Beyond the Black Stump (13 page)

“Real?”

“Do you really have cars like that?” She pointed to the long, flowing lines of a big convertible in a glamorous setting.

He studied the picture. “I guess so,” he said after a minute.

“Don’t you know?”

“It was just trying to remember,” he said. “I’d say that’s about right. Sometimes an artist might exaggerate, make it look longer than it really is. No, I’d say that’s about right for an Olds.”

She studied the picture for a moment or so longer, and then leafed the pages through slowly, looking at the television sets, the electric toasters, the electric blankets, the brightly coloured bedspreads. The advertisements, designed to catch the attention of a population accustomed to discount their advertising, were positively dazzling to her. She put the
Post
down reluctantly, afraid that she was being rude to her host. “You do have the most lovely magazines,” she said.

He was a little surprised at the note of yearning in her voice, because these articles were normal to him; he liked the
Post
for the articles and stories, but he paid little attention to the advertisements. “Would you like to borrow some of them?” he asked.

She withdrew a little. “Oh no. You’ve got nothing else to read.”

“I think the boys have read most of these,” he said. “There’s a fresh batch comes in each week with the mail.” He wanted her to have them very much, and her sincerity in not wanting to deprive them of their reading pleased him. They were obliged to the Laragh people for doing their washing; if now they could give pleasure to this girl it would be something in return. The
Post
was his own property, but there were many others on the table. He called through to
the office tent, “Hey, Hank? You finished with the September
Cosmopolitan
, if I lend it to Mollie?”

“Sure,” said Hank. He appeared in the mess tent. “Look, she can take these others, too.”

She could not avoid their generosity, nor did she really want to; there was little to read at Laragh but the books she bought herself or borrowed from David Cope. The Americans made up a bundle of about a dozen magazines for her and put them in the Laragh jeep, and her thanks were more evident in her gleaming eyes, her raised colour, and her slight excitement than in her words. Stanton, pleased himself at her pleasure, became aware that he was talking to a very lovely girl, a lovelier girl than he had seen in Hazel during his vacation.

Supper in the mess tent with the Americans was a new experience for Mollie, as it was for her mother. The Americans, however, were more accustomed to the change in manners than the Australians. “I guess we don’t eat the way you do,” said Stanton to the girl, laughing. “See, this is what you do with it. You lift it up, so, ’n put some butter in, ’n then the maple syrup, ’n then a bit of fried chicken, ’n a bit of bacon, ’n a hot biscuit and jam on the side. Then you just eat with a fork.”

She laughed with him. “Mayn’t I use my knife, Stan?”

“I guess you can,” he said generously. “Back home you wouldn’t use it the way people do here.”

“I’ll try and do it your way.”

“That’s a girl,” said Spencer Rasmussen. “Make believe you’re eating with Chinese and using chopsticks.”

“It’s not like that a bit,” she said. “I think it’s rather a nice way of eating. But we don’t eat sweet things with meat so much as this.”

“We eat more sweet things than you do, I’d say,” said Stanton. “That might have something to do with the climate back home. We don’t hardly ever get it hot like this, but it gets mighty cold in the winter in some parts of the States.”

“Is it very cold where you live?” she asked.

“Most winters we’d have a foot of snow for around three months,” he said. “A bad winter, or in a blizzard, it might be two feet.”

“Is that fun, or is it horrid?” she enquired. “I’ve never seen snow.”

“I’d say that probably depends on how old you are,” he said. “If you’re at High School or home from college on vacation, ’n go ski-ing or on sleigh rides, then it’s fun. I always liked the winter when I lived at home. I guess you’d get to look at it differently as you got older.”

In the hot outback, in a tent pitched on the red earth, it all seemed very distant, very beautiful, and as refreshing as the Americans’ ice cream. “You really do use sleighs to go about in, in the snow?” she asked. “With horses, with bells on the harness?”

“Only on the farms,” he said. “The main highways, they get the snow ploughed, ’n you change to your snow tyres for winter. But in the country districts they use sleighs still. Not much, but enough to find one for a ski-ing party when you want it.”

