The White Earth (15 page)
The realisation shook him. He thought of the dark hallways within, and suddenly it was as if he could see through them, to panels of polished wood. He thought of chandeliers sparkling from the ceilings. He thought of flames raging in great fireplaces. And dwelling on these visions, he could see an image of himself as an adult, a man,moving through those golden hallways. Tall and assured and invulnerable. Alone in the House. His own House.
The sense of expansion widened, thrilling in a deep, physical way, as if ownership was something that enlarged the veins and enriched the blood. For there was not only the House, there was Kuran Station as well, a sleeping giant of a thing, native and alive and half wild. His mother had said they could sell the property if they wanted. But she hadn’t even seen it. William had. He had felt the reality of it, earth and rock swelling beneath his feet, he had smelled it, and listened to the silence of it. If it was his, he would be able to walk the hills just as his uncle did, knowing them, having learnt all the stories and secrets that there were to learn, a master of wisdom inaccessible to anyone else. The power of that! The certainty of that!
William suddenly felt a need to shout or laugh or run. It didn’t matter what the housekeeper said. It didn’t matter about his mother. It didn’t matter that everything depended on him alone. For in that moment, he made up his mind. He
did
want the station. And whatever it took, he would show his uncle he was worthy.
A
T THE AGE OF TWENTY-FOUR, JOHN MCIVOR HAD KNOWN FEW women. Indeed, there had been only one romantic interest in his life so far, and she had remained a stranger to him, right up until the day she banished John and his father from her presence. Was he still in love with Elizabeth White? All John knew was that no woman he’d met since was comparable to her. They were either too frivolous or too coarse, their conversation bored him or their broad accents grated in his ear. They had, to sum it up, no stature. They stirred nothing inside him to match the memory, so repressed he was barely aware of it, of a girl curled in a cane chair, white curtains billowing gently behind her.
Harriet Fisher changed all that.
She was the daughter of Oliver Fisher, who was the owner of the sawmill for which John and Dudley and the rest of their gang cut timber. Oliver was a self-made man of some wealth, fifty-five years old and with the stocky frame of a labourer who had served his own time felling trees in the forests. Now he lived in an impressive residence halfway between the Hoops and Powell, on the main road. It was Oliver who had plucked John from unemployment back in 1933. However, he had never introduced any of his workers to his daughter. In honour of his wife, who had died some years before, he had raised Harriet for finer company than timber-getters.
Luck cast them all together in early 1938. One mid-summer afternoon,John and Dudley were on their way into Powell, bearded and ragged after a long stint up in the mountains. As they tramped along the road, greenish-grey thunderheads were building in the west. The two friends watched the storm’s approach in weary resignation, but as the first warning breezes stirred the dust, they spied the Fisher house ahead of them. They would not normally have thought to intrude, but now they sprinted the last few hundred yards. By the time they knocked on the front door, the wind was rising, the sky was black and the first drops of water were smacking the ground. Oliver, recognising them as two of his own, welcomed them in. From the back verandah they watched as rain and hail hammered down, and the surrounding paddocks turned into white lakes. The Powell road, still mostly unsealed, would be an impassable quagmire until the next day at least. Oliver, in a fit of generosity, declared that his two loggers should stay for dinner, and then the night.
The men washed and shaved and emerged transformed, drying off in the kitchen while the Fishers’ elderly cook prepared the meal. Edging awkwardly into the dining room, they found Harriet and her younger brother waiting. Matthew was fifteen, a solid, youthful version of his father; John and Dudley had already caught sight of him about the sawmill. But Harriet, just turned nineteen, and matron of her father’s house, was an entirely pleasant surprise. Indeed, it had been so long since John and Dudley had sat in a well-appointed dining room, with fine china and crystal glasses on the table, that the evening seemed almost magical. Oliver was a genial host, the wine settled deliciously in his guests’ veins, and, more than anything else, there was the pleasure of female company. Harriet was nothing like her brick of a father. She had been born into wealth, polished at respectable schools, and had inherited a slender shape and natural style from her dead mother. Yet for all her education and grace, there was nothing aloof about Harriet — she was perfectly at ease entertaining two of her father’s workers for an evening. Her conversation was bright and bantering,and even John, with his innate reserve, found himself caught up in the good cheer.
