The White Earth (2 page)
For when the ashes settled, his wife and child were destitute. The property was laden with debts, and there was no question of William’s mother carrying on alone. She didn’t work and never had — it was accepted that her health was not up to it. So the only option was to surrender the farm to the bank. William supposed that perhaps he had a right to be angry at his father for this — his mother certainly seemed to be — but he wasn’t. He wasn’t even angry at him for dying. That pillar of smoke in the sky had been too momentous a funeral pyre, too much like the hand of God in the heavens, for William to lay blame. And he had no wish to spoil the memories of his father with bitterness. Those memories were too few and too precious, the fading images of an untidy, gangling man with a lean, unshaven face and a smile that was always somehow sad.
Then there was the fateful harvester — one of William’s favourite pastimes had been to ride in it with his father, high up in the cab, staring down as the wheat surrendered to the flashing blades of the comb. It was a fascinating process, the heads disappearing in a frenzy of dust and leaves under the rolling drum, sucked inwards to the guts of the machine, which rumbled and shook mysteriously, until naked grains poured out of a spout into the bin behind the cabin, and from the rear of the harvester shot a dirty fantail of stubble and waste. William couldn’t imagine handling a machine so complex, and admired his father tremendously for doing so. There was no point in remembering that the wheat they were harvesting was always too thin, and that the harvester itself was too old, always prone to breaking down, and that the dust that would feed the fire had been gathering within the engine all the while. No point either in picturing how things must have been that day. There was so much to monitor while harvesting — the height of the blades, the level of grain in the bin, the rate and spin of a dozen different parts of the machinery — that one man could hardly keep track of everything. Maybe if William had been there in the cabin too, watching — but he wasn’t, not on that afternoon. And so his father must have missed the first curl of smoke from below, and then the flames growing hungrily…
It was no part of love to think of any of that.
William’s mother, meanwhile, had not received the grace of an early death and a martyrdom to fire, but his feelings about her had always been more complex. She was harder to love than her husband — physically harder too, a thin woman of angles and bones, with long wispy brown hair. If at his father’s core there was a crucial weakness, a life of plans made but never fulfilled, then at his mother’s core William sensed something fractured and brittle. It was never spoken about, but he had been aware from a very young age that she was delicate, in a special way. Headaches plagued her, and much of the time she was listless and exhausted. At other times she was wildly short-tempered, screaming weakly at William if he annoyed her, and stinging him with slaps. Afterwards she would lock herself in the main bedroom and weep. She took many pills, and frequently visited the doctor. On several occasions she had disappeared for up to a week. Resting, William’s father would say, at a place where people went when they needed time away by themselves.
But when William played with children on the neighbouring farms, he could see that their mothers were different. They bustled with energy, they were friendly and welcoming, they helped their children with homework, they volunteered to serve on school committees and in the canteen, they had sandwiches waiting whenever William arrived. His mother did none of these things — she was always too tired, or her head hurt, or she was hidden in her room and William was forbidden to make a sound. It made him feel secretly ashamed of her, and he felt guilty about the shame. He knew that at least part of her behaviour was explained by the simple fact that life was more difficult for them than for other families. Their farm was not as prosperous, their car was not as new, their house was not as nice, and while these things did not seem to bother his father, they made his mother unhappy.
It was their house that displeased her most. It was very small and very old, a four-room cottage, with a back verandah, and a kitchen annexe to one side. It rested on wooden stumps that were driven deep into the soil — but never deep enough, for on the plains the bedrock lay far down below, and so the stumps were forever shifting, warping the floors and the door frames. Inside, the rooms were cramped and dark, and it was hot in summer, cold in the winter. William’s father had promised that he would build them a new home one day. There was even a pile of lumber at the end of the yard, stacked up in a big square like a castle. But it had been there as long as William could remember, overgrown with weeds. His mother would harp on at his father about this, and William knew that she just wanted a nice home for them to live in, a place where she could invite people and host dinners, and not be embarrassed. Most of their neighbours had sprawling new homes made of brick, set on concrete slabs that floated upon the black soil like rafts. That’s what his mother would really have loved, but his father wasn’t so sure.
