by Alex Miller
They went on in silence until they breasted the bank of the river. They stood side by side then looking down at the broad sandy bed of the Isaac. The far bank fifty metres distant, the riverbed a level stretch of golden sand cutting through the sunlit timber like an abandoned highway from some unnamed metropolis of antiquity whose population had been dispersed and murdered long ago, the scattered survivors dreaming their time would come again and the great wheel of history turn once more upon another unimaginable revolution of their fate. The river a river in name only, carrying no surface water. The sand drifted and rippled by the wind, as if in imitation of the missing water, a crisscross of cattle tracks and four-wheel drive tyremarks. From a dark tangle of low scrub on the far bank the pale trunks of ancient bluegums rose clean and smooth, the upper limbs of the great trees breaching the blue sky sixty or seventy metres above the golden river sand.
Bo gestured and turned away. ‘We’ll go up here.’
She followed him. The warm air filled with that dry elusive smell.
After they had gone a few metres Annabelle asked, ‘Why did your grandmother hit you if you asked her where she was taking you?’
Bo paused a step ahead of her on the steep cattle pad. He coughed and drew breath. ‘If we was wondering about where we was going then we wouldn’t be taking a lot of notice of where we was. You’ll know where you’re going, she’d tell us, when you get there.’ He turned and went on ahead of her up the track. ‘The old people didn’t like questions.’
They came over the top of the bank and walked on in silence for fifteen minutes or more, Bo making the trail through the dry stand of buffel grass, Annabelle a couple of paces behind him. They crossed an open area of poisoned yellowbox then started up the incline of a stony rise. On the flank of the rise the African buffel grass gave way to bare patches of red gravel between thin stands of sandalwood and bendee, spiky tussocks of purple wiregrass and buck spinifex. Bo paused, nudging a stone with the pointy toe of his boot until it loosened. He bent and picked the stone up, leaving behind the clean mould of its inset in the eroded surface of the red gravel. He turned the stone in his hand, rubbing the crumbly clay from its underface with the ball of his thumb. Annabelle leaned close to look. He handed it to her. ‘Chert,’ he said. ‘That’s heat splitting.’
When she took the stone from his hand she saw him glance at her wedding ring. She turned the stone between her fingers, considering its bladelike facets. Its pink surfaces glowed softly with an inner light, veined and deep.
Together they looked at the shattered splinter of pale stone in the palm of her hand.
‘You seen this stuff before?’ he asked.
‘I went on several digs and did some fieldwork in South Australia when I was a student. We saw a lot of knapped stone tools there, but I’ve never looked for them in Queensland. We never thought about looking for them when we were kids.’
They were both silent suddenly, standing looking at each other as if they expected the other to speak, the stillness of the bush warm and fragrant around them, a crushed weed or blossom scenting the air.
‘Yeah,’ he said and waved his hand around. ‘You find flaked tools all along these ridges. The thing with this heat splitting is you can’t never tell if they’ve been used or not.’ He delicately took the stone from her hand and considered it. He dropped it and they went on. She breathed freely again, watching him examine the ground, pausing now and then to pick up a piece of shattered stone that attracted his attention.
‘They’re not learning nothin sitting back there in that truck,’ he called back to her. ‘They may as well be home watching teevee.’ He squatted and picked up a stone. ‘Here’s something.’
She went over and looked to see what he’d found.
He reached up a battered orb of petrified wood. She took the rock from him. It was heavy, its substance dense and twisted in the grain of the primordial tree, the ancient growth rings striped red and purple and palest lavender. She squatted beside him and handed the stone back to him. ‘What is it?’ She would like to have told him, if it had been possible to speak of something so intimate in a simple way, of the quiet joy she felt at being in the bush with him on this modest expedition. She watched him fit the stone into his palm and heft it.
‘It’s what’s called a core,’ he said. ‘Here’s the bulb where he struck a flake off.’ It was a confidence he offered her in their examination of the stone. A stone that others might have walked past or kicked aside. Anonymous in its belonging to the landscape. He pressed the flat striking platform of the core with the nicotine-stained thumbnail of his other hand, and might have proposed knapping a flake from the stone himself. He handed it to her.
