Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  It seemed the young man had no answer.

  There was a silence. The Hearns’ disappointment. Their unwillingness to accept that they were too late in their dream of pioneering.

  Mathew looked at his father, then at Bo. ‘We’ll find a way,’ he said.

  Bo said with an edge of irritation, ‘You leave them scrubbers alone, Mathew.’ He eased himself on the chair as if he would get up. He reached again for his tobacco, his fingers stopping at his shirt pocket and he looked at Ruth Hearn. ‘We’d best be getting along, Ruth. Thank you for the tea.’ He looked at Mathew. ‘How’s the road down there? That causeway still holding? They put them rocks in with a team of bullocks. Seven tons, old Nellie reckoned some of them big stones weighed. Bedded them down into the bottom of the creek so the floods would wash clean over the top of them. I’ll bet you there’s not a one of them’s shifted.’

  ‘The causeway’s still there,’ Mathew said.

  ‘I’m not surprised to hear it. Them old Bigges knew what they was doing.’ Bo chuckled, ‘Except their causeway outlasted them.’ He looked at Annabelle. ‘We’d better be slipping along if we want to get down there before dark.’

  Ruth Hearn said quietly, ‘You won’t be leaving before you’ve had lunch with us, Bo.’ She stood. ‘Give me a hand in the kitchen, Mathew.’ She went out.

  Mathew stood.

  His father said, ‘You heard your mother.’

  When he’d gone Bo said, ‘He’s a fine boy, John. A horsy man, eh?’

  ‘Well he’d like to be,’ John Hearn said regretfully. ‘But I’m afraid there’s not a lot I can teach him about horses. Around Emerald we used bikes to move the stock.’ He looked out the window. ‘She’s a bit different up here.’

  ‘This is what Dougald Gnapun calls the wild country. And Dougald’s a man who knows wild country. You gotta have some idea what you’re doing up here. You keep that boy away from them bulls now. They’re as quick as cats. Not like that Emerald stock he’s been nursing. Get him a rifle. That’s the way to clean them scrubbers out of this Furious country. Dog meat, they’re safe that way. You could use a bit of dog meat.’ Bo stood up. ‘If we’re going to be having a feed with you folks, I’ll nip out onto that big verandah of yours and have a smoke.’

  Annabelle and Trace sat looking out the window, watching Bo and John Hearn standing at the rail of the verandah talking. The two men side by side, Bo smoking a cigarette, his hand going out this way then that, John Hearn listening and questioning. The heat rising through the still air, shimmering among the limbs and bouncing off the bare rocks and dry tussocks. The young man came out and Bo and John Hearn turned and greeted him. He went over and stood by them. Then he turned and looked back towards the windows of the house.

  Trace said, ‘I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking anything.’

  ‘Yes you were.’

  ‘All right I was. But he’s nice. Admit it, he’s nice.’

  Trace rested her chin in her hands, her elbows on the table. She went, ‘Hmm, maybe. How can you ever tell what they’re really like?’

  Annabelle thought about the girl’s question. Fifteen years ago she had thought Steven Küen was the man of her dreams. Now that idea seemed silly. She looked at Trace, ‘Feminine intuition? What d’you reckon?’

  Trace looked at her. ‘Is that what you’re using on Bo?’

  Annabelle laughed and put her arm around Trace’s shoulders and hugged her.

  They laughed together, private, intimate suddenly, keeping their voices down, sharing the amusement of their understanding, their discovery of companionship, like a bright flower suddenly in their path.

  Trace said, ‘I’m glad you came with us.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Ranna Station

  BO PULLED UP IN A STAND OF WHIPPY SCRUB AT THE edge of the escarpment, the motor ticking over. The valley spread out below them, a blue distance of hills. The eroded side-cutting of the Bigges’ old dray road starting down the spur just ahead of the Pajero. He sat hugging the wheel, his hat tipped back, smoking a cigarette and gazing over to their left through the windscreen. The white truck waited back along the track some way. Arner doing as he was told, keeping a careful distance, the bass of his music throbbing in the warm afternoon, the shrieking of insects in the dry air.

