Currawalli Street (11 page)

Cedric scratches at his beard. ‘I might not be there when you arrive, Walter, and so I'll say good luck to you.'

‘And to you,' Walter answers. They shake hands.

Cedric urges the horses on around the lead wagon. As he draws level to where Elizabeth is sitting, he takes off his hat. ‘Good luck to you too, Elizabeth. I hope it all works out.'

‘Thanks Cedric. I'll see you back there.'

‘Maybe.' He waits until he is past and then mutters to himself, ‘Maybe not.'

Cedric's wagon makes good speed now. He is a better driver than Elizabeth and his horses know the road ahead will take them back to Currawalli Street.

‘Home by tomorrow, do you think?' Johnny asks in a voice suddenly light.

‘I reckon. Probably we'll turn into Currawalli Street late afternoon.' Cedric smiles at Johnny. ‘Maybe earlier.' He keeps smiling as he looks beyond the heads of the horses.

Johnny rides alongside the wagon. He looks back and sees Elizabeth steering her wagon onto a track that goes down to the river.

*

Elizabeth draws in a breath. The wagon rolls down the embankment to a flat grassy area that Walter has singled out by the river. It will be the first place to flood if the river rises and Elizabeth doesn't like it. She indicates further along the embankment to another flat section that is much higher. She urges the horses on. Two well-trained animals. She looks over at Walter, who lifts his eyebrows.

‘It's okay,' she says as she grips the brake handle tightly just in case the wagon begins slipping. The ground becomes a bowl and dips before rising to the site she has selected. She applies and then releases the brake at the right time and the horses begin to pull again. Only for a few steps and then the wagon is on flat ground. The horses stop without being ordered. Elizabeth's arms are sore from the reins and she straightens them a few times to stretch the muscles.

Walter has dismounted and is now unhitching the horses, who know the procedure well enough to wait for the last leather strap to slap against the wood and then they walk down to the water. Elizabeth watches them drink as Walter unbuckles his saddle. His horse follows the others and they stand side by side with their heads bowed into the water.

‘Swim?' asks Walter. Elizabeth nods.

Clothes come off easily; in the heat of the day, most of the buttons are already undone. The water is cold around Elizabeth's feet at first but as she steps forward and the riverbed falls away, she doesn't notice it.

Travelling by wagon is a brutal, dusty business. The horses disturb a lot of dirt and then the wagon upsets the rhythm of the wind and the
dust tends to circle around the driver. Elizabeth only has to sink underwater once before her body feels hers again. She stops to reacquaint herself with her stomach and hips and shoulders.

Her feet no longer touch the bottom and she has to swim to reach Walter. She treads water, watching a banksia branch dip into the water and then rise hurriedly. Gently it dips back into the water again, as if it is equally attracted to and repelled by the water. She looks at Walter again.

Standing on a submerged rock, he overbalances slowly and falls back into the water. Elizabeth laughs and feels around with her feet for the rock. She slips on the slimy algae, falling forward into Walter's arms. The previous days have been long and hot. It is good to wash them off. Good to rid themselves of the echoes of empty words that should never have been spoken. Elizabeth puts her arms around Walter's neck and together they slip under the surface and then rise up for a moment only to sink back under. They are relaxed enough to allow breathing to become a secondary issue, both drifting along in a sleepy moment as if they are in the same dream, and as though the sounds of the bush around them are part of it.

Walter slides under her once more and Elizabeth lets him go. He rises to the surface and holds her feet. She lies back in the water, moves her arms to stay afloat and bends her neck forward, strands of her hair across her face.

She has to push only a little for Walter to let her feet go. She is pleased that he lets go easily. She realises that, about some things, she doesn't know him that well. About others, she feels that she has known him all her life. She assumes that he feels the same about her.

