When Colts Ran (34 page)

Recovered, pounding the steering wheel metronomically, a bit overdone, Hovell found he was able to function despite feeling harrowed and drained. You felt one way in military parlance, you fulfilled orders in another. You soldiered on. ‘The godhead in us wrings our nobler deeds from our reluctant selves.' That was his code.

Now in a dark pit of himself Colts lay at the bottom, fit to be flayed. Never far from Hovell's thoughts was the parable of the good Samaritan as a yardstick of action, helping decide when to reach a hand for the bloodied figure huddled beaten and lost, to whom Colts, Hovell cautioned his admiring conscience, bore no resemblance at all.

Pattison's idea was to buy back
Goats
and give it to Colts, Hovell to supply the money.

‘It's worth a fortune,' said Hovell.

‘Depends who you are,' said Pattison, ‘as to what a fortune is.'

Pattison looked at him then turned away. A profound, probing silence travelled between them. Hovell knew Pattison would never again touch firearms or express an enraged, extreme opinion likely to ignite any sort of fatal confrontation, the moral equivalent of arms. He was bound, tied and held to a life sentence of self-control. He would sometimes, however, make strange requests.

Pattison gave directions; Hovell, after some thought, obeyed.

They arrived at a homestead on the Upper Isabel, with abandoned cattle yards choked with thistle. A withering season of neglect lay over Ted Merrington's Burnside. He now lived alone, keeping an ear out for cars crunching the side road.

The big ship's bell door-ringer clanged.

‘All right, all bloody
right
,' and Merrington wrenched the door open to find himself facing a known identity, the philanthropist big-spender, Chook Hovell.

‘Good evening, let me introduce myself, explain myself . . .'

‘Not at all, delighted, do come in . . .'

Merrington had never lost an electric effect on men of good judgement: Hovell felt for his sword.

Shortly afterwards Merrington found himself better off than he would have been selling
Goats
through the Macleay Street dealer he had already promised (make that half-promised) a sale. ‘If I had started that fire myself, creating a shortage,' his satisfaction implied, ‘I could not be more pleased. Add to that the supreme satisfaction of having paid peanuts for the cameo in the first place, from a drunken sot.'

When Hovell and Damon Pattison left, the picture bound in an old blanket and tied with twine to the roof rack, Merrington held the cheque to the light and waved it in the air, fanning his cheeks before placing it under a paperweight. Something else to be done, then, for he felt charged up. There was still sufficient daylight to walk over the hills and gun a bunny, scare a wild pig, slug a mangy fox or disintegrate a wild cat deceiving him through the folds and declivities of the land. He filled a pocket with shells and set off.

After the death of Boy Dunlap, Faye Colts came east and gave a few half days a week as consultant researcher in West Australian languages at the ANU. Sorting Boy's notebooks and transcribing his early ethnographic recordings took much of her time. Somehow the word got out. Colleagues in the research school loved the idea that the beautiful young model glowing in flower beds and radiating rings of golden bathwater in the lost Buckler masterworks (reproduced now in weekend magazines) was the same authoritative woman in her eighties putting young linguists in their place and arranging the assumptions of anthropologists on the basis of a lifetime of living in bush camps.

Isabel Junction was only two hours away and when she could, Faye drove out to see her brother.

‘You can't go on living like this,' she said, resuming a custom of care never quite abandoned on her marriage those years ago, but more intense, as if sisterly closeness could be taken up without question now that she'd got the more interesting claims of her life out of the way – ‘saying it was just yesterday you bunked in with Randolph, really!'

‘Not exactly “yesterday”,' said Colts. ‘Not “bunked in”, either.'

‘All right, darling, but how long has it been, freeloading when you've wasted everything, and I think Randolph would never say so, but Stone Wall Cottage is getting a bit too much for him. It's very unsatisfactory Kings, when you think of it.'

‘Only temporary . . .'

Faye trailed off, hating to use the word ‘waste', that lascivious theme of the Isabel she had studied long distance – waste in men's lives embraced with more passion than they gave to anything but dogs and sheep and the Five Alls Hotel.

