The wind rent a gap in the cloud and let moonlight fall on the path of the boys on the last crest before Mary Smokes Creek. The clouds closed and the land was dark and the wild boys were gone. I should have gone to them, he thought. A light came on over his shoulder in the kitchen. He crept back inside unnoticed.
IV
GREY WOKE EARLY THE NEXT DAY AND HIS GRANDMOTHER was sitting in a wicker chair by the stove. She slept no more than four hours in any night. Only her eyes shifted when she addressed her son-in-law. She told him to go into town to buy food, so she might go about the task of feeding his children.
Bill North said she could come and cook if she was determined to, but she was not to stay in the house. The old woman took no notice. And Grey watched his father turn his eyes to the floor. It was the same betrayal of guilt he had read in his father’s eyes at the funeral and days before at the hospital. The atmosphere in the house was taut with a final accusation that was never made …
GREY’S MOTHER AND father had lived apart beneath a common roof. Michael Finnain had insisted on the marriage after his daughter fell pregnant, despite the mother’s protests. “Even our girl must own her actions,” he said pitifully. “The child will be born and the two married, though it breaks my heart to lose her.’ In marriage, Irene had found faith consoling; she recalled her soft-spoken father’s admissions of the inevitability of sin and the need to accept original guilt. It made her load easier to bear, to think she was not paying for some extraordinary mistake that was hers alone. She prayed for forgiveness and forbearance before her icon cards of St. Magdalene and St. Pelagia …
At fifteen she had kissed a boy she came to detest. She wanted to eradicate the stain. Bill North saw her standing on the road in front of school in the rain with her books over her head. He drove her home in his truck. She felt important and romantic, and the next Friday afternoon Grey was conceived in the cabin of Bill North’s truck at the edge of Lake Wivenhoe. Clouds floated along the water that evening while the young man lay beside her asleep with a half bottle of whisky still in his hand. A small timber row boat was pulled off its anchor and drifting near Cormorant Bay. Irene Finnain leant on the windowsill and watched the boat and cried.
Her father had taught her to speak Irish. She would have amazed her old aunts in that distant country she would never see. She played Bach’s preludes and fugues and sang the canticles of Hildegard von Bingen. An Ursuline nun who trained in music at the Brisbane Conservatorium had taught her. Sister Marie Hauswald said no one in Mary Smokes knew how well the girl’s voice carried the great prayers. When she married she rode with her piano and books in the back of Bill North’s truck to her new house beyond the southern edge of town and every young hope she had in the world beyond vanished into the country’s great emptiness.
She did her best to be a dutiful wife. To counter his feelings of inferiority, Bill North told her that their marriage and the child had kept him from a life he intended, though he could give no shape to that envisioned life; only that in it he was free from all duty. He spent his spare hours with boys from the railway. Most nights he saw no reason to come home early, or at all.
Grey had often sat up with his mother who waited by a cold plate of dinner. She would send him to bed before midnight. Then he would sit in the doorway of his room, listening to her praying until her husband returned.
Grey would not sleep if he heard her crying. He would remain in the corridor and if she saw him he would go to her and she would not send him to bed again. One night she wiped her eyes and turned down her icon lamp and took his hand and told him about heaven. She made it sound like a palace in the sky with a glass floor, so you could look down and watch over the ones you loved. “Will Bill go to heaven?”–“ Yes,” she said. She said everyone would be changed in heaven, so they were fit for it. They would even change in appearance. He said he did not want her to change; he asked how he would recognize her if she changed so much. And the pretty girl of twenty-two smiled, “You’ll know me. You’ll know me by the things I say.”
“Were you praying for me again?’ Bill asked when he returned that hour and found her sitting in a chair beside the Black Madonna.
His wife turned away from him.
