Watching the Climbers on the Mountain

by Miller, Alex

  watching

  the

  climbers

  on the

  mountain

  Alex Miller is twice winner of Australia’s premier literary prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, first in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He is also an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game. His fifth novel, Conditions of Faith, won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the 2001 New South Wales Premier’s Awards. In 2011 he won this award a second time with Lovesong. Lovesong also won the People’s Choice Award in the New South Wales Premier’s Awards, the Age Book of the Year Award and the Age Fiction Prize for 2011. In 2007 Landscape of Farewell was published to wide critical acclaim and in 2008 won the Chinese Annual Foreign Novels 21st Century Award for Best Novel and the Manning Clark Medal for an outstanding contribution to Australian cultural life. It was also short-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the ALS Gold Medal and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Alex is published internationally and widely in translation. Autumn Laing, his tenth novel, was published to wide acclaim in 2011.

  www.alexmiller.com.au

  watching

  the

  climbers

  on the

  mountain

  ALEX MILLER

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2012

  First published by Pan Books (Australia) Pty Limited in 1988

  Copyright © Alex Miller 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

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  ISBN 978 1 74331 109 7

  Internal design by Lisa White

  Set in 10.5/16 pt Minion Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed and bound in Australia by SOS Print + Media Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR STEPHANIE AND ROSS

  Contents

  part one

  one

  two

  three

  four

  part two

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  part one

  one

  A small Queensland cattle station during the height of summer is a place where events that are quite out of the ordinary may sometimes occur. There is, at that time of the year in such places, an enforced dislocation of the regular rhythms of daily life. The sense of isolation deepens with the coming of the season of storms and the intensification of the heat. In addition to distance there is the problem of periodically impassable roads. The herd of beef cattle is better left to its own devices until the autumn mustering, and so the occupants of the station have nothing to do. Or at least they must make an extra special effort to do something because—except for the small everyday chores the very repetition of which tends to emphasise the monotony of life—there is nothing that must be done.

  There is a cattle station in the Central Highlands of Queensland where a few years ago an event took place which shocked the local community and for which there seemed at the time to be no rational explanation. The people involved in this tragedy were a young stockman, the owner/manager of the station and his wife, together with their two children, a boy aged eleven and a girl aged thirteen.

  The stockman was Robert Crofts, an immigrant from England. He was a glutton for hard work and since his arrival the area around the homestead had been greatly smartened up. Where there had been a haphazard pile of branches and logs overgrown with rank burrs and blackberry, which had served as the wood heap, there was now a neat lean-to stacked to its roofline with sawn, chopped and size-graded fuel to feed the open fire on frosty winter evenings. A regularly slashed path through the horehound led from this shelter to the rear entrance of the homestead garden. When he was not working, the stockman would often sit for hours on the bank of the creek and simply watch the clear water flowing past. The creek lay at the bottom of deep precipitous banks and, although the homestead was not more than fifty metres from it, the water could not be seen from the verandah. The water’s edge was an especially pleasant place on a hot day. Overhung by the great branches of the river gums and below the level of the heated plain the clear stream contained numerous fish: perch, silver and black bream, and great slimy catfish which were nevertheless good to eat. Many species of birds lived near the surface of the water and others visited it daily. Once a watchful python eased its olive coils through the creamy branches of the overhanging paperbarks nearby.

  The stockman would sit here by the water while the setting summer sun flared overhead, until he was called to the evening meal. Being the only full-time hired hand on the place he took his meals with the family. On these occasions he was silent unless questioned directly and he never attempted to share his thoughts with them. At first they teased him about his shyness but soon recognised that it was something more than this. There was a closed solitariness about him that was not natural in a young man. He brought this solitariness with him. It was deeper than theirs—it had nothing to do with geography—and they hadn’t expected it. Robert Crofts was also very beautiful. His body was strong and well-muscled, he was slim and upright and his movements were finely coordinated. His rather Germanic features were slightly elongated and his lips were full and red. In the expression of his eyes, which were a deep and luminous brown, there seemed forever to be an observation on his surroundings that he could not be brought to utter.

  His beauty and his aloofness disturbed the equilibrium of the Rankin family. His arrival was an event of some moment on this lonely station and each of the family in their own way sought to draw him to their particular world—with the exception of the young boy, Alistair, who stood determinedly apart from the newcomer from the very beginning. Without ever actively opposing them, indeed often acquiescing in whatever they might suggest, the stockman nevertheless for a long time offered a resistance to the efforts of the members of the family to involve him in their lives—his shield was his calm politeness. He moved about in their familiar world, observing it with unfamiliar eyes; and quietly, industriously he slowly rearranged it.

