When Colts Ran (15 page)

Eddie's mind went from place to place as he drifted off to sleep, but never too far. Never as far as Lone Gum Garage, that was for sure, never so far again. There were plenty of places left along the river and up the purling creeks where banks of peaty soil held worms ready for the hook, dragonflies hovered and platypuses nosed along. When fires lapped the hills they burned in the daytime, flared, yet all was well, because at night mountain fogs came over the saddles and damped them down.

After a while people would forget who had lived on the ridge up there. They would hardly recall the small school, the brass bell, the flagpole, the water tank, the backyard dunny that Jack Slim dug ten feet deep every year in a new position, the shelter shed of flapping tin where farm kids took their lunches. They would even forget that old Eddie Slim had ever lived there.

But they would know old Eddie himself, Eddie believed. He saw himself coming back. There he would be heading down from the hills to get his weekly supplies at Demellick's store. Up in the hills he'd have an underground mine with a stout door and a brass padlock on it. Deep in the earth he'd go crawling along and chipping away in the darkness finding gold.

NINE

FRED DONOVAN, SON OF RUSTY
Donovan, hotelier of far- western New South Wales, was a stocky boy, nimble on his feet, always running to catch up with older boys, clowning to get attention.

Typical fatherless son of a flash woman, you might say Fred was, until the day a stranger appeared dropping him at school, and his teacher put her foot in it, saying how lucky Fred was being brought to school by his grandfather.

Not so fatherless, then, after all, was Fred. Except there was an understanding, rigorously applied, that the relationship between them must not be admitted on either side.

That older man, military of bearing, came and went over the years, staying at Rafferty's Hotel with commercial travellers and railway engineers, school inspectors, clerks of the court and Group 11 Rugby League players locally employed as a condition of their transfer. Shearers and contractors stayed at the National, near the railway line. Hoppy Harris came that far east twice yearly shearing and crutching but never spoke to, or of, the woman who'd shamed him. Just sometimes he drove past Rafferty's to get a look at a boy who wasn't his.

The corridors and dining rooms jostled with father-figures but that bloke of grandfatherly age, Dunc Buckler, was the one: seemingly made of compressed rubber, with kindly, somewhat offended eyes, white teeth, minted breath and carrying a small japara bag stuffed with dried fruit, nuts and candied ginger. Fred played up and down the stairs, using the first-floor landing as a stage, getting Buckler's attention, having something to show, folding and unfolding paper parachutes and raining them down, laughing the whole time, being instructed by the old bloke's cheery, you might say loving, yet somewhat defensive encouragement. With its many rooms – warm in winter with fireplaces on the landings, cool in furnace-breath summer under shadowing ceiling fans – and enough decent permanent boarders to outweigh dubious casuals as an influence on a kid, Rafferty's seemed a good enough place for just about any lively boy's upbringing.

‘But good enough for my son?' said Buckler aside to Rusty when the routine of visits was well settled.

‘Don't question it,' said Rusty. ‘Ever.'

She considered banning him just for saying it. Or slapping his face. There was support for her rule from the quarter of Mrs Veronica Buckler, who tolerated Buckler's visits for the reason that boys should know their fathers. Some who didn't were lost in this life, and don't say who. Don't say Colts the step-ghost of this boy on the other side of these lives split down the middle.

In 1953, when Fred was ten, Buckler had confided to Rusty that he might sell Limestone Hills and buy into a pub – they'd each have shares. Rusty said, ‘Splendid, have you told Mrs B?' That was enough to silence him. It worked like the waddy she kept under the bar and sometimes used on blokes (or threatened to). The town was the third of six where Rusty would run hotels into her seventies. She wouldn't take money from Buckler. Her savings went to a fund for Fred. Buckler kept a Commonwealth Bank book for him, she allowed that. There was a handsome Greek courting her with princely discretion. He never showed up when Buckler came. He'd lost his money gambling – the café, the block of flats, the Armstrong Siddley motor car, all gone. Just a silver-haired foreigner's consideration for a woman's needs left to give.

Learning early to put on the dog, Fred Donovan was Peter Pan in the school play – and Buckler was there. He was district Empire Day speechmaker – Buckler sends a proud letter. Winner of the cross-country event in the Near West Interschool Athletics – a telegram is delivered congratulating Fred. At Christmas there is always a book.
Deerfoot in the Mountains
,
Nemarluk the Warrior
, authored by that old fraud Idriess, the flyleaf containing a homily in Buckler's scrip, signed off with his elaborate copperplate B.

For example: ‘
Reading Makyth a Full Man
– Bacon.'

