Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  ‘Well they would have trouble moving it around if they wanted to move it around,’ Bo said, considering his words. ‘Once you had it set in your house, well then you wouldn’t be wanting to move it around.’ He looked at John Hearn. ‘Would you? What do you think Annabelle? She’s a good sort of a table.’

  Arner and Trace came up and stood off a little, observing the older people.

  Bo turned to them. He introduced them to John and Ruth Hearn. They all said their hellos and Arner and Trace followed Ruth Hearn across the verandah and into the house.

  ‘It’s for sale,’ John Hearn explained, lingering behind with Bo and Annabelle, looking over his work.

  ‘It’s great,’ Annabelle said.

  He turned to her eagerly. ‘You think there’s a market for it in the city?’

  ‘I’m sure there would be.’

  ‘Well that’s what I’m hoping. I’ve heard these bush tables have brought anywhere up to a thousand dollars in Brisbane.’

  ‘I wouldn’t doubt it,’ Annabelle said. She reached and touched a tall notched branch bedded in a dark lacquered stump. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘That’s a CD holder.’

  ‘A CD holder,’ she echoed him wonderingly.

  He grinned at them. ‘Let’s go in and have that drink of tea.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ Bo said. He squeezed off the burning end of his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, and they followed John Hearn into the kitchen of his house. Ruth was buttering bread. She looked up from the bench and gestured behind her with the knife. ‘Go on through,’ she encouraged them, pointing the way. They entered a small low-ceilinged room.

  Annabelle had an impression in the halflight of lace and faded furnishings, settees and deep old armchairs too big for the room, a china cabinet backed against the far wall, its glass shelves crammed with a collection of family knick-knacks, stones, seashells and holiday mementos. Hanging from the picture-rail were framed photographs of unsmiling Hearn ancestors in their Sunday best, posed at weddings and christenings. Beside these, coloured prints of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and another of the Matterhorn. A small porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece, modest and blushing, her child cradled in her arms.

  ‘Keep going there,’ John Hearn urged her. ‘Right on through.’

  Annabelle went through the door, passing beneath an emblem of the crucified Christ.

  Arner and Trace were sitting up at a table beside each other on a long timber bench built against the far wall, their backs to a row of windows giving on to the verandah, a view of the sunlit bush beyond. The bulldozer coming back through the glittering trees, its blade raised like the mandible of a giant beetle advancing upon its prey.

  John Hearn followed them in. They stood by the table. The tabletop was an immense irregular slab of timber twelve centimetres thick, four metres in length and a good three metres wide at its deepest.

  Bo laid the flat of his hand on the table. ‘This the main section of that old mango trunk then?’

  ‘This is her,’ John Hearn confirmed, touching the tabletop with pride.

  ‘She’s some table.’

  ‘Incredible,’ Annabelle said. She looked around the room. ‘How did you get it in here?’

  ‘We took those windows out.’ John gestured at the row of windows behind Arner and Trace. ‘Lifted her through here on the point of the tree-pusher before I put the verandah on.’

  ‘With the dozer?’

  ‘That’s it, Annabelle. With the dozer.’

  They stood admiring the table.

  ‘The South Island of New Zealand,’ Annabelle said, her head on one side.

  Ruth Hearn came in.

  Her husband said, ‘Ruth? Did you hear that?’

  ‘I heard it.’ Ruth Hearn put down a plate of sliced bread and butter and another plate with a dozen or so Anzac biscuits on it. ‘Madagascar,’ she said and smiled at Annabelle. ‘John’ll get the atlas.’

  John got up and went out.

  ‘Sit down, Bo. You too, Annabelle,’ Ruth told them.

  Bo took off his hat and put it on the table and he and Annabelle sat beside each other.

  John came in and laid an old Jacaranda school atlas in front of them. He opened the atlas at the map of Africa. Ruth stood behind him, looking over, her hand resting on her husband’s shoulder. John traced around the island of Madagascar with his forefinger. His fingernail was split and blackened. ‘The straight eastern side,’ he said. ‘Here.’ He looked down and ran his hand along the edge of the table in front of them, ‘And the bulge in the middle on the western side.’ He pointed across at Arner. ‘Beside Arner there.’

  Annabelle said, ‘Madagascar, eh? Who thought of that?’

