A Thousand Candles

by Joyce Dingwell

Beside her Davy chuckled delightedly and experimented, ‘Pippa C. Mrs. C.’ Then in a satisfied voice he said: ‘My sister, Mrs. C.’

  He was still smiling over it when he fell asleep somewhere on the road to Orange ... they were heading inland and hoping to make Bourke that night.

  Pippa removed the carnation which he had refused to take from his lapel, and pressed his little head to her shoulder. The carnation was wilted and crushed and she went to throw it away... and then she didn’t. Instead she put it in her bag.

  ‘Mine, too.’ Crag took out his and handed it to her, and for a moment their eyes met.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Bourke isn’t just a western town,’ Crag said as they left the main street, ‘it’s a last stand before the hinterland sets in. Songs have been sung about it, verses written. Everyone speaks of “Out at the back-o’-Bourke”.’

  ‘How far back are we going, Crag?’ Davy, who had wakened up, asked eagerly.

  ‘As back as Falling Star finally, scrubber, but right now only a mile back to the river where I reckon we’ll make camp.’

  An uncertainty enveloped Pippa. She had enjoyed her journey, finding the country much more as she had imagined Australia, not the second England the green Highlands had proved.

  But making camp meant her first night as a wife. What had the man beside her said? One tent. You, the scrubber and me.

  If Pippa was uncertain, though, Davy was rapturous. He was out of the waggon as soon as they reached the camping ground, helping Crag choose a suitable site, making ponderous agreements as to drainage should it rain ... rain with a sky of flawless satin!... shelter should it blow ... with not even a breath to stir the starlit leaves of the trees by which they would pitch the tent! One tent.

  Crag decided on the most suitable spot, then set Davy to gather fuel and tinder. From now on that would be his duty, Crag informed him, until they reached Falling Star.

  Pippa’s duty, he said next, would be to start the tucker. Pippa nodded, and began laying the chops on the grid he had set out, but at once she was told to wait for the embers, since cooking over that flame would smoke the meat. Again Pippa nodded.

  While Davy gathered the fuel, then threw it on ... Pippa was a little nervous about that, but Crag appeared to have confidence in the boy, so she must, too ... and while she waited, Crag pitched the tent and unrolled the sleeping bags. Then he came back to the fire and gave Pippa her first lesson in damper.

  ‘I can make soda bread,’ she said a little stiffly, ‘which is the same.’

  ‘No soda in this,’ he instructed. ‘Ashes.’

  ‘Ashes!’

  ‘Potash is a form of rising.’ He took some from the spent end of the fire. ‘You take your flour, salt and a handful of ashes and some water. Then you knead.’ He did so. He told her to put the chops on the grid now and to stand by to turn them, then he finished his kneading and pushed the damper well in, saying it would be awaiting them for their breakfast.

  They ate under a deep blue cloth of sky, the stars glittering with a brilliance never seen on the coast, Crag claimed.

  Then, replete and drowsy, they all agreed on bed. While Crag built up the fire for the night, Pippa undressed the little boy down to his singlet and underpants and slipped him into the bag.

  ‘God bless,’ she kissed.

  ‘Am I next?’ Crag drawled as she came outside again. He was sitting near the tent flap and smoking his eternal pipe.

  ‘I’ll say God bless to you,’ she promised lightly.

  ‘Also tuck me in the bag?’

  He did not comment on that, he tended his pipe, and she stared out at the velvet darkness beyond the fire’s flickering beams. A little noise that rose above the soft stir of the bush and the ripple of the river alerted her, but Crag assured her it was only a pheasant on the forage.

  ‘He says “puss-puss”,’ he told her. ‘Listen.’

  Soon afterwards there was another bush noise that Crag said would be a wood pigeon.

  ‘He calls “move-over-dear”.’ A laugh. ‘Not much good in a sleeping bag, would you say, Mrs. C.?’

  Davy gave a little possum snore, and Pippa went rather thankfully in to see to him ... and to slip into her own niche.

  She was drifting off when Crag finally came to his sleeping bag. He was so quiet she might not have known, except that he came across to her and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Good night, Mrs. C.’

  Now wide awake and staring into the darkness where he must be but she couldn’t see him, Pippa answered a little indistinctly, ‘God bless.’

