Dust of the Land

by J. H. Fletcher

  It was not the storm it would have been once – although Garth was still as strong as an ox, thank God – but tender and generous, deeply satisfying, and when they were done Bella had tears of enduring affection in her eyes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Garth Tucker had always liked to believe he was a down-to-earth man who worked hard, took his pleasure where he found it, swore like a trooper and didn’t give a damn for any opinion but his own.

  The truth was otherwise. Twenty-six years back he had hired Bella to sort out what he had called his tip of a house. Marrying her had not been part of the plan but that was the way things had worked out, because in the course of changing his house she had changed him. He no longer went in for the massive binges that had been a feature of his life in the pre-Bella days; he no longer shared his bed with any woman who came to hand; he had even moderated the war he had waged for so many years with his neighbour on Limerick Downs. When Colin had been killed he might have slipped back into his old ways but had not. He was a changed man and now, quarter of a century after Bella had first come to the Pilbara, he was not exactly old but certainly no longer a youth.

  He decided to organise an outing to celebrate the anniversary. He laid his plans in secret, with not more than ten people in the know, but if Bella heard anything about it she didn’t let on.

  He had been teaching her to fly; she didn’t have her licence yet but could manage the Cessna well enough, and he suggested they should take a spin together to give her a bit of practice. Nothing unusual in that; they flew together two or three times a week, but this time he proposed going a little further.

  ‘We’ll head south,’ he said. ‘I went there once, years ago. There is a lot of timber, and a valley with hills on either side and a river running down the middle.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ Bella said.

  It was even better than he had said: gorges and peaks eroded by the centuries, stately forests and a waterfall spouting a hundred feet into a valley shrouded in mist.

  They put down on a level strip of ground, Bella handling the landing perfectly. They climbed out of the cockpit, Garth moving more stiffly than he would have done once, and it was like stepping into the past. Everything was old and watchful and still.

  ‘It feels like we could turn round and see a dinosaur,’ Bella whispered. It was a landscape where even whispers were an intrusion.

  ‘Better hope not,’ said no-nonsense Garth.

  They sat within sight and sound of the waterfall and mulled over the past, the things they had hoped for and how they’d worked out. Garth talked about Colin and Bella reminisced about her childhood and the mother she had lost and mercifully found again.

  ‘You didn’t stay in contact after you came to Australia?’

  ‘I tried, but the letter came back. It seemed she’d moved and I had no idea where. I’d have got a private detective to look for her but in those days I couldn’t afford it. And afterwards there never seemed the time.’

  They talked about their children and the hopes they had for them. Peace was doing well at university. It was early days but already she was making a name for herself in both sport and academics.

  ‘Tough as hell, that one,’ said Garth.

  Bella smiled. ‘You mean she’s a chip off the old block.’

  As for their second child… They agreed Richard would make a fortune quicker than any of them.

  ‘Three paper rounds and that car-wash business,’ Garth marvelled. ‘Other boys doing the work and him creaming the profits! I can’t imagine where he got that from.’

  He did not notice Bella’s smile at his remark, nor did he discuss the mine. The massive royalties – when they eventuated – would mean that Miranda Downs and by extension his own life would become little more than a sideshow in the funfair of the family’s growing prosperity. To accept that was a hard ask for any man, let alone someone as proud as Garth Tucker, so he avoided the subject whenever he could and instead talked only of peaceful times, happy times, loving times, and the morning passed.

  Garth, who always said he was the most unromantic of men, had smuggled aboard a picnic basket which Bella pretended not to have seen, so they had roast duck pate and huge steaks that Garth grilled on the fire he lit for the purpose, and shared a bottle of wine, Bella taking the barest sip because of having to fly them back, and eventually they packed up and returned to Perth at peace with each other and the world.

  Safely home, Garth turned to his wife in their gigantic bedroom with its unparalleled view of the Swan River and gave her what he hoped was an evil grin. ‘Now for the best part.’

  She had expected it. Soon, eyes shut and hands clinging to his shoulders, she lay revelling in the rising momentum of their union, familiar yet always new, always wonderful, nerve ends beginning to plead for the release that was coming, coming now…

  Until, in mid-thrust, Garth paused, gave a deep sigh and fell off her and lay unmoving.

  For a moment Bella lay still, paralysed by shock. She could not believe what had happened. At sixty-three Garth was still a young man, still vigorous. It could not be serious. Could not. She did not panic. She scrambled to her feet, checked he was still breathing and rang for an ambulance. They said they would send someone at once.

  She covered his inert body with a sheet. Garth was breathing more easily but still unconscious. It reminded her of the day of Peace’s accident. It had scalded her, knowing there was nothing she could do; now, once again, inaction was a trial.

  Garth had over-exerted himself. That was all. Nothing serious. Nothing permanent.

  She pulled on her clothes, the ambulance came and Bella went with him. At the hospital the doctor said it was a heart attack.

