Highways to a War

by Koch, Christopher J.

  The thought of Mr. Langford made me nervous; but this nervousness, and the sense of trespassing, was not the only effect the room had on me. The past, I see now, waits always for us to open its doors; and once having done so, we can choose to open our spirits to its thin, helpless voices, or else turn away. Both choices have their consequences. Mike was indifferent; I was interested; and that was when the past enrolled me in its service.

  At first, moving cautiously about beside Mike, I thought myself indifferent too—if not to the room’s atmosphere, at least to its contents, which were the sorts of objects that filled us with instant boredom. We fingered the files on the table, most of which contained depressing-looking documents and business letters we had no desire to read. There were mountains of old magazines —The Bulletin and The Land—which were of no interest either.

  What bloody junk, Mike said. He looked disgusted.

  There must be something here, I said. Otherwise why should he lock it?

  Mike looked at me appreciatively; he lived in the hope of intrigue. Right, mate. Let’s keep looking.

  We began now to rummage about independently; and edging past the long table towards the right-hand corner of the room, I came on a painting. It was large—about four feet by two—in a heavy walnut frame, and stood propped on a small cedar table against the wall: a portrait of a man in his early thirties, in the clothing of the last century. The thick, filtered sun through the blind fell on it in such a way that the eyes and the skin had something of the gloss of life. Like all paintings of its period, it had a veiled quality, as though it were covered in dark gauze. Yet it was very real, being technically accomplished enough to resemble a photograph.

  The man wasn’t looking at the viewer directly: he stared steadily past my shoulder to the right of the frame, which was my left. He wore a cravat and a dark, sober suit with wide lapels. His long brown hair was parted on the left, like that of a man of today, but grew so far down the sides that it covered his ears. His face appeared modern, being clean-shaven. His head was cocked a little to one side, his lips faintly smiling. At the same time, his full lower lip projected in a way that warned you to be careful. He looked from under his eyebrows, which were low-set, and the shrewd, humorous glint in his dark blue eyes made me feel that if I studied him long enough, I’d discover what he was thinking. His face was lean, his nose straight and narrow.

  Who’s this? I asked.

  Mike looked at the picture with little interest. Him? One of the great-grandfathers. I’m not sure which one.

  He wandered off to the other side of the room; but I lingered. There was something not ordinary about the man: an intensity, coming out of the picture, that I hadn’t the knowledge to diagnose, at that age. Looked at in one way, he had the musing, neurasthenically refined expression of a Victorian poet. But then this began to seem wrong: the face had a blade-like readiness for action that I didn’t associate with poets: more with sportsmen or military officers, or the leading actors in films. Both possibilities existed, and strangely blended. He would be a man capable of lightheartedness; of all sorts of fancies—but one who would not tolerate fools, or fail to challenge annoyance. Getting closer, I saw the family likeness. Except for the color of his hair, the man was an adult version of Michael, and also resembled Ken. The eyes were the same blue, and the narrow nose was the Langford nose.

  Faintly, through the closed window, I could hear the barking of Angus. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why Angus was up from the fields; I’d lost interest in the picture now, and was looking elsewhere. Michael had wandered off to pick up an old Minties tin with comic pictures on the side, and had began to chuckle at it.

  There was an old-fashioned box standing on the table in front of the painting. It was about fifteen inches wide, of polished wood, and bound with brass clasps. Its top sloped, so that it looked rather like a miniature writing desk without legs. I couldn’t imagine its purpose, never having heard of a writing-slope, but it attracted me. I fingered it, and discovered that the top was secured by a brass lock. Turning the key in it, I was able to push the lid back. There were many compartments inside. Some of the small ones were ink-stained, and I realized that these had been for ink bottles and pens. In the main compartment were two very old-looking notebooks bound in calfskin; nothing else.

  And here, coming up to me from the box’s interior, was the smell of the past.

