Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (2 page)

The stockman reined in under a tree and patiently surveyed the line of the scrub to his right. He waited. Half an hour later horses emerged from the trees and began cropping their way out onto the plain. He dismounted and started to stalk them, keeping the limes and stringybarks between himself and them. But he had not counted on a family of wild pigs that were camped round the delicious supply of fallen limes. They dashed screaming from him. The horses were alarmed at once, keeping their distance and snorting with suspicion at his stealthy intrusion. The stockman realised now that he should have driven them openly into the yards in the normal way and drafted off the foal there. He could see the foal clearly enough, however, peeping around the protective shoulder of its mother. He steadied the rifle against the trunk of a stringybark and looked along the sights. The foal's head was a hittable target. Why not pull the trigger? . . . He fired and the powerful explosion drove him backwards. The fearful noise roared and echoed through the trees and across the plain, sending the horses racing for the back fence. A cloud of fine dust rose up into the first rays of the sun that slanted through the trees.

•

Robert Crofts had unsaddled the night horse and hung the gear on its rack in the shed. He was on the point of returning to his quarters when a voice suddenly said, ‘Did you have any luck?'

He had been aware of the sound of someone walking towards the shed but it had not registered with him until Ida Rankin asked her question. She had been collecting down at the hen run beyond his hut and her hands were filled with warm brown eggs.

‘You were very quick,' she said. On going out she had tucked her dress up high around her thighs to avoid the dewy weeds that grew rankly along either side of the track. When she saw Crofts she had shaken out the folds—one tuck had remained caught up, like an imitation of a toga. Her well-shaped legs were tanned and smooth.

‘You should cut the weeds here too,' she said and laughed lightly, pleasantly conscious of his attention.

He gazed beyond her now, along the path that led to his hut and to the hen run, and beyond that to the rubbish dump. ‘I'll do it today,' he said.

‘And did you shoot the foal?' she asked again.

‘No,' he said uneasily. ‘I missed her.'

She sounded sympathetic. ‘Oh,' she said. ‘Well, it's not the end of the world, is it?'

His gaze focused on her and for the first time their eyes met. He hesitated then said, ‘Not for the foal anyway.' A slight squint in her eyes gave her strong handsome features a point of fascination, as if the physical misalignment were reflecting an uncertainty in her thoughts, which she might voice at any moment. The sounds of the morning suddenly rushed in on them. An insane screeching of cockatoos shook the trees over their heads. They both looked down at the eggs in her upturned palms. The undercurrent of feeling between them had left in its wake a slight awkwardness. She smiled and turned and left him standing there. He watched her walk towards the house.

Except for the subdued click and scrape of cutlery on china, breakfast proceeded silently. The news that the stockman had shot his favourite mare through the shank had been received by Ward Rankin half an hour earlier with a restrained raising of his eyebrows and a slight shake of his head. He had not spoken since. He ate his bacon delicately, absorbed by the technical precision of the task, his knife making repeated, evenly spaced, snicking sounds against his plate. Ida Rankin glanced at him from time to time. Each forkful he raised to his mouth bore an equal measure of egg and bacon. Without fixing directly on anyone, his gaze would make a rapid survey of the table every few moments and when the children were on the point of finishing their meal he paused, his fork suspended, apparently listening for something.

His wife looked at him and then at her children. ‘You can go and get your work ready,' she said to them. ‘I'll be out in a minute.'

And with that the station owner resumed eating his breakfast. The three of them were left at the table, and when Ida Rankin went to fetch coffee from the kitchen only the stockman and his boss remained.

Ward Rankin wiped his mouth with his white napkin and carefully arranged his plate squarely before him, a procedure that occupied him for a surprising length of time, as if he were unwilling to bring this moment to a conclusion. When he was ready he sat back and looked directly at Robert Crofts, staring at him steadily until at last the stockman was forced to meet his eyes. It was not certain then whether Rankin's lips formed themselves into a sneer or whether he were simply trying to dislodge a remnant of bacon from a tooth. At any rate he waited longer than necessary before speaking, and when he did speak he emphasised each word, not shifting his gaze from the young man's for a second. ‘Get the horses into the yard,' he said.

