Journey to the Stone Country
Page 28
They all laughed.
‘A lot of them people was white years ago,’ Bo said, matter-of-fact, his hand going out, turning in his seat to indicate a direction. ‘Around the Dawson and the McKenzie a lot of them Murris still got a white look. Up this way they wasn’t so much.’ He leaned and gripped the dog by its muzzle, looking into its eyes. The dog gazed back at him, its stumpy tail banging the tyre mat. Bo gave the dog’s head a bit of a shake then let go its muzzle. He sat up and reached into his shirt pocket for his tobacco. ‘Back then Eva and her mates didn’t want to know us when we come to town. They was too good for us. Then when they seen there was money coming through the Land Council they discovered they was Murris after all. Now they got themselves elected into office and they just wanna tell other people they don’t qualify. They’re scared somebody gonna remind them they was Spanish a little while ago.’
They all laughed. Tiger joined in. ‘The Spanish dancer,’ he said.
‘That’s Eva!’ Bo said. ‘She’s took the powder off now and is going for the boot polish.’
They laughed some more. Then they fell silent. Tiger said, ‘Life’s like a wall of water.’
‘That’s it,’ Bo encouraged him. ‘A wall of water.’
‘It goes out of control and knocks everything down. Then it’s gone and there’s nothing.’ Tiger sat cheek-to-cheek with his daughter, gazing out the long window at the evening sky. ‘Look at that sunset!’ he said. A high ripple of cloud tinted a brilliant vermilion lit up the room. They all sat looking at the sunset. The brilliance did not last long before the evening sky turned grey. Elsie switched on the light.
Tiger said, ‘You ought to get the Land Council to buy back Verbena for you, Bo.’
They looked at Bo, waiting to see what he would say. He examined his cigarette.
‘For someone like you it’s the right time,’ Tiger said. ‘They got money for that sort of thing.’
Elsie said quietly, ‘Bo don’t want the Land Council getting mixed up in Verbena. He don’t want that country for the Murris.’
‘Then who’s he want it for?’
Elsie kept looking at Bo. He smoked his cigarette, looking down at the dog and saying nothing, the smoke from his cigarette drifting through the kitchen.
‘Bo wants it for his Grandma and for old Iain Rennie.’ She waited until Bo looked up at her and smiled. ‘Did you know Bill Stirling’s still alive?’ she asked him.
‘Yes I did know that.’
Elsie turned to Annabelle. ‘He’s the land agent went out to Verbena with Jude Horrie to see Bo’s grandma with the agreement of sale that day. He’s still living in Collinsville with his granddaughter. He’s over ninety. He’d know if Bo’s grandma ever really signed that agreement of sale or not.’
Bo said quietly, ‘Grandma never signed no agreement of sale.’
Tiger said, ‘You need a piece of paper, Bo. That old feller’s not gonna last much longer. While you still got the chance you oughta get a piece of paper off him swearing your grandma never signed. You need a good witness for that too. A magistrate or the sergeant of police. Someone them people gonna believe.’
Bo sucked his teeth. ‘My dad always said people will lie to you on paper quicker than they’ll lie to your face.’
Tiger said, ‘That may be true. But it’s the piece of paper that’s gonna count for you. It don’t matter what you know in your mind, if you haven’t got a piece of paper you got nothin. That’s the way things are, Bo. Them courts not gonna listen to you without a piece of paper to back you up. No one is. Looking them in the eye don’t impress them judges one little bit.’ He turned to Annabelle. ‘Annabelle knows that’s true. You can’t do nothin without a piece of paper. Look at what Jude Horrie did with that piece of paper of his? That so-called agreement of sale of his? And that was a forgery.’ He looked around at each of them in turn to see if they appreciated the justice of his argument. Sarah looked around with him, checking the impression made on the company by these truths of her father’s. Tiger laughed and they cuddled each other, laughing together. ‘Go and get my guitar,’ he told her. He held her around the waist, not letting her go, and she turned and looked at him, waiting for what he would say. ‘That’s what they call evidence, Bubble. In this world, proof is not in a man’s word but is on the paper he carries. Without a piece of paper even the best man is only a liar and a thief. It’s not only your mother’s people gotta get their pieces of paper back. We all gotta do it any way we can. That’s why they crucified our Lord and Saviour, Jesus.’
Bo murmured, ‘Here we go.’