“Ah, you were. That’s why I’m home. Your God came and pulled me by the ear. You must be a favourite of His.’ He lit a cigarette and sat down in the dark. “I was just about to take from Molly Small the thing that you can’t give me. A slut she may be, but she sympathises. She’s a warm woman, where others are cold as fish.’ He began undressing and throwing his clothes over a chair. “He’s spiteful your God that doesn’t exist. You must be the most chaste girl that was ever knocked up at fifteen. Molly thinks so. Well, now He’s got you all to himself.’
Grey lay awake and listening.
Bill North left his food untouched in order to mock his wife’s sense of duty. He resented her for making herself a martyr on his account.
He believed a racehorse might make him the wealth that some-mysterious-how would free him. He went to sales and bought the cheapest yearlings in the hope that one would be lucky–he could give countless stories of unpredicted success that had arrived on other men. He spent the family’s money on horse feed, veterinary bills and carriage to district races. And what was left he drank. He squandered his wife’s dowry and borrowed another two-and-a-half thousand dollars from his father-in-law that was never repaid. He bought a colt with good bloodlines with Stan Eccleston, who was living with a black woman next door. But Eccleston sold his share to August Tanner and left town for reasons no one knew and took work dropping bores in the far northwest of the state. Tanner was a horse dealer–in the phonebook he listed himself under “bloodstock agent”–but rumour said he sold whisky, black girls and guns as often as horses. Tanner and Bill North made poor partners and the horse was soon sold.
Bill North bought more than a dozen horses through Tanner, but none worked out, and finally he was convinced that Tanner had been cheating him for years, passing off horses he knew were faulty. One of the most promising had fallen dead in the paddock. Tanner blamed a snakebite that could not be found.
The only visitors to the house were Bill North’s railways friends and a few local hands and horse workers who came for cards and drink. When they came Irene would sit on the back steps with Grey and name the constellations, though the boy’s amblyopia meant he could not bring them into focus; else she would sing “Fhir a’ Bhàta” or “O virga ac diadema,” and she would not go back inside until the house was empty.
Bill North’s friends teased him jealously about his pretty wife. One night a half-caste ringer made a joke regarding her and a hand of cards and Bill North broke the man’s jaw and dragged him onto the road.
IRENE NORTH TRIED to teach her son the piano but he had no aptitude. He was sorry that this saddened her. “Perhaps when you’re older,” she hoped. And Grey nodded. He promised when he was older he would learn to play the piano, and even to speak Irish as she did. Occasionally she taught him a word or phrase, and her husband mocked her for teaching his son a language that was dying in its own tiny country half a world away.
Irene’s consolations were her son and prayer, and walks on car tracks over the plain and on foot tracks she made herself through woodland. She collected wild flowering herbs in the rock outcrops that grew in the shade of the big grey gums. She sat on one that was fallen and watched the wind turning over the dry understorey leaves one by one, as though they were politely stepping into Mary Smokes Creek …
V
IN THE EVENING BILL NORTH LEFT FOR WORK AT HELIDON freight depot. Grey’s grandmother resumed her station in the wicker chair by the stove fire.
“What on earth are you pacing about the place for, boy?”
Grey shook his head.
“Something’s troubling you?”
His sister cried. His grandmother rose and went to her and rocked her to sleep. Grey waited. He poked the coals in the stove with a long splinter of cypress pi
ne. The old woman sat heavily back down in the chair and wrapped a grey shawl around her shoulders.
“Why did my mother die?”
“Many women died in childbirth in my day.”
But a calendar on the wall said the year was 1985 and Grey knew that number was a talisman against such disasters as death in childbirth.
“Bill said it was her heart.”
“Toxemia we called it when I was nursing in the war.”
And Grey thought that this word sounded more like a cause of death.
“Irene had it when you were born too. She survived it then. It was not so severe. But we all knew she must never fall pregnant again.”
“Then why–?”
The old woman had gathered momentum now and her scruples fell away.
“Because your father could not keep his hands off her. Because his love was insufficient. Like a dog that plays with a kitten until it’s dead, he had to maul her though it meant it would kill her. And then he left her … he left her all alone. He should have had her in the city already. He should have been home. He should have left you home with her too.”
