Best Australian Short Stories (20 page)

ENGINEERS have built a new road up the Plenty Ranges to Westgate—or Tommy’s Hut, as we used to call it when I was a lad.

The new road is a modern mountain highway, a black stream of bitumen that loops and sidles along the flank of the range, with pointed bends in the shadowed gullies, and scenic sweeps round the sunny shoulders of the spurs. There are neat white hand-rails to the little bridges and white posts marking the outer edges of the curves. Each cutting and embankment is like a brown cicatrice on the aboriginal body of the mountain, but the road passing between these earthy scars is smoothly purposeful in its upward course. Above and below the road the bush is impressively tall, dense and flourishing, with high undergrowth, bright wheels of tree-ferns; and the trunks of the mountain-gums are like long white stitches in the green. The air is cool, moist, and fragrant with leafage. The ascent of the range is so gradual you’d scarcely notice it.

The old road was different—unsurfaced earth, a pioneer track, broadened and graded within the limited resources of a rural shire. Its course had been determined by that axiom of simple buslunanship: “To get through the ranges, stick to the tops of the ridges.” The settlers had had no road-building gear—and you can’t take a cart along the side of a mountain gully—so they had taken the foremost spur by frontal assault. It was a long stiff pull, and raised the sweat on a horse. You might have to spell him on the way up by chocking the wheels. You must needs walk beside him to help lighten the load, and you had to give him a spell at the top, where he would stand with quivering chest and dripping belly. If you were heavily loaded someone would have to meet you at the foot of the range with a spare horse to hook on in front.

The roadside timber was different from that which shades the new road. The thin soil of the ridges ran to no opulence of leafage, only to slender, grey rnessmate saplings, with bare gravel and rocky outcrops between, and a few tufts of grey wire-grass. Here was no bird-song, no undergrowth, no ground life. It was a lean, spare bush; life clung to these bony heights only by drawing in on itself; you imagined that the putting forth of a new leaf would be a matter affecting deep issues, and notable in an uneventful calendar.

At long distances—and for brief seasons—the roadside would be adorned with miraculous clumps of wattle and sarsaparilla, but the old road—though it occasionally commanded noble vistas of valley and range, was wholly a working road. In places it broke into a broad web of tracks—detours made among the trees by the settlers over boggy hollows in wet weather. On the high places the wheels ground over protruding boulders, or lurched over the exposed roots of trees.

By the kindness of friends I was on my way to revisit Tommy’s Hut for a day, after many years and much wandering. We had motored from Melbourne, gliding across the plain in less than half an hour, along a highway horses had needed a day to cover in more laborious years. From the last township before you come to the foot of the range I had been welcoming old landmarks, resenting new ones, noting the disappearance of others; becoming, bit by bit, a little uncertain of myself.

The general contours of the landscape were much as I remembered them, although there was a timbered hill which I seemed to have forgotten, and the willowed creek was closer to the township than I thought. A grey homestead drowsing on the lower slope of a green knoll was reassuringly familiar—even to its rust-mottled roof—and the sheep grazing on the flat below might have been those that memory recalled, rather than their probable descendants of many generations. But a sprawling roadside barn had vanished, the grass quite unmarked where it had once stood; and bleached and brown skeletons were all that remained of a once notable clump of old red-gums. Split-rail fences had largely given way to wire, and some rows of tall pines that had no place in recollec-tion affirmed the slow passing of the years. A red tractor with plough in tow—modernity in the long-remembered place—was a small shock to the heart, even while reason hastened to bring feeling to heel.

“The old road up the range should begin about a half a mile further on,” I said, almost anxiously, as we came under the foothills, and, “Yes, there it is”, as it came into sight.

John must have caught the note in my voice. “We’ll have a look- see,” he said, and shortly after turned onto the gravel. A hundred yards farther on he slipped into second gear and we purred steadily up the spur where the mountain settlers’ horses had once won their way toilsomely.

As we ascended, the sides of the spur fell away like the sides of a roof-gable, revealing valley and lowland on either side. Down in the valley to the left there was a patch of brown tillage where I remembered a peach orchard in a mist of pink bloom. Near the top of the rise we passed the spot where a loaded cart had once gone hurtling backward down the right-hand declivity.

It was eleven o’clock at night, and we were trying to get up the range with a horse weary from the day’s journey from the city. A chock thrown under the wheel must have been a clod of clay and not a rock as was intended, for the cart ran back.

“Chock! For God’s sake, chock!” The driver’s voice had panic in it. There was a frantic scraping of hooves as the horse struggled to regain control. Then the horse and cart disappeared into the night. Out of the dark came the thump of something overturning, and a bang and clatter as the dislodged load shot off and avalanched down the hill. Then the groan of a horse, followed by sounds of ineffectual plunging. Then silence again.

It was chill dawn before we had extricated the horse from under the cart, man-handled the cart back onto the road, collected our scattered goods, reloaded, and—shaken and hollow-eyed—were on again on our way. A shaft of the cart, lodging against a stump had stood prop against complete disaster.

From the top of the first rise the ascent of the range is more gradual, but steep enough; a heavy pull and a bit of level going; a dip down along a saddle between two ridges, and then ascent of another spur; always with that lean bush on either side, perspec-tives of slender grey trunks, with a scattering of trees of larger growth as you penetrated the hills.

It was not good travelling for a car. John would have had an easier time on the new road. His interest in the old road—and that of Hilda and Hugh—was only through me. I appreciated his setting himself to tool a sedan carefully up six miles of rough going; and I appreciated the willingness of the other two, consenting to be thrown about in the back seat as we lurched slowly across deep wash-outs dug by the rains of past winters, and accept-ing in faith our gingerly passage over rotting culverts.

