She claimed she could see paths lit for her in the deepest corners of the woods. It was true she seemed to have a map and compass always in her mind, even in country she had not seen. She never became lost or frightened, no matter how far she walked, no matter how late. She knew how to follow the creeks and she knew by the shape of the country where they would lie, like one who had spent years there. She knew the stairways of granite and exposed tree roots in the mountains; the lie of lost and forgotten cemeteries; the wild mulberry bushes and wild orange trees where she harvested fruit in its season.
She would play truant from school and sit all day watching the clouds, else sit on Mary Smokes Creek from morning until dusk, calling birds to her hand. Some evenings there would be a phone call to the house to say she had been seen on a stretch of a man’s country, and Grey would drive to collect her. Then he would find her wending her inscrutable way through waves of hay and barley in the dusk, just like the lost simpleton people took her for. And in the night she and Grey would sit together on the splintering back stairs and watch the stars and listen to the wind jangling their half-fallen back fence and soughing in the eucalypts and she-oaks on Mary Smokes.
At school she stood in Grey’s shadow amidst the other sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys, only reluctantly parting with him to join children her own age when the bell rang for class. She waited faithfully each afternoon for him by the school gate. She would miss the bus rather than leave without him–causing them to have to walk home together.
A jesting rumour persisted that Irene was not Bill North’s daughter, but rather the daughter of the middle-aged Vietnamese cook at Mary Smokes’ Chinese restaurant. It was encouraged by the colour of Irene’s hair and the friendship she had struck up with Minh Quy’s daughter, Amy. The two loners had paired up and, once Grey had left school, they often played on the lawn beside the restaurant after class. Old Minh would give Irene dinner and sometimes there was enough for Grey.
Irene’s hair was black and her face ghostly pale. Her body remained excruciatingly thin even into her mid-teens. Grey guessed this last condition was due to the sicknesses she had suffered. Yet the curious thing about her appearance was not that she must ever bear the marks of infant frailty, but that at the same age her mother’s hair had been white-blonde and her skin olive in the ideal Australian fashion. Grandma Finnain said Irene showed Black Irish blood, a strain of old Celtic via Iberia, but when the girl misbehaved she recalled her Scottish grandfather dealing with a family of reviled Polish Jews from Minden, who for want of companions interbred with Chinamen. They were called Noschkes, and the old woman guessed North was an Anglicisation of that name … More than one lost language, more than one people and history flashed briefly in Irene: in her sharp Celtic tongue, and the deep and whispering Hebrew eyes that always seemed to be looking far away, from the border of this world into some other. In Grey, so far as he could see, these were mute, vanished.
THEIR FATHER DID not return to stay permanently at Mary Smokes for seven years, after his horse fell on his leg on the Dumaresq River. He had been working for cash and could claim no pension. He was forced to take up work at the Helidon railway again, with half the duties he had before and only a dozen hours’ work a week.
By this time Irene had made of Grey a father, brother and closest ally, and welcomed her father home as one would a distant and barely-recognisable uncle. Bill North did not recognize his daughter either–she had lost her infant manners, dictates of her once sickly body. Now, by turns, she was the most vivacious and most solemn of young girls.
Feeling he had lost something never properly valued in time of possession, Bill North tried on occasion to reclaim the small part of his daughter’s affections that had been his, but the attempts were in vain.
For feminine companionship and domestic service he married a divorcée, the daughter of an old man he once worked for called Teal. The woman worked as a waitress at Minh Quy’s restaurant. One night when collecting Irene, Grey brought his father along to put some food in his system to counter the drink. Bill North’s wife-to-be was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the back wall of the restaurant, staring into the small-town night.
Bill North and Angela Teal married in a registry office on the outskirts of the city. On the third night of their North Coast honeymoon the woman was shocked to discover they had run out of money. She drove in tears to her sister’s house in the city and did not return for days …
NOW GREY FELT pity for the poor lame man who sat in the living room in the dying afternoon light, staring out the window while the wife he did not love and who did not love him spent yet another weekend at her sister’s, the man asking his daughter, who indifferently refused, to come sit by him and talk.
THE NIGHT SKY was high and cloudless. Grey walked across the windblown stretch of grass and spare deadwood that he had walked since boyhood. Eccleston’s two barely-ridden horses, the smoky-blue gelding and old Appaloosa mare, walked along the roadside fenceline. Grey climbed the low hills and walked into the trees and stepped down the tallowwood roots to the bend in Mary Smokes Creek.
He sat down with the boys on the strip of sand and gravel. It was warm and there was light enough without a fire tonight. They sat in a vivid dark.
Matt Thiebaud told Eccleston about some country in the north that he could get them onto to shoot, where a couple of young blokes might make a living, at least for awhile before coming home. He said he was sick of working at the abattoir at Kilcoy and of fencing at Tiger Scrub with the boy called Jack Harry, who he said was as thick as the posts he strained wires to. He spoke through the rolled cigarette that he kept always intact in his mouth and squinted his pretty blue eyes. Grey was not listening. He squatted on the bank and watched the water purl around rocks and shake the stars. The water ran deep and fast around the bend, and faster over the gravel bar where Raughrie Norman stood.
