Best Australian Short Stories (34 page)

“This man never speaks,” the store-keeper in the town three miles away had told me. “A few people have heard him say one word like ‘Hullo’ or something. He makes himself understood by shaking or nodding his head.”

“Is there something wrong with him?” I had asked.

“No. He can talk if he wants to. Silent Joe, they call him.”

When the man reached a spot where the creek widened into a pool he squatted in his heels and scooped some water into the dish. He stood up and, bending over the dish, began to wash the dirt it contained by swinging it in a circular motion.

I lifted my crutches from the ground and hopped along the pebbles till I stood opposite him across the pool.

“Good day,” I said. “Great day.”

He raised his head and looked at me. His eyes were grey, the greenish grey of the bush. There was no hostility in his look, just a searching. They suddenly changed their expression and said, as plainly as if he had spoken, “Yes.”

I sat down and watched him. He poured the muddy water into the clear pool. It rolled along the sandy bottom, twisting and turning in whorls and convolutions until it faded into a faint cloud, moving swiftly with the current. He washed the residue many times.

I crossed over above the pool and walked down to him. “Get anything?”

He held the dish towards me and pointed to three specks of gold resting on the outer edge of a layer of sand.

“So that’s gold,” I said. “Three specks, eh! Half the troubles of this world come from collections of specks like those.”

He smiled. It took a long time to develop. It moved over his fact slowly and somehow I thought of an egret in flight, as if wings had come and gone.

He looked at me with kindliness and, for a moment, I saw the bush, not remote and pitying, but beckoning like a friend. He was akin to trees and they spoke through him.

If I could only understand him I would understand the bush, I thought. But he turned away and, like the gums, was remote again, removed from contact by his silence which was not the silence of absent speech, but the eloquent silence of trees.

“I am coming with you I said.

We walked side by side. He studied the track for my benefit. He kicked limbs aside, broke the branches of wattles drooping over the pad that skirted the foot of the hill.

We moved into thicker timber. The sun pierced the canopy of branches and spangled our shoulders with leaf patterns. A cool, leaf-mould breath of earth rose from the foot-printed moss. The track dipped sharply down into a gully and ended in a small clearing.

Thin grass, spent with seeding, quivered hopelessly in a circle of trees. In the centre of the clearing a mound of yellow clay rose from around the brink of a shaft. A windlass, erected on top of the mound, spanned the opening. A heavy iron bucket dangled from the roller.

“So this is your mine!” I said.

He nodded, looking at it with a pleased expression.

I climbed to the top of the mound and peered down into darkness. A movement of air, dank with the moisture from buried rocks and clay, welled up and broke coldly on my face. I pushed a small stone over the edge. It flashed silently from sight, speeding through a narrow darkness for a tense gap in time, then rang an ending from somewhere deep down in the earth.

“Cripes, that’s deep!” I exclaimed.

He was standing beside me, pleased that I was impressed.

“Do you go down that ladder ?” I asked. I pointed to a ladder of lashed saplings that was wired to a facing of timber.

He nodded.

“I can climb ladders,” I murmured, wondering how I could get down, “but not that one.”

He looked at me questioningly, a sympathetic concern shading his face.

“Infantile paralysis,” I explained. “It’s a nuisance sometimes. Do you think you could lower me down in that bucket? I want to see the reef where you get the gold.”

I expected him to demur. It would be the natural reaction. I expected him to shake his head in an expressive communication of the danger involved.

But he didn’t hesitate. He reached out across the shaft and drew the bucket to the edge. I placed my crutches on the ground and straddled it so that my legs hung down the sides and the handle lay between my knees. I grasped the rope and said, “Right-o”, then added, “You’re coming down the ladder, aren’t you?”

He nodded and caught hold of the bucket handle. He lifted and I was swung out over the shaft. The bucket slowly revolved, then stopped and began a reversing movement. He grasped the windlass, removed a chock. I saw him brace himself against the strain. His powerful arms worked slowly like crank-shafts. I sank into cold air that smelt of frogs.

“What the hell did I come down here for?” I thought. “This is a damn silly thing to do.”

The bucket twisted slowly. A spiralling succession of jutting rock and layers of clay passed my eyes. I suddenly bumped the side. The shaft took a turn and continued down at an angle so that the opening was eclipsed and I was alone.

I pushed against the side to save my legs from being scraped against the rocks. The bucket grated downwards, sending a cascade of clay slithering before it, then stopped.

A heavy darkness pressed against me. I reached down and touched the floor of the shaft. I slid off the bucket and sat down on the ground beside it.

In a little while I heard the creak of a ladder. Gravel and small stones pattered beside me. I was conscious of someone near me in the dark, then a match flared and he lit a candle. A yellow stiletto of flame rose towards his face, then shrank back to the drooping wick. He sheltered it with his hand till the wax melted and the shadows moved away to a tunnel that branched from the foot of the shaft.

“I’m a fool,” I said. “I didn’t bring my crutches.”

He looked at me speculatively while candle shadows fluttered upon his face like moths. His expression changed to one of decision and I answered the unspoken intention as if it had been conveyed to me in words.

“Thanks very much. I’m not heavy.”

He bent down and lifted me to his back. Beneath his faded blue shirt I could feel his shoulder muscles bunch then slip into movement.

He crouched low as he walked so that my head would not strike the rocks projecting from the roof of the tunnel. I rose and fell to each firm step. The light from the candle moved ahead of us, cleansing the tunnel of darkness.

At the end of the drive he stopped and lowered me gently to the ground. He held the candle close to the face and pointed a heavy finger at the narrow reef which formed a diagonal scar across the rock.

