The Man on the Headland

by Kylie Tennant

  It was a sight to see Lois and Bert setting off in their car. Bert, in particular, was glorious in knife-edged, snowy flannels, his club blazer with the crest on the pocket, his panama hat with crest on band. His hair was brilliantined, his moustache had an air of authority and anticipation. Lois, more tall than ever in white, more athletic, had the endurance, the determination, the strong wrist and flexibility of a champion.

  Ernie had just waited until they went off to bowls and then vanished. He and I went together to wait in the loathsome disinfectant smell at Sydney Hospital while the doctor examined him.

  “He says it’s ray treatment or the knife,” Ernie recounted. “I said, The knife.’”

  Cancer was eating into Ernie as the rutile mining ate into Dimandead. He had this lump in his back. He was no whit disturbed but as humorous as ever. When I went to bring him home from the hospital he made a royal progress. All the other patients had to come and wish him well, swearing undying friendship. Nurses kissed him, doctors left their busy round to shake his hand. He was something fabulous and precious, he was their country, strong and wild and strange.

  He was no sooner established in bed at our house than, waiting to give me the slip, he had dressed himself and walked a mile down to the hotel by the water. The barmaid greeted him as a long-lost friend. When I realized he had gone out by himself I knew how Lois must feel.

  “Ernie, you know that I would have driven you. To climb that great hill coming home when you were only just out of hospital!”

  “Man needs a bit of exercise,” was all that Ernie would say. He complained that, as usual, Sydney had given him “a cold”. It was a bad attack of bronchitis and Roddy just called in the doctor who ordered him to stay in bed. When he was able to sit on our patio a group of visiting ladies asked him whether he should not give up smoking. “I realize smoking may carry you off,” said Ernie, straight-faced. “I’ve been smoking since I was ten and I’m seventy-nine now. It’ll take me any day.”

  Elizabeth and Benison and I drove him to Dimandead. Roddy, who had played unending games of chess with him, saw him go with foreboding. I drove very carefully and Ernie, in the back, was quite himself, pleased to be going back to Dimandead. But as soon as he had established himself in his hut he lay in bed. “Just that damn cold I always get in Sydney. Can’t seem to shake it off.”

  “The obstinate old devil,” Lois cried, with tears in her eyes. “He worried us sick. We’re so relieved to have him back I can’t tell you.”

  I was determined that when we went Ernie should move into our shack. “It’s sheltered there, Ernie. You’ll be closer to Bert and Lois, and Bert can come across and see if you need anything instead of tramping all this way. I’ll come down and take your things up in the car.”

  “Don’t you do anything of the sort. I’ll bring my own gear.”

  I was so pleased to have persuaded him to move into our house that I conceded this. Early next morning, while we were packing the car to leave, Ernie appeared on the other side of the stream. He had his great miner’s barrow piled as high as his head with his goods, tucked neatly under a tarpaulin. He had even roped on the top his shovel and pick and the blackened camp oven he had carried all over Queensland. He had pushed this load near half a mile around the lake over tiny plank bridges above his ditches, through the paddocks to the new horse-gate he had built in our fence for the lost Pickles.

  Our outcry only made him smile. “Just like women,” he said, “carrying on a treat at a man for walking across his own paddicks. The barrow was humping the load.”

  We kissed Ernie and left him, and he settled in contentedly by the fire. He could lean out of bed to put wood on it in the night if he chose. Bert found him in the morning lying cold on the floor. He had got out of bed in the night and had a stroke.

  In the hospital they gave him little hope, but after months he was back at Dimandead again, and when we arrived he walked across the paddocks to meet us. His smile was a little stiff on one side, but he walked. He sat down by the fire just as usual, yarned of the old days in Queensland. Bert and Lois had established him in the old laundry across the yard. He could make himself a cup of tea on the primus, sit on the sunny doorstep and talk to the cats.

  When I went there and saw the tiny window covered in cobwebs and black spiders I made to brush them away.

  “You leave them alone,” Ernie said with spirit. “Those spiders are doing a fine job keeping the miskeeters off me. Never can let an animal or insect alone but must always take a swipe at it! They’ve got their life, I’ve got mine.”

  For two—was it three?—years, Ernie lived in the tin laundry. Bert waited on him devotedly. He and Lois still went into town three days a week to play bowls, and Ernie’s relations reported that he sometimes said, when he came into town, that he’d like to go to an old men’s home where he’d have plenty of people to talk to. But no old men’s home would have had him because he was too ill.

  At last Bert and Lois could justify themselves by caring for him. When we came we would drive him about and he even took himself to the hotel for a drink, meeting Jack, hale and discontented as ever. Ernie was like an old dog who has always had his own kennel and will not go into the polished house, but in summer the little laundry was very hot and in winter very cold.

  Alan Mobbs and his nephew, Harry Metcalfe, visited him. Bim and his friends dropped in and played their guitars. He liked that and wished they would come more often. The rutile works spread its depredation all over the plain, and the hidden death in Ernie kept pace.

  There was an incident. People said it was a good thing Lois had got the gun away from him. Ernie would have thought it was just her need to interfere. Ernie had often told Roddy he would die when he chose and find a clean, warm sandhill for his bones. His plans for his end had been thwarted. A woman as usual. Doing things for your good.

  “If it was that old rifle he used to have,” Harry Metcalfe told me, “I doubt if he could even hit himself. It was all out of kilter. Once Ernie fired it and it hit a bough yards off where he reckoned to make his mark. And if it was his service revolver I doubt if he had the ammunition.”

