Jack had moved his circus caravan over to a grassy bank on the Dunbogan side of the river. He complained that in a storm the caravan did not just shake and tremble, “it cantered”. He had cooked Christmas dinner for his brother, and Ernie duly appeared wading through the flood water. People were being taken off in boats from Dunbogan, near Jack, and moved to the higher ground at the foot of the Big Brother. Even Jack suggested to Ernie that perhaps they’d better shift.
“You invited me to dinner, didn’t you? Damned if I’m going to shift before I’ve had it.”
“That’s right,” Jack agreed. “Don’t see how I’d eat all this tucker by myself. But you always was a selfish bugger. Probably get me drowned. Always trying to get me killed even when I was a little kid.”
Complaining cheerfully he dished out the dinner, and the water, which had only covered the floor, crept up the table leg. They were sitting with the table top six inches out of the flood water as they finished their Christmas dinner. They did not hurry and they ate with appetite, swapping brotherly insults.
“How about the washing-up?”
“Be damned to the washing-up! All this flaming water.”
They were taken off by boat as the water rose over the table.
The rutile mine changed hands once again. The dumpy little man had sold out to a syndicate and the syndicate sold out to the Americans, giving a party in a city hotel where the champagne alone cost hundreds of pounds.
The Americans had their own methods. They would come driving up in a fleet of great black cars, alight hurriedly and go about saying, “Sack that man.” Even if, it was reported to us, the feller in charge was only a director’s son-in-law he still had to sack someone to show he was on the job. Then the Americans would get back in their cars and drive away, and the manager would promptly rehire whoever had been sacked if he wasn’t high enough up for the Americans to notice, and everything would settle down again, and the work of chewing up the landscape would go on.
Dimandead still offered yellow daisies of classical shape and soft leaves glittering, the stiff everlasting with grey leaves and pointed sepals, purple pea vine, the sarsaparilla leaves so sweet the old hands used them in their tea when sugar gave out. In the dunes the wire grass swept long fronds under the wind and the little birds ran almost invisible as if blown sideways. Green and scarlet rosellas flew through the she-oaks, purple snake-flowers reared their delicate triple tongues from furred brown sheaths. The wait-a-while vine and the prickly clubs of yellow flower in the rocks gave way to white spider lilies on the cliff slopes. Lantana invaded our track with pink flowers, and at the cliff foot, where poor old Baldy’s skeleton had so long been a landmark to the fishing eagles, his skull had sunk into the maiden hair, pale violets grew through the empty eye-socket. One day we walked under a great arch of rainbow on the beach. The feet of rainbows often rested in our clearing as if it were their native place.
The Rodds still cooked over their open fire in billycans or in Ernie’s camp oven. We had added a kerosene refrigerator when we left the school. Hail beat down a guttering, a bird flew through a shattered window, the white melaleuca crept to the doorstep. And when we came up we would sweep out, clear a little, repair. The silver house, weathered to a grey that was indistinguishable from the paperbarks, had its door painted blue. The door was never locked. As soon as we went away Dimandead would quietly remove the traces of occupancy. A bat moved into the chimney to be ejected when the Jameses came. Now Bim was old enough to bring his friends by himself. Benison and my friend Elizabeth and I would come. After an accident Roddy was no longer able to surf and he refused to make the journey. He sent a jacaranda tree to be planted down by the creek against the gap in the trees that showed the South Brother. “Tell Ernie,” he said, “that when it flowers I’ll make a trip up to see it.” Ernie pointed out that cattle loved nothing better than a jacaranda tree, but he built a great fence round the tree and saw it had water in the drought.
We told an artist how to get to the shack, warned Ernie of his coming, drew maps. “Don’t go down that road. It leads to the rutile mine. Take the turn to the left and you’ll come to a gate with a sign that says, ‘Private Property—No Trespassers‘. Go right in. You can’t see the shack for the trees until you get the car to the watercourse. Ernie has made a rock crossing, but be careful of the bump going down into it.”
The artist took his family and set out. “We drove and drove over those terrible plains,” he reported. “Night was falling and the children were frightened and we had to turn back.” This piqued Ernie, who, when he came over to spend the evening, would seize his hurricane lantern to go home and exclaim dramatically, “Well—out over the terrible plains!”
“I want a horse,” Benison said when she was an art student. “Princess is too slow and she tries to wipe me off on trees.”
Ernie considered this. When he thought of a horse it was not like a city poet. He thought of horses individually as persons. “Now Don is a steady goer and he’ll camp. You can walk right up to him. Princess has the speed, but, of course, she’s a mare and wants a bit of notice taken. She knows you’ve got the bridle behind your back and you can see her saying, ‘Oh, so he thinks he’s just going to hold out a bit of bread, does he?’ So you’ll hold out your hand with the bread in it and she’ll just blow on it to show what she thinks of you and off she goes.” If he had heard of Cocteau he would have doubted if the feller had much experience of horses.
“I want a horse with some spirit,” Benison said. “A young horse. Princess is too old and cunning.”
