by Alex Miller
The handsome Greek arranged the dishes on a tray then set the tray aside on the table in the next booth. He offered his hand to Lena first, then to Robert. ‘Dom Alvanos,’ he said. They introduced themselves. He had an open, relaxed, slightly ironic smile. ‘I’m not a local,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’ve guessed that. You won’t find anything to suit you up here on the tablelands. They’re all big cattle and sheep properties up here. The old families hold on to their country. If you keep on out of town past Nomchong’s hardware until you hit the gravel, you’ll see a sign to the Araluen Valley after you cross the creek. There’s no bridge. But there’s no water in the creek either. You might find something to suit you down the valley. I’ve leased a piece of country down there myself. Look out for the sign for Big Oakey Creek. That’s it.’
The unsealed road down the mountain was steep and narrow with one tight hairpin bend after another, and the gravel surface was washed out in places. The inside of the car was soon reeking with the hot carbide stench of the brakes, the windows wound down, the scream of cicadas out in the forest. Robert was silently praying, Dear God in heaven, let us find a place for ourselves in this valley of Dom Alvanos! A priest had once told him we pray without knowing we’re praying, but Robert knew he was praying. The phrase Dear God in heaven was his mother’s.
Half an hour or so later they came out of the last bend and saw the valley opening out ahead of them, a scatter of dwellings, spirals of smoke rising into the still air, one or two horses and the odd cow and calf, heads down grazing on the sparse winter feed, a horse with its head pushed through the second wire of a fence lipping at a milk thistle. Orchards of peach trees over on the right, lines of trees, a tractor spraying between the lines. It was close-fenced country, smallholdings and orchards. The purple hills rose up in the distance on the far side of the open ground. They drove along a short strip of bitumen. A single-storey pub standing alone thirty metres off to the right of the road, a big old quince tree out the front, the ground thick with yellow globes of fruit. A white ute with two shivering dogs chained in the back, catching the edge of the shade from the tree. The sign across the front of the pub, ARALUEN HOTEL, square letters in faded pink, the paint peeling. The door was wide open.
Lena said, ‘Pull over. Let’s talk to the people in the pub.’
Robert pulled off the road and parked beside the ute, the two dogs watching them. They walked across the dusty patch in front of the pub and went through the front door into the sudden dark. There was no one in the bar. A smell of beer and roasting lamb, the back door open to a view of the yard beyond, a red International truck with a cattle crate and a clutch of forty-four-gallon fuel drums, a rusting Willys jeep, brown chooks pecking the ground. Robert called but got no answer. A radio playing somewhere. They waited. Robert called again.
They went out to the station wagon and drove on. Ruins of stone buildings and deserted brick houses standing in isolation among overgrown gardens here and there by the side of the road.
Three or four kilometres further on the valley abruptly closed in. They entered a narrow dirt track, following the twists and turns of the creek, overhung by the festooned branches of big old candlebark trees, the glare gone off the shaded road, and with it a stillness. Heavily timbered ridges on their left hand, the cutting on their right hand dropping away steeply to the bed of the creek, a good flow of clear water down there despite the drought.
‘Keep an eye out for Dom’s Big Oakey,’ Robert said. ‘If I take my eyes off this road we’ll be over the side.’ The road was so narrow he could not see how two vehicles could pass one another. If they met someone coming the other way, one of them was going to have to back up. Every couple of kilometres they crossed a gully coming out of the hills to their left. There were no causeways or bridges, the crossings just the tumbled rocks of past floods. He slowed the Holden to a walking pace, lifting and bumping over the rocks, the dif bottoming on the biggest of the rocks with the hollow sound of steel on stone. They had been negotiating this road for some time when Lena yelled, ‘Big Oakey up ahead!’ She was like a kid on an outing.
He pulled up in the middle of the gully. They got out and looked over the iron gate that stood across the front of a cleared patch of ground. A few acres worked up by the plough, tucked into the groin between steeply timbered hillsides. An iron shed over to the left. A mechanical cultivator parked over to the right. The worked country ridged up, brown stalks lying along the furrows. ‘Dom’s been growing potatoes here for his shop,’ Robert said.
