Sunset Ridge

by Nicole Alexander

  ‘Whatever the reason, the Jacksons feel duty-bound to work at Sunset Ridge,’ Madeleine replied as she too studied a ledger.

  ‘Isn’t there a Jackson family noted on the district land-owners board in the Banyan playground?’ Rachael asked.

  George removed his metal-rimmed reading glasses. ‘You’re right, there is. And no Jackson owns land around here anymore.’

  ‘And Sonia said something about it being hard to look back on your ancestors and wish their lives had been different,’ Madeleine offered. ‘If it’s the same family, then Grandfather must have given Julie Jackson a job after the Jacksons hit hard times.’

  ‘So, if that’s it,’ Rachael argued, ‘what’s the big deal? The Jacksons fell on hard times and Grandfather Harrow gave one of them a job.’

  ‘Exactly, Rachael,’ Madeleine agreed. ‘Why the secrecy and why is Sonia worried about old wounds being opened up?’

  ‘Scandal!’ George announced, theatrically spreading his arms wide. ‘And it follows Great-Uncle Luther’s chopping of the Evans boy’s finger in 1916, which, judging by the editorial in those old newspapers Sonia gave you, obviously caused quite an outrage at the time.’

  ‘Evans,’ Madeleine repeated. ‘You don’t think old Ross Evans is related to that boy, do you, George?’

  ‘At this point, anything is possible,’ George declared.

  ‘Here we go. Julie Jackson started employment here in the last quarter of 1918.’ Madeleine squirreled her eyebrows together. ‘Look at this − it’s another entry. Isn’t two thousand pounds a lot of money, George?’

  ‘It was back then,’ he agreed.

  ‘Well, either someone was owed a lot of money or it was a big purchase, not that we’ll ever know. The amount is categorised as an incidental expense. And here’s another one for five hundred pounds.’

  Removing his glasses George sat them on the table. ‘Considering all the other entries are so carefully itemised − food, clothing, saddlery items, et cetera − it does make you wonder what these payments were for.’

  Later, as she lay on the bed in her grandfather’s room and stared at the ceiling, Madeleine thought more about the ledger entries, which they had spent a number of hours going through. The two thousand pounds appeared to be a one-off payment, but each cash-flow book from 1918 up to 1925 showed a withdrawal of five hundred pounds at the same time every year during that period. Madeleine, George and Rachael agreed that these were substantial amounts to be paying out after the war, especially when the world was heading into a depression. George matched stock numbers from paddock books with livestock sale records from the same period and concluded that the property’s financial situation began to decline in the late 1930s, and within a decade Sunset Ridge was in serious trouble. He recalled a comment that Jude had overheard her parents make about their great-grandmother Lily Harrow – of her having worn the pants in the family. If that were the case, George suggested, it was possible that as Lily’s age increased and her health declined, her role in running Sunset Ridge might have lessened and her son simply may not have been capable of managing the property. Either that or as David Harrow aged he grew less inclined to be a farmer and became more interested in his painting.

  There was a substantial gap between the unknown commissions from 1918 and when David Harrow began painting his first landscape, titled Deliverance, in 1935, although it was possible that other works could come to light from this lost period in his life, it was equally plausible that David Harrow had simply ceased painting for nearly seventeen years. Why? Was it a combination of things? Had the war affected him so much, did marriage and the business of running the property truly take up all his time? It was possible.

  ‘Your great-grandparents hated your grandfather painting.’

  Ross Evans’s words came to her unbidden. Sitting up, she dangled her legs over the side of the bed. His statement didn’t help Madeleine with the post-war gap in her grandfather’s life, but what if Ross Evans was correct and G.W. and Lily Harrow didn’t approve of his talents from an early age? Madeleine knew that David Harrow had begun drawing before the war – the river sketches hanging in Jude’s apartment were evidence of this – but what if he had hidden his creative side from his parents in the early days? He was a bush boy raised to work the land; maybe his interest in art was considered a little too feminine, and not for public display.

