The Valley

by Hawke, Steve;

  He used to tease her that it was the Landrover she wanted, not him. She did love sitting up there in the front beside him as they poked along, with a bunch of countrymen crowded on the back. Marj had picked him out, even if it was from a small pool. She didn’t want to marry up with some feller from outside and have to leave home, she told him, and there was no other bugger straight for her round here.

  The confirmed bachelor, the head stockman who never so much as looked sideways at a girl, was snared. He’d been terrified at first, but despite what everyone else thought, by some mysterious quirk of chemistry Two Bob and Marj suited each other almost perfectly. Oh, she would give him the sharp end of her tongue when others were around. In the stock camp the other men would make sly jokes about who wore the trousers in Two Bob’s camp. He would smile wryly at the jokers, and change the subject with another story; he knew how things stood.

  14

  The folly of love. That is the only way I can explain it.

  Many years ago, before the termites had devoured the Collected Works of William Shakespeare that I stole from Twelve Inch, I read the tale of Romeo and Juliet. It is a story from centuries past in another world, but is all I know of love as it may be conceived of in the world beyond this valley. Yet I dare to declare that Bessie’s and mine was such a youthful love, conceived too against all odds in an atmosphere of madness. Why else would she take such a chance?

  As we lay together that night Bessie told me of her uncle Marralam, a man she knew only by the tales of her mother. He was a survivor of the time when the country was inflamed in conflict as the police hunted the outlaw Pigeon, whom she called Jandamarra. Not just a survivor, but a comrade in arms, and a man of fearsome repute.

  In Pigeon’s time a secret pocket deep within an unknown valley was their safest refuge when they retreated from the battle. One never breached by the troopers who scoured the country seeking their sign. Even in nomadic times of old it was but little known and used. A sort of no-man’s-land where the Boonooba territories abut and overlap those of other bands, out of the way of the usual routes the people followed in their daily business.

  Marralam had sworn a vow, to himself and to Pigeon, to ‘never live like a whitefellow’s dog’ in the station camps. Imprisoned after Pigeon’s death, upon release he made his way by foot the hundreds of miles from Roebourne back to his lands, and made haste for the valley, where he forged a refuge for the last of the munjons unable or unwilling to wear the yoke of the white man.

  The redoubt had only ever been mentioned to Bessie in fearful, reverent whispers, and always with dire warnings of the perils to any who might reveal its whereabouts, or even its very existence.

  Bessie meant to find her uncle, and to join his band.

  Her tale of Marralam’s lair was meant as explanation, not invitation. That night, though, I was not of a mind to bid her farewell. What’s more, I’d been growing ever more afraid that the events at Poison Hole may have come to light whilst we blundered around the countryside. If they had, I gravely doubted my chances of making it across the border to the Northern Territory. To disappear with her into the valley of the munjons seemed to me a sensible course of action.

  ‘I’ll come with you!’

  The look on her face when I said it!

  ‘He’ll put a spear longa you,’ she cried.

  ‘I’ll take my chances,’ I begged.

  ‘Might be longa me too, for bringing you.’

  Yet even as she spoke she held me close. With all that had happened we felt ourselves alone against the world. She could not lead me to this valley, she said. But if we travelled to the place she knew, and waited, we would be found. She undertook to plead my case, if given the chance, but that was all she could promise.

  ‘Lead the way,’ I answered, drawing her to me again.

  The spot was a hillock of modest size on a plain south of a goodly river. I was happy to stop our wanderings, let the animals out on long hobbles, and put my feet up. At Bessie’s insistence, I left all the weapons in clear view by our campsite. Each day she climbed the hillock, and lit a clump of old-man spinifex, sending a cloud of oily smoke roiling into the sky.

  We had been at the camp a little over a week. I was by then well rested after our travels, and had begun to let down my guard somewhat. Indeed, with the pleasant idleness of the days, it had rather the feel of a holiday. I strolled from the river to our camp, well pleased with the brace of bream I had caught for our dinner. I hung the fish in a branch and set about stoking the fire for a billy of tea. Squatted down in this manner, I sensed a movement, and looked up to see two men facing me, spears poised.

