The Man on the Headland

by Kylie Tennant

  There was nothing to do but wait until Bert and Lois came back from the bowls club, which they were supposed to do about eleven at night. Ernie went back to sleep and Benison and Margaret returned through the dark and the falling rain. Margaret spent her time until eleven wondering if the finger would develop gangrene or fall off. She attacked the lamp with a tin opener, a chisel, a hammer. It seemed to be made of the kind of metal they use for interplanetary rockets. She couldn’t even dint it.

  At eleven o’clock they set off to consult Bert and Lois, who were concerned, amazed, but failed to find any solution. “Even the doctor,” Bert said gravely, “wouldn’t be able to prise the thing off with his tools. You’ll have to go down to the rutile works in the morning and see if they’ve got the gear for the job.”

  Margaret spent a terrible night, waking every half-hour to bathe the finger with cold water. Benison, accustomed to strange happenings, slept.

  In the morning they took the track by the creek, picking their way over eroded clay and broken trees until they came to the quarry and the bridge that the rutile works had flung across the creek to bring rocks for their roads. The two wandered into the manager’s office where everyone from engineers to truck-drivers gathered to study the problem.

  Under the supervision of the manager they cut round the lamp until it was only a jagged frill. Then they tackled the slow, painful job of removing the brass rim, which was now embedded in Benison’s finger. Very gently, very skilfully this was accomplished.

  Benison was driven in the manager’s car to the doctor. In a week her finger was half-way down to its normal size. When we arrived we heard the story in three different versions. I owed the rutile works grateful thanks, and as I scraped white ants’ nest under the house, I wondered how to say, “We have avoided you for years with your immense resources, your destruction and efficiency. Now that destruction has been turned to a small useful purpose. We thank you.”

  But they were still the enemy. I realized that the rutile works, a cancer in the side of Dimandead, had done something worse to me. It had made me mean. Thanks stuck in my throat. Benison was off looking for the horse as cheerful as ever. Margaret went around singing little songs in praise of rutile mines which were inhabited by angels of mercy. Oh hell, let them have the whole damned beach!

  Some months later we were at Dimandead again and I was saying to Elizabeth as we went in to town for supplies, “Do you think we’ll ever coax Margaret back again?” Elizabeth thought not. As I put the car into gear after we went through the gate nothing happened. I tried again, but although the engine was running the car did not move. We had a broken back axle.

  There was nothing to do but walk down to the rutile mine to ring a garage. They had the only telephone for seven miles. Unfortunately, the people at the manager’s office said, the line had blown down in a gale the night; before. “There’s always something. Talk about the trouble we’ve had!” The linesman had gone out to look for the break, but it might be hours before he found it.

  I thought of Ernie saying, “Nothing that a good storm wouldn’t fix.” Dimandead fought back against the rutile works. First, they said, their dam had been swept away, then the road sank into the swamp. The cost of maintaining the road was terrible. Here the seas raced up to destroy, there the plains.

  Elizabeth started in to Laurieton on foot. Benison went on the horse. I was left to telephone when the line was repaired. Long before that a great and costly car came racing across the bumps and hummocks of the paddock into the clearing.

  “I’m Sloane,” the man in it said. “They only just told me you had a broken axle. Get in.”

  “How did you know where my house was?”

  “I ought to know this place. Years ago when we only had two jeeps we had a terrible time. We couldn’t get in to the creek. Ernie told us to cut through your clearing. We always owed you a debt of gratitude for that. I don’t think we could have made it without.”

  We overtook Elizabeth on the plains and when she stepped into the car a cloud of flies came with her. Benison was taking the short cut so I left a message with the punt-man, “If you see a very small girl on a horse would you tell her not to bother about the rear axle?”

  The garage at Laurieton had a rear axle but no sleeve bearings. The rutile works manager drove me another five miles to the next garage. Finally a red-headed boy in a tow-truck came out and the car, looking somehow shameful, was upended and jolted away.

