Journey to the Stone Country (33 page)

‘You saw the photograph?’ Annabelle said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful!’

Bo’s hand flicked down to her side. ‘She was laying there beside you this morning.’

‘It was rammed down in amongst these rotten boards,’ she told him.

‘That’s Jude Horrie for you,’ Bo said, his tone matter-of-fact, unsurprised. ‘That boy of May’s would always do something miserable if he could think of how to do it. If he’d took that old picture with him, like he took everything else, instead of offering an insult to Grandma that way, well we wouldn’t have it now.’ Bo selected a burning stick from the fire and relit the stub of his cigarette. He seemed unmoved by the recovery of the photograph, or accepting of it. He leaned and set the stick back on the edge of the fire. ‘Jude give the picture back to us without knowing what he was doing. That’s the way things go. A man like Jude Horrie is always in a hurry to get things done and move on. He never considers how anything he leaves behind him is gonna work out.’

‘It really is Grandma Rennie, then?’ Annabelle said.

‘It’s Grandma. I guess she reckoned it was time she put in an appearance.’ He chuckled, ‘About time you two met up.’ He gestured over towards Arner. ‘George Bigges give that picture to Grandma as a wedding present. She was very attached to it.’ He turned and examined her. ‘You’re looking a bit peaky on it this morning, my love. Me and Arner was wondering if you was ever gonna wake up. We was banging things around but you just kept on sleeping through the noise. You can eat three of these and a couple of sausages. These are good eggs!’ he said with conviction. ‘They’ll set you back on your feet.’

‘One egg and one sausage will be plenty, thanks.’

‘One egg’s not gonna be enough!’

‘All right then, two.’ She sipped her tea and watched him dishing up Arner’s breakfast.

Arner set the photograph on the floor and rolled onto his side, kneeling on all fours a moment, like a weight-lifter readying himself for the lift. He picked up the photograph and raised himself onto one knee, a hand to the wall. He grunted with the effort and stood. Standing, he was transformed, the enormous bulk of his body majestic, grave, beautiful and aloof, a being detached from his fellow humans, entranced by his steady contemplation of another world. He ambled over to the swag where Annabelle lay drinking her tea by the fire. He leaned and set the photograph on the floor beside her and nodded at her, meeting her gaze fleetingly, as if he were making the point that the photograph was in her care. He turned and took his breakfast from Bo, murmuring his thanks.

‘If you want more, we got plenty,’ Bo offered.

Arner studied the steaming plate of food in his hands. ‘You gonna do toast?’

‘We’ll do toast.’

Annabelle picked up the photograph and looked at it. ‘What do you think of the photograph, Arner?’ Even as she asked him the question she knew it was pointless, that her question was, in a way, a measure of her own failure to see things his way. But she wanted to know. She wanted to hear him express some enthusiasm for her find.

Arner paused, standing and considering. ‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘It’s good.’ Solemnly delivering his verdict.
It’s good
. He moved to the doorway and leaned down, one hand to the wall, setting his plate on the floor before lowering himself into position beside it, sitting on the doorstep in the sunlight with his back to them.

‘Two eggs going in here for you,’ Bo said.

She watched him.

He tipped the pan, taking care not to break the yolks of her eggs. ‘You go back over old country,’ he said, offering a response to her question, ‘and these things come around and find you.’

‘Our families are together in this photo,’ she said. ‘Your grandfather and mine.’

‘Pictures don’t lie,’ he agreed amiably.

She looked across at Arner. He did not appear to be attending to their conversation. He was concentrating on his meal, his shoulders hunched, leaning over his food. He ate, she decided, with a religious diligence, each mouthful carefully considered, as if he were constructing an object of lasting value, everything but the food excluded from his awareness. She looked down at the photograph in her hands. ‘She was beautiful,’ she said. ‘No wonder your grandfather couldn’t resist her. Is this the only photo of her?’

‘You getting out of that swag for this?’ Bo asked. ‘These eggs is just about done. It’s the only photo of her I ever seen, but there would have to be others somewhere. George Bigges was always taking them. My dad said he was as good a photographer as he was a cattleman. George Bigges loved to photograph. Whenever George was visiting in the district, or travelling with a mob of cattle, dad said he’d have an extra packhorse loaded up with his big old wooden cameras and tripods and boxes of them glass plates. Old Nellie showed me and Dougald a whole heap of them plates down there at Ranna one time. There’s boxes of them planted in that house somewhere. Stored up in the roof most likely.’

