Journey to the Stone Country (28 page)
Bo fell silent, gazing out the window at the streetlight, the sky in the west now palest citron.
‘The most peculiar thing at the time was it looked like my dad lost his will. When Ben Southey give them a half hour to clear off, dad went into the house and changed into his town clothes. He come out wearing his suit and tie and he walked. Never said nothing to them Southeys nor to Grandma and he never looked back at the old place. Just kept going down the road towards Mount Coolon, the way Grandma told it.’
Bo fell silent again, thinking about the scene he had not witnessed himself, his father that day, dressed in an unaccustomed suit and tie, walking down the dirt road away from the homestead.
‘Grandma said they all just stood there watching dad and wondering what he was gonna do. The strays coming up out of the creek and looking on. But she knew what he was gonna do. Dad didn’t have to say nothing to Grandma for her to know what he was gonna do. They both knew the story of Verbena wasn’t done yet. Them Southeys and the sergeant and constables they’d brought with them, all watched dad going down the road till he was out of sight. Then the sergeant turned to Grandma and asked her what she reckoned Coll Rennie was gonna do. You just seen him do it, she told them. He never looked back and he’s not gonna look back, not at you nor at the old place. You don’t need to ask me. You just seen it yourselves. Well, people was surprised that Coll Rennie never made a fight of it. He never got on a horse again. That was the most peculiar thing of all at the time. That Coll Rennie could just turn his back on the old place and on them ponies he’d bred up over the years. He finished up living in an old caravan on that high bank of Nebo Creek. The van belonged to a Irish feller by the name of Sam Craven used to do a bit of mustering with dad and them Mount Coolon Murris one time. And that’s where dad died and where he’s buried. In the Nebo cemetery beside my mother. Dad wasn’t much over fifty at the time. These days people would say he was a young man. It looked like he took one king hit and went down and never got up again. That’s what people said. And that’s how he was judged in the end. But they was wrong about him. Though I didn’t know that at the time and when I found out what he’d done I was as puzzled as everyone else was. It didn’t seem like the dad I knew to fold up and lie down.
‘After me and Dougald got back from the Gulf country I went down to Nebo and seen him. It was raining. We sat in that leaky old caravan of his and had a drink of tea and we smoked a couple of cigarettes and I don’t believe either of us said more than a dozen words to the other. If Rose or mum had still been around, well maybe he would have opened up to them. I don’t know. Maybe not too. Maybe he would have acted different if he’d of still had mum taking care of him. Except for being a fine bushman and the best horseman I ever knew, the old man was a closed book to me. We shook hands when I got up to go that day and I never saw him alive again. I think he’d decided I didn’t need him any more.
‘We’d done all we was ever gonna do together when I was a young feller and he was teaching us boys about horses and cattle and how to behave in the bush. And that was nearly all hand-signals from him and a look here and there and us watching the way he was doing it and trying to do it just the easy way he did it. Never much in the way of words. He never valued language. Didn’t need a lot of it to get by on. Like all them old bushmen, dad’s was a language of signs and silence mostly. He did his work as if it was something natural and was already in him when he was born. But I suppose he’d had to learn it just the way we did. Though he never had his own dad to show him. Iain Rennie was killed when dad was only a child. So I don’t know where he got it from but he got it from somewhere. And that’s the way it was. I don’t ever remember dad telling us kids we was doing it right if we was doing a thing right or that we was doing it wrong if we was doing it wrong. He just give us a bit of a look and we knew if we’d got it right or wrong. There wasn’t no consequences with dad of you getting a thing right or wrong, except in yourself and the way you felt about what you was doing. That was the only consequence and it was the one we all lived by. Not the strap. He never hit us. He left us kids to judge ourselves. It didn’t matter if you was his own kid or someone else’s kid. Like Grandma, he never made no distinctions. You was a kid and you needed room to learn in and he give you all the room you needed. We was lucky to have him.’
Bo reached to the sidetable for his packet of Drum. ‘That was Coll Rennie. Admired in life and misunderstood in death. My dad. I wish I could have been even half like him.’ He rolled a smoke.
