Janelle had a way of looking dismayed if not depressed, which stirred Colts’s feelings as he stood at the front gate of the plain old weatherboard house extending his goodbyes before he went up to the Five Alls to slake his thirst. The house purchase, when she learned of it, distanced her. She felt uncomfortable with it. The crossbow arrived and Colts sat at home putting it together, putting it on top of a cupboard. The moustache came off and the moleskins went back on.
Interest rates climbed that year, bank managers looked grim; and Colts needed to trade something to keep hold of the mortgage and did, getting offered money for something he owned thanks to Randolph as go-between. It was the painting: Goats.
A man wanted a Veronica Buckler, said Randolph – regarded it as a rare prize: ‘Yours is a period piece, in its own strange way.’
Well, so it is, thought Colts, experiencing sulky over-familiarity with the ’40s style that Randolph carried on about. ‘Take it away,’ he said. Damon Pattison was there to hear the summation as Colts looked at Goats for the last time.
Colts was no connoisseur when it came to styles but knew the decade for its harsh light; its hot, thin shade, through which he sometimes still stumbled, angry and dismayed, drinking from a fibrous waterbag. There he was. All prophesied. Now for his year of changes.
The buyer was Randolph’s loud friend Ted Merrington, who trawled through the ranges impressing the wizened with largesse, calling on his monkey-faced twin sons with their crane-equipped ten-tonner to haul out old tractors and whatever else they could seize from under blackberry bushes and from garbage gullies and ship to Red China. Merrington played the game of old-school tie with bullying self-interest. Randolph loved that game in the sheep-bitten hills.
In Colts’s Woodbox Gully cottage the absence of Goats, a pale rectangle on the wall, made Colts see it clearer. As soon as he pocketed the cheque he felt a door open in the sky. If he’d felt like pleasing Randolph and driving through the desert in a truck with swags and billies, as Randolph kept urging him, he didn’t now. This was a release, as if he’d come somewhere to find the vision that drew him. It was an airy openness of release, a deep-drawn clean breath.
His reply to a note from Pamela saying she’d be down on the seventeenth was unusual in that he replied at all. Their habit was that she told him and she came. Not this time, however. Never again.
There were a number of possible reactions to what she’d said when she said she knew what it was like to be truly loved, or something like it. Colts might indeed have asked her what she’d meant, but didn’t. Just felt strangled when he felt her asking for more. So he wrote to her for a change.
Blunt, humiliated, stung and goodbye were Colts’s astounding words, his expressed feelings in a Lettergram responding to her proposed seventeenth arrival – a Lettergram being a pre-stamped piece of dismal cardboard post-office stationery available at less than the price of a standard stamp as long as no extra pages were included.
Colts’s outburst was a surprise, and over and done in his few scratched lines. Lack of any earnest point, but a buried strength, a presence, was what had drawn Pamela to him in the year of changes when they began. Now she found him diminished. This blow was ungenerous of him. His letter hurt.
‘Truly loved.’ What did that mean? She’d meant that she loved him, couldn’t the old fool see it, however undeserving he might think that was. It had come out otherwise. And now this.
Now she wasn’t so sure. But that didn’t stop her crying into her pillow for what seemed like weeks, before she dried her eyes and resumed her visits to the Junction, staying down the other end of town and managing to avoid Colts just as Randolph had in a previous cycle of withdrawal and known to all. Here were two more strangers to each other in the puzzle of life.
Shakespeare in Schools arrived every September, Randolph its local patron. There was never a season like the first nor an actor as promising as Fred Donovan. Randolph ‘followed’ Donovan, keeping track of his name on Sydney playbills and architectural write-ups until he was told he was gone overseas.
‘Wonderful,’ said Randolph. ‘To the RSC?’
‘No, to New Zealand. Building mountain huts.’
