Drylands

by Thea Astley

  He stammered something that didn’t sound like words and went silent.

  Then there was the sound of feet treading along the verandah and the man from the horse was standing right behind him, checking his property, his servants.

  ‘Young feller says he’s got a message for you, Jilly.’ The man stood so close, Benny could feel his body-heat, smell sweat.

  ‘I’ll give him a cuppa,’ the big woman said. ‘That orright, boss?’

  ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘That might loosen him up. And then you’d better get him on his way.’ He swung about and his feet went thump thump thump down the stairs and out into the yard.

  ‘You better come on in,’ the big woman said. So he pushed the screen door back and went in and sat at one end of the kitchen table while the woman poured tea into a mug.

  He didn’t know how to start. He took a sip and put the mug down and looked from one woman to the other.

  The big one smiled. ‘C’mon! We ain’t got all day, boy. What’s your name?’

  ‘Benny,’ he said. Then it came in a rush. ‘Benny’s the name they gave me at the reserve. And Jilly’s my mum.’

  The kitchen fell silent. The kettle’s spluttering died away and Jilly put down her dishmop and came over to the table and lowered herself into a chair. She stared at the boy. He stared back and then dropped his eyes.

  ‘You gammon, eh?’ the big woman said.

  ‘No gammon.’ Benny’s feet shifted under the table, sought for and found the rungs of his chair.

  ‘Jilly don’t say much,’ the big woman said. She turned and looked at her companion. ‘Could be?’ she asked.

  Jilly looked down and nodded.

  Then she spoke, her voice small and uncertain. She asked where the reserve was, said she’d been taken there too but put in the women’s section. A half-wail broke from her mouth. Benny became frozen where he sat. Her pain was his. She’d asked and asked to see him, she said, and then after a few months they’d sent her out to work on a property near Marburg. Then later the boss moved her on to this place.

  She put one thin brown hand across the table and touched Benny’s fingers. ‘You man now,’ she said. ‘All them years, eh?’

  Then she got up and came round the table and put her arms around him and he could smell the dusky dusty smell of her and felt her thin body shake as she hugged him, shake and shake.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how did it happen? Who was he, my father?’

  Jilly lifted her head and stared over Benny’s shoulders, her eyes blank or filled with unwanted memories.

  ‘She got busted,’ the big woman interrupted. ‘Boss-busted. Man called Briceland out Red Plains way. Jilly was housegirl there, helpin. Me too. Our mob lived down by the creek and had jobs now and then, fencin, herdin. The boss’s wife was away at the coast and he busted Jilly. Kept at her till his wife come back. Jilly was only a kid, twelve, thirteen. Soon as he see what’s happenin, he get rid of the evidence, eh?’

  She laughed without mirth and went back to the stove and began stirring something in a large saucepan.

  ‘She don’t like talkin about it none.’ The big woman tossed words over her shoulder. They thudded like small stones. ‘She married now, one of the stockmen, Charlie Harris. They got little place on the property.’

  Benny took his arms away gently from his mother and sat back in his chair and looked at her standing there, hunched over her grief. ‘I got brothers?’ he asked. ‘Sisters?’

  His mother shook her head.

  She was only young, not even thirty, he estimated. He was disappointed at the lack of family. In the very marrow of him he knew family was important.

  ‘Lissen, boy,’ the woman by the stove said, ‘you ask too many questions, eh? Don’t you upset her. You want the truth, that ole Briceland he so rough with her, she can’t have no more kids. After you was born, the doctor feller he tell her that. I was there, see, down that same reserve, and they let her keep you a bit before they took you away to the boys’ dormitory and then they bung Jilly off long with me for domestic work. That’s what they call it. Not our own domestic work. Other folks’.’ She went over to the sink and refilled the kettle, dumping it back angrily on the stove. Water hissed and spat on the iron hob.

  ‘This Charlie,’ Benny asked his mum, ‘he good to you?’

  Jilly nodded. He had to lean close to hear. ‘Part white too. He understand.’

  ‘No one understand,’ the big woman said. ‘No one.’

