Eagle on the Hill

by JH Fletcher

‘That would be best of all. Nuthun beats a bit of rottin’ flesh.’ He looked no more than twenty when he grinned.

  ‘Maybe you’d better check out the riverbed. You might find somethin’ there to suit you. Nuthun like that round here.’

  ‘Perhaps if I could check for myself …?’

  They looked at each other, eyes burning like the lamplight.

  ‘A fine thing,’ she said, ‘when I gotta prove the truth of my words to my own husband.’

  But she went with him, all the same, and gave him the proof he needed, and for a time thought no more of what she’d been saying. But in the saloon the chairs remained empty, and next day, when the glow of the previous evening had faded, she knew that, kitten apart, nothing in her feelings or her life had changed.

  She decided there was one thing she could do to cheer herself up, and two months later she did it.

  CHAPTER 80

  Or made a start on doing it. She and Charlie put up their house.

  They enlisted the help of a gang of men who claimed to know what they were doing — though within a short time Charlie and Sarah weren’t so sure.

  First came the business of pulling down the old structure. That should have been easy. The state it was in, no more than a dirty look should have been necessary. Yet the gang had a plan, and the days drew out while pieces of timber were levered out one by one, and dumped, and bits of rotted corrugated iron were treasured like jewels. To say nothing of the weeks when nothing happened at all, when Charlie and Sarah came back from trips up and down the river to find everything exactly as they’d left it. ‘I’ll pull the bastard down myself!’ Charlie said. And put the crew on their backs, too, while he was at it.

  ‘Don’t let them hear you,’ Sarah implored. ‘Hurt their feelings and they’ll never do it.’

  ‘It’s not only their feelin’s I’ll hurt, once I get started.’

  Down came a wall. Another wall. The rubbish lay in piles. Then came rain, with nothing possible. Sarah and Charlie went away upriver again, then came back to a quagmire. No house.

  Stone arrived for the foundations. It came by river and was carried down a gangplank that writhed like snakes under the men’s shambling boots. And bounced once too often, and tossed first one member of the gang, then another, into the water. Whence they emerged, spluttering and indignant, several pieces of stone lost.

  ‘Why yer wanna build in this godforsaken hole, anyway?’

  Up went the first wall. Higher and still higher. And came down in a gale that blew it flat.

  ‘Storms at this time o’ year?’ marvelled the boss ganger. Wonders would never cease.

  They had another go. One wall, another, then the outer shell was in place.

  ‘Get the roof done,’ said the boss. ‘Then we can get goin’ on the inside.’

  Taking the thought for the deed, the team disappeared for a month.

  ‘Next thing we know it’ll be winter,’ Sarah said. Winter meant endless rain, when nothing would be possible.

  The future stretched away with not a house in sight. Charlie, all fire and fury, went looking for the gang, which he found in the Niland boozer.

  ‘You wan’ me to chuck the lotta you in the river?’

  ‘What?’ Meaning: what have we done?

  ‘Get on with it, for Pete’s sake!’

  ‘Give us a week. Urgent job, see?’

  A week came. And went.

  One day, with Charlie contemplating murder, the team arrived, and finally got stuck in. The ridge went in; the spars were bolted home. The purlins were fitted.

  ‘Solid as a rock,’ the gang boss said.

  Sheets of twangling iron were hauled up by a rope that had been slung over a tree bough. Higher … Higher …

  The next section was positioned to overlap the first. And the next. And the —

  ‘Another piece of iron needed ’ere.’

  ‘There isn’t any.’

  They’d run out.

  ‘A mistake anyone could make,’ the boss ganger said. ‘No worries. We’ll order some more.’

  It might take a week, or a month, but who was counting? Certainly not Sarah or Charlie, not any more.

  ‘She’ll be right.’

  Charlie eyed the ganger’s neck, the rope noose dangling, and thought: No jury would convict me.

  And then, finally, astonishingly, it was done. The interior followed, secure from winter’s lashing rains. Floors, partition walls, glazing in the windows …

  ‘Hey, she looks all right!’ Charlie exclaimed.

