Best Australian Short Stories (31 page)

“How else?”

“Oh,” she said, “yet it is all so ruthless.”

“You mean what he does?”

“No. You only ever think of what he does.”

“Well, I’ll admit he’s given us a few things to think about.”

“Clearing with those tractors and the chain,” she said. “Everything in their path goes—kangaroos—all the small things that live in the scrub—all the trees—”

He looked at her as if her words held some relevance that must come to him. He said:

“We clear the land. Yes.”

“You clear it,” she said. “It seems to be what is happening everywhere today.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Ann,” he said.

She got up from the chair by the steps. “Perhaps he feels something should be left.”

“Look,” he said, “maybe you teach too much nature study at school. Or you read all this stuff about how we shouldn’t shoot the bloody roos—so that when some crazy swine wrecks our property you think he’s some sort of a—”

“Some sort of a what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, aware she mocked him. “Better than us.” “No,” she said. “Perhaps just different.”

`Different all right.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get the police,” he said. “They don’t take much notice most of the time, but they will of this.” He looked at her as if he would provoke the calm he felt to be assumed. “We’ll burn him out if we can’t get him any other way.”

She looked up quickly and for a moment he was afraid. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“He’s gone too far this time,” he said stubbornly.

The long thin streamers of cloud above the darkening line of scrub were becoming deep and hard in colour, scarlet against the dying light. He watched her face that seemed now calm, remote, as if their words were erased. She was small, slight, somehow always neat, contained. Her dark hair was drawn straight back, her brows clearly marked, lifting slightly so that they seemed to give sometimes humour to her serious expression, her firm mouth.

“I’d better go, Ken.”

“The family expect you for tea.”

“It’s Sunday night. I’ve to work in the morning. I have somethings to prepare.”

“Look,” he said. “If it’s this business—”

“No. I’m just tired. And I’ve assignments to mark.”

“All right,” he said.

As they drove she watched the long shadows that spread across the road, and over the paddocks from the few shade-trees, the light now with a clarity denied through the heat of the day. She would have liked to make some gesture to break the tension between them, to explain to him why she had been unwilling to stay and listen to the inevitable talk of what had happened. But to tell him that at such times she became afraid, as if she could never become one of them, certain that the disagreements which were now easily enough brought to a truce must in the end defeat them, would not lessen their dissension. He said suddenly:

“You’re worried about it, aren’t you?”

She knew that he referred to themselves, as if he had been aware of her own thoughts.

“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes.”

“It could be all right, Ann. You’d come to like it here.”

“In so many ways I do.”

“It’s nothing like it used to be. This light land has come good now. We’ve done well. We’ve got everything—you wouldn’t be without anything you’d have in the city.”

“I know that, Ken,” she said.

“But you’re not sure of it.”

She thought that he perhaps deliberately tried to provoke an issue on the material grounds, as if these at least were demonstrable of some conclusion, that he was lost, unwilling, in the face of their real uncertainty. He was more perceptive, she knew, than he cared to reveal, but he had a stubbornness she felt it was perhaps im-possible to defeat.

“Not sure of some things. You must give me time, after all. I —hadn’t thought to live here. It’s different for you.”

The few high trees stood out darkly above the low thick scrub, and beyond she could see the roofs of the town.

“This other business will probably be over next week, anyhow.”

She supposed he deliberately minimized this which perhaps he did not understand, preferring evasion, the pretence that when it was settled it would not matter. He was so clearly afraid that she would escape. She reached out quickly and touched his hand.

He stopped the car before the house near the end of the main street where she boarded. Further down, near the club, she could see the cars parked, and people moving without haste along the pavements.

There was no wind, and in the darkness the street was hot, as if the endless heat of summer was never to be dissipated. As he closed the door of the car he said:

“I have to go out to the paddock on the way back. It won’t take long.”

She made no comment and he said, as if to prevent her censure: “I’ve got to take some stuff from the store out there.”

