‘You come in that thing?’
Again she laughed. ‘And shall go back in her, too. All being well.’
‘Can’t believe you dare trust yourself to it. A wheel come off on the track, you could break your neck.’
‘It brought me and Iris in safe enough.’
‘Iris?’
‘My sister.’
‘And where is she?’
‘Off with some bloke, like always. She’ll find her own way back, eventually.’
‘Don’t your dad get after her?’
‘Dad don’t care. It’s the boys that matter with Dad, not us. They’re better with the timber,’ she said. ‘That’s all that matters to him. A girl won’t never make an axeman, will she?’
‘I s’pose not.’
He went with her, all the same, half hoping something might happen on the track, an accident or fallen tree, perhaps, that would give him a chance to be masterful, the man he assumed she wanted him to be, but the rickety cart did not oblige him, lurching and creaking behind the plodding horse up the steep track between an infinity of trees. So he missed out on the chance to prove himself a hero or even a man. When they reached where they were going it seemed at first as though there was nothing there, and Jory was puzzled before a shaft of moonlight speared through the clouds and he saw the shack, little changed since Jethro had chucked it together over half a century before.
‘That your place?’ It was hard to keep the disbelief out of his voice.
‘Don’t look much, does it? But it keeps the rain out. Mostly.’
‘No trouble with snakes?’
‘No shortage of them, neither,’ she laughed. ‘You gotta watch where you put your feet, especially this time of year when they’re coming out of hibernation. You get used to them, same as you get used to the trees. I’ve known them all my life. Though there’s times,’ she confided, ‘when I think if the snakes don’t kill me the trees will. There’s days it feels like the trees are throttling me.’
* * *
They had taken the horse from between the shafts of the cart and turned it out to graze in the little fenced paddock.
Marina watched Jory Trevelyan as he walked back down the track towards Mole Creek. She didn’t want him to think she had turned to watch him go or give even the slightest hint that she was waving him goodbye—how embarrassing that would be!—but she knew these woods and played a game both with herself and him, deciding to give him enough time to reach the bend of the track, a hundred yards or so below the house, before turning to watch his diminishing figure. She didn’t expect he would look back at her from there or, even if he did, that he’d be able to make her out, standing motionless amid the shadows. She did this without knowing why. He was nothing to her, or she to him, she’d wager. They’d met by chance; they’d danced, if you could call it dancing; he’d sat beside her all the way home in the cart; now he was gone. No doubt he would have forgotten about her already. Yet still she waited and when she turned to look after him she found, as she’d expected, that she’d timed it just right and the figure of the tall man had almost reached the place where the track vanished into the trees. She watched unmoving until he was out of sight, then turned again and walked up to the house with its low roof and tiny windows, its floors that tilted every which way and would have you down if you didn’t watch out, its rough timber walls and the dunny out the back.
She didn’t get down to Mole Creek above once or twice a month and there was no reason to suppose she would ever set eyes again on the young man with the strange name and his tales of the remote west coastal region from which he’d come and to which, presumably, he’d return once he’d done his duty by the butcher’s wife.
The connection with Rascal Rogers was no recommendation; everyone in the district knew Rogers was the rascal people called him, which made it likely that any connections of his on the west coast, known already for its wild ways, would be rascals, too. This time tomorrow Jory would no doubt be eyeing another Mole Creek girl, of whom she knew more than a few who’d be willing to play their games with the tall stranger. Let them, Marina thought, indignant despite herself; she couldn’t think of a single reason why she should care.
Yet she had waited in the shadows until the bend in the track had hidden him, looking to see if he’d glance back or even wave, but he’d done neither. Which she told herself showed he was as indifferent to her as she was to him.
She went to bed, resolved to think no more of Jory Trevelyan or the land where he lived. He’d said the winds there were so wild that trees could not survive, their roots unable to find proper anchorage in the stony soil, and she wondered why anyone should want to live in such a place, with its relentless gales and rain, its tumultuous seas roaring like hungry lions at the gates of the salt-blighted land.
She was firm about it so it was vexing that the moment she closed her eyes he broke into her thoughts once again. She couldn’t think why he should, but the fact remained that he did, as she remembered his blue eyes and his politeness when he had first spoken to her; remembered, too, how the warmth of their bodies had mingled so enticingly as they danced, the firmness of his arm around her waist, his fingers spread protectively upon her back, the pressure of his long thighs against her as they moved around the floor.
Unlike her sister Iris, she’d never been much for men. What with her father and her brothers, she’d seen enough to know there was nothing special about them. They were men, with the advantages of being men; she was a woman and knew she would always have to fight for her place in the world. But she was content to be a woman and had never thought of marriage, or of moving away from the place she’d lived all her life. She supposed it was a restricted life, but it was hers in the land she knew, surrounded by the people she knew.
Yet now she was unsettled. Jory’s description of the inhospitable land of the west coast had stirred her. His talk of the bleak country of stone and salt, of violent seas and violent men, had carried in it an unexpected message, that in its violence freedom might be found. It was a notion that both excited and perplexed her, and she thought that she would never be at peace until she had seen it for herself.
