When Colts Ran (11 page)

The first mail ever to land in Isabel Junction postmarked ‘Occupation Forces, Japan' arrived in the hands of Rose Demellick, mail truck contractor. She handed it over to Randolph like a blessed wafer while he repressed his disappointment. Colts had gone from active duty to an assignment with the occupation forces with the rank of sergeant, heading a bunch of older men, some of them sick from being first to enter the radiated zone of Nagasaki. They'd believed it safe because of intact architecture and an obliging Japanese businessman welcoming them to his soft drink plant where they had guzzled the wares.

Next Colts was learning Japanese and fascinated by the experience of being a ‘conqueror on the q.t.' –
did that mean making free with geisha girls?
Randolph wondered – but expressed a wish ‘to get back to the bush one day and take up a piece of dirt if it ever proved possible, and to get on with sheep'.

Randolph read the intention as a sworn statement of trust and relaxed his inclination to control the future too much. In appointing stud agents and allowing for offsiders, or even a partner, he left a vacancy on the books, one of the dusty authors he favoured having somewhere quipped, ‘What name doth best fit sorrow in young despair? –
Tomorrow
– What name doth joy most borrow when life is fair? –
Tomorrow
.'

Randolph had no interest in travel, except he intended visiting Crete one day and locating his brother's grave. Then he would continue to the old country as his parents had in the '30s, taking in Buckingham Palace and the Edinburgh Tattoo before settling in at Old Trafford and the Marylebone Cricket Club. Hopefully Randolph would cross paths with Colts if the latter still had the gadabout bug and they would follow the Ashes together.

Meantime Randolph planned new and better paddocks, laid out stock lanes, undertook advanced grazing schemes, rebuilt the ram sheds using second-hand materials, postwar shortages being what they were. Starting to make the cumulative changes in breeding that counted, he lifted himself into the almost metaphysical plane of stud masters. What had real existence for those beau ideals didn't exist yet – a sheep for local conditions refined on most points, and having whatever anyone said about the utility of the feature (in Randolph's persistent case) a prognathous or royal jaw, defined as pride.

Randolph and his father rode the paddocks on prancing chestnut mares while the Isabel Junction stock and station agent, Careful Bob Hooke, puffed and swayed beside them on a fat-bellied pony.

‘Sandy would have liked this' and ‘Sandy would have liked that', said Careful Bob, who was with Sandy for a time in North Africa. ‘How's that little Timmy coming along? Ain't he the dead spit of the other one?'

The other one was Sandy, and always would be.

There were universes of creation within sight of the old wire gate on the skyline, but just sometimes Randolph's personal lifetime struck like a blow and he was an irrelevance in the eye of nature. His father's favourite had been Sandy and his mother's now was Tim, born in '45 to replace Sandy plain and simple. Randolph felt a vacancy existed at the top of the family ladder where he should have been and Tim was meant to grow into it. Randolph would be old by then. If only he hadn't been born shovel-jawed Randolph, without much room for improvement, being considered a perfect enough all-rounder to satisfy under most circumstances, without the family getting too excited. Baby Tim was perfect, though.

Then Randolph stepped back from that feeling of panic in which nothing was promised, all was fixed, settled without him, and he was filled by a bounteousness of mood that needed an outlet proving he was better than shit. It was on such a feeling day that Homegrove Holdings sold Careful Bob Hooke a sweep of high mountain country called the Bullock Run, and Randolph, who had never looked at the untouched thousand acres before, went for a ride and believed his father had forfeited a paradise. It made him tense on the whip hand. When he showed his determination with management of the property he felt his father weaken, and his vocation was properly started.

Randolph stored Colts's letters in the old biscuit tin that Buckler had given him on Eureka Station in '42. It bore a design of embossed fruit in a silver bowl standing before a three-arched window and looking down on successive terraced ridges and greenish-yellow creek flats. Randolph could still taste the metallic, charred, candied cherries on the back of his throat and hear the last one rolling in the tin before Buckler rattled the invitation to have another and he took it out.