‘Those slabs will crack one day,’ he’d insist.‘And then all those bricks will just crumble. A wooden house is better. It might not look like much, but this old place will never fall down.’ Then he would reach out to caress the crooked door frames fondly, the sleeves of his favourite green jumper all tattered and frayed at the elbows.
For William, the house was simply home and the centre of his world. Beyond the back door spread a bare dusty yard. His mother wanted a lawn, but his father was much more interested in one corner which he’d roped off and cultivated as a vegetable garden. Every year he planted ambitiously — tomatoes, beans, lettuces, melons, pumpkins — and yet nothing much ever seemed to grow. William’s father blamed the birds. He shot at them with an old .22 rifle, or built scarecrows, but it made no difference. He planted trees too, oranges and lemons, the fruit of which William could never remember ripening. Then there was the chicken coop, which was supposed to supply them with roast dinners and eggs for breakfast. But foxes had got in some years earlier, and now the doors swung emptily and the wire fencing gaped. William had only one recollection of his father actually slaughtering a chicken — its head jammed between two nails on an old tree stump, until the axe came down and the bloodied, headless body leapt about. But then the gutting and plucking was a chore, and after half an hour of sitting on the back step, surrounded by feathers, his father lost patience, and from then on the family’s chickens were store bought.
Beyond the coop was the farm’s ageing shed, and it was one of William’s favourite places to explore, big and dark and ramshackle, made entirely of corrugated iron. All the farm vehicles were kept within — the tractor, the harvester, the grain truck, an ancient Land Rover (army surplus from the Second World War, his father claimed) — but there was lots more. Huge workbenches loaded with all sorts of tools and engine parts. Old furniture, old cupboards, piles of old magazines and books. Mysterious blocks of metal, stacks of broken plough shares, air pumps, welding equipment, drums of oil, folded heaps of tarpaulins. All of it fitfully illuminated, for there were bullet holes in the shed’s tin walls and shafts of sunlight would angle through them, highlighting the motes of the dust in the air. And everywhere there were nesting holes for rats and mice, an endless quarry, especially at night when William hunted them with a flashlight, and the whole shed rustled and creaked with their movements, and their tiny eyes shone back at him from every corner.
Outside, at the far end of the shed, were the grain silos, two great rusty metal bins thirty feet high. And here was the best place of all, for ladders ran up their sides, and if William had the nerve to climb one or the other, he could sit on the peaked roof and see the whole farm at a glance, laid out like a quilt. It was a square mile exactly, six hundred and forty acres, perfectly flat, the fields marching right up to the back of the shed, alternately golden or green or black with fallow. Beyond their own property were those of their neighbours, and from there the view went on for miles, dozens of farms, hundreds, stretching out to a patchwork blur under an uninterrupted sky.
These were the Kuran Plains. They occupied, William knew, the northern part of a greater region known as the Darling Downs. If he looked south from atop the silos, he could see a smudge on the horizon that marked the town of Powell, with its ten thousand people;William caught a bus into school there every day. (An hour beyond Powell was the city of Toowoomba, the capital of the Downs. And beyond that again, over the mountains and down to the coast, lay the metropolis of Brisbane, where he had never been.) Turning east meanwhile, he could see, perhaps twenty miles away, the hazy blue ridges of the Hoop Mountains. They were an offshoot of the Great Dividing Range, and there was a national park up there, and forests and cool streams. Turning further still, to the north, he could see more plains, and then distant hills covered in scrub, where the Darling Downs came to an end at a little town called Lansdowne. And westwards? To the west was an open horizon that seemingly went on forever, bare of trees or towns or hills. Somewhere out there was a river known as the Condamine, and countless miles beyond that was the Outback, the desert, and the whole of Australia itself.
