Bo stood, hesitating. He examined his broken fingernails. ‘We found campsites all along both sides of the gully.’ He turned and gestured, his arm extended, a considered embrace of the country he and Annabelle had surveyed. He dropped his arm and looked in at the young man. The girl looked with him. The young man gazed through the windscreen. He was golden in the wash of sunlight; modest, serene, enigmatic and beautiful, as if he possessed a thousand years and more and might await the moment of his destiny without the anxiety of time.
Bo said, ‘This was a favourite spot with our old people, Arner.’
The young man’s eyes closed then flickered open, his long curved lashes trembling. His hands were crossed on his vast stomach, his fingers loosely entwined. The cabin of the truck chill with the rush of air from the cooler, the smell of tobacco and cannabis, the strong acid odour of the young man’s sweat.
Bo stood by the open door of the truck. From the sandalwood ridge behind him a friarbird repeated its ardent cry again and again, warning off the intruders, Ar-coo! Ar-coo! Ar-coo!
Bo turned and walked down the hill towards the Pajero. The volume of the music increased, the voice of 2PAC pursuing him along the slope,
I shall not fear no man but God, though I walk through
the valley of death . . .
The girl’s laughter, rich, youthful, sensuous. A liberation of some deep amusement. The dry groundcover crackling beneath Bo’s boots, releasing the musty odours of dead time. The girl’s indifference to the remains of the old people, flaked stone tools lying anonymously along the dry ridges of the Isaac. Bo seeing the longwall’s subsidence cracks meandering through the poisoned timber and thinking of the earth drying out and dying under the treeroots. ‘The valley of death,’ he said and spat to one side. ‘She’s afraid of that husband of hers. He’s probably coming after her.’ He spoke softly and as if to an intimate companion who walked by his side.
Annabelle did not mention Steven’s call to Susan. Although she did not examine her motivation in withholding this information, she was aware that a slight awkwardness might arise between herself and her friend if she permitted the question of her marriage to become a major area of confidence between them. Susan, it seemed to Annabelle, had troubles of her own about which she was being stoic and reticent. It was a sign and she decided to observe its message.
Next morning the three of them breakfasted together in the noisy mess hall with the men employed by the subcontractors. While they were eating, the young man and the girl came in and joined them. They nodded and bid each other a good morning, each inquiring how the other had slept. The girl wore her white hardhat and ID tag. While she ate she leaned her elbows on the table and gazed around at the men. The men looked back at her and laughed and commented to each other. A man with his mate passing their table on his way out rapped her hardhat with his knuckles. ‘How’s it going there little sister?’
Bo looked up and the man smiled and nodded to him.
‘Yeah good here big brother,’ the girl replied, laughing and looking quickly at Annabelle, her dark eyes alight with the danger of her uncertain quest.
After breakfast they drove out of the compound through the striped boomgate into the encircling scrubs. All day Bo and Annabelle and Susan traversed the grid of tracks, prospecting on foot the gravelly outcrops along the gullies beside the sandbed of the Isaac, quartering the coal lease and linking their progress to the pegged chainages of the drill line—where the dozer had passed over the earth like some scouring disease over living flesh, leaving a bare scrape of gravel cankering under the dry flames of the sun. On the riverflats where the cattlemen had poisoned the boxforest, the African buffel grass grew too thick for them to see the ground, so they left the dead forest alone, the grazing Brahman cows and calves undisturbed by their prospecting for shattered stones in a landscape abundant with stone.
And each morning the young man and the girl followed them out of the accommodation compound and they sat all day in the cabin of their white truck, the windows wound up, the motor ticking over and the airconditioner going. Sealed away from the bush with their music, while the others walked the ridges and the gullies of the coal lease. At the end of each day’s survey Bo came and stood by the cabin of the white truck and spoke with the girl and the young man, and he told them what had been found, as if this passing on of what he knew to the next generation bestowed the grace of some point and purpose upon the labours of his day.