  At fifty-six Ward Rankin, the owner and manager of the station, was a disappointed man and was easily aroused to extremes of irritation and even—especially in his dealings with the animals—to outbursts of violence. But he was not predictable in this and could be gracious, even charming, so that his family treated him with caution, forever hoping for the best. He stayed indoors as much as possible and loathed the work of the station, doing the minimum needed to keep the place going. He was a short brittle man, nervous, well-read, priding himself on his civilised habits. An only son, for many years he had managed the property for his aged mother. It was not what he had intende
d for himself. He had wished to travel and to study in the old centres of European learning, but when his father died there had been no one else to take care of the station and, as it was his patrimony, Rankin had stayed, putting off his plans one year after another. He was forty-one by the time his mother died. A year or two before this he had married Ida Sturgiss, a girl from a neighbouring station who had volunteered to help out. She was eighteen. A few months later their first child, Janet, was born. Eighteen months after Janet came Alistair. Ward Rankin never got away from the station and with time he grew to resent the circumstances that bound him to it.

  During the past few months he had come to view the hardworking efficiency of Robert Crofts with increasing irritation and hardly ever let an opportunity go by without offering a disparaging comment on it. When Crofts had been on the station for six months and his latest self-imposed task was to clean up the generations of accumulated rubbish at the horseshoeing area, Ward Rankin said to him—without any preamble, so that the children around the dinner table looked at their father in fear—‘If you must do something useful why don’t you shoot Julia’s bloody foal!’ And with that he got up and left the dining room.

  A thin haze of mist from the creek hung in the still air among the dark lime trees when Robert Crofts emerged next morning from the bare fibro hut that was his living quarters. He carried the high-powered .303 rifle used for shooting brumbies. He walked past the silent dogs chained to their trees and went into the machinery shed. The house too was silent, its occupants asleep. In the windless quiet of the dawn hour the sound of the creek could be heard. Inside the shed the stockman clamped bullets in the bench-vice and carefully sawed their points off so that they would flatten on impact and cause a maximum of damage to the target. This practice had been ordered by Rankin—who was strangely frugal in such matters—and who would be scathing in his reaction if the stockman were to use more than one bullet to accomplish his task. Rankin’s severe attitude seemed to act as a challenge to the stockman, goading him to strive for perfection in everything he did. His one objective appeared to be to serve Rankin diligently. Riding the night horse and with the rifle slung over his shoulder he went slowly through the early morning towards the horse paddock where he hoped to find the mare, Julia, and her foal. The mare was Rankin’s most useful stockhorse but had been rendered temporarily useless through getting into foal by a brumby stallion that had jumped the horse paddock fence almost a year since—an intrusion only made possible by the poorly maintained state of the fence.

  A few hundred metres beyond the homestead Crofts reached the edge of the lime trees and emerged onto the perimeter of a grassy plain from which the station’s setting could be viewed. Beyond the plain, almost entirely encircling the valley and more than five kilometres distant, basalt-topped ranges rose into the pink dawn from the dark mantle of an ironbark forest. They were like the ramparts of an ancient city, their silent fortress walls scarred with countless deep ravines, weathered into stranger shapes than anyone would invent.

  The stockman reined in under a tree and patiently surveyed the line of the scrub to his right. He waited. Half an hour later horses emerged from the trees and began cropping their way out onto the plain. He dismounted and started to stalk them, keeping the limes and stringybarks between himself and them. But he had not counted on a family of wild pigs that were camped round the delicious supply of fallen limes. They dashed screaming from him. The horses were alarmed at once, keeping their distance and snorting with suspicion at his stealthy intrusion. The stockman realised now that he should have driven them openly into the yards in the normal way and drafted off the foal there. He could see the foal clearly enough, however, peeping around the protective shoulder of its mother. He steadied the rifle against the trunk of a stringybark and looked along the sights. The foal’s head was a hittable target. Why not pull the trigger? . . . He fired and the powerful explosion drove him backwards. The fearful noise roared and echoed through the trees and across the plain, sending the horses racing for the back fence. A cloud of fine dust rose up into the first rays of the sun that slanted through the trees.

  •

  Robert Crofts had unsaddled the night horse and hung the gear on its rack in the shed. He was on the point of returning to his quarters when a voice suddenly said, ‘Did you have any luck?’

  He had been aware of the sound of someone walking towards the shed but it had not registered with him until Ida Rankin asked her question. She had been collecting down at the hen run beyond his hut and her hands were filled with warm brown eggs.

