Coal Creek

by Miller, Alex

  She reached around and touched the stone of the wall again and said nothing. I was proud of her for her silence, for I could see she had a strong feeling for the story of the red wall I had given her. Learning that she had set her camp in a place like that was something I understood would mean a great deal to her. And I believed she would not talk about it as if it was nothing to her. It was a story first given me by my father. Dad knew some of them Old Murris of this part of the ranges when he was a boy, and they trusted him with some of their knowledge. I told her how the playgrounds shone like a white silk dress in the starlight but was dull under a full moon and that it was a mystery to know why this was. The means of making ground shine like that has been lost, I said. When I was finished telling her she said, Will you take me there tonight? I said, Well, it is too far. We would not be home before light. I should like to go there, she said.

  She sat considering me for some time, chewing on a date. She took the date stone out of her mouth and looked at it. It glistened in the candlelight with her spit. She set the stone down and looked at me and did not look away. She said, You always have a reason for not doing things. I said, Like what else haven’t I done? You promised to take me to the spring of the fig tree one day. I said, And I will do that when we have the chance for it. That old tree is not going nowhere and it will still be there when we get to it. It is best to wait till the signs are right before you try to do something like that. Or you are just pushing against things and they do not work out as you hope they will. If you and me was to go to the spring of the fig tree now your father would wish to come with us. She said, That is true. She stared at me a long while until I got uncomfortable with it. I said, What is it? She said, I am wondering if you are one of those people who keep their promises. Or if you are one of those people who find reasons for breaking their promises. I did not like to hear this. I said, Well, you will find that out one way or another in time, and then you will have the answer to your question. She asked me then, Do you think the signs are right for us? I did not know what to say to this. I believed in my heart all the real signs was right between us, but I did not trust our situation to work out in our favour. So I said nothing and her question hung there and she was not upset I did not answer her. She knew our situation just as well as I did.

  We was silent a while after this. I rolled a smoke and lit it and I blew the smoke out the entrance. She said in a quiet voice, I like the smell of your cigarette, Bobby. You don’t have to blow the smoke out the door. I looked at her and she smiled and said, I did not mean to say I do not trust you. I believe we are friends and can say anything that is in our minds to each other. And that is what being friends is. I said, I believe that too. You know how to speak your mind straight out better than I do. I will learn that from you. We both laughed and she said she was glad she had not upset me. I told her it would be hard for her to do that. I thought about it and said, We cannot know everything there is to know about each other yet. She said, Do you think we ever will? I said, Know everything about each other? Yes, she said. I knew that my dad would not have answered a question like that. I said, I do not think we can ever know that, but I do think we can trust each other. I was thinking how much I knew of Ben and yet I knew nothing of him really when it come to being sure of what was in his mind. After this Irie and me began to talk more openly about ourselves and our lives and the things we was hoping for. I cannot remember now what them things was that we talked about but I know they seemed important and true to us at the time. The pleasure was not in the things but was in sharing with each other. And that I do remember. The candle burned down and we forgot the time that was going by.

  . . .

  Irie Collins was the first friend I ever had outside Ben Tobin. And the first woman friend I ever had. If I can call her that. She would have liked me calling her a woman, I know that, even though she was not really at that stage of her life just yet. As well as teaching me how to read and write she taught me a lot about friendship and how we can talk to each other in ways I never thought of before, and how we can ask each other questions and disagree without getting angry or impatient. I knew it was dangerous, me and her being friends and being out there together. But I did not wish to put a name to how I felt about her, or to speak with her of the danger to myself. I did not see there was also a danger in it to her. I only come to that understanding later on. We do not see everything at once.

  Tip was settled in the doorway of the shelter, her snout resting on her paws, which was crossed under her chin. She give a woof and sat up. Me and Irie both looked out at the night. I seen the sky was getting light over to the east and I said, We had better be getting back. Irie said, Is someone coming? I said, Tip was just letting us know it is time to be getting back. If Miriam wakes up she will see you are gone and will tell your parents. Irie said, If Miriam wakes up and I am not there with her she will be too scared to get out of her bed in case the monster that hides under her bed grabs her by the ankle. I said, Well we had better be getting back all the same, or they will be up and about before we are there. Irie said, I would not care too much if they did find out about us. Would you? I said, Then I would be out of a job and you and me would not be able to see each other. She said, I would run away if they tried to stop me seeing you. She looked at me very serious then and she said, I want to be a woman of the ranges, just as you are a man of the ranges. This is more my country than the coast ever was. I don’t want to go back there. I feel as if I have known this place all my life. That is how I have felt since the day we got here. That first day, before we unpacked anything and I was standing at the back door for the first time looking out at the scrub and the distant escarpments, I said to Mum, There is a funny feeling about this place. She thought I was going to tell her I didn’t like it. But I said, It feels as if this place is already our home. She said to me, Well that’s lovely, darling. Mount Hay is going to be our home for a while, so I’m very glad you feel like that. But that was not what I meant. I meant I knew it here. When I first looked out on it from the back door of the police house I felt as if I already knew this country and it was my home country. Mum didn’t understand. She never does. She thinks I’m still a child. I said to her, I meant, it feels as if we have come home. She didn’t take any notice of this but asked me to give her a hand unpacking the kitchen things so we could get a meal underway. The kids at the school are the same. They only talk about getting away to the coast. They hate Mount Hay and the scrub. Most of them have never been into the scrub. They don’t want to go into it. All they ever talk about is getting down to the coast and into the city when they finish school and buying a car. But this is where I want to be. She was frowning with the heaviness of her thoughts. You are the only one who understands what I feel about the ranges. She looked at me in a way that made me feel I had better not betray her trust in me, not ever. I did not say nothing for some time, but I had liked to hear her say I was the only one who understood her. I was thinking of myself at her age of thirteen and how I believed myself to be a man and had been working in the team with my dad and Ben and his dad for three years by that age. When I did not say nothing she said, And I do not want to get you sacked. She wet two fingers with her tongue and snuffed out the candle.

