When Colts Ran

by Roger McDonald

  Faye wasn’t so smitten by their country life, but now, thanks to a passionate love match, lived on a mission station in the wild ranges of Western Australia, a place as rough and remote as any in the world, where there were only four whites – herself, her husband Boy Dunlap, a mission mechanic and a mission nurse – and a tribe of wild blackfellows who nobody except Boy understood. So Faye wrote in love and praise of Boy Dunlap and his anthropological religion.

  In the returned men’s magazine Reveille, Buckler wrote about missionaries – ‘malarial young reverends, dithering sky pilots, poodle fakirs of the worst order, defeatist milksop hem-clingers living in the wide-open, undefended north of Australia peddling pork-pie caps and pipe-clay dreams to demoralised savages’. That was when Faye had informed him she was marrying one.

  Before Faye left Sydney, Veronica had painted her bare-headed, gold hair a halo, in a white-spotted blue dress in the garden with a branch of wattle bloom dipped over her shoulder. There were many such paintings of Faye bundled up awaiting their future: just the one of Colts.

  Faye’s letters spoke of difficulties, hardships for which her whole life had waited. She had previously been too blessed – each had been by the guardian of their own sex, leading to opposite impulses. Faye turned outwards dealing with the world, believing she went inwards to God, while Colts battled the world clambering over material reality from where he lived too much in himself.

  *

  Next morning, looking up the track from the kitchen window, Colts remembered a great sight of Buckler – a man going away the moment he was seen – heading off with a handkerchief around his neck, driving a finger-slapper grader.

  With its hard metal blade screaming against the earth, a grader had the power of returning without turning around, sending out sparks and the acrid smell of gunpowder rocks. It clanked under kurrajongs with leaves dusty in the heat as down it came into the dry creek bed and up again, scraping a path for farm lorries on limestone and quartz. A road was raised under the boy’s eyes as Buckler banged the controls, flipped levers, spun handwheels in repetition. Colts drank crushes of heat and gulps of diesel fume and noise.

  The homestead’s tennis courts were built by Buckler from forty ant hills especially so young people and their friends could use them. The last time Faye was there Colts smashed, volleyed, lobbed and backhanded with an accuracy that wiped away smiles as the three of them played cutthroat. Buckler played to win but Colts toppled him. Faye wasn’t so flash: she ran for a shot, concentrated on preparing a serve, laughed when she lost a point or received service badly, parachuted to earth after missing a high lob and stood there, giggling, just for the fun of it. That was Limestone Hills in the days when Buckler stayed put.

  Swallows nested in the kitchen and the smell of the fat-stained boards and old iron cooking pots swam round the boy sitting with a breakfast cuppa and reading Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World and waiting for his toast. Afterwards Veronica laid out harness along the verandah stones for soaping and mending.

  He looked up at her.

  ‘Those horses are immortal,’ he said.

  No need to ask which horses, or who coined the phrase. Buckler and his big-noting. They both understood where they were going, then, on this wartime excursion released from ties, what the first target of their march would be – a triangular paddock far away.

  Dunc Buckler’s Clydesdales were kept on that reserve of the Darling River, downstream from Wilcannia, two hundred miles away, eating thistles and rare green pick. They were as old as Moses, wiry whiskers on rubbery lips, shaggy hairs matted over their hoofs. They had the stars for company and visits from a swagman to see they weren’t ever bogged, foundered or caught in wire. Veronica’s old tin caravan stood nearby, shuttered tight against snakes and mice. A painted arch gave shade protection. Old George and Mrs Dinah, they were called, released to a life of greater ease. Last seen in ’39, they’d snuffled their nosebags and ambled closer, giving Colts the feeling of hoofs about to stand on him, a delicious fear that he encouraged while curling his toes inside his boots.

