East of Outback (17 page)

Hannah brought the truck to a lurching halt beside a sawed-up log. Les sat on it, and beside him, Max’s Lady dozed with one hind foot cocked. “There’s a meeting tonight in the logging camp down the track. Let’s go, Colin.”

Colin slid out his side as Hannah jumped down out of hers. “What kind of meeting?”

“Some kind of preacher. Mr. Brekke says he’s very good.”

“Naw. I’m not interested in going to hear no preacher.”

“Suit yourself. I’m going.”

“With Mr. Brekke?”

“And Jack and some others, I think.”

That did it. Colin would go too.

______

It was a good thing Mr. Brekke, not Hannah, drove his truckful of sleeper cutters that evening. A cold, drizzling rain fell, making the slippery track nearly impossible. With the skill of an old hand, Brekke drove a snaking, twisting path through the trees, often in the track, sometimes leaving it.

He forded the puddled low spots by shoving it into first gear and speeding up. As the men whooped, the motor howled, and Hannah shrieked, they hit the fens full tilt, spraying muddy water ten feet high on both sides. Only one time did they bog to a stop. Everyone hopped out and pushed, and then ran like sixty to clamber back on, for once the truck got moving, Mr. Brekke stopped for no one. Colin found himself sharing with the others a wild and heady glee as they rattled and slogged the four miles to the logging camp. This was living, rain and all!

The Marri Creek logging camp looked like a war zone, if Colin had any notion what a war zone looked like. Huge stumps stuck out wherever you turned. Wilting, drying branches littered the ground. The earth itself, with no protective covering of grass, had been churned to the consistency of a newly plowed field by the hooves of scores of bullocks and horses.

The loggers’ only sleeping accommodation was a grayed tarpaulin stretched between trees, the only kitchen a tin safe and the open fire. Colin hopped down; he had to run to keep up with his eager little sister.

Mr. Brekke hailed the boss. “Brought you blokes a bit of fresh meat and some tomatoes. Even brought the cook, if you’ve a need for one.” He nodded toward Hannah.

“A sheila! Our baitlayer’s sixty years old and can’t see outta one eye. How’d you rate so high, Brekke?” Laughing, the boss shook Mr. Brekke’s hand. He doffed his battered hat to Hannah. Colin instantly regretted letting her come.

“Our man of God here.” The boss waved a hand toward the fellow who apparently would speak tonight. “James Otis.”

The young fellow smiled and nodded in an unassuming way. He was younger than Colin would have guessed—still in his teens—and much more cheerful. One might expect a preacher to be old and somber and set in his ways, to wear black clerical garb. This lad dressed like a logger. James Otis looked to be a half-caste—Aboriginal and white. Whatever Colin had expected, this young man certainly wasn’t it.

He approached Hannah boldly. “You surely have a Christian name; what do they call you besides ‘the cook?’”

“Hannah Sloan.” She smiled, and for the hundredth time Colin regretted everything about this venture. “Do you really preach?”

“Yes, mum, I really do. But I’m a logger by trade. Top disposed mostly.”

“You dispose of tops?” Her voice sounded so childlike.

“Yes, mum, exactly that. After the fallers drop a tree and others take the wood, there’s still the leafy crowns to be gathered and burned—or cut for firewood.” He smiled, and the charm in his smile neatly circumvented Colin’s determination to dislike the man.

The last of the bullock teams came plodding in, bedraggled and muddy. Hannah watched wide-eyed as the ungainly, waddling beasts made their way through the camp to a makeshift paddock on the edge of the wood. And then, smoothly, before Colin was quite aware of it, the preacher lad was leading Hannah about showing her this and that. He was talking about bullock teams; the leaders, body bullocks, pinners and polers; terms all as foreign to Colin as Dizzy’s bursts of Spanish; and Otis obviously knew what he was talking about. Hannah followed, absolutely enthralled.

“Once they’re cut, the logs are all moved by bullock teams, or horses.” He gestured as he spoke. ‘Trucks and tractors need a bit of a track, you see, and their tires slip and slide in weather like this. The bullocks can go anywhere, climb over anything. It may take them forever, but they get there.”

Colin could not wedge himself between Hannah and Otis; she was pressed too close. So he stepped in at her other side. “You from around here?”

