by Miller, Alex
I was away with these thoughts when Daniel suddenly pulled up and turned off the motor. He did not speak but sat looking into the scrub ahead of the jeep where the track cut through a stand of sandalwood. We called it the bush plum. Sitting there staring as if he seen someone riding towards us out of the scrub. The answer to the things he was trying to understand in what he was seeing. But I do not think Daniel Collins was a man to ever see things that was not there. Which was his loss. The track was grown over with wiregrass from them late storms they had been catching over that way, but it was there. There was nowhere else for it to be but there. The engine block ticked and just then the wind dropped and the sudden stillness settled over Daniel Collins and me, the pair of us sitting there in that ex-US army jeep side by side out there in the scrub. I did not know where this was going to get us to. The stillness of the bush. That is it. Daniel sitting and looking. A puzzled man out there. In the hand of the mystery. Cupped and held until the day of his death, as we all are, like my mother as a helpless child held in the arms of the Mother Superior, safe so long as them arms of that kind woman held her. The sisters was my family, she always said. She knew herself to have been cherished.
Daniel spoke suddenly into the quiet, the cries of the eagles faint now, rising in their circles. He said, Esme asked me last night what did Rosie say exactly that Ben did to the girl. He was silent a minute and I felt I was not expected to answer what he had said so I waited until he spoke again. Which he soon did. I could not talk to Esme about my feelings, he said. I told her Rosie just drew it in the dust. She did not say it. She could not say it. Esme said to me, Are you going to tell me or not? I can’t tell you, I said to her. The thought of the abomination of it has silenced me. The hideousness of evil cuts deep in us. But Esme would not leave it at that. Can’t or won’t, Daniel Collins? she said.
Was he speaking to himself or to me? I wanted to ease my left foot which was pressed up against the side of the metal guard, but I did not dare to move even one muscle in my entire body. Something was coming out of him. Esme is a strong woman and I thank God for her presence in my life, he said. She waited for me to come back from those cursed jungles up in the north and I knew how much she believed in me. The war was a test for both of us. But it was a clean test. We knew where we stood with the war. After I came back we were closer than we had ever been before I went. I did not expect this job to be something that would come between us and prove difficult up here in the ranges. But that is how it has turned out. Daniel did not look at me while he was speaking but looked straight ahead into that stand of broken sandalwood, shattered and twisted by dry heat and winds over the years, looking into it as if he was talking to someone I could not see who was in there. It unsettled me. He said, I told her, I do not hate Ben Tobin and I do not wish that man harm, but I will find out what he has done to the girl. Esme would not leave it and she said, But you would hate him if he was ever to touch one of our girls. It upset me to hear her say that as I knew it was bringing something into this thing with Tobin that did not rightly belong in it. Daniel stopped speaking and was silent a long time after this.
I wanted to roll a cigarette but thought I would wait until he got out what he was needing to say. I felt, he said, as if Esme was cheating when she said that, bringing our girls into it. He turned and looked at me then as if he suddenly remembered I was with him. I looked back at him and I seemed not to be able to stop myself from blinking. So I pretended to cough and put my hand up to my mouth and turned my face aside. He said, It upset me and I could not settle to sleep after that. I told her Ben Tobin is not going to touch our girls. That is not the issue for us. That is not going to happen and you should not speak of it as if it is something else for us to worry about.
I did not know what I could say to this, so I said nothing.
The eagles was black specks way up there in the dazzle of the sky, like specks in my eyes, then gone, the pair of them, circling each other in great looping rings, wings fixed and still. The dance of the eagles. In my eye then gone then back again in my eye as if they could make themselves disappear and appear again, mesmerising their prey with the magic of themselves a thousand feet above the country. Was I no more than a black speck in the eye of the eagle? The air was so heavy with moisture it should have held them to the ground. How do they rise without effort into the white emptiness of sky like that without no weight on them? I have often seen a pair of them perched close to the ground and giving me that superior look they have, and I have come on them stripping a carcass and they have looked up at me sitting my horse and I have seen their resentment of my presence. Which is surprising, but you see it when you come close to them, or if you have shot them and hung them spread on a fence as some people will. That is something I have never done, to shoot an eagle. I would fear the curse of it would never leave me in peace ever again. But people do it. Calm as anything. Like they believe they are the boss of the eagles. Which they are not. I could not do it. An eagle is an eagle. We are not that. We are only men. When you live as we had lived our lives in the scrubs you know you are not the boss of nothing and there is the sky and the eagles and the scrubs going on forever into them great stone escarpments. No man knows himself to be the boss of that.
Daniel started the motor and drove on, easing his way through the tormented landscape. I had said nothing. We saw bones. Daniel pointed them out like he thought I might not have seen them. I knew them bones belonged to an old scrubber bull my dad shot fifteen years before. Some years after he had shot that big old bull we hung the skull in the fork of a dead cabbage gum, my mother called them blue gums. There was a great spread of horns on that skull. It had been missing some years already. The horns on that old bull was the widest I ever seen. Some gold fossicker must have taken that skull to sell it. And no doubt he boasted about it to his friends. The hole my dad’s bullet made was dead centre of that skull, looking at you, like an eye, looking at you out of the death of that old bull. It would have give Rosie a turn to see it.
