Orphaned Leaves

by Christopher Holt

  But then Brandt cuts in. “Mrs Moore knows about young people. She knows that you’re still trying to get over the despicable things that priest did to you, and the hidings you got from the brothers. She sees you as a very brave young man, Alan; so does Milo and, of course, so do I. Hold your head up and walk tall. I’m proud of you, Alan, and I’m proud that you’ve let me be your dad.”

  Alan looks up again and sounds more assured. “Thanks, Otto. Yes, I think I would like to board with Mrs Moore, but if I do, I won’t be able to help you on the farm.”

  “Don’t worry about Garigo, even I won’t be here most of the time. I’ll still have to be working on the Snowy Scheme – that is, until I’ve made enough money so I can be on the farm all the time. Then we’ll get a dog, a big dog like Chaucer, and we’ll drive around the bush with him in the back of the ute.”

  “I’d really like to do that, Otto. It sounds fun.”

  This is not turning out to be an easy conversation for Brandt. When he is stressed he becomes aware of his German accent and supposes, that to Alan, he must sound very much like those Nazi officers in the war films.

  But you were a Nazi officer. An SS monster.

  As if he can ever forget.

  “Anyway, I am glad you like Mrs Moore,” he says. “She’s a very kind lady. As you know, she is English like you. I know she will take good care of you, and I promise you, Alan, if I had the slightest doubt, I wouldn’t consider it. I want only the best for my son, so are you really sure now?”

  “Yes, I am, Otto; I think I am, anyway. I want to give it a try and I’m excited about getting a dog one day.”

  Brandt has only five days of his leave left, and he knows that, realistically speaking, there is no other option but to take up Peggy’s offer. He suspects that Alan knows this too and it occurs to him that Alan has had no domestic contact with a woman for as long as the boy can remember.

  After Alan goes to bed, Brandt pours himself his third glass of Bell’s whisky, then gets up from the chair to close the curtains. For reasons he can’t fathom, he is developing a horror that someone could be looking in on him from outside. He shudders as he recalls the nightmare of the fox woman at the porthole. He gets up, closes the curtains and returns to his drink.

  Sipping the whisky, he thinks of Peggy Moore’s kindness and her offer to look after Alan on school days, and yet this would not be necessary if he had a wife, so now his thoughts are on Magdalena. An aerogramme in her handwriting arrived only yesterday, but he’d burnt it without bothering to open it.

  She went off to America to make atomic bombs.

  But why does he still care what she does?

  And then there’s Peggy with her ‘orphaned leaves’. The odd expression lingers in his mind and he begins to apply it to the book of his own life, where the leaves have long been scattered. It will have to be a small book, mostly to do with the last pages because the earlier part is a necessary fiction, vulnerable to the slightest scrutiny. And Peggy Moore is precisely the person to do this, not because she is inquisitive or suspicious but because, as she said, she is ‘intrigued’ by human behaviour.

  He thinks ‘perplexed’ might be more apt. According to Milo, Peggy is like this because she has known so much suffering. She was taken prisoner in Singapore by the Japanese and spent three years of hell in a camp where her daughter, her only child, died of dysentery.

  “They beat her husband to death,” Milo had told him. “It was when he was a slave labourer on the Burma Railroad. After the war, instead of going back to England, Peggy migrated to Australia. She hoped to get a job in one of the state libraries, but they wouldn’t recognise her qualifications so she ended up in Tumut, where they were only too glad to have someone of her experience.”

  Yet, despite Peggy’s appalling ordeals, she has an effervescence for life that Brandt finds invigorating. He puts Peggy Moore into his rarest category for women, that of the ‘ever young’. He has discovered that being a psychological eunuch has given him an advantage over most men: he can be amazingly objective about women, even an attractive woman like Peggy. She may not be beautiful, but he suspects that Mrs Moore has been beguiling men since she was sixteen. ‘Comely’ is the word in his Concise Oxford Dictionary that best describes her. Why this useful term is nearly extinct mystifies him. Peggy Moore is comely and there is no other word for it. Milo is a most lucky man.