  Annabelle looked but could see nothing of special interest in the direction of Bo’s attention.

  He said, ‘You could take one of them panorama shots from here. Get the Pajero in it. I’ll lean out the window.’

  She got out and took a photograph of the valley and the Pajero with Bo leaning out the window gazing into the distance. She climbed back into the cab.

  Bo turned aside and spat through the open sidewindow. ‘They’re struggling,’ he said.

  Annabelle looked at him, ‘The Hearns? Mathew’s a nice boy.’

  ‘They’re all nice. How’s that gonna help them? That’s dog country they’ve got there, and I think they know it.’

  Annabelle continued looking at him, the camera on her lap. ‘Ruth seems a capable sort of woman.’

  Bo drew on his cigarette.

  Annabelle waited but he said nothing. She experienced a sharp pang of jealousy and laughed. ‘Why did you tell her the Public Trustees still had Ranna?’

  He took the burned down cigarette out of his mouth and examined it. He motioned over to the left, ahead of the Pajero. ‘There’s a stand of sandalwood in over there. That’s the last of it once we head down this spur. Sandalwood don’t grow in the valley.’

  Annabelle said, ‘How can you remember where it is after all this time?’

  ‘There’s only one spur goes off this ridge into the Ranna. This is it. There’s no other. That’s not a fact you can forget once you know it.’ He pointed into the blue distance of hills, sighting along his aligned fingers. ‘She’s a wall all along here to the northwest till you get just this side of Mount Cauley.’ He leaned towards her. ‘See that humpy looking peak there? The Broken River flows out of the valley this side of it. Used to be a road of sorts through there. Take you out to Emu Plains and the Bowen River eventually if you kept following it. A whole heap of rough country to get through first. Me and Dougald took a mob of cows and calves out that way one time.’ He got a last drag out of his cigarette and tossed it out the window. ‘This Ranna country don’t change. We’re not in that Isaac country around Burranbah now, all poisoned out and cleared, that longwall going under it and creating subsidence cracks all over the place. A man hardly knows where he is out there any more.’ He opened the door and stepped out. He pointed, ‘That stand of sandalwood’s over there, the other side of them grass-trees.’ He grinned at her. ‘I’ll bet you she hasn’t walked away.’ He went around and opened the back door of the Pajero and lifted the axe from its brackets.

  He set off towards the bright green topknots of the grasstrees and Annabelle followed him, walking in his track. She realised he was at home. They walked over the rocky ground, stepping around the tussocks of wiregrass and springy wattle, going along Indian file. She searched at her feet for pecked cores and worked shards of stone. Looking for artefacts. Seeing the country differently since Burranbah. After they’d gone fifty metres off the track they came onto a patch of powdery white clay where no grass grew. A stand of rickety grey trees, leaning this way and that, the ground beneath littered with shattered pieces of deadwood lying across itself like a game of pick-up sticks. Bo laid into the deadwood with the back of the axe, the brittle fuel splintering and whirring around his head. ‘Watch out there, Annabellebeck!’

  They gathered armfuls of the dark aromatic wood and loaded it into the back of the Pajero, poking it piece by piece into the spaces around their gear. ‘She’s all snug,’ Bo said and closed the back door. They got back in the cab.

  He started the motor and sat looking ahead down the steep decline of the side cutting. ‘There’ll be no turning around once we’re headed down this spur.’ He looked in the rear vision mirror
at Arner’s truck and waved his hand out the window. He engaged low gear and they eased away, the Pajero angling over, the outside wheels nipping at the crumbly edge of the old track, a near-vertical drop into the valley.

  Annabelle reached for the handhold.

  ‘Here we come, Nellie!’ Bo said. ‘That Rennie boy’s coming back to see how you’re doing down there.’

  It was late afternoon going into evening by the time they came off the spur. Bo pulled up in a tall stand of untracked grass and they sat looking at a dark bank of lofty trees along the river ahead of them. Ancient forest gums and casuarinas, here and there a red bottlebrush blossom low down among the blue shadows around the bases of the trees, the glint of running water between the foliage, a dense traffic of insects and birds back and forth through the failing sunbeams. The charmed coolness of evening in the perfumed air of the valley.

