Something battered on the window behind them. ‘What’s that?’ asked Gwyn, surprised.
‘Just a fantail,’ said Dusty. ‘She’s picking the flies off the windows. Some things like tomatoes, some like flies. Has a go at the spiders too. She’s got a nest out in that big camellia. Your gran planted that camellia. She planted the rest of the garden too. Haven’t kept it up like I should. I’ll show you the nest if you like. Just don’t go too close and scare her.’
Gwyn reached for the jam. It was dark and seedy blackberry, out of an old pickle jar, with the handwritten price still on one side. She spread it thickly over the doughy white bread, up to the crackled black crust.
‘What are you kids going to do after lunch?’ asked Dusty finally.
‘I don’t know, Grandpa,’ said Rob.
‘Don’t you go calling me Grandpa,’ said Dusty Dargan. ‘You call me Dusty like everyone else. Even your mother called me Dusty till she left home and bought her television sets and fancy baths and all the rest of it. Your Uncle Michael, he called me Dusty too.’
‘Who’s our Uncle Michael?’ asked Rob, interested. ‘Mum’s never told us about him.’
Dusty was silent for a minute. ‘Well, I don’t suppose she might have,’ he said finally. ‘Don’t suppose your mum talks about her family if she can help it, unless she needs me like she does now to look after you two. Michael was her younger brother and my son and he died up north in a place called Vietnam. I’ll tell you about your Uncle Michael sometime. Now, do you kids want to help me with the wood or mooch off on your own?’
‘What are you doing with the wood?’ asked Gwyn.
‘I’ll be chainsawing it, you’ll be carting it to the woodshed. You can have a go at splitting it if you like, but I don’t suppose you’ll have much luck. It’s an old casuarina that came down last year. Hard as a boulder now.’
‘Can’t we use the chainsaw?’ asked Rob.
‘No, you can not,’ stated Dusty Dargan. ‘You can use the chainsaw when you start growing whiskers, not before.’
‘What about me?’ objected Gwyn.
‘Girls have more sense than boys with machinery,’ said Dusty. ‘Maybe next year, if you come down again.’
‘Why don’t you get an electric stove and electric heaters?’ asked Rob. ‘Then you wouldn’t have to cut wood.’
Dusty shook his head. ‘I like cutting wood,’ he said. ‘I like fetching it. I like the smell when you cut it and the smell when it burns and the strength it gives your arms when you’re finished with it. Turn a switch and what do you have? Nothing. Just the warmth and that’s all, and that’s soon gone, and a whopping bill at the end of it. Come on, let’s get moving.’
It was quiet after dinner. Too quiet. No noise of TV in the living room, no mutter of cars from the streets around them. Dusty carved a wooden spoon at the table with the old knife from his belt. Rob read on the sofa. Gwyn lounged in the soggy armchair by the window and inspected her blisters from splitting wood.
‘Dusty?’ she asked finally. ‘Could you tell us another story?’
Dusty looked up. ‘You don’t want my stories,’ he said. ‘What are they to you?’
‘I liked the one you told at lunch,’ said Gwyn. ‘Mum never told us you had such an interesting life.’
Dusty grinned. ‘Your mother doesn’t think it’s interesting. She thinks it’s embarrassing, an old father in an old shack like this. She’s been down twice since she married, and the last time was just to drop you kids off here while she and your dad went to Bali. She’ll sell this place when I’m gone and buy a bigger house with the money and never think of the love that went with the place, the people and the memories.’
He thought for a while. ‘You want a story? All right, I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you about your Great-Great-Aunt Jean. I’ll tell you how she beat the government.
‘I got to know Aunty Jean in the ’twenties, when I was still a kid. She was my dad’s sister. My dad and I had been living here alone for years, since Mum died, sweating over this place to raise a crop. Then he died, while he was fencing, and I was alone.’
‘How old were you, Dusty?’ asked Gwyn.
‘I was twelve. Aunty Jean took me in, and Uncle Reg, even though they had seven of their own.
‘You never saw a woman like Aunty Jean today. A bust like a pair of watermelons and dresses pulled in at her waist like a sack of potatoes. She always smelt of flour, Aunty Jean, or vanilla custard. She fed us on bread and dripping and eggs from the chooks and we all dug spuds and worked in the vegie gardens down the backyard. There was never enough money. She was a wonder, your Aunty Jean. We lived on the smell of an oil rag, and your Uncle Reg worked on and off, then he didn’t work at all, because there were no jobs. It was the depression.’
