Brian Penton Page 3

  The rains came. The brown of the valley turned yellow.

  “Looks as if it might be a good year,” Emma said. “The dam's running over.”

  Cabell, in his rocking-chair on the veranda, stared across the flooded country-side. “Let it,” he growled. After twenty-nine years he was tired. Ahead he saw only a procession of years as monotonous as the dribble of rain-drops leaking from the roof. Lambing—shearing—carting wool. Lambing—shearing—carting wool. Year in, year out. . . One night Larry woke and heard between the gusts of rain hissing on the roof the peevish cry of a baby, the sound of his mother twisting and groaning in the next room. The other babies were wailing in their crib. Emma was forty-nine then. She had a hard struggle before she could cut the cord with her scissors and take the baby to her breast. A girl. There were three babies now. Larry watched his father fondling them.

  “Harriet, that's what we'll call you, little one,” Cabell said, dandling the sickly newly-born. “And when you grow up we'll send you Home to kiss the Queen's hand and marry the handsomest man in England.” And looking at Emma he repeated it defiantly. “So we will, by God.” “Your ma's done her dash,” Gursey said. “She won't drop no more.” He was lying in his bunk wrapped up to the ears in blankets. His gums chattered with ague and the tic leapt up in the chalky skin hanging loosely on his skull. His voice kept breaking back into a hoarse whisper. “But she never had more than one of her own kind and that's you. These others—he'll take care of them. You see. They'll be Cabells. They won't have the brand on them.” He lifted himself on his elbow and let the blankets fall. “See?” he said. “See the brand?”

  Larry's eyes widened, looking down at the thin shoulders calloused like the hide of a working bullock with the weals of many scourgings. “My mother!” he said scandalized.

  “They stripped her in the streets of Sydney and the mob stood round and watched her flogged. She was a real devil, was Em Surface, your ma.”

  He died the same night, leaving Larry the legacy of an inexpugnable hatred that had kept him alive through sufferings unimaginable to generations to come. In Larry's brooding imagination his wrongs and humiliations became the dark shadows of Emma's own story, which she kept locked up behind her squawlike face. He soon forgot Gursey, but the pictures of floggings and starvings bit deeper into his mind. It was his mother he always saw in those pictures in place of Gursey, and in place of the English mill owner, the English judge, the brutal soldiery, the squatters using the convicts like nigger slaves, he saw his father. Pity, shame, and hatred burnt him up—pity for his mother, frail in her simple blue dress of a vanished fashion, with big, ugly hands hanging at her sides, wrinkled face, everlasting patience—shame for his birthmark—hatred for his father.

  Cabell, on the homestead veranda, watched Sambo and Jack Berry shovelling the damp clods on to Gursey's grave behind the woolshed. “They're dying out. The times are changing. Maybe my luck will change, too,” he murmured to the child in his arms. He was always a great believer in omens.

  Chapter Three: Climacteric

  “Bah! It never changes,” he muttered in the next breath. He was fortyseven then, suspended in the climacteric of scepticism that is the spiritual MALAISE of middle age. He could remember so many years of promise, so many promising omens—shining baits to trick him into optimistic drudgery. “Like the carrot they hang in front of the donkey to keep it jogging,” he used to say.

  Looking back on his life now he felt as though he had been risking his neck to climb the wrong peak. But the disillusion was too profound for regret or self-reproach. There was even a sort of comfort in it, revealing as it did the process by which the blind will of the seed, to flower and fruit and give forth seeds to flower and fruit again, got itself fulfilled. What was the use fighting any more? The aspirations men fought for were only the lure of powers that breathed their incense from the luxuriant vitality of the thing they had created, from the sweat and suffering of men. “Like the dung I put on the flowers to buck them up,” he told himself. “That's what these silly damned notions are.”

