Beyond the Black Stump (15 page)

Stanton Laird said slowly, “Well, what do you know!”

The girl said, “Oh, Stan!”

The geologist asked the reporter, “Do you know who wrote this?”

Duncan Mann smiled broadly. “We’ve just had dinner at Miss Regan’s homestead. I might make a guess.”

The girl said, “He shouldn’t have done it. He gets a sort of bee in his bonnet sometimes. I’m so sorry, Stan.”

The geologist smiled. “That’s okay, Mollie. He didn’t mean any harm.” He turned to the reporters. “I guess it was kind of unusual to go running seismic soundings through a cemetery, but we did get permission. We were only on the ground three days. We made eight holes in the area about half a mile away from the grave—the only grave there is—’n set off a pound of gelignite in each. And then we did a few more outside.”

Mr. Mann said, “We’re not reporting this, Mr. Laird. My editor was definite on that. It’s off the record. But while we’re talking about it, do you know if it was consecrated ground?”

“I reckon not. There’s nothing religious on the notice, and they didn’t tell us anything at Yantaringa.”

The reporter glanced down at the letter. “He doesn’t say specifically that it was consecrated ground, although he talks about desecration. Maybe that’s just a way of writing like he thinks. In any case, it doesn’t matter; the story’s dead.” He turned to the geologist. “This gas seepage, though—
that
story’s not dead. Can you tell us anything about that, Mr. Laird?”

“Why, certainly.” The geologist turned back the cover sheet and exposed his plans and diagrams upon the drawing board. He started to explain the layout of the strata to Mr. Mann. Phil Patterson, the photographer, attended for a minute or two, and then moved back, unpacked his camera and equipment from their black leather case, and took a couple of flashlight photographs of the men as they talked
at the drawing board. The girl moved away, not wanting to be in the story, and went and drank a coke with Ted in the cook tent.

All afternoon Stanton and Spencer were busy with the journalists. They drove them out and showed them the terrain, both in the region of the big limestone outcrop and in the region of the cemetery. In the fading light they sniffed at the gas seepage. It was arranged that the visitors should stay in the Americans’ camp and take a series of photographs next day, probably leaving for the south again in their Land Rover in a couple of days’ time. In the fading light they offered to drive Mollie back to Laragh.

“That’s okay,” said Stanton. “I’ll run her back home after supper.” He turned to the girl. “You’ll stay for supper, Mollie?” He smiled. “We’re on maple ice cream, regular, this week.”

“I’d love to,” she said. She wanted to be driven home by Stanton, because the Judge’s misdemeanour was very much on her mind. She ate her stewed steak with hot cakes, her peach pie and ice cream, with a pre-occupied mind, and drank her coffee thoughtfully. Somehow she must let him know that at Laragh they really did appreciate the Americans, in spite of what the Judge had said in his letter.

She sat in thought while he drove her home in the jeep, not knowing how to broach the subject that she wanted to discuss; moreover the oil men’s jeep had seen hard service. It rattled over the unmade track with a shovel and a couple of chains banging about in the back, and the dust swirled round her, making conversation difficult if not impossible. When they topped the last low rise and the white roof of the shearing shed appeared in the bright moonlight a mile ahead of them, she felt she had to do something.

She said, “Stan, stop here a minute. I want to talk.”

He pulled up and switched off the motor. “Kind of difficult to talk in this jeep.”

“I know,” she said. “Stan, it’s about the Judge. He’s not really like that, you know.”

He smiled down at her. “Don’t think of it,” he said. “He didn’t do us any harm.”

“That’s not the point,” she said. “I wouldn’t like you to think that he was trying to do you any harm. He’s English, you know. He’s awfully English, although he’s been here so long. I should think in a country like England
every cemetery must be full of bodies, and consecrated and all that. He’d think of it as making an oil well all in among the tombstones.”

“Wouldn’t he have seen it?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. He can’t ride a horse, and he doesn’t often go out on the station. I don’t suppose he’s ever seen it in his life.”

He glanced at her. “Mind if I ask something?”

She looked up at him. “No.”

“Is he a bit nuts?”