  The next morning the damper was taken from the white embers, its casing sliced off to reveal a perfect soda ... no, potash, remembered Pippa—loaf that was deliciously warm enough to send the butter that Crag knifed generously over it into golden runnels.

  ‘Mmm!’ said Davy, eating more than Pippa had ever seen him eat. His little chin dripped runnels of gold.

  Crag brewed tea, throwing the leaves into the boiling water, rotating the billy bush-style, and they drank and listened to the river and the sound of the awakening bush.

  They set off again after Crag had carefully doused the fire, instructing Davy meanwhile how very important this was. Then he cleaned up the site to make it attractive for the next campers, telling Davy about this, too. Pippa saw Davy nodding as he absorbed every word.

  Now they went west, the bush road as straight as a gun barrel, and the names rolled from Crag’s tongue ... Milparinka, Tibooburra, Wittabrinna, Wompah. On the rim of Caryapunda Swamp they crossed the Queensland border.

  Camp that night was by an overflow, and the sounds of the water birds enchanted Pippa as she helped Davy gather the fuel, which, because the trees had become sparse, was not so easy to find as at Back-o’-Bourke. Crag had told her to delay the meal until he went up to a station he knew. But, the fire started and thriving, Pippa could not resist trying a damper herself. Davy looked a little dubiously at the rather darkish result and asked his sister was she sure she had used white ashes.

  ‘Yes.’ Indignantly.

  ‘Then it must be your hands.’

  ‘It’ll be all right. You’ll see in the morning.’ She shoved the damper in, Davy still looking dubious.

  But at that moment the waggon came back, and Crag jumped out and held up three huge steaks. ‘Also,’ he rejoiced, ‘station bread.’ He exhibited a crusty loaf.

  ‘I’ve already put in a damper,’ Pippa informed him loftily.

  ‘Good for you. But just in case...’

  Pippa tossed her head at that ‘just in case’.

  There was also fresh milk for Davy, and a bottle of home preserves. By the time of the billy routine that finished off the meal three people were well fed and three heads were nodding.

  Pippa was first up in the morning, and she went stealthily to the spent fire. She poked around ... and poked around. There was no damper.

  Crag came to the flap of the tent, let her search for a while, then drawled, ‘Were you looking for a cricket ball by any chance?’

  ‘No, of course not, I was looking for a—’ She saw the laughter in his face, and stopped. After a few moments of private wrath, she accused, ‘That’s not funny!’

  ‘Neither was the ball, brick, what-have-you.’

  ‘It was soda ... I mean potash bread.

  ‘Leave out the bread,’ he advised with a grin, ‘for that’s all there was, a ball of baked ash. Knowing small boys, and how they love to tease, I removed the evidence, Mrs. C.’

  ‘I’m not!’ she cried angrily, for she really had looked forward to surprising him with that damper.

  ‘No.’ His voice cut in quietly but all the more intensive because of its quietness. ‘No, you’re not, are you?’

  She flushed vividly, suddenly aware of his bright eyes on her. ‘I meant I’m Mrs. Crag, not that ridiculous Mrs. C.’

  There was a pause. In the silence Pippa could hear Davy stirring. She knew she should go into the tent and help the little boy out of his bag, for h
e had the knack of tangling himself up. But somehow she could not pass Crag in that narrow space he had left her.

  The silence grew. Even Davy did not break it again, so he must have gone back to sleep.

  Then Crag broke it. He said: ‘I wasn’t meaning that. He still looked at her, until, with an effort, she brushed past him into the tent.

  Davy remembered the damper. Munching on a steak sandwich, he related the damper to Crag, and how Pippa had either used black ashes or her hands had given it a funny colour.

  ‘Didn’t turn out funny, though,’ said Crag. ‘Sorry I didn’t leave you any, scrubber, but I was so hungry when I woke up last night—’

  ‘You ate it all?’ Davy did not look so much regretful as incredulous, incredulous that anyone could have demolished that brick. He dropped the subject, though, for which Pippa knew she should be grateful to Crag. She was not. All the same she tossed him a cold appreciation of his lie.

