Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  ‘I don’t drink no more,’ Bo said. ‘I give the grog away.’ He turned to Annabelle, ‘Annabelle might join you. She likes to take a glass of wine occasionally with her sister back there in Townsville.’ He turned to the old ringer. ‘You remember Louis Beck’s granddaughter, Elizabeth? This is her younger sister, Annabelle.’

  Clarrie reached up and touched two fingers to his hatbrim. ‘How are you, Miss Annabelle? I remember Elizabeth,’ he said, looking keenly at Annabelle. ‘And I remember you too. I worked for your dad. He was a top cattleman, your dad. And your granddad too. Them two and this feller’s old man. I worked for all three of them fellers. I remember you, but you don’t remember me. You was too young.’ He grinned. ‘I was ringing for your dad out there at Haddon Hill the year you was born. It was a good year for calves. Nineteen-fifty-three. Your old dad give us all a bonus when you was born. I remember drinking your health. How’s that?’ He turned and indicated Bo. ‘Not this feller. His old Grandma never let him get near Haddon Hill and that wild granddad of yours. She reckoned he’d be sure to get himself shot for a blackfeller out there in them scrubs and no one never see what happened to him.’ He turned suddenly to Bo. ‘You give up the grog?’ He was dismayed and incredulous.

  ‘We didn’t see Herb along the road,’ Bo said. ‘So maybe you’re gonna have to give her up too, Clarrie.’

  Clarrie stared at him, appalled. He turned to Annabelle. ‘You should’ve seen this one and that Dougald Gnapun when them two got on the grog. There wasn’t no one in Mount Coolon could touch them.’ He stood looking at Bo, remembering. He watched Bo roll a fresh smoke. ‘You heading out to the old place,’ he said. It was not a question so much as an observation. ‘There’s no one camped out there on Verbena these days. Been no one there for a couple of years now. Ever since that feller Heffernan and his two boys left. They just cleared out. She’s agisted to the Beck’s old place. Them Heffernans never knew what they was doing. They was always driving around in them four-by-fours shooting. I don’t think any of them ever done a tap of work out there.’

  Bo lit his smoke, the flare of the match lighting his features.

  Far out in the scrubs a solitary nightbird was calling.

  ‘I reckon them Heffernans would be glad to hear an offer on Grandma’s old place,’ Clarrie said. ‘If you was to come up with one. That what you goin out there for, Bo? You reckon to get the old place back? I knew you’d come back for it one of these days. That was a bad thing happened to Grandma and your dad.’

  Bo was silent. He might have been attending to the night-bird’s call.

  Annabelle watched him, holding her coat close around her against the biting wind, waiting for him. She was longing to be somewhere warm. She recognised nothing of this place. It held no memories for her. She had never been inside the hotel. She had never really noticed it. Bo stood smoking, as if he had forgotten why they had come and had slipped back in time with Clarrie Stokes. His hip resting against the toprail of the verandah as if he did not intend to move away in a hurry, toeing a loose verandah board with his boot.

  Clarrie said, ‘You’re gonna pull that board away if you keep doing that. Someone’s gonna come out with a skinful one night and trip on it. Break their neck.’ He gazed out at the scrub, his eyes screwed up. ‘I don’t know where Herb’s got to with that beer if you fellers didn’t see him.’

  ‘Well we didn’t see him.’

  Annabelle felt the dark of the night coming on, the wind carrying the touch of cold metal in it. She was affronted by the meagre remains of her town and its poor inhabitants. She said, ‘I’m freezing!’ She turned to Clarrie Stokes. ‘You don’t seem to feel it?’ She might have been accusing him of a dishonourable inclination, a failure to be a man, a failure even to be quite human.

  Bo laughed. ‘Clarrie don’t feel nothing. Do you Clarrie? Wind, rain or summer heat. He’s like one of them old Murris.’ He smiled at the old ringer. ‘You own a coat Clarrie? I bet you never owned a coat.’

