Stars Over the Southern Ocean

by J. H. Fletcher

  It was true he needed more beer money than most. Kept it to himself, too.

  If you don’t work, you don’t eat.

  How true that was, so a week after he got back Jory signed up with the same fisheries crowd he’d worked with before he went to Mole Creek.

  Marina hated that but, like Jory had said, hated the thought of starving more. She told herself she’d put up with it for a time, just for a time, so made no objection when Jory took his swag and headed down to Strahan, putting to sea in one of the deep-sea fishing trawlers.

  When he was home they got along fine, husband and wife things and not only in the bed. That, too, but they talked and joked and made much of each other and Marina found, to her surprise, that she’d fallen in love with this man who had brought her out from the prison of the trees only to imprison her again in the house where the woman was dying, although taking a long time about it, and Marrek’s eyes, blue chips in a hatchet face—like son, like father—seemed always to be watching her.

  At least there was the sea. She fell in love with that, too, its roar and crash and relentless power, and she thought it was the sea that gave her strength to endure the long nights when Jory was away and every evening she asked herself whether tonight might be the night when Marrek decided it was time for them to get more closely acquainted. For the thought was in his mind: she could read it so clearly the words might have been written on his forehead.

  In the generator shed she found a narrow-bladed knife with a worn wooden handle which at one time had probably been used to gut fish. The blade was rusty and blunt but she set to work on it. There was an old grinding wheel in the shed, too, and a can of oil. Whenever she had a moment she worked on the blade until she’d restored it to what it had been once: razor-sharp and shining silver in the sun.

  She took it into the house and kept it under her pillow when Jory was away, but for weeks nothing happened. Jory came and went, the dying woman clung to life, Marina did the cooking and cleaning, the blue-glass eyes watched.

  And each night, nerves tight in her lonely bed, Marina waited for the day she was convinced was coming, when Marrek would decide to try his luck.

  Another thing she did: she discovered books. A travelling library came by once a month. She took some books out and found she liked to read. In no time she was devouring them as her starved mind opened to the world.

  I’m educating myself, she thought, and was happy. Not before time, either. It would help her face the world. And Marrek.

  CHAPTER 19

  Wreckers, he’d told Jory’s woman. ’Tis in the blood. And dead men tell no tales.

  Head back, Marrek sat in a chair at the back of the house, in a spot sheltered from the wind. He was not asleep but dreaming with open eyes.

  Marina, he thought. The woman from the sea. What clearer omen could there be than that?

  He could hear her now, busy inside the house—she was a willing worker, he’d give her that—and stopping now and then to poke her nose around the bedroom door to check how the missus was doing.

  A big surf was running but in his mind he was watching other images and listening to sounds he could hear clearly above the incessant thunder of the sea.

  The heath fire crackled, bright in the darkness, its flames protected from the wind by the bodies of the men. All watching, all waiting, in the darkness.

  They had rum in a stone jar that they passed from man to man.

  Marrek heard the wet slush of rum in the jar, tasted the reeking spirit in his throat. He sensed the tension, heard the whispers, the bellows of triumph, the scream of shattered timbers as the storm-savaged ship, lured on to the rocks by the false light, struck. The screams of drowning men.

  Those who made it alive to shore they killed. The pleading faces under the waves. The blood. What had he told Marina? That dead men tell no tales. But when was a man or woman dead? Their spirit: what of that?

  Marrek dreamt with open eyes.

  A small step back in time. Two years before. Once again it was 1936. The blank faces of the dead watched.

  1936

  CHAPTER 20

  From the time they’d arrived in the district, two years before, everybody said that Kelsey and Marybelle Reinhardt, taking up what had been the Cameron place, perched on the edge of a two-hundred-foot vertical cliff, were a strange couple.

  No one who wasn’t strange would have dreamt of taking up the old house, more ruin than dwelling, that had been empty for thirty years.

  ‘Needs a lotta work,’ one old-timer said. ‘I mind the time—’

  ‘Needs pullin’ down,’ his mate said. ‘Pull it down and start again. Only way. And the land’s no good, either. Won’t get nuthin’ to grow there.’

