by Gregory Day
Darren slipped the empty cartridge onto the index finger of his right hand and began tapping the dashboard, delighted at the thought of his grandma doing that.
‘Nowadays of course,’ Ron went on, ‘if you pinged a cormorant you’d have the wallopers on your back. In even time. Nah, they’re gamey anyway but we used to shoot plovers if there weren’t any ducks. Good feed, plovers. Surprising amount of meat on the breast.’
A wind had begun to pick up outside the ute now, they could hear it occasionally thrumming the grille and soughing through the trees opposite. Ron used it as his cue that it was time to move along. He started the engine and let it idle.
‘What now?’ Darren asked him as Ron turned the ute around and brought it to a standstill on the road, facing back the way they’d come.
Pressing the accelerator ever so gently, his wonky left headlight coming and going as they moved slowly forward, Ron kept his eyes on the road ahead and didn’t answer. They slid down off the height of the saddle and back out of the wind.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said eventually, ‘I’m not slippin’. Even Rhyll couldn’t shoot ducks in this light.’
They drove back through the potholes in the dip, up the side of the first saddle once more, along a sharp section of laid blue metal. Apart from the bumpy ride, Darren and Noel were now as still in expectation as the sheep had been in the paddock where they had been parked. It wasn’t until the incline levelled that Ron spoke again.
‘I’ve told Sweet William and I’ll tell you too and then I don’t have to speak any more about it. I’m selling half my father’s block.’
Noel and Darren were confused for a moment. The term Ron used had them wondering, as if there might have been some other piece of land that Ron and Min owned other than their home. Their thoughts circled, until by elimination they realised it was the clifftop Ron was talking about.
‘I’ve got a buyer, I reckon, and the mother and I don’t need all that land anymore. We could do with the money. She’s a bit crook. And being sick costs.
‘Anyway, I’m sellin’ the headland side from that boundary to the woodpile. Half the block, it is. None of the graves are on it. Dad’s on the house side and so are the dogs. So’s the bench he built for the soldiers. Public land, the actual cliff edge. Like a riverbank. Anyway, it’s the half of our block I’m concerned with. I’m selling it.’
Fifteen minutes later, shuddering back along the Dray Road beside the quarry, no-one in the cabin of the ute had uttered a word. He’d said what he had to say and Darren and Noel felt unqualified to speak. It was a gulf of time that silenced them. A whole lifetime of things as they were. From long before they were even born. A lifetime of looking after something your father gave you. And then doing away with it in order to care for your mother. Both Darren and Noel were more affected by all the trouble Ron had taken to tell them the news than by the news itself.
In a clifftop life of weatherchange only three or four things had ever seriously altered for Ron McCoy. And this was one of them. The ute rolled down off the final ridge, out of the charry bush and back onto the outskirts of their riverflat. Ron flicked the radio back on. A man was reading scorelines from the soccer in England. As they came out of trees and into the clearing, the morning light was finally spangling upward from the sea. The two young men were both deep in thought, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, their eyes wide open.
TWO
THE WORLD THROUGH HEXAGONS
There was a bench in the clearing on the cliff made of mountain ash and his father had built it for the men he’d known but could know no more. Well, they were boys actually, boys he’d grown up with in Winchelsea who, unlike him, had not been diagnosed as colour blind, and who went away to war, destined never to swim under the bluestone bridge which crossed the river of their home town ever again.
Len McCoy built the bench with judgement and care, sourcing the timber himself on the bush ridge out near the duck ponds, milling it by hand once it had dried on the long noggings down the eastern side of the house, and fixing it deep into the ground with concrete footings so as to withstand the Bass Strait winds which came in a direct line to them from the South Pole. He had intended to leave it then as it was, to silver in the weather, a mute testimonial to a tragedy beyond words, until his wife Min suggested he carve a note of its purpose in the timber, an eloquent phrase of memorial that would speak to those who might sit on the bench opposite the Two Pointer rocks, long after they’d passed on.