  The best idea was to take the truck but the petrol they found was almost all siphoned away, so off they set on the motorbike with a cluster of spare containers and a canvas waterbag. Colts took the controls wearing dust goggles, Veronica huddling in the sidecar protected by cushions. They had bags, boxes and bottles stacked, everything roped or wedged for the ride west, both intently hopeful of make or break. With stubborn ceremonial pride devoid of reason, Colts wore his cricket boots – a pair of once-white Niblicks bought from a man named Kippax in a store hung with bats and pads and pyramids of cherry-red stitched balls. Those boots charged to Buckler left a distinct impression of Colts in his footprints, heart shapes riveted with studs. He found patches of smooth sand and made perfect stencils of them as they went along.

  The small towns they came to had one long road unravelled at either end by thistly stockyards, tin shacks and smoking garbage dumps, with a motor garage, a stock agent, a bank, a school, a police station, a pub with a long, high verandah, a few lank peppercorn trees, drifting dust, iron roofs catching glare and corrugated water tanks waiting for rain.

  Talk was of bombs wrecking towns far to the north. Colts imagined Japs penetrating as far as these drought-stricken districts, peering into mirages, kicking at shadows under trees, attacking sheep.

  The motorbike continued on its wrenching way, Colts erect at the controls, observed by crows and circling kites.

  A dim, relieved shadow stole over the plains and stars pricked the sky. First night, they camped on a showground, second night on a claypan. Colts threw brush on a fire making a bright roar. He studied Buckler’s letters under the lamp of constellations, their position markers dangling. The cartoon drawings in the margins of the letters he’d always believed would make indicators of Buckler’s location, but the idea was hopeless. There was the fat cook, Abe, the skinny sergeant, Jack Slim, and stout Buckler himself under a big hat visible as a pair of boots and a pipestem.

  Veronica said they were simplistic scribbles worthy of one-track minds and carried on scooping a hip-hole for herself in the dirt, laying a canvas over blankets to protect them from dew. Buckler had lived that way for years, carving bush tracks with or without her, often without her, living half their married life away and coming back into towns that weren’t hers but, oh, he seemed to have made his own so cosily now.

  Sounds in the night made Colts sit up from his blankets.

  ‘Whaassat?’

  Curlew, vixen, wild-pig-grunt, wandering cow, tawny frogmouth, earth-tremor, shooting star.

  ‘It’s all right, Kings. Nothing to fear. No reason to be. Look at that sky!’

  Colts peered from his swag and saw her sitting in a light that seemed to shine from her like dew. Whatever he denied in himself spoke for him. She said, ‘You must go back, one day, and visit your mother’s grave,’ and his answer was, ‘No.’ Pushing himself back into sleep, he woke again, and there was Veronica still going on.

  ‘A beautiful young woman, gay, free, social, full of life, never put-upon, always willing, humorous, naughty, a fountain of laughter. My darlingest friend.’

  The words laid onto him thickly. Her darlingest friend who’d introduced her to Buckler, and so on.

  The hour before dawn was enchanted. Insects clicked and there was a regretful thrill in the last of stars as the old world, the night world, holding such sway over everything, was beaten back to its lair and Colts’s eyelids drooped. He knew the day had truly begun when the first fly got in his ear and another one tickled his eyelashes.

  The fire crackled and Veronica appeared at Colts’s side with a mug of tea. When she brushed his tangled hair with her fingers he was too sleepy to knock her hand away. He fell asleep again. Or so he pretended.

  Buckler said in a camp, stay in your swag, someone will bring you tea, stay longer you�
�ll get the whole box and dice, the chops and eggs, fried damper. So it proved with Veronica.

  At last they reached the bank of the Darling River, a scene of desolation. Bleached bones were scattered under trees. Hide and hair scrawled in shifting dust along sagging wire fences. Kangaroos and sheep lay dead of thirst at parched turkey’s nest dams as windmills rustled and groaned. A plague had been through and the plague was a worse drought than the one they knew. Australia was a dry roasting bone of a country tossed away by time. At the corner of the triangular paddock where the roof of the old caravan was sighted, the carcases of Old George and Mrs Dinah were found, the two great horses stretched with dry hide where they had fallen into their last grins.

  ‘It’s not them,’ said Colts, remembering love he had for named animals.

  ‘Stop that always denying, Kings, it’s wearing thin.’

