The Grass Castle (28 page)
Daphne squats to retrieve the stone from the floor and tucks it back in her pocket. ‘Who made the paintings then?’ she asks.
Her father raises a sceptical eyebrow. ‘What paintings?’
‘I saw them on a rock up in the bush. Pictures of kangaroos and emus and people. Somebody painted them.’
Her father laughs and she feels the harsh rub of humiliation. ‘There are no paintings round here,’ he says. ‘You’ve been looking at water stains, not paintings at all.’
‘I’ll take you there,’ Daphne offers.
He stands up and brushes her off, impatient, declaring he has enough to do without indulging her ridiculous fancies.
‘Who lived here?’ she persists. ‘Did you see them? Where did they go?’
He turns on her, rage simmering in his eyes, and his look silences her. She feels a small white light flare in her chest, a jolt of recognition. Her father knows something, she’s sure of it. He has stories he’s not willing to share, information about the Aborigines, Johnny’s people. And he is angry, furious. There is a deeper reason why he hates Johnny. Is he guilty about something? Has he hurt somebody?
Questions whirl in her head, but she knows not to push further. Her father is glaring at her, thunder in his brow. She lowers her eyes and goes to unsaddle her horse. Down at the yards she pulls the sharp grey stone from her pocket and the round white stone from her saddle-bag and holds them in her cupped hands, hard and smooth, lying side by side. Then she wraps them up again and contemplates where she can hide them.
Perhaps she can ask Johnny about it. Maybe he knows what happened to his people.
Daphne places the stone back on her bedside table, switches off the lamp and tries to go to sleep. But her thoughts won’t settle; they jiggle in her legs, making her restless and twitchy, so she turns on the light again, gets up and pulls on her dressing gown, pads quietly into the kitchen. Blearily, she makes a cup of tea. She’s tired, but there’s no rest to be had till all the memories work themselves through.
Johnny Button lingers with the story of the stone. When she tries to remember the first time she met him, it seems he was there from the beginning, coming and going, materialising from the bush then disappearing again. He was always kind, always finding something new to show her. Because of him she’d learned about bush tucker. And he is the one who showed her the moths.
He became her friend during her childhood. It was a quiet friendship, a concealed friendship. Daphne knew her father was uncomfortable with Johnny. There was that incident down at the yards when the horse broke its leg and Daphne’s father had to shoot it—that was the first time Daphne had sensed her father’s desire to lay into Johnny with his whip. But there was more. When Johnny was around, her father glowered with a particular tension. It seemed he would never reconcile this conflict: he required the Aborigine’s assistance with the stock, but couldn’t bear his presence.
Each year, however, Johnny showed up at the property. He arrived alone, turning up at the yards on horseback, a wide grin on his face. Sometimes he arrived bare-chested, as if he’d just returned fresh from walkabout and had been roving naked through the bush. One time he stole the shirt from the scarecrow at the vegie patch and wore it like a king, parading in front the other men. It was a bold and brash performance, destined to stir the boss’s ire. No-one else would dare steal from Daphne’s father, even if it was only in fun.
Johnny was clever enough to display humility and respect around Daphne’s father, but when the boss was absent, his cheeky nature would emerge. Whenever he saw Daphne, his eyes would dance and he would tip his hat like a gentleman. He was a consummate prankster, unrivalled in his ability to sneak up and surprise people. Daphne was eternally being caught out by him. Once he appeared in the chicken coop and gave her a fright and she dropped all the eggs, the thick orange yolks and sticky whites spreading as fast as her dismay. That was a trick Johnny never repeated. Daphne had received a hiding for it; she could have let Johnny take the blame, but she didn’t, knowing her father sought any excuse to dislike the black man.
Johnny wasn’t always funny. Often he was serious, especially when he was focused on shooting a kangaroo or climbing a tree to drag a possum from a hollow to roast over his campfire. Daphne had tried many different bush meats that he’d killed: possum, bandicoot, wallaby, lyrebird. They all had varied flavours and textures—some tender, some tough. Daphne liked lyrebird best; it was like chicken, but with a stronger taste, enhanced by Johnny’s smoky fire. He always roasted meat in its skin which he would later peel back like baking paper so he could bite into the hot flesh.