Norman, who the boys called “Flagon,” fell fully-clothed from the bar into a deep pool. Eccleston hung his clothes in a tree up the bank and stepped in at the bend and Thiebaud went after him. Grey leant against the husk of a tree. He watched the boys with their heads beneath the last granite step of a waterfall. He hung his clothes on the husk and stepped in. The water had come from somewhere other than their warm night, from the high country of shattered rocks in the southwest, and he shivered at its touch.
The night ran on and the water ran faster and spilled over the rocks and timber and splashed the boys’ faces. The creek had broken its banks in a storm a week ago and scoured the country and the water tonight spilled into the newly cut rills.
Eccleston, Norman and Thiebaud crawled and swam to a downstream rock pool. A full moon scaled the eastern sky and illuminated the boys. Grey was alone. He swam upstream and sank into the pool beneath the cradling spotted gum root and rested his arms and let the water crash over him. He laughed to himself at this inconsequential, late-night-creek-swimming small-town life. At such times all thoughts of leaving or anything else belonging to that still-distant place called the future left him alone. The world still moved slowly at Mary Smokes Creek. At the creek you took in the infinite and nameless changes in the hours, and moving at the same speed as the earth there was not that whiplash of time and the death feeling that came with hours lost unwittingly in degrees of waking sleep. At Mary Smokes Creek there was time for everything, and no desire to do anything at all. For a year now Grey had taken what work there was in the country, a little horse work and shifts at Bizzell’s service station at the edge of town. And that was all he and his sister needed.
Thiebaud burst from the water. Grey had been quiet for too long and the boys covered him with arm-fulls of creek. He slid into the deepest hole. He knew that he and these boys owned the night as ever. They were the dramatis personæ of nothing and nowhere, and only so intangible as they were could they lay claim to so intangible a thing. And so they did.
The wind dried them on the walk home. By the time they got to Eccleston’s back fence al
l the joking had stopped. They had given in to tiredness and in tiredness to silence. Grey left the other three on their way to Eccleston’s house.
He climbed through the rusted barbwire and his father’s red bitch ran to his heel. She licked the creek off his shins and licked his canvas boots. The back door was unlocked and the windows were all open. He crept through the kitchen, careful not to wake his sister.
She sat awake before the Black Madonna and icon lamp. The tips of her fingers touched the glass.
She smiled. She did not care that he was late, only that finally he had come.
THEY WERE BOTH happy. It was deep summer and the long days barely passed; they were spent in a state of staid, balmy dreaming that was not real. There was nothing else to do tonight, nor all tomorrow. Grey’s next shift at Bizzell’s was three days away. His cold muscles were tired and gently aching from pushing against the current at the creek.
He showered and fell asleep beside his sister on their lounge chair, a cool wind from the mountains playing with the ragged veils of curtains in the living room.
II
GREY TOOK HIS 1958 FC HOLDEN TO COLLECT HIS SISTER from school. A storm moved swiftly across the plain. Nine inches of rain had fallen already that month and the season’s leafy green sorghum was spread across the land. The sorghum pushed hard against rotting wooden gates at the roadside. Telephone lines sagged as though burdened by the weight of the enormous bruising sky. Leaves sailed to the ground through shafts of golden light, borne upon the storm wind.
There was a bang like a rifle going off and the truck tilted. He had blown a tyre. He pulled off the road. He took his jack from the boot but realized he had leant his wheel brace to Matt Thiebaud. The sky began to drizzle. Then it was pouring. He sheltered at the back of the corrugated-iron Windmill Fruit Market. He took a dark-brown cigarette from a crushed box in the pocket of his jeans and reshaped it. He leant on a pile of blue crates with his back to the highway and smoked and watched the storm empty on sorghum and barley stubble.
When the best of the storm was passed he put the cigarette under his heel and set out walking.
SHE HAD WALKED along Banjalang Street in the rain while the town children ran for shelter. She crossed the box girder at the edge of town. Her hair was stuck to her face when he met her on the brink of the highway proper. The colour of her hair seemed like it should run like dye into her pale cold face. Her dirty, ill-fitting clothes clung to her bones.
She sighed deeply.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She took his arm.
SHE FELL BEHIND him. She pulled flowers from the Natal grass that grew along the edge of the highway and her hair blew about her face in the north wind. Dark-blue cloud was banked in the northeastern distance and lightning flashed and made the cloud a lantern. They met Grey’s truck and Irene stood by, watching the road and the rippling grass and the flashing clouds while Grey borrowed a wheel brace from an old ringer at the fruit market and changed the tyre.
A WOMAN WITH richly-dyed mauve hair and a swollen red face came charging out of their house when Grey and Irene were on the stairs.
“The restaurant opened twenty minutes ago,” said Angela Teal, tying her hair and scampering past them on her way to a night’s waitressing.
Grey stared out his bedroom window onto the rain-drenched country. The words “You must always look after me” came like pencils of light from that immense emptiness.
And he turned and saw she who had spoken them, standing in his doorway having showered and put on dry clothes. She came to his bed and knelt beside him and looked out the window. Grey smiled and patted down her hair. Then Irene smiled too.
