Stillwater Creek

by Alison Booth

  Eileen had left the bedlamp on but she had her back to him. Although the night was still hot, she had drawn the sheet right up to her chin and tucked it firmly under her, so he had to untuck his side of the sheet to climb in next to her.

  ‘I’m sorry about our disagreement,’ he said, and he was sorry. If only she would quietly give in.

  ‘So you ought to be.’ Her voice was muffled by the pillow but he was heartened she had deigned to reply.

  ‘I hate it when we argue.’ Her dark hair was spread on the pillow next to his. Several white hairs he had never noticed before moved him strangely but he couldn’t afford to become distracted. He switched off the lamp.

  ‘Jim’s not going, George.’

  ‘Yes he is, Eileen.’

  ‘He’s not. It isn’t fair to Andy.’ That was it, out with the new war cry, and her tone was so savage. ‘Andy would feel he was second-class if Jim went to Stambroke.’

  ‘Why should he? You’ve said yourself they’re different.’ He just couldn’t see Andy being bothered by this, or at least not in the sense that Eileen was suggesting. Andy would miss Jim, no doubt about that; but he had lots of his own friends and wasn’t exactly lacking in confidence.

  ‘Andy’s just as talented as Jim. You only have to look at his artwork to see that.’

  ‘Even you have to admit that he isn’t that good at his books,’ George said, his resolve sharpening to such an extent that he no longer minded what she thought of him. Taking a deep breath, he said firmly, ‘Jim’s going to be allowed to take up the scholarship come what may and you can just put that in your pipe and smoke it.’ This was perhaps the unkindest he had ever been to her in their entire married life.

  She didn’t seem unduly perturbed. ‘We’ll see about that,’ she said, and within a few minutes she was sound asleep.

  Lying awake next to her, George felt his heart racing. So that was it. The end of communication between them.

  Nothing was going to stand in the way of this dream. Nothing.

  Once he had convinced himself of his resolution, and this took some time, he too fell asleep; only lightly, visited by strange fancies that drew him in and out of consciousness.

  Peter was awoken by a bell ringing. Not the phone. Not the old dinner bell outside the kitchen that was occasionally used by his few visitors. Must be the front doorbell that hadn’t been rung in years. Easing himself out of bed, he picked up a dressing-gown on the way into the hall. The doorbell rang again. Moonlight washed into the hall through the fanlight over the front door and illuminated the wall clock. Its hands showed ten to two.

  He turned on the verandah light and opened the door. Old Charlie stood there, blinking. His appearance was even more dishevelled than usual, and there were leaves and grass seeds on the greatcoat that he wore regardless of the season.

  ‘You’d better come in.’ Peter knew Old Charlie would come to his house only if something really bad had happened. He led him down the long hallway and into the kitchen. Charlie didn’t smell the best and it was a hot night, so he opened the outside door before offering his visitor a cup of tea and trying to get him to sit down at the kitchen table. The old man avoided the chair and attached himself to Peter’s dressing-gown sleeve instead.

  ‘You’ve got to come with me.’

  It was the first time Peter had ever heard Charlie speak more than a couple of grunts or a mumbled g’day and he was surprised at his coherence. ‘Can’t it wait till morning?’ he said gently. Nothing could be so urgent that it had to drag a man out of his bed on Saturday night, when the morning after was the only time all week he could sleep in a bit.

  ‘No.’

  For an instant Peter wondered if the old man had been drinking, even though rumour had it that he’d never touched a drop. Peter sniffed and couldn’t smell any alcohol although there were lots of other odours emanating from Charlie’s person. ‘What’s up?’ he said.

  ‘You’ll see.’ Charlie was starting to look upset now and if Peter was not mistaken, a couple of tears spilled out of his rheumy eyes.

  ‘What will I see?’

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘I’ve got to change first.’

  ‘I’ll wait on the back verandah,’ Charlie mumbled. He shuffled outside and parked himself on the step.

  Peter pulled on trousers and a shirt, and slipped on his boots. No socks to be found so he’d just have to go sockless. Before joining Charlie on the verandah, he retrieved a torch from the cupboard underneath the sink.