Tiger looked at him. He said without rancour, ‘You can mock, Bo, but in this house it’s the truth of Jesus we live by.’ He turned again to Sarah. ‘The Lord Jesus asked them to believe his word. He gave them the truth. But they wanted evidence. It’s evidence that destroys the word of truth in a man’s heart. Nothing’s changed, my little Bubble. That’s the world we got. Without the Lord Jesus, you and me and your mother are nothin. Without a signature on a piece a paper we got nothin. X marks the spot.’ He laughed and let her go.
She slipped off his knee and went into the back room and a moment later came back with a guitar. She handed him the instrument and stood by watching him tune it. He looked up from tuning the guitar and said evenly to Bo, ‘You gotta bring that old Verbena title into dispute. I know something about that business and how it works. You listen to me. Them Heffernans not gonna get no one to offer for your Grandma’s old place if the title’s in dispute.’
Elsie said, ‘It’s true, Bo. You gotta have a disputed title on Verbena. That’s what happened to Tiger’s mum and dad with their place at Sarina. There was no clear title and it finished up they couldn’t find a buyer for it. There’s squatters in there now and they can’t be shifted.’
Tiger gazed at his daughter, his eyes shining. He began to sing softly, striking the chords and a rippling array of notes with his fingers, his light tenor voice tuned perfectly to the pitch of the instrument, Free at last, free at last, thank God a’mighty I’m free at last . . . After a few bars he stopped singing and put the guitar aside. ‘Sing Grace for Annabelle, Bubble.’
Sarah smiled at Annabelle and she pulled out a chair from the table and she sat, her knees together, her open palms flat on her skirt. She gazed levelly ahead of her out the window at the evening sky and sang, Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see . . . She sang the familiar words of the old gospel song in an unmannered and clear voice that was without sentimentality. When she came to the end of the song she turned to her father and smiled. He thanked her and she got up and went over and stood with her mother. There were tears in Tiger’s eyes.
Annabelle said, ‘Thank you Sarah. That was beautiful.’ She was afraid she might seem to be condescending if she said more.
Tiger picked up his guitar and strummed it. ‘It was a white slaver wrote that song, Annabelle.’
It was past midnight when Tiger left them and went to bed. Bo went out to the Pajero and brought the swag in and they unrolled it by the stove. They lay side by side waiting for sleep and thinking their thoughts. Bo smoking an illicit cigarette. The dog watching them from the doorway, its head laid on its paws. Every once in a while it gave a breathy woof and Bo spoke back to it. Outside in the night scrubs curlews cried back and forth, their eerie chorus like the forlorn wailing of the damned calling to each other. Bo raised himself on his elbow and opened the fire door of the stove and threw the butt of his cigarette in, his face lit by the red glow from the coals. He looked down at her, ‘Am I gonna get that massage?’
He lay beneath her in the glow from the fire door and she probed the muscles of his back with her fingers.
He said, ‘Grandma always said the whole story’s in that photograph, if only there was someone could tell it.’
After breakfast in the morning, Tiger and Elsie and Sarah came out to the Pajero with them to say goodbye. The older boys climbed i
nto the cabin of Arner’s truck with him and closed the doors, turning the music up as high as it would go. Tiger showed Bo and Annabelle his workshop in the shed, Sarah standing with him, her arm through his.
Annabelle picked up a spear-thrower, smoothing her hand along its polished shank. ‘It’s beautiful, Tiger.’
‘Buy it,’ he said and laughed, a pain of self-mockery in his laughter, so that Elsie looked at him. ‘It’s fifty bucks, that piece. Red bauhinia. She’s hard to find in these scrubs around here. Sarah found that piece.’ He turned to Bo. ‘I stopped doin it. After what that Eva woman said I thought maybe a Indian shouldn’t be makin Murri stuff. What do you think, Bo?’ He frowned, puzzled, uncertain, angry, waiting for Bo’s verdict.
Elsie and Sarah looked at Bo and waited for his judgement.
‘There’s a Russian feller making it in Townsville,’ Bo said. ‘Peter the Great he calls himself. Not bad lookin stuff neither. He sells it to the tourists in the mall there.’ He looked up at them. ‘I seen the police move him along a couple of times but he comes right back and sets up again. Big feller. Sits cross-legged playing a warpy lookin didgeridoo to attract the customers.’ Bo shook his head in wonderment. ‘Gets some weird sounds out of that thing. Make your hair stand up.’ He looked at them as if he thought they might go and listen to the Russian didgeridoo player in Townsville. ‘He sells his stuff.’
