Drylands

by Thea Astley

  He swung again, the oars heavy in his skinny arms, but they went down sharp and he pulled against the water and the boat shot forward.

  ‘We’re moving!’ he shouted. ‘We’re moving!’

  ‘You’re doing great,’ the big man said.

  Delight knocked him silly. He pulled again and again, the knack of it becoming easier each time, and glancing over his shoulder he saw the far side of the inlet coming in at them.

  ‘Time for port and starboard,’ Mr Watters said. ‘You’ll be a regular old salt by the end of the day. Now, listen carefully while I tell you how to put the boat about.’

  He learned how to hold one oar, how to pull it against the other. He learned fast.

  ‘Not bad, not bad at all. You keep this up and I’ll be offering you a job.’

  They went backwards and forwards across the little inlet half a dozen times. He wanted never to stop but then Mr Watters said, ‘That’s enough for this morning, eh. You’ve come along fine.’

  ‘I want to keep going,’ the boy said. ‘I love it.’

  ‘I know, son. I know. But your shoulders are going to be that sore you won’t thank me. We’ll rub in some oil when we get back. Anyhow, I’d best get back to the others, eh, and give the missus a break.’

  ‘Can I come out on my own then?’

  ‘Can you swim?’

  ‘A bit. Learnt in the creek at home.’

  ‘Well, then. We’ll see. This’ll be easier. Maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ the boy said. ‘I really can’t wait.’

  ‘Think you might have to,’ the big man said. But he said it kindly with a grin.

  The next morning Mr and Mrs Watters brought the tiddlers down to the lagoon where, buoyed by salt water and zest, they spent an hour learning to float and dog-paddle, stroking up and down in a clumsy crawl. Jim came out first and dug his bony toes through sand, kicking it in little spurts. There was a scab hanging off his knee above raw pink skin. He picked at it absent-mindedly, his mind on boats, watching the big man walking up the beach towards him.

  ‘Can I now?’ he asked. ‘Please, mister? I did two widths, across and back.’

  ‘I didn’t see you,’ Mr Watters said.

  ‘You did! You did! I waved from the other side.’

  ‘Was that you, eh? So you did. I thought it was some champ from up the coast.’ The big man’s eyes were very blue in the morning light and crinkled with amusement. ‘Look, son, it’s these young nippers keep me busy. All right, then, while we’re here, scoot up the shed and get the gear.’

  Jim was to remember for years the envy on the faces of the smaller boys as they watched him drag the dinghy down to the water, put the oars in position, shove off with one foot and pull out into the lagoon.

  ‘That’s the way!’ the man yelled. ‘That’s it!’ He was being pestered and grabbed at by capering kids shrilling and yelling for a go. ‘Now you’ve done it! Now you’ve started something!’ But he was laughing. ‘Have to run joyrides now!’

  But Jim didn’t hear. He was pulling away across the water in permanent summer bound for Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti: the coral islands he’d read about. ‘I can row,’ he heard himself say out loud. ‘I can row I can row I can row.’

  I can row, he told himself all the way back in the train. He told his dad, too, who looked pleased for the moment but chewed up his son’s pleasure with, ‘Not much call for that out here, lad,’ as he looked skywards into a cobalt desert. ‘But your mum would have been pleased.’ He sighed. ‘She was a coastal girl, all full of waves and beaches.’

  Jim couldn’t really remember his mother. She’d died when he was three and his father, stubbornly refusing to give his kid up to grandparents, to remarry, to do any of the things other men would have done to save themselves effort, had struggled on his own to raise his son, grappled with farm and bad weather and just scraped a living for the two of them. He managed. ‘You’re a bloody wonder, Davo,’ his mates said. ‘Couldn’t do it meself. How the hell do you cope?’

  But his father’s comments didn’t stop the boy. He planned a raft for the creek swimming-hole, a packing-case floater that could drift in the few feet of water left. The waterhole was on their property, a dank sombre place where the creek was dammed up by rock and fallen log. He imagined lying on his raft, drifting, staring at a sky checkered by the limbs of the red gums and the coolabahs. He wanted to do this on his own.