‘I saw a program about that on TV,’ said Rob.
‘You see a lot on that TV of yours, don’t you? Too much, I reckon. It’s on your screen one minute and gone the next and you can forget about it. You couldn’t forget about the depression then.
‘Jean and Reg didn’t own their own house, it was rented, and they couldn’t pay the rent. There was this place, but there was just a shack on it then. I didn’t build this house till later. So we went down the coast, the whole boiling lot of us, to a place called Happy Valley. It was a dole camp. You know what that was? Thousands of us living in tents and shanties made of packing cases, living on the dole, just a hand-out to keep us going.’
Gwyn shivered. She wondered what it would be like to have to leave your house, to live in a tent instead.
‘Then they wanted to cut it down,’ continued Dusty. ‘Cut down the dole. We were just about starving as it was, but they wanted to save money. Governments like saving money so they have more for big ships and offices and statues of themselves.
‘How can you fight when you’ve got nothing, like we had down there?’ He seemed to want an answer.
‘I don’t know,’ said Rob.
‘You fight like your Aunty Jean. Like her and all the other women. They had a dole strike. They didn’t collect the dole. And that meant the shops and the merchants weren’t selling any goods, weren’t providing any tucker, and they were going broke. We lived on air and gum leaves, and everyone shared what little they had, but they won. The shopkeepers badgered the government till they gave in and the dole was restored. All because of your Aunty Jean and all the other women. They stopped the dole cuts and they won.’
‘That’s when you went north, Dusty?’
‘That’s when I went north.’ Dusty yawned and stretched. ‘And this is where you go to bed. Off with you, the both of you.’
It was dark in the bedroom, with its dry bunches of spiders in the corners and knotholes in the wood above their beds. It smelt of pepper and clean sheets. Rob’s bed was under the window, Gwyn’s on the other side of the room, divided by the big old wardrobe.
‘Gwyn?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘Are you asleep?’
‘Yes. No. Sort of.’
‘There’s something out the window.’
‘It’s probably just Dusty,’ said Gwyn sleepily.
‘It’s not Dusty. There’s something out there breathing.’
‘Well, look out and see what it is.’
‘You come too.’
Gwyn sighed and got up, and went over to the window. They parted the old wooden blinds and looked out.
The moon sailed like a golden orange above the valley. The world slept in shadows and light. Casuarinas waved above the creek, dark against the purple sky. On the lawn, black and silver in the moonlight, was a wombat. They could hear the grinding of its teeth as it pulled the grass.
They watched silently. The wombat glanced up, as though it knew they were there, then continued eating. It turned its back on them, round and hairy, and began to tear the grass from under a camellia bush. The breeze hummed down in the casuarina trees and slipped fresh and quiet into the room. The night was thick and sweet as a ripe peach. A low
hoot floated across from the ridges.
‘Gwyn? Can you hear that?’
‘The owl? Why, you frightened of it or something?’
‘No. Stupid. It’s just sort of nice, isn’t it? Just hooting away in the distance.’
‘’Night, Rob,’ said Gwyn firmly, as she slipped back to her bed.
‘’Night, Gwyn,’ said Rob dreamily.
‘Can we help you this morning, Dusty?’ asked Rob, watching Dusty scramble eggs on the stove. They were brown eggs, with straw from the chook run still sticking to their shells.
Dusty considered. ‘You can feed the chooks, like yesterday, and get the eggs. Then you may as well mooch off for a while. Go explore the creek or something. It’s not natural for kids to stay in one place all the time. You should be out conquering the world.’
‘Starting with the creek?’ asked Rob.
‘May as well,’ said Dusty, banging the plates on the table. ‘Here, get that lot into you.’
‘Have you got a story about eggs too?’ asked Gwyn, buttering her toast.
‘Not off hand,’ said Dusty Dargan. ‘There was a brown snake a couple of years ago kept stealing the eggs. It’d squeeze through the wire and squeeze out again. Could never catch it. Then one day it ate too many and it couldn’t get back through the wire. It just sat there with this great bulge in its tummy looking stupid. So I lopped its head off with the spade. Don’t like killing snakes. Don’t do you any harm mostly if you leave them alone. But it was frightening the chooks, and anyway I wanted my eggs.’
