by Miller, Alex
. . .
The children was in bed and blue lightning was flickering over behind the high ridge of Mount Dennison. The back door was open to the warm night, the thunder faint, just like the rumbling of the ore train we had in Mount Hay when I was a boy. Esme said, What are you going to do, Dan? It was Dan now. Daniel was twisted around in his chair watching the lightning out the door, a book open in his lap. I rode those Mount Dennison bluffs and stony ridges with my dad and Ben and his dad many times. There was wild bulls in there that never seen a man in their whole lives and had no fear of us when we come on them but only a blind belief in their own great strength, as if they was gods. If they was old, Ben’s dad shot them between the eyes with that Colt. They shook their heads when they was hit with that big slug and they looked at Ben’s dad with a calculating surprise and they only dropped to their knees when they took the second shot. I always felt sorry for them and how they had lived up there without men for all their lives since they was dropped from their mothers. Ben’s dad said killing them was a mercy. But I did not see it.
I watched the lightning with Daniel. He did not answer Esme at once. I thought of the quiet patience my mother had. Then the day come when she saw her answer looking at her. Do not ask, you will know when you need to know, she said. That is the way she always understood it. My mother had foreknowledge with her faith. That was Daniel and Esme’s mystery if they wanted a mystery out in them ranges, but no one was ever going to talk to them about those things. Those things was private to all of us who lived out there, if we was religious or not. We never spoke about them things, not even to each other. We just knew them. People from the coast would not understand. People like the Collins knew the city and the coast and they had another way of seeing things that was not our way of seeing things. The Collins wanted to know what they had no need to know. There was no respect in them for the mystery they hoped to entertain themselves with. They was not bad people, just ignorant. My mother said the ignorant was to be pitied, not despised.
My mother loved them nuns that looked after her with kindness and great care when she was a child. They were my family, she told me, and that far-off look come into her eyes as she thought of them, naming them and considering her memories of them, the sisters she called them. She was knitting by the stove and me and Dad was home one time when it was too wet to get about the country. She told me she had never forgotten the first night she was with the nuns. I think Dad had heard the story before but did not mind hearing it again, as I seen he was listening with his eyes on my mother. She must have decided I was old enough just then to hear her story and to keep it inside myself. My mother was an orphan. Like everyone, she said, I must have had a mother and a father, but I do not remember them or know anything about them or if I had brothers and sisters. I always thought they was dead, she said. The Mother Superior was standing out the front of the hall on a platform with some of the other nuns that first night and everyone was assembled before her listening to her. My mother was standing out in the body of the hall with the very young kids and her legs suddenly give way under her and she went down in a heap on the floor. Everyone turned around and looked at her. Her legs had lost their power to lift her back up and she stayed down, crumpled and helpless as a shot cat, the whole assembly staring around at her and the kids nearest to her moving back a little to give her room, and maybe in fear of her. The Mother Superior was the boss of the place and she stopped giving her speech when she seen my mother go down and she stepped off the platform and walked along the middle of the hall and she bent down and picked my mother up from the floor and cradled her in her arms and carried her back out of the hall and into her own room up on the top floor of the building.
The Mother Superior put my mother in her own bed and she pulled the covers up around my mother and she leaned down and kissed my mother on the forehead. I have never lost the feeling of that kiss, my mother told me, and she looked into the firebox of the stove as she said it, her knitting forgotten between her fingers, as if she was seeing a vision of herself as a child in the Mother Superior’s bed that first night in the convent. And the Mother Superior said to her, Do not be afraid, my child. We will take care of you. You will get well and strong again with us. And that is what happened. It is a true story. My mother’s legs got their strength back and she was always made a fuss of by the nuns after that. They saw in her recovery the work of their faith in their Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. And they give my mother special lessons and she was taught to play the piano and to speak French. That is how she come to be a governess on that station when my dad was out there mustering that time, which is when they met up and fell in love.
That story must have reminded my dad of his first meeting with my mother out there on that station. The name of it slips my mind just now. When she finished telling her story he got up off his chair and he come over and rattled the fire up then he leaned and kissed my mother on the cheek. My mother always sung her songs, mostly hymns but not all of them. She had a lovely voice until the last. She was not old when she died. I do not know what she died of. It was sudden and come without no warning while we was out mustering.
. . .
You hear me, Daniel? Esme said. I am talking to you. Daniel looked up at her and he said, I do not know what I will do about Ben Tobin. I must give it some thought. He picked up his empty cup off the table and looked into it, turning it to one side to see the pattern the leaves had left. Esme said, If that girl is dead, Daniel Collins. Like it was a warning to him. He looked at her, and I seen the hurt in his eyes. Please do not say that, Esme. I will go out and look for them in the morning. We do not know yet what has happened. We only have Rosie’s word for it. And he looked at me and he asked me what I thought. I seen he was really asking not just what I thought but what I thought he should do. I said Ben would take some finding in the scrubs if he did not wish to be found. And that is all I said. I got up and said goodnight and went on out to my quarters. I feared we was going to have trouble with Esme pushing at Daniel the way she did.
