Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  ‘It’s got to be Anna. That bloody bitch is up to something.’

  THIRTY

  Let light perpetual shine upon this house, oh Lord. Bless the brothers and sisters who live within it and those who pass by upon the road to life or damnation.’

  Two of them. The man who called himself Preacher Moffatt, fine unctuous voice, moist eyes watching around invisible corners; the hanger-on with him.

  Anneliese never knew where they came from but one day, four months after the end of the Second World War, there they were, trudging up to the homestead, battered hats and dusty clothes, smiles smeared like jam across their lips.

  She had always known trouble when she saw it.

  Sylvia asked them to stay; it was normal bush courtesy, and they had walked far. Sean and Scott Macdonald were away on the far side of the run, so there were only the three women to greet them: Sylvia, mistress of the house, Anneliese and Sylvia’s daughter. Sylvia had named her Margaret but to Anneliese she would always be Rëen, after the drought-breaking rain that had been falling at the time of her birth.

  Rëen was nineteen, plum-ripe, eager like the rest of them to meet the strangers who had come to them from the big world. Anneliese watched as Preacher Moffatt sprayed wet words from a mouth as red as cherries, saw Rëen’s eyes stray repeatedly to the young man she had privately named the hanger-on.

  Archer Fitzgerald was a good-looking man, if you forgave the treacherous and discontented mouth. Very loud in his amens; Anneliese never trusted him and was right.

  As weak as a reed, vain as a cockerel and, like so many of his breed, knew how to charm the geckos off the walls. He certainly charmed Rëen, who had little experience of men and none at all of good-looking ones.

  They hung around for a week, then Sean came home and chased them off. South of Paradise Downs was an emptiness without water; too far for a man to walk to the next station, so the Preacher set out to return to Waroola.

  He went alone. That had not been the plan but, at the last, Archer Fitzgerald fell as he came down the verandah steps. When he got up, he was hopping around on one foot, cursing and telling the world how he had broken his ankle into a hundred pieces.

  Anneliese had as many doubts about that ankle as about its owner. Scott inspected it and said afterwards there had been nothing wrong, not even a swelling, but Archer swore to heaven it tortured him to put his weight on the ground. He made such a commotion that in the end it was easier to let him stay than chuck him out. Preacher Moffatt went alone, seemingly unconcerned at leaving his mate behind.

  No complaints from Rëen, you may be sure. Very solicitous she was about poor Archer’s ankle, always running to him with cups of tea and the like, while he sat at his ease on the verandah, looking out at the countryside like Lord Muck and happy to be waited upon.

  It took an extraordinary time for that ankle to come right. In the end, Sean told him that if he couldn’t work he would have to learn not to eat, and the next day he struggled out of his chair. Many protestations and winces, agony to curdle the milk, but only Rëen took notice.

  Sean might as well have left him where he was; the work he did was always half-done and badly, at that. It was obvious to them all that Archer couldn’t last.

  One night Rëen came to Anneliese’s room and said he was leaving in the morning, that she was going with him.

  Anneliese loved her grand-daughter but in a kindly way, as one might love a kitten. She was as pretty as a kitten but without pride; Sean allowed none about him to have that, and Rëen had been weak from the first. Anneliese felt love but little respect; had no faith at all in her ability to survive someone as inherently useless as Archer Fitzgerald.

  Anneliese wanted her to see she was heading for disaster but, for the first time in her life, found she no longer had stomach for the battle. She was seventy years old. She had never given her age a thought but now, suddenly, it seemed too hard to go on trying to protect later generations from their folly. If Rëen wanted him she must have him, and the consequences.

  One question remained. ‘What have your parents to say about it?’

  ‘I haven’t told them.’

  ‘You must.’

  She looked dubious, but Anneliese insisted. ‘Or I shall tell them myself.’

  Reproachful eyes gleamed in the half-light. ‘I never thought you’d cause me trouble, Gran.’