The boy’s eyes fell to the floor. He remembered the blood on the floorboards; how he could very nearly carry her; the hour he had taken to walk home from school that day …
“But you were not to know.”
IN THE NIGHT he knelt on his bed and faced the open window. He looked up at the stars and prayed to God that his mother would be returned to him, and this time he would be her keeper. I will stand between her and the world, if only You will trust her to me.
Grey prayed with tears in his eyes and finally the stars seemed to throb and the throbbing was in his heart and then, worn out with grief and the impossible distances out the window, he fell on his bed and slept.
VI
WITH HIS MOTHER GONE GREY KNEW HE DID NOT BELONG to any family. So his thoughts turned to the wild boys of town, who could be found at any hour of night, for they had no careful guardians.
He had watched them every night since his mother’s death, walking through land that was not theirs by any title, yet they claimed it as the last ones awake when the dark enfeebled all man’s claims.
Grey imagined the nights of the wild boys charged with secret meaning. Such was their deliberateness in walking to the water, away from the world. So when all the lights in the house were out and his sister had stopped crying, Grey stepped quietly out of his room and buttoned his duffel coat and left by the back door.
THE SKY WAS high and cloudless and winter bright. The galaxy flowed from the southeast like a lambent river. He came to his back fence. The bent iron gate was rusted tight to its hinges. He put the toes of his canvas boots in the mesh and leapt into Eccleston’s. He walked away from the road, northwest across shot-blade wheat and yellow grass toward the house where smoke was unravelling from the chimney. Eccleston’s hairy, long-unridden Appaloosa followed him along the fenceline. White moths rose from the grass at every footfall.
He crawled through a barbwire fence and climbed the high flight of stairs at the back of the house. He saw the Eccleston boy raise the glass of a kerosene lamp, turn up the wick and light it. Eccleston’s step bore heavy on the floorboards, but there were no others in the house to wake at the creaking of the boards. The boy sat the lamp on the kitchen table and took a short-brimmed angler’s hat from a nail in the wall and pulled his duffel coat over his shoulders against the wind that rushed through the open doors. Grey knocked on a wallboard.
“North!”
The boys knew each other, as all boys did in the town, though they had never been friends. Gordon Eccleston was five years older than Grey. And Grey had always been shy, a loner, a mother’s boy …
Eccleston was rarely at school. He collected wild limes and sold them to the Windmill Fruit Market till he could pay for a sheath knife and a set of rabbit traps. Once he had trapped a dingo in the mountains and brought it down to fight boys’ dogs for bets. He scoured the country for sound windthrow and chipped off burls to sell to district wood turners. These were the visible ways he remained alive.
Eccleston’s father was a good horseman. He had taught his son how to ride and how to work cattle. But the lessons were cut short when the man left town. The boy’s mother, so it was said, was living in the ashes with some remnants of her people near the reserve at Cherbourg. It may have been calumny that said the boy’s father had staked his own life on the turn of a card, and that this was why he was gone northwest, also that the boy was not truly the man’s son, also that his Aboriginal mother’s people had tried to kill him at birth for the trouble he might bring them.
Grey’s mother had known the boy better than he. She spoke to young Eccleston on her walks–he was often on the river and in the woods. The first time she saw him she was walking along the burn-off at Mary Smokes Creek flat that was also the stock route. She came to a smoking van and tethered horse and saw a small half-caste child, wild-eyed and face caked with mud. He half-hid behind the van and watched her come. She asked him who he was and where he came from, but he remained silent and stared at her with the complicit curiosity and fear of a wild animal. She stayed with him until evening, when the sound of cattle treading on stick came through the scrub into the clearing.