  Once he had tried to believe that it was his own will that had made his life what it had been, even what he wished it had not been. Then he had had to explain why, after nurturing it for twenty-three years, he had suddenly renounced a dream of going Home to end his days in the placid security of a little village by the sea. If he had not willed it so then he would have had to admit that such things came about in the adventitious way of a world bereft of all rhyme or reason, or that Emma, weaving her own ambitions into his life, had trapped him, led him by the nose. Had either of these been true what could he have expected from the future? Scarcely less alarming than the potentialities of a madhouse given over to the caperings of Chance, was the alternative which delivered him up as a bond slave to Emma's will. No, no, that could not be true. It MUST not be true. It had all been his own doing. To prove this he crushed out of his heart the resentment which festers from defeated longings, made gruff overtures of friendliness, let a spurious kind of intimacy grow up between them, half-ashamed after years of estrangement. Behind all this, really, was his desire to forget what he had lost, to placate the still watchful schemer in her eyes, to salvage his courage and battered selfrespect. Besides, he was tired. He wanted a truce. He wanted rest.

  So Emma was pregnant again. To him the children came as a diversion in the arid monotony of a life from which the spur to think and act had vanished. To Emma they represented God alone knew what blind urge of fertility ebbing to its close, what obscure motive of triumph or revenge, or what merely provident expedient against the unpredictable vagaries of his spirit. But he accepted these new responsibilities without any explicit comment, except a vague expectation as her time drew near, a vague surprise when he found her up and about the house again, as well as ever, and, perhaps, a vague annoyance. As the sight of Gursey, emerging from his annual bout of fever, a little more wizened, a little more cadaverous, but still vividly, ominously alive and full of spleen, wrung a spurt of indignation from him. But it passed, swift and gestureless, leaving him, stretched out in his rocking-chair on the veranda, to contemplate the valley with the blank, uncritical stare of resignation.

  His comfortable theory of triumphant wilfulness had given way by then to an immense lassitude and indifference, for he had begun to perceive, in his twenty-five years of hard graft, a constant pattern of hope and disappointment, hope and disappointment—the subtle disappointment secreted in success. He was like a gambler to whom the inevitability of mischance has been mathematically demonstrated. His power to project new plans, ambitions, wilted before irrefutable logic, which tore the veils from his future and showed him its years, days, hours, minutes spread out in the same sterile and fore-ordained design. He still bullied the men, weighed their rations in skinflint ounces, haggled with carters, cursed the shearers, but merely from habit and without zest. He ought, he told himself, to begin fencing properly like Miss Ludmilla over at Ningpo, ought to build a new shearing-shed, ought to do something about the offal dump. But he did nothing, except by fits and starts, sunk in a terrible stasis of boredom after a generation of days filled every moment with action, dreams, and conflict. His cattle wandering off into the bush with the wild scrubbers to return, within a few years, to shaggy, humpbacked primitivism, the shed leaning eastwards from the winter westerlies in rain-sodden, ant-eaten decrepitude, the rats obscenely squealing and fighting around the offal dump in the dusk only served to deepen the conviction that effort was wasted in a world given over to inevitable decay. The kangaroos began to come back and ravish the pastures and the neighbours' fences. There were quarrels. He didn't even want to quarrel. Yes, he ought to do something, he agreed. He hired men to sink the post holes but forgot to hire men to cut the posts, put it off till the holes had caved in. The dingoes came down from the hills again to prey on his sheep, the blacks came back too. He sent the poison cart out every day for a month, then forgot about it for the next six. One day he went down to the blacks' camp
and chased them all across the river with his stock-whip; a week later they were crowding round the table where he was salting meat, stealing bits under his nose.

  “Aw, patch it up,” he said when Sambo came to tell him that the white ants were getting at the stockyard.

  “Oughta see the yard they just put up over Black Rock,” Sambo said.

  “Iron bolts 'n' all. Putting up a cement washpool too. Got a ram paid a hundred quid for.”

  “More money than sense,” Cabell said.

  “We usta have the best stockyard round here,” Sambo said. “Usta have the best rams 'n' the best horses too.”

  “Damn you and your rams,” Cabell flared with the irritability of a sick man protecting the blessed coma of half-death from the lure of a resurrection to life and suffering. He brushed Sambo's equine face, with its caricature expression of outraged pride, from the empty, the mercifully inhuman field of his vision—that blue-grey arc of sky and hills at the end of the valley where nagging thoughts and all fretful sense of personal being dissolved in vistas of immemorial unchange.

