by Maeve Friel
‘Robert tells me your father’s name was not on the muster, William,’ she said.
‘No,’ said William. ‘The officer said there is no one in the whole country with the name of Spears.’
‘Arrah, you wouldn’t believe that. There are hundreds of people not on any of their old lists. They might have spelt his name wrong. He’ll show up one of these days, take my word for it.’
William shook his head. ‘I don’t know any more, Mrs Traylor. I feel like giving up.’
Peggy put her hands on her hips and glared at him.
‘What sort of talk is that? That’s what the System wants you to do, wanted all of us to do, just shut up and ask for nothing. You have every right to know what has become of your father. And he has every right to know what has become of you.’
Annie nodded enthusiastically. ‘Mrs Traylor is right, William. We must not give up until we find him.’
A loud explosion of laughter came from the kitchen.
‘Have you talked to the drovers to see if any of them ever came across him?’ asked Peggy.
‘Of course,’ said Annie, ‘and it is always the same. Nobody has ever heard of him.’
‘Now, darling dear, don’t give up hope. People are always being moved around from one settlement to another. That way they think the men will have no time to hatch plots and set up a rebellion against the whole stinking system. Sure, I was never more than a couple of months in the one place myself until I got my ticket-of-leave and came out here to Parramatta with the bould Robert. I suppose they thought an Irishwoman like me would contaminate all around me with my opinions.’
There was a shuffling noise from under the veranda.
‘What is that?’ said Annie, as an awkward-looking beast blundered into view. It was like a small bear and yet quite unlike a bear, with a blunt snout and short thick legs. The land was full of strange wild beasts, weirder than anything ever dreamt of in England. Every day huge flocks of kangaroos bounded across the dry brush. Only the day before, down by the river, she had seen a creature that looked as if it was made up of parts of a whole lot of other animals for it had a furry body but a beak for a mouth and feet like a duck. It laid eggs, but then suckled its young! And now here was something else just as odd.
Peggy smiled at Annie’s startled face. ‘Have you never seen a wombat? They tunnel around under the ground. God only knows why it’s on the move at this time of the night. And the horses are very restless too. Maybe it’s just this terrible heat getting to them.’ She stood up and stretched. ‘Now come inside and get a bite to eat, William, for you must be starving. One of the new cattlemen might know something about your father. Annie, you come along too.’
The cattle drovers were gathered in a circle around the kitchen table, playing cards. Nobody looked up as they came in. There was a vague smell of poteen, the hooch that Peggy made with maize, and the air was almost blue with the smoke from the men’s pipes.
Robert Traylor, seated at the top end of the table, was half the size of his wife but there was not a man in New South Wales who would have made a joke about it. Robert was small but tough and could lay a man out flat on the ground if he had a mind to. As he said himself, after his experiences on the voyage from England under the notorious villain, Donald Trail, he could fight his own corner. He was a fairly rich man now, with many men working for him, but he still preferred to sit in his kitchen with his assigned convict workers rather than lord it in a parlour full of imported carpets and overstuffed armchairs.
As the door opened and Peggy led William and Annie in, he looked up from his hand of cards.
‘I’m just getting a bit of grub for William,’ Peggy explained.
‘Come in, come in,’ said Robert, ‘pull up a couple of chairs. I expect you’re very disappointed, Annie, that William had no luck in Sydney.’
Annie nodded.
‘It’s a rum business, to be sure, but those lists are only as good as the men who make them. We’ll find him, wherever he is.’
Peggy turned around from the range.
‘Did any of youse men ever run into a John Spears from England?’ she asked the card-players. ‘He’s the father of these young ones.’
‘What’s he doing out here?’ one of the men grunted, throwing his cards face-down on the table.
‘They said he passed a forged note,’ said William.
‘Forgery? Good on him, mate,’ said one of the other men as he shuffled the cards and dealt out the pack again.
‘Have you heard of him? He’s been here for about five years. John Spears.’ Peggy repeated.
‘No, I don’t remember ever coming across a forger,’ said the first man.