I did not wish to listen to their conversation any longer. Like most men, or all of us, Ben was a mixture of things in himself. I did not know everything there was to know about him, that is for sure, and I hoped not to misjudge him. We change from what we was. There was changes in me and there was changes in Ben as we grew from boys to young men, and as time went on we thought things we had never thought before and did things we had never done before. Which is one reason I disliked to hear Esme and Daniel judging on Ben. I do not think Ben himself ever really knew what he was going to do in advance of actually doing it. Deeds had softened him, and maybe he was going to let it slide this time. It would be a first for him if he did. But so what? I do not know the answer of it to this day. If I could ask Ben right this minute I believe he would wink at me and play a few bars on that old Hohner of his. And that would be my answer. Esme and Daniel wanted things clear cut. But there wasn’t no clear cut with Ben.
As I was going out to my quarters along the path I seen Irie and Miriam scooting off along the track past the chook house, which Esme called the hen run. Shadows of children in the moonlight. I took off my clothes and lay on my bunk and a picture of Irie come into my head and I let myself think about her while I smoked a cigarette. The day I heard my mother died, standing up there at the yards beside my dad, I knew then I was going to die one day myself. Before my mother died I never thought of the death that was waiting in me and always believed I was going on forever. I had a fear for them two children and could not imagine Irie’s death but only had the fear of it, like she was my own child. She must have been around twelve by then and a real young woman, serious and full of feelings. I valued the friendship I had with her very highly. I do not have words for it.
FOUR
The track ahead of the jeep was not evident with all the rain they’d had over that way and the heavy new growth of wiregrass. Daniel weaving around this way and that through the stands of bendee and prickly Moses. He said
a number of times he could not remember the track from last time, speaking his words low and half mumbling, as if he was talking to himself, the jeep leaping and rattling. But I knew what he was saying just by the look of him, leaning over the wheel and gazing around as if he thought he was going to see a signpost out there in the scrub saying, COAL CREEK THIS WAY. But there are no signposts in the scrub and only the scrub itself. There is all the signs you need if you are only looking for them and wish to see them. I told him I knew the road and it was there in front of us and I indicated the direction. He was nervous and keyed up with everything that was in his mind and not knowing what he was going to do. I seen water in some old ruts of Fay Stubbs’ mail truck fifty yards over to our right from the last time she went through, the glint of white sky in a long pool. But I did not point it out to him.
It was not one track out to Coal Creek but many tracks. The trick was to pick the right track on the day. It is the general direction you must take in that country once you are off the made road, not one particular track. I do not know what Daniel saw in the scrub ahead of him that day but I do not think his mind was clear on the general direction he was going in. It seemed to me he was distracted thinking of Esme’s way of pushing him to his duty and was fraying somewhat with the irritation of that, like an old rope wearing thin rubbing against something and getting ready to snap next time you put a sudden strain on it. I wish he would have told her he was the police not her and got that settled between them. I never heard my mother tell my father the way he should go with his own work and I never heard him tell her how to do her work neither. No good can come of telling other people how to do what they are supposed to be doing of their own. But only irritation. I seen it before with Chiller’s missus before she died. Chiller grieved for his wife when she was gone, but all the same he was like a man on holiday, though he was too ashamed to admit it. You could not miss it. There was no one tailing him.
If Daniel had asked me to drive I would have got us to Coal Creek without troubling myself too much about how to get there or anything else, except I knew we was not going to get to Coal Creek that morning in the jeep. The storm was over that way and the creek would be too high. I knew that. But he did not ask. I was not happy that morning sitting up there beside Daniel in that police jeep when I knew we should have taken the horses. I never had no trouble working for my dad alongside Ben and his dad. There was never one of us telling this or that to nobody else about how to get the job done. I did not mind working under a boss, but I was fraying a bit too with Daniel’s way of half doing things his way and half doing them Esme’s. He was never sure of what he was going to do and when things did not work out for him he was cursing at being given the wrong advice by his wife. And none of this out in the open but all rancid inside him. It made me feel like a dumb idiot sitting up there next to that man, and I did not like it and was not easy with him or with myself. What we was doing going out to Ben’s place was not clear to me. I always liked to be clear about what I was letting myself in for.
. . .
The scrub was swaying and heaving with strange unsettling shadows that morning, the wind not knowing which way to blow after the fuss of the storm passing through in the night. There was unusual shapes of high cloud, belled and bowed like they was under some pressure from below and could not move on, left over from the violence of the storm like people left behind to settle up on a violent dispute. Flocks of crows diving and cawing and crying out through the tops of the red ash pines, which some call the soap tree, agitated and angry with us for disturbing them, and unhappy with the day for their own reasons, which I did not know. But I do know it is the white eye of the crow rules that country of the birds and they was telling us something they knew that we did not know. Them are the kind of signs the bush gives you. But Daniel was not reading the signs that was there, and was too busy looking for the signs that was not there. And maybe that was like me with not reading the alphabet before Irie took me in hand, and Daniel did not know how to read them signs that I was bred up with, and it was his ignorance on top of everything else that was frustrating him now. I would not say Daniel was angry exactly but he was not far off it. He was a foreigner in our country and was not comfortable knowing he might make a mistake any time. And maybe it takes a bigger man than Daniel Collins ever was to call out for help or to admit to being unsure of himself. That is what I believe. But he did not ask me nothing, only went on as if he knew enough already, when I could have told him the way of things in the scrubs, just as Irie told me the way of reading and writing and I was happy to learn from her. I believe Daniel thought he had nothing to learn from me except the gossip of people around the town, which was something I did not care about and I knew little of it.