Annabelle watching him, the room faintly lit by the streetlight across the road. The sky black and glittering with stars. She was thinking how sheltered her own life had been. She had known almost nothing of the real lives of their neighbours down the road at Verbena. She was remembering her father telling them around the dinner table of the fights at Verbena and the strays along the creek. They had all laughed to think of such a place and had thought it peculiar and different. The old Jangga woman she had never met, Grandma Rennie. Bo was speaking of another reality. It had all seemed so simple to her as a child, the complexity of their lives unnoticed by her.
I
T WAS JUST BREAKING DAY NEXT MORNING WHEN BO BACKED THE
Pajero down the sideway and turned into Zamia Street, a cold green thinness of high cloud veiling the heights of the escarpment to the west. They had slept the night together in her parents’ bed. The clink of a cup on its saucer waking her in the dark, Bo already dressed, leaning and touching her shoulder. ‘Time to go, my love.’ They breakfasted in the kitchen, Mr White watching them. Bo stood by the Pajero rolling a smoke and watching her put the cylindrical stone in the blue grocery box. He didn’t ask her what she had in mind and they drove over to South Townsville along the silent streets. Bo pulled up outside a fibro-cement house, Arner’s white truck parked in the sideway. A light on in the house. Bo sounded the horn and a moment later Arner came out of the house. He raised his hand in greeting and climbed into the cabin of his truck.
They turned onto the narrow two-lane highway, heading south along the coast in the dawnlight towards Bowen. Roadkilled wallabies lining the verges. Arner’s white truck dogging them a hundred metres back. Bo drove fast, an edge of impatience in him, chewing the dead butt of his cigarette. Annabelle was remembering their first meeting at the Burranbah coal lease. This Queensland ringer seeming to know something of her that day that she scarcely knew herself. The confident intimacy in his voice: ‘Oh we met all right, Annabellebeck.’ Offering her a memory of herself that he had cherished, keeping it close for this moment: she and he playing together as infants in the waterhole by the redcliff on summer picnics, her mother in those days Grandma Rennie’s friend, the two women intimate and confiding in each other’s gentle company. An image to be treasured by her, the innocence of their shared infancy making the connection real. She looked across at him.
He took one hand from the wheel and put it in hers. ‘You look good in them faded dungarees, Annabellebeck.’
‘I feel good in them, Bo Rennie.’ She squeezed his hand.
After two hours driving south they turned off the highway beyond Merinda and climbed away from the coast, the bitumen behind them, heading west now into the Clarke Ranges along the graded dirt of the Bowen Developmental Road. Bo’s impatience seemed to leave him once the coast was behind him and they were travelling the sparse open country of the ranges. He settled back and handed her his packet of Drum. They saw no other vehicles before they reached the old mining town of Collinsville, the only settlement of any substance along the road west. Yellow dust whirling and eddying along the deserted mainstreet. Bo slowed the Pajero and pointed to a sagging weatherboard fronting the road. ‘Old Bill Stirling lives there. He was the land agent put that crooked deal through for May and Jude Horrie. We’ll drop in and pay him a visit on the way back. A bottle of that OP rum will soon light up his memory for him.’
A half hour later they descended into a fold in the ranges and Bo pulled off the road at the Bowen River. He lit a fire on the smoothworn riverstones in the lee of a grassy bank and set the smoke-blackened billy to boil. Annabelle went down to the water and washed her face and hands. There was a cold wind, like nothing on the coast. The tall casuarinas along the riverbank sighing and swaying. Arner sitting on the grassy bank watching Bo grilling the sausages and steaks for lunch. When she returned from the river Annabelle stood at the tailgate of the Pajero buttering slices of bread. She came over to the fire with the tin plate of bread and the tomato sauce and stood watching the meat cooking, the wind whipping the fragrant smoke into her face. Bo leaning and turning the meat with a pair of crocodile tongs, his free hand going out, motioning up to the head of the valley. ‘This water comes down from that Ranna Creek. Them sweet springs up in that Furious country, behind Mathew’s people’s place. She’s good water.’
Arner’s broad buttocks resting on the edge of the grassy bank, his big hands on his knees, his gaze fixed devotedly upon the hot fat wheezing and popping through the sausage skins, lighting up the red coals with small flares of yellow flame.
