by Alex Miller
Bo looked at him wonderingly and shook his head. ‘Well I just hope she’s loaded.’
Trace smiled at Annabelle and gave a little shrug, the soft rounding of her shoulders and breasts moulding the faded green cotton of her T-shirt.
‘Won any more trophies?’ Annabelle asked her.
Trace gazed at Annabelle, her dark eyes bright with some excess of emotion. She shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘I got the Burranbah hardhat,’ she said and grinned, abashed by Annabelle’s admiration.
Dougald came over and pushed aside the papers and set his plate on the table. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite Bo.
Bo looked at Dougald’s plate. ‘What’s that you got there, old mate?’ he asked disapprovingly.
Dougald shifted uneasily, gazing unhappily at the milky gruel on his plate. ‘Them doctors reckon I’ve got to give the eggs and bacon a miss.’ He looked at Bo, hoping to be let off lightly.
Bo said in a tone of considerable affront, ‘Well that bloody porridge isn’t gonna do you any good. A man can’t live on porridge.’
‘It’s semolina.’
‘Semolina is porridge!’ Bo said. ‘How’s that gonna help you?’
Annabelle’s mobile sounded the opening four notes of O patria mia. She got up from the table and went out onto the verandah to answer it. She realised she didn’t care if it was Steven.
They ate in silence, the murmur of Annabelle’s voice from the verandah, Disney animals shouting on the teevee.
Bo asked, ‘Did you talk to Les?’
Trace got up and carried her plate into the kitchen. Arner lifted his head and watched his sister.
Dougald spooned the grey semolina into his mouth. ‘There’s that feller from the Department of Natural Resources. Les reckons he’ll be coming in the helicopter too.’
‘Who else?’ Bo asked.
‘Tom Glasson. He’s a bigwig with Folson and Harbin.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The principal contractors for the dam.’ Dougald spooned more semolina. ‘He seems like a good bloke.’ He nodded at the mobile that lay on the table. ‘I had a talk to him the other day.’
‘Steve Punaru going down there?’
‘No. Just Les.’
Bo pushed his plate away and unstuck the cigarette from the table and lit it. ‘Did Les say when they was goin in?’
Dougald shook his head. ‘I don’t think he knew.’ He gestured at the pile of papers beside Bo. ‘There’s a fax from him in there somewhere if you want to have a look for it.’
Arner pushed back his chair and belched softly. He got up and went over and sat on the couch in front of the teevee, pointing the remote, skipping through the channels.
Annabelle came in and sat at the table. ‘That was Elizabeth.’
Dougald pushed the plate of semolina aside. He had eaten barely half of it.
Bo said, ‘Them bloody doctors are no good to you, old mate. You ought to come down to Ranna with us and get yourself a good dose of cumby cumby.’
Annabelle collected their dirty plates and cutlery and carried them out to the kitchen. She cleaned off the plates and put them in the sink and ran the hot water.
The two men sat looking at each other across the table, Bo drawing on his cigarette, his eyes half closed, Dougald watching him as if he read in his friend’s features the maturing of some deep thought concerning their way forward. They might have slipped quietly into their past, these two, ringers once again and seated crosslegged at the fragrant sandalwood campfire out in the lonely scrubs of Deception or the Conway Tableland, the uneasy cattle settled for the night, the tock-tock of the packhorse bell from the sweetpick down by the waterhole. Watching each other’s eyes in the firelight, waiting for a sign to mature from the darkness. Alert against that anxiety of a time when the stars will no longer stand in the firmament to guide them over the hollow ground, where a man of little knowledge might easily fall and never regain his feet. Recalling the low singing of Grandma Rennie against such a fate for her children, saving her sons and daughters on the long journey to the head of Verbena Creek and the springs of Bulgonunna, the stone ground of the old people where the labyrinth of the generations is set out. Not to abandon the language of the stones. Not to permit the knowledge to drift from her children’s hearts, out among the mute ghosts of the irrecoverable past.
Bo said, ‘You remember old grandfather Beck?’
Dougald smiled slowly, remembering.
‘He had them real cattleman’s eyes.’
Dougald nodded. ‘Squatters’ eyes, Grandma used to call them.’