She took it from him.
‘When you think of it, that stone’s just sat there since the day the old feller finished with it,’ he said. ‘He must have squatted here just where we’re squatting now, flaking off his scrapers and tools. Then when he’d done he set it aside, just where we find it laying now.’ He reached into his shirt pocket for his packet of Drum and looked around them. ‘He had himself a good vantage here.’ He gestured down the ridge towards the Isaac. ‘He could see anybody coming up the rise off the riverflat from here. And he could look on down through the timber towards the gully.’ He picked up a tiny facet of stone and handed it to her. ‘She’s a jigsaw puzzle. If we sat here long enough picking over this stuff we’d find all the pieces belonging to that core except the ones he took away with him.’ He smiled at her, looking to see her thought.
Annabelle could smell the tobacco on his breath and the faint acidity of his sweat. She said, ‘I’ll record its position on the GPS.’ She unclipped the instrument and switched it on, putting it on the ground beside the core and watching for the screen to pick up the satellite coordinates the way Susan had shown her.
‘I believe them things is inaccurate,’ he said, a dismissive flick of his hand at the instrument on the ground. ‘I can always bring you back here any time you want to come. You don’t need that thing to tell you where you been.’
She said, ‘It’s just for the record.’
‘I know that.’
‘Maybe I should take a photo.’
He lit his cigarette and stood up, favouring one knee. He stepped away, examining the ground, circling the spot where she kneeled on the red gravel—as if she were a devotee engaged in some ritual arrangement among the stones and he the guardian of her occult procedure.
‘Flakes all around here,’ he called to her softly. ‘Must’ve been a campsite.’ He spoke as if the silent scrubs were haunted, as if he detected the movement of his grandmother’s people among the trees and did not wish to disturb them or to attract their attention.
She watched him a moment then leaned over the GPS, reading the grid references and copying them onto the summary sheet on the clipboard. Beside the grid references she pencilled, ARTEFACT SCATTER. FLAKING FLOOR. POSSIBLE CAMP SITE. Under the column headed ‘landscape’ she wrote, GENTLE SLOPE OF RIDGE ABOVE A GULLY, WITH SCATTERED STANDS OF SANDALWOOD AND BENDEE. She left blank the space under the column headed ‘Comments & Recommendations’. When Annabelle had finished entering her notes she unslung the camera. She crouched over the core and photographed it. As she pressed the shutter her mobile began to ring. She put the camera on the ground and took out the phone. She put it to her ear, ‘Is that you Sue?’
‘It’s me, Dearest. Where are you?’
It was Steven. He sounded uncannily close. As if he stood nearby among the trees observing her. She went very still, a chill passing through her stomach.
‘Please speak to me, Dearest! Don’t hang up! It’s over with Sara. I promise you. I’m at home. It’s horrible here without you. It was a ghastly mistake. I can’t believe I did it. We have to talk. Where can we meet?’
She said slowly and deliberately, ‘I don’t want to talk to you. Don’t call me again. I’ll call you when I’m ready to talk.’ She pressed END CALL and sat on her heels looking at the mobile. She had the
sudden conviction it was about to ring again and she switched it off. She hated this fear of him, as if he might swoop down on her and persecute her. She stood up.
Bo was watching her. ‘You okay there?’ he said with concern.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I stood up too suddenly. Have you found any more?’
He stepped across and leaned and picked up the camera. He handed it to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t Susan.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think it was. Why don’t you sit down for a spell.’
She hesitated. ‘It was my husband.’
He nodded.
‘He’s in Melbourne.’
‘You don’t have to explain nothing to me unless you want to,’ he said.
‘We’re separated.’
He nodded again, looking at the ground then up at her. ‘You been separated long?’ he inquired carefully.
‘No. It’s why I came up here. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m burdening you with my stupid problems.’
‘You got no kids then?’
