Coal Creek

by Miller, Alex

A stockman come into Chiller’s pub in Mount Hay from Brolga Station one afternoon. I do not remember the year. In those days we did not see many stockmen in town except at the end of the season. The stockmen was mostly blackfellers in those days and they stayed out on their country with their families during the wet. This feller was drinking in the bar and he looked at me and asked me what I was doing there. I had a very young look about me. Me and Ben was drinking overproof rum like we used to in them days. My dad and Ben’s dad was sitting on the bench by the door outside smoking like they always did. They would get up and come into the bar to buy their next drink. We left our money on the bar in them days and Chiller took what was owed. My dad and Ben’s dad never stayed inside any place if they could stay outside it. We took a bunch of old piker bullocks over to the railhead from Deception one time and Mr Dawson, who owned the place back then, offered to put us up in the house, but Dad and Ben’s old man slept in their swags outside beside the ashes of the fire. And they never let me cook for them inside a house. They claimed inside spoiled the taste of food. Which is true. But I did not mind sleeping in a bed when I could get one. My dad smoked a pipe but Ben’s dad rolled his own from them Champion plugs the stations used to buy in for their stores.

  I did not think the stockman was being unfriendly but was just making conversation and asking after my reason for being there because he could think of nothing else to say and maybe he took me for a boy. I do not know. The mistake he made with Ben there was he put a kind of edge on his question to me, like he thought maybe I was stupid or should not have been there drinking overproof with the men. I did not take no offence from it. If he had known Ben Tobin that stockman would not have done that but would have known it might be going to cost him something. Anything out of the way when we was in town was like a spark to a can of petrol with Ben in them days. Ben went over to him and pointed back at me and he said in that stockman’s face, taunting him in a singsong voice and making it rhyme, as if he was saying a line from a poem or a song, That’s Bobby Blue you’re talking to. And he dropped him. Ben had a fist like an iron ball. It was no good trying to hit him back. He was hard as wood all over and you would just bust your hand on him. The stockman was lying on the floor bleeding and Ben told him, If you get up I will kill you. I knew Ben was not serious about killing him but he made it sound serious the way he said it. He made the ringer crawl out the door on all fours, laughing at him all the way. When Ben come back in the bar no one said nothing to him, which was the way he liked it.

  In them early days when we was not much more than boys it was like Ben had to keep proving for himself how weak other men were beside him and how they would take it from him, like he always had to take it from his old man, I suppose. I think I am the only man who ever loved Ben Tobin. But I did. And once you love someone you always love them. Dead or alive. It is not a matter of forgiving or understanding but of just loving. And that is in you, just as your memory of your mother is in you. You can do nothing about it, good or bad. Love is what it is. Just that. Call it by whatever name you like. Love is like faith. It does you good to have it, but it usually has a price to it.

  It was no use asking Ben why he was doing something wild, so I never did ask him. It was like asking him why he was eating his breakfast or drinking his tea. He was just doing it because he was doing it. Just whatever come into Ben’s head he would do it. No matter how wild it was. No one had ever gone up against him in Mount Hay and come off without being damaged and he pretty much had his own way in the town. It was before we had helicopters and it was all horses once you was off the tracks. That was what we knew. And that is where Ben was in his true home; in the scrub on a horse he was a quiet and reliable man you could depend on. But if someone who did not know him had a go at Ben for his cruelty he would take that man down off his horse and fight him. And he never let no one forget the beating he give them. There was an anger in Ben in them days that his dad put there with all the beatings he give him as a boy. I always feared he was going to kill a man one day. They still hung you for murder in Queensland and I did not want to see Ben Tobin hanged. I might curse him but my heart beat for him when he put himself in danger. And it is the heart that knows the truth in us. We can act as calm as you like, but the heart will betray us.

  Ben never used a swear word that I ever heard. His dad beat him with the handle of his stockwhip close to killing him when he was a boy of five or six years of age after his dad heard him taking the Lord’s name in vain, which Ben had picked up somewhere. Ben would not stand foul-mouthed people after that and we had plenty of them in Mount Hay, but they always cleaned up their tongues when Ben was around. I never knew him beat a woman or a horse so I was surprised when he owned up to beating that girl and went along with Daniel without making nothing of it at the time. I had my ideas, but I still knew there was some things I did not understand about that day and I was troubled thinking about them. Looking at Irie leaning over the kitchen table writing with her pen on them blue lines in the pages of her book it give me goose bumps knowing there was good and there was evil in this world and that any one of us can be touched by either any time without needing to get up and go looking for it. Now you try, Bobby, she said to me, and she handed me the pen, sitting up close so I smelled the child smell that was still on her.

  THREE

  They are lying up there behind the town dam in that stony cemetery, side by side like they was in life in them mustering camps all those years, next to my mother. The white ants cleaned up in no time the wooden crosses I planted. I replaced them crosses many times but I seen I was just feeding the ants and saving them fossicking for their own wood, so I quit replacing them crosses. They are still lying there, them two old fellers and my mother, unmarked just like the graves of all the poor of the world, but I know where they are. I do not know if white ants eat skeletons.