  Clarrie looked startled by the sudden turn of the conversation and he made a decision. ‘I’ll go and fix Em’s tyre for her. She’s expecting me.’ He stepped down off the verandah. ‘We’ll have a drink of wine when I get back. Don’t you fellers go slipping away.’

  They watched him hobble across the hotel yard and climb into the cabin of the old army blitz that stood nosed into the buddleia. He started the blitz with a roar and drove down the road, moving into the darkening landscape, leaving a tail of luminous haze drifting off the red gravel, a flight of birds crossing him in the rose-pink sky as if they escorted him respectfully to another world beyond the day.

  Bo turned to her. ‘We’ll get on up to May’s and light a fire. Get a feed and a drink of tea into us.’ He put his arm around her shoulders and leaned to touch his warm lips to the chill of her cheek. ‘You’re blue with the cold, my love.’ He held her against him. ‘You don’t want to let this old place dishearten you. We’ll head out to Verbena as soon as I’ve made a couple of calls in the morning. It’ll change the way you feel when you see the sunlight on Grandma’s tamarind tree by the waterhole.’

  Across Bo’s shoulder she saw Arner watching them from the cabin of his truck, his sombre features underlit by the green dash lights, poised in his thoughts, isolated and as still and silent as stone, as if he had been cast under a spell and knew something they would never know, carrying his knowledge with him all his waking hours, until the day he would unburden himself and begin to speak with the ease with which other men spoke.

  They climbed into the cabin of the Pajero. On the western horizon a silver crack of light resisted the oncoming darkness, bending the sky like a steel blade bowed by the ineluctable weight of night. Close at hand the dark silhouettes of abandoned dwellings, the tall apron fluoros illuminating the Shell servo, an island in the darkness. Annabelle thought of the eyes of the young woman. ‘This would be our town,’ she said, ‘if we ever set up on Verbena.’

  ‘Mount Coolon.’ Bo pronounced the name of the town as if he believed he had the measure of the place. As if it were an old opponent with whom he had come at last to settle his account. He started the Pajero and drove away from the hotel.

  She felt a conviction then that he would never attempt to explain himself or to share his innermost thoughts with her. No doubt he was like his grandmother had been, trusting to the steady increment of signs and silence rather than to the hazards of explanation. It was something she would have to accustom herself to. But she wondered if, on those terms, she would ever feel herself to be a part of his inner life. Explanation was a habit with her. There was a reassurance in it and she wondered if she could ever learn to do without it. She thought of Steven and the layered rationalisations of his letter. She had not finished reading it. It would change nothing for her. Its explanations explained nothing. She thought of him in Townsville at this moment. Had he called Elizabeth? They would become allies, Steven and Elizabeth. Suddenly she could see it. They would sit up all night drinking wine and offering each other layers of explanation. Where was he staying? Had Elizabeth taken him to Zamia Street? She had a key and they would wander through the house together. Touching and looking, passing judgement. What would they see? What had she left lying about in her parents’ bedroom that they might stand and gaze at? Would it be obvious to them that a man had slept there with her? She put her hand on Bo’s knee and watched the headlights dance across the gravel and tussock grass ahead of them, the shadow of the Pajero looming and giant, cast before them by Arner’s following lights. The moon was rising from behind the ridge in front of them, golden and fat, lifting heavily from the dark horizon of scrub and casting its light over the lonely windscoured landscape.

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

  ‘What am I thinking?’

  ‘Let’s get inside by a warm fire. That’s what you got in mind.’

  They crested a low rise behind the town and came in sight of a stretch of water.

  ‘A lake!’ Annabelle excl
aimed.

  ‘The old reservoir. Town’s got the pipeline now.’

  A small fibro-cement and weatherboard cottage surrounded by an overgrown garden stood in picturesque isolation on a rocky prominence overlooking the reservoir.