They worked the mine survey for a week. Annabelle kept her mobile turned off. When she checked the messages there were three from Steven. She deleted them without listening to them. On the fourth day she found a strange stone artefact eroding out of the wall of a gravel gully. Susan and Bo were off a way to her left. She saw the stone from the bank of the gully and knew at once that it did not belong to the local stone types they had been encountering. She called to the others and they came over and scrambled down into the gully with her.
Susan said, ‘Well you found something here. It’s what they call a cylcon. A cylindro-conical stone artefact of unknown purpose.’ She looked at Annabelle. ‘Beginner’s luck. I’ve never seen one of these things before except in photographs.’ She turned to Bo. You ever see one?’
‘No,’ he said.
They recorded the stone’s position and photographed it. Susan said, ‘We’d better take it with us or it’ll get lost for ever down one of the subsidence cracks once they start mining this section.’ She turned to Bo. ‘You think it’s okay to take it?’
He shrugged and stepped away, reaching into his shirt pocket for his tobacco. ‘It’s not doing no one no good sitting here,’ he said.
‘Well, we’ll take it,’ Susan said, but there was a doubt in her voice. She took out her penknife and eased the stone out of its gravel embedment. It came away easily. She brushed the clay from it and turned it in her hand. It was a smooth cylinder, about twenty centimetres long, tapering to a point at one end, a deep circle incised around the tapering head. ‘Limestone,’ she said. ‘Are there any limestone deposits in this area?’ When Bo did not answer she looked around for him. He had walked away some distance and was squatting in the bed of the gully turning over rocks. She handed the stone to Annabelle. ‘Bo’s got the wind up. They don’t like finding this kind of thing.’ She laughed. ‘No one knows what these were used for. The meaning’s been lost. Whatever it was.’
Annabelle said, ‘Maybe we should leave it here then.’
‘Keep it,’ Susan said. ‘A memento of your flight to Burranbah.’ She laughed thinly. ‘Put it on the mantelpiece when you get back to Melbourne.’ She turned away. ‘We’re not going to get this survey finished if we don’t keep moving.’
Annabelle watched her walk back along the gully until she caught up with Bo. Bo stood up and he and Susan walked along together until they came to the place where they’d scrambled down the bank. Bo stood aside to let Susan go up ahead of him. He looked back towards Annabelle. She looked at the stone in her hands. She felt the weight of it, not in her hands but in her chest, the archaic mystery of its lost purpose a constriction around her heart.
She carried the stone with her all that day and neither Susan nor Bo offered to relieve her of it. That evening when she pressed Susan for more information, Susan said even the old Murris didn’t know what such stones had been used for. ‘They’re like words from a dead language. We’ve got no way of cracking their secrets now.’
After the meal in the mess hall the last evening Susan set up her laptop in her room and began drafting the preliminary report from the data they had entered on the summary sheets.
Annabelle came in and stood by her, looking over her shoulder and reading what she had written:
Of the 68 sites recorded, stone artefact
scatters manufactured from a range of raw materials were the most common.
Together with isolated finds of artefacts they constituted just over 85% of the total.
Their most common location was along the banks of the Isaac River and associated
eroding gullies. The range of materials included quartzite, silcrete, chert, petrified
wood, sandstone, basalt, mudstone, siltstone and ashtone, crystalline and milky
quartz, as well as other volcanic and sedimentary materials. Other site type
occurrences were less frequent. No occurrence of stone arrangements was recorded.
Annabelle said, ‘Are you going to describe the cylindrical stone?’
Susan took off her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger and put her glasses on again. The reverse-cycle airconditioner in the wall above her head trembled on its mounts, blowing a thin stream of warm air over them, riffling the flowered curtains at either side of the narrow window. She sat staring out at the parked vehicles glistening with frost under the arc lights of the compound. ‘Go and get some sleep,’ she said. ‘I do these things on automatic.’ She turned and looked up at Annabelle, ‘We can describe your stone in the full report. This is just something to keep Dougald Gnapun and his mates happy. It might keep them off my back for a week or two.’ She turned back to the laptop, the keys going tickety-tack under her reddened fingers. She paused. ‘Steven called me,’ she said. She looked up at Annabelle. ‘He said he’d spoken to you.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said his call was the first I’d heard from either of you for three years.’ Susan resumed keying in the data.