She dug amongst her things and in a leather-bound book which her father had read aloud from when she and her sister Elsie were small, The Gift of Poetry, and which he’d subsequently given Min to take when she decided to move out of the city to Mangowak and marry Len, she found some lines she thought struck a perfect note, blending a sense of the beauty of life with her own defiant anti-nationalist attitude to the war:
Young men are for living not for dying
For laughing and working, loving and crying
Each man’s thought is his own country and home
True friendship’s the highest goal to attain
Len McCoy didn’t say what he thought of the lines Min had chosen, on such an issue he would always defer to her, but immediately he began drawing up the template in grey-lead so that he could carve the words into the bench. It took him three full days of the utmost concentration to finish what in the end was a reasonable job, legible and quite evenly set, and luckily he had a fine brace of light winter northerlies to do it in. Below the lines from the La Branca poem which Min had chosen was added: ‘FOR THE FALLEN OF THE GREAT WAR 1914–1918’.
By finishing the bench and the inscription, Min knew that her husband had done himself a great favour, assuaging the guilt that he carried with him always, that so many had died and that he had stayed behind, seeing blue for green and never seeing red at all. At least now he had said his piece in a permanent fashion, and although the words of the La Branca poem were an integral part of his bench, it was in actions rather than words that a man like Len McCoy could express himself.
They were an unlikely couple, Len McCoy and Min Mahoney, a hybrid of the silent taciturn plains of Winchelsea and the clinker-bricks and garrulous high collars of Melbourne, which was where Min had grown up. Her mother had died of meningitis when Min was six and although her father was nothing more salubrious than a barber in the working-class suburb of Clifton Hill, Papa Mahoney, as young Ron would come to know him, was a man who worked with a phonograph playing in the corner of his Spensley Street shop at all times, a man who lived for music and literature and who showered his two girls as they were growing up with an almost feminine affection of culture and emotion, acutely aware as he was of the absence of a mother in their lives.
Min met Len at a Footscray football club dinner, to which she’d been invited by her cousins on the Maribyrnong side of town. For those present it had been an important night, a fundraiser for the club that was trying to make a case to be included in the Victorian Football League. For Min, however, the night was important on an entirely different plane.
It was like earth meeting sky. As she sat opposite Len McCoy’s handsome and healthy face at the dinner table, the muscularity of his torso showing through his tight starched white shirt, she’d never felt a physical impulse quite like it. Min was small, and pretty, with jet-black curls and dark eyes, and she could be very demure and sweet, but her father’s education had also encouraged in her a tendency to be headstrong and aloof, and occasionally haughty as well, and now she found herself quite confused by the un abashed exhilaration that was coursing through her in this young countryman’s presence.
Sensing Min’s willingness, Len McCoy was not about to let the opportunity slip. Despite her mother’s diamond brooch, her fine ways and the difficult things she said to him across the plates of lamb and beef and the FFC mono grammed bowls of peas and potatoes, he figured she was still working class and therefore within reach. They danced amongst the club members and associat
es that night, Min suddenly more fascinated by life on a sheep and poultry farm at a place called Winchelsea (which he told her was a godforsaken place, famous only for introducing the rabbit to Australia) than anything else in life, and Len more charming and impressive than he’d ever imagined he could be.
His trump card, as he saw it, was that he was on the verge of leaving his family’s farm and striking out on his own. He’d recently been on the scout and seen a bit of land on the coast at a place called Mangowak, and he was hellbent on buying it. He’d not told a soul about this but soon found himself describing it closely to Min. It was a tiny piece of land, barely six acres, cleared for the most part for grazing, but with the remnant of a pine windbreak which would provide perfect shelter for a house site. It was right on the ocean-cliff, perched above a series of small coves and beaches, where tea-coloured creeks ran down out of the hills to the sea every mile or so. Mangowak itself was not far from the timber and fishing town of Minapre, but it was just a rivermouth, with a cleared pastured riverflat, and until recently the block he had his sights on had been government land attached to a Meteorological Station. The six limestone buildings of the Meteorological Station were built in a cluster on the headland to monitor Victoria’s prevailing southwesterly weather, but now that the station was becoming increasingly automated the few acres surrounding it were for sale.
