The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  The scene reminded William a little of his own farm, but he didn’t think he could ever go down there to ask for rides on the tractor, or to investigate the sheds, as he’d done with his father. It wouldn’t be the same. For a moment a cold sensation of loss swept through him. He turned and stomped on through the grass. The brow of the hill flattened out, then at last the land dropped away, and there before him was a small, shallow valley. Beyond it another hill rose to the east, wider and broader, and beyond that he could glimpse yet more hills, receding away under the sky.

  It all seemed to be the same sort of country, scrub and trees and grass, and there was no guessing how many miles it ran, but below him he could see a gravel track. It curled around the slope on which he stood, and then climbed away eastwards. No doubt it came from the sheds and stockyards, and from there it must wander its way into the depths of the property. But what really caught William’s eye was a structure nestled beside the track on the far side of the valley. It was a church. Tiny and white, with a little steeple. And beside the church, fenced in iron, was a cemetery.

  This was something! He tramped down the hill, and then up again. As he approached the church he saw that its weatherboard walls were actually a scabrous grey. The building was just another ruin. Grass grew high around the foundations, the window frames were empty, and the tin roof had fallen in at the far end, where the green leaves of some plant poked out. William studied it all in disappointment. He had never been inside a church, but he had a dim conception of pews and altars, of candles and statues and priests in robes. There would be none of that here. The front steps were broken, and the doors were padlocked shut.

  He moved on to the cemetery gate and edged through. He remembered another graveyard, in Powell, a spreading green lawn where his father lay buried under a rectangle of black stone. William could still see the coffin as it sank into its hole, neat and smooth. This place was different. It was small and very old, the iron fence tangled with bushes, the headstones barely visible amidst tall, shaggy weeds. There were only five graves. The first two were side by side in one corner, marked by leaning headpieces, the writing worn away to a blur. The third grave must have been more recent. It stood alone, the slab cracked and sprouting grass, but the name on the headstone was still legible. ‘Malcolm Jeremy White’. The dates below told that the man had died in 1930, but there were no other messages or clues about him.

  The last two graves were the biggest, with pillars and carved angels to stand guard over them — except that the pillars were broken and the angels had been vandalised, their wings snapped off, their faces staring blankly without noses or lips. But here too the names on the tombstones were still visible. The less impressive of the two read,‘Marjorie Anne White, Beloved Wife of Edward’. The larger said simply,‘Edward Thomas White, of Kuran Station’. William pondered them both. Who were all these Whites, and why were they the only ones buried here? He saw a large hole in the earth, leading down under the two stones. It tunnelled away at an angle, rutted by rain and trailing roots. But it was also smooth in places, as if an animal had burrowed there. He remembered the wild dogs then, his uncle talking about packs of them, howling at the moon. The graveyard no longer felt like a place he wanted to investigate. The day remained bright and warm, and the House was only a few minutes walk away over the rise, but it was so quiet, and he was all alone.

  He left the graves, made his way to the sunken steps of the little church and climbed up carefully. He saw now that the padlock on the doors was broken, hanging loosely on the bolt. William pushed and one of the doors gave a little, scraping against the floor. With another good shove he was able to slide inside. He found himself in a small, empty room with narrow windows and a rubbish-strewn floor. Broken glass crunched beneath his shoes. Something scuffled and scratched above him, and looking up he saw that there was no ceiling, only the open framework that supported sheets of tin. Birds had nested up there. He could see tufts of straw and mud in the corners. The floor below was layered with feathers and droppings, and William felt a sudden itch in his scalp, thinking about lice.

