The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  In the centre of the clearing a mound of yellow clay rose from around the brink of a shaft. A windlass, erected on top of the mound, spanned the opening.

  A heavy iron bucket dangled from the roller.

  ‘So this is your mine!’ I said.

  He nodded, looking at it with a pleased expression.

  I climbed to the top of the mound and peered down into darkness. A movement of air, dank with the moisture from buried rocks and clay, welled up and broke coldly on my face. I pushed a small stone over the edge. It flashed silently from sight, speeding through a narrow darkness for a tense gap of time, then rang an ending from somewhere deep down in the earth.

  ‘Cripes, that’s deep!’ I exclaimed.

  He was standing beside me, pleased that I was impressed.

  ‘Do you go down that ladder?’ I asked. I pointed to a ladder of lashed saplings that was wired to a facing of timber.

  He nodded.

  ‘I can climb ladders,’ I murmured, wondering how I could get down, ‘but not that one.’

  He looked at me questioningly, a sympathetic concern shading his face.

  ‘Infantile paralysis,’ I explain. ‘It’s a nuisance sometimes. Do you think you could lower me down in that bucket? I want to see the reef where you get the gold.’

  I expected him to demur. It would be the natural reaction. I expected him to shake his head in an expressive communication of the danger involved.

  But he didn’t hesitate. He reached out across the shaft and drew the bucket to the edge. I placed my crutches on the ground and straddled it so that my legs hung down the sides and the handle lay between my knees. I grasped the rope and said, ‘Righto,’ then added, ‘You’re coming down the ladder, aren’t you?’

  He nodded and caught hold of the bucket handle. He lifted and I was swung out over the shaft. The bucket slowly revolved, then stopped and began a reversing movement. He grasped the windlass, removed a chock. I saw him brace himself against the strain. His powerful arms worked slowly like crank-shafts. I sank into the cold air that smelt of frogs.

  ‘What the hell did I come down here for?’ I thought. ‘This is a damn silly thing to do.’

  The bucket twisted slowly. A spiralling succession of jutting rock and layers of clay passed my eyes. I suddenly bumped the side. The shaft took a turn and continued down at an angle so that the opening was eclipsed and I was alone.

  I pushed against the side to save my legs from being scraped against rocks. The bucket grated downwards, sending a cascade of clay slithering before it, then stopped.

  A heavy darkness pressed against me. I reached down and touched the floor of the shaft. I slid off the bucket and sat down on the ground beside it.

  In a little while I heard the creak of a ladder. Gravel and small stones pattered beside me. I was conscious of someone near me in the dark, then a match flared and he lit a candle. A yellow stiletto of flame rose towards his face, then shrank back to the drooping wick. He sheltered it with his hand till the wax melted and the shadows moved away to a tunnel that branched from the foot of the shaft.

  ‘I’m a fool,’ I said. ‘I didn’t bring my crutches.’

  He looked at me speculatively while candle shadows fluttered upon his face like moths. His expression changed to one of decision and I answered the unspoken intention as if it had been conveyed to me in words.

  ‘Thanks very much. I’m not heavy.’

  He bent down and lifted me to his back. Beneath his faded blue shirt I could feel his shoulder muscles bunch then slip into movement.

  He crouched low as he walked so that my head would not strike the rocks projecting from the roof of the tunnel. I rose and fell to each firm step.

  The light from the candle moved ahead of us, cleansing the tunnel of darkness.

  At the end of the drive he stopped and lowered me gently to the ground.

  He held the candle close to the face and pointed a heavy finger at the narrow reef which formed a diagonal scar across the rock.

  ‘So that’s it!’ I exclaimed.

  I tried to break a piece out with my fingers. He lifted a small bar from the ground and drove it into the vein. I picked up some shattered pieces and searched them in the light of the candle. He bent his head near mine and watched the stone I was turning in my fingers. He suddenly reached out his hand and took it away. He licked it then smiled and held it towards me. With his thumb he indicated a speck of gold adhering to the surface.

  I was excited at the find. I asked him many questions. He sat with his hands clasped around his drawn-up knees and answered with eloquent expressions and shakes of the head.