  He hardly felt the stones through his worn-out sandshoes on the way back to town. His mind was a turmoil of discovery, bitterness, anger. Anger for what had happened to both of them: to his thin pretty mother, battered into silence by events she couldn’t control; for himself for what he had lost.

  He’d been quick and keen at the reserve school. His teacher, Mr Bussell, found him moving ahead of the others in his group, reading whatever the tattered supply of schoolbooks could offer. One day he overheard Mr Bussell say to the superintendent, ‘Young Shoforth must have had a bright white daddy. He’s miles ahead of the others. I think we ought to let him try for the scholarship.’ He’d pressed back behind the classroom door, hating the implication that the black bits were stupid. He waited until he heard the two men walk away across the yard and then he took a piece of chalk and wrote on the blackboard:

  I love a sunburnt country.

  The land belongs to me.

  I’d like to see the whites strung up

  From every gidgee tree.

  ‘Stand up the boy who wrote that!’ Mr Bussell said next morning. There was a long silence. Some of the older boys began to giggle.

  ‘You will all be punished,’ Mr Bussell warned. He was not a cruel man. He was simply forced to play by the rules. Secretly he was impressed by the neatness of the parody. He wouldn’t have suspected anyone in this ragtag class capable of doing it. There was only one boy who might have written those words. His eyes fixed on Benny Shoforth sitting quietly at the back of the class and for the longest of moments they looked at each other. Then Benny raised his hand.

  ‘Yes?’ Mr Bussell said.

  ‘I did it.’

  ‘Come out here, lad.’

  Benny shuffled out to the front of the class.

  ‘Get the duster and rub out those words.’

  Benny stood there mute.

  ‘You heard what I said, boy. Rub them out.’

  No one in the room moved. In the morning heat the smell of sweat and fear, glutinous and tart, became almost palpable.

  ‘I can’t,’ Benny said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I mean them.’

  Mr Bussell sighed. ‘I’ll have to cane you,’ he said, adding, ‘but you have a fine sense of scansion.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Benny asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ Mr Bussell said.

  He walked over to the cupboard and took out his cane and went back to the front of the room. He was hating this job, hating the tensions of the reserve, the governmental intransigence, the sheer selfish idiocy of the whole system. He’d be gone by Christmas, he vowed inwardly, and said to the skinny kid before him, ‘Hold out your hand.’

  He gave the offered palm the merest flick with the cane and went over to the board and erased the last two lines before turning to look at the class. Twenty eyes looked back. ‘Well,’ Mr Bussell commented, risking public service permanence, ‘you’re right about the first bit.’ Then he rubbed that out too.

  He didn’t report the matter. The superintendent never got to hear of it. But the incident, brief as it was, bonded teacher and class and made the last months of that year more tolerable.

  They didn’t allow Benny to sit the scholarship exam after all, and before either the war or the year ended he ran off from the reserve and worked fencing on a rundown sheep property near Condamine. Once when he had to go to town to help pick up supplies in the property’s truck, he saw Mr Bussell walk by. They looked at each other, Benny’s heart jumping for fear he might
be dragged back to that place he’d learned to hate, but all Mr Bussell did was smile and say, ‘Hello, Benny. Don’t worry, son. I haven’t seen you.’ Then he’d walked on without a glance and Benny’s heart stopped jumping and the day grew bluer and he whistled as he stacked feed bags in the pick-up, so happy the missus said, ‘What’s made you chirpy all of a sudden, Benny?’

  And he simply couldn’t say.

  Two years of this and that.

  Taller. Knew more. Thought he knew more. Still had the pocket dictionary he’d pinched from the books cupboard the day he ran away from the reserve. Sneaked it out before anyone could see and rammed it under his shirt. He wasn’t sure why he’d done that but he never let go of it. Sometimes at night he’d read bits. He knew words mattered. Every so often he thought about going to look for his mum. Thought about it until finally curiosity ate him up and forced him on his way. Ate him up and ended with those words, ‘No one understand.’

