Stone Country

by Nicole Alexander

  The wounded buffalo was panting and blowing, setting dark eyes on him from over the top of Nugget’s body. Ross grunted with effort as he reached for the spare pistol holstered near the saddle. The trigger was steel-cold as the cow lowered its head, readying to charge.

  Ross lowered the gun to his side and waited.

  Part Four

  1929–1939

  Chapter 50

  Darwin

  Ross tugged at the straps tying him to the railings of the cot. He thrashed and yelled, trying to free himself, and then gave in to the pain and frustration. He lay sweating and aching, his breath slowing until the pounding in his head eased and he could hear beyond the internal struggles of his body. Mechanical music was playing somewhere. It was so long since he’d heard a tune. He was briefly mesmerised.

  ‘Morning, Mr Grant,’ said the doctor, who came to stand by his bed.

  ‘Untie me,’ Ross demanded. He strained on the bindings, noting the people in the beds lining the room. There were so many of them. Myriad strangers weighing his uselessness, waiting for the opportunity to attack, like meat ants stalking a freshly staked-out cowhide. ‘I need to get out of here.’

  ‘Just relax,’ the doctor told him.

  He pulled on the fastenings until the bed began to rattle.

  ‘Fine.’ The doctor cut the restraints with a pair of scissors and stepped back. ‘You won’t be able to get very far.’

  Ross tried to sit up and was blinded by pain. ‘What are they looking at?’ he yelled at the patients in the ward. A nurse appeared and stretched out a panelled screen around his bed.

  ‘Mr Grant.’

  ‘Stop calling me that.’

  ‘Mr Grant,’ the doctor repeated. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I need to get out of here,’ answered Ross.

  ‘You can’t. You can keep on ranting as much as you like but the fact is you’re too unwell to be released. So stop asking.’

  Ross breathed heavily. His legs felt useless. ‘Give me something for the pain.’

  ‘We’ve had this discussion. You’ll have to bear the pain from now on. You’ve needed more morphine at night than the average man, which corresponds with your addictive illness, but as of today you will have to draw on your own strength.’ The doctor pulled up a chair. ‘I assume at some stage in the past you were capable of controlling your impulses. You haven’t always been addicted to alcohol, have you?’

  Ross thought of taking a punch at the man but the doctor was canny. He’d sat just out of reach.

  ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ The man wore a white coat. His curly red hair and freckled skin suggested Irish origins. Ross hated the Irish. They reminded him of Marcus Holder.

  ‘I was hunting buffalo.’ Ross recalled the piles of hides and horns at the camp.

  ‘Yes. Your horse was gored and crushed your legs.’

  Images played in Ross’s mind as he tried to remember what had happened. All he could recall was a litter being dragged across the ground and the lugger that floated along the river to the sea.

  ‘Once the morphine wears off your memory will improve. Now I need to place this stethoscope on your chest. As you hit the last doctor who attempted to do that, I’m hoping I won’t need to tie you up again.’

  Ross grunted assent and the cold stethoscope was moved about his chest accompanied by a hollow-sounding two-fingered tap. His skin felt inflamed as if it had been scrubbed with a currycomb. ‘Why was I tied down?’

  ‘Apart from the punching incident? Delusions. Pain. Anger,’ the physician replied. ‘You will control yourself?’ Ross picked at the material wrapped around his wrists until it came loose and rubbed at the red marks. ‘Let me remind you that you have two broken legs, a fractured pelvis and cirrhosis of the liver, along with some sundry complaints that include jaundice and weight loss. The malarial infection has gone. All in all, you’re lucky to be here. You should be aware, however, that the damage to your liver may well shorten your life. No more alcohol, Mr Grant, if you want to live for another twenty years. And I can’t promise you that time, either. I have no idea how much damage you’ve done to your other organs.’

  Having long ago given up considering more than one day at a time, Ross was disappointed at being told an end point. Twenty years. It was something to work towards, he supposed.

  ‘When you’re more yourself I will bring the nurses who attended on your arrival so you can thank them. You were a mess, Mr Grant. There is no excuse for such filth.’