  The candle flame began to flutter in a scooped stub of wax.

  ‘I think it’s time we left,’ I said.

  He rose and carried me back to the foot of the shaft, I tied my knees together with string and placed my legs in the bucket this time. I had no control over the right leg, which fell helplessly to one side if not bound to its stronger neighbour. I sat on the edge of the bucket clasping the windlass rope and waited. The candle welled into sudden brightness then fluttered and died. I could hear the creaks of the tortured ladder, then silence.

  In all the world only I was alive. The darkness had texture and weight like a blanket of black. The silence had no expectancy. I sat brooding sombrely, drained of all sunlight and song. The world of birds and trees and laughter was as remote as a star.

  Without reason, seemingly without object, I suddenly began to rise like a bubble. I swung in emptiness; I moved in a void, governed by planetary laws over which I had no control.

  Then I crashed against the side and the lip of the bucket tipped as it caught in projecting tongues of stone. The bottom moved up and out then slumped heavily downwards as the edge broke free.

  I scraped and bounced upwards till I emerged from a sediment of darkness into a growing light. Above my head the mouth of the shaft increased in size.

  I suddenly burst into dazzling sunlight. An arm reached out; a hand grasped the handle of the bucket. There was a lift and I felt the solidity of earth beneath me. It was good to stand on something that didn’t move, to feel sun on your face.

  He stood watching me, his outstretched arm bridging him to a grey box-tree that seemed strangely like himself.

  I thanked him then sat down on the rubble for a yarn. I told him about myself and something about the people I had met. He listened without moving, but I felt the power of his interest drawing words from me as dry earth absorbs water.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said before I left him, and I shook his hand.

  I went away, but before I reached the trees I turned and waved to him.

  He was still standing against the grey box like a kindred tree, but he straightened quickly and waved in return.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he called, and it was as if a tree had spoken.

  Wild Red Horses

  Bill took the axe and made a V gap in the saw cut. He thrust the broad end of an iron wedge in the opening and drove it home with ringing blows of the sledge hammer. The breath burst from him in grunts at each impact. The wedge went in with little jerks.

  ‘Drive him well home,’ said Blue. ‘We don’t want it falling on our heads when we are getting down. I know a bloke that was killed that way.’

  Bill drove another two wedges into different sections of the cut, then returned to his place at the end of the saw.

  ‘I hope my first peg doesn’t go with the tree,’ said Blue. ‘Sometimes these leaning cows go with a snap. You don’t have time to do anything. If he splits to the peg hole I’ll land on my backside.’ He looked down at the ground below him. ‘I hate skidding off spurs.’

  ‘Hurry up,’ said Bill. ‘Here comes the tractor.’

  A faint roar of sound came up from the valley. It was not a consistent sound but waxed and waned in a swinging rhythm. Its clattering echo fled up gullies and ricochetted from the side of ridges until it was impossible to tell where the sound originated.

  It suddenly faded into
a faint clatter as the revolving treads moved the tractor slowly into the thick scrub at the foot of Mount Campbell.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ said Blue sawing with the fresh vigour that comes when the task is almost done. ‘A few more will do the trick.’

  The mountain ash had become strangely still. The leaves were motionless. The gentle swaying of the branches had ceased. A silence deeper than the absence of sound seemed to hover around its mighty head. A tenseness flowed from it, silencing the birds and imbuing the surrounding trees with a quality of grief.

  No sound but the tearing of the saw—to and fro, to and fro. . . .

  Suddenly, high above them, the topmost leaves of the tree began an agitated fluttering. Each leaf shook in panic as convulsive tremors shot up the limbs.

  A series of faint cracks and reports came from the tree’s centre.

  The men moved swiftly. Bill lowered himself to a peg beneath him and dropped to the ground. Blue stood erect on the platform and raised a curved hand to the side of his mouth.

  ‘Timb-er-r-r-r.’

  His call echoed across the gully and down the track. It faded on a sad intonation that drifted through the trees like the spirit of sound.

  He followed Bill to the ground and stood back with him, looking aloft at the head swaying slowly over as if the tree were about to bow.

  A loud report came from the cracking butt. The head gathered speed.

