The White Earth
The White Earth
ANDREW
McGAHAN
The White Earth
First published in 2004
Copyright © Andrew McGahan 2004
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
McGahan,
Andrew. The white earth.
ISBN 1 74114 147 8.
1. Inheritance and succession – Fiction. 2. Family – Fiction.
I. Title.
Set in 12/15 pt Bembo by Asset Typesetting Pty Ltd Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents, whose life this isn’t.
This is a work of fiction. While the Darling Downs are real enough, the northern parts of the region do not exist as described here. This story is not meant to portray any actual place, person or event.
Contents
O
NE SPRING DAY IN LATE 1992, WHEN WILLIAM WAS HALFWAY between his eighth birthday and his ninth, he looked out from the back verandah and saw, huge in the sky, the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. He stared at it, wondering. The thunderhead was dirty black, streaked with billows of grey. It rolled and boiled as it climbed into the clear blue day, casting a vast shadow upon the hills beyond. But there was no sound, no rumble of an explosion. Hot silence lay across the wheat fields, and the air was perfectly still. William said nothing, for there was no one to tell — his mother was in bed with a headache, and he knew better than to wake her. He sat on the edge of the verandah and watched. Ever expanding, the cloud began to drift, caught by some upper breeze. It loomed over the house, and great jets were arcing out from the main body, like the trails of slow meteorites. Down below, ash was beginning to fall, small black flecks spiralling in the air. Other particles were bigger, shrivelled and twisted embers, still glowing red as they settled. William was aware of the smell of burning … but it was a good smell, a familiar smell. The smell of grass, of wheat, of the farm itself.
Suddenly he heard engines. There was a dirt track that ran past the house and out across the property, and now a flatbed four-wheel drive sped by along it, trailing dust. A car followed close behind. William didn’t recognise either vehicle. This was odd. What were strangers doing on the farm? Looking out across the paddocks he saw an even more bizarre sight. A tractor — not his father’s — was bouncing across the fields, as fast as he had ever seen a tractor go. And there was yet another four-wheel drive, right out amidst the wheat where there were no tracks, cutting a straight line through the crop. The farm was alive with movement. The phone had started ringing, and from the front of the house came the noise of more cars arriving, of doors slamming, and of women yelling. William climbed to his feet, studying the cloud. It was breaking up now, thinning to a misty orange. From its base stretched a long murky stalk of smoke, leading back to the ground. It seemed to touch down somewhere at the rear of the farm, where a haze hung around a small point of darkness.
There were urgent voices in the hallway. William’s mother and two other women — he knew them, they were neighbours — dashed onto the verandah. They stopped, staring. His mother’s hand went to her mouth.
‘Oh God,’ she said,‘Will …’
And William knew that she meant his father, not himself.
It was outside all of his experience.
Only later would he understand what had happened, that the cloud was not from an atomic bomb, that indeed it couldn’t have been anywhere near as big as a real mushroom cloud, no matter how large it loomed in his memory. Instead, it was the smoke from a seventy-acre paddock of wheat — ripe and tinder dry after the hottest spring in years — going up in flames. And somewhere in the middle of that field was the harvester which had set off the blaze. A big, bright red machine. Singed black. The fireball might have been started by an electrical fault, or an overheated bearing, perhaps, igniting some chaff that had gathered under the engine casing. William would never know. But in that harvester — or near it maybe, on the ground, for William was never told this either — were the remains of its driver. A man, suffocated probably as much as he was burned. Dead, either way. There was nothing anyone could have done. Dozens of farmers from the surrounding properties had seen the smoke, and knowing instantly what it was, they’d leapt into their farm vehicles and raced directly across the plains. All of them much too late.
After it was over, they gathered in the kitchen and in the dining room. Men grimed with ash and smoke, women busy making tea, or passing out iced water and solemn glasses of beer. William drifted through them, aware that something terrible had happened, but feeling outside of himself, confused by the attention the men and women gave him, and by their compassion. He caught passages of conversation. Plans. Offers of help. Of food. Of money. The police came and went away. An ambulance came, gathered up something from the shed, and went away. All the men went away too, and most of the women, leaving only a few to cluster around his mother. The afternoon lengthened into evening. William went and stood on the back verandah, stared out over the farm. The sky was clear again, as if nothing had happened.
When evening had turned into full night there came a final visitor, an old man who walked with a limp. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen, tall and grim. The women fell silent.
‘Veronica,’ he said.
William’s mother nodded, dazed. She looked around the room until she saw William. He moved to her side, gazing up at the stranger. The man did not smile.
His mother said,‘William, this is your uncle John.’
William had never heard of any uncle.
He slipped away and hid in his bedroom. From there he could hear the talk in the kitchen. The women’s voices mostly, but sometimes the man’s voice too. It was low and dry and, unlike the others, it held no sympathy at all.
Later his mother came in, sat on his bed.
She said, ‘I’m going to need your help from now on, Will. You’ll have to be strong.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you understand what’s happened?’
He nodded.‘I watched the fire.’
She echoed him distantly.‘You watched the fire …’ Her hands were twisted in each other. But then her gaze narrowed.‘What do you mean, you watched it?’
‘From the verandah. I saw the cloud going up.’
‘You were out there the whole time?’
He nodded again. Looked up at her.
She shuddered suddenly. Her arm lifted and she slapped him, her hand catching his right ear in a painful, piercing smack. Then she was crying. ‘Stupid boy. You just sat there and watched? Why didn’t you come and get me? Why didn’t you do something? Your father …’
And then she was gone.
William sat on his bed, his ear ringing. It was not the first time his mother had hit him and as always he knew she hadn’t meant it, forgave her for it even as it happened. It was just the way she was. But he started to cry at last, because of the pain, and because of everything else. Finally he curled up, wanting to sleep. He lay there for hours, while out across the blackened fields the shell of his father’s harvester smouldered under the stars. But the ringing in his ear wouldn’t go away.
I
T WAS THE WINTER OF 1993,DRY AND COLD, BY THE TIME WILLIAM and his mother said goodbye to their farm. They were going to live with William’s uncle, John McIvor.
‘He’s not really your uncle,’ William’s mother warned. ‘He’s your great-uncle, on your father’s side. That means he’s not obliged to me and you at all, but he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart. So when we get there, I want you to behave yourself.’
William understood. They were now relying on charity.
It was not an entirely new sensation, for they had always been poor. Their farm was in the middle of the Kuran Plains, a region famous for its fertile black soil, but somehow their own property had never been a success. True, the last few seasons had been bad for everyone. The rains had failed two years running. Even so, the crops on William’s farm seemed to wither or die more readily than those on surrounding properties. He had often heard his parents argue about the problem, and about money, and sometimes his mother would accuse his father of being no farmer. And maybe he wasn’t. Would a good farmer have let his harvester accumulate so much dust within its engine compartment that a fire was inevitable? And would a good farmer have allowed the insurance to lapse, not only on the harvester, the farm’s most expensive piece of equipment, but on his own life as well?