The sun lowered quickly then, and even though it was hard to see, Tom rubbed cool creek water onto the scratches on Flynn’s arms and legs and picked specks of dirt and gravel from a deep graze on his own knee. He found a fern and stripped it of its fronds and laid them on the rock and laid Flynn down on them and then curled up round him. He watched him fall asleep, watched his thumb go into his mouth, and then he too closed his eyes. Finches chattered in the bushes and from somewhere up in the hills came the soft, clear tolling of bell-birds.
6
Grace leant her head back against the seat and began to see the tricks the light was playing on her. She swung the door to and fro and small horses of reflected light galloped backwards and forwards across the road. It was nearly midday and the heat radiated down through the metal of the car like lightning down a rod but found nowhere to go. The sun burrowed into the car’s paint and cracked the colour apart, found a rainbow where you wouldn’t expect one, lifted it out for the boiling air to cushion, display like a dusty nugget, spin back out into the day. Everything on either side of the road seemed to be wilting. The road was empty, chalky. The rails running parallel to the road, behind the barbed wire, gleamed like chrome and appeared and disappeared in the heat haze. She looked over at the edge of the trees, where the timber started, where the shadows began, where it might have been just a little cooler. It almost seemed up to the country now, and the sun, to conjure up the boys, to have them step out from the shade and walk directly over to where she sat. They would be dusty, very hungry, and thin. They would probably have cuts on their legs and arms and torn clothes and she would bandage them up and then she and her father would drive them into town and they would sit quite still between them while Pop cracked jokes and she would put her arm across Tom’s shoulders and when they arrived in town everyone would come out and crowd around and chatter with excitement and amazement.
They’d been missing for more than a week now. Nearly two hundred men, including blacktrackers and men with dogs, had been brought in to search. It was in all the newspapers—even in Sydney— and on the television and radio stations. She hadn’t gone out with Pop again but she had sat by the two-way radio in the station listening to the talk and following the searchers’ progress on the big map pinned to the wall. She hadn’t even thought about Darcy until she hadn’t turned up to have her dress altered, and then she wondered whether her father was being even more strict with her than usual.
She squinted over at the trees again, then turned and perched on her knees to look out the back window, but there was nothing there either, just a red-sided steer plugging slowly across the paddock. Pop stirred from his nap with a loud snort. He opened one of his eyes and looked at her. She knew his mouth would be dry so she jumped out of the car, unhooked the waterbag from the front bumper and handed it in to him. He took a long drink.
“Thanks, love.”
He looked at his watch.
“Any sign of the train?”
“No.”
“Flamin’ thing is later than usual. Should’ve come past hours ago.”
“Maybe it’s been derailed. Hit a cow or something.”
“Yep. Maybe it has.” Pop smiled and leant towards the dashboard. With a trickle of juice from the battery the radio cranked out a bit of music, then a horse race.
“Who have we picked in this one?” Pop reached for the paper, creased open at the form guide, and his glasses, positioning them on the end of his long nose.
“I picked him. Twenty to one. Regular Rocket. But it’s the next race.”
“Regular Rocket. We’ll see,” he said, smiling wearily at his daughter. “Let’s find some shade. It’s more than regulation hot in here.”
“We were in the shade before you fell asleep. The shade went that way,” she said, pointing.
“Didn’t mean to fall asleep. Must be more tired than I thought.”
Grace looked at him. He’d been out until well past dark for the last week, rising before the sun. She wasn’t surprised he was tired. They climbed from the car and sat where it was throwing a little shade onto the grass verge. They looked out across the river flats towards town, their backs against the warm steel bodywork. The storm over a week ago had done little to break the dry spell they were having. There hadn’t been any good rain in months and the usually green paddocks were looking tired and very thirsty. The cattlemen were complaining, the dairymen as well. Everyone else was doing their best to stay cool. There was nothing for it but to wait. The good rain would come—they were too close to the coast for it not to. At least one thing was certain, Pop thought: it would come, whether the boys were found, or whether they never were.
