Ghost River (2 page)

‘I knew soon as I walked in the house from school she was gone, without my old man saying a word.'

‘How'd you know?'

‘Not sure. But I could feel it. The house was empty of her and it made me feel empty inside.'

Ren decided he should share something of his own story with Sonny.

‘I don't have a dad. I mean I've got Archie, and he's okay most of the time. But no real dad.'

‘Your mum and dad split? I bet you miss him.'

‘Nah. They never got together in the first place. I don't miss him at all. More like he never was. Or a ghost.'

Differences between the boys could have set them apart, but their shared loss drew them together. Sonny and Ren were also the only kids around the neighbourhood without brothers or sisters living under the same roof, which was unusual. Most families had three or four kids at least, and often more. The Portelli family, two doors along from Sonny, had eight kids, and Mick O'Reagan around the corner had eleven. Mick was a lucky man. He had a job as a milkman and got his cream, butter and milk for free, which helped him to keep his tribe fattened over the cold months of winter. Before Sonny came along, Ren had been friends with a couple of Mick's boys, but from the day he'd been rescued in the schoolyard it became the two of them, for better
and
worse.

CHAPTER 2

Loretta Renwick knew her son was a dreamer from the day she spotted him looking up at the sky as a small boy. He was sitting on a rug in the public gardens, watching the flight of a bird above his head. He soon began drawing them with crayons, on the rough concrete ground in the backyard, or on the footpath in the street. As he grew he took his sketchbook everywhere he went, drawing train wrecks in the railyards, and mighty ghost gums growing along the banks of the river. It was where he spent most of his weekends, alone, roaming as far as he liked. Ren had a loose contract with his mother, one that Archie went along with despite his grumbles. As long as he was always home before dark, and, as his mother would remind him, he brought no trouble to the family door, he was given a free rein.

Only weeks after Sonny moved into the street Ren decided it was time to share the river with him. The water was not easy to find and local knowledge was vital. The dirt track leading to the river lay in the shadows of the mill, hidden among a forest of wild thorn, scrub and overhanging trees. At the bottom of the steep riverbank another track skirted its edge. In one direction lay an iron bridge, which carried traffic to and from the high side of the river where the moneyed people lived. In the other direction, a wooden pontoon nudged the bank, bobbing up and down with the current. The pontoon nestled next to the ruin of a wheelhouse. When the gates of the mill were shut the giant wheel that drew water from the river to supply the mill seized with rust, the wooden floors and foundations rotted and the building slowly sank into the muddy riverbed. From a distance it resembled a red-brick boat floating on water.

Further upstream a low waterfall stretched the width of the river, topped with a concrete ledge, maybe three feet wide. When the wheelhouse had been in operation, an iron handrail had been bolted into the ledge of the falls to transport workers from one side of the river to the other. The handrail had been swept away in a flood many years before, leaving the crossing dangerous, particularly after a heavy rain when the water from upstream swept across the falls with ferocity.

Ren knew
his
river as good as anyone and better than most. As well as drawing birds and other animals, his exercise books were increasingly filled with maps of the river, including sketches of the swimming holes, the hollows where rabbits burrowed into the ground, the fox holes hidden beneath the barbs of blackberry, and the drainways spewing out rubbish from the streets above. Ren's thoughts of the river were so constant he sometimes woke in the night, recalled an image of his most recent visit, opened one of his books and began drawing.

On one of Sonny's early visits to the river with Ren they came across the river men. It was a Sunday, and they had spent much of the morning in the grassed laneway behind their yards, doing what teenage boys do when they're bored, resting against Ren's back fence and talking about nothing in particular. Sonny was teaching Ren how to roll cigarettes. He was a slow learner. The wind blowing from the north suddenly gusted. Ren could smell the water calling them.

‘Come on, Sonny. Let's go.'

‘Where to?'

‘Follow me.'

They ran beside the wall separating them from the mill and negotiated the maze of thorn bushes before sliding down the steep track to the riverbank.

‘The falls or the bridge?' Ren asked.

‘The bridge. I've got an idea,' Sonny said. ‘Them pigeons that make a home under the bridge, I'm gonna catch a couple and start my own flock. I could race them. There's prize money in that. And you can make even more betting on your bird. Or against it.'

‘You don't have any place to keep birds.'

‘I could build a coop outside my bedroom window, over the kitchen roof.'

Ren didn't doubt Sonny had the skill to build a coop, there was nothing he couldn't do with his hands. Just the same, he didn't like the idea at all.

