Journey to the Stone Country (27 page)

Bo said, ‘I believe I can get the old place off them Heffernans.’

She saw the grand project of recovery shining in the blackness of his eyes, as if he expected a meteor to approach out of the dark reaches of the past and illuminate his way. She said, ‘You’ve thought about it all your life, haven’t you?’

‘That’s it! Attitudes in the courts have swung around from what they was years ago. They gotta listen to the Murris’ side of things now. There’s a lot of different owners failed on Verbena since Grandma lost it. That place has changed hands seven or eight times in the past twenty years. She’s not worth half of what them Heffernans paid for her. I hear they’ve had no stock on her for years. They’d be glad to hear any kind of offer I reckon.’ He smoked his cigarette, his features lit by the glow of the sunset spreading across the sky.

She said, ‘How did your grandmother lose Verbena?’

‘Verbena was never the same as Ranna or your people’s place. It was different. Iain Rennie and Grandma always made the dark people welcome.’ He nodded. ‘Verbena become a haven in the Mount Coolon district for a lot of lost and bewildered souls. And for a few fugitives too. Anyone in trouble knew they could always get themselves a feed at the Verbena homestead and no questions asked. That went for white people too. There wasn’t no distinction made at home when I was a boy. Everyone mixed in. There’d be twenty or thirty strays camped along the waterhole at any one time. Bits of wurlies and old canvas tents hooked onto whatever they could find, old cars and wattle branches. I seen them turn up on bicycles and camels, motorbikes and sidecars, droving goats and pigs and lopsided brumby horses, dry cows. Anything. They had everything and nothin them people. They’d all be tramplin around down there. Wild men too. Bits of cooking fires smokin all along the creek. It was a travelling circus for us kids. The sergeant of police used to come out from Mount Coolon to check them over from time to time. Whenever they heard that V8 Plymouth of his coming down the track they’d scatter into the brigalow and lay low just in case he decided they was a troublemaker. Sergeant Collins never liked to go home without making one or two arrests.’

Annabelle said, ‘I remember that Plymouth. It was powder blue.’

‘Yes it was and always polished up like new. If you was in the cell for a night it was your job to clean the sergeant’s motor car before they let you go in the morning.’ He relit his cigarette. ‘Grandma and Iain hated to be parted from each other even for a day. That’s how that big tamarind tree comes to be growing where it is on the high bank of the creek.’ He lifted his arm, gesturing out the window towards the west and the last fire of the sunset. ‘Iain had to go down to Brisbane one time and Grandma couldn’t go with him for some reason. She asked him to bring her back a tamarind tree. And that’s it. She planted it herself on the bank of the creek above the big hole. That tree has flourished there ever since. The canopy was bigger around than two houses last time I seen it. Eighty or ninety foot high. It’s the only thing that has flourished out there since Grandma was kicked off the place.’

‘It was my matriculation year when Grandma Rennie left,’ Annabelle said. ‘It must have been nineteen-seventy-three.’

‘That was the year. Seventy-three.’

‘When I got home for Christmas after the exams everyone was talking about how your dad and Grandma Rennie had suddenly left Verbena and new people had come onto the place. My dad always said your grandmother would never have sold Verbena. There were all kinds of rumours about what had really happened.’

‘Well your dad was right. You gotta go back to when Iain was killed off his horse back in thirty-six. Grandma and her sister May inherited the place in equal shares. It was not to be sold by one without the consent of the other, and then only to go to some other member of the family or their direct descendant. That was the way Iain had written his will. The same day Iain was killed off his horse, Grandma told us, May packed a bag and walked into Mount Coolon. She set herself up with a white man by the name of Jack Horrie and she never come back to Verbena. Not even for a visit. Grandma give May her share of the cheque every quarter. And May and Jack Horrie and his mates pissed it up against the back fence of that fibro-cement place of theirs over by the reservoir in Mount Coolon. I don’t think Jack ever done anybody no harm, but he was a useless poor bugger. He didn’t care where the money come from so long as he had a drink of OP rum.