Fred stared at the advice, turning it around in his head until he was old enough to realise that a book and a plate of bacon wasn't meant. Nevertheless, he would trudge down to the hotel kitchen, tired from play and happy, a book tucked under his arm, and sit up at the big steel counter while Mavis the cook fed him bacon crackling. She never had to ask what he liked shredded and crisped into the crusted sauce of his macaroni cheese: just put it before him.

Buckler showed Fred a white scar on the back of his head, shaped like a half moon. Hair wouldn't grow there. ‘I came through two world wars without a scratch – look what a nine-stone redhead caused,' he said. ‘A chain of events rounded off by a bloke with a two-by-four hardwood plank, “like a hammer on the red son of the furnace” as Dr Johnson said.'

Fred Donovan saw early that life was a construction: people laid it down for themselves, then walked that path as if it was all news to them. In Fred's life entrances and exits were made according to certain conventions. Never, not once, did he doubt that Buckler was his father. But he never asked beyond what was given.

Letters were allowed. Buckler was to come to Fred, not the other way around. Christmases on the Isabel Estuary were never to happen. Veronica herself had no interest in meeting him. She had done enough, tolerated enough with stoicism, humour and forgiveness. This would be going too far.

As an aid to precocious wisdom Fred read Buckler's
Up Against It
(Angus & Robertson Pioneer Library, 1935) finding it a drama from the time of Troy, it had such whiskers. Buckler said Troy gleamed over the hill from a stinking gully filled with Australians. Anzac Cove was an amphitheatre, where they'd performed their piece with candles guttering and homemade bombs rattling off. Buckler never said much about it. In a play you strutted the stage, the rest was hidden. Fred's stage was Rafferty's: rooms for the various acts, doorways, proscenium arches, cellars and under-floor spaces, trapdoors, ropes, pulleys. When he left home he took that with him in his head – the enormous house that a pub was then.

Always well liked even though wearer of the badge of the boaster, as a boy Fred Donovan was Fred of the mashed mouth, split lip, chest of bruises from being knocked down, springing up, taking more. ‘I betcha, betcha anythin' I can . . .'

Fred unmatched in the playground Monday mornings, acting out scenes from Ransome's Flicks where he huddles front row, dress circle, mouth open gaping light, as many times as he can get to go, Rusty always letting him, crushing a ten-bob note into his hand: ‘Shout your friends . . .'

Red Indians crawled in dirt and Fred was them, the whole tribe of them, from chief what's-his-name in headdress to halfwit injun Joe. A gangster sat on the lid of a garbage bin, smoking a cigar made from gum tree bark, Fred gravelling his orders. Then there was Shakespeare, school showings at the flicks, ranks of them marching down there at eleven a.m., of which Fred could barely understand a word, except Shakespeare's words crammed into him like fire.

Best tree climber, too – unquestioned victor in that – and one who liked on Sundays to disappear, get away from the mob, take himself off carrying a hip haversack into the rocky hills west of their town, red-baked stones the size of motor lorries and torpedo boats, mournful casuarinas catching the wind at the rim of the western plains and howling like sirens in an air raid.

There was a picnic once when he'd shown a girl, the prettiest in his class, all the best places. She'd climbed where he climbed, grubbed in the bark where he grubbed, shared his egg sandwiches and squashed sponge cake. With her Fred experienced love so intense it rushed after she was gone into the quartz veins of the rocks like a ribbon she left. Sometimes he'd breathe on a rock face for the life there, and watch it glisten to his call.

In a sandy-floored overhang Fred made a day camp and lit a fire. It was a sheltered gully, just a slit in the plain but remarkable where a ghost gum (as he called it) sent roots into moisture. Towards evening he started climbing, following the light. Found himself edging higher into the bare forked limbs, and where else to go but up?

Standing athwart a branch, swaying with his shirt flapping, he wondered what it was like to be the first person ever to come this way, finding these lands. How would he be as a spear-carrying Nemarluk such as Idriess wrote about, keeping an eye peeled for goannas and kangas?

As light faded Fred shifted his gaze a fraction down, into an old dead socket of the tree. A noise alerted him and a scrabbling shape appeared, a small, round-eyed, delicate-nosed ball of fur hauling itself out of the shelter and coming warily into the evening light. A rat? A freak rat?

A membrane stretched from its armpit like Superboy's cloak – revealing a flying marsupial, a squirrel glider, a story for that girl he wanted to like him, if only he could grab it up, make it seen and felt. Then something happened that made him covet the creature more, yet stayed his hand. The glider scuttled along a branch and spread those delicate membranous wings. Fred blinked, having heard of possum gliders, and imagined them into his heart, as he did with all life that climbed and flew – moths to the light, hawks on air currents, eagles circling, pilots, mountaineers getting to the top. But to see one, and then have the creature implore as if to say
fly
– shining a last glint of those amorous eyes – well, there was nothing for it then except to follow.

