The Burning Land

by John Fletcher

  Finally they bought a giant plum pudding, wrapped in cloth and brought down especially, so Mr Simmons assured them, from Sydney.

  ‘That’ll be enough,’ Lorna said, thinking, that’ll be far too much.

  ‘Somethin’ to drink.’

  A bottle of rum and two of canary were added to the pile.

  ‘I reckon that’s the lot,’ Mary said.

  Simmons reckoned the bill. Lorna wanted to make sure they had not gone beyond Andrew’s limit but Mary got to it first and would not let her see it.

  ‘You’re holding money for Montrose, Mr Simmons. Please set it against the amount you owe us.’

  Outside the shop they turned to each other.

  ‘Enjoyin’ yourself?’

  ‘I canna tell ye how much. Like coming back to life again.’

  Mary put her hand on Lorna’s arm. ‘We got a lot o’ living still to do, you ’n’ me.’

  Lorna covered Mary’s hand with her own. ‘I hope so. I truly do.’

  ‘Hope?’ Mary laughed, a robust sound that turned the heads of passers-by. ‘I guarantees it, girl.’

  Simmons had sent a boy with them to carry the parcels. George, good as gold, was waiting where they had left him. The boy helped load the goods into the dray and they gave him a penny. A man came out of the ale house, swaying and singing to himself as he walked towards them.

  George loaded the last of the parcels and stood back into the man’s path. They collided with each other.

  The man broke into a fit of coughing, showering the three of them with spittle.

  ‘Sorry, mate. Sorry.’ He wiped his mouth, gasping. ‘This bloody throat o’ mine’s killin’ me.’ Then he staggered off down the road, leaving the stench of liquor behind him.

  ‘Throat?’ George said and laughed. ‘Blind drunk, more like.’

  They drove back to Montrose surrounded by laughter, excitement, all their wonderful parcels. Side by side on the driver’s bench, Lorna and Mary held hands.

  Four days later was Christmas Eve.

  Even Andrew had entered into the spirit of the thing by now. He did not ask how much all this extravagance was costing them. Perhaps he did not want to know.

  The men finished work early. Matthew, overexcited, was in a demanding mood but they were still sitting down before six.

  ‘Our Christmas feast‚’ Mary declared, eyes shining.

  Andrew gave a lengthy grace then they started. They began with soup made from the peas they had bought, followed it with a good slab of roast mutton, a brace of pigeon and the potted bloaters, and finished with the grand plum pudding and the Melbourne oranges. All accompanied by wine and the bottle of rum.

  By the time they finished it was a quarter to eight and the sweat was running off them in streams.

  ‘Madness!’ For once Andrew’s voice was genial. ‘Eating like this in midsummer? Enough to kill us, I wouldna wonder.’

  ‘Di’n’ notice it stop you,’ Mary told him.

  ‘I didna say it wasna enjoyable.’ He drained the last of the rum. ‘Well, well. Christmas Day tomorrow, then. A lot of water under the bridge since the last one.’

  Lorna watched him, lips smiling, thinking, it would have been better if I had died. But if I had died, Stuart would not have been born and that I canna wish. He and Mary are my only hope, now. My hope and my consolation.

  The others were laughing, noisy, full of the liquor that had so long been denied them.

  When they went to bed Andrew said to her, rum on his breath, ‘I have been thinking aboot Stuart …’

  She watched him, saying nothing, mind closed to him. Her hands unbraided the golden hair, a little tarnished now, letting it fall about her shoulders.

  ‘Ye feel I’ve no’ been fair to him …’

  ‘No’ to him or me. Ye’ve nae reason to doot my word, none.’ She had thought to be angry. Instead, mortified, she began to cry. ‘Ye’ve nae idea what it was like to be a prisoner of those men. Never knowing from one minute to the next whether they were going to kill me or—’

  ‘Or worse.’

  Aye, she thought, a man always thinks that. Let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than death. I’ve been there and I know.

  ‘And then behaving the way ye did. And to Stuart, as though it was his fault, poor bairn!’ At last she found the anger she had been seeking. ‘Ye should be ashamed, Andrew McLachlan. Ashamed!’

