by Alex Miller
‘Where is she?’ Annabelle asked.
‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘Maybe we should go and have a look for her?’
‘If we can’t see her, maybe it’s because she don’t want us to see her. Maybe we ought to leave them two to get this thing done their own way. I don’t believe they need us to do it for them.’
‘Supposing his dad won’t give him a vehicle?’
‘He’ll give him one.’
‘How can you be sure of that?’
‘I can’t be sure of it, but I think he’ll give it to him.’ Bo motioned with his hand to where the road they’d come in on crossed the saddle a hundred metres higher up the hill, beyond the machinery sheds. ‘We’ll wait out by the Eungella dam for them to pick us up when they come by. Throw in a line and brew up a drink of tea while we’re waiting. Might catch us a couple of perch.’
‘And if they don’t come by?’
‘They’ll either come by or they won’t. And if they don’t come by they’ll be here. Either way we’re not going to lose track of them.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ she said. She was reluctant to abandon Trace. She thought the girl might need her support.
‘I am right,’ he said firmly. ‘Mathew’s gonna stay staunch to her.’
‘I might just take a stroll over to the shed and see if she’s there all the same,’ Annabelle said.
Bo said nothing to this.
The brindled bitch sat up and yawned. There was the screech of the flywire. They turned around. John Hearn was standing by the door propping himself with one hand to the frame and pulling on his boots. He came across and stood with them at the verandah edge, looking out at the yard, the white truck and the Pajero. Half a dozen of the dogs making their way across, looking up at him expectantly, scratching and snapping at themselves. The clouds were dispersing, patches of sunlight moving through the trees.
‘That’s the end of the rain,’ John Hearn said.
‘Looks that way.’
The day was windless and quiet, the beseeching cry of crows off somewhere along the ridge among the timber, lamenting existence, a faint dampness from the rain lingering in the cool air. The three of them stood looking out at the day, no one speaking, as if the bush had the power to rob them of their voices. High above them trails of a jet plane creeping across the limitless azure of the sky. After some time the sound of a door closing and voices. A moment later Mathew Hearn walked out across the yard from the rear of the house. He was carrying a khaki bag and wearing his hat. He didn’t see them but walked across the yard and passed out of the sunlight and into the purple shade of the machinery shed. They heard the metal screech of an ill-fitting vehicle door, then the sound of voices.
John Hearn breathed and said heavily, ‘I don’t know.’ He might have been referring to the entire enterprise of his family, their tenuous presence up here on this stony ridge; the torn and broken trees, the tumbled rocks ripped from the hard ground by the dozerblade. As if he saw it all for the first time as a stranger might see it and knew himself to be yet waiting for a sign concerning the outcome of his vision. ‘I don’t know,’ he had said, wondering aloud if lending his son the old Bedford truck were the right decision, but perhaps voicing the weightier conclusion that after forty years and more he knew nothing, possessed no certainties, could not fathom events beyond the perimeter of this broken field of endeavour that presented itself to his gaze each time he stepped from the house onto his verandah. To view it suddenly without the presence of his son.
Bo examined his cigarette and squinted up the track, his hand dipping out at waist level, making a small gesture towards the road. ‘Me and Annabelle might be slipping along, John. We’ve got a bit of travelling to do.’
John Hearn turned and looked at them, a hunger in his gaze to keep the precious company of his visitors a while yet, to resolve the issue that lay between them like the pain of a disease for which they did not hold the cure, but to hold them witness, at least, a little longer to his enterprise, in the hope that a resolution would form itself out of their mutual regard. ‘When do you reckon you’ll be back to finish your survey at Ranna? I might come down there with you next time, if that’s all right with you? I’d love to see that library, Annabelle.’
She smiled at him. ‘Yes,’ she said, responsive to his fascination with the silenced books, his yearning after the wonders of the world, his books of knowledge, the lost, puzzled fervour of his unframed curiosity.