The summer Fred was sent away to boarding school, aged thirteen, involved a size of rock, Buckler said, big enough for a boy greedy for superlatives to get his hands on. He'd caught Fred's word ‘mountaineer' in a run of gushed, unreal ambition from the mouth of the mouther-off.

‘I'll show you something on your way to barracks, it'll knock your socks off. She'll cut you down to size, Sir Edmund.'

The move took time to happen, waiting until Rusty relented her long-held opposition to sending a nominal Catholic to a toffee-nosed Anglican school. Buckler said it was either that or the Presbyterians up the hill, overlooking the Rose Bay reach of Sydney Harbour, but he'd dirtied his boots on their flaming kilts years back and they'd turned up their noses at him. The brains behind everything and the purse-holder supreme was Veronica. So the choice of school, in reality, was made by the woman whose name was never mentioned. It came down to obedience; Veronica's absence, her disdain of Fred had the strongest hold. Years later, at her funeral, he would sit anonymously in the back row of the church and silently mouth wry words of thanks.

They loaded the Humber and Rusty hugged Fred to the point of never letting go. A big loop of country was involved, hundreds of miles, driving first to Dubbo where Buckler visited old mates and then turning south. They had until the first week of February when they'd swing north and put Fred into school. Fred kept his eyes on the horizon looking for the surprise Buckler said would be unmistakeable when it loomed from the shimmering flatness. But wait, wait, he said, wait. The day after the day after tomorrow or the day after that you'll see it.

Fred's love for Buckler would never seem more fixed than on the grey sweatband of his hat, the dottle he flicked from his tooth-scarred pipestem, the timeless waits he demanded by the hot, midafternoon roadside with Fred playing marbles while Buckler snored in the back seat, one leg hooked over a suitcase and his white, blue-scarred shins naked above his socks. His Australia was everything worn out and second-hand, out of date, his stories went backwards through two world wars to a time that didn't interest Fred all that much. What Buckler gave him, a clean gift, was his future.

From dim haberdasheries in country towns they bought items from a school list sent by House Matron: underpants too large and belted with thick elastic that Bucker said he'd grow into, singlets of coarse, itchy weave, wiry socks, overlarge Dunlop Volleys. Buckler kept a food pouch on his lap and trickled nuts and raisins across to the passenger side as he pointed the wheel and rumbled along hardly ever faster than forty miles per hour. If Fred wanted chewing gum, Cherry Ripes or Coca-Colas, he connived them. Rusty had stuffed his pockets with banknotes enough. But Fred made sure from consideration that Buckler didn't see his choices downed, except for a Coke, about which Buckler had gained the idea from a wartime grudge against Yanks, was a love potion on the level of Lucky Strikes. So Fred got him one, and watched him fondle the squat dewy bottle then gulp it back, followed by a spray of disgust.

Fred loved that old man in all this, however, and had the feeling that his own role even as a boy was to protect him, to somehow enclose him away from the world as it was, or had become while Buckler had his attention fixed elsewhere. Why this should be so when Buckler was the greatest self-styled boaster that ever gave a detailed opinion of himself at full bore, Fred hardly knew, except that the louder Buckler carried on about something, the smaller and more limited the world seemed to get around him. He just couldn't see it so somebody had to.

The routine in that week out of time was they'd share a room in a hotel, Buckler would contact old mates, Fred would go to the flicks, whatever was on. He'd pretend to be asleep when Buckler came in, shoes dropped to the floor, a round of beery belching, and after the first fart if he gathered for another (the warning was a heave of his twanging bedsprings as he raised his haunches) Fred would sit upright in his narrow bed against the other wall.

‘Faugh!'

Buckler would hold back, but give a homily on the benefit of keeping the gases moving. Same thing in the car.

‘Was that you?'

‘We just passed a dead cow,' Buckler said, rolling his driver-side window up while Fred rolled his passenger-side window down.

He never phoned ahead but would cruise into farmyards and blow the horn. Sometimes only a few fowls would scatter, no barking even of an old dog, and an old woman or some kind of gaunt stranger would appear, blinking in the haze, and tell Buckler that he was too late, that the bloke he wanted had passed away. The great thing Buckler had with the living was that he cheered them up. They got their smiles out, after some decades of keeping them locked, gave them a shake, worked muscles around their crusted, oxidised, acid-foamed lips. They turned to Fred, nerve-shattered old doubtfuls, long-damaged past repair and faced with the peerless, ageless bounce of Buckler. They'd ask, ‘How does he do it?'