‘He was a tanner, from Shropshire,’ Annie said. Both she and William had long since stopped telling people their father was innocent. Innocent or guilty, all the transports had suffered the same. ‘He used to have a blond beard.’
‘If he was Irish, I might have heard of him,’ said another, swallowing the last mouthful of the poteen in his glass and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, ‘but, in any case, if he’s been here as long as you say, he could well have got his ticket-of-leave, and will be working for himself. I hear there’s men heading further west and north now, taking up new grants of land.’ He pushed himself back from the table and balanced his chair on its back two legs, studying his hand of cards.
‘I saw men and wagons this morning,’ said Robert, ‘driving sheep up the valley. I reckon they had a couple of hundred ewes at the very least.’ He abruptly rose from the table, walked over to the open window and sniffed the hot air. The horses were still nervously circling the corral.
‘They seem edgy tonight, Peg,’ he said, ‘did you see anybody out there? Anyone moving about? Bushrangers?’
‘No more shadows than any other night,’ his wife replied, ‘but something is up with the poor beasts to be sure. C’mon out a minute, all of ye.’
Peggy led the four men outside. William and Annie followed behind. A new noise had started up, like the sound you heard if you picked up one of the enormous conches on the beach and put it to your ear, William thought, though it was magnified a thousand times greater than that. It was the sound of air rushing, a hot high wind fanning the whole continent.
‘There’s the trouble,’ shouted Peggy, suddenly pointing towards a distant red glow up on the ridge above the valley. ‘May God protect us. That’s the last thing we needed.’
‘What is it?’ asked Annie.
‘The bush is on fire,’ said Robert Traylor, grimly, ‘and it’s blowing this way. We’ll need to move fast if we’re to save the farm and the dwelling. Those blazes travel like the devil.’ The farmer’s voice was quite steady but William could sense the anxiety welling up from his stomach. Even in the few months he had been with the Traylors, William had heard stories about bushfires, about how they engulfed everything in their path, advancing like a wall of death across the landscape, devouring trees, scrub, fences, bridges, buildings, farm animals. They could rage for days, reducing areas hundreds of miles across to a parched black lifeless desert, undoing the efforts of years and years.
Even before her husband had finished speaking, Peggy was racing back towards the house to fetch her children.
‘Get up, get up,’ she was shouting. ‘There’s a fire up on the ridge.’
Men began to come running out of the long hut where they slept, pulling on their shirts, asking what needed to be done.
‘Which way is it travelling?’
‘Is there a break between it and us?’
‘For God’s sake, will someone do something to calm those horses!’
In the dark heat of the night, all peace was shattered.
William glanced at Annie. She had turned completely pale and was staring with wide panicky eyes at the distant wall of fire up on the hills.
‘Oh William,’ she murmured. ‘Not a fire, not here too.’
She had a sudden heart-breaking flashback of the burntout shell of the h
ouse where her mother and sister had perished and the hump of red earth on the grave where they lay far away in Ludlow. She remembered too that other night when she had looked down on the blazing effigy of Napoleon and the hate-filled faces outside Dinham House. Had she and William survived all they had been through only to lose their lives in another fire?
Standing in the coppery moonlight, Annie could see a curtain of hot air shimmering a long way off. The heat dissolved everything, turning solid rock to fluid insubstantial waves of light. The high dry wind fanned the fire, coaxing it down the valley. Even in the short time she had been watching, she could see it had drawn nearer, growing larger all the time as the flames spread from treetop to treetop. The sky on the horizon blazed red and gold. Clouds of birds flapped urgently overhead; a herd of kangaroos fled past, their stamping feet sending vibrations through the earth like tribal drums.
Suddenly, Peggy Traylor thrust a screaming baby into Annie’s arms.
‘Come on,’ she said, dragging her away by the elbow, ‘you take Seanie. I’ll carry the other two. We’ve got to get you all across the river.’
Years before when Robert Traylor had been given his first grant of land on the Parramatta, he and his work-gangs had cleared a broad strip either side of the bank and dug the ashes of the timber into the soil as a fertiliser. Now that narrow strip along the river was their only chance of halting the fire in its trail of destruction, a natural break which the raging cliff of fire could not cross.