  But, in saying this, how can he honestly describe himself as a eunuch? Stabs of mental anguish goad his thoughts onto Magdalena. The letter he burnt was only a slim aerogramme. Why hasn’t he received the divorce documents? Perhaps she thinks he should he be the one who starts the proceedings, but she’ll have to wait; he’ll get around to it sooner or later. And how will he feel when she is free again? Will it be like watching Michaela Haas leaving the ship with that Danish photographer? No, it will be worse – much, much worse; he knows it will.

  He pours himself a fourth whisky, but then stops and returns the liquid to the bottle spilling some on his trousers. His hands quiver.

  Alan deserves better than this.

  17

  The dreadful pre-war Dodge van has a hole in its manifold, and Brandt hears it grating up his farm track long before it roars up to his veranda and stops short with the clap of a misfire. A scarecrow of a man, with grey hair sprouting from under a floppy, green hat, climbs out, then retrieves a slender object protruding from the one of the rear windows.

  “Got something for your boy,” says Gunna. He shakes Brandt’s hand then rests a brand new, split-cane fly-fishing rod against the rail and starts pulling out other items from his bulging khaki haversack. “Thought he might like these – we had a few spare at the store.”

  Brandt stares at two Bakelite boxes of hand-tied wet and dry flies, a reel complete with line, and a canvas folder of leaders. “You amaze me, Gunna – oh, bugger it, what’s your proper name?”

  Gunna looks taken aback. “Well, it’s Thomas, not that anyone ever calls me that– except Connie.”

  “What about Tom?”

  “That sounds all right to me.”

  “Good. I’ll call you Tom. Tom, I don’t know what to say. I’m at a loss for words – except, thank you. Alan will be overjoyed.”

  “Can you teach Alan to fly fish?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about fly fishing.”

  “I’ll come over at the weekend, if you like. Connie can take over the store for me. What about, say, four o’clock? We can go up to one of your top creeks and get some fishing in before dark. Casting’s not easy, though. If Alan wants to be any good at it, he’ll need to practise.”

  “I’m looking forwards to seeing Alan’s face when he sees all this. I don’t know what to say, Tom.” Brandt is so overwhelmed by the generosity of a man he hardly knows and stumbles over his words. “Come in – I’ll get you a drink. I want to hear a bit more about fly—”

  “Gotta delivery, so hafta shoot through,” says Tom. “See yah next time round.”

  *

  Tomorrow, Brandt finally completes his contract with the Snowy Mountains Authority, but they have offered him some part-time demolition work, which gives him a reliable income plus all the time he needs to devote to Garigo.

  But this doesn’t change his arrangement with Peggy. He has discovered that there are other advantages to having Alan in her charge during the week. For many years, the entrance to Brandt’s inner world has been too narrow to let others in. Although he has widened it sufficiently to admit one twelve-year-old child, it is not enough to receive an adroit and questioning adolescent, and the entrance is likely to close once more. Only the other day, Alan wanted to know how many soldiers he had killed when fighting in the desert and Brandt had only mumbled something about not wishing to think about the war.

  *

  It’s late, but, despite the mosquitoes, he is still out on the veranda. He pours another whisky
and gazes across the front lawn into the bush. There is no moon tonight, but the stars are blazing overhead. The half-light is capricious; the ferns take humanoid forms and their fronds elongate into fingers, and the limbs of the snow gums looked twisted in agony, but now there is another terror to add to his restlessness.

  Without a shadow of doubt, he knows that he is being watched. There is a creeping in the patchy darkness, lithe shapes slipping back and forth into the shadows.

  He gulps down the remaining whisky in his glass. Tonight, he’ll bolt all the windows as well as the doors, and then he’ll look in on Alan, who is hopefully fast asleep. Brandt needs to sleep too; he’ll be good for nothing tomorrow unless he gets some sleep.

  After checking Alan, he goes to the back room and returns with a single-barrel twelve-bore shotgun and four cartridges in their bright-orange casings. He loads the chamber, rests the weapon against his bedside table and lies on top of the bed without changing.

