When Colts Ran (12 page)

After Rotary on Wednesday nights a group of returned men left Randolph feeling sidelined from the only Isabel Junction activity, apart from Anglican worship, that he regularly joined. When the meetings were over he shouted a round and headed home. His midweek drinking was done alone, under a gum tree, under the stars in the teeth of a gale as wind came over the Dividing Range like an endless, flapping, flaying bloody belt.

One day Randolph decided to say something heartfelt to Colts or explode with constraint. It might be asked: what was in Randolph that he needed to fix what was working, and giving him enough, little as it was?

After a typical silence at the smoko table, Randolph cleared his throat and remarked that he'd been ungenerous in not acknowledging how Colts, in his small boat experience, would have operated behind enemy lines in '44, not just that one time when he copped the bullet, but all through the twelve months of his New Guinea war service.

Ordinary enough to say, but did Randolph have to put his hand on Colts's wrist as he said it, taking courage to single out courage? For moments after he should have let go, he held on. It seemed to Colts that he suffocated from the arm up, small hairs prickling.

‘Well?'

Colts responded that in jungle warfare nobody knew where enemy frontlines were, you moved through them constantly.

And from then on, simple as that, the friendship disappeared almost completely from their lives. Though as before, when something important broke through, neither of them could ever quite bring themselves to acknowledge its loss. More simply, Colts wondered what it was that had truly begun. Only from time to time did he find out. It was a few years before they had another conversation going further than a greeting. People watched them avoiding each other when they passed up and down the main street.

SEVEN

WHEN EDDIE SLIM WAS A BOY
in the 1950s his father, Jack, recited a poem about a soldier who swam a frozen river to save his trapped platoon. It was printed in an anthology of the Left Book Club and translated from Russian, an episode in the Red Army's war against the Germans on the frozen steppes.

Jack Slim knew ‘The Crossing' by heart. Their family friend, Uncle Abe, recited it in the original. To Eddie, the Red Army's exploits on The Steppes were more real than anything Jack had been involved in in the Red Centre, Top End and Kimberleys during the war. The setting was far from Australia, which as a battleground didn't count, yet to a kid in the haze of childhood stories, living on the saltbush plains and seeing corrugated iron water tanks as castles and knowing dark mulga scrub as a backdrop for imagination, there lingered a wish, and it seemed a good question.

‘Was he Australian?'

‘Was he what?' laughed Jack. ‘Struth, little mate, screw your brains in, his name was Vasily Tyorkin. Does that sound dinkum?'

‘Vaseline Tworkin . . .'

‘Give it another try.'

‘Is he still alive?'

‘Like a colossus.'

Eddie crossed Vasily with Jack's commanding officer, Major Dunc Buckler, MC, whose mythical age of exploits was in the First War, while his Second was a joke with Jack, his offsider, getting the best digs in.

When Eddie was a bit older and understood things better it was no ordinary soldier but Uncle Joe Stalin in the poem, the swimmer who stepped ashore – big waxed moustache, grandfatherly eye, gigantic overcoat held ready to wrap around him, dripping with amazing icicles.

‘Say it again,' said Eddie, pulling the quilt up to his chin and feeling blankets go tight as Jack sat on the bed and recited lines bringing the figure up and out from under the ice, staggering to the shore cramped, paralysed, frozen but grabbed and wrapped in a Russian overcoat down to his boots and given a big shake and then sent on his way to run like hell.

In 1953 the Slims moved one-teacher-schools five hundred miles east from Pooncarie to the Isabel River district under the Great Dividing Range. The Chev Fleetmaster was loaded for the move with pots and pans, laundry baskets, books and a stretcher mattress laid over the filled-up back seat where Eddie spent the trip in comfort, dipping into a paper bag of boiled lollies and licorice allsorts. He was a teenager now, fourteen, his world expanding just as he needed it, into mountain gullies and clear-flowing creeks.

It was a cool April night after brief rain when moths changed from grubs and crawled through cracks in the walls and burned in the tall glass chimney of the pressure lamp. The moon had a closer feel on the Isabel, sailing through tatters of upland cloud that might even have rain in them. Everything there had a stronger feel to it, better.

‘Where've you been till you got this plum little perch?' said a young schools' inspector in those first months.

‘Chewing sand in the desert, sonny, so you could get promoted,' said Jack.

He was his own worst enemy, a stubborn card-carrying commo but undeniably brilliant in the classroom, an inspiration to poor kids with no example at home. As author of rallying calls circulated by the Teachers' Federation he was hated by the Director General in Sydney, who kept him in the bush.

‘Oh, being on the Isabel isn't bad,' agreed Jack, when Eddie was stirred by the place, saying he'd never leave it.

