The Mary Smokes Boys

by Patrick Holland

  A biting wind blew through Plainlands where they sat drinking black tea at Rusty’s Roadhouse cafeteria. Out the wide glass window were railcars loaded with coal. The railcars sat beneath sepia lights and ran far into the dark.

  At Helidon derailed and graffitied railcars sat rusting beside a smoking, stinking abattoir and neglected football field.

  “You should stay a while,” said Thiebaud.

  “I’d better get back.”

  “There’s a game here tonight.”

  Grey looked down at the field that stole light from the glowing abattoir.

  “We should have brought Ook,” Thiebaud said. “Where is he tonight?”

  Grey shrugged.

  In truth, Grey had some idea. There was no more horse work, and Eccleston was back doing the same work he had skipped school to do as a fourteen-year-old boy: hunting and trapping in woods and scrub. He killed feral dogs, hares and foxes, though he could only collect a bounty on the foxes. He sold the salted fox pelts to a hawk-faced man at a pelt box for a few dollars apiece. The hares, he ate. The dogs he shot while contracted on a retainer by pastoralists or the DPI. Feral dogs were fiercer these days than they had ever been; his first contract came in autumn after a pack had carried off a four-month-old calf. The work meant Eccleston must be away, farther and for longer than he had ever been from his home, driving long hours alone.

  Thiebaud slapped Grey’s shoulder. “So you’ll stay?”

  Grey felt the cold bite his face when they were out of the truck. He took his duffel coat from where it was hooked over his shotgun on a mount behind the seats. He and Thiebaud stepped down onto the pitch where other hooded boys stood breathing smoke.

  The rare game began and rolled on toward no foreseeable end. Grey was glad to be out of Mary Smokes.

  BACK ON THE highway he remembered Vanessa. She might be in town tonight. It was a long weekend. He might stop in now before heading home. But he drove past the Haigslea turn-off. He wondered if she would have welcomed him.

  The house was empty when he returned. He drove into Mary Smokes and walked by a military recruitment night at the Lyceum Hall. He stood by the window listening to a shaving-rashed major talk about duty and prosperity in the same breath. He walked north then south along Banjalang. There was nothing and no one on the street save the light of spare orange lamps and a couple of boys loitering in that light outside the Workers’ Club. He put his head in the door of the club but saw no one he knew. He got back in his truck.

  HE SAW A human shape on the side of the road in front of his house. As he drew closer, the figure became two. Eccleston and his sister. Grey imagined Eccleston had her by the arm. At fifty yards this was not the case. But he could not dismiss the notion that when he first saw them Eccleston had hold of her.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said directly he pulled up. She did not give Grey a chance to ask questions. “We were walking home. But I’m tired.”

  “Get in,” Grey said. He looked into Eccleston’s eyes. He read some discomfort there, but he could not define it.

  “You want to come to the house?’ he said. “No one’s home.”

  “No. Thanks. I’m goin into the hills early tomorrow.”

  Irene clung onto Grey’s arm. She sighed deeply. Her black hair fell from her hood across her face.

  “Take me home, Grey.”

  Eccleston stood with his head down in the dark on the road.

  “What is it, Ook?”

  “Nothin.” Eccleston slapped the roof of the cabin. “Goodnight, Grey.”

  IRENE STOOD WAITING for him on the stairs. From the truck he watched Eccleston walk along the way to the big white house.

  HE CHOPPED WOOD by the light of the moon with a bottle of beer. The beer ran quickly through his blood. In time Irene came and stood in the back doorway. He had been drinking and splitting blocks for some time before he knew she was there. He looked up.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you want to go into the shed and get me a couple more logs?”

  “Grey,” she whispered.

  He threw the halves of a split block on the pile. He waited.

  “I’ll get the wood,” she said at last.

  She returned with only one more block.

  “Come in and sit with me,” she said after he split the block.

  He did so, but she did not speak for the rest of the night. He felt there was some significant revelation or question teetering at the edge of her silence. If once she had told him that someone pursued her against her wishes, if that was what this was, then he would have done anything to stop it. He wondered why she kept so silent?