‘After Iain was killed, Grandma put on a couple of fellers and managed Verbena herself till my dad was old enough to pitch in and help her. They worked the place together, dad doing the manager’s job, for more than thirty years. When things was quiet at home dad would get a plant together with them gun Murri ringers from around Mount Coolon and he’d go out mustering that Ranna Creek country and them other big stations over in that Broken River country. Them Bigges would hold off mustering till they could get dad. He’d bring their cattle in nice and easy. Scrubber bulls and wild cattle all mixed in with the quiet stock. That’s the way he did it. Tail them along real gentle for a couple of days before camping them at the yards. There was never no rip tear and bust about dad’s way of doing things. Them station owners liked to see that. The old feller wasn’t doing it for them. He was just doing things that way because that’s the way he did things. The best way he could. And never said nothing about it to nobody. Me and Dougald knew what he thought and we was never invited to discuss it with him. And that’s what he done till they lost the place. Horses and cattle. That was what my dad knew his entire life.

‘He never had a woman again after mum died and he never talked about her to us kids. I don’t believe he ever stopped loving our mother. My sister Rose was closer to him than the rest of us, and I think that was because she looked like our mother. Rose would take him by the arm them summer evenings at Verbena and walk him out past the garden down to Grandma’s tamarind tree and they’d stand there admiring the view and saying good evening to the strays camped along the waterhole. When Rose got married and moved down south to Chinchilla dad missed her.’

Bo paused and relit his cigarette. ‘Grandma never seen much of her sister May till May was widowed in seventy-two. Jude Horrie, May’s son, he come back into the district for his old man’s funeral and he talked his mother into selling her share of Verbena so he could buy himself and his woman a motel down there on the highway outside Bowen. Grandma couldn’t afford to pay May outright for her share of Verbena so she offered to pay her her portion on a yearly instalment basis. That wouldn’t do for Jude Horrie. He started calling himself Jude Rennie, taking his mother’s maiden name so it would make him more one of the family and related to Iain Rennie. He come out to Verbena one morning with a real estate agent from Collinsville and fronted Grandma with an agreement of sale signed by May. That agent was an old-timer by the name of Bill Stirling, tall whippy feller, all bent up like an old brigalow stick he was, and he’s still living there in Collinsville, he must be ninety. He told Grandma the place had been sold for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and she was required to sign the agreement if she wanted to collect her share of the sale price. Grandma hunted them off the place.

‘Me and Dougald was up in the Gulf country in them years, breaking horses for those big stations along the Leichhardt River, Augustus Downs and Nardoo and them places, and we never knew nothing about any of this till a couple of years later when we come home and found Grandma and dad gone and the strays all cleared out from the waterhole. The new people was living in a poor looking ripple-iron homestead they built on the flat the wrong side of Verbena Creek. They didn’t want to know me and Dougald. We wasn’t even invited in for a drink of tea. I think they believed they was now old-time pastoralists. We told them they could expect Verbena Creek to flood through their house in a wet year.

‘When the agent come out to see Grandma with Jude Horrie that day dad was away chasing wild cattle over in the bendee scrubs of Why Not. Well, Grandma never give the matter another thought till a month or two later she received a solicitor’s order through the mail requiring her to vacate Verbena. The order claimed the Verbena title was now legally held in the names of Ben and Esmé Southey, a farming couple from down the coast there near Carmila. These Southeys never knew the first thing about running a herd of beef cattle in them old windbreak scrubs. They required occupation of the property, however, within thirty days. There was no way of proving it, and it was only his and May’s word against Grandma’s, but it seems Jude Horrie had forged Grandma’s signature on that agreement of sale. And May stuck by him and swore on a affidavit it was her sister’s signature. I think that hurt Grandma more than anything. Her own sister going against her in that way. Jude and May said Grandma changed her mind after the deal was done. They claimed she was not a person whose word could be relied upon, and was only looking to keep the whole property to herself and deny her sister and nephew their rightful share. Which everyone in the district knew was not true and that Grandma had paid May her share of the cheque for the steers all those years and May never doing a tap to earn it. But no one was going to stand up and swear to any of this on Grandma’s behalf. They seen it was one of them family disputes that are happening all the time and they didn’t want no part in it in case they come out on the wrong side. The sale and transfer of the property had gone through anyway, title searches and all, and everything looked legal and straightforward. I guess people must have decided Grandma Rennie’s time was up and that she’d had a pretty good run for an old Jangga woman from the Suttor country.