  She would never have thought it was in her to say it. She waited, fearful of an explosion. It did not come.

  ‘I saw him tonight,’ Andrew said. ‘Like it was for the first time. Before I could never see the likeness but tonight I saw it plain. God has given us both a new chance, Lorna. Dinna turn your back on it.’

  God, she thought. For months he turns his back on us and now all of a sudden it’s God’s will. Too late. Too late for me, too late for him, too late for Stuart. Stuart is my son, now, mine only, with his father’s chin.

  She said, ‘I have turned my back on nothing.’ But distantly, giving no encouragement.

  They finished undressing and climbed into bed. Andrew blew out the candle and turned towards her, placed his hand upon her.

  She said, ‘I am tired.’

  He said, ‘As a symbol of our reconciliation?’

  She said, ‘No’ tonight. I am tired. As I said.’

  He drew her nightgown up her legs. ‘Tonight.’

  Next day Mary sat at the table in the kitchen trying to slice greens. She had a cup of water beside her. Every few minutes she stopped to take a sip.

  Lorna watched her. She had drunk hardly anything at dinner last night. Later, in bed, she wished she had but now was glad of it.

  ‘Dry’s a bone‚’ Mary muttered to herself.

  Chop, chop, went the knife, then slipped.

  ‘I’ll do it for you‚’ Lorna offered.

  ‘Leave me be‚’ Mary said, irritated. She lifted the glass but found it empty.

  ‘I’ll get you some more‚’ Lorna said.

  Mary was already on her feet. ‘Fresh air will do me good.’ She walked towards the door and stopped, swaying.

  Lorna came after her, taking her arm. ‘What’s the matter?’ The arm was hot, soaked in sweat.

  Mary coughed as though broken glass were in her throat. She whispered, ‘I must have taken a chill from that drunk in Jim Jim.’

  ‘How long have you felt like this?’

  ‘I woke in the night. I thought it was jest a hangover.’

  ‘Maybe it is.’ Knowing it was not.

  Mary shook her head. ‘I can’ swallow. Me neck’s all swelled up. An’ my ’ead …’ She put her hands to it. ‘It’s that bad.’

  Four of them went down with it: Mary, George, both children. Lorna expected to catch it but did not. Neither did Andrew.

  They did not know what to do. There was heavy fever. Their throats were sore and covered with a grey film that every hour grew thicker. Already it was affecting their breathing. All four were barely conscious, temperatures through the roof. Stuart was delirious. Andrew held Mary while Lorna tried to sponge the film away. It made her throat bleed. The more Lorna tried, the more it bled.

  She looked at Andrew. ‘I’m frightened for them.’

  He rode into Jim Jim for the doctor, going flat out. Late in the afternoon he returned, alone. Lorna came out to meet him. She was exhausted, eyes shadowed, face like parchment.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He couldna come. He’s alone there and half the town’s got it.’ He hesitated. ‘They say there’s four dead.’

  He slid from the saddle and came towards her. ‘How are they? How is Stuart?’

  ‘Bad.’

  The hut was a charnel house. The sick took up both rooms. In the first, George lay unmoving. He breathed irregularly with a sound like tearing cloth. His eyes stared unseeing at the shadowed roof. A fly buzzed in the room, indifferent to the struggle going on in the sweaty bed.

  Andrew stared, horrified. He turned to Lorna. ‘Where is Stuar
t? Where is my son?’

  They went into the other room. Mary was on the bed, the children on pallets on the floor.

  Matthew tossed and gasped, semiconscious, fighting for breath that screeched like a rusty saw in his throat. There were red blotches behind his ears, on his neck. His face was flushed and strained, the sturdy little body not so sturdy now, exhausted by the constant battle to breathe, yet fighting still.

  Stuart was a different case. The baby lay still, each breath rasping faintly with long intervals between them.

  Andrew was white with shock. ‘He’s dying!’

  ‘I’m afeart he is.’ Fatigue and despair lined her face.

  ‘We must do something!’

  There was nothing to be done.

