Coal Creek Page 9

  I was making myself unhappy thinking these thoughts as I knew there was little hope of them ever becoming my real life. I seen something useful I could be doing and I got off the bench and went back out the side door and I took a shovel and the wheelbarrow over to the pile of ant nest and I dug in till I hit the dry stuff and filled the barrow with it. When the barrow was full I pushed it around to the front door and filled the puddle with the ant nest till the water rose up around the sides of it and the ant nest was sitting proud of the floor. The entire floor was tamped ant nest that we had crushed out. I dug a channel to drain off the water and tamped the patch down hard with the back of the shovel. It felt good whacking at it with the back of the shovel, the thumping going out around me in the quiet of that still afternoon, the sound of the creek and the cry of birds giving to that place its own silence, which I loved to be in. I soon forgot to be unhappy. I stood up to ease my back and I seen one of them black falcons sitting in the bauhinia watching me like he was thinking of going home to tell his people a story about me whacking the earth. I told him I had seen him and I stood back to admire what I had done and I asked him if he thought it was okay. That falcon flew and Mother give a low whinny. I turned around and seen Daniel riding Finisher into the clearing. He was kicking that horse along and looking pleased with himself.

  I took the barrow and the shovel around to the galley and put them back where Ben kept them. When I come back to the front Daniel had stepped down off Finisher and was standing holding the reins. He was looking off in the direction he just come from. His shirt was dried off but his moleskins still looked heavy with creek water. He did not look at me but just said, like he had made a discovery, I saw their tracks crossing a patch of open ground going out that way. He lifted his hand and indicated, just like Dad used to. Which was the first time I ever seen him do that. He turned and looked at me and he said, We had better head on out there after them, or we will be travelling in the dark.

  I had thought of what I would say to him about leaving the police but I did not say it. After the silence had gone on awhile and he was staring at me, he said, I have the feeling I can’t be sure you will be with me against Ben Tobin if we should come to a hard situation with him.

  I did not know what to say to this, mainly because I did not know the answer to it myself. I did not wish to lie to Daniel, nor even to half lie, which in my opinion is twice as bad as lying straight out. So I said nothing about it and instead I said to him, It seems to me if you was to ride back to the police house and telephone to them Dawsons they will tell you they have seen Ben and his girl. Then you will not need to take my word for these things and you will be satisfied with the word of Frank Dawson, or his wife Anne, if it is her you speak to and Frank is out in the country as he most often is. I might have left it at that but I went on, And then Mrs Collins will stop pressing you to some action where you are not sure of the outcome. I was pushing things saying this, I knew that. But I felt things needed pushing or I was going to be in trouble with both sides of this.

  Daniel did not say nothing in reply but kept looking at me, his eyes narrowed somewhat and his mouth working as if he intended to spit, but he did not. I never seen Daniel spit. I said, The Dawsons will tell you they seen Ben and his girl. I know that. Daniel turned away from me and he looked at Finisher as if he was going to say something to the horse, and he said in a quiet voice, You are very sure of yourself, Bobby, about this. Yes, I said, I am sure of myself about this. I will stay here and wait for Ben and his girl and I will ride back to the police house in the morning and give you my report. Daniel thought a while, reaching and rubbing Finisher’s nose, which that horse did not mind, as it made him think he might be going to get something to eat. Daniel did not turn around and look at me, and when he spoke again his voice was low and quiet and thinking. And what if the Dawsons have not seen Ben Tobin and his girl? Now he did turn around and look at me. What then, Bobby? What do you suggest I do then? He was looking at me in a way like he thought I would not have an answer for him to this question.

  I said, Ben will be back here at first light with his stores. There is nothing here for them two to eat. I have looked. There is no flour in that bin and no tinned meat and their fruit tins is finished except for them pineapple chunks. Which I know are not Ben’s favourites. He would have ordered them only when Fay told him there was nothing else to get from the Mount Hay store. I know that. This is where Ben lives. His things is all here. And anyway, we cannot go chasing off after them tracks in this light. Once you are in the scrub it is not so easy to see. The night comes down early in the scrub and stays late. If something has been done to that girl that should not have been done to her we are not going to undo it by chasing off into the scrub at this hour.