Tiger cast his gaze over the bench, the litter of half-finished artefacts. ‘I sold none.’ He gave the little self-mocking laugh again. Sarah held his arm, pressing herself to her father’s side. ‘Not one piece. I’m not a salesman. Some people got the knack.’ He picked up the spear-thrower that Annabelle had replaced on the bench and he slapped his open palm with it. ‘You wanna keep that Ranna country the way she is, Annabelle. And that’s all right for you and I can see what you’re thinkin about conservation. But what are our kids gonna do for a economic base if we don’t exploit the water resources out there now we got the chance?’
Annabelle did not know what to say.
Bo said, ‘You startin to sound like Les, Tiger.’
‘So what? Les’s right.’
Elsie said, ‘He is right, Bo. I’m sorry, Annabelle, but it’s true. Les is getting things done for us.’
Bo lit his smoke and he turned aside and spat against the front tyre of the old Holden sedan. He spoke with impatience. ‘That dam’s not gonna make nobody free. You’ll be tied to the government and the banks by agreements. If you wanna be free you gotta get out and do something yourself.’ He made a flinging gesture at the artefacts with his open hand. ‘There’s a way to sell this stuff. I don’t know what that way is but I know there’s a way. You’re good at it. I never seen better lookin stuff than this even out there in Alice Springs, and they got some good stuff out that way. You just gotta find the way to sell it. That’s the hard part. Findin the way. But that’s what you gotta do. It don’t matter if you’re Indian or what you are. If you make good stuff it’s good stuff. No one can argue with that.’ He stood examining the three of them. ‘You may as well have stayed on the missions as get yourselves tied to the government and them banks. They’ll give you a hardhat and a site pass with your name on it like young Trace keeps on her trophy stand, but you’ll never get to be the boss of what you’re doin. Not with them people. Your kids neither. That dam’s not gonna be a economic base for them, it’s gonna be another chain around their necks.’ He turned to Annabelle. ‘You ready?’
‘I’m ready.’
Sarah let go of her father’s hand. She stepped up to Annabelle and put her arms around her and hugged her. When Sarah stepped away there were tears in Annabelle’s eyes.
Tiger and Sarah and Elsie followed them out to the Pajero. Tiger carried the polished shank of red bauhinia. He watched Bo. ‘Dougald don’t agree with you neither,’ he said.
Bo paused, holding the door open, and turned back to Tiger. ‘I didn’t say nobody had to agree with me.’
Tiger stood with one hand on the bonnet watching him settle himself into the driver’s seat. ‘You’re like they say your old feller was, Bo Rennie. Stubborn.’
Bo was rolling a smoke. ‘That’ll do me, Tiger.’ He called over to Elsie, ‘That was a good feed we had for breakfast, Elsie. We’ll be coming back for some more of that.’
As they were pulling away, Tiger called, ‘You be sure to call on Panya, Bo. Don’t you go slipping away without seeing that old woman.’ He laughed and handed the spear-thrower to Sarah. ‘Give this to Annabelle, Bubble.’ He watched his daughter go around to the passenger side and reach the spear-thrower in through the window to Annabelle.
Bo hooted the horn and waved out the sidewindow, Arner pulling in behind, the boys hanging off the back of his truck yelling, Annabelle leaning out her window and calling back her thanks to Tiger.
She turned to Bo, ‘They’ve got nothing and they gave us everything.’
‘That’s the way it is,’ Bo said. ‘The poor always got their door open.’
Driving out past the racetrack sheds again Bo looked across at the rusting bulldozer. ‘Trace and Mathew,’ he said, considering. ‘How long before they have a kid?’ He looked at Annabelle, ‘You reckon that mother of his is gonna be pleased to be expectin her first grandchild?’ He came to the end of the dirt track and turned onto the Yacamunda road, heading back into Mount Coolon. ‘Elsie’s right. We’re gonna have wedding bells before too long.’
The Last Stone Woman
HE WAS SILENT AS THEY DROVE BACK INTO TOWN. SHE DID NOT ASK him what was troubling him. He turned right at the police station and followed a dirt track for two hundred metres over a bare undulation of stony ground into a narrow-sided gully. A derelict weatherboard shack stood alone on the side of the dry gully, its framework canting downhill, its grey boards sprung and no smoke coming from the roof pipe. Bo parked the Pajero on the sideling. He turned to her, ‘If you wanna wait here, that’s okay.’