  I realized as we settled into the life of the green clearing that I no longer felt mean and vindictive towards the rutile works. Along the creek came a faint roar which was either surf or the works chewing up and spitting out sand. After I was dead the great grey sheds would fall to rust, the sand dunes would sweep over the abandoned bulldozer, the machinery would fall into the grass. It is no use coming to a beautiful place if your state of mind does not match it. By an effort I felt benevolent towards the rutile works. One must clear and improve one’s attitude against resentment. One must co-operate with the inevitable until at last the inevitable disappears.

  Chapter XII

  BERT AND LOIS had come to live at Dimandead to look .after the old folk, full of good intentions, energy ‘and cheerfulness. Lois set about establishing the wall-to-wall carpet from her suburban home, the vases of artificial flowers, the chenille bedspread. She improved on her mother-in-law’s housekeeping and, presently, finding there was not enough work for two women in the house, Clara moved into a house of her own next to Dot in Laurieton. Her sight was beginning to fail, but she managed everything for herself and at ninety-two was still as quick to enjoy as when she had once climbed down the cliffs with me.

  Bert established a garden for vegetables and fruit. He grew enormous papaws that looked as though they had been polished every morning, and no animals ever broke into Bert’s garden. The agricultural strain in the Metcalfes, released in him after so many years of being adroit and affable, now flourished in bananas and oranges, in perfect tomatoes, in carrots with never a weed in the furrows.

  We came up to find that past our fence a great wind-row of melaleuca and gum-trees had gone down before the bulldozers and in the torn-up quarter of a mile over to the rutile works stood naked poles bearing the wires for Lois’s light and power.

  “Whatever it cost us,” Lois said with the air of a martyr, “it was worth it.” Now she could have television, an electric stove and refrigerator. She was a tall woman with long legs and clear green eyes, self-confident as women are who are admired for their good looks. “Oh, Uncle and I understand each other, don’t we ? He knows I’m only joking.”

  After some time of Lois’s gaiety Ernie decided that yet one more bloody woman had moved in on him. He built himself the corrugated-iron shack with a mud floor down near the bees, above what had once been his terraced vegetable garden by the lake. Bert and Lois felt humiliated by this. Not all their pleading could move his good-humoured determination to go his own way and they finally had to be content with persuading him to share one good meal a day.

  “He’s such an obstinate old devil,” Lois complained. “Whatever you say he takes no notice.”

  She had come prepared to cosset him and do everything for his good. Now he would go off on his motor scooter for a trip around the tablelands of a few hundred miles, camping as he had done when he was younger. He would go off to the Returned Soldiers’ Club in Laurieton and, coming home in the dusk, skid on the loose gravel and take a fall, sneaking home like a boy determined not to let the women know.

  When he broke his collar-bone in a slight mishap with a car in Taree his first thought was that Lois must not hear of it. “Don’t tell her,” he persuaded his rescuers, but the bush telegraph had worked before Ernie arrived back. “And so you weren’t going to say anything, were you? You thought I wouldn’t find out? Really, Uncle, the things you get up to, I wonder at you.”

  On one occasion when the motor scooter just brushed a motorist’s mudguard Ernie had given the motorist a lecture. “I
was riding a bike before you were born.” He didn’t say that it was a push-bike. He was tetchy about pedestrians who were irresolute. He had puttered into Taree and was waiting at a crossing for a nervous man who kept advancing and retreating. Finally he lifted the front wheel of the scooter and brought it down on the man’s toe. “Let that teach you to make up your flamin’ mind,” he roared.

  The constable at Moorlands had been dubious about giving Ernie a licence. He thought he was too old at seventy-five. “Where did you learn to ride it?” he asked. Ernie told him he had ridden the scooter around the paddocks over the furrows. “Well, look,” the constable told him, “take the bike into Taree and if you come back alive I’ll give you a licence.”

  So Ernie rode the dangerous dirt roads around Dimandead which the Rutile had laid down for trucks, and when he broke the couple of ribs he was persuaded, scolded, pleaded with to lie still and not breathe too deeply. Lois had once worked in a hospital.

  “Now that is not the way Nature works,” Ernie jutted his beard at her. “Stands to reason the lungs want to push out against the ribs and they should be expanded.”