  It was a worrying smell; even faintly alarming. Since then, I’ve learned not to be deceived by it. The odor that comes up from that deep, dry shaft isn’t what you should attend to if you want to see the past as it really is. Nor am I misled any more by the faded, crimped and dried-up appearance of old objects. These provoke sadness, but that isn’t how things were, back then; we’re merely looking at corpses. The past is alive, and full of juices. It continues in a dimension which neither human wishes nor human indifference can affect, even if the relics it leaves behind are dead—just as our own precious objects will soon, soon be dead. But on that hot afternoon, as I fingered one of the notebooks, it was another matter; I felt vaguely threatened by the past, and was affected by its melancholy: a faint, dry perfume that came not only from the writing-slope, but seemed also to hang in the room itself—its likely point of origin being the drawn holland blind. Melancholy was given off like a constant shimmering from the blind’s warm surface; and the blatant sun of today, passing through that brittle linen, was being transformed; was turning into the dense mustard glow of the past itself.

  I’d just begun to flick through one of the notebooks when I heard the door handle rattle.

  Terror jolted through me, and I pushed the book back into the polished box, and slammed its lid shut. I had some notion of warning Mike, but it was too late. The door opened, and John Langford stood looking at us, holding the china handle. He wore his usual clean khaki shirt, and had on the rimless glasses he used only in the house, from behind which his slitted brown eyes examined us like those of a headmaster. He frowned.

  Mike stood quite still, holding the Minties tin; I couldn’t see fear in his face: just surprise.

  When Mr. Langford finally spoke, it was more softly than usual. What are you doing here, Michael?

  Mike didn’t answer; and in those moments, he slowly flushed. The flush was astounding: it crept up his neck like a stain from inside his sky-blue shirt; soon the face that looked back at his father achieved a shade of bright scarlet that I’d never seen in any human face before—except, perhaps, in the faces of aged drunks.

  John Langford contemplated this phenomenon without expression; then he began to put a series of questions to us both. Few of his actual words come back now, perhaps because I was half deafened by fear; but I remember that I had the impression, even inside fear, that he was angry not merely at Mike and me, but at something else: something in the storeroom.

  What in particular were we looking for? he wanted to know. What had been important enough to make Michael steal his keys?

  Getting no satisfactory answers, he stared at us both in silence again, his thin mouth growing thinner. Then he said: What you’ve both been doing is prying.

  He looked at me. You will go back to Launceston as soon as possible, Raymond. I’ll ring your father tonight. Now you can get out, while I deal with Michael.

  Slowly, hot with confusion, I moved to the door, leaving Michael and his father staring at each other. I feared for him, and not without reason.

  When he was younger, he’d been beaten with a leather strap for any misdemeanors John Langford regarded as serious: a bad school report; tasks around the farm neglected. These beatings were administered on the bare legs, and were savage: he’d once shown me the welts. Since the age of thirteen, the beatings had stopped; but for entering the storeroom, his punishment was to do heavy farm work ten hours a day until school went back, with half-hour meal breaks and no break at the weekends.

  It seemed excessive, and I said so when he told me. He looked at me for a moment without comment. Then he said somethin
g I’ve always remembered, his pale face expressionless.

  Sometimes I don’t think I’m his son, he said. I think I’m the son of someone better.

  Only those who have not been tied to the land can romanticize it. I loved Clare because I could escape it. Mike could only dream of escape; meanwhile, he’d found a way of escaping reality by transforming it.

  The device that made this possible would eventually be his passport to the world. Ken had once given him a box Brownie camera, and Mike became more and more interested in photography. He photographed everything, and I still have the prints he gave me: his brothers working at the plow, or supervising the picking; Duke and Prince; the old blacksmith’s shop in New Norfolk where they still shoed horses, and where big old Percy Maynard, hammer in hand, grins at Mike’s camera from the forge: an afterimage from the nineteenth century.

  The small, crude black-and-white pictures are surprisingly good; it was as though he saw these ordinary things as strange, and made the camera show it. And the light in the pictures, despite the box Brownie’s limitations, was different from the flat light in the snapshots I took: he seemed to have chosen moments when it defined things.