  ‘And my things?’ asked Ross.

  ‘What things? You only had the clothes you were wearing, and as they were full of lice everything was burnt.’

  ‘No book?’

  ‘Nothing. You’ll have to improve your attitude, Mr Grant, now you’re back in civilised society. You’ve been in the papers on and off for many years. Some of it good, like, for instance, that young man you took to the mission, but most of it bad. Don’t expect people to take to you right off. They haven’t yet decided if you’re man or madman. Me included.’

  The doctor left and Ross was moved into a wheelchair by two orderlies. The pain lashed out, strong and throbbing.

  ‘So, mate, we’re taking you outside,’ said one of the orderlies.

  ‘Moving me out of here?’ asked Ross.

  ‘No, mate,’ the man answered. ‘The doc thought you’d like a bit of sun. Normally we wouldn’t move someone as banged up as you, but the doc said you’d live with the discomfort and you don’t strike any of us as the indoors type.’

  With his bandaged legs extended in front of him, Ross was wheeled feet-first out of the ward like a man in a wooden box. They travelled along a corridor and down a sloping surface until Ross was finally out in the sun. A hard sky met the cobalt-blue of the ocean. It was too bright. Too fine a day for the way Ross felt, but he was so relieved to be away from the hospital ward. He wondered if he could escape and then looked down at his legs. Unlikely.

  The orderlies deposited him beneath a shady tree next to a rattan table where a bowl sat on a tray, shielded from flies by a doily. A nurse arrived and, holding the dish up, waited for Ross’s agreement. The woman was middle-aged, and she smelt of menthol and starch. Ross stared at her as he had the other nurses, marvelling at their different faces, at their familiarity with a place he no longer understood. She held up a spoon and leant towards him. Ross snatched the bowl from her grasp and slurped from the rim, his stomach gurgling and groaning as if being slowly strangled. She looked at him as if he’d lost more than the use of his legs. Then she got up and left.

  She was replaced by Connor. Ross was used to the man turning up when least expected, but his arrival jolted him awake far more than the trip across the bumpy hospital grounds. Connor took up the seat left warm by the nurse and together they stared out at the sea. Ross imagined that each was waiting for the other to speak. For his part, he had both too much to say and not enough. Ross recalled so many things: paintings on cave walls, the bloody welts made by a knife in a boy’s leg, a cross in the middle of nowhere and the fisherman waiting at the bottom of a hill.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked Connor eventually.

  There was no comfort in seeing his old friend. It was because of him he had just been dumped like wreckage at the tree’s base instead of laying stiff and cold, oblivious. It was the Scotsman who’d appeared with a blood-curdling yell to take aim at the wounded buffalo, dropping the beast in its tracks.

  ‘I lost Alastair’s book,’ was all Ross could say. It was a long time since he could remember what his brother clearly looked like but with the loss of the novel it was as if the last shred of Alastair’s existence had finally disappeared.

  ‘Aye,’ replied Connor. ‘It’s probably still lying next to the carcasses of that horse and cow. Joe sent his regards. He’s gone south. How are the legs?’

  ‘Not working,’ said Ross.

  ‘He was a good horse, Nugget. They say you won’t ride again and walking will be difficult. Have they told yo
u that?’ Connor fumbled with his empty pipe.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, now you’re prepared for when they do.’ With an embarrassed smile, Connor tucked the pipe back into his pocket. ‘It took so long to get you back here. I wasn’t sure we’d make it in time, and then when the malaria set in … There’s a lawyer who’s keen to have a word with you, Ross. There are things that need settling.’

  Ross couldn’t think beyond a few minutes at a time. ‘You handle it.’

  ‘I cannae. I have no authority. I don’t work for the Grants anymore and I haven’t for some time.’

  If he probed, Ross knew that the reason behind Connor’s leaving would point back to him. It was best to say nothing. In the end, Connor’s motives were his own, although Ross appreciated that the man’s separation from the Grants would have come at a personal cost. Connor still remembered a Scotland of clans and chieftains, whereas Ross identified with none of it.

