War it seemed had reshaped Colts not quite as expected. Missing from his attitude, it struck Randolph as he read and re-read the mail in the hallowed biscuit tin, was any trace of the exaggerated warrior urge derived from Buckler. War as a background to places, sights and sensations – that’s what affected Colts more than the big drama he’d been raised on. Randolph prided himself somewhat paternally as one who’d turned the tide for Colts by making jackarooing possible, whereas the main cause probably was that Colts had suffered running supplies to the coast watchers – the shot he’d taken in the lung.
Something else, though. Randolph would never be able to explain how the knowledge of that shot, irreversible in damage wrought and not to be spoken about except in the code of men’s soldiering, increased a sullen, selfish, brooding certainty of attachment in Randolph himself, a possessiveness towards Colts that soured his earlier feelings from supple to unyielding.
Randolph heard regularly from Dunc Buckler. The man’s postwar obsessions dwelt on a world changed utterly from the one he’d saved, or attempted to save, as a Great War returnee and quarrelled with since. The big bogey was the Soviet Union getting the upper hand. Minerals were the alchemical key to victory – magnesite, mica, uranium, bauxite, asbestos and iron ore. Rare metals abounded in remote parts of Australia if only they could be dug out to benefit free nations in beating down Red cunning. Mention was made of those earths, very hush-hush – essential for jet plane alloys and who knew what, attractive to flying saucers wherever they came from, dancing into Buckler’s consciousness on lonely roads as they appeared to fools the world over.
Stirred by Buckler’s brainstorms, however, Randolph and his father invested in a revived mining company, Arcturus Metals N/L. Before leaving for the Centre on his first season’s prospecting, Buckler called at Homegrove to show off the result of their interest (they’d sunk five hundred pounds into the plant). He arrived in an army surplus Blitz towing a pink plywood caravan.
And sitting up in that great, lumpy, left-wheel drive cab, on the right-hand side so that she seemed to be the driver, with Buckler only an appendage to the rig-out, was Mrs Veronica Buckler with a silk organza scarf tied over her yellow straw hat, tufted, sparrow-brown hair poking out in a cheerful way.
Introductions were made. She said, ‘You’re a bit unexpected, Randolph . . .’
It would be the jaw, because people always made oblique references to its oblique preponderance.
Well, so was she unexpected – bearing no resemblance to any brilliant artist type Randolph had ever imagined. She was a small woman in Land Army overalls with a perky smile and bright red lipstick. Maybe she talked too much, that was all, delivering her observations in an interested tone of voice without noticing that nobody had asked an opinion.
‘Beauty is sooh dependent on an argument with perfection,’ was one of her maxims. It made Randolph tug his chin in thought.
They crossed to the verandah for tea. Randolph took charge organising the whiskies and teapot and biscuits, leaving his mother to the business of getting on with Veronica. Edwina Knox was a handsome, forthright woman who knew all about art through taking adult education summer schools in Albury once Tim was old enough to be left. Veronica, in a thin piping voice, disputed art education at the popular level, saying it could never touch what painters suffered alone and condensed into visions. Edwina persisted, saying that knowledgeable people were always talking about Veronica as up there with the very best, and she would like to pick through her studio and bring her chequebook with her. Veronica clapped her hands and said she was won. While the men talked about minerals, the women walked around the garden arm in arm.
After the Bucklers left, Edwina told Randolph about the arrangements in Veronica’s life, compromises based on failure and need, on convenience, submission, confusion or whatever. That Buckler was under Mrs B’s thumb was deemed evident.
An amusing letter came from Veronica describing their travels. She’d set up a sun umbrella on a salt lake, on a rocky ridge, or on a sand dune, and paint; and when she wanted Buckler for some chore or other she fired a shotgun. Buckler would come in from wherever he was poking around with sample jars and testing kits and do what she wanted.
The war over, Japan occupied, the Far East travelled and known, the half-century year was almost upon them but Colts still hadn’t yet come home.