After supper the Regans started off for home, Mollie driving the jeep. It was a fine night with a rising moon, and the track, though faint, was clearly visible in the silvery light. Mrs. Regan and Mollie protested that they were perfectly capable of driving back to Laragh by themselves, as indeed they were, but the Americans would not hear of it. To them the wide expanse of the station properties was still menacing and journeys in them were expeditions to be undertaken with some thought and some provision for disaster. It was unthinkable to them that two women should be allowed to venture out at night to drive home fifteen miles without an escort, and they were unyielding on the point. Accordingly Spencer and Stanton got into their jeep to follow the ladies. They drove behind them till the shearers’ camp of Laragh came in sight; then they pulled up alongside, waved and shouted good-night, and wheeled around to drive back to their camp on the oil site.

Mollie Regan went to bed with an armful of American magazines and with a lot to think about. A whole new world was opening before her. She had never in her life been outside West Australia, had never been further from her station home than Perth. Throughout her education at the convent school and at the University of West Australia she had been brought up to believe that England was the seat of all learning, all wisdom, and all culture in the world. Everything stemming from her own country was immature and puerile compared with that which stemmed from England. As regards America, her opinion was formed
entirely on the movies and the movie magazines. For fifteen years, the majority of her short life, the dollar exchange shortage had prevented any Australian from visiting the United States unless on dollar-earning business. In consequence Mollie Regan had never spoken to anybody in her life who had visited America. The picture of America that had been placed before her was that of a country uninterested in simple pleasures and devoid of simple virtues, brash, over-luxurious, dissolute, ignorant, uncultured, and hagridden by gangsters.

She had accepted this picture of American life without question; now she was having to revise it. She had found these Americans, mostly men in their late twenties or early thirties, to be simple and unaffected people. Half of them did not drink at all, all were generous to a degree that she had seldom met before, and it had not escaped her wondering notice that the only book in Stanton Laird’s tent had been a Bible. She did not understand their work, but it was quite clear that they were highly educated people and very competent in the outback, strange though it was to them. Her mother had offered to do their washing and they came in with that every other day, and to collect their mail; apart from that they had not asked for anything, and needed no help at all from Laragh Station. Their equipment was superb, but she could not hold that against them; if they were clever enough to invent a shower that ran for three minutes on a gallon of water they were not to be despised for the achievement. Physically they were very like the people that she was accustomed to see on the movies, and they had the same sort of names, but in behaviour they seemed totally different, and a great deal nicer. Especially their leader, Stanton Laird.

David Cope, coming to Laragh to meet Spinifex Joe next mail day, found the verandah table littered with American magazines, and Mollie deeply engrossed in them. “The things they have!” she said. “Look, there’s a toaster that makes the toast pop up and turns itself off when it’s done! Isn’t that a good idea?”

“You can get those in Perth,” he said.

“Not like that—where they pop up and turn themselves off.”

“Yes, you can.” He named the make. “I’m not sure that they’re not made in Australia.”

He convinced her in the end about the toaster. She said, “Well, look at these sheets. They’re made with a sort of pocket that the mattress tucks into.”

He grinned. “You can get those, too,” he said.

“Oh, David, you can’t! I know you can’t.”

“You can.” He told her the name of the shop.

“Well, anyway, you can’t get a car like
that
in Perth.”

He laughed. “I don’t suppose you can in America, either. I should say the artist’s had a go at it.”

“He hasn’t,” she informed him. “I asked Stan, and he said an Oldsmobile really was just like that.”

He had to accept defeat about the car. He picked up one of the magazines and leafed it through, a little enviously. “I believe we’ve got most of these things,” he said. “Not the big cars or the television, of course, but most of the rest. But they do advertise them well, don’t they?”

She was unconvinced. “I don’t believe you can get half these things here in Australia,” she said. “I think they’re beaut.”

Presently the mail was sorted, and it was time for him to get back to Lucinda. “What about the movies?” he enquired. “Mannahill on Saturday?”