‘To think everything they did came to nothing,’ he said, awed by the fate of the wealthy and cultivated Bigges, his gaze sweeping the yard before him, the piles of old ripple-iron weighted against the wind with stones, pieces of broken second-hand equipment, a tangle of wire for reuse some day, the snuffling pack of mange-stricken dogs, scratching and fidgeting and sniffing each other, increasing their numbers by the week, squealing litters of pups under the flooring of the feed shed and the house, their increase a mockery of order and progress. A plague of dogs. ‘To think they had all that good ground . . . and everything.’ But he was not able to encompass the vastness of his thought in words and fell silent.
‘I wouldn’t go feeling sorry for them Bigges,’ Bo said, an unaccustomed note of irritation in his voice at the idea they were to be pitied. ‘They enjoyed it while they had it. My Grandma knew them when she was a girl, sitting up there on that verandah by the French windows on their cane chairs. Them sisters of George Bigges, dressed in their sailor suits and white frocks, all long hair and curls, taking tea and discussing their visits to old England and the Melbourne Cup. They done that for a time before things slid away from them. I don’t think that was too bad a hand. I believe they had better than nothing out of that place. No one keeps a thing for ever. Its yours one day then someone else’s tomorrow. People you never knew and never will know are gonna have their turn with what you had once in your hand. There’s no news in knowin that. The Bigges didn’t do too bad when you think what the old people who had it before them got shifted to.’ He fell silent, his feelings of injustice aroused, smoking his cigarette and squinting down at the brindle bitch, as if his appeal was to her powers of reasoning and her sense of justice. Her pale dog eyes clung to him with gratitude and unfathomable understanding. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s right.’
Annabelle and John Hearn said nothing, aware that Bo had not yet said all that he intended saying.
Bo looked up. ‘If you and I knew the truth about them people, John, I don’t reckon they could ever have been easy in themselves about holding that country.’ He looked searchingly at John Hearn, waiting for his objection. ‘Dying out on themselves,’ Bo said then, flinging his hand at the yard so that the brindle bitch struggled to her feet and swung away to see what he had tossed. ‘That might have been their way of dealing with not being easy about holding the country.’
John Hearn frowned. He hesitated a considerable moment before venturing to say, ‘You surely don’t mean to suggest they died out on purpose?’
‘I don’t know what I mean!’ Bo said, raising his voice angrily. ‘You don’t have to know what you mean to mean something.’
Annabelle looked at him wonderingly.
‘I do know that old house of theirs don’t feel right to this day. I was never in that place before, but it’s not a comfortable place to be in.’ He considered John Hearn. ‘There’s got to be a reason for that, John, if you want reasons. The next time he comes through here you get Les Marra started on the subject. Les’ll tell you straight out what the score with them Bigges was when they first come into this country and cleaned out the old Murris. It’ll make your schoolteacher flinch. Les don’t care who he offends. He’s made a whole heap of enemies coming straight out with the way he sees things. We all like to think we can do that, but we don’t do it when we need to do it. Les does it. You stir him up and he’s a wild feller. Hard as one of them scrubber bulls. Comes straight at you, head down and snortin. Get yourself into a fight with Les and you’ll know
you’re in a fight. I’ve seen him stand up in front of a hall full of graziers and politicians and their wives in Brisbane there one time and tell them to their faces their old dads and grandads was murderers. And not one of them told him he was a liar. They knew he was ready for them. And that was years ago, before all this stuff become fashionable. That’s LesMarra. There’s no one gonna stop him.’ Bo sniffed and spat aside, as if to rid his palate of the fust of the old Bigges homestead. ‘I don’t know how Annabelle could work in that house. Like visiting somebody’s grave!’ He relit his cigarette and pointed to the southwest, sighting along his extended arm onto a gap through the Carborough Ranges, his tone of voice suddenly settled and calm. ‘Susan’s got a job over there at Burranbah that’s gotta be finished before we come back and knock this one over,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact that woman’s got unfinished jobs all over the Bowen Basin and out there past Charters Towers.’ He laughed. ‘Everybody suddenly wanting everything culturally assessed in a mad hurry ever since that legislation come through. Disputes about land bring out the worst in everyone. As if we didn’t know it was all laying out there looking at us for generations. I don’t think we’re gonna be back here before winter, John.’ He turned to Annabelle, ‘What d’you reckon, next winter?’