Annabelle’s gaze followed the direction of Bo’s indicating hand. He might have been talking to himself, reciting his memories, his voice low and indistinct, his head turned away, a mumbled inventory of the country, checking off its principal features and the notable moments that touched upon his personal history. Connecting their journey to his past. Accounting for where they were. He stood up and eased his back. ‘The Bowen River,’ he said emphatically, the portentous conclusion of his meditation on being somewhere. ‘Don’t wait for the wind to chill that meat, you fellers. Get into it while it’s hot.’ He reached and forked a steak onto a slice of buttered bread and poured a liberal quantity of tomato sauce over it.
They sat eating the hot grilled meat and sipping their dark sugared tea in silence, the tinkling of the water over the stones, the wind sighing in the tall sheoaks, a solitary crow observing them discreetly from a shattered bluegum on the far bank.
Annabelle broke a long silence, ‘If the Oorana Dam gets built, how will it affect the flow in the Bowen here?’
Bo gestured at the river, ‘She’ll be just a bit of a trickle along here.’ He tugged the last of the meat off the bone with his teeth and tossed the bone off to one side. The solitary crow lifted from its perch and rode the wind, settling on the stones with a quick two-step a metre back from the bone, eyeing them sideways. Bo said, ‘Go on then, feller. Get it!’ The crow stepped up with a sideways hop and snatched the bone off the stones. It heaved itself into the air, working its great sable wings and swinging away from them towards the far bank, the bone gripped sideways in its beak.
After lunch Bo lay down beside the fire on his swag and put his hat over his eyes. He slept for an hour then woke and made a fresh billy of tea. Lingering by the Bowen lunchcamp, making his presence felt, easing himself back into his country. They stayed there for another hour or more, Bo drinking tea and smoking, Arner shut away in his truck, the thump of his music, almost as if they would not leave this day but might remain at this place indefinitely, until the sighing of the trees and the tinkling of the river had become the familiar sounds of home to them, and the white-eyed crow a customary guest at their table. Some sign or other, however, attracted Bo’s attention and at last he stood and stretched his limbs and said they had better be slipping along, a reluctance in his voice, almost as if he had received a quiet instruction to that effect, rousing him from his pleasant reverie.
Only then did Annabelle realise something. She said, ‘You’ve camped at this spot before?’
‘Oh yes! Me and old Dougald unsaddled here a heap of times. She’s a good lunchcamp.’ He waved his hand towards a grassy clearing the other side of the road. ‘A mob of cattle will settle sweetly on that flat.’ He looked around. ‘They call this Chinaman’s Flat.’ He waved his hand, a loose indefinite gesture. ‘There’s an old Chinese prospector buried over there somewhere. I don’t know exactly where. There’s no headstone.’
They packed their things and drove up out of the valley of the Bowen onto the high windswept upland of the Leichhardt Range, the Pajero trailing a pale dust off to one side, the gravel road spearing through the grey scrub ahead of them, the landscape flat and undeviating, punctured here and there in the blue distance by the abrupt upthrust of cone hills; the antique remnants of a volcanic age when the high plains smoked and the sky was for ever a bloodred hue. The heartland, Bo called it. The ancient stone country of the Jangga. A high cold windswept upland dividing the tropical coast from the inland, a place of mingled forms, plateaus and downs and concealed valleys, and sudden strange tenements of stone, a unique warp in the great Tasman geosyncline.
The Pajero sped past small clearings in the scrub floored by white earth, as if these were the trodden ashes of abandoned fires, overarched by the skinny limbs of twisted turpentine trees that might have been the desiccated remains of the dwelling houses of a species long vanished from this earth. Bo pointing all the while, murmuring and indicating, his hand going out, a nervousness of anticipation in him. Annabelle catching a phrase here and there through the roadnoise, ‘That old turpentine, she’s the only timber the white ant don’t eat.’ He laughed and looked across at her. ‘They should’ve stuck some of that turpentine wood into them books of George Bigges.’ Bo going on, his voice falling below the rumble of the Pajero then rising, audible to her for a moment, a string of men’s names, his hand pointing, ‘Good old feller come down off his horse back in there. Broke his neck.’ The grey scrub a lava flow to the horizon, the Pajero rattling over the corrugations. ‘Get yourself confused real quick . . . Them watersheds head out four ways . . . I’ll show you something so you’ll never get lost up here.’ Another gesture, quick and precise. ‘The home of the springs. Plenty of good men got themselves bushed following one of them creeks around in circles looking for her.’