The Man on the Headland

by Kylie Tennant

  “And I’m buying the land and Fve got a right to say what I’m paying.”

  This haggling went on until the solicitor refused to take my instructions and I sacked him. Ernie promptly came in great triumph to say he’d hired him. “Seeing he’s mine he’m have to do what I tell him.” The land was sold for sixty-five pounds.

  Ernie was still incredulous about die price. The respect the town now showed him as a landowner who was very smart in a deal was a little quenched when someone broke into his house to search for the money. Ernie had to lock his door when he came into town and it made him uneasy.

  Roddy, who took great pleasure in planning and directing, took advantage of Ernie’s new status as a man of wealth. Ernie decided to build the house himself and we refused to let him unless he was paid to do so. We bought the gyprock and timber for the flooring, and my father, with great craft, for building materials were still on some kind of wartime ration, procured me some second-grade iron roofing. The great mahogany slabs, two inches thick, which formed the outer walls Ernie brought from the old barn.

  He began to chop down the tall paperbarks and dynamite out those that resisted. As a miner he loved dynamite. He had a bushman’s fear of trees about a house. Every time he cut down a tree there was a dramatic scene with myself as prima donna and Roddy and the baby as appreciative audience. Ernie took no notice. He went on clearing.

  The first summer, as though Dimandead had made a sudden bid against this new invasion, a fire leapt the creek and came so close to the house that one window cracked in the heat. Ernie fought the fire single-handed and when we arrived he was standing sooty with ash in his beard in a blackened desert with the house safe in the middle.

  After that he would “burn off’ every winter whether I liked it or not. There was one gaunt ring-barked tree which the birds used as a look-out post. Benison would watch them through binoculars. We came back one holiday and the tree was gone.

  “Ernie, you old devil,” I yelled, “you’ve cut down the tree!”

  “Fifteen years,” Ernie began, “she’s been on to me about diat tree. What an eyesore it was standing there ring-barked. And now it isn’t diere and she’s still not satisfied.” He had these sudden impulses to improve our corner while we were away. He would fence it. One year he put up a small lavatory but never got as far as the roof.

  Ernie never ceased to take pleasure in the shack. This took the form of lamenting how he had always meant to build himself a house there. Along we came and put up a house in the very place—cool in summer, warm in winter, protected from the westerlies and southerlies, which you couldn’t say for that house of Clara’s. “You don’t need to sweep that. All you have to do is open the door and the wind blows the dirt straight out the back. Open the door when the wind changes and it blows it straight out the front.” This chant of Ernie’s always concluded with his knocking out his pipe and looking up the chimney to remark how well it was drawing. What he was saying was: “I have given my friends a priceless gift and we are enjoying it together.”

  The chimney was his masterpiece, constructed of great rocks which he hoisted up and cemented into place. When I wailed that we should never have let Ernie build the house, it would kill him, Roddy replied, “He’s enjoying himself. Concentrate on being sorry for me.”

  Roddy was the unskilled labour going out at week-ends to hold up the ceiling or walls while Ernie hammered them into place. Not since Ernie drained the lake had he tackled anything that turned out such a great success. The system of Macgregor-gardens would have been equally successful had it not been for the birds and animals. The Rodd house, which was still standing when Benison and her brother were grown up, had two windows in the solid mahogany walls and a veranda later extended to provide extra sleeping space. We cooked over the open fire.

  While the house was going up Roddy would walk the seven miles from Laurieton on Friday evening, leaving me to cope with visitors and odd jobs. He would be holding up the ceiling like Atlas while Ernie hammered the nails. Then he would go surfing or they would declare a chess tournament or just sit in the sun. Once the rain was so heavy Ernie had to ferry Roddy back across the plains in the sulky, the dogs swimming in front, each in its separate ripple. Fine weather Roddy would go along the beach, surfing every now and then. We never knew if we would see him again because once, looking down on his favourite surfing place from the cliffs, he saw five sharks lying on the bottom of the clear water. It was a hot day and he was so indignant that he just waited till they began to move before he went in.

