A Far Country

by John Fletcher

But knew she would go, nonetheless. Because she had said she would, because the moment demanded it, because Jason needed her to do it.

  Softly he said, ‘Come here.’

  She came into his arms at once. No hesitation, no shyness, simply the need to share with him the moment that had come upon them both.

  She asked, ‘Where will you go? If you get away?’

  ‘I haven’t thought.’

  Had, in fact, but was reluctant to talk about it, even to her. What she did not know she could not reveal, however inadvertently.

  Her warmth invaded him. He felt her breath on his neck and moved his head to kiss her, their mouths coming together as naturally as though they had been doing nothing else all their lives. His tongue probed between her teeth, he felt her quiver and strain closer to him, the warmth of her breasts against him, her slender arms around his neck. He explored her, tenderly, pausing before each instinctive moment, giving her the chance to make the rebuff that never came.

  She gasped, sighing, doing some exploring of her own. She said, ‘I can’t bear it,’ but could and would, having no choice.

  Trembling, breathing fast and shallow through her open mouth, Alison said, ‘Wait. Wait.’

  He paused, feeling her warmth, her movements as she disposed of clothes, did whatever it was she had to do in the scented darkness.

  She said, ‘There, then,’ and he came together with her, a tension indescribable, a rendering, a fulfilment beyond expectation or dreaming.

  Jason saw everything and nothing: the grain and odour of her skin, the rounded firmness of her breasts, the hair at the nape of her head and on her body: all of this. He saw nothing and everything. He had lost sight of the detail in attaining the universal. She had superseded the sum of her parts.

  Gently, he lowered his head down her belly.

  Alison, moved by awakening passion, the moment frozen, ephemeral yet eternal. Even at the moment of union she understood instinctively that the instant, the emotion, could not be captured; knew, too, that ever after the memory of that instant would call her back. It was the distillation of life, a pulse quivering in her sundered loins.

  The beginning called to the future.

  Later, she cradled him.

  ‘What did you say? Just now?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  What will happen to us?

  He had thought the words but had not realised he had actually spoken them. He stared at the shadowed recesses of the wooden stable. The future was a shadow far darker than anything he could see here. It lay between them like a curse.

  Through a crack in the planks Jason watched in angry trepidation as Alison went out into the cool darkness and made her way across to the shed outside which Blake was sitting, his back against the door.

  It didn’t matter that he had agreed to her doing it; it didn’t matter that he knew she was acting only as a decoy so that he could get Mura away before they did anything to him; what mattered was that she was his woman and he was jealous.

  He visualised Alison’s smile as she talked to Blake (smiling at Blake Gallagher!) and it was all he could do to stay where he was. Her smile … He could have killed for it.

  ‘What you doin’ out here?’ Blake made a special effort to be friendly.

  ‘Came to give Jason his supper.’

  ‘’Ow come ’e gets special treatment?’

  ‘Because when he came here first you wouldn’t let him eat with you.’

  ‘That were years ago. Any case, it weren’t ’im. Were yon black bastard. And now you’ve fed him,’ he asked, ‘what you doin’, eh?’

  ‘I thought I’d go for a stroll before I went back inside, get some air, but now I’m not so sure.’ An exaggerated shudder. ‘It’s dark out there.’

  ‘You don’t want to go wanderin’ off,’ he told her. ‘You never knows what you might meet up with.’

  ‘It’s hot in the house,’ she said.

  And no-one of her own age to talk to. She was—how old?—fifteen? Thereabouts. No wonder she wanted to come out of the house in the evening. Blake thought, maybe the old man knew what he was talking about, after all.

  With visions of spreading acres before his eyes he said, ‘Wan’ me to come with you?’

  ‘Would you?’ Eyes round.

  ‘Reckon the blackie’s safe enough locked in there. He ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

  He stood. He was taller than Jason and more powerful. His skin was stained dark by the sun, his brown eyes looked at her admiringly. She felt nothing for him at all.