  We crawled out of the shelter and I let her take the lead through the scrub, as I seen she was keen to do that. The moon had gone down behind Mount Dennison and the air was cold, the bendee whispering with the coming dawn, the birds chattering nervously waiting for the light to break free of the night before getting their courage up. Walking behind Irie there was a sadness in me that one day me and that girl would most likely have to go our own separate ways.

  NINE

  Some days went by, it might have been a week or longer, I do not remember the exact amount of time. Me and Daniel was busy with a bunch of fresh-branded cows that turned up in the Mount Hay yards. Someone told Frank Dawson about the cows and he come into town and stopped the sale going ahead. He claimed they was cleanskins robbed off his
country a while back and fresh branded with some Territorian’s new brand, which was not familiar to none of us in Mount Hay. There was only thirty of them cows and they was so poor-looking I did not think they was worth troubling about, but Frank Dawson was not a man to let nothing go by if he could account for it. Me and Dad and Ben and his dad had done work for the family many times. I did not mind Frank, he paid well and I believed he was honest. I agreed them cows was his but I did not say nothing to Daniel. You could tell by the look of them where they come from. Shorthorns, they was, big and rangy, all cock-horned and with a wild streak in them, tails up and on the lookout for trouble. They was easier scared than scrub turkeys. Daniel impounded them and I took them down to the government reserve with Mother the next day, Tip doing some quiet slipping around distracting them, keeping their minds off making a run for it, which she proved to be expert at. I seen Tip did not need no training to be an expert in stock handling and that it was in her nature, just like Irie’s feelings for the ranges was in her nature. There was no rip-tear-and-bust with Tip but a quiet sneaky way of sliding around and I loved to see it. It was like she hypnotised them cows. You do not see many dogs handling cattle in the ranges as they cannot take the long miles in the heat without water. Me and Mother did not get out of a trot and them cows was in the government reserve with the bogan gate shut on them before they knew what was happening to them.

  There had been no stock in the reserve paddock for months and there was plenty of fresh feed and good water in there. By the morning they had stopped walking the fence and bellowing for their freedom and was settled down to living the good life. While I was closing the bogan gate on them Tip was sitting up straight as a chair beside Mother, watching me, her tongue hanging out drooling and her eyes shining with pure pride. I told her how good I thought she was and she just about melted into the ground, grovelling around my feet and licking my boots. A dog shows gratitude for praise with a passion no other beast has in it. You cannot be impatient with a dog but have to let them get on and do their job without getting in too close on your horse, or they cannot do it so well. My dad and Ben’s dad never worked with dogs and was always impatient around them and was most likely to raise their whip and give the dog’s backside a sting. Them old fellers was happier when there was no dogs hanging about.

  Daniel had the paperwork of it and he was doing it by the government regulations and making a big job of writing up his report on it. I think he was glad to have a real crime to report to the coast on. George Wilson would have let it work itself out and them cows would have been sold to the buyer from the meatworks the same day and the money gone to Frank, and that would have been the end of it. Them cows was no good for nothing but dog meat anyhow. I knew Ben would have dodged them from Dawsons’ place for that Territorian and was most likely betting on the fellow being new to the game and not picking they was barren. Ben would not have been expecting that feller to put them in the Mount Hay yards for sale. There was not a lot of harm in it for anyone. But I seen early on I could not tell Daniel nothing and I did not try to but kept my thoughts on it to myself. He liked to have the record of everything he done in writing and filed away in that filing cabinet of his in the office and a report sent down to the police headquarters. I think all those years George Wilson was the constable there must have been dead silence from Mount Hay for the cops on the coast, and I would say they was glad to hear nothing from him. The less trouble the better would have been their philosophy.

  Daniel and Esme seemed pretty much at peace with each other, and me and Irie was feeling easier about meeting up. We was taking a few more risks having our private get-togethers in the night and it got that way that I was lying awake in my clothes waiting for her to come out to my quarters for a talk pretty much every night. Miriam seen what we was up to, but Irie said she had got her sister onside and we need not worry about her. I did not ask her how she had managed that and she did not offer to tell me, but knowing Miriam I would say it was not something she would do for nothing but there must have been something in it for her. I seen Esme walking back down the track to the house from the direction of my quarters when I was riding in one day and it give me a scare to see her there. There was nothing for her once she got past the chooks and I wondered if she had been snooping around my place and getting suspicious of me and Irie meeting. It did not give me a good feeling. I did not tell Irie, as I feared she might come out with it and challenge her mother.