Princess knew enough to break into a shambling trot when she saw Benison coming. Princess was the leader of a small herd, the puntman’s old horse, Peg Slocombe’s piebald gelding, Freckles, meekly eating grass now that Peg had gone off to be married and had children. There would always be a few horses eating grass with them whose owners had begged the hospitality that Ernie never refused. At sight of Benison with the bridle they would all lift their heads and move off towards the wooded rises.
When Ernie suggested that the stock sales at Taree were the following Wednesday it was agreed that he should come and advise on the purchase of the horse. Benison, Elizabeth and Ernie, with myself as driver, set out through Moorlands, Ernie in the back seat, advising already. When we reached Taree he disappeared into his favourite hotel and we had difficulty winkling him out.
“Hurry, hurry!” Benison urged. “It will all be over.”
“Plenty of time,” Ernie protested. “There’s another sale next Wednesday.”
The stockyards on the edge of the town were rimmed by cars heating in the afternoon sun, their windows glancing back white rays. But the pens were shaded by trees and the horses and cattle stood tranquilly enough, all except one gelding with a white eye, pawing and snorting.
“Not that one,” I stipulated.
The Jersey cows, with their fawn-coloured flanks and black muzzles, were so beautiful that I begged, “Ernie, couldn’t we just buy a few ? They could graze around the lake.”
Ernie observed that women were unaccountable at sales. They’d come to buy a horse, hadn’t they? Under the shade of a tin-roofed stand by the ring red-faced farmers and their stout wives bid with grim concentration for cows and the afternoon wore on. The prices were ridiculous. They rose only when the horses were led in. Ernie, who had been smoking tranquilly, was outbid each time. “Plenty more auctions,” he murmured as the last horses were led out.
“It doesn’t matter.” Benison was resolutely bright.
I looked down at her bent head. “Which one did you really want?”
“That one.” It was, of course, the gelding with the rolling eye.
The horses were being loaded by a dealer who was taking them to the tablelands. In my travels I had learnt that a horse-dealer would sell his mother if you gave him a little over the last bid.
“I’ll give you two pounds to boot for the gelding.”
“Sold,” said the horse-dealer promptly.
Ernie was stirred by these unaccustomed stock dealings. “I’ve got three old horses just stumbling around the paddocks ready to drop in their tracks,” he told the butcher briskly. “It’d be a kindness to them to get rid of them.” The butcher made a deal to remove the horses and slaughter them.
He forgot about it for a few weeks and then he appeared one night and said he had come for the horses. In the meantime Ernie had seen Princess standing up to her knees in the lake with Freckles and the other old gelding, Sailor, His heart misgave him. “They can still pick a bit of grass,” he thought. “They’re still getting a bit of enjoyment.”
When the butcher appeared Ernie denied absolutely that he had said anything about disposing of any horses. “Turning up here in the middle of the night,” he told the butcher. “You must be drunk.” The butcher wasn’t speaking to Ernie for a long time.
“What is his name?” Benison asked the butcher’s wife, as she gazed after her horse.
“Pickles—you can always catch him with a bit of bread.”
We did not dare ask why Pickles was being sold. We found out. He seemed to prefer women as more likely bread givers.
“He tosses off boys,” Benison said with satisfaction.
Pickles reminded me of my mare Betty who was always going back to Moorlands to look for her long-lost colt. They could have been of the same strain. Pickles had a hard mouth and a strong will. You could certainly catch him with bread, but the trouble was to find him. He took over the leadership of the herd from Princess and would lead them to some inaccessible gully. He objected to being parted from his herd. Benison adored him and easily foiled his attempts to buck and rear her off. She would go up to Dimandead without me just to ride the horse.
Ernie came to Sydney sometimes to play chess with Roddy and sanlple the pleasures of the city, but he complained that the smog gave him bronchitis. “I come down here stomping like a two-year-old and before I know it I’m coughing my head off.”
His curls were grey now, his pointed beard was grey. But his step was as light as ever. Aristocratic old ladies of Hunter’s Hill who snubbed everyone who had not lived there for twenty years positively flirted with Ernie. With Roddy’s white silk scarf about his throat, he would greet them with the courtesy of the ancient world. The barmaid also asked after him when I met her in the hairdresser’s shop.
Once, strolling through the city on a solitary sight-seeing, he stopped to light his pipe and a business-man came up and pressed money into his hand. “God love you, old-timer,” the man said. “It does me good to look at you.” Ernie gracefully thanked him for the few shillings he did not need. He took the token as it was meant, for goodwill. As he moved through these haggard people, scurrying and perhaps overburdened, Dimandead looked through his eyes, with its eternal dignity. “It’s the beard,” he chuckled, but it wasn’t the beard.
He sometimes stayed with a wealthy business-man, one of his nephews who was proud of him and admired him. His great-nephew John was grown up now, the little boy with red curls. Ernie visited. He enjoyed a meal of bean shoots and curious vegetables cooked at our house by a Chinese doctor and his wife who were friends of Benison. He took over the “fiddle” which had been bought for our son, who preferred a guitar. Ernie carried the fiddle back to Dimandead where he played jigs in the lamplight, old forgotten country tunes, from the days when he danced.
A professor of music from Melbourne on holidays in Sydney asked what she could play him on our piano and he said, “Well, there was one tune I always liked.” He seemed almost shy.
