Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (11 page)

 

 

T
here had only been one other time, in the mad weeks after his father had died, that Ron and Min had ever discussed the prospect of selling the block, although ‘discussed' was hardly the word. It was more that the prospect was shot at them out of the blue, by Min's unhinged distress over her husband's sudden death.

On a February day of high cirrus cloud and stillness, Ron's father Len McCoy, aged fifty-seven, had fallen over in the spidery gloom of the outdoor toilet. When Ron reached him, blood was pouring out of a gash above his eye. He didn't think for one minute that his father was dead but, in fact, it was a heart attack that had caused him to fall and the gash was merely a bright crimson decoy. Ron stood bewitched by the sight before him, until he gathered his wits and dashed inside. He and his mother negotiated the big body, cleaned Len up and placed him on the spare bed with a sheet over his cooling body, while they waited in shock for the doctor to arrive. Ron himself couldn't see the point of the doctor, but Min at least
knew that things like death had to be certified, made official. So, Dr Sheahan had arrived in a brand new two-tone Holden.

In the following strange weeks, Min's night crying and preoccupied air at first merely annoyed Ron. Death was a fact, he wanted to tell her, there was no bringing anyone back. Even his father. But then, as slowly his own grief sifted down, forcing him to understand how irreversible the world really was, and how he would one day most likely simply keel over as his father had just done in the hugeness of things, and die, Ron began to develop a sense of the possible knots and webbings Min had caught herself in. But when she suggested in a harried fashion only weeks after the funeral that they should sell up and move, he felt for certain that she was quite deranged.

On the day after she'd brought it up, Ron was at a property out on the Dray Road, called to shoot a city farmer's one and only working dog. He'd known the place, he had been there before as a teenager, helping his father grub an acre for a house paddock. The dog was a clay-coloured kelpie, not at all old but it had a tumour. It looked up into the barrel of the gun with an unsettling awareness, almost as if it had been shot before, until Ron bit down on his cud and pulled the trigger. An uncustomary shiver came over him as the kelpie's frame buckled. He took his payment, and the warm carcass in a potato sack to be thrown with a beach stone into the Bootleg Creek, excused himself from cake and lemonade, and headed straight out of there.

All the way home on the Dray Road, via the drop-off of the dog, unbidden images inflicted themselves upon his mind. He saw his father doubled over the mattock on that house paddock, with one hand pointing always at what young Ron had to learn, the other hand jockeying the wide tongue of the mattock in the obstreperous silver and black ground. He saw the disappointed truth in that clay kelpie's eye and also the ovoid beach stones marking his father's
clifftop grave. By the time Ron was floating the ute in neutral down towards the Mangowak valley, he had the distinct scent of formic acid in his nostrils from all the ant mounds he and Len had disturbed on that city farmer's house paddock long ago, and as he swung out of the trees to head back along the riverflat, with the dune bar low but resolute out in front of him, blocking the ocean horizon, he was certain his father would climb out of his hessian coffin in the grave on the cliff and haunt them for the rest of their lives. ‘He's a monty to,' he said to Min that night over tea. She scoffed at such a suggestion. But Ron insisted. ‘Selling his land. Nothing would upset him more,' he had told her.

Crossing the dip and rise of the paddock slopes from home, on a track worn by bullocks in the days when the Meteorological Station was first operating, Ron would, in those days, go twice a week to the store and post office. From the elevated vantage of their block he could view the track slung in a slanting line across the grasses, above Tim Considine's potato crop, as if it was a cord uniting the house and their supplies. If the grasses were left long in summer the snakes were rife and he'd take the path higher up and straight along the clifftop, through a colonnade of tea-tree, and then duck in across an untended paddock of pigface and wild orchids to get around that way to the store. In the awful weeks following his father's death, however, Ron took to the tea-tree colonnade rather than the open slopes when he ventured that way, not because of the risk of snakes but because he didn't want to be seen, in dark or daylight.

As he emerged from the tea-tree one midweek morning in early April, quite deaf in his worry to the ratcheting of wattlebirds all about and oblivious of the rabbits scurrying to either side, he caught sight of Dr Leo Morris over near the main road, heading along like himself in the sunlight for the store. Ron quickened his pace through the paddock. As he scaled the post and rail, Leo had
disappeared but he figured he could already hear him inside the post office talking fifteen to the dozen with the postmaster, George Beal.