  He didn’t reply, and she was left once again with understanding of him softer than thistledown in her bruised heart.

  The only living creatures were goats – a herd of big-horned, dapple-bred animals making their way through dead trees on the riverbank, disdaining shortages and getting by on pride. Their smell was rank urine on a twist of breeze.

  ‘My goats,’ Veronica called them.

  ‘You can have ’em,’ said Colts.

  ‘Your goats,’ she taunted back at him, and he’d never tell her how when he’d looked through her studio window and seen that goat and that boy, how he’d loved himself in his collarless shirt and braces, chin up eyeing back at the painted eyes transfixing him. He’d been made a hero, taking that exchange of looks as an assurance of time at his feet like dirty clothes he’d never need to pick up.

  The padlock on the caravan dangled open and tinned food left inside was gone. Piles of old newspapers were stained by marsupial mice, their nest of leaves neat as a whirlpool, but soiled. Veronica’s painting of a lovers’ arbour done the year of her marriage to Buckler, 1931, was blistered and cracked.

  She cursed the swagman who was left to mind the outfit. Buckler had promised his care.

  Colts went around cooeeing and then went to the waterbag and drank tepid, fibrous water.

  Veronica found the swagman when she went to wash in the billabong. She covered her mouth. He seemed to have arranged himself with some deliberation in a cleft of eroded bank. Pads of dumped leaves matted his head and shoulders. The gun, what her father called a fowling-piece, well named, had fallen from his grip when the shell was fired, leaving his shattered face thankfully turned away. He was a clothed skeleton.

  Colts heard her cry and came looking.

  ‘Don’t look,’ she warned.

  Suicide was expected of mad hatters and lonely figures in the bush, but the details were unwanted.

  ‘A dead body,’ Colts so very needlessly stated. His gaze, like a wary fly resisting its need, came and went but never too close.

  Veronica spoke a prayer for the dead, in the same breath thinking such inert, angled limbs could never be imagined but needed to be studied in this lonely place, nose wrinkled against the stench. She wanted pencils she didn’t have on her, and lucky for her shame. ‘Hallowed be thy name, thy will be done . . .’

  Colts stepped away from Veronica’s side and peered closer over the bank. ‘Ashes to ashes, that is for sure,’ said the trembling boy. Dead men were a separate matter from the fine singing soldiers of human memory Dunc Buckler wrote about, yodelling and chucking grenades at Huns.

  Veronica had no answer except to hope, as Colts once expressed it – a small boy longing for a mother’s love – that they would all gather in heaven.

  It was what he’d said one day, she insisted on reminding him, reducing them all to tears. ‘Such a wise little man, so beautiful.’

  ‘That’s bunkum and bull, and you know it,’ said Colts.

  ‘You were seven, dear, almost eight, the age of divine reason in a child, and what can I say?’ She reached for his hand. ‘That you were wrong? You were not wrong. Heaven is a memory and a promise.’

  ‘Bloody palaver,’ he spat.

  ‘Buckler’s words,’ corrected Veronica. ‘What are yours?’

  Colts had the motorbike running when Veronica came back. They had not unpacked. Now he switched the engine off and watched as Veronica stacked dry thistles and parched leaves under the caravan and hauled dead branches over and struck a match.

  ‘What are you doin’?’

  ‘Making a fire.’

  ‘You’re not going to burn it?’

  He tried too late to stop her.

  ‘That’s ours!’

  The flames drove him back with his arms crossed over his face. The fire wouldn’t spread because there was no grass to burn, just bare dirt everywhere, although dirt itself might explode from the emotion he put into watching.

  ‘Wait till I tell him!’

  Veronica danced around the burning caravan waving her hat. ‘Tell him, if you can find him,’ she said.

  The caravan speared through with sparks, flame spiralling at first and then going straight up and making a chimney roar.

  Colts walked down the track away from the blaze, looking back to check on the caravan as he’d done when they last left, making sure the roof was still there, a sentimental tactic stamping images to recall when he was stuck back at school. The difference now was a smoking curve held by spindly uprights getting charred black and wrapped in sheets of flame. The corrugations rose like an aeroplane wing, wafting but never taking off. Through stacks of heat he saw Veronica going to the bike, and so he kept walking, turning his shoulder on her until she caught up.