  And yet there were clear signs that people had been here. Empty beer bottles. Soft drink cans. Cigarette butts. Bits of newspaper and magazines, and even what looked like a mouldering toilet roll. In one corner was a crude barbecue made out of bricks and a sheet of tin, with a pile of ashes beneath it. In another corner lay an old mattress, filthy and flattened and stained. Near it were a pair of crumpled track-suit pants, and a single sandal. And here and there around the walls, jagged graffiti had been carved into the wood, initials and names and dates and dirty words. It all reminded William of an empty shed near his school in Powell, where the bigger kids had gone after classes to smoke and have fights. Maybe the children from Kuran village had once done the same thing up here at the church. But everything, the cans, the bottles, the mattress, was layered with dust and bird droppings. Even trespassers had long abandoned the place.

  At the far end of the church the floor had fallen in, grass had grown through the hole, and in the middle of it, leaning against the rear wall, was a tree. The limbs had reached up and unseated the sheets of the roof, so that a mottled green daylight was visible through a fringe of leaves. But within the church itself the tree looked dead, a leafless tangle of branches that had sought its way across the wall in search of light. Again, some creature scuttled momentarily in the roof. A bird, perhaps, or a possum. Or a rat. A tremor ran through William. This was worse than the cemetery. Would everything on his uncle’s property be the same, defaced and decayed and torn apart by the slow creep of branches and roots? If so, then what was the point of exploring any of it?

  He backed away, out of the church and into the daylight again, leaving the door open. But the afternoon no longer seemed bright and welcoming. He gazed around, apprehensive, and eager now to get back home. He could follow the gravel track, but that would be the longer way, and meanwhile there was the knot of gum trees up on the hill, his landmark. He set off through the grass. But when he reached the trees, confusion rose. The land fell away into another shallow valley, and he couldn’t see the House. Looking about, he realised that there were several groups of trees, and his landmark could have been any one of them.

  He considered going back down to the track, but then decided that the House simply had to lie to the west. He walked towards the sun for a few minutes, but there was only more grass and trees. Finally, to his bafflement, he found himself on a hillside that faced north, gazing out over rolling country which was completely foreign to him. On the maps in his uncle’s office the property had looked only a few miles wide — why was it proving so difficult to find his way? He set off again, and descended into a gully, the bottom of which was dense with scrub and already in shadow from the westering sun. He stopped, seriously worried now. Surely he couldn’t be lost? He had walked barely fifteen minutes to reach the church in the first place. He turned around again and aimed towards the highest land in sight. But when he reached the spot, he saw no sign of the House or the church. Tears started in William’s eyes. What if he was still out here when it got dark?

  He thought about wild dogs again, and other things his uncle had said about the hills, how parts of them were still unexplored. The dark gully behind him, was that one of those places? He plunged off in the opposite direction. Should he yell for help? Was he close enough to the House for anyone to hear? Or was he heading further away all the time. Then he tripped over something in the grass. He fell, the rough blades scratching at his face, and glimpsed something white. Scrambling to his feet, he saw a bone, a long, curved rib, sticking up from the earth. He realised there were more. Brown skin clung to some of them, and they joined at a half-buried spine. The skull lay to one side, its jaws stretched open in one last soundless cry. Ants crawled and picked at dark shreds that lay within, and there was the faintest scent of rotting in the air.

  It was only a cow, he told himself, only a dead cow. But he was horrified, stumbling away in tears, unable t
o stop the panic growing. They were an awful place, the hills. At home on the plains he had been able to see everything, it was impossible to get lost, but the hills were deceitful, they tricked and misled and were full of dead things, gravestones and creeping trees on walls and empty eyes set in skulls. Why had he ever left the House? And then all of a sudden there it was, rising before him. He gaped at it. He had come the wrong way round, because now he was approaching the House from the rear. He could see the tumbled ruins of the outbuildings, and beyond them the familiar grey slate roof. But even through his relief, the House looked grim and cold and ugly. He remembered the interior of the church, and it came to him that the upper floor of the House would be the same, dark and filthy, and that his uncle slept on a stained mattress in some derelict room.

  But it was his home now. Exhausted, he picked his way through the last of the grass and climbed through a break in the back wall. All he wanted was the safety of his own room. He tramped across the red earth of the car park, and then around to the front garden. And there he stopped short.