War it seemed had reshaped Colts not quite as expected. Missing from his attitude, it struck Randolph as he read and re-read the mail in the hallowed biscuit tin, was any trace of the exaggerated warrior urge derived from Buckler. War as a background to places, sights and sensations – that's what affected Colts more than the big drama he'd been raised on. Randolph prided himself somewhat paternally as one who'd turned the tide for Colts by making jackarooing possible, whereas the main cause probably was that Colts had suffered running supplies to the coast watchers – the shot he'd taken in the lung.

Something else, though. Randolph would never be able to explain how the knowledge of that shot, irreversible in damage wrought and not to be spoken about except in the code of men's soldiering, increased a sullen, selfish, brooding certainty of attachment in Randolph himself, a possessiveness towards Colts that soured his earlier feelings from supple to unyielding.

Randolph heard regularly from Dunc Buckler. The man's postwar obsessions dwelt on a world changed utterly from the one he'd saved, or attempted to save, as a Great War returnee and quarrelled with since. The big bogey was the Soviet Union getting the upper hand. Minerals were the alchemical key to victory – magnesite, mica, uranium, bauxite, asbestos and iron ore. Rare metals abounded in remote parts of Australia if only they could be dug out to benefit free nations in beating down Red cunning. Mention was made of those earths, very hush-hush – essential for jet plane alloys and who knew what, attractive to flying saucers wherever they came from, dancing into Buckler's consciousness on lonely roads as they appeared to fools the world over.

Stirred by Buckler's brainstorms, however, Randolph and his father invested in a revived mining company, Arcturus Metals N/L. Before leaving for the Centre on his first season's prospecting, Buckler called at Homegrove to show off the result of their interest (they'd sunk five hundred pounds into the plant). He arrived in an army surplus Blitz towing a pink plywood caravan.

And sitting up in that great, lumpy, left-wheel drive cab, on the right-hand side so that she seemed to be the driver, with Buckler only an appendage to the rig-out, was Mrs Veronica Buckler with a silk organza scarf tied over her yellow straw hat, tufted, sparrow-brown hair poking out in a cheerful way.

Introductions were made. She said, ‘You're a bit unexpected, Randolph . . .'

It would be the jaw, because people always made oblique references to its oblique preponderance.

Well, so was she unexpected – bearing no resemblance to any brilliant artist type Randolph had ever imagined. She was a small woman in Land Army overalls with a perky smile and bright red lipstick. Maybe she talked too much, that was all, delivering her observations in an interested tone of voice without noticing that nobody had asked an opinion.

‘Beauty is sooh dependent on an argument with perfection,' was one of her maxims. It made Randolph tug his chin in thought.

They crossed to the verandah for tea. Randolph took charge organising the whiskies and teapot and biscuits, leaving his mother to the business of getting on with Veronica. Edwina Knox was a handsome, forthright woman who knew all about art through taking adult education summer schools in Albury once Tim was old enough to be left. Veronica, in a thin piping voice, disputed art education at the popular level, saying it could never touch what painters suffered alone and condensed into visions. Edwina persisted, saying that knowledgeable people were always talking about Veronica as up there with the very best, and she would like to pick through her studio and bring her chequebook with her. Veronica clapped her hands and said she was won. While the men talked about minerals, the women walked around the garden arm in arm.

After the Bucklers left, Edwina told Randolph about the arrangements in Veronica's life, compromises based on failure and need, on convenience, submission, confusion or whatever. That Buckler was under Mrs B's thumb was deemed evident.

An amusing letter came from Veronica describing their travels. She'd set up a sun umbrella on a salt lake, on a rocky ridge, or on a sand dune, and paint; and when she wanted Buckler for some chore or other she fired a shotgun. Buckler would come in from wherever he was poking around with sample jars and testing kits and do what she wanted.

The war over, Japan occupied, the Far East travelled and known, the half-century year was almost upon them but Colts still hadn't yet come home.

After Japan he'd travelled some more – sailed in a ketch with two Canadians from Hong Kong to British Columbia, worked as a machinery rep in Canada and then as a truck salesman in America, shore sheep on a blizzardy mountainside in Wyoming, travelled to Mexico and arrived back via New Zealand. He was still only twenty-three years old at the end of 1949 and in the new year, to Randolph's satisfaction, took up the offer of working as the Knoxes' Homegrove stud agent.