  Bo said, ‘Smell that sweet water!’ He pointed, ‘The old Bigges’ causeway’s in over there.’

  Annabelle leaned close to see along his pointing hand.

  ‘To the left of that sheoak,’ he said. ‘See up in that high fork? That’s where the Bigges anchored their steel ropes when they was setting them stones in. The last time I seen that tree me and Dougald was tailing a mob of bally Herefords out of this valley. I sat here rolling a smoke, my horse snatching at this sugargrass, and I looked back at them trees. I can smell that mob of cattle coming out of the water now, their backs all steaming and bellowing at each other for comfort.’

  Behind them the sun was topping the high ranges, the distant stony ridges of Furious and the Hearn’s Zigzag. He looked at Annabelle. ‘The Ranna Valley,’ he said.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Take a photo.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It won’t come out in a photo. Not in one I’d take anyway. I wonder how old those trees are? I’ve never seen such big casuarinas.’

  ‘Them trees have always been here,’ Bo said, offhand, as if the ancient trees were not subject to the years as man is and their ages could not therefore be calculated by such a measure. He leaned out the window and looked back along the Pajero’s tracks through the high grass. ‘Arner and Trace sitting back there as if they’re out for a Sunday drive,’ he said. He engaged the gears and they moved off across the flat towards the trees, easing their way through the tall grass and keeping an eye out for old flood debris. They crossed the river at the Bigges’ causeway, the water running clear and deep over the black stones, and they rode on up the bank onto a wide plain of silver grass, isolated crow ash pines casting long shadows in the late sun. Far over to the east the grasslands edged the ironbark forest at the base of the ranges, foothills rising in tiers towards the far-off rockwall of the escarpment, standing tall and cold and hard in the splendour of the evening light. A purple shadow across the deep of the sky.

  ‘She’ll be a cold night,’ Bo said.

  Annabelle pointed, ‘Look!’ she said excitedly. ‘There’s the homestead.’

  ‘That’s her.’

  A pale cluster of buildings out ahead of them on the plain, catching the evening light like a village set along the dorsal of a low rise back from the treeline of the river. Bo was silent, gazing at the old Ranna Station homestead for the first time since he was a young man of Mathew Hearn’s age. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘There she is. I can just about see smoke coming out of that kitchen chimney.’

  Annabelle said, ‘It looks inhabited.’ She turned to him, ‘Has there really been no one down here for twenty years? You expect to hear dogs barking.’

  ‘If the Bigges was here there’d be white-faced cattle all over this pasture. I don’t like to see good pasture empty of beasts.’

  ‘That’s just what my dad would have said.’

  ‘It don’t seem right. All this feed falling down onto itself and not a track through it.’

  They drove on slowly towards the station buildings through the strangely trackless grass, silent with each other. Bo drew up at the main house. It sat solid and unmarked, apparently still intact within its perimeter of fence and wildgrown English shrubs and trees. Some of the less substantial outbuildings were in a state of partial collapse. One structure engulfed entirely, its timbers and ripple-iron ridden flat by a giant bougainvillea, the violet blossoms glowing and intense in the failing light. ‘That was the dairy,’ Bo said, pointing. ‘I can hear old Nellie telling one of them girls off for forgetting to water that bougainvillea plant. She should take a look at it now.’

  They sat looking at the house.

  Bo said, ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the old girl was in there behind them shutters watching us right this minute.’

  Annabelle examined the row of elegant French windows set back under the brow of the verandah. She was more than half prepared to detect a flicker of movement behind the glass. She turned to Bo. ‘Where will we camp?’

  He considered her and the question of where they were to spend their nights. ‘You want to camp in the house?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘It looks a bit spooky. What about you?’

  He was silent, gazing at the house, his eyes narrowed, considering something that had come to his mind. He turned and spat through the open window of the Pajero. ‘I was never in there,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve never been in the house?’