In a sense he was right about this being his trump, for Min was excited, not by the land, but rather by the audacity of it all, of this young boy’s willingness to leave behind everything he knew to make something independent of himself. He had already teed up work with a certain Mr Bolitho, who owned the large pastoral lease of the river flat and the upslopes, and who was prepared to offer Len McCoy a future. Given the extent of the attraction she was feeling it was all Min really needed to know about his character. She didn’t need to know, for instance, that for Len the move to Mangowak was nothing much at all, not compared with the move his boyhood friends had made, the heroic move against which he constantly measured his own inadequacy. No, it was enough for Min to have learnt that Len McCoy – from ‘Winch’, as he called his home town – was an adventurer, and also that he seemed a gentle soul like her father, which she’d sensed from the moment they’d been introduced.
By the time the dancing was over at the end of the evening they both agreed it was a great stroke of luck that they’d met. They came together in the chill of the grandstand, amidst the cooing and rustling of the pigeons that roosted in its eaves, and as they looked out over the shadowy oval at the city lights beyond, they briefly touched before parting with an arrangement to stay in contact. ‘And the sooner the better,’ Min had boldly suggested.
By the following autumn of 1922, Len McCoy and Min Mahoney were married and living in a makeshift slab bark hut on the block of land they christened ‘Belvedere’, on the cliff beside the Meteorological Station at Mangowak. Together they fenced their land with post and rail, a chain back from the cliff edge on the ocean side and butting right up along the bullock ruts on the inland side. They left an entrance the width of a dray in the fence alongside the bullock ruts but just one small melaleuca gate on the ocean side to access the open cliff. Whilst Min planted a gardenia, a camellia and nectarine trees on the block, cooked and sewed and read inside the hut, and went for long familiarising walks in the skirts and frills of the tide on the empty beaches (they were strewn that autumn, she would always remember, with copious amounts of kelp and sea-cucumber), Len and his brother Dinny laid the yellow bricks of what was to be the McCoys’ only married home, and the house into which young Ron was born.
*
It was dangerous to leave him as a little child out on the cliff by himself but that’s where he wanted to be. Otherwise he would either howl and squeal in the house or mope in the garden. The roar of the cliff was a magnet, and anything else in his midst seemed dull by comparison, like ox tongue or tripe on his plate, like devilled kidneys when there were strawberries and ice-cream nearby. So, at Min’s suggestion, Len erected a chickenwire cage around the La Branca bench, to act as a playpen for the boy. On fine days then, Min could leave him unattended where he liked it most, out on the open cliff, and go about her chores.
At first he hardly even noticed the restriction but when he eventually did, the little boy’s tears were panicky and Min had to sit beside him and give him the options. It was the chickenwire cage, or the kitchen, or the garden. Or, if he refused them all, the wooden spoon. Very quickly his tears were quelled by his preference for the clifftop, even if he had to view the wider world through the hexagons of the cage. Overwhelmed by all there was to see and all there was to do on the bench from within the chickenwire cage, by the ants and skinks and tiny whorling shells in the bindweed and dirt around him, by the passing birds and seaspray and cloud formations in the sky, he calmed right down and eventually grew content with his confinement.
From the time he was two right up until he was six years old, Ron would be placed inside his chickenwire pen and left to his own devices, although by the time he was four and a half the chicken-wire and posts had to be raised to curb the growth of both his body and his tippy-toe curiosity. Straight out across from him the Two Pointers, King Cormorant Rock and Gannet Rock, loomed out of the sea to the same height as the cliff. On these massive discarded crumbs of the mainland, black cormorants and other large sea-birds – gannets and skuas and petrels – liked to roost and dry their wings after a feed. The boy was a natural witness and could watch their comings and goings endlessly. Until, of course, the milk ran out in the bottle and he’d no choice but to cry until she came.