  He’ll not sleep, and he knows it. Recently, he’s been having fleeting hallucinations of smoky trains dragging rattling cattle trucks through patchy forests in windswept snow. At other times, the fox woman rises like a spectre and always behind her is the weird dwelling in the forest. These horrors don’t always occur at night. One morning, only last week, he had been priming detonators near Junction Shaft when he thought he heard a long train rumbling deep beneath his feet. He remained standing there like a fool and if the young Polish shift boss hadn’t bellowed a warning, Brandt most certainly would have met his end.

  And then what would have happened to Alan? Thank God the boy would have had Milo and Peggy there for him.

  Today, as usual, it is Milo who reassures Brandt about Alan’s future. “You’re still a young man, Otto. I can’t for the life of me see Peggy and I outliving you, but as you say, this world is anything but predictable – anything can happen on the Snowy Scheme and out here out in the bush too. But put your mind at rest, we’d look after Alan like our own son and make sure he’d come into his inheritance.”

  They are watching Alan practising his fly-casting into a bucket on the lawn, twenty yards away from him. His score was more than twice Brandt’s and Otto’s put together, and both had retired from the contest to take a smoke.

  “Tom wants Alan to enter for the casting competition in Jindabyne next year,” says Brandt.

  “He’s taught him well. Has Alan started catching any nice pan-sized trout for you?”

  “A few – up in the alpine zone. Tom’s shown him the art of dapping. If we put our minds to it, we could have trout dinners right through the season.”

  Milo stands up and stubs out his cigarette. “I bet you’re glad you bought this place,” he says.

  “It’s a lot of work, but I want Garigo to be an inheritance he can be proud of, Milo.”

  “He’s already proud of it. Don’t try and do everything – leave something of a challenge for him to do in the future. By the way, any news of Magdalena?”

  “It’s a sore subject with me at the moment.”

  “Righto, we’ll stick with Alan. Peggy tells me he likes his school a lot.”

  Peggy had been right. Since starting at Tumut High School, Alan looks much more confident. Thankfully, there were lots of other first-form enrolments in February, so he escaped the trauma of being the sole new pupil. The school itself is becoming Alan’s social and academic salvation. When he comes home at the weekends, Brandt can’t help but notice the gradual lifting of his spirits. Alan laughs a lot more and can’t wait to tell Brandt the latest jokes circling among his classmates. However, Brandt feels sure that the main reason for Alan’s newfound light-heartedness is the news that, according to Milo’s contacts in Canberra, Father Walsh has been transferred to Rome.

  Time is accelerating, Brandt is sure of it; a noisy rushing through his brain, faster and faster as if life is dragging him along. He feels the sting of every unfulfilled moment. It’s Friday already, and Milo and Peggy will be arriving with Alan within the next hour. All four of them always have dinner at Garigo on Fridays, when they bring Alan back from Tumut. Normally, Brandt cooks a meal for them, but coming up with vegetarian menus for Milo shows up his culinary limitations.

  Tonight, though, it should be easy. Milo has promised to bring over a basket of the wild mushrooms that Aubergine collects under the pines every morning and Milo, being Milo, will insist on preparing them according to his own recipe.

  Brandt has only just returned from Island Bend himself, after finally relinquishing his cabin there. He gives the homestead a perfunctory inspection, then he slips outside and scans the southern horizon. Not all the drifts melted away during the summer; some remain on the upper screes of the Cone like strips of white satin. In a few weeks, they will have merged with the fresh snows of May, anticipating Brandt’s fourth winter in Australia.

  Henty was totally mistaken in his disparagement of the farm’s potential. Garigo, like Tumbledown, possesses its fair share of ‘little Eldorados’, where soughing sheoaks act as windbreaks, and keep pockets of land free of snow and frost throughout the winter. Here, the alluvial soils are deep and rich, ideal for crops such as root vegetables, asparagus, horseradish, cabbages and other brassica. Brandt collects some carrots, potatoes and silver beet in case they are needed to augment Milo’s mushroom roast.