“No. New South Wales, down on the Murray. My father ran a mission to the Aboriginals there for many years.”

“Red gum, right? Murray red gum trees and Murray cod. My father brokers the lumber and salted fish from there. That where you learned logging?”

The dark man smiled again, rather sadly. “I’m sure my father had seminary in mind for me, but I wanted to be on my own. Went off to work in the Barmah forests east of Echuca when I was fourteen. I love working with my hands. Of course, I love the Lord, too.”

“And you think loggers need preaching?”

He laughed. “Do you doubt it?”

“Not for a minute.” Colin was careful to stay on guard against this brash young fellow who was so obviously playing up to Hannah. Why didn’t he dislike the bloke more?

That evening, the loggers and the railway sleeper-cutters ate their meal together—not Hannah’s cooking, but that of the one-eyed camp cook. With the rain drumming harder than ever, they built a roaring fire as close to the tarp as possible, then lowered its back end nearly to the ground in an effort to trap the warmth.

It didn’t really work, but it looked as though it ought to, so you felt just a bit warmer. Colin mused upon the tricks the mind can play.

Here was another mind trick. Standing before the men seated under the marquee, his back to the fire, young Otis looked much taller than before, more dignified. Hannah sat right up front, Colin at her side, as close to the fire as anyone, but she shivered all the same. Reluctantly Colin removed his own coat and wrapped it around her.

Otis smiled in his own disarming way. “I learned bul-locking from my father, as well as a lot of other practical skills. He’s a very religious man, in the best sense of the word. He loves God and he loves serving God.”

Religious man. Colin thought. Could Papa out-religion Otis’s father? He’d come close!

“Being a man of God, my father doesn’t use the foul language bullock drivers are known for, even when angry or frustrated. I remember when once our bullock cart bogged near the river, bringing a load up from the dock. The riverboat skipper, Gus Runyan, came upon him in the track, laughed at the struggling bullocks and asked, ‘How they doing?’ My father replied, ‘All they do is puff, piddle and poop.’ It was the worst language I ever heard him use.”

Colin found himself laughing. Papa knew some language, too, pretty rough words—picked up around stables and such, but he never used it—at least not in Colin’s presence.

“My father was a good lad when he was small and a good man when he grew up. He was the kind of person every woman wants her son to be. But, my friends—” Otis paused, looking about. “He was not a Christian! Being good doesn’t make you a God-fearing man. Fearing God does. Being good doesn’t make you a Christian. Trusting Christ does.”

Hannah leaned over and stretched up to whisper in Colin’s ear, “Then what is Papa? And what was he before?” She was obviously listening, hanging on every word.

Otis launched into a series of stories then, entertaining yarns that were more jokes than tales, about his youth and his father’s youth. He spoke of Ellen, his Aboriginal mother, of her enduring faith, and of the way she kept the mission running even when his father preached out on the circuit.

He told about his father’s joy and embarrassment years ago when a lovely red-haired woman virtually proposed marriage to him. Twelve hours later another woman confessed her love for him—a double whack between the eyes with a red gum board, Otis called it. A sharp twist of envy wrenched Colin’s heart. Young Otis here was apparently privy to minute details of his father’s life. The line about the red gum plank was surely his father’s phrasing as he bared his past to an eager, listening son. Colin sighed. The humorous, intimate tales continued. Otis was a good storyteller.

“I hope none of you has ever stood in the dock, being tried for a crime. I think you all know, though, what a witness does at a trial. A witness delivers his testimony, telling what he saw and knows. This is my testimony; it is what I’ve seen, and what I know.

“At thirteen, as soon as I could quit school, I left my home to work in the forests nearby. It was not what my parents wanted for me, but I was determined. I’m sure all of you can understand a boy who’s anxious to grow up. Two years later, I decided I was not far enough from home. My father knew all the loggers. In fact, many of them worshiped at the mission. I was always under his eye one way or other. So I came out here to where the trees are legends. Pemberton, and the king karri.” He breathed an almost reverent sigh, “Oh, how grand,” and a dozen loggers nodded in complete agreement.

