Journey to the Stone Country

by Alex Miller

  Bo took the packet of Drum from his shirt pocket and tossed it into Arner’s lap.

  ‘Roll your old Aunty a smoke, Arner,’ she said. ‘He thinks he’s as smart as his daddy was.’ Confiding in Arner as if they were alone in the room. She accepted the lit cigarette and took a long drag at it. ‘Bo Rennie always thought he was a smart packet. Drinking and chasing other men’s women.’ She brought up more loose phlegm and swallowed it. ‘He’s takin that Beck woman to the playground of the old people, that’s what he’s doin. I know him. That woman already got things don’t belong to her. But she wants everything.’

  Dismayed by the old woman’s words, Annabelle looked at Bo. But he would not meet her eyes. She wanted to turn and leave the house, but she was afraid to.

  ‘They can’t leave nothin alone, Arner. They gotta have everything before they’re satisfied. They leave you with nothin. I know them. He’s gonna show her the heart of the old people.’ She coughed and groaned and drew on the cigarette, reaching for what she had to say. ‘That grandfather of hers hunted us in the moonlight. Louis Beck and his mate, George Bigges. Them two hunted our people all up through them bendee scrubs.’ She spat hard without taking aim. ‘Now he’s takin one of them Beck women up there to the playground of the old people. What’s that woman want with our old place?’ She waited, the silence dragging out, and no one answering her question. ‘What’s she want?’ she repeated. ‘That’s the man you are, Bo Rennie!’ she accused him. ‘You not worth a spit of your old dad.’ A skein of tacky saliva clung to her lips, dribbling onto her front. She swiped at it impatiently with the flat of her hand. ‘Don’t even know his grandmother’s name, Arner.’ She was silent again. ‘You gonna ask me your grandmother’s secret name, Bo Rennie? That what you come to see old Panya for?’ She smoked, mocking him. ‘You don’t know nothin.’

  ‘I know where the old playground is,’ Bo objected, quiet and modest in his claim. ‘I know where them old highways are. I followed them with Grandma when I was a boy.’

  ‘What d’you know about the stone people? You know nothin! Your grandmother was the last woman given birth to in the cradle of them stones. When we was little children together me and her seen the killings. That woman there! Her granddad was huntin our families up through them scrubs. Your grandmother’s old lady hid us two kids with her in the hollow carcass of a old scrubber bull that was layin out in the open of a natural clearing. Me and your Grandma was all curled up inside that carcass looking out through the old bull’s skullholes watching them men murderin our people in the moonlight. They never thought to come looking for us inside that old bull. After they finished the killings, they lit a fire and brewed up a quartpot of tea and they sat on a ironbark log and ate their damper and beef, laughing and talking, them bodies laying all around in plain view, all broken and unattended. I don’t forget that sight,’ she said and was suddenly overcome by her emotions. She sat weeping noisily and unable to speak, her hands clinging to Arner’s big hand, her fingers kneading his flesh as if she found a resource in his great size and in the perfect equanimity of his unbroken silence. When she had regained her composure she went on, ‘We stayed in that old bull for three days like we was goannas livin there and then we come out and walked the scrubs all the way back to the Suttor. We kept going, hungry and scared, till we met up with your grandmother’s mob. That’s when them Bigges come over and took your grandmother and her sister to the Ranna Station. But I give them the slip and they didn’t get me. And they still haven’t got me, Bo Rennie!’ She was crying softly to herself again, sniffling and murmuring, the tears glistening in the folds of her cheeks. ‘Where are my sisters and brothers, Bo Rennie?’ she cried out to him. ‘Where did them kids go to? I watched them bein murdered! My mother and father too. Murdered in front of me. Your grandmother’s old lady holding her hand over my mouth so I couldn’t cry out to them. I seen that Louis Beck ride down my little brother across that clearing and bust his skull wide open with his stirrup iron. That’s what I seen. I seen it happen. I don’t forget that! I never gonna forget that. I see that little boy running for the shelter of the scrub every day of my life and that horse coming up on him and I see he’s not gonna make it and I cry out to him and weep for that little boy every day of my life. My dear and loving family killed by the grandfather of that woman you got standing there beside you! Now you come back here and you bring that Beck woman into old Panya’s place! That’s the kind of stupid man you are and always was, Bo Rennie. You got no sense.’ She didn’t turn and look at him. ‘You could have turned out like Les Marra but you never did. You could have done some good for your people. That sister of his got little enough but she and her kid brings me cooked meat and cigarettes whenever they can. What did you bring? That woman! A insult. Now you gonna insult the old people.’ She said suddenly, ‘You take off your hat in here! You have some respect for old Panya.’ She wiped her face on her sleeve, sighing and moaning and struggling with her memory of the horror.