  ‘Needn’t have been a lie,’ he grinned. ‘I was up last night, listening to the frog song down in the Overflow, looking up at the stars.’

  All at once she pictured it ... the velvet night, the star shadows, the bright moon, the crooning whispers and the soft rustling of the bush.

  She wished she had been there, too.

  ‘Why don’t you, Pippa ? Why don’t you come?’ He said it as though she had spoken her thoughts aloud. She jumped to her feet, aware of her scarlet cheeks, and began getting ready for the road again.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Crag told Davy, ‘you’ll be wearing a fly veil.’

  ‘Why, Crag?’

  ‘For flies, of course. They’re not everywhere Inside, but they are where we’ll be passing through. Bush flies.’

  ‘How will we eat, Crag? Through the holes?’

  ‘If you intend eating only currants, yes, scrubber, but I think you can sneak in a mouthful here and there, then at night they’ll be gone, they don’t care about fire.’

  ‘Where will we be?’

  ‘Latitude twenty, I’d say.’

  ‘What does that mean, Crag?’ Pippa heard Davy’s little voice as her brother followed his idol down to the water to get replenishment for the radiator. She heard Crag’s patient answer. He was good father-material, she thought, and with that thought came a regret for him that so far that had been denied.

  So far ... She stopped what she was doing. Although she had said to the man who was now her husband: ‘I’m not a child. I realize that complying to a certain state means more than living as I lived before,’ she had never really thought about it. Now she thought.

  ‘All aboard!’ called Crag, and they were on their way again.

  Each day, each moment of the day, the country changed. They were in the Inside now, that strange, unpredictable hinterland where for hundreds of miles there was nothing but red sand and gibber, saltpans, claypans, dry inland seas, but where at times, without warning, a blossoming burst on you, a verdure so intense that it hurt the eyes, flowers of unbelievable size and the tenderest of hues.

  When Pippa called out that the paradise she suddenly looked out on must be a mirage, Crag shook his head, then told her that out here mirages came in different wrappings from the usual mirages ... for instance drivers of trailers saw opposite trailers drawn up on the wrong side of the road, often they swerved to avoid them coming at them.

  ‘Fatigue?’ asked Pippa.

  Crag shrugged. ‘Perhaps ... or a sort of second vision, a reflection. Look at that sign.’ He pointed to a ‘Beware of road trains 140 feet long’. Beside it a warning: ‘No water for 900 miles.’

  ‘Have we enough?’

  ‘I know the wurlies around here—a wurlie is an old aboriginal watering hole. Also if you can teach yourself the plastic trick to trap moisture you won’t parch. This is it...’

  Davy was breathing down his neck in intrigue, and Pippa realized she was doing almost the same. This strange fascinating desert!

  The red ochre days continued, the lupin-blue ridges that at night turned indigo, purple and scarlet. They passed a buffalo herd being headed in by buffalo hunters wearing ten-gallon hats against a blazing sun. These beasts were to be shipped to Singapore to work, and strangely it was from Singapore originally that they had come to work here. They passed camels, donkeys, packs of dingoes, flocks of galahs, graceful brolgas.

  Now the nights were wine-dark until the moon came up, but before that Crag always made camp.

  ‘Two fingers above the horizon,’ he told Davy, ‘is enough travelling for the day.’ He held his big hand sidewise, extending two fingers.

  ‘Your fingers or mine, Crag?’ asked Davy.

  ‘I see what you mean, scrubber. We’ll make it yours this time and camp here.’ As he drew up the waggon, he said: ‘This is the last night’s camp, folk.’

  ‘What?’ Pippa turned in surprise to him, but only Pippa, so Davy must have known already, but then there was little of this trip and this country that that young fellow did not know.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ nodded Crag, ‘is Falling Star.’

  It was with an odd feeling of the end of something in her life, almost the final turning of a page denoting a book is finished, that Pippa prepared the meal that night.

  Davy was in high spirits, gathering tinder and fuel with nervous energy, anticipating what tomorrow would bring.

  What would tomorrow bring? Pippa stared at the fire gathering embers much more quickly surely than it generally gathered them, forming white ashes for the damper ... she was expert on that now... making the end of a day come faster. —And the beginning of a night.

