When Colts Ran (3 page)

‘Only if he's keen,' said the man, ‘before he pushes along.'

‘I'm ready,' said Colts, lifting his jaw.

The woman looked round startled when he came back into the kitchen to get his hat and heard her on the telephone asking for Limestone Hills, Mrs Buckler.

Through cleaning a feed bin and hauling heavy sacks of seed wheat onto a horse-drawn wagon, Colts's fingernails bled, his eyes ran red-rimmed and sore that day, and he developed a rasping cough. Through digging a post-hole to a depth of three feet, his hands were raw by smoko time.

The farmer was a First War man. ‘You're looking for trouble,' he said as they yarned of the scrap, leaning on shovels. ‘You're scared you'll miss out. You think fighting will give you that. Well, it might, so get on with it, son, and you'll soon find out.'

A rabbit plague was on and the man handed him a pea rifle. There were so many bunnies coming in for a drink they barely stirred when Colts walked through them shooting from the hip, rippled hunched furry nothings with nowhere to go.

In the full day's work Colts understood something about labour that seeded a thought in his brain. The heave of a strainer post made its own dumb impact down the end of its hole and stood there throwing a hard shadow into the day.

When he came back to the house there was a figure on a motorcycle waiting. Not a male, he saw when he came closer, but a woman in trousers with a hat and the front brim turned up. He recognised the bike, too. It was Buckler's old BSA 250cc with sidecar from Limestone Hills, which Faye – hair flying back – had so loved to ride, spinning around like a willy-willy as Colts sat in the sidecar laughing and hanging on.

TWO

THEY HADN'T SPOKEN ABOUT FAYE
but her presence was everywhere at Limestone Hills. They reached there on dark. Mementoes of past holidays lay where she'd left them over the years – a play table made of twigs, arrangements of fossilised shells, a book with a gumleaf bookmark,
The
Green Hat
by Michael Arlen with a sentence underlined and the word ‘sigh!' pencilled in the margin. That night Colts carried a hurricane lamp, sweeping its bars of light into corners of his old room. It was a whitewashed cave with fig trees over the window, where a tawny frogmouth came and sat unblinking.

A smell of warm fat was in the air. There was a leg of mutton in the oven. Veronica promised the crunchy burnt outer slices he loved, which he called Vegemite. Faye always handed hers over when he wanted more.

The first time they were brought there it was as if Colts had been born there. A gate clicked behind them. Limestone Hills. Whatever feelings had filled his heart on the other side of four years old were left behind. Except there were scenes of them walking together. She had such dreamless eyes he couldn't find them ever again. There were rounded rocks like giant eggs in the bush behind the house, where she took him in his stroller. It was where she was buried: he knew that. His mother. Yet every surge of his feelings denied the oblong mound of earth that was stuck in his heart and would never shift. He remembered a room, how he'd looked into corners finding spider webs of interest, but not looked at her lying blue, pale and alone in a pleated nightdress. He must have looked, though. Otherwise how did he know it was her, dying, and he'd felt nothing?
Nothing
.

Standing at the edge of the dry garden at Limestone Hills, he'd eaten a fig. They grew wild there, fat and purple, splitting their skins with sweet red jam. He'd set off climbing the rocky creek, looking for goannas, hitting puffballs with a stick, the landscape fitting around him like a skin.

After his basin wash he lay naked on the starched clean sheets and touched himself. He gazed at the stars until he was no longer able to tell who he was and slid from the bed to the cotton rug on the cement floor and lay there with his eyes jammed open.

Even after Colts was too old for baby things he'd carried a tin truck and a stout, bedraggled teddy bear under his arm, and when the truck gashed his knee Faye asked the teddy to make him better, on account of the red cross stitched to its chest. The last time she did that he threw the playthings away, but she gathered them and put them somewhere safe.

Loose soil and road ruts baked in the sun were the material of his playground then, soil blunting his hearing as he wiggled a finger in his ear imitating the way men did, at the same time as holding their pipes. The grainy feeling of Limestone Hills dirt, the taste of it spat from his tongue, clinging to damper cooked in the ashes, dirt stuck to a boiled lolly taken from a paper bag, was the medium Colts was born into, as far as he could tell. A fly got stuck in his ear, sizzling deeper. That was the feeling too. He'd never get over it or past it either. The hum of the dry bush, crickets, Christmas beetles, cicadas.

Faye wasn't so smitten by their country life, but now, thanks to a passionate love match, lived on a mission station in the wild ranges of Western Australia, a place as rough and remote as any in the world, where there were only four whites – herself, her husband Boy Dunlap, a mission mechanic and a mission nurse – and a tribe of wild blackfellows who nobody except Boy understood. So Faye wrote in love and praise of Boy Dunlap and his anthropological religion.