So the party carried on far into the night. When it finally broke up, Oliver, actually quite drunk, announced that the two men must feel free to visit the house whenever they might happen to be passing. Thus the courtship of Harriet began. Of course, neither John nor Dudley, in those early days, considered himself a serious proposition for Harriet. Nor did Oliver Fisher. He liked the two men well enough, but he also knew how little they earned (who knew better?) and two timber-getters of slim means, without a home to call their own, were hardly the most eligible of suitors for his daughter. Still, he made no serious objection to their visits, not even when they started escorting Harriet to the occasional movie, or to picnics, or to the local dances. He even let John and Dudley borrow his car to drive Harriet around. Perhaps he looked on the two men as older brothers to his daughter, a rough and ready influence, but a benign one. It would have been a different story if either man had tried to date her alone, but as it was, there was always the one to chaperone the other.
To John, Dudley and Harriet, however, it gradually became clear that they were more than just big brothers and sister. For the two loggers, time away from the mountains became increasingly focused around the Fisher house, while for Harriet, the days spent with her boys from the hills became the most precious of her engagements. Did they seem more vital and alive than anyone else she knew? They had nothing in the world but themselves, but did that make them freer, more fiercely individual? Whatever moved her, she played no favourite between them. Dudley was the laughing one, the better talker, and the better dancer. Harriet responded in kind, but there was more to her than conviviality. Perhaps the early death of her mother had matured her, for there was a side to her that appreciated the gravity in John, and which shared, in part, his wariness of the world.
After a year it became accepted between the three of them that Harriet would choose one or the other eventually. Her father remained blissfully unaware of this development, but she no longer even pretended to be interested in other men. It was with Harriet in mind, then, that John and Dudley began to seriously assess their futures. They had saved alarmingly little from their time in the mountains. In truth, the work was intermittent. There were often long periods when there was no demand for timber, and the gangs had to wait idly in their camps until new orders came in, surviving as best they could. It might be years before either of them would have any real financial security. They arrived at an agreement, therefore, that neither would press his suit until happier and richer days. It seemed that Harriet tacitly acquiesced. And maybe it was better that way, for it delayed a painful choice.
Not that John had any doubts about whom Harriet preferred. Admittedly, he was rarely alone with her, but he was convinced that in those moments he could detect an emotion from Harriet that was meant uniquely for him. It was as simple as an intensity in her eyes as she probed at his long silences. Dudley, all on the surface, she seemed to understand effortlessly, but John could see that in comparison he himself remained a mystery. She was intrigued — and that was a heady thing to sense from a woman. Especially one so smooth and elegant, and now amazingly within his reach. But what would happen when she actually made her choice known — how Dudley would react when he lost — that was something John couldn’t bring himself to contemplate.
Fate took it all out of their hands, in the shape of a falling tree.
It was the spring of 1939, and John, Dudley and the rest of their gang were at work high in the mountains. They were sawing through the trunk of a hoop pine, deep within a rain forest gully. John was standing by, well out of the line of fall, but when the tree began to topple, its upper limbs became caught in the canopy, and the trunk revolved perversely on its own base. Men scattered as the tree lurched this way and that, but when the whole thing came down, it was John who failed to get clear. He received a glancing blow to his left leg. It shattered his knee and snapped his shin in a compound fracture.
His work mates quickly rigged up a stretcher and got him down the mountain, from where, via an agonising ride on a sawmill truck, they took him to the hospital in Powell. Infection set in, and for a week John hung in a delirium of pain, fever and repeated surgery. When his head finally cleared, a doctor told him that they’d managed to save the leg, though he didn’t think it would ever be much use again. On the brighter side, the doctor added, at least John didn’t have to worry about joining the army now. The army? John didn’t know what the man was talking about. Oh, the doctor replied, hadn’t John heard? Australia was at war with Germany, and had been for four days.