Tonight singed moths gave a charred, nutty aroma to the air and fell to their backs for an interval of sharp electric buzzing. Eddie scooped them up and busied himself with a magnifying glass while Jack looked on from the end of a table of rough-sawn pine he'd built in self-critical inspiration one weekend, and left unpainted.

‘A good one, Ed?'

‘Y'oughter see it!'

There followed a quick execution in a glass vial on a cotton pad of pure alcohol. Jack leaned close as Pamela looked over his shoulder and made encouraging noises while the legs of a scarab beetle struggled and went still.

Pamela avoided colliding with Jack in the small room. There was a charged space between them. All their attention fell on their son. Eddie liked the way they depended on him, when they fought, as the one subject they agreed on.

But they gave the feeling it would kill them if Eddie failed at whatever it was he was meant to do. This month Ed would be an entomologist, it seemed, next month – a geologist? He was at the moment when all was won or lost, according to Jack's wisdom. Now his rock collection was building outside, blocking the laundry sump, and his geology hammer with inlaid bands of leather was wrapped in tissue paper at the back of a cupboard, ready as a Christmas surprise. Trust it wouldn't end on a hillside somewhere, neglected and freckled with rust.

After the evening meal came the national news read by John Chance, heard with an attentive hush. Eddie lay on the floor with his ankles crossed, stretching closer, filtering static from heavy words and watching the green silk covering of the loudspeaker box vibrate.

Jack liked imitating the announcer's plum but not tonight; he raised a hand to bring on concentration. Valves glowed amber, batteries leaked power from a crusty set of wires; Stalin was dead; the name of his successor, Malenkov, came stumbling into the room as if the name of a self-server could enter where it pleased.

‘Will it be all right?' said Eddie, angling a bony shoulder. He felt a panicky concern. The feeling was that America might take the opportunity to start a war against a weakened Soviet leadership.

‘I'd say so,' said Jack. ‘It'd better well bloody well ought to be bloody all right.'

The way Jack talked gave Stalin the power to rise from the slab, putting a stop to rot. Eddie had always lived in the shelter of that idea, but now the great man was stone-cold dead confirmed and world leaders were making their way to Moscow.

‘They'll all be there,' said Jack with a narrow smile, ‘singing “The Internationale” and looking for the chance to slip the knife.' He threw back his head as if he, Jack Slim, Australian country schoolmaster, was absent from the centre of world events by a mere oversight and the mourning Soviets, handicapped, would have to march their revolution on from the command end without him.

‘Are they dreaming?' recited Eddie. ‘Are they outta their minds, “is it hoarfrost on their lashes, are they seein' things, is there really something there?”'

‘No, they're not seeing things,' answered Jack. ‘A little
dot
has appeared to them far, far away.'

Eddie grinned. ‘
He's
the one to send for.'

‘Send for old Vaseline Tworkin!' said Jack, parting the air with the Red salute. It was time for the State news, then, a tally of level-crossing accidents involving stalled cars dragged along railway lines by steam engines screaming with brakes locked. Then came the district forecasts and river heights. Afterwards Pamela moved to the bug-littered table with her sewing box and Jack swept the surface with his forearm, the gesture of a courtier making way for a queen.

Pamela opened her sewing box with a sharp snap. There was a reason for their fights but Eddie wasn't going to know it if she could help it. Kingsley Colts, who found, cut, delivered and stacked firewood for school and residence, was paying attention to her, awakening a liking betrayed by a blush.

‘What's wrong with being helpful? You make it sound like a crime,' she said.

Pamela was making clothes for a needy family, the Maguires, a pair of khaki overalls with sharp, finger-cutting copper buttons. They were the same buttons she used on Eddie's trousers and shirts, and he hated the way they wouldn't ever properly fit and needed shoving in. Moving the lamp to one side Pamela leaned into a ring of light, sewing with quick strikes of the needle and snapping thread in her teeth. She had straight black hair cut short, shining dark eyes and a luminous pale forehead. Locals nicknamed her The Crow to disparage her disquieting beauty, which only
looked
fragile, as she went around relentlessly doing good among the most broken, hopeless and shocking cases. The little girl Maguire, when she came to school, had the mark of destitution and borderline starvation, threadbare outgrown clothing and nothing warm for winter. Jack sent her over to the house and Pamela darned her blouses. Rather than flatter more comfortable people with her friendship Pamela preferred driving down rutted tracks visiting these Maguires living in rags and scavenging at the dump. Then she would sit smoking and drinking tea with Colts, who appeared to have nothing better to do than drop by while Jack peered out the schoolroom window.

When Jack put his arm around her and kissed her on the back of the neck, she held still, then made a movement pushing him off.

‘Jack, for heaven's sake.'