Up the first spur, and for half a mile afterwards, we saw a couple of recent cartwheel marks on the road before us—firewood cutters’, most likely—then these disappeared among the trees, and we realized that the old road was quite abandoned. It was natural to wonder if we could reach our destination; but the road went on as if in the forlorn keeping of a faith no longer required of it; and John, with no exchange of words, accepted the challenge.

As well as being deeply channelled by past rains, the road was littered with fallen timber—a lace of twigs, leaves, great branches, an occasional whole tree—brought down by the winds in the years since it was last used by the settlers. The side-tracks that had led to the settlers’ homes were abandoned, the moss deep in the old wheel-ruts. Haulage was by motortruck now, and passed along the new road. The dray, the spring-cart, the jinker, the occasional bullock-wagon that had once comprised the old road’s trickle of slow traffic were at one now, presumably, with the split-rail fences, the vanished barn and the splintered red-gums.

Only the old road itself endured, a weathered line scrawled roughly through the ranges. Its loneliness and emptiness grew upon us as we topped each rise and turned each bend and came upon further untravelled stretches; a highway advanced in dis-repair, still passable, but unmarked in years by wheel or heel or foot. It had something of the quality of an old garment that has given good wear, and something of the eeriness of a deserted dwelling.

As we passed the old side-tracks I named them from memory—”Glendenning’s Turn-off”, “Cummins’s Turn-off”, “Jamieson’s Turn-off”.

I explained how each of these turn-offs had once led to the homes of two or three selectors, and took its name from the family that had been first to settle. Each track’s point of departure from the road had once been the scene of small twice-weekly meetings. Mr Bailey, who owned the store at Tommy’s Hut, used to journey on Tuesdays and Fridays of each week to the railway below the ranges, with his wagon and horses. He carried mail for the settlers, sold them newspapers, picked up packages for them at the rail, bought butter and eggs from them, and did a small wayside business in groceries, haberdashery, lamp-wicks and other kinds of country-store stock. He also did a gratis trade in local gossip.

His times of passing were known, and a little before he was due there would be a small gathering of people at each turn-off; a woman or two—perhaps with a piece of crochet or other current needlework to fill the time of waiting—a few small children, a boy or girl past school age, and perhaps a man or youth with sprouting beard, if there was a sack of flour to be shouldered. These little gatherings of an hour were a pleasant break in the isolation of selection life, and notable in a restricted social round.

Mr Bailey could always be heard before his wagon came into sight around the nearest bend of the road. Years on the road had accustomed him to driving with his thoughts on other things. His cry of command to the horses had become clipped to a shrill bark uttered loudly and repeated unthinkingly every fifty yards. “Yah-yep! Yah-yep!” He might have had a lively terrier for passenger.

He often approached his stopping-places bottom first as he groped behind the seat for packages. The horses drew up thankfully of their own accord. As he shuffled the mail he peered at each envelope as if he were seeking the answer to a difficult riddle, and he shouted the names as if he were announcing the result to an expectant multitude instead of the little knot of humans close about his wheel. He was the only man of business in the community. In his dealings with us he was very obliging and scrupulously just, and yet, as he gathered up his reins, he always looked as if he were counting up how many pennies we had been worth to him; and there always seemed to be a note of triumph in the terrier bark that came back to us as he trundled off with the dust rolling up behind his wagon.

It was White’s Turn-off I was looking for, and Sims’s selection, where I first put down roots in the earth. Arthur Sims was from the Old Country, a man of Kent who had spent the better part of a lifetime in Australia—or the Colonies, to use the term he employed with a slight air of patronage—bringing up a large family by dint of heavy toil until, in his late fifties, he had found himself with enough money to make a small start for himself on the land; a dream that had stalked his thoughts for years, growing more insistent as the time before him shortened. I was the boy about the place, wide-eyed, and with a mind as receptive as the soil to water.

The family, in addition to Mr and Mrs Sims, comprised two daughters and three sons; there was Jessie, aged about fourteen, in her last year at school, strong-limbed, blue-eyed and as blonde as new rope; imbued with something more than a tomboy interest in every aspect of the outdoor life of the selection. We were friends, even acknowledged sweethearts, following the day when we exchanged, in the twilight of the barn, the startling kiss of adolescence. Annie, aged sixteen, a buxom girl with smooth honey-coloured hair parted in a white line up the centre of her head, was one to whom the four walls of a dwelling were in the nature of a cocoon. She was the protectress and student observer of our virtuous attachment.

The sons—Ernie who was before my time, Harry who came after my arrival, and whose going overlapped Charlie’s arrival and preceded my own departure—were a special feature of the place. They came in their turn from their wanderings far and wide to toil awhile shoulder to shoulder with the old man. Here was a home-life and mum and dad. Here was a son’s duty. Here was effort with which they could identify themselves, until the calls that young men answer drew them off. Harry, the one I came to know best, was twenty-four, sober to the point of dourness, hard-working, and with a pride in past feats of labour on the ballast trucks of railway construction camps.

Mrs Sims I remembered only as a smallish dark figure ever hurrying about some household task, someone whose kindness I took as much for granted as I had taken my own mother’s. Mr Sims was a man of medium physique and courageous countenance. Under a bald head fringed with greying curls he had fine blue-grey eyes in a bronzed face, a straight nose, and a good mouth showing between moustache and grizzled beard. Hard work had affected him. His gait was stiff-kneed and he walked with drooping shoulders and dangling hands. He had a habit—perhaps it was the Kentish accent—of drawling and distorting certain vowels. In his mouth “yes” became “yuurce” and “year” “yuur”. He had a melodious voice and in his lighter moments would pause in his work to troll a line of song, most often, “I’ll Be a Jolly Pedlar and Around the World I’ll Roam”.