When Colts Ran

by Roger McDonald

Faye had been talking. ‘Watch him.’

  Each day Colts was stronger on grilled cutlets and mashed pumpkin, on cheese pie and shepherd’s pie, a style of cooking Rusty brought from her pubs. Up and down the track and into the dry creekbed Colts walked, along the low rocky ridge of hardy plants, scraping their seed-heads in the dust. Of course it wouldn’t last, but while it held, this was the life and the definition of the life in Faye’s estimation.

  These days a sealed road led into town, to a clinic where Colts was treated for the leg ulcers he barely noticed.

  They heard the pallid cuckoo calling over paddocks of wheat sown by a sharefarmer who watched the wheat wither to nothing. They turned back time, remembering the first steps they took through the wire gate with the grimy spring that slammed back resisting sheep getting through. It was all Colts remembered, he said. The two of them back together. Entering there.

  ‘No, there was somewhere else . . .’ said Faye. ‘And you promised to come with me.’

  Mornings were bad, evenings a test, Colts dodging the cocktail hour hanging over him. They had pineapple juice topped with cold ginger beer in schooner glasses. A line of foam was left on Colts’s upper lip. It looked like the moustache worn by a handsome old Greek café owner, said Rusty. Such a man the last and greatest love of her life.

  So Buckler had a son. Faye had tracked him down this far, making the friendship with Rusty. The question was, had Veronica ever known about a family hived off, and the answer was that she had – of course she had – though she did not ever speak of it. Money sorely needed by Rusty at various times of need had come through from Buckler’s account. He didn’t have a red cent after his mining ventures drained him. So it was all from her.

  They talked about 1942–43, when this had begun, the creation of who they were. Buckler had been on a foray when he left Colts at Eureka, some wild notion about investigating mysterious sounds – Faye told the story for Rusty, Colts listened, correcting this fact or that – rumbles of mining machinery reported coming from the broken ranges and long sea inlets away to the north, possibly from Japanese landing parties doing God knew what. Buckler crossed the continent to investigate. But there was nothing there, nobody there except three white people – Buckler’s own estranged wife, Veronica, his ward of legacy, Faye, her husband Boy Dunlap – and a headcount of ninety-three blackfellows of supremely doubtful loyalty, as Buckler characterised them in the report he wrote to the army chiefs who ignored it.

  No doubt Buckler always loved Rusty in the stronger way, the wanting way, but she wouldn’t have him. Only those visits sometimes, when he saw Fred. How Veronica must have loved him to be satisfied with him beat the two women at the level of reason but not of the wanting heart.

  Had he ever come back east, that last time they went bush together? It was a question of interest along the lines of all unsolved disappearances. Faye brought out maps and Rusty perched her magnifiers on the tip of her nose, Colts peering over their shoulders and saying very little. When Buckler left the camp that day, they wondered, had he gone through the deserts to reach Rusty, to see Fred a last time? If so, it would have been an abandonment of Veronica, a piece of old-age nuttiness, inconceivable to consider even in a man attuned to a double-serving life. No, it was not to be considered.

  Yet they considered it – the two old magpies, Faye and Rusty, as they gave each other foot massages in the window seat, did the washing up together and went about the droughty garden in the spirit of long-lost sisters.

  Fred always said it was possible, reported Rusty – sometimes in the early years between Buckler’s visits he said he’d seen him in the flesh when he wasn’t supposed to be there. Fred’s earliest childhood had been a catalogue of imagined events interspersed with the rare enough too-real ones. Buckler influenced his imagination, made him what he was, a show-off loving attention and getting it without going to the extremes Buckler had gone to in two world wars and the contested peace between them. Since turning to architecture putting it into physical shapes, dwellings, shelters.

  ‘No,’ said Colts sharply, breaking a silence.

  The women looked over at him, to where he stood forgotten in the room, sorting photographs from old shoeboxes and arranging them for Faye to decide which to paste in an album.

  ‘“No”? What do you mean?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Buckler never went very far. Look at these.’