But at times, sitting on the silo roof on a still, hot, summer’s day, the immense silence of the plains weighing down upon him, William would turn from compass point to compass point and find not a single thing in motion — not a bird in the air or a car on the Powell road or a tractor in the fields, not a single hint to let him know that the world lived and moved beyond his boundaries. There would be only himself, crushed and tiny on his lonely prominence, hypnotised by sheer scale into an exhausted lethargy.
And now he was leaving it all.
His uncle’s property lay no more than a dozen miles away, and yet it sounded nothing like William’s farm. It was a big place, his mother had told him, at least twenty times the size of their own, and it ran cattle, up in the foothills of the Hoop Mountains. It was called Kuran Station, and apparently it boasted a large homestead called Kuran House. They should consider themselves lucky, his mother said, to be offered such a grand new home. And yet William found himself disturbed at the thought. He would have to go to a new school. And then there was his uncle. William hadn’t seen him again, but he remembered the man with a limp, the measuring way he had stared at everybody, and he wondered what it would be like to live with someone so stern and so old.
It was school holidays when the time to move came. William helped as best he could with the packing, feeling more cold and reluctant with every day. Finally, on the last afternoon, he went out to say his farewells. The house had turned into a foreign place, half stripped of furniture and littered with boxes, but the farm was worse. The bank had already held sales and auctions, and almost everything moveable was gone. The shed was empty except for the workbenches and the old cupboards and magazines. There was no grain in the silos. Someone had even taken the pile of timber away from the back yard. Out in the fields there were only the rotting stubble of the last wheat harvest and the black stretches of fallow paddocks. And somewhere down the back of the property, where he had never gone since the fire, was a field of ash, an alien place that had afflicted the whole farm.
He stared east to the low humps of the Hoop Mountains. The weather was grey and chill, and leaden clouds rested like a sheet upon the range, but the wind rattled dryly and there was no sign of rain. To the northeast William could see a long spur of hills that ran from the mountains out into the plains. His uncle’s property was up on that spur somewhere, he’d been told. It looked as far away as the moon.
Over a bleak dinner his mother attempted a smile. ‘It hasn’t been much fun for us, has it, Will?’
He didn’t answer.
‘It’ll get better,’ she promised, a little desperately. ‘I know it’s all hard to understand, but moving in with your uncle is the best thing for us, really. You’ll see.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
He went to bed, and could not sleep. He waited until the house grew silent, then sat on the back verandah, wrapped in a blanket, staring out as he had been the day his father died. It was dark under the clouds. A few pinpoints of brightness marked distant farm houses. Away on the southern horizon was a line of twinkling lights — the town of Powell, bright enough to cast a faint orange glow on the clouds above. He turned and looked towards the blackness of the hills and his uncle’s station. There was a lone light visible up there. He waited, clinging to the blanket. The light was orange, not white like the farm houses across the plain. It quivered oddly. And it seemed to be moving. He watched it without real curiosity for some time. Then it flickered and blinked out, and everything up there was night again.
I
T WAS ANOTHER COLD, OVERCAST AFTERNOON. THE REMOVAL van lumbered out of the driveway, and William and his mother followed in their old blue station wagon. William was in the passenger seat, and the heater didn’t work. He forgot to look one last time at his little cottage. Then the thought came to him that he hadn’t sat in the back seat of the car since his father died, and never would now.
They turned onto the Powell–Lansdowne road and rolled north. Familiar landmarks slid by — the houses of neighbours, a disused railway siding, a line of old telephone poles, all leaning askew in the shifting soil. But after only a few miles William was already out of his home territory, for the focus of his life had always been south towards Powell, never towards the north. And so they soon came to a crossroads beyond which he had rarely travelled. Nearby rose heaped mounds of earth, surrounding a deep trench full of weeds and water, the mounds all grass-grown like ancient tombs. William’s father had told him they were merely the remains of an abandoned drainage scheme. But they were still ominous shapes under the grey sky, sentinels beyond which all was strange.