“It was near lunch time, and the fallers were working on one last stick before breaking. I was thinking about something else, not paying attention. Every one of you knows that can be fatal in the forest. I heard the crack and the whoosh. I could feel it coming. I heard the fallers shouting. Its shadow fell across me. I was doomed and I knew it.

“I whirled and looked up. It was right there! All I could do was cry out to God, ‘Please, God, save me!’ “

A charming grin spread across his face. “I’m standing before you, so you know how my story ended. But let me tell you how God saved me. First, the crown of that falling tree caught in the branches of a plain, trashy old marri. That threw the log off plumb. It spun on its base and fell five feet away from me. The second way He saved me was to open my eyes, right then and there, to the fact that He
does
exist, and He
does
care about me.

“I’d been hearing the Gospel my whole life. Jesus came into the world as a man, died on the cross as a sacrifice to pay for my sins, rose from the dead, entered heaven, and promised to bring His believers to paradise with Him. But only at that moment, when death had just brushed me with her skirts, did I realize how very personal that Gospel is. God, a person—and me, a person.

“It wasn’t a catechism that saved me that day, or a precept or a fact. It was a person saving me. A
person
. Do you see? That is my testimony. That is what I have seen and know.

“And now God wants to deal with each one of you, person to person, if He has not already—just the way He became real to me. If you do not yet know Him, I want to talk to you. We can discuss it together, and further see what salvation means personally.”

Otis stepped forward into the seated audience, casually squatting down to talk to one here, another over there. He was congratulated by others for an entertaining message. Hannah studied the wet ground between her and the fire, staring motionless at the dripping water.

Personal. A lot this Otis knew. And yet, he said he
did
know. Colin’s brain spun itself dizzy with fruitless thinking.

_____

Because of the constant rain and fierce wind the crew opted to stay overnight at Marri Creek. As always, Hannah slept in the truck cab; everyone else huddled under the soggy tarp.

At dawn they started back, Mr. Brekke’s crew and two fallers on loan. The lumbering stakeside bogged down frequently and Colin had to walk the last mile back to camp to fetch Max’s Lady. She pulled and the men pushed to free the truck from the sucking slop.

The truck rolled into the camp twenty minutes before Colin got there on Max’s Lady. The fallers had already begun their work, hacking in synchronization at the base of a tall jarrah, one to the left and one to the right.
Chik chuk chik chuk chik
. They cut a wedge-shaped notch in the tree trunk—putting an address on the tree, Mr. Brekke called it.

Opposite the notch they set their crosscut saw and began cutting. Colin walked down to the creek. Why did the doom of this tree—a mere spiritless timber—affect him so?

The creek ran muddy from last night’s rain. It was reshaping its bank here and there, eating away a bit at one point, laying a shallow mud bar somewhere else. There on the bend it had washed away half the soil from beneath a jarrah. The washout must have occurred many years ago. Robbed of its underpinning, the sapling had tipped over nearly horizontal, hanging above the flowing water. But the tops of trees are constrained by nature to grow upward, reaching for the light. And so it grew—straight up toward the sky like any other tree, its lacy crown nearly as high as its mates’. Only the L-shaped angle at the very bottom of its trunk remained as evidence of its victory over the destructive vagaries of the meandering brown creek.

Men yelled in the distance. In spite of himself, Colin turned to watch. Cracking and rattling, the tall jarrah leaned in the direction of the wedgecut. The whole tree shuddered, poised on the edge of death. Slowly, with an air of stately resignation, it began its first and final fall. Its leafy top whooshed, brushing through the crowns of luckier trees. Down it came, faster, faster. Dignity abandoned, with a roaring, shattering thud it shook the spongy earth.

Small mortal men swarmed over the giant, instantly at the task of reducing its immensity to narrow strips to be slipped beneath iron rails. Colin joined the other mortals in butchering a tree because he was paid to do it. Here was the most heinous of all the miserable, unpleasant jobs Colin had worked at in the last year. To cut up this inert titan into sleepers, to fell so noble a symbol of—

Of what? Philosophy escaped him, his thoughts were as jumbled as they were yesterday—indeed, as they were for many days. They tumbled about in his head, chaotic and disjointed.

Hannah arrived with the noon meal. Work ceased, but not the confusion, or the haunting, pounding memory of the falling jarrah.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN