Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  The fire had burned down to a spread of glowing embers. She knew she was not going to sleep. She inched herself out of the swag so as not to wake him and draped her coat around her shoulders. She sat cross-legged on the swag beside his sleeping form in the glow of the embers, the noggings and joists of the unlined timber walls faintly illuminated by the moonlight from the window. Arner’s music pumping into the night. Bo slept deeply now beside her, no longer snoring, his body as still as if he had slipped away to another place. She leaned and touched her lips to his forehead. His skin was cool. He did not stir at the touch of her lips. She felt his absence. The mystery of sleep and the unconscious that we take for granted, that vast region where our longings and fears appear to us in the form of visions, the voices of the oracles, ambiguous and obscure, arising from our own depths. In our dreams the whispering voices of our gods. She turned to the hearth and reached for a stick and stirred the embers . . . She was seeing the books on her shelves in her study at the house in Carlton: Halliday, Parke and Wormell. Delphi, Didyma and Claros. The oracular shrines of the Greeks. They had also spoken in an antique language of signs and silence. Seduced by the labyrinth of meaning and double meaning until they became transformed, lost to the world in the incubation of another reality, meaning slipped from their words to lodge in the charged spaces of silence, escaping the tyranny of the literal text. She thought: If only we could share the sleep and dreams of the person we love!

  She reached and selected pieces of sandalwood bark and chipwood from their stock of fuel and placed them on the coals and blew on them until a flame sprang up. The fragrance of the sandalwood strong in her nostrils. It was the incense of the bush. The smell of the brigalow and poison bendee and the lancewood scrubs. The smell of her childhood. She closed her eyes and savoured the smell of the wood oils. To know when something is sacred to you! Her father gazing at her across the smoke of their lunchcamp fire when she went out on the muster with him during the holidays, the burden of his love for her so heavy she remembered it as a sadness in his eyes. Learning then that love is inarticulate and does not need words. And she would get up and go around the fire to him and hug him. And they would hold each other, breathless against the ineluctable moment of their separation. Wreathed in the sacred smoke of the sandalwood, she and her father. Making time stand still . . . The fire was going well. She turned and reached behind her for the tea billy. As she turned, her attention was caught by the yellow flames reflecting in the shattered pictureglass in the dark of the hole in the floorboards beside her. She set down the billy and reached her hand in through the rotted boards, easing the broken frame free, picking the shards of glass from it and placing them back in the hole. An old sepia photograph mounted on grey cardboard was held to the back of the broken frame by rusty pins. The cardboard mount had been snapped in two. The photograph, its image faded and fragile, cracked down the middle like a stroke of lightning, its corners broken. She removed the mount from the frame and held the image towards the pale flames of the fire.

  Two men and four young women dressed in the formal clothes of the early part of the century gazed at her out of the past, posed on the verandah of a grand old homestead, a pair of French doors open behind them, a maid standing in the deep shadow there. Before the seated young women a round table laid with an embroidered cloth and tea things. The group framed by the delicate foliage of a Chinese wisteria trailing from the coping of the verandah. The four young women were seated on cane chairs, the two men standing behind them. The man closest to the camera rested his hand on the back of a chair, as if to signify his claim on the affections of the young woman who sat in it. He was the only one in the group, however, not looking directly out of the photograph at the camera. His attention was directed towards the young woman seated on the extreme right of the picture. At first Annabelle thought this young woman was sitting in the shade of the verandah coping. Then she realised she was not in the shade but was black. Annabelle leaned close to examine the young woman. Assured and at ease, the black woman gazed steadily at her out of the stilled moment of past time, her hands folded in her lap, a necklace of beads or pearls at her throat. Her posture upright and formal, her pale gown narrowly waisted, her bosom buttoned firmly within the bodice of the dress, her dark hair parted severely down the centre. Her gaze was self-possessed and calm, as if she were in the most familiar of surroundings among these white people and knew herself to be at home. She looked out of the photograph from her own world, an authority in her gaze, though she could scarcely have been more than sixteen years of age. Annabelle felt a thrill of recognition. There was a likeness to Bo that was as much in the assurance of the young woman’s bearing and style as in the modelling of her features.

