Hills End (21 page)

The eighty-five miles to the town of Stanley ceased to be merely eighty-five. The distance began to roll away into a deep emptiness without measure or time. She could picture the town rushing away from her into space. She was cut off.

Then she saw a figure, indistinct and grey in the fog. She didn't stop to think. She immediately thought it was her father and rushed towards him.

‘Daddy! Daddy!'

It wasn't her father. It was Paul, with the rifle and with haggard lines under his eyes, but with a smile so gentle that it astonished her. ‘Sorry, Frances. Only me.'

‘Oh, Paul…' She pulled herself together and sought to cover up her embarrassment by snapping at Paul. ‘Where on earth have you been? Hours and hours and hours. You've worried the lives out of us.'

Paul's expression changed suddenly to irritation. ‘Oh, boil your head!'

He brushed past her and climbed over the sill into the shop and felt tired enough to lie down and die, but he heard Gussie's excited shout and was nearly knocked from his feet by the force of her rush.

‘You're back,' Gussie cried, ‘safe and sound. I thought you were dead. I thought you were dead.'

Paul groaned. ‘Come off it. Dead? What are you talking about. I've found Miss Godwin, that's all, but I'm too tired to carry her. Someone will have to help me.'

He leant against the counter and realized that he was responding to all their excitement and their chorus of praises. It came like an injection of new strength.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘she's alive, but she seems to have suffered an awful lot. She knows me, but I can't get any sense out of her. I suppose it was her book that did it.'

‘What about her book?' said Gussie sharply.

‘Blown all over the place. That's how I found her. She was looking for the bits, crawling all over the hill in the dark, picking up bits of paper. I suppose we've got about half of it.'

‘We'll find the rest,' declared Gussie, ‘even if it takes all day.'

‘We've got to bring her back here first. She's been up there all night, on the school porch. Golly, it was a long night…Has Buzz come back?'

‘Buzz?' squeaked Harvey.

‘That means he hasn't, I suppose. And what's wrong with Frances? Like a bear with a sore head. Practically threw her arms round me and then started abusing me.'

‘Frances,' said Maisie wisely, ‘has got the jitters.'

‘Someone's got to help me find Buzz,' squealed Harvey.

‘Buzz doesn't need finding. He'll find you when he's ready. Probably got his nose down a rabbit-hole.' Paul looked, then, from face to face. ‘Butch, you'd better stop here. Keep an eye on things. The rest of you come with me and give a hand…Where's Adrian? Yeah, where's Adrian?'

Maisie shrugged. ‘Putting on an act, that's where he is. Caught out, that's what happened to Adrian. He's a great big puff of wind. Adrian doesn't fool me, like he fools some people.'

Paul glanced at Maisie warily. ‘What are you talking about?'

They were surprised to hear Frances, surprised to see her standing at the window. ‘You're being mean, Maisie. Adrian did his best—while
you
were asleep.'

Maisie glared but Frances silenced her. ‘Are you people coming to get Miss Godwin, or not?'

‘What about the bull?' squeaked Harvey.

‘Really,' said Paul, ‘what about it?'

 

Miss Elaine Godwin felt cold and frail and aged, but she was far more herself than Paul had known. She knew what the boy had done, just as she knew what the fat boy Christopher had done. Perhaps they had not saved her from death, but they had given her at least a few more hours of life.

She was humbled physically as she had never been humbled. Her proud independence didn't matter now because it had ceased to be. For years she had believed that she could go through life giving, without taking anything back. Even when the boys split wood for her stove she never allowed them to do it without payment. She was in no person's debt, man or woman or child. She was afraid of favours and sympathy. When the children had come to her two days ago on the hillside she had received them in dread. That she really needed sympathy and affection was obvious, or she would not have been afraid of it. Her pride did need to be broken. Her independence did need to be humbled. Until she learnt how to receive as well as to give she would never be wholly happy. But still she was broken only in body, not in spirit. She was not really humbled at all.