  ‘There’s someone here to see you.’

  ‘I don’t want to see anyone, Connor. I’m not fit.’

  ‘Fit or not, you have a visitor.’ Connor briefly gripped his arm. ‘I don’t know when you crossed the line from running away to punishing yourself but it’s time to stop. I’ll be back in a few days.’

  A woman was walking across the lawn. Ross knew the face and yet didn’t know it. He looked to the ocean and then back again, just to make sure it wasn’t a drug haze that was altering what he saw. He fidgeted with the wheel of his chair. An onshore breeze stirred the branches overhead. Leaves caught in the wind and fluttered downwards to rest on his useless legs.

  Darcey waited to be invited to sit and then finally claimed the chair next to him, positioning it a little out of the harsh sun so that they almost faced each other. The returning memories were unwanted. The farewell letter on the dining room table. The smell of her on his skin. It took months to forget Darcey and it came as a shock when those last few hours returned, vibrant and real. Ross thought of her hair fanning across his chest, the nestling of a leg over his thigh, her warm arm outstretched.

  ‘Hello, Ross.’

  There was a fragility to Darcey that showed in the fiddling with a silver ring about her finger. Her hair was short, styled so that it framed her cheeks, lessening the slight sagging that made her jawline uneven. Still, she was pretty. Ross scratched at his face and then reached for his hair. The beard was gone, the hair cropped close. The doctor most likely believed that he had cut off the wild parts. The pieces that fought men, killed horses and drifted onwards without purpose.

  ‘I never left the Territory,’ Darcey told him.

  It was because of her that Ross abandoned Waybell. Because of her and Maria. And other things, a tangle of other things. Ross was taken aback by the knowledge of Darcey waiting. By her coming to see him after what he’d done to her.

  Darcey he could have. Maria he couldn’t. Had it been as simple as that? A fool’s game of rebellion.

  ‘I stayed at Waybell for a time and then I moved here to Darwin,’ she went on. ‘I have a nice house.’

  Darcey couldn’t hold his gaze for more than a few seconds at a time. Ross knew a woman like her shouldn’t be in his company.

  ‘You should go,’ he told her. Darcey moved uncomfortably, her back straightening. There was an explanation for her staying in Darwin. A bargain made. A pact. Ross clasped the arm of the wheelchair. ‘Why did you stay?’

  ‘You have to ask?’

  Ross didn’t know how to respond. His stomach was rebelling against that sloppy meal. The child. A child for freedom.

  ‘At first it was because of that last night.’ Darcey played with the strap of the handbag in her lap, snapping the metal clip open and closed. ‘Things seemed different between us. As if it wasn’t an obligation.’

  ‘So there’s no child,’ concluded Ross, swallowing the rising bile. Without warning he leant sideways, bringing up the food. He collapsed back in the chair, embarrassed by his feebleness. Darcey offered him a lace handkerchief but he used the back of his hand. He could smell lavender and something sharp and clean, like cut grass. Ross seized her wrist, seeing his own sun-dark knuckles, swollen and glutted by endless fights.

  He told her to leave. And moments later she was gone.

  ‘Making a fuss, are we?’ A nurse appeared and wheeled him further into the shade.

  ‘I need something for the pain.’ Ross clenched his teeth.

  ‘We can’t have one demon being replaced by another, can we?’ the nurse retorted.

  ‘I don’t want any more visitors,’ said Ross.

  The nurse shook out a thermometer and held it questioningly in front of him. Reluctantly Ross opened his mouth. ‘Better,’ she concluded on reading the temperature. ‘No visitors it is, then. For how long?’

  The sea was hard and flat. Between the hospital grounds and the ocean a car motored along the road. There were bicycles and people. Normality.

  ‘Until I can walk,’ he answered.

  ‘That might be some time.’

  ‘So be it,’ he replied.

