Journey to the Stone Country (37 page)
She turned for the first time and looked across at Bo, her head swivelling, her eyes large, the pupils gleaming yellow in the halflight from the door as if she suddenly recognised him as her quarry. ‘You never hear this story from your Grandma?’ she asked. ‘She never tell you how we mussed them white men? Sung em to their destruction? Watched the curse workin in them over the years? She never tell you that?’
Bo stood looking down at his boots. ‘No,’ he murmured softly.
Panya crowed with laughter, ‘No! See! Too busy big-noting yourself around them white people to see nothin! Your Grandma seen it wasn’t worth tellin you nothing! We been waitin for you, Bo Rennie. We knew you was comin back. That Beck woman you got with you musta got down on her knees to you, did she? Covered her hair in dust and tore off her shirt and begged you to forgive her for what her people done to our people? That how come you got her with you? She beg you to forgive her for the killins? Busting open the skull of my poor little brother?’ She laughed and coughed, choking on her tears before regaining her breath. ‘No one never come here and asked me to forgive em. I never heard nothin from none of em. They knew where I was livin all these years, but not one of them Becks or Bigges ever come by and asked me to forgive em. All they wanna do is forget. They want us to believe the bad times is over and we all gotta be friends now. Only they got everything for themselves, and they not giving it back. That’s what the white man want now. Peace for himself. And that’s what you gonna give him. But that’s not what I’m gonna give him. Let’s all be friends, he says, as if nothing never happened. And if some of us don’t wanna be friends we’re a trouble to him and in the wrong again.’ She was silent a moment. ‘There’s gonna be no peace for him. I’m used to being in the wrong so it don’t matter to me. I give him the slip a long time ago and he’s not catchin me now. We’re different from them, boy, and we always gonna be different from them, and you know that, Bo Rennie. The white man never wanna hear nothin about what’s different from him. What’s different don’t interest him. He don’t see it. He don’t know how to respect what’s different from him. He just wanna explain everything his own way and forget what he done. But I never gonna forget. He thinks he got nothing to fear from a broken down old Jangga woman like me. But that’s the mistake he made before. He just makin it again. The same old mistake. That’s what he does. He thinks it’s all over. He thinks he won.’
She cackled. ‘You forget and you’re one of them! As good as murder your own people. Is that you, Bo Rennie! Do they forget their own dead? Well they don’t do they? Look at all that Gallipoli stuff they go on about. They don’t forget. So what makes them think we gonna forget? Now you get out of Panya’s house! This story’s not over yet. The old people not finished yet! That Les Marra and my Arner here, they gonna fight this war for another thousand years. Where’s the white feller gonna be in a thousand years? He’s the one gotta worry about that, not us. We still gonna be here. You get out of this house and take that woman with you. Your grandmother never told you her secret name because she knew you couldn’t be trusted with it. She knew you’d be tellin it to that Beck woman one day. You get out of here! That woman stinkin up my place! You bring one of them Becks into old Panya’s house! And I had to live to see it.’
She lowered her voice to a new pitch of menace. ‘You take that woman up to the playground of the old people, Bo Rennie, and you gonna have a lot of trouble. You never gonna be free of trouble again in your entire life if you take that Beck woman up there. I’ll sing you and her just the way me and your Grandma sung her granddad.’ Her yellow gaze was steady on him for a full minute before she said, ‘You gotta decide whether you a Jangga man or whether you one of them.’ She patted Arner’s hand. ‘This boy knows who he is. He gonna do something for the old people. He’s ready for it. Now you get out of here. You no good to us. You go on back to the coast. You don’t belong out in this country no more. You belong with that woman and her friends. We don’t need you here.’
Bo stood, rigid a moment, then he took Annabelle by the elbow and hustled her ahead of him into the passage. He urged her out into the bleached light of the day, his hand pushing roughly against her back. Outside he stepped away from her.