  I thought his interest merely a passing craze, at the time. I still see him focusing on something, peering into the tiny viewfinder, earnestly bent; the tip of his tongue would creep out of the corner of his mouth. He had no conscious idea then of where this would lead, I’m sure; but from his absolute seriousness, I can see now that he knew it unconsciously. We always do.

  At the end of the visit that John Langford had cut short, on the night when I was leaving the farm, Mike gave me a present: a leather-covered album of his snapshots. We were standing on the front verandah, watching for the lights of my father’s car.

  Here, he said. Something to remember the place.

  I looked through the book, and found that he’d mounted a set of his photographs. The pickers; Percy at his forge; Ken plowing in his Digger hat. Strangely, there was also a picture of Luke Goddard, striding through tussock grass at evening in his dark bluey: head down, outraged eyes fixed, white stubble on his chin, his long shadow behind him. Mike must have snapped him from hiding; and I suspected now that he didn’t just fear the old man: he was unaccountably fascinated by him.

  In the front of the album, he’d written: From your friend Mike.

  The next summer, when he and I were sixteen, I was invited again. But this would be the last time. I didn’t know it then, but there’d be no more holidays at Clare: Mike and I would drift apart when he left school the following year.

  Two deaths hung over the place now, and the heart had gone out of the house. Both deaths had occurred the year before, not long after John Langford had cut short my visit.

  Mike had told me about it at school. But he’d given no details, and I’d asked for none. His face had a stricken emptiness; and I knew, even at that age, that I was looking at shock.

  He’d lost the two members of his family he loved most. Ken had died first; then his mother.

  He only talked about it when I arrived at the farm. It was the middle of a warm afternoon: we were loitering in the barn, where Mike had been feeding the horses. We now spent little time in the house, which seemed permanently cold. A hired girl from a nearby farm did the cooking, and the men sat silent around the table at meals, knives clicking on plates. Much more was locked up in that house than the storeroom at its core. Hearts were locked; the Langfords wouldn’t show grief except through silence.

  Long, amber stalks of sun grew to the barn’s rafters; there were smells of chaff and machine oil here that had once excited me, and I knew we were saying goodbye to boyhood. The two big Clydesdales ate in their stalls, blowing through their nostrils, and Mike stood patting Prince’s brown flank as he talked.

  Ken had been killed in a motorbike accident on the road to Hobart, at nine o‘clock in the morning. The bike was Cliff’s; Ken had borrowed it to go in to the city. He’d come around a blind bend near Bridgewater to find himself meeting a car that had passed a truck and was still on the wrong side of the road. He’d swerved to avoid it and had gone down a bank, pitching over the handlebars and breaking his neck.

  On the evening before it happened, Mike told me, Ken’s former girlfriend Peggy Stanton had phoned from Hobart. She’d broken up with her husband, who’d treated her badly, and she wanted Ken to come and see her. The whole family had heard the conversation: the old wall phone was in the hall outside the kitchen, so that no calls were really private.

  I could tell from Ken’s voice that he was really pleased, Mike said. He’d never got over losing Peggy. He told her he’d come in the next day, and he asked the old man for the day off, and wanted to borrow the Dodge. But Dad said they were too busy to spare him; told him to wait a few days. Then there was a row. Ken did his block and called Dad a mean old bastard. Told him to stick his car up his arse; he’d borrow Cliff’s bike.

  Next morning when Ken left, I was sitting at breakfast with Mum in the kitchen, Mike said. Ken came through wearing a leather jacket and Cliff’s motorbike helmet; he had a clean collar and tie under the jacket, and he didn’t look the same. Different: his face kind of hollow, and his eyes staring—as though he was ready to jump off the edge of something. And I had this feeling that maybe something terrible would be there when he jumped. I remember Mum looked up, and she told him to take care. Ken winked at her and smiled and told her he would; he was always very fond of Mum. But then he looked real serious again, and said: “He’s not going to bugger my life up any more. He can keep my bloody share of the place, if he likes. He can cut me out of it.” And Mum said: “It won’t come to that, Ken. You just go to her.”