  ‘We’ll stroll a little,’ Blake told her, arm around her shoulders as he smiled down at her.

  It was all she could do not to draw away from him, agonisingly conscious of Jason watching them from the shadows.

  She smiled back at him. ‘My father may be watching.’

  He grunted with displeasure but withdrew his arm, all the same, and she breathed a little easier.

  ‘Let’s stroll, then,’ she said.

  As soon as they were out of sight Jason moved out of the stable and across the patch of bare ground. He stopped by the shed door, mouth close to the wood.

  ‘Mura …?’

  ‘What is it?’ Barely audible through the wood.

  ‘I’m opening the door. We’re taking off.’

  He lifted the bar; the hinges creaked as the door swung open and Jason flinched, looking over his shoulder to see whether Blake Gallagher might be bearing down on him.

  Mura’s dark eyes gleamed out of the darkness.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Away from here.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Of course now. You want to wait until they can see us?’

  But even after all these years Mura’s fears of the night were not so easily dispelled. He hesitated and Jason was suddenly blazingly angry. Here he was, putting his own neck in danger, only to come up with this sort of nonsense.

  ‘We stay around here they’ll hang you.’

  He did not think that Asta Matlock would allow such a thing but never mind.

  ‘They know I helped you, they may hang me, too!’

  Mura’s heavy lips worked uncertainly, his eyes examined the night for demons.

  ‘I’m coming …’

  Alison and Blake had gone off towards the creek; Jason and Mura headed the other way, up the hill and along the crest of the range. Gradually the valley fell away behind them. The stars-bright sky looked down on a sleeping world.

  Jason paused and glanced back. Nothing showed of the settlement they had just left: neither roofs nor buildings nor lights. They might have been the only people in the world.

  He thought of Alison down there with Blake; forced himself to put such thoughts out of his mind. It would be a long time before he saw her again; in the meantime, he had more pressing matters to think about.

  He turned to Mura. ‘Let’s get moving. We’ve got a long way to go.’

  EIGHTEEN

  The mangrove swamp stretched for miles along the coastal flats that separated the plains of the interior from the coast. To the north the low ground ended in a line of hills but here the shore seemed to breathe with the movement of the tides, water and mud mingling and often indistinguishable in salt-scoured channels where crabs, tiny fish and wading birds were the only inhabitants. A couple of miles from the head of the gulf a narrow creek ran inland, drying at low water to a series of muddy pools no more than a few yards across. Everywhere was the smell of silt, salt and decay under a sky so vast that it, like the swamp itself, seemed endless.

  At the mouth of the creek a few shabby buildings had been erected, little more than shacks, at the end of a mud-churned track rutted with wheel marks and thick with bullock dung. The buildings were Port Wakefield and the track ran inland to Burra Burra, the huge copper mine several days into the interior. The creek, unpromising though it was, was the point at which the copper ore was loaded for trans-shipment to Adelaide a hundred miles down the coast.

  Jason and Mura had come to
Port Wakefield through the desolation of mangrove flats that fringed Wild Horse Plains. The journey from Bungaree had taken them several days, a large portion of which they had spent hiding: from settlers likely to shoot them on sight, from bands of aborigines whose territory this had been before the arrival of white men.

  At last, half-starved and close to exhaustion, they had arrived. They stood at the edge of the grey water and looked through the last fringe of mangrove at the solitary barge that lay propped upright on the mud half a mile to the south. Around the barge a number of drays was assembled while hoists hauled heavy sacks over the side.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Mura wondered.

  ‘Loading the ore to take it south to Adelaide.’

  ‘What will they do with it when they get it there?’

  ‘Turn it into copper.’

  The idea that it was possible to take sand out of the earth and turn it into a metal hard enough to cut was something that Mura could not imagine. It was incomprehensible, like all the other incomprehensible things he had seen since he had been brought into the world of the white man.

  ‘Why have we come here?’ he asked.