  When Ben’s dad died and Ben was no longer working the scrubs on a regular basis he took up that piece of ground out there at Coal Creek where Daniel Collins arrested him. I do not know that he ever bought that ground or if he was squatting on it. It was a dry flinty place and it suited him, cold as bones in winter with the wind coming up from the Moonlight Ranges with nothing to stop it. Like I said, Ben bred a tough-bodied type of pony on that piece of country with hard feet and never shod one of them. He would sell a horse if its feet turned out soft. He had a woman there with him from time to time but mostly he was alone with his horses or out in the country catching wild bulls or shooting brumbies or doing some other work for the stations, and on occasion he was stealing cleanskins and putting his own brand on them or someone else’s who was paying him for them so much a head. Then he got Rosie’s niece out there staying with him and that was the end of it for other women. Her name was really Deirdre, but she was always known as Deeds. She was not much more than a child. I do not believe Ben ever beat her but was gentle with her. When I was out there with them the first time, I seen Deeds had touched something in him he had kept hidden in himself till then. It was something gentle and private and too precious to him to be let out in the ordinary way. But it was there. It pleased me to see it.

  The only work Ben refused for the stations was fencing. Wire strung in the bush was an evil to him and to all of us. Old wire neglected and grown over with the regrowth would cut your horse or bring you down. I often helped him cut the wire of an old fence and roll it up and hang it in the fork of a tree. Ben had a galley for his cooking out the side of his shack and cooked his meat in the open like his old man did and as I did for them when we was all working as a team back in the early days. When I was out there at his place on Coal Creek visiting Ben I smelled them good old cooking smells from our years together in the camps, beef fat falling onto the sandalwood coals and spitting. It is the only smell there is like that and for me it is the smell of home. Them days when me and Ben was boys and young men together in the scrubs with our old men and was trusted and respected. And all that was lost when our fathers passed on.

 
I did not know Deeds when she was first out there with Ben and only seen her that one time when Daniel arrested him, standing at the door of Ben’s place looking on. It was her young age, I believe, that they sent him to Stuart for, for that and for Esme insisting to Daniel that it was his duty to protect the women of Mount Hay from brutal men. Esme had some ideas about it. She had a strong hold over Daniel in her opinions. I heard him call her The Reformer, like she was a horse that would buck him off if he didn’t set the saddle on her just right. Daniel might have eased back and taken a bit of a look around if he had been left to himself to do his policing his own way, but you could see Esme was not going to leave him alone to do his policing his own way. She seen herself as part of the team. That was how she called it. Esme had an opinion about most things and it was not her way to keep her opinions in a back drawer. She said to Daniel, You are all that stands between these women and men like Benjamin Tobin. Esme was the only person I ever heard call him Benjamin. I might have said to her that she did not know Ben and never would know him but only knew the reputation he had made for himself when he was not much more than a boy and was given to wildness.

  She was the identical same with their two girls as she was with Daniel. Esme liked to direct her family to her way of doing things, and she would direct people in the town too, but mostly they did not listen too closely to her after they got used to her. Them two girls, Irie and her sister Miriam, soon started sneaking off into the scrub on their own to get a bit of time away from their mother. She was always pressing them to be doing something useful every hour of the day. Esme was good to me and she pretty much left me to my own ways so long as she seen I was improving my reading and writing. She was firm on her family with the direction she wanted them to go in. I do not know if she was right to be the way she was or not. It is not mine to say. Them two girls of Esme and Daniel’s was both of them pretty as spring robins, and they started looking for their own lives early in the piece as a result of Esme coming down on them the way she did. I seen they was starting to keep secrets from their mother, which they would not have needed to if she had trusted them. I never did keep no secrets from my mother. We knew each other’s heart as we knew our own.

  . . .

  After Ben and me quit working the scrubs together and I got the job as the constable’s offsider I was mostly around the police house and station from then on. The station and the house was all one timber building, and was most likely the best building in the town, the rest of them tin and fibro except for the hotel. The Catholic church was ripple iron and the Methodist chapel was never finished but was just the grey frame they begun with. That old frame always overgrown with wait-a-while vine since I was a kid. I do not know what happened to the Methodists. They most likely left or died.

  Our mother was brought up by the nuns, which was where she got her education. She never knew her own family but always said to me and Charley, The nuns were my family. She loved the nuns and feared the priests. She and Dad met when she went out to the Holsons’ place working as a governess to their kids and Dad was contract mustering for them people at the time. I got Bobby Blue from Mum and Dad being Mr and Mrs Blewitt. So Dad was always Blue ever since anyone could remember. They called us anything in them days. How you got the name that stuck to you was what you was called. So that is why I got Bobby Blue. And it was the name for me my mother liked best and she used it. My Bobby Blue, she said and looked at me like she feared a mountain was going to fall on me one of these days. I told her, It is okay, Mum. I know what I am doing and I can look after myself. But she felt something in her mind like a warning to her about her youngest boy and I seen that far-off knowing look in her eyes. Which she only had for me, like she sensed the terrible thing that was to happen lying out there waiting in the path of my future, like the serpent of the Bible waiting to turn the people to evil. She always wanted me to get an education but she would not go up against Dad’s decision to take me out of school and I did not press her as I could not wait to get out in the camps with the men. I took hold of her and kissed her cheek and she trembled when I held her. She is with me until I go up the hill myself.

