‘Nothing,’ he brought out again.
Frances decided she might have been overdoing the classes, and knowing how important it was to stop the minute there was the least boredom or restlessness, brought out the paints again, not objecting when Jason once more drew futuristic rivers and mountains. He soon got tired, though, and actually asked for a sleep.
‘But not in my room, in that hammock.’
‘That’s H,’ said Frances, ‘the letter shaped like a chair.’
Jason nodded, which was better than ‘nothing’ but not enough encouragement to go on with the impromptu instruction. She helped him to the hammock. This time she took no risk, she waited till he slept. She felt quite confident about this.
And perhaps she was right and Jason wakened later ... or perhaps the fraud lay doggo as he had before until she went away again. But she still couldn’t understand it. She hadn’t been far off, so how could he not be there when she came back barely twenty minutes later? Especially when he was gone from a garden so close and so visible from the house?
She dreaded raising an alarm a second time, yet this was something she could not delay, play around with. Her first encounter was Jim, and she babbled out her discovery, tears not far off.
He nodded sympathetically and soothed, ‘This time he can’t have gone far.’
They looked around for evidence of a laboriously dragged small leg, but on the smooth lawn nothing would have been brushed or flattened, and Frances was not really surprised when there were no signs.
Searching beside Jim, Burn West’s words after the last disappearance came starkly to Frances.
‘He’s in danger of being carried off ... kidnapped would be cloak and dagger ... less dramatic and more honest would be that Jason could be taken away.’
Had that happened now?
‘Here’s the young imp!’ called Jim by the river, and racing to his side Frances saw Jason doubled up in the red boat.
‘You wicked boy!’ she called in vast relief, completely forgetting her child psychology. ‘You’re not supposed to play in the boat!’
‘He looks more like he’s hiding in it,’ estimated Jim, laughing at the little secret figure.
Thanking the fencer, Frances went down the bank and plucked Jason out of the boat. ‘Why are you so bad?’ she cried.
‘Nothing.’
‘Oh, Jason, don’t answer nothing to France, tell France. Why did you pretend you were asleep again?’
‘Didn’t either. I was so asleep. Except not in this eye.’ Jason demonstrated the one-eyed sleep. ‘And I saw him in the awake eye. He was looking at me from up on the hill behind the trees. When he looked away again I came and hid in the red boat from him.’
‘You’re telling fibs, Jason, not just stories, big untruths. It’s very naughty of you to make up such bad things.’—That ‘France’ and ‘Berne’ of Jason’s had hurt no one, Frances thought, but Jason’s father would be annoyed at this new flight of quite malicious fancy.
‘’Tis so true! He was looking down at me, and I don’t like him. I don’t want his gold.’
‘Oh—Mr. Trent.’ Frances spoke with relief.
‘Yes, that man.’
They were walking slowly back from the river now. Jim had returned to work.
Frances thought sensibly that if she was to consider Jason’s story, and after all a child, too, must be considered, then Burn West’s old mate certainly must be instructed not to scare them all like this a second time. But, she decided progressively, it must be Frances Peters who advised him of this, not Burn. Flushing vividly, she imagined the inevitable exchange of grins between the two men if Burn did the forbidding then later listened to a very amusing story that Trent had to relate.
‘Why don’t you like Mr. Trent?’ she found herself asking Jason unreasonably, unreasonable because you did not question an adult’s likes or dislikes, so why a child’s?
‘I don’t.’
‘He likes you.’
‘He doesn’t!’
‘Jason, you’re being difficult.’
‘I’d like to do some mountains,’ said Jason, changing the subject, ‘but inside my room.’
Jim came over to carry him into the house. As they went up to it Frances asked him, and she could not have explained why she did so: ‘Yesterday when we were at the panning, Jim, and you were in the field, were you talking to anyone?’
‘Thought you heard voices, eh? I do myself down at the river,’ Jim chuckled. ‘No, just me and the fence.’