‘If you wasn’t grass and you wasn’t cattle, there was that instinct in him to get rid of you off the country.’
Dougald laughed throatily. ‘They reckon old grandpa Beck got rid of a few.’
‘Don’t you go telling Annabelle that,’ Bo teased, raising his voice.
‘Don’t tell me what?’ Annabelle called, the rattling of the dishes pausing.
The two men chuckled. Bo pushed his chair back and stood. ‘We’d better be slipping along if we’re gonna make that Ranna homestead before dark.’
Dougald didn’t get up. He gazed into Bo’s eyes. ‘You don’t want to go down there into that wild country if it looks like rain. You won’t get back over them gullies.’
‘Arner’s got the winch. We’ll get back.’
They assembled on the verandah and said their farewells. Bo and Annabelle led off in the Pajero, Arner and Trace following in the white truck, the steady beat of the bass thumping from the cabin, the fierce voice of the black man crying forth his bitter desire for revenge.
Dougald stood at his front door watching the departure until the two vehicles turned onto the highway at the T-junction and disappeared from his sight. He stood a moment longer, gazing upon the quiet morning, then he turned and gripped the doorjamb with his hand, steadying himself. He went back inside the house and closed the door on the day. He reached for the remote and switched off the teevee. He sat at the table in the halflight staring at the mobile, his large hands resting on the tabletop, a tremor in the swollen fingers, the flesh soft and grey, the strength gone, his breathing audible as the stillness of the house settled upon him.
Two kilometres west of Maryvale, Bo turned off the highway onto a minor road, cutting south between Milton’s Lookout and Mount de Moleyns and heading for the Pioneer River. They crossed the river at Mariah and turned west for Finch Hatton along the valley road. Annabelle screwed around in her seat and looked back. ‘They’re coming,’ she said.
‘They’d better be comin.’ Bo handed her his packet of Drum.
She rolled a smoke for him.
They crossed the Pioneer again where it narrows to little more than a brook just after Nanyima, the valley squeezing up between the ranges, the wide acres of cane fields dropping behind. Thirty kilometres farther the valley pinched down to a tight gullet ahead of them. They dropped abruptly out of the sunlight into the forest shade, beginning the steep climb up the escarpment into the ranges, the road dirt now, a narrow switchback, ochre dust lifting behind them and powdering the overhanging foliage of the trees.
Bo wrestled the wheel. ‘They still coming?’
She twisted around and looked back. The white truck came around the corner below them, emerging from their dust like some implacable pursuer, Arner at the wheel, his features impassive through the trembling leafshadows on the windscreen, his sunglasses like two black holes in the carapace of a helmet, his sister beside him, the beautiful enigmatic maiden of all men’s dreams. ‘Y . . . ep. They’re coming,’ Annabelle said, staying twisted around, watching the white truck looming through the dust pall.
Later in the morning the two vehicles breasted the scarp and came out of the forest onto a high plateau of desolate stone ridges. Bo picked up the pipeline road coming down from the Eungella Dam, the white line of the pipe cutting through the tangle of broken country. The ridges dry, littered with shattered upturned strata of sedimentary rocks
like the old bones of the world exposed, the forest open and sparse, the trees small, twisted and hungry in their growth. There were no hamlets, no habitations and no road signs. In this maze of hard country they crossed the watershed of the Broken River and turned northwest along the ridge, passing the cold waters of the Eungella Dam on their right hand and leaving the pipeline behind.
The track they followed now was little more than wheel ruts cutting back and forth, seeking a passage through the tumbled rocks and broken timber. They ascended the incline of the ridge through a tract of country where prehistoric grasstrees and cycads stood in isolation among bloodwoods and stunted hickory, petrified sentinels from the age before man, their shaggy topknots and skirts trembling in the mountain breeze as if they would flee at the sight of the oncoming vehicles.
In the blue haze of distance to the northwest the valley of the Bowen River spread out below them, a broad pastureland where herds of white Brahman cattle grazed the sweet natural grasses of the uplands and fertile riverflats. To their northeast another country, intimidating and vast, the folded ranges of Salitros and the Massey Gorge, a forested wilderness without dwellings or roads, no smoke or sign of habitation across the wide and undulating landscape of iridescent hills that lay glittering in the morning sun below them. Bo’s indicating hand going out, ‘Ranna’s way over in there.’
