The White Earth

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘Know about it? I’m a member.’

  William was speechless.

  ‘It’s true.’ She considered him.‘Do you know what I do for a living?’

  William shook his head.

  ‘I’m a legal adviser. I work for the state government — in the Premier’s Department. One of our jobs is to keep an eye on radical political organisations. One day someone was passing an Independence League newsletter around the office, laughing at this crazy little right-wing group from the bush. So I had a look. And there was the name on the letterhead.’ She breathed out smoke in wonderment. ‘My own father, chief proprietor of Fascists Incorporated. The weirdest thing is, take away the bogus patriotism and the inherent racism, and he’s mouthing the same old anarchist shit he used to hate so much.’ William was staring at her in bafflement, and she caught herself. ‘Sorry … It’s all before your time. Anyway, I subscribed to the newsletter. Not under my own name, of course. But it was one way to stay in touch. Poor Dad. I gather the rally was something of a disaster?’

  ‘You know about that too?’

  ‘Oh, I know plenty of things. I know that my father has been dumped from the League’s central committee, for a start. In fact, there is no League any more. Now it’s called Unity Australia. I got their new magazine the other day. Nicely printed too. But otherwise, it’s the same old names, and the same old policies. They’ve just tacked on a militia and a call to arms. Plus they’re going to start running candidates in elections. The idiots are actually going to register as a political party.’ She shook her head, disbelieving.‘I don’t think my father would ever have stood for that.’

  William had nothing to say. The way she spoke about the League was so bizarre. He had always known that his mother, for instance, didn’t approve of his uncle’s activities … but that had seemed mostly because of the money the old man wasted. This was different. Ruth sounded almost amused by the League, in a cruel way. He found his eyes drawn to the flagpole in front of the House. And for the first time since the rally, he noticed that the Eureka flag was no longer hanging there.

  ‘You actually liked all that League stuff, didn’t you?’ Ruth asked.

  He could only nod.

  ‘That’s what I thought … He’s got you locked away with him in this House, and he’s filling your head with all his crazy ideas. I don’t know why your mother allows it, or why she even brought you here. Except, I do know.’

  But that didn’t seem fair. ‘We had nowhere else to go.’

  ‘There’s always somewhere else to go.’

  William shifted his legs uncomfortably. Her judgment was spoken with all the weight of her years, and he couldn’t argue.

  ‘Where’s your mother,’ he asked.

  ‘She died,’ said Ruth simply. ‘She’d been living with me in Brisbane. I wasn’t sure my father would come to the funeral, but he did. That was the last time we spoke. You know what he seemed most interested in? Who Mum had left her money to.’

  ‘Was it you?’

  ‘Of course it was me.’ She was stubbing out her second cigarette, sparks showering down into the pool. ‘And he was pleased with that. He thought it proved something.’

  She fell silent. As it was, William already felt he’d heard too much, seen a hidden part of his uncle’s life nakedly exposed. All the things he’d thought he understood, they sounded different when they came from her — twisted and strange. He remembered his uncle’s warning. Maybe she was just trying to confuse him. But why? Indeed, why was she talking to him at all? If it was the station she wanted, then it was her father she had to deal with.

  He realised she was watching him sidelong.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘will you fix the pool, when this whole place is yours?’

  William went still. There it was. Spoken out loud. Now the attack would come.

  Instead, she smiled. ‘You don’t have to worry, you know. I don’t want it. Not the House. Not the property. Not any of it.’

  He stared at her. ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Not even if my father offered it to me. Which he never would. But what about you? Do you want it?’

  Amidst his surprise, William wasn’t sure what to answer.‘Yes,’ he said at last.

  ‘I thought so.’ Ruth sounded almost sad.‘And to get it, all you have to do is be nice to your Uncle John…’ Then, abruptly, she was standing up, tucking her cigarette packet away. ‘Enough for one night.’ She turned to face the plains. ‘God, it’s hot. And look at those fires, up in the hills. They must have burned out half the national park.’