They stood a while, awed by the wildness of the place, birds calling back and forth among the timber.
They got back into the station wagon and drove on. A couple of kilometres beyond Dom’s Big Oakey they crested a rise. Below them over to their right the creek abruptly left the road, flowing away in a wide loop, a line of tall casuarinas along the creek sweeping in a curve, enclosing a cleared area of forty or fifty acres, a weatherboard house, a barn and cattle yards. Ahead of them on the road a man was leading his horse behind two cows and calves, his dog off to one side. The cows were Herefords, their hips poking up, their guts hollowed out, the calves bothering them for a drink. The man turned around and looked back at them.
Robert pulled up alongside him and called a greeting. The man stepped over to the car window and touched the brim of his hat to Lena. He was an old man, brown and vigorous, his features heavily lined, his nose flattened and pushed over to one side like a boxer’s. His abundant white hair touching the shoulders of his leather jacket. In his dark eyes a glint of amusement.
Lena and Robert introduced themselves and the man said his name was Ray McFadden. Robert asked him if there was anywhere for sale around there. Ray McFadden turned his head and gestured down to the house below them in the paddock. ‘She’s been on the market for three or four years. You’d need to be a young man to take her on.’ He took a packet of Champion Ruby from his shirt pocket and stuck a paper to his lower lip, rubbed a pinch of tobacco between his palms then took the paper from his lip and rolled a smoke, nipping the whiskers from the ends and lighting it with a match. He shook out the flame of the match and looked at the wisp of smoke from it before flicking it onto the road with his thumb. Robert had not encountered a man like him since his Queensland days and his instinct was to trust him. Seeing Ray McFadden standing there smoking his cigarette, Robert felt a hopeful thrill of possibility. He believed Martin would also approve of this man. They would sit together in their comfortable silence and they would know one another at once. Robert believed and hoped that he belonged in the company of such men.
Lena nudged him. ‘Are you getting out?’
He stepped out of the car and stood beside Ray. The day had warmed up. The three of them looked down onto the house and barn with the yards and, directly behind the barn, the line of trees along the course of the creek. They stood considering the scene. The warmth triggered a sudden rise of a cicada chorus, the shrieking waves of sound flowing back and forth in the forest behind their backs. The roof was gone off the house, sheets of roofing iron scattered over the paddock, black wattle trees growing up here and there, patches of blackberry spreading along a fence line.
Ray said, ‘A storm took her off a couple of years ago.’ He took the cigarette from between his lips and examined the end, then pinched a strand of tobacco and put the cigarette between his lips and sucked on it. The smell of the smoke in the fragrant air was making Robert wish he still smoked.
Lena asked, ‘Do you think it would be all right if we went down and had a look around?’
‘There’s no one going to stop you. There’s been no one down there for years.’ Ray smiled, his eyes filled with the enjoyment of the moment. She smiled back at him and Robert had the thought that here was a man who appreciated Lena just as she was. Ray didn’t have to tell them he lived on his own. Robert knew he did. Ray gestured down the hill. ‘The bank’s on the back of them Wilson boys and I know they’re dead keen to sell. They was buying up country all over the shire
before the drought. Jim Forbes is looking after the sale for them. They was intending to winter heifers down here but they never did stock the place and I only seen them the once. They come down here in a blue and white Pontiac motor car half the size of a house and just about ripped the bottom out of her in Big Oakey. You’ll find Jim at the Australian Estates office in Braidwood. You could call in on your way back and talk to Jim. He’ll do the right thing by you. Tell him Ray McFadden sent you.’
Lena asked, ‘Are they really orange trees down there?’
Ray said, ‘Old Patrick Waddell put them orange trees in the year I was born. Betty used to always give us a box of them to take home whenever I come up this way as a boy. She called them my birthday oranges.’ He drew on his cigarette, squinting down at the orange grove. ‘They sweeten after a couple of frosts. They’ll be good eating now.’