“They haven’t found him ?”

“No. The police think he’s moved out. But we know he hasn’t. He makes fools of them in the bush. They’ve been looking since Sunday, but they’ve given it up now. Anyhow, you could walk right past him at three feet. And there are no tracks.”

“To be able to dodge them like that he must know all this country well.”

“I suppose he does.”

“Almost—more than that. He must understand it.”

“He doesn’t seem to do anything else all day.”

She smiled. “Well, do you?”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that. You mean we don’t understand it?”

“Perhaps in a different way. You’re making it something you can understand.”

“Here we go again.” He banged his hand against the steering wheel. “We never take a trick. Why don’t you go and live with this character?”

She laughed suddenly. “I’m sorry, Ken. But how long has he been here? That’s a harmless enough question.”

“He’s been round about here something like ten years. I remember when I was at school. He’s mad.”

She said: “All those who oppose us are mad.”

“Well,” he said, “we’re going to get him out this time. We’re taking shifts down at the tractors, and we’ve got a watch on a camp of his we found.”

“A camp?”

“Made out of boughs.” His voice was grudging. “Pretty well made. You could live in it. We flushed him out, because he left some food, and a radio.”

“That’s not in keeping—a radio.”

“It doesn’t work. May never have been any good. But it might be only that the batteries are flat. We’ll find out. But he could have camps like that all through the bush. We’ll be lucky if he comes back to this one.”

They turned off through a fence gate, and down along a track that followed a side fence. He switched off the car lights and drove slowly.

“He’ll hear the car,” he said. “Still, the lights are a give away.”

Suddenly they were close to the dark thick scrub, and then she saw the forms of the tractors, gaunt, high, like grotesque patches of shadow. Two men moved up to the car. One of them started to say something, then saw her, and paused. He said:

“He came back, Ken. Got the food. We never saw him.”

They carried rifles, and suddenly she began to laugh. They looked at her with a surprise that had not yet become hostility.

“It—it just seems funny,” she said weakly.

“It’s not funny,” Ken said. She was aware of their anger.

“We’ll get him,” the tall man she recognized as Don Mackay said. “We’ll get him this time.”

She was reminded suddenly of the boys at school in the playground at the lunch period, confronted by some argument physical force could not immediately solve. Even their voices sound alike, she thought. Perhaps it is not so serious. But when they had taken the box he held out to them, and as they stepped back from the car she saw again the guns they carried, and the parallel frightened her.

“How long will they be repairing the tractor?” she asked.

“End of the week.” His voice was brusque. She knew she had belittled him before his friends. She moved closer to him as he drove, and he looked briefly at her small, serious face shadowed in the half-light of the car.

“We’ll go through there next week. I wish he’d get between the tractors when they’re dragging the chain, that’s all.”

“Is he armed?”

“Yes,” he said. “He is. He’s lived off the land for years. And by taking food. He might be dangerous now.”

She said slowly: “I wonder what made him begin to live like that?”

“No one will know that.”

“You’ll have to take care.”

He nodded. “There’ll be a few of us there to watch for him.” “Actually he hasn’t ever threatened anyone, has he?”

“No. But he’s never damaged anything big like this. And the police have never bothered about him before, either. You can see why. He’s made fools of them.”

“And of you.”

“All right. And of us.”

“Oh, Ken,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s—it’s just that I wish somehow you could just let him be.”

“And have him do what he likes?”

“Well, he’s not done anything much.”

“Only wrecked a tractor.”

“He would hate tractors,” she said as if she no longer spoke to him.

“Well, it’s a reason why we can’t leave him there.”

“I suppose,” she said, “you have to clear that land?”

“Of course. We clear some land every year. It’s a tax deduction. And we need it the way taxation is.”

“So there can’t be anybody who wants things to stay the way they are for a while?”

He looked at her strangely. “Stay the way they are ?”