  So he bought himself a flageolet and the defiant tootling drifted across the paddocks, startling the hares in the dew. He was curing himself in his own independent way. “Cantankerous old devil,” Lois said. Men must be cajoled, bullied, jollied into right behaviour, and Ernie was impervious to all she had in her feminine weaponry.

  The contest between them settled down to resignation on Lois’s part. “Just let him go his own way,” Bert advised. “Uncle’s always done what he liked. He’s too old to change now.” Bert, too, had looked forward to working with Uncle, sharing with him, and Uncle had withdrawn into his independence.

  When they found that the object of their care had betaken himself to his disgusting corrugated-iron shed down in the scrub, a dwelling that would disgrace even an aboriginal settlement, Bert and Lois began to experience a peculiar desolation. Bert, with all the digging, hurt his back. Lois for a time had to go into hospital. And their pride and good nature had suffered other hurts. Ernie was no Lear of the plains, ousted from a comfortable home by those who had dispossessed him. He rather enjoyed his contests with Lois.

  Now he felt freer to come and go. He let the great ditches silt up because the lake was coming back. He still repaired his fences, burnt off the underbrush skilfully. Dimandead was like a great park.

  We, too, pleaded with him to take our shack in the clearing. “Not on your life! I’d just have settled in and you’d be coming back again. Too much trouble moving in and out.”

  So he stayed in the honey-scent by the lake taming birds, playing his flageolet or the violin. An Indian summer had set in for Ernie. He had a little loosed the ties of Dimandead. He went back to Queensland on a wide-flung tour with Alan Mobbs in Alan’s old car, revisiting all the places he had known. But somehow his old mates were dead or they did not remember. He came back to Dimandead without the new pair of Queensland leather boots. Leather was not what it was and the old boots had not worn out yet. Speeding through Queensland by car—his hearing was not so good and his eyes did not take in the rapid blur of the roads—was not the same as travelling slowly in the sulky with a good horse. Old Princess, indestructible, was still stumbling around the paddocks, bullying the other horses now that Benison’s horse, Pickles, had gone.

  “Every holiday Pickles gets wilder,” Benison had complained as Pickles scampered off tossing his mane. “If I had him in Sydney I could ride him oftener and then he wouldn’t be so hard to catch.”

  There was nowhere we could lodge a horse in Hunter’s Hill. Roddy, with one arm, was editing and typing book after book. Bim was studying and playing. Benison was working in an electrical engineering factory and painting pictures in a studio built at the back of the house. Elizabeth and I at week-ends scoured the countryside for a hundred miles round Sydney. Finally we bought an old dairy farm of several acres in a little valley in the Blue Mountains, and a paddock was constructed for Pickles, with a stable which he treated with disdain. He was not used to shelter and would stand out in the most terrible weather in his horse-coat, refusing to go into the stable.

  The first problem had been to get him from Dimandead to the Blue Mountains. Benison was determined to ride him down herself. “You’d have done it,” she told me.

  “I’d sooner ride a mad elephant than Pickles. I wouldn’t even ride him round the paddock.”

  The problem was solved by the artist who had once lost his way on “the terrible plains” looking for Dimandead. “Nothing simpler,” he declared. “There’s my son, Jonathan, who was studying singing in Adelaide. He’s at home eating his head off. He’ll ride the horse down.”

  Jonathan, a wild good-natured boy with a beard, was willing. He stayed at the house in the clearing for several days trying to catch Pickles until Ernie walked over with a bit of bread and put the bridle on him. Then there was the epic struggle to accustom Pickles to the idea of Jonathan’s riding him. The Rodds were able to track Pickles and Jonathan down the coast by reports in newspapers and from radio stations. A young man with a beard, stripped to the waist and singing as he rode, was not inconspicuous.

  There were long periods of silence, never explained, when Jonathan had lost Pickles. Benison fretted. Jonathan looked for the horse.

  Weeks passed. At last a telegram from Jonathan sent Benison up the mountains to wait for him. She lived alone on the farm in a fever of impatience. She was perfectly capable of living by herself in lonely places.