  Bo removed his hat and stood holding it by the brim, looking down at his boots.

  ‘You ever hear the story of them killings before, Bo Rennie?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Bo murmured.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘There, you hear that, Arner? Bo Rennie never heard that story before! That’s what he says! Some people don’t find it too hard to lie to themselves.’

  Bo looked at her. He didn’t say anything.

  ‘You bring that Beck woman here so she can apologise to me? Is that what you doin bringin her in here? Because I been trying to think of a reason why you would bring Louis Beck’s granddaughter into old Panya’s house. Or she just come here to look at old Panya? That her idea is it? Satisfy her curiosity? Pretend to her friends she understand the old Jangga people now? You gonna marry her? That what you gonna do?’ She sniffed back hard and spat, her hand going out in a direction-making gesture. ‘That’s all hollow ground up there. You go tramping around up there with her and you’ll wake up them old people. That grandfather of hers hunted us through them scrubs till we had to stop and rest. Then he shot the grown people and he rode down the children and clubbed them to death with his stirrup iron. Yeah! I seen it! Him and his mate. I seen him swing his stirrup and bust the skull of my brother. Did I tell you this before? But maybe you forgot it already and you need tellin again? I don’t forget. Every day I weep for them murdered people of ours. Every day. I never gonna forget. To me it just happened yesterday. You one of them people like to forget. You gonna ask me the secret name your grandmother was given by the old people the day she come into life up there in the playground? That what you come to ask old Panya for?’ She waited. ‘If I told you her name, and I’m not gonna tell you, Bo Rennie, so don’t get your hopes up, if I told you her name it wouldn’t mean nothin to you because you don’t know enough to make no sense of the old ways. Tellin you your grandmother’s name would be like spittin it into that shit bucket there.’ She coughed and spat some more and sat musing and murmuring and stroking Arner. ‘I been waitin for you to come lookin for your grandmother. I knew you was comin back for her.’ She fell silent.

  Minutes went by.

  Annabelle dared not move.

  The boards creaked under the heels of Bo’s boots as he shifted his weight.

  ‘Well here’s something else you don’t know, Bo Rennie. Me and your Grandma planned our revenge and we took it. As soon as we come of age your grandmother and me went up there to the women’s place in that old playground where we was born. Them Bigges over at Ranna didn’t know where your grandmother was gone to. They was stupid enough to think she was lost in the bush.’ She laughed at the idea. ‘They sent out search parties lookin for her. But she give em the slip and met up with me in the poison bendee and we walked to the old playground together. It was cold and rainin and they never picked up our tracks. We stayed a week up there without eating nothin. And we sung Louis Beck and George Bigges. That George Bigges, he was always smiling at you and givin you a shilling, pretending he was a friend
of the dark people. Only me and your grandmother seen what him and Louis Beck done that day. We set the demons free in them two. You ask her! That woman standing next to you! She his granddaughter! Her own dad watched the demons eating into that old man over the years until he lost his mind and become a old dried up carcass of a bull himself, a tormented halfwit wandering around the paddocks. You ask that woman you got with you! She seen it. She knows. Them Becks was ashamed of him before the finish. She don’t say nothin but she knows what I’m talkin about. Them Becks never said nothin about it, but they knew. They knew what their old man done. They all knew it. She seen her grandfather eaten up by the demons in his head. Me and your grandmother done that. That’s what we done, Bo Rennie. We sung them two real good. We never give Louis Beck no place to find rest from his torment. He heard the cries of them murdered children for the rest of his miserable days in the wailing of the curlews in the moonlight. Louis Beck never slept peacefully again after me and your grandmother sung him. We watched the spirits of them murdered children drive him out of his senses as the years went by. It all come to nothing for him.’ She was silent. ‘The remains of that George Bigges’ place is finished and him and his generations gone for good too. You think we didn’t do that? Me and your Grandma? We done it. Les Marra gonna see that old Ranna drowned. Les know what to do.’ She laughed loudly, a sudden exultant youthfulness in her voice. ‘We cleaned them two out! They all gone from round here now! We done that! Your Grandma and me. Only that Beck woman trying to get back in and pick over what’s left. Are you gonna be the one to let her do that, Bo Rennie? You gonna be the one to let them people back in again? Is that what you plannin to do for the old people after me and your Grandma sung em out? You don’t understand nothin of what’s going on between us.’