When Dudley came to visit he was full of the news. John listened without much interest. He was in pain, and Europe was a long way away. So it was a complete shock when Dudley announced that he planned to enlist as soon as possible. He talked on about duty and the old country and the evils of Nazism, and went so far as to offer sympathy because John would be unable to join up too. But even through his disbelief John knew full well that, leg or no leg, he would never have enlisted anyway. His experiences at Kuran Station still bit deep. True, the Whites were no more English than John himself, but he had glimpsed the mother country behind their prejudices and arrogance. They stood for the Empire, the Whites, and they had rejected him. So the Empire’s wars were no business of his.
They weren’t Dudley’s business either, and John told him so. How could he throw everything away just for the sake of rallying around the Union Jack? If Australia insisted on sending an army to Europe, well, there were hundreds of thousands of unemployed men who would welcome the food and the pay. They didn’t need Dudley. Oliver Fisher agreed. The sawmill owner could see lucrative military contracts in the offing — it was no time to be losing his timber men. Why be rash, he told Dudley, why run off to war? Nothing was actually happening in Europe yet anyway. When Harriet echoed her father, Dudley relented. He turned his back on the recruiting stations and returned to the mountains.
Relieved, John began the long, painful process of learning to walk again. At the end of several months, the best he could do was shuffle along with the aid of a stick. The stick, hopefully, could be disposed of one day, but he would always limp, and when he was tired the knee was liable to give way entirely. Oliver gave him some part-time duties around the sawmill, but John was forced to acknowledge that he would never cut timber again. And things weren’t really settled with Dudley. John and Harriet were aware of a restlessness in their friend as he pored over newspaper reports and listened to the radio. His ears were pricked for the sound of faraway gunfire.
When Germany finally invaded France, there was no holding Dudley back a second time. They resolved to send him off as best they could. Even as the evacuation of Dunkirk was being carried out on the other side of the world, Dudley’s enlistment party was held at the Fisher house. John spent the night full of a cold foreboding. The war was assuming an ominous tone. It was obviously going to be long and bloody and world-altering, and however deluded Dudley might be, he was going to fight for his country and John wasn’t. It would change things between the two of them forever. He’d seen it amongst older men who had lived through the Great War — the unbridgeable gulf between those who went and those who stayed. Whatever their individual stories, those left behind had ever after been judged the lesser men. And it would be the same this time around.
At the end of the night, John and Dudley and Harriet sat out on the back verandah. They knew it was the end of something. They were caught up in a bigger history now, vulnerable to its currents.
We’ll all come back here
, Harriet insisted as they sat there, the night cool and dark about them. She clutched their hands, looking back and forth.
When it’s all over, we’ll meet up right here,
and everything will be the same
. Her eyes searched into each of her two men, affirming and questioning at the same time. John and Dudley exchanged glances over her head, understanding fully what she meant. And afterwards, when Harriet had retired, it did not need to be spoken again. Everything was to be held in abeyance until after the war was over. It was the only thing to be done. They shook hands, more than six years of friendship and trust behind them, and then withdrew, each to his sleepless bed.
I
T WAS TWO WEEKS BEFORE WILLIAM’S UNCLE RETURNED, AND when he did, he immediately set to work in his office and spoke to no one for three days. William hovered hopefully outside the door. He could hear the clatter of the typewriter, and again, the rhythmic thump of the other machine. It was all very frustrating, and it wasn’t until the fourth day that he was invited inside. He found his uncle ensconced behind the desk, still poking away at the typewriter. He looked tired, his face hollow above the collar of a faded woollen jumper. Stubble pricked his cheeks, and under the desk William could see a pair of bony feet jammed into slippers. But the old man’s eyes were alert, and his fingers stabbed down vehemently on the keys. Coffee-cups and dinner plates littered the desk, and papers were scattered everywhere, some printed, some handwritten, some crumpled up into contemptuous balls.