  He climbed into the sidecar and wedged himself steady with cushions. It was soon dark as she drove. The headlight flounced ahead like a dying torchbeam but always finding a tree or a bush.

  ‘Can’t you go faster?’ Colts urged, but only because he didn’t want her to know he hated being taken away like this, dependent, stunned. She kept stealing glances at him, easing her shoulders around and angling her neck as they drove, and wondered about a feeling, if it was true motherliness, which she had never strongly had. The boy had not screamed and threatened her so much as treated her, not coldly, but reservedly, saving passionate attachment for the real mother he barely knew and who awaited him six feet under, and giving his male ardour to that heroic goat, Dunc Buckler.

  The ingratitude of children she was feeling anyway. That, at least, was an authentic touch of the parental fate.

  In Colts’s mind the triangular paddock by the river wasn’t how they had left it, destroyed. The caravan was replaced by a shining turnout on four pneumatic tyres inflated hard, with new wood and bright copper nails, and those horses, Old George and Mrs Dinah, displayed freckled lips and foaming spittle as they had when hauling loads, great with leaning life and hoofs biting forward.

  Just by Veronica lighting the fire and destroying the lot, the horses returned with their immortality intact. Colts wondered if Veronica knew the mare of the couple still wore a perky straw hat. And she did. And she did.

  Later that night a town slept, tin roofs shining under a zinc moon, silent except for dogs jerking on chains and drunks under a tree on the track to the blacks’ camp there, the riverbank plunging down a clay slide to cracked mud and smoky camp fires.

  They went over the rattling-board bridge and slept by the roadside a mile out, returning next morning for Veronica to wash and groom herself on the riverbank, to bargain for rationed petrol at the town garage and speak to the police.

  When details were given, the circumstances of the swagman explained, the long-faced sergeant said: ‘I knew this was on the cards with that gent. I’ll have to mention the fire you lit, Mrs Buckler. There might of been things of his in it.’

  ‘There weren’t things though.’

  The Sarge lowered his voice.

  ‘You must hav
e had a reason for it.’

  ‘Does the name Molyneaux mean anything to you?’

  The Sarge angled his head. ‘Yes. But he’s deceased.’

  ‘Mine’s out this way working – a friend, an associate of my husband, a pale sort of young fellow, book-keeping on stations.’

  ‘The Molyneaux I knew was Joe Mole, as we called him – the little skipper.’

  ‘That was Des Molyneaux’s father,’ Veronica nodded.

  ‘A brave man. There must be good in the younger version, then?’

  ‘He keeps in touch by mail,’ said Veronica emphatically, ‘and doesn’t always sign what he writes, leaving no return address.’

  ‘That swaggie, the returned man, Major Buckler’s caretaker –’ said the Sarge. ‘A sad case, came from a good family.’

  ‘There was a steel plate in his head,’ said Colts.

  ‘Messines or Kemmel, I believe,’ agreed the Sarge.

  Then the Sarge’s wife said, ‘There’s a postie in Broken Hill called Molyneaux.’

  ‘Postie is a good one,’ said Veronica.

  ‘He delivers to my sister and plays the harmonica if she’s feeling off.’

  ‘That’s him,’ said Veronica, ‘purveyor of questionable emotions.’

  All she wanted was for Molyneaux to look her in the eye, confirm his queasy truth with bold assertion – ‘making a run’, ‘released from ties’ – and then she would seek counsel of an Adelaide lawyer, an old friend, and find her way forward in the changed condition of her time on earth.

  The police wife invited them through to the residence and gave them mugs of tea, thick-lipped government cups on heavy saucers with Anzac biscuits baked to toffee hardness.

  Veronica asked for a road report.

  ‘Same conditions as always,’ said the Sarge. ‘Dry. Not even a trickle, never a lick to lay the dust. The world’s gone off its lid, you dunno what’s coming next, only drought’s a cert.’