  John turned the pages. ‘The South Island of New Zealand has the bulge at the bottom.’ They looked. He was right.

  Ruth Hearn went out.

  Bo looked at Annabelle and grinned. ‘Now that’s something you didn’t know.’

  A grey-haired woman came in urging two children ahead of her.

  John introduced her. ‘Mrs Anderson noticed the table was Madagascar.’

  They shook hands all round and John introduced the children, James and Ellen. Ruth Hearn came in carrying a big two-handled enamel teapot. She set the teapot on a coaster on the table and went out and fetched a tray of plates and mugs. She stood at the table to pour the tea, handing the mugs around. ‘There’s milk and sugar there, and help yourselves to biscuits. I don’t know whether you like plum jam, Annabelle?’

  They busied themselves with the tea and helped themselves to biscuits and bread and jam.

  The little girl stood gazing at Arner.

  Bo said, ‘Why don’t you take them dark glasses off, Arner. There’s not a lot of glare in here, old mate.’ He laughed.

  Arner breathed and he reached and removed his sunglasses.

  The little girl said, ‘We’ve never had Aboriginal people in our house before.’

  There was a silence.

  Ruth Hearn cleared her throat, ‘Well, dearest, we didn’t know any Aboriginal people before this, did we.’ She looked at Arner and smiled. ‘Ellen didn’t mean it the way it sounded, Arner.’

  Arner’s eyelids drooped. He barely acknowledged their presence. It appeared he might close his eyes and deny them even the illusion of access to his thoughts.

  Trace took a bite of an Anzac biscuit. She leaned her elbows on the table and smiled at John Hearn, who was seated at the head of the table next to her. ‘How many dogs have you got, Mr Hearn?’

  Ruth Hearn said, ‘Don’t go starting on dogs, Tracey.’ She laughed. ‘Dogs are getting to be a sore point in this house.’

  John Hearn said, ‘Well, Trace, I believe we had fourteen at last count.’ He grinned broadly at his wife.

  ‘Twenty,’ the boy corrected him, ‘if you count the new pups.’

  The little girl was still gazing at Arner. She said solemnly, ‘The Aborigines were here before we were.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, Ellen,’ Mrs Anderson said brightly, congratulating her pupil. She didn’t look at Arner but put out her hand and touched the girl on the arm, as if she would liberate her from the thrall of her fascination. ‘Thousands and thousands of years before us.’

  Annabelle said, ‘And do you ride one of those motorbikes, Ellen? You don’t look old enough to ride a motorbike.’

  ‘Don’t tell her that, Annabelle,’ Ruth Hearn said. ‘Ellen will ride anything you put her on.’

  The girl looked at Annabelle, her gaze cool and dignified. ‘The blue one’s mine,’ she said.

  ‘And did you paint the sign on your gate?’

  The girl took her time to examine Annabelle, her gaze lingering on Annabelle’s hair then moving to her overalls, to her hands, reddened and freckled, where they lay on the table. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Zigzag’s a good name.’

  ‘That’s what Mathew called it,’ the girl said.

  ‘What would you have called it?’r />
  The girl shrugged. She returned her attention to Arner. ‘Something,’ she said absently.

  Bo sucked his teeth noisily and set his mug on the table. ‘Well that’s a good cup of tea, Ruth.’

  ‘Thank you, Bo. Would you like another? We enjoy our tea in this house.’

  ‘Bushells,’ Bo said, handing up his mug.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You can’t beat Bushells.’ Bo swung around to John Hearn and gestured out the window. ‘I don’t know about Zigzag, John, but that old Bigges family named all this broken ridge country through here Furious.’ He brought his indicating hand around behind John Hearn, his fingers sweeping back and forth as a compass needle affected by local interference, then steadying on a precise heading, as if the wall of the house was not there and he believed John Hearn would see the shifting detail of his subject as plainly as he saw it himself. ‘Furious Creek, she’s back in over there. These ridges are full of old scrub bulls. They eat them poison zamia nuts when the feed cuts out in the winter, then when the heat comes on in summer the rickets come out of their limbs. They go down in the hindquarters and get themselves snared up among that shattered basalt. When we’d ride up on one of them, the wild dogs would be sitting in the shade close by, watching him die, taking it in turns to jump in for a quick bite every now and then.’ Bo fell silent, thinking back. The others around the table watching him, waiting for their visitor to produce his memory, as if he searched for an item of rare interest from among the contents of his pockets, this traveller who had known their country before their time. ‘I’ve lain there plenty of times in my blankets in the moonlight listening to one of them trapped bulls bellowing. That high-pitched bugling sound they make. You’ll know it when you hear it. The trumpet of the angel, my dad used to call it. Carries all up and down these ridges.’ He grinned at them, enjoying their attention. ‘I used to lie there at night thinking that old angel was out there turning the stones over looking for me.’