She looked and wondered at the beauty and mystery of her own country.
They had been driving along the crest of the ridgeline for some time when they came to a fork in the track. The left branching northwest through the open forest, descending the easy gradient of a spur into the Bowen valley. At this dividing of the way a wooden board was nailed to a dead tree, an arrow crudely carved in the grey and weathered timber of the board pointing down the spur, the word BLENHEIM in letters of faded carmine, as if the Duke of Marlborough’s decisive battleground really lay that way, the lost resting place of ten thousand defeated Frenchmen. Bo slowed and engaged the four-wheel drive, dropping the Pajero into low gear. He took the right-hand track towards Salitros and the Massey Gorge. They eased over the ground at a walking pace, lurching and swaying over a steep and narrow way littered with boulders and scored by deep washouts, the Broken River Range standing between them now and a view of the Bowen valley.
Bo eased the Pajero up a steep pinch, leaning forward hugging the wheel to his chest, lifting himself in his seat to see the ground ahead over the rearing bonnet. A makeshift gate stood closed across the track fifty metres before the crest of the pinch. Bo said, ‘Get ready to get the gate.’ The Pajero came to a stop, standing on its tail, blue sky and treetops through the windscreen, the washed-out track falling away steeply beside them.
Annabelle opened the door and got out. She stepped around in front of the bonnet, clutching the bull bar to keep her balance. She stooped to unhasp the gate. The gate was five barred, put together from crooked tree limbs, grey corkwood and sally wattle, iron coachbolts drilled through at the joints, the hasp a length of galvanised plainwire doubled back on itself and looped over the strainer post. A tin sign on the gate, painted in blue in a childish hand, made the modest claim, ZIGZAG STATION. Annabelle lifted the gate aside and stood back to let the Pajero through. Bo moved on up the gradient to the crest and parked. Annabelle waited while Arner brought the truck on. As the truck eased past, Trace leaned from the window, ‘Why thank you ever so kindly my dear,’ she said in a mincing English voice. She put her hand to her mouth and stifled a laugh.
Annabelle gave a bow. ‘It is my pleasure, milady.’ She fastened the gate and walked on up the track past the truck to where Bo was waiting. She climbed into the cabin and they moved off.
‘That was never there,’ Bo said. He lit his smoke and shook out the match. ‘How’s that boy of Dougald’s doing back there?’
She twisted around and looked. ‘He’s doing good. Trace seems pretty relaxed with his driving.’
‘Oh, that young lady knows about relaxing.’ Bo pointed to one side of the track, a quick gesture with his hand to where an outcrop of tumbled basalt formed shadowed caves and recesses in the hillside. ‘Old man dog watching us.’
Annabelle looked. ‘Where?’
‘He’s slipped away there.’
Annabelle felt that she was entering a country out of which the legends of her own past had arisen. She looked at Bo, wondering how he must be feeling, returning after an absence of more than twenty years, so great a portion of his life lying between this moment and the time when he and Dougald rode these ridges as young men. He was concentrating on the driving and did not look back at her.
An hour later they came over a rise and saw below them, a hundred metres distant, a cluster of buildings and yards set unexpectedly in a wide dusty clearing on the forested hillside. A bunched pack of dogs of all colours galloping up the road to meet the vehicles, barking and leaping and snapping at each other. Two white-painted weatherboard houses, a long machinery shed roofed in ripple-iron, smaller outbuildings straddling the road. Stockyards and a vegetable garden off among the shade trees, a sprinkler standpipe tick-ticking a thin spray of water across a raggedy crop of greens, the droplets catching the sun. Windrows of shattered trees and uplifted boulders lying along the limits of the clearing. A raw look of newness and struggle about the settlement, as if it had not yet achieved permanency and might be pulled down and towed away again at any time, leaving the wilderness to heal itself. A young man in a cowboy hat was operating a battered yellow bulldozer, pushing rocks and tree branches and domestic rubbish ahead of the blade, blue smoke surging from the stack, a haze of dust drifting back over the clearing behind him in the leafy sunlight.