  His uncle was sitting on the porch.

  He could have been waiting there just for William, or for no purpose at all, an old man merely watching the afternoon sky. He looked nothing like the wild-haired prophet of the night before. He was wearing work pants and boots, and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing the gnarled bones of his forearms. Tufts of white hair were visible on his chest, and he cradled a teacup in his hands. William hesitated, knowing that he wasn’t quite safely home after all.

  The old man regarded him levelly.

  ‘You look a bit done in. How far did you go?’

  William lowered his eyes, feeling guilty for no reason he could name.‘The graveyard…’

  ‘Only the graveyard?’ His uncle fixed him with a frown. ‘Something give you a fright, did it?’

  William could feel that his face was flushed. Even worse, his eyes were still swollen with tears. Yes … it was obvious to anyone. The little boy had got lost, and started to cry.

  ‘Hmm.’ The old man drained his cup, then stretched out his bad leg and kneaded the muscles before rising to his feet. ‘Well, never mind. We’ll make a proper start tomorrow.’

  William looked up. ‘A start?’

  ‘It’s a big place, this station. I should have known. No use you blundering about on your own. We’ll go for a drive tomorrow, you and me, and I’ll show you the whole property.’

  William blinked in confusion. He could still feel the itch of grass against his skin, and he could still smell the dead cow’s flesh clinging to bone. He hated Kuran Station, every inch of it.

  But the old man was smiling. ‘At least that way we’ll know what we’re talking about.’

  Chapter Nine

  FOR JOHN MCIVOR, BANISHMENT FROM KURAN STATION WAS LIKE an amputation. One moment he had been whole and young and full of hope. The next, a limb had been lopped away and the blood was draining out, leaving him cold and pinched. Elizabeth White had wielded an axe upon his life.

  The last days on the station were almost too painful to remember. The House was stripped bare, the stock was sold off and most of the workers were dismissed. After swift negotiations, the property was bought by a grazing consortium from interstate. The McIvors were homeless. John’s only hope lay in his father. Kuran Station might be lost to them forever, but Daniel had savings, so why shouldn’t they buy some land of their own somewhere else? It would be a more humble place, no doubt, but the family could start all over again, secure this time in ownership.

  Instead, his father cashed in everything, borrowed more, and purchased a hotel in Powell. The station manager would become a publican. John was amazed. What did his father know about the hotel business? Cattle and sheep, that was their life. But Daniel’s sacking had turned him bitter and stubborn. He would not, he declared, be chased away. For thirty years he had been the strength behind the White throne, the most important man in the district, and nothing about that was going to change. Accordingly, the Royal Hotel was one of the grandest buildings in Powell, a two-storey affair, with wide balconies fringed in wrought iron. By early 1931 the purchase was complete, and the family flung the doors open for business.

  John, working behind the bar, saw that the enterprise was doomed from the start. The publican trade was nothing like the pastoral industry. There was no store of wealth behind a hotel, no resources of land and stock to see it through troubled times and keep the banks patient. A hotel needed cash, it needed a regular turnover, and for that it needed customers. But nobody came to the Royal. There were logical explanations for this. The depression was raging, and Powell, with a population of only four thousand, had over twenty other pubs. But John, roaming about the town in lonely anguish, saw that there was another, uglier reason for the lack of custom. Powell, in fact, was enjoying Daniel McIvor’s downfall. Now that he had been stripped of his power (and by a mere girl, no less!) the townsfolk finally had him at their mercy. Old accounts were being settled.