  Next, he strides over to the timber stack to gather some small logs for the stove. As he carries it back, a huntsman spider the size of his hand leaps out of the bark and Brandt instinctively drops the wood on the veranda steps. The huntsman scurries off and Brandt laughs to himself. Why does he get so alarmed? Milo always assures him they are harmless, but, the trouble is, they don’t look harmless at all: they’re great hairy brutes as agile as monkeys, with bolt-cutter mandibles and clusters of beady eyes stemming from the imagination of H.G. Wells. And huntsmen spiders invade the house too, hovering on the ceiling and sprinting across the walls.

  He stoops to pick up the logs, but ceases abruptly, his heart beating wildly, as he spies human forms moving among the trees on the far side of the billabong. As he straightens up, the figures freeze; they are so motionless that they meld like shadows within the silver barks.

  “Aborigines? Are you absolutely sure?” Milo is carving a big mushroom into thin slices as though it were a side of roast beef.

  “Don’t you also see them sometimes, Milo?” asks Peggy who is scraping the new potatoes. With her glossy, black hair spilling out from under a red beret, she looks like a svelte revolutionary.

  “No, never at Tumbledown. When I was a kid I had to ride over to the Cone if I wanted to see them. Dad said the Tumbledown Ngarigo were extinct even before he was born, but then Dad used to say a lot of odd things.”

  “Extinct?” says Brandt. He feels the blood leave his face and his stomach tightens. The work of human extinction had been his specialty for nearly six years.

  “Yes, I was wondering about the very same thing,” says Peggy. “Surely the word ‘extinction’ can only be applied to plants and animals.”

  “You obviously don’t know and I’m ashamed to tell you,” says Milo putting down his slicing knife, “but the policy of the federal government is to classify the Aborigines among the indigenous fauna. They don’t so much want to make them extinct like the dodo, but to breed them out of society all together.”

  “That is terrible, Milo,” says Alan, “How is that possible?”

  “Well, first they collect up all the kids with lighter skin and sometimes blond hair. Then they put them up for adoption by white families and hope they’ll end up marrying whites.”

  “But what about the Aborigine parents?” asks Alan perching on one of the kitchen stools and possibly remembering his fellow ‘orphans’ on the Syrenia. “Surely they get upset about their children being taken away.”

  “You bet your life they get upset, but there’s not much the poor Abos can do about it.”
>
  “But that’s… appalling. It’s so unfair.” Peggy’s face is red. “What do they do? I’d want to—”

  “They do what many other human beings do when they are powerless: they turn to the spiritual. As I understand it, the Aborigines live their lives on two planes: the practical here and now, and the spiritual, which they call the Dreamtime.”

  “That’s not much consolation,” says Peggy scraping her next potato so vigorously that there’s hardly any of it left.

  “It’s a lot more than you might think. The Dreamtime is more real to them than life itself; I think they must be the most spiritual people on earth. They regard this life as only a tiny part of the journey of the soul. Their cosmos is sacred: they see a deep sacred mystery in the stars, they find it in every tree and in every mossy rock, and they hear it in the treble of the flame robin and the coo-eee of the wedge-tail eagle. Their greatest mystery is when a human being passes from this life to the next.”

  “Don’t they believe in heaven and hell?” asks Alan.

  “Well,” replies Milo, “from what I’ve read and learnt about the Australian Aborigines, no one goes to any hell; they haven’t even got a world for hell.”

  “But don’t they have to atone for their sins?” asks Brandt now so intensely involved with the subject that he starts pacing about the kitchen.

  “They’ve got their own laws and penalties just as we have,” Milo tells him, “but there’s no such thing as eternal punishment. You’ve got to face up to the things you’ve done wrong. Their Great Spirit believes in justice too, but doesn’t seem to bear grudges.”

  Brandt ceases his pacing, he is hanging on every word. “How?” he asks Milo.

  “It’s because the land itself communes with them. They don’t have sacrificial rites, nor does a priest give them absolution, but they have other ways. One is their smoke ceremony; they burn the leafy emu bush and the smoke cleanses their souls. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.” Milo pauses and smiles. “And having enlightened you three Newchums, about the smoke ceremony, I suppose it’s my turn to get some firewood. Coming, Alan?”