From the cemetery on Vinegar Hill you can see fifty miles on a clear day—past the wharf and sheds and stockyard at the bottom of the hill out over the channel to the first of the islands in the chain and beyond them to the mainland hills, all pale and smoky in the distance.
After it was finally over I went across to where the bearers were standing together by a clump of she-oaks, all solemn and ruddy and uncomfortable in their blue suits, and shook hands with them. They had all been mates of Chris’s, had gone to school with him, boozed with him, played football with him. Mannie Boone was there, the one whose sister Claire we thought Chris was going to marry at one time. I wasn’t sorry when it blew over, because Mannie is as thick as two planks, and Claire’s not much brighter.
Away near the fence there was a little group of boongs, three or four of them. When I looked closer I could see that one of them was the Marsden girl, and I thought, shit, she’s got a cheek…
Then I saw that she was crying, and hanging on to one of the others.
They turned away then, and were off out the gate and down the track before I got back to the old man.
‘You ready to go?’ I said.
You never know these days if he hears you or not. He just looked at me, lifted his chin a bit and turned away, headed for the car, leaning on his stick. Elaine took my arm, and we followed him. Everyone else hung back until we passed.
The old man sat in the back on his own. He used to like to sit up front with Chris when Chris was driving.
We rattled down the track to the road and turned north, away from the harbour. The day was cold and clear and bright as only mid-winter can be on the island. The steering of the old Falcon chattered on the corrugations, and I made a mental note to check the mounts on the steering box.
‘That was good of them,’ said Elaine.
‘Who?’
‘Hawthorn—you know, sending the wreath.’
I just grunted. Big city football clubs and wreaths and telegrams of condolence. The truth is that Chris thought they were a bunch of shits, all of them.
I glanced over my shoulder at the old man, but he was just sitting there straight as a ruler, staring in front of him.
I drove in through the gate at Emerald and parked by the front door, let Elaine out. She tried to help the old man, but he brushed her off. He eats the food she cooks, wears the clothes she washes, lives in the house she cleans, but he barely looks at her. He’s never forgiven her for not being able to have kids.
I went in and took off my suit and got into my working clobber. Island funerals are like that, there’s no wake, no piss-up, just the church and the cemetery, and then home to do the milking or dag the sheep or whatever. When I came out the old man was sitting there on the verandah, his face as hard and expressionless as a hatchet.
‘You want a cup of tea, dad?’
He took no notice, so I went off and left him, I thought that by the morning he’d be right, and back to work. He’s only seventy-three and spry enough, and hard as an old boot. Always has been. I think he was born tough. When he was only eleven or twelve his family took up five hundred acres, rough acres, in outback New South Wales, and he and my grandfather ringbarked and cleared the lot. They worked from daylight to dusk; and then by moonlight, and if there was no moonlight they lit bonfires to see by. And once when my grandfather gashed his leg with his axe he just walked back to the shanty, stitched it up with black cotton, gave it a dab of Stockholm tar, and went back to work. Anything less than that sort of behaviour the old man thinks is sissy.
I was wrong about him coming back to work, though. For a long time after the funeral he just sat there on the verandah, hour after hour, day after day, staring out at our six hundred acres of clover, at the straggle of sheep, the stunted tea-tree scrub that stretches away to the coast. He did nothing, just sat there, his bony face pointed westward as if he were waiting for something. But he didn’t have much to wait for now. All the spark was gone from him, all the life, and in those months he seemed to turn dry and thin and bone-brittle.
It’s strange—I found an old photograph the other day, taken at the island show five or six years back. Chris and the old man and me, standing just outside the cattle pavilion. Things were going well that year, I remember, the clover knee-high, the sheep shearing seven kilos, money in the bank, and Chris ready for the big time in Melbourne. And the three of us, all dressed up in our good clothes, alike as three peas in a pod. Except for the difference in ages. And except for that subtle thing that set Chris apart from the old man and me. Oh, you’d never mistake him for anyone but a Barton, one of old Black Jack’s brood, but where in me and the old man it’s a matter of hard lines and angles and bony noses, in Chris it was different somehow, softer, gentler, with little curves and laughter lines. A sort of innocence to him. Everyone loved him, as far back as I can remember. Not too many loved the old man. Or me, for that matter.
In the first few weeks after the funeral the old man grew into his new habits, and every morning he’d go out after breakfast and sit in the old green armchair on the verandah, locked deep in his deafness and his misery. For a while I tried to jolly him out of it. God knows I didn’t feel too jolly, none of us did, what with Chris gone, his absence like a black hole in the day. Still, I tried. But he didn’t seem to hear me at all, and most of the time he just looked through me.