His suggestion puzzled her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll come with you.’
He nodded and they stepped down.
Arner followed them up to the doorway. The door was half open, stubbed against a lifted board in the passage. Bo eased the door wider and called uncertainly, ‘You in there Panya?’ A dog barked gruffly. They stepped into the foetid passageway and turned into a small dark room. A blanket was nailed down over the window. An old woman sitting back on a sagged-down settee under the window, the cold blue light of a teevee playing over her features. Her eyes set deep in her head, reflecting the teevee, flickering in the darkness of her face. The skin of her features jowled and folded down over her cheeks, as if it would slough and leave the naked white bone of her skull. A surprising epiphany. Annabelle wondered if she was blind. A grey dog stood shivering at the old woman’s feet. It barked feebly a couple of times then lay down, whining and twisting around, licking and nipping at a deep ulcer on its back, the muscles and sinews of its hindquarters laid bare as a piece of butcher’s meat. There was a strong smell of excrement. An open pail standing beside the settee. Blowflies humming around inside the pail, coming out and batting against the teevee screen, ricocheting off into the dark. The sound on the teevee was turned down low, the voice of the commentator a barely audible mumble above the whining and buzzing of the flies. The channel replaying highlights of the Eagle Farm races. The old woman didn’t turn from the teevee but raised her arm and called throatily, ‘Come over here, Arner! Let Aunty Panya touch you.’
Arner went over and stood by her.
Annabelle stood just inside the door to the passage, a step behind Bo. She held a hand to her mouth.
The old woman reached and took hold of Arner by the wrist.
Arner lowered himself onto the couch beside her. She took his big hand in hers, folding it on her lap, tucking herself close against him. Minutes passed, the two of them sitting gazing at the screen, as if they communicated by means of its mesmerising illumination.
Bo and Annabelle waiting by the door.
The big fli
es droning around, dipping in and out of the bucket.
The old woman’s voice came out of the silence with a suddenness that made Annabelle jump.
‘I know what you come here for, Bo Rennie!’ Her tone was harsh and unwelcoming, her speech half-stifled by an occlusion of phlegm in her throat, a cheesy mucous in the corners of her eyes. ‘You don’t even know your own grandmother’s name.’ She laughed thickly.
Bo was silent, shifting uneasily, glancing at the teevee then looking down at the boards, as if he had been called before the ancient dark of this old Jangga woman’s judgement to answer for all the wrongdoing of his life.
‘He don’t know his own grandmother’s name!’ she confided, lifting Arner’s hand to her lips and kissing it, the dog raising its head and going, whooo. ‘What else don’t he know?’ She chuckled throatily. ‘They tell me you give up drink, Bo Rennie.’
Bo said quietly, ‘I haven’t had a drink for seven years.’
‘Seven years not long!’ She dismissed the significance of his claim. ‘Foul language and drinking. I heard all that from you. A man like you will take up the drink again when he’s got troubles.’ She fell silent, holding Arner’s hand and stroking it as if it were a warm creature nestled comfortingly in her lap. Arner’s great bulk beside her in the teevee light like a carved effigy. Her demon companion. Still and sombre, drugged by the airless stench and the effulgent light of the screen, the soft caresses of the old woman, his eyelids drooping. He might have arrived at his destination.
Minutes went by, the silence broken only by the hum of the flies and the murmuring teevee. It seemed as if Panya had forgotten Bo and would not address him again, her preoccupation with passing some occult knowledge to her companion on the settee. Then suddenly she said, ‘You goin up there to the playground of the old people.’ Her voice accused him. She coughed, gasping and choking and bringing phlegm into her mouth. She leaned forward and spat the gobbet of phlegm at the pail. It hit the side and slid down, the flies rising with a hum at the impact. She eased back and groaned, struggling to regain her breath. ‘Your grandmother was the last stone women,’ she said. ‘You didn’t even know that.’ She fell silent again, the immensity of her charge recoiling against a resistance in her, as if the effort of speech and recollection exhausted her, memory draining her of the will for words. ‘Now there’s only old Panya left to tell the truth. Get him to toss his tobacco over, Arner. I gotta clear these pipes.’