Journey to the Stone Country (32 page)

Bo turned and went out the door.

Annabelle and Arner fetched the swags and gear from the Pajero and the truck while Bo lit the fire. Annabelle wrapped potatoes in foil and set them in the heart of the fire. They sat around looking into the blaze, waiting for the potatoes, Bo smoking and no one in a mood to talk, the wind shaking the timbers of the old kitchen and snatching at loosened pieces of roof-iron. When they could smell the potatoes baking and judged them to be nearly done, Bo spread the coals and barbecued the meat. She and Bo sat close, cross-legged on the swag, Arner seated on a plastic crate, eating their dinner from blue enamel plates. The wind slamming the door back and forth against the lintel and no one getting up to fix it.

When Annabelle and Arner had cleaned the dishes, Arner said goodnight and took the flashlight and went out to his truck. A moment later his music started up, the thumping of the bass a drumbeat against the wind in the night, like the ritual accompaniment of a soul possessed. Annabelle wondered at his emotions, visiting for the first time the heartland of his father’s forebears. Or was he untouched by it? To have asked him directly, it seemed to her however, would have been to ignore Bo’s unspoken rule. Would have been to be insensitive to his preferred style and have risked setting a distance between them. It was not a matter of understanding, but of enduring. She resolved to wait for the story to unfold, as Grandma Rennie would have advised her to do.
You’ll
know where you’re going when you get there
. It was Grandma Rennie, after all, who had brought them here together this night. Without her there would have been no return. For none of them, not even for Bo himself.

Annabelle went outside and trod down a patch of the high grass in the garden and relieved herself. When she came back inside Bo was sitting cross-legged on the unrolled swag. He was gazing into the fire smoking a cigarette, his hat pushed back, a mug of tea clasped in his hands. He grimaced and eased his back. She asked, ‘What is it?’

‘I’ve got this pain.’ He put down the mug of tea and reached his hand up his back. ‘Right . . . there!’

She kneeled beside him and touched the place.

‘That’s it!’

‘It’s standing around in that cold wind after all the driving,’ she said. But she was worried. He smoked too much and she saw how sapped and tired he was, as if the effort of breaking down Jude Horrie’s mean-spirited barriers had cost him a sacrifice of his morale. She took his hat off and placed it beside the swag and she took the half-burnt cigarette from between his fingers and set it on the edge of the hearth. He looked at her as if he were a child in need of comforting. She kneeled in front of him and unbuttoned his shirt, stripping it from his back and pulling the sleeves off his arms. ‘Lie face down on the swag,’ she told him.

‘What are you going to do?’

She put her hands on his bare shoulders. ‘Just do as you’re told, Bo Rennie,’ she ordered him firmly.

He lay down and she kneeled astride him and massaged his neck and shoulders and the muscles of his back, the probing of her fingers making him groan. ‘I’ll do this for you every night when you’re an old man,’ she promised him. His naked torso, the grain of his honey-gold skin in the firelight. She touched the pale scars of his youth. He was no longer a young man. She wondered, with a small shrinking in her heart, if they had left their enterprise too late. For it would surely take the energy of a young man to bring Verbena back into production. She resolved to defend him against whatever frailties their future held. And might even welcome his frailty, so that she might care the more for him. She smiled when he winced at the probing of her fingers into the tight hollow of an old scar. ‘There!’ she said. ‘It’s doing you good.’

When she had finished she undressed and lay beside him in the swag. It was warm in the kitchen in front of the fire now. She sensed his need for sleep and lay close against him, the warmth of his body, his mansmell and the smell of his cigarettes. She could feel his heart throbbing. She lay listening to the wind and to the thud of Arner’s music, strong and near one minute, a tremor inside her own chest or within the earth itself, then distant and scarcely audible, as if Arner’s phantom drummer rode the wind in a great arc across the sky, an uncanny familiar of the cold stars or the old people. Bo began to snore and she studied him in the halflight. A flickering of his eyelids, his features contorted and easing with the passage of his dreaming, the great objects of mystery in the vastness of sleep rising to greet him as he fell through time, his hands trembling as he strove to grasp some passing form, to hold it, to struggle with it and to subdue it. She whispered, ‘I love you, Bo Rennie.’ Their enterprise seemed to her to be a fragile thing, opposed by a vast indifference, and their tenure of life itself a brief stewardship only.

