When Colts Ran (9 page)

‘The idea with Captain Oakeshott,' said Randolph, ‘is to do it right one hundred and one per cent of the time.'

‘You might have to shepherd Colts a bit,' Buckler said. ‘Horses, dogs – he's experienced enough with them – I'm not a sheep man myself, nor's he. Goats are his most recent livestock experience, ha ha, nothing too grand in that.'

Buckler scribbled a mailing address – Brigade HQ – and a radio code on a scrap of paper, which he took from his glasses case. ‘None of it's his idea. Everyone's sorry about him. If he goes off the straight and narrow, this will always find me.'

Next day Randolph rode in from the boundary rider's hut through the heat of the day, watching Eureka outbuildings hover in the sky long before he reached them, mirages of rippled iron breaking and folding. From the weed and waste tracks of the station approaches, eaten over by stock, Randolph scanned the outbuildings for the presence of a newcomer.

And there he was, a slender youth escaping the afternoon heat in the shade of the jackaroos' quarters, poised over a game of solitaire tensely smoking a cigarette.

‘You must be Colts.'

‘So you remember me?'

A smile broke, light flooded his features. Randolph felt pleased, except for a little irresolute knot in the stomach holding him back from some bigger emotion he might feel, the intensity of friendship at first glance, a deeper attachment wanted perhaps too much.

‘More or less,' Randolph hedged.

In fact he'd never forgotten young Colts at the school nets, no, not at all, the improver of merit in the Under-14As, determined to the point of tears to prove his worth. And that pure yearning look, nobody could shun the effect, least of all Randolph.

He led Colts around the quarters. ‘Take this room at the end, move your gear, it gets the shade of the tank in the late afternoon. There's a doormat, a bedside cupboard made from a kero crate, the flywire's all right, anyway it keeps the biggest blowies out.'

‘There's a suitcase under the bed,' noticed Colts.

‘I'll get rid of it,' said Randolph.

Colts picked up a book and flipped the cover back.

‘Is this your room?'

Randolph stared at him, ‘No.'

But the book had his name in it.

A pattern developed when Oakeshott's work rule allowed. On the wide claypan between the big Eureka shed and the jackaroos' quarters, Randolph and the new first-year jackaroo bowled to each other on a makeshift pitch cleared of pebbles with an old fibre broom. It became a spectator sport for those who wandered past – cook, housemaid, yard man, and Ah Sup the Chinese gardener.

Colts enthused, remembering a day at Moore Park when there were twenty wickets on four fields and two hundred and twenty players in a schoolboys' carnival. Fielding at deep cover point he'd found himself alongside Randolph at deep square-leg in another game. Randolph said he only vaguely recalled the day but certainly he did – because of that serious, almost heartbreakingly earnest junior fieldsman in grubby whites, with the square dimple on the chin, and the way the dimple had smaller dimples in it.

When the mail truck arrived there were other jackaroos on Eureka, newcomers spilling out and staring around, adjusting to the dusty space. Two gawky pulled-from-the-gutter misfits who wouldn't last were caught entreating the mailman to take them back until Oakeshott cut in. The other two were stalwart sons of the land comfortable with starkness like Randolph and eager to be schooled by Oakeshott. Their names were Devitt and Poole. So they made a society but in later years whoever else was there in those last six months would slip from the surface of Randolph's memory – he would see only Colts.

They partnered at sheep work, one each side of a drafting race wrenching horned heads into line and shouting themselves into a rhythm of getting a queue of tightly pressed backs moving towards the gates. There Captain Oakeshott stood separating the spurned from the chosen, two-tooths from hoggets, ewes from wethers, wearing a grey dustcoat, a dented felt hat and smoking a pipe. Between Oakeshott and Randolph there was rarely a word exchanged; it was all speaking silences.

Sheep were the essence, that's why. Playing cricket was more just a trick, like the quandong seed Randolph rolled down the inside of his arm and produced in the open palm of his hand at smoko, or the tightrope walk he balanced in his dreams, thousands of feet above a deep blue sea.

Randolph gushed to Colts about sheep.

‘They're only ground maggots,' answered Colts.