  William rose as well, still uneasy, yet relieved.

  But Ruth was studying him again. ‘It was a fire in the wheat, I’m told.’

  William blinked at her.

  ‘Your father, I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That must have been hard,’ she said. And then to William’s dismay she reached out a hand and rested it on his shoulder. ‘Poor boy. I know what it’s like.’

  Then she set off back across the garden, picking her way with care in the darkness, while her father’s House waited silent to receive her.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  BY 1969, JOHN MCIVOR HAD TO ADMIT THAT HIS DAUGHTER baffled him.

  He blamed the times. A new age had swept across Australia, and the decade seemed to belong to young people with wild hair and wilder clothes. These types were not a familiar sight around Powell, but they were everywhere on television and in the newspapers. And it wasn’t just their appearance that John disliked — what grated most was their aggressiveness, all their marches and riots in the streets, their protests against the war in Vietnam, or apartheid in South Africa, or whatever took their fancy. But what did they know? Had they survived any great wars or depressions? Had they struggled to raise families and buy homes? No. And yet they felt free to cast judgment upon anyone older than themselves. It was a sorry state of affairs. And that wasn’t even considering their preoccupation with drugs, and their sexual immorality.

  Worst of all, they had stolen his daughter away.

  John had once thought that law would be a sensible career for Ruth. But after finishing her degree, she joined a community legal centre in Brisbane’s West End. Her work had something to do with women’s rights, although she was never clear about what she did exactly, or whether she was even paid. Indeed, John was aware that Harriet often sent her money secretly. Of course, all his money was his daughter’s to ask for, if she really needed it — but this was just subsidising her in folly. Who knew what she spent it on? Certainly not on her clothes or her appearance. The neat daughter John remembered had turned into someone scruffy, barefoot and careless. She talked of nothing but campaigns and rallies and protests. Closing his ears, all John could do was hope that inside her the old Ruth remained, ready to re-emerge one day, when reality sank in.

  That hope was especially important now.

  For in late 1969, at the age of fifty-five, John McIvor finally began proceedings to sell all his land and purchase Kuran Station. Nearly forty years had passed since the day he and his father had been banished by Elizabeth White. Forty years … it was a span of time to be marvelled at. He had waited so long, and grown so old. But when the agent took him for an inspection tour of the property, John was overcome by the sight of it — so huge, so alive, so beautiful. And almost his now. He could feel the strength of the hills flowing into his limbs like youth. What then did age matter? He would have as many more years as he needed. A price was settled upon, and all that remained was the paperwork, then the sale would be official.

  The moment was a culmination so sublime that John felt full to bursting with the desire to express it — but who was there to tell? Who could even understand his achievement? No one around him remembered his earlier days on the station, or the shame of his downfall. His father was dead, so was his mother. He hadn’t spoken to his sister in decades. Harriet was coldly uninterested. Which left Ruth — and if only s
he could grasp the importance of what he’d done, then John would’ve been content. But on the rare occasions she deigned to visit, all he saw was a young woman who lolled about the house in torn jeans, obnoxiously bra-less beneath her T-shirt, spouting maxims from the lunatic fringe.

  How was he to make her understand that all the grandness and stature of Kuran Station was ready for her now — that the whole life he’d always planned for her was ready. The picture of it was so clear in John’s mind. With the station behind her, she could have her pick of the finest suitors in the country, she could find someone influential and rich, from a landed background maybe. The House would be hers and her husband’s to live in, restored to its former glory. And when they had children of their own, the kids could be raised there on the property. Kuran Station would become a family seat once again, the foundation of a new dynasty, eclipsing even the Whites. And there at the head of family, the great patriarch, would be John himself. If only he could make Ruth see.

  Just how vain were his hopes, and how totally deluded he was about his daughter, became clear the moment Ruth arrived home on what would be her last visit.