  Me and Irie did not go out again to her shelter by the red wall but sat on my verandah to do our talking at night. That was my suggestion. Tip was always close by, her eyes blinking like she was following every word of our talk. And that’s all it was. Talking was enough for me and Irie. She was pressing me to tell her when I was going to take her to the playgrounds of the Old Murri people. She wanted to see them playgrounds shining in the starlight the way I told her. The most silent place on this earth, I said. Something so still you feel the country listening to you breathe. Your horse feeling it too. And if you have a dog with you the dog will whimper and hang close to you and not go off chasing scents. I told Irie all this and she listened with a look of belief in her eyes, and I loved seeing that look and knowing myself trusted by her, and I went on with the story and made up some things that come into my head. Not lying exactly, but colouring in. I did not wish to lie outright to Irie.

  There was nothing finer than being with her on my verandah telling her them things. I think I give her an idea them playgrounds was some kind of enchanted fairyland where dreams come true. Which I half believed it was myself. But not written about in her school books, or in them books of Daniel’s. Them playgrounds was my own special secret that I give to her as part of us being together, just the two of us knowing it. Talking about it was our way of talking about our hopes and our own dreams and the things we was feeling about each other that we could not speak of directly. I did not expect none of it to ever be real, but I believe she did. I kept my dreams in one place and my real life in another place. But I think for Irie at that time her dreams was what she seen as her real life, and she did not separate the two. That was not something I understood then, but expected her to be like I was in everything. Which was foolish of me. She had not had her confidence dented yet. That would happen.

  . . .

  Rosie come around to the back door of the police house one afternoon while me and Daniel was having our smoko in the kitchen, which she knew was her time to catch the constable. She told Daniel it was Ben had branded them impounded beasts for the feller from the Territory, which everyone in town but Daniel already knew was an obvious fact. She said Ben got paid two pounds a head for them beasts. Daniel listened to her and said he would follow it up, but he did not. He had lost his trust in Rosie’s word and had seen she was just after getting Ben into trouble as payback for Ben beating her boy and that is all it was with her. But we all knew it was Ben anyhow who had branded them cows. There was nothing new in that. Who else would have done it? The feller he done it for was putting a herd together out in the Territory. Ben had dodged them cows off Dawsons’ place because they was barren. It stood out at you. Frank Dawson knew but he did not want Ben charged and going to gaol for it so he did not make a complaint against him. Making complaints to the police was not Frank’s way of doing things and anyway he and Ben got on fine most of the time and had a lot time for each other. Frank just wanted his cows back, barren or not, or the money for the sale of them. Everyone in Mount Hay knew that except Daniel. I left it alone and said nothing.

  If George Wilson had still been the constable he would not even have made no enquiries but would have left it to Frank Dawson to send a couple of his men into town to get them cows from the government reserve where I put them. When George was doing the job he would have stood up at the bar in Chiller’s place and had a yarn with them men of Frank’s and Ben too without making nothing of it. In George’s day these things got worked out by themselves and the only time they was spoken about was if someone made so
me joke about them and everyone knew what they was joking about and they laughed to let the other feller know they knew what he was really talking about. An outsider like Daniel understood none of that, and even if he had understood it Esme would not have let him enjoy being an easygoing person like George Wilson was. The worst I ever seen George do was to knock the wind out of a ringer with a sharp whack in the ribs with that leather baton of his. Everyone in Mount Hay said Daniel’s shirts was too starched up by his wife. I did not join in with that kind of thing. So long as I was taking the government’s money I reckoned I owed Daniel something. He was my boss.

  . . .

  It was around my usual time for going to bed, about an hour after our evening meal. There was some thunder about up in the escarpments and the air was still and heavy with it. I was sitting on my bunk having a last smoke and looking at my mother’s Bible, which I had unwrapped from her scarf and opened on my knees. I had the Bible open at the Book of Revelation, which I had heard my mother read to us many times. I knew the supper of the great God, and how we was all to eat the flesh of kings and great men and of ordinary men and I never understood it but it stayed sharp in my mind, the picture in my head of us tearing at the flesh of people to eat it. There was something so wild in that picture the truth of it stayed within me, even though I did not understand why it had to be so. I felt it in my own blood, and it stood out at times when I was troubled, as if I was told by it of the terrible things ahead. My mother told me the Book of Revelation knew my fate before I knew it myself. And I believed it in this picture of us eating the flesh of people. I do not know why. I looked at the writing but was not able to read all of it yet, my mother’s beautiful soft voice in them words, holding the book open as if I might be reading it, my thoughts driven into a fantasy of a future with Irie and our kids. Which I knew was a precious dream of a fate that was not to be mine.