  The vivid memory of that day is of Bessie’s scream. It was all a blur of fear and chaos as she screeched and begged and cried, and the two men snarled and glowered. Somehow she stopped them. The elder of the pair lowered his spear. I had no doubt from what she’d told me that this must be her uncle Marralam. He held out his arm to still the younger man. My life was spared. Though for how long I knew not.

  With Marralam barking orders, Bessie led me blindfolded up a steepling path. The next thing I saw, when the cloth was torn from my eyes, was this valley I have called home ever since.

  15

  It’s funny the way he feels better now when he finds himself remembering Marj. Talking to her. For so long it was so hard, so painful. He doesn’t know why, doesn’t want to know, but lately it seems like she’s become his mate again. The memories have gradually become nurturing, not an agony.

  Marj felt liberated by the hundred-yard move from the scramble of ramshackle huts where all the Riders lived, across to the Walker camp. She supervised the rough-and-ready extensions to Two Bob’s hut, and generally took charge. He said yes to everything, not trying to hide his delight at the change in his circumstances. They worked out early on how to make each other laugh, and to give each other the space they needed.

  Her favourite week of the year was the Derby races. She loved the hubbub of it, the furious exchange of gossip, the news and speculation of new times coming: the Gurindji mob going on strike in the Territory; a referendum in Canberra. It still wasn’t to his taste, but he could hardly refuse Marj, with as many of the Rider clan as could squeeze aboard coming along for the ride.

  He often encountered Jinda in there. She would either ignore him, or scream at him to fuck off. Jinda had become Jenny, and fallen in with a ragtag group dependent on the down-at-heel whitefellers who floated around the backblocks of the town in makeshift, impermanent camps. And dependent on the grog they supplied.

  The first time Marj witnessed Jinda’s screaming, she challenged Two Bob. He held her eye but gave no answer. ‘You and your secret family humbug,’ she said with a glare. ‘One day I’ll get to the bottom of it.’ But she backed off. An unofficial policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was mutually accepted.

  Two Bob’s annual valley pilgrimage always started with a visit to Bertie Ahmad’s camp in Derby. Bertie had closed down his trading post that catered to the drovers and prospectors and other battlers of an era that had all but disappeared. But the shopfront had only ever been a part of his business. He was a go-to man for the bushmen of the Kimberley hinterland with goods of dubious provenance – a station manager doing a little business on the side, or a countryman who had mysteriously come into possession of some item of value.

  Billy was no longer up to the trek through the Leopolds to Halls Creek, but still managed to coax a little gold from his secret reef. Bertie, in retirement on his block behind the meatworks, was happy to receive a visitor like Two Bob, and exchange a stack of grubby old notes for some gold flakes. Money in hand, Two Bob would head to Elders at a quiet time the next day, load up with stores then head back up the Gibb River Road.

  Many miles before the Highlands turnoff, he would turn in on the back road to Bullfrog Hole, and begin the slow crawl over the old track that no-one graded any more. It was the only time in the annual cycle of his life, dictated by the slow rhythms of the muster
and the familiar patterns of Highlands, that he felt the pressure of the ticking clock. The slow track. The walk in. Back with his father and the mules for the stores. The work waiting at the station. Marj’s silent disapproval. And the undercurrents of the handful of stolen days in the valley.

  Bessie and Sarah seemed to shrink ever inwards. There were fewer stories each time of their own year past, and fewer questions about his own stories; except for Sarah’s avid attention to his tales of her daughter Jinda. And tales they were. His renowned stock camp yarns were recollections with the odd embellishment, but for Sarah he concocted a whole new life for Jinda in which she had settled into a job as a cleaner at the hospital, and lived in a little house with her feller who was a gardener there. Each year as he made his slow way along the backtrack he rehearsed the latest instalment he’d created. This imaginary Jinda became almost more real to him than the Jenny he encountered at the races. When he drove away from Bullfrog Hole the deception sat like a heavy stone in his guts.