  For a while after that he’d managed to see his mother off and on. He worked now on the railway that ran through to Brisbane and because he looked more white than black found he was paid more. When he and his mother met, nothing was able to dissolve that tundra of years that had separated them. That’s what made them both weep secretly and hopelessly after each parting. In the end it seemed easier not to make that painful visit to the big homestead. Three years on he found out that his mother and Charlie had moved away and rented a poverty-spare patch outside Rockhampton. Charlie was getting by with seasonal work on the cane and pineapple farms.

  Benny got a more or less permanent job in the railway yards in Rockhampton. No one worried much about his ancestry or perhaps it didn’t show. He spoke differently now. Even back at the reserve his words had been losing that pidgin coloration that marked him and his people as a lesser breed. He kept to himself. Not unfriendly. Not too friendly. His wife Mellie worked as a cleaner in a hotel and together they managed to save sufficient money to buy an old shack on a couple of acres outside Drylands, hoping to move there some time. Back to the start of things. His start. The dream, he had told her. It’s the dream.

  Now, all these decades later, he was losing that as well.

  He gave up trying to sleep and went out to the kitchen and boiled up some coffee.

  What was the point of mulling over all those years?

  No point, really, but as a sop to loneliness.

  All those stupid plans, he thought as he sat sipping his over-brewed coffee in the wideawake house, had come to nothing. They’d never had kids. Mellie had died in her late forties and his mother not long after. He had gone out to visit the old place where she and Charlie Harris had lived and found it abandoned and scrawled with spiderwebs, Charlie having cleared out for Brisbane, nursing loneliness and bereavement with the bottle.

  Benny had never felt so lost.

  There and then he decided to give up his job at the railway yards and move out to Drylands to try his hand at subsistence living. All he took from his mother’s house was a sagging Genoa-velvet three-piece lounge suite and a picture of her and Charlie sitting on a sand hill at Yeppoon watching the ocean.

  He had that picture in front of him now and ran a fingertip over the yellowed surface that showed his mother trying to smile – he guessed she was trying to smile – and Charlie, one arm about her thin shoulders, the two of them there just staring at the panting sea. He thought it was the saddest thing he had ever seen.

  If he had been honest with himself he would have admitted he had chosen Drylands as a roosting place because that was where his mother had conceived him. Wait! That was too gentle, too generous a phrase to use. Correction: where his mother had been raped by Howard Briceland’s father; where Howard lived in pastoralist comfort, a big man in the district, an opinion swayer on council, a known enemy of Benny Shoforth’s people.

  Half-people, Benny thought, but without bitterness. He didn’t know where he stood in the scale of things but he believed the only way to play the people game was to play it white way. Sometimes when he passed Briceland in Drylands, he wanted badly to say, ‘I’m your brother. Your half-brother. Let’s go and have a drink, mate.’ With an extra-acerbic ironic stress on the ‘mate’. Always he held himself in check. It was easier to turn the other cheek. It was safer. And that cheek-turning was, he discovered to his delight, often maddening.

  He sat through the night in one of those old lounge chairs, waiting for the sun to come picking its way through the scrub. Give it an hour, he decided, and he’d be on the move. No use making further appeals to the council. No whimpers for mercy. They’d handed him notice to quit and given him a final date to vacate the premises. That moment came with sunup. Not for him those humiliating tailpiece tussles with council heavies and police forcing him out under the eyes of a smirking real estate agent come to assess the leavings. He’d made his plans and he’d stick to them.

  And after that?

  He owned so little.

  He looked around the room that served as kitchen and sitting-room. A small pine table and two chairs he’d picked up cheap at a fire sale in Red Plains, the lounge suite with its awful nostalgic autumn tonings, his mantel radio that worked off batteries, and half a dozen books. He slept on a fold-up camp stretcher in a small room off the kitchen, a room with one window that faced east and trapped hope each day with the rising sun. He was glad he hadn’t woken there this particular morning.