‘No. Thank god.’
He was silent. ‘I’ve got two boys. They’re with their mother in Mackay. We’ve been separated seven years.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need to be. We’re better off without each other. All we ever did was fight. The four of us.’
‘Do you ever see your boys.’
‘I see the boys once in a while. I camp down there with Dougald sometimes you know.’ He stood looking at her. ‘You want to keep going, or you want to go back and have a drink of tea?’
‘Let’s keep going.’
He didn’t move. ‘You afraid of this feller?’
‘No,’ she lied, meeting his gaze steadily.
He said, ‘I always had the feeling you was gonna come back up this way one day. Now you did.’
‘You said that before.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I probably did.’
‘Why did you think I’d come back? We didn’t exactly know each other.’
‘There’s some things you know without knowing why you know them,’ he said. ‘And it don’t help to try explaining them.’
She looked around them at the bush, the thin grey bendee and sandalwood, the dry stony ridges unchanged since time began. ‘I’ve always loved this country. I’ve always missed it.’
‘Well there you are,’ he said. ‘You knew you was coming back.’
‘I didn’t really know I was coming back, but if someone had told me I could never come back I think I would have been heartbroken.’
‘That’s it,’ he said.
It was mid afternoon by the time Bo and Annabelle walked out of the scrub onto the ridge behind the white truck. There was no sign of Susan or the mine vehicle at the camp below them. The muffled beat of the music from the white truck punctuating the stillness. They started down the ridge together along the wheeltracks towards the truck. When they drew level with the cabin Bo stopped and looked in at the girl and the young man. Annabelle didn’t stop but continued on towards the parked Pajero where it stood lower down among the bitter barks.
The girl reduced the volume on the CD player and swung the door of the truck open. She grinned at Bo. Her teeth were even and white. She was still wearing the hardhat, the plastic site ID with her photograph on it pinned to the neck of her black T-shirt. She rested one bare foot on the door handle. ‘Did you find lots of good stuff, Uncle Bo?’
‘What are you wearing that hardhat for?’ he asked her.
‘I’m doing what the mine man said, Uncle. Why aren’t you wearing yours?’ She giggled. In her beautiful dark eyes an expression both of modesty and mischievous delight, measuring the seriousness of her uncle Bo, hoping to make him smile. ‘They’ll be very annoyed with you.’
‘You seen Susan?’
‘We didn’t see no one.’
‘Me and Annabelle are gonna have a feed. You two had better come down and have a drink of tea and eat something.’
‘We already ate our lunch,’ the girl said.
Bo stood looking in past the girl at the young man. ‘You all right there, Arner?’
The young man turned his head slowly and looked at Bo, his eyes sleepy, his expression mild, reflective, detached. ‘Yeah sure,’ he murmured.
‘You ought to get out and walk around, old mate,’ Bo advised him.
The young man’s eyelids drooped. He said nothing, returning his attention to the view through the windscreen, or perhaps considering the corpses of the insects against the glass, broken wings snared in the blades of the wipers.
Bo stood, hesitating. He examined his broken fingernails. ‘We found campsites all along both sides of the gully.’ He turned and gestured, his arm extended, a considered embrace of the country he and Annabelle had surveyed. He dropped his arm and looked in at the young man. The girl looked with him. The young man gazed through the windscreen. He was golden in the wash of sunlight; modest, serene, enigmatic and beautiful, as if he possessed a thousand years and more and might await the moment of his destiny without the anxiety of time.
Bo said, ‘This was a favourite spot with our old people, Arner.’
The young man’s eyes closed then flickered open, his long curved lashes trembling. His hands were crossed on his vast stomach, his fingers loosely entwined. The cabin of the truck chill with the rush of air from the cooler, the smell of tobacco and cannabis, the strong acid odour of the young man’s sweat.
Bo stood by the open door of the truck. From the sandalwood ridge behind him a friarbird repeated its ardent cry again and again, warning off the intruders, Ar-coo! Ar-coo! Ar-coo!