  Annabelle drew in her breath. She was looking at Grandma Rennie! . . . There used to be a photograph hung over the stove in the kitchen at Verbena when I was a kid, Bo had told her that day at Zamia Street. Them three Bigges girls and Grandma taking tea on the verandah at the Ranna homestead, May with a pinafore on standing holding a tray in the shadow of the doorway behind them. This was that photograph! The maid was Grandma Rennie’s sister, May, standing in the doorway. It would have been impossible for her not to have been jealous of her younger sister’s privileged position within the family. The French doors behind the group opened, Annabelle knew, into the Ranna dining room with its balloon-backed chairs and long cedar table, the ceiling rotted and collapsing, the pile of debris gathering on the table. She examined the photograph with a feeling of intense excitement, almost as if she were there herself with these people. The man looking at the black woman must be Bo’s grandfather, Iain Ban Rennie. A morally stalwart man, Bo had called him. The other Iain Ban Rennie! He was of medium height, heavily bearded, wearing a stand-up collar and black necktie. His jacket unbuttoned to reveal a high-buttoned waistcoat and watch chain. He looked as if he had for the moment forgotten the photographer and the tableau he was himself a part of and was lost in his contemplation of the beautiful black girl. Annabelle had no doubt of the identity of the other man. His likeness to her own father was striking. It was a likeness her grandfather had lost by the time she remembered him, however, by then a poor soul trailing around the paddocks with his old bullock, Paddy, for a companion. It was the first time she had seen a photograph of her grandfather when he was a young man. Louis Beck, the son of the founder of Haddon Hill, friend of George Bigges and Iain Rennie. There they were! Together in George Bigges’ photograph, the Becks and the Rennies. Her own family and Bo’s!

  Her first impulse was to wake Bo and show him her find. But she didn’t wake him. She sat instead studying the photograph by the light of the burning wood. Grandma Rennie and her own grandfather gazing back at her steadily across the span of almost a hundred years, as if each of them strove to communicate to her their own measure of events back then . . .

  She woke with the smell of frying bacon and spiced sausages strong in her nostrils. The room was bright with the morning sun shining through the open door, the day outside clear and still. Bo squatting by the fire cooking breakfast in the big iron frying pan, steam rising from the tea billy set on the edge of the coals beside him.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

  He turned and regarded her. ‘Time you was out of that swag young lady. You been doing some serious sleeping there. Here’s a drink of tea here for you.’ He reached for the billy with his free hand and filled her mug with the strong black tea. ‘Me and Arner was watching you. You been laying there like a dead woman.’ He handed her the mug of tea.

  She sat up, wrapping the green blanket around her shoulders in the manner of a priest’s cope, and took the mug of tea from him. Arner was sitting with his back to the wall over in the sunlight by the open door. His great bulk collapsed against the wall, his legs spread wide apart, thrust out in front of him, as if he had been shot and were dazed by the impact. His broad hands resting on the floor, readying himself for the task of standing up. The photograph was lying across one broad thigh.
He was not looking at the photograph, however, but was studying the food cooking in the frying pan.

  ‘You saw the photograph?’ Annabelle said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’

  Bo’s hand flicked down to her side. ‘She was laying there beside you this morning.’

  ‘It was rammed down in amongst these rotten boards,’ she told him.

  ‘That’s Jude Horrie for you,’ Bo said, his tone matter-of-fact, unsurprised. ‘That boy of May’s would always do something miserable if he could think of how to do it. If he’d took that old picture with him, like he took everything else, instead of offering an insult to Grandma that way, well we wouldn’t have it now.’ Bo selected a burning stick from the fire and relit the stub of his cigarette. He seemed unmoved by the recovery of the photograph, or accepting of it. He leaned and set the stick back on the edge of the fire. ‘Jude give the picture back to us without knowing what he was doing. That’s the way things go. A man like Jude Horrie is always in a hurry to get things done and move on. He never considers how anything he leaves behind him is gonna work out.’

  ‘It really is Grandma Rennie, then?’ Annabelle said.