After Japan he’d travelled some more – sailed in a ketch with two Canadians from Hong Kong to British Columbia, worked as a machinery rep in Canada and then as a truck salesman in America, shore sheep on a blizzardy mountainside in Wyoming, travelled to Mexico and arrived back via New Zealand. He was still only twenty-three years old at the end of 1949 and in the new year, to Randolph’s satisfaction, took up the offer of working as the Knoxes’ Homegrove stud agent.
The day Colts arrived at Isabel Junction on the all-stations Randolph couldn’t sit still. He was the first one there, pacing the platform in the hot, empty afternoon. At last there was a distant whistle, the altered sound of wheels crossing the river bridge, and Randolph saw Colts leaning from the dogbox carriage and waving his hat from two hundred yards off. It was going to be all right, then, the mocking smile of the kid was still there, the old Eureka easiness was still in reach for both of them, thank God, as they shook hands, pulled off each other’s hat, and crossed the road to the Five Alls Hotel to sink a schooner.
It was sales day and the bar crowded. Colts returned the shout and they got stuck into it, elbow to elbow. Standing close and summarising a good few years of work routines in the empty hills, Randolph heard a constant wheeze like a small bellows operating in Colts’s one lung.
Two hard-living men set up in an old weatherboard house in a cluster of dwellings known as Woodbox Gully. Work was one thing, sport the other. Randolph Knox (capt.) and Kingsley Colts (vice-capt.) led the Isabel XI into a clean sweep of the regional cricket championships and went through into the NSW country finals.
The top end of sheep work was show preparation and rebuilding the stud along lines fought decision by decision in favour of Randolph. The routine end was crutching, paring feet against footrot, dipping, fencing, gate mending and rabbit and dingo control. The Anglican church held fundraising drives on Homegrove where parishioners beat rabbits to death against netted fence lines. Randolph fumed about the timbered country being a breeding ground for dingoes, and so Colts paid his keep by dogging, going around with traps and getting five pounds per scalp. After a year he began visiting distant parts of the state driving a utility truck and finding new clients for Randolph’s rams advertised as Homegrove All-Purpose Doers. He made friends and began socialising away from Randolph’s patch. His innovation was to carry two rams, San Pedro and Immaculate, in a crate in the back of the ute in order to show them off better than any catalogue description or photograph. When talking about themselves Colts and Randolph said they were old Eureka hands. That seemed to take care of many attributes they lacked in common.
Edwina Knox was a devoted horsewoman. With her band of alikes – men and women all long-faced as horses and wearing worn jodhpurs and old tweed jackets – Colts took rides into the untouched bush of the coastal ranges, which Randolph disparaged for its tangled uselessness. Tim Knox from a young age rode along, a boy senseless with adventure. It reminded Colts of his own young dream. It was how Colts became attached to the Isabel as wilderness and could name every bird, small marsupial, goanna and snake, and show Randolph creatures he didn’t know existed that had lived under his nose the whole of his life, in logs or in hollows of trees. They passed up under the shadow of a cliff of rusty rocks, organ-pipe gullies and flatiron slabs said to be unclimbable, reaching three hundred feet in under the brow of Mt Knox. The great pile had never had a name, at least that any white man knew. Now they called it the Isabel Walls.
Incredible how time ran like water into the years towards thirty. Randolph watched rugby as Colts, grown rangy and headstrong, pro
ved himself a player heedless of injury, managing on his one lung, always pushing himself, turning out for district games each winter. Sometimes Randolph spent weekends skiing with friends. Those friends wheeled down from Bowral and collected him in their Triumphs and MGs. They were never part of Randolph’s world on the Isabel, for just as Randolph kept bloodlines distinct in fenced paddocks he kept his friends apart. ‘There’s goats and kings,’ he said, leaving Colts with the feeling that he was in the former category, and that Randolph’s friendship, so apparently unlimited in the way Randolph prickled with need, had limits. The Knoxes affected a feudal relationship with Isabel Junction, calling the town the village to their Sydney friends when they entertained in their Point Piper flat or at Homegrove in house parties. As Randolph refined his life away from the stud into a social set Colts’s friendships became locally rougher.
