Food and water were always given—the first law of the bush. And for the most part, the men were honest, polite, hardworking blokes come upon by hard times. Most of the stragglers came from the west and north, heading down to the mines and fields beyond them. Criminals were rare in the Outback, preferring the anonymity and dark streets of the city slums.
Only when the storm ripped inland and flooded the streams and streets to creeks did the travelers pause. For that week and the ones that followed, life outside Wanjarri Downs seemed deserted. But as the water receded and dried and left scars and ruts in its place the travelers picked up again like termites on rotted wood.
But there was a shift. Leonora noticed more and more of the men came from the south now, their faces sallow, eyes more vacant than before the rains. As she loaded them up with lamb pies and peaches and refilled their billies with freshwater she always wanted to ask them where they came from or where they were going, but she never did. Something in their faces did not look interested in conversation, didn’t look much interested in anything anymore.
And in all the time she had been at the station, a female traveler never once stopped at the door. A few times, she would see a woman huddled in the back of a wagon or tending to a crying baby, but the woman always stayed to the background, never glancing up at the house or joining her husband on the verandah. So it was with great surprise when, in the highest of the day’s heat, Leonora opened the door to a woman holding the hands of two small, scraggly boys.
The woman did not meet her eyes. “Sorry t’bother yeh, miss.” Her voice was filled with shame. “Was wonderin’ if yeh could spare a bite fer m’boys.”
Leonora did not want to prolong the woman’s agony and answered a bit too fast, “Of course. Please come in out of the sun.”
The boys started forward, but the woman pulled them back. “Won’t be a bother. If it’s all the same, we’ll just take it t’go.” The poor boys looked at their feet, their shoes worn to the soles, dirty toes peeking out from the holes.
“Please,” Leonora urged. “It’s no bother. I’d rather enjoy the company. Besides, we have a fresh stew cooking and it’s not quite ready.”
The boys looked at their mother hopefully, the hunger clear on their faces. She sighed and gave in. “Just for a bit an’ then we’ll be on our way. Don’t mean to be a bother, miss.”
Once inside, the boys stared with open mouths at the space of the room, the high ceilings and the rich furnishings. Their mother cleared her throat to get their attention and gave them a silent order with a nod of her head. The boys quickly took off their hats, sending dead flies and red dust all over the floor. “For crikey’s sake, boys!” the mother hissed.
Leonora laughed. “It’s all right. My husband leaves a trail of dust around the whole house.” She walked to the kitchen doors and called out, “Meredith, how close is the stew?”
“Ready now if yeh like.”
“Yes. I’m having guests for lunch.” She smiled at the boys, who beamed with their new titles. “I’ll need three more bowls and lots of bread and butter.”
The four of them sat down at the fresh-linened table, the boys’ heads barely above the edge. Their mother looked so uncomfortable that Leonora wondered if it was cruel bringing them in. She knew how Australians felt about handouts, especially the women.
Meredith brought out the dishes of stew, glanced oddly at the faces. The boys tore into the rolls and scooped up the stew before it had a chance to cool. The woman looked at her now, the lines of her face deepened with dust. She could have been anywhere from twenty to fifty years old. “Yer goin’ to too much trouble.”
“My husband’s gone often.” Leonora lowered her eyes, spoke honestly. “We don’t get many women out here. It can get lonely.” The woman’s shoulders relaxed, and in less than an instant they shared a common truth that went beyond class or accent.
“Where are you traveling from?” Leonora asked.
“Coolgardie.”
“From the mine?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s been a lot of men coming through here from that direction. Is there another mine hiring up north?”
The woman cocked her head, incredulous. “They’re all runnin’ from the fever.”
Leonora didn’t understand. “Fever?”
“Typhoid. All through the camp.”
The boys stopped gorging for a moment, their eyes clinging to their mother’s face as it hollowed.
