Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  Trace and Mathew came and stood in the doorway, not joining her in the room but standing and looking in at her from the door, their expressions doubtful and curious. She saw that they were already together. Their shoulders touching. The physical contact uncomplicated and direct. In love, she supposed. As simple as that. Nature’s playthings. ‘Hi,’ she said.

  Trace said, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, just looking around. Amazing isn’t it?’

  Trace said, ‘Aren’t you cold in here?’

  ‘It’s you. You’ve only got that damp T-shirt on.’

  Trace giggled and they turned from the doorway and went on down the passage. Annabelle heard their voices, then the sound of a door closing. Their laughter came from the verandah. The hollow thump of Mathew’s riding boots on the boards. Then they were gone. The house was silent. She was alone. She took her mobile out of her pocket and switched it on. She would give Susan a call and tell her about the Ranna homestead. She would describe this room to her. Susan would support her. The mobile’s screen said NO NETWORK COVERAGE. She switched it off and put it back in her pocket. She was on her own. ‘Well I’m not going to just leave it,’ she said aloud. She stood listening. There was a sound with her in the room. She had been hearing it on and off for some time. Something shifting stealthily, behind the piano perhaps, easing its body weight. One of Bo’s old man brown snakes stirring . . . But the sound was not coming from behind the piano. It was in the air around her. Close by. She realised then that she was hearing the termites. She put her ear to the books and closed her eyes, listening. A faint rustling from within the volumes. A nervous suspiration, like a vast army of pilgrims shuffling across a landscape of infinite extent, persistent and continuous, embarked upon a journey-without-an-end in obedience to a restless urge to be on the move. Millions of white ants at their blind work, recycling the world and returning it to some kind of cosmic dust, heartless, unconscious and inert . . . She was holding her breath, listening, her inner gaze calling to her mind an image she had fixed there at university from Milton’s line in Paradise Lost, Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks In Vallombrosa. Not the numberless dead, however, she had discovered, but the legions of fallen angels. Ourselves. She opened her eyes. She searched the shelves for Milton’s book. But the poets were not present on the Bigges’ shelves. She looked round the room once more then turned and left. She went down the passage and out into the bright afternoon. The sudden heat as she emerged from the side door. The purple bougainvillea blazing triumphantly in the thrashing sunlight, the dairy crushed beneath its imperial blossoms.

  Arner was sitting outside the kitchen within the lilac shade of the overhanging buddleia. His huge hands, swollen like his father’s hands, clasping his bare knees. She raised her own hand in greeting, but he did not respond. Behind the lenses of his sunglasses no doubt his eyes were closed. Dreaming or meditating within the vast stillness of his body. She imagined him the queen of the termites, transmitting his mysterious purpose, donating meaning to the blind and wilful labours of his infinite tribe, dwelling in a dimension without time. There was an old friend, now dead, who would have understood him at once. A friend of Steven’s who had become more her friend. A Polish intellectual for whom Willy Brandt had been a protegé. A man of a former generation. A Jew who had survived the camps. If fate is with you, why hurry? If fate is against you, why hurry? She could see him smile at the sight of Arner. She had only heard him say it once, but it had seemed as if this saying was his final conclusion on life. He was the only person she had ever known who was truly broken in spirit. He had possessed nothing more to give than the gentle ironies of his resignation. And it was these that had touched her and entranced her. She remembered him, the hollow space of his absence in her heart now. To love a person, then, is to love them for ever.

  The air in the kitchen was rich with the smell of grilling meat and onions. The five of them sitting up at the table eating the steaks and sausages and fried onions that Bo had cooked on the flat top of the iron range, and the potatoes and broccoli Annabelle had steamed. They reached for slices of the white bread from the packet and spread the warm oily margarine with their knives. The busy clink and tap of cutlery on plates. The elegant oil lamp from the Bigges’ dining room standing in the centre of the table, its tall globe polished, the warm light from the trimmed wick a benediction on their faces and hands. They ate in silence, as if they were a working family at their supper.