‘I don't know about that.' He frowned. ‘Keeping a bird in a cage. I reckon it's cruel.'

‘It's a coop, not a cage. If I can find enough wood and wire I'll make it as big as a house. Anyway, you train pigeons and you don't need to keep them locked up. They fly away and come back home to you. No harm to the bird in that.'

‘S'pose so.'

‘Is so.'

As they approached the iron bridge Ren heard hollering up ahead. He whispered to Sonny to keep low and stay quiet. They moved off the track and lay in the long grass, Sonny's knee digging into a length of metal pipe. He pulled it out of a tangle of weeds, put one end to his shoulder and pointed it at Ren.

‘You're fucken dead.'

Sonny stuck his head up above the line of grass and saw a group of men underneath the bridge stomping around a campfire. They looked like a long-lost tribe. The men passed a flagon of wine between them while they sang and kicked up dust.

‘We have trouble,' Sonny said. ‘We're gonna have to take them, Ren.'

‘You'll be doing it on your own.'

‘Please yourself, coward.'

Sonny stood up, lifted the pipe to his shoulder, moved forward through the grass and took aim at the men. One of them saw him coming, nodded to the others, took a couple of steps forward himself and raised his hands in surrender.

‘Don't be shooting at me, youngster. Are ya from the authorities?' he asked Sonny, humouring the boy.

‘We're outlaws,' Sonny answered.

‘Thank Jesus Christ for that one.' The man smiled, relaxing his hands at his sides. ‘So are we. How about you be polite and come over here and introduce yourselves?'

After some coaxing the boys walked closer to the camp. The man offered them a seat, which they refused. The other men took no notice of the boys and went on shuffling around the fire, humming a tune and continuing to pass the bottle.

‘This is my camp,' the man said. ‘So you can end the poor manners and stop pointing that weapon at me,' he ordered Sonny. ‘If not, I'm as likely to take it and shove it up your arse.'

He made the comment with a smile on his face, but it was enough of a threat for Sonny to throw the length of pipe to the ground. The man clapped his hands together.

‘Good boy. That's what I like to see. They call me Tex and I'm boss down here.' He pointed at Sonny. ‘What name do ya go by?'

Sonny wasn't accustomed to providing his name to a complete stranger but he offered up
Sonny Brewer
without thinking about it.

Tex took a step closer and studied Sonny's face. The man was delighted by what he found. ‘That eye you have there, I believe it may be a true wonder. Come take a look at this,' he barked at the others. ‘We have someone special visiting this morning. How'd you earn such an eyeball as that, son?'

Sonny rubbed the knuckle of his thumb over his eye, unhappy with the attention it was getting.

‘I was born with it.'

Tex gently patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good for you. It's a true beauty. I have never seen an eye like it. And it's a sign, we can be certain of that.'

‘What sort of sign?' Sonny asked.

‘Can't say right yet,' Tex answered, seemingly holding something back.

Neither Sonny nor Ren was sure what he was talking about, but they would soon get used to Tex speaking in riddles.

‘And you would be?' He turned to Ren.

‘Ren,' he answered, through a mouthful of dust and woodsmoke.

Tex skipped back and then forward, reminding Ren of a circus clown he'd seen perform at the town hall one Christmas.

‘Wren! The name of a bird. I like that one. You are a free spirit, boy.'

‘I'm not a bird. It's short for my last name. Renwick.'

‘Don't talk yourself down, boy. The wren is a bird I know from another time. And you're that one. Don't go forgetting it. One day ya will need to fly.'

Tex stepped forward and rested an open hand on Ren's forehead. ‘There is no doubt you are a bird. I can feel you have heart and spirit in you, boy. Don't matter that you know nothing of it now. You will sometime in the future.' Tex lifted his hand from Ren's head and straightaway the boy felt different than he had before the old man had touched him, lighter somehow, as if his body might leave the ground.

Tex dusted off his ragged clothes. He had a rich dark face and what looked to Ren like a film of milk across his eyes. He stood a little straighter and cleared his throat. ‘Let me introduce you to my companions.' He circled the fire. The men walked in one direction, Tex in the other, and one by one he announced them as if they were about to step up for a boxing title bout.

‘First off here we have Big Tiny Watkins, hailing from the heat and sweat of the north, where as a young man he made his mark in the snowdropping trade.'

Big Tiny, who was as wide as he was tall, bowed his head gracefully and went on pacing the fire.