‘Thanks.’ Annabelle hesitated. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t tell you he’d called.’
‘It’s okay. I don’t want to know the details. Just let me know when you’ve made a decision.’
When she came out of Susan’s room Annabelle saw Bo standing at the end of the demountable smoking a cigarette. She walked down and joined him. He turned to her and said good evening.
She said. ‘I love the smell of cigarettes in the bush on frosty nights. It reminds me of when I used to smoke.’ She waited but he said nothing. ‘My dad was the opposite to your Grandma. He was always urging me and Elizabeth to ask questions. He longed to give us the answers to everything.’
After a time Bo asked, ‘You hear from your husband again?’
‘He rang and left messages.’ She was silent a moment. ‘I deleted them.’
He looked at her. ‘You think he might come after you?’
‘He might, I suppose.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You got a plan?’
‘No.’ She turned to him. ‘Your Grandma wouldn’t have approved of all these questions.’
‘I believe she would have understood,’ he said soberly. He stood thinking. ‘I seen your old grandad plenty of times. An old man in a narrow-brimmed hat. He was never without a coat. Always black. And a waistcoat, even on the hottest days of summer. He’d ride over with your dad when your people was buying our steers. While your dad was having a drink of tea in the house and doing business with Grandma, the old man would sit his horse out there in the shade of a yellowbox that grew just outside the garden fence. Never said a hello. He threw down a few pennies for us kids there one day. Grandma come out of the house and shouted to us not to touch them. He laughed at her. She never would let us look for them pennies and I guess they’re still laying there to this day.’ He stood thinking. ‘He was one of them real old-timers, your granddad. Us kids was frightened of him.’
‘Was your grandmother frightened of him?’
‘If she was she wouldn’t have showed it.’
They said no more. The sound of a movie on a teevee from one of the rooms along the passage. A mopoke calling in the scrubs. A vehicle door slamming and a motor starting up. Standing alone in the evening air with him, Annabelle felt no awkwardness in the silence that settled between them. It was as if they knew they had the rest of their lives to say whatever they might wish to say to each other. She realised she had never felt quite so at ease in the company of a man. When he said he’d known she would come back one day, had he meant, she wondered, that he had
hoped
she would come back? ‘I wouldn’t mind going back to the Suttor, one of these days. Just to have a look.’ It was not what she meant, but it would have to do for now. The reality was too complicated. There was too deep an ambivalence in her attitude to the country of her childhood to make anything she might ever say about it wholly the truth. She waited but Bo did not respond. ‘Have your people still got Verbena Station?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘We lost the old place.’
W
ITH
B
O BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE
P
AJERO AND
A
RNER AND
Trace following a hundred metres back in the white truck they left the mine compound at ten the next morning and turned northeast off the narrow stretch of tar onto the Peak Downs Highway. Susan had been up half the night finishing the report and was curled up on the back seat, a blanket from Bo’s swag covering her.
They drove through Coppabella without slowing, overhauling an eastbound coaltrain at Tootoolah. They crossed the open grasslands of Oxford Downs where thousands of white Brahman cattle grazed on the African grass, then swung north towards Nebo and the ranges. Bo saluted only two vehicles going by them the other way in all this time. After leaving Nebo they climbed into the forested Pisgah and Connors Ranges, crossing Denison Creek in view of Mount Spencer, the cold waters of Lake Epsom on their right. On the eastern slope of the ranges the road wound its way down through darkly forested country towards the coast. At Spencer Gap Bo raised his hand, pointing out Annabelle’s sidewindow. Thirty kilometres distant over to the east, plumes of white smoke rising straight into the still air from the cane mills around Sarina, the kingfisher blue of the Coral Sea stretching out beyond, merging eventually with the cloudless sky.
They skirted the town centre of Mackay on the bypass road and crossed the Pioneer River, going the back way into Maryvale.
Bo pulled the Pajero off the road and parked on a patch of scuffed kikuyu grass in front of a small weatherboard house. He turned off the ignition and the hot motor ran on then died. Arner pulled in and parked alongside the Pajero.