  When Jonathan handed over the horse he told her that going to Dimandead and riding the horse back had changed his life. “After that I realized I could do anything.” Benison begrudged him the journey. He set off for Greece with his pay for the ride and I reflected that it had cost me more than I had paid for Pickles in the first place.

  Pickles was as independent as ever after his adventures. He would rush up the paddock neighing at sight of us, waiting for Benison to fling on the saddle and take him out. But he found the weekdays boring by himself. He set his mind to breaking out and heading back north. He always went north and would be recaptured at the edge of some great gulf of air where the cliffs fell hundreds of feet, and even a horse as spirited as Pickles found this great ditch of the Grose Valley too wide by miles to jump.

  One time some irate householder tied him to a telegraph pole and left him there all night in the storm. I rode him home and he was glad to go, but planning to get back to the paddocks of Dimandead. I would have done anything to bring this about, for I had so thought myself into the horse’s skin that I suffered.

  “He needs other horses,” Benison said, and a woman who had other horses took him as part of her riding school. Pickles was very happy. But the horsewoman had to break up her riding school and offered to sell Pickles to a good owner. Sooner than leave him alone on the farm we agreed. But I was still haunted by the idea of Pickles far from home and setting his nose north to the unattainable paddocks of Dimandead. This is the curse of animals, that you become their jailers and then their slaves.

  Ernie approved the farm high in the mists. He knew he could always go there if he wished to annoy Bert and Lois, but he agreed with my neighbour in the mountains that the place was all right if you didn’t mind winter nine months of the year. Ernie was too good-natured to really want to spite Bert and Lois. He knew their goodwill. He returned to Dimandead appreciating the warmth of his snug little corrugated-iron shed in the hum of the bees.

  Now Benison had no horse at Dimandead. “Far better if you’d left him here in the first place,” Ernie said.

  “But I couldn’t catch him.”

  “Well, that’s the way of horses. They see no reason to be rode. And, come to that, what were we given feet for?”

  I had worried about that horse for so long I tried to forget him. At least he had not succeeded in killing either Benison or Jonathan. But I was haunted by the vision of a reproachful horse far away among strangers. Now the sheer impo
ssibility of tracing him defeated me, for Benison’s horsewoman friend had moved and left no address.

  The horse had come to symbolize something for me in a way that Ernie might perhaps have understood. All of us have some sore place in our mind and mine has to do with ill-treated animals or children.

  At this time I had struck what Ernie called “a bad spell” of too much work and not enough laughter. In this turmoil it was easier to go to the mountains, only seventy-five miles away, than to Dimandead, though the road had been shortened and was a faster road than it had been when it took us all day in the dust to arrive. All the time the children were growing up we had fought through floods and heat to get to Dimandead. It was Benison’s spirit place, the land of her dreaming, as the aborigines would understand.

  I had mixed the ideas of loneliness, desertion, Ernie, Dimandead and the horse. Somewhere I had made a pattern in my mind in which I had done the wrong thing. Where did it begin ? I had left Ernie lonely. I had left the horse lonely and I was powerless to do otherwise. As it was, I thought defensively, I was always in three places at once, the busy water-rat, running, swimming, digging and climbing in the publishing game which is of all the most maddening. Or an overburdened horse plodding on until it dropped. I always needed guilt and self-reproach to make me work.

  In my life of telephone calls and letters, of reading manuscripts and publishing, I came to answer the front door, and there was Ernie with his little suitcase such as children take to school.

  “Ernie!” I cried, hugging and kissing him and burying myself in the beard, gold-stained from smoking. “How wonderful!” Ernie accepted the family rejoicings and, when they died down, the impression just drifted casually that he had not told Bert and Lois he was coming. He had to go to hospital. Bit by bit it transpired that he had a lump that the local doctor said was cancer. Bert and Lois would have made a fuss. If he had to go to hospital he’d sooner be in Sydney.

  Telegrams and letters went to Bert and Lois. What had saved them from an ignominious retreat from Dimandead was not only their own definite and determined natures but that they had discovered a new rich life. Before they broke up their home in the city they had thought bowls was a game for elderly dodderers. Now they had become champion bowlers winning prizes and pennants and cups and fleeing from Dimandead three days a week to play in tournaments.