‘And him,’ disliked Jason blackly. His little face showed clearly that he was going to be in a difficult mood.
When they got him to his room Frances made him comfortable, put paper and paints handy, then asked Sandra to pop in now and then while she slipped out for a while. She went to the garage and took out her small car. There was something she had to do.
She was going to Uplands to tell Trev to please, please, until things settled anyway, keep away from Jason. It was impolite, she knew, but she had no choice.
It was only some ten minutes along the road to Uplands. She got out at the gate to open it only to find it bolted. Evidently Trev was not stopping here, only ‘spinning’ out from Wagga Wagga, as Jim had said, which meant that Jason would have been story-telling today, the man would not have travelled that distance both yesterday as well as now.
About to give up and come back, possibly tax Jason, Frances suddenly knew she would not rest until she satisfied herself, so she left her car and walked up the long drive ... over half a mile, surely ... to the homestead. It proved much older than West of the River, though, of course, West was quite recent.
It was also undoubtedly not being lived in at all.
Frances just stood and stared at that last fact.
She knocked on the doors, even tried them. She walked round the house. After a while she came back to the front door, noting the dust around the doormat, other unmistakable signs of a substantial period of absence. There isn’t anyone here, she thought, and there hasn’t been. Not even briefly ‘spinning’ in and out. No one at all at Uplands.
She walked slowly and thoughtfully back to the car, got in, drove home.
She sat beside Jason who was still absorbed with the posters and she remained so quiet that at length he asked, ‘France, why are you looking at me like that?’
His little voice breaking in on the drift of her wonder startled her. For a moment she still stared at him. Then in supreme inspiration she retorted ‘Nothing’, received Jason’s shocked look ... then actually his delighted chuckle.
She laughed, too. It was all (or she was determined to make of it) a fuss over nothing.
But when the men told her at the evening meal that Burn would be back tomorrow she felt a vast relief.
CHAPTER SIX
Frances decided to say nothing to Burn about what had happened, though if the fencer mentioned Jason’s second disappearing act to his boss and West demanded an explanation she was aware that she must tell all. But she doubted if Jim would bring the subject up; like all the employees at West of the River he led a busy day-to-day existence, for country life always demanded that. Then seen, too, in retrospect the whole thing seemed rather trivial and childish. Just a simple instance of a naughty little boy having a lark.— (If deeper down in Frances she had other thoughts as well, she succeeded in putting them aside.)
It was also less embarrassing to Frances to adopt this attitude, since a full report to Burn would have made her look a fool in his eyes. Someone who could not judge a friend from an interloper. Someone without discernment. So Frances decided to keep everything quiet, and as Trev Trent was away in Wagga Wagga it could be weeks, a month, before he encountered Burn, and by that time the matter become one of such small interest that with luck it might never be brought up at all. Trev might not grin, ‘Yes, I met Frances, but she gave me the brush-off. You certainly drilled her well, Burn.’ The dislike Jason had taken to him need not be recounted. The little boy’s hiding away in the bo
at from him, which she felt sure now must be based entirely on Jason’s imagination, could be forgotten.
Fortunately Burn West, apart from a casual ‘How have things been going?’ for which he did not wait a reply, did not delve. He had brought things with him, things he obviously was as anxious to open as Jason and Frances were anxious to see.—Though Jason characteristically pretended no interest at all.
The little boy stood apart as Frances and Burn pored over his first correspondence lesson; drawing each other’s attention to some aspect of it, but ... cunningly ... never Jason’s. But even then the boxes of bright pencils, the chalks, the small blackboard did not win him, though when Burn narrowed his eyes significantly at Frances and they both moved casually out of the room they smiled as they heard his clumsy little leg dragging behind his agile one as he tried to hot-foot it to the table to gloat at the things that awaited there. They watched through the half-closed door as he touched the piles of new exercise books, the reading primers. His fingers on the pencil boxes and rubbers were almost reverent.