He was tired. He was bone tired. Waiting for the train, listening to the races, were welcome chances to empty his mind of all the worries, all the impossibilities, all the disappointments of the past few days. There in the stillness, with his eyes closed and the sun against them, was also the place where things sometimes began to make sense, where he often heard the first word of something new. Today, though, there was nothing.
The police radio crackled and there was an echoing squeal and then silence. Pop thought of the noise as a phantom copper, forever on rounds, radio in ghostly hand, maybe whistling softly to himself. In the last week the radio had been constantly alive with voices from dawn to dusk. He’d heard them change from energetic and keen to resigned and anguished. They’d tramped in long ragged lines through dense bush and bivouacked where they’d stood when the daylight failed. He’d had them comb the roads again, on foot and on horse-back, and drag the river with hooks, but still nothing had been found. Henry Gunn, the poor bastard, unable to sleep, had lost his voice completely from calling the boys’ names. He’d never seen a man grimmer, a jaw as hard set. He was in some kind of twilight world, along with Ellie, where hope slipped away like time. There was nothing he nor anyone else could say to them that was much help. Yesterday he’d had to send most of the searchers home—it had made him sick to do it—and now there was just a man or two with a team of dogs, some of the bushfire brigade lads, and himself—and the occasional crackle and sigh from the radio.
“Wish you were some help, old son,” Pop said out loud.
He sighed and closed his eyes again. Where were those boys? Where the hell were they? To think they’d landed men on the moon, yet two little boys could not be found. They’d stared at the map, tried to get inside their heads, but they really seemed to have vanished without a trace. Henry had been adamant they’d gone fishing, told him how much Tom liked it. Pop thought it was doubtful, but the river still had to be searched, and thoroughly this time, not just by a few blokes in a boat with some hooks. Even though nearly every child in the district could swim, water had still claimed too many, particularly the little ones. Little Flynn could have fallen in somewhere, and Tom might have had to jump in after him. After that, with clothes on, even a grown man could get tired quickly and start to go under. It was either look in the river again, or sit quietly up the back of the church and pray.
He opened his eyes. The girl was over in the old siding now, the heat haze from the tracks making her limbs tremble and flicker. Just half a year ago she had been skinny and shapeless—a little girl. He thought of the boys lost out in the bush and was seized by the sudden realisation of how much he loved her, the precise size and shape of it revealed to him without alteration as if he had always been loath to believe it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d told her as much, or the last time he’d really held her the way he had when she’d been younger. He watched her a little longer until he realised his mouth was dry again. He heaved himself up and went to the front of the car and unhooked the waterbag from the bumper and took another good long drink from it.
Grace followed the rusting rails through the long grass. In front of the old sawmill there were sidings and steel-edged humps for the loading and unloading of trains that had not stopped there for years. The old stationmaster’s office stood empty at one end of the main pl
atform. She tried the door of the little wooden hut and it creaked open on rusted hinges. Inside she found a bank of seized levers, coated in dust and cobwebs, and a clock on the wall stopped at seven minutes past three—an eternal afternoon. She closed the door and sat outside by the rails and waited with her hand on the hot steel and then, almost as though she’d wished it, the rails began to quiver under her fingertips. She thought of Darcy racing the train and she put her ear down to the rail and fancied she could hear its faint song. Presently she heard the train’s horn sound off in the distance. She stood and climbed the siding to wait, looking over to her father.
Pop heard the blast of the horn as well but the race they had an interest in had also just begun. It was raining down there and the track was heavy. He pictured the horses, well fed and fairly sparkling with condition, not like the working hacks up here, some with their ribs showing, scratching their flanks against ironbark posts and flicking flies away with a judder of muscle. The racecourse would be like a path to horse heaven for those nellies.
The caller began his call. He sounded like he was selling cattle, auctioning first place off to the highest bidder, and then, fluttering across the country, came news of the winner, the placegetters, the dividends on the last race, odds on the next—always a next race like waves against a shore. He wondered what the odds were now of finding the boys alive. If he could find God’s bookie he would certainly ask him. What were the odds?