‘I hate snakes,’ said Gwyn.
Dusty eyed her. ‘There’s probably a blooming great snake out there muttering to its friends, “I hate humans.” Let’s hope neither of you meet each other.’
They ate their eggs in silence.
‘I ate a snake once,’ Dusty announced, as he scraped his plate.
‘Yuck!’ said Gwyn.
‘Up on the Birdsville Track?’ asked Rob.
‘No. This was in Western Australia. About a year later. Met this old guy on the road. He showed me how to throw them in the fire. Chop their heads off in the right spot and cook them well and you don’t have to worry about poison. Tasted okay. Bit like a fatty chicken. Never bothered again though.’
‘What other things have you eaten?’ asked Rob.
‘Never you mind,’ said Dusty Dargan. ‘I’m not serving them up to you, not if you behave yourself. Go on, out with you, the both of you, while I do the washing up. No, you can’t help. I’ve got my own routine. You two skedaddle.’
The creek was cold in the morning. The water broke and scattered in the early light round the pink rocks, quivered in the dark deep holes under the casuarinas.
‘I suppose Dusty’s trying to be kind,’ said Gwyn. ‘His stories are good. But he just doesn’t know what kids like today. I mean, no muesli for breakfast or Kentucky Fried Chicken or computer games or anything.’
‘He’s okay,’ said Rob. ‘He’s better than I thought he was at first.’
‘I think he’s worried about something,’ said Gwyn.
‘What?’ asked Rob curiously.
‘I don’t know,’ said Gwyn. ‘He looks . . . I don’t know . . . as though maybe we should have done something but haven’t.’
Rob shrugged. ‘If he wants us to do something he should ask,’ he said. ‘Come on. Are we going up the creek or down?’
Gwyn considered. ‘Up,’ she said finally. ‘Dusty said there was a waterfall up the creek, and bigger pools.’
The valley narrowed as they climbed. The cliffs beside the creek grew steeper. The creek slipped between them into deeper pools or ran down races, smooth with a thousand years of flood. Fat lizards baked in the sun, kookaburras chortled warning calls from the high dry ridges up above them.
‘Rob.’
‘What?’
‘Shh. Over there.’
It was a fox, dirty summer brown. It padded between the trees on the bank, and bent to drink. Suddenly it raised its head, and sniffed. It saw them. The children froze.
The fox bent again, wary now. It drank quickly, glanced at Rob and Gwyn, then it was off, a brown shadow through the trees.
They continued walking. Silver fish darted in the sky-blue pools.
‘Look at the reflections,’ wondered Rob. ‘You can see the clouds.’
‘If you swam you’d think you were flying,’ said Gwyn.
‘Want to swim?’
‘When we get to the waterfall.’
The gorge was full of the sound of water now. They turned a corner. Ferns spilled down the cliffs. The world smelt of heat and moisture. The falls splashed before them, a web of white lace crashing into a green pool.
‘Oh, wow!’ said Rob.
‘Incredible!’ whispered Gwyn.
Rob recovered. ‘Last one in’s a maggot sandwich!’ he called.
The falling water was rock-cool, cool as the earth it seeped from. It stung their backs and eyes so they dived to escape its force, and the world was green and shimmering and tadpoles nibbled at their legs. Rob surfaced. Water dripped from his hair. Gwyn was laughing in front of him.
‘Not bad?’ he shouted above the falling water.
‘Not bad at all!’ yelled Gwyn.
It was hot as they walked back up the flat. Dusty was working in the garden, digging potatoes. Sweat mingled with dirt and ran down his face.
‘Hello, you two,’ he said. ‘You’re late.’
‘I’m sorry, Dusty,’ said Gwyn. ‘We went up to the waterfall.’
Dusty inspected them.
‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘that explains it then. There’s no one ever went up there yet was able to tear themselves away without a swim and an hour for looking. Come on. You’re probably starving.’
‘We are,’ agreed Rob, suddenly realising he was.
It was cooler in the house. The dust danced in a sunbeam through the window. The stove was out. Dusty made tea on the gas ring, and cut thick slices from the high white loaf, and hauled out more lettuce and tomatoes from the cool safe.