‘They’re beautiful trees,’ Lena said, and she glanced at Robert, looking for a sign from him, her enthusiasm in her eyes, the sun in her hair. Robert smiled to see the eagerness in her.
They stood a while longer, reluctant to say farewell to Ray McFadden, his presence making them feel welcome. He smoked, the reins looped loosely over his arm, his brown gelding hanging its head, eyes closed, sleeping on its feet, its long mane knotted up. The two cows had moved on, nipping the dry rubbish on the roadside, their calves bumping their saggy udders for a pinch of milk. The dog lying close by, her eyes not quite closed, keeping a check on Ray. Kookaburras starting their cackling, working themselves up to a high pitch of excitement, then falling silent as if they were waiting for applause. In the distance the sound of an aeroplane high up in the blue somewhere.
They talked some more. Ray told them he lived two kilometres further along the road, his hand going out and gesturing in that direction. His place neighboured the one they were looking at. He had three thousand acres. ‘Mostly hilly scrub,’ he said. ‘Like this place. Some nice creek flats like the one you’re looking at. It’s healthy country.’
When Ray had moved on, Robert turned the car at a gate and drove back up the hill. They went in over the cattle grid, the familiar rumble of the tyres, and swooped down the loopy track to the yards. They passed the ruin of another house on the high creek bank up the hill from the yards. Robert said, ‘There’s material there to repair the cottage with.’
There was a closed gate across the road between the stock yards and the barn. He pulled up at the gate and they got out of the car. The crouched form of a dark scrub wallaby raced away from the side of the barn and charged into the casuarinas, leaving a little spurt of dust in the air. The barn stood fifty metres from the house on the rocky bank above the creek, its roofing iron intact. Beside the barn, the set of heavy timber cattle yards. A solitary dunny standing behind the house looked like a sentry box. Between the dunny and the yards six orange trees in two rows of three, old and healthy-looking trees, trees of character, bright oranges set among the deep green of their leaves, as if someone had been decorating their branches with Chinese lanterns.
There was so much of Robert’s past in this scene, the rural past he had made for himself after leaving the Council estate as a boy of fifteen, his magical time with Morris Aplin on Warren’s farm in Somerset, then journeying alone to Australia. The first small cattle station he had worked on, where he had been the only hired hand and had become part of the family. He might have returned home to find the old place derelict and deserted. It was as if he looked into his own past and saw that he was no longer there. And he was stirred by a feeling of sadness and nostalgia. Lena and he stood together by the car looking at the orange trees. He said nothing to her about his feelings. He didn’t want to encourage her to convert her mother’s blue-chip shares into some marginal hillbilly farm in the scrub just so that he could have the peace of mind to write. But all the same, and without a need to consider it, he was at once in love with this wild little patch of country and saw in it a haven from the despair that had come over him in Canberra.
They walked over to the orange trees and picked an orange each. She held the orange to her nose and closed her eyes. ‘Smell that! I haven’t smelled an orange like this since I was a kid.’
Robert peeled the thick skin from his orange and broke off a section and put it in his mouth. It was running with juice and sweetness. ‘These trees must have deep roots to produce fruit like this in a drought.’
They stood in the sun eating their oranges.
She wiped her lips with her handkerchief and said eagerly, ‘Let’s look in the barn first.’
They walked back to the gate and Robert lifted it and dragged it half open, where it was sagged on its hinges. They went through and stood outside the wide entrance to the barn, looking into the dark cavern of the interior. As he followed Lena in, two owls flew out over their heads. Lena said, ‘Do you think they’re good luck?’
‘Sure to be,’ he said.
The barn was on two levels. They were on the ground level in a parking bay for machinery, a workshop at the far end. An unglazed window over the workbench. To their right a set of three steps led up onto the main floor. Lena went up the steps and Robert followed her. She stood looking around. ‘It’s enormous.’
The flooring of this upper level was made of broad pit-sawn timber planks. They were worn smooth with use. The tall iron walls and roof were supported at the corners by enormous tree trunks, the roof heavily beamed and artfully structured. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Robert said. ‘I wonder why they needed a barn like this?’