  She appeared at the door with a man, and declared that they were married. But ‘man’ was too kind a word. In those first few hours of shock and anger, John saw him as the very worst example of everything he hated about the younger generation. His name was Carl, and his long dark hair and beard couldn’t hide the fact he was only a boy, nor could the infuriating air of superiority with which he slipped into the house in Ruth’s wake. Slim and pale, his clothes of tie-dyed cotton, it was obvious he had never laboured for anything in his life, and yet there was a persistent mockery to his smile as he looked over the farm. It was, Ruth told them, his very first trip west of Brisbane. He was the son of two university lecturers, and he was trying to become a playwright.

  It only got worse over dinner. Carl announced that they should know he was a confirmed anarchist. He proceeded to lecture a silent, fuming John about what libertarian socialism really meant — implacable opposition to hierarchy, or any organisational structure that embodied authority, and hence oppression. Anarchists were not against order itself, but it had to come from below, directly from the community, and never from an institution artificially granted power over others. Like parliament, Carl offered helpfully. Did they understand what he was getting at? John understood all right — it was perfect idiocy. He loathed every word that came out of the boy’s lips, shining pink and plump amidst the wispy hairs of his ridiculous beard. And yet Ruth sat by, nodding.

  At the other end of the table, Harriet watched them all unhappily. Caught between father and daughter, she sought for a topic that might distract them both. She opted for Kuran Station, and the fact that John had made an offer on the place. It was the worse possible choice. Ruth greeted the news with a deliberate indifference, and John glared at his wife in rage. This was no time to be speaking of the House! Not with this intruder present. And yet Carl was the only one interested in the news. What was this Kuran Station, he wanted to know. And so, faltering under her husband’s icy stare, Harriet explained a little about the station and its history. It set Carl off on another lecture. The grand homesteads, and the landed gentry who had owned them, were prime examples of an oppressive hierarchy. Land was inalienable from the people, he declared, a common possession, and should never be owned by any individual to the exclusion of others. And all along, Ruth smiled at her father.

  John could think of nothing to say, his outrage so towering that it was all he could do to remain at the table. She had married this fool. When Harriet tried to divert the conversation by asking about Ruth and Carl’s wedding, John’s control almost fractured. How could she want to talk about it? Didn’t she understand what Ruth had done to them all? But then, blessedly, came deliverance. For it turned out that Ruth and Carl weren’t married at all, at least not legally. An anarchist could hardly accept that any church or agency had the right to formalise a marriage contract, so they had devised a service of their own, and held it in front of a few of their friends in a park.

  It was still a binding vow, Carl asserted. But John was so relieved he was barely listening. Maybe something could still be salvaged from the wreck. Ruth may have become almost fatally misguided, but so far there were no legal ramifications to her actions. That lone fact enabled John to survive the rest of the evening without exploding, and it also saw him through the awkward discussion about Ruth and Carl’s sleeping arrangements. Even if they really had been married, the idea of them together would have disgusted him. But as it was, with only a narrow single bed in Ruth’s room, there was nothing to argue about. Carl had to make do with the camp bed in the office. So John went to his own bed with a measure of calm. With sleep and time to think, perhaps things would improve. Time was the key. Time, more than anything, for Ruth to come to her senses.

  But far into the night, John awoke from a dream haunted with flame and sensed, just as he had fourteen years ealier, that somewhere, someone was moving in the house.

  The déjà vu was chilling and immediate. Only this time, he knew instantly what the half-heard sound must be. He rose anyway, and crept down the shadowed hallway. The camp bed in his office was empty, and so he came without pause to his daughter’s bedroom. There was a light under the door, and a smell in the air that he didn’t recognise, but which he guessed, despairingly, had to be marijuana. Yet far worse were the noises. He sagged against the wall, weak with anger and shame as, mere feet away through the thin wooden door, his daughter was violated by the man she called her husband. Images flooded John’s mind and he was helpless to stop them — a thin white body heaving above Ruth’s; long, greasy hair hanging down across her face; those pink lips smeared on hers. Was it Dudley he was seeing, or the hideous boy? It didn’t matter, his daughter was willing this time, he could hear with appalling clarity exactly how willing.