. . .
The cut of the track down the bank of the creek to the wattle flat was right there in front of us and Daniel just kept going. I grabbed the handhold under the windscreen and I said, Hold up there, Daniel! He stomped on the brake as if my voice woke him from a dream. The wattle flat was flooded by the rush of the creek, the wattles bent over, sticks and rubbish caught up in them bowed branches going with that heaving current. I do not think we can go through there, I said. But I had no need of saying it. He asked me, Is there some way across for us? I indicated with my hand and told him, On the horses we can ford lower down where she flattens out over the stones, but the bank down there will not take this vehicle. She’s a breakaway where the flat was all washed out by that big flood ten years ago. You will not get a vehicle over there without grading the bank. If you give an hour or two the horses would make it.
Daniel switched off the motor and stepped down and went up to the edge of the cut and stood looking down the bank at the brown flow of the water. I got out and went over and stood beside him. The sun was striking through the tops of an old budgeroo, what they call mahogany tree, on the other side of the creek. I knew that tree at the crossing from when I was a boy. It had not changed one bit and my dad would have known it today. There was not many of them mahogany trees around just there and this old man stood alone. A faithful pair of black cockatoos was watching us from the top branches of the budgeroo, waiting to see what we was going to do, like our arrival at the crossing had disturbed them at their lovemaking.
Daniel said, Why don’t we boil up and have a drink of tea before we head back? He was calmer now. The tension gone out of him. The creek was stopping him and that must have been clear to any man. The creek was making his decision for him. He did not seem to care a whole lot about the eventual outcome of this any more. I still did though. He considered me for some time and I was afraid he might be going to ask me something about what I thought of the way he spoke to me about Esme and was maybe regretting lettin
g me into his private thoughts like that, which I had not asked to be let into. I stepped away and went around to the back of the jeep and picked the axe out of its divot and went over and took a swing at an old dead piece of sandalwood and I hit it hard with the back of the axe. The splinters flew and I heard one pinging past my ear. A splinter of sandalwood went into the eye of a young Chinese boy who used to work for Chiller at the pub and the boy was blind in that eye from then on.
I got a fire going and went over and dropped the rear of the jeep and slid the tucker box out and opened her up. Esme had wrapped sandwiches and a big piece of her fruit cake. I loved that fruit cake of Esme’s. I squatted down and set the billy on the flames and fed sticks all around it. I smoked a roll-up and squatted by the fire watching the water heating, bubbles hissing around the edge of the billy, the smell of the smoke and my tobacco. It was the smell of old times. Daniel was standing across the fire from me. He said, I should not have spoken like that to you about Esme. I stayed squatted down and poked a dry stick in under the billy and squinted into the smoke. It was blowing over me the way smoke from a fire always will blow over you. The morning was more than half gone. The sound of the creek roaring. I liked to hear the roar of a creek in flood. It was the sound of the country breathing after a long dry spell of holding its breath. That is how it always seemed to me, as if the country was letting it all out in a rush. There was a happiness in that sound that would have made my mother want to dance.
The black cockatoos got tired of waiting for us to leave and took off, keening their dismal cry like they just lost a friend, flapping them big black wings of theirs lazily and showing us the red flash of their tails like they was sending us messages. I was glad to be out in the scrub away from the police house. Daniel said no more and I thought maybe his silence was a sign he was listening for once. The bush is always talking to us. The water boiled and I tossed in some leaves and lifted the billy off the fire with a stick and set it on the ground to one side, steaming and strong with the smell of the tea. I tapped the sides of the billy to settle the leaves and turned to Daniel. He handed over his quart pot and I filled it and handed it back to him. He cut the cake and squatted across from me and we sipped our scalding tea and chewed the cake and looked into the fire with our own thoughts. I always liked a fire. I was the one got out of my swag first thing in the old days with Dad and Ben and his dad, and it was me who always got a fire going and a billy heating up and doing something about our breakfast, which depended how long we’d been out in the camp. Being up first before it was light and the white mist was still rising among the timber. The times I seen a big old man roo standing there watching us, like he was wondering if he might come up and introduce himself. I used to wait till I had the fire going well and the billy on before I went off a little way into the bush and had a long satisfying pee, the horses clinking about in their hobbles, heads raised watching me. I often told them my dreams. I did not speak to the others about my dreams. And the old man roo watched me pee and scratched himself behind his ear and he turned around and hopped away real slow, shaking his head and thinking about the show he had seen out there in his country, the men and their fire and the man peeing and talking to himself. That was our life. I seen it many times in them big cow eyes of the roo, soft and dreamy with that easy wisdom of his country in his long head. Ben liked to drink his tea while he was still in his swag and I was happy to take it to him. I went over to where he was sleeping and pulled back that grey blanket of his with the red stitching around the edges of it, and I crouched there looking at him, watching him waking up and smelling the tea and opening his eyes and seeing me there. Tea boy! he said, and he smiled and reached his hand out for the quart pot. Are we getting some of that toasted damper of yours? Ben Tobin, my friend. That was him then. Both of us young and full of life.