She said, ‘I searched for them. Remember? I didn’t think to look in the roof.’ She put aside the photograph and dropped the blanket from her shoulders. She stood up and put on her clothes.

Bo watched her a moment, then he looked down at the photograph. ‘She never lost her good looks. When she was an old lady, Grandma was still a good-looking woman. She could have remarried half a dozen times but she never did. White men and black. She stayed staunch to Iain the rest of her days.’ He leaned down and laid his finger on the young woman seated in front of Iain Rennie. ‘That’s Katherine Bigges. She was the eldest of them girls. Iain was gonna marry her but he knocked everybody off their feet and married Grandma instead. Grandma used to have a chuckle about the way he’s looking sideways at her in this picture.’ He turned back to the fire. ‘You could make some toast when you’re done with them eggs and sausages. These coals are getting real good for toast.’

She watched him shift the sausages and bacon to one side of the pan and crack four eggs into it for himself.

‘We’ll pack up this gear and get on over to Elsie and Tiger’s place before we head out to Verbena.’ He did not look around. ‘Elsie’s Les Marra’s sister. She’s a good woman. You two will get along.’ He pointed the fork at the wall, steadying it in a south-easterly direction, his eyes narrowed, as if he saw the subjects of his story through a warp of time. ‘Elsie and Tiger used to live down there on the coast at a little place just out of Sarina. He was a fitter on the railways for years till he got sick and couldn’t work. He’s never really come good again. He turned religious a couple of years back, the whole family did, but the Lord don’t seem to be doin a lot for them. There’s not much of the tiger in him. That’s what Les called him when he started courting Elsie, and it’s stuck to him. He don’t answer to nothin else now. His mother and father was part Indians. The family come over from Fiji back in the early days. Les got Tiger and Elsie this place here rent free. It belongs to the Land Council.’ He scooped the eggs and flipped them over.

Annabelle finished her breakfast and made toast over the coals.

‘Make a heap of that toast,’ Bo said. ‘We got that new pot of English marmalade from Coles. Me and Arner are gonna give her a try out.’

After breakfast Arner went back to the isolation of his truck and the sustaining heartbeat of his music. Annabelle did the dishes and cleaned up. The morning moved on slowly around them, the town down the hill silent except for an occasional vehicle going by along the road or the bark of a dog. Someone was operating heavy machinery off in the scrub at a distance, the noise of the machine flowing in and receding. By mid morning the wind had begun to stir again, coming in drifts of air as if some hidden power tested the way forward.

Bo squatted on his heels by the fire, making brews of tea and smoking cigarettes, placing sandalwood sticks on the coals and watching them burn, the fragrant smoke filling the kitchen with the incense of the bush. He seemed in no hurry to leave the peaceful day behind. He might have been waiting for someone, listening for their approach in the strengthening wind, sheets of loose roof-iron beginning to ease back and forth on their nails. He got to his feet at one point and fashioned a neat wire hasp for the door as if he had decided to stay at May’s old place. He tested the hasp until he was satisfied it would hold against the buffeting of the wind.

It was noon before Bo roused himself, satisfied, it seemed, to have arrived at last at the moment of their departure. He stood up and stretched, then stood looking down at Annabelle where she was sitting out of the wind in the sunlight by the door.

‘That was a good massage you give us last night, my love.’

She looked up and smiled and reached for his hand. ‘I’ll give you another one tonight.’

He stood considering her. ‘You okay?’

‘It was good to find Grandma’s photo.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. He turned to the fire. ‘I don’t think we need put this out. Let it burn. You ready?’

‘I’m ready.’

‘Let’s go.’

Outside the door he fastened his new hasp and tried it. ‘She’ll hold,’ he said. If they ever returned it would be there to let them in. The cold wind had picked up and was blowing strongly again. There was a high cloud haze, the sunlight brazen and dazzling to the eyes so that they adjusted their hats, a pall of refracted light over the silvery scrubs stretching away beyond the town perimeter to the horizon, the broad high plain of the burnished landscape punctured by conical peaks. Annabelle pulled her hatbrim down harder, pushing her sunglasses with a finger.