  The tearing trunk groaned as the rushing limbs, sweeping earthwards, hurtled through the air with a swishing scream.

  As the head met the crown of other trees, limbs smashed with reports like artillery. The reports mingled into a roar as black-wood and wattle snapped and collapsed beneath the blow. Limbs and bark flew like thrown stones.

  The roar rose to an immense thunder and ended in a dull boom as the trunk hurled itself into the soft soil.

  The earth trembled and was still. Silence snapped into being like a presence. Struck trees swayed drunkenly. Dry leaves fluttered down, rocking and twisting as they fell.

  The fallen trunk lay beneath a covering of leaves, strips of bark and dry twigs that, torn from other trees, had followed it to the ground. A sloped tree-fern projected from beneath its rounded side.

  The severed end lay thirty feet from the butt. It showed the bevel top of the scarf which dropped in a step behind the line of daggered splinters to the smooth face of the saw cut, edged with three dark blue patches where the wedges had bruised the wood.

  ‘There he lies,’ said Bill suddenly angry. ‘Most of him will rot, but that’s got nothing to do with you or me. We’re here to slaughter them.’

  ‘What’s biting you?’ asked Blue, grinning.

  ‘My grandmother loves trees,’ said Bill in a change of thought.

  ‘You’re always quoting your bloody grandmother,’ said Blue.

  ‘She is a fine woman.’

  ‘Too right, she is! She’s a sneezer if ever there was one.’

  They turned to watch the tractor nose its way into the open space like some enormous wombat foraging for food. The roar of its approach shattered against the near trees and spread through the bush in tatters of sound.

  Behind it lurched the bobtail, a two-wheeled conveyance supporting a bull wheel for use in hauling logs.

  Steve Turner, the swampie, walked ahead of the tractor. He stopped beside the head log while it pivoted slowly round and came to rest beside him.

  The roar of its engine died to a muffled throbbing. It spat puffs of fumes from its exhaust.

  The driver climbed down and stretched himself.

  Paddy Dwyer was a short man with bowed legs. His blue, unclouded eyes sat oddly in a face lined by misty years spent knocking down cheques. (‘The longest bender I ever had was eight months. It took me three years to get over the shakes it gave me.’)

  His hair untouched by any brush grew straight from his scalp. His appearance had once led Blue to remark, ‘Pat you on the head, Paddy, and a bloke’d be a week pulling out the splinters.’

  He hailed Blue now, his face crinkled with a quick grin.

  ‘How’s the best lead-swinger in the bush?’

  ‘Strike me if it’s not Lord Salisbury himself!’ exclaimed Blue, walking over and seating himself on the log. ‘The bloke that starts his car at nine and don’t come in till eleven.’

  ‘I don’t have to start earlier,’ said Paddy, helping Steve to drag the cable from the winch at the back of the tractor. ‘You blokes can’t keep the logs up to me.’

  ‘We’ll have three beauts for you after lunch,’ said Blue.

  ‘What’s the time now, Paddy?’ asked Bill.

  ‘About eleven.’

  ‘It’s time to get out,’ muttered Steve, driving the dogs into the logs with vicious blows.

  ‘Steve’s a grape on everything,’ explained Paddy.

  ‘There’s a big fire working up behind Barret’s and he reckons we’ll roast if a north wind comes up.’

  Blue looked disturbed. ‘How far behind Barret’s?’

  ‘About four miles. It’s at the foot of Mount Gold. It won’t do any harm out there. It’s creeping back into the Crown Lands.’

  ‘No!’ said Blue. ‘It won’t do any harm, eh! Let me tell you, Paddy Dwyer, any fire’s a bad fire. It was a fire that “won’t do any harm” that burnt thirty-two of us in ’26.’

  Steve straightened himself. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling him. I was through the ’26 fires. This fire behind Barret’s is only a scrub fire, but a north wind would whip it into a crown fire in two ups and where would we be then?’

  ‘In the pub at Tandaluk,’ said Paddy.

  ‘In the ’26 fires,’ said Blue looking ahead of him through the trees, ‘I saw Cocky McKinney squeal himself to death in the sawdust twenty yards from me and I couldn’t do nothing because I was burning myself.’