  Year on year Billy seemed less energetic, less attentive to his routine of gardening, repairs and improvements. Each time Two Bob tried another way of raising the subject of them leaving the valley, his father’s response was curter than the last. How might they emerge from the valley and explain themselves to the world? Two Bob could never offer a plausible answer. Sarah simply remained terrified of the world beyond.

  Each year the trip depressed him more.

  Until the time he took Milly.

  How did I get away with that? That’s right! It was when Marj had to go into hospital first time, for that diabetes business.

  The look of delight on Bessie’s face when he walked into the camp with Milly perched on his shoulders is something he has never forgotten.

  Little girls. I reckon they’re different to boys, the way they make everybody go soft.

  The clock wasn’t ticking the same way that year, with yet another change of managers back at the station, and Marj in hospital. But it was Milly that changed the feel of things. Even Billy couldn’t stop smiling.

  She was a solemn little girl, who tended to react more to the twittering arrival of a gaggle of zebra finches at Billy’s birdbath than to the cooings of her aunt and grandmother. But nor did she object to their constant attentions.

  For the first time since he had begun his returns to the valley, the night-time silences did not hang heavy. They would all watch the sleeping girl dreamily instead of each wondering what the other was thinking. When Two Bob took Milly up to the spring to splash about in its cool, shaded waters, and exclaim with delight at the flash of a skimming rainbow bee-eater, he was able to drift back in his mind to his own childhood when all had seemed simple.

  He never said anything to Milly, but somehow the girl divined that their trip to the valley was something private between them. She said nothing to her mother when Marj returned. The silent mutual conspiracy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ between him and Marj seeped down to embrace their daughter.

  16

  I am granted another day, though my rheumy lungs and ebbing strength suggest a need to press ahead.

  Just why did Marralam spare me? I would not have been the first to die at the end of his spear, and if that had been my fate, it would have troubled him not at all. I think it did me some credit that I had disposed of Twelve Inch. And as I would discover, a natural curiosity was one of his qualities. He glimpsed an opportunity in those frantic moments to observe at close quarters one of the hated whitefellows. It was intended to be a temporary reprieve at first, I suspect. But he soon surmised that I posed little threat; a blundering, fearful youth likely to perish if he tried to flee, easily tracked down if needed. He chose to give me a chance.

  Now I am the inheritor of his domain. What irony.

  At our first encounter I would have guessed him between fifty years and sixty. He was not an overly tall man, but well built and heavily muscled, with a proud and fierce demeanour that could, when he so chose, be overwhelming and intimidating. He was, by experience as well as by natural inclination, a warrior.

  He had reclaimed his wife Weela from Fish Creek and arrived back here some ten years or thereabouts before Bessie and I. Their daughter Polly was five or six as I recall. He maintained a secretive contact with a few of his trusted comrades from the fighting days. He allowed in a handful of others seeking refuge. Most particularly, I believe, women who had been misused, or who had lost their husbands, or both. And so this wee community of souls was born.

  Not all of them welcomed my arrival, let it be said, but Marralam’s word was law. Bessie and I made our camp on this side of the creek, somewhat apart from the rest. At first an ill-trusted novice, by my diligence and reliability, and gradually by my ingenuity and resourcefulness, I grew to be accepted. By most. As the years passed I stopped fretting so much about our circumstance and my fears of pursuit, and settled into the life I was leading as something … what? Natural to me, I suppose.

  In our fifth year here there came the moment that made any notion of departure unthinkable. Bessie suffered two miscarryings before the happy event, but, our Sarah arrived.