  Mary lay on the bed. All her vitality had drained away. Breath strained, gasped and fell silent before painfully repeating the cycle. Her face was flushed, eyes half-closed.

  ‘She vomited a whiles ago‚’ Lorna said. ‘Brought up a mess of black phlegm. It made her easier but now she’s as bad as ever. I’m feart for the lot of them.’

  ‘I’m going to the chapel‚’ Andrew said.

  It was warm and shadowed inside the little hut, sunlight glinting in bands of gold between the rough-hewn slabs of the walls.

  He thought, I always intended to get those chinks filled in. There had been so many things to do. Now it did not seem to matter.

  He knelt in the shadowed room, listening to the silence, the faint creaking of the roof in the hot sunshine. His nostrils were filled with the smell of dust and heat.

  Aloud he said, ‘If thou will spare them, Lord, I will praise thee as I have all my life. I repent that I did not know my ain son Stuart until recently. Forgive me for that. Grant me a sign of thy love. Spare him so I may know I am forgiven also.’

  He knelt for a while listening but it was no use. He stood, heart as dry as the dust that he brushed from his knees. Once, so long ago, he had been at one with God. There had been no need to ask anything, to say anything. It had been sufficient simply to be, to know that he was one with the spirit. No longer. Speaking as he had now was talking to the dust, to emptiness. God had not heard him, he knew.

  He opened the door. Sunlight flooded in. He went out into the warm day. Lorna was waiting for him, her face still and cold.

  ‘Stuart is dead,’ she said. ‘My baby is dead.’

  Before night George and Mary had followed Stuart.

  Andrew sat watch over them, their bodies at peace after the struggles of the past hours.

  He remembered Mary teasing him about money, arranging the special Christmas treat. Yesterday, he thought. For an hour or two she had made them all like children again. Now all three of them were dead. They had died on Christmas Day, which she had looked forward to so much.

  The man who had been clever at fashioning things from wood and metal would fashion them no more.

  How am I going to manage without them?

  He could not look at the body of his son.

  He went out of the room and closed the door. It had been vanity, after all. An abomination.

  Now they must do what they could for Matthew.

  They sat up with him. Lorna was so exhausted she could hardly stand or hold up her head but she would not let go. She had fought for him before, when he had nearly drowned. Now she would fight for him again. She was too tired to feel for the others—it was too late for them anyway. There was only Matthew. She believed if she closed her eyes he would die. She sat by him all night, willing him to live.

  By the morning he was on the mend.

  Three months later Andrew sat in the new land commissioner’s office while Horace Eggnut, the thin-lipped replacement for the flamboyant John Charles Carter Ingham, looked disapprovingly at the documents spread out upon his desk—no longer the acreage of gleaming mahogany that had departed with its owner, as had the Turkey rug and the paintings, but a small, shabby, mean table to suit, Andrew thought, a small, shabby, mean man.

  ‘Mr McLachlan, this simply will not do.’ Eggnut tapped the top document with a bony finger. ‘My predecessor,’ he sniffed, ‘agreed to allocate you and your late partner over one hundred thousand acres of prime land despite the fact that your present stock level is … not even one thousand animals.’ He looked at Andrew across the top of the wire-rimmed glasses that clung to the end of his nose. ‘Is that correct?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I cannot think what Mr Ingham was thinking of.’

  Andrew bit his tongue, watching Eggnut shifting the papers on the table. Each edge lined up, so. Each pile together, so.

  ‘The licence runs for one year. And your current licence expires, let me see,’ the papers rustled, ‘on the last day of the current month. Which of course is why you are here, is it not? To pay your next year’s licence.’

  ‘I have the money right here,’ Andrew said quickly.

  ‘My clerk will give you a receipt. Mr Ingham’s notes say you intended to increase the size of your flock. As soon as possible. Whatever that may mean. From the figures you’ve given me, you have not done that.’

  ‘We lost animals in the flood.’

  The thin nostrils flared. ‘No doubt. I shall come and view the situation on the ground. You realise that the fee remains the same, whatever the acreage finally agreed upon?’

  Andrew walked down the road, fury and frustration bubbling.

  All over again. Yon dried-up wee rat is determined to reduce the acreage. I canna bear it.