  ‘Where was that at?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Trembo’s.’

  ‘I was at Warren’s and they had two dug-outs for thirty of us. Twenty of us came through, but old Joe, the engine driver, had his eyes cooked in their sockets.’

  ‘I’ve met him,’ said Blue.

  ‘He loved the bush, old Joe,’ reflected Steve.

  ‘He was like Bill here, only he was old,’ said Blue.

  ‘I saw him a month ago,’ said Steve, ‘and he says to me then, he says, “The bush has no beauty for me now, Steve.” That’s what he said.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a crown fire,’ said Bill.

  ‘Those that see them hardly ever live to tell about them,’ said Blue, turning to look across the valley.

  The Wombat Ranges, convoluted with the crowded heads of trees, reared to a ridge clean cut from the lighter blue of the higher range. And behind this, line upon line of reinforcements, powdered with the palest of blues, were pasted on the distant sky like the silhouette of arrested waves.

  But the valley had changed. The visitation of some pale spirit had softened its outlines. The squat mill lay closer to the earth. The smoke from its stack no longer formed a contrast to the unrelated air but merged its pale outlines with a kindred presence.

  The pungent breath of burning eucalypts had crept in and filled the hollow between the mountains. There were no rolling movements of visible smoke. It came in furtiviness. It brought with it a strange disquiet, a restlessness.

  It brought a fear-smell—the smell of a bushfire.

  ‘Look,’ said Blue, pointing. ‘The breath of the bastard.’

  ‘The month of the burning heat,’ murmured Steve. ‘February—the bushfire month. Whenever I smell one I go cold.’

  ‘You two blokes give me the dry horrors,’ said Paddy gloomily. ‘If I was holding right I’ll roll up and snatch it.’

  ‘Snatch it because of a fire!’ said Blue, and laughed ironically. ‘We talk like that; we always talk like that, but when she comes you’ll find us four silly cows standin’ round waiting to save the mill for the boss.’

  ‘Why are we like that?’ asked Bill won
deringly. ‘Why are we?’

  ‘It’s a hang-over from the depression,’ said Blue. ‘We worked so long under fear of the job, we lost our guts. Now when they say, “Stop in and fight it,” we stop in and fight it, and after the mill has melted together the doctor comes and lifts our singlet and all our hide comes with it.’

  ‘That’s what happened to you, isn’t it, Blue?’ asked Steve.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let them have a look at your back,’ said Bill. Blue pulled his flannel over his head and turned so that the three men could see his back. They stood in silence looking at it.

  As the dry skin on new paint slides and wrinkles at a thumb thrust, so had the skin on his back slipped over the weeping flesh when the fire had gone.

  Pale skin, glossy and bereft of pores, rose to soft ridges and wrinkles.

  Faint lines of tension converged on points of puckered flesh. Beneath this covering his muscles slipped and moved untouched.

  ‘I felt it drying out and wrinkling like a green gum leaf on coals,’ said Blue, ‘and not a flame touched me.’

  ‘Now you know why I leave my wife and kids in Melbourne,’ said Steve.

  ‘And now you know why I wear a flannel,’ said Blue. ‘Blokes that wear singlets always burn. You’ve got a chance with a flannel.’

  He slipped it on once more.

  ‘I’m missing the best years of my kids’ lives,’ complained Steve.

  ‘If the mill built dug-outs you could have them up here with you,’ said Bill.

  ‘If. . .’ said Steve.

  ‘Are those dogs right?’ asked Paddy, climbing on to the tractor.

  ‘Wait till I put joggles in for the legs.’

  Steve picked up his axe and cut two notches, one on each side of the log end. He slipped the wire ropes attached to the dogs into these grooves, then yelled, ‘Righto!’

  The engine roared, the cable tightened. There was a moment’s strain, then the dogs flew out above the writhing cable.

  ‘They’re a bit tight when the dogs fly out of them,’ said Blue.

  Steve hammered them home a second time. ‘How about sniggin’ him up with a winch?’

  The winch whined as it took the strain. Silver dust of steel fell from the cable where it ground into the bull wheel.