“My husband died of it a few days back,” she said, her voice curt, numb with anger. “My baby before that.” Her knuckles turned white as she gripped her spoon. “Takin’ the boys west to Daggar Hills. Husband’s family has a small farm.”
“That’s a long way.” Leonora put her napkin to her lips. “How will you get there?”
“Walk.”
One of the boys looked down at his shoes and his face fell.
“You’ll at least stay the night?” Leonora asked.
“No.” The woman looked like she might stand to leave at the mere mention. “We’ll be on our way. We’ve stayed long enough.”
“Please, stay. Let the children rest. We have the room. You can leave first thing before the heat.” She smiled weakly. “Besides, I sleep better when there’s someone else in the house.”
As the woman thought about it, she seemed to let her body give in to fatigue. She looked at her tired boys and her eyes softened. “Orright, we’ll leave first thing.”
After supper, Leonora ran a deep bath for the boys, the rain tower brimming with water from the storm. It gave her a selfish happiness to care for the family, even for just a short time, made her remember the days at the hospital.
The mother tucked the scrubbed boys into the warm covers, smiled for the first time. “They’re good lads,” she said. “Had it rough. Too rough for their age.” The voice rose. “Why I left. Couldn’t lose ’em t’the fever.” Her eyes moistened. “Just couldn’t lose ’em, too.”
“What about the doctor at the mine?” Leonora asked. “Wasn’t he able to help?”
“Never saw a doctor. We called fer him, as did everyone else, but he was only concerned wiv the top of the gang. My husband was just a digger. Managers only care ’bout whot comes out of the walls, not the hands workin’ ’em.”
Leonora realized the woman had no idea she and Alex owned the mine; she prayed it stayed that way. “Bath should still be warm,” Leonora offered. “Might as well use it before it’s drained.”
The weariness seemed to overtake the woman. “That would be nice.” She gave Leonora a long look. “Yeh’ve been kind. Too kind. After my wash, I’ll just curl up wiv the boys. Won’t bother yeh no more.”
Guilt waffled over her skin. She had done nothing for this woman. On the contrary, Alex may have made her a widow.
The next morning, the three guests were up early as they had promised, their bellies filled with eggs, bread and bacon. The boys had a new sparkle to them thanks to the rest and food. Leonora wondered sadly how long it would last.
The dray was waiting outside. She had asked James to stock it with feed for the horse and some blankets and canisters of water. Leonora raided the pantry and put in as much food as would keep. In the bottom of a basket she put a few bills, tucked the money far enough down so the woman wouldn’t find it until she was too far away to return it.
The woman was mute when she saw the dray and horse waiting, could not have been more stunned if it had been a carriage of gold. She tried to refuse, silently shaking her head, but Leonora stopped her. “The dray hasn’t been used in years. The men were going to break it up into firewood. And the horse doesn’t have much life left in her, I’m afraid,” she lied. “Might not even make it all the way to Daggar Hills. You’d be doing us a favor by taking her.”
The woman did not say another word, but her eyes were deep with gratitude as she watched her boys climb onto the blankets under the flatbed’s canopy. They left without further words, not even an exchange of names.
Leonora left for the mine soon after the dray pulled out of sight. She knew Alex would be furious, but her fury was greater, a trail of white light speeding over gunpowder, pulsing at the end of each nerve. “Let him be angry!” she hissed under her breath. How dare he let workers, his workers, suffer and die, leave children orphaned. How dare he not bring every doctor in Western Australia to help these people. “Let him be angry,” she dared. “Just let him try.”
In the trunk of the Ford she had as many canisters of freshwater as could fit, a basket of clean rags, several bowls of lemons and oranges and a few vials of opiates. In the passenger seat she packed several canteens of water for herself and some fruit and sandwiches along with a few changes of clothes, not knowing how long she intended to stay. She left Clare a list of house instructions, only mentioning she was going to visit Alex for a few days.