  Bo sucked his teeth and drank his tea and every now and then he looked across at Annabelle. Once or twice Trace caught him looking and they each made a little movement of the head to let the other know what was what. Arner ate in his stately manner, a prince at any table, reaching sedately and forking another steak from the iron pan of cooked meat Bo had set before them, not raising his eyes to meet theirs.

  Mathew said, ‘This is a great feed.’

  ‘It’s good to have you with us, Mathew,’ Annabelle said. ‘Help yourself to more steak and sausages. That’s all got to be eaten now it’s been cooked.’

  ‘I will, thank you.’ He reached and forked another steak and two sausages onto his plate.

  She watched Arner’s covered gaze slide over the young man, his eyelids drooping. Some information he required of the stranger who held his sister in such an intense blue-eyed thrall. Shelving the information by whatever means he possessed for cataloguing such things, niched among the galleries and tenements of his thought, arranged in an order scarcely to be imagined, either of an infinite simplicity or complex beyond systems of ordering and structure. A mystical landscape of dreams and visions, fluid and irreducible, repeated upon itself infinitely, the problem of storage and retrieval overcome. She wondered if she were in danger of misreading him in the light of her own hopes for his tribe and her own. To see in him Dryden’s noble savage, the ecological saviour of a disintegrating world. His half-concealed glance might simply have been agreement with Mathew that the food was plentiful and full of juices and good flavours, but his assent to this opinion, if it was this he had given, was not plainly given as Mathew’s was. She suspected him of more.

  After the meal Annabelle went and stood in the night outside the open door. The sky was luminous with stars above the black silhouettes of the giant trees, the air still and cold. The smell of the river. The murmur of the water over the rocks like voices, hushed and conspiratorial, in the dark down the rise among the timber. Distant lightning from the leading edge of another weather system, pale and elusive against the starlit sky, playing along the crests of the ranges. A low continuous rumbling of thunder from the west. There was no moon. Behind her in the kitchen Mathew and Trace were doing the washing up, laughing and teasing each other, as if they played at domesticity, delicate and light in their approach; a game they might yet hope to abandon without pain.

  Bo came out and stood beside her. He rolled a smoke and lit it, the match flaring beneath the brim of his hat then extinguished abruptly. The end of his cigarette glowing as he drew in the smoke.

  Wild dogs howled in the ranges, the forlorn voice of the dingoes scarcely real, echoing along the rocky walls of the escarpment as if they called in answer to some longing within themselves.

  ‘It’s going to be cold,’ she said. Their earlier disagreement was in her mind and she wanted to be clear of it.

  ‘The air gets trapped down here along the river.’

  The smell of Bo’s cigarette, the woodsmoke from the stove, the voices of the young people in the kitchen, the dark shape of the haunted house next door.

  ‘We had the remains of an old kitchen at Haddon Hill,’ she said. ‘Separated from the house like this.’

  ‘They built them separate so the house would stay cool in summer. And they was always dead afraid of fire. It would give old Nellie a nightmare to see this dried grass and rubbish right up to her door like this.’ He spoke of the last of the Bigges as if he believed the widow still existed somewhere and might yet come to hear of the neglect that beset
her home.

  Annabelle put her hand on the thick timber doorpost. ‘The white ants haven’t touched the kitchen.’

  ‘Them little fellers are not done. They got plenty of time for the kitchen.’

  She turned and looked at him. The lamplight from the open kitchen door lighting one side of his face, the other side in darkness, one keen eye gleaming at her beneath the brim of his hat, as if he pondered some act of mischief. She said, ‘Are you going to take Mathew down the river to look for the calves of those wild cows?’

