Journey to the Stone Country (17 page)

Bo said, ‘Me and Dougald had our breakfast here the day we pulled out.’ He went to the end of the room and opened the door of the firebox on the range. He bent and looked in. ‘Ashes still in here,’ he said. He straightened and looked at Annabelle. Trace had come to stand behind her in the doorway. ‘Will this do for you two ladies?’

Trace said with a sense of affront, ‘I’m not sleeping in here, Uncle Bo.’

Annabelle turned to her and laughed. ‘It might be less spooky than the house.’

‘I’m not sleeping in that house neither.’

Bo said, ‘Get something to wipe this table off. You and Arner bring the gear in, Trace. It’s gonna be dark in a minute.’

They all set to and a few minutes later a wood fire was burning brightly in the iron range, the firebox door wide open, the big old kitchen perfumed with the fragrance of sandalwood. Annabelle covered the end of the table nearest the range with a blue plastic groundsheet and they set out the esky and bottles of sauce and loaves of plastic-wrapped bread, a fifty-litre plastic waterbottle with a red tap, the cutlery box and plates and mugs. When they’d done, Arner sat up at the table and took the top magazine off the pile. It was the
Australasian Post
from the seventies. He read by the light of a makeshift kerosene lamp, his elbows on the table, his hands covering his ears, his heavy shoulders bowed. A monk at his evening devotions. Black smoke rising to the rafters from the broad yellow flame of the wick beside him, set through the pierced tin lid of a jam jar.

Bo stood grilling sausages and steaks on the scrubbed hotplate, the tea billy brewing off to one side. Trace had found a three-legged milking stool and pulled it up close to the range. She sat looking in at the fire, poking dreamily at the burning wood with an iron rod. Annabelle sat with her back to Arner, resting her weight against the table, a piece of bread and margarine in one hand and a mug of tea in the other. Her attention caught by a framed embroidery pegged into the mortar between the courses of the bricks above the recess of the range, the words bordered in sooty forget-me-nots. She read, ‘
Alas! thy trials yet are small, nor hast thou resisted unto blood, as I and they have
done
.’ There was no attribution. She wondered who it could be.

After they’d eaten their meal and washed up the dishes Arner stood, the magazine in his hand.

They looked at him.

‘Goodnight,’ he murmured and turned and went out the door.

Trace got up quickly. ‘I’ll see you guys in the morning.’ She leaned across and gave Annabelle a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘Sleep tight you two,’ she said cheekily and skipped out the door after her brother.

After Trace had gone, Annabelle and Bo sat by the range watching the flames for some time without speaking. Annabelle wasn’t sure whether they were particularly at ease with each other or if there was a tension between them. The silence, however, grew and thickened between them until she felt she had to break it by saying something. She moved and was about to speak when, at the same moment, Bo cleared his throat. She turned to him expectantly.

‘I’ll roll out my swag in the old ringers’ quarters,’ he said and stood up.

Annabelle laughed. ‘You can’t be serious? You’ll sleep in here won’t you?’

He said evenly, ‘It looks like them quarters has held up pretty good. I’ve slept there plenty of times.’

Annabelle said with some annoyance, ‘If you don’t sleep in here, Bo, I’ll be really offended.’

He looked at her and grinned. She was not sure if he was uncomfortable with her insistence or pleased. She realised she was finding him difficult to read, and felt put at a disadvantage.

They went out to the Pajero together and brought their swags into the kitchen. Bo would have unrolled his by the door but Annabelle told him to unroll it next to hers by the fire. ‘I’m not going to bite you,’ she said. ‘We can be a bit companionable, can’t we?’ She sat on her swag and took off her boots and overalls.

Bo carefully averted his gaze until she was settled.