As they drove away she turned in her seat and looked back, a thin smoke flying from the chimney of Aunty May’s old kitchen, the reservoir reflecting the steely sky, the cold water ruffled by the wind and no bird life. Despite the smoke the place looked abandoned, as if there was nothing left there now to be scavenged or retrieved from that place in the past. On the near bank of the reservoir a half-submerged car body rusted among yellow plastic rubbish bags and a discarded mattress. By daylight an unromantic and sinister place. She turned back to the road ahead. The precious photograph was stowed safely in her bag. It was a comfort to think of it, as if it were her passport for the next stage of their journey. As if Grandma Rennie had broken her long silence and given her this sign of approval, extending the old Verbena welcome to those with a little respect. She had rescued George Bigges’ wedding present to Grandma Rennie from the fate of Jude Horrie’s insult, and it felt good to have done that.

Amazing Grace

B
EYOND THE TOWN PERIMETER THE ROADSIGN SAID,
YACAMUNDA. Bo drove for a kilometre or so then turned off onto a sidetrack by a piece of cleared ground. There was a disused training track for racehorses, a wide ellipse of lancewood railings and two ripple-iron sheltersheds. An old Allis Chalmers bulldozer stood abandoned and rusting behind the sheds.

Bo gestured at the bulldozer as they went by. ‘I bet that young feller of Trace’s could get that machine going. We’d more than likely get hold of her for the price of scrap.’

Annabelle looked back at the bulldozer. It was half-buried under a rank growth of Madagascar rubber vine. She thought of Mathew Hearn and the Madagascar table at Zigzag. She turned to Bo, ‘Are you thinking of doing some land clearing?’

‘You never know what you’re gonna do,’ he said reasonably. ‘When you got land, a piece of machinery’s like a friend. It’s good to have it around when you need it. But you never know when you’re gonna need it. You gotta keep an eye out for opportunities.’

Annabelle said, ‘I don’t think that bulldozer’s ever going to move again.’

‘I wouldn’t give up on it that easy.’ He raised his voice and sang, ‘
If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the ti-ye-eem
.’ His singing was tuneless and off-key and he did not persist with it. He coughed up some phlegm and spat out the sidewindow, then dragged deeply on his cigarette.

They followed wheel ruts past the sheds. The track looping through open box and ironbark for two hundred metres, coming to an abrupt end by a square fibro-cement house with an unpainted ripple-iron roof. The house was set on a patch of cleared ground, a fresh regrowth of silver-leaved wattles and bitter barks seeding among the sparse wiregrass tussocks, patches of thin red ground showing through like wear in an old carpet. Fibro-cement sheets around the base of the house holed and split. A family of grey kangaroos watching their approach from the edge of the scrub.

Bo pulled up by a hedge of blood-red geraniums overgrowing a netting fence along the near side of the house. Outside the netting a rusted windmill hung in the air, the gantry crippled and leaning, resisting the wind like a frail old man. A new open-sided pole and ripple-iron shed stood alongside the windmill, a Queensland railways’ tarpaulin hanging at the open side, bellying in the wind, its loose ropes trailing across the rear end of a Commodore sedan heeled over on pancaked tyres, wheelrims bitten into the dirt, the bootlid sprung like a surprised mouth.

‘Here’s the boy coming now,’ Bo said. He reefed on the Pajero’s handbrake and swung his door open.

Annabelle lifted her arm and took a sniff of her armpit. ‘I need a shower.’

‘I don’t know if Elsie and Tiger got a shower.’ He stepped down and went to meet the man who was crossing towards them from the house gate.

Annabelle got down and went around to the front of the Pajero. Bo introduced her. Tiger surprised her by embracing her warmly and giving her a firm kiss on the cheek, his short arms going around her and squeezing. He was a small man with narrow shoulders and a firm round pot belly. He had a droopy moustache and wore spectacles with thick lenses and heavy black frames, a red and white baseball cap set square on his head, the peak pulled down hard over his black hair. He stepped away, grinning, an impish expectation in his regard of her, as if he had arranged a practical joke for her reception and couldn’t wait to spring it. ‘Where’d you fellers camp last night?’ His voice was high and nervous, as if he repressed a desire to laugh, or maybe to mimic a bird. He looked quickly at Annabelle and giggled, sharing his private joke.