  Chapter 51

  Ross sat across from his lawyer, Mr Maitland, at a desk overflowing with papers and files. Outside, a woman swabbed the floor with a mop, the looped yarns dropping lengths of fibre onto the wet surface. Mr Maitland frowned as the doctor left, closing the door. They were using the physician’s study and disturbances were frequent. The lawyer shuffled his papers and waited for Ross to resume speaking, his gaze drifting to the crutches leaning on the wall. They had started poorly. For his part, Ross had little interest in spending time satisfying the lawyer’s inquisitiveness regarding his long absence. All the lawyer required was an autograph book to make Ross truly feel like a pariah.

  ‘So my father’s assets are intact?’ confirmed Ross. That was unexpected. It had been over three years since Morgan Grant’s passing. Ross assumed at least a portion to have been sold by now.

  ‘The majority, yes. A trust was set up to administer the estate after your father’s death. It was decided that the winery should be sold, and one of the sheep stations. Wool prices have been on the decline since the end of the war.’

  ‘Which one?’ asked Ross. ‘Which property was sold?’

  Mr Maitland read the document, removing his spectacles before speaking. ‘It was located near Burra. Gleneagle. I believe you were there for a time. Are you sure you don’t wish to discuss your personal situation, Mr Grant? I’m told you’ve allowed no one to see you these past weeks. Sometimes it helps to talk things through.’

  Ross set his mind on the loss of Gleneagle. He was sorry that, of all his father’s acquisitions, it was this piece of dirt that had been traded to the highest bidder. The thought of that unrelenting square of red country, the place where he grew, unfettered by family, belonging to another, brought home some of what he had thrown away. ‘Whose decision was that?’

  ‘The trustees,’ answered Mr Maitland. ‘Business associates of your late father’s. As I said, they were placed in control of the estate. Had your whereabouts been known, things may have been different. I must say I find it quite extraordinary that with the size of the legacy involved and your older brother only recently declared dead –’

  ‘I thought that had been done years ago,’ said Ross.

  The lawyer placed the paper he held on the table. ‘I wasn’t involved in those legalities, Mr Grant, but it’s been more than a decade since the end of the war. Consider it closure for you and the family.’ Mr Maitland toyed with the reading glasses, flipping them over and over. ‘What’s left of them.’

  Ross thought of the novel that lay rotting northeast of Mr Dyer’s fragile Christian cross. White-anted in disregard. He couldn’t sit there much longer discussing the property of the dead. He felt like an intruder in someone else’s life.

  ‘Your mother retains the right to stay in the family home until her death.’ The lawyer read each clause precisely, taking a heavy breath as the remaining contents of the document were announced. ‘The
re are funds set aside for a paid companion and a live-in nurse.’

  ‘And everything else,’ asked Ross, breaking Mr Maitland’s studied explanations. ‘Waybell Station, the other properties? After my mother is finished with the mansion? What happens to all of it?’

  ‘It was about to be transferred to a new beneficiary, however your turning up the way you did has rather changed things.’ The lawyer waited as if expecting the words to have greater effect. ‘Currently, in the event that you were found alive, you were to be the recipient of a modest yearly stipend. The remainder of the estate was to go to your wife.’

  ‘Darcey?’ said Ross.

  ‘Yes.’

  The word wife suggested warmth and caring and honesty. It was a grim reminder of the complications of a marriage he never considered real.

  ‘I understand your concerns, Mr Grant. It is one thing to be on the brink of losing a fortune, quite another to discover it was to be placed in the hands of a woman, even if she is your spouse. And there were no stipulations as to how this bequest was to be managed. Mrs Grant was to receive it unencumbered. But now you can easily contest and lay claim to your late father’s estate. After all, you are her husband and unlike your brother, you were never legally declared dead and even if you had been, the situation is far from irreversible.’

  Ross thought of Darcey’s father buried in England’s cold, loamy soil. He had wanted his daughter cared for and she would be. ‘Let her have it. All of it except Waybell, and that stipend, I’ll take it too.’

  Mr Maitland sat the spectacles on his nose and fussed with the settling of each curved end over an ear. He appeared baffled. ‘You should think about this, Mr Grant. We can delay. The house in Adelaide would be a comfort to you in your condition.’