Dismayed, she watched him walk down into the bed of the stony gully and stand gazing at the ground, head down as if he were a man waiting to be shot. She was trembling. She stood a while in the cold wind watching him. When he did not turn around or acknowledge her presence she went to the Pajero and climbed into the cabin and closed the door. She put her head in her hands. She felt sick in her stomach. She was afraid and ashamed and angry all at once. She felt as accused as if she had committed the murders herself and must answer to old Panya’s charge. The familiar Biblical phrase came back to her from her schooldays,
visiting the iniquity of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that
hate me
. Surely there would have to be an atonement in blood for such horrors. Could there ever be an end to the offence? What amends could there ever be for murder? Annabelle knew that the truth of Panya’s indictment lay behind the decades of her own family’s silence . . . She could see her fierce grandfather’s bronze stirrup catch the cold glint of moonlight as he swung it over the head of the terrified boy running for the shelter of the scrub, the triumphant yell of the hunter on horseback. The child’s thin bleached cry of terror cut short. The flash and smack of the hit. Dispute settled! My land now! Without benefit of law. Lease in perpetuity . . .
Annabelle gave a small moan and opened her eyes, unable to face the violent images that rose in her imagination. She felt she must surely be haunted for the rest of her days by Panya’s story.
Bo was still standing in the bottom of the gully. He was a forlorn and solitary figure in the dried up broken landscape, the wind whipping up little dust spirits around his boots and tossing the heads of the burr grass back and forth. Bo no longer looked like the confident Queensland ringer she had seen that day at Burranbah. She longed to go to him and put her arms around him and comfort him. She sat looking at him, wondering if they would ever be able to reclaim their innocence with each other. She felt the touch of despair creep into her heart . . . She twisted around in her seat and looked back at the truck. There was no sign of Arner. The open door to Panya’s house was empty. The wretched dwelling place seemed abandoned, its living inhabitants departed long ago . . . Old Panya persisting like a nightmare. Annabelle stared at the doorway, seeing her grandfather standing there as she had last seen him; not a memory of him, but the image in the framed sepia photograph on the washstand in her parents’ living room at Zamia Street, the old cattleman in the last months of his life, a figure shrunken and without dignity in his crumpled three-piece suit and narrow-brimmed hat, grinning senselessly at the world. His life and his deeds brought to ruin by the haunting of his past. Burned by the terrible song of Panya and Grandma Rennie. A dry husk of a man at the end of a cursed existence, his carcass white-anted and as empty of portent as the books in George Bigges’ library. Her grandfather: pastoralist, pioneer, cattleman, Louis Nicholas Beck, eldest son of Nicholas Louis and Marthé Annabelle Beck, from Haddon Hill in the green Vale of Taunton. Had her father known the truth? That gentle, loving man? Had her father secretly known himself to be the son of a murderer and his beloved land the plunder of that crime? She had never thought of herself as the granddaughter of a murderer. The Becks, like all the others, had trusted to their silence about such things in the belief that their crime would eventually be forgotten. She thought of all the country town museums she had visited, where there was never any mention of the Murris. And whenever she asked the attendant why this was so he would tell her with a fatuous sincerity, Why, Miss, didn’t you know? there were no Murris in this part of the country. For it was either tell her that or tell her the celebrated pioneering forebears of the district had been murderers and thieves. And that is what they must have been. For in truth there were no other means than murder by which they might have acquired their land. The truth was simple enough, but nearly impossible to deal with.
A movement at the corner of her eye made her turn. Bo was climbing back up the side of the gully towards the Pajero. She sat up straighter, nervous and unsure what to expect from him. He swung open the back door. She turned in her seat and watched him searching for a fresh packet of tobacco, waiting for a sign from him. But he did not look at her. There was a stillness between them that shocked her. When he had found the tobacco he shut the back door and stood in the wind rolling a cigarette.
Annabelle felt sure at that moment that they had reached the end of their journey together and that she and Bo would go no further. She expected him to climb into the cabin of the Pajero and tell her in a minute that they were going back to Townsville. She did not propose to argue with him. She imagined herself alone in the house at Zamia Street, waiting for him for a while, then eventually accepting that he was never coming back for her. She could not think beyond that. Her throat was dry and she felt empty. Panya was right. This country was broken and forlorn. That war was over. The old pioneering families gone long ago. There was no place in it for her. Nellie Bigges and her five ‘generations’ a joke. Panya was right, the Murris would persist and would still be here in a thousand years when the days of cattle and mines would be little more than a distant memory, a brief interruption to the life of the stone people. She felt fatalistic, anguished and strangely detached all at the same time. She felt that her fate was not something she could manage to determine herself but that it would be determined for her by the vast impersonal forces of culture and history. She would eventually go back to being an academic in Melbourne and all this would seem to have been a dream. She realised she was weeping, silently, the tears running down her cheeks, the gusting wind rocking the cabin of the Pajero.