She shook her head. “He’s got a very clear mind. He’s a wonderful teacher, you know. All of us, when we left here to go to school, we were really interested in getting to know things. We wanted to do lessons. We just shot ahead of all the other kids in school. It’s all because of how he started us.” She paused. “He gets a bit confused sometimes, but that’s just the rum.”

He laughed. “If I drank that much rum I’d be confused all the time.”

She looked up in surprise. “He doesn’t drink a great deal. Daddy drinks twice as much.”

“That’s what I can’t figure out,” he said. “Back home, if any person drank like people drink out here, he’d be right on the skids. But this is a good property. Everybody I speak to tells me that Laragh’s a station that’s well run. I can see that for myself, even though I don’t know the first thing about sheep. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

She recalled the advertisements of whisky in the American magazines that he had lent her. “Americans aren’t all teetotal, are they?”

“The States is a big country,” he said. “I come from a small town in the West. Back home where I come from we don’t drink alcohol at all, hardly. My family, they don’t, and none of our friends, either. I guess it’s different in the Eastern States, and in the cities.”

“I don’t drink it, either,” she said. “I don’t like it much. Most station people drink round here. I think perhaps we may drink more than most, at Laragh.”

“You don’t think it hurts?”

She shook her head. “Ma cuts it down when she thinks they’ve had enough. Daddy and Uncle Tom do what Ma tells them.” She turned to him. “Ma knows about the grog.
She was a barmaid before she married Uncle Tom, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said.

“She was. She was a barmaid before she married Mr. Foster, and then when he died she was a barmaid again before she married Uncle Tom. Ma knows all about men and drink. That’s probably got something to do with it.”

“I guess it might have.” He turned to her. “You know what?” he said. “I always thought Mr. Pat Regan was your father.”

“He is,” she said. “I suppose we’re rather a difficult family for strangers to understand. You see, after Mike and Charlie and Bridget were born, Ma and Uncle Tom didn’t get on very well together, so Ma left Uncle Tom and married Daddy. It makes us rather a complicated family, but that’s how it happened.”

He blinked. “Didn’t that make things kind of difficult? I mean, did they just go on here together, just the same?”

She laughed. “I don’t know, Stan. I wasn’t born. It seems to have worked out all right. Only, of course, Father Ryan says that Ma and Dad aren’t married. We’re all Micks here, you know.”

He blinked again. “Didn’t they get married?”

“They can’t, because we can’t get a divorce. Father Ryan says Ma’s still married to Uncle Tom, but of course that’s not right. It’s all a bit of a muddle.”

He smiled. “I’d say it might be. They didn’t have a civil marriage, or anything like that?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” she said. “You’d have to go to Perth for that, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe. I wouldn’t know.”

“I’ll ask Ma sometime. I shouldn’t think they did, though. It’s over a thousand miles.”

He nodded. “Quite a way.” He sat for a moment looking out over the rolling downs of spinifex. “I’m mightily glad you told me all of this,” he said. “It kind of helps to get the picture straight—about the Judge and all that.”

She said, “We’re a kind of a muddled up family, I suppose, if you include the Countess and her sons.” She looked up at him a little wistfully. “Does it all seem very terrible to you, Stan?”

She was very appealing to him in that moment. “Not a
bit terrible,” he said. “It’s just kind of different from things at home. But then, the whole country’s so different.”

“People don’t live like we do in America?”

“No,” he repeated. “Everything’s quite different back home.”

“But you’ve got a lot of empty country, with big stations like we have, haven’t you?”

He shook his head. “We’ve got nothing like this country. Back home there’d be roads all over, and little towns every so often, with a few stores and a movie theatre and a church, maybe. It’s all quite different.”

“Do we seem like a lot of savages to you, Stan?”

He turned to her. “I guess people are the same all over.” He smiled down at her gently in the dim light. “If you wore pedal-pushers instead of these long pants you’d be just the same as any girl in my home town. Only a whole lot prettier than most.”

She drew a little closer to him in the jeep, and when his arm slipped round her shoulders she did not protest. “Tell me about your home town, Stan,” she said. “What’s it called, and where is it?”

He told her, and she said, “What’s it like in Hazel? Is it like Carnavon, or like Geraldton?”