  But the moon was almost bright enough for them not to need the torch. Charlie led him down the driveway and onto the narrow path through the dense bush to the north of Ferndale. For someone whose gait was usually more of a shuffle than a walk, he could move remarkably fast.

  Peter thought of his comfortable bed and wondered why on earth he was following a mad man through the bush when he could be fast asleep. He grabbed hold of Old Charlie’s greatcoat to slow him down. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Tommy Hunter.’

  ‘What about Tommy Hunter?’

  ‘Got to see him.’

  ‘Well I’m not walking all the way up to Wallaga Lake. We’ll go by car.’

  ‘Not far from here. Two, three miles north.’

  ‘Of here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re driving then.’

  They retraced their steps. Peter unlocked the car and wound down the window before standing back to let the old man in. Now Old Charlie seemed a bit daunted. The shock of having to ride in a motor vehicle. Peter helped him into the car and shut the door behind him.

  In silence they drove several miles north of Ferndale.

  ‘Stop here,’ Old Charlie said, pointing to the edge of the road. ‘Look.’

  Then Peter saw, in a clearing at the side of the road, a crouching man. He appeared to be holding something and was rocking to and fro. Peter stopped the car at once and retrieved the torch from under his seat. He directed the beam so that it illuminated the figure. It was indeed Tommy Hunter.

  ‘What’s up, Tommy?’ he said. ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘Lorna’s cardigan,’ he said, holding up a dark bundle. ‘And look what was in the pocket. That green elephant she carries round. Must’ve dropped the cardigan in the struggle. Welfare’s taken her.’

  ‘Maybe she just dropped that when she was walking here.’

  ‘No. Look at them scuffle marks. They dragged ’er into the van, just like they did the other kids at the reserve.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Yesterday. Welfare took lots of kids. Missus told Lorna to run and she did. Thought she’d got away till now.’

  ‘When did you find this?’

  ‘Three, four hours ago.’ Tommy’s voice broke and he coughed.

  ‘You’ve been here all that time?’

  ‘Yes. Old Charlie said ’e’d get you.’

  Peering around for Old Charlie, Peter saw him crouching motionless nearby, a squat dark shape, and breathing heavily through his mouth. The trees seemed to be looming in, squashing them, so it was becoming a struggle to breathe. ‘I think I’d better go to the police. See if I can find out what’s happened. You want to wait here?’

  ‘She won’t come back. Won’t let ’er back.’

  ‘But she’s a …’ Peter didn’t know quite how to express what he was thinking. If both parents were full-blooded Aborigines she shouldn’t have been removed. It was the mixed-race kids they took away.

  ‘Missus ’ad ’er by whitefella when she was fifteen.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m comin’ with you. Old Charlie wait here in case.’

  Old Charlie nodded.

  Peter opened the car door for Tommy, who was still clutching Lorna’s cardigan. The drive south to Burford seemed interminable but it was probably only half an hour. The Burford streets were deserted. Peter parked right outside the police station with its depressing blue light illuminating the entrance. Tommy refused to get out of th
e van. ‘’Aven’t got m’ dog tag on,’ he said. ‘They’ll lock me up.’

  Inside, Peter found a bored policeman slumped at a desk, a red-faced man in his late forties. So happy was he to see some break in the routine that he almost embraced Peter, but his expression altered when Peter explained why he was there.

  ‘A half-caste Abo. Yes, they’ve been taken away.’

  Peter felt disembodied, as if it were someone else, and someone he didn’t know all that well, standing in the police station.

  ‘Lorna Hunter’s ten or eleven. The daughter of a good friend of mine,’ he said.

  ‘Not your daughter then?’

  If Peter hadn’t felt so shaken he might have resented the man’s patronising tone.

  ‘No. Can you check your records?’

  The officer went into the back of the police station, leaving Peter alone in the waiting room. He could hear the murmur of voices from out the back. Pacing up and down, he occasionally stopped to check on his car parked outside. The last thing he wanted was for Tommy to get arrested for being in town after six without his tag.

