Irene’s consolations were her son and prayer, and walks on car tracks over the plain and on foot tracks she made herself through woodland. She collected wild flowering herbs in the rock outcrops that grew in the shade of the big grey gums. She
sat on one that was fallen and watched the wind turning over the dry understorey leaves one by one, as though they were politely stepping into Mary Smokes Creek …
V
IN THE EVENING BILL NORTH LEFT FOR WORK AT HELIDON freight depot. Grey’s grandmother resumed her station in the wicker chair by the stove fire.
“What on earth are you pacing about the place for, boy?”
Grey shook his head.
“Something’s troubling you?”
His sister cried. His grandmother rose and went to her and rocked her to sleep. Grey waited. He poked the coals in the stove with a long splinter of cypress pine. The old woman sat heavily back down in the chair and wrapped a grey shawl around her shoulders.
“Why did my mother die?”
“Many women died in childbirth in my day.”
But a calendar on the wall said the year was 1985 and Grey knew that number was a talisman against such disasters as death in childbirth.
“Bill said it was her heart.”
“Toxemia we called it when I was nursing in the war.”
And Grey thought that this word sounded more like a cause of death.
“Irene had it when you were born too. She survived it then. It was not so severe. But we all knew she must never fall pregnant again.”
“Then why–?”
The old woman had gathered momentum now and her scruples fell away.
“Because your father could not keep his hands off her. Because his love was insufficient. Like a dog that plays with a kitten until it’s dead, he had to maul her though it meant it would kill her. And then he left her … he left her all alone. He should have had her in the city already. He should have been home. He should have left you home with her too.”
The boy’s eyes fell to the floor. He remembered the blood on the floorboards; how he could very nearly carry her; the hour he had taken to walk home from school that day …
“But you were not to know.”
IN THE NIGHT he knelt on his bed and faced the open window. He looked up at the stars and prayed to God that his mother would be returned to him, and this time he would be her keeper. I will stand between her and the world, if only You will trust her to me.
Grey prayed with tears in his eyes and finally the stars seemed to throb and the throbbing was in his heart and then, worn out with grief and the impossible distances out the window, he fell on his bed and slept.
VI
WITH HIS MOTHER GONE GREY KNEW HE DID NOT BELONG to any family. So his thoughts turned to the wild boys of town, who could be found at any hour of night, for they had no careful guardians.
He had watched them every night since his mother’s death, walking through land that was not theirs by any title, yet they claimed it as the last ones awake when the dark enfeebled all man’s claims.
Grey imagined the nights of the wild boys charged with secret meaning. Such was their deliberateness in walking to the water, away from the world. So when all the lights in the house were out and his sister had stopped crying, Grey stepped quietly out of his room and buttoned his duffel coat and left by the back door.
THE SKY WAS high and cloudless and winter bright. The galaxy flowed from the southeast like a lambent river. He came to his back fence. The bent iron gate was rusted tight to its hinges. He put the toes of his canvas boots in the mesh and leapt into Eccleston’s. He walked away from the road, northwest across shot-blade wheat and yellow grass toward the house where smoke was unravelling from the chimney. Eccleston’s hairy, long-unridden Appaloosa followed him along the fenceline. White moths rose from the grass at every footfall.
He crawled through a barbwire fence and climbed the high
flight of stairs at the back of the house. He saw the Eccleston boy raise the glass of a kerosene lamp, turn up the wick and light it. Eccleston’s step bore heavy on the floorboards, but there were no others in the house to wake at the creaking of the boards. The boy sat the lamp on the kitchen table and took a short-brimmed angler’s hat from a nail in the wall and pulled his duffel coat over his shoulders against the wind that rushed through the open doors. Grey knocked on a wallboard.
“North!”
The boys knew each other, as all boys did in the town, though they had never been friends. Gordon Eccleston was five years older than Grey. And Grey had always been shy, a loner, a mother’s boy …
Eccleston was rarely at school. He collected wild limes and sold them to the Windmill Fruit Market till he could pay for a sheath knife and a set of rabbit traps. Once he had trapped a dingo in the mountains and brought it down to fight boys’ dogs for bets. He scoured the country for sound windthrow and chipped off burls to sell to district wood turners. These were the visible ways he remained alive.