Paul had left her, covered with his coat, lying against the wall of the school porch, but he had not been gone a minute before she was striving to reach the mud-stained sheets of paper which were her book, which the boy had weighted down unnecessarily with a stone.

It hurt her to sit up, but she refused to surrender to pain. She wouldn't break. She wouldn't die with this remnant of her labour lying here to stir pity in the hearts of others. She'd never have them say, ‘Poor woman. Isn't it pathetic? Surely she had done nothing to deserve it. Poor dear, of course she knew that insurance would rebuild her home, but nothing could rebuild her book.'

She thought back over the years. A dozen times she had sat down to type another copy of the manuscript, but every time something had stopped her. It all fitted together now into a pattern that could almost be called destiny. The book simply was not meant to be. Fame was not for her.

She stretched out and grasped the pile of sodden paper and squeezed until it became a mass of pulp, then she raised her pale eyes into the fog of the morning and saw that all the world beyond her was blotted out.

It was a symbol, and she was too bitter in her heart even to weep.

 

Butch's feet were sore and he didn't really know what to do with them. He hadn't said anything about it to the others because there seemed to be so many things that were more important. He hobbled here and there about the shop looking for relief, though he didn't know what he was looking for, not until he arrived in the storeroom and saw the sausage machine.

Butch smiled his ready smile and sat on the stool nearby and stared at the sausage machine and at the mincer and at the shelf above on which were arranged the ingredients used by Mr Matheson to make the sausages. It was gloomy, so he brought a lamp in from the shop and turned it up high and again sat on the stool and took it all in, in his thorough and laborious way.

It was a wonderful machine, the sausage machine. How was it that meat went in one end and sausages came out at the other? This wasn't a curiosity born of the moment, but a lifelong fascination. Often Butch had stood at this door now behind him, and had watched the magical process in wonder. From as far back as he could remember he had admired those deft twists of Mr Matheson's wrists that transformed the slippery rope of meat-packed skin into neat little sausages. If, one day, Butch could mince the meat, mix it and blend it, and create from it a perfect string of perfect sausages he would know true bliss. If he could create sausages Butch would be happy, and if he could go on creating them he would be content to do so for the rest of his life.

He had mentioned it to Miss Godwin once and she had smiled at him. ‘When you start making sausages, Christopher, be sure that they're the best you can make. Some men build bridges and some make sausages.'

Butch again went to the door, but the shop was still empty. He waited and waited, but no one came and he started trembling and still no one came.

He didn't really feel guilty, but he was shy. He didn't want anyone to catch him in case they made fun of him. It was because he was shy that he had never asked Mr Matheson to teach him how.

That was the trouble now. How did one begin?

He moved along the bench, inspecting the labels on the tins. There seemed to be so many of them. So many things to go in one little sausage—and then he found a sheet of paper stuck on the wall. It was a yellowed sheet of paper with many splash-marks over it and the ink that once had been bright and blue was dull.

His heart leapt, because it was the recipe. It must have been the recipe for the sausages, because it didn't make sense for anything else. His excitement was so intense that it caught his breath.

Meat—25 lb.

Wheatmeal—4¼ lb.

Sugar—6 oz.

Salt—6 oz.

Seasoning—2 oz.

Onion powder—½ oz.

Preservative—¾ fluid oz.

Water—1 gal.

Butch shivered with emotion. This was real treasure. This was the recipe. He
knew
how to make sausages.

He smiled to himself. He had invaded the grown-up world and captured one of its secrets. Even his mother didn't know how to make sausages. Even his father didn't know. Frances didn't know. Paul didn't know. Adrian didn't know. Perhaps even Miss Godwin didn't know.

All he had to do now was make them and everyone would say how clever he was. He would work fast. He would do everything just as he had seen Mr Matheson do it, because he had known the motions even if he had not known the recipe. He would make the sausages and cook them and perhaps have them ready by the time the others were back.

He found the box of sausage skins beneath the bench, drew out one long length and shook the salt from it. He knew Mr Matheson always soaked the skins in water, so he took the bucket into which Frances had emptied all her precious water, poured half of it into the sink and kept the other half for the recipe.