  If Sambo's alarums had disturbed him at all it would have been only for the moment. The times conspired to bemuse him with a false security. They were bad years: rains were poor, banks dried up, squatters who had borrowed heavily had to sell out and go looking for a job. Dirk Surface, Emma's brother, failed for a mortgage of ten thousand and Winbadgery was sold. Bellamy drank himself out of Black Rock and one of the new agricultural companies bought it. Down in Brisbane the Government was bankrupt, men were rioting for bread. By contrast Cabell, owing no debts and getting fairly good prices for his wool—thanks to years of careful breeding—seemed almost to progress. At least no urgent cause for thought or action came to rouse him from the trance in which he tried to forget the debacle and horror of the past and to sterilize the future of all motive to hope and struggle and be again disappointed.

  Emma watched him, marked how his beard grew shaggier, how his teeth blackened and broke away, how he wore trousers frayed at the heel, saw the casual habits of inert and aimless reflection gaining upon him. Her eyes, blurred in their cavities of bone and wrinkles, like the foreknowing eyes of an old cat, watched him sideways through the doorway as she worked in the house, covertly under their lids at the meal-table, her only comment the satisfied silence of her catlike waiting. One, two, three years went by. Then, “You better quit wasting time and learn some real work,” she told Larry, sullenly, in the usual way of their intercourse.

  Through the kitchen door and across the half-darkness of the livingroom they could see Cabell mummified in his chair.

  “That drivel of Gursey's won't help you much when you're boss here,” she said.

  “I won't ever be boss here, Gursey says.”

  “You'll be boss here. One day. You better get some real work and learn how to be boss. You'll want to do better than your uncle Dirk.”

  “I won't be boss if I live to be a hundred, Gursey says.”

  “You'll be boss before you've learnt how to be if you don't start soon.”

  They were husking corncobs. Their heads were close together, his skin fresh and clear like a dusty ivory—the gipsy blood of the Surfaces—hers wrinkled in deep, tiny wrinkles, like taut wires holding her jaw tight so that she to speak out of the corner of lips scarcely movable. They looked as if they were hatching a plot, as if they knew it.

  After a while Larry slunk out with lanky, loutish clumsiness, his face, as always, bent sulkily to his feet plodding in the dust. He too had a crisis of age to fight through or be damned. It took him to the men's hut where the plump face of Berry's bride-to-be, smudged with Berry's thumb print, smiled down, drifted him out again to lounge over the fence and watch the sun sink into the gold and opal Valhalla of gathering clouds, left him stranded in the black chaos of night and his own frustration. Turning back to the house he saw his father's head cameoed against the light from the living-room. He hesitated, thinking of the long legs sprawled across the top of the stairs where he must go. The knotted dry retch of anger came up in his stomach again, then he sheered off to the back door. But under Emma's eye and nagging he abandoned his life of pottering about the backyard and the scrub, and rode out with the men. Cabell saw him driving in horses for the muster, and at the muster saw him swinging his whip easily in the thick of the dust and moiling bullocks. He was down at the washpool working the race and through the shearing slaved at the woolpress with the dogged industry of a paid hand. He took the poison cart out again, hunted the kangaroos with Sambo, put new posts in the stockyard, patched the shed.

  “A proper Currency Lad,” Sambo said, approvingly. “Give him a paling knife and a bit of number nine wire and he'll build a humpy fit fer Queen Victoria.”

  The genius of the bushman was in him. He would fit a tyre on the wagon, forge a horseshoe, turn a tea case into a piece of furniture for his mother, break a horse, douche a sick cow, mend a saddle, pull out a tooth for Jack Berry, carve his rosewood whip-handle and inlay it with mother-of-pearl, kill the ration bullock, salt the meat, tan the hide and make a pair of shoes out of it—all in the day's work.