T
HEY WAITED FOR MORE THAN AN HOUR BEFORE
A
RNER CAME OUT
of Panya’s shack. He climbed into his truck without a sign to them. Bo started the motor and drove out of Mount Coolon, not looking back. He drove fast, hunched over the wheel and concentrating on the rough strip of road ahead of them. Annabelle beside him, her feet braced against the floor, one hand gripping the door handle. The pair of them staring ahead as if they were pursued. Twenty kilometres down the road they topped a low rise, the scrubs giving way abruptly to yellowbox, the trees standing tall and solitary in open savanna. A mob of grey kangaroos watching their dust. Signs of cattle. A black kite trembling on the air above the track ahead of them, harbinger of their arrival. Bo watching for dried mud-holes, his hat set on the back of his head, a dead cigarette between his lips, the Pajero leaping and bucking, their gear rattling loose in the back.
The road was little more than old wheel ruts and cattle tracks snaking through the grass ahead of them. A dark line of scrub on the horizon. Dry creekbeds, meandering and broken banked like scraper wounds in the land, skipping under the wheels of the Pajero, defining the contours of the shallow watershed. Bo wrestling the wheel, closed in on himself, driving as if he were terrified of missing a rendezvous—a meeting prefigured, no doubt, in the elaborate texture of his destiny, a conjunction of events in time and space that would slip by and leave him stranded for ever on the wrong side of his own history if he did not reach his destination at the appointed hour. He stamped on the brake then accelerated, swearing at the broken ground that was slowing him.
Annabelle spoke for the first time since they had left Mount Coolon. ‘I remember this,’ she said, raising her voice to be heard above the din.
Bo lifted a hand from the wheel and pointed, ‘Turn-off to Haddon Hill just down the road here.’
‘Up there on the right-hand side,’ she said.
‘Yes it is.’
They fell silent again.
A few minutes later they came on a branching of the wheeltracks. A forty-four gallon drum mounted on a timber frame at the Y junction, a fresh painted sign nailed to a board,
HADDON HILL
.
‘They kept the name,’ she said, twisting around in her seat and looking back. The branch track spearing through the open boxforest and disappearing into the dark line of the scrubs as she remembered it, the feeling of being home when her father reached the turnoff. She imagined her old home ten kilometres down the road, coming first onto the cattle yards, then the green roofs of the station homestead rising from behind the cyprus hedge. The ripple-iron of the machinery shed and ringers’ quarters beyond. Saddled horses standing head down under the lime trees, tails flicking at the flies. The big rivergums rising up out of the creekbed, the scrubs giving way to a surprising plain of silvery native pasture. She could not imagine the new people. It was her own old people she saw there, herself and Elizabeth and her mother and father, a ringer riding by and touching his hat in salute.
Bo said, ‘You wanna turn around and take a look at the old place?’
‘Keep going,’ she urged him, looking back along the track they had come. No sign of Arner in the haze of their dust. ‘We’ve lost Arner,’ she said.
‘He’s comin,’ Bo said. ‘There’s nowhere he’s gonna get lost to.’ He was forced to slow to a walking pace in order to negotiate a rack of deep breakaways. The Pajero heaving and scrambling over the scoured channels, tilting wildly and threatening to roll onto its side, Bo chewing the dead cigarette. They climbed out of the channels onto the level ground and sped up again.
Annabelle gazed out her sidewindow at the strangely familiar countryside of her childhood, a weight of sadness in her heart, their journey becoming the dream she had dreamed again and again at boarding school on the coast all those years ago, her nightmare of returning home to find her family gone and only silence and absence to greet her, the country forbidding and desolate without her loved ones. Like a deserted battlefield. How to imagine returning in a thousand years? She looked at Bo. He stared ahead at the track.