  A few moments later we heard the bike start up in the yard, Mike said, and then it went down the drive. Mum and I didn’t talk, and we could hear the bike’s engine going down the road to New Norfolk, getting smaller and smaller, like a bee. I’d decide I couldn’t hear it any more, and then I’d pick the sound up again.

  His quiet voice stopped short. He left off patting Prince and came and sat down on a bale of hay, not looking at me. Prince stamped, in the barn’s quiet.

  If Dad had lent him the car, it wouldn’t have happened, Mike said. His gaze was remote, looking at the horses. The old man killed him, he said softly. And that killed Mum. They said she died of a heart attack—but I reckon she died of a broken heart. She hardly ever said another word to Dad after that. She wouldn’t talk to anyone about Ken; but she talked once to me about him, on the day of his funeral. I came into the kitchen and she was sitting there at the table by herself, waiting for Dad and the others: in a few minutes we’d all get in the car to go in to Saint Matthew’s in New Norfolk for the service. She had a black suit on I’d never seen, and a white blouse. She looked me over and told me I looked nice for Ken’s funeral.

  He paused; then he went on. I wished that he wouldn‘t, but he seemed compelled.

  I’d never seen Mum cry, he said. She was tough, Mum was. But that day in the kitchen she cried. She had her elbow propped on the table, and she was reaching up with one hand, as though she was blind, and trying to take hold of something in the air. I thought how red and rough her hand was, from all the work she’d done, and I took hold of it. She held mine pretty hard; Mum had quite a grip. For a while she couldn’t seem to speak; she just sat sucking in breath, blinking away tears. When she did speak, she was looking past me, as though she was talking to someone else: someone who was to blame for Ken dying. Her eyes got really fierce, and she said: “Ken was the best of all you boys. He came right through the War, just to be killed on that damned motorbike. That’s not right, Chick. That’s not right.”

  He stopped, and dug in the earth floor with a stick. His own eyes were dry.

  She died a month later, he said. It was me who found her. She died feeding the fowls. It was around teatime, and she hadn’t come back from the yard; the old man told me to go out and look for her. It was dark; I came around the corner of the barn here,
and what I saw first was the spilled pot of wheat and her hand lying near it. Just her hand, where the light from the house caught it.

  He was silent again for a moment. Then he said: The old man came and carried her inside. He laid her on the kitchen table while he called the doctor. Can you imagine that? On the bloody kitchen table.

  He looked at me now, his face a pale egg, his eyes drained light blue by an anger that worried me. Then his usual calm came back, and he drifted to the door of the barn, hands in pockets. I followed.

  From across in the evening kitchen we could hear the radio playing, tuned to the Country and Western station it stayed on all the time. Hank Locklin was singing “Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On.”

  Ken always liked that song, Mike said. His tone was gentle. He used to whistle it, he said.

  Afterwards, at dusk, we wandered up the hillside past the pickers’ huts, reaching the spot among the boulders where Ken had confiscated the guns when we were boys. There was a clear, dark sky. It was still light enough to see the house, a plowed field, and the white of the road; but already the valley was cooled by stars. We stood looking out, not speaking, and I was remembering Ken plowing down there.

  On Saturday mornings, when Mike and I would lie in later than usual in the sleepout, we’d listen to the sounds of the waking farm: the warbling of magpies would rise through the blue like bursting bubbles, and Ken’s voice would come up from the paddocks across the road.

  Prince! Git over there! Git over!

  His shouts would fill the whole valley, echoing from the dark green hills of bush. He’d be plowing with the Clydesdales, and they’d be wandering out of the furrows. Dwindled by distance, comical in its wrath since it came from good-humored Ken, the deep voice would rise higher.