  It was Bessie who made the point one night as we lay here, watching Sarah sleep. ‘You know we can’t ever leave here now.’ She made clear, after her own manner, that anywhere beyond this little world, our circumstance would be seen as far from natural. Our precious daughter would be branded a half-caste and taken from us, and we would be torn asunder. For though every white man assumed his right to empty his loins upon a black woman, none out there would accept his right to live with that woman as his mate.

  ‘It seems we are stuck here,’ I said.

  ‘Julyee.’ She drew me close, for the first time since our daughter had been born.

  Of all my names, Julyee is the one to which I cleave. My skin name. Other names might change with time and events, but a skin name is immutable. Bessie was Nagarra. As her man, I was therefore Julyee.

  It was not really until the birth of Sarah that my probation was completed in Marralam’s eyes. After that, though I was a much younger man than he, we started to become friends. Despite the limitations of our pidgin versions of English and Boonooba, we spent many an hour in spirited conversation. He was something of a philosopher, in his thirst for knowledge and comprehension of a society he scorned. He spoke with a great pride of being the last still holding fast to the old and true ways. He conveyed a condescension bordering upon contempt for his fellow Boonooba who had surrendered their independence, voluntarily or otherwise, for a life as the ‘gudia’s dogs’.

  However, he would at times, by word or more commonly by a revealing pause or reflective silence, convey that the matter was not entirely straightforward. He sometimes questioned the wisdom of the course he had chosen. These are not his own words, but he admitted to a selfishness of motivation. This lay not just in the stubborn adherence to his old vow; but also in the ever-burning hatred he felt, and the knowledge that succumbing to the other world would be a constant humiliation and affront that he feared he could not bear. And because he could not contemplate such a fate, he forced the others to endure the harsh and lonely life of the valley.

  In the consequences of his selfishness for his kin, I find echoes of my own story.

  Ah! I muse and I ramble, my confession deferred. What is my defence for such indulgence? The account of my first great sin burst forth on the page almost the moment I started. Perhaps because I have confidence that for that sin I shall be, or should be, forgiven. It troubles me, but not deeply in my soul.

  The second is another matter. I have no such confidence, for it involved the betrayal of those I have loved.

  17

  Everythin’ was startin’ to change by the time you came along, eh Milly girl.

  Two Bob had done well out of the equal wages decision, with his wages suddenly shooting up to thirty-five dollars a week from the five it had been. He felt like a rich man. But he was in a small minority. All over the Kimberley the different mobs
had walked off or been kicked off the stations as the old order broke down. A few of the young fellers who were laid off and a couple of families drifted into Derby, but most of the Highlands mob stayed put.

  When he camped at the Derby reserve while Marj was in hospital for the birth, the number of people living there had more than doubled from a year before. Most nights it was a madness of drunken noise and intermittent fights. He was thankful that they were able to take Milly home to the peace of Highlands.

  Marj was just about the only one who didn’t go soft around the edges in the presence of Milly. She loved her daughter deeply, but maintained her businesslike attitude to life, whereas even gruff Uncle Bob fell under Milly’s spell. When Two Bob was in camp, if the babe wasn’t on Marj’s breast, she was in his arms. And once she was weaned, she hardly ever left his side. It became another subject for jokes amongst his fellow stockmen.

  Two Bob felt his life was charmed. The only shadow came from the valley. When Parli passed, and then his mother, they were down to two, Billy and Sarah. It had become a forlorn place to visit, but he had no choice.

  He always timed the supply run for off-week, as it was called, when the fortnightly cycle of binge drinking fuelled by the pension and dole payments was at its low point. This time he’d loaded up at Elders, then spent the evening yarning with Bertie before rolling his swag on Bertie’s verandah. In the pre-dawn glimmer he started the engine before he realised; she was sitting there in the passenger seat. Jinda!

  It was only when the light improved that he realised what a mess she was in. Eyes blackened, one swollen shut. Dress torn and bloodstained.

  ‘Got any gear with you?’ he asked.

  A brief shake of her head.

  ‘Want to go back to the hospital, see if they can patch you up?’

  Another head shake.