  ‘You were very quick,’ she said. On going out she had tucked her dress up high around her thighs to avoid the dewy weeds that grew rankly along either side of the track. When she saw Crofts she had shaken out the folds—one tuck had remained caught up, like an imitation of a toga. Her well-shaped legs were tanned and smooth.

  ‘You should cut the weeds here too,’ she said and laughed lightly, pleasantly conscious of his attention.

  He gazed beyond her now, along the path that led to his hut and to the hen run, and beyond that to the rubbish dump. ‘I’ll do it today,’ he said.

  ‘And did you shoot the foal?’ she asked again.

  ‘No,’ he said uneasily. ‘I missed her.’

  She sounded sympathetic. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it?’

  His gaze focused on her and for the first time their eyes met. He hesitated then said, ‘Not for the foal anyway.’ A slight squint in her eyes gave her strong handsome features a point of fascination, as if the physical misalignment were reflecting an uncertainty in her thoughts, which she might voice at any moment. The sounds of the morning suddenly rushed in on them. An insane screeching of cockatoos shook the trees over their heads. They both looked down at the eggs in her upturned palms. The undercurrent of feeling between them had left in its wake a slight awkwardness. She smiled and turned and left him standing there. He watched her walk towards the house.

  Except for the subdued click and scrape of cutlery on china, breakfast proceeded silently. The news that the stockman had shot his favourite mare through the shank had been received by Ward Rankin half an hour earlier with a restrained raising of his eyebrows and a slight shake of his head. He had not spoken since. He ate his bacon delicately, absorbed by the technical precision of the task, his knife making repeated, evenly spaced, snicking sounds against his plate. Ida Rankin glanced at him from time to time. Each forkful he raised to his mouth bore an equal measure of egg and bacon. Without fixing directly on anyone, his gaze would make a rapid survey of the table every few moments and when the children were on the point of finishing their meal he paused, his fork suspended, apparently listening for something.

  His wife looked at him and then at her children. ‘You can go and get your work ready,’ she said to them. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’

  And with that the station owner resumed eating his breakfast. The three of them were left at the table, and when Ida Rankin went to fetch coffee from the kitchen only the stockman and his boss remained.

  Ward Rankin wiped his mouth with his white napkin and carefully arranged his plate squarely before him, a procedure that occupied him for a surprising length of time, as if he were unwilling to bring this moment to a conclusion. When he was ready he sat back and looked directly at Robert Crofts, staring at him steadily until at last the stockman was forced to meet his eyes. It was not certain then whether Rankin’s lips formed themselves into a sneer or whether he were simply trying to dislodge a remnant of bacon from a tooth. At any rate he waited longer than necessary before speaking, and when he did speak he emphasised each word, not shifting his gaze from the young man’s for a second. ‘Get the horses into the yard,’ he said.

  He waited until the stockman was in the doorway before adding, ‘Wait there for me.’

  The sun laid a shimmering haze over the yards as the mob of restless horses churned the fine dust into the air. The stockman observed their quarrelling, wait
ing more than an hour before Rankin’s jeep rattled up. An examination of the mare’s foreleg revealed that the bullet had missed the great cannon bone and had passed cleanly through the muscle an inch or so above the delicate joint formed by the sesamoid bones. Rankin said nothing. He applied Stockholm tar liberally to the wound and instructed the stockman to turn the horses out.

  The two men stood and watched the mare limp off behind the scattering mob, her impatient foal darting ahead of her. Now that she was out of action anyway, Rankin had decided that she may as well rear the foal.

  The yards were empty but the two men continued to stand there facing the open gate and the grove of limes in the paddock until the stillness had arranged itself around them again. The morning was settling into silence. Beyond the deep channel of the creek and far out on the silver plain the baleful lament of the crows was drawing the day forward.

  Rankin moved away a few paces then turned and faced the stockman. Holding a cigarette between the second and third fingers of his left hand, and in his right hand an old-fashioned brass lighter (it was highly polished and caught the sun, the solder at its joints worn almost through with years of regular use) he examined the young man. Rankin did not light the cigarette but held it and the lighter poised in front of him. He was agitated and his pale eyes were watering, glinting sharply from under the brim of his hat. He moved again until he was almost directly behind the stockman. Only then, when Robert Crofts turned to face him, did he say sharply, ‘This is another case of you wavering! Isn’t it? Dithering about instead of doing the job cleanly when it’s something important!’

  He stopped speaking. This was not what he wished to say.

  Before the stockman could respond Rankin made an angry dismissive gesture and turned away. He walked quickly to where his jeep was parked. Before climbing into the vehicle Rankin looked back and, seeing the young man still standing in the middle of the empty yard, he shouted mockingly, ‘Why don’t you go and get on with your cleaning up!’