Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  ‘Us kids rode in from Verbena on the tray of that old Fargo of Grandma’s and played tennis here every Saturday. Girls and boys. Young and old. Grandma never let us miss our tennis. She always said a good doubles partner was welcome anywhere.’ Bo laughed and looked at Annabelle. ‘Your sister Elizabeth and your mum and dad played here most tournament days. I partnered your mother plenty of times in the mixed doubles. Elizabeth too. They was both good doubles players. We all mixed in together in the tennis in them days. Your people used to stay on after the tournament for the dinner dance down at the picture hall in the evening. Elizabeth liked nothing better than to dance. I think your dad would have been just as glad to go on home.’

  Annabelle thought of Bo and Elizabeth in those days. She looked across at him. ‘Did you dance with Elizabeth?’

  ‘I did, on occasion,’ he said, a certain reluctance in his voice. ‘She was a good dancer. I think your sister danced with every man in town before she was through.’

  Annabelle watched him, but he offered no more. She did not press him with further questions on the delicate matter of her sister, but she did wonder if there had ever been more than dancing between them. The gun ringer from Verbena Station would have posed a challenge to Elizabeth in her youthful days. It was a world she had never entered herself, but had slipped past, not seeing it then, but seeing her own grander destiny apportioned somewhere in a Europe of her imagination. Well here she was. Back again. She reached for his hand. ‘I would never have come back without you,’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t coming back on my own neither.’

  He idled the Pajero down to the crossroads and turned right at the Shell servo. Fifty metres further along the road he pulled up beside a tall street frontage of ripple-iron and timber. The faded remains of lettering on a headboard across the front said, BILLIARD HALL & PICTURE PALACE. On the verandah front next door a weathered FOR SALE sign hung by a single nail, shifting back and forth in the wind. A deep stormwater gutter and stretch of unmowed grader grass separated the roadbed from a redbrick footpath alongside the buildings.

  Bo turned off the motor. They sat in silence, Bo leaning on the wheel smoking.

  Arner pulling in behind them, the heavy treads of his truck tyres popping the gravel.

  Bo opened the door and climbed out of the Pajero. He looked in at her, ‘How about bringing the camera? It’s got a flash.’ He shut the door and stepped away, going to the back to have a word with Arner.

  Annabelle took the camera from the glove compartment and got out of the Pajero. She jumped the stormwater drain and high-stepped through the rank growth of grader grass to the brick footpath. The cold wind gusting around the building, snatching at her jacket. She turned up her collar. She stood looking up at the high-peaked frontage of the ripple-iron building. ‘This was the centre of mum and dad’s community for fifty years,’ she said.

  Bo stepped up beside her. He pushed open the sagging timber door. ‘We had a lot of fun in here.’ He stepped out of the sunlight into the dark interior of the building, crisscrossed with beams of near horizontal sunlight. ‘You could find the entire population of Mount Coolon on any Saturday night yarded up in here. The whole mob of us. The place full of smoke and us all laying back in them canvas chairs gaping at that silver screen and touching knees in the dark.’

  Annabelle followed him, entering the dark cavity of the hall after the bright day. She stood by the door, watching him, the pole frame and loose iron of the building creaking and groaning and crashing around as if she were in the hold of an abandoned ship. Bo stood over against the back wall in a bright patch of sunlight, one arm raised, gripping the sidepole of what looked to be a make-do hanging scaffold. His head wreathed in a gilded radiance of cigarette smoke. He stood looking up at the mysterious apparatus. It was constructed from crossed brigalow poles wired together. He gestured at the structure. ‘You ought to take a photo of this thing. I don’t reckon you’re ever going to see another like it.’ He slapped the pole. ‘This is what you could describe as significant European remains.’ He shook the pole back and forth. ‘Still holding up here.’

  Annabelle took the camera out of its case. She put it to her eye and studied him through the viewfinder. The pale crown of his wide-brimmed hat tipped back, the mellow afternoon sunlight falling on his handsome features, the brown and yellow-striped shirt with the star-point pockets, the beginning of a soft belly rounding the shirt above his pale blue jeans, the silver buckle on his belt glinting as he swayed back to look up at the rickety platform above him. He was still within the reach of youth, but no longer young. His cock-a-doodle attitude as he stood there waiting to be photographed offended her. Her view through the camera detaching him from the present, seeing in him the young buck doing his thing with the girls in town. She pressed the shutter button. Nothing happened. She called, ‘We’re out of film.’