  But the Reinhardts were apparently uninterested in growing anything, nor did they have any livestock.

  ‘Gawd knows what they live on.’

  There was a rumour—no one knew how it had started—that the missus had money, or at least a monied family back in Melbourne some place. Not that they spent much in Boulders.

  Mrs Willis, who had the clothes shop, had a fixation about Marybelle Reinhardt, who might have bought her clothes from Mrs Willis’s emporium but did not. Mrs Willis was asked about her once by Mrs Prothero, a newcomer to the district.

  ‘She’s a strange one, all right. The clothes she wears: all them reds and yellows. Enough to poke your eyes out.’

  Mrs Willis despised gaudiness, which in her opinion had no place in the stern country of the west coast.

  ‘But who is she?’

  ‘Marybelle Reinhardt, she calls herself; lives down the coast a ways, with her husband.’ Mrs Willis corrected herself, almost before the words were out. ‘At any rate, the bloke she says is her husband. These days you never know, do you? Money in the family, I’m told.’

  Although who had told her so, and how they had found out, Mrs Willis did not say.

  ‘She’s certainly high and mighty enough. Gets her clothes from Melbourne, if you please. Or so I hear.’

  Enough to sicken any local shopkeeper, but Marybelle Reinhardt came to Boulders only to buy food and pay regular visits to Doctor Burgess, the town quack.

  Strange they certainly were, both Marybelle and her husband. Marrek would have confirmed Mrs Willis’s opinion, had he been asked. As their only neighbour, he saw more of them than most and had realised from the first they were different from anyone he’d ever known.

  Kelsey Reinhardt was like a thundercloud, a massive man with huge hands and a permanent scowl. Marybelle was little and years younger, in her bright clothes, like a twinkle on legs.

  Kelsey didn’t seem to do much but shut himself up in his house and seldom came out, although on fine evenings Marrek occasionally saw him, pacing along the cliffs and scowling at the sea and the gulls that flung themselves screaming past his head.

  He wasn’t a bloke you could talk to, and his skinny wife was even less so, going this way and that in her little car and over-bright clothes, with never a smile or word to say to anyone.

  There were times, late at night, when the wind was in the right direction, that Marrek could hear music coming from the Cameron place, even though it was half a mile away. It wasn’t the sort of music he liked, with a jolly tune to it, but had lots of crashes and bangs that would have driven him crazy had the houses been any closer. As far as he could tell they lived more or less separate lives, although on rare occasions, after the music had been especially loud, he would see them walking side by side across their land, her piccolo to his kettledrum.

  Holding themselves aloof seemed a strange way to behave when there were only the two properties down that section of the coast, but sociability was obviously not something the Reinhardts possessed or welcomed. They had every right to be as private as they liked, yet it didn’t seem right to have neighbours who were so stand-offish.

  Perhaps it was that, a feeling of resentment that grew stronger as the months passed, that made him start spying on them. If they wouldn’
t come to him, he would go to them! Only after dark, of course, and making sure they never spotted him.

  Maybe it was living in so remote an area that made them careless about drawing their curtains. Marrek had done nothing like it before, yet there was something about them that both annoyed and fascinated him. Sometimes he saw things he had not expected to see or told himself he had not wanted to see. Yet still he watched.

  It was like going to a picture show, except there were occasions when he saw things you would never see on a picture show.

  The bedroom, with a stark-naked Marybelle beating her fists furiously against Kelsey Reinhardt’s chest. Kelsey, stripped to the waist, as impervious to her fury as a block of stone, while the music bellowed and sobbed in the background. Until at last he picked her up as easily as a kitten and slung her on the bed. What followed …

  Marrek knew he shouldn’t watch.

  Kelsey with bloody tracks on his back by the time he’d finished, the pair of them inert, seemingly exhausted. Even the music had died. Passion …

  The breakers roared along the shore. The wind was rising as Marrek found his way home, knowing he had watched his neighbours travel to a country he had never seen.