  ‘Need any help?’ his father had asked as Jim headed to the shed. The old man couldn’t stop himself: ‘Don’t forget Archimedes’ law.’

  ‘I don’t need a hand,’ the boy told him, stubbornly knocking out planks from a case.

  ‘Well, when you’ve done that,’ his father said, hurt by rejection and a failed joke, ‘I’ll need a hand on the truck later with the feed runs.’

  Although Jim did not want overseeing, he realised that he could never manhandle the finished raft all the way down to the creek, so he dragged the pieces there plank by plank and tried to assemble them on the sandy slope. After an hour he achieved a clumsy inexpert flatness of pineboards hammered onto green tea-tree branches and lashed with rope.

  The moment the last lashing was tied he hauled the raft down the bank and eased it into the creek where it teetered drunkenly, with water oozing between the cracks and slopping over the surface.

  Floating. But only just.

  He watched with a smile, then waded in and holding it by one corner edged himself aboard until he was sitting square in the middle. Instantly it sank three inches and his pants were soaked. Furious, he paddled back to the bank and stared at his work. With his weight lifted, the raft rose once more and flopped impertinently. ‘Bugger!’ he shouted. ‘Bugger! Bugger!’ He wondered if packing the cracks with some of his dad’s plastic grouter would help. He wanted to yell and howl with frustration and he screeched out all the rude words he knew.

  Nothing helped.

  He waded in again, shoved the raft, now much heavier with its waterlogged pine, back to the side of the creek and, gasping and tugging, managed finally to hoist it over the lip and along the bank to hide it under scrub.

  When his breath came back he ran home against grass, against hot air, against himself, to be stopped mid-stride by his father who held him tight for a moment, inspecting the excitement and disappointment on the boy’s crumpled face.

  ‘So how did it go?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The raft? Does it work?’

  Jim was scowling through snotty tears.

  ‘Well, does it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’d better let me have a look.’

  That was then. Randler could still remember that day in every detail. His dad had lugged the pineboard mess back on the tractor, puttied the cracks, added a frame and had taken it down to the creek the next morning. ‘Now we’ll see,’ he said. ‘Should be right now. I’ll trim off a pole for you and you can use the raft like a punt. How about that, eh?’ He paused, thinking for a moment. ‘You know, it’d be better up in the house dam. Not much water there at the moment, and a lot safer. And you wouldn’t have those little creeps from town coming to muck it up.’

  ‘I want them to see it.’

  He was proud of what his dad had done. He’d painted a name on it – Kon-Tiki – which he’d read about in a book from the town library.

  ‘The dam would be better.’

  Jim was obstinate. ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘No. I want the creek.’

  ‘Okay then,’ his old man said. So they’d had an official launch, his dad snapping open a beer for himself and a Coke for the kid and splashing the wooden planks. ‘Let’s see you go.’

  Afloat.

  He shoved off with the pole his dad had fixed and worked his way across the waterhole to the tree barrier and back. When he lay down he could paddle with his hands, pushing over the water under the dusty gauze of leaves.

  ‘Well, that’s pretty good,’ his father said. ‘Pretty damn good.’

  ‘Yo
u want a go?’ the boy asked.

  ‘No, son, no. I’d be too heavy. You’d see her sink again. Archimedes’ law!’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’ll explain sometime. You go ahead, sailor.’ He sat there sipping his beer slowly and watching the sun freckle the water beneath the scrub. He’d never seen his son’s eyes so alight, so bright with possibilities.

  ‘You go now, Dad,’ Jim called after a while. ‘I’ll be okay.’

  ‘Lunchtime,’ his father said. ‘I’ll help you stow her. I’ve got to get into town afterwards. And you’ve got school again tomorrow. We’ll have to get your duds sorted.’ He wanted to take the raft home on the trailer but Jim begged for it to be left higher up the bank under the gidgee.

  ‘So I can get at it. It’ll be okay,’ he argued. ‘It’s on our place.’

  He was wrong. He couldn’t stop himself from talking about it at school. Howie Briceland and his gang listened, watching with small eyes. On the last day of that week when he went down to the creek he found the raft smashed to bits. Someone had taken to it with a sledgehammer, leaving splintered pine all along the bank. Pieces had been tossed into branches on the far side and dangled like a bad joke.