  The rattling and moaning of the wind, Bo standing there holding the pole, posing as himself, a touch of swagger in the way he stood, as if he anticipated the admiration of others for this record of himself. He called out, ‘Old Billy Collins used to sit up here on this platform all night with the projector. When he eased his bum around to get comfortable, she swayed from side to side and set the film ducking and diving all over the wall there. We’d chorus up at him, Keep still there Billy! He always seemed to move at a real suspenseful moment in the film. He ran two movies, with an interval for milkshakes. There was a western for the men and a romance for the women. But everybody watched them both and there was never no complaints. If the film was extra popular he showed it again the next week. Me and Dougald and Grandma, and your people too, we watched True Grit here three or four times. The women liked the little girl and the men liked the manner of John Wayne riding back across that paddock with no hope of living through what was coming at him. Just getting on with the job he had contracted to do. I still remember that film.’

  Annabelle called to him, ‘We’re out of film.’

  Bo let go of the pole and stepped away. ‘Well that’s too bad,’ he said gaily. ‘Maybe they’ll have some at that store up at the servo.’

  Annabelle watched him walking about the hall, the heels of his boots clapping on the boards, bending to examine one of the canvas reclining benches that stood about, some half collapsed on themselves and folded into strange almost human shapes. Everything covered in birdshit and a heavy layer of silvery dust.

  ‘See that?’ Bo stabbed his forefinger at the leg of a bench. ‘That’s my initials! I. B. R. Iain Ban Rennie.’

  She watched him searching the space for reminders of the old days, enthusiastic and delighted, like a terrier onto the scent of a rat under the boards. The loosened ripple-iron and brigalow poles squealed and screeched under the force of the wind, the last pale sunbeam busy with streams of dust and spindles of grader grass. The picture palace being torn apart around them. Watching Bo, Annabelle knew suddenly there would be times when he would seem foolish to her. Was he unaware of the sadness of this place? Unaffected not just by this forlorn abandonment, but the failure of the town to mature, to mellow and to grow with the passing of the years? Her memories of Mount Coolon had not been memories at all, but the unreliable inventions of nostalgia. Steven would have had his contempt confirmed to see this place. She was grateful he had never been here. She would have felt shamed, for herself and for her sad country. She turned and went out of the picture palace and crossed the storm drain. She was glad of the warm cabin of the Pajero. She wondered where Bo planned for them to spend the night. They were evidently not going to reach Verbena. She folded her arms and pulled the collar of her jacket up and closed her eyes. She was suddenly depressed and exhausted. The wind buffeting the Pajero, making the cabin rock. She was soon half asleep, an image in her mind of young people dancing. It was an old-fashioned barn dance and the girls were wearing flowered dresses with wide skirts that flowed around their bare legs. They stamped their feet and threw back their heads and laughed, trusting their weight to the men’s
strength. She opened her eyes. There was no sign of Bo. The sky was cold, a violet shadow rising where the sun had set. She began to cry. The tears catching her without warning. It lasted no more than a moment. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She had suddenly felt alone. As if she were venturing into a place that would never welcome her. She twisted around and looked back at the white truck. Arner was a dark anonymous shape in the cabin, unmoving, gazing ahead. She raised her hand, but he did not react.

  May’s

  BO DUCKED HIS HEAD OUT OF THE WIND AND LIT HIS SMOKE IN the lee of his hatbrim. He stepped across the stormwater drain and got into the Pajero. ‘She gets a bite in her about this time of the evening,’ he said, speaking of the wind as if he spoke respectfully of an old acquaintance. He started the motor. He seemed calmer. Subdued even, perhaps by some unexpected encounter in the abandoned palace.

  Annabelle felt a wave of tenderness for him. His acknowledgement of the familiar wind a reassurance that the essentials of this place, whatever she had imagined them to be, had not really changed for either of them since their childhoods. She put her hand on his knee.