  Daniel give some thought to what I said. He sniffed a couple of times, drawing in his breath, and he looked down and plucked at his moleskins where they was clinging to his thighs. I did not know how he was going but I was hungry. His moleskins was still heavy with creek water. He said, As you know so much about our Mr Ben Tobin, I will do this your way. He looked at me straight. I said, I am sure you will not regret it. Mrs Collins will be glad to see you tonight and gladder still when you have spoken to the Dawsons and set her mind at rest, which you can easily do over the telephone as soon as you gets in. Daniel said, We shall see. He turned around and gathered the reins and put his foot in the stirrup and got up on board Finisher.

  He sat looking down at me the way people will look down at you from a horse when they are talking to you and you are on foot, his boots pointing their toes at me out of the stirrups like them boots knew who I was. That Webley revolver looked big and heavy on his belt. I seen his hand go to it, his fingers fumbling at the buckle and him taking it out and aiming it at my head. Looking into the barrel of a gun pointed at me, that round hole staring at me like a blind eye, black and hollow with no feelings in it for me. I was in a kind of daze imagining this happening to me, Daniel deciding in his mistrust that he must get rid of me altogether. In my daze I knew if I was shot by him at this moment I would disappear and not be just any ordinary dead body lying there but would not be there at all. Not anywhere. No sign of me, and as if I had never been. I seen him grin and put that gun away again, looking real satisfied with himself, like he had proved himself the better man.

  I come out of my daze when he said, Well, Bobby, you will get nothing for your dinner tonight. And he grinned at me, like he knew he had really shot me and it was his secret that I could not know and was dead. I said, That is true, but I have gone without my dinner other times and it has not killed me. He said, I can expect to see you back at the police house in the morning then? I said, That is for sure. I seen he still had his doubts and was a long way from being entirely satisfied to put his trust in me. I wondered suddenly if he thought maybe me and Ben was together in some kind of a plot against him. I had not had such a thought before, but once it come to me I found myself watching for signs of it. That perhaps he was testing me. There was something else he had to say before he left. You said Rosie sees things we do not see, he said. Now you are asking me to believe that we do not see those things because they are not really there. If Rosie is right and you are wrong, then we are giving Ben Tobin a twenty-four-hour start on us and I am failing to act on Rosie Gnapun’s report of murder. He did not wait for me to say nothing to this but left it with me to think on and swung away and set Finisher into a trot and headed across the clearing, sitting askew in that big saddle of his the way he did, as if he was half ready to step off. The way he rode set a horse off-balance and I did not like to see it.

  I stood watching him riding into the evening light, going down towards that crumbly silt bank where we had made our crossing. I seen him go down over the bank and I looked at the sky. Them high curved clouds was all gone and the sky was clear, purpling at the horizon. The sun was gone off the flat too and was golden among the top branches of the brigalow, a chill beginning in the air. Daniel had turned around and raised h
is hand as he was going over the bank, and I wondered if he had had some second thought about me and how we stood. He would not be back at the police house before dark. I believed there was a fair chance of him missing his way and getting confused in the bendee. I did not think he was convinced by what I had said to him. I was not convinced of it myself. I wished I could have been more straight with him but I did not see how that might be done without speaking to him of my secret hopes of Irie and my pleasure in the friendship of that child. Which was something I knew I could not do. All them thoughts belonged in my own head and nowhere else. A stick of gelignite blowing everything to pieces if they ever did come out of my head into the open, Esme and Daniel looking at me like I was a devil come to destroy their child and their happiness. I knew all right where them thoughts of mine about Irie belonged and where they would land me if I ever did let them out. I knew that clear and clean as I knew my own mother’s name. My mother’s name was Mary. The nuns give it to her. She did not know the name her own mother give to her. She liked being Mary and it suited her.