The route needed no map; there was only one road. Every hour or so, a ragged hand-painted sign would point to an offshoot listing the towns east or west. The black car blazed with trapped heat and the following sun. Leonora cracked the window halfway—an even battle between the scourge of dust and stale heat.
Along the way, the smell of soot and fire tinted the air. Rows of scarred and hacked forest dotted the land on either side. Thousands of low-cut stumps spread as far as the eye could bear them—ugly pustules that oozed with hard, weepy sap. And here the maimed land was laid to waste. The birds had gone, the shade nonexistent along the blistered ground. There was a deep grief to this land, almost human in its intensity.
Leonora’s hands darkened the steering wheel’s brown leather to black with wet palms. She took turns removing one stiff hand at a time from the wheel and stretched out her fingers in an attempt to return circulation to the joints. Blue smoke twirled upward into sight. A sharp acridity hardened the air. She peeked at the hood of the car to make sure the engine wasn’t on fire. Then wafts of sewage, subtle at first, grew and swelled like rotten eggs and masked the burning iron. She tucked her nose in her shoulder and coughed into her sleeve. In the radius of the stench the camp came into view: rows of scraggly tents; shacks of canvas and hessian, metal scrap heaps tied into form with green hide and stringy bark.
Leonora slowed the car, stared at the camp through the side window. The lines were quiet. No one seemed sick. Litter was at a minimum. Leonora had pictured the camp akin to a battlefield, strewn with dead bodies and the cries of the sick. But for the smell, the camp was clean, orderly, peaceful. The men were most likely at work, the children in school. Perhaps she had judged too quickly; perhaps a doctor had been sent after all.
Leonora pulled off the road and set the brake, the engine rattling over the silence. She leaned back in her seat, stretched out her numb legs. Smoke wafted from some of the stovepipes jutting from the tent roofs. Occasionally, a person was visible through a window or open door. A thin dog barked from a tied stake. A sudden blockage of wind prickled Leonora’s neck. A shadow slid cold across the inside of the car. A man stared at her through the glass, tapped upon the window with a knuckle as if she were asleep. “You lost?” The man sounded Eastern European, but he spoke clearly. He was stocky and small but had full, honest eyes.
Leonora opened the door and stepped out. “I’m looking for the head office,” she ventured, not sure what the building was called. “For the mine management.”
The man pointed to an empty spot in the distance. “Past the camp. You’ll see building on left.” He started to shake his head, looked like he wanted to say words that his mouth wouldn’t allow. “You go. Not good here. Typhoid.” The man said the word almost as a test, not sure if she knew the disease was in the camp.
“I know.”
“You nurse?”
“No.”
The man looked disappointed. He took off his hat and twisted it in his strong hands. “My baby ill. Don’t know if it’s the typhoid. My middle one, too.” Heavy, unbridled tears wet his cheeks.
Tears in a woman were hard to witness, but to see a man weep so openly cracked into Leonora’s heart. “Where do you live?”
He couldn’t speak, just breathed hard through his nose as he showed her a building that was half tent and half iron, supported haphazardly with chicken wire.
The man entered the iron part of the structure and Leonora followed. A baby, red and naked, cried from a small wooden bed. A young boy of maybe eight rocked the baby listlessly with his foot. A woman sat on the floor next to him cradling a thin, frail girl in her arms. They all looked at the stranger without interest, stared right through her.
Leonora stooped and picked up the baby in her arms, so light he might have been hollow. His skin burned against her hands. “Please get the water from my trunk and fill up a basin with it,” she ordered, fighting hard to steady her voice. As she looked at the baby’s bloated belly, she saw the small, flat red rash of typhoid, as unmistakable as the blackness of gangrene. Leonora held the baby against her chest, rocked him softly, looked at the mother who stared at the corner, perhaps looking to a future that held no hope or a past that had once relished it.
The man brought the basin and Leonora submerged the baby into the water up to his neck. He was too weak to complain beyond a dry wail that was getting quieter by the minute. Leonora met the man’s eyes and she opened her mouth to speak, but her confidence gave in and she looked at the floor.