If it was not what she meant she could not perhaps have found words that were any more adequate. It was not a simple thing of statement, of definition. She saw with a sudden desolating clarity the grey sprawl of suburbs crossed by the black lines of roads, the clusters of city buildings that clawed up like a focus, the endless tawdry over-decorated little houses like the one he and his family had placed on the long low rise of land from which almost all else had been erased. As though, she thought painfully, he hated this land she had herself, incongruously enough, come to feel for in the brief time she had been close to it. And it was perhaps worse that he did not see what he was doing, himself a part of some force beyond him. Duped with pride. It was as if she had made some discovery she could not communicate to him, and that set them apart. She said desperately:

“Do we have to change everything? Wipe out everything so that everlastingly we can grow things, make things? Get tax deductions? You don’t even leave a few acres of timber, somewhere for animals and birds—”

“Animals and birds,” he said. “You can’t stop progress.”

“The unanswerable answer,” she said. Before them the shade-trees showed briefly as the road turned near the farm. “So we must all conform.”

He slowed the car for the house gate, and in the headlights she saw the facade of the house as if suddenly they had turned into a suburban street. As he stopped the motor the silence held them.

For a moment they did not move, then he drew her against him, his arm about her shoulders, the gesture token of a security they might both have willed, denying the words with which they had held themselves separate.

“Maybe,” he said slowly, “it’s because you’re so crazy I have to have you. You—you’re different—”

“I’m sorry, Ken. Because I’m afraid I do love you—I suppose I have to have you, too.”

“And you’d rather you didn’t.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “I would rather I didn’t.”

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?”

“It might sort out,” she said, and she laughed with him. At the house the front door opened briefly, the light shining, across the entrance porch as someone looked out at the car.

In the week-end she had arranged to stay at the farm, and she expected him to call for her soon after breakfast. She put her small case on the veranda, but she went back inside. Idly, rather irritated at his lateness, she took out her paints and began to work on the flower illustrations she was making. She had begun to paint the native flowers, their grotesque seeds and leaves, to use for her teaching, but the work had begun to absorb her, and she spent whatever time she could searching for new examples. Many, at first, she could not identify. Now, though she had told no one, she had begun to hope the paintings might be publishable if she could complete series of different areas. It was mid-morning when she heard him outside. In the car as they drove he said:

“Some of the fences were cut, out by Hadley’s boundary. We’ve been too busy this week to look down there, and the sheep had gone through into the scrub. We got most of them back.”

“You lost some?”

“Some.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, as if somehow it were her fault.

“He knows we’re going to clear that land, and he’s out to do as much damage as he can first.”

She had no wish to draw him, as if she deliberately sought their disagreement, but it seemed she must form the words, place them before him, his evasion too easy.

“You’re sure about it, Ken, aren’t you? That he’s just getting his own back? That it’s as simple as that?”

“It’s obvious. He’s done pretty well, so far.”

“And that’s the only side there is to it?”

“What else could there be? He can’t expect to stop us.”

“He might know that.”

“Well—that proves it.”

“No—perhaps we’ve all got to make a gesture of some sort. For the things we believe in.”

“You put it your way if you like. But what I believe in is using that land.”

“Yes, Ken.”

“We can’t all be dreamers.” And then as if he refused to be further drawn he laughed. “It’s funny the way I’ve got caught up with one. Perhaps it will sort out, like you said. You do the dreaming. I’ll do the work.”

She ran her hands lightly over her arms, smiling at him. “You think we might convert one another ?”

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take.”

“yes.”

“I’ll be out a bit this week-end, Ann. We’ve got to stop this somehow. While we’ve a few sheep left.”

He went out late in the afternoon for more than an hour, and she helped his mother in the kitchen. The older woman had a quietness, and a kind of insight that she found attractive, and they had always got on well together, though sometimes the girl was irritated by her acceptance of the men’s decisions and views, as if this was something she no longer questioned, or perhaps, Ann thought, she had never questioned.