  ‘It’s Grandma. I guess she reckoned it was time she put in an appearance.’ He chuckled, ‘About time you two met up.’ He gestured over towards Arner. ‘George Bigges give that picture to Grandma as a wedding present. She was very attached to it.’ He turned and examined her. ‘You’re looking a bit peaky on it this morning, my love. Me and Arner was wondering if you was ever gonna wake up. We was banging things around but you just kept on sleeping through the noise. You can eat three of these and a couple of sausages. These are good eggs!’ he said with conviction. ‘They’ll set you back on your feet.’

  ‘One egg and one sausage will be plenty, thanks.’

  ‘One egg’s not gonna be enough!’

  ‘All right then, two.’ She sipped her tea and watched him dishing up Arner’s breakfast.

  Arner set the photograph on the floor and rolled onto his side, kneeling on all fours a moment, like a weight-lifter readying himself for the lift. He picked up the photograph and raised himself onto one knee, a hand to the wall. He grunted with the effort and stood. Standing, he was transformed, the enormous bulk of his body majestic, grave, beautiful and aloof, a being detached from his fellow humans, entranced by his steady contemplation of another world. He ambled over to the swag where Annabelle lay drinking her tea by the fire. He leaned and set the photograph on the floor beside her and nodded at her, meeting her gaze fleetingly, as if he were making the point that the photograph was in her care. He turned and took his breakfast from Bo, murmuring his thanks.

  ‘If you want more, we got plenty,’ Bo offered.

  Arner studied the steaming plate of food in his hands. ‘You gonna do toast?’

  ‘We’ll do toast.’

  Annabelle picked up the photograph and looked at it. ‘What do you think of the photograph, Arner?’ Even as she asked him the question she knew it was pointless, that her question was, in a way, a measure of her own failure to see things his way. But she wanted to know. She wanted to hear him express some enthusiasm for her find.

  Arner paused, standing and considering. ‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘It’s good.’ Solemnly delivering his verdict. It’s good. He moved to the doorway and leaned down, one hand to the wall, setting his plate on the floor before lowering himself into position beside it, sitting on the doorstep in the sunlight with his back to them.

  ‘Two eggs going in here for you,’ Bo said.

  She watched him.

  He tipped the pan, taking care not to break the yolks of her eggs. ‘You go back over old country,’ he said, offering a response to her question, ‘and these things come around and find you.’

  ‘Our families are together in this photo,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather and mine.’

  ‘Pictures don’t lie,’ he agreed amiably.

  She looked across at Arner. He did not appear to be attending to their conversation. He was concentrating on his meal, his shoulders hunched, leaning over his food. He ate, she decided, with a religious diligence, each mouthful carefully considered, as if he were constructing an object of lasting value, everything but the food excluded from his awareness. She looked down at the photograph in her hands. ‘She was beautiful,’ she said. ‘No wonder your grandfather couldn’t resist her. Is this the only photo of her?’

  ‘You getting out of that swag for this?’ Bo asked. ‘These eggs is just about done. It’s the only photo of her I ever seen, but there would have to be others somewhere. George Bigges was always taking them. My dad said he was as good a photographer as he was a cattleman. George Bigges loved to photograph. Whenever George was visiting in the district, or travelling with a mob of cattle, dad said he’d have an extra packhorse loaded up with his big old wooden cameras and tripods and boxes of them glass plates. Old Nellie showed me and Dougald a whole heap of them plates down there at Ranna one time. There’s boxes of them planted in that house somewhere. Stored up in the roof most likely.’

  She said, ‘I searched for them. Remember? I didn’t think to look in the roof.’ She put aside the photograph and dropped the blanket from her shoulders. She stood up and put on her clothes.

  Bo watched her a moment, then he looked down at the photograph. ‘She never lost her good looks. When she was an old lady, Grandma was still a good-looking woman. She could have remarried half a dozen times but she never did. White men and black. She stayed staunch to Iain the rest of her days.’ He leaned down and laid his finger on the young woman seated in front of Iain Rennie. ‘That’s Katherine Bigges. She was the eldest of them girls. Iain was gonna marry her but he knocked everybody off their feet and married Grandma instead. Grandma used to have a chuckle about the way he’s looking sideways at her in this picture.’ He turned back to the fire. ‘You could make some toast when you’re done with them eggs and sausages. These coals are getting real good for toast.’