He stood and slapped his overalls and squinted out from under the brim of his hat in the direction of the arriving train. Grace stood on the siding with her hand up to shade her eyes. She waved to the train as it appeared round the bend, her arm smudged near the shoulder with pale dust, her long dark hair halfway down her back just like her mother had worn hers years ago.
“Gracie!” he called, not able to help himself. “Be careful now!”
She turned and flashed her eyes at him. He strode up to the siding and raised his hand as well as the train slowed. The driver showed them his pale palm. Pop put his hand down on Grace’s shoulder.
“Our horse came second.”
“Damn.”
“Hey now. Enough of that.”
The train rumbled on, the wheels squealing on the steel curve, and then it straightened up and came alongside the platform.
“Step right back now, girl,” said Pop, as the engine passed in a billow of hot, smoky air. Grace glanced up at her father. She thought his eyes were far too dainty a blue for his stern look, but she stepped back anyway.
When most of the train had passed and they could see where it ended a face popped out of the guard’s van. It was a youthful face with a shock of straw-yellow hair blowing up in the train’s wake and a huge smile formed from wildly angled teeth. As he came closer Pop saw that the young man had his foot on a wooden box and was getting ready to shove it out the door of the van.
“They’re late,” said Pop. “They’re not stopping.”
He pulled Grace back and watched as the young guard disappeared back into the van. Then the box came flying out and fell with a thud against the sandy gravel of the platform. The guard looked back at them from his door, dust swirling up between him and them. His shoulders were shaking and he was hooting with obvious glee. Pop stared after him, unmoving, the box at his feet, until the guard and his wild smile had faded from view.
“Silly bugger,” he said, finally.
He turned to his daughter. She was standing stock-still, staring at the box, the way he’d seen her do during certain games when she’d been younger, or the way she did when she saw a snake.
“Come on. It’s all right. Give me a hand.”
Grace looked up at him. The sun had buried his face in black shade so she couldn’t read his expression, but she trusted his voice and, breaking her stillness, bent and lifted the box with him and carried it to the car, surprised to find it not as heavy as she thought it might be.
Henry Gunn was waiting for them down by the boat ramp, a terrible uncertainty in his eyes, as if he doubted the veracity of the air he breathed and the earth he walked upon.
“The outboard’s broken down,” he croaked. “I’ll row.”
Pop nodded. He had Grace help him unload the box of gelignite and then he sent her home with a quiet word. After she’d gone they headed upstream from the ramp until they reached Henry’s house and then another mile or so along from it they stopped to set the first charge, in close to the bank where the river curled around on itself. It was just one of a dozen places along the river where two children might have fallen in, drowned, then been caught on an underwater snag.
Pop tossed the charge towards a spot where the great bole of a redgum leant out over the water. Henry watched him, slouched over the oars like a hunchback, like a beaten man, his neck and shoulders corded with hard muscle. Pop detonated the charge and there was a thud and muddied water lifted up in a thick geyser and then crashed back to the surface like a fountain being turned off, the shock wave setting the boat rocking. A mass of leaves and black, waterlogged branches broke the surface and rolled back under like living things and all about them was the stirred-up detritus of the riverbed—hag’s fingers of twigs gloved with lace of green weed.
They continued up the river in the same manner until dusk, Henry dipping and feathering the oars and manoeuvring the boat, Pop throwing out the charges like bait. Both of them waited in the aftermath of each blast, hoping for a result, yet not hoping for the body of a drowned boy, swollen and pale, with dead, staring eyes, to be loosed from the depths. Yet sometimes the pale underbelly of a stunned and rolling catfish, twelve inches below the surface, could have been a boy’s arm or leg, and when they saw one their hearts jumped up into their throats until they could see for certain what it was, and each time it was not a boy Pop looked over at Henry and wondered how he could endure such cheap torture. Then, when the light was scarcely enough to see by, Pop called it a day.
“Tomorrow we can do down below the ramp,” he said. “Steele’s Reach.”
Henry nodded and began to row.