Perhaps that was what drove Iris into the arms of men. It was not a solution Marina would ever seek but she supposed it was possible they were both trying to find the same thing in their different ways.
It was an idea that gave her courage, and the conviction that something would have to be done.
It made for a restless night, long periods of wakefulness succeeded by tumbled dreams, the contents of which she could not remember when she eventually rose to face the morning light, with Iris naked and snoring on her tumbled bed on the other side of their cramped room.
Cramped, everything cramped; life, living and future, amid the close-set trees.
No, she thought, looking at her sister, Iris’s way would never be her way, but her unconscious body reinforced Marina’s conviction that she must do something to change the direction of her life. Do something soon.
She went out into the morning. The air was still, the treetops unmoving. A kookaburra perched on the branch of a nearby tree, busily announcing the dawn. Nothing different, nothing new.
She dragged a load of washing to the base of the nearby cascade, where the water fell in a shining arc from high up on the hill. She’d left it to soak overnight before leaving for the dance. Now she pummelled the washing relentlessly, letting the clean cold water of the fall run over it before squeezing it between hands that work had made hard and strong.
She was hanging it on the wire when something made her look up and she saw the figure of the tall, dark-haired man walking up the track towards the house.
* * *
Walking back to the township, Jory saw that it was indeed a strange world he had come to. A strange world and a strange girl, too, yet on the long walk back to the little town he found himself thinking about her more than he would have expected.
It was an odd feeling, and unanticipated, bec
ause the shack amid the black-shadowed trees had brought home to him something that he now discovered he’d sensed all along, that the way of life followed by Marina Fairbrother was so different from his own that she might have been a creature from outer space. Yet she’d felt light in his arms when they’d danced, while her matter-of-fact way of speaking had appealed to him.
He thought, too, about the sister who Marina had said was off with some bloke. Doing what he didn’t know but could guess, although he had no experience in that area. Darkness could not conceal imagined images as well as it could the solid substance of the trees between which he trudged down the muddy track towards the town. At intervals, between the over-arching branches of the forest, he could see the brilliance of the stars.
That night, in the shed out the back of the butcher’s flash house where they’d rigged up a place for him to sleep, where even the sheets had about them the smell of yesterday’s meat, he turned restlessly, tangled in a conflict of thoughts.
Of Mum, coughing blood. Of the indisputable fact that a two-man household needed a woman to provide focus and, if she was the right woman, a measure of the comfort that might otherwise be lacking.
He’d taken a fancy to the Fairbrother girl. But how would she adapt to the stark bones of the west coast, with its hard winds and harder people? Would she be willing, in any case? She’d talked about the trees throttling her, but those were only words. Would she be willing, when it came to it? It wasn’t something you could check out on a day trip; distance alone would necessitate commitment. They barely knew each other yet instinct told him she wanted to get out.
He was wary of things he didn’t understand, of unexplored things, but he was brave, so next morning he took the long walk up to the shack where he found her with a load of washing in her arms, white in a green-stained world.
* * *
Marina straightened, easing her back, and watched him, the load of washing in her strong arms.
‘I wasn’t expecting to see you this morning.’ But she felt a stirring, slow but insistent, deep inside her. ‘I thought you’d be long gone. Didn’t you tell me last night you like to make an early start when you’re travelling?’
‘I thought I’d drop by first,’ he said.
She took the washing and began to hang it, item by item, on the wire.
‘Why doesn’t your sister help you?’
‘She’s asleep. By the smell of her, she had a busy night.’
‘And that’s all right with you, is it? To be the drudge while she lolls in bed?’
‘I manage.’
‘I’ve never had much to do with women,’ he said. ‘Don’t know much about them, you want the truth, but that don’t seem right to me. Seems to me you ought to do something about that.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Try another way.’
‘Any suggestions?’
‘It’s a long road to the west coast,’ he said. ‘If you was a man, I’d say come along for the trip. We could chat, maybe have a laugh together, make the journey pass more quickly. Maybe you’d hop off at Burnie, maybe come all the way, depending how you felt.’
‘I never been to Burnie,’ she said. ‘Our timber goes there but I never been. I’d go with you to Burnie, see what it’s like, see the country, if you promised to bring me home again.’
‘But I’m not coming back, Marina. I’m going on. Heading down the west coast to my own place. And you’re not a man.’
‘I know that well enough,’ she said.
‘Come with me, come now, and you’d know it even better. But you’d have to sign on for the whole trip.’
She was standing watching him now, hands slack, washing forgotten. The kookaburra that had been making such a racket had fallen silent.
‘I’ve never thought to leave the forests,’ she said.
‘Then don’t. Stay here all your days. And maybe some time you’ll get to Burnie and maybe you won’t. But you’ll never learn what it’s like to lie in bed at night and listen to the seas roaring outside your window, or stand tall against the gales threatening to blow your head off. You’ll never know what it would have been like to be free.’
‘I’m free now.’