The day Colts arrived at Isabel Junction on the all-stations Randolph couldn't sit still. He was the first one there, pacing the platform in the hot, empty afternoon. At last there was a distant whistle, the altered sound of wheels crossing the river bridge, and Randolph saw Colts leaning from the dogbox carriage and waving his hat from two hundred yards off. It was going to be all right, then, the mocking smile of the kid was still there, the old Eureka easiness was still in reach for both of them, thank God, as they shook hands, pulled off each other's hat, and crossed the road to the Five Alls Hotel to sink a schooner.

It was sales day and the bar crowded. Colts returned the shout and they got stuck into it, elbow to elbow. Standing close and summarising a good few years of work routines in the empty hills, Randolph heard a constant wheeze like a small bellows operating in Colts's one lung.

Two hard-living men set up in an old weatherboard house in a cluster of dwellings known as Woodbox Gully. Work was one thing, sport the other. Randolph Knox (capt.) and Kingsley Colts (vice-capt.) led the Isabel XI into a clean sweep of the regional cricket championships and went through into the NSW country finals.

The top end of sheep work was show preparation and rebuilding the stud along lines fought decision by decision in favour of Randolph. The routine end was crutching, paring feet against footrot, dipping, fencing, gate mending and rabbit and dingo control. The Anglican church held fundraising drives on Homegrove where parishioners beat rabbits to death against netted fence lines. Randolph fumed about the timbered country being a breeding ground for dingoes, and so Colts paid his keep by dogging, going around with traps and getting five pounds per scalp. After a year he began visiting distant parts of the state driving a utility truck and finding new clients for Randolph's rams advertised as Homegrove All-Purpose Doers. He made friends and began socialising away from Randolph's patch. His innovation was to carry two rams, San Pedro and Immaculate, in a crate in the back of the ute in order to show them off better than any catalogue description or photograph. When talking about themselves Colts and Randolph said they were old Eureka hands. That seemed to take care of many attributes they lacked in common.

Edwina Knox was a devoted horsewoman. With her band of alikes – men and women all long-faced as horses and wearing worn jodhpurs and old tweed jackets – Colts took rides into the untouched bush of the coastal ranges, which Randolph disparaged for its tangled uselessness. Tim Knox from a young age rode along, a boy senseless with adventure. It reminded Colts of his own young dream. It was how Colts became attached to the Isabel as wilderness and could name every bird, small marsupial, goanna and snake, and show Randolph creatures he didn't know existed that had lived under his nose the whole of his life, in logs or in hollows of trees. They passed up under the shadow of a cliff of rusty rocks, organ-pipe gullies and flatiron slabs said to be unclimbable, reaching three hundred feet in under the brow of Mt Knox. The great pile had never had a name, at least that any white man knew. Now they called it the Isabel Walls.

Incredible how time ran like water into the years towards thirty. Randolph watched rugby as Colts, grown rangy and headstrong, proved himself a player heedless of injury, managing on his one lung, always pushing himself, turning out for district games each winter. Sometimes Randolph spent weekends skiing with friends. Those friends wheeled down from Bowral and collected him in their Triumphs and MGs. They were never part of Randolph's world on the Isabel, for just as Randolph kept bloodlines distinct in fenced paddocks he kept his friends apart. ‘There's goats and kings,' he said, leaving Colts with the feeling that he was in the former category, and that Randolph's friendship, so apparently unlimited in the way Randolph prickled with need, had limits. The Knoxes affected a feudal relationship with Isabel Junction, calling the town the village to their Sydney friends when they entertained in their Point Piper flat or at Homegrove in house parties. As Randolph refined his life away from the stud into a social set Colts's friendships became locally rougher.

Colts enthused to Randolph about his Saturday afternoons on the Isabel blinding with cold, yellowed poplar leaves in the frozen mud of the playing fields, long blue shadows across the dirt roads on the drives home. It was when he got lucky with a ‘local doer', as he called her, taking a hot bath at the Five Alls Hotel after a bruising, artless game. She was Sandra Turnley, the publican's daughter, who came in, locked the door and scrubbed his back in what he winked was a Japanese pleasure. It was how Colts became a Saturday night boarder in the Five Alls, his ‘bolthole', taking Room 17 upstairs, the one with the fireplace in the corner and the narrow iron bed where Sandra Turnley snugged in.