I tipped the dregs from my quart pot onto the dying fire and rolled a fresh cigarette. Daniel watched me. He said, I was never a smoker. I had guessed that. I never yet felt easy with a man who did not enjoy a smoke. We stayed a while then packed up and headed back to the house to catch the horses. The day was well advanced. We was quiet with each other on the way back, Daniel easier in himself. He did not point out nothing to me, that is how I knew his feelings.
FIVE
Daniel parked the jeep in the shed and he went over to the back door with the tucker box. I took our bridles down to the paddock and caught the horses. I do not know what Esme and Daniel had to say to each other. He come out of the house before I had the saddle on Mother. I did not see Esme come to the door to watch us leave and Tip did not bark. I had saddled Daniel’s gelding first and it stood there droopy-eyed and trying to catch a quick nap before heading into the day’s work. I did not know why a man would keep a horse with such an attitude to a day’s work but it was not my business to say. Daniel bought that horse for the police off Ron Parker out at Beelah and Ron was well known for getting rid of things he did not wish to keep. Finisher, Ron Parker called that horse, and it was well named. It was a layabout and had them sleepy eyes. What my dad called a Sunday horse. It would not walk nice and companionable alongside another horse when you was travelling through the bush but was always trying to follow behind, dreaming along, its head down and not watching where it was stepping, tripping on roots and loose stones rolling under its feet, and giving that little cough horses give when they are not happy. It was of a mild temperament and did not have a mean streak at any level but it leaned its weight on me when I shod it. Daniel give it to Irie to learn to ride on. He said it was safe. I told her it was not good to learn to ride on such a horse as she would learn nothing but kicking her heels into its flanks and urging it to stay awake and keep moving. I give her Mother to canter around on, which she did, bareback till Daniel bought her a saddle. I knew Mother would bring that girl home safe. Irie was the only other person I ever let ride Mother. I was proud to see her on Mother’s back. Them two took to each other. That thing of Daniel’s would have left her and come home alone, stepping on its loose reins and just thinking about itself and its next feed of lucerne hay. Irie knew without me saying nothing to her I would never let anyone ride Mother but her and she blushed when I set her on that mare’s back for the first time. Till then I did not know a child could blush. It moved my heart to see it.
. . .
I led off down the bank into the flood of Coal Creek and out across that wide reach of stones where she flattens out and the water is spread over a wide area. There was the taint of our morning’s fire in the air. The water come up to our horses’ bellies, the stones rattling and clinking under the rush of it, like someone was chipping at a prison wall down there to make their escape. I never did like them loose stones. I was watching upstream in case one of them floating logs come by and was keeping a lookout for a place on the far bank where the horses could get a purchase with their feet. I did not know what the great hurry was to be out there at Ben’s place. By the next morning the water would have gone down a couple of foot or more and we could have waited till then. But Daniel was set on it and I seen that. Esme not coming to the door when we was leaving the second time was her telling him nothing had changed since the morning when we left the first time. I believe that was her sign the pressure was still on him to get the thing done. She was a mother and I would say she had strong feelings about Ben’s girl. But it was not only that in my opinion but was her way of stiffening Daniel to his policing.
The far bank was all crumpled and broken away by the water, big chunks of grassy clods tipped in and washing out. The bank was nothing but silt, ten foot of it, straight up mostly, with a lip at the top where the grass roots was holding the silt together. I seen a place where a dead tree had broken down the lip and I guided Mother downstream a little way to get her next to it. I was going very easy as I did not want Mother stepping into a hole. She was snorting and reaching her neck and was not happy to be urged into this, but I knew her to be reliable and willing and she had never come down with me yet. My boots fill
ed up with water. It was cold. We come out of the water and lunged up into the breakaway, the silt bank giving under the thrusting of her hind legs. She was lurching and foundering and I was ready to step off when she found a purchase and got herself up onto the bank with a great heave and a grunt. She stood on the bank and shook herself, nearly shaking me off. I looked around and seen Daniel struggling up the breakaway on Mother’s tracks. He was out of the saddle and up over the neck of that old gelding of his, its eye white and frantic. The pair of them looked like they was going over backwards into the water any minute. Finisher went down on his knees and Daniel had his boots dragging in the silt. They ended up back in the creek again, side-on to the bank. Daniel reefed the Finisher around on the rein and swore at him, sticking his spurs into that soft hide, the red stain of the blood sluicing away with the water.
I was getting no pleasure at all watching the performance. I turned away and seen Ben’s place over on my right-hand side on that piece of high ground where he set it, maybe a hundred and fifty yards off through the timber. A little less than that. His old International truck inside the shed. I seen its red roof flickering through the thin leaves. I sat looking over the horses in the paddock beyond Ben’s stockyards. The old packhorse, Lazy, was not there and nor was Ben’s young entire that he called Muscles. Ben always liked to ride a stallion. Muscles was an iron-footed tough little pony that he bred his stock from. There was four mares looking over towards me from the other side of the fence, a new foal with one of them and two others heavy in foal. The black and white pony he called Stumbles was not there neither.