‘Here,’ whispered Frances joyfully to Burn, ‘is a quick brain.’
‘Yes, indeed, he’s his father’s own son.’
Frances glanced at Burn at that, but she did not say anything. She thought it, though. She thought: Where does his mother ... and Burn West’s wife ... come in? She could not help feeling troubled over it; critical, too, of the high self-estimation in which West held himself; appalled at the total exclusion of the other origin of small Jason. The woman, she had always sensed, came somewhat closer to the child. Law upheld that principle. Most people felt it. Frances believed she did. There had been psychology courses during her teacher’s training, welfare lectures in her nursing years, and she remembered acutely that most of the accent had been placed on the mother’s role, even a mother considered less a mother in some eyes.
Burn West’s eyes?
They decided not to hurry with Jason. On Burn’s suggestion they agreed to let him come to the books himself. They spent that afternoon examining the wheat crop, for harvest time was now not very far ahead, and in four weeks, more, less, barn doors would be opening, headers chugging out, then the iron print of tractors biting deep into the ground.
The next few months, Burn explained as Jason and France sat in the station jeep beside him, Jason’s little leg straight out in front, belonged to the wheatmen. Wool, fat lambs, dairy, rice, wine might abound in this growing Utopia, but right now wheat only was king, the coronation was fast approaching, and it was time to look over the scene, particularly check the moisture content of the crop, for stripping, if not done at the right moment, might produce a grain at more moisture level than the authorities allowed. Burn had his own portable Baldwin meter with him. He said he intended collecting samples and testing them on the spot.
Wheat was a flush crop, he went on. Millions of bushels could appear across the country almost overnight. It was also unpredictable. Ten years ago drought had reduced the harvest drastically, but this year the problem was not the amount but the disciplining of the amount. Many of the stations ... not West of the River, West had other irons in the fire, more eggs in the basket ... had sown their biggest acreage for years. If the weather held, and it looked like holding, there might be a record of millions of bushels. And too much. Even though here there were the most modern and best equipped grain terminals in existence, importers who knew the markets had issued a warning and there still could be not room enough.
‘It’s an incredible jigsaw,’ Burn sighed, running the jeep down a thin channel between crops. ‘I thank a wise father continually for advising more than the golden grain.’
‘And yet the world is hungry...’
‘Key men haven’t reached a solution to that yet,’ he said gravely. He pulled up, got out. Frances watched as he got to work with his moisture meter. First he collected samples, then he tested them.
When he came back to the jeep he shrugged, ‘It’s reaching thirteen. That’s too much. But it will be all right by the time the grain elevators are ready.’
‘How will the authorities know? Surely a portable machine like this wouldn’t be used in bulk handling?’
‘The silo operators are equipped with hygrometers, which measure moisture. If a wheat farmer wants to argue, an operator has only to stand one of the hygrometers in a sample bag and that’s it. But don’t think’ ... a grin ... ‘it’s a pitched battle. Once the harvest begins tempers simmer down and differences disappear.’
‘And wheat is king?’
‘Wheat is king.’
Burn now left the fields and went miles in from the direction of the river to show his passengers the irrigation scheme. The water of life, he called it. They were shown a section of the Murrumbidgee’s irrigation area’s main canal, which extended some ninety miles from the Berembed Weir. ‘During winter,’ Burn explained, ‘the main water supply is drained to permit maintenance to be carried out.’
‘You wouldn’t need water in the winter, I suppose.’
‘Mainly. I never need it,’ he said gratefully. ‘But ah, what a difference it’s made to the overall Riverina. When the fruit harvest is on I’ll have to take you and the sonno to a Yanco orchard to see just how big and beautiful a peach can grow. Grapes for drying, too. Every other crop you can dream of.’
He showed Frances the Dethridge meter that measured the water supplied to a block.
‘Does anyone cheat?’ she asked.
‘Pirates are not unknown,’ he smiled, ‘landowners who try to stop their meters recording by jamming a stick through the wheel to prevent it rotating.’