“He’s dying, isn’t he?”
She nodded. His voice cracked. “Is there nothing to do?”
“I can give him something so he’ll rest.” A tear escaped and fell down her cheek. “He’ll go peacefully. I promise.” The man nodded and left the house; the wife held the dark corner tight within her focus and did not blink.
Hours passed. Daylight evaporated. Leonora moved from one tent to another, from one bedside to the next. Men and women of various appearances and accents blurred into a nightmarish web of indistinction. Temperaments that raged with anger and helplessness to untethered grief to silent despair called her forth and left her haggard. So many of them—all weak, all thin—some capering with hallucinations, others in obvious pain. But it was the children who made her mind scream, the little lives that had barely begun, who made her want to pull her hair out, even as she worked calmly by their sides, shedding no more tears, offering no signs of the horror that nearly broke her in two. And with each human cry, she shoved her own emotions, her own grief, farther and farther into her stomach.
Leonora brought nothing to this camp. She could offer no more comfort than a fresh, unsickened face who cared enough to be there. She offered clean water and cloths to feverish bodies and opiates to the dying but could not cure any of them. Only God would choose who would live and who would not, who would be the orphans and who would be the widows.
She did not know what time it was when her medicine vials lay empty and her hands were wrinkled and white, poached from the constant dunking in water. All she knew was the camp was deadly quiet and the moon was tall in the sky. No one walked her to the car when she finally left. She couldn’t remember a face or a name of anyone she had met.
Her muscles ached as she sat onto the cool leather of the car, but she was wide awake with adrenaline. Leonora gripped the steering wheel but did not put the key in the ignition. For several minutes, she sat there, quietly numb, staring into the silent night. Her hands vibrated on the wheel and the shaking climbed through her arms and down her torso as she broke into violent sobs. All the grief and helplessness she had buried while at the bedsides erupted now. She laid her head on the wheel and pounded the frame with her fists, moaning, until the pain spent itself and made room for what lay immediately below the surface. As the last of the tears dried on her face, the new emotion surged. Anger. Raw and hateful. And a name—Alex. Leonora turned the key in the ignition and the engine, now cool, took with the first try.
With her body weak from fatigue and hunger and helplessness, Leonora sped the car past the sleeping tents to the steel factory and the open pit ringed with lights in the d
istance, glowing like a chasm to Hell. She parked in front of the neatly bricked manager’s wing, barely waiting until the engine idled before storming up the steps and into the empty secretary’s office. From outside Alex’s door came the smell of cigar smoke and the muffled sounds of men talking, an occasional laugh varying the pitch. It didn’t matter Alex wasn’t alone—shame on them all.
Without hesitation, Leonora pushed the door open. Fat brown cigars simmered in mid-puff. Tumblers of alcohol raised to lips froze. Alex sat behind his desk, his legs crossed languidly at the ankles. Two men sat in front of him, reclining easily on thick leather wing chairs. And they all stared at her with open mouths and eyes. Had Leonora been an apparition, their faces could not have been more stunned.
Alex recovered first, dropping his legs to the floor and standing like a rod. “What are you doing here?” he spluttered.
She ignored the question, ignored the eyes of the men staring. The anger throbbed her temples, burned her throat. “Why aren’t you helping the people in the camp?”
Confusion angled his face toward the floor. “Camp? What camp?” He shook his head. His lower lip hung forward with growing frustration. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The camp, Alex!” Her voice shattered the quiet. The two men stiffened in their chairs. “The one not five miles from here! The one that houses your precious miners. The one that has typhoid running all through it!”
“That’s what this is about?” He put his fists on the edge of the desk and made a short laugh before looking at her with eyes stretched in amazement. His voice started calmly but rose with each word. “You drove all the way out here to tell me about the fucking camp? ”
Daughter of Australia Page 32