  They were taken at Boy Dunlap’s funeral. Colts fanned the photos over the table. Faye had gone around snapping people she’d known over most of her lifetime, from many far-flung communities, outstations and bush camps, catching them as they came into the place on the flatboards of trucks and clinging to various doorless cars – old men with prophetic beards, jelly-fat women sitting on the ground cross-legged and laughing, kids running up to the camera and splaying out their limbs, pulling faces, throwing wide grins. And there in the background of one of those shots could be seen the chassis of a vintage Land Rover, Buckler’s – hauled in from some side road among the trees. Desert oaks Colts imagined, a circle of them, the wind mournful in the needles of the branches but such a wind as would allow a man to tuck his skull under his arm and rise up and ride into the night sky.

  Colts was down at the dry creek a day later when a car drove in. Dust billowed over him and drifted away. When he got back to the house a painting hung on the verandah wall. Colts stopped and looked. Indelibly stared, dumbstruck and sober. A corner post was in the painting and it held up the roof of the real house in the actual garden of Limestone Hills where he stood imagining himself back into the painting he’d sold for a song: Goats.

  ‘An anonymous benefactor,’ said a man wearing a beret, stepping from the shadows of the grape arbour, ‘wants you to have it, Mr Colts.’

  Colts peered at the visitor, the man with that jarringly dislocated angle of jaw, with that long, sharp, weatherworn face of moral authority, freakishly sharp of nose and protruding chicken-chest, last seen in the street outside a small-town bakery.

  ‘You?’ he challenged.

  ‘No, if it was up to me, Colts, me,’ the man stepped closer, trembling-lipped, dropping his voice a couple of tones so that what was said would pass only between the two of them, ‘I would keep this great picture for myself.’

  ‘Hovell.’

  ‘Colts.’

  Faye asked Hovell to drive them in his robust car and insisted on Kings taking the front passenger seat. It was not yet obvious to Faye that for the duration of their drive, which wasn’t far, the two men weren’t going to talk. Down a rutted road, up a rutted hill. The grave Colts had always believed was far from Limestone Hills was close.

  Midafternoon and Hovell’s all-wheel drive navigated the track leading out to the abandoned cemetery on the rocky ridge where Faye had seen her mother buried long ago. A brave little girl wearing a seersucker frock, her hair pinned back by tortoiseshell combs, she had taken on so much.

  She led Colts to the broken, weed-strewn gravestone, but when he began weeping she stepped back. Goats had been through eating everything. When Kings sat on the gravestone sobbing, kicking the bitter earth, she said nothing but went over to the only tree offering shade, a peppercorn where she unpacked Rusty’s picnic hamper and poured tea from a thermos for herself and Hovell.

  ‘He’ll be a while yet, I think,’ she said.

  Author’s Note

  Early parts of this work appeared in Best Australian Stories 1999 (Melbourne, 1999); the Monthly (September 2005); Where the Rivers Meet: New Writing from Australia (Manoa, Hawaii, Winter 2006); Making Waves: Ten Years of the Byron Bay Literary Festival (2006); the Bulletin, Summer Reading Edition (December 2006 – January 2007); Best Australian Stories 2007 (Melbourne, 2007); and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 (New York, 2008). Acknowledgement is made to the editors concerned: Peter Craven, Frank Stewart, Mark Tredinnick, Marele Day, Ashley Hay, Robert Drewe and Laura Furman. Quota
tions attributed to Dunc Buckler on pages 7 and 215 are from Soldier In Battle (1940) by G.D. Mitchell (1894-1961). Thanks to John and Gwen Bucknall for being part of this story’s search for itself in bush camps and conversations over the years; to Bill Gammage for a resonant reference; to Jim Morgan for more than an anecdote; to Trevor Shearston for shining a light on the manuscript when needed most; and to Susie Fisher, with love, for inspiration in, and beyond, these pages.

  About the Author

  Roger McDonald was born at Young, New South Wales, and educated at country schools and in Sydney. His novels include 1915, winner of the Age Book of the Year, Slipstream, Rough Wallaby, Water Man and The Slap. His account of travelling the outback with a team of New Zealand shearers, Shearers’ Motel, won the National Book Council Banjo Award for non-fiction. His bestselling novel Mr Darwin’s Shooter was awarded the New South Wales, Victorian and South Australian Premiers’ Literary Awards, and the National Fiction Award at the 2000 Adelaide Writers’ Week. The Ballad of Desmond Kale won the 2006 Miles Franklin Award and South Australian Festival Prize for Fiction. A long story that became part of When Colts Ran was awarded the O. Henry Prize in 2008.