by Alex Miller
The three horses were feeding in a soft green glade. The old brown gelding looked up and gave a low throaty rumble of welcome to see him. The creamy mare blew out a startled whistle and trotted stiff-legged in a circle, her tail up, her eyes wide, snorting, expecting the other two to set off with her. The old brown stood his ground. The young filly gave a sideways jump then stood looking at the dog.
Robert walked over to the brown gelding and gave him one of the apples he had brought. The old horse was glad to see a man again and pushed his head into Robert’s chest, pushing him back and looking for another apple. He did not object when Robert slipped the halter over his ears. Robert led him over to a fallen tree and sat on the log and rolled a smoke. The old horse took the slice of bread from Robert’s hand, his eyes dreamy with the pleasure of it. Robert sat smoking and looking at the creamy. She stood well back, watching. There was plenty of feed about. The horses were all in good condition. The creamy was interested but she wasn’t going to come too close. She was not so trusting of men as the gelding. Robert wondered who had owned her. She was a beautiful-looking thing. The filly, her daughter out of the priest’s stallion, was narrow in the chest and small-rumped, just as Ray had described her. She shook her head at Robert. He said, ‘You don’t like being stared at. Is that it?’ She knew herself addressed and perked her head and took two or three prancing little steps towards Toby, who gave a squeal and hid behind Robert. The filly wheeled away and kicked up. Robert gave Toby’s ears a scratch. The gelding reached his nose down and snuffled at the pup. Toby yelped and rolled onto his back. Robert stroked the gelding’s nose. The horse half closed his eyes, his long lashes black and elegantly curved. Robert said to him, ‘You have had nothing but kindness from men.’
He was in no hurry to leave the soft light of the glade and did not resist the feeling that he was being observed. He had camped alone one time by a great stone on which there rested an old flat iron, far up in the headwaters of Coona Creek on Reg Wells’s station, when he was sent out to hunt brumbies. His horses both stood close by his fire that night and did not feed on the level green of the creek flat he had chosen for the night camp. A woman, he was told by Reg when he recounted the experience to him, a mother and wife, was murdered with that flat iron. Robert had known nothing of that story when he set up his camp that night. But whatever it was that remained of the woman’s brutal death had kept him and the horses awake all that night. Being observed by such spirits was not all that new to him.
He stood up and led the old gelding out of the gully onto the sunlit flat and climbed on his back. The creamy and the filly followed their old leader at a respectful distance. When they reached the river Robert stepped off the gelding, picked up Toby and climbed on again. Setting the dog in front of him, he urged the old plugger into the water. The current was strong there and the dog might have made it alone and he might not have. Robert had not wanted to risk him. Toby enjoyed the ride and the old gelding did not object. Robert walked the gelding on down the far bank of the river and set Toby down. He did not look back but heard the other two splashing across behind them, the thud of their hoofs and the snorting as they cantered up the bank.
Robert rode the gelding into the big yard and slipped off his back. He noticed Toby running over to the house. He looped the lead rope over the rail at waist height and propped the gate open. Then he went over to the barn and fetched a couple of tight slices of the hay bale Ray had left for him and a scoop of the milled oats and set the oats and one of the slices of hay in front of the gelding. Robert set out the other two slices of hay one either side of the gelding, not too far off but not so close that he could reach them. Robert went into the dark interior of the barn and waited in the shadows until the creamy and the filly finally gave up ducking and diving around the gate and tucked their backsides and scooted right into the big yard where the gelding was enjoying his feast of oats and lucerne. The creamy and the filly crowding the gelding in their nervous excitement. Robert went over and closed the gate on them.
Robert put a set of shoes on the creamy the next day and took her for a ride up the creek. She was skittish at first but soon settled, and it was clear she was a well-mannered horse and, like the gelding, must also have had a caring owner.
47
Soon, sooner than anyone expected, Lena was having to plant her summer salads again. She had done it once, but it hadn’t stayed done. She began ordering vegetables from Dom Alvanos. The weeds soon took over. The fabled orchard had not been planted. The orange trees remained as they had been when she and Robert had first seen them. The hills remained the same. The same trees continued to grow where they had grown before. Robert’s book was nearly finished. He hadn’t let her see it.
A momentary excitement broke the routine when Robert finished repairing the boundary fences and Ray took them both up to the cattle sales in Braidwood. Instructed by Ray, Robert bid successfully on a yard of thirty in-calf heifers, and he and Ray and Lena followed the stock float down the mountain and watched their beautiful red-and-white cattle slide and clamber down the ramp into the yard. After the truck had gone Robert opened the yard gate and he, Lena and Ray went over to the house and watched the lovely beasts find their way out of the yard and begin to graze on the fresh green pick of the hillside. By evening there was no sign of them. In the morning Robert saddled the creamy and went out to look for them. They had not gone far. When he breasted the hill over onto John’s and saw his heifers grazing peaceably on the flats along the creek, he felt a thrill. Some had already made their way up the gullies and into the hills, as if they had long been accustomed to the tight clefts of the lower valley. Toby went with him and they stood together, horse and rider and dog, at the top of John’s clear-felled paddock the other side of the hill from the house. Robert rolled a cigarette and watched. And watching, he felt a new sense of responsibility on his shoulders.