Bo said, ‘It’s Zig and Zag all right. Looks like they’ve decided on breeding dogs ahead of bullocks.’ He turned and spat out the sidewindow, the dogs snapping at the tyres. ‘I don’t blame them. This is dog country,’ he said. They pulled up beside the first weatherboard house. The house was enclosed within a timber verandah all of forty feet deep. Bo thumbed his hat back and sat looking, rolling a smoke. ‘Look at that verandah, will you?’ He turned to Annabelle. ‘You ever seen a verandah that big?’
‘No I haven’t.’
They sat looking. One or two of the dogs sniffed the wheels and lifted their legs, most losing interest and sitting off scratching and nipping at themselves or lying in the dust panting, pink tongues lapping the air and dripping drool. Bo lit his cigarette and opened the door and stepped down. Dogs gathering around his legs, snuffling at his jeans. They had open wounds on their legs and bare, scarified patches of mange along their backs. A one-eyed yellow brindle bitch stood up and set her front legs on Bo’s shirt, begging to be patted, her nipples pink, raw looking and distended with milk. Bo pushed the bitch away with a slow patient gesture and she sat aside and scratched behind her ear, eyeing him lovingly. A big black pig wandered over from the machinery shed, the dogs mobbing it, licking its snout and yapping at it. The pig came on, grunting and snuffling around the Pajero. A man came out of the house. He stepped across the verandah. A woman coming along behind him.
The man came up and took Bo’s offered hand. He introduced himself as John Hearn. ‘So you’re Bo Rennie?’ he said. ‘They said in town you’d be coming by.’ He looked into Bo’s eyes, an air of respectful expectation in his manner. He was tall and lean and weathered, his workclothes dusty and oilstained from tinkering with machinery. His chin cleanshaved, his eyes pale blue, filled with friendly curiosity and interest, his manner alert and kindly. He stepped up and took Annabelle’s hand. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Annabelle.’ He turned to the woman. ‘This is my wife, Ruth.’
Ruth Hearn was a big handsome woman, her gaze direct and open, a watchfulness about her, as if she was making a mental note of her husband’s performance and giving him points out of ten in her mind.
John Hearn said, ‘And that’s Mathew, our eldest.’ He pointed at the bulldozer, his gaze lingering on his son, as if just to watch his boy being a man was pleasure enough for him. He jerked
his head. ‘The other two are inside with their schoolteacher.’
Ruth Hearn said, ‘It’s not easy to get children to stick to their schooling out here.’ She touched the worn seat of one of the motorbikes leaning by the corner post of the verandah. ‘They’d rather be out on their ponies or riding around on these things all day.’ She turned to Bo, ‘You’ll come in and have a drink of tea, Bo?’
Bo said, ‘A drink of tea sounds good to me, Ruth.’
The woman laughed. It was an exclamation of pleasure. She turned to Annabelle, ‘We don’t get many visitors up this far, Annabelle.’
John Hearn said, ‘You fellers are the first.’
They all laughed.
‘This road doesn’t go anywhere from here except down the spur to old Ranna. They tell me there’s been no one at the house down there for more than twenty years, Bo? Is that right?’
‘Probably is, John,’ Bo said.
They followed John Hearn into the shade of the broad verandah. Bo turned and lifted his hand, motioning to Arner and Trace, who had not yet stepped down from the truck. He turned back to his host and gestured at the assemblage of tables, stools, bookshelves and other large heavy pieces of furniture in various stages of construction that lay about on the verandah. ‘You making these, John?’
John Hearn ran his hand over the lacquered surface of a three-legged table crudely fashioned from the branched stump of a mango tree, the wood yellow and wavy-grained. ‘What do you think of it?’ He looked up at Bo as if he awaited a valuable and knowing appraisal of his work.
Ruth Hearn stood looking on, a frown narrowing her eyes, her arms folded across her shirt, her gaze on her husband.
Bo gripped the thick timber of the tabletop with his thumb and fingers and tried it. ‘There’s a bit of weight there,’ he said, impressed.
‘Too heavy, you think?’
‘I didn’t say too heavy, John.’
‘No, you didn’t, but you think people would have trouble moving it around? Is that what you meant?’