Two days later Pop Mather went into the kitchen of the station house and made himself a pot of tea with much more care than he usually took—warming the pot, warming the cup, putting the milk in first— and then he sat out on the station house’s back verandah in a steamer chair and watched the sun set. One of the tracker dogs had followed a trail that afternoon, way out to the west, but then had lost it. Pop couldn’t believe—if it actually was the boys—how far they had travelled. He went through his plan of action for the next morning and then he closed his eyes for a moment. He dozed for a few minutes but when he woke it seemed hours had passed. It was dark, and his back was as stiff as the southerly that had loped in, all bluster and show, when he hadn’t been looking. He reckoned the clouds that had come with it, swirling over the town, would barely shed enough rain to damp down the dust.
After a while—he thought it might have been five minutes or so but was unsure until he looked at his watch and saw that fifteen had ticked away—he stood up and stretched his back. He heard a plaintive sound from inside the house and looked round the doorjamb to see what it was. Grace was standing under the hall light in her new dress and Lil, pins in mouth, was on the floor adjusting the hem. Pop could tell by the look on his daughter’s face that she wasn’t enjoying herself at all.
He’d forgotten all about the dance. It had been postponed from Saturday, and while some had voiced their opposition, he thought it was probably about time it went ahead. God knew they could all do with something to cheer them up. Christmas was just over a week away now and he doubted whether anyone was quite ready for that. He took a last look at the evening sky before going inside. He gave his grimacing daughter a wink and then he went on into his room to change his clothes.
Grace didn’t really expect Darcy to be there when she walked into the hall with her mother and father, so when she saw her sitting on a chair up the back she almost stopped dead in her tracks. Fortunately her parents had
already peeled off from her side to talk to people so they didn’t notice. Darcy looked up, caught her eye, then looked away again. Grace hesitated and then went to the side of the hall and sat down. Slowly, more people arrived, but the mood and the volume of the evening remained subdued and very seldom did anyone raise their voice or even laugh out loud. She avoided dancing when the music began and every so often she would glance over at Darcy to see what she was doing. Sometimes her brother Sonny was sitting beside her and sometimes she saw Charlie Perry, who worked on the Steeles’ farm, whispering in her ear. She liked Charlie and was a little jealous of Darcy sitting next to him, a little hurt by the fact that he was the only boy who hadn’t come and asked her for a dance. She was thinking about slipping out the side door and home when her father sat down beside her.
“You and Darcy have a falling out?” he asked.
She shook her head. Pop didn’t repeat the question, just leant back and crossed his arms and sat like that beside her for a good five minutes.
“Why don’t you just go and say hello,” he said, finally. “Wouldn’t do any harm, would it?”
Grace shook her head again. Pop sighed and wandered away. She watched him go, feeling as though she’d let him down somehow, but also a little annoyed at him.
She waited until neither Sonny nor Charlie were around and then she stood and began to walk. When she was a few yards away from Darcy she stopped. Darcy was barefoot—her shoes discarded under the chair beside her—and she wore the pale cream dress borrowed weeks ago from Grace’s own wardrobe. It was too small for her across the bust and she looked uncomfortable and self-conscious in it. Pinned to the bodice was a wilting carnation and around her neck hung the cowrie shell Grace had found on the beach last summer and brought back for her. They both looked up at the same time and their eyes met. Grace saw the unhappiness in her friend’s eye and was instantly ashamed of herself. She had just taken her first step forward when all the lights in the hall suddenly winked out. She stood there for a moment in stunned surprise, her eyes adjusting to the dark, people jostling past her, some making gibes about the county council and their beautiful timing. She heard people pulling out drawers in the kitchen at the back of the hall and then matches were struck and candles lit and her surroundings reappeared, but altered subtly, as if the darkness had changed something, moved things around, worked some curious magic. She looked back to Darcy, who was now fiddling nervously with her hands. Without another thought she went and sat down beside her and took one of her cool, dry hands and pressed it between hers. They sat like that for a few minutes, saying nothing amidst all the commotion, and then Grace squeezed her hand tightly and Darcy lowered her head and rested it against the top of her friend’s arm. Grace looked down at the top of her head and, despite a much deeper current of confusion running through her, was sure she’d done the right thing. After a while she lowered her head until her mouth was right over Darcy’s ear.
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