  The legend in Laurieton had been that Ernie was a shiftless hermit. Ernie performed miracles of toil. After the house was built he would say quietly that he was going to do “a bit of fencing up along the cliffs where old Baldy fell over”. This fencing included felling the trees, splitting them into fence-posts, digging holes, boring through the posts, straining the wires. The unfortunate Baldy was a carcass hanging in a tree at the foot of the cliff when we first came and the white skeleton little by little dropped to pieces until only the skull with curved horns remained. Finally all of Baldy was gone. Gradually the earth of Dimandead claimed whatever the sea did not wash away. One year all the sand had gone from the beach leaving black rock. “It’ll all be back,” Ernie prophesied, and next year this was so.

  The lagoon would be six feet deep, Then the following year it would be up to your ankles. But year by year the little plume of smoke would go up from the chimney Ernie built. Ernie would arrive for dinner and die chessboard and the demijohn of wine would be brought out. He would bring a pumpkin or a cabbage to add to the feast and draw up his chair with great appetite to my cooking. “Nothing like a stew. It curves round your ribs.” Or, “What I like is an underdone potato. Always like my potatoes with bones in them.”

  Ernie believed in the philosophy of ascetic excess. “I like a good gorge,” he said. “Take the blackfeller now. He only eats one sort of thing at a time. Once you’ve eaten enough lobsters you don’t want any more. The thing is to have enough. The blackfeller would eat fish until he didn’t want to see a fish again. Then he’d go inland and eat bunya-bunya nuts or remember the wild plums were ripe. When he’d had enough of those he’d go off and eat something else. That’s the way we ought to be. None of this business of eating a lot of different diings at once.”

  Almost before Benison could walk he had her on the back of Princess and would stride beside her holding her on. He would be off with her to show her some nest or haunt of animals. There were hares that came out at dusk in the dew. There were koala trees that only they knew of. Ernie claimed that if you wanted to study rare animals you ought to watch what the cats brought in. He had them trained to bring him anything they caught and bring it alive. Then he rewarded them. There was one cat on whose collecting instincts Ernie expanded. He told of the rare little creatures the cat found and brought to lay at his feet. “Little fellers I’d never come across myself. But the old cat found them. She’d sit and look at me when she brought them the way a mother cat looks when it brings its kitten a mouse. Never hurt them. Just picked them up in her mouth and brought them to me.” We were sceptical of Ernie’s collector cat. We did not like to say that it probably only brought him what it couldn’t eat itself. An occasional rare phalanger bestowed on Ernie was probably just dessert which the cat did not feel it wanted after a Jiearty meal, but Ernie would not believe this.

  By the time Benison was in her teens and an art student she was also a Nature bore. “What,” she would demand of some young man, “are you doing to protect the kangaroos in Queensland?” And without our noticing it Benison grew up in Ernie’s philosophy, which was suitable to an Australian bushman of the nineteenth century. God for Benison wore a grey flannel undershirt and looked on any kind of complaining or self-pity as unworthy, unless it was humorous and a ripple on the top of conversation. He valued patience and quiet.

  “Now why do you have to be rushing about?” Ernie would demand of me. “Look at Roddy, look at me lying in th
e sun. When you’re with experts like us who know how to laze you ought to profit by our example.”

  His generosity was not civilized. It was that of a native tribesman. He explained this by saying that he hadn’t got anything valuable. “It’s only when a man gets to owning a heap of stuff that he starts saying, ‘Hands off!’”

  There was one person who, knowing this reckless generosity of Ernie’s, suffered agonies of worry over the sale of the acres by the creek. This was Bert Bullen, Clara’s son; referred to by Ernie as “the nephew”. Because he had broken his arm at Dimandead he never passed exams, but became head waiter at the Journalists’ Club, which is a fine place to pick up tips on the stock exchange. Bert was saving to retire so that he could join Uncle at Dimandead. The place worked on him even at a distance. It was his mirage, beautiful and enticing. Bert now wrote desperately begging Uncle not to sell any more land. He had a picture of Dimandead flenched into building lots, each with a square box of house on it. If Uncle wanted money he only had to ask. That was what Ernie would never do. He would fend for himself even if he starved.