“So that’s it!” I exclaimed.

I tried to break a piece out with my fingers. He lifted a small bar from the ground and drove it into the vein. I picked up some shattered pieces and searched them in the light of the candle. He bent his head near mine and watched the stone I was turning in my fingers. He suddenly reached out his hand and took it away. He licked it then smiled and held it towards me. With his thumb he indicated a speck of gold adhering to the surface.

I was excited at the find. I asked him many questions. He sat with his hands clasped around his drawn-up knees and answered with eloquent expressions and shakes of the head.

The candle flame began to flutter in a scooped stub of wax. “I think it’s time we left,” I said.

He rose and carried me back to the foot of the shaft. I tied my knees together with string and placed my legs in the bucket this time I had no control over the right leg which fell helplessly to one side if not bound to its stronger neighbour. I sat on the edge of the bucket clasping the windlass rope and waited. The candle welled into sudden brightness then fluttered and died. I could hear the creaks of the tortured ladder, then silence.

In all the world only I was alive. The darkness had texture and weight like a blanket of black. The silence had no expectancy. I sat brooding sombrely, drained of all sunlight and song. The world of birds and trees and laughter was as remote as a star.

Without reason, seemingly without object, I suddenly began to rise like a bubble. I swung in emptiness; I moved in a void, governed by planetary laws over which I had no control.

Then I crashed against the side and the lip of the bucket tipped as it caught in projecting tongues of stone. The bottom moved up and out then slumped heavily downwards as the edge broke free.

I scraped and bounced upwards till I emerged from a sediment of darkness into a growing light. Above my head the mouth of the shaft increased in size.

I suddenly burst into dazzling sunlight. An arm reached out; a hand grasped the handle of the bucket. There was a lift and I felt the solidity of earth beneath me. It was good to stand on something that didn’t move, to feel sun on your face.

He stood watching me, his outstretched arm bridging him to a grey box-tree that seemed strangely like himself.

I thanked him then sat down on the rubble for a yarn. I told him about myself and something about the people I had met. He listened without moving, but I felt the power of his interest drawing words from me as dry earth absorbs water.

“Good-bye,” I said before I left him, and I shook his hand.

I went away, but before I reached the trees I turned and waved to him. He was still standing against the grey box like a kindred tree, but he straightened quickly and waved in return.

“Good-bye,” he called, and it was as if a tree had spoken.

IT was the most eerily beautiful place I had ever seen. Nailed to a tree, just above head-height, was a board with the crudely painted word: GOYAI.

Before me was a track running between walls of manna-gum, casuarina, tea-tree in full blossom, and wedding-bush even whiter. And as I walked on the whites and the greens and the mellow sunlight all came to an end, and there was the hill, rounded and brown, void of ground-cover, puffing itself up on the lonely heath-lands like a great poisoned breast. From foot to summit nothing lived on it except a forest of burned and blighted mealy-gums. From the edge of the surrounding scrub bracken ferns crept out in ever-thinning numbers, faltered, and fell back.

But because there was a dwelling at the top, the first I had seen in several hours of walking, I went on.

A bronze-wing pigeon, lurking in the fine sand, whirred away almost under my feet. The chatter of parrots and honeyeaters died out behind me. A cuckoo, perched on the lowest branch of the last manna-gum, stared at me with strange troubled little eyes, opened wide its pink mouth, and ran wearily up the scale of thirteen melancholy notes.

The air became cool, and the dry-sweet smell of living scrub gave place to an odour of rotten wood tinged with eucalyptus. The deep car ruts in the track lost themselves on a hard sour soil littered with bark and dead leaves, sprinkled with faded sundews, and blotched with patches of moss that had withered in the heat of summer. All the trees staggered northward as if violent winds often blew here. Cinnamon bracket fungi glowed on trunks charred by bushfires and ravaged by disease.

The large weatherboard but at the top looked bleak and furtive. There was no garden, no fowlpen, no outhouse of any kind except the inevitable sentry-box convenience. Only a wood-heap, and a sheet of hessian stretched from one tree to another over an ancient car.

But smoke was coming from the chimney, and the door was open.

As I got near there came a sound of footfalls, and an old man appeared on the threshold and stood watching me. He had a face resembling that of King George V on English coins, and was dressed in a blue flannel shirt open at the neck, and whipcord trousers held up by a soiled red necktie.

When I got to within a dozen or so paces he descended the steps with astonishing agility, hurried toward me, and grasped me eagerly by both hands.

“From Jean, surely?”

“I’m afraid I’m not the person you’re expecting,” I said. “I’m a complete stranger here.”

The grip of his strong hands relaxed and his face took on an expression of keen disappointment. “You are not from Jean?”

“No.”

“Then who are you?”

“My name is Quaife. I lost my way in the bush and I thought you might be able to help me. I want to get out to the main road.”

He glanced down the hill to make sure that I was indeed alone.

“How did you find your way in here?”

“I just came on this track. I’ve been walking for hours.”

I told him where I had come from, where I wanted to get to. He listened suspiciously, never for an instant taking his eyes off mine. “Seventeen,” he said suddenly, as though trying to catch me out in something.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Seventeen.”

“I don’t quite understand...”

“Does it mean anything to you that this is the seventeenth of November ?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“All right, come inside.”

Frowning, he let go my hands at last, and left me so suddenly that he’d gone several paces before he realized that I wasn’t following him.

“I don’t want to disturb you,” I said. “If you could just direct me...”

“Disturb me?” He turned right round and regarded me with what I thought was exaggerated surprise.