  ‘It couldn’t be that easy, could it?’ she asked herself. Within seconds she was on her knees tapping the bottom of the desk, removing drawers and checking for false panels. Nothing. Sitting on the floor, Madeleine glanced at the tongue-and-groove walls and then very slowly she looked up to the manhole in the corner of the ceiling. Her mouth filled with saliva as she dragged the stacked storage boxes and shoe-filled milk crate out of the way and positioned the desk chair beneath the manhole. She grabbed an old hockey stick and clambered up.

  ‘Here goes nothing.’ She jabbed at the wood panel, loosening it, and then jabbed again. The board flipped sideways, dislodging dirt and leaves, mouse-droppings and paper. Madeleine dropped the hockey stick, rubbed dust from her eyes and looked at the floor. She couldn’t believe it. Climbing down from the chair, she quickly unfolded the two pieces of paper. They were a little mouse-eaten and stained but the charcoal drawings were complete. One sketch was of a woman, all angular shapes and distorted lines; the other was of a chair that appeared to have been pulled apart and then reassembled. They displayed all the hallmarks of Cubism and were both initialled with the letters D.H. and dated 1916.

  Madeleine let out a scream of excitement that brought George and Rachael running.

  Madeleine had always found the village of Banyan an uninspiring destination. Comprised of four short streets, not much had changed in the past hundred years; the original three churches, hotel and post office had been classed as historical buildings.

  The heat from the bitumen rose up in a wave as Madeleine left the car and walked across the deserted street. She was still reeling with excitement from having found the two sketches yesterday and she had left George and Rachael checking every crevice, bit of old furniture and manhole in the homestead in the hope of discovering more. The two sketches were wonderful early works, but Madeleine had no way of knowing if her grandfather had had access to art magazines from the period and she could therefore not be sure how much of his skill was raw talent or emulation. If they were drawn without outside influences, then these two early attempts at Cubism would have matched the innovative talents of the greats such as Picasso – an incredible achievement for a young isolated bush boy.

  Now here she was, flush with excitement and hoping that a trip to Banyan might dislodge further snippets of information about the Harrow family, specifically her grandfather. A worn plaque noted the destruction of the Banyan newspaper offices from a fire in the 1960s, an event that also destroyed the local court documents from the 1880s that were housed there. It seemed she would have to be satisfied with Sonia’s newspaper clippings, which included an opinion piece from 1916 commenting on all three Harrow boys being punished for Luther’s crime. She was beginning to form a clear impression of her tyrannical great-grandfather.

  Turning left, Madeleine walked down the street to the original post office, which was now a museum. Australia Post had shut up shop some years earlier, citing cost constraints, and the old building was now decked out in a creamy yellow with a brown trim, its signage noting that it was once a changing post for the Cobb & Co. line. Inside, the original mail counter was covered with souvenir teaspoons, tea towels and enlarged laminated photographs of the Banyan River, which in a good season was still a popular spot for fishing enthusiasts. Any spare wall space was taken up with old black-and-white pictures of the village: the time-stained photographs showed a busy place, with varied shopfronts and streets teeming with people and horse-drawn carts.

  At the rear of the former post office the building had been extended, and Madele
ine was intrigued to find a not-to-scale model of a Cobb & Co. coach laden with mailbags and luggage, with a dressmaker’s dummy inside decked out in period costume. Various paraphernalia associated with the turn of the nineteenth century lined the walls, including pictures of a steam engine that had once milled timber in the local lumber yard; and lanterns and ladders and countless other items of hardware were grouped under a sign that said Lawrence Ironmongers.

  ‘What do you think of our museum, then?’ The woman was short and had a weather-beaten look. Madeleine guessed she was anywhere between forty and fifty. She held a clear plastic container, the label on which stated that a gold-coin donation would be appreciated. She curled red-and-black-streaked hair around a nail-bitten finger, nodding when Madeleine dropped some coins into the jar.

  ‘Love it,’ Madeleine replied. ‘I’m wondering, do you have any information on the old families of the district?’

  ‘Sure thing.’ They walked to the front counter, where the woman handed Madeleine an A4 photocopied screed. ‘Mostly that’s on the big families − you know, them with money. The squatters, well, they came first. They’re all in there, like the Cummins family. They’re the best known in these parts, after the Wangallon Gordons, of course. At one stage the Cumminses gave Waverly Station a run for their money. You know, them that bred the ram that was on the shilling coin for nearly thirty years?’