  The James family went up for a holiday and reported that Ernie was lonely. “I think he wants you, but he’s too proud to say so.”

  “Just as soon as I finish this book I’ll be up there.” The book had taken me three years and I was within a week of the end. I had written to Ernie: “Hang on. We’re coming.”

  But I had delayed too long. He did not eat anything and was slowly starving to death. He did not like being dependent. As the white ants slowly ate away the walls of a house so the virus in him left only the resolute set of his great arched nose, his amused eyes, his independence and the skin that covered him.

  He had long ago let the rutile company have his two-hundred-acre lease on the plains. “They need it more than I do. Bert don’t want grazing. He’s got enough here without it.”

  The rutile company had even taken a miner’s right to prospect over our clearing and Ernie’s bee-yard. He smiled as he thought of my language. “Won’t she perform!” I was not able to come up and fight them in the warden’s court because of the book.

  He knew then that he would die without us. He sat in his door in the cool after the sun went down and could see, with dimmed eyes, the trees crowding down the slope from the cliff towards Bert’s vegetable garden with its great defences and high wire-netting.

  Because the trees didn’t have a human time-scale nobody remembered they were alive. Come to that, if an angel got itself up in green feathers and just stood there, nobody would notice. Or if it put on coloured feathers and flashed across the clearing—just a bird. His mind ranged over Diamond Head from the gate on to the road up the track, through the timber and the high rock pinnacles. He knew what was growing in every crevice, he didn’t need to see it any more.

  Ernie thought it was a pity that the rutile works hadn’t found any rutile on his property. They would have driven through with th
eir great mechanical scoops and levelled all that scrub down by the bee-yard that the Rodds set such store by. You had to clear the land. He’d always held to that. Bert would never sell but would pass the land on to young John. Bert had been upset when he found empty shells just inside the gates because he set store by the kangaroos and birds. Ernie’s great-grandfather had come to Australia for taking a bird on private property, and now here was his great-great-grandson protecting birds on private property.

  Ernie wished that Benison would come with her eager talk. They had been talking to each other since she was a little nugget of a baby. His arms that had been knotted and brown were now mere driftwood. All his strength had fallen from him. Well, he was on the edge of eighty-three and when a man could not eat it stood to reason that Nature had only one thing left to take away—his life. Not that he had ever valued it. He slept a little. He waited.

  “I can’t stand it any longer,” Lois said determinedly one morning. “He’s got to go to the hospital. We can’t take the responsibility.”

  When Ernie heard what she intended he locked the door of the laundry. It was his last flare of independence. Right to the end no woman was going to manage him. Lois walked down to the rutile works to ring the ambulance while the desperate Bert broke Ernie’s window and got in to him that way. He had had a haemorrhage and was lying in his blood on the floor.

  “Don’t let her come,” Ernie said, as they moved him to the ambulance, and to Lois, “I don’t want you.”

  “I’m coming anyway,” Lois told her old adversary, stepping in to tend him on the last journey.

  Bert, who drove the car behind the ambulance, broke down and cried. He had loved Ernie all his life. From Port Macquarie Lois sent me a telegram to say that Ernie was in hospital and I was ready packed to leave when the news came next day that Ernie was dead.

  They found he had left instructions to be cremated and they had to drive a hundred and fifty miles so that he could have his way. The Returned Soldiers’ Association gave him his funeral with a flag draped over the coffin. Lois, taking no notice of Ernie, sent flowers. We sent nothing. We had left him, not for the first time, to wait our coming in vain.

  We could not believe we would never see him again, that we had missed him by a week. Everything would be different now and we could hardly bear to come in the gate. “The lake is filling up again,” we said as we passed it.

  Bert was digging in his garden, Lois in her house getting ready to go to bowls. We went into the clearing over the crossing Ernie had made, through the fence he had put up, working by himself.

  The camp oven Ernie had promised to leave me in his will stood by the fire. Ernie’s pick and shovel were in a dry place under the tank stand. We tried to feel our loss. Bert was demolishing Ernie’s hut over by the bee-yard. Someone had robbed the bees, leaving a scattering of old comb and some wax in a tin tub.

  But when we tried to remember Ernie had died there was no absence of Ernie. It was as though he was just coming into the clearing. He would always be standing, just out of range of your eyes in the shadows of the paper-barks, silent-footed, bare-headed, his beard, his old grey flannel undershirt tucked into the harness strap that held up the greenish corduroys. He had simply not gone away. He had not gone anywhere at all. He was still there and we, as usual, came back, went away, and returned again.

  A year later, my son coming back from Dimandead, said, “You were right about Ernie. He’s still there.” Somehow the memory of his old army hat has left him. He is always bareheaded in the sunlight. If I did not turn round Ernie could be heard talking of the weather and the birds. Dimandead shines now with more splendid light. It is not every day that a headland takes to itself the soul of a man.

  At first we thought that Ernie might have been waiting for us, but Jack took another view. “He was always that obstinate,” he said. “Told me he’d die when he was good and ready in his own time. Nobody was going to tell him how to live and how to die either. If he wanted to do a thing he would, and if he didn’t he wouldn’t. Always suited himself and his own convenience. Apart from that, he’s lazy. Loiters around just looking at this and that. ‘People have got one way of doing things,’ he says. ‘I’ve got another.’ And be-the-Gawd, nobody would stop him from having his own way.”