Colts enthused to Randolph about his Saturday afternoons on the Isabel blinding with cold, yellowed poplar leaves in the frozen mud of the playing fields, long blue shadows across the dirt roads on the drives home. It was when he got lucky with a ‘local doer’, as he called her, taking a hot bath at the Five Alls Hotel after a bruising, artless game. She was Sandra Turnley, the publican’s daughter, who came in, locked the door and scrubbed his back in what he winked was a Japanese pleasure. It was how Colts became a Saturday night boarder in the Five Alls, his ‘bolthole’, taking Room 17 upstairs, the one with the fireplace in the corner and the narrow iron bed where Sandra Turnley snugged in.
After Rotary on Wednesday nights a group of returned men left Randolph feeling sidelined from the only Isabel Junction activity, apart from Anglican worship, that he regularly joined. When the meetings were over he shouted a round and headed home. His midweek drinking was done alone, under a gum tree, under the stars in the teeth of a gale as wind came over the Dividing Range like an endless, flapping, flaying bloody belt.
One day Randolph decided to say something heartfelt to Colts or explode with constraint. It might be asked: what was in Randolph that he needed to fix what was working, and giving him enough, little as it was?
After a typical silence at the smoko table, Randolph cleared his throat and remarked that he’d been ungenerous in not acknowledging how Colts, in his small boat experience, would have operated behind enemy lines in ’44, not just that one time when he copped the bullet, but all through the twelve months of his New Guinea war service.
Ordinary enough to say, but did Randolph have to put his hand on Colts’s wrist as he said it, taking courage to single out courage? For moments after he should have let go, he held on. It seemed to Colts that he suffocated from the arm up, small hairs prickling.
‘Well?’
Colts responded that in jungle warfare nobody knew where enemy frontlines were, you moved through them constantly.
And from then on, simple as that, the friendship disappeared almost completely from their lives. Though as before, when something important broke through, neither of them could ever quite bring themselves to acknowledge its loss. More simply, Colts wondered what it was that had truly begun. Only from time to time did he find out. It was a few years before they had another conversation going further than a greeting. People watched them avoiding each other when they passed up and down the main street.
SEVEN
WHEN EDDIE SLIM WAS A BOY in the 1950s his father, Jack, recited a poem about a soldier who swam a frozen river to save his trapped platoon. It was printed in an anthology of the Left Book Club and translated from Russian, an episode in the Red Army’s war against the Germans on the frozen steppes.
Jack Slim knew ‘The Crossing’ by heart. Their family friend, Uncle Abe, recited it in the original. To Eddie, the Red Army’s exploits on The Steppes were more real than anything Jack had been involved in in the Red Centre, Top End and Kimberleys during the war. The setting was far from Australia, which as a battleground didn’t count, yet to a kid in the haze of childhood stories, living on the saltbush plains and seeing corrugated iron water tanks as castles and knowing dark mulga scrub as a backdrop for imagination, there lingered a wish, and it seemed a good question.
‘Was he Australian?’
‘Was he what?’ laughed Jack. ‘Struth, little mate, screw your brains in, his name was Vasily Tyorkin. Does that sound dinkum?’
‘Vaseline Tworkin . . .’
‘Give it another try.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘Like a colossus.’
Eddie crossed Vasily with Jack’s commanding officer, Major Dunc Buckler, MC, whose mythical age of exploits was in the First War, while his Second was a joke with Jack, his offsider, getting the best digs in.
When Eddie was a bit older and understood things better it was no ordinary soldier but Uncle Joe Stalin in the poem, the swimmer who stepped ashore – big waxed moustache, grandfatherly eye, gigantic overcoat held ready to wrap around him, dripping with amazing icicles.
‘Say it again,’ said Eddie, pulling the quilt up to his chin and feeling blankets go tight as Jack sat on the bed and recited lines bringing the figure up and out from under the ice, staggering to the shore cramped, paralysed, frozen but grabbed and wrapped in a Russian overcoat down to his boots and given a big shake and then sent on his way to run like hell.