Randolph suggested they see the show in its new configuration and Colts surprised him by agreeing. He was apparently prepared to brave a school hall if Damon would like to come. Violent swordplay appealed to the boy, as stage competed with film for an audience, Shakespeare being the Sam Peckinpah of the 1600s according to roneographed Teachers’ Notes placed on each chair. Colts leafed through them uncomprehendingly. Damon sat between Colts and Randolph, the latter explaining plot points in bad breath. Afterwards Randolph took Damon onto the stage to finger the gore of blue jelly where Cornwall gouged out Gloucester’s eye.
As if to prove that Colts’s intentions with Janelle were honourable he woke one morning in the arms of a woman named Sylvie. They had their own bar stools in the Five Alls where the bar dog-legged into a corner. Colts liked Sylvie’s close-set gimlet eyes and thin lips, her complaining directness over getting what she wanted. Sylvie brought out in Colts a variation of lust matched to her country shirts and skinny jeans all somewhat suggestive of Janelle. Married men never had such selfish luxury as Colts took for a bachelor’s reward with Sylvie. And get this, Pamela Slim: the word ‘bachelor’ was out of date as the result of women taking men on, relieving them of choice. Colts lay back, scratching his chest hair and ruminating on existence. Love with Pamela had never had much to do with sex, a side dish. With Sylvie it was the whole saddle of mutton.
On Christmas Day that year Colts drove down to Veronica and Buckler’s place on the Isabel Estuary, supplying farm-cured ham from a pig fattened in a compound built of corrugated iron and star pickets, erected at the far end of Alan Hooke’s house paddock on the edge of town. He took Janelle and Damon with him. They sang ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ and Damon counted all the dead animals on the road with exact arithmetic.
Janelle teased Colts frankly: ‘You and Sylvie – do you actually do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘You know, “it”.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think – uh oh.’ She laughed.
With Janelle realising that Colts might not be too old for a rumpty-pump, her manner changed. She was full of affectionate, joshing humour. She felt safer with him and leaned on his shoulder. It made no sense to Colts, except it was what he was trying to say to Janelle through his dealings with Sylvie, when he paraded them to her.
Janelle gave Colts an expensive fine-weave print shirt in an American size and boxed in cellophane. Colts crackled the packaging in his large hands, feeling tides of emotion he was unable to comprehend. Janelle advised him he was wasting his time with Sylvie, which baffled his hopes yet again.
They wore paper hats, blew whistles, spoke to Faye and Boy Dunlap by radio telephone hook-up. After the gigantic reality of childhood there was always the lesson of ordinariness to be borne on Christmas Day. Buckler was eighty-nine that year, you’d never know it. His old-time physical vigour was pouched and belted slacker, but not by much. He’d always worn his trousers above his navel like Tweedledum and his flannel slippers had cuts in the sides like fishes’ gills, to protect his bunions. Gone deaf, he shouted as if his head was in a bucket, so it was better to let him monologue his way along than get a word in. Driving the brown Bedford, stamping the clutch, he kept his arms, solar plexus and thighs strong over thousands of miles of bush-bashing every other northern dry season. Next time he’d take the Land Rover. All his old mates were dead. Next dead was the next lot: Hammond Pringle was dead, de Grey, the foreigner Abe and so on. Buckler still wore the old felt hat. He still wore the stained neckerchief against dust and sweat. He still appeared in Colts’s dreams, hung on his bones like a giant. His daytime power was long since reduced to a bunch of stories, repetitively told. For these, Colts had been thrown
down and left to make his way on the earth among a bunch of rural live-alikes.
Colts went outside for a smoke and a look at the stars. From away over behind the dunes he could hear the surf thumping. He supposed Janelle saw him in Cuban heels and tight blue jeans, wearing a Stetson: so let her, he smiled. He changed into his new shirt. In April there’d be the ride in memory of Edwina Knox, and Tim Knox urging Colts to saddle up for old times’ sake. Janelle would be coming along. When Colts came back into the room he’d missed taking out pins and a cardboard collar stiffener, which made them all laugh. Janelle took them out for him.