‘When Grandma went and seen a solicitor in Mackay about it he advised her to take her share of the sale price and count herself lucky she was getting anything at all. He pointed out that according to the Protection Act she’d never been legally entitled to have her name on any title deeds to freehold country anyway, or even for that matter to have had a legal marriage to Iain Rennie, as the Act prohibited Murris from holding title to freehold property and from marrying into the white community. The solicitor advised her the less said about the matter the better for her, unless she wanted to stir up a whole nest of claims and counter-claims that would most likely tie up the property in expensive litigation for years to come. He said it was only having Jude Rennie’s name on the document of sale that made the deal look anywhere near legal, as Jude was to all appearances a white man and had a claim to being the grandson of Iain Rennie if he wanted to go into the courts and insist upon it. Grandma and dad always had a pretty good idea about the Protection Act, but it was never something that had bothered them out there around Mount Coolon where they was well known and respected since Iain Rennie’s day. Now they seen they was vulnerable to that business and there was nothing to be done.

‘Them Southeys come onto Verbena with the sergeant of police and two constables from Mount Coolon. Ben Southey give dad and Grandma a half hour to pack themselves up and clear out. Which was a mistake for him. If he and his wife had come onto the place nice and easy, and showing a bit of respect, Grandma would have called them into the kitchen and give them a drink of tea and showed them one or two things that could have turned out useful to them. Like not building their new house on the flood side of the creek for one thing. They was only people after all. And she knew the land would always be there waiting for her to come back to one day. Nothing was gonna change that. But the way they hustled her off, as if she was some kind of criminal in her own home, well that got Grandma’s back up. She laid an old Murri curse on them so they could never prosper on her land. Which turned out to be true. Though there’s plenty of people around Mount Coolon, including your old dad, who could see the Southeys wasn’t gonna prosper in that country even without an old Murri curse on them. But then no one since them ever prospered there neither. So that’s something. Grandma spat on the ground at the feet of Ben Southey and she walked away with nothing. I’m not leaving anything behind, she told them. My grandson’s coming back here one day and you won’t be here to see him. She told them that despite their names on the title deeds the land of the Verbena Creek country could not leave her or her ancestors or their descendants and those they favoured, but was with them for all of time and was not a matter of legal documents. You may occupy my home by this fraud, she told them, because you have the sergeant and his constables standing over there to back you up. But you will come to see in time that this occupation of yours is nothing more than a shifting shadow over the land and has nothing enduring in it. The land will be here unchanged when you are gone again, she told them, and you know that in your hearts. Her descendants, she said, would reoccupy her family’s country by a means the Southeys possessed no power to prevail against. You will have your day here, she said to them, but because the land will not take care of you it is to be a short and bitter day for you. So you had better make of it what you can while it endures. Them Southeys was all bravado and bluff that morning and laughed at her. But secretly they knew in their hearts that what Grandma said to them was true, because she had said it in a calm voice. And because of that they feared her, seeing that she must have an assurance of truth in her mind to make her so calm at this moment of being turned out of her home. She told me she seen their fear that morning when she touched on their uncertainty about what they was doing out there in her country so far from their own home. And that’s where the old curse lodged in them, in their uncertainty, where they was most vulnerable to its hook. Her curse clung to them in that place where they couldn’t reach, like a grass-tick clinging to a wild bull’s arse, and it grew and prospered there and irritated them until it sucked the life out of their resolve. They never shook it off. It’s what finished them in the end, as sure as a bullet in the brain would have finished them, but slower.’