The jeep was winding its way to the road again now, but not, noted Frances, the road back to West of the River. She seemed to recognise the route, though, and when Burn indicated Seven Fields, his boyhood home, she remembered this man waving a lazy arm in its direction on the occasion of her first journey here.
When they got to the gate she got out without being prompted and opened up, waiting for the car to pass through to shut the gate again.
‘You’re catching on,’ he praised.
‘I’m not that much of a townie,’ she defended, though ... later ... she wished she could have claimed that privilege of ‘townie’.
The young McKinneys who were leasing Seven Fields came out of the old homestead to greet them. Susan McKinney (a pleasant-faced woman with several children hanging on to her as they looked shyly at the adults but eagerly at Jason) wanted to serve tea at once, but Burn refused, saying he wanted to go to Great Rock as well this afternoon. But at least Susan brought out lemonade and while the men conferred had a few words with Frances. The boy and girl were intrigued with Jason’s leg, especially when he allowed them to write their names on it.
‘Can I have a plaster on my leg?’ appealed Ian McKinney of his mother. Susan McKinney, getting in as much as she could in the practised way of the countrywoman, brushed him aside with, ‘Only a broken leg can have plaster.’
Fortunately his father caught him on the way to the ladder propped against the barn, had a few words which he also directed above Ian’s head to Ian’s mother.
‘Well,’ accepted Susan McKinney, ‘I expect I deserved that. Kids! Tell me, how are you going with yours?’
‘Slowly. We’ve received our first correspondence lesson.’
‘Good. Later on perhaps the three can get together.’
‘I’d like that. Children do better with a little competition. Are there small ones, too, at Great Rock?’
‘No, a reluctant old bachelor is running it for Burn, and by reluctant I mean that he’s tired of the land. He’s only hanging on until Burn finds a replacement, a fine family home at Great Rock. Much later, so more convenient than this one.’ Susan sounded wistful.
‘Why didn’t you take it in preference to Seven Fields?’
‘It wasn’t available for lease. For some reason Burn was keeping it. He may change his mind after Matt Gibson gets out. Matt lives in the lodge and doesn’t use the homestead
. Such a waste!’
Susan was the happy informative type, and it occurred to Frances that here, anyway, she could probe without appearing to be probing and probably receive answers—answers she often felt she could do with. But the memory of Burn West’s scornful face as he had anticipated just this stopped her, and at that moment Burn returned to the jeep, waved goodbye to the McKinneys and moved down the drive again. Once more there was the gate ritual, and then some twenty miles further the ritual again, but this time the drive into Great Rock.
There was a big rock beside the homestead, in fact the house almost touched it. It was a comfortable house, and though the gardens were not attended, it had a promise of beauty once things were put in order.
When he pulled up, Burn West stayed where he was a long moment, just looking at the house. Then, rather to Frances’ surprise, for he had not spoken to Jason at Seven Fields regarding the property, he turned and said a little tentatively ... tentative? Burn West? ... ‘Well, sonno, what do you think of that?’
Jason was tired; after all, he had seen quite a lot this afternoon. He did not say ‘Nothing’... thank goodness he seemed to be getting over that ... but he still said actually nothing. He just sat and didn’t reply.
Burn began drawing his attention to the house. To the rock behind it. To little things about it that he magnified to endeavour to interest and intrigue the little boy. Then, rather abruptly, he got out of the jeep, took Jason up in his arms and carried him to the house.
For a few moments Frances remained where she was, puzzled at Burn West’s eagerness ... one could almost say anxiety ... for the child to see the house.
‘Look, Jason,’ she could hear Burn’s voice, ‘this is a fine verandah. On a summer’s day you can ...’ The voice drifted off as Burn bore the child inside.
Frances got out of the jeep and followed them in. She followed the direction of Burn’s voice, still pointing out, still acclaiming, while Jason...
While Jason barely nodded sleepily in his arms.
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