They swim side by side down the centre of the river, then pause while a long red-bellied black snake glides from bank to bank ahead of them. It disappears into the ferns above the waterline and they swim gently back to the wagon, their heads above the surface, taking in mouthfuls of the other's splashes. Once inside, they make love easily; each has become versed in the movements and reactions of the other and so the pleasure has reached a higher level.

Walter is running on a decision he made. About to marry someone else, the manager's daughter at the farm where he worked, he first met Elizabeth and her father on their initial map survey. When they left to return to where they came from, Walter found that he couldn't get her out of his mind. He broke off his engagement and when Elizabeth came back the next time, they both declared themselves and decided to embark on a life together. They were passing a little church in a small country town, the reverend was out the front weeding the garden and, on the spur of the moment, they decided to go in and get married. Cedric was the best man, and from then on Walter started sleeping in the front wagon. But since leaving that little country town, he and Elizabeth have been arguing about every little thing, so much so that Walter sometimes looks at the wheel tracks in the dust and wonders about the wisdom of the decision he made. But there is no going back. The wheel tracks always get blown away by the wind and now his heart burns like never before when Elizabeth touches him.

He thinks of their plans. A house is being built for Elizabeth in the same street as her parents. Next door, in fact. He is reserving his judgement on that until he sees the street, the house and the mother. The impending decision about these living arrangements looming before them is one of
the reasons they are quick to break into an argument over anything.

Elizabeth tries to stop him thinking too much about the future and he tries to stop himself from thinking too much about the past. That only leaves the current moment. He doesn't mind too much, quite liking what he is becoming. Gentleness was never required in his old life because Annette was happy for him to be as rough with her as he was with the men on the farm. But already he can see that being gentle is going to have its own value with Elizabeth. There seems to be a new sun shining and he is beginning to see things in its new light.

As he walks out of his front gate and onto Currawalli Street the Reverend Thomas Tierson looks up at the afternoon sky. He then steadily lowers his head until he is looking at the horizon beyond the treetops. He takes a deep breath and holds it, a little apprehensive. When he visited the airfield, it had only a shed and three cows on it. The man inside the shed turned out to be a parishioner and was happy to oblige Thomas with a flying lesson. Tomorrow at dawn. He lets the breath out and wonders what time the man meant by dawn. He didn't want to ask; for some reason it is a piece of knowledge that he doesn't want to confess he doesn't have.

Tomorrow morning he will see the world from a new perspective. The street. The manse. The church. Maybe he will even have a new view of God?

The Word of God is something that hasn't come very easily to him ever since he watched his father die five years before. If ever there was a reason for him not to believe in the existence of God then that was it.
The old man, who had devoted his whole life to the work of the Lord, died in an agony of uncertainty. Every man has his moment of crisis, so the bishop says, and unfortunately his father had his just before he died. Thomas didn't have any words to comfort him because, like him, the old man needed more than the obscure ramblings that both of them used at times like this. He wanted to know where the logic was in his final moments and whether it would offer the comfort he wanted. Faith and Logic. They go side by side like unsettled brothers. If a man desires one, he will love the other. If faith is the root of a man's distress, then logic will be his comfort. And if logic is his well-founded system of belief then faith will be his unfounded passion.

Thomas knew this. He had learned it by observing that most men of faith had what was close to an obsession with logic. Their lines are always straight; their sums are always correct. If a clergyman has retired to his office, it is most likely not to study the Bible, but to study his book keeping. His father certainly had this obsession.

But at the time of death, logic is left standing at the door and a man has to rely on faith by his bedside. Most men are able to surrender to their faith at that moment. But Thomas could see that his father wasn't able to.

He had no words when his father asked him for certainty about God. He had none when his father asked him if a lifetime of belief was enough. He had none when his father asked him if heaven was a reality.

He didn't know.

But then he remembered something he had witnessed four years before in an Aboriginal settlement near Leongatha. An old man was
dying and, although Thomas could not understand the words, he knew that the man was scared about what he would find on the other side. The daughter, kneeling by his side, leant down and held him to her breast. The man's uncertainty and fear had left his mind long before he died, rising above the clearing, drifting into the currawalli trees. Thomas felt it go.

