Coming Rain

by Stephen Daisley

The old homestead was built of local honey-coloured stone and the hardwood timber jarra-djarraly. The stones had been taken from the Daybreak Springs formations. Lime masonry cement mixed in a dry creek bed near the house. The roof was of terracotta tiles, the old Cordoba thigh tiles carted up from Fremantle docks. Took two weeks. Bullock carts then, camels too sometimes in the summer, they said.

  As he approached the house, he could see the wide, dark verandas with canvas deck chairs and old tables. Piles of books and the pages of abandoned newspapers lifting in the breeze. Iron filigree: circle and star, fleurs-de-lis; lathe-finished veranda posts and dressed lintels. Five palm trees in a row and green lawns.

  Along the west wall, windows large and low enough for a man to step into and out of. Akubra hats, an oilskin Driza-bone coat and two coiled stockwhips hanging from hooks next to a door. There was a snaffle bridle and below that a stockhorse saddle. Four tennis racquets on another set of hooks against the ancient honey stones. Wisteria vines coming into full summer leaf and shivering, they had claimed a southern hip and an ancient jacaranda in the front yard, startling against the blue sky, the mauve November flowers. Some had fallen onto the red gravel driveway.

  Jimmy was coming out of a side door holding a galvanised bucket in one hand and a stool in the other. He did not see Lew and disappeared around the side of the building. A rooster crowed somewhere beyond a line of lemon trees. Jimmy reappeared, leading the small Jersey cow, must be Velvet. He tied her to a fence and sat down on the stool near her back leg. He placed the bucket beneath her, leaned into her flank and, using both hands, began milking her. He turned his head, saw Lew as he approached the front of the house. Raised a hand. ‘Mr Lew.’ He called. ‘Cooooeee.’ The cow too had turned her head to gaze at him. She slowly chewed her cud.

  Lew paused at the bottom of the steps. Debated if he should say to Jimmy nobody used cooee like that anymore. Or that he was terrified coming here. Shook his head. Not within cooee. I am not within cooee of being good enough to walk up these steps. Thought of Clara and the candle on the floor between them. The canvas and rubber smell of tennis shoes and the length of her legs climbing into his window. The glimpse of white underwear between. He took a breath and quickly walked up the steps, crossed the veranda and knocked on the front door. There was no answer and he waited. He knocked again and after a few minutes John Drysdale came to the door.

  ‘Lew?’ He frowned and looked at him and past him as if looking for Painter.

  ‘Mr Drysdale.’

  ‘Lew, you here by yourself?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well, what can I do for you young man?’

  ‘I would like to stay on for the wheat harvest and to see your daughter, Mr Drysdale. Clara. With your permission.’

  Drysdale reached into his pocket and took out a handkerchief, wiped his burnt eye. Looked at what he had wiped off. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I would like to see Clara.’

  Drysdale shook his head. ‘Well she is not here at the minute Lew. She…’ He paused. ‘You want to see her? Go out with her? To dances and the like? Socials and engagements? The Gungurra Show?’

  ‘Yes Mr Drysdale.’

  He almost laughed, then looked at Lew again. ‘Are you serious boy? No. Don’t be bloody silly, it’s out of the question. Listen to yourself. You are a shearer. Clara is my daughter.’

  Lew stood there, not knowing what to say.

  ‘All right?’ Drysdale stepped back into the doorway and began to close the door.

  Lew realised he was nodding in agreement with Mr Drysdale. Heard himself even say yes all right then as he turned and reached the veranda balustrade at the top of the steps. His hand was shaking. He saw his leg go out to take the first step down and his knee too was trembling. Didn’t remember reaching the bottom step but as he held the post he suddenly took a deep breath and spat.

  ‘Righto, that’s the story?’ he said and felt a terrible burning in his belly; opened and closed his mouth. ‘I am a shearer here.’ A humming behind his eyes and he clenched and unclenched his hands. The biceps in his arms seemed more sensitive and he wanted to take off his shirt. She kissed me and asked me to ask, should I have told the old man? Knew it would have made no difference. I have become, he thought, a coward.

  Lew was about to walk off when he heard the faint scrape of the front door being reopened. John Drysdale’s voice.

  ‘Young man.’

  Lew turned.

  Drysdale’s eyes narrowed. He looked down at Lew from the top of the steps, studied him for a full ten seconds. ‘I,’ he said. ‘I should not have been so short with you just then.’

  ‘Mr Drysdale.’ Lew looked up at him.

  ‘You were good enough to come to my door, I will give you that. And I am the son of a Kalgoorlie gold miner. He was a man, he told me, equal to any other white man.’

  Lew was looking at him and holding the rail.

  ‘You better come through,’ Drysdale said. ‘I should like to show you something…I’m sorry about before.’ He turned into the house and left the front door open, walked through a long hallway and opened a back door, also left that open, framing it in a rectangle of light, stepped onto a wide back veranda and disappeared.

