The Mary Smokes Boys (4 page)

The water’s violence had grown quiet, stored like the violence of a candle flame. The water’s secret was kept out here, hinted at in the rushing at Mary Smokes, in barely remembered high-water marks in the valley, and in the fierce southwest wind that poured from out of the plains across all the waters of this country, even shifting their courses. That wind carried weather that could darken the sky in an instant.

And all this, that they barely comprehended themselves, was the boys’ secret at this hour of night. No one else in the universe was watching these waters. The boys and God were alone. Grey imagined they were the water’s keepers.

 

NYALL THIEBAUD TOLD how at the mill that day he had been sawing she-oak when a dull tooth put his blade off course and the log bucked and then split, and had his hand not got in the way the splinter would have caught his face. The younger Thiebaud sipped the dregs of a bottle of green ginger wine and borrowed
flippant toughness from his brother, nodding and cursing at everything the others said. Raughrie Norman had to be held back from leaping into the too-cold water. A girl had made fun of his slow speech at school that day and he would catch pneumonia to make her sorry. And Eccleston–who the older boys called Ook–sat and smoked with a faraway expression upon his face, and Grey imagined he saw pain akin to his own there.

Eccleston spoke to him when they were out of earshot of the other boys.

“Your mother was the loveliest woman I ever knew.”

Grey nodded.

“My mother’s gone too. She was just an old black woman. Still … ”

He told Grey how his mother and grandmother had baptized him here in this water and in the smoke of bulrushes. This water, the last course of Mary Smokes, was one of many sacred places his mother’s people mapped.

“Where are the others?”

“I don’t know,” said Eccleston.

“Could Possum tell you?”

Eccleston was surprised the small boy beside him knew the old black man he called his uncle.

“Pos isn’t from here. He doesn’t even know what country he takes. My mother told me about gettin baptized here. In her own language too.”

“You spoke it with her!”

He shook his head and took a pouch from his duffel coat and took a pinch of tobacco.

“There was a time I could understand it. That was years ago.”

Eccleston said his grandmother spoke nine dialects. His mother, two.

“And you were baptized right here?’ said Grey.

“I don’t know.” Eccleston licked the edge of a paper and sealed and lit a cigarette. “Somewhere round here.”

Grey nodded and stared into the fire.

 

SO THE TOWN’S wild boys made some of their ocean of time significant. At Mary Smokes Creek; at Lake Wivenhoe; at the edge of the woods, building fires and scattering them with their boots. On the highway finally, walking on the edge of the asphalt in silence. They raised their eyes from their hoods to see the disconcerted look of late-night drivers who wondered what this sleepless tribe was and what it meant.

They walked to the top of Solitary Hill at the edge of town and caught glimpses of Highway 54, the faint glow of mercury-vapour lamps that reached beyond the purpose of the lights and into the dark of the boys.

GREY’S GRANDMOTHER WOKE IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE September night and walked past his bedroom door and looked in at an empty bed. When Grey returned from the creek the yellow veranda-light was on and his grandmother sat in her wicker chair watching him come. Thereafter she kept a careful watch, rising at the slightest creak of the floorboards. She declared she would not let her daughter’s son become recalcitrant in her absence. As a punishment she made him return directly from school and did not allow him to see anyone except old Jack Naprasnic the cabinet-maker, who Grey had taken up weekend work for, stacking and polishing timber.

For amusement in the evenings Grey played with his sister.

Irene was hardly ever well. She suffered severe bouts of croup that required treatment at the clinic in Toogoolawah and nightly care at home with steam and camphor through the dry winter. Her ailments and the absence of mother’s milk meant she took slowly to food and was underweight even into adolescence.

Grey pitied her. He ran his fingers through her dark hair to make her sleep. He wondered that she looked so unlike his mother.

To fill the hours before bed his grandmother told him old stories. She spoke of her father. For Grey, that man’s existence was achieved chiefly by a painted photograph that had once greeted him in the living room of his grandmother’s house in town. The photograph was of a fair-haired, femininely handsome man in
infantry uniform who shared certain features with Grey’s mother. The man had fought in the Battle of Beersheba. The photograph was taken months before he was killed advancing on Damascus. Now it sat in a pile of such photographs against the skirting boards in the old woman’s room. She often shuffled and meditated upon one or other of the pictures, though she did not ever hang them, as though it was pointless or blasphemous to decorate the awful present with the golden past.