With the house built and her son growing, Min went about her daily business, but always with an eye open or an ear cocked to little Ron out on the cliff in his cage. It was a practical idea and he seemed perfectly content, but she had to be careful. It was safe all right, he couldn’t go anywhere, but wallabies and foxes liked to graze out there and she wasn’t absolutely sure they’d have no interest in him. Or his milk. More than that, though, it was the weather she had to worry about.
The blows came out of a wild source that was always brewing in the southwest. The bench in the chickenwire pen, on the cliff facing the wide and changeling sea, was first port of call for any squall that hit. She kept an eye on the ocean for bluster and flecks and on the sky in the west and south for inky tints in gathering cloud. With Len’s help she learnt to pick the patterns. More often than not bad weather would pile up at the big rainforesty hills some six miles across the sea behind Minapre, and then it would split in two, in one direction along the horizon line to the south, out into the far ocean as a wispy tempestuous knot, and in the other direction along the faultline inland where the hills finally dwindled. In this direction it would then head away with the wet forest’s tapering off, into the drier messmate and ironbark country to the north.
This was the pattern by which most of the rain and bad wind dispersed to either side of their headland but if it did come straight on and scudding across the open expanse of water from the hills in the west, it could rip straight off the sea and scare the little one clean out of his wits. Perhaps, she dreaded, it could even blow him away, dash him onto the rocks below. He was game enough, the wind didn’t seem to bother him at all, whereas other children would’ve howled along with it, but at the very least he could catch his death out there in the wrong weather. At the mangle or the sink she was always near enough to a window to watch the fronts develop. She’d watch them pile up like bruising and then see them separate, as if at some kind of crossroads, out over the sea and back into the distant timbered hills. That was where any danger would come from. The northerlies that came from behind them were no trouble to the cage. They held hot desert fire within them during the summer but as a city girl she was proud she’d learnt to pick a northerly three days in advance.
The boy was, in fact, caught in the weather once. His father burst out of his open shed amongst the bushes along the cliff to find him drenched and frightene
d underneath the bench as an October downpour came out of the blue. Len was incensed. Where in Hades was Min? With Ron slung over his shoulder like a sack of grain he rushed back through the clicking melaleuca gate in the rain and into the house. He found her on the floor in the laundry, unconscious. He shook her awake and her eyes opened and he realised. A miscarriage. She’d fallen down and the world had gone black. The boy may as well have been as far away as Melbourne for all she knew. He stood Ron on the floor and told him to get his clothes off and dry himself. He threw him a gingham tea-towel. And in his arms he gathered up his little birdlike wife and carried her in to the bed.
Min was out of action for two days. As soon as she felt the blood had all passed from her she started making soup. Then she made bread, almond biscuits, and then more soup, with the fish heads and frames from Len’s daily catch, and then a series of jams from fruit Len had procured in his travels. Apricot, cumquat, plum, marmalade, preserved and graded in the pantry. As it drew towards Christmas her chirp started to return a bit. She began to sing again. Amidst her work ‘My Coral Delight’ came to her over and over, a Hawaiian string tune that had been popular with her father and his friends in the weeks before she had left town. The deep, relaxed sway of the Pacific song helped her restore. By the time she had, the next winter’s jam cupboard was stocked up to the hilt.
For Ron the sea of diamonds had all begun in the chickenwire cage. It was the fox that had first told him. Unbeknown to his parents Ron was quite familiar with the fox, whose lavish coat would appear from time to time at the edge of the tea-tree in a smudge of russet. The fox would sniff, snout in the air, or dart through the clearing after bristlebirds or small bush mice.