  ‘Where you been?’

  Doc Burgess, shaking his lugubrious head, had declared Marrek’s wife would never be well again. For months, now, she’d known days of calm alternating with episodes of pain that left her pale with exhaustion and praying for death. Marrek knew it was cruel to compare what he had with what he’d just seen, but he couldn’t help it.

  ‘Slipped out a minute,’ he said. ‘Wanted a breath of air.’

  As though there was any shortage of air along the west coast. In truth he was angry, not just at his helplessness in the face of his wife’s illness, but at their neighbours’ antics. Passion … It had seemed closer to hatred than love. He couldn’t understand it at all, so he told himself to stay away from the Reinhardt property. He saw the lights at night, heard the music, his imagination left his skin with a thousand pin pricks, but for weeks he never went near them. In the end his fascination with the Reinhardts and the lure of the forbidden drew him back. He didn’t feel guilty about it; if they didn’t want people to look, they should draw the curtains.

  Twice during that period he watched Marybelle Reinhardt drive up the switchback road to Boulders. He knew he was seeing her differently than before. He neither waved nor acknowledged her in any way, nor did she acknowledge him, but he’d seen her with her legs in the air and that gave him a sense of power she didn’t know he had.

  There came a time when he didn’t see either of his neighbours for several days, and when he went into Boulders he heard a rumour that Marybelle Reinhardt had inherited a stack of money from one of her rich rellies on the mainland.

  He didn’t care—they weren’t likely to give any of it to him, were they?—but in a town that feasted on rumour that was a rumour worth feasting on.

  People—naturally—wanted to know how much but it could have been tuppence or a million; nobody knew.

  Nobody had seen her for a few days, either, so that was another rumour to add to the first, and in no time at all the word was that she’d upped sticks and gone to Melbourne.

  ‘When will she be coming back?’

  ‘Will she be coming back?’

  No one knew.

  No lights, now, shining through the windows of the Reinhardt house. None of their crash-bang music. If Kelsey took solitary walks along the cliffs, Marrek didn’t see him.

  It was October, with the coast at last beginning to shrug off a late winter. Not that you’d have known it: for three days after Marybelle had gone missing, the gales blew tin trumpets along the coast and the pouring rain was blown near horizontal by the gusting westerly wind, fifty miles an hour and stronger, while along the crest of the Wombat Ridge, sharp-edged as sheet steel, lightning danced in endless pyrotechnics and thunder overwhelmed all other sound.

  On the evening of the fourth day the gale died. The clouds blew away, the stars shone on a suddenly peaceful world and, in the stillness, Marrek, topping up the fuel in the generator shed, heard the metallic rasp of a spade cutting into the stony soil.

  At first, he did not recognise what he’d heard; then he did, and for a moment the realisation made him stand motionless, fuel can in hand, breath tight in his throat. He was aware of his heart, beating steadily in his chest. He was aware of his eyes, stretched wide in his head, his ears listening intently for the slightest sound.

  There. He heard it again, the faint rasp of metal on stone. He went to the door of the shed and stared out at the Reinhardt place, but over there the house was in darkness and he could see nothing.

  Why would anyone start digging in the dark?

  Disposing of rubbish? That—surely?—could wait until morning.

  Death of a loved pet? That made no sense, either; the Reinhardts had no pets, or chooks, or livestock. They had nothing, and their fifty acres were bare.

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to investigate. He wasn’t sure he dared. He told himself it was none of his business. He continued to tell himself so even as he began to walk slowly towards the sound.

  The groaning timbers of the wrecked vessel. The greedy seas smashing on the rocks, the dying ship, the drowning men, burying the sins of those who watched. Dead men tell no tales. Dead women, neither.

  If Kelsey Reinhardt really had … No. He would not think it. But, if he had … What might he do to the man who found him, spade in hand, burying murder?

  The sound of digging was much closer now. He could hear the breathing of the man using the spade. Hard work, digging in this harsh soil. In the dark.