Lena took to going for long walks into the bush. She climbed to the summit of hills and sat alone and gazed out at the vaster view she had achieved, seeing weather changes before they became apparent in the valley, meeting shy king parrots and rock wallabies and finding discarded mining equipment from the old days. And every morning after breakfast Robert sat on his swivel chair in the study and added to the pile of single-spaced typescript pages beside his typewriter. The closer he got to the end of the story the more eager he became to continue working and was reluctant to come out for lunch. At times he worked on the book in the evenings and on into the early hours of the morning. But sooner or later the awkward process of re-entering reality had to be faced, and he felt that great wave of discontent and hunger for the sublime diversion of exquisite sex with his imaginary Ann.
Then, one Wednesday morning when he picked up the mail at the pub in Araluen, there was a letter from Martin. He parked along the road and opened the letter and read it:
I will come and see you soon. Birte has not been well this year and we haven’t been able to travel. I am looking forward very much to seeing you and Lena and helping you with your farm work. You know my father and I were also skilled workers. Perhaps I have never told you this. I don’t know the word for our trade in English. We made a living sewing the fancy stitching that you see on shoes and boots. Like you, dear Robert, I have a deep respect for the manual skills and for the values of working people. I would feel happier for you, however, if I knew you were enjoying the company of other writers and one or two intelligent friends, as well as the pleasant company of Ray and the local farmers that you speak about in your letters. I would also like to hear your impressions of the book I gave you on Karl Liebknecht. You’ve not mentioned it. I hope you are leaving time for serious reading.
A phrase from the Liebknecht biography was, in fact, Robert’s epigraph for his book: Karl Liebknecht understood his political activity in the interest of the proletariat as a fight for equality and justice. It stood as Robert’s homage to what he took to be Martin’s expectations of his writing, and as a justification for his private st
ruggle to write something that would resonate beyond the narrow compass of his own experience.
48
That winter was cold and wet, with frequent frosts and even a light covering of snow on the hills one day, the creek often running a banker. By the time spring came around the heifers were all doing well in the hills away from the constant wet. Robert rode out on the creamy mare and checked them from time to time, Toby, a grown young dog now, tagging along and getting weary.
Lena walked every day, rain or shine. Thin as she was she didn’t seem to feel the cold. One morning when Robert went outside to take a piss, a ginger cat was sitting on the verandah gazing fixedly at Toby. Toby staring back at it. When Robert came out the cat stood up. It yawned and stretched then jumped down and rubbed itself against his legs. Toby made a careful approach and sniffed it. The cat ignored him. Toby was required to accept his inferior status and it wasn’t long before he and the cat were lying close together.
The grass on the flats began to grow at the first touch of spring and the cattle began grazing on the open slope above the house. Robert and Lena were astonished one morning to see the first calf suckling at its mother’s teats. Lena said, ‘You’ve become a farmer.’ He looked at her. ‘And what about you?’ She didn’t reply. ‘The calf is beautiful,’ she said. And it was, shining in the morning sun as if it had been groomed and polished. Robert said, ‘Are you content?’ He knew she wasn’t content. She had stopped playing the part of the simple peasant woman. Ray called in to see them from time to time and often stayed to eat his evening meal with them. He dozed in the armchair in front of the fire, and when he woke he always said, ‘Well, I’ll see you fellers later,’ and he picked up his hat and put it on his head and said goodnight. Robert and Lena always went out with him and watched him drive away.
Robert had been up on the ridge behind the house since lunch, dragging broken old barbed wire together and cutting new fence posts. It was a hot sticky windy day up there among the trees, the flies and a thousand other insects finding his sweat irresistible. He was unable to endure it a moment longer and picked up his tools and made his way down to the creek. He started the pump and went on up to the house.
When he came into the house he called to Lena but got no answer. Toby wasn’t around. He went down to the back verandah and stood looking into this room which he rarely visited. The Rönisch had been standing silent for a long time. The first thing that struck him was the rescued doll, which was usually sitting up on the closed lid of the piano. It was slumped against the wall under the louvres. The doll looked as if it had been thrown against the wall, violently, its limbs twisted under it, its head facing back over its shoulder on its stumpy neck. Two old ledgers which he recognised from the tin box in the barn were lying on the floor. One of them was lying open. On the open page were delicate pencil studies of the bits and pieces she had found on her daily explorations, notes inscribed beside each sketch. He crouched down and read the notes. They recorded where she had found each article. Every entry was dated. Robert turned the page of the heavy old quarter-calf ledger. On the right-hand page there was a heavily overscored pencil drawing of the doll. The drawing was utterly different to the careful little studies of the found objects. The agony of the doll’s violent abandonment was convincing. On the left-hand page Lena had written something in pencil. The notes were not written in the finely disciplined hand in which she had written her notes about the found objects, but were scrawled carelessly across the page on a sharp diagonal, as if with a little more freedom, a little more flourish, with another leap of conviction, the pencilled words might themselves become the sensuous lines of an expressive drawing.