  The fear I had was that Daniel was getting disappointed in his adventure in the ranges and was losing the dream he had of it for his family when he brought them up from the coast after the war had been keeping them all apart for them anxious years. I was afraid he would be making a decision to return his family to the coast soon enough. Which was where they rightly belonged. And nothing was clearer to me than that. Daniel was never going to be at home up in that wild old scrub country of ours. He might hold to it if Esme made him do it but he would not belong. I could not see that such a man for good order and neatness was ever going to fit with the way things was done in Mount Hay. I did not know why our town was called Mount Hay. There was no mountain and there was no hay thereabouts. Esme was another story to Daniel. I seen she was the kind of person to push hard at what she wanted, and not be content till she got it all facing the way she wanted it facing. I had a blue dog like that once. Some old scrubber bull would get his backside in a thorn bush and face that dog down head-on. But that dog never give up till he got the bull to rush him. Then he was behind that old bull and swinging from its tail. I had that dog from a pup and called him Smiley because he always looked like he was smiling at me. He was trod by a heifer in the yards out at Beelah and had his back broke and my dad had to shoot him. I was not able to do it myself. I never had a dog after Smiley. My dad did not like working with dogs. That was Esme. Always smiling and persisting. A blue cattle dog. I believe she could have made her home anywhere, Mount Hay or anywhere else if she had a mind to do it. She would just keep at it till she had things lined up her way. If the place did not suit her she would make it suit her. Daniel was not going to resist her when she was pushing but was inclined to quit the whole thing and go her way. Which was what he had just done with me, going my way with this hunt for Ben, unless it was all just a test of me. All the same I do not believe Esme would have resisted Daniel if he had come back to the police house at the end of a day and told her point blank, We are leaving this place and going home. I think there would be no arguing with Daniel once he was pushed to the point where he decided to stick on something big like that.

  SIX

  On my own out there at Coal Creek that evening I stood outside Ben’s place after Daniel was gone down over the bank and I watched the night coming on around the edge of the scrub. I liked the quiet and my solitude. The cry of birds overhead going home for the night to wherever they go, driving through the evening sky with confidence, calling to each other, flocks of them crying at the end of the day like they was lamenting the end of life itself. I looked up and watched them going over and I asked myself, Do birds know the sun will rise again in the morning, or do they think the darkness is come down forever? And I did not know the answer. How can we know what birds think? If they only wanted water there was plenty of water for them right there in Coal Creek. I do not like to hear a man claim that animals and birds do not think. The man who says that is not thinking himself but is just blowing himself up to look bigger than things he has no understanding of. You would never hear a blackfeller saying animals and birds do not think. They know better. It was not water them birds was looking for but some big stand of old wild fig trees. There is not many of them fig trees in the ranges, but I knew such a tree. A thousand years old my dad said it was. And maybe older than that by far. Who could tell the true age of such a tree? That great old tree grew beside a pure spring deep in the scrubs up against the ironstone flank of Mount Coats, its many trunks and roots growed into the crevices and across the planes of the stone, and the stone and the wood of the tree was wedded to each other like the tree had become molten. The air was always cool and sweet under the great canopy of that tree, the water of the spring deep and clear, blades of sunlight striking through the water to the stones on the bottom, an old-man eel six foot long living in the mouth of the spring. The spirit of that spring I would call him. And how old was he? A thousand years old too? Old, for sure.