  She turned for the first time and looked across at Bo, her head swivelling, her eyes large, the pupils gleaming yellow in the halflight from the door as if she suddenly recognised him as her quarry. ‘You never hear this story from your Grandma?’ she asked. ‘She never tell you how we mussed them white men? Sung em to their destruction? Watched the curse workin in them over the years? She never tell you that?’

  Bo stood looking down at his boots. ‘No,’ he murmured softly.

  Panya crowed with laughter, ‘No! See! Too busy big-noting yourself around them white people to see nothin! Your Grandma seen it wasn’t worth tellin you nothing! We been waitin for you, Bo Rennie. We knew you was comin back. That Beck woman you got with you musta got down on her knees to you, did she? Covered her hair in dust and tore off her shirt and begged you to forgive her for what her people done to our people? That how come you got her with you? She beg you to forgive her for the killins? Busting open the skull of my poor little brother?’ She laughed and coughed, choking on her tears before regaining her breath. ‘No one never come here and asked me to forgive em. I never heard nothin from none of em. They knew where I was livin all these years, but not one of them Becks or Bigges ever come by and asked me to forgive em. All they wanna do is forget. They want us to believe the bad times is over and we all gotta be friends now. Only they got everything for themselves, and they not giving it back. That’s what the white man want now. Peace for himself. And that’s what you gonna give him. But that’s not what I’m gonna give him. Let’s all be friends, he says, as if nothing never happened. And if some of us don’t wanna be friends we’re a trouble to him and in the wrong again.’ She was silent a moment. ‘There’s gonna be no peace for him. I’m used to being in the wrong so it don’t matter to me. I give him the slip a long time ago and he’s not catchin me now. We’re different from them, boy, and we always gonna be different from them, and you know that, Bo Rennie. The white man never wanna hear nothin about what’s different from him. What’s different don’t interest him. He don’t see it. He don’t know how to respect what’s different from him. He just wanna explain everything his own way and forget what he done. But I never gonna forget. He thinks he got nothing to fear from a broken down old Jangga woman like me. But that’s the mistake he made before. He just makin it again. The same old mistake. That’s what he does. He thinks it’s all over. He thinks he won.’

  She cackled. ‘You forget and you’re one of them! As good as murder your own people. Is that you, Bo Rennie! Do they forget their own dead? Well they don’t do they? Look at all that Gallipoli stuff they go on about. They don’t forget. So what makes them think we gonna forget? Now you get out of Panya’s house! This story’s not over yet. The old people not finished yet! That Les Marra and my Arner here, they gonna fight this war for another thousand years. Where’s the white feller gonna be in a thousand years? He’s the one gotta worry about that, not us. We still gonna be here. You get out of this house and take that woman with you. Your grandmother never told you her secret name because she knew you couldn’t be trusted with it. She knew you’d be tellin it to that Beck woman one day. You get out of here! That woman stinkin up my place! You bring one of them Becks into old Panya’s house! And I had to live to see it.’