Grey’s grandmother spoke to him of a Celtic heritage, even of a pioneering Australian one, a Christian one–Protestant, never betraying the Catholic tradition of her husband, who she called “romantic and unstable like a woman.” But Grey did not feel he possessed any heritage. His isolation–his embittered grandmother who was like a relic of something long passed, and his mute and broken father–meant that all he inherited was broken or delivered stillborn.

The one cherished thing bequeathed him by the past was the memory of his mother. He had never let his grandmother clean those wallboards darkened by the smoke of the icon lamp. Only to stories of his mother would Grey listen with rapt attention. So Margaret Finnain would set out through her private landscape of reverie, with Grey trailing in the shadows …

“Once,” she chuckled, her eyes out the window, following the story she told to where it fled into the hills, “Irene looked all day for a mangy pet rabbit in the woods. Now
was
it the rabbit?–some such triviality. She got hopelessly lost and tore her ankles on an old flood fence, and when we found her in the evening, her face red and streaked with dirt and tears, she was sitting on a fallen crows ash beside a creek, cradling the thing in her arms, and laughing that she had prayed and the rabbit had come. Dreamy little girl she was. I asked her why she hadn’t prayed for the way home …”

There was nothing in his grandmother’s stories of how his mother had met his father, and Grey knew better than to ask. Nothing of how Bill North married her with a pinchbeck ring in
the days when he was a part-time logger and railways boy and those boys had the run of the country. There was nothing of Irene Finnain’s entrance into the world of adulthood–her few menial jobs, Grey’s birth. Instead she remained ideal and untouched, at a vestal fifteen years old.

Grey knew his mother was the most beautiful girl who had ever lived. Her hair was blonde, with the enigmatic hues of the eucalypt woods in changing light, and her eyes were clear green like the lake after evening rain. She made old women sigh and children smile. At shire functions the children competed with each other to be closest to her, and vied for the right to hold her hand and skirt, and Grey’s heart swelled when finally the prettiest creature anyone had ever seen let him lie across her lap while she listened to music or the conversation of others and ran her fingers through his hair.

But now, even so soon after her death, he could not always recall her face. He relied on photographs. He used his grandmother’s stories to place her in familiar settings, as though her face might borrow solidity from the places. At night he would lie in bed and try to imagine her, and sometimes her face would not come. Then he prayed again,
bring her back to me
.

 

GREY WATCHED OUT his window for the boys. He saw Eccleston had walked off unaccompanied. Grey wondered if the other boys had deserted him. That could not be true. But so it seemed. He went to the back stairs. Eccleston carried no lamp. Grey could barely discern the boy’s form in the scant light that escaped piles of October’s clouds. Tonight Eccleston was not walking down to the bend in Mary Smokes Creek, but south toward the big highway.

Grey heard the chink of crockery and his grandmother’s footsteps behind him.

For want of an explanation he pointed across the yellow grass. His grandmother’s cataract-clouded eyes could not have seen the diminishing shape that was Eccleston, still she seemed
to know what Grey had pointed at. Strangely it seemed he was not in trouble.

“You be careful making a friend of him. There’s some in this world that are destined for trouble. It’s written in the book before time. You see if I’m not right.” The old woman sighed and frowned.

She went to bed sure Grey was daunted by Calvin’s hell. But when he heard the rattling breath that meant she was asleep, he pulled on his canvas boots and duffel coat and stepped quietly down the stairs.

He stood at the barbwire fence. Though he was gone from view now, Grey imagined Eccleston was bidding him to follow. If he hurried he would catch him up.

 

THEY WALKED ACROSS a rolling wood of eucalypts and met Mary Smokes Creek where it was a few fetid pools of amber water. Much of the timber and rock had been removed from this reach, so only floodwater stayed here for any time. They met a dirt road that ran down from the hills to the Valley Highway.

