Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (5 page)

‘I can see a lot from up here,' Crofts said.

Ward Rankin smiled. ‘Look around, Robert. Keep your eyes open,' he advised. ‘And let me know if you see any sign of scrubber cattle, won't you?' He felt almost happy as he jumped into the cabin of the truck and started the motor.

The moment they entered the narrow defile between the trees Crofts felt the stifling air close around him as if it had been waiting for him—hot and still, making him open his mouth and gasp for it, his lungs hungering in the deadness of it. The dearth of oxygen, the suffocating staleness, made him panic for a moment as the load lurched wildly from side to side. He snatched for something to steady himself with, at the same time doing his best to toss out steel droppers and wire in response to Rankin's shouted instructions. Getting into the scrub seemed to give the station owner an unusual burst of energy, and for some reason this increased Crofts' feelings of unease, making it difficult for him to focus his own energies.

Within less than a minute, however, he had more pressing things to worry about than the state of Ward Rankin's mind. As he worked feverishly to unbind the black wire ties holding the bundles of droppers together, a grey cloud of whining mosquitoes assembled under his hat brim and, despite all his efforts to rid himself of them, for the rest of the day they feasted there. They were a torment to him and they didn't try to avoid being killed. There were a thousand to replace every one that he squashed.

As the day wore on and the sun climbed directly overhead, splintering the light from the shining surfaces of the leathery foliage, the mosquitoes formed a constantly shifting haze in front of the stockman's tiring vision, making it increasingly difficult for him to see clearly. Just before midday, hotter and more thirsty than he had ever been, half-blinded by sweat and needled almost to the point of insanity, he ripped off his hat and flailed wildly at the grey cloud, cursing and yelling. At that moment the rear wheels of the truck lifted over a stump and he lost his footing. He fell heavily onto the pile of coiled barbed wire and steel droppers, almost toppling off the load and onto the ground. He lay there, hanging on and gasping with pain.

‘Keep them coming, Robert! For Christ's sake keep them coming!' Rankin's voice sounded manic, urging him on from the cabin below and, unbelievably, in the same breath exhorting him to observe the nest of a mound-building scrub turkey that they were passing just then.

The pace set by Rankin was fierce—although after a while it did not seem to be altogether his doing—the truck was relentlessly drawn forward along the narrow scar into the enclosed grey landscape, which seemed all but totally without life beyond their moving point of activity. And while Crofts did not have the time either to reflect calmly on his situation, or to appreciate turkey nests, nevertheless a question repeated itself to him: had he done something to provoke in his boss a desire for revenge? He could find only the inadequate motive of the shot stockhorse. But despite some confusion and the station owner's often belittling attitude towards his efforts, Crofts did not, deep down, see his boss as a vindictive man.

The station owner betrayed little awareness of the stockman's ordeal this morning. Throughout the day, in addition to precise instructions on the placement of the fencing materials along the line, he kept up a shouted commentary to Crofts on points of passing interest—as if he were leading Crofts on an inspired tour of the brigalow for the sheer novelty of it.

And there
was
something inspired about Ward Rankin's mood as he negotiated the heavily laden truck along the narrow clearing, past the vigorous two-year regrowth of scrub and the windrow of smashed timber and earth that had been pushed up by the bulldozer blade and which still lay unburnt all along one side of the cleared passage. The driving would normally have taken all his attention and skill. Today he did it with flair.

And later—apparently oblivious to the searing waves of heat radiating off the inner surfaces of the truck's cabin and practically cooking him in his own sweat—Rankin sang. At first snatches from his favourite ballads, isolated lines with some particular poignancy for him. They seemed to pop into his head without any conscious effort; so he sang them boldly.
‘When songs
of spring are sung remember that morning in May.'
Despite its volume, however, his voice carried only a short distance, absorbed quickly by the silent grey walls of scrub on either side. He had a pleasant singing voice, normally rather a cool baritone which was today a little too shrill around the edges. He broke off in mid-verse and yelled to Crofts to lever another weighty strainer post to the ground, then he continued:
‘Re-mem-ber, re-mem-ber
when we were young one day
.' And so on, managing to get his notes resonating now and then with the roaring reverberations of the motor.

