh being a mining man – bush telegraph you might say. Well, yuh gonna sit on your arse there all day?’ And she turned and strode out into the sunlight, moving with a gipsy swing to her skirt and light on her feet despite her bulk.

  Looking back on it, I am reminded of Big Bill Garrety’s postscript to the discovery of Golden Soak – the beginning of all my troubles. That day was the beginning of my troubles, and it was the gipsy woman Prophecy who was the cause of it. Whether she had the gift of second sight or not I don’t know, but she was like a witch, and within twenty-four hours, riding the broomstick of her curiosity, I had become so caught up in the past of Jarra Jarra that nothing else has seemed to matter very much since then.

  ‘Your name’s Alec Falls, right?’

  I nodded, the sun beating down on my bare head, the dry air breathless.

  ‘Then we’ll go to the post office first.’ She turned to the left, towards the petrol pump which was backed by a general store. ‘There’s a telegram for you. Don’t reckon it’ll have gone out yet.’

  The telegram was from Kadek and had been despatched from Kalgoorlie: NEED YOUR ADVICE MINING DEAL. FEE AND EXPENSES BUT ESSENTIAL YOU ARRIVE HERE MONDAY MORNING. CONTACT CHRIS CULPIN PALACE BAR. I Stood there for a moment, considering it. ‘Well?’ Prophecy asked. ‘You heading straight for Kalgoorlie or you wanta see Wolli’s sister first?’

  It was now Thursday. ‘I’ll hitch a ride in the morning,’ I said. ‘But it’s Wolli I want to see.’

  She nodded and crossed the road to a track that led up behind the wash-house. We found the black woman stretched out on a bed on the verandah of a dilapidated corrugated iron house halfway up the hill. She was small and bony, jet black, with strong hands and very thin wrists and breasts that sagged under the bright cotton shift that was all she seemed to be wearing. In repose her face was ugly, the nose broad over a wide, big-lipped mouth, the brow so low that she looked as though she had been dropped on her head as a child. She got up from her chair on the verandah, a broad smile of welcome, and with the smile her whole face seemed to light up, the quickness of her movements suggesting extraordinary vitality, her whole body instantly and intensely alive. And those big dark eyes of hers bright with pleasure.