‘What was she doing on the bar? I told you –’
I shall kill whoever did this to her.
She was filled with a savagery she had not known she possessed, yet she meant every word.
With unnatural calm she said: ‘Who was driving the jeep?’
‘Ringer.’
A new hand, with a reputation as a tearaway.
Why was Ringer driving? Where were you when it happened?
Answers were needed but could wait; what mattered now was to get back to the house as fast as they could, radio for help and hope all would be well. Hope and pray.
Garth skidded to a stop outside the homestead door. They eased Peace out of the jeep, carried her indoors and put her on the settee. Garth began to gabble on the radio while Bella looked at her daughter.
The blood on her forehead came from a gash just above the hairline. Bella wanted so much to take Peace in her arms but did not dare. It was killing her to be so helpless. The child was breathing but how badly she had been hurt she had no way to know.
Garth got off the radio.
‘Well?’
‘They’re sending an aircraft from Wyndham.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘They said they’ll be here as soon as they can.’
They stared at each other, besieged by the ghosts of what might be. Bella could have screamed at him but did not: they had to support each other, not have a row that would serve no purpose.
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘I don’t know. I had to give the boys a hand and I told Ringer to bring up the jeep. He must have let Peace ride on the bar. The next thing he’d hit a pothole and she was flung off.’ He clenched his fists. ‘He’s finished here.’
Bella closed her eyes. ‘Never mind Ringer! It’s Peace we have to worry about.’
Richard was suddenly there.
‘Why’s Peace not moving? What’s wrong with her head?’
‘You get off out of it!’ A sudden bellow from Garth. ‘Don’t come in here, okay?’
Bella went to the child at once. ‘Come with me, darling.’
She took him out. He was in tears but Bella did what she could to console him.
‘I wasn’t doing anything –’
‘I know you weren’t. But Daddy’s worried.’
‘What’s wrong with Peace?’
‘She fell over but the doctor’s coming.’
‘Will she be all right?’
A smile was hard to find but Bella managed. ‘She’ll be fine.’
Pray to God.
The plane arrived: a two-seater Cessna, with barely enough room for the stretcher. Bella watched, Richard clutching her hand, as the men carried Peace to the plane and loaded her in.
‘I must go with her,’ Bella said.
‘No chance,’ the pilot said. ‘No room.’
‘Of course I must go.’
‘See for yourself.’
It was true. It was impossible to get another adult in.
‘But why such a small plane?’
‘Only one available.’
‘Where are you taking her?’
‘Fitzroy Crossing.’
‘Isn’t Wyndham nearer?’
‘No emergency department.’
She needed to be with her child, yet could not. It made despair a thousand times worse.
‘How is she?’ she asked, hoping for assurance.
‘She’s crook,’ the orderly said. ‘Hopefully she’ll be okay. We’ll let you know.’
They were gone, Bella feeling they had taken her heart with her.
She had to talk to Garth but not yet. Now she needed to be alone. She walked away from the house, going nowhere. Every joint ached; her mind’s anguish had spilled into her body. Her open eyes saw only darkness. She crouched on the ground, away from everyone, her head on her knees as she rocked back and forth in a paroxysm of despair.
This must have been how Mumma felt when she packed off her only child to Ripon Grange, Bella thought. Although even Mumma had not had the terror of a possible death hanging over her.
There was a wind gusting in the trees. The branches creaked. The leaves hummed their dirge. A dirge for the dying?
Bella did not think she could bear it. Such promise to be destroyed. A life cut short by her stupidity. She had allowed Garth to over-persuade her. She had said no, the child was too young, it was unsafe… But she had let Peace and Garth talk her round. She knew that Garth, too, would be suffering but for the moment her heart had no room for any grief but her own.
Peace, her own dear Peace.
She could not even weep, her tears dried up by the flames of her remorse. She was alone and desperate. She was not a weak woman, yet she would willingly have died at that moment, had it been possible.
Here Maisie found her. She did not speak; words were futile. Instead she sat beside her for a while before taking Bella’s head in her soft hands and cradling it to her breast. The two women sat silently, until at last the tears came.
‘Okay, missus,’ Maisie murmured over and over. ‘It’s okay, missus.’
Simple words to express comfort. They meant nothing. Yet later that night, when Garth came running to say that he had just heard on the radio that the child was out of danger, it was as though a promise had been fulfilled.
Bella looked at him, barely daring to hope.
‘She’ll be all right?’
‘She’ll be fine.’
More tears, then: the easing of anguish, Bella and Maisie weeping together, their arms about each other.
Bella thought she would never be able to repay her friend, who had come to her in her agony. Who had said it would be okay. Who, frightened of the night and its spirits, had nevertheless stayed with her through the long hours.