While he grappled dextrously with the hot steering wheel, performing a complicated and largely intuitive counterpoint with it and the foot pedals, Ward Rankin sang, and the more he sang the more readily words rushed into his head. He didn't pick and choose. He sang the lot, giving to each an equally full measure of exuberance and energy, although at first he was scarcely aware of what he sang. Through it all he did not forget Crofts but retained in his mind a sharp image of the stockman labouring heroically on the load behind. After a few hours, however, this image had become distorted to that of an idealised sense of the young man up there reacting precisely to every shouted instruction and carrying it out with an effortless efficiency that he, Rankin, had somehow come to control, almost to determine, himself. As if Crofts
were
himself, or were at least an extension of himself.

By the time they had penetrated deep into the brigalow, when the unremitting blast of the noonday's heat was becoming a frightening thing to Crofts, entire sequences of stanzas that had remained for decades in the depths of forgetfulness had begun to spring to Rankin's mind. Gusts of poetry and song began to flow back to him from his past, and he thought he saw now, for the very first time in his life, the true depths and richness of their meanings (he had forgotten, or did not care to remember, why they had moved him in his youth). Unexpected and precocious phrases rippled through his thoughts with a fluent clarity they had never previously seemed to possess. A pure and powerful pleasure had begun to take hold of him.

Enclosed within the noise, the heat and the fumes of the metal cabin, half-blinded by the glare of the sun on the shifting ground ahead of him, it seemed to Rankin natural and right that he should feel as he did. He even began to let himself believe that it had always been this way for him and that any pessimism he might have felt about his life had been no more than a momentary dip in an otherwise buoyant perception of things. He sensed that this wasn't true, that it was even a reversal of the truth, but he couldn't resist the allurements of the lie. The truth was too uncertain, confusing and impenetrable. The lie made things seem clear to him; he had to go along with it. And he had to go along with it for reasons that were, for the moment, beyond him—in the same way that he couldn't just
think
the songs but had to sing them, and to sing them with the most unreserved joy.

Rankin's state of mind, as he sat in the dazzling oven of the International's cabin, was beyond mere daydreaming. With the small, detached part of his consciousness that had remained objective, he observed that he was drawing away from the light airs of fantasy and was heading towards the irresistible winds of delusion. This flicker of understanding, he foresaw, would eventually have to determine when things had gone far enough. And with that he abandoned himself to the pleasures of song.

‘
I attempt from love's sickness to fly in vain/ For I am myself
my own fever/ For I am myself my own fever and pain
,' he bellowed John Donne's phrases as he effortlessly guided the truck around the bloated green bole of a massive bottle tree, smack in the middle of the fence line. ‘Great fodder,' he yelled to the stockman, ‘when the feed's all gone.' And he laughed, not at the humour of his words, but because the instant he had seen the misshapen remains of the tree he had understood why the bulldozer driver had left it standing. He was laughing with a sudden excess of self-regard, delighted by the realisation of just how sharply his mind must be operating. He accepted this insight into the thoughts of the long-departed bulldozer driver as further evidence that he was understanding things more rapidly and more clearly than usual today. And while he was within this fantasy, it became possible for Rankin to imagine something like a bright future for himself, rather than an imminent descent into old age—a prospect that had been disturbing him for a while. He laughed again, realising that, normally, had he come across a bottle tree left in the middle of a fence line that he had paid his share to have cleared, it would have sent him into a futile rage against the stupidity of the whole class of working men, and of this operator in particular.

Today, however, he perceived with a compelling clarity that the bulldozer driver, camped out here in the scrub alone for weeks on end, had grown wistful—he had approved of this sensuous tree in its eccentric isolation from the miserableness of the crowded brigalow sticks around it, and had had no choice but to spare it. The man himself was probably huge, rotund and generous of nature. To have pushed over this tree with the rest of the rubbish would have required him to ignore his own view of things, his aesthetic, or something like that. The intuition that this was so revolved around Rankin comfortingly—a less sensitive person, he was aware, might have insisted on more evidence to arrive at this conclusion. Not he. Not today.