THEY SAT BY the window eating melon cooled in an icebox and watching the claw of another northern storm grip the house.
The rain spattered hard on their iron roof and they shouted to be heard above it. The storm swept in gusts across the plain and emptied itself in wild flourishes across the green undulations that Grey would always call Eccleston’s, whoever held the deed. The rain flooded the gutters and soaked the veranda.
By half-past five the storm was spent and left gilded clouds in its wake.
Through the window Grey saw the houseyard was overrun with milk thistle and buffel grass. The white flowers of a lemon tree fell on the wasted fruit of fourteen winters. Honeysuckle and cat’s claw contended with the wild jasmine for dominance over the jangling fences. Paddymelon vine overran what were once garden beds. These domestic things that had grown wild belonged to the gently-eroding memory of Grey’s mother.
There were few things left on earth that recalled the first Irene North.
Her daughter rarely asked about her. Even the copper-tinged photographs Grey gave her were afforded no special place in her room. They were left in drawers and never viewed. The first Irene’s piano sat idly in the corner of the living room. Her daughter was too flighty to ever seriously sit down to it, and there was no one to teach her and, as she protested, the hammers and strings had decayed and only a few keys either side of middle C were not dead or hopelessly out of tune. Very rarely she played a melancholy melody of her own making on the white keys, a melody that recalled the old church music Grey heard late at night on the radio, attached to strange foreign names like Léonin and Josquin.
Grey kept a single, favourite photograph of his mother, sometimes in his wallet, sometimes in his bedroom drawer or the glovebox of his truck. Occasionally he would sit on his bed on a golden afternoon such as this, in quiet contemplation of the girl smiling out of his barely-remembered past, smiling that eyes-closed-into-crescents smile that made her irresistible. In the photograph she was standing with his father, newly married, in a cheap cotton dress and fleece-lined pink corduroy coat against the winter, looking every bit the child she was. The picture was taken six months before Grey’s birth. He tried to recognize his mother’s face.
Better than her face now he recalled her voice. Inconsequential phrases came most often to mind, these rather than what should have been the significant things she had said to him: worldly advice, declarations of love … Those must have been spoken, but were all forgotten. He remembered such things as a passing comment about his dirty hair, or a simple condescending joke of the kind that is shared between a mother and child … He remembered one winter afternoon when he had run off after school and not made it home until after dark. He had been lost in the woods. He did not yet know to follow the dry creeks and he had cried, not for fear but because his mother would be upset. At last he found his way home. Irene had searched the woods on the creek then returned to the house in case he was there. She had been about to set out in the dark when she heard his steps on the stairs. “It’s me,” he whimpered when he opened the back door. His mother wiped her tears and held him and smiled: “I know who you are, little boy.”
GREY AND HIS sister went to a wrought-iron bench beneath the stringybark in the yard. He dried the bench with an old shirt and they sat down. He rolled and lit a cigarette. Insects rose out of the grass into the golden light that clung fast to the trees and even to the air. The washed air meant a cool night. He did not want to go back inside. He was avoiding their father who would drink very gently and quietly by himself on his days off the railways now, drinking cheap whisky while Angela was at work or visited relatives in the city. Now that the rain had stopped, the man’s heavy presence could be felt within the walls, and Grey was eager for the energy of Eccleston and the boys. Mahony’s Boxing Troupe was in town tonight and Eccleston would fight.
“Please take me along.”
“It’s no good for you.”
But he did not want to leave her alone.
He went inside to tell his father they were going, and the man who was staring out his window and descending fast into the inarticulate final stage of afternoon drunkenness nodded and asked no questions.
III
HALFWAY TO TOWN WAS SOLITARY HILL AND THE DRIVE-IN movies, and Irene knelt backwards in the seat of Grey’s truck to see th
e Friday night reel alight.
“Can’t we go to the pictures?”
“Maybe later. Let’s see the fights first.”
“But I don’t like fights.”
“You said you wanted to come.”
She sighed.
“After the fights we’ll do something else,” Grey said.
“See the pictures?”
“Maybe.”
“Why maybe?”
“You don’t even watch them. You just fall asleep.”
She laughed. On another night she would not be dragged to the pictures.
“So we’ll go?”
“Maybe.”
THE BOXING TROUPE was set on an empty dirt lot behind the Railway Hotel. The scattered crowd only half-filled the lot. Grey picked out Matt Thiebaud, Raughrie Norman and Hart Bates. Bates was the younger brother of Rod Bates, the boy Eccleston fought on the night of the fires fourteen-years ago. He had taken to tagging along with Raughrie Norman since Norman began spending three days a week shovelling sawdust at the sawmill for a little less than a living.
Mahony banged his bass drum and called the last of his fighters up to the scaffold where Eccleston already stood beside a shirtless raw-boned boy in jeans. On the other side of the boy was a pot-bellied gas worker who looked more than sixty. Standing beside the challengers were Mahony’s fighters: a young Italian-looking boy; a toothless Aborigine of indeterminable age, who Mahony said had lost his last six fights; and a short, heavily muscled man with grey temples and tattoos that ran the lengths of his arms.
The Mary Smokes Boys Page 5