Stone jars and bottles and pieces of rusty iron, old iron bedsteads, two hurricane lamps hanging on wire from a crossbeam, a bench with a blacksmith’s vice and a carpenter’s vice. A long row of tins ranged against the wall on a bench. He went over and looked into them. The tins were filled with an assortment of nails and screws, coach bolts, nuts, washers, split keys and other bits and pieces whose uses were familiar to him. Remnants from a way of life in which nothing was ever thrown away, but was only ever set aside for possible reuse at some future time. At the far end of the bench was a pile of iron heads from old hand tools. He counted several mattocks, axes, adzes, picks, wedges, hoes, worn-down plough shares and tiller feet. Rows of horseshoes strung along the side wall, arranged in fours, hind shoes and front shoes in pairs. Dozens of fuel drums and oil cans. There was a tarpaulin covering something on a crossbeam. Laid across the tarpaulin were several halters and bridles. He went over and lifted the end of the tarp and looked under it. Three stock saddles and a pack saddle. Lena came up and stood next to him. He set the bridles and halters aside and took the tarp right off, sending a shower of dried bird shit and dust into the air.
Lena reached out and fingered the steel hooks on the pack saddle. ‘Goodness, what are these for?’
He hadn’t seen a pack saddle since the last camp with Frankie. He told Lena the hooks were where the panniers were hung. He looked around but there was no sign of them. He was thinking of lifting the heavy panniers off the pack saddles when they came into camp in the evenings. He covered the saddles with the tarp and laid the bridles and halters over it. Lena had wandered away. A sunray of dust motes in the air where they had intruded.
He was crouched down trying to prise open the lid of an iron box with writing on it when Lena came up behind him. She said, ‘Look what I’ve found.’
Lolling in the crook of her arm was a stained old doll, fine wood shavings poking out from a rent in its stomach. Lena touched the open wound. ‘I can sew it up,’ she said. The doll had a sad-looking face crudely painted on its round head, faded pink lips and blind eyes. No hair. Lena looked down at it where it was nestled against her t-shirt. ‘I wonder if the little girl it belonged to lost it or threw it away?’ She looked at him. ‘I don’t think she would have thrown it away, do you? You don’t throw away a doll just because it’s old.’
He said, ‘Maybe her parents told her she had to leave it behind when they left.’
‘If she could speak she would tell us the sad story of what happened
here.’
He wasn’t sure if she meant that the little girl to whom the doll had belonged would tell them the story or that the doll would tell the story. ‘What is it?’ he said.
‘Don’t laugh, but I feel as if she’s been waiting for me to come and find her.’
He said carefully, ‘Or maybe it’s you who’s been waiting to find her.’
‘Isn’t that what I said? I’m going to keep her. She’s never going to be tossed aside again.’
‘You sound as though you mean it. Will you give her a name?’
‘She has a name. We just don’t know what it is.’ She walked across to the small doorway and stood looking out towards the orange trees and the cottage, her back to him. ‘We should go and have a look at the creek before we go over to the cottage,’ she said.
Her sudden change of mood had distanced her from him. He got up from his crouch and walked over and stood next to her at the open door.
‘It’s so peaceful,’ she said. ‘You could write your novels here. They would be as beautiful as this place is.’
He said, ‘What did you think of Ray?’
‘Ray is a gentleman of the old school. My father would have trusted him at once.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘We’ve met two lovely men today. It’s a sign.’
They went out of the barn and turned down towards the bank of the creek. The bank was too steep near the barn for them to get down. The barn had been sited above the reach of floods. They walked on a little way below the barn, following the wallaby track down to the line of casuarinas, and they stood on the bank in the dappled shade and looked at the clear stream flowing by.
She said, ‘Smell that sweet water.’
The slim trees around them, their needles whispering in the gentle movement of the air. The far bank of the creek a shelf of rock, on their side a silt bank sloping into the water. A green sunlit hole under the rock bank. He said, ‘Keep still a moment. See that green lizard over there watching us? That’s a water dragon.’