Rankin not only forgave the bulldozer driver for leaving this obstacle in the way of the fence, he congratulated him for doing it. Doc Kavanagh's heirs could protest as loudly as they liked, the tree would stay. Unthinkable though it was in this cattle country, the stock fence would deviate around the tree. The driver's decision to leave it there was a brilliant statement about how things ought to be. The kink in the fence would remain as a landmark to a unique human view in this desolate scrub, puzzling only to those without imagination. In his enthusiasm Rankin vowed to himself that he would make the effort to get in touch with the bulldozer driver and tell him of his passionate approval. They would become firm friends on the strength of it. It would form a special bond between them. Ward Rankin wished he could share something of this insight with the stockman right now; but such intimacies would have to wait until other things had been settled between them.

What Crofts had seen plainly enough from the back of the truck, and what Rankin had failed to notice, was a deep scar in the bottle tree's green hide where, despite repeated efforts, it had proved beyond the bulldozer's power to shift it. The driver had simply left the removal of the old tree to the chainsaws of the fencers.

Ahead of the truck now the bare ramparts of the earth tank were coming into view. The truck was nearing the crest of the low hill which they had been approaching slowly for some time and the cut stood open in front of Rankin—through the dislocating smears of the filthy windscreen, it looked like a pass between walls of dazzling stone. Moved by his sense of comradeship with the bulldozer driver he sang with fervour. Though perhaps his tone was a shade less exuberant than earlier. Comradeship had proved to be an elusive business with him . . . He sang louder. But his joy flickered dangerously now.

As they moved up closer to the steep walls of the earth tank, and while the level view of the scrub beyond was still below Rankin's line of sight, the peak of a distant mountain began to rise in the centre of the defile. Slowly the unmistakable features of its towering formation appeared before Rankin's gaze, its mass standing out sharply from the remoter Ka Ka Mundi ranges, as if it were an outlying castle of a sinister empire. Behind it the black clouds of a summer storm were forming deep within the ranges, and the sandstone pinnacle of Mt Mooloolong—the peak around which, as a girl, his wife had woven her own personal legend in the district—gleamed in blazing sunlight against that remoter darkness of the developing storm. The pinnacle seemed to radiate light and to emerge from the air itself.

Rankin's singing faltered, then died. For a frightening moment he could not decide where the bank of the earth tank began and where the cleared passage in front of him ended. He adjusted the wheel a little to the left. The heat inside the cabin was suffocating and his blood was thumping painfully at his temples. He leaned forward over the wheel, squinting desperately into the blaze of light, then wrenched the wheel violently over to the right as he saw the steep sides of the earth tank looming immediately in front of him. The right hand front wheel climbed over something solid before the radiator hit the bank. The motor stalled and they came to a sudden crunching stop, the whole outfit heeling over at a steep angle.

In the sudden silence Rankin heard Crofts cry out. The cry sounded distant and strange from where he lay, thrown into the lower corner of the cabin, the door jammed shut against the rising bank. A wave of fear spread through him at the sound of Crofts' call, as if the fear had been pent up inside him for ages, waiting for the stockman's cry to release it. An eternity seemed to pass while he struggled to get out of the cabin. He slipped back and snatched at the door handle above him. Finally, he pushed forward, tore at the door and wrenched himself out into the shattering sunlight. He scrambled up the earth parapet of the tank on all fours and stood panting on the rim.

Beyond the tank the brigalow stretched to the horizon and a great silence washed around Ward Rankin. He was sure Crofts' cry had come from this direction and it seemed to have come to him a long time ago. He had lost his hat in the struggle to get out of the truck and he raised his hand to shade his eyes against the ferocious white light. As he gazed down into the vast amphitheatre of exposed clay below him, the reflected heat came up at him in a solid blast, rising steadily so that he cringed back from it. He could see nothing through the intense glare. His senses were paralysed; he seemed to be waiting for an apprehension of tragedy to be confirmed. He was hunched forward, staring without seeing, expecting to be struck a terrible blow. He began to take tentative steps down into the ovenlike bowl, and as he descended, the ramparts of the tank forming his sole horizon now, he realised that out in the centre was a stretch of clay-white water. Through the distorting shimmer of heatwave he saw him. Out in the middle. Face down in the water. Floating in the stillness.