  Mura had followed Jason here unquestioningly, knowing that Blake would have killed him had he stayed behind. Why not? After helping Jason to escape from the clan, he no longer had a home, not even a way of life. He was like the tidal fringe on which he now stood: neither water nor land. He no longer knew where his home was.

  ‘To get a job on that barge, if I can arrange it.’

  ‘Where will it take us?’

  ‘To Adelaide.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘To Kapunda. I shall get work in Kapunda.’

  Another meaningless concept: the idea of work as the kuinyo understood it.

  ‘You stay here,’ Jason instructed him. ‘I’ll go and see the master of the barge.’

  He walked out of the shelter of the mangroves and crossed the mud to the circle of drays that surrounded the beached vessel. Scrollwork about her stern announced her name to be Tulip, of Port Adelaide.

  He ignored the curious looks he received from the waiting drovers. There was a blue-jerseyed man standing at the rail of the vessel, supervising a lift bulging with sacks as it came swinging and creaking over the side and disappeared into what was presumably the hold. He was the man Jason wanted.

  It was obviously a bad time to talk to him but Jason doubted there would ever be a good one.

  ‘Mister …’

  The man ignored him.

  ‘Mister…’

  ‘Piss off. Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  ‘Need a deck hand?’

  The man’s eyes remained fixed on the sacks as they swung in-board. ‘Half my crew gone off to the mine and he asks if I need a deck hand. What I need is an experienced man, not some copper bunny that don’t know port from starboard.’

  ‘I was deck hand on the Kitty,’ Jason said, lying.

  The man looked at him then. ‘The Kitty was lost years ago. Where you been since?’

  ‘Working on one of the sheep runs.’

  ‘What you doing here, then?’

  ‘Time to move on.’

  ‘Why not up to the Burra Burra? That’s where everyone else’s headed. There’s money there: more’n you’ll ever find here.’

  Jason shrugged, not wanting to leave a trail by mentioning Kapunda.

  ‘If I find out you killed someone,’ the man warned, ‘I’ll hang you meself.’

  So he had the job, then. But.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ Jason said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There’s two of us.’

  It proved a trouble-free journey. The master of the Tulip was an easy-going man for all his ferocious talk and had raised no objection even when he found that the second man was a black. The gulf was calm and it took only three days to complete the journey.

  ‘Now for Kapunda,’ Jason said.

  It took another week to get to the mining town. Nothing much had changed. The new chimney was now complete but apart from that things remained as they had been. The same ragged urchins picked at the ore tables, the same miners crunched hard-soled along the dirt streets, the same smoke and fumes poured into the air.

  Jason went to Lang’s house and knocked on the door. The same forbidding servant opened to him.

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘Stefan Lang.’

  Before the woman could say another word she was pushed to one side as Stefan hurled himself at his friend.

  *

  ‘My father won’t let you stay in Kapunda.’

  ‘It was arranged I should come here to learn mining and watch out for the Matlocks’ interests in the mine.’

  ‘That was before you ran away. He’ll never agree when he finds out about that.’

  ‘That was the agreement. What difference does it make how I got here?’

  ‘Because he never wanted to keep to the agreement in the first place. Now he’s got an excuse not to.’

  ‘Then I’ll get a job at Kapunda Main.’

  ‘You don’t know my father. You’re lucky he’s away. You’ll be safe for a few days but you won’t be able to stay anywhere in Kapunda once he’s back. He’ll have you sent back straightaway, you try that.’

  ‘But they would have killed Michael if we’d stayed.’

  Stefan shook his head. ‘My father won’t care about that. He thinks the blacks should be killed. Why don’t you go to Burra Burra? There’ll be work up there for both of you. You said you can read and write? We’ll fix you up with a job in the office. That way you’ll learn all about how a mine operates.’

  ‘Can you really do that?’

  ‘Why not? My father’s a very influential man.’

  ‘But why should he do it for me?’

