In talking to old men whose experiences I feel would be valuable to me in writing, I am often amazed at the mass of words they use to convey their thoughts, the unnecessary and boring words that obscure personality and knowledge. Listening to them is like washing for gold. As you swirl the water in the dish nothing is revealed but sand. Sometimes in this sand shines a speck of gold. You grasp this glittering speck, the presence of which suddenly gives value to the sand, the revealing mark that illuminates their tale.
I remember one such remark.
I was driving along a rutted track on my way to a deserted mining field. The fragrant breath of the bush rose from the frail grasses and from the blossom on the thorny acacias that skirted the track. The caravan lurched behind my car like a drunken man. A long trail of dust marked my descent into the valley. Where I had passed it hung poised a moment then moved in languid coils through the trees, softening their stark outlines and giving them the appearance of ghosts.
It was not far. Another bend and there was the hut. It stood in a clearing shadowed by a huge red gum. It had a bark roof supported by log walls. The logs had shrunk with the years and the clay that once had bound them had dried and fallen to the ground. A north wind could now thrust its thin fingers through the crevices and stir the hessian walls that lined it.
Against the trunk of the red gum rested the silent witnesses of a past generation—buggy wheels with bleached spokes projecting crookedly from hubs cracked by the wind and rain. The tyres were pushed askew from the rims and were now rings of rusted iron held upright by the trees. A buggy seat leant against the trunk. Its perished leather had burst into gaping holes through which the horse-hair padding projected like lifeless grass. From nails driven into the trunk hung rusty horse shoes, a pair of hames . . .
I eased the caravan across an eroded drain that carried the tank’s overflow, skirted a broken iron bedstead with its legs aloft, and pulled up beside a miner’s cradle lying on its side.
I stopped the engine and looked at the hut. I wondered why he was not standing at the doorway to greet me. He was always there at other times. I expected him to emerge at any moment, invite me inside, make me a cup of tea and, after a while, talk about murder. He always did.
I looked around. The floor of the valley was littered with lumps of quartz that had slid down from the mullock heaps around the old shafts on the hillside. Beyond the shafts was a fence of sagging barb-wire that held back the bush from the ruins of mud huts. These huts had once housed the miners.
An old man carrying a pick stepped from behind one of these crumbling walls and came walking down the track towards me. I knew him as Old Bob. He was about seventy-five and had a beard and long grey hair that gave him a patriarchal appearance. Bushy eyebrows projected over eyes that were as bright and sharp as a bird’s. He wore faded jeans and a plaid shirt open down the front revealing a mat of white hair.
He stopped some distance from me and called out, ‘How ya good?’
‘Good.’
‘Did you write that story I told you?’
‘No. I didn’t get it right. I want to talk it over with you.’
He grunted and continued down the track. I followed him into the hut. An iron kettle suspended by a chain was steaming gently above a bed of coals in the fireplace. Pieces of burnt wood and charcoal littered the stone hearth.
‘I’ll made some tea. Sit down.’
I sat on a form that was built against the wall behind the table. Tins of jam and condensed milk stood on the table with half opened lids bent up and back in half moons. Knives, forks and spoons were scattered on the surface. A tin of nails, screws and rusty bolts stood at one end. There was a loaf of bread with a hole in it gnawed by mice.
In a few minutes he pushed a mug of tea in front of me and sat down. He took a noisy sip from the mug he held and looked at me. I talked about the weather and the dry spell but he was abstracted and kept looking out the doorway.
‘What’s troubling you?’ he asked. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘I’ll tell you what Pd like you to do,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to tell me the whole story again.’ Pd taken my notebook out of my pocket and opened it on the table. ‘I wrote down a lot, but when I came to put it into shape there was a lot of questions I felt Pd like to ask you—little things—like what weight was the bloke he killed—things like that. I mightn’t use them but I’ve got to know them.’
‘Well, he was a big bloke, about twelve stone, thick-set sort of.’ He looked for a long moment at the table. ‘That about describes him. He was bigger’n me, a sight bigger.’
‘Right. Let’s have it from the start. They’d lived together for years you say.’
The story he told me, with many digressions, was about the days when he first came to the diggings and hundreds of miners camped along the creek and up the hillside. The ground became pock-marked with diggers’ holes and though a lot of alluvial gold had been washed from the creek bed the deep shafts had failed to trace the rich reef the miners were certain existed deep down in the earth.
For many years two men lived in one of the huts. They were taciturn, unsociable men who seemed to find in each other’s company the companionship they needed. They worked together, they walked together, they ate together. When they went into the town for supplies they drank together. No one ever heard them argue.
‘They were mates,’ Old Bob told me. ‘Mates for years. I liked him.’
‘Which one?’
‘The bloke that was killed.’
‘You knew him?’
‘Yes, I knew him.’
He remained silent for a moment then continued. ‘They began to get on each other’s nerves. Mates get like that after they become old. Anyway, something must have happened one night. It was cold and neither of them wanted to leave the fire. Then it happened. One of them rose from his seat and killed the other with a log of wood he had lifted from the hearth. He looked down on him, then bent and picked him up and he carried his body up the hillside in the darkness and cast it into a deep shaft where it fell, turning and twisting, to the cold water waiting there.’
‘There must have been men about who saw him.’
‘No, they’d all left by then. The three of us—well, we were still hoping to find that reef; we still hung on. These two blokes reckoned they had a lead but I dunno . . . I never found it.’
‘What happened to the murderer?’
‘He shot through. No one ever saw him again. When the police came a few days later—I told a bloke walking through here to tell them—I said to them, “He went off his head and made bush. You’ll find him somewhere out there under a gum tree with a bullet in his head. You might never find him.”