She was taken off-guard by the suddenness of his question and was on the point of explaining that by next winter she would no longer be in North Queensland, but she checked herself. He did not smile but held her gaze steady in his own, waiting for her to answer. She was aware of the dog panting at his feet, staring up at her as if it waited with him for her answer, the small distant sounds of the bush, the windless day among the rocks and scrubby trees of the ridge, John Hearn gazing at her as if he were transfixed by a profound inner doubt. She took a breath. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘It’s quite on the cards me and Bo will be back here next winter.’ She smiled at John Hearn. ‘Who knows?’
Bo gave a small nod and turned to John Hearn. ‘You hear that John? If you’re still interested, you can come down to Ranna with me and Annabelle next winter.’
Annabelle was intensely aware of Bo’s physical closeness, her attention concentrated where the sleeve of his shirt was touching the sleeve of her blouse. She felt him ease his stand and his arm moved firmly against hers.
There was the roar of an old truck motor starting up.
They turned and looked towards the machinery shed. A blue cloud of exhaust smoke drifted out of the shadows into the sunlight. A moment later an old green truck backed out of the shed. It was a sixties model and had a timber traybody, tailboards and tailgate, a running board alongside the cabin. Mathew leaning out the window looking to see what he was backing into. When he’d brought the truck around alongside Arner he ducked his head back into the cabin and reefed on the handbrake. Trace sitting up alongside him. She turned in her seat and looked across at her brother.
Arner turned his head slowly and looked at his sister.
Mathew opened the door and jumped down. He started over towards them.
‘I don’t think Ruth’s coming out,’ John Hearn said, sad and dismayed.
Mathew stepped up and stood looking at his father. ‘I’ll fix the clutch and the brakes when I get down to Mackay, dad.’
‘I wouldn’t leave it too long,’ John Hearn said.
Father and son looked at each other.
Mathew said, ‘I’ll give mum a call in a day or two.’
‘Yeah. I’d give her a couple of days.’
Bo said, ‘You slip in between us and Arner, Mathew. Before we get going down the escarpment, Arner’ll hook you up to his winch. That truck of his will hold anything.’ He turned to John Hearn. ‘He’ll be okay,’ he said. They shook hands, ‘We’ll be seeing you, John.’
‘Yeah, Bo. Thanks.’
They left him standing there and went over and climbed into their vehicles and drove out the road, the dogs chasing ahead, snapping and barking at each other, a covey of red-backed quail scattering into the air and setting the pack yelping. As the Pajero breasted the saddle Annabelle swung around and looked back. Mathew and Trace coming on behind, Arner following, John Hearn standing alone on his verandah like an outpost sentry. He raised his hand and waved. She reached out the window and waved back. She ducked into the cabin. ‘The kids didn’t come out and wave goodbye to Mathew!’
‘That’s what they’re getting from that schoolteacher and their mother,’ Bo said. ‘Them women are trying to control everything with their hurt feelings, and they’re souring it all.’
‘Ellen’s okay.’
‘Ellen and Mathew are gonna go their own ways, I reckon. Them kids are gonna see things the way they see them.’
She sat looking at him, but he did not turn and look at her. Once again she had the impression that he was content to wait for her, confident of her affection, as if he had made up his own mind years ago and had no doubts. She said, ‘What was it that made you so sure I’d come back up this way one day?’
He grinned. ‘Maybe I wasn’t so sure. But I always hoped you would.’ He handed her his packet of Drum. ‘Trace got herself a fine young man.’
‘I reckon!’
He reached and slipped a tape into the player. ‘I’ll get him a start at the sugar mill before we head back to Townsville.’
She made the cigarette and handed it to him. She wanted to touch him but didn’t dare. Her life seemed poised in a delicate balance at this moment. She was not sure what she had done, but she resolved to mirror his restraint and be content to let the story unfold within her. She realised she was smiling.