Janelle came from the horse world at Pullingsvale where polo and polocrosse, rival codes, ruled the calendar year only just holding off from open warfare in mutual derision. As a young girl she’d been seduced to the polocrosse side from pony club with her cousins, the Frizells, sticking to polo. Cud Langley was in the campdrafting, country-and-western corner chasing calves through narrow posts with masterly disdain on ponies just a little bit undersized for his frame. Cud was national campdraft champion and attended by a succession of girl stablehands among whom Janelle had won first place after sitting on a railing fence with six others, waiting to be chosen just nine months before Damon was born.
Damon proved a willing disciple as Buckler turned the pages of the Illustrated History of the Great War, describing the firepower of dreadnoughts and the deadly exactness of sniper fire. Then it was all off to bed. Colts woke from dreamlessness to see Buckler in striped pyjamas, standing out in the kikuyu grass emptying his bladder and coughing like a loose crankshaft.
Afterwards, Colts could not sleep and turned on the reading lamp. In the sleep-out Buckler had shelves of books, papers, maps and photographs, tumbling onto the bed and out across the floor. Colts found a pamphlet, Shakespeare for Schools, with a section written by Randolph’s star, Fred Donovan. Colts frowned, he was never a reader, but read this much and fell asleep at the end.
A king went along separating himself from his kingdom, thrown up in a flood of clods of soil and tufts of grasses ripped from fields of Britain.
Lear was giving his rule away, wishing cares and business from his old age, conferring interest of territory on younger strengths in desire to crawl unburdened toward death.
He promised his first daughter, Goneril, shadowy forests and champains riched, plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meadows. His second daughter, Regan, was promised an ample third, no less in space, validity and pleasure than that conferred on Goneril. They answered beautifully to his foolishness, the pair of them rhyming doves of flattery. But when he asked his youngest, sweetest daughter, Cordelia, for her pledge of love to draw a third share more opulent than her sisters’, she baulked with nothing to say. Nothing!
Nothing would come of nothing, said Lear, and asked Cordelia to speak again. When she spoke, it was to regret her inability to heave her heart into her mouth.
For some reason, when Colts woke, a memory or the expression of a memory was what he had. Never had he heaved his heart into his mouth. He knew he loved Janelle, but she was many years his junior and the idea felt tragic and naive. He’d paid a price in being ungenerous to Pamela. She wrote, finally, and told him so: ‘How dare you,’ etc. ‘It was all going so nicely,’ etc. ‘I don’t understand,’ etc.
Shimmering off into the square of Colts’s fading dream was the emptied frame of Goats. He was anxious that Veronica not ask about it. As far as Veronica knew, Goats remained in pride of place on his walls in Woodbox Gully.
Veronica described Limestone Hills to Janelle. ‘This man, your friend, was a peerlessly lovely boy. He lived in a place where dryness pulled moisture from the soil and dust exploded in mares’ tails on white dirt roads.’ She was describing her own painting of course, her favoured colours and textures. Colts clamped his eyes shut, praying she wouldn’t name the name, Goats.
‘Do you ever go back there?’ asked Janelle. ‘To Limestone Hills?’
‘It’s in the hands of a sharefarmer,’ said Veronica. ‘Paddocks, machinery, the lot. Dunc takes his rent, except for a few fenced acres, the graveyard, under separate title.’
The both of them, for some reason, looked at Colts when Veronica said that.
Outside Colts’s childhood window, in that sweep of limestone country belched by drought, trees died in thousands in the 1940s in patterns like old worn carpet. Veronica had stitched them to canvas with rapid jabs of her brush. He’d set his face to the future, whatever it would bring.
FOURTEEN
ON A COOL DESERT MORNING in the bloom of great age after Buckler had eaten his breakfast of oaten bran, nut mix and chopped dried fruit on a gritty tin plate, swilled tea from an enamelled mug, cleaned his teeth with a shredded twig, and gone for a good healthy bog in the dunes, he cranked the Land Rover, waved his hat from the driver’s window and charged off.