  Stefan winked, grinning. ‘It’s amazing how things can be arranged.’

  ‘And Michael?’

  ‘He’ll be able to get a job, too: above ground or below, it doesn’t matter. There’s plenty available. I’ll write a letter to Challoner.’

  ‘Who’s Challoner?’

  ‘The mine accountant. The real boss is a man called Henry Ayers but he’s based in Adelaide and I don’t know him.’

  If Kapunda had seemed busy the Burra Burra mine was ten times more so. The workings sprawled all over the hillside and down in the valley the miners had built their homes along the banks of the creek. The sheoaks that had previously covered the lower slopes of the hills had been cleared to provide fuel for the furnaces, and the whole district, it seemed, rang with the sound of hammers, the rumble of engines and metal-wheeled trolleys, the yelling of men, the shrill wail of whistles. Over everything hung a pall of acrid smoke.

  Challoner said, ‘Have you ever worked for a mining company before?’ His lips were drawn together disapprovingly, as wrinkled as prunes.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘I can’t think what Mr Lang was thinking of.’

  Once again the mine accountant picked up the letter that Jason had brought and stared mournfully at it.

  Dear Mr Challoner

  In his absence I am writing on my father’s behalf to request that you find a position at the Burra Burra mine for Mr Jason Hallam. Mr Hallam is well known to me as a conscientious and loyal person. In my opinion he will be an asset to the workings of your office.

  I have the honour to be, sir, yr most obt servant

  ‘Can’t imagine what he was thinking of,’ he said again.

  Jason did not look at the letter. There was no need; he knew it by heart. He and Stefan had spent the best part of an afternoon concocting it, copying it painstakingly from a number of other letters that Stefan had found in his father’s study.

  Challoner rubbed the tip of his nose with his quill pen. ‘I suppose it’s all right,’ he conceded reluctantly. His voice scraped like a quill drawn across paper.

  It had been dark for over an hour yet behind the accountant’s table jacketed figures still bent attentively acros
s high, sloping desks. Pens scratched. Everywhere piles of papers—orders, invoices, sales dockets—lay in apparent confusion, illuminated by a wan and guttering lantern that provided the only light. The air was stale, redolent of dust, ink, paper, an infinity of boredom and routine.

  Jason thought, I stay here I’ll go mad.

  But it was a start, at least, and as Stefan had said, a man who kept his eyes open would be able to learn more about mining in six months than he could hope to pick up in a lifetime of manual work.

  Dubiously Challoner eyed his sturdy shoulders, his work-toughened hands. ‘You’re familiar with normal office routines?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Challoner.’

  Of course, Mr Challoner. Call me a liar, Mr Challoner.

  ‘Where did you gain your experience?’

  ‘In Hobart.’

  Check on that, Jason thought.

  Another sigh. ‘You will need to get out around the mine, pick up the loading dockets, sort out the drovers before they leave. They can be a burden. Have little notion of proper accounting records …’

  The thin voice scratched on; the thought that he might be able to escape from the prison of the office made Jason happier.

  ‘I can handle the drovers, Mr Challoner.’

  Once again the accountant eyed Jason’s sturdy body, his determined and pugnacious jaw.

  ‘Perhaps you can. I certainly hope so.’ He reflected. ‘Seven shillings and sixpence a week,’ he said. ‘Your hours are seven until seven, twenty minutes break at dinner time, you are required to live on the mine, no alcohol at any time permitted on the mine property. Start tomorrow.’

  Seven and six. Stefan had told him some of the face workers earned as much as thirty shillings a shift. Learning about mining clearly came at a price.

  ‘Where do I sleep tonight?’

  Challoner eyed him coldly, dithering no longer. They were now employer and employee and he clearly welcomed the chance to show Jason that their relationship had changed.

  ‘Tonight you sleep where you like. Your employment, I repeat, starts at seven tomorrow morning. Do not be late.’

  NINETEEN