  She went to bed leaving him alone by the stove.

  III

  GREY TOOK HIS BREAK-ACTION SHOTGUN FROM THE mount in the truck and packed a box of rifled slug shells and slung his leather water pouch over his shoulder and walked across the grass to Eccleston’s.

  “North?”

  “Ook.”

  “What are you doin here?”

  “Day off. Last night you said you were goin into the hills. I thought we’d shoot together.”

  Five traps hung on the bullbar of Eccleston’s International. He would usually take them off before driving through town, as they made people nervous, but dawn was still an hour away. Grey saw apple mint under Eccleston’s stairs. A little garden of it, cordoned off by smooth stones.

  They drove onto Wivenhoe-Somerset Road and left the truck on the northeastern edge of Lake Somerset. On foot they followed a faint track through eucalypt woods and came into dense forest on the old southern fall of the Stanley River catchment. They walked up a creek called Gregor, high into the hills. They drank stewed tea from Eccleston’s thermos and water from Grey’s pouch.

  There was a crackling of dry leaves and Eccleston set his bag and traps down behind a tree and slung his rifle from his shoulder to his hands. The boys knelt in the brush. Eccleston imitated the sound of a wounded rabbit and a red fox moved out of the mist in the light timber. They stalked the fox up a gully and along a dry creek bed. The fox ran from scrub to tussock to iron bark. Eccleston had no dogs to flush the fox. He knelt on one knee for a quarter of an hour, fingering the inside of the trigger housing, then fired into a sliver of light between trees and shot the fox dead.

  He laid his rifle on the ground and tied one of the fox’s hind legs to a branch with a cutting of wire. He took his skinning knife from his bag and pushed the blade in above the left foot and cut across to the right. He skinned the fox and scraped the fat and gristle and stretched the skin higher up in the tree and threw the carcass to the birds.

  They stayed in light timber another hour and the sun rose without trace of another fox or dog.

  They walked high into rock ridges where no one ever walked and Eccleston untied a trap. He dug a hole with his hand. He rubbed his hands with eucalypt and kerosene leaves to disguise his scent. He kept an old shirt in his shoulder bag that he tied around his head so no drops of sweat fell on the trap. He bandaged the jaws of the trap with calico and dropped strychnine in between the folds. Then he placed a sheet of newspaper over the plate and hinges so the jaws would not jam on the soil. He set, laid and buried the trap but for a short chain and heavy metal drag. Then he went about setting the rest of the line.

  “I’d rather shoot em than trap em,” he said. “But we started too late and moved too slow.”

  Grey wondered if there was a note of resentment in the words. But Eccleston buckled up his shoulder bag with no particular expression on his face.

  Resentment would have pushed Grey now, pushed him to ask about last night. Instead he kept silent. Anyway, it was for Eccleston to speak. Grey felt if he started it here and now he would likely burst into tears that reason could not account for, maybe even hit the boy who stood beside him. Eccleston must speak first if there was anything to say; otherwise they were finished. And they could never be as they were. But perhaps

  Eccleston had n
othing to tell him after all. Perhaps Grey was losing himself.

  On the walk back, Grey sighted a dog in a fringe of cypress. They followed the dog along a dry creek bed but lost track of it. They sat down on an exposed tree root. Eccleston pulled back the bolt of his rifle to check the breech. He switched the safety and lay the rifle down beside him. He took Grey’s water pouch up over his head and squeezed the bladder and let the water jet then trickle into his mouth. He handed the pouch back to Grey. Then he stared at his boots.

  “You’re my brother, Grey. My one true brother. But I wonder if you love me like I love you.”

  “What the hell’s that mean, Ook?”

  Eccleston stared at him and said nothing.

  “Have it your way.”

  Eccleston laughed charily.

  “You know you and Irene and the boys, but especially you and Irene, you’re all I have in the world. I’m a broke half-caste who used to work horses and now shoots dogs.” He spat. “You’re a good man, Grey. But you don’t know everything.”