  Presently the officer returned. ‘Take a seat, mate,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a few minutes before my colleague finds the file.’ Peter sat down on one of the hard wooden benches.

  ‘Want a cup of tea?’ The man took a thermos flask from under his desk.

  ‘No thanks.’ Peter stared glumly out the window.

  ‘Abos were moved on from here last week,’ the man said, taking a noisy sip of tea. ‘We started shifting them up by Jingera and then came back here to move the local buggers on.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Where they’re supposed to be. Up at Wallaga Lake Reserve.’

  ‘That girl Lorna Hunter went to school in Jingera.’

  ‘She probably wasn’t there much. Terrible truancy rates the Abos have. Kids in and out of school, it’s no wonder they’re not educated.’ Putting his feet up on the desk, he rocked the chair back and forth. ‘We moved the Burford coons on after the Welfare Board took the half-caste kids. I reckon Welfare will have their hands full.’ He laughed.

  Peter tried to imagine what it would be like to lose someone you loved and found there were tears in his eyes. Becoming emotional would never do. Looking out the window again, he blinked rapidly several times. ‘Where did they take them?’

  ‘The Gudgiegalah Girls’ Home or the Kinchela Boys’ Home.’ The man paused before adding, ‘It’s for their own good. They’ll have the blackness bred out of them in a generation or two. Once the half-caste kids were gone, we moved on the full-blooded Abos. They’d been fouling up the land, doing their business anywhere and everywhere. Public Health had to close the conveniences at Burford Oval because the niggers’d been using them all the time. They were that filthy no white person could bear to go in.’

  ‘They’ve got to go somewhere,’ said Peter.

  ‘Yeah, Wallaga Lake.’ The officer now emptied the last of the tea from the thermos into his mug.

  ‘No, they’ve got to go to the toilet somewhere. If the Council shuts up the public toilets in the park, the Aborigines have got to do their business somewhere.’ Peter’s head was starting to spin. It must be the fatigue; maybe he should have accepted that offer of tea but it was too late now.

  ‘Nah, they do it anywhere even when they’ve got proper toilets. Not a nigger-lover, are you?’

  ‘I reckon they’re people just like you and me.’

  The officer laughed indulgently. ‘You see another side of life in this job,’ he said. ‘And it isn’t too nice, I can tell you.’ He got up and went into the back of the station again. A few moments later he returned.

  ‘Yes, Lorna Hunter’s gone. She’ll be sent to the Gudgiegalah Girls’ Home. Ain’t nothing you can do about it, mate. Sorry about your friend, but that’s the long and the short of it.’

  Containing himself, distancing himself. George had been doing that all morning. Occasionally, when he least expected it, it came rushing in at him again, threatening to overwhelm him. Then he had to stop whatever he was doing and take deep breaths until he was strong enough to push it away from him once more. He wasn’t going to give in though.

  Mentally gauging the length of each log, he stood in front of the wood pile. They were uniformly eighteen inches long and he planned to rearrange them so the pile was even more orderly than usual. The whole afternoon lay in front of him. He would stack the logs in the timber frame he had constructed the previous Sunday.

  He began to arrange the logs between the constraints, with their rough sawn edges facing out. Or facing in, it all depended on your perspective, and he feared he was losing his. The growth rings, year after year, were exposed to view. The big logs he would stack first and afterwards he’d slot between them the more slender pieces of wood.

  The day was hot and the woodpile was in the sun. He took off his felt hat and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. Eileen was indoors having a rest. He could do with one himself but he had to keep his exhaustion at bay, just as he had to keep his loneliness at bay too. He drove himself on, not heeding the splinters, not heeding the heat.

  After several hours he heard the fly-screen door slam but he didn’t turn. He knew it was Eileen. She didn’t say anything and he didn’t stop working. He didn’t even turn around, but he was aware of her standing on the verandah, watching him.

  ‘Quite a work of art, that,’ she said at last. ‘Reminds me of the Royal Easter Show.’ Her voice was not unkind.