‘You two want to come to town this afternoon?’ demanded Dusty over lunch.
‘Sure. Cool,’ said Rob.
‘Cool my foot,’ said Dusty Dargan. ‘It’ll be as hot as an old tin roof. I’ve got to get some fencing wire and wheat for the chooks. You lot can go get a milkshake or something in the cafe.’
It was sweaty in the ute, all three of them squeezed into the front seat. Dusty didn’t seem to even know about air conditioning. He steered round the potholes on the road to town.
‘Why don’t you have a dog like other farmers, Dusty?’ asked Gwyn. ‘He could ride in the back.’
‘Because I’m not a farmer. I decided that years ago,’ said Dusty. ‘I like the land the way it is, not shaved of all the trees and animals and anything you can’t make money out of. You can’t have dogs as well as wombats and wallabies mooching up round the front door. Dogs scare them off.’
‘What’s wrong with farming?’ demanded Rob.
Dusty waved a hand at the paddocks along the road. ‘Take a look at them. Cattle, sheep, grass and wire. Nothing else. May as well live in the city with nothing but cars and houses. Farming’s all very well. But it’s not the bush.’
Dusty parked in the main street. He nodded to a woman lugging groceries, then to a man loading hay into a trailer. A man in shabby moleskins waved a greeting from across the road.
‘Do you know everyone in town?’ whispered Gwyn.
‘Know most people to nod to,’ agreed Dusty. ‘I’ll be in the stock and station agents. Cafe’s just over there.’
The cafe smelt of coffee and carrot cake and roses on the tables. There were fresh biscuits under the glass counter and posters on the wall.
‘What’re you having?’ asked Rob.
Gwyn read the menu. ‘Milkshakes. Fresh strawberry, peach, banana, chocolate. I’ll have strawberry.’
‘I’ll have banana,’ decided Rob. ‘I haven’t eaten a banana since we came here. Do y
ou think Dusty would buy us some bananas?’
‘He’d just tell us to go pick some apples or oranges or strawberries or something,’ said Gwyn. ‘I think the garden’s sort of fun, anyway. It’s good being able to just wander out and pick anything you want.’ She looked around the cafe. ‘Hey, look, there’s a dance here next weekend!’
‘Boring,’ said Rob.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Gwyn. She read the notices along the wall. ‘Someone wants baby-sitting. Kittens to give away. Cement mixer for sale. Hey, Rob, look at that one!’
The poster was handwritten. Gwyn got up to look at it more closely. ‘It’s about a public protest meeting,’ she said. ‘There’s a plan to woodchip Gunnah Forest. Hey, that’s next to Dusty’s! I wonder if he knows!’
‘Ask him,’ suggested Rob.
‘I will,’ said Gwyn. ‘Hey, here he is now. Dusty, have you seen this?’
Dusty glanced at it. ‘I have,’ he said. He went to the counter. ‘Afternoon, Marge. I’ll have a milkshake. Vanilla. Plenty of ice-cream in it please.’
He sat down at the table with the children.
‘Are you going to the meeting?’ demanded Gwyn. ‘Gunnah’s right next door to you.’
‘No,’ said Dusty.
‘Why not? Don’t you mind the woodchipping?’
‘Mind! Have you seen what happens when they chip a forest? The soil washes away in the rain and wind. You think what the creek’ll be like after woodchipping — silted all along it so it floods in the wet and goes dry in the drought. Think of the animals that’ll die without the creek. Think of the fires after all that mess. You get fires where you get woodchipping and they spread. Too right they spread.’
‘Then why aren’t you going to the meeting? Don’t you think they’ve got any chance of stopping it?’
Dusty looked at her. ‘I’ve never lost a battle yet,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve fought for what I believe in time and time again.’ He looked out the window, at the tall green hill above the town, then back at Rob and Gwyn. ‘What’s the use of fighting this one?’ he said softly. ‘I’m old. Ten years’ll see me out. Then what’ll happen to the place? It’ll go to your mother, and she’ll sell it. Won’t matter then if Gunnah’s woodchipped or not. It’d be different if you kids wanted it. But you want the city, like your mother. No, I won’t be fighting this one. This one’s for other people.’
Rain Stones 25th Anniversary Edition Page 8