They left the Zigzag gate behind and drove on out past the fork in the track with the faded signboard to Blenheim nailed askew to the broken tree, keeping on along the crest of the ridge, the open valley of the Bowen coming into view over on their right, the cabin of the Pajero jumping and lurching over the uneven ground.
Lefty Frizzell plucked his guitar and sang, I’m goin away, leavin today, I’m gonna bring my baby back, if that eight-wheel driver don’t jump the railroad track . . .
Townsville
ANNABELLE WOKE LATE THE FOLLOWING MORNING AT ZAMIA STREET and lay in her parents’ bed wondering if Bo would ring or turn up. When she didn’t hear from him that day she began to fear that she had misread the signs. Could it have been indifference to her, she wondered, that she had interpreted as his gracious restraint? The following day, instead of hanging around the house on the off-chance of hearing from him, she decided to go out. She found the waiting and the uncertainty too demoralising. She met her sister, Elizabeth, in town and they had lunch. After lunch she called at Susan’s office and offered to help with the backlog of correspondence. She was nervous and restless and unable to keep her mind on the job. When she asked Susan what Bo was doing, Susan told her he had borrowed the Pajero for a few days. ‘He’s up to something,’ Susan said. ‘Being all mysterious as usual. You know, don’t ask questions. They’re all like that. They expect you to be clairvoyant. You’re just supposed to know. Just as I think I’m beginning to understand them, I realise I don’t know anything. I shouldn’t be living like this.’ She handed Annabelle an envelope. ‘I nearly forgot. This came for you,’ she said. There was no return address on the back of the envelope but the postmark was Carlton North and Annabelle knew it was a letter from Steven. ‘It’s from him,’ she said and put the envelope in her bag without opening it. She knew what it would be like without reading it. Page after page of elaborate abstract moralising argument attempting to persuade her that as his wife she carried a compelling obligation to forgive him and return to him. He would have worked out by now that it was all her fault and would be feeling unjustly abandoned. Susan was watching her. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going back to him,’ Annabelle said. She was surprised by the assurance with which she said this and wondered if it were true. Was she really not going back, then? Was that phase of her life done with? Had the decision already been taken at an unconscious level? It was a heady possibility.
Susan was considering her. ‘What will you do?’ she asked. She was being gentle. Careful not to pry.
‘I don’t know.’
The telephone on Susan’s desk rang and she answered it. When she hung up she said, ‘Look, there’s no pressure. Okay? But I need a partner. I mean, I’ve got to have a partner. I just never get the time to look for one.’ She gestured at the mess in the office. ‘Look at this! And there’s no one out in the field.’
Annabelle said, ‘Thanks. But I don’t think I’m ready for that yet.’
‘Don’t say no. Give it some thought.’ The telephone rang again. Susan made a face and reached for the handset. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
Back at Zamia Street Annabelle couldn’t settle to anything. The cylindrical stone she had found at Burranbah sat in the middle of the circular table in the sitting room where she had left it. It was so out of place among her parents’ heavy Edwardian furniture it seemed to accuse her of something. But what? She felt uneasy with her possession of the stone, resenting it, and in her present mood it began to seem to her to be a bad omen. She regretted bringing it back and wished she had insisted on leaving it eroding out of the gully wall where its last owner had left it. She tried going on with the spring-cleaning that she had begun with so much enthusiasm and energy before they went down to Ranna, but her heart was no longer in house cleaning. It just did not seem important enough. Every time a vehicle went by along the road she jumped up and ran to the window to see if it was him. And every time it was not him she felt more alone in the silent house. She felt angry and let down. To distract herself, she thought of searching through her parents’ things for any of George Bigges’ old photographs of them and her grandparents at Haddon Hill in the early days. She unlocked the spare room and opened the massive old wardrobe. The sight of her mother’s and father’s old clothes hanging there, the smell of must and neglect, the old hatboxes and shoeboxes of a bygone time. It was too much like Ranna and the decaying remains of Nellie Bigges. She closed the door and locked the room. She felt bleak, miserable and abandoned. She walked to the corner store and bought a bottle of wine.