“Where are we goin, Ook?”

“I’ve gotta get some money.”

They walked to within hearing distance of Highway 54. They pulled a gap in a barbwire fence and went through and walked to the white house that belonged to August Tanner. Men and boys sat on bonnets and stood beside a dozen vehicles in a ring on graded dirt beside the house.

“Wait here,” said Eccleston.

Grey stood at the edge of the dirt that was lit by a spotlight mounted on Tanner’s roof gutter. The light was trained on a point in the centre of the cars. Eccleston walked through the light, and Grey felt that Eccleston was sorry he had brought him. At a glance Grey took in a gallery of grotesque faces. A man with a stubble beard and a wide-eyed black man made some inaudible joke and the white man’s angular features gathered into a grinning mask.

 

GREY WALKED IN the dark around the backs of the vehicles and saw Eccleston standing at the door of a corrugated-iron shed, asking something of an old Aborigine who Grey knew was Possum Gallanani. When Eccleston went inside, Grey went to the window.

The shed was lit by one unshaded bulb that gave light enough to show a man taking cash out of a metal box. The lantern-jawed face and cropped grey head belonged to Tanner.

Grey heard muffled snatches of talk. Eccleston said he had no money left, he hadn’t eaten. Tanner returned to the metal box and took out a note and handed it to the boy.

“Your old man can never say I didn’t look after you.”

But Eccleston said he needed more than that.

“Bloody hell, boy, you go through money.” Tanner spat on the dirt floor. “We’ve got fights tonight, like you see.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

Tanner took back the note.

“I’ll put this on you.”

“Who’ll I fight?”

“Rod Bates.”

Rod Bates was distantly related to Tanner. The man called him his nephew. He had just quit school and was working at the abattoir north of Mary Smokes at Kilcoy. In the past he had run with the wild boys of Mary Smokes, though he had fallen out with Eccleston.

“Find someone else.”

“You boys have fought before.”

“Not for money.”

“The only others here are two full-bloods come down from Cherbourg. One’s a shithead kid who thinks he can’t be beaten, who every bloke here’ll see right off you’ll wipe the floor with; the other’s a ringer from Jondaryan who Pos calls his cousin–he’ll wipe the floor with you.”

“I won’t fight Bates.”

“You’ve only gotta scratch the skin to see all you halfies’a got piss for blood.”

“Why him?”

“No one expects me to bet against him.”

“They’ve seen me before.”

“He can fight too.”

Eccleston sighed and spat.

“Then put your money on him and I’ll take a dive.”

“And get my throat cut? You said yourself they’ve seen you before. I trust you to fight better than to dive.”

“Who’s makin your bet?”

“Pos. I’ve used Charlie Lemon too much. The bloke who runs the book is wakin up to it.”

“You’re a fool to use Pos. He’ll tell someone without meanin to.”

“They’d expect him to bet on you. It won’t affect the odds.”

“They won’t expect him to have any money.”

“Today’s Friday. Even an Abo can hold onto a paycheck for a day.”

 

GREY SQUATTED AT the front wheel of a truck and watched two fights between black boys. He watched Eccleston and another boy, who looked at least two years older, take off their coats and shirts and have their hands wrapped in cloth.

The boys raised dust so it was difficult to see. They fought three three-minute rounds. By the end of the second, Eccleston had been knocked down twice and was bleeding from more than one cut. Possum wiped the blood from Eccleston’s face and Grey saw plainly the gash under his left eye.

At the beginning of the third round Eccleston took a blow to his left cheek that sent him stumbling onto a car bonnet and a man called out an insult from the ringside shadows and Grey ran onto the dirt, flailing at the boy who stood arrogantly over Eccleston who was on his knees now. Like all pensive, sentimental boys Grey moved swiftly to tears and violence. He stood shivering and crying in the ring. Even when Eccleston grabbed his coat sleeve and tried to pull him into the cars, he stood fast. He stood
between Eccleston and his opponent while laughter came from all sides, and then three men were needed to pull him off the Bates boy who slapped him hard with the back of his hand. The men threw Grey back out between cars.