  She lowered her voice to a new pitch of menace. ‘You take that woman up to the playground of the old people, Bo Rennie, and you gonna have a lot of trouble. You never gonna be free of trouble again in your entire life if you take that Beck woman up there. I’ll sing you and her just the way me and your Grandma sung her granddad.’ Her yellow gaze was steady on him for a full minute before she said, ‘You gotta decide whether you a Jangga man or whether you one of them.’ She patted Arner’s hand. ‘This boy knows who he is. He gonna do something for the old people. He’s ready for it. Now you get out of here. You no good to us. You go on back to the coast. You don’t belong out in this country no more. You belong with that woman and her friends. We don’t need you here.’

  Bo stood, rigid a moment, then he took Annabelle by the elbow and hustled her ahead of him into the passage. He urged her out into the bleached light of the day, his hand pushing roughly against her back. Outside he stepped away from her.

  Dismayed, she watched him walk down into the bed of the stony gully and stand gazing at the ground, head down as if he were a man waiting to be shot. She was trembling. She stood a while in the cold wind watching him. When he did not turn around or acknowledge her presence she went to the Pajero and climbed into the cabin and closed the door. She put her head in her hands. She felt sick in her stomach. She was afraid and ashamed and angry all at once. She felt as accused as if she had committed the murders herself and must answer to old Panya’s charge. The familiar Biblical phrase came back to her from her schooldays, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. Surely there would have to be an atonement in blood for such horrors. Could there ever be an end to the offence? What amends could there ever be for murder? Annabelle knew that the truth of Panya’s indictment lay behind the decades of her own family’s silence . . . She could see her fierce grandfather’s bronze stirrup catch the cold glint of moonlight as he swung it over the head of the terrified boy running for the shelter of the scrub, the triumphant yell of the hunter on horseback. The child’s thin bleached cry of terror cut short. The flash and smack of the hit. Dispute settled! My land now! Without benefit of law. Lease in perpetuity . . .

  Annabelle gave a small moan and opened her eyes, unable to face the violent images that rose in her imagination. She felt she must surely be haunted for the rest of her days by Panya’s story.

  Bo was still standing in the bottom of the gully. He was a forlorn and solitary figure in the dried up broken landscape, the wind whipping up little dust spirits around his boots and tossing the heads of the burr grass back and forth. Bo no longer looked like the confident Queensland ringer she had seen that day at Burranbah. She longed to go to him and put her arms around him and comfort him. She sat looking at him, wondering if they would ever be able to reclaim their innocence with each other. She felt the touch of despair creep into her heart . . . She twisted around in her seat and looked back at the truck.
There was no sign of Arner. The open door to Panya’s house was empty. The wretched dwelling place seemed abandoned, its living inhabitants departed long ago . . . Old Panya persisting like a nightmare. Annabelle stared at the doorway, seeing her grandfather standing there as she had last seen him; not a memory of him, but the image in the framed sepia photograph on the washstand in her parents’ living room at Zamia Street, the old cattleman in the last months of his life, a figure shrunken and without dignity in his crumpled three-piece suit and narrow-brimmed hat, grinning senselessly at the world. His life and his deeds brought to ruin by the haunting of his past. Burned by the terrible song of Panya and Grandma Rennie. A dry husk of a man at the end of a cursed existence, his carcass white-anted and as empty of portent as the books in George Bigges’ library. Her grandfather: pastoralist, pioneer, cattleman, Louis Nicholas Beck, eldest son of Nicholas Louis and Marthé Annabelle Beck, from Haddon Hill in the green Vale of Taunton. Had her father known the truth? That gentle, loving man? Had her father secretly known himself to be the son of a murderer and his beloved land the plunder of that crime? She had never thought of herself as the granddaughter of a murderer. The Becks, like all the others, had trusted to their silence about such things in the belief that their crime would eventually be forgotten. She thought of all the country town museums she had visited, where there was never any mention of the Murris. And whenever she asked the attendant why this was so he would tell her with a fatuous sincerity, Why, Miss, didn’t you know? there were no Murris in this part of the country. For it was either tell her that or tell her the celebrated pioneering forebears of the district had been murderers and thieves. And that is what they must have been. For in truth there were no other means than murder by which they might have acquired their land. The truth was simple enough, but nearly impossible to deal with.