“What was it?”
“It’s called ’Danny Boy‘.” She played the Londonderry Air while he accompanied her on Bim’s “fiddle”:
... ‘Tis you must go and I must bide—
But come you back when summer s in the meadow ...
Or when the valley s hushed and white with snow ... But he had never gone back to Bertha, who married another man.
Ernie’s visits were infrequent. He would just appear at the front door without warning. In 1965 he found that there was a free pass to the city for the old soldiers so that they might march in that special Anzac Day procession. He came down to visit us, on the free pass. He had so little intention of marching on Anzac Day that he had not even brought his returned soldier’s badge. Over Ernie’s protests Roddy rang the committee, who arranged for a car to come and pick him up.
We were delighted to see him riding near the front of the procession and he had a glorious time after the march, feasting with good fellows. He was returned home very drunk—not that it showed. He still spoke most lucidly and walked in a straight line, but there was a certain air of dishevelment about his beard. There is always some moral disapproval about returned soldiers drinking on Anzac Day, but for men who remember their near escapes from death and the queer and sinister chances of war, this is a defensive measure, a natural thing. What else can a man do?
But men at whiles are sober,
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.
Now that Benison had the horse Pickles she coaxed our friend Margaret, a novelist and critic, to go to Laurieton by train, taking the bus from Kendall, then a taxi from the town. Margaret had never, in Australia, left the city. She came from Scotland. “But I have never been in the bush,” she protested.
“It’s not isolated,” we assured her. I was to come up a week later by car. “Ernie has a motor scooter now and he often goes in to Taree to terrorize the traffic. His nephew Bert and his wife have come to live at Dimandead and Clara has gone in to Laurieton to be near the doctor. Bert would bring out your food because they go in to play bowls. Around the bend of the creek is the rutile mine, but luckily you can’t see it.”
Margaret and Benison went to Diamond Head and Benison spent all her time looking for the horse and riding it when she found it. Margaret called Bert in to deal with the refrigerator, which was as sensitive and difficult as Pickles. She took out all the food from the cedar cupboard with the mousehole gnawed in the door. She spread clean paper on the shelves. She had a wash-up of blackened billycans and frying-pans with all the odd plates and cups guests had left over the years. She carried mattresses on to the veranda and aired them, rigged mosquito nets. Competently she swept.
Benison suggested she should go for a walk over the plains.
“Where are they?” Margaret gazed doubtfully at the ring of trees about the clearing.
“Over there.” Benison swept a careless arm half round the compass and Margaret decided to clean out a cupboard the white ants had chewed.
She felt, I think, that the trees were creeping nearer, waiting to wipe her and the shack off the clearing as though they were writing from a wall, the quivering wall of sunlight on which is written, “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.’
No two people ever have the same experience of Dimandead because they take their own events with them. Benison’s event was being thrown from her horse and staggering home very little damaged. Most people become adjusted to the lawful peace of the place, its suggestion that one must give way to the inevitable until the inevitable is no longer there. Margaret, a competent person, was tested in this pride in her capability. As she and Benison sat by night at the table Margaret said, “I wonder if there’s enough kerosene in that lamp?”
Benison, to be helpful, unscrewed the brass knob from the hole into which kerosene was poured and put in her little finger to feel the level. “I can’t get my
finger out,” she said.
“Nonsense,” Margaret said briskly, “Try again, Benison.”
“It’s stuck.” Under the rim were jagged teeth of metal pointing downwards. Benison’s finger when they both tried their best to tug it out was cut and bleeding. “Do try again.”
“I can’t. The finger’s swollen.”
Benison remained cheerful and courageous. So did Margaret, but this was a situation she was not trained for in Scotland. How did you get a finger out of a lamp? They set off in the darkness to go for Ernie. He had lived for a time in Clara’s house with Bert and Bert’s wife, but, finding the house too civilized, had moved down to the camp he had built for himself near the bees. It was sheltered there, he said, from the wind. He could lie on the hessian bedstead he had constructed with saplings and to§s a piece of wood on the fire without getting out of bed at night. I think he liked the birds around his door, the little lake to which the ducks were coming back—but this was a secret between himself and Benison—“Tell everybody and they’ll be in here shooting.” Perhaps the blue lilies might come back, he thought, but they never did.
Benison, attached to the lamp, went sure-footed across Ernie’s little plank bridges over the black ditches. A light rain was falling. Margaret followed uncertainly while patches of deeper darkness rose and crashed away as cattle. The two seekers-for-help toiled up the rise to Ernie’s door. The motor scooter stood under a tarpaulin in a lean-to beside his little hut. He usually went to roost now at the same time as the fowls. “Wasn’t he cold down there?” visitors would ask. “What, with a six-cat blanket?” Ernie responded.
Now, although it was only half past seven of winter darkness, Ernie was in a sound sleep. He thought he was being awakened in the middle of the night. He entertained Margaret and Benison with stories of queer accidents that had happened in mining camps or to men he knew who had been nayvying or down the Darling. But he was unable to get the lamp off Benison’s finger.
The Man on the Headland Page 11