  ‘Trouble? You try to slink away, your father will come after you with a gun, and you will know more trouble than either of you can handle.’

  So tell them she did. Sean warned that if she went he would wash his hands of her and Sylvia, determined until the day she died to protect herself from all things, said nothing.

  Rëen came back to Anneliese, very quiet, yet with an air of determination her grandmother had not seen before. ‘I’m out of here, Gran.’

  Anneliese saw that she could say nothing to change the child’s mind. ‘With my blessing,’ she told her.

  ‘Won’t you come with us?’

  She laughed. ‘Archer would love that, an old lady trotting along behind you.’

  ‘I want you to come.’ She meant it.

  ‘Why, child? Young people must make their own lives. Old ones have no place.’

  Yet in Africa it had been normal for old and young to live with each other in one large family.

  ‘I would be afraid by myself,’ she said simply. ‘I know I am not good at a lot of the things that have to be done. I need help.’

  ‘No one can live your life for you,’ Anneliese cautioned her.

  She came and sat by her, placing supplicant hands in her lap.

  ‘I know what he is, Gran. I know he is not … strong.’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘I need to get away from here. He is my chance,’ Rëen said passionately. ‘Can’t you see that?’

  She could indeed. There was nothing here for her, nor would be. Her father, contemptuous of all the world, would grant the girl — and her foolish man — no space. Archer, broken creature that he was, presented what was probably the only chance she would ever have to make a life for herself. Otherwise she would sit here and rot, as Anneliese, for twenty years now, had done. She and Scott Macdonald had found a place for each other once, but that had been long ago.

  If she needed her grandmother to help her find the strength she would need, with Archer of all people, who was Anneliese to deny her that chance? It might mean salvation for her, also.

  ‘If Archer himself asks, I shall come.’

  Rëen hugged and kissed her and ran outside. Within minutes Archer was in the room, beseeching her to join them. He spoke lightly, as though the request had no weight in either his life or hers. She knew there would be trouble on the road ahead but said, Very well, if that was what they wanted, she would come.

  Later the usual tropical storm broke about the house. Anneliese stood at the window and looked out at the rain gleaming like silver rods in the darkness. Rëen, she thought. She had said she needed him, but need was not love. Would it be enough? And would Sean agree?

  Sean didn’t give a damn — one less mouth to feed — but Anneliese herself made one stipulation before she agreed to go.

  There were two unfinished stories in her life.

  She had never heard from Dermot, after all the years. It had hurt her and still did, an aching sorrow that never went away. There were times when she believed she would sooner know that he had been ten years in his grave than endure this constant void of not-knowing, the doubts that gnawed and gnawed, giving no peace.

  The second story concerned Jack Riordan, the one man in her life whose brutal strengths had not so much dominated as ignored her will, treating it, and herself, as of no account. A man wedded to his own gross appetites, whose existence had made so permanent an impact upon her life.

  He would be long dead by now. She herself was seventy, which meant that Jack Riordan, if he were still alive, would be getting on for ninety. It was out of the question that so lusty a man would
have made such old bones, yet Anneliese had a desire to return to that wilderness of trees and precipices and icy winds where she had first tasted passion.

  Again and again in their wandering years Anneliese had talked to Dermot about the rough wooden house like an eagle’s eyrie, perched high in the Victorian ranges. She had told him of the grandparents who had raised him to childhood, the mother who had died giving him birth. She had believed it was his right to be acquainted with his own beginnings, despite or perhaps because they were beyond his recall. It was her duty to tell him as much as she could about his life. Without that knowledge he would be incomplete, as Anneliese herself would have been incomplete without knowledge of her own childhood in Africa.

  So Dermot had grown up knowing at least something about his family and the land from which he came. Those cold ranges were the only place outside Paradise Downs he could call his own; was it not conceivable that he might have gone there when he turned his back upon the north?

  It was beyond hope that either Jack or Dermot would be there now, but perhaps, in that place peopled by memories, she might find a trace of what had happened to them both.