It was for his usual circuit of the minerals’ map, Geiger counter crackling, radio direction-finder turning as he rotated its small black handle through a hole in the vehicle roof.
At four that afternoon Veronica, a decade younger than he was, a stringy old bird, active physically and mentally sharp, banged off the shot letting Buckler know she was impatient for her canvases to be bundled and the camp ordered for the night – water drawn, wood fetched – these being their afternoon routines on their desert forays, all of which she was mostly capable of continuing on her own except their bargain was otherwise. She made coffee and waited, the quart pot simmering in the ashes. It wasn’t the .410 gauge bird gun gifted from her father she used; it was the heavy centre-fire rifle of American make that Buckler employed against bull camels entering the camp. She lugged it between rocks, holding the butt against a buried stone and boomed the signal in the direction he’d gone. The fat, dangerous slug rose Sputnikwards.
No return, the shot brought only intensification of wind, loneliness, sand whispering over wheeltracks. There was no messenger of Buckler’s daily schedule – no sign of his dog, that scabby-coated emblem of man trotting into the camp before him.
A wind came up even stronger, cold and bleak as ever they blew in desert winters, lifting the sand like a floating bedsheet, stinging the embers from the fire around Veronica’s ankles as she scanned the dark. There was a radio schedule due at nine next morning and nothing to be done till then except wait. Sitting up in her swag, she later told Colts, sleepless, peering at every shape.
On her return east she gave her account and Colts wondered, was the gap in the stars Buckler standing watching, the moan in the wind his crate returning, the voice in the wind the conversation interrupted in a man’s life, fractured and never quite smashed, never quite suspended and never quite finished in its demand for an ear lent?
Colts had a recurring dream of Buckler telling him to pull up his socks. It seemed that death and disappearance restored his old power.
It showed in his face, Veronica giving him a long considering stare: ‘It’s not over yet for you, is it, poor boy . . .’
The boy as referred to, Colts, had turned fifty-eight that year.
Next day the wind blew even stronger, Veronica said, and a promised plane was heard but not seen. A full sixty hours after the alarm went out, the Cessna from Marble Bar landed and the search party started. The police wanted to know if Buckler had listened to forecasts, as you’d need to be an idiot not to know what was coming in the way of windstorms. Anyone wanting to cover their tracks could not have chosen a better time. The search was extended but Buckler’s truck was not found and the man’s dog likewise.
Talk about ghosts and their whimsical power of growth and destruction – Buckler’s disappearance was more than unsettling. It broke a way of thinking over Colts’s brain like a jug of iced water. It shook him out of unmastered routines. Strange to say, he stopped drinking.
At the memorial service at St Stephen’s Church, Macquarie Street, six months after the even
t, Colts’s eyes wrenched around expecting the doorhandles to be banged open and the man alive to walk in. Veronica seemed to have the same feeling but not about Buckler. ‘There are some people,’ she said, ‘who might try and take advantage of my grief.’ Colts had no idea what she meant. Among the scattering of twenty or thirty people, he knew few there. The minister read Psalm 23. A piper played ‘Flowers O’ the Forest’. The congregation sang ‘Abide With Me’. A bunch of old soldiers tottered under the load of their George V medals. Lucky there was no pallbearer detail to challenge brittle bones. Yet with no coffin people hardly knew where to look. Then a stocky, balding man of around forty, wearing a yellow-striped seersucker suit and a sporty bow tie, came from the back of the church carrying a small twist of flowers, went forward, bent to one knee at the communion rail, placed his offering next to Veronica’s wreath on centre stage and departed up past the pulpit and out the vestry door without turning around. Veronica sighed, almost a hiss but maybe a sigh of relief. ‘Who was that?’ said Colts. There was something about the angle of shoulders that gave his memory a tug, a drinker’s shadowy recall.
When Colts Ran Page 21