‘No, you’re not. All your life you’ve been a prisoner and not even realised it, because this is the only life you’ve known and you’re scared to stick your nose out and sniff the air. Years down the track you’ll maybe know it but by then it’ll be too late. You’ll look back and say I could have been with him now but the trees held me.’ He walked over to her and cupped her face in his hands and kissed her hard on the mouth. Then he stepped back, smiling at her. ‘That’s something to remember me by. Now I must get going, so I’ll say goodbye. Time’s passing and, like you said, I’ve always been a man for an early start.’
He raised his hand and turned away.
‘Wait,’ she said.
He turned and watched her, unspeaking.
‘This place you talk about, your home on the coast. What’s it like?’
‘Hard country, hard people. A land of stone, storms and wild winds. Not an easy place, like here. Not soft. There you got to fight to survive, and there are no guarantees. But that’s what freedom is. Hard days, harder nights, and no guarantees.’
‘No ring on my finger, either.’
‘Three weeks for the banns to be read? I’ll not wait for that. Later, if it means that much to you, but not now. Like I said, no guarantees.’
She stared at him, eyes wide, and it was as though she were seeing for the first time something for which she had hungered all her life.
‘Wait,’ she said again.
‘For what?’
‘While I tell Iris she’ll have to hang out the rest of the washing.’
CHAPTER 15
They took the train for the first stage of the journey.
The change of scenery came slowly. Marina, perched on the frayed edge of her seat, looked out of the window at the passing countryside as the green-painted train, puffing smoke and self-importance, trundled along the track from Deloraine, through Dunorlan, Elizabeth Town and Sheffield, sometimes in sight of the sea and sometimes not, but always with the comforting familiarity of the Western Tier mountains on her left-hand side until Mount Roland, just outside Sheffield, marked the end of the range, and the steel rails, sun-glinting, reached out across the flat land to the port town on the coast where the paper mill was located, the town that in the early days had been known as Emu Bay but now was called Burnie.
All this was new to the woman from the land of trees who had seldom travelled beyond Deloraine, fifteen miles distant according to the milestone in Mole Creek, and only half a dozen times to Launceston, forty miles further to the east and the biggest town in northern Tasmania, yet the name of Burnie was familiar to her since every month Dad and her two brothers loaded the flat-bed wagons with felled timber for the paper mill in that town.
They stayed overnight in Burnie and the following morning boarded a bus that carried them south-west. Now they entered a different world that grew steadily more forbidding as the journey progressed, the principal feature being the barren outcrops of black rock, shining with rain that had begun to fall from a darkening sky. There were few trees, their warped trunks growing at an angle out of the stony soil, their tangled branches blackened by salt. For now the road ran very close to the ocean.
Weary of watching the dismal landscape, Marina turned to the man seated beside her. ‘Tell me more about the place you’re taking me.’
‘What d’you want to know?’
Everything would have been the true answer, but she had already found that while Jory might be a man comfortable in his skin he was no talker, except when it suited him. He’d talked her into coming with him, sure enough, but now it was a different matter. If she wanted information, she’d have to squeeze it out of him, drop by drop.
‘Tell me about your farm.’ It seemed as good a place as any to start.
‘Two hundred acres. A few sheep, som
e highland cattle.’
‘Any crops?’
‘Mum used to plant spuds, beans, things like that, before she got sick. It’s not what you’d call real cropping country, not possible with the weather we got.’
‘Your mum and dad?’
She could feel him groping for words. ‘Mum’s sick. I already told you. And Dad … You’ll be meeting him soon enough. You’ll be able to form your own opinion.’
‘Neighbours? The nearest town?’
Because every life needed a framework in which to find itself, didn’t it? Otherwise how would she have a chance of finding herself in the new life to which she was committed? She supposed she would discover these things for herself, in time, but it would be nice to have some advance notice, or even warning.
Jory was clearly finding it a chore to put into words matters that were so familiar to him. ‘Boulders is the nearest town. It’s on the other side of the Wombat Ridge. Inland.’
‘How far?’
‘A fair hike.’
‘Funny name,’ Marina said. ‘What’s it mean?’
‘Doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a name.’
‘What about the neighbours?’
No one could ever have accused Marina Fairbrother of giving up on anything without a fight. Legally speaking her name hadn’t changed, not yet, but to heck with the law; as far as she was concerned, she was a Trevelyan now. Changing from Fairbrother to Trevelyan wouldn’t change her willingness to fight for what she wanted—Dad had always called her the stubborn one—but she wore her new name with pride, a badge upon her heart. Not that she would ever admit it, even to Jory, for fear of embarrassing him. Some secrets were best unshared.
‘We don’t have neighbours,’ Jory said. ‘Not what you’d call real neighbours. There was Kelsey Reinhardt, half a mile down the coast where the old convict settlement was, but he died.’
Marina perked up at once; that sounded interesting.
‘What did he die of?’
‘Blew his brains out, apparently. I was off fishing at the time so I only heard about it later. Strange bloke, Kelsey Reinhardt. His wife run off, a year previous. We heard she’d inherited some money from a cousin on the mainland someplace, so maybe she saw no point in staying. Not now she was independent, like. Kelsey was always an ornery bastard but her going the way she did made him ten times worse. Give you a black eye, soon as look at you. Big enough to do it, too, a real big bastard. I never had much to do with him, tell the truth.’
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