Twenty-five pounds of meat! He opened the freezer door and was not repelled by the fearsome odour, because Butch had had an operation on his nose and had lost his sense of smell. How was he to know that the meat was decomposing and was loaded with poisonous organisms? The light was so bad he couldn't even see the colour of it.

At 7.38 a.m., in the air-conditioned comfort of a broadcasting studio, more than a thousand miles from Hills End, far, far beyond the fog-shrouded slopes and the desolated forest, sat a pleasant young man. This was the young man whose duty it was to read the National News at 7.45.

Invariably this young man scanned his script beforehand. Overseas incidents had a habit of happening in places with unpronounceable names, and even though they were written in phonetics an unprepared reader could stumble and raise amused smiles in the homes of the educated—or, worse still, bring through the next morning's post a heap of letters from those crusty persons who forgave no errors of speech except the ones they committed themselves.

He rehearsed the tricky place names and thumbed back through the sheets to the main story of national interest, this rather grim story that was happening in the Stanley Ranges. Floods were floods, destruction was destruction, but they were wounds that could heal. This was something different.

‘Events in the flood-isolated north have taken a dramatic turn. Seven school-age children of Hills End and their mistress, Miss Elaine Godwin, are marooned or lost in remote mountain country, apparently beyond all hope of immediate aid. Repeated attempts to gain radio contact with the area have failed.

‘The discovery late yesterday of seventy-two men, women and children trekking on foot through the bush twelve miles from Stanley solved the mystery of the missing population of Hills End. These persons had abandoned their motor vehicles after waiting, as they believed, in vain, for assistance from the outside world. The appalling conditions of the road that made so difficult their own escape from the mountains had delayed the rescue party, fifty strong, led by Police Constable Fleming.

‘At the joining up of the two parties it was learnt that the failure of the brakes in the leading vehicle had prevented the picnic convoy from reaching Stanley before the onset of Saturday's cyclonic storm. All were safe and well, though cold and hungry, and reported that ten of their menfolk, with the balance of their food, had left the stranded convoy at daybreak to return on foot to Hills End, a distance back into the mountains from the convoy of approximately sixty miles. These ten men include the fathers of seven schoolchildren who had remained in Hills End to accompany their mistress on an expedition to what is known locally as “The Bluff”. The Bluff, a high cliff riddled with caves, had been reported to contain a number of aboriginal rock paintings of great antiquity.

‘The plight of the children and their teacher is not known, except that they should have been in the vicinity of Hills End early yesterday, but no sighting of any person, dead or alive, was made by the RAAF aircraft which closely surveyed the devastated area at midday.

‘As reported in earlier bulletins, the airmen observed widespread destruction, landslides, extensive flooding, and a crazed bull, an accumulation of conditions which gives rise to the gravest concern. All bridges are cut and the main span of the bridge over the River Magnus Gorge, fifteen miles south of the township, was seen from the air to be wrecked. The collapse of this bridge, which won the Roger Morris Rural Developmental Prize for 1951, is a grievous loss to the district. It spanned the gorge at its narrowest point, bridging a gap of 147 feet, and it is not known at the present time how this formidable barrier, in conditions of flood, can be crossed from either direction.

‘The ten Hills End men who are attempting to reach their town may know of an alternative crossing, but this is not considered likely. The little known, but magnificent River Magnus, which is the northward-flowing arm of the Stanley River, cuts the ranges in two. The only other known approach, occasionally used by experienced bushwalkers, involves a wide rerouting through rugged country which, in favourable weather conditions, has been known to take five days and more. It is not conceivable that these ten men could be carrying food sufficient for more than two or three days. It is not possible at present to warn them that the bridge is down.

‘It is reported this morning from Stanley that two parties of thirty volunteers, each including a doctor and each led by an experienced bushwalker, left at 3 a.m. to follow up the ten local men, one party taking the river road and the other the overland route. Low-lying cloud and continuing mist and rain are preventing the use of aircraft.'