  ‘There is somewhere in the south I have to go …’

  They agreed, Rëen because she would have been willing to agree to almost anything to have Anneliese’s company, Archer because he did not give a damn either way.

  So to the southern ranges, the land of vertiginous heights and howling air, of cascades white as bone and forests green and silent, Anneliese returned at last.

  The house, empty now of eagles, was a wreck. No one lived there, or had for many years. Yet the area was not deserted. Some distance from the house, Jack had built a shed where he had stored his horses’ winter feed. Here there remained human life, of a sort.

  A witless woman, about forty years old, who stared and gobbled and tried to flee for refuge into the woods. Anneliese, for all her seventy years, was too quick for her.

  The woman was submissive when caught, allowed herself to be led back to the fire that Rëen had built, while Archer, useful as a cockatoo, whistled about the place, poking his nose and what passed for his mind into corners weed-choked and mossed with damp.

  It took a while to get the woman to speak, although, once she got used to the idea, she managed well enough. She was slow to comprehend, certainly — not absolutely witless but timid beyond belief, unused to people. She flinched from the least of human sounds; the noise of speech batted against eyes as well as ears. You could see the impact of the sound upon her eyes.

  It would have been merciful to leave her to her solitude but, after so many miles and years, Anneliese had not come back to this place to be merciful.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’

  Forever, it seemed.

  ‘Alone?’

  Yes. Alone. After the old woman died.

  ‘Old woman?’

  The woman led Anneliese by the hand to a clearing in the forest, fifty yards from the house. Stood, pointing.

  Two patches of ground, side by side, each perhaps ten feet by five, from which the grass had been cleared. Graves, under the trees and talking leaves.

  ‘Who’s buried here?’

  The woman. And, before her, the man.

  So. Two graves. For the man and the woman. She had found Jack Riordan at last.

  She stared silently at the patch of cleared ground but Jack was not there. The earth could not hold him; rather he was in the leaves, the impact of the cold and swooping air.

  After many false turns, Anneliese found her way to the place where Jack had coralled his stolen horses. Saplings had grown amid rank grass; all that now remained was the remnant of fence posts, worm-rotten, tilting drunkenly towards the consuming earth.

  Here she found him. Jack’s presence remained, claimed by the forest, the memory of horses, as never by the grave that held only his bones. He had been a terrible man, harsh and brutal, yet he walked at Anneliese’s side now as she made her way back to the house.

  Archer wanted to move on straightaway, but Anneliese would not. Her instinct told her that in the woman’s wandering soul, at least one of her stories might be resolved. It would take time to glean the truth; very well, time she would give.

  First, the woman’s name.

  It took two days while the hunted eyes fled frantically from side to side, folded arms clutching her secrets to herself.

  ‘Agnes …’

  The whisper signified surrender; after that, it was easier.

  It seemed that Agnes had not been here forever, after all, but had come.

  ‘Where from?’

  A sweep of the hand, embracing the forest, the world beyond.

  ‘You came alone?’

  No, not alone. Once not alone. But later … Her eyes widened fearfully.

  ‘Fire,’ Agnes whispered, fingers clutching Anneliese’s arm.

  She could make no sense of it but persevered, prising open the lock of Agnes’s tangled memory, her tangled speech. Discovered at last, after a week of questions, the answer, not to one of her unfinished stories, but to both.

  The words remained fractured, incomplete, based upon Agnes’ memories and what she had heard from others, but from them Anneliese was able to construct an edifice that might, at least in part, be the truth.

  When the train pulled out of Waroola, Dermot had thought he was on his way to a new life. By the time it reached its destination, he knew he’d been kidding himself; there were no new lives to be had. What he was doing, what he had always been doing, was running from himself. Fat chance.