Crouched there looking at this writing he was remembering the postcard she had sent to Birte and Martin from Florence. He couldn’t recall the name of the artist whose picture was on the postcard, or what Lena’s message to Birte and Martin had been, but he remembered vividly the impression of the picture itself: a group of figures huddled under a shattered tree, battered by the violence of a storm, the wild swirling lines of the drawing, its freedom and energy. He also remembered the dramatic change in Lena’s handwriting on that card, the large looping scrawl.
He could hear the tank overflowing. He’d have to go down and turn the pump off. She’d left the ledger open. Was that an invitation to him to look at it? She’d kept these drawings to herself. She hadn’t even spoken about them, let alone offered to share them with him. Her drawing, even more than her wandering in the bush, seemed to be a cherished private matter with her. He set about deciphering her notes with a feeling of trespass. He knew he was looking at something utterly authentic and meaningful and could understand her reluctance to share it with him. She was sure to be afraid he wouldn’t see the seriousness of it for her. How to believe our dreams and little creations will have meaning for others as well as for ourselves? He understood such doubts. He had them every morning when he sat down to begin writing. The farm work was its own justification. No one would ever ask him why he fixed the fences or cared for the animals. It was obvious to everyone why he did these things. But drawing and writing had no such obvious meaning. With difficulty he deciphered the words Lena had scrawled across the page of the ledger facing her drawing of the contorted body of the doll:
Finding meaning by drawing the same image over and over again.
FIERCE
Self-portrait emerges
* I am a fierce, intense little woman
* I am a helpless doll
* I am a comical vessel containing an unruly brood of thoughts and feelings
—this I MUST TAKE FURTHER !!!!
Is this my own nursery tale?
Jagged
Watchful
Grey
STIFF—girl
My world—my home & garden—a broken doll
Joy—collapse
He was moved by the desperation of these intensely private inscriptions. Had she really come to see herself as a helpless doll? A comical vessel? This tortured image of herself dismayed him. But it also fascinated him. There was something terrifyingly real about it. As if, with this poetry, if that’s what it was, she had cut into the deep anatomy of her dilemma. It was ruthless and determined. A nakedness in the images of herself that impressed him hugely. He couldn’t have written such vivid words himself. There was an honesty in it that he knew himself to be incapable of. He read over her wild scrawl several times.
The words made him wince. To think of her solitary suffering, keeping it all to herself, unable to speak to him about it. He turned the page. A drawing of the doll lying face down, as if it had fallen forward onto the ground or been roughly pushed, its face thrust into the loose surface, scumbled smudges of charcoal blurring the outlines of the figure, giving an impression that it was melting into its surroundings. The violence again. The pencilled caption: Sketch of a dead toreador. Beside the drawing, stuck onto the page, a small glossy photograph cut from a magazine. The carcass of a bull being dragged through the dust by a tractor, a chain around the buts of the bull’s horns. And a long note, written in a clear hand:
Ray told us one frosty winter evening when Robert and I were sitting with him by the hearth that the previous owner of this place was driving his tractor across the hill above the cottage when a chain he was dragging became hooked on a stump and whiplashed around his neck. He was killed on the rise above the house. I can see the stump that killed him when I stand at our front door. He had seven children. He comes into my dreams. One night I went out into the moonlight to pee and he was standing looking at the house, the chain looped around his neck, his hands holding the loose ends of the chain. He was looking directly at me. His eyes were deep and were fixed on mine. I was not afraid of him, but knew a kindred link with him and with the pain of his futile struggle. We did not exchange words, that dead father and I, but exchanged the empathy of our deepest emotion. My hero! My saviour! The abandoned Barn Doll! My child!
The dreadful cry of Lena’s anguish startled him. Sh
e had not written that dead man and I but that dead father and I. Robert thought of her own dead father who might have saved his life if he had possessed the courage of his dreams. Fathers, dead prematurely, crying out in the final days against the failure of the dream; mothers holding the keys to the cage; and children, her aborted child in the form of the discarded doll. He saw it all hopelessly knotted together in a tangle that could never be unravelled. And she had exposed it here. Made poetry of it.
He turned back to the page where Lena had left the ledger open, and stood up. He realised the pump had stopped. It must have run out of petrol. His fingers trembled as he rolled the tobacco and touched his tongue to the paper, sealing it. He lit the cigarette and drew the smoke into his lungs. Set up on the lid of the piano and across its top, and ranged along the wall under the louvres, were the souvenirs Lena had brought back from her explorations into the bush. An old sauce bottle. A rusted can with a dead bat in it, the bat black as a crow and desiccated: a bat mummy. A dry root shaped like an arm without a hand. A range of coloured stones from the creek. A black stone Aboriginal axe, its cutting edge chipped ragged. A piece of iron from a machine.
He went to the kitchen and got the fire going in the stove and put the kettle on. After he’d eaten his lunch he made a stew for the evening. Lena would push the potatoes and carrots around on her plate and maybe take a few spoonsful of the gravy.
That evening they were sitting by the hearth drinking a cup of tea after dinner. He had said nothing to her about her drawings and her poetry. The moment for him to speak of them hadn’t arrived yet when she said, ‘I’ve decided to go and visit Birte.’