Beth

On the way to Pearl’s, we drive past the burnt area I’m convinced Owen lit to draw me away from the house. A whole section of Wallaby and Kangaroo Grass has been reduced to black stubble, trees scorched about ten metres in on the desert side. Whatever the human quarrel, the land always pays. In the passenger seat, Neme is watching too. She turns to me.

‘Thanks,’ she says.

I hold tight to the wheel, still astounded by her words. Try not to hear each one as the answer to why grasses send down roots ten times longer than the stalk is high, or a seed will wait more than a human lifetime to sprout.

Pearl’s farm is ten kilometres out of town and in undulating country, challenging the idea of the plains. Attached to the front fence is a wooden sign, the words White Mallee so morphed by the elements they look more like the burrowings of a literate insect than the handiwork of a human. Her car isn’t out front, but there are outbuildings visible beyond a stand of Sugar Gums. No White Mallee in sight.

I park us in the shade and Neme gets out, even before the engine has rattled to a halt. I join her, the wind carrying the scent of grasses that have infiltrated what were once well-defined garden beds, leggy rosebushes tipped with dead buds.

Neme nods towards the house. Built of stone, it’s impressive and designed to be so. Turned columns. Ornate lattice. Red-brick corner work emphasising its presence in the world. From what I read at the Historical Society, this was the grandest residence ever built in the area, some of the materials brought from as far away as Italy and the Middle East. Apparently it has an underground ballroom, dug out of the hard earth so the rich could waltz their way through summer nights. A place this size would take muscle and funds to keep it from yielding to the land. The will to see it persist.

As we move closer, the house reveals its age. It’s not as perpendicular to the horizon as it should be, paint sun-blasted from the columns and fascia boards. If the house is testimony to the way things have become for Pearl, it’s worse than I thought. The front door has frosted glass panelling on either side, native species intertwined. Some variety of eucalypt. A generic kangaroo. I try the heavy brass knocker, but there’s no answer.

‘Pearl,’ I call, but the wind filches my words.

It carries them the length of the verandah and out towards the open fields to the south. A sense of isolation comes over me that I never get at my place, not even if I spend a whole week without heading into town.

‘Do you feel that, Neme? There’s something not right about this place.’

She nods, then steps back as the door unlocks. It opens halfway and Pearl peers around the side before opening it, her eyes red around the rims.

‘Beth,’ she says, her voice tentative. Then she turns her gaze on Neme. ‘I’m so sorry, dear girl. I had no idea he would try to get the letter back. He was so angry … he didn’t understand.’

‘Didn’t understand what, Pearl?’

She purses her lips.

‘Did Owen hurt you, too?’ I ask her, moving closer.

‘This land means everything to him, he couldn’t bear to lose it …’ She hangs her head. ‘No, he didn’t. Not in that way.’

The wind sifts through her wispy hair, which today is the grey of storm clouds. I pull the envelope from my back pocket and hold it out to her. She hesitates, then takes it.

‘Neme has nothing to do with the events described in there,’ I tell her, more force to my words than I intended. ‘It happened a long time ago. You know that, don’t you? And Neme isn’t Aboriginal. We’ve talked with Sal about it. I need you to understand, Pearl.’

She holds still except for the slight trembling of the hand that holds the letter. How could a woman as strong-minded as Pearl become so confused, concoct such a perversion of people and time? She slips the letter into the pocket of her jacket, thick and woollen despite how warm it is.

‘There’s something I have to show you,’ she says, opening the door wider.

I turn to Neme. She nods and we follow Pearl inside.

It’s much cooler, with the smell of an old church. A long hallway leads past open doors, the worn boards the colour of mahogany. The rooms at the front of the house appear lived in – master bedroom, sitting room, kitchen – but as we continue along, they look more like museum pieces than a home, a huge dining room arranged with furniture from different periods, the tick of a tall grandfather clock adding to the effect.

Neme grabs hold of my arm as we pass a bedroom. A Victorian-era cradle is hung with lace, the effect eerie, as if a phantom baby will soon be returned to it for her afternoon sleep. Next to the nursery, a long wooden barometer hangs on the wall. In the book Neme tore the pages from, a barometer carrier was one of the professions Stapylton listed within the Mitchell expedition. They must’ve come through here not long before Pearl’s family squatted this land. The brass needle hovers between Fair and Change.

At the end of the hallway, Pearl halts before a closed door.

‘In here,’ she says, her voice diminished by the height of the ceiling.

Pearl draws out the gold chain she keeps around her neck. Dangling from it is an iron key, a heavy-looking thing, not the kind you wear as jewellery. She feeds it into the lock. The click travels down the hallway, a sound on the move.

Pearl grasps the handle, a fusty smell exhaled as the door falls open, following the lean of the house. Inside the curtains are drawn, the details of the room and its function difficult to make out in the low light. Pearl ambles over to the window and draws back the heavy curtains, animating the dust.

Neme looks at me and frowns, then turns her focus to what’s been revealed by the influx of light.