  He stopped first in Brisbane, mooched about the streets, ended up bumming a job on a freighter. One trip was enough. Not a man for the sea, he discovered. He skipped ship in Melbourne, made his way east by easy stages. On foot, mostly; job here, job there. He met Agnes on the road. She was not much more than a child, wide-eyed, fey, perhaps a little mad. Her dad had died, her mother gone; Agnes as alone in the world as he was. They decided to join their lonelinesses together, found it worked.

  They wandered on.

  Back on the road, Dermot thought. Where I was always meant to be. He had thought he would be troubled by memories of the places and people of the north, but was not. He never wrote. Life contracted to the day, the hour, the minute. The world was what they could see, nothing else.

  They came to the forested ranges. He could remember nothing, yet somewhere beyond memory, a subterranean recollection awoke stealthily to life.

  They found a track, went up and up. At the top was a house, high above a swooning valley of trees and air and plunging cliffs. There was a man — old, but still a man, dominant over all, visitors included. A woman, a few years younger, with watchful eyes, a closed and suspicious face.

  It was a week before he discovered who they were.

  There was no place for them here, with these old people. The gap between them was unbridgeable; his grandparents had expunged him from their lives years before.

  Dermot and Agnes left early one morning, wandered on, going nowhere. Or everywhere. Days later, they fetched up at Noojee.

  Dermot got labourer’s work at the new power plant. It was a far cry from mustering cattle in the northern bush, but enough to put bread on the table. Later he changed his job, got back in the saddle for a forest grazier named Ellis.

  Mid-February. A hot day with a blustery wind from the north. A stink of fire.

  ‘You take care,’ Agnes told him. Crossly, as though blaming him for the heat.

  ‘Sure.’

  He paid no heed. This time of year, there was always fire about. Bound to be; more and more the forest was being invaded by weekend block owners who burned off scrub and briars to clear their land. Tourists, too, who left billy fires to burn out untended.

  Always a smudge of smoke in the air.

  ‘I’ll be right,’ he told her.

  A nasty and uncomfortable day, all the same. By ten o’clock the mercury was up around the hundred, the wind had strengthened, there was a s
teady rain of ashes from fires somewhere over the northern horizon. There’d been a flare-up only a few days earlier, a hundred or so acres burned in a blaze that had died down only when a providential shower fell.

  Maybe there had not been enough rain to put it out completely. Maybe it still smouldered, waiting for the hot wind.

  The northerly strengthened through the morning. The stock was uneasy, tossing heads everywhere you looked. Hemmed in by timber Dermot could not see far, only the tops of the trees tormented by the wind that was gusting at forty miles an hour and rising with every minute.

  Now he was uneasy, too. The whole day, wind and all, seemed to tremble upon the brink of catastrophe.

  A break in the trees led to a crest a couple of miles away. From there he would be able to see across the treetops to Warburton, twenty miles distant. If fire were heading this way, he would spot it from there.

  He left the cattle to look after themselves, rode up the trail. He was halfway to the ridge when a blink of light shone along the crest. For a moment he did not realise what he was seeing, the first golden glitter of Armaggedon. Then a great gum exploded like Guy Fawkes and suddenly flames were everywhere, a wave of devastation coming down the slope amid the roar and crackle of exploding gum crowns, racing light-footed through the branches a hundred feet above the ground. The heat was enough to pucker eyeballs.

  No time to think, to do anything. He had to get out at once, evade the clutching arms of flame that even now were reaching towards him through the scrub.

  Dermot’s mount was shying like a loony and small wonder. He spun it around so fast it went down on its haunches, then took off down the hill with the fire demons roaring at his back.

  Dermot had always envied Sean his riding skills; the way he rode now would have put Sean or any other man to shame. Down the hill, no time to think of the cattle — they’d be long gone anyway — riding for his life, the heat swarming up the scale, the air full of smoke and smuts, the sky gone.

  To his left a stand of trees withered, burst into a riot of flame. Between his knees Dermot felt the thrust and pull of muscles as the horse swerved. Another swerve as a fallen log licked flame in their path.