  ‘Of course.’ Madeleine had no idea what the woman was talking about.

  ‘Anyway, the Cumminses are still here. They bought up a fair bit of land early in the piece and they’ve managed to hold onto it.’

  ‘Anything else you can tell me? Are there any interesting stories about any of the properties, or townspeople – you know, stories from the past?’

  ‘Well,’ she said as she lit a cigarette and leaned confidentially across the counter, ‘there’s a place here called Sunset Ridge.’ She blew a puff of smoke over her shoulder. ‘People around here reckon the property is bad luck. One of the old people out there lost some of the land in a bet years ago. He was a cranky old bastard, which is probably why his three sons were always getting into scrapes with the townies. Eventually one of them nearly went to gaol, so the old man locked them all up, and then they ran away to the war.’

  ‘Was there a woman involved?’ Madeleine tried to sound gossipy.

  ‘Isn’t there always? And she was a real looker in her day, Corally was. People around here thought a fair bit of her. She came from nothing – lived near the cemetery in a hut with a dirt floor – and she tried to make something of herself. Every boy for miles about was in love with her.’

  Madeleine nodded, thinking how different a picture this was to that painted by Sonia.

  The woman took another good drag of the cigarette and dropped the butt in an empty beer bottle. ‘Anyway, the story doesn’t end there. There was a murder out there too, later on, so they say. Then the male line eventually dried up and a daughter married a bloke by the name of Boyne. Ashley Boyne.’ Madeleine tried to remain calm, but her stomach began to churn as the woman leaned further across the desk and continued. ‘He wasn’t from around here – he’d met the daughter at uni, I think, and he came out with her when she inherited the place. He was a drunk, apparently, and there he was out on this big spread. The place was handed to him on a platter, but they say he couldn’t take to it, couldn’t handle it. Eventually he killed himself. What a loser.’

  Madeleine nodded numbly, wondering how much truth was contained in the comment about her father’s drinking. Was alcohol the cause of his mood swings, or did he drink to self-medicate? Either way, Madeleine had never realised that he had drunk; maybe it was just gossip.

  ‘After that the place was locked up and leased for ages. There’s a son there now, married to a hoity-toity wife. Personally I don’t know how anyone can live out there with a history like that.’

  Madeleine digested all this information like she was eating a raw egg, feeling an anger welling inside her at the woman’s proprietorial attitude towards the Harrow family history. She forced herself to remain calm as she asked: ‘And the artist? Didn’t David Harrow live there?’

  The woman waved away a sticky black fly. ‘Yeah, he painted, it’s true, although me ma tells me no one liked him much ’cause he was friendly with Germans. Anyway, he couldn’t have been very important.’ The woman flicked a strand of red hair from her brow. ‘So, are you a visitor, then?’

  Madeleine straightened her shoulders and stated: ‘I’m Mad­eleine Harrow-Boyne.’ She didn’t wait for the woman’s stuttered apology; instead she left the museum and crossed the street, making for the shady Box tree, where she concentrated on calming her roaring heart. Diagonally opposite was the courthouse, to her right a peeling signpost that directed visitors to the site of the old blacksmith’s forge and the path to the Banyan River. Madeleine’s brain hurt as the information percolated through her skull, raising questions and shattering long-formed ideas. Was her father an alcoholic? And what was this about murder? She needed to speak with George, immediately.

  Verdun, France

  October 1916

  When the guns began, Francois woke with a start. Roland nestled close to his chest and twitched nervously. Pinpricks of light, the glowing tips of cigarettes, punctuated the shadowy recesses of the trench, yet Francois took little comfort from the men around him. At a right-angle to where he sat a slither of sky was just visible. Stars sprinkled the narrow void.

  Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, he whispered silently through clenched teeth. The noise haunted him day and night, echoing in his brain whether he was asleep or awake. He couldn’t go out there again; he knew he couldn’t. The land was gone. It had simply vanished, reduced to a mass of boggy ground filled with bodies and bits of bodies. Only yesterday he had reached for a hand extending up from a shell-hole, only to have the arm it was attached to disintegrate. No, Francois decided, he wasn’t going back out there.