  While the gangers smirked modestly. What a team.

  CHAPTER 81

  On 1 August Luke came home unexpectedly — but it was not the joyous occasion his parents would have wished.

  The man Luke worked for, Jock Harris, owner and captain of Proud Agnes, ferocious to the roots of his red hair, had thrown his last tantrum.

  ‘We was comin’ through the narrows,’ Luke said. ‘Jock was coilin’ a line on the foredeck. I dunno what happened. Somehow he slipped and went over the side. Before I could move, the paddles had gone over him. I went in after him but it was too late. Time I got to him … mince,’ he said.

  And he was in his mother’s arms and crying like a baby.

  Charlie was upset too. Jock had been one of the owners who had met to discuss what they could do about the Grenvilles’ big boat Titan all those years ago. Titan was old news now, yet Charlie still had a soft spot for those early owners. They had all been so young.

  We were fiery bastards, he thought, Jock most of all. Not many of us still around.

  Walt Fiske was dead, his big sternwheeler matchwood down at Mannum. Max Duggan had sold up, defeated by competition and his teeming family. Now Jock, too, was gone.

  ‘Soon I’ll be the only one left,’ Charlie told the river. He was forty-four. Maybe Sarah was right; maybe they were getting old.

  Jock Harris had died under the paddles of his own steamer. Jock had lived on the river, as they had. Now the river had claimed him, as, in one way or another, it claimed them all. There was a fitting sense of symmetry about that.

  But he’d been more than just a riverboat captain. He had been one of the personalities of the river. He’d even stood as Niland’s mayor once. He’d lost, mind, but that could have been why his funeral, on the following Saturday, turned into such a special event.

  Boats came from up and down the river. People arrived from every town within fifty miles. The boats formed a line, each with black bunting fluttering from lines rigged fore and aft from the funnel. Proud Agnes led the procession, with the coffin hidden beneath flowers in the saloon and Luke Armstrong, Jock’s recently promoted mate, at the wheel. Each man wore a black tie and hat, each woman a black dress.

  The flotilla moved slowly downriver to Niland, where the service was to be held. People who had known Jock, or had heard of him, or simply wanted to attend his funeral, stood in silent groups upon the wharf or lined the streets leading to the chapel. Nearly everything was black, the only touches of white the faces of the women and the shirtfronts of the men. No-one cried out or wept, yet there was the faintest ghost of sound as the cortège passed between the lines of waiting people, like a black wind blowing softly through an avenue of trees.

  Charlie hated the morbidity of funerals — he always said it would be better if people celebrated life instead of death — but he was one of the pallbearers and had no choice. All the way from the wharf they carried Jock on his last slow journey, with the town’s silver band blowing dirges to darken the sunlight and everywhere the soft crunch of feet on gravel.

  They went into the chapel and up to the front and put the coffin down. Then came the service, with all sorts of people eager to say how much they missed the deceased and how he had made their road through life lighter, and more and more nonsense until Charlie wanted to reach up and tear off the roof to let the air and sunlight in. Jock Harris had been a ferocious old bastard with a good heart, a man who had fought everyone and got pleasure from it, but
no-one was willing to say that. Instead there was hypocrisy and a bleating like ewes from the self-righteous who had never learned silence.

  Outside the church they lowered the coffin into the fecund earth and waited until the gravedigger began to heap on the soil.

  ‘Let’s get outta here,’ Charlie said to Sarah.

  Let others enjoy the cakes and goodies; he couldn’t wait to get away.

  ‘Some of that lot are more in love with death than life,’ he said as they hurried away to the river that had killed Jock and a thousand others yet remained clean and innocent for all that.

  They had steam, so made their way upstream and drew into the bank just as darkness was falling. They took mooring lines ashore, ripped down the black flags from the funnel stay and, sheltered by the night, stripped to the skin and went naked into the river together.

  The cold water washed away the feeling of grime with which the funeral had smothered them. At last, spirits and bodies cleansed, skin puckered with cold, they clambered out onto the deck and rubbed themselves down and were at peace.