She was unable to sleep and after a while she turned onto her back and lay watching the last of the firelight dying against the open timbers of the ceiling. She wondered if she might ever become as he was. Such a transformation would entail a campaign against the grain of her upbringing and her training, against the grain of her life and her culture. Her father’s encouragement from the beginning had been to inquire into the reasons for everything. Had it not always seemed to her a right and a duty to do so? The tireless interrogation of facts and phenomena at school and at the university in search of endless explanations. The very foundation of her profession, of
all
professions. If she were to adopt Grandma Rennie’s and Bo’s language of signs and silence it would be to defy the code of inquiry that lay at the very heart of her own culture . . .

The fire had burned down to a spread of glowing embers. She knew she was not going to sleep. She inched herself out of the swag so as not to wake him and draped her coat around her shoulders. She sat cross-legged on the swag beside his sleeping form in the glow of the embers, the noggings and joists of the unlined timber walls faintly illuminated by the moonlight from the window. Arner’s music pumping into the night. Bo slept deeply now beside her, no longer snoring, his body as still as if he had slipped away to another place. She leaned and touched her lips to his forehead. His skin was cool. He did not stir at the touch of her lips. She felt his absence. The mystery of sleep and the unconscious that we take for granted, that vast region where our longings and fears appear to us in the form of visions, the voices of the oracles, ambiguous and obscure, arising from our own depths. In our dreams the whispering voices of our gods. She turned to the hearth and reached for a stick and stirred the embers . . . She was seeing the books on her shelves in her study at the house in Carlton: Halliday, Parke and Wormell. Delphi, Didyma and Claros. The oracular shrines of the Greeks. They had also spoken in an antique language of signs and silence. Seduced by the labyrinth of meaning and double meaning until they became transformed, lost to the world in the incubation of another reality, meaning slipped from their words to lodge in the charged spaces of silence, escaping the tyranny of the literal text. She thought: If only we could share the sleep and dreams of the person we love!

She reached and selected pieces of sandalwood bark and chipwood from their stock of fuel and placed them on the coals and blew on them until a flame sprang up. The fragrance of the sandalwood strong in her nostrils. It was the incense of the bush. The smell of the brigalow and poison bendee and the lancewood scrubs. The smell of her childhood. She closed her eyes and savoured the smell of the wood oils. To know when something is sacred to you! Her father gazing at her across the smoke of their lunchcamp fire when she went out on the muster with him during the holidays, the burden of his love for her so heavy she remembered it as a sadness in his eyes. Learning then that love is inarticulate and does not need words. And she would get up and go around the fire to him and hug him. And they would hold each other, breathless against the ineluctable moment of their separation. Wreathed in the sacred smoke of the sandalwood, she and her father. Making time stand still . . . The fire was going well. She turned and reached behind her for the tea billy. As she turned, her attention was caught by the yellow flames reflecting in the shattered pictureglass in the dark of the hole in the floorboards beside her. She set down the billy and reached her hand in through the rotted boards, easing the broken frame free, picking the shards of glass from it and placing them back in the hole. An old sepia photograph mounted on grey cardboard was held to the back of the broken frame by rusty pins. The cardboard mount had been snapped in two. The photograph, its image faded and fragile, cracked down the middle like a stroke of lightning, its corners broken. She removed the mount from the frame and held the image towards the pale flames of the fire.