In the returned men's magazine
Reveille
, Buckler wrote about missionaries – ‘malarial young reverends, dithering sky pilots, poodle fakirs of the worst order, defeatist milksop hem-clingers living in the wide-open, undefended north of Australia peddling pork-pie caps and pipe-clay dreams to demoralised savages'. That was when Faye had informed him she was marrying one.

Before Faye left Sydney, Veronica had painted her bare-headed, gold hair a halo, in a white-spotted blue dress in the garden with a branch of wattle bloom dipped over her shoulder. There were many such paintings of Faye bundled up awaiting their future: just the one of Colts.

Faye's letters spoke of difficulties, hardships for which her whole life had waited. She had previously been too blessed – each had been by the guardian of their own sex, leading to opposite impulses. Faye turned outwards dealing with the world, believing she went inwards to God, while Colts battled the world clambering over material reality from where he lived too much in himself.

*

Next morning, looking up the track from the kitchen window, Colts remembered a great sight of Buckler – a man going away the moment he was seen – heading off with a handkerchief around his neck, driving a finger-slapper grader.

With its hard metal blade screaming against the earth, a grader had the power of returning without turning around, sending out sparks and the acrid smell of gunpowder rocks. It clanked under kurrajongs with leaves dusty in the heat as down it came into the dry creek bed and up again, scraping a path for farm lorries on limestone and quartz. A road was raised under the boy's eyes as Buckler banged the controls, flipped levers, spun handwheels in repetition. Colts drank crushes of heat and gulps of diesel fume and noise.

The homestead's tennis courts were built by Buckler from forty ant hills especially so young people and their friends could use them. The last time Faye was there Colts smashed, volleyed, lobbed and backhanded with an accuracy that wiped away smiles as the three of them played cutthroat. Buckler played to win but Colts toppled him. Faye wasn't so flash: she ran for a shot, concentrated on preparing a serve, laughed when she lost a point or received service badly, parachuted to earth after missing a high lob and stood there, giggling, just for the fun of it. That was Limestone Hills in the days when Buckler stayed put.

Swallows nested in the kitchen and the smell of the fat-stained boards and old iron cooking pots swam round the boy sitting with a breakfast cuppa and reading Joshua Slocum's
Sailing Alone Around the World
and waiting for his toast. Afterwards Veronica laid out harness along the verandah stones for soaping and mending.

He looked up at her.

‘Those horses are immortal,' he said.

No need to ask which horses, or who coined the phrase. Buckler and his big-noting. They both understood where they were going, then, on this wartime excursion released from ties, what the first target of their march would be – a triangular paddock far away.

Dunc Buckler's Clydesdales were kept on that reserve of the Darling River, downstream from Wilcannia, two hundred miles away, eating thistles and rare green pick. They were as old as Moses, wiry whiskers on rubbery lips, shaggy hairs matted over their hoofs. They had the stars for company and visits from a swagman to see they weren't ever bogged, foundered or caught in wire. Veronica's old tin caravan stood nearby, shuttered tight against snakes and mice. A painted arch gave shade protection. Old George and Mrs Dinah, they were called, released to a life of greater ease. Last seen in '39, they'd snuffled their nosebags and ambled closer, giving Colts the feeling of hoofs about to stand on him, a delicious fear that he encouraged while curling his toes inside his boots.

The best idea was to take the truck but the petrol they found was almost all siphoned away, so off they set on the motorbike with a cluster of spare containers and a canvas waterbag. Colts took the controls wearing dust goggles, Veronica huddling in the sidecar protected by cushions. They had bags, boxes and bottles stacked, everything roped or wedged for the ride west, both intently hopeful of make or break. With stubborn ceremonial pride devoid of reason, Colts wore his cricket boots – a pair of once-white Niblicks bought from a man named Kippax in a store hung with bats and pads and pyramids of cherry-red stitched balls. Those boots charged to Buckler left a distinct impression of Colts in his footprints, heart shapes riveted with studs. He found patches of smooth sand and made perfect stencils of them as they went along.

The small towns they came to had one long road unravelled at either end by thistly stockyards, tin shacks and smoking garbage dumps, with a motor garage, a stock agent, a bank, a school, a police station, a pub with a long, high verandah, a few lank peppercorn trees, drifting dust, iron roofs catching glare and corrugated water tanks waiting for rain.

Talk was of bombs wrecking towns far to the north. Colts imagined Japs penetrating as far as these drought-stricken districts, peering into mirages, kicking at shadows under trees, attacking sheep.