  CHAPTER 82

  For a week after the funeral Jock’s family squabbled over the whos and whats of his will. While they fought, Luke went to Adelaide to visit his sister.

  He found her looking older than he’d expected, but, full to the brim with his own life, did not at first inquire into hers.

  He told her about Jock’s funeral and how grand the procession of riverboats had been.

  ‘Proud Agnes led the fleet,’ he said.

  ‘Will the family make you captain?’

  ‘Dead cert, I reckon.’

  ‘Have you got your ticket?’ Recent regulations required a master or engineer to have a certificate; even Charlie, with all his experience, had needed one.

  ‘Long ago, for Heaven’s sake!’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be there, then, smiling at them?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be necessary, I should bloody hope!’ The quiet walls of the college blenched. Luke had grown into a hearty man, his voice accustomed to bellowing from one end of a paddle steamer to the other. ‘I’m the best they bloody got!’

  ‘Then shouldn’t you be telling them so?’

  Luke might have a mouthful of oaths to prove how grown-up he was, but in reality he was an innocent man. He didn’t like to think self-promotion was important, but Alex, two years younger, was older in many ways. If you didn’t blow your own trumpet no-one else would do it for you. Yet it was up to Luke. Her listlessness made her unwilling to interfere in her brother’s affairs. Not that she’d have done it anyway.

  Luke told her about how all the talk was of the coming of roads to the little river towns.

  ‘Although these days they’re not so little, either. You saw it for yourself. Most of ’em have got one shop at least, some more. And the people … Sometimes you’d think you was here in Adelaide, Chookie.’

  Chookie. It was years since he’d called her that.

  The river and riverboats were Luke’s life but eventually he took enough interest in the outside world to ask Alex how her life was going. She told him a little about her studies and nothing at all about Martin Grenville. At last he yawned and said he had to get moving. He was spending a couple of days in town with a mate before heading back upriver, and Alex guessed she would be better off not knowing how the two friends intended to pass their time.

  After Luke had gone, her world seemed empty and still once more. For a day or two she was lonelier than ever.

  Then she had a letter from Martin. She opened it with eager fingers, fumbling in her haste. It told her he was well, that his studies in Sydney were progressing well, that he had been chosen to give a recital in the city. It was a great honour, he wrote. He was excited by the chance to show the world what he could do, and by the career he could sense opening in front of him. He said nothing of his love for her, or how he saw her place in his future life. Almost as an afterthought, he hoped she was well.

  It was jolly and newsy, the sort of letter an affectionate brother might send his sister. She sat and looked at it, and at emptiness. Boys’ promises meant nothing; every girl had that drummed into her from the moment she could understand speech. Alex was convinced now that she’d been fooling herself, and it was almost too much to bear.

  Alex was now in a higher class and had all the privileges that went with seniority. With Miss Dorcas’s permission she went out of the college grounds and walked down to the Torrens. She sat on the bank. It was a warm day, the sun pressing upon her, and she closed her eyes.

  She saw a vision that had no beginning and no end, that came to her with the quietness and inevitability of truth. In it she saw the Murray, a river much greater than this one. Its movement was not so much of water as of men, and its voice was the voice of men. The men worked upon it and its banks, dredging it of obstructions, felling trees and building towns and great estates like Eagle on the Hill. By their actions they changed the river and the land through which it flowed, and Alex saw that in only a few years the river she had known would be no more.

  The roads were coming. As Luke had said, shops were opening in all the towns. It would mean the death of the river trade. Of the river families, too. The riverboats existed to bring supplies to the towns and take produce out. Soon they would be needed no longer.

  The roads would mean new forms of transportation. Only the other day there’d been a report from Melbourne of a new type of vehicle known as a horseless carriage. This, too, would no doubt play its part. She saw boats abandoned, rotting, filled with water and the squeaking of rats, all the dangers and joys of their existence forgotten. She saw families on the move, leaving the river empty of traffic, its level dropping as the water was drained away to irrigate crops. She saw how, in time, the water itself would fail.