‘But sheep's where things happen, success gets launched from the square of the yards, prizes are won. You take yourself to town for the Sheep Show and live it up at the Australia Hotel, and you're the same all through. People know who you are, there's no doubt in their minds. Sheep men with grime in their nostrils, mutton fat in their pores, they're the big names, only a bit down from God.'

‘That's laying it on thick.'

‘They have staples of greasy wool always tucked about them somewhere – in their pockets, between the pages of their notebooks, in their saddlebags and caught in the hairs on the backs of their hands. You should see them.'

‘I might, one day,' said Colts rather lazily, ‘when I've done everything else.'

Randolph was intense, more than listening to himself, creating himself: ‘The best blokes, at the breeding end, can hardly ever do the same thing twice without surrendering a quality they've bred for the first time round. It makes it hard to peak with an animal on most points. Sturdy on four legs like a low heavy table, my father likes to breed, packed with crimped fleece, lava flows of dewlap under the chin. I'm looking for a bigger, plainer animal. I like Oakeshott's Ironsides. That ram's ready for Noah's Ark come the second flood or Jesus of Nazareth, come the second coming – the Good Shepherd, they called him.'

‘Get off your bike, Randolph.'

‘Things have to add up. They've got to mean something.'

Randolph rolled two cigarettes and passed one to Colts.

‘Shit scared is how a bloke feels,' said Colts, ‘but you can be who you are and still be the best.'

Randolph looked at his young friend curiously.

‘That's Buckler,' Colts admitted, colouring – the tags of the man who'd promised the world but abandoned him still coming to him. Defiance was what Colts had expressed when he agreed to Veronica's plan and caught the mail truck to Eureka on the grounds that he'd find Buckler's camp. Defiance was what he expressed being there when Buckler wasn't. It was the same defiance in looks but not in feeling.

‘He won't say what he expects of you.'

‘You feel it though,' said Randolph.

Colts faced the bouncers Randolph sent down. Struck on the arms, shoulders and head, he didn't complain. Likewise, he was hard on Randolph and kept the balls coming until it was time to clean up for tea.

Pre-dawn Colts was out catching the horses before Randolph was properly awake. If volunteers were called for chipping burrs in the holding paddocks, Colts went to it. If Randolph said he was off doing a job he found Colts willing to go one better; and he wasn't bad either, helping dismantle a windmill with the station mechanic, putting the parts back together, never wasting an effort, pacing himself, only needing to be told a detail to remember. All he wanted was more practice at sheepwork, and he'd get that. When Oakeshott assigned them to separate work parties, Randolph connived to get them back together again. It never took long.

After a while Randolph announced he'd extended his finishing date on Eureka another month, always worrying a bit that Colts needed extra shepherding before his farewell.

They rode out early with their fresh horses kicking each other and swishing their tails getting rid of flies. Colts wore a leather sweatband around his wrist, tooled by Randolph in a pattern of lizards and bush mice.

Randolph caught him turning at the sound of a motor at the rear of the sandhills by the salt lake, where the inwards track ran. At first he'd said the only thing keeping him at Eureka was that Buckler would be back. After a while he expressed his fury at being dumped. Randolph drew the story out. The only ones who cared had left him for the west and centre. His sister, Faye, was gone off as a missionary's wife; Mrs Veronica Buckler was gone to make Buckler pay for his sins; Major Dunc Buckler was gone pushing along north to find the war that didn't want him.

Buckler was hypocritical as all shit built up, said Colts, when he learned about Buckler's men and de Grey's boys heading off from Eureka together – he'd blocked Colts from going with him but travelled with a boy his age and toting a rifle too, Hammond Pringle.

Randolph knew enough to know that wasn't quite how it was. Colts was the one who broke out, got himself expelled from school and set off travelling inland spurning counter opinion. Lucky for him Buckler evaporated with his half-arsed army. You made objections to make a place where you could go in this life. Randolph saw it might be to Colts's surprise a place called Eureka.

Colts circled out looking for sheep dispersed in fives and sixes over wastes of saltbush stretching to a horizon of white dust haze and immeasurable glare. The animals scattered around one side of a clump but failed to appear on the other. Their fleeces were the same colour as the soil, a mustard grey. Randolph waited like a magnet a few miles away until the mob was mustered towards him, and they set off walking them.