The motorbike continued on its wrenching way, Colts erect at the controls, observed by crows and circling kites.

A dim, relieved shadow stole over the plains and stars pricked the sky. First night, they camped on a showground, second night on a claypan. Colts threw brush on a fire making a bright roar. He studied Buckler's letters under the lamp of constellations, their position markers dangling. The cartoon drawings in the margins of the letters he'd always believed would make indicators of Buckler's location, but the idea was hopeless. There was the fat cook, Abe, the skinny sergeant, Jack Slim, and stout Buckler himself under a big hat visible as a pair of boots and a pipestem.

Veronica said they were simplistic scribbles worthy of one-track minds and carried on scooping a hip-hole for herself in the dirt, laying a canvas over blankets to protect them from dew. Buckler had lived that way for years, carving bush tracks with or without her, often without her, living half their married life away and coming back into towns that weren't hers but, oh, he seemed to have made his own so cosily now.

Sounds in the night made Colts sit up from his blankets.

‘Whaassat?'

Curlew, vixen, wild-pig-grunt, wandering cow, tawny frogmouth, earth-tremor, shooting star.

‘It's all right, Kings. Nothing to fear. No reason to be. Look at that sky!'

Colts peered from his swag and saw her sitting in a light that seemed to shine from her like dew. Whatever he denied in himself spoke for him. She said, ‘You must go back, one day, and visit your mother's grave,' and his answer was, ‘No.' Pushing himself back into sleep, he woke again, and there was Veronica still going on.

‘A beautiful young woman, gay, free, social, full of life, never put-upon, always willing, humorous, naughty, a fountain of laughter. My darlingest friend.'

The words laid onto him thickly. Her darlingest friend who'd introduced her to Buckler, and so on.

The hour before dawn was enchanted. Insects clicked and there was a regretful thrill in the last of stars as the old world, the night world, holding such sway over everything, was beaten back to its lair and Colts's eyelids drooped. He knew the day had truly begun when the first fly got in his ear and another one tickled his eyelashes.

The fire crackled and Veronica appeared at Colts's side with a mug of tea. When she brushed his tangled hair with her fingers he was too sleepy to knock her hand away. He fell asleep again. Or so he pretended.

Buckler said in a camp, stay in your swag, someone will bring you tea, stay longer you'll get the whole box and dice, the chops and eggs, fried damper. So it proved with Veronica.

At last they reached the bank of the Darling River, a scene of desolation. Bleached bones were scattered under trees. Hide and hair scrawled in shifting dust along sagging wire fences. Kangaroos and sheep lay dead of thirst at parched turkey's nest dams as windmills rustled and groaned. A plague had been through and the plague was a worse drought than the one they knew. Australia was a dry roasting bone of a country tossed away by time. At the corner of the triangular paddock where the roof of the old caravan was sighted, the carcases of Old George and Mrs Dinah were found, the two great horses stretched with dry hide where they had fallen into their last grins.

‘It's not them,' said Colts, remembering love he had for named animals.

‘Stop that always denying, Kings, it's wearing thin.'

He didn't reply, and she was left once again with understanding of him softer than thistledown in her bruised heart.

The only living creatures were goats – a herd of big-horned, dapple-bred animals making their way through dead trees on the riverbank, disdaining shortages and getting by on pride. Their smell was rank urine on a twist of breeze.

‘My goats,' Veronica called them.

‘You can have 'em,' said Colts.

‘Your goats,' she taunted back at him, and he'd never tell her how when he'd looked through her studio window and seen that goat and that boy, how he'd loved himself in his collarless shirt and braces, chin up eyeing back at the painted eyes transfixing him. He'd been made a hero, taking that exchange of looks as an assurance of time at his feet like dirty clothes he'd never need to pick up.

The padlock on the caravan dangled open and tinned food left inside was gone. Piles of old newspapers were stained by marsupial mice, their nest of leaves neat as a whirlpool, but soiled. Veronica's painting of a lovers' arbour done the year of her marriage to Buckler, 1931, was blistered and cracked.

She cursed the swagman who was left to mind the outfit. Buckler had promised his care.

Colts went around cooeeing and then went to the waterbag and drank tepid, fibrous water.

Veronica found the swagman when she went to wash in the billabong. She covered her mouth. He seemed to have arranged himself with some deliberation in a cleft of eroded bank. Pads of dumped leaves matted his head and shoulders. The gun, what her father called a fowling-piece, well named, had fallen from his grip when the shell was fired, leaving his shattered face thankfully turned away. He was a clothed skeleton.

Colts heard her cry and came looking.

‘Don't look,' she warned.

Suicide was expected of mad hatters and lonely figures in the bush, but the details were unwanted.