‘Thank you,’ she said, over and over again. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
And kissed her and went back with her to her place and waited until she had gone inside before returning to her own house more exhausted than ever before. She sat with her husband, sharing a drink with him before bed. Garth knew she had not been there for him but that did not matter. Neither had she blamed him as she might have done. He said nothing but helped her into bed and lay unmoving at her side. Until she turned and kissed him passionately, and tried to smile, and finally fell asleep with his arms about her.
It was a week before Peace was fit to come home. Bella had driven over to Fitzroy Crossing and stayed with her while she recovered. It had been a bad knock but the doctor said she would make a complete recovery.
‘At that age kids bounce,’ he said. ‘Don’t try it yourself.’
They drove back together, taking it easy. When they got home Peace hopped out of the car and looked around her with a pleased expression.
‘When can I go on another muster?’ she asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Damn this bloody leg!’ said Garth.
It still troubled him but Bella knew that was not the true reason for his bad temper. He was only fifty-two yet his body could no longer do all the things he demanded of it. It made him mad, and when Garth was mad he took it out on the whole world. Not that she let him get away with much.
‘It’s not my fault you came off.’
Eventually, when she’d had enough of his foul temper, Bella decided she must do something about it.
When petrol rationing had ended back in 1950 Garth had bought a Cessna 140 to replace the much-mourned Minnie. Now it was April 1953, with his birthday coming up.
‘How are we going to celebrate?’ Bella asked her husband.
‘We’re not.’
That she had expected but Bella was in the mood for adventure and would not let it go.
She kissed him. ‘You’ll be fifty-three. Of course we must celebrate.’
‘I’m old and lame. Worn out, for God’s sake. What’s to celebrate about that?’
‘The fact that you are still alive,’ she said.
Again she kissed him. And a t
hird time. They were in the bedroom, so the rest was easy.
‘There you are,’ she said later. She started to get dressed. ‘Not bad for such an old man.’
‘I dunno what got into you,’ Garth said.
‘You should,’ she told him. ‘Unless you’re losing your memory, too.’
At least she didn’t have to worry about falling pregnant. She loved her children with all her heart but without discussing it with her husband had decided after Richard’s birth that two were enough. She had spoken to Maisie about it and Maisie, an authority in what she called women’s business, had told her what she needed to do. So far it seemed to be working.
‘Was that the celebration you had in mind?’ he said.
‘That was special,’ she told him. ‘Thank God it always is, but no, I was thinking of something different.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like an adventure.’
On the twelfth of April, the day before his birthday, they flew back to the Carlisle River, where in 1939 Bella had asked Garth to marry him and he had accepted. She had found enough space in the cockpit for two extra items: a tin containing a birthday cake, which Garth was supposed to know nothing about, and a collapsed inflatable dinghy, complete with paddles, about which he had complained vociferously from the moment he had discovered her real plans.
‘Downstream in a rubber dinghy? When we know nothing about the river or the rapids or anything? Are you crazy?’
‘It’ll be fun,’ Bella said.
‘We may not be able to land,’ Garth warned. ‘We don’t know what the country is like down there.’
They knew there were mountains; the Hamersley Range contained the highest peaks in Western Australia. Asbestos was mined there, and there had been rumours of gold, but for the moment they had no interest in the Hamersley. It was the unknown country this side of the range that Bella wanted to explore.
They followed the river until they found a patch of level ground on the bank east of the mountains. Here they camped overnight. In the morning they inflated the dinghy, grabbed the paddles and the folding trolley they would need to get the dinghy back to the aircraft and took to the water.
At this point the river flowed fast, with many rocks and rapids in the gorges, but they avoided the worst of them and made good progress. The water was slate grey, with spectacular rock formations along banks that rose so high overhead that all they could see of the sky was a narrow strip of light far above their heads.
Garth watched Bella staring up at the passing cliffs. He thought how young she looked. She’d had two children yet looked hardly any older than when he’d married her thirteen years before. Somehow, by instinct or artifice, she always made their lovemaking a feast of the unexpected, a never-ending source of joy. It wasn’t that they experimented with anything new, but it was the way she did it that made the difference. It was not only in bed that she had this effect on him, either; in so many ways she made him feel younger than he was. Take this trip. If it had been up to him he would never have done it, yet now he was enjoying it. She had added an extra dimension to his life.
Bella frowned, and pointed up at the cliff. ‘What’s that red stuff?’
At this point a break in the eastern wall of the canyon allowed the sun’s rays to penetrate, and he saw a reddish-brown band in the granite. It was several feet wide, dipping occasionally to water level but for the most part running parallel with it. He stared in disbelief. The band grew wider as the current carried them downstream. At times it was one-third the height of the cliff, and continued as far as he could see.
Garth sat back on his heels. His mouth was dry, his heart racing. ‘It’s hematite,’ he croaked.
Bella remembered the rusty-coloured piece of rock on the table in Garth’s mineral room. He had called that hematite and said it was the pride of his collection.
‘It looks very pretty,’ she had said.
‘Never mind what it looks like,’ he had said. ‘It’s what it contains that matters.’