Annie ran after the fleeing figures. Looming over her, drovers on horseback whooped and yelled as they drove their precious cattle down to the bank, breaking and trampling underfoot the tall stems of maize that were almost ready for harvesting. The river was deep and wide where it flowed through the Traylor land, so wide and so deep it made the rivers Teme and Corve of Ludlow seem no more than creeks. This was not a place any man would have chosen to cross with three hundred head of cattle, fifteen horses and all the members of his household but there was no alternative. The panicky beasts bellowed and tried to climb over one another as the men steered them towards the black water.
Annie looked back over her shoulder. The fire was getting even closer. The smell of smoke caught her throat. The air was thick with tiny smuts of soot like flying insects which clung to her skin as she ran through them. The baby she was carrying coughed and sobbed but Annie just clutched him even tighter to her breast and ran on. She had lost sight of Peggy and of William. All along the river bank, men were screaming, hitting the water with long sticks, driving the wild-eyed terrified animals forward.
A couple of hundred yards down river from them, the party that Robert Traylor had seen that morning trekking up the valley were busy rounding up their ewes. Two tense collie dogs crouched low on the ground, their ears alert for every command, every whistle. The sheep bunched together until they were cornered in between the riverbank and the waggons pulled up behind. One of the trekkers had dragged a long sheet of wood down from one of the waggons and slipped it into the river. As Annie drew nearer, she saw Peggy handing him the two tiny bundles that were the other Traylor children.
‘Wait for us,’ she screamed, running awkwardly across the dry uneven ground with the baby bouncing painfully against her, but the man had already pushed off from the bank. He was standing up, steering his makeshift raft with a long pole. The raft bounced and rolled and drifted downstream. Annie reached the bank and stood beside Peggy, who took the baby from her arms and put a hand around her shoulder.
‘You go across next with little Seanie,’ the Irishwoman said to her.
‘Will you not come with us too?’ asked Annie. She could not bear the thought that she would be all alone again in the world if anything happened to Peggy Traylor.
‘Not yet, darling. I’ll go back and help the men with the animals once I know all you children are safe. Don’t worry about me. Just keep an eye on my babies for me and I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’
They watched the raft’s uncertain path until it finally reached the opposite bank and the ferryman lifted the children on to dry land.
‘Thanks be to God for that man, whoever he is,’ Peggy murmured.
Later, John and Annie Spears would compete to tell the end of the story. He said he had felt the first drop of rain fall upon his cheek as he pushed the raft off from the bank on its return journey. He looked up at the sky and the high black clouds gathering behind the full moon.
‘Alleluia, thank God for rain,’ he thought, rowing hard for the shore where a small girl with a halo of gold hair had joined the mother of the children he had just set down. As he drew closer, he fancied for a moment he had seen her before although he had only come up the Parramatta valley that day on his way west to the land he had been granted.
Kezia, he thought, she has the look of Kezia about her, and felt once more the pang of heartbreak that the wife he loved so much and had had to leave behind in England had never once replied to his letters.
Annie watched the man rowing furiously towards the bank. There was something familiar about him, she thought, something that made her feel briefly happy and unafraid. Behind her, she heard a roar go up from the stockmen as the clouds burst and the rain began to fall, huge warm drops rolling down her cheeks like tears. The river danced. The ground steamed and a thousand frogs suddenly broke into defiant chorus. William raced past her, shouting, ‘Annie, Annie, come on.’
Down at the river edge, some of the waggoners had knelt down to steady the raft as the man who had punted the Traylor children to safety reached the bank. One of them held out his shepherd’s crook and the man seized it and leapt on to the bank.
Over the chaotic croaking of the frogs, the bellowing of the cattle, and the bleating of bewildered sheep, Annie could hear the man with the blond beard shouting, ‘Annie! William!’
And as her brother flew into the man’s open arms, Annie knew she was finally surfacing from a nightmare that had gone on far too long. She hurtled towards her father, with warm rain-drops coursing down her face. The moon hung overhead like a lantern behind a veil of rain.