The room is lined with wooden shelves full of objects and boxes, arranged according to a system that is unclear. Near the centre is a small round table with at least a dozen more objects, most of them with white labels attached to them, similar to the display cases at the Historical Society. The labels, written in faint blue ink, describe each object, and the date and place they were found. Whoever put this together was meticulous and obviously had a reason for taking so much care in their cataloguing. Not objects, but artefacts.

Spearhead, 1875, White Mallee, eastern paddock.

Grinding stone, 1922, Gatyekarr Creek.

A shiver runs through Neme’s body.

Pearl walks over and picks up a stone from the table. She hands it to Neme, but Neme holds it away from herself and passes it to me. The surface is grey and smooth, a river stone, which may have once lain at the bottom of the Wimmera. The edge has been chipped, small curves marking where some other implement was used to fashion it. The other end is easy to grip on to, no doubt selected for this purpose. There’s no label attached to this one. Nothing to pinpoint when and where it was found.

Neme steps back from the table.

‘Not here,’ she says, shaking her head.

Pearl startles at the sound of Neme’s voice. Her eyes narrow, suspicious, as if a bird just spoke to her and she’s waiting to be proved sane. She turns to face Neme.

‘I dreamt you were the girl who ran into the desert to escape the shooting that day – the one my great-grandmother wrote about in the letter. The dream was so real, came to me so often after you arrived, I was sure …’

Pearl breaks off and begins to cry. She makes no move to stop the tears that track the fissures in her skin.

On a shelf next to the window, something catches the light – the trigger plate of a rifle. It’s similar to one that belonged to my grandfather, passed down from his father to mine and only brought out as a showpiece, its barrel damaged, no longer safe to shoot.

I move closer, Neme following me, her breath as measured as mine. Ah, Neme, what have I brought you to? Is this where it was always leading?

The rifle has a grey-black stock, a deep scratch along the side, the steel of the trigger pitted with age. A relic – from the days when this house was first built, or before then. The day described in the letter.

Neme gasps. Beside the rifle is a wooden box, NET WT. 42 LBS stamped on the side. She’s leaning over it, her face still, a keening coming from Pearl’s direction, so soft it could be the wind.

The box is full of bones. What looks like a femur. A set of curving white ribs. Smaller bones, possibly once part of a foot or hand. Three skulls. Two are turned towards the wall, one facing the room, its empty sockets cavernous as if the last thing it saw required a deep space. A label is attached to it, in the same fading blue ink.

I don’t want to, but I read what’s written there.

Human remains, 1854, desert clearing.

I turn away from the shelf. Neme does too, her eyes averted from this vile ossuary.

Pearl sweeps her arm in the direction of the shelves. ‘There must be rooms like this all over the country,’ she says, her voice full of the horror that must have visited her each time she woke from that mad dream – one where a child who survived slaughter walks out of the desert more than a century and a half later. A revenant. A mnemonic of a terrible crime. One committed by Pearl’s ancestors, not far from here. So full of horror that every artefact, every presence in this room, becomes the only truth, as if also released from the dream, or rather the nightmare of its concealment.

‘Pearl?’

‘The thought haunts me … you can’t even begin to imagine.’

Pearl’s eyes widen as if extending their focus to those envisioned places, and I see them too. The boxes. The rooms. A mise en abyme stretching through time and space. Just collections, a part of me wants to say. But collections of what? Exotica? Memento mori? Proof? Each item labelled and attached with a string, like the evidence presented in court during all those police procedurals my father used to watch. Exhibit A. Exhibit B.

Pearl’s mouth goes slack, a sinew of saliva between false teeth. I go to tell her everything will be all right, that it’s over – tell me something untrue, Beth, tell me something untrue. But the room is imposing its own logic, one constructed not of arguments for and against, but of artefacts. Each one an accumulation, and also its own story.

Spearhead.

Grinding stone.

Knife.

The whole country a cold case.

‘Beth.’

I turn to see Neme pointing at a shelf. Boxes are stacked on it, some wooden like the one holding the bones, others cardboard. Written near the top of one of the boxes is the name Mathers. In my father’s angular handwriting.

And I see it, hear it. The TV channel’s music at the end of the news report. The red of the sky, like my father’s mood. The strain of his arms as he carried the box to the back of the ute. The smashed tail light. Driving away without tooting goodbye. Me standing there, unsure if I was somehow at fault for having found the box. And a sound, over by the desert. The cry of a bush stone-curlew.

Pearl begins to cough as if she might choke.

‘Take this away and bury it,’ she says, holding up the letter. ‘All of this!’

I shake my head, vigorously, my whole body tensing in protest.

Concealment – the second layer of wrongdoing.

Layer upon layer.

Such poor soil.

Neme grabs my arm, her skin warm against mine. She holds my gaze long enough for me to know she understands.

Letting go of me, she walks over to Pearl and eases the letter out of her grip.

‘Enough,’ she says.