  Me and my dad and Ben and his dad camped there when we was chasing them scrubber bulls over in that lonely country. We always stayed there longer than we had a need to. It was such a fine place to be. Ben’s grandfather had known it. That fig tree spring, as we called it, come into my dreams often since Dad passed on and I believe that is where his spirit went. The spread of that old tree was a hundred yards in every direction except up against the stone face of the mountain, them pale roots all glossy and hanging down from the high spread of the branches like they was hanging from the ceiling of a church, coming down in the soft light through the leaves, fat and green, the branches heavy with them little purple fruits, all speckled and sweet to the taste of the possums and the flying foxes which was always there when the fruit come ripe. When the fig tree spring come into my dreams my mother was always out there with us. Nothing was said in my dreams between her and my dad but in the dream I knew they was happy to be there with me and with each other. It was my happiness dream. I always felt good after having it.

  I told Irie about that place and my feelings for it and she took my hand in hers and made me swear a solemn oath to her that I would take her there one day, which I was fool enough to swear to. I do not know how any person could have resisted her, sitting there gripping my hand in her own warm hands and looking with that great innocent seriousness of hers into my eyes, as if she thought I was the most special person she had ever met or ever would meet, and she could place her trust in me and be at ease with me. I took that oath with Irie though I knew it was most unlikely I would be able to keep to the terms of it. Which is the way things are for us and our dreams mostly, so it seems to me, in this life. But I do not know why that should be. They just is and that is all there is to be said of it.

  Standing out there beside Ben’s galley on my own with the evening to myself and my dreams of what life might yet hold for me if only things could go my way, I knew how glad I was to be rid of Daniel . . . A great fire like the fire of the last days was raging across the scrubs before my eyes, red and orange flames devouring all that stood in their path, the roaring and the howling of the fire wind, and I was running fast as a wild horse towards the police house, the flames licking and wrapping around them boards, the tin curling from the roof, and I was inside and Irie seen me and I picked her up and carried her outside and I was so strong I outran the fire and flew over the scrub with her till we was at the fig tree spring, her entire family lost and the town burned down like the old picture theatre and only Irie and me left to care for each other. I shivered to think of the beauty of it.

  I was getting a chill through my shirt standing there, so I walked over and untied my jacket from the back of my saddle and put it on. I could still see them flames. My imagination of such a fire frightened me it was so real. I could feel it in me and I feared it, for I did not know how to stop such a raging thing if it come up from inside me. When you go in a daze you do not know what is a vision and what is real to touch with your hand. I spoke to Mother and
she followed me over to the small yard and I unsaddled her and let her loose. Ben’s mares come up to the rails and looked in at her, tossing their heads and kicking up and showing off as horses will in front of a stranger. They are no different to us in that way. I carried my gear back to the house and took Mother a scoop of oats out of the bin Ben had there with a wooden lid on it to keep the rats out that Sweetheart had not killed off. If that old snake had died and had not drifted off somewhere looking for a mate it would have been the rats that ate her corpse. I thought of that. The rats eating the snake that ate their own parents. It was like the rats was eating themselves. There was a half forty-four-gallon drum filled with sweet water in the small yard for her. I stood back and watched Mother lipping them oats and when I had seen enough I went around to the galley and lit myself a fire. I made a drink of tea and rolled a cigarette.

  I thought I might eat one of them cans of pineapple chunks later on. Or maybe two. They was not my favourites neither and I would have liked a can of corned beef and some fresh bread and potatoes, but I had seen there was nothing to be had, only that pile of empty cans out the back attracting the rats, them horse thistles growing up through the pile with all the rain they had been having out there. While I was watching the billy coming to the boil I was remembering Esme telling Daniel he was all that stood between the young women—which was her words—and the likes of brutal men such as Ben. And it seemed to me the evil of her misunderstanding was working itself into things and was in that opinion of Esme’s and her putting it on Daniel that he become some kind of protector of young women. I knew Esme would not have taken my word against Rosie’s. I knew that. Not ever. No matter what I said. That day Rosie come by and Esme come out of the house and lifted her up and took her in her arms Esme had decided she and Rosie was some kind of sisters. But I do not think Rosie had decided Esme Collins was her sister. Rosie had her own sisters, and she had her own thoughts. Which was too deep for Esme Collins.