  She opened her eyes and saw a shelduck, brightly coloured and handsome, floating on the surface of the stream with its family of ducklings.

  The breeze had got up and blew through the reeds, which bowed in an attempt to avoid it, but the breeze persisted and the reeds began to whistle in complaint. It reminded Alex of the sound the wind made along the Murray.

  That sound was in her forever, with all her other memories. It was something that the activities of men could not take away. The river’s voice would remain as long as those who remembered it remained. Charlie and Sarah and Luke and Martin and herself, even Tibby Slippers and Queenie her successor — whom Alex had heard about but not seen — all of them were part of it, and of the stream that joined past and future, flowing away into the distance. What that future would be she did not know. She could not see her own part in it, or Martin’s, but knew that the river would be there always, amid the trees and in her heart.

  CHAPTER 83

  Three weeks after Jock’s funeral, on Friday 27 August 1897, Charlie met Wilf Laird in the back room of his shop at Wentworth to finalise their plans for trading along the Darling. With a second boat, Charlie — who could not have afforded to buy one by himself — would see a big increase in his income, while Wilf would get the toehold he had always wanted in the river trade.

  After the meeting they went down to the wharf to inspect the paddle steamer Margaret that rumour said was for sale.

  She was a tidy little craft with a very shallow draft, which was just right for what they had in mind, but it took a while to clinch the deal.

  First off, Perce Harrington, Margaret’s owner, wouldn’t let them on board. Perce was tall and thin and grey. His tiny grey eyes had never looked straight at anyone in his life. He had a thin, grey face and talked in a thin, grey voice.

  ‘What you blokes snoopin’ for?’

  You’d think they’d tried to pirate him in midstream.

  ‘We heard you was sellin’ up,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Where you hear that?’

  ‘It’s all over town,’ Wilf said.

  ‘Then the town’s got it wrong.’

  ‘Right,’ Charlie said. ‘In that case we won’t bother you.’
And turned away.

  ‘Hang about,’ Perce Harrington said. ‘We can always talk.’

  ‘Not with you there and us here.’

  ‘Come aboard, then, if you must.’

  He stomped away across his deck as though their doing so was the greatest imposition in the world. They went on board and followed him into the saloon.

  Perce eyed them. ‘Now, then. What’s your price?’

  ‘You just told us she’s not for sale,’ Charlie said mildly.

  ‘Everything’s for sale if the price is right,’ said Perce.

  That was the start of it. It went on and on, each side trying to wear out the patience of the other. At one point Perce even seemed to be denying that Margaret was his to sell.

  Charlie was sick of it. Left to himself, he might have agreed to Perce’s price, just to finish the argument, but Wilf was a man of deals, with the patience to go with it. Arguing this, arguing that, haggling over the state of the paintwork and a sixpenny-sized patch of rust, with the words flying first one way then the other, like woodchips in a logging competition. Things were getting heated.

  Eventually it was Mrs Perce who sorted things out. ‘You two will argue me into my grave.’ She was a roly-poly woman with eyes like blackcurrants in a lumpy, mulberry-coloured face, and the arms of a stevedore. She threw a doleful glance at the ceiling. ‘I might die with you still yappin’. As if I didn’ have enough to put up with.’ She manufactured a cough that sounded like a strip of calico being ripped apart.

  ‘Got a cold, Mrs Perce?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘If it was a cold you’d see me dancin’, mate.’ She gave him a look to melt mountains, for even suggesting such a thing. ‘We’d not be sellin’ if it was only a cold. All our lives we’ve given to this dear little boat.’ Her fat hand stroked the bulkhead. ‘Breaks my heart to leave her, but when your time’s up …’ She seized Charlie’s hands, pressing them in fingers as plump as sausages. ‘Sickness is a dreadful thing.’ Again the cough, like dragging a length of rusty chain, while the sausage fingers clung tight and her lumpy face looked more like a mulberry than ever. ‘But there’s no feelin’ left in the world. No sympathy. No-one cares.’ Half-whisper, half-gasp, with the breath gurgling somewhere beneath, and the little eyes full of pain.