  “What the hell are you talkin about, Ook?”

  “Maybe nothin.”

  “Don’t tell me that then tell me it’s nothin. You’re like a bloody child sometimes.”

  Eccleston nodded and rolled and lit a cigarette. Just then there was a cracking of twigs and the dog broke cover.

  Eccleston slammed forward the bolt of his rifle and knelt on the floor of the wood. He pulled the rifle fast into his shoulder but the dog was already gone into the thick timber where they could not follow.

  IN THE AFTERNOON Eccleston took his rifle and crossed Mary Smokes Creek and walked across Tanner’s north country to Possum’s humpy. He saw the bodytruck in the yard for the first time since the night of the horses. Possum must have borrowed it again from one or other of his cousins, who all claimed part ownership. The registration plates were gone.

  Possum sat on the floor of the humpy with a bottle of whisky, watching a small television set. The boys had given him a hundred dollars of the horse money.

  “And this is what you did with it?”

  Possum grinned and pointed at the picture that rolled over and over like a reel of film.

  Eccleston laughed and sat down on Possum’s sour mattress.

  “Let’s go hunt some dogs.”

  “Why?”

  “I need some money. You got any?’ Eccleston smiled.

  Possum shook his head.

  “Cause you bin buyin whitefella things.”

  Possum grinned.

  Eccleston looked on the floor and saw old pizza and hamburger boxes from Mary Smokes café.

  “You bin eatin flash whitefella tucker too.”

  “If a bloke only et bush tucker e’d die.”

  “And now your money’s gone.”

  Possum nodded.

  “Come on,” said Eccleston, standing up. “I set traps this mornin. I’ll give you half a what’s in em. Get your shotgun and a decent knife.”

  “Gun’s in the truck,” said Possum.

  They walked behind the humpy and Possum climbed up into the cabin and reached behind the seat.

  Eccleston rolled a cigarette and leant on the deck. He looked through the rails and saw halters tied inside. He saw dried horse dung.

  “Pos.”

  “Yep.”

  The black man leapt out of the cabin with his shotgun.

  “There’s horse shit in the back a this truck!”

  Possum furrowed his brow and nodded.

  “You didn’t clean the deck after we took the horses?”

  “Nuh.”

  “And you left the halters tied ere?”

  Possum looked embarrassed like a child.

  “I left the number plates in a hole in the hills,” he said. “Ownin halters don’t mean nothin.”

  Eccleston looked away and spat.

  “Where’s this truck bin?”

  “Lockyer for a couple a weeks. Then ere.”

  “How many blackfellas who know Tanner have you had ere since then?”

  “Dunno. Few fellas from Cherbourg one night. But I don’t reckon they know Tanner.”

  “Most of em have worked for im at one time or other. And Tanner knows you don’t haul nothin anymore but whisky’n blackfellas’ old furniture.” Eccleston looked across the rolling country to the south. “Has Tanner bin round ere to hire you since that night?”

  Possum thrust out his bottom lip and shook his head.

  “E hired you?”

  “No,” Eccleston said. “Not once. And he’s got unbroken horses too, and cattle to pull down from the hills.” He sighed and wondered what that meant. At least Tanner had not been round in person and seen the truck. “Do you remember who you sold the horse to–the big one?’

  Possum nodded.

  “Like I said. Same as I sold all of em.”

  “Was e a dealer ord e keep im?”

  Possum shrugged.

  “Dunno, Ook. But I erd im say somethin about Ma Ma Creek.”

  “You reckon you could find im if you had to?”

  “Dunno. Maybe.”

  Eccleston sighed and put his cigarette under his heel. He looked again to the south. “Get me a hose, Pos.”

  IV

  IT WAS THE NIGHT OF THE TIGER SCRUB CHARITY DANCE and Irene walked to the truck barefoot, carrying her shoes in her hands. Grey noted her blue-painted fingernails. Amy Minh’s Yunnanese mother had given her a high-collared qipao that she had worn herself thirty years ago in another country. The woman felt sorry for the girl who had no mother and was always with men and boys and had no pretty things.