Jack went to the other end of the house and came back wearing his Harris tweed sportscoat, knotting a hairy tartan tie for his Parents and Citizens meeting at eight. He pinned on his Returned Soldiers' League membership badge, and altogether it was what he described as his camouflage for getting by in the world he was born into – foiling accusations of disloyalty among the small-minded and guarding his innermost convictions. At cricket Jack came number two in the batting order after Randolph Knox and put more into district events than the local MP because there was nobody finer in public spirit, more principled or devoted than Jack Slim. Everyone knew it and some even said it – this while the Director General withheld the city school he craved, the tougher the better in a working-class suburb.

‘Time's up,' Jack said as headlights raked the windows and the firstcomer arrived to spread the supper table in the schoolroom adjoining the house. ‘Mrs Dalrymple is here. The others won't be long. Got your tag written, Ed?' he said over the boy's shoulder.

‘Almost.'

Later Eddie would pin the bug to a card, or maybe not. It would certainly be Jack who wrote the Latin inscription, tired and watery-eyed after battling those who came to his meeting nights in confusion. Such fearful pioneers, he called them, and yet there was always one or a pair who made nights worthwhile. They were not always a couple – just the last time had been – one a man of the soil with strong ideas, the other a woman of passion who was invariably Pamela's threat. Jack drew them out from whatever circumstance he happened to find himself in. More often than not they were insensibly left wing or Douglas Credit loonies, and he ran an impromptu Adult Education class for them. When he returned from his meeting later he might or might not be tipsy, having shared a flask with his closest confrères. He might or might not have lipstick on his mouth, a hurled clench from his lady crush. ‘I weaved and wove but Mrs Dalrymple got me, I couldn't duck it,' Jack might say. And Pamela, a little haughty, would almost certainly reply, ‘Jacko, how am I expected to feel?' while Jack would respond with a standard materialist thrust: ‘Feelings don't come into it, darling. Not of the finer sort when instincts raise their heads, ha ha.'

Eddie put a box of matches and a torch in his haversack.

‘Going out?'

‘Down to Bonney's.'

‘Take the star map,' said Jack.

Eddie went to the drawer and fetched the folded chart of the heavens.

Pamela went to the pantry and found him an apple – ‘I don't expect you've cleaned your teeth.' She kissed the top of his head, tugged his hair, twisted his ear and gave him a hug.

‘Back by ten.'

‘Let go of me, comrade,' squirmed Eddie. ‘Won'tcha for once?'

She loved that little tussle leaving her helpless with longing.

*

Closing the screen door behind him, Eddie crossed through the side gate and into the schoolyard past the flagpole where the school's loyalty pledge was made; past the rainwater tank shining dull silver and heavy to the knock of knuckles; past the shelter shed of cream-painted tin where farm kids took their cold mutton chops and chunks of farm bread, their boiled eggs wrapped in newspaper and their salt and pepper in twists of greaseproof paper. The schoolyard felt alive to Eddie in the dark as he circled the big gum tree where he and Claude Bonney took their correspondence lessons and smoked cigarettes in school time. There was a low ding from the school bell as an insect struck – sometimes grasshoppers went loony in the dark or maybe it was a shell-backed beetle, hard as a pebble as it thrashed through the night towards the classroom windows where Mrs Dalrymple positioned the Tilley lamps. Eddie slipped closer and stood on a bench to see what the supper promised. Leftovers would be handed to Jack as of right and a portion brought home. The rest would provide school treats shared in the classroom until the last crumb was denied the hungriest mouse.

Mrs Dalrymple stood looking at her reflection in the windowpane, giving the neckline of her flowered dress a pluck and turning sideways to lift the back of her hair while moths pattered the glass. She was a sweet-smiling, plump-shouldered, soothing woman with blonde curls and blue eyes. She had large breasts (a ‘big front', Jack called it) and wide hips but small wrists and fine hands, which she protected with leather gloves when driving and riding. Her husband, Oliver, was a thin, dark-browed farmer, an insistent bundle of nerves who consulted Jack with a sheaf of drawings about perpetual motion machines. Their son, Gilbert, freckled as a frog, skinny as a bean, was mad about aeroplanes and ran about the playground with his arms out stiff. Mrs Dalrymple, thrilled to escape such rattling inspirations for at least one night per month, had brought a plate of triangle-cut sandwiches and a tray of pikelets with jam and cream that were placed on the teacher's desk at the front of the room. Quickly, before anyone came, she took a pikelet from the plate and slipped it down like an oyster, wiped cream from the corners of her smile with the tip of a finger while still watching herself. Jack always said Mrs Dalrymple's bum was broad as a battleship – ‘I like a good bum,' he said when Pamela raised an eyebrow. ‘More bounce,' he winked at Eddie, ‘per ounce.'