  These glimpses everywhere he went of Larry working among the men as one of themselves but with an undefined authority startled Cabell under the swathes of preoccupation. He did not understand why until one day he rode down with a buyer from the meatworks to see the men cut out a mob of fats. There was one large bullock, a big red brute, which the buyer particularly wanted, but it kept in the centre of the mob and Sambo was a long while bringing it up to the coachers, which were grazing a few yards from where Cabell and the buyer sat watching on their horses. Suddenly it sheered off and made, head down, for the scrub by the river. Cabell pulled his horse around and galloped across to turn it but he was careless and it swung aside and got past. He sank his spurs and tried again, and again it beat him. He tightened his knees then and was riding full tilt, angrily, at its shoulder when, in a flash of chestnut horse and red shirt, a man rode past, cutting Cabell off from the bullock and shaking him in the saddle, took the bullock like a football from Cabell's toe, forced it round, and sent it with a flick of the whip into the middle of the quiet mob.

  “God blast you and damn you for a clumsy dog,” Cabell roared, then cantered out of the dust and saw Larry riding away, half-turned in his saddle to look back. The sweat and dust were caked on his face, a mask to the shine of his eyes, from which the excitement of riding had burnished the dull, sullen glaze.

  They exchanged a quick glance, with the ground racing away between them, then Larry rode back to the men, leaving Cabell to swallow the dust from the chestnut's hoofs as he yelled, “Be more careful where you're riding.”

  The buyer laughed. “Bit too smart for you now, Cabell. Getting stiff like me. Ah well. . .”

  “What? Getting stiff? Me?” Cabell frowned at an impertinence.

  “Ah well, got to give the young'uns a chance,” the buyer said. “It's a young man's country. They don't do the old man in with a club like in some places I been—that's something.”

  But glancing round quickly at the valley, unchanged in its grey antiquity since first he saw it thirty years ago, frozen in some instant of past time, fossilized in time like a fern frond that was green when this stone was a handful of living, breeding mould, Cabell could not believe in his fugitive mortality, the sudden image of himself laid out, the shiver of fear in his bones, the wind of fear rising suddenly in his ears. “Huh,” he muttered. “Huh.” But the wind, like the breathless, fierce wind in the shell, persisted in his ears for days as he sat in his chair on the veranda and watched Larry among the men in the yard, head and shoulders above them now, strong as a young bull; as he watched him eating at the table with eyes downturned, sulky and evasive eyes like Emma's, face like Emma's, patinaed like Emma's, with a soft black beard already beginning to lick sideways from his habit of pulling at it with his right hand; as Larry passed him in the yard, his hat pulled over his eyes which he kept fixed on his feet striding along in
eager search of the promising but elusive destination for which youth is always setting out.

  “Damn it all, I've got another thirty years' work in me.” Work? And here a new resentment came to plague his long hours on the veranda. Work for whom? That woman's brat—thought he'd gone through all that—chucked England, exiled himself—just to provide for him. That woman's brat! Well? For what had he “gone through all that?” A question the tone of his disillusioned musings was not likely to solve. A rich station, ten thousand pounds' worth of freehold, fifty thousand acres of leasehold, thirty thousand sheep, cattle and horses—what was to become of all this when—well, one day he would have to decide. “That woman's” other brats, crawling about their mother's feet in the kitchen, were just as little his, just as discouragingly, when he thought of them, the symbol of aspirations come to nothing. He let his hand slide down his beard and lie upturned and inert in his lap. Oh, well, one of them would have to get it. And the brief revolt of the life in him against the daily maturing death in him ebbed away, and the drumming in his ears ebbed away, into the horizon where his thoughts, ambitionless, automatic, decomposed in silence and haze.

  Chapter Four: Excuse to Live

  A month later the girl was born. She had brown eyes and a round chin and a short, straight nose—unlike the others, her mother, or Cabell except in the colour of her eyes. But hers were darker than his. Stopping at Emma's door to take a casual look at the newly-born—the last, he guessed, from Emma's drained lips and jaw gone loose after a night's struggle—he was swept out of the room, where the heat-and-rainbuckled timbers of the walls were like trees still writhing from the brutal axe scars on them, back into a room with damask curtains climbing to the sky-lofty ceiling of a childhood memory. Between himself and the direful immensity of the room hung brown eyes and the reassuring smell of something known and trusted.