‘You can look now,’ she said playfully. She was determined to wear down his old-fashioned manners. Things seemed to her to be ambiguous enough between them without having to negotiate the labyrinth of bygone Queensland habits of chivalry. Bo lay down and pulled his blanket up around his ears, his back to her. He wished her goodnight and began snoring evenly and gently almost at once. She lay awake looking across at his shape under the blanket in the glow from the embers of the fire, marvelling at how incredibly relaxed and untroubled he must be to go straight to sleep like that. She lay awake for a long time, listening to the night sounds and wondering about her life, her job at the university and what she was beginning, in her mind, to refer to as her old life with Steven. It all seemed so unreal and hard to believe in from her place by the fire in the Ranna kitchen. She had been surprised and impressed by the way her parents’ old house at Zamia Street had enfolded her with a feeling of being her own special place. A real haven. Her sense there at once of being effortlessly at home. She wondered if perhaps it was the honeymoon enchantment of being suddenly liberated from troublesome responsibilities and duties . . . She realised she must have been sleeping, for suddenly she was wide awake and alert. The kitchen was cold and in darkness, the fire dead. Something was moving stealthily on the table. She held her breath, listening, imagining a king brown snake gliding towards her. She reached and felt for Bo’s shoulder in the dark and shook him. He murmured, ‘What’s doin?’

She whispered, ‘There’s something on the table!’

‘An old possum,’ he mumbled and began snoring again at once.

She said, ‘God! You’re like a possum yourself.’

It was daylight when he woke her with a mug of tea. She sat up and took the mug from him. The fire was going and he was dressed, the early sun streaming in through the open door.

He stood looking down at her admiringly. ‘You’re a number one sleeper,’ he said.

‘I was awake half the night. I hardly had any sleep.’

After a late breakfast that first morning they all walked down the rise to the river Indian file, Bo in the lead trampling a track through the ribbon grass, Annabelle and Trace staying close behind him for fear of brown snakes. The air was filled with a moving tide of living creatures. Grasshoppers, beetles and clouds of small chocolate moths flickered in the sunlight around them. Arner was back some way wearing shorts and thongs and seemingly untroubled by the possibility of venomous serpents in the grass. After a hundred metres they came out of the tall grass onto a cropped greensward of soft ankle-high couchgrass, black wattles standing like park trees. Closer to the river they came into the shade of the old casuarinas and bluegums, a coolness in the sweet air, brightly coloured butterflies and birds feeding on the insects and nectar among the drooping foliage and blossoms. The warm air vibrating with the shrilling of millions of insects.

Annabelle and Trace came up and stood beside Bo on the smooth benchrock at the edge of an open stretch of sunlit water. They stood gazing on the scene at their feet, the flow of the river green and clear in its depths, the water golden and rippling with sunlight where it slipped over the shallow bottom sands.

Bo pointed with his fishing rod towards the purple shadows of a deep hole against the far bank, overhung by weeping fronds of bottlebrush, the green tips trailing vees in the current. Dragonflies hovering above the pool, touching the water delicately then sweeping away upon the shadows of the air. ‘I reckon we might hook us a big old black bream out of there.’

Trace asked, ‘Are there any crocodiles in here, Uncle Bo?’

‘No crocodiles in the Ranna, my dear.’

Annabelle said, ‘I’m going in.’

Trace looked at her.

Annabelle put down the bag she was carrying and dropped her towel on the rock. She took off her hat and put it on the towel and unfastened her overalls. Bo carried his rod and bucket of tackle back into the shade. He crouched to fix the body of a fat woodgrub on the hook, his back to the women.

Annabelle swam in her pants and bra, diving to the bottom and drifting through the cool flow of sunlit water over her limbs. The taste of the water familiar. She was remembering the swimming hole by the redcliff on the Suttor, seeing herself as her mother had been then, a woman of middle age, but without the comfort or distraction of young children. She stayed underwater for a long time, holding her breath easily, moving across the sandy bottom, reaching and touching the glassy surface of the rocks, shoals of small translucent fish darting away from her approach then returning to delicately pick at suspended morsels from the sand disturbed by her passage.