‘Listen, you're doing all right,' said Randolph, with the mob bunched and moving, and they could yarn as they switched away flies. Maisie ran away out, low to the ground like a dusty moving comma, keeping the sheep all in order. Randolph carried a small black-and-tan kelpie on his lap because her feet were sensitive to the hot ground, but later coming up to the yards when it was cooler she would do the job while Maisie stood back and rested.

‘Eureka wasn't my idea – they duped me,' said Colts.

Randolph feared hearing him say it was a big mistake.

‘It's all right, though,' Colts spoke into the angle of his chin and the shadow of his hat fell on his face.

Randolph whistled a tuneless tune as they advanced another mile or so. Then Randolph said strangely, after complicated thought, ‘I'll never forsake you, Kings.'

Colts kept riding slack in the saddle and looking elsewhere, as if Randolph hadn't spoken.

After a while Colts said defiantly, ‘If Buckler comes crawling back I'll tell him where to shove it.'

‘Good on you, sport. Sounds like a fine idea.'

They rode along until Colts leaned across, making a sign of entwined fingers.

‘Buckler and Hammond Pringle's old man, Birdy Pringle, who's white as you and me, were like
that
in the first war. They made a vow to look after each other's orphans if any came up. Each reckoned he was king pin and had the right. On the way back from France on the troopship they had an argument on principle. Birdy says he's killed, he can't get over it. Buckler says it's kill or be killed on the frontline, not murder as Birdy sweated it. They were demobbed and Birdy shouldered a swag in Port Adelaide and headed north on foot, he must have come through here, kicking Eureka stones, aiming for the Top End and a cattle run. When people asked what he'd done in the war he said nothin'. They gave him the white feather. You're like that.'

‘Like what?'

‘You give nothin' away.'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Why did he do it?' Colts spat a fly.

‘Was he ashamed?' Randolph said.

‘He was covered in medals. It didn't matter how many lives he'd saved, how many Turks and Fritzes he'd popped – he was beaten up. Then he married a gin, mission wedding and all. Buckler was not impressed.'

‘Along came Hammond,' said Randolph.

‘And Dorothy. They send us Box Brownie snaps at Christmas and cards rough-cut and glued with flour paste. Birdy sends a ten-quid note for the school year; he'll save his hard-earned money now. It might have been me and Faye living up there with them – halfies and creamies and full-blood boogies – under a bark roof with four poles, except for the penny Buckler tossed when our father died, to see which one would get us. Birdy never knew it was a double-header.'

‘What about your mother?'

‘Veronica?'

‘No, your real mother.'

‘I never had one.'

‘That's a first.' Randolph let it go.

Each night they showered under the tank stand in sulphurous bore water, put on clean shirts, knotted neckties and buttoned their tweed jackets, no matter how high the thermometer climbed. Being trained for self-reliance they did their own sewing and mending, laundering their stiff moleskin trousers free of crushed dags and weight of dust in an outdoor copper cemented like a tomb. Woe betide the jackaroo who arrived late at the Oakeshotts' table with or without excuses. They were permitted to remove their jackets only after Mrs Oakeshott invited them. Following the meal they sat round the short-wave set while Oakeshott expressed tactical opinions. Sometimes London and Berlin were clearer than Radio Australia. At the distant end of the dial they heard Tokyo Rose broadcasting from Japan. Colts talked of enlisting as soon as he could, went around firing at shadows with an imaginary Tommy gun and mowing down Nips in the saltbush till Randolph told him to knock it off.

One Sunday Randolph and Colts spent the whole day searching for a sharpening stone Colts had dropped along the single-wire telephone line leading out to the boundary riders' huts. Oakeshott was a bastard, they agreed, for insisting on every meaningless tool being accounted for. But when Randolph said he still respected Oakeshott, Colts said he did too. If Randolph said he'd like to rocket to the moon and run sheep there, Colts would say,
wouldn't that be something
.

Everything hung on Colts as the keeper of Randolph's toothy smile.