  Roland nuzzled his neck as Francois hugged the great animal closer to his body. He had fallen asleep perched on two munitions crates, his dog beside him, his backside and rotting boots free of the water moving sluggishly along the bottom of the trench. The trench had been cut through a ridge, and it was this slight height that prevented the area from becoming a complete bog hole. Pulling at the fingers of his right hand to straighten them, he blew on the tips and with cold-stiffened hands began to roll a lumpy cigarette. For two days Antoine had been missing. ‘Do you think he’s still alive?’ Francois whispered, puffing on the cigarette, his free hand resting on Roland’s back. ‘If anyone can survive out there, surely it’s Antoine.’

  Roland pricked his ears. Further along the trench six men carried a single stretcher between them. They waded through the knee-deep mud of the trench, their progress desperately slow.

  ‘Have you found many?’ Francois queried when the men staggered past. ‘My brother, Antoine Chessy?’

  The stretcher-bearers greeted Roland before one shook his head in answer to Francois. ‘I’m sorry, this weather . . .’ The sentence remained unfinished.

  Francois knew the danger of wounds exposed to the putrid water that filled shell-holes and covered the ground. Nearly all the men in his platoon were reinforcements; few of the original faces were left. How long had they been here? Two weeks. This, then, was Verdun.

  ‘Keep your dog safe,’ a stretcher-bearer called.

  Francois drew heavily on the cigarette and tossed it in the soupy mud. If they all died today Roland would probably survive. Neither side fired purposely on the battalion dogs, with the majority of wounded animals simply caught up in the maelstrom of war. It seemed that there was a limit to man’s cruelty. Francois straightened his legs, feeling the click of bones. How he wished they were back in the flea- and spider-infested barn they wrote to their mother about. The last village they had stayed in had no straw and was rank with the stink of death. Although they were only ther
e for one night en route back to the front, it had been a long night: before they arrived, the village well had been struck by a German shell, and they had been forced to drink water from a shell-hole that also held a dead body.

  At least their time here was soon to end. Their captain had informed them last night that General Nivelle, the new commander of the French Second Army, was carrying on with General Pétain’s habit of ensuring that troops were rotated regularly. Where possible, every Frenchman was to be put through the wringer that was Verdun. After mere days here Francois had comprehended the reasoning behind this tactic: the casualties on both sides were enormous and the Allied and German bombardments rarely stopped – no man could sustain such horror for long.

  Taking a swig of water from his canteen, Francois poured some of the contents into his steel helmet. ‘Sometimes I think Antoine is still alive.’ He stroked Roland’s head. ‘Then at other times I imagine him sitting and talking with our father. I envy him then.’

  The dog slurped up the cool liquid. All along the trench men checked their equipment, reaching for rifles and ammunition. Francois’ heart began to race. He clutched at Roland’s back.

  ‘I keep thinking of the farm and dear Mama. I think perhaps it would have been better for you and me if we’d not listened to Antoine. It would have been better not to be a soldier. Imagine if we were at home now: we would be asleep in the farmhouse; in a little while Mama would be up checking the fire and putting water on to boil.’

  Roland yawned. A fog was forming. Trails of moisture began to streak the air. Francois leaned wearily against the trench wall. ‘Do you think they know we are attacking again?’ he sighed and then gave a weak chuckle. ‘If Antoine was here, he’d tell me to stop asking so many questions. Have a look, will you, boy?’ he said softly, nodding upwards. ‘I don’t trust the sentries. We’re all exhausted.’

  Francois watched as Roland scrambled up the earth wall to a cavity that had been hollowed out for him. It was barely deep enough for the dog’s body, yet by scrabbling forward Roland could balance quite well. The sandbags along the top of the trench had been repositioned and from this vantage point the dog could peer through a gap out across the battlefield. Francois stood and leaned against the trench wall as Roland curled his tail beneath him and then rested his chin on the cold ledge of compacted soil. As Roland sat quietly for long minutes, Francois grew aware of the men either side of him waiting for a warning sign, a low growl or a hurried bark. Above them shells whistled and thumped as the fog thickened.