He shook his head. “It’s not like either of those. It’s sort of cleaner, and more dignified.” He began to tell her about the home town that he loved so well, the mountains and the pastures and the rivers full of trout. He told her a little about his family, a little about his father’s business, a little about his friend Chuck, a little about his home. She listened entranced to the description of a new world, a world that matched the magazines she had been reading, lulled by the warm comfort of his hand upon her shoulder.

“It must be marvellous to live there,” she said. “I wonder you can bear to leave it and come away to places like Australia.”

He smiled. “I guess Australia’s not so bad as that,” he said. “But I’d say this is probably my last assignment outside the States.” He went on to tell her of the offer that his father had made him; it was an easing and a relief to talk it over with the girl. “I think I’ll be writing to the old man pretty soon, ’n say that I’ll be joining him next year.”

Presently she stirred in his arms. “It’s getting pretty late,
Stan,” she said. “I love hearing you talk about America, but don’t let’s start anything with Ma or Daddy.”

He laughed and released her. “I’d just as soon not start anything with your father.”

She wriggled her shirt straight upon her shoulders. “One thing, Stan,” she said. “Why do you say that you’ll be joining your father next year? Why not now, if he wants you to help him?”

“We got to make a hole first.”

“Here?”

“Uh-huh. It’s just a question now of fixing the exact location. I’d say we’d have the drilling rig up here within a month. I couldn’t go away until we’ve drilled the well.”

He started the motor and drove her to the homestead. She got out, and turned to bid him good-night. “It was awfully nice of you to drive me home,” she said. “Thanks so much.”

“You know somethin’?” he enquired. “I’m kind of glad I haven’t got to go away at once.”

“So am I,” she said.

He raised his hand. “’Bye now.” The jeep vanished in a swirl of dust in the night air.

I
N
the next few weeks the oil activity on Laragh Station increased enormously. Great trailer trucks began to come through, manned mostly by Australians, bringing huge loads of the components of prefabricated buildings, pre-drilled girders for the great tower of the oil rig, tanks, pumps, diesel engines, cement, pipes, cooking stoves, beds and furniture, cases of foodstuffs, drums of diesel oil, great quantities of earth for drilling mud imported from America, and everything else needed for a camp of nearly a hundred very highly paid men about to drill a hole that might be two miles deep.

All this was normal to the Americans, a routine that they had been through many times before. Even the camp plan was normal to them; the cookhouse and messroom went here, the recreation room there, the showers and toilets here, the septic tank there, the two rows of two-bed cabins here, the office there. The camp was the same camp that they had made from Texas to Palembang; if you knew the camp at Abu Quaiyah you could walk blindfold in the camp on Laragh Station. In consequence it all went up incredibly quickly, because the key men knew exactly where each bit had to go.

To the Regans the growth of the camp was little short of magical. One week there was nothing there but the tents of the survey party; a fortnight later the place seemed full of houses and a party were laying a pipeline to the nearest bore at the rate of about a mile a day; a fortnight after that there were eighty or ninety men accommodated in the camp erecting the steel tower of the rig and installing pumps and tanks and diesel engines.

“Sure,” said Pat Regan in the evening session, “ye’d think all the devils in hell were chasing after them, biting at their tails. Aren’t they the restless fellows?”

The Judge said, “It is the greed for gold, the curse of the modern age. Avarice kills more men than any physical disease, I am afraid. These men will not make old bones.”

Tom Regan, who was worth ten times as much as any
American on the site and who worked, when he worked at all, sitting in the driver’s seat of a jeep or in the easy chair of a saddlehorse at the walk, said, “That’s a true word. They’ll all be dead in ten years time. What use will all the money be to them then?”

They wagged their heads gloomily together over the perdition awaiting the avaricious Americans, and shot down another rum.

The growth of the camp was as fascinating to Mrs. Regan as it was to Mollie. Most days they drove over in the jeep, with the two younger children in the back, to park on the hillside above the camp out of the way, and to watch the buildings going up. The speed with which the men worked was a continual amazement to them. “It’s what they do in America, Ma,” Mollie said, armed with the superior knowledge of her magazine-reading. “Everybody works like that in the United States.”