  And yet in his vision she was joyless. She stared over the man’s shoulder directly at her father, as if there was no wall between them at all, and there was only hatred in her eyes as his hips pumped and pumped. I fuck him to fuck you, Father. This is what I learnt from you.

  This is what you allowed to happen to your daughter, and this is what I will go on doing forever and forever. And when Ruth cried out in pleasure, John almost cried out as well, longing to fling open the door, tear the man from her, throw him to the floor and beat him, beat him ceaselessly … but beat who? It wasn’t Dudley in there,and his daughter didn’t want to be rescued. He’d had his chance to do that years ago and had failed her. He had sent her away, and now she was avenged. All he could do was creep back down the hall, impotent and nauseated. His daughter’s soft, fierce laughter chased after him,and he knew that she had wanted him to hear everything, that her hatred was unqualified and permanent, and that nothing could be saved after all.

  The next morning, while Carl showered and sang in their bathroom, John told his daughter that if she insisted on staying with her husband, then he had no interest in seeing her again. The vindication in Ruth’s eyes made it perfectly clear that she’d hoped for this. But just to make the cut as deep and fatal as it could be, John spelt out exactly what he meant — that she would be severed from them completely, there would be no more support, she would never be welcome home, and no matter what sort of wealth John accrued in the rest of his life, no matter what property, no matter the possession of Kuran Station itself, none of it would ever come to her. Not if it was to be shared with this boy she had presented. And with a triumphant, shining anger, Ruth replied that such terms suited her exactly.

  She and Carl were gone within an hour. It was left to Harriet, tearful and horrified, to follow them out, clinging to Ruth and whispering into her ear. Whispering what — pleas, promises, sorrows — John didn’t know or care. He was aware of a vast hollowness opening inside him, and all the pain and rage was falling into it, to vanish forever. He felt nothing at all, only an exquisite isolation. Whatever he did from now on would be for himse
lf, and that would be enough. When Harriet came back, her eyes red and her body jolted by shock, he said nothing, felt no need to speak. Instead he left her mourning in their little cottage, and went off to his work on the farm.

  Two months later he signed the contracts, and Kuran Station was his.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  IN THE DREAM WILLIAM WAS WALKING THROUGH A BURNED-OUT wheat field, and he was aware that his father walked beside him. He could hear footsteps crunching in the stubble, and though he wanted to see his father again, he didn’t dare look, because if he looked he would see the burning man instead. But when he finally did look there were no flames, there was just his dad. And he wasn’t burned, he was the same as he had always been, whole and clean and smiling. William felt immense relief. But then he saw that his father’s cheek was smeared with a streak of black ash. Sorrow welled up in him, and suddenly he couldn’t see his father any more. His father was dead, and though in the dream William turned and turned, he couldn’t catch sight of him again. He was alone in a terrible field of burned wheat and dust, and somewhere far away a monster trod the earth.

  There were tears in his eyes when he woke. His ear throbbed as if someone had lanced it with a knife, and William curled up into a ball, waiting until the pain eased. And the other pain as well, from the dream. It was his cousin’s fault — she had resurrected the ghost of his father. And so gently … he should have been angry with her for even daring to mention the subject, angry with her pity and her hand upon his shoulder. And yet he wasn’t. All he felt was lonely and unwell. He stared at the window. Red daylight glared out there — the sun, the haze, the torpid air, none of it had changed. He rose finally, his limbs sluggish and sore. In the living room he found his mother, slumped upon the couch, staring fixedly at the television, even though it wasn’t switched on.

  ‘Mum?’

  Her eyes did not leave the blank screen.‘What?’