  They laughed uneasily and reached for their tea, sipping from their mugs, picturing the doomed bull trapped among the tumbled rocks, the dingoes eating into his quivering flesh while he yet lived and suffered; a transformation scarcely to be imagined, a brutality that must surely leave its ghostly impress on this country, an imprint for them to encounter in their quest to live among these stony ridges and ravines of the escarpment, the history they must adopt if they were to prevail in this place.

  Ruth Hearn said into the silence, a wistfulness in her voice as if she had once imagined for her family a more heroic life than this, ‘Some of those wild bulls are beautiful.’

  Annabelle looked at her.

  Ruth Hearn’s gaze went past Arner and out beyond the window to the sunlit bush. ‘One of them comes and stands out there among the timber the other side of the yards some early mornings. He just stands there staring at this house as if he can’t make out what it is. And when I look away and look again he’s gone.’

  ‘That’s one of them,’ Bo said, confident, respectful of the subject, for he had known of men and horses killed by the wild bulls.

  ‘You never mentioned that,’ John Hearn said, mildly reproving his wife, as if she had spoken in the presence of these strangers of the visits of a demon lover.

  ‘I didn’t think till now,’ she said.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to upset the dogs,’ John Hearn objected, as if he doubted her and would test the substance of his wife’s vision against a more familiar truth.

  ‘No,’ she said, unable to explain, and she gazed thoughtfully at her hands. She looked up at Bo, ‘Why is that, do you think, Bo, that the dogs don’t seem to see him?

  ‘These wild bulls are an unusual strain, Ruth. They’re not like ordinary domestic cattle any more. This place is their home now. They know how to slip around without drawing too much attention to themselves.’

  Ruth Hearn asked him, ‘You mean we only see them if they want us to see them?’

  Bo looked at her, perhaps seeing something in her suddenly that interested him. ‘Maybe,’ he said, his gaze lingering on hers, allowing the possibility of such an understanding to slip between them, as if their fingers touched at the passing of a note beneath the tabletop, an unexpected intimacy in their shared desire to acknowledge something in the wild bulls that would resist explanations.

  Each of them present at the table stole glances at the others, then looked out through the windows, the glittering bush beyond the dusty perimeter of the clearing the Hearns had made with their bulldozer, heat waves rising from the strewn rocks and desiccated tussocks. Now that the bulldozer had passed, a stillness among the trees again that might never have been broken, a persistent virgin quality in the bush that had not yielded to their presence and would close over once again after their departure and retain no trace of them.

  John Hearn cleared his throat and leaned forward. ‘You knew old George Bigges, then, Bo? They told us in town he was something of a legend up in this country? Is that right?’

  Ruth Hearn watched their visitor, waiting with her husband, hoping for further knowledge from Bo of this place that they had come north to inhabit. Perhaps hoping to be given a cause for optimism.

  Annabelle and Trace watched her listening to Bo, an attention in her that had not been there before.

  Bo’s large gesture encompassed the entire watershed of the Broken River. ‘Me and Dougald Gnapun, Trace and Arner’s dad here, we worked all this country back in seventy-three after old George Bigges died. It’s one of my regrets I never met the old feller. My dad reckoned George Bigges was just about the best horseman he ever seen. It was on my father’s recommendation to her that the old feller’s widow, Nellie, put me and Dougald to mustering Ranna before she give away trying to manage the place on her own and went down to Brisbane to live. Me and Dougald was about your boy’s age then. By the time we’d finished we’d taken out more than fifteen thousand head of cattle from the Ranna country. After we’d cleaned the place out the old girl let it to agistment. I don’t know whether she ever did much good.’