  ‘Well I don’t know,’ he said doubtfully, his voice low and private. ‘I don’t want to kid him along. There’s no future in them wild cattle for that boy. It was a way of life for me and Dougald. But them times are gone and it’s no good pining after them. You can’t go chasing scrubbers on your own. Me and Dougald had the old fellers to show us. Then we had each other. That’s all we did back then, chasing cattle through these ranges, wet or dry.’ He waved his hand to the dark, the encompassing gesture, the flickering blue line of the escarpment, the faint cannonade of thunder over towards Blenheim, as if the great battle still raged, a rustling of dead souls in the brilliant sky, thick as autumnal leaves . . . ‘We was never out of the sound of their bellowing and calling to each other day or night.’ He drew on his smoke and stared into the night, as if he contemplated a raid on the hidden camps of the wild cattle before morning. ‘You need a good moon for that business,’ he said, squinting. ‘Mathew might get himself a couple of calves. But I can’t show him all that. And his own father don’t know a thing about it. He could get himself one of them dart guns and stun them, I suppose. I’ve heard of fellers out west doin that with buffalo. But what’s he gonna do with them then? They’ve got to wake up again. He’d have himself a heap of dogmeat, that’s for sure.’ He chuckled.

  They were silent again.

  Annabelle said, ‘What will Dougald think?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Trace and Mathew seem to be getting on pretty good.’

  ‘Don’t you go matchmaking now,’ he warned her.

  ‘I’m not. I’m just saying.’

  ‘Well there isn’t nothing to say from what I can see. They’re just playing around.’

  ‘Trace is seventeen, isn’t she?’

  Bo made no reply.

  ‘You said at Burranbah they weren’t kids.’ She wondered if he expected Trace and Mathew to remain celibate in each other’s presence. It seemed an unrealistic expectation. In the years to come, Ranna would surely always remain in their memories as the garden of Eden. ‘What were you doing at seventeen?’ she asked him.

  ‘I was working for Grandma Rennie alongside my old man on Verbena before I come over here and Nellie put us on. And my sisters was at home where they should have been.’

  ‘Things have changed since we were their age.’

  Arner came out and they moved aside to let him pass.

  Bo said, ‘You turning in, Arner?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He carried a magazine.

  ‘Goodnight then.’

  They watched him make his way around the corner of the kitchen, his big shadow shaping the dark. The sound of his truck door opening and closing then the soft glow of his light falling across the bleached grass.

  Annabelle said, ‘Mathew hasn’t got a swag.’

  ‘He’s got a blanket.’

  ‘That won’t be enough.’

  ‘He’s young. They don’t feel the cold.’ He stepped out into the darkness and was gone.

  She heard his footfalls through the grass, making his way towards the old blacksmith shop. Going for a leak, she supposed. She turned and went into the kitchen. Mathew and Trace were sitting by the iron range. They looked at her as if they expected something from her, her encouragement or a solution perhaps. She smiled at them and went up and stood beside them, warming her back at the fire. ‘It’s a cold night out there.’ She thought of the girl growing up these last five years without her mother, alone with her brother and Dougald in that forlorn house in Maryvale.

  Mathew said, ‘I woke up my hair white with frost here one morning last winter.’ He laughed and looked at Trace to see if she was watching.

  When he looked at her Trace looked down at her hands, a gentle uncertainty in her manner that had not been there before, no longer the girl with dash, but wistful and trusting, a vulnerability in her manner that the men in the Burranbah canteen had not been permitted to see.

  Bo came in. ‘Well me and Annabelle might turn in. I see you got a spot picked out over on the verandah of the house, Mathew.’

  Mathew stood and took his hat from the table, the greasy brim folded under his fingers. He looked at Trace then at Bo. ‘I’ll see you all in the morning.’

  They said goodnight and watched him leave.

  Trace looked at Annabelle.

  Annabelle gave a little shrug.

  Trace got up and said goodnight. She turned back at the door. ‘You want this closed?’

  ‘You can leave her open,’ Bo said.

  Bo took his swag from where it leaned against the wall and unbuckled it. He rolled it out on his side of the range and stood listening. ‘I don’t hear the door of Arner’s truck.’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘You gonna take responsibility for that girl?’

  She looked at him. He waited for her to speak. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s hard enough being young. They just need our support.’

  He leaned over the table and cupped his hand to the globe of the Bigges’ lamp and blew out the flame. There was a smell of kerosene. ‘That’s it then,’ he said.

  They sat on their swags by the glow of the fire. Bo rolled a smoke and lit it. Annabelle pulled off her boots and set them under the table. She hugged her knees and gazed into the fire. ‘Mathew wishes he was living back in the old days with you and Dougald.’