  Them ripple iron and fibro buildings in Mount Hay was losing their nails from trembling in the winds, cold in winter, roasting in summer, expanding and shrinking and forever trembling. I was restless sleeping in a house that did not have a bit of a tremble in it. Rusting and slipping sideways off their stumps most of them was. Raised up in the forsaken highlands among the poison bendee and the bitter barks was how Chiller Swales said it. Godforsaken. But Chiller only ever lived in Mount Hay. It was his old man built that pub.

  It would have been a few months after Ben got back from Stuart Prison when the thing between him and Daniel broke out from sheer misunderstanding. We was all settled back into our quiet lives by then and was not thinking of Ben. If I am honest I would say I had begun to wonder if maybe I had been wrong about Ben needing to get his revenge. I still do not have no certainty of this. I could not read his mind and he did not speak to me of it.

  It was one of them days when we was taking things easy. I had been washing my clothes after lunch and taking a long shower under the tank where we all did our washing. It was deep in shadow and always cool in there and I enjoyed the feeling of being clean and alone with myself and the job of washing out my shirts and moleskins, the chill of the tank water running over me and the smell of the soap. When I was changed into clean gear and had hung out my things to dry on the verandah over at my quarters I was called over to the house for afternoon smoko. Me and Daniel was in the kitchen of the police house drinking our tea and Esme was standing at the sink occupied with one of her domestic tasks. I watched Daniel drink from his tin cup. The tea was scalding hot. I seen he burned his lip on the cup’s rim and he swore. I remember that day like I seen it on a film. Esme kept doing what she was doing at the sink, her back to the both of us. Daniel blew on the tea and sipped at it. I seen the way he heard the shuffle of the woman coming up to the back door but he did not make no sign of hearing her. Tip did not bark neither because she knew the woman from before. The woman called out something in that soft voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Maybe she called, Mister Collins, but real soft, I did not exactly hear it. I knew who she was. It was like a cloud come over the sun at that moment.

  Daniel twisted around in his chair and looked behind him out the screen door when the woman said her words. He must have seen a piece of the woman’s yellow dress as she ducked away off to one side, just as I seen it from where I was sitting across from him at the table. I could have told him who it was but I said nothing. Things have a way of coming to you when you need to know them. There is no good ever comes out of rushing things before their time. The woman was down there at the side of the door where the shade still is beside the tank stand at that time of the afternoon. The side where Tip sheltered herself from the cold wind or from the hot sun, scrabbling a hollow for herself in that fine grey dust. Daniel kept twisted around in his chair looking out the door. I seen it then, the shadow of the storm coming up across the scrub, bending the sticks and humming through the silver grass. I remember there was the sound of the supply truck going away along the road, the sound strong then weak as it topped the ridges then ducked into the gullies. Fay Stubbs was new driving the supply truck then, which is why I remember hearing it. She had one of them Canadian Blitz trucks with an open-tray body that come in during the war. It had a winch and was the only vehicle could ever get over the creek crossings in the wet. You could hear the busted exhaust on that truck engine fading then coming back for hours in the silence, changing into low gear and grinding up them long ridges like nothing was ever going to stop it, eating the road gravel. I was thinking of Fay Stubbs going down the coast and having a good time like they say she always did, her fat arms wrapping the wheel, an unlit cigarette between her lips all chewed and wet where she was mouthing it. Hearing Fay’s truck made me see the country in my mind, them long rolling ridges of sc
rub, one after another as far as the eye can see, going on into the haze of the day like a dream till you forget where you are. Just played-out mining and poor scrub country, that is all it is, fit only for them half-wild cattle and that was all the good it ever was. My country. I have no other.

  Daniel was always on the lookout for some kind of mystery that he and Esme liked to talk about and that we did not talk about. I do not know what they meant by it. We talked about the struggle to get on, which is what we all had. Just our lives. If him and Esme ever seen them cock-horned beasts out in the bendee they would not think to speak of a mystery. Them cows never had one extra mouthful of feed in their lives. Their bones was scattered all over. It was hard country and the people in it was hard but good in their hearts and ready to share what little they ever had with each other. That is the way it always was for us in the ranges. If someone was in trouble the feuds was forgotten till they was helped. Then the feuds usually started up again.

  Daniel swivelled back to the table from looking at the storm and he took up the last half-slice of toast from his plate and bit into it and he looked at the dirt under his fingernails. Like he had all day and there was no one asking for his attention. The salt of the tinned fish must have been stinging his burnt lip. Tuna in brine. We ate a lot of that. I had never had it before my days in the police house. I did not mind eating it. Esme was singing some song which I forget what it was. She was pounding at something on the board in time with her singing and I knew things was beginning, and I believe she did too in her own way, the song her way of covering up her feelings. That need in Ben to square things up, put there by his old man when he was a boy, exaggerating the hurt he had from his old man that had struggled to be healed in him till Deeds come into his life and loved him. I prayed for his healing. He was my friend.