When Daphne was old enough to accompany the men on the brumby hunt, she rode with Johnny whenever she could. He didn’t come every year—sometimes he was off back-country when the ride was on. His life seemed devoid of dates and concrete commitments. While the white men measured days and weeks by ticking off numbers on a calendar, Johnny wafted to a different rhythm, absorbed in wanderings triggered by weird ethereal things, like the flowering of the gums or the migration of the honeyeaters, indicating some great event of nature taking place elsewhere.
By the time Daphne rode into the mountains with the men, she was sixteen, and a capable young woman. She had graduated from Bessie onto a livelier horse: a brown brumby mare captured on a previous hunt, a willing but nervous horse that took quite some skill to handle. Daphne was proud to ride with the men. The invitation to join them was a rite of passage she had awaited for many summers. She was careful to be quiet and unobtrusive—some of the men were not entirely pleased to have her along. A woman had to earn her place. She had to be better than a man. For this reason, Daphne kept mostly to herself.
Those years that Johnny came along, she liked to ride near him for company, and also because his steady horse somehow calmed her own skittish mount. Often she rode to one side, or slightly behind him, and occasionally they chatted. But their conversations were rare beneath the eagle stare of her father. He didn’t like her to talk with Johnny, and she learned to keep her distance, to snatch whatever opportunities arose, and to move away strategically when her father appeared on the track.
Trailing the main group of riders one day, she fell in alongside Johnny and asked if he could show her the moths up in the High Country. He answered with a nod and a grin. ‘Maybe you try moths for tucker. I cook him up on the fire. Good and juicy.’
A few days later, on the slopes below a scabby mountain top, when the riders took a break for tea, Daphne saw Johnny up-slope on foot, gesturing to her. She tied her mare, grabbed something from her saddle-bag and crammed it in her pocket, then excused herself from the group and followed Johnny up the hill, remaining some twenty metres behind him. They made their way among twisted snow gums and beyond the tree line to a pile of granite slabs and boulders, jutting against the sky like needles.
Like a monkey, Johnny scaled a large flat rock then slid between the grainy faces of two boulders. Daphne followed him into a dark recess of cool shade. At first, her sun-glazed eyes couldn’t locate him, but then she adjusted and found his dark shape silhouetted against the speckled silver rock. He directed her to a narrow crack and slipped his hand in. ‘In here,’ he said. ‘You can feel ’em.’
Moving close, she reached into the crevice and her hand connected with a carpet of fur, her fingers gliding over the backs of a thousand moths, their wings like soft scales adhered to the rock. Her heart thrilled at the marvel of it, at her proximity to Johnny, the raw salty, bushy smell of him, the black shadow of his arm, so near to her own, stroking the moths inside the rock crack.
Withdrawing, she flattened her hand on her chest, inexplicably breathless. Johnny pulled out too. In the dark space between the boulders, she could make out the shape of his outstretched hand, and there, on his palm, sat a brown moth slowly fanning its wings. Daphne felt her breath fluttering too. She backed away and stood where she could see the bright flash of Johnny’s eager smile in the shadows. From her pocket she pulled the round white stone she’d found at the rock shelter years before, and placed it in his hand beside the quivering moth. It was with some reluctance that she relinquished the stone. She loved the unblemished texture of it, the way it fitted perfectly in her hand, worn smooth by the grasp of generations of women before her. But this summer she’d decided to give it to Johnny, and she wanted to surrender it somewhere special—here among the mountain tops where she felt close to the sky. The moths provided the final trigger: this was the time. ‘It’s from your people,’ she said. ‘I found it in a place where they left paintings.’
Johnny looked at the stone with a blissful kind of awe. He picked it up with his other hand and ran his fingers over the surface before slipping it carefully in the rear pocket of his trousers. Then he moved near, holding out the moth, his eyes never leaving her face, his skin shimmering like polished wood in the dull light.