  ‘There she is!’ Bo said. ‘Aunty May’s.’ He pulled up at the front gate of the cottage and switched off the headlights. The reservoir below them glinted in the moonlight as if it were a night mirage in this desiccated landscape, the trailing branches of wintry European willows lashing the water, wind driven crests of small waves breaking against the retaining wall, its concrete buttresses standing against the pale sky like the ruins of an antique fortress long ago abandoned by some old imperial power.

  Bo got out and slammed the door and went back, calling to Arner to bring steaks and sausages. He shouted to Annabelle to fetch the pliers from under the dash. She got out and handed him the pliers and stood watching him struggling to unfasten the gate. Arner came and stood beside her. His head covered by the black hood of his windstopper. He was hugging a cardboard carton of supplies to his chest. She could hear his breathing. He stood close, his shoulder touching hers, as if he wanted company in the cold night. She wondered suddenly if his mystery were simply that he was a shy lonely young man, self-conscious about his size and unable to identify his peers among the people he met.

  Bo said, ‘Aunt May never wired up a gate!’ His voice raised into the gusting wind as he struggled to unhitch the knotted turns of wire securing the iron gatepost to the timber strainer. ‘This would be Jude Horrie’s doing. That boy of hers always wanted to keep his hands on everything!’ Bo reefed violently at the final turn of wire with the pliers and cut it repeatedly, tossing the short sections aside into a lantana bush. He ripped off the last piece of wire and wrestled the gate open against a rank growth of burr grass.

  There was an exaggerated, impatient violence in the way Bo thrust the gate aside, as if he were thrusting aside the impediment of Jude Horrie himself. He strode up the narrow strip of cement path to the front door. On either side of the plain wood door a row of louvred windows. The louvres shut. Bo tried the door. It was locked. He said with amused contempt, ‘Who ever seen a Murri’s door locked in Mount Coolon?’ He turned and spat aside.

  Annabelle and Arner followed him around to the back.

  The fibro-cement section of the cottage adjoined an older original weatherboard dwelling of one room. The door to this modest structure was without a lock but like the gate was held closed with a double turn of plain wire through the latch hole. Bo cut the wire and tossed it aside into the burr grass and pushed the door open.

  They stepped up behind him and stood side by side in the sudden stillness after the buffeting wind. Annabelle thought, Another abandoned dwelling place! The hidden purpose of their journey might have been to surprise the ghosts of the past.

  Bo said, ‘You got that light there Arner?’

  Arner set the carton on the floor and stood up with a flashlight in his hand. He played the broad beam around the room. It was bare of furnishings. There was a fireplace to the left of the door beside them and green-painted cupboards fixed to the far wall, their doors hanging open, the shelves empty, as if someone had made a final check to ensure nothing useful was to be left behind. The floorboards by the fireplace were rotted and broken through. Someone had pushed a collection of rubbish down the hole before leaving. Annabelle identified old newspapers and a broken picture frame, the smashed pictureglass glinting in Arner’s light. Across the room a flower-patterned half-curtain strung on a spring wire at the only window was the sole remaining sign of an intimate domestic occupation. Whoever had helped May move had cleaned the place out.

  Bo turned and went out the door.

  Annabelle and Arner fetched the swags and gear from the Pajero and the truck while Bo lit the fire. Annabelle wrapped potatoes in foil and set them in the heart of the fire. They sat around looking into the blaze, waiting for the potatoes, Bo smoking and no one in a mood to talk, the wind shaking the timbers of the old kitchen and snatching at loosened pieces of roof-iron. When they could smell the potatoes baking and judged them to be nearly done, Bo spread the coals and barbecued the meat. She and Bo sat close, cross-legged on the swag, Arner seated on a plastic crate, eating their dinner from blue enamel plates. The wind slamming the door back and forth against the lintel and no one getting up to fix it.