  Knowing he had no choice.

  Eggnut came, not with the panache of a cavalry column but on a tired, dun horse. He rode around the valley, making no comment but writing copious notes in his black-covered notebook.

  Andrew tried to share his dream, explaining how he saw the future, the flocks, the dipping pens, the shearing sheds.

  Eggnut raised his nose from his notebook. ‘That is the future, Mr McLachlan. Whether you will be able to do these things depends on the present investigation. For the moment it is irrelevant.’

  Andrew knew his companion was seeing, not the splendour of the land but squares drawn upon a grey and dusty plan. Dreams had no place there.

  ‘I shall write and inform you of our decision,’ Eggnut said before riding away. He passed the three graves set at the point of the knoll furthest from the house but made no comment. No doubt they were irrelevant, too.

  The allocation was reduced to five thousand acres.

  Within two months, new settlers had moved into the upper reaches of the valley.

  The glory was gone.

  I have lost my partner, my son and now my land. As for my wife … I believe I lost her a long time ago.

  In bitterness and agony, he offered a deal to God.

  I was proud. I thought too much of the things of this world. Of frivolity. I allowed myself to fall away from your law. I became apostate. I accept the chastisement ye have thought fit to bring upon me. I shall ensure that neither I nor anything that is mine will fall into sin again.

  He became a tyrant. To himself, his wife, and the boy.

  THIRTEEN

  Five years later, on the third day of a gale that had brought trees crashing all about the buildings, there was a lull.

  Lorna went to the door of the house and pushed it open. A blast of cold air flung itself yelling into the stuffy interior. She stared out at the clearing. Undergrowth had sprung up around all the huts. She had neither the strength nor inclination to bother about such things nowadays and since Bannerji had disappeared, it must be three years ago now, Andrew had never had the time. Wool prices had collapsed at the end of the thirties and had still not recovered so there had been no question of finding a replacement, no question of anything but hanging on and praying to survive.

  None of Andrew’s dreams had come to pass. No wide acres, no riches, no position. They were penniless and would probably remain so all their lives but at least, she thought, they had survived. It was more than many could claim.

  The
wind was still high, the tossing branches of the trees storm-racked, but for the moment the rain had ceased. A beam of wan sunlight shone through the clouds and illuminated the far corner of the knoll where the bush grew thick. In its light Lorna saw a patch of iridescent blue that flickered once, then again, and grew still.

  She stared, trying to make out what it was.

  Matthew was out there: it took more than a storm to keep him indoors. He couldn’t stay in, the walls strangled him. She’d sent him out to the wood pile to chop sticks for the stove.

  He wasn’t chopping wood now. He was standing in the middle of the clearing, staring at the corner where she had seen the bright blue flicker. Lorna watched him run quickly towards it then, a yard or two away, stop and prowl forward with exaggerated, stalking movements, wide-brimmed hat clutched in his hand. He poised momentarily, then lunged forward, swinging the hat. A shriek of excitement. He turned, seeing her in the doorway of the cabin.

  ‘I got it, Ma!’

  Ma. After all these years it still sounded strange.

  He ran towards her, hand covering the hat.

  The wind buffeted her as she stepped on to the soaking ground. Stripped leaves and bark lay in piles in the corners of the clearing. Seeing without looking, she could tell that the three graves were almost buried in debris. She would clear them later, when the wind had died. Overhead the tree branches surged like a stormy sea.

  ‘What is it, Matt?’

  He had taken whatever it was out of his hat. He peered between grubby fingers.

  ‘A butterfly,’ he said.

  ‘A butterfly?’ she repeated, astonished.

  He extended his hand.

  It was like no butterfly she had ever seen. It was huge, bigger than the palm of Matthew’s hand, yet it was the colour rather than size that made it so striking—a brilliant, iridescent blue, tipped with black. As she watched, it flexed its wings slowly and again lay still. The wind ripped screaming through the gum trees overhead. Instinctively, she turned her shoulder to it, hating its boastful ways.

  ‘Where’s it from?’ the boy asked.

  ‘The storm must’ve brought it doon from the north.’