In 1953 the Slims moved one-teacher-schools five hundred miles east from Pooncarie to the Isabel River district under the Great Dividing Range. The Chev Fleetmaster was loaded for the move with pots and pans, laundry baskets, books and a stretcher mattress laid over the filled-up back seat where Eddie spent the trip in comfort, dipping into a paper bag of boiled lollies and licorice allsorts. He was a teenager now, fourteen, his world expanding just as he needed it, into mountain gullies and clear-flowing creeks.
It was a cool April night after brief rain when moths changed from grubs and crawled through cracks in the walls and burned in the tall glass chimney of the pressure lamp. The moon had a closer feel on the Isabel, sailing through tatters of upland cloud that might even have rain in them. Everything there had a stronger feel to it, better.
‘Where’ve you been till you got this plum little perch?’ said a young schools’ inspector in those first months.
‘Chewing sand in the desert, sonny, so you could get promoted,’ said Jack.
He was his own worst enemy, a stubborn card-carrying commo but undeniably brilliant in the classroom, an inspiration to poor kids with no example at home. As author of rallying calls circulated by the Teachers’ Federation he was hated by the Director General in Sydney, who kept him in the bush.
‘Oh, being on the Isabel isn’t bad,’ agreed Jack, when Eddie was stirred by the place, saying he’d never leave it.
Tonight singed moths gave a charred, nutty aroma to the air and fell to their backs for an interval of sharp electric buzzing. Eddie scooped them up and busied himself with a magnifying glass while Jack looked on from the end of a table of rough-sawn pine he’d built in self-critical inspiration one weekend, and left unpainted.
‘A good one, Ed?’
‘Y’oughter see it!’
There followed a quick execution in a glass vial on a cotton pad of pure alcohol. Jack leaned close as Pamela looked over his shoulder and made encouraging noises while the legs of a scarab beetle struggled and went still.
Pamela avoided colliding with Jack in the small room. There was a charged space between them. All their attention fell on their son. Eddie liked the way they depended on him, when they fought, as the one subject they agreed on.
But they gave the feeling it would kill them if Eddie failed at whatever it was he was meant to do. This month Ed would be an entomologist, it seemed, next month – a geologist? He was at the moment when all was won or lost, according to Jack’s wisdom. Now his rock collection was building outside, blocking the laundry sump, and his geology hammer with inlaid bands of leather was wrapped in tissue paper at the back o
f a cupboard, ready as a Christmas surprise. Trust it wouldn’t end on a hillside somewhere, neglected and freckled with rust.
After the evening meal came the national news read by John Chance, heard with an attentive hush. Eddie lay on the floor with his ankles crossed, stretching closer, filtering static from heavy words and watching the green silk covering of the loudspeaker box vibrate.
Jack liked imitating the announcer’s plum but not tonight; he raised a hand to bring on concentration. Valves glowed amber, batteries leaked power from a crusty set of wires; Stalin was dead; the name of his successor, Malenkov, came stumbling into the room as if the name of a self-server could enter where it pleased.
‘Will it be all right?’ said Eddie, angling a bony shoulder. He felt a panicky concern. The feeling was that America might take the opportunity to start a war against a weakened Soviet leadership.
‘I’d say so,’ said Jack. ‘It’d better well bloody well ought to be bloody all right.’
The way Jack talked gave Stalin the power to rise from the slab, putting a stop to rot. Eddie had always lived in the shelter of that idea, but now the great man was stone-cold dead confirmed and world leaders were making their way to Moscow.
‘They’ll all be there,’ said Jack with a narrow smile, ‘singing “The Internationale” and looking for the chance to slip the knife.’ He threw back his head as if he, Jack Slim, Australian country schoolmaster, was absent from the centre of world events by a mere oversight and the mourning Soviets, handicapped, would have to march their revolution on from the command end without him.
When Colts Ran Page 10