  Lew followed him into the house. The hallway floor, a long narrow Persian carpet. Wide, dark floorboards. A table with a brass top and a dried flower arrangement in a vase. Yellow light from a side window edged in stained glass. Photographs of rams, horses and wedding groups. A bullock wagon piled high with wool bales. Dogs and Clara. Clara at the Royal Show on a grey horse, ribbons and medals around her neck and her smile. Families at a beach. A group of workers, posed in front of a mine-head poppet: Great Western Gold Mines. Two football teams and a cricket eleven. Into the light.

  John Drysdale was staring at a small grave. A beautifully threaded marble headstone:

  Poppy Elizabeth Drysdale

  Born April 30 1902 Died Aug 21 1906

  Aged four years and four months. Safe in the arms of Jesus.

  A posy of rusting flowers fashioned out of sheet metal was resting against the base of the headstone. A plaster dove, sun pitted and ingrained with red dirt. An Agee jar with the dried stalks of dead wildflowers and a white line around the shoulder where the water level had been. Next to Poppy’s grave another larger and more ornate memorial. Fewer words, more swag and scrolling.

  William John Drysdale

  Born 1858 Died 1921

  At Rest Now.

  John Drysdale glanced back at Lew and then continued to stare at the grave of his father. ‘Sixty-three and still looking for gold,’ he said. Nodded as if agreeing with his dead father. ‘Yes, you were.’ He knew the young shearer Lew was standing respectfully behind him, but he kept looking at the graves as he spoke. ‘A bucket of rocks fell on his head. I found him at the bottom of the shaft. He had twenty-four thousand acres of sheep and wheat and he still wanted to find the gold. Twenty-four thousand acres, can you believe it?’

  They were both silent.

  ‘Y’know Lew, we never spoke much. My father and I.’ John Drysdale cleared his throat, leaned back, looked up. ‘That rain storm last night was promising,’ he said. ‘We might be right now.’

  ‘It was, Mr Drysdale,’ Lew said. He had approached the fence and was standing alongside the old man.

 
‘After Poppy died, I asked him why our God would take her like He did.’

  Lew was silent, nodding, not knowing what to say.

  ‘My dad, y’know, he didn’t say anything for a long time when I asked that. That bloody impossible question. Seemed like years but it was probably only about five minutes or so.’

  Drysdale paused and his head sank below his shoulders as he laughed. ‘And then he said, did you hear Poseidon won the Melbourne Cup son?’

  Lew nodded.

  ‘Won the bloody Caulfield as well, the old man said, and the St Ledger. Bloody good horse. Still entire. Tommy Clayton the hoop. A great Melbourne Cup it was.’

  Lew cleared his throat. He didn’t know what to say.

  ‘It was 1906. Tommy died from injuries he took from a fall three years later, 1909. Horse called All Blue fell on him, would you believe it? Took him four days to die.’

  ‘Four days?’

  Drysdale nodded. ‘Anyway, after my father was killed, Mother went to her people in Adelaide. She put me in a Perth boarding school and a manager on the place until I was old enough to take over. Never was right after Poppy, never was. It was the end of her here.’ Drysdale waved at the flies landing on his face. ‘Tommy Clayton. Yep, the old boy said he was a top jockey until that horse fell on him. You know what entire means?’

  ‘No Mr Drysdale,’ Lew said. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘It means they hadn’t cut his balls off.’

  Lew looked at the headstones. ‘Like a wether? Or a barrow?’

  ‘That’s right,’ John replied. He nodded to Poppy’s grave.

  ‘My little sister. I remember when she died. Snakebite. Big brown, must have been five foot. Over near the chook run. I was eleven.’ He straightened and squeezed the top rail of the fence in his hands. ‘Little Poppy. Still see her sometimes. Bugger it.’

  ‘A brown snake, Mr Drysdale? The gwarder?’

  ‘Yep,’ he slapped his hat and hand against his leg, ‘gwarder kill a horse. They can.’ He cleared his throat, waited and continued speaking. ‘I wanted to name Clara after her. Call her Poppy. But Judith found it too morbid. You have to let go of the past, she said. Judith was my wife. The cancer. Did you know?’

  Lew looked at the sky. Cumulus cloud moving against the blue. ‘Yes sir,’ he said.

  ‘That’s her over there,’ Drysdale indicated with his chin a small black marble headstone off to one side of the family plot. White writing. A mound of red soil. The rain from the previous night had gouged tiny run-offs. Dead flowers flattened. Exposed white stones.

  ‘I see her,’ Lew said.

  Drysdale did not indicate he had heard him. ‘How can you do that? Let go of the past. That’s just nonsense. How can it not be what it was, and what it is?’ He continued to speak, appeared unable to stop now. ‘I will be buried here next to her. Clara will take over the place. My mother is buried in Adelaide. At the West Terrace cemetery there. She didn’t want to be here.’

  They were both silent for a long time.

  ‘You can’t go out with Clara, Lew. See her.’

  Lew frowned and slowly shook his head in bewilderment. ‘What? I’m sorry Mr Drysdale,’ he said.

  ‘Do you not understand?’

  ‘No sir.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘The graves of your family, Mr Drysdale.’