Now he gripped her hand. ‘There it is! I’ve found it at last!’
‘Gold?’
‘Iron.’
‘Oh.’
It was hard to get excited about iron. Now if it had been gold… A hundred years earlier people had been picking nuggets off the ground, but nowadays riches were not so easily found.
Except that Garth was excited. He wriggled about so much she had to laugh.
‘You’ll have us swimming if you don’t watch out!’
He subsided, yet excitement continued to froth. ‘I knew it had to be here somewhere…’
He had told her so in Charters Towers.
‘Well done,’ she said indulgently.
She thought he was crazy to get so excited over something that – surely? – could not be that important. She’d read somewhere that iron was the most common mineral on earth. So what if they’d found more of it? She supposed it was a victory of sorts, like rustling O’Malley’s cattle, but what did it mean? Their lives would go on as they always had, focused on cattle and dust. All the same, she was pleased for Garth’s sake. He had always said the ore was there; the authorities had said it wasn’t. It was gratifying to be proved right. She smiled and put her hand on his arm.
‘Happy birthday, darling,’ she said.
When they got back to Miranda Downs Garth went straight to his mineral table, which they had moved into what had been Bella’s room. She gave him five minutes, then followed him. She found him turning his prized chunk of hematite in his hands and muttering to himself.
‘Come and have a slice of birthday cake,’ she said. ‘Then you can tell me what all this means.’
But he could not control his excitement and the words burst out of him, with crumbs, before he was halfway through the cake they had never got around to eating on the Carlisle.
‘I always knew it had to be there somewhere,’ he said. ‘The trick was finding it.’
‘What we’ve seen today: is it a big find or not?’ Bella was feeling her way.
Garth looked at her. ‘We followed the river downstream for – what? – five miles?’
‘About that.’
Certainly her feet had known all about it by the time they’d got back to the Cessna.
‘And there was no sign of the seam petering out?’
Garth was tossing the hematite sample in his hand.
‘It was getting wider,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’ He pondered. ‘I think this could be really big. Huge.’
Bella had thought the find meant nothing but now she began to wonder. If it was indeed huge, it might put a different complexion on their discovery.
‘When you say huge, what do you mean? Hundreds of tons? Thousands?’
He looked at her. ‘Try millions.’
‘Millions of tons of ore?’ It was hard to comprehend. ‘What’s it worth?’
‘No way to be sure until we know how far it goes. But I guess we’d be talking in the tens of millions.’
‘Tens of millions of pounds?’ Bella thought: This must be what it feels like to have a heart attack.
‘Almost certainly.’
‘Who owns it?’
‘Whoever claims it.’
Now she was aroused, too: not by the simple joy of discovery or the prospect of riches, but by the challenge the find represented. Buying the meatworks had taught her that she had an unsuspected business flair. Development of a new mine would be on a vastly different scale but that made it even more exciting. She thought it was possible that no woman had ever done such a thing. No doubt the world would laugh at her for even thinking of it, but what a wonderful achievement it would be if she could prove the world wrong!
‘What do we do about it?’ she said.
She sensed the excitement go out of him. ‘We can’t do anything. Mining iron ore is prohibited. We can’t even peg the claims.’
It was like being offered a lolly and having it snatched away again. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Iron is a strategic material. The federal government believes there’s very little iron ore in Australia so no one’s allowed to export it. The state government even forbids prospecting or the pegging of claims.’
‘So what we saw today –’
‘Stays where it is. We can do nothing about it.’
Bella was not a woman to be beaten so easily. ‘I don’t think I accept that,’ she said.
‘What do you have in mind?’ Garth said.
‘I think we should buy a house in Perth.’
Garth frowned. ‘Why would we do that?’
‘We’ll need a place when the children go to school.’
‘That won’t be for a while yet.’
‘Not so long,’ Bella said. ‘Peace will be eight in June. And land prices are rising. Besides…’
He looked at her cautiously. ‘Besides what?’
‘You’ve just told me this discovery could be worth tens of millions?’
‘It would have to be assayed, to find out what the mineral content is. Then the area would need surveying –’
‘But it would still be worth millions?’
‘Definitely.’
‘And the only thing standing between us and those millions is the law?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And the laws are made by politicians?’
‘Of course.’
‘How do you feel about all that wealth lying there and being unable to do anything about it?’
‘I hate it, of course –’
‘Chews holes in your guts, does it?’
‘It certainly does.’
‘So we need to change the law.’
He was struggling to keep up but her agile brain was taking her further and further ahead of him.
‘How do we do that?’ he said.
‘We spend time in Perth. We entertain, sweet-talk the pollies, help the ones who have influence –’
Garth was listening now, all right. The discovery had galvanised Bella. She had never been one to let the world go by, but now she was on fire. Finding the hematite had opened the door on depths that neither of them had suspected.
Dust of the Land Page 24