  ‘My dad neither, for all the years he worked for these people he never set foot in the place.’ He was thoughtful a moment. Then, ‘Did your old dad have the ringers in the parlour with you and your mother over there at Haddon Hill?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not. But your grandmother was brought up here. You said as one of the family.’

  He indicated an opening where a section of the paling fence had fallen down. ‘Let’s see if we can’t sneak this vehicle of Susan’s in alongside the old kitchen.’

  He had evidently done with questions of ambiguity concerning the Bigges homestead, for he said no more but let in the clutch and eased the Pajero forward through the tall stand of ribbon grass. She didn’t press him.

  He pulled up close beside a rectangular building constructed from heavy split timber slabs. The building had once been annexed to the house by a covered pergola. The timbers of the pergola were being wrestled to the ground within an entwining corslet of buddleia.

  ‘This’ll do,’ he said and switched off the motor.

  In the sudden silence the air was filled with the racket of crickets and frogs from the riverflats below the house.

  Bo stepped out of the Pajero and trampled a path through the grass to the kitchen door. He tried the door. The iron hasp resisted him. He gave the bottom of the door a kick and pushed it open. It scraped back, a shower of dust and splinters of desiccated wood glittering in the air. There was a scurrying in the back. ‘Old cook in here scampering away,’ he called and laughed. He stepped through the door.

  Annabelle followed him. The rectangular interior was palely illuminated by the last of the evening light from two small windows set either side of an iron range in a brick chimney at the far wall. A long wooden table stood down the centre of the room, rough-hewn timber benches either side. A wall shelf had collapsed, sending tins and jars and bottles scattering across the table and floor. A pile of old magazines sat neatly on one corner of the table, as if someone had been called away from finding a place to store them and had never returned to finish the task. Slender tendrils of pale roots and garlands of translucent leaves hung among skeins of dusty cobweb from the wall batons and open roofbeams, like a mockery of welcoming decorations. There was the musty smell of the earth and decomposition.

  Bo said, ‘Me and Dougald had our breakfast here the day we pulled out.’ He went to the end of the room and opened the door of the firebox on the range. He bent and looked in. ‘Ashes still in here,’ he said. He straightened and looked at Annabelle. Trace had come to stand behind her in the doorway. ‘Will this do for you two ladies?’

  Trace said with a sense of affront, ‘I’m not sleeping in here,
Uncle Bo.’

  Annabelle turned to her and laughed. ‘It might be less spooky than the house.’

  ‘I’m not sleeping in that house neither.’

  Bo said, ‘Get something to wipe this table off. You and Arner bring the gear in, Trace. It’s gonna be dark in a minute.’

  They all set to and a few minutes later a wood fire was burning brightly in the iron range, the firebox door wide open, the big old kitchen perfumed with the fragrance of sandalwood. Annabelle covered the end of the table nearest the range with a blue plastic groundsheet and they set out the esky and bottles of sauce and loaves of plastic-wrapped bread, a fifty-litre plastic waterbottle with a red tap, the cutlery box and plates and mugs. When they’d done, Arner sat up at the table and took the top magazine off the pile. It was the Australasian Post from the seventies. He read by the light of a makeshift kerosene lamp, his elbows on the table, his hands covering his ears, his heavy shoulders bowed. A monk at his evening devotions. Black smoke rising to the rafters from the broad yellow flame of the wick beside him, set through the pierced tin lid of a jam jar.

  Bo stood grilling sausages and steaks on the scrubbed hotplate, the tea billy brewing off to one side. Trace had found a three-legged milking stool and pulled it up close to the range. She sat looking in at the fire, poking dreamily at the burning wood with an iron rod. Annabelle sat with her back to Arner, resting her weight against the table, a piece of bread and margarine in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. Her attention caught by a framed embroidery pegged into the mortar between the courses of the bricks above the recess of the range, the words bordered in sooty forget-me-nots. She read, ‘Alas! thy trials yet are small, nor hast thou resisted unto blood, as I and they have done.’ There was no attribution. She wondered who it could be.