Would somebody please explain to her what it meant? she'd asked, carrying the question into the anthrop tearoom one day. ‘And don't start telling me anything specious, as favoured in postgrad speculation, along the lines of men having completed their reproductive function and finding there is nothing left for them so they might as well go off. There's spirit, you know. There's love.'

This from a woman who'd known happiness in her married life, in extreme circumstances of geography and material reward. She'd believed in love, having fountained that particular emotion through all her days and suffered to prove its truth. Wasn't going to give up on love quite yet, then.

Boy had nosedived the Cessna on the 13th of June, 1991, on his seventieth birthday, stalling on take-off from Nullagine, heading back for the big happy all ready and waiting for him, people coming in from a thousand desert kilometres in all directions, driving all manner of strange contraptions. Never had celebration turned into funeral so abruptly.

Colts waved an unlit cigarette around, then hunched in over it, flicking a lighter peevishly.

‘I do give Randolph a hand round the place, don't say I do not.'

The most she'd seen him do was track up through Randolph's olives lifting rocks and getting down on his knees under weed mat looking for a bottle he'd hidden that had probably been smashed by the slasher. Then he came back to the walled garden and his wooden bench, his tobacco tin and transistor radio tuned to rural roundups.

‘How long has this been here?' said Faye, shuffling through a pile of mail. She showed Colts a letter, one of dozens that lay around in a mess – she'd forwarded it to him months ago.

‘A while.'

‘You know what it says, then?'

‘Buckler is “in”?'

The chairman of a working party on the Australian Dictionary of Biography advising on subjects for inclusion had recommended that the racist, utterly forgotten, troublesome, egomaniacal, warped but peerlessly brave Major Dunc Buckler, MC (1894-1985?) was worthy of inclusion.

‘You were his shadow, his footprint, his little sidekick and pal,' said Faye.

‘So I was.'

Colts made something of watching an ant clambering over a splinter of wood on the seat beside him, leg by thin leg.

On her next visit Faye spoke decisively: ‘Your friend Kingsley is taking a holiday from the Isabel,' she told Randolph, after working out that although Colts would agree to almost nothing, he would do almost anything, now, if she led.

Randolph sat under a pool of lamplight with the volume a fellow-royalist, Eddie Slim, had given him for Christmas, which he pored over like a studious monk – Prince Charles at Highgrove, a name so like Homegrove it thrilled, a book of organic farming on biodynamic principles, which Randolph loathed as a rule.

It wasn't until the next day, and they were threading into the late afternoon sun on a back stretch after many hours that Colts felt his stomach lurch, and cursed not taking a last look around his hiding places. A line thinner than saliva reached the back of his brain to the last drink he took, two days ago, passed over the dry-stone wall by Gilbert Dalrymple, no longer a partaker but soft landings his wish for the incorrigibly desperational.

‘Where are we going?' Colts blinked. So far he'd dozed, cocooned in a mood taking him far back past any beginning of what could sensibly be called his life. He'd assumed they were going to the comfortable flat Faye had been given in University House (above the garden bar), or possibly headed in the opposite direction, to the far South Coast, where Faye proposed visiting the rural cemetery south of Narooma where Veronica was buried.

Instead they swallowed a sun of boiling fire, and came towards nine down a dirt road and then to a recognisable place (whitewashed stone in the headlights) where Faye led Colts by the hand up a gravelled pathway, into a room where there was a bowl of ripe figs, a jug of water with a beaded glass cover, a narrow bed with a cotton bedspread and theatrical posters on the walls,
A Midsummer
Night's
Dream
,
Richard
III
,
Waiting For Godot
. It was a boy's bedroom kept for a boy's return, intensely familiar and old, a cool cellar in the hot night. But Colts wasn't that boy he found himself confusedly thinking. After fumbling with his glasses and beaming the bedside lamp around he saw the name Fred Donovan featured on the old posters.

Because of this room, because of the purple split figs, the deeply recessed windows, the hot night and loud crickets, the stars caught in the angle of narrow window glass, Colts began to understand something about fragments of importance in a life, how they flew apart and kept their distances life-long. How they were that life in the end, such as the stars were, in their cold distances.