In that moment, something took hold of her and she reached and grasped him, surrendering to a sudden urge to taste his lips. For a moment he was wooden, rigid with shock, then he flicked the moth away and curled his long sinewy arms around her, tugging her close, kissing her, his deep brown lips awakening in her an age-old desire that knew nothing of the colour of a person’s skin.
With her hand she explored the bony angles of his back. His hair had the consistency of steel wool, but softer. Carried on a tide of primitive need, she unbuttoned her shirt and lifted her vest.
This is the image she always remembers: the breathtaking shock of his black roughened hand on the sacred milky white of her breast, the unspeakable electricity of his fingers connecting with her skin.
Then her father’s voice barked at the edge of darkness. Everything stopped, locked into the horror of discovery: what had begun with such innocence ending with the taint of sin.
Cowering, Daphne emerged from the cleft between the rocks, Johnny following. Her father’s whip tore the air around them. He slashed Daphne across the cheek, braying his anger. Then he shouted at her to go, and laid into Johnny with the lash, his eyes snapping with rage.
Daphne retreated, fearful. Just below the outcrop she waited while the whip cracked like gunshot. She wanted to scream at Johnny to get out of there—he was faster than her father—but she couldn’t speak. Her voice was knotted somewhere in her throat.
Then there was silence. Her father appeared on the rocks, thunderous. He strode towards her, grabbed her arm in a mean pinch and dragged her down-slope. Peering back, she saw a shadow slipping across the landscape like a cloud—Johnny escaping.
With the red welt of her guilt prominent on her face, she packed and saddled her horse under the enraged supervision of her father. Then she rode home in disgrace, banished from the hunt. Johnny rejoined the ride the next day, but after that he was an outcast. He was shunned from local properties. Shortly afterwards, he left the district and was never seen again.
Daphne has never forgotten her humiliation that day, the judgemental looks on the faces of the men. Doug was among them, her future husband, watching as she rode off alone. Years later she married him, and he never mentioned it, but Daphne knew he hadn’t forgotten. She wishes she had explained to him the innocence of what had taken place between her and Johnny that day, but she never found the courage to speak of it. Doug’s silence was his forgiveness.
And yet, all these years later, she still hasn’t forgiven herself for what happened to Johnny. As a result of her actions, he lost his status and the life he had known. She could have given him the stone at the farm, could have spared him the degradation of being exiled by the only workmates he knew. She could have saved him from her impetuous naïvety, her uncontrolled spontaneous surrender to her body’s desires. She could have displayed some grace and respect. But it’s too late for that now. She flung herself at him and ruined his life. Walking the same path as her family, she had destroyed him.
Wearily, she sets her unfinished cup of tea on the bench, switches off the kitchen lights and takes herself back to bed.
Abby makes a habit of morning tea with Daphne once a week. Daphne is similar to Gran, and it takes Abby back to her childhood, makes her feel secure. It’s also a welcome diversion from writing and analysis, and Daphne seems to enjoy having her around. Abby likes the homeliness of visiting with Daphne. When she is with the old lady, she feels something settling inside her.
They have a comfortable friendship. Even so, in quiet moments at home, Abby has to admit she’s lonely. Life without Cameron is rather empty, a bleak plain she must navigate alone. But it’s better this way. On her own she can’t hurt anyone, and she doesn’t need to worry about promises she can’t keep. If Cameron was thinking marriage, she’s done the right thing unleashing him.
Morning tea with Daphne is good for her. They chat, and sometimes they just sit together watching Ben play on the floor. He is a creative child, Abby thinks, so absorbed in his Lego. First he follows the instructions and makes the design on the front of the box then he pulls it apart and concocts his own constructions: space-age machines, towers, vehicles with all sorts of useful modifications, like guns and levers and canons sprouting fire. It seems he never tires of putting blocks together in innovative ways—except when his legs start to tingle and he explodes with the need to run. That’s when Pam takes him down to the park and lets him loose on the equipment, so he can come home a more manageable little person.