  ‘Well,’ his father said, hugging the sobbing kid, ‘well, son, it’s a rotten trick but it’s a lesson for life. Envy’s a terrible thing.’

  ‘Can you make me another?’ the boy asked between snuffles. ‘Can you?’

  ‘Maybe. But you’ll have to keep it up on the dam then. Listen,’ he added, ‘don’t let them know at school, eh. Don’t say a word about it being smashed up. That’ll only please the little bastards.’

  When the kids made snide references the next Monday, when they asked him how the raft was going, he lied and said his dad was buying him a boat on the coast and they’d keep it there.

  They didn’t believe him. And his dad never got round to making a second raft. And work on the farm went on endlessly with the ploughing of the near paddock for lucerne and the hay baling and the dagging and help with the dipping and the culling of sick lambs who staggered blindly dying on their feet because their mothers couldn’t feed them in the drought and trucking feed out to the grazed-bare paddocks for the older ones still standing and helping with the meals after he got in from the school bus with his dad dropping dead-tired in a rocker on the verandah, eyes red and hopeless with dust.

  Jim was eleven, twelve, thirteen.

  He felt older than his old man.

  ‘It’s all yours,’ his father would say, waving expansive arms, ‘the whole godawful place. You’d better learn to make a go of it, son, because there isn’t anything else.’

  ‘Why don’t we sell up?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Who’d buy it?’ his father replied. ‘Anyway, it’s a love-hate thing, I suppose. You’ll understand one of these days. It’s got memories. Your mum. You. And fundamentally, son, it’s all we’ve got.’

  After Jim did well in his fourth year at high school and wanted to go on, ‘No,’ his father said. ‘No, lad, I’m sorry but there simply isn’t the money. I need you here. It costs too damn much even for casual hands. None of those books can teach you how to run a farm.’

  Although he’d wanted to answer back, to say that even without books nothing much would help in the drought years, he shut up, wishing there’d been a mother to keep things in line, like the other kids had. He recalled a period of inexplicable howling doglike grief from his father that had lasted a week, though it had seemed to him then like a year.

  Remembering now, Randler wondered if the old place had clawed stigmata on his father and himself, branded them.

  A year or so after his father died he had married a city girl he met at the Brisbane Show. The marriage lasted two years, until he returned late one afternoon from the paddocks in the hot angry weather before Christmas to find she had packed up and gone. There was no note.

  Why hadn’t he sold up and moved when his father died – a disgruntled seventy-year-old who’d retained the picky perfectionism of his younger years but without the ability to realise it. No money, no rain, and a weight of years. Jim Randler still heard his father’s last words: ‘Sorry, son. I never did make you that second raft.’ The old man’s eyes had lit up for a minute as the words trickled out between his drying lips.

  Enslaved by habit, that was it. Routine kept him going, thoughtlessly as it were. His heart wasn’t in it. He craved a more detailed landscape than these flattened plains, this uncomplicated sky.

  The morning he woke to decision, the sky was a drained skin with rags of cirrus peeling away to the coast.

  He ticked off the components of freedom. He had sold off his land, his stock, the two farm horses, both sheepdogs – whose presence he missed more than he liked to admit. He kept Cracker, the house bitser he’d had for seven years. There was only the farmhouse and shed squatting on their few acres up from the creek. Free, he told himself.

  But he was not. Driven by compulsion and that dream maggot of his youth, he drove his rattler of a truck on the long bitumen run east and reached Rockhampton in the early afternoon where he booked into a run-down hotel that gazed sluggish over the sluggish river, a pub with a sprinkling of elderly boarders as tired as he. Exhausted he might have been but he was filled also with a strange exultation. There was an inner fire to be stoked.

  First he visited boatsheds along the river and asked prices. Everything was exorbitantly expensive. One boatshed owner admitted that Randler could build what he wanted himself for half the price. The boatshed would, the man told him, supply a custom-built keel, all the planking he needed. What exactly was he after?