  He turned and looked at her, a slow smile gathering in his eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We’re here.’ He put his hand on hers.

  She leaned and kissed him on the mouth then drew away.

  ‘What was that for?’

  She did not answer at once. Then: ‘It should be the easiest thing, shouldn’t it, coming home?’

  He considered her a moment, gauging the complication of her mind. ‘We’ll camp up at May’s tonight.’ He did a U-turn and drove up the street onto the floodlit apron of the servo, Arner coming on behind. A young woman came out of the store at once, as if she had been standing behind the glass door watching them. Despite the cold she was barefoot and wearing only a light cotton dress. A half-naked toddler and a black dog followed her. The child stopped and put its arms around the dog’s neck and hugged it. The dog standing patiently, eyes half-closed enduring. The woman might have been one of the young women in Annabelle’s dancing daydream. Except there were red sores on her shins and bare forearms and she was thin and had the tight-skinned look of the poorly nourished.

  They got down from the Pajero and the woman greeted Bo. She nodded in an offhand manner to Annabelle and asked Bo if there was any way she could help him.

  Bo said he’d fill the Pajero. Annabelle asked the woman if she had any 35 mm film.

  The woman did not look at her. ‘We had film,’ she replied, as if having had film at one time compensated for the lack of it at the present moment.

  ‘But you don’t have any now?’ Annabelle asked her, just to be certain.

  ‘It’s been a while since anyone asked for film,’ the woman said, as if Annabelle might have been expected to know this. She studied Bo. ‘Have I seen you around here before?’

  ‘Where you from?’ Bo asked her.

  ‘I’m off a property.’ She gestured loosely to the wind, gazing around at the deserted town, indicating no particular direction. ‘So I don’t mind the isolation.’ She smiled and quickly corrected herself, glancing at Annabelle. ‘The semi-isolation I should say. I don’t mind it.’

  Bo indicated the road. ‘I grew up out there on Verbena.’

  ‘You not one of them Rennies are you?’

  ‘Bo Rennie.’ They shook hands, touching the ends of their fingers lightly. ‘This is Annabelle Beck. Annabelle’s people had Haddon Hill.’

  The woman examined Annabelle with a new respect. ‘Them Brooks have got your old place now,’ she said to Annabelle. ‘They got cattle agisted on Verbena.’ She turned to Bo. ‘You heading out that way?’

  ‘My dad was Coll Rennie,’ Bo told her. ‘He managed Verbena for Grandma Rennie. She was the owner with her sister May.’ Bo considered the woman. ‘You’d be too young to remember Grandma Rennie.’

  ‘Oh I’ve heard people speak about her,’ the woman said, making a claim, her manner a little defiant, as if she meant to imply that hearing about Grandma Rennie was equal, in its own way, to having known her in person. ‘That old ringer, Clarrie Stokes. He knew all them people first-hand.’ She gestured freely at the scattered town, ‘You’ll find Clarrie at the hotel. He’ll tell you.’ She scratched her nose, thinking. ‘There’s not a lot of dark people left around Mount Coolon these days. Except that old Panya woman whatever her name is up there. I don’t know where they all went.’ She gazed up the empty street as if she expected to see a Murri walking in from the scrub along the graded strip of red gravel. ‘I don’t know where they all went,’ she repeated. ‘But they’re gone.’ She looked at Bo, studying him. She sniffed lightly, pushing at her hair with her hand. ‘This place is gonna pick up when they put the new railway line through.’

  Bo looked where she pointed. ‘Through to where?’ he said and chuckled, catching Annabelle’s eye. He drew the tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette. A white utility was approaching along the road. They turned to watch it. The driver drew into the servo and got out. He examined them and called a greeting and went into the shop.

  ‘That’s my husband, Ron,’ the woman said. ‘We’re gonna be well-placed here to take advantage of the new development when it comes through.’

  Annabelle noticed the woman’s eyes. They were clear and grey like pebbles polished by the wind. A strange lucid vacancy. She thought of the eyes of a dead bird.

  The filler on the pump cut out and Bo put it back on its cradle and screwed the cap on. He handed the woman some notes and sucked his teeth and looked at Annabelle. ‘We’d best be slipping along.’