  Besides, he was rich now. He wrote consolingly to Bert promising he would not sell any more land. Bert could not come to Dimandead then, but he realized that the Metcalfe reverence for property was somewhere deep down. Ernie would not dissipate Bert’s inheritance and squander it on high living. Sometimes now when he came into town he would go down to the hotel and engage in convivial exchange. He still lived mostly on bread, corned beef and pumpkin. But his reputation as a mad hermit was on the wane, though it did not entirely vanish. Two visitors called in and told us how they had been lost crossing the plain.

  “And then we came to this gate and went through it, with enormous trees and bushes everywhere, until we came out and saw a house in the distance. So we drove up and a pack of savage dogs came barking out at us. And then a piece of sacking was drawn away from a broken window and a terrible bearded face peered out. I tell you we got away from there—fast!”

  We tried to explain that the dogs had come out, Pup and Bluey and Ole Mammy, barking welcome and Ernie was the terrible bearded face. He was looking out to see if it was us. “That was our friend.” They were not impressed.

  Chapter IX

  ERNIE had been much taken with the white Saanen goats, which multiplied and bred and now that Benison no longer would drink their milk were purely decorative. The kids sported up and down the fallen pine trunk donated by Uncle Johnny. They would tiptoe into the house by night led by their mother and leap on the table to eat fruit, smashing the bowl as they did so. We would wake up and see the great billygoat standing with his front feet on the mantelpiece while he cropped off a vase of azaleas. You could not leave a door open for them, but they were elegant creatures.

  One early morning I came into the bush-house and the queen of the herd was stretched out giving birth. This time she had twins, snowy and immaculate, complete with hoofs and hair, wrapped in a shining transparent envelope. Within an hour they were teetering about on their high-heeled little hoofs. To see these young goats born was almost to be converted to Ernie’s philosophy of Nature, which at other times I regarded as too trusting and optimistic. He was assured that there was nothing this mysterious force he called Nature would not in time make perfect. He altogether overlooked the sinister side of the life force.

  “In a thousand years,” Ernie would say, waving the thousand years away with his hand, “Nature will have fixed it all up again.” This Nature of his was like The Mother, it was his divine Sapphira, a feminine force caring for the young, always working and planning and bringing into being. Time for Ernie was infinite. He told us how once he was lying looking at the stars so intently that he felt himself lifted from the earth. I regarded time as something I snatched minute by minute. Ernie and Dimandead might have thousands of years between them, but I had none to waste, was always hasty and distracted. I envied them.

  Ernie, hearing me lamenting over damage by the goats, offered to buy them. I gave them to him gladly.

  “I’ve always liked goats,” he said, accepting them. “But these big white ones are a cut above the little fellers round here.”

  I had promised the animal husbandry expert who sent them to keep the strain pure and mentioned this to Ernie. I might have known he would have a theory. He jutted his beard stubbornly when he heard about keeping the strain pure.

  “Now that is not the way Nature works,” he contended. “Stands to reason that the more you cross animals the more likely you are to come up with something new. Don’t matter if it takes a thousand years or so . . .”

  “Yes, but Ernie...”

  He also had a theory that weeds were good for the soil and should not be removed from between the “furrers”. They kept the soil moist and prevented evaporation. He scorned those farmers who found their soil all dried out because they removed weeds that were doing a good job, sheltering the young plants. He had another theory that it was not wearing clothes that wore them out, but washing them. “Women always at them, wash, wash, wash, What happens ? The clothes fall to pieces.”