  Tiger Scrub lay to the northwest of Mary Smokes, twelve miles off the Valley Highway. It was not a town, but a cattle-grazing district. One small yellow hall beside a schoolhouse was all that marked it out from the surrounding country that was poisoned and ringbarked so dead trees stood pale and twisted on the hills.

  THEY LEFT THE truck on the gravel in front of the hall. They came up the stairs where a small brother and sister sat playing and already dirty-faced. The children smiled roguishly up at Irene and she mussed the boy’s hair. The smell of varnished floorboards came wafting from inside along with the pretty, waltz-time music of a band.

  The hall was powered, but the only electric lights were on the stairs and in the kitchen and above the hole-in-the-wall bar. Kerosene lamps sat on the tables and their light burnished the walls. The band played on a raised platform in the corner before a space for dancing where no one danced.

  Grey looked over the crowd. The season’s three showgirl entrants were selling raffle tickets. The boys were there. All but Eccleston. Irene spotted some of her schoolmates through a doorway on the back veranda and went to meet them.

  Grey sat down next to Thiebaud on a bench along the wall.

  “Where’s Ook?”

  “Who knows.” Then Thiebaud smiled. “Few out-a-towners here tonight. Look at her!”

  He nodded in the direction of a girl in a slim-fitting red dress at a nearby table.

  “Old Reg Swan’s granddaughter. That’s her parents she’s with. She’s all right, eh?”

  Grey nodded.

  “Why don’t you go talk to her? You used to fence for old Reg, didn’t you?”

  “That was years ago.”

  Grey glanced again at the girl.

  “I think I might have met her once.”

  “There’s your ticket!”

  Raughrie Norman crossed the hall in front of the girl, glanced at her, and came and sat down on the other side of Thiebaud.

  “She’s all right, hey Flagon?”

  “Who?”

  Thiebaud laughed.

  “Why don’t you ever wear your glasses out?”

  “Who, Grey?”

  “The girl in red.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, she’s all right.”

  Thiebaud laughed again.

  “Don’t try’n fool me, Flagon. You can’t see a bloody thing from here. You’re probably lookin at her father.”
r />   He put his arms around Raughrie Norman’s drooping shoulders and the boy giggled.

  “Go to hell.”

  “Her uncle looks all right from here too! Mind, I’m near drunk. You might be the better judge.”

  “Go to hell,” Raughrie Norman giggled.

  They were still laughing when Grey remembered very suddenly the thing he had forgotten and he felt a small hole–only the size of a marble–inside his stomach and he felt the breeze go through it though there was no breeze inside the hall.

  “I’ll be back in a minute, boys.”

  “Where you goin?’ Flagon asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  Directly he stepped onto the veranda the talking ceased. He glanced over the faces that looked up at him. There were four girls and two young boys he knew well enough. A boy shifted a stolen bottle behind a chair with his boot.

  Irene smiled at her brother.

  “What is it, Grey?”

  He stood in silence, thinking of what to say.

  “I was just wondering if you wanted something to eat.”

  “Are they serving already?”

  “Soon.”

  She smiled and furrowed her brow.

  “That’s all right. I can get it myself.”

  He nodded and went back inside and sat down with Thiebaud and Flagon, feeling foolish and watching the front door while one by one the lamps went out and the room dimmed.

  Thiebaud danced with most of the girls in turn. Raughrie Norman stayed faithful to the bench and the wall, looking around anxiously and tapping his feet in contemplation of a move that did not happen until dinner. Eventually Grey stood up and joined the line at the counter. The girl in the red dress lined up behind him. He looked over his shoulder and smiled at her. She stared at the chalkboard menu. She came beside him and stared so long and intently at the names of the three simple meals on offer that it was obvious she wanted to talk.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “the Women’s Committee have never killed anyone with their catering, at least not in my time.”