  She was silent as she ate that evening, silent later as she tucked Davy into his bag. She stopped with him long after her God bless, long after his little possum snores told her that he slept. At length she knew she could stop no longer, yet still she lingered. There was a pulse and a throb in her that she had never known before. It was with an effort that she lifted the flap of the tent and went outside.

  Crag was sitting out of the beam of the fire, for it was warm up here, no need to hug the glowing embers. She could just see his big dark outline against a tree.

  He saw her, though. He got up. ‘I was waiting for you,’ he called ... and as though impelled there she went across.

  For a moment they stood looking at each other, then he took her in his arms, and she did not resist.

  The navy blue night encompassed them. The stars. A silver of moon. Somewhere the pheasant cried out its ‘Puss-puss’, the wood pigeon began its ‘Move-over-dear’. He ... Crag ... had smiled that that would be hard in a sleeping bag.

  But they were not in sleeping bags now, they were on soft earth, and a tree leaned over.

  ‘Good night, Mrs. Crag,’ Crag called as he got into his sleeping bag in the tent, but she pretended oblivion at once, and did not answer.

  For I am, she knew now. I am Mrs. Crag, not Mrs. C.

  I am Crag’s wife.

  Every moment of that final day brought Pippa a mounting excitement. Always she had thought of her stay at Falling Star as something temporary, merely a waiting until Davy...

  Never had she thought of the place which they would reach at sundown ... Crag, veering north-west now, had just reported that ... as home. It wasn’t, either. It was just a pause for her, a pause only, and yet...

  She looked out on the nothingness either side, an astonishing nothingness, for the longer you gazed at it the more features ... and beauty ... it achieved, and wished she could lose this foolish concept of journey’s end. For Yantumara could never be her journey’s end. It was the scrubber that man loved ... there, she was calling him that herself now ... and because of that love he had married her. Just to have Davy. Last night ... her cheeks flamed ... had only been part of the biological pattern of life. Life went on. People went on. Children. What if—The sudden thought caught her breath. Oh, no, it wouldn’t happen: Yet what if it did? She gave the man at her side an oblique glance. How had she thought of him? As good father-material. What if...

  Wh
en the sun was right above them, Crag pulled up for lunch. While Davy examined one of the giant anthills that were part of the scene now, Crag, boiling a billy so quickly with dry tinder he almost could have pulled on an electric switch, said wryly: ‘Relax, Pippa.’

  ‘Relax?’ She gave a start, then looked at him in question.

  ‘There are eight rooms at Falling Star.’ He threw on more tinder. ‘Five of them bedrooms. We ... a deliberate pause ... ‘will only be using two.’

  ‘Two?’ she queried.

  ‘The scrubber and I in one so I can watch him and you can stop wearing yourself out, another for you. No’ ... as she went to intervene ... ‘I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me like you did before that complying to a certain state ... stop me if I use the wrong words ... means more than living as you lived before.’

  ‘Crag,’ she said awkwardly, ‘I want to be fair.’

  ‘Fair?’ He repeated the word incredulously. He almost seemed to try out its taste. ‘Fair?’

  ‘Crag, I ... I...’

  ‘Look, Pippa.’ He looked up at her from his squatting position, the tinder dangling from his big hand. ‘Look, girl, last night didn’t establish anything. I mean there’s no ties tied. I mean—’

  ‘Yes, Crag, what do you mean?’

  ‘That it was nothing. Now relax.’

  Relax. Pippa turned away.

  Davy had run back from the anthills full of questions. The man answered him as to their magnetic properties as he scattered the tea-leaves in the bubbling water, then rotated the billy.

  ‘Not much for tucker,’ he regretted, ‘but tonight will be better. I telephoned Mrs. Cassidy at the last station.’

  ‘Who is Mrs. Cassidy?’ Pippa asked.

  ‘My housekeeper, and my father’s before me. That’s why you couldn’t have taken over that role, girl.’

  ‘Won’t Mrs. Cassidy feel it’s odd that we ... I mean ...’ She glanced towards Davy, but he was still pondering over the anthills.

  ‘She’s had scrubbers of her own,’ said Crag, ‘and she’ll accept that a man sometimes needs a man’s attention. Anyway’—he poured three teas ... ‘she lives in her own cottage.’