Ron hurried along and entered the post office to find Leo's broad Welsh face beaming in profile, his silver spectacles catching what light there was in the dark-timbered postal room. Sensing Ron at the doorway, Leo turned from his conversation at the counter and halloed enthusiastically, waving a cream envelope about and cajoling Ron straight away to join him for a drink at the hotel. A wave of relief coursed through Ron's body. He nodded warmly back and accepted the invitation.

As Leo Morris concluded his business with George Beal, Ron stepped out from under the post office awning and back into the sun to wait, entirely forgetting the supplies he'd come to buy from the store. When Leo himself emerged from the post office a few minutes later, the two of them headed off side by side down the hill along the road towards the hotel.

Dr Leo Morris, in his uniform powder-blue slacks, cream v-neck jumper and white shirt with gold crosses on its collar, chatted happily to Ron as they wandered along. He was a squat, ample man and it was he who had given Ron the Ontario pump organ years before. Ron had never forgotten the day, how they'd loaded it onto the tractor tray out the front of Bonafide View, with the sky threatening to bucket down and the ocean the colour of bluestone. He had been coveting it for months and Leo had noticed. When he finally took it home it had been the shortest day of the year, June 21, 1943.

A Doctor of Music, a Catholic priest and an unabashed epicurean, Leo Morris had semi-retired to the coast by the time of Len McCoy's death, to spend his days bodysurfing the breakers in front of his house between writing and annotating folk and liturgical music in his home at Bona fide View, where he gave a regular Sunday morning mass amongst the bush rats and the sheafs of Bach
and Britten and Monteverdi. He liked to pass his afternoons drinking carafes of moselle in big Martin Elliot's pub, where on occasions he had been known to shout the bar, most particularly on the days when he received his biannual royalty cheque for the famous song ‘Click Go the Shears', which he had overheard and written down in a shearing shed in western New South Wales just after the war, and to which he now claimed a small but pleasurable copyright. On the days when these royalties arrived at the post office, Leo Morris would saunter into the hotel and lay the cheque on the bar, for every last penny to be spent on whoever happened to be drinking there at the time. Big Martin Elliot, standing by the taps, all six foot four inches of him, balding and with a low-slung beer belly, would bellow ritualistically as he entered: ‘So, how many clicks of the shears have you got for us today, Your Holiness?'

Leo Morris would beam back up at his giant friend and point theatrically at the cheque. ‘I trust our Mine Host can read
by now
,' he would say, with an ironic plum and pleasant mirth spreading all over his face.

These ‘Click Go the Shears' afternoons had become legendary since Leo had semi-retired, and he would regale the bar with preposterous and even ribald stories from his time as a young priest studying at the Vatican or from his folk-song collecting days. His stories were often littered with famous and notorious names and peppered with exotic destinations which he had visited on his travels. Primed by the alcohol and the loquacious, iconoclastic priest, the sessions would invariably end with singing lasting well into the night.

This Wednesday, however, the cream envelope in Leo Morris' hand held nothing more interesting than an erratum to an article he'd had printed in a Melbourne Catholic newspaper. Ron and Leo wandered together through the cypressy perfume of the pub's carpark and past the painted red iron of the hotel garage and the bottle
green hotel truck. They stepped from the brightness of the day into the dim light of the bar, said hello to Martin Elliot's black Labrador, Guts, who was in his customary position in front of the fire, and also to the permanent lodger, Trumpeter Carson, who was manning the taps, before taking their seats on two stools beside the tiny hotel aquarium set in the left-hand wall.

As soon as they were seated, after ordering a stout and a moselle from Trumpeter Carson, Leo inquired about Min.

‘How's she getting on, Ron, without your dad?'

Ron pushed his big lips forward in consideration. He took a sip. ‘Nah, not good, I don't think, Leo,' he said. ‘She's not herself.'

‘Is that so?'

‘Yair, she's not good.'

Leo's rotund body shifted on his stool. ‘Has Rhyll paid her a visit?'