  Randler didn’t know. He was furnishing a dream. A sloop, the man at the boatshed suggested, one mast, two sails. We can fit an outboard any time. ‘I want a cabin,’ Randler told the man, who was a muscular giant with a sad, used face, not given to many words but a lot of thinking, ‘so I can live aboard for weeks at a time. Nothing big. A bunk and a bit of a galley.’

  ‘Twenty-one, twenty-five footer,’ suggested the boatshed man, another who had refused to go metric. ‘Could you handle building something that big?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Randler said. ‘I really don’t know. What I do know is I’d rather do it myself. Feel part of it.’

  ‘There is that,’ the boatshed man agreed. He was an easy kind of fellow with honest eyes. ‘Yes, there is that. We can supply plans, specifications, and like I said, all the timbers. But it’s long work, mate. And it’s hard. Had any experience with timber?’

  Randler repressed a crazy impulse to tell him about the raft, that nagger failure he had yet to correct. Even if he could have afforded the overpriced yachts or launches that were on sale, he wanted no other man’s dream.

  He had remained a fortnight in town, waiting for plans and working sketches. The boatshed man became a friend and sometimes they drank together in the evenings. ‘Boats are love affairs,’ Cherry Cole said. ‘Won’t let you go. I know.’ He had stared down into his glass and gone silent.

  ‘Love affairs,’ Randler repeated as he set about putting up stocks and cradles back in his own shed for the skeleton frame of his mistress. He would purge all memories of that almost forgotten partner. The work was hard. An oak keel, hog pieces and kelson, he’d decided, and kauri for planking. The timber was stacked along one wall of the shed. He had a basic set of tools to which he kept adding: clamps, a rebate plane, a jig for his borers. Cole had offered to drive out one weekend and help with the setting up and though Randler was touched, tempted, he kept insisting he wanted to do it alone. Despite that, his friend appeared unexpectedly one early Sunday a month later, a slab of beer in the back of his ute, a lot of advice in his head.

  ‘Not bad,’ Cole commented, surveying the keel set up on the stocks. ‘Not bad at all.’ He ran an inquisitive and admiring finger down the curve of the wood. Already Randler had the hogs and kelson in place and was ready to begin work on the stem. ‘Look, I’m sorry for barging out without warning, but I w
ondered how you were going. Wanted to help if I could.’

  ‘Not barging. I’m pleased. Come on up to the house and have a beer.’

  Although Randler, used to solitariness, was uncomfortable with guests, he made a bed up for Cole on the verandah and played the uneasy host. The friendly interest on his visitor’s face cheered as they faced each other across the bachelor dinner of chops and potato he served up.

  ‘You remind me of someone,’ Randler finally said. There was a beach nearly fifty years away, a beach and a kindly man who’d taught him to row. He talked about that time while they drank their tea.

  ‘That was my uncle,’ Cole said, grinning. ‘A great old character, eh. Died a few years back. Eighty, by God, and still out there fishing, nagging me in the shed, telling me how to do it.’

  They had parted the next morning, with Cole’s offers of further help stubbornly declined. Yet it took the best part of six months for the skeleton of the sloop to take form and then another six to fit the planking, each day from sunup to sundown filled with problems of scarfing, treating fayed surfaces, waiting for adhesives to set. He worked with hour-long fanaticism, only pausing to brew up tea on the spirit lamp he kept in the shed. He was drunk on the smell of freshly planed timber as much as the salt-tingling tides that washed across his heart. He’d long forgotten the paddocks, the sheep, the crop planting that had been the Calvary of his years. He had smashed down the habits of a lifetime and burst through into a visionary place that might or might not become the real world. He wouldn’t entertain for a moment the possibility that it might not.

  It was getting there that counted.

  He still went to the pub on Friday evenings and by now the whole town knew of his project, humouring old Jim because they thought he was going a bit round the twist. But they no longer asked about it. No one said any more, How’s it going, mate? After the first year, when the town had weaselled out his secret and he felt compelled to talk about it, he’d known he was becoming a bore. Perhaps an eccentric, he eventually hoped with pride. Eccentricity was safer, more tolerable. Small towns, he’d learnt long ago, cherished their oddballs.