He waited until the stockman was in the doorway before adding, ‘Wait there for me.'

The sun laid a shimmering haze over the yards as the mob of restless horses churned the fine dust into the air. The stockman observed their quarrelling, waiting more than an hour before Rankin's jeep rattled up. An examination of the mare's foreleg revealed that the bullet had missed the great cannon bone and had passed cleanly through the muscle an inch or so above the delicate joint formed by the sesamoid bones. Rankin said nothing. He applied Stockholm tar liberally to the wound and instructed the stockman to turn the horses out.

The two men stood and watched the mare limp off behind the scattering mob, her impatient foal darting ahead of her. Now that she was out of action anyway, Rankin had decided that she may as well rear the foal.

The yards were empty but the two men continued to stand there facing the open gate and the grove of limes in the paddock until the stillness had arranged itself around them again. The morning was settling into silence. Beyond the deep channel of the creek and far out on the silver plain the baleful lament of the crows was drawing the day forward.

Rankin moved away a few paces then turned and faced the stockman. Holding a cigarette between the second and third fingers of his left hand, and in his right hand an old-fashioned brass lighter (it was highly polished and caught the sun, the solder at its joints worn almost through with years of regular use) he examined the young man. Rankin did not light the cigarette but held it and the lighter poised in front of him. He was agitated and his pale eyes were watering, glinting sharply from under the brim of his hat. He moved again until he was almost directly behind the stockman. Only then, when Robert Crofts turned to face him, did he say sharply, ‘This is another case of you wavering! Isn't it? Dithering about instead of doing the job cleanly when it's something important!'

He stopped speaking. This was not what he wished to say.

Before the stockman could respond Rankin made an angry dismissive gesture and turned away. He walked quickly to where his jeep was parked. Before climbing into the vehicle Rankin looked back and, seeing the young man still standing in the middle of the empty yard, he shouted mockingly, ‘Why don't you go and get on with your cleaning up!'

•

Ward Rankin was in an uncomfortable state of mind. On entering the house he went straight to the sitting room. This was a room of generous proportions in the eastern end of the house. Rooms had been built on around it and it was now windowless, in a perpetual half-light even on the brightest day. Filled with Rankin's books and the heavy Victorian furniture of his parents, the room had a musty, suspended-in-time feeling about it. The children avoided it and, except for the first half-hour or so by the wood fire after dinner on chilly winter evenings, it was never the scene of family gatherings.

Rankin switched on a wall lamp and closed the door. Sitting at his desk he began sorting through the mail which had arrived the day before. Much of the correspondence was from stock agents and distributors seeking payment of their bills and custom for new products. The details of this work disgusted him today and he couldn't settle to it. After a few minutes he gave up and sat staring at the bookshelves.

In part the reason for his extreme restlessness was clear. He was justifiably upset with the stockman for putting his best mare out of action. It was the sort of gross clumsiness he hated more than anything. There was something ugly about such a thing. It was a serious act of stupidity. But here Rankin's feelings encountered a difficulty, for he was aware that Robert Crofts was not stupid. Staring at the spines of the books Rankin realised that he was beginning to formulate an unpleasant intimation. Could there have been something wilful in the shooting of the mare by the stockman? He had no wish to consider such a possibility and made an effort to distract himself at once. He ripped open the first envelope lying before him and saw that it contained a letter from Dennis Laing, the Rockhampton manager of The Australian Estates Company. One of the first things Laing asked was, ‘How is Crofts settling in?' It was a reasonable enough enquiry, as it had been Rankin's request to Laing that had resulted in Crofts being sent out to the station from the coast.

Throughout his life Ward Rankin had perceived station hands as men belonging to a race of beings distinct from and inferior to his own. He would never have expressed it like that, but it was how he saw the matter. As a boy home from boarding school only during the holidays he had had fleeting contact with a succession of these men who, for the most part, were semi-itinerant in their habits and more or less illiterate—their legacy of reading matter was invariably a messy collection of wretched magazines shoved in a corner of the quarters or strewn around the floor after they had departed. They came from poor town families. Rankin had viewed his own future then as a flowing one, securely in place among the prolific and civilised offerings of a mellow European scholarship—a view no less real to him for having been largely imagined for him through the eyes of his schoolmasters. He did not see himself as the daily companion of station hands.