Trace’s shadow entered the water above her and Annabelle looked up. The girl’s bare legs glossy and golden in the sunlight, moving languidly back and forth in the water. It seemed to Annabelle that the mystery of all life was radiant in Trace’s beauty. Entranced, she gazed up through the dazzle of sunlight at the young woman. She was filled suddenly with intense happiness, as if she could touch life’s essence and make it real for herself . . . Annabelle surfaced beside Trace, laughing to see the girl’s startled look. ‘It’s all right, I’m not a crocodile.’ She touched Trace’s shoulder and kissed her on her wet cheek. Their eyes met, bright with the dazzle off the water. She climbed out onto the rock ledge and picked up her things and went back into the shade. She lay down on a cool contour of water-smoothed rock, her towel bunched under her head. Her heart was thumping in her chest, her breath catching in her throat. It was as if for a fleeting moment she had been in love, with Trace and with herself . . . She soon fell into a delicious half doze on the warm rock, images and dreams moving softly through her mind like fading sepia photographs; herself as Trace, poignant and intense and just beyond the reach of reality, a sadness and joy in the identical longing, then something of the tattooed man in the Bowen servo slipping between the images of herself and the young girl, something she had not understood and would never understand, a glimpse of a coded message . . . She sat up and looked around. There was no sign of Bo. Trace was lying in the shallows on her stomach in the sun, her T-shirt ballooning in the water, her bare legs trailing in the gentle current. She saw Arner then, back in the shade of the trees, seated on a square rock, his back resting against the furrowed trunk of a black casuarina. The guardian of his perfect sister. As still as the stone he sat on, as if it were his throne and he solemnly awaited the sacramental anointing of the chrism, sovereign of Australia, king of kings. Annabelle watched him. Although he made no sign, she felt certain he was aware of her attention.

She lay down again and closed her eyes. Time passed as it had passed when she was a child, the gurgling of the river over the stones and around the roots of the casuarinas, the cicada chorus shrilling then dying away, then rising again mysteriously, flowing back and forth through the warm day, the chirrup and chitter of small birds busy in the bushes, and the cool sweet smell of the riverwater . . . She heard the distinctive click of a horse’s iron shoe striking stone. She sat up.

On the far bank Mathew Hearn stepped his horse out of the dark trees into the sunlit water and started across, the horse’s ears working, ducking its lips at the stream. Trace got up hurriedly off the sand and sat on the flat rock, facing the young man, her shoulders hunched, her bare arms hugging her breasts, her shining legs pressed together, her toes working into the sand, as if she were a startled creature of the wild and would conceal herself from the intruder. The young man rode up beside her. He lifted his hat in an old-fashioned gentlemanly manner and wished her good morning, his tone modest and respectful.

Trace looked up at him, squinting into the sun. ‘Yeah, I’m all right, how are you?’ she said. ‘Where are your dogs?’ She giggled and looked around, making a face at Annabelle.

‘They’re dad’s and Ellen’s dogs,’ he said, serious, diffident and earnest in his manner, concerned for his reception, for her image of him, his world touching the young woman’s world delicately like the dragonflies touching the surface of the water, hesitant and sensitive and ready to flee at the first sign of a rebuff.

Annabelle called, ‘Hi Mathew. What are you doing down this way? Looking for scrubber bulls?’

He rode his horse out of the water onto the rocks, ducking his head to pass under the trailing bough of a casuarina. He stepped off beside Annabelle and dropped the reins. ‘I thought I’d come and see how you fellers were making out.’ His blue eyes anxiously held her gaze, watching for a sign from her.

‘Well we’re very glad you did. Bo’s down the river somewhere trying to catch a fish.’ She stood and put on her overalls. ‘Your horse is walking off.’

Mathew Hearn looked at his horse, which was picking its way through the trees to the couch grass flat. ‘Dancer won’t go far.’

‘That’s a lovely name for a mare, Mathew.’

‘Ellen does the naming.’

Annabelle looked at him and smiled, ‘And it’s Ellen who won’t let your dad kill the pups, I suppose?’

‘That’s it.’ Mathew shook his head. ‘Something will have to be done soon though, or we’re going to be overrun with dogs.’

‘We’re just about to have some morning tea.’ Annabelle crouched and opened the bag. She pulled out a stainless steel coolpot and a square plastic cake box. She laid out mugs and tea things on the towel.

Trace stood and Mathew turned to watch her. She reached and picked up her towel from the rocks and tied it under her shoulders. She came over and stood beside him, looking down at Annabelle. ‘Bo’s going to want a fire for his tea,’ she said. ‘You got any matches?’

Annabelle looked up at her.

Mathew Hearn reached into his shirt pocket and took out a box of matches. He held them out for Trace. ‘I’ll gather up some firewood,’ he said.

‘It’s all right, I can do it.’ Trace took the matches from him. ‘Thanks.’ They stood looking at each other. She laughed and turned away, making her way back among the trees where the dried flood debris of seasons past garlanded the limbs. He watched her, the colour rising on his neck, then he followed her.