  Suddenly, there he was. Kelsey Reinhardt at the back end of his land. Up to his knees, spade in hand.

  In the dark he looked even more massive than in the daylight. He looked up at Marrek, poised between curiosity and flight. He said: ‘I mighta guessed you’d turn up, sooner or later.’

  His expression was hidden in the darkness. There was no way to tell from his voice whether he was dangerous or merely indifferent.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Burying my wife.’ He climbed out of the half-dug grave. Standing upright, he towered over little Marrek. ‘Come to give me a hand, have you?’

  Marrek didn’t know what to think about that.

  ‘Mate, I don’t understand what’s going on.’

  ‘If it’s any of your business,’ Kelsey said. ‘I told you: she died. That’s what’s going on. She died and now I’m gunna bury her. The way she wanted, on her own land, within the sound of the sea. They were her last words. “Don’t stick me away in that boneyard over in Boulders.” That’s what she said. “I want to be buried here, within sight and sound of the sea.” Her dying wish. So that’s what I’m giving her. Her wishes were sacred to me, the way she stuck to me. Thousands wouldn’t, you know. Thousands wouldn’t.’ A sigh from the heart, heavy shoulders bowed. ‘I’ll get you a spade. You can give me a hand.’

  Whatever Marrek had been expecting, it was not that, but he found himself caught up in the impetus of Kelsey’s words and actions and didn’t know how to free himself. The next thing he knew, Kelsey had shoved a spade in his hand and he was down in the grave, digging away.

  He couldn’t help wondering whether he was helping to conceal a murder, but only a fool would say a thing like that, alone in the dark with a man years younger than he was and twice his size. And so instead, to his own surprise, he found himself telling Kelsey about his ship-wrecking forebears from Cornwall. On nights like this, he said as he dug into the stony soil, they lured ships onto the rocks, killing the crew and stealing their cargo. Kelsey said nothing and Marrek grew silent, throwing all his energy into digging.

  Hard yakka it was, too, and by the time they’d gone deep enough in the iron-hard soil the night was half gone.

  The wind had come back, too, with more rain, and the sound of the surf along the base of the cliff was growing louder by the minute.r />
  Marrek felt a drizzle of water run down the back of his neck. He was muddy all over and the way his back was aching it might have been pounded by a dozen hammers.

  ‘I’ll get her,’ Kelsey said.

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  ‘You stay here. I won’t let no one put a hand on her. Okay?’

  Fierce as a furnace, Kelsey was, and glaring at Marrek, who’d helped dig the grave, as though he had somehow become the enemy.

  ‘Okay, mate. Anything you say.’

  Not another word from the big man, which was a relief. He went back to the house, leaving Marrek standing there like a fool. Two minutes later he was back, carrying a shrouded figure in his arms. Marybelle coming to her last home.

  ‘I couldn’t bury her in that storm,’ Kelsey said.

  He laid the shrouded shape in the grave and stood looking down at it. Not a word, but a silence worth ten thousand words.

  Marrek didn’t know whether to go on standing at Kelsey’s side or move away to give him a bit of space. He still hadn’t moved when Kelsey seized his spade and stuck it furiously into the mounded earth.

  ‘Let’s get it over with, then.’

  Not a flower to place on her; no ceremony; no words spoken. Just the spades, rasping, burying her deep. While the rain continued to fall.

  When it was finished, the mound of earth flattened by the backs of the spades, Kelsey Reinhardt turned and walked back to his house. Not a word of thanks, nothing.

  Marrek watched him go, heard the door slam behind him as he went indoors.

  Am I a fool, or what?

  He left the spade stuck upright in the ground. He walked back to his house through the rain.

  Next day he sat in his house, listening to the surf beating on the shore, the drumming of rain on the roof, and did not know what he should do.

  He had helped bury his neighbour’s wife. At night. He had not asked how she’d died. He hadn’t asked anything. He’d seen how they’d been with one another; for all he knew, Kelsey might have murdered her in a fit of passion. Which would make Marrek an accessory, if the facts came out, with jail the inevitable consequence. Maybe for years.