  ‘He would have been a good man.’

  ‘He’s got a certain style, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes he has, if I know what you mean.’

  They were silent a while, then he said, ‘I reckon you’d better do that bit of a survey over at the house that you was talking about doin.’

  She looked at him. ‘Thanks. I thought I might just spend a couple of days on it.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you insisting it was no different from them playgrounds. If you don’t do a thing like that when you’ve got the chance to do it there’s no end to thinking about doing it after the chance to do it has gone by.’

  ‘It probably isn’t anywhere near as important as the playgrounds,’ she said. ‘But I would like to do it all the same.’

  ‘These things are important to our peace of mind.’

  They watched the fire a while, listening to the night sounds. ‘Was there ever something you wanted to do that you didn’t do?’ she asked.

  ‘No there wasn’t. I always did what I wanted to do.’

  She waited, but he said no more.

  Then, ‘There’s something I haven’t done yet that I’m plannin to do. I’m gonna get Grandma’s old place back.’ There was a tightness in his voice suddenly, as if in speaking of this matter he were moved by an apprehension or an emotion that he had not anticipated. ‘The time’s never been right to have a go at it before this.’

  She observed his profile against the fire. ‘But now you think it might be?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it might be. These things come around. I do know it’s no good doing something when everything’s set against it moving your way. I learnt that from my dad.’

  She wanted to ask him how his grandmother had lost Verbena, but felt she should wait until he decided the time to tell her was right.

  The hiss and murmur of the burning wood in the stove, the steady munching of Mathew’s mare feeding on the seed heads close to the house, the distant call of a mopoke repeated again and again way off in the timber. Bo leaning his back against the table, smoking and gazing into the fire, his stockinged feet stretched out on the swag in front of him.
The cold sky beyond the little windows to either side of the stove blazing with stars. ‘Grandma took us up to them playgrounds the winter our mother died,’ he said, his voice little more than a murmur, confiding to her the thoughts that were in his mind. ‘That virgin bendee country up the head of Verbena Creek’s never been of much interest to cattlemen or miners. It’s an unvisited place. That was the last winter of our childhood, if we’d only known it then. Grandma led us out into them scrubs with nothing. That cold wind driving through our clothes and snatching the flames of our evening fire flat to the earth. We was chilled to the bone, our bellies empty, our hearts sick with grief for our mother. We never took our eyes off Grandma out there at night in that country. I thought we was all gonna die like our mother died. Grandma never said nothing. She’d be sitting there motionless by the fire hour after hour. As if she was waiting. After a few days we started waiting with her. I come to believe that we was waiting for the wind to kill us all and leave no trace of our passing there. Just waiting for death to wipe the dreams out of our hearts and fret up our bones till there was nothing of us left out there but the wind itself and the whispering of the grass.’ He paused and relit his cigarette. ‘That’s how us kids learned to be silent. And we learned too it wasn’t Grandma who was gonna answer our longings but something else, as grief sick as we was at the death of our mother. We listened to that wind and we come to understand that we was children of the stones ourselves. There wasn’t nothin else. It was a terrible knowledge for young kids to have in their minds, knowing where they’d come from and where they was goin to. And when Grandma seen that we was ready she rose from the fire and led us out of the silverleafed wattle into a great wide clearing. I’ll never forget it. And there was the labyrinth of stones lying there on the bare ground, polished by the wind and gleaming in the moonlight like rows of skulls laid out in a secret pattern. And we knew we was looking on our old people. We never spoke but stood and gazed on them ancient circles and paths and patterns on the ground and we seen it was the playground of life and death and we knew them old people was little children just like we was and they had gone on before us and left us their dreams and their sweet lives. Grandma never needed to say nothing to us about having something to live for. We seen it ourselves. When we followed Grandma home through them scrubs none of us was crying or complaining.’ He leaned and tossed the butt of his cigarette into the open grate of the stove. ‘That’s them playgrounds of the old Murri people. I’ll take you up there one day if you decide to stick around. I’m going back up there before I make a try for Verbena.’