Eccleston’s father was a good horseman. He had taught his son how to ride and how to work cattle. But the lessons were cut short when the man left town. The boy’s mother, so it was said, was living in the ashes with some remnants of her people near the reserve at Cherbourg. It may have been calumny that said the boy’s father had staked his own life on the turn of a card, and that this was why he was gone northwest, also that the boy was not truly the man’s son, also that his Aboriginal mother’s people had tried to kill him at birth for the trouble he might bring them.
Grey’s mother had known the boy better than he. She spoke to young Eccleston on her walks–he was often on the river and in the woods. The first time she saw him she was walking along the burn-off at Mary Smokes Creek flat that was also the stock route. She came to a smoking van and tethered horse and saw a
small half-caste child, wild-eyed and face caked with mud. He half-hid behind the van and watched her come. She asked him who he was and where he came from, but he remained silent and stared at her with the complicit curiosity and fear of a wild animal. She stayed with him until evening, when the sound of cattle treading on stick came through the scrub into the clearing.
The drovers who tailed the cattle found a spider-thin girl in a calico dress at their camp, barely showing the six months she had been with child, and holding the filthy hand of the half-caste boy who a week before had shown up at their fire just as unannounced as she did now. The drovers told her they did not know who the boy was or where he had come from or even his name. He had just taken to following them like a dog. Their woman meant to drive him in to the police that day, but he had run off and hidden in the woods, and she had gone to town without him. They told Irene North she was welcome to him, then watched her lead the boy across the burn-off in a spitting of rain that raised clouds from the ash on the ground.
She did not give the boy over to the police but to the only Aborigine she knew, Possum Gallanani, who lived on the other side of the creek, and was then building horse yards for Stan Eccleston. Possum took one look at the boy and sighed and claimed to know him and claimed the boy belonged to his “cousin,” Beatrice. He said he would ask his boss for a car to go get her. He said the boss would give it. The next morning the wiry-haired black woman appeared on the Norths’ doorstep. And that night woman and child were living next door.
Grey’s mother did not tell the authorities when finally the boy was left alone. She had witnessed the bleak humanity that the government delivered to the half-caste children of the district. After Stan Eccleston left, she and one itinerant nun made sure the boy was alive. Irene would have taken him in at dinner, only she was afraid of his possible influence on Grey. She was ashamed of her fear, especially when her husband caught her taking a slice of corned brisket to the Eccleston house and warned her it
was not his duty to feed the delinquent black boys of the country. Once Grey had seen his mother stroke the Eccleston boy’s head …
Now he stood in the house he was never allowed to visit. A blue bitch walked across the kitchen to retrieve a rotten shin bone from a cardboard box. The wind fluted through the chimney flue. Sawdust and ash were scattered at the base of the potbelly stove. Leaning against the stove was a chair with two sawn-off legs.
Eccleston saw Grey staring at the chair and smiled.
“Last night got cold.”
THEY SAT AT the top of the backstairs.
“Smoke?”
Grey nodded and Eccleston lit two cigarettes at his lamp. The younger boy drew hard and choked and Eccleston smiled.
He said they would go to light a fire on the creek tonight. Despite the season the creek was running with rain fallen in the west. In only a day it would be winter-still again.
They sat in silence until seventeen-year-old Nyall Thiebaud arrived in a station wagon with his younger brother Matt.
Nyall came holding a bandaged hand before his face.
“Caught a splinter the size of a butter knife,” he said.
“They milled late tonight,” said Eccleston.
Nyall shook his head.
“I bin at the hospital. Severed an artry. Went to the bone.”
Eccleston sucked his teeth.
In his good hand Nyall held a bottle.
“Finest Scotch whisky eight dollars can buy.”
“Good painkiller,” said Grey, quoting a man who came to his father’s card game.
Eccleston and Nyall agreed. Grey smiled and looked at his boots and spat off the stairs.
“This is Grey North. From next door.”
Eccleston pointed to the yellow cottage across the way.
“You’re the one whose mother died,” announced Matt Thiebaud.
Grey nodded.