  The woman said, ‘The truck don’t need filling?’

  Bo looked at Arner’s white truck. ‘She’s got big tanks,’ he said. ‘You could drive her to Brisbane and back without stopping to refuel.’

  The woman laughed. ‘She’s no good to us then.’

  ‘No. We’ll be seeing you,’ Bo said.

  She watched them get into the Pajero and drive away.

  Bo spat out the sidewindow. ‘You not one of them Rennies?’ He mimicked the woman’s thin voice. ‘She makes a feller sound like a stomach pill.’ He pulled off the road by a big old wounded lemon tree, its branches blackened and warped into grotesque shapes by the wind. He parked the Pajero in behind a long verandah concealed from the road by wildgrown buddleia and mimosa. There was a rusted blitz truck nosed into the bushes. Bo sat a moment then switched off the motor. He opened the door and stepped down from the Pajero.

  Two men came out onto the verandah from the dark interior of the hotel. The taller of the two came forward, the other hanging back in the shadows, standing looking. The man who came forward to meet them was considerably aged, his bones showing through his dappled shirt where the wind pressed the material to his body. As he came into the low radiance of the evening, he lifted a hand and tipped his greasy hat back, exposing a pallid forehead, his cheeks dark and leathery, the narrow brim of the hat tight curled against the crown. He stared hard in silence for a moment then said softly and with a kind of wonder in his voice, ‘Bo Rennie!’ His boots were worn over at the heels and he stood as if broken-ankled. As if he would not move again, squinting to see. Before him the vast unbroken landscape of the scrub, a sea incandescent beneath veils of drifting gossamer, countless minute spiders riding the wind in the coppery radiance like a silent migration of souls.

  Bo stepped up and shook the man’s hand. ‘How you doin, Clarrie?’

  ‘Yeah, real good Bo.’ The tall man seemed to test each word before delivering it, rocking on his turned ankles with the light rhythm of his speech. He held Bo’s hand and shook it slowly, gazing close into Bo’s face. His voice touched by an inward laugh of pleasure. ‘How are you, old mate?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty good,’ Bo reassured him easily, his manner as offhand as if he had parted from this man only hours before.

  Clarrie Stokes let go Bo’s hand and gestured down the road. It was Bo’s gesture precisely, an adjusted alignment of palm and fingers offering informatio
n as to the heading. ‘I got to go and fix up old Em Butler’s ute for her right off. I’ll be done in half an hour. It’s only a tyre.’ He looked hard at Bo. ‘You still gonna be here when I get back?’ His inquiry carried some force, as if he were afraid that Coll Rennie’s boy would slip away from him again and be gone for another dozen years or more; or perhaps would prove to have been no more than a longed-for visitation of his own dreams, a phantom of distracted memory. ‘Bo Rennie,’ he said again, affirming his belief.

  Bo sniffed, clearing his nose, gazing around him, examining the verandah as if he were a prospective purchaser. To Annabelle he seemed too solid and too real for this situation beside the wavering apparition of Clarrie Stokes and his shadowy companion.

  Bo turned again to Clarrie. ‘Em still hanging on then?’

  ‘She’s waiting for the new railway line, Bo. Like the rest of these fools. I tell her no new line’s ever coming through Mount Coolon, but she don’t want to hear it. They all think a new mine’s gonna be opening and making them rich. I tell them minerals is done for out this way. Cattle’s all this country’s ever been good for. People always gonna like to eat steaks.’ Clarrie’s hand slipped out again, the silent language of the ringer to his mate, adjusting his open palm, telling of cattle camped in the low scrub before them. He glanced behind him into the deep shadows of the verandah where a flywire door creaked on its hinges in the wind and the figure of the other man stood observing them, as if he waited for them to pass through the door, a spectral guardian of the portal who might yet hold the power of the dream and prove to be the principal of the moment. ‘You should’ve come by yesterday. Me and Herb and old Omo here, we drunk all the beer last night. Rum too. There’s nothing left. Herb went off first thing to get some more. You must have met him out the Collinsville road.’ He grinned at Annabelle. A gold filling glinting in the cavern of his mouth. ‘We got wine.’