  ‘Is it bad?’ Bella asked. ‘He’s still young, still strong…’

  Of course he would be all right. He had to be all right. But her voice tailed off into uncertainty and the doctor, more honest than many, shook his head. ‘It is very bad…’

  Bella was back in the bedroom at Ripon Grange, the dust-brown curtains draping the windows, while Achilles Richmond waged his unsuccessful battle for life. She had told the doctor the truth; her husband, like the seventh earl, was a strong man, vigorous and vital. He was sixty-three, for God’s sake, not eighty-three. Yet now, like his father before him, Garth lay in the hospital bed, a faded shadow of himself, and Bella knew in her heart if not her head that this was the end.

  It took longer than she expected. Over the next twenty-four hours he seemed to rally. His colour improved. The damaged heart beat more strongly. The fluttering pulse grew steady. He hung on long enough for Bella to start thinking in terms of miracles, even when she knew it was foolish to do so. Then, quietly but remorselessly, the pulse and heartbeat faded, the colour turned to chalk, and Garth Tucker died.

  Bella’s thoughts rattled in the space left by her husband’s dying. That was her first response: that Garth’s death had created an emptiness impossible to fill. Perhaps that was nonsense; she hoped so. Even as her mind grappled with shock and grief she was planning what she must do.

  Immediately after it had happened she’d tried to get hold of the children but had no luck. She had left messages for them at the university and at Richard’s school. No doubt they would be arriving at the hospital very soon. The three of them would have to comfort each other. There would be the funeral to arrange, notices to put in the papers, accountants and lawyers to deal with. The will… No doubt there would be stacks of reporters looking for a story. No room for love in any of this. No room for grieving. Like so much else, death had been taken over by the system. Dear God, she thought, we dehumanise everything.

  She would have to get up to Miranda Downs as soon as she could. That at least had not been dehumanised. There the red blood of compassion still flowed beneath the skin. She would put Tommy in charge. It would raise eyebrows, an Aborigine running the show, but she didn’t care about that. Tommy would ensure the flow of cattle to the meatworks went on as before, and that w
as what mattered.

  She could expect problems from BradMin; the terms of the agreement gave them the right to seek variations now Garth was dead. Pete Bathurst would shaft her if he could but she had one or two ideas on that subject and was not scared of him at all.

  As for the rest of her life… The deals, both above and below the table, would continue unchecked; lawyers would send in their fees, bankers would shake their heads: in many ways her life would be unaffected. Yet that was only on the surface, because with Garth’s death the foundations had shifted. Now, as never before, she was alone.

  She had not realised until now how important it was to have someone share your bed: not just for sex but because only in that close relationship was true support and comfort to be found. For the first time in months she found herself wondering what her life would have been like had she married Charles Hardy. Certainly nothing like this. She regretted none of it – she would always remember Garth with love and affection – yet at that moment it would have been so wonderful to have the comfort of Charles’s arms about her.

  She shook herself to dismiss the thought, which in the circumstances seemed dangerously close to betrayal. She walked out of the hospital and looked at the sky pulsing with heat above the trees. Peace, in particular, would be devastated. They would all be devastated. But the best way to remember Garth, she thought, was to go on with what they had been doing: to create a meaningful memorial to the man who had occupied her life for quarter of a century.

  Bella set her jaw. I shall build something truly remarkable, she told herself. That is how I shall honour him, and myself. I shall create an empire.

  Strength of body and will returned, yet when she got back to Desire it was all she could do to hold back her tears, because the man who had despised displays of emotion had prepared for her an unexpected gift to mark the anniversary of her arrival in the Pilbara.

  She opened the cardboard box – no frills for Garth Tucker – and found a pair of antique silver candlesticks and a note.

  You said once you liked Hester Bateman’s work. I never gave you anything when the kids were born. I came across these at an antique dealer in Perth. He probably ripped me off but anyway, they’re yours.

  This man who’d had no time for romantic words or gestures. Tears were indeed very close but she bit them down.

  News of his father’s death left Richard feeling as though the skin had been ripped from his body.

  They had never had much to say to each other. There had been times when he had felt Garth wished he had been more of the blood-and-guts person he was himself. Richard would have liked that, too, but he was not and there was no point fussing about it. He was as he was, as Father had been. Mother was the clever one, but Garth had the blood and bone of the land bred into him, and to be faced out of the blue with the reality that he was there no longer was hard to take.

  The day after it happened he went down to the Swan River. There was comfort in that, to be alone with the water and the birds. He sat on the bank and let the silence soak into him. He closed his eyes, remembering.

  Garth had been an in-your-face man, a true son of the land that had reared him. A man wedded not to books but to action, and glorious in his achievements. He had run a flourishing business, even in the depths of the depression and the war; he had done everything a man could for his family. A good man, therefore, who had found, out of all the women that rumour had attributed to him, the one woman who had been the right woman for him and their children. He had found her and held her close, and that had perhaps been his greatest achievement of all.

  A moorhen squawked and rustled in the reeds. Richard opened his eyes and saw, far out in the stream, a flotilla of swans sailing majestically across the current.

  He would remember him as Garth would have wished to be remembered: as a man larger than life, laughing, swearing, welded to his horse as he rode year after year to muster the cattle that were his – that at times were not his – robust and ribald, triumphant in victory and stoical in defeat, the flame of living a shining light to permeate all he did.