Eccleston threw away his cigarette butt and furrowed his brow. Grey saw he had not known. Each fixed the other’s eyes. Grey nodded.
“Ah, hell,” Eccleston whispered. “Ah, hell,” until his whispers were silent.
Off the road and down the gravel drive came treading a long-gaited boy who Grey knew was Paul Offenbach–the way the boy pronounced his name would have been unrecognizable to his grandfather. Behind Offenbach waddled part-simple Raughrie Norman.
Offenbach indicated his companion with a flick of his hand.
“Look what I found on the road!”
Raughrie Norman’s strawberry-blond hair blew across his bespectacled face in the chill wind. His slightly prognathic jaw jutted with the excitement and frustration he felt among the boys, of wanting very much to speak and having nothing to say. Norman was shuffled between grades for English and Art at Mary Smokes School. His teachers were perpetually undecided on the question of where he was least awkward. Sometimes he attended the special school at Toowoomba, though mostly he wandered without purpose from class to class at the school in the town where he was born and would never leave.
ECCLESTON TURNED DOWN the lamp wick and left the lamp at the top of the stairs and pushed down his hat. The boys buttoned their duffel coats and pulled up their hoods and walked east to Mary Smokes Creek. Eccleston had dragged his left foot since the age of ten, when he was hung up in a stirrup pulling cleanskins out of the hills with his father, and he dragged it now across the country his father had years ago sold to August Tanner.
The wind beat a loose sheet of shed iron in the north and hushed in the grass. When the wind dropped there was the sound of the stars: the immense and ancient roar of silence.
They took the steep descent, holding onto grass and trees,
steeping sideways in unsure footholds, treading on stairs of tallowwood roots and petrified wood, and along a narrow footpath in the brush down onto the bend. At the bend a strip of gravely beach stepped into a slow-running pool that was sheltered by a jutting of earth and a lighting-struck red gum.
Slabs of granite and basalt were settled in the bed and the water purled around them, though in time of heavy flood you heard the rocks grinding, the water turning them over. The water pooled and then riffled over rock and gravel bars both up and downstream of the bend. Debris was piled eight feet high on the branches of a she-oak on the outer curve.
“When’d the creek ever get that high?”–“ When we were sleepin.”–“ When were we asleep?”–“The water knows when we’re asleep. Then it rises.”–“ You think it knows?”–“The water knows. I seen bridges either side of ere where the water bent and snapped steel posts set three feet deep in em. And always at night when no one’s watchin.”–“That’s true, I’ve seen that.”–“The water knows all right.”
A pencil of moonlight breached the trees and lit the creek. Winter’s scant water was the colour of coffee, but the rain that had fallen upstream had turned it clear. In summer the boys would sit in crystalline water, backs against the bough of the fallen tree, or against the riffling rocks and boulders, else upstream a little where the roots of a giant spotted gum cradled and held up a section of the stream and made a waterfall and pool like a bath, where you could nestle in and let the water spill over your head and rest your elbows on the roots. But the boys would not swim now in August.
They lit a fire of windthrow and sticks on the bank. They found a log of eucalypt. The eucalypt log was long to catch but when it caught they would have sweet-scented fire all night and coals for tomorrow night too.
The creek murmured.
Grey thought about where the course of the water was
unknown to him. The splintering creeks and gullies west of here, in the mountains and across the plain.
Mary Smokes Creek had captured the headwaters of creeks in the north, leaving misfit streams in the valley and wind gaps in the hills, and this course that was barely known and kept water through most of the year. The creek met the Brisbane River south of Lake Wivenhoe. Then the water skirted the range and wound through the city before emptying into the Pacific. The big river’s current was strong, but not as it had been before the Middle Creek section was dammed to keep the city from being washed into the sea. Grey’s grandfather had told him that in 1893 men saw a fifty-foot wall of floodwater strike a cliff at Caboonbah and felt it shake the earth. A rider was sent to the nearest town to warn the city, and the wire he sent that Friday afternoon stayed pinned to a post office noticeboard, unheeded over a carefree Brisbane weekend, until the city flooded famously. The Valley’s big artificial lakes with European names–Wivenhoe and Somerset and Manchester–contained that water now.