The drovers who tailed the cattle found a spider-thin girl in a calico dress at their camp, barely showing the six months she had been with child, and holding the filthy hand of the half-caste boy who a week before had shown up at their fire just as unannounced as she did now. The drovers told her they did not know who the boy was or where he had come from or even his name. He had just taken to following them like a dog. Their woman meant to drive him in to the police that day, but he had run off and hidden in the woods, and she had gone to town without him. They told Irene North she was welcome to him, then watched her lead the boy across the burn-off in a spitting of rain that raised clouds from the ash on the ground.
She did not give the boy over to the police but to the only Aborigine she knew, Possum Gallanani, who lived on the other side of the creek, and was then building horse yards for Stan Eccleston. Possum took one look at the boy and sighed and claimed to know him and claimed the boy belonged to his “cousin,” Beatrice. He said he would ask his boss for a car to go get her. He said the boss would give it. The next morning the wiry-haired black woman appeared on the Norths’ doorstep. And that night woman and child were living next door.
Grey’s mother did not tell the authorities when finally the boy was left alone. She had witnessed the bleak humanity that the government delivered to the half-caste children of the district. After Stan Eccleston left, she and one itinerant nun made sure the boy was alive. Irene would have taken him in at dinner, only she was afraid of his possible influence on Grey. She was ashamed of her fear, especially when her husband caught her taking a slice of corned brisket to the Eccleston house and warned her it was not his duty to feed the delinquent black boys of the country. Once Grey had seen his mother stroke the Eccleston boy’s head …
Now he stood in the house he was never allowed to visit. A blue bitch walked across the kitchen to retrieve a rotten shin bone from a cardboard box. The wind fluted through the chimney flue. Sawdust and ash were scattered at the base of the potbelly stove. Leaning against the stove was a chair with two sawn-off legs.
Eccleston saw Grey staring at the chair and smiled.
“Last night got cold.”
THEY SAT AT the top of the backstairs.
“Smoke?”
Grey nodded and Eccleston lit two cigarettes at his lamp. The younger boy drew hard and choked and Eccleston smiled.
He said they would go to light a fire on the creek tonight. Despite the season the creek was running with rain fallen in the west. In only a day it would be winter-still again.
They sat in silence until seventeen-year-old Nyall Thiebaud arrived in a station wagon with his younger brother Matt.
Nyall came holding a bandaged hand before his face.
“
Caught a splinter the size of a butter knife,” he said.
“They milled late tonight,” said Eccleston.
Nyall shook his head.
“I bin at the hospital. Severed an artry. Went to the bone.”
Eccleston sucked his teeth.
In his good hand Nyall held a bottle.
“Finest Scotch whisky eight dollars can buy.”
“Good painkiller,” said Grey, quoting a man who came to his father’s card game.
Eccleston and Nyall agreed. Grey smiled and looked at his boots and spat off the stairs.
“This is Grey North. From next door.”
Eccleston pointed to the yellow cottage across the way.
“You’re the one whose mother died,” announced Matt Thiebaud.
Grey nodded.
Eccleston threw away his cigarette butt and furrowed his brow. Grey saw he had not known. Each fixed the other’s eyes. Grey nodded.
“Ah, hell,” Eccleston whispered. “Ah, hell,” until his whispers were silent.
Off the road and down the gravel drive came treading a long-gaited boy who Grey knew was Paul Offenbach–the way the boy pronounced his name would have been unrecognizable to his grandfather. Behind Offenbach waddled part-simple Raughrie Norman.
Offenbach indicated his companion with a flick of his hand.
“Look what I found on the road!”
Raughrie Norman’s strawberry-blond hair blew across his bespectacled face in the chill wind. His slightly prognathic jaw jutted with the excitement and frustration he felt among the boys, of wanting very much to speak and having nothing to say. Norman was shuffled between grades for English and Art at Mary Smokes School. His teachers were perpetually undecided on the question of where he was least awkward. Sometimes he attended the special school at Toowoomba, though mostly he wandered without purpose from class to class at the school in the town where he was born and would never leave.
The Mary Smokes Boys Page 2