  When Annabelle and Arner had cleaned the dishes, Arner said goodnight and took the flashlight and went out to his truck. A moment later his music started up, the thumping of the bass a drumbeat against the wind in the night, like the ritual accompaniment of a soul possessed. Annabelle wondered at his emotions, visiting for the first time the heartland of his father’s forebears. Or was he untouched by it? To have asked him directly, it seemed to her however, would have been to ignore Bo’s unspoken rule. Would have been to be insensitive to his preferred style and have risked setting a distance between them. It was not a matter of understanding, but of enduring. She resolved to wait for the story to unfold, as Grandma Rennie would have advised her to do. You’ll know where you’re going when you get there. It was Grandma Rennie, after all, who had brought them here together this night. Without her there would have been no return. For none of them, not even for Bo himself.

  Annabelle went outside and trod down a patch of the high grass in the garden and relieved herself. When she came back inside Bo was sitting cross-legged on the unrolled swag. He was gazing into the fire smoking a cigarette, his hat pushed back, a mug of tea clasped in his hands. He grimaced and eased his back. She asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve got this pain.’ He put down the mug of tea and reached his hand up his back. ‘Right . . . there!’

  She kneeled beside him and touched the place.

  ‘That’s it!’

  ‘It’s standing around in that cold wind after all the driving,’ she said. But she was worried. He smoked too much and she saw how sapped and tired he was, as if the effort of breaking down Jude Horrie’s mean-spirited barriers had cost him a sacrifice of his morale. She took his hat off and placed it beside the swag and she took the half-burnt cigarette from between his fingers and set it on the edge of the hearth. He looked at her as if he were a child in need of comforting. She kneeled in front of him and unbuttoned his shirt, stripping it from his back and pulling the sleeves off his arms. ‘Lie face down on the swag,’ she told him.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  She put her hands on his bare shoulders. ‘Just do as you’re told, Bo Rennie,’ she ordered him firmly.

  He lay down and she kneeled astride him and massaged his neck and shoulders and the muscles of his back, the probing of her fingers making him groan. ‘I’ll do this for you every night when you’re an old man,’ she promised him. His naked torso, the grain of his honey-gold skin in the firelight. She touched the pale scars of his youth. He was no longer a young man. She wondered, with a small shrinking in her heart, if they had left their enterprise too late. For it would surely take the energy of a young man to bring Verbena back into production. She resolved to defend him against whatever frailties their future held. And might even welcome his frailty, so that she might care the more for him. She smiled when he winced at the probing of her fingers into the tight hollow of an old scar. ‘There!’ she said. ‘It’s doing you good.’

  When she had finished she undressed and lay beside him in the swag. It was warm in the kitchen in front of the fire now. She sensed his need for sleep and lay close against him, the warmth of his body, his mansmell and the smell of his cigarettes. She could feel his heart throbbing. She lay listening to the wind and to the thud of Arner’s music, strong and near one minute, a tremor inside her own chest or within the earth itself, then distant and scarcely audible, as if Arner’s phantom drummer rode the wind in a great arc across the sky, an uncanny familiar of the cold stars or the old people. Bo began to snore and she studied him in the halflight. A flickering of his eyelids, his features contorted and
easing with the passage of his dreaming, the great objects of mystery in the vastness of sleep rising to greet him as he fell through time, his hands trembling as he strove to grasp some passing form, to hold it, to struggle with it and to subdue it. She whispered, ‘I love you, Bo Rennie.’ Their enterprise seemed to her to be a fragile thing, opposed by a vast indifference, and their tenure of life itself a brief stewardship only.

  She was unable to sleep and after a while she turned onto her back and lay watching the last of the firelight dying against the open timbers of the ceiling. She wondered if she might ever become as he was. Such a transformation would entail a campaign against the grain of her upbringing and her training, against the grain of her life and her culture. Her father’s encouragement from the beginning had been to inquire into the reasons for everything. Had it not always seemed to her a right and a duty to do so? The tireless interrogation of facts and phenomena at school and at the university in search of endless explanations. The very foundation of her profession, of all professions. If she were to adopt Grandma Rennie’s and Bo’s language of signs and silence it would be to defy the code of inquiry that lay at the very heart of her own culture . . .