He'd never seen Fred Donovan perform but remembered him from the Five Alls – a cheery, voluble, overweight young bloke greeting him with a beer and a whisky chaser. Then Randolph pompously started following Donovan in his next career, that of architect: Donovan's name loudly dropped in company, his prizewinning designs clipped from colour supplements and into the scrapbook with them.

Now Colts remembered Donovan saying he'd grown up in pubs when Colts quipped he'd grown old in one, and so he recalled without the name Donovan ever teasing him before, that Rusty was a name snapped off a branch, and left as a flowered twig at Buckler's memorial service by a half-familiar figure.

She knocked at his door, a thin, sharp-eyed old woman with the light behind her, leaning on a stick, introducing herself.

‘Are you comfortable, Mister Colts?'

Thank you, he was, because of this room, because of the purple split figs, the deeply recessed windows, the hot night and loud crickets, those stars caught in the angle of narrow window glass.

Limestone Hills was her retirement fund, she said, a piece of country living where city people could spend a night or two and explore the local attractions: gold panning, limestone caves, vineyards.

After she left, Colts swept the lamp around the wall and looked again at the tinted features of Fred Donovan, and saw Dunc Buckler written all over them.

Then Colts undressed and, using the towel and washing bowl provided, cleaned himself – face, underarms, chest, everywhere – and lay down on the tight white sheet naked as a corpse. Eyes open, lids peeled back, listening and wondering what he was listening for. Was it a machine breaking the gunpowder rocks, throwing sparks? Was it that?

At breakfast under a net of vines on a white-painted, wrought-iron table they deferred to Colts as if he trailed a dynamite fuse. ‘Tea, eggs, orange juice – we squeeze our own . . .'

Faye had been talking. ‘Watch him.'

Each day Colts was stronger on grilled cutlets and mashed pumpkin, on cheese pie and shepherd's pie, a style of cooking Rusty brought from her pubs. Up and down the track and into the dry creekbed Colts walked, along the low rocky ridge of hardy plants, scraping their seed-heads in the dust. Of course it wouldn't last, but while it held, this was the life and the definition of the life in Faye's estimation.

These days a sealed road led into town, to a clinic where Colts was treated for the leg ulcers he barely noticed.

They heard the pallid cuckoo calling over paddocks of wheat sown by a sharefarmer who watched the wheat wither to nothing. They turned back time, remembering the first steps they took through the wire gate with the grimy spring that slammed back resisting sheep getting through. It was all Colts remembered, he said. The two of them back together. Entering there.

‘No, there was somewhere else . . .' said Faye. ‘And you promised to come with me.'

Mornings were bad, evenings a test, Colts dodging the cocktail hour hanging over him. They had pineapple juice topped with cold ginger beer in schooner glasses. A line of foam was left on Colts's upper lip. It looked like the moustache worn by a handsome old Greek café owner, said Rusty. Such a man the last and greatest love of her life.

So Buckler had a son. Faye had tracked him down this far, making the friendship with Rusty. The question was, had Veronica ever known about a family hived off, and the answer was that she had – of course she had – though she did not ever speak of it. Money sorely needed by Rusty at various times of need had come through from Buckler's account. He didn't have a red cent after his mining ventures drained him. So it was all from her.

They talked about 1942–43, when this had begun, the creation of who they were. Buckler had been on a foray when he left Colts at Eureka, some wild notion about investigating mysterious sounds – Faye told the story for Rusty, Colts listened, correcting this fact or that – rumbles of mining machinery reported coming from the broken ranges and long sea inlets away to the north, possibly from Japanese landing parties doing God knew what. Buckler crossed the continent to investigate. But there was nothing there, nobody there except three white people – Buckler's own estranged wife, Veronica, his ward of legacy, Faye, her husband Boy Dunlap – and a headcount of ninety-three blackfellows of supremely doubtful loyalty, as Buckler characterised them in the report he wrote to the army chiefs who ignored it.

No doubt Buckler always loved Rusty in the stronger way, the wanting way, but she wouldn't have him. Only those visits sometimes, when he saw Fred. How Veronica must have loved him to be satisfied with him beat the two women at the level of reason but not of the wanting heart.