  ‘Have you been back since?’ John Hearn asked.

  ‘No I haven’t.’ Bo looked into his mug. He drank the last of his tea and set the mug on the table. ‘In my granddad’s day them Bigges ruled this country. They was kings up here on the Ranna. It was George Bigges’ granddad who come into the valley from Victoria back in 1863. Walked his stock and his family overland through the scrubs for a year and a half to get here. They were a legend all right. If old Nellie was here she wouldn’t let you forget that. She was for ever telling me and Dougald all about their history whenever she could trap us into listening to her, how she was a fifth-generation Australian and what a great pioneering family she come from.’ He reached into his shirt pocket for his tobacco and sat with the packet unopened in his hands, his gaze going through John Hearn. ‘Oh yes.’ He looked down at the tobacco, then slipped the packet back into his pocket and smiled at John Hearn, ‘But they’re all gone now, John. Them Bigges turned out to be a vanishing race.’

  Annabelle cast a quick glance from John Hearn to his wife.

  Ruth Hearn asked, ‘Who got the place, Bo?’

  He looked at her, ‘Well, Ruth, I believe it’s still in the hands of the Public Trustees in Brisbane. I think they finally gave up looking for first cousins in England.’

  She looked at her husband. He examined his broken fingernails.

  The little girl said, ‘Would you like to see my horse?’

  Arner slowly turned his head and looked at her. They held each other’s gaze, a private silence blossoming between them. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he murmured. He placed his big hands on the table and raised himself, easing his bulk out from behind the massive table with a care that was considered, unhurried, and which had about it a grace of movement that would have dignified the progress of a royal person. The child stood waiting, watching him. When Arner came around the table she reached and took his hand and they went out of the room together. The boy watched them go, standin
g close against his teacher’s skirts, his weight resting there, making no move to follow his sister.

  Mrs Anderson turned to Ruth Hearn, ‘I’ll give them a minute or two. Then it’s back to work for that girl.’ There was a breathlessness, almost of panic, in the schoolteacher’s delivery, as if she had run into the house with an urgent message for her employers.

  Ruth Hearn said quietly, ‘It’s all right, Edna. Let them be.’

  There were voices raised in greeting in the other room. The eldest son came and stood in the doorway, his gaze fixed on Trace.

  Trace smiled at Annabelle, a small helpless lift of her shoulders.

  ‘This is Mathew, Bo,’ John Hearn said. ‘Mathew rode down to the old Bigges homestead when we first came up here. He tells us the house is still locked up.’

  Bo reached and shook the young man’s hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Mathew.’ He turned back to John Hearn. ‘Well I don’t think Nellie would have locked it. Them Bigges never locked a door that I know of.’

  John Hearn said, ‘Bo might have some advice for us on catching the scrubber bulls, Mathew.’ John turned to Bo. ‘We’ve had a couple of goes at them but we haven’t done any good. We thought we’d try cleaning them out before we fence the place and bring breeders in. They say the abattoirs will pay up to five hundred dollars a head for them, if you can truck them down there without too much bruising.’

  Bo sat examining Mathew Hearn, his eyes narrowed, his gaze going over the young man’s limbs, as if he examined a horse, checking for its weaknesses and strong points. Mathew was slim and tall like his father, the expression in his blue eyes clear and respectful. Bo said, ‘You try tossing them wild bulls in this steep country, Mathew, and they’ll spear your horse.’

  Mathew looked at him.

  ‘They’ll kill you,’ Bo said.

  Ruth Hearn breathed. ‘But didn’t you used to get them in, Bo?’

  Mathew said, ‘We heard you had a way.’

  ‘Well I don’t know where you heard that.’ Bo made an impatient gesture, a flick of his hand at the bright glittering bush beyond the clearing, ‘Down on them riverflats, maybe. Not up here in this sidling stuff. You gotta have a mob of quiet cattle to coach them along with. That’s the way me and Dougald done it. You toss them bulls up here and they’ll roll like a cat and be back up on their feet before you can blink. Me and Dougald had them good old fellers to show us how to do things back then.’ He looked at Mathew Hearn. ‘In country like this, Mathew, you gotta work with men who know what they’re doing. Them old fellers are all gone. Who’s going to show you?’