  Richard had one final vision, diminishing now, ebbing gently like the strength from Father’s sadly ruptured heart yet still vibrantly alive, a vision that he would hold close to his heart: the black-haired man on his black stallion, rearing like a figure out of heraldry, enshrined in a rainbow radiance of dust, the dust of the land across which in memory he would forever ride.

  Peace’s first response: it could not, must not, have happened. It was impossible. Later came anger.

  Garth had been sixty-three, a relatively young man. A man like that, strong and vital, should have lived forever. And now, out of nowhere, to be suddenly dead? There had to be an explanation. Someone was to blame. She would find out the culprit and destroy him. How she would do it she neither knew nor cared.

  Later, when she found out that there had been no explanation beyond the simple fact that, like his father, Garth had possessed a weak and ultimately defective heart within his strong body, she directed her anger furiously against the fate that had deprived her of the one being she had valued above all others.

  With Garth’s loss, Peace was on her own. No matter; she told herself she was tough enough to survive this or anything. She would devote her life to advancing the power and strength of the family as a monument to the heroic father she had lost. That would be her purpose and her justification.

  Somehow Bella got on top of it all, with the help of Deborah Smith, the efficient young assistant she had taken on earlier in the year. Thank God for her, Bella thought. I would never have managed without her. As it was she still had to handle a lot herself. There were phone calls and letters without number. She accepted the regrets of people who had known him: members of the office and domestic staffs; business associates; casual acquaintances. Cattle men from the Pilbara sent telegrams. A handwritten note came from Pete Bathurst, saying that he looked forward to future co-operation with her. Whatever that might mean. Martin Dexter was especially considerate. The premier phoned, promising support for the bereaved widow.

  ‘Most kind,’ Bella said.

  She said it until she was sick of saying it. She spoke calmly, showing her sorrow but with emotion well under control. She allowed people to see that life was for living; in Bella’s future there would be no room for tears, and if people thought her cold it was too bad.

  In the dark hours in the empty bed in the echoing house it was a different story. Then loneliness, grief and apprehension took her by the throat and she wept until she thought there could be no more tears left in the world.

  Bella had known the children would be desolated and so they were.

  Richard was withdrawn, face white, feelings locked away. Like her, he kept his grief hidden. For both of them, their tears burnt unseen.

  Peace, as always, was different. Grief was a challenge to be taken by the throat. She had clear ideas what she wanted for her father’s funeral: the sky and mourners alike dressed in black, the sombre sound of trumpets over a rain-pocked grave.

  Bella felt for her but would not go along with her ideas. This was Garth’s day, as that last day amid the forests of the south and upon the bed had been Garth’s day, a time of fulfilment and celebration as well as grief. She was determined that the proceedings would reflect Garth’s wishes as she believed they would have been.

  She told herself that Garth would have turned the whole thing into a rodeo. Bull-riding was hardly a practical proposition but at least they could celebrate his life while mourning his passing.

  For the funeral she chose not the cathedral, as Peace and no doubt the premier would have preferred, but a small church in the country.

  ‘I wonder you don’t just dig a hole and dump him in it,’ said Peace, fighting to the death for the father whose memory, she thought, was being debased.

  ‘If I thought that was what he’d want, I’d do it,’ Bella said.

  The tiny church had been constructed by convicts over a century before. It
was a stone building and in the graveyard the tilting stones were pocked by lichen. The site was surrounded by trees, their white trunks soaring into clouds that released a doleful rain on the proceedings.

  Peace defied her mother by wearing black, as did many of the congregation, but Bella stood out, subdued but distinctive: grey patterned skirt, white shirt and an emerald silk scarf that had been one of Garth’s especial favourites.

  So I throw defiance in the face of death, she thought. He was my husband and believed, as I do, that life is a constant festival. Death, also: because death is a part of life. In a reversal of the normal way of saying it, Bella knew that in the midst of death they were in life; it was entirely appropriate that Garth should have died in the celebration of physical and emotional love.

  It was a packed church, which would have surprised him. Politicians, industrialists, friends and the merely curious filled every seat. Others crammed the porch or sat outside in the marquee that Bella, one eye on the weather, had arranged.

  Her choice of music – the Toreador’s March from Carmen, The Rolling Stones’ version of ‘Come On’ which had recently gone to number twenty-one in the UK and had been one of Garth’s favourites – raised surreptitious eyebrows, no doubt, but Garth would have been rocking in the aisle, and that was how Bella was determined the world would remember him.

  There was no burial service; the body would be cremated and later Bella would inter the ashes at the lookout on Miranda Downs where Garth had more than once sought solace from the bush.

  ‘Why do we have to do it like that?’ Peace demanded.

  ‘It was what he would have wanted,’ Bella said.

  ‘Are you sure it is not just what you want?’

  ‘That, too,’ Bella told her.

  The wake, if that was what it was, took place in the church hall. Like the church, the hall was not grand but Bella had arranged for the most upmarket caterers in Perth to provide the food and drink. They have certainly done Garth proud, Bella thought as she looked around. Those who felt themselves cheated by the humble nature of the church could console themselves with roast beef – appropriate for a cattleman – ham off the bone, fresh-run salmon, crayfish and prawns.