  She watched him shift the sausages and bacon to one side of the pan and crack four eggs into it for himself.

  ‘We’ll pack up this gear and get on over to Elsie and Tiger’s place before we head out to Verbena.’ He did not look around. ‘Elsie’s Les Marra’s sister. She’s a good woman. You two will get along.’ He pointed the fork at the wall, steadying it in a south-easterly direction, his eyes narrowed, as if he saw the subjects of his story through a warp of time. ‘Elsie and Tiger used to live down there on the coast at a little place just out of Sarina. He was a fitter on the railways for years till he got sick and couldn’t work. He’s never really come good again. He turned religious a couple of years back, the whole family did, but the Lord don’t seem to be doin a lot for them. There’s not much of the tiger in him. That’s what Les called him when he started courting Elsie, and it’s stuck to him. He don’t answer to nothin else now. His mother and father was part Indians. The family come over from Fiji back in the early days. Les got Tiger and Elsie this place here rent free. It belongs to the Land Council.’ He scooped the eggs and flipped them over.

  Annabelle finished her breakfast and made toast over the coals.

  ‘Make a heap of that toast,’ Bo said. ‘We got that new pot of English marmalade from Coles. Me and Arner are gonna give her a try out.’

  After breakfast Arner went back to the isolation of his truck and the sustaining heartbeat of his music. Annabelle did the dishes and cleaned up. The morning moved on slowly around them, the town down the hill silent except for an occasional vehicle going by along the road or the bark of a dog. Someone was operating heavy machinery off in the scrub at a distance, the noise of the machine flowing in and receding. By mid morning the wind had begun to stir again, coming in drifts of air as if some hidden power tested the way forward.

  Bo squatted on his heels by the fire, making brews of tea and smoking cigarettes, placing sandalwood sticks on the coals and watching them burn, the fragrant smoke filling the kitchen with the incense of the bush. He seemed in no hurry to leave the
peaceful day behind. He might have been waiting for someone, listening for their approach in the strengthening wind, sheets of loose roof-iron beginning to ease back and forth on their nails. He got to his feet at one point and fashioned a neat wire hasp for the door as if he had decided to stay at May’s old place. He tested the hasp until he was satisfied it would hold against the buffeting of the wind.

  It was noon before Bo roused himself, satisfied, it seemed, to have arrived at last at the moment of their departure. He stood up and stretched, then stood looking down at Annabelle where she was sitting out of the wind in the sunlight by the door.

  ‘That was a good massage you give us last night, my love.’

  She looked up and smiled and reached for his hand. ‘I’ll give you another one tonight.’

  He stood considering her. ‘You okay?’

  ‘It was good to find Grandma’s photo.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. He turned to the fire. ‘I don’t think we need put this out. Let it burn. You ready?’

  ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Outside the door he fastened his new hasp and tried it. ‘She’ll hold,’ he said. If they ever returned it would be there to let them in. The cold wind had picked up and was blowing strongly again. There was a high cloud haze, the sunlight brazen and dazzling to the eyes so that they adjusted their hats, a pall of refracted light over the silvery scrubs stretching away beyond the town perimeter to the horizon, the broad high plain of the burnished landscape punctured by conical peaks. Annabelle pulled her hatbrim down harder, pushing her sunglasses with a finger.

  As they drove away she turned in her seat and looked back, a thin smoke flying from the chimney of Aunty May’s old kitchen, the reservoir reflecting the steely sky, the cold water ruffled by the wind and no bird life. Despite the smoke the place looked abandoned, as if there was nothing left there now to be scavenged or retrieved from that place in the past. On the near bank of the reservoir a half-submerged car body rusted among yellow plastic rubbish bags and a discarded mattress. By daylight an unromantic and sinister place. She turned back to the road ahead. The precious photograph was stowed safely in her bag. It was a comfort to think of it, as if it were her passport for the next stage of their journey. As if Grandma Rennie had broken her long silence and given her this sign of approval, extending the old Verbena welcome to those with a little respect. She had rescued George Bigges’ wedding present to Grandma Rennie from the fate of Jude Horrie’s insult, and it felt good to have done that.