“Some of the Americans are going,” she said. “They’re coming here at about four o’clock to pick us up. I don’t know who’ll be going over from here. I told Stan to come through with his party and have a cup of tea, and we’d go on after that. You’d better join up with us here, David, and we’ll all go on together.”

He hesitated for a moment. “All right.”

Back at the oil site the Americans were now paying a great deal of attention to the land around the gas seepage in the cemetery. They spent some days examining the surface outcrops and correlating them, so far as they were able, with the more detailed knowledge they had gained of the sub-surface structure round their camp, three miles to the north. It was evident to them that the strata underneath the cemetery ran up in a gentle fold to the north end, but they had no means on the surface of estimating the extent of this fold, or the amount of gas or oil that might be trapped in it. In the circumstances there was only one logical course for them to pursue.

“We’ll have to run a line of shot holes right across, ’n
take some seismic readings,” Stanton said. “The only thing is, I don’t know that we’ve got the right to go in there.”

“Hell,” said Spencer Rasmussen, “who’s to stop us?”

“It doesn’t belong to Laragh Station now. It belongs to the Shire.”

“All the better. They don’t take no interest in it.”

“I guess we’d better get permission from the Shire Office.”

The Shire Office was in a little town called Yantaringa about a hundred and seventy miles to the north of them; it boasted a hotel with three dormitory bedrooms, a store, an airstrip, and sixty-three citizens. Spencer Rasmussen grumbled a good deal, but drove over one day in the jeep, arriving in the metropolis after eight hours’ hard driving. The Shire Clerk, he found, was also the storekeeper, Clerk to the Justices, Shell agent, aerodrome manager, postman, and registrar of births, deaths, and marriages.

Spencer Rasmussen explained his business. “Aw, look,” said the Shire Clerk. “Do what you like so long as you don’t disturb the Chinaman.”

“We’ll be operating at the other end, more than half a mile away from the grave.”

“Good-oh. You won’t wake him up.”

Spencer Rasmussen got into his jeep and drove a hundred and seventy miles back in a fury. Next day the Americans moved up towards the cemetery and commenced to drill a line of six shot holes in a position laid down to a yard by Stanton Laird, the last two of which were within the cemetery area. To run their big trucks in they removed a section of the nominal, single-strand, barbed wire fence.

While they were doing this a half-caste on a horse appeared out of the blue, herding half a dozen sheep before him on some obscure mustering errand. This was Joseph Plunkett, one of Pat’s sons by the Countess Markievicz. He waved to them and reined in, smiling broadly, and exchanged a few words with Hank, accepting a cigarette. He stayed with them for an hour, watching the drilling in progress, and then remounted, gathered his sheep together from their grazing in the cemetery, and made off over the horizon with his little flock, singing as he rode.

At Laragh Station that evening, in the forum of the station store, sitting on the floor or on the boxes drinking rum out of enamelled pannikins, the men discussed this new development. “Aren’t they the queer fellows?” asked Pat
Regan. “It’s a strange thing that with all the length and breadth of Australia laid out before them, they must choose a cemetery to make their holes.”

“It will bring them no luck,” said Tom soberly. “No luck at all. No good ever came to men who desecrate a cemetery.” There was a long silence while his words sank in. “Ye remember the strongpoint in Kilgorran cemetery made by the English—the curse of Cromwell on them?”

“I do so,” said Pat. “We had them destroyed entirely. James Doherty crept up beneath the wall and threw in two grenades. There was only two of them not killed or wounded, and they lepping the walls like mountain goats till the rifles got them. No good ever came of desecrating a cemetery.”

“Sure,” said Tom, “only the Black and Tans or the Americans would think to do a thing like that.”

The Judge stirred. “How very right you are,” he said quietly. “God’s acre has to be protected from unscrupulous and thoughtless men. I take it that the cemetery is clearly marked?”

“Wasn’t there a fine board painted with the name, unless it’s blown down or somebody has taken it to make a fire,” said Pat. “I painted it with these same hands, not more than eight years back.”

“I saw it last summer. It was still there then,” said Tom. “And a fine strand of barbed wire, hardly rusty even, all around.”

The Judge said gravely,