Bo turned and walked down the hill towards the Pajero. The volume of the music increased, the voice of 2PAC pursuing him along the slope, I shall not fear no man but God, though I walk through the valley of death . . . The girl’s laughter, rich, youthful, sensuous. A liberation of some deep amusement. The dry groundcover crackling beneath Bo’s boots, releasing the musty odours of dead time. The girl’s indifference to the remains of the old people, flaked stone tools lying anonymously along the dry ridges of the Isaac. Bo seeing the longwall’s subsidence cracks meandering through the poisoned timber and thinking of the earth drying out and dying under the treeroots. ‘The valley of death,’ he said and spat to one side. ‘She’s afraid of that husband of hers. He’s probably coming after her.’ He spoke softly and as if to an intimate companion who walked by his side.
Annabelle did not mention Steven’s call to Susan. Although she did not examine her motivation in withholding this information, she was aware that a slight awkwardness might arise between herself and her friend if she permitted the question of her marriage to become a major area of confidence between them. Susan, it seemed to Annabelle, had troubles of her own about which she was being stoic and reticent. It was a sign and she decided to observe its message.
Next morning the three of them breakfasted together in the noisy mess hall with the men employed by the subcontractors. While they were eating, the young man and the girl came in and joined them. They nodded and bid each other a good morning, each inquiring how the other had slept. The girl wore her white hardhat and ID tag. While she ate she leaned her elbows on the table and gazed around at the men. The men looked back at her and laughed and commented to each other. A man with his mate passing their table on his way out rapped her hardhat with his knuckles. ‘How’s it going there little sister?’
Bo looked up and the man smiled and nodded to him.
‘Yeah good here big brother,’ the girl replied, laughing and looking quickly at Annabelle, her dark eyes alight with the danger of her uncertain quest.
After breakfast they drove out of the compound through the striped boomgate into the encircling scrubs. All day Bo and Annabelle and Susan traversed the grid of tracks, prospecting on foot the gravelly outcrops along the gullies beside the sandbed of the Isaac, quartering the coal lease and linking their progress to the pegged chainages of the
drill line—where the dozer had passed over the earth like some scouring disease over living flesh, leaving a bare scrape of gravel cankering under the dry flames of the sun. On the riverflats where the cattlemen had poisoned the boxforest, the African buffel grass grew too thick for them to see the ground, so they left the dead forest alone, the grazing Brahman cows and calves undisturbed by their prospecting for shattered stones in a landscape abundant with stone.
And each morning the young man and the girl followed them out of the accommodation compound and they sat all day in the cabin of their white truck, the windows wound up, the motor ticking over and the airconditioner going. Sealed away from the bush with their music, while the others walked the ridges and the gullies of the coal lease. At the end of each day’s survey Bo came and stood by the cabin of the white truck and spoke with the girl and the young man, and he told them what had been found, as if this passing on of what he knew to the next generation bestowed the grace of some point and purpose upon the labours of his day.
They worked the mine survey for a week. Annabelle kept her mobile turned off. When she checked the messages there were three from Steven. She deleted them without listening to them. On the fourth day she found a strange stone artefact eroding out of the wall of a gravel gully. Susan and Bo were off a way to her left. She saw the stone from the bank of the gully and knew at once that it did not belong to the local stone types they had been encountering. She called to the others and they came over and scrambled down into the gully with her.
Susan said, ‘Well you found something here. It’s what they call a cylcon. A cylindro-conical stone artefact of unknown purpose.’ She looked at Annabelle. ‘Beginner’s luck. I’ve never seen one of these things before except in photographs.’ She turned to Bo. You ever see one?’
‘No,’ he said.
They recorded the stone’s position and photographed it. Susan said, ‘We’d better take it with us or it’ll get lost for ever down one of the subsidence cracks once they start mining this section.’ She turned to Bo. ‘You think it’s okay to take it?’
He shrugged and stepped away, reaching into his shirt pocket for his tobacco. ‘It’s not doing no one no good sitting here,’ he said.