  He stopped at this, at the memory of those piles of fruit and vegetables, and the beautiful arrangement of the more colourful vegetables into the coat of arms of New South Wales. The background to his meeting with Eileen all those years ago. He felt a prickling behind his eyes. Eileen’s kindness was not what he needed at the moment, and it wouldn’t be genuine, it would be part of their war of attrition. It isn’t fair to Andy. He could hear again the savageness of her tone the previous night.

  He had to hold himself together, he had to be self-contained. Taking a deep breath, he turned slowly to look at his wife, who was standing on the verandah and smiling at him.

  ‘Nice to see you being tidy, George.’

  For once he was glad of the veiled reproof. It would stop him falling apart. He thought of the shopfront window of Cadwallader’s Quality Meats. Of the exquisitely arranged display of chops and steaks, of the orderly rows of sausages and the mounds of tripe decorated with sprigs of fresh parsley. He knew he was always tidy but Eileen would never look at that display.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she added.

  She brought it out to him in the old enamel mug with the chip on it right where his mouth went. Unhygienic it undoubtedly was, but it was his favourite mug and had belonged to his father before him. Gratefully he took it but didn’t look at her face. When she’d gone back inside, he sat down on the stump he used as a chopping block and again wiped the sweat from his brow.

  That morning Peter Vincent had telephoned to tell him the news about Lorna Hunter. He knew about this policy in the abstract but it had never before happened to anyone he knew. Never to a kid who was in the same school as his sons. It must be a mistake and he was going to phone the Burford police himself this afternoon. That sort of thing couldn’t be allowed to happen in a civilised place like Wilba Wilba Shire.

  Yet if Peter was right, what would it be like to lose your family? He couldn’t bear to lose his. They meant more to him than anything. Without warning he began to weep. For the callousness of authorities who would take away half-caste children, their families were only Abos after all. For Jim, whose cleverness meant that Jingera was not big enough for him. And for Eileen who no longer loved him, he was quite sure of that now.

  Putting the half-empty mug down on the ground, he rested his head on his hands. Softness and love, that’s what might have been. But not for the likes of Lorna Hunter, if Peter was correct. Not for himself either, as long as he refused to yield to Eileen. He knew that soon he’
d have to resume constructing his barrier. There was no meaning to life, there was no order to life, unless you imposed it.

  Only at this instant did it occur to him to put himself into Eileen’s shoes. Maybe it wasn’t just the expense that was bothering her. Maybe it wasn’t fairness to Andy either. Maybe she was thinking she was losing a part of her family; in a way she was. Even though the scholarship was the right thing for Jim, and George was absolutely convinced of this, the children were Eileen’s life and now unexpectedly part of this life was about to be removed. At such a prospect Eileen might well be feeling a sense of loss. Or even of anger, and what better way to manifest this than to refuse any physical contact with him? How insensitive he’d been not to think of this before.

  On the other hand he wasn’t entirely to blame. If only Eileen had been able to say to him, George I’m going to miss Jim terribly, if only she’d been open with him. Then they could have talked things through and avoided this awful alienation. He would have to tread more lightly with her. Although Jim was going to be allowed to seize this opportunity, he himself would need to work harder at understanding Eileen’s point of view. She might never soften but he had to try to understand what she might be going through.

  At this point he rubbed a handkerchief over his face. It was as wet as if he’d just washed it and his mouth felt dry. Picking up the mug of tea again, he deliberately sucked at it, slurped at it, something he would never do if he were not alone. When the tea was finished, he carried the mug to the back verandah and left it on the splintered planks. Constructing the wall of logs was allowing him to put things in perspective. Constructing the wall was holding back the worst of his unhappiness.

  Jim, washing his hands in the bathroom later that same afternoon, wasn’t aware that his father was on the phone until he came into the hallway. Dad had his back to him and was holding the receiver up to one ear and a cupped hand over the other ear. The radio in the lounge room sounded quite loud, even through the closed door, but Dad was speaking softly in spite of this. Jim might have gone straight past him and into the kitchen if he hadn’t heard him mention Lorna Hunter. He stopped still. This wasn’t exactly eavesdropping, he just wanted to know more.