  But there was more to it than that. John could read it in faces and overhear it on street corners. The familiar pattern of whispers and looks, of half-caught insinuations about his father, had asserted itself again. Some dark slur lay behind it all, both maddening and mysterious, and ultimately unanswerable, because, as ever, John had no idea where the core of it lay. Nor was there anyone he could ask, for he was as much a pariah in the town as his father, the son of a marked man. Still, after only a few months of poor trade and mounting debts, he could foresee the inevitable. He pleaded with his father to sell the hotel again, quickly, before all was lost. They could still start over, as long as it was away from Powell. Daniel only shook his head, a mania gleaming deep within his eyes. Powell owed him, he insisted. The whole region owed him for the things he had done. He would never leave. But he was drinking much harder than he ever had before, and even in defiance he seemed shrunken now, suddenly an old man.

  John could think of nowhere else to turn. His mother had always been a silent stranger to him, and anyway, she had no influence over her husband. And his little sister — born in 1927 — was just a child, merely another mouth to feed. So John gave up in disgust. His father might be bent on self destruction, but there was no need for his son to stay and share the humiliation. John was almost eighteen now, old enough to stand on his own. He packed his few belongings and struck out along the dusty roads, westwards, to seek his fortune.

  He had assumed he would find employment on cattle or sheep stations. But the properties in the far west proved to be nothing like Kuran. They were vast, scorched, empty things, with low homesteads squatting away alone in the scrub. John knew nothing about such arid country, and owners and managers alike laughed when he talked about his pastoral experience back east. To them, Kuran Station, for all its grandeur and history, was no more than a gentleman’s hobby farm. Their own properties were ten times the size, and fifty times harder to run. In any case, no one was hiring. Even if they were, there were always twenty other men after the job. The roads were choked with wandering souls. It was the same story with the railways gangs and the drovers and shearers. If there was any work at all, it went to men with wives and children to support, not striplings on their own.

  Disillusioned, John moved on, a swagman. From the far west he travelled north through the mining country, labouring for a day here and there, and then east to the coastal towns admidst the mangrove swamps. Last of all he tramped his way southwards to Brisbane. But wherever he went, all he found were thousands of unemployed, as desperate as himself. It was John’s first look at greater Queensland, and his first true indication of just how alone he really was. He hated the cities with their crowds and squalor, he hated the coasts with their sweltering heat and tropical jungles, and the great emptiness of the west, naked and red, oppressed him. Most of all he loathed his own helplessness and poverty. No one knew his name. No one understood what great things he had been promised. No one cared that the prize had been torn so cruelly from his h
ands.

  It took John a full year to accept that he had made a mistake and that his father, even in madness, had perceived a kernel of truth. The most important thing was to keep to your own country. The Kuran Plains was where he belonged. His name might do him no favours there, but even prejudice was better than crushing anonymity. So from Brisbane he turned westwards, up the Great Dividing Range to Toowoomba, and then out through the rolling hills until they faded away into black soil. The horizon etched a curve before him, and he was back in Powell. The town had been battered by the depression, but John had seen a hundred other towns far worse off, some of them stricken to the death. Powell would survive. The same could not be said of the Royal. The hotel was dirty, neglected and empty of guests. His father was incoherent with alcohol. His mother was as powerless as ever, his sister a face he barely recognised. It took only a glance over the books for John to see that the money was all gone.

  So he refused to stay at the Royal. The important thing was to stand apart, to create his own name, free from his father. He slept on the banks of Powell Creek, amongst the tents and shanties which had sprung up there. Eventually he was hired by a farmer to help with the filling and carting of wheat bags during the harvest. It was John’s first experience of grain-growing. Nothing about it appealed to him, but he did see that, if necessary, wheat could be a means to an end. More importantly, the farm, a few miles north of Powell, was situated right up against the old southern boundary of Kuran Station. John could stare over the fence to his former home, where only two years previous open grassland had extended away forever. Now the land had been surveyed and the blocks marked out with pegs, three hundred and twenty or six hundred and forty acres in size. Here and there the new owners had already moved in, ploughing up the grass and planting crops. Shacks had been built, and sheds, and fences. In some places the pasture still grew undisturbed, but to John’s eye the plains had taken on a painfully moth-eaten appearance.