Two men and four young women dressed in the formal clothes of the early part of the century gazed at her out of the past, posed on the verandah of a grand old homestead, a pair of French doors open behind them, a maid standing in the deep shadow there. Before the seated young women a round table laid with an embroidered cloth and tea things. The group framed by the delicate foliage of a Chinese wisteria trailing from the coping of the verandah. The four young women were seated on cane chairs, the two men standing behind them. The man closest to the camera rested his hand on the back of a chair, as if to signify his claim on the affections of the young woman who sat in it. He was the only one in the group, however, not looking directly out of the photograph at the camera. His attention was directed towards the young woman seated on the extreme right of the picture. At first Annabelle thought this young woman was sitting in the shade of the verandah coping. Then she realised she was not in the shade but was black. Annabelle leaned close to examine the young woman. Assured and at ease, the black woman gazed steadily at her out of the stilled moment of past time, her hands folded in her lap, a necklace of beads or pearls at her throat. Her posture upright and formal, her pale gown narrowly waisted, her bosom buttoned firmly within the bodice of the dress, her dark hair parted severely down the centre. Her gaze was self-possessed and calm, as if she were in the most familiar of surroundings among these white people and knew herself to be at home. She looked out of the photograph from her own world, an authority in her gaze, though she could scarcely have been more than sixteen years of age. Annabelle felt a thrill of recognition. There was a likeness to Bo that was as much in the assurance of the young woman’s bearing and style as in the modelling of her features.

Annabelle drew in her breath. She was looking at Grandma Rennie! . . .
There used to be a photograph hung over the stove in the kitchen
at Verbena when I was a kid,
Bo had told her that day at Zamia Street
.
Them three Bigges girls and Grandma taking tea on the verandah at the Ranna
homestead, May with a pinafore on standing holding a tray in the shadow of the
doorway behind them
. This was that photograph! The maid was Grandma Rennie’s sister, May, standing in the doorway. It would have been impossible for her not to have been jealous of her younger sister’s privileged position within the family. The French doors behind the group opened, Annabelle knew, into the Ranna dining room with its balloon-backed chairs and long cedar table, the ceiling rotted and collapsing, the pile of debris gathering on the table. She examined the photograph with a feeling of intense excitement, almost as if she were there herself with these people. The man looking at the black woman must be Bo’s grandfather, Iain Ban Rennie. A morally stalwart man, Bo had called him. The
other
Iain Ban Rennie! He was of medium height, heavily bearded, wearing a stand-up collar and black necktie. His jacket unbuttoned to reveal a high-buttoned waistcoat and watch chain. He looked as if he had for the moment forgotten the photographer and the tableau he was himself a part of and was lost in his contemplation of the beautiful black girl. Annabelle had no doubt of the identity of the other man. His likeness to her own father was striking. It was a likeness her grandfather had lost by the time she remembered him, however, by then a poor soul trailing around the paddocks with his old bullock, Paddy, for a companion. It was the first time she had seen a photograph of her grandfather when he was a young man. Louis Beck, the son of the founder of Haddon Hill, friend of George Bigges and Iain Rennie. There they were! Together in George Bigges’ photograph, the Becks and the Rennies. Her own family and Bo’s!

Her first impulse was to wake Bo and show him her find. But she didn’t wake him. She sat instead studying the photograph by the light of the burning wood. Grandma Rennie and her own grandfather gazing back at her steadily across the span of almost a hundred years, as if each of them strove to communicate to her their own measure of events back then . . .

She woke with the smell of frying bacon and spiced sausages strong in her nostrils. The room was bright with the morning sun shining through the open door, the day outside clear and still. Bo squatting by the fire cooking breakfast in the big iron frying pan, steam rising from the tea billy set on the edge of the coals beside him.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

He turned and regarded her. ‘Time you was out of that swag young lady. You been doing some serious sleeping there. Here’s a drink of tea here for you.’ He reached for the billy with his free hand and filled her mug with the strong black tea. ‘Me and Arner was watching you. You been laying there like a dead woman.’ He handed her the mug of tea.

She sat up, wrapping the green blanket around her shoulders in the manner of a priest’s cope, and took the mug of tea from him. Arner was sitting with his back to the wall over in the sunlight by the open door. His great bulk collapsed against the wall, his legs spread wide apart, thrust out in front of him, as if he had been shot and were dazed by the impact. His broad hands resting on the floor, readying himself for the task of standing up. The photograph was lying across one broad thigh. He was not looking at the photograph, however, but was studying the food cooking in the frying pan.