In my dream in the night I had seen Rosie’s knowledge map and I had a sweat of fear in the dream of Rosie going up against me. I was afraid of what that old woman was up to. Her map was gone in the morning when I went out to shower myself, the ant-lions’ cone traps built back up in the night, like them insects never give up. People from the coast like Esme and Daniel did not believe that the Old People of that country have their own way of writing and reading with knowledge maps, but think there is only their own alphabet to read by. Which was their arrogance. But them Old People always had their own way of writing that was kept secret from the whitefeller. I could not read it but I knew they had it.
Just after we turned off the made road at the ten mile outside Mount Hay earlier, when the mist had not gone off the country yet, I seen a yellow robin in a patch of mesquite, the native bird sitting in the branches of the stranger bush. That bird did not fly when we rattled past her in the jeep but stayed put and I thought about her sitting there. Which was another sign to me. The ant-lions and Rosie’s people are kin to the ranges. Everything abides in them. The beauty of their persistence awed Daniel Collins, his mind aching for a connection to the mystery that would make him certain of something in himself. I seen he had formed a kind of love for the country but doubted his own presence in it. Daniel was to die a stranger in that country that had not formed him but had bewitched him like a story bewitches a child and the child cannot sleep thinking on the story after its mother has put out the light and gone to her own bed, but goes on dwelling in that country of the witch and the fairy, fearing the end for itself in the story. I believed I understood that morning that nothing of Daniel’s longing was to be satisfied in him. For he was longing in the wrong direction. He was looking to understand something that could not be understood. It was not understanding was missing in him, but knowing. Like Rosie knew. Like the ant-lions knew. Like that yellow robin and them angry crows all knew. Daniel Collins seen understanding as the way to the comfort of his troubled soul, but anyone could have told him he was on the wrong track with that.
The day was warming up and I took off my jacket and tossed it into the back. It was Ben brought me that jacket back from Townsville when he was there at the meatworks getting away from his dad for a spell that time. It was leather with a sheepskin lining and I always wore it on cold mornings. Daniel told me my first week with him I should be wearing the police-issue jacket but I said I would not be hanging up my old jacket and he seen I meant it. The great wedgetail eagles was circling already, rising on the thermals like gods themselves into their own blessed sky, their distant cries pitching across the wind. God’s eagles. The eagles of Christ. Lord Jesus Christ and his blessed eagles. The talons of the Lord. It was my mother’s voice in my head telling me her own feelings of unease. My mother always come near me when I was in trouble. In her death too she was my mother. I took her belief of gentleness and it come into me and stayed with me. I did not like being with Daniel if we was to meet up with Ben, and I was wishing I could have gone out to Coal Creek on my own and talked to Ben and been just the two of us. I knew me and Daniel was not going to make it in the jeep out to Ben’s place anyway. After that storm the creek would be running a banker this morning and not even that old Blitz of Fay Stubbs’ would ha
ve got across.
But Daniel would have to learn the country his own way if he was ever to learn it. If he had asked my opinion that morning, nice and casual, the two of us men together, smoking a cigarette and looking at the weather, I would have told him. But he did not ask. And he did not smoke neither. He just backed the jeep out of the shed first thing after breakfast before it was scarcely light and told me, Get in, Bobby, like I was his dog and had nothing of worth to say. He was wearing George Wilson’s top-break Webley in that closed holster, which did not help my feelings one bit. Daniel’s face just as closed and set as that beat-up holster of George’s. I did not think there was no need for it. We had the .303 behind the seats on a pile of sugar bags. We always carried that rifle when we went out in the jeep so I did not think nothing about it being there. Sometimes there was animals needed to be shot.
When we was leaving the police house Tip come out and barked at us. Esme standing at the back door watching, the tea towel in her hands like a flag, red and white, but not waving it, seeing to it that her man did not spend another day thinking on what he might do but was going out to get it done before the sun was up. My mother always said everything means something. I seen Daniel had put the tucker box in the back, which cheered me up somewhat, as I guessed Esme would have packed it for us and her packing of provisions was always generous. Esme did her own job well. I never heard no one complain to her about it nor have a reason to. Which made me wonder why she did not leave others to get on with their jobs on their own but had no confidence in anyone but herself to get things done right. I looked at her one evening with the thought of asking her this. I must have looked at her for a long time because she laughed and said to me, My goodness, Bobby, what are you thinking? I said I was not thinking nothing and I went back to copying out the book me and Irie was doing. I do not think Esme would have had an answer for me if I had asked her that question. I do not know what she thought I had in my mind staring at her like that.