‘Falling in behind Tiny we have the mighty, mighty Tallboy Parrish, our camp cook, who was at one time the undisputed champion tea-leaf across the state of Victoria.'

Tallboy waved and smiled at the boys. He wore a friendly face that Ren took an immediate liking to.

‘And that skinny fella trailing him,' Tex said, moving on, ‘is my own second-in-command, the silent but deadly Mr Cold Can Jonson.'

Cold Can, who looked more like a child than a man, and had to weigh something less than a starved jockey, avoided the unwanted attention of the newcomers by turning away.

‘And this here is the Doc,' Tex said, completing the introductions in a flat voice, pointing to a silver-haired man wearing a full three-piece suit and no shoes or socks. ‘There's nothing more to say about this one.'

Ren couldn't take his eyes off the man's filthy, scabbed and bloodied feet.

‘They're some weird names,' Sonny said.

‘They are,' Tex answered. ‘There was a time when we went by everyday names, until we ditched them and took up with new autographs from no public record. Most of all the police and vagrancy record.'

Sitting around the fire that afternoon Tex told the boys the story of how the men had recently shifted camp after being forced out of their home some distance upriver. Their old campsite had been destroyed by workers from the Water Board laying a run-off channel to deal with flooding. The men had been marched out of their camp, with nothing but the possessions they carried in their arms.

‘The camp was burned down on us,' Tex told them. ‘They said they done it to kill off the bugs and germs. But we got no germs. If you don't include the Doc.' He chuckled. He explained that the site for the new camp had been carefully chosen, as it would be shaded from the sun on warm days and protect them from the wet weather when it rained. The men had built themselves a humpy between the web of iron supporting the bridge, out of whatever bits and pieces they could scrounge, scraps of timber, an old tarp that had blown off a truck crossing the bridge above, and sheets of iron roofing found in the scrub. The structure was held together with wire and old rope and a handful of rusty nails. Although the humpy swayed like a boat at sea whenever a strong wind came through the valley, it held together well enough to provide what comfort they needed.

Tex ruled the camp, and rule number one was that any man in need of a warm fire and a meal could not be turned away. While sharing the fire and food, Tex would observe a newcomer until he came to what he described as an
understanding of character
.

‘I got to read a man's soul. Takes some time and thinking, that one.'

‘How'd you misread the Doc?' Tallboy asked him, raising his eyebrows and smiling across the fire at Ren.

‘Was gone on the grog the night he turned up. By the next morning he'd settled in like a stray pup and I didn't have the heart to turn him away.'

As camp boss, Tex also demanded that any man who shared his fire and shelter came and went by three commandments:
Never call a man a dog unless he is one. Never take another man's food or bed unless he offers to share. And never touch another man's fire.

Tallboy, the most capable of the men when it came to repairs and maintenance, fashioned a stove from a cut-down 44 barrel he found along the bank and rolled back to the camp. It sat out the front of the humpy and the men worshipped around it of a night, seated on fruit boxes or old car tyres, cooking up a feed, passing the bottle, belting out a tune and sharing stories. Baked beans or canned sausage and vegetables were number one on the camp menu, as they were easiest to lift from the milk bar and could be heated and eaten straight from the tin. When things were on the up, the river men feasted on bacon bones, provided free of charge by sympathetic local butchers. Tallboy boiled the bones in a pot of river water and served them up with potatoes roasted in the fire.

The men possessed a single blunt knife between them – a precious item – which they used to hack at a tin-loaf of stale bread, or split the chest of a rabbit whenever they caught one. They didn't carry a spoon, knife or fork between them and ate with their fingers.

‘Licking these stumps after a feed,' Tallboy often pronounced, ‘is the best tasting tucker you're likely to come by.'

Big Tiny, always in a hurry to get his food down, had a habit of eating with his face, sticking both his snout and full lips into the can and coming out with a mess of food woven into his scraggy beard.

Cold Can, although he looked like he couldn't lift fresh air, had a shotgun throwing arm and could hit a retreating rabbit with a rock up to a distance of fifty yards, in the old measurement. He'd pass the concussed rabbit over to Tallboy for necking, skinning and roasting over the coals. Rabbit hunting was restricted to mornings though, as once the grog took hold he wasn't capable of hitting the side of a tree trunk, even a few feet out from the mark.

Sonny would soon come to believe there wasn't a creature on the planet as unlucky as one of those rabbits. ‘You know, not one of them fellas can even leak straight. I've seen them piss on their own feet,' he would later say to Ren.