Rankin had specifically requested Laing in his recruiting to look out for someone a bit different from the usual run and had not objected when the latter had telephoned to say that a young English boy was looking for work on a cattle station. He had even permitted himself to look forward with a degree of pleasurable anticipation to Robert Crofts' arrival and, reassured by his appearance at their first meeting, had initially offered him the use of his books. But the response to his unheard-of invitation had been disappointing. More than that, his rejected offer of intimacy had left Rankin with the uncomfortable feeling that he might have rendered himself vulnerable to the stockman. He had been looking for the means to redress the balance ever since. The accident with his mare this morning had seemed to present the perfect opportunity for putting Crofts firmly back in his place. But in the yards Rankin had found himself inarticulate. As he sat at his desk ripping open envelopes Ward Rankin conjured for himself a fantasy in which he humiliated Crofts. In this daydream the stockman was no longer muscularly beautiful but bore instead the worried hungry look of the local poor. Rankin felt a little better after this and even managed to settle down to his work for a time.

There were many causes for Ward Rankin's disturbed state of mind this morning. He had found satisfaction in neither of two fundamental areas of life—sex and the fulfilment of dreams. And these failures were connected. The most promising relationship of his youth—a deep love for his English master at school which had matured during the best four years of his life—had remained unconsummated, leaving both the man and the scholar in him forever stranded on the edge of seduction. For years after his enforced return to the station he had kept up a correspondence with his friend, who had guided him in his thinking and in his careful assembling of a library. It became a matter, however, of rationalising hopes that in the end were no longer real. The library had ceased to grow and the correspondence had dropped from a letter a month to a letter a year and at last to silence. Even reading in the newspaper of the man's death years later had not greatly moved him.

Ward Rankin's scholarship, such as it was, had become frozen in time, his attitudes those of a generation whose opinions were no longer viable. Recently he had wondered briefly if those early preoccupations might not be rekindled. As he sat alone at his desk this morning he found himself again—and against his will—thinking of Robert Crofts. The stockman had stood in the doorway and gazed around the unfamiliar room, his expression betraying neither interest nor surprise. He had accepted the loan of a volume but it was clear that the books meant nothing to him. That day Ward Rankin had decided that Crofts was bent on some private purpose of his own.

On the verandah a screen door banged twice in quick succession announcing that the children's morning lessons with their mother had come to an end. Rankin got up and left his paperwork unfinished. In the bright light on the verandah his wife was laying the table for morning tea.

Ida Rankin was as much a Central Highlander as her husband. Her great-grandparents had trekked their belongings, their cattle and their horses almost two thousand kilometres from the Goulburn district of New South Wales to settle on the Nogoa River in 1862, less than a year after the local Aborigines had been exterminated by the settlers in retribution for the massacre of the Wills family at Cullin-la-Ringo. In contrast to these preceding horrors, her family had enjoyed the beginning of a peaceful and prosperous history. Like Rankin she had spent four years at a boarding school on the coast and had then returned to the station, intending to stay no more than twelve months before starting an Arts degree at the university in Brisbane. While her sojourn away from the Highlands had broadened her view of the world and of her possibilities it had done nothing to erode her love for the grand landscape of her childhood.

Unlike Ward Rankin she had not wished to escape from the Highlands but, as a child of a large family, had viewed her eventual departure from them as a sad necessity. She was not indifferent to the effects of beauty on her soul—Goorbulla, the mysterious ‘roof' of Queensland and once the sacred domain of the Bidjara peoples had revealed itself to her in childhood and she was never thereafter entirely free of its irrational influence. By volunteering her services as companion to Ward Rankin's semi-invalid mother she had found a convenient way to occupy her time. She had also been attracted by the element of risk in sharing, for a limited period, a domestic situation with a man of Rankin's age and difficult disposition. Once within the household her youthful enthusiasm had seized on Rankin's unresponsive personality as a challenge to her womanhood. Her teachers had made her as familiar with English literature as he was and so she had contrived this as the way to bring them together. Love had never really come into it for either of them. For the past few years they had shared the same bed only on rare occasions, and then uneasily.