‘No, she has her hands full with Sid, I gather.'

There had been a pause then, the two of them staring at the miniature shark gliding back and forth behind the aquarium glass.

Ron said eventually: ‘We went out to Beeac the other day in the ute, to look at some Border collie pups. Billy's on his last legs. I persuaded the mother we should get in early. Got a couple of good ones from the Tetaz farm, cheap, given their lines. That seemed to perk her up a bit. She got a bit excited. Named them straightaway.

‘Anyhow, on the way back I pulled the ute in under the ironbarks near the Telegraph Road there. We propped for a cup of tea from the Thermos. Before I know it, she's turned away from where we were leaning on the bonnet and she's bawling. Waving her hand, saying, “Sorry, boy”. It was crook, Leo. We got home all right in the end, the puppies cheered her up and all, but yair, it was crook. And now by her reckoning we should sell up and move.'

Leo Morris's brow creased as he listened, but promptly as Ron fell silent the priest's countenance brightened. Turning on his stool,
he grasped Ron's shoulder tightly in his hand, digging in with his long nails. ‘Sounds to me like I should pop over for a visit, Ron, wouldn't you say?'

With stout foam on his large upper lip, Ron winced from the sharpness of the nails. He nodded his agreement by way of a quick and emphatic dip of the head. Leo had understood. Ron knew he would. Apart from anything else, Leo was from the city, like Min. They'd always got on like a house on fire.

Satisfied, Leo Morris loosened his grip on Ron's shoulder and turned to Trumpeter Carson behind the bar. Trumpeter Carson was a tall, well-kept countryman who'd been a fixture at the hotel for a decade and who also played the violin. By the time the counter lunches had come on at midday – brains and bacon, T-bone steak, beer battered garfish, rabbit goulash – Leo had persuaded Trumpeter to go and get the fiddle from his room at the back of the hotel, and to play the hungry patrons all a tune.

Amidst the aroma of hops and gravy, between pouring beers and fixing drinks, Trumpeter Carson managed to play, ‘A Daisy a Day', ‘Oft In the Stilly Night' and, on request, ‘Mad Jack's Cockatoo', a song from the Barcoo river region which Leo had notated and taught to Trumpeter not long after the lodger had first arrived in Mangowak. It had become a favourite since then, a rhythmic bush tune with a surreal and comical tale of drinking to tell. As Trumpeter Carson played, his normally neat hair falling over his forehead, his fiddle held across his chest in folk style rather than wedged up under his chin, Leo sang in his classically ornamented voice, delighting in the story and the scansion.

When big Martin Elliot returned from the banking in Minapre halfway through the song, he cut in with a purposefully raucous strine and the two personalities began sparring between their respective renditions of the song. In the course of the long verses they settled into a duet, one line from Leo in his grandiloquent
warble and then its antidote from Martin Elliot, rasping like a cockatoo. By the end of the ballad, the whole bar, Ron included, was in cahoots. Even the shark behind the aquarium glass seemed trans-fixed by the song, not to mention Guts the black Labrador, who had got up on his feet for the first time since breakfast, drawn from the warmth of the open fire by the raucous hilarity all around him.

To Min in bed at night by kerosene light in those months after her husband's death, the ocean seemed to punch and hound the Two Pointer rocks ceaselessly at the bottom of the cliff, no matter the weather. You could not have surprised her with how wild life could get, given that she had lived all her married days in that spot, but now she tossed and turned in what sounded like a relentless world, trying to fill her mind with chores rather than recriminations, but failing miserably.

She kept two books beside her bed:
The Gift of Poetry
, and her father's Bible. In the shock of losing Len so suddenly, big Len who had wooed her with his marmorean physique, his innocent good looks and a smile that would emerge like water out of ironstone, Min took to her two books with a searching intensity that had as much to do with her own sense of guilt as it did with the gaping emptiness of death. She would have liked to sit and talk to Rhyll Traherne but didn't want to bother her. Sid had lost two fingers to a tomahawk only the week before and Rhyll had her work cut out nursing him. And so it was
The Book of Job
Min turned to, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, Blake, and the Anonymous ballads.