And so that is what Thomas did. As an answer to his father's questions, he held the old man's head to his chest and rocked him like a baby until he stopped breathing. Thomas continued to rock him for ten minutes afterwards. It was there that he and his father had finally learned about the logic of faith.

Thomas thinks a lot about the issue of faith. He has spent most of his life unsure about the decisions he has already made: the clothes he has bought, the meals he has chosen from the menu, the books he has decided to read. And yet he has undertaken to devote his whole life to something of which he has no proof, something on which he must trust his own intuition.

He continues to walk down the street, determined not to look back to see if the church's steeple has collapsed during the night. It is every clergyman's fear that his church will topple over while he is not looking. It is as much about a doubt of faith as it is a doubt of engineering. He sighs and looks back. Of course it is still standing. Across the street he can see the apostle birds flying around their tree. He likes these birds. He crosses over towards them, pulling the bread crusts from his pocket. The birds see him coming and begin to gather on the fence of number twelve.

He hears the steam engine climbing up towards Currawalli Street.
The rails begin to sing, filling the air.

When the engine has passed, Thomas starts distributing the crusts, trying to make sure each bird receives an equal portion. He can never be certain that has happened; it is another one of the things that worry him.

An automobile turns into the street. He knows the colour, the same colour as a bishop's robe. The car is driven by Edward, the bishop's attaché; the bishop doesn't know how to drive an automobile. Thomas stops concentrating on the birds. They stop paying attention to his empty open hands.

Alfred is at his front fence, his hands in his pockets. He stops looking to the end of the street. He watches the automobile drive towards the church. Thomas watches too. It sails straight past where he is standing. Even though Thomas is sure he has seen him, the bishop makes no move to acknowledge Thomas. He thinks he is too important for such trivial people.

Thomas sighs again and walks back towards the church. Edward has already leaped out of the driver's seat and is standing by the rear door until Thomas nears, then he pulls it open. The bishop is sitting in the centre of the backseat and looks out as if he is a visiting member of a royal family.

‘Hello, Your Eminence,' Thomas says, hoping he sounds sufficiently respectful.

‘Good day to you, Thomas,' the bishop says in his small, shrill voice. ‘I thought it was time I paid you a visit. Is your sister at home? I may need her to do some special work for me. Something of the highest order.'

The bishop tries to deepen his voice, but the moment he stops
paying attention, it leaps back up to its usual high pitch. More than once Thomas has noticed Edward trying not to laugh as the bishop does battle with his vocal eccentricities.

‘What sort of special work?' Thomas knows to keep the bishop away from his sister.

‘Now, I don't really think it's any of your business, is it?' The bishop accepts Thomas's help as he climbs from the high leather bench seat, speaking all the time in an undertone. ‘Really, Thomas, I find your curiosity quite vulgar. It may be of use to you with the people around here but I find it . . . unsanitary.'

The bishop needs the car seat high so that he doesn't look like the short man he is. But once he is standing on the ground there is no denying his small stature. Thomas towers over him. That makes the bishop angrier.

‘There's no need to stand so close. No need at all. My highest apologies if I ever gave you the impression that you could stand next to me and pretend you're . . . my equal. Now don't fawn. Show some dignity.'

Thomas looks at Edward, who rolls his eyes, slightly enough that the bishop won't notice.

‘S-sorry, Your Eminence,' Thomas stutters. ‘My sister is not home at the moment. I believe she is . . . ah . . . out visiting.'

‘Well, run along and fetch her, there's a good little fellow. I'm sure she would be wholly disappointed not to see me when I have come all this way.'

‘I'm afraid I can't do that, Your Eminence. She is working on your behalf and the Lord's. Administering to a dying man.'

‘Oh I see. The Lord's work. How well I know it. And how often it plagues me.'