  So it was no surprise when I heard he had bought the Twomey goats when Old Pop retired from Humbug. Ernie brought them over to cross with mine. The white goats refused to associate with the brown and brindle goats and drove them up on to the cliffs where they foraged happily. Ernie liked to look out on the white herd sporting on the green behind his house. He taught the big billygoat to wrestle with him and at sight of him it would rear up on its hind legs, inviting him to fight. The herd followed him over to our shack and took possession of a heap of gravel left from the house building where they butted each other off. They stood on their hind legs, bending down and breaking every scrub, delicately nibbling the tips, and in no time at all had eaten off every wattle in the paddocks.

  When we went down to the beach to look for driftwood they followed along, with the cow bobbing anxiously among them, not letting Ernie out of her sight. He never bought timber when building our house if he could find what suited him on the beach and would shoulder baulks of timber that Roddy and I together could not have lifted. Most of the softwood in our house floated ashore, washed up among fishermen’s glass floats, weed, bluebottles, nautilus and uprooted mangroves.

  This amity with the herd of goats might have continued had not the billygoat developed a vicious streak and challenged me to fight as I was crossing the paddock, rearing up and striking at me with its sharp hooves. I sent it scampering, but I was worried lest it knock Benison over, for it was bigger than she was. I persuaded Ernie to drive the billygoat away on to the cliffs, and at first the goat was hurt by the treachery of its friend. But Ernie, who secretly hoped for a goat-cross with the brindled herd, persisted in shooing him away. The goat took the hint and removed his white herd to the cliffs where they found the salty herbs and acrid shoots so to their liking that they made only periodic visits to the homestead.

  This was the prelude to a tragedy. Ernie had always allowed fishermen to drive through his fences and up on the cliffs with their cars or trucks. While he was in town a gang of them came out and shot all the goats, the brindle-brown and the white Saanens, loading what they wanted for meat on the trucks, skinning what they did not want for the hides, and throwing the bodies down a crevice. Some were killed as they leapt down the rocks and Ernie, wondering why the goats did not come home, found their bodies. Only old Billy and one son escaped. The 6ld billy-goat was far too cunning to be shot.

  When Ernie came next into town even his hair seemed to have turned red with anger. He sat down on the wooden bench in the kitchen and related how he had tracked the men across the plains and up the Moorland road until he lost the tracks in a criss-cross of other tyres. I advised he should go to the police, “If I can’t track them the police can’t,” he said. “I’ve got a pretty fair idea who done it.” He waited for the men to come with his rifle always handy. But why should they come back ? They had made a clean sweep.

  Because not one doe escaped
the slaughter Dimandead was spared the erosion of ancient Greece. About fifteen years later I heard Ernie remarking with approval that the wattles were coming back again and that Nature was wonderful. He liked to see the cattle enjoying the shade of the wattles. “A dry camp for them and good shelter.”

  I had felt some remorse at having prompted him to banish Ole Billy, but Ernie was too fair-minded to think it was my fault. However, die disaster affected some deep spring of trust in him. He had always been free and friendly with chance comers. Now the latent landed-proprietor, inherited perhaps from his Welsh ancestors, was aroused. He put up a “No Trespassers” sign by the gate. He repaired the fences, running wires across the tracks the fishermen had been accustomed to use.

  The track, no longer brushed by wheels, was soon deep in flowering bushes. The crossing over the creek running down from the cliff became impassable. More of Dimandead reverted to wild growth, fewer people came there. When Ernie found some young men shooting on his land he went out with his rifle and “frightened hell out of them”, deliberately exploiting his mad hermit reputation to keep people away.

  But about this time he made another friend. Alan Mobbs, who had a small farm on the Moorland road, had once seen Ernie when he was a young boy and asked Harry Metcalfe, “Who’s that old bloke?” “That’s my Uncle Ernie, lives at Dimandead.” Twelve years later Alan Mobbs met Ernie again out on the plains. He had been herding a mob of bullocks and his horse had galloped off and left him so he was walking. Ernie helped him round up the cattle. Later Alan rode to Dimandead and, as the place always did, it held what a man desired most. For Alan it was feed for his cattle, a dream of Paradise green and deep when his own paddocks were parched and bare. Twelve months later he was bogged on the plains in his truck and Ernie dug him out.