‘They wandered round for a couple of days and found the shaft with the body in it. They wrote in notebooks then got a bushman to come and track him but they lost his tracks on the rocky country behind those hills.’ He nodded his head towards the open doorway through which I could see hills against the skyline.
That night sitting in front of his fire I gazed at the coals while he filled his pipe and lit it with the glowing end of a stick that he picked up from the hearth.
‘I wonder why he did it?’ I asked.
‘It’s hard to say. It had been a bad winter that year, a lot of rain and wind. It’s easy enough to live with a bloke when you’re young. As you get older your nerves get tighter or something. You begin to notice habits in the other that annoy you. Your mate keeps on coughing or something and after a while you begin to think he’s doing it deliberately. You wait for it, then he does it again. And another thing—you’re beginning to wonder why you are alive. Even if you do find gold it’s no use to you. You don’t know anyone you can help. Nothing makes sense. You look at your mate and he doesn’t matter any more. Somewhere along the line you’ve lost something. What is going to happen to you both—sitting in a hut in front of a fire with that bloody wind and rain outside?’
He paused and looked into the fire. After a while he said, ‘It’s a pity, you know.’
‘What is a pity?’
‘That men get like that—you know, like I said.’
‘Yes it is, I suppose.’
‘You know how I think it happened!’ He turned and faced me.
‘No.’
‘As I said, I knew this bloke. Mick, his name was—the bloke that was killed—I knew some of his habits. On those cold nights they used to sit over the fire—like we are now. They used to both look into the fire. They didn’t talk much. They’d sit there and there’d be a wind outside and they’d hear branches sweeping against the walls. Maybe that mopoke out there would be calling. Hear it? Now!’
‘Yes. I hear it.’
‘Well, that would keep on. Then Mick would spit in the fire.’ Old Bob leant towards the fire and made a noise with his lips that suggested he was spitting. ‘Like that . . .’
I nodded.
‘Now when Mick spat in the fire the other bloke would turn his head away like this.’ Old Bob turned a twisted face towards me. ‘After a while Mick would spit in the fire again, and this time the other bloke’s hand would clench on his knee as he turned away. Another quarter of an hour would pass and Mick would spit again. This time his mate would whip his head away and his fingers would be still. After that he would sit there staring into the fire but not seeing. He would be waiting, waiting, till it came again and he would shudder and flinch at the sound.
‘And this would go on night after night, week after week, month after month, all through the winter nights till there came a night when he could stand it no longer. Then he would grab a log from the hearth and jump to his feet and he would raise it over his head and bring it down . . . His eyes wide open and his teeth showing. And Mick . . . Well he wouldn’t know what hit him. He may have looked up at the last moment. It would have been a look of astonishment, I think, before the log came down. He would never know why. That’s the bloody awful part—he would never know why.
‘The other chap stood there looking down on his mate. You see, he would be astonished himself. He wouldn’t be able to work out exactly why it happened. He would just stand there, but after a while all he would be able to think about was how to get rid of him. Then he would bend down and swing him up on to his shoulder in the fireman’s lift. He would open the door and step out into the dark with Mick dangling on his back, his one arm swinging and his big boots knocking together. That’s how it could have happened.’
‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ I said.
‘Would you like to go up in the morning and have a look at the shaft?’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘All right.’ He rose. ‘I think we’ll turn in.’
Next morning I followed him along a track that led through a tussocky water course before it began its climb through the stringy bark saplings on the hill.
At the foot of the hill Old Bob pointed to a red box. ‘He laid him down near that box and had a blow.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘That’s what the police reckoned.’
‘There must have been a mark there.’
‘The grass was all pressed down and there were some spots of blood.’
‘Yes, they’d see that,’ I said.
‘When he lifted him again he had a better grip on him,’ Old Bob went on. ‘From now on it was tough going. The track had a lot of loose stones on it . . . hard to miss them in the dark. They’d roll and slip and he’d nearly fall over when they did that.’
I followed him uphill, skirting shafts and diggers’ holes. Some of the mullock heaps had slid across the track and in these places we climbed over loose boulders and clay. The track levelled off along a ridge then took a steep sweep upwards across the face of a huge mound of mullock. On the top of this mound was a flat area in the centre of which was the gaping mouth of a shaft with four fence posts enclosing it. The rails that had formed the fence were rotted away.
‘This is the shaft,’ said Old Bob.
He stood back but I walked up to the edge and looked down. Cold air broke over my face, damp air smelling of decay. There was an almost unbearable tension coming from that deep hole in the ground. I threw a stone into the depths. It struck the side beyond my sight then silence; again I heard it hit the wall, then a long silence that ended in a faint splash.
‘Horrible!’ I exclaimed stepping back.
‘It is that.’
I looked around me trying to imagine what happened that winter night when the wind was swaying the trees.
‘What time was it—when he brought him up here?’
‘About midnight I’d say. Maybe a little later.’
‘Was it very dark?’
‘As black as the inside of a black dog.’
‘I doubt whether he carried him up that last steep pinch we climbed,’ I said. ‘I think he would make for that fence up there then follow it along. He would need something to guide him.’
‘Maybe so.’
‘He’d come down to this level patch from up there,’ and I pointed. ‘It would make it easy. When he found he was on level ground he’d know he was near the shaft. He’d walk straight to it then heave the body over his shoulder and wait till he heard the splash. He’d then stand still for a moment listening before he sneaked off amongst those trees like a shadow. He wouldn’t make a sound. He would be afraid of sound. He’d sneak down there and no one would ever know he had been here.’
‘No, he didn’t; he ran.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘How do you know? You weren’t here. My guess is as good as yours. I reckon he sneaked away.’
‘He ran, I tell you.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked.
‘I came up next morning and tracked him, and for a mile his heels never once touched the ground.’
He had moved quickly back as he spoke and upon his face was the expression of a man running in fear and desperation through the night.