  He began shovelling his few spare bits of clothing into a cardboard box. Then the books: the dictionary, an atlas, a copy of Jack London’s stories, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (‘I think you’ll like this’ – Paddy Locke), and a couple of thrillers set in Australia. (There was an Aboriginal detective he found unbelievable. Still…)

  Outside was a garden of sorts. He walked into dawn and looked at the drooping plants he’d struggled to establish in front of the stumps of his drooping house. There was never enough water in the tanks to sustain them through the dry. He’d managed to get a bush lemon growing and each spring – or what passed for spring – had planted beans and tomatoes that gave scabby fruitings. He nurtured vast images of sterility.

  When he received the first notice of overdue rates, he’d ridden his bicycle into Red Plains and put his case to the uninterested girl working the inquiry desk in the council chambers.

  ‘Don’t get much for the rates,’ he said. ‘No water. No garbage removal, not even a decent road. The gravel’s cut to pieces.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she’d said, not sorry. ‘I’m just the clerk. You’d have to take it up with the councillors.’ She tossed an impudent blonde mane.

  What was the use?

  The next time he was in town buying a few washers for his taps at Briceland’s hardware store, he brought the matter up.

  ‘It’s like this, Benny,’ Howard explained, leaning confidentially over the counter. (Did he know it was brother to brother?) ‘The value of land’s going up round here, see. That’s what the rates are based on. We plan to run the town water pipes right out past yours and Mrs Locke’s place and that will bring the rates up even higher, eh? Council’s starting on that next month. There’s a new subdivision going up at the five mile.’

  ‘Got two tanks. Won’t need it.’

  ‘You’re lying, Benny,’ Howie said jovially. ‘You need all the water you can get out there. And even if you didn’t connect, you’d still have to pay for the service. If it’s there and you don’t choose to hook up, that’s your problem. You’ve still got to pay.’

  The pipes had gone past in a nightmare of graders, trenchers and dust that coated his house inside and out with a plummy skin he could never quite remove and after a while didn’t try to. A faded royal red.

  Like the dusty geranium he now picked, rubbing the leaves between his fingers so he could carry that marvellous fragrance with him. The pipes had gone past and he didn’t hook up and his rates rose and the payments soon got beyond him. It was as if the trenchers had dug him out with the clods of red earth and flung him to one
side.

  He sniffed once more at the crushed leaves. It was time to be going.

  Ever since she’d settled in the house beyond his, gutsy Mrs Locke had always been friendly. Right from the start, he remembered, she’d pull up in her semi-ute as he pedalled his way into the township and say, ‘Toss that mad contraption in the back, Benny. I’ll give you a lift.’

  Over the years they’d become friends in an undemanding way. She’d turn up at his door in the morning with a few pots of jam and ask if he needed a ride into town or if there was anything she could pick up for him. In return he would do odd jobs about her garden, fix guttering, patch up rotting timbers. There would be cups of tea afterwards and unprobing conversations that skittered around banalities of weather and town. When she got to know him a little better she would lend him books. She had a wall of them in her front room. Once she had begun talking about Chardin’s notion of the Omega point, the ultimate integration of all individual consciousness.

  ‘That’s where evolution’s heading, Benny.’

  ‘You mean all of us, even no-good –’

  She interrupted him before he could utter the words she knew were coming. ‘All of us. The whole of humanity. All all all. Even a crusty old dame like me.’

  Always she understood the delicacy, the fragility of the reclusiveness he had pulled around him like a cloak. From the few remarks Benny picked up while he drank his rare beer at the Lizard, he knew townsfolk thought she was a nutter. He didn’t. She’d begun reading circles, drama and discussion groups, and tried to drag cake-baking homestead wives into university extension courses on ethics and contemporary religions. ‘Give over, Paddy,’ they’d say. ‘Get real. No one out here’s got time for that sort of stuff.’ Once in the Red Plains supermarket, driven crazy by the screeching of rock singers as she shopped, she had pretended to faint outside the manager’s office and after he had helped her to a chair and raced off to fetch a female assistant, she had wedged the office door shut with a chock she had brought specially for that purpose and switched the hell tape in his machine for the first movement of the Sibelius second, of which she was particularly fond.