  ‘There’s a gate around the side of the house.’ He gestured to the right as he continued looking at the gravestones and markers, kept speaking, ignoring Lew.

  ‘I want to stay here for a bit longer. This is where I’ll end up. Go on now and have a think about it. You worked hard boy, I’ll give you that, shore fine and clean. I’d have you back.’

  Lew stepped away from the railing.

  ‘But it’s completely out of the question boy. You are who you are and there is no changing that.’

  Lew did not notice Jimmy standing with two buckets, watching him as he let himself out through the side gate and walked back towards the shearers quarters.

  Again he tasted the bitterness of his stomach. His heart beating in his temple and at the end of his fingers. He had never felt like this since the day he had watched his mother weeping and holding the pillow over her face so he wouldn’t see the bruises and missing teeth.

  CHAPTER 42

  It was coming into night when they stopped. She turned to the north and lifted her nose into the wind. The fur across her back ruffled and she saw the black storm clouds coming. She felt the thunder beneath her feet before she heard it. Began frantically to dig. The young dog had stopped next to her and watched. She was using both her front feet and digging as fast as she could.

  He began to imitate her. It was as if she was trying to uncover a rabbit burrow with young to feast on. She had made a hollow deep enough for her and he was almost there. She started pawing at the earth where he was, helping him. The black clouds began to squeeze together above them. Rain drops hitting the hot ground. Flurries of water in the wind.

  They dug faster and both lay in their hollows, noses to tails as the clouds opened above them and it rained. The sky became a storm and seemed to be running from something as she ran from the old man in the blue car. This is her licking the young dog. Him licking her. She shook herself yet again as the downpour continued. The hollows they had dug to hide in began filling with water. The rain in heavy sheets.

  They stood and waited.

  Every now and again the dogs opened and closed their mouths and simply endured. There was nothing else to do but this. He would glance at her but she would ignore him.

  When the storm had ended and the rain stopped falling they sniffed each other in reassurance. He, at a loss, looked to her to make a choice. She raised her nose and sniffed the air and saw the night beginning to close. They stretched, front feet out and backsides in the air. Wide jaws and then lifting their chests and flattening their back legs. Stood up and shook themselves.

  CHAPTER 43

  Clara came for him the next morning. Monday morning.

  Drysdale had taken Painter into Gungurra to arrange for payment for the shearing. They were going to a branch of the Bank of New South Wales. Painter had repeated that he needed more tobacco.

  She parked the Land Rover outside the shearers quarters, walked to the door, knocked, called his name and returned to sit behind the wheel.

  Lew stood on the veranda, pulling on a shirt. She told him where they were going. Jimmy had helped her make up a picnic.

  ‘Your father told me I could not see you Clara,’ he said. ‘I asked him if I could and he said no, it was out of the question.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did he tell you why? Say anything?’

  ‘Nothing really. He left this morning. Took the town car. Said he’ll see me when he gets back.’

  ‘What shall we do?’

  Clara stared at him and laughed. ‘Come on, I promised you a swim.’

  ‘I can’t…I never learned to swim.’

  ‘I’ll teach you then. A swim and a picnic at Daybreak. No one will know. Only Jimmy and he’s a love.’

  They drove across the dirt roads for almost an hour. She would glance over at him from time to time and smile but it was difficult to speak because of the noise. It was just the two of them and they had to sho
ut to be heard. The rain had washed the land and it seemed brighter than before. Sparkling. The air clean and sharp. Even the birds seemed to fly faster and twist as if in celebration. Lew had the almost constant sensation of wanting to laugh as they drove. To sing, and he never sang.

  She yelled that it, the world, describing with her hand an all-encompassing circle, was this. Our land and we are the only young people in the world. That he too was with her and the laughter was infectious and with the noise of the vehicle and the crashing through it, unable to be heard, anything and everything seemed easier to say.

  In just over an hour they arrived at Daybreak Springs. They left the Land Rover at the gate. There was a curving path between the rocks and trees and she held his hand until they reached the banks of a freshwater pool. It was edged with large rocks, kangaroo grass and paperbark melaleucas. Clara unpacked the straw bags. The towels and a bottle of homemade ginger beer. Sandwiches in brown paper made with cold corned beef, pink with a fringe of white fat. Piccalilli relish, pickled cucumber and onions, tomatoes and a square of butter. She tied string around the bottle’s neck and lowered it into the cold water.

  ‘We used to come here when I was a little girl,’ she said. ‘It was known as Winjilla Springs in the old days, grandfather told me, but he renamed it Daybreak. Told Dad it was in the first light of morning when they found it. And now it’s a safe place to swim.’

  She bent down, took off her boots, overbalancing slightly as she did so. Dropped her hat on the boots. Stepped forward then onto a tongue of flat striated red stone which led to the water’s edge. Squatted to study the surface riffle and reflections of the sky. Turned back to him, looking over a raised shoulder. ‘Come on.’

  Above the pool were great slabs of grey and stippled red boulders. A small waterfall ran between fissured dolerite rocks and fell into the pool. The sound of water falling into water. A quandong bush clung among the rocks.