The truth is that for him Chris had been the future. Looking back I can see that it all started to change when he found out that Elaine and I weren’t going to have any kids, ever. His interest turned slowly to Chris, focused on him, and we felt ourselves, Elaine and me, slowly fading into the background like a pair of ghosts…
The thing about Chris’s death that so stunned us, I think, was its appalling triteness, the bloody silliness of it. He ran out of cigarettes one night, and took the old ute to drive into town and get some. It was late, and we never thought a thing about it.
When I got up next morning I went to his room to wake him, the way I always did, and he wasn’t there, his bed wasn’t slept in. Something was badly wrong, and I knew it straight away. I didn’t say a word to anyone, just slipped out and drove off down the road, looking for him.
I didn’t have far to go. A mile down the road, he’d managed somehow to hit a culvert and up-end the ute into a creek. He was still there, had been all night, crushed and bloody and still, the cold dark water rippling over him through the broken windscreen.
God knows how it had happened—a clear night, a straight road, him as sober as a judge. I don’t know, too fast maybe, a wallaby on the track, a sudden distraction…
First I had to get him out, and that took a while. And then I had to go back and tell the old man. And that part of it is something that I just don’t want to think about…
It was months after the funeral that I heard about the baby. Coming up to shearing, and we were getting the gear cleaned up and greased, and the boongs were yakking together instead of working and I was just going to shut them up when something made me prick up my ears.
‘What did you say? About the Marsden girl?’
Herbie Alberts, who is some sort of cousin of hers—they’re all bloody cousins of some sort—just looked sly, and half-grinned, and dropped his eyes.
‘She’s up the duff, Dick,’ said Trevor Murphett. ‘In the puddin’ club…’
‘Better than being in the bludgers’ club, like you two,’ I said, just to shut them off. I didn’t really want to have to think too much about it, to tell the truth. They just grinned at each other and went back to work.
But I told Elaine that night while we were getting ready for bed. She was in front of the mirror, doing those things that women do in front of mirrors, cream all over her face. She was still all of a sudden. ‘Do you think it is?’
‘Christ knows,’ I said.
She was silent then for a minute. She knew that Chris had been going about with the girl. She always gets a bit odd about babies, not being able to have any herself.
After a bit she went back to work on her face. Then: ‘Do you think he was…you know?’
‘Rooting her? Christ knows.’
But I knew he was, because he’d told me—come in late one night half-pissed, and tried to tell me all about her. Well, he was only twenty-three, and there isn’t much on the island for them to do Saturday nights at that age except get pissed, buy a couple of bottles of plonk and drive down the island looking for a bit of black velvet. I know, I’ve done it myself at that age. And if a girl has a baby, generally she doesn’t have a clue who the father is and even to think of a paternity suit would be a joke.
‘She’s a bright girl,’ said Elaine.
‘Mmm.’
‘I taught her in Grade 4.’
‘Ah.’ Elaine taught half the bloody island in Grade 4.
We got into bed and I turned out the light.
‘Put your arm round me,’ she said after a while, and I did.
‘Did you ever do that sort of thing? You know, with the black girls?’
‘Not me,’ I said. ‘The old man kept me too busy. Besides, I’ve never fancied it, you know, the black stuff…’ I was glad the light was out and she couldn’t see my face.
‘She’s not really black, only about a quartercaste,’ she said. ‘And she’s very pretty…’
‘That a fact?’
It was time to take my arm away and turn over and go to sleep. But tonight was different somehow, and so I didn’t move. We just lay there, warm and close. And there was that old pain between us, and I knew that she was thinking about babies again, and kids about the place and Christmas trees and all that, so I just kept my arm round her and we didn’t move for a long time.
He never had much time for the boongs, the old man. Coming from the kind of country he did, I suppose it’s no wonder. And I suppose it would be a miracle if some of his feeling hadn’t rubbed off on me. The thing about them is they’re not steady, and steady is what farming’s all about.
And to give the old man his due, if he doesn’t think much of the boongs, he doesn’t think much of anyone else, either, outside the family and a few of the locals who are as hard as he is.
Because he never had it easy, coming here late as a soldier-settler, landing with his few belongings, half-frozen from the trip in the cargo hold of a Bristol freighter, no money and a wife who didn’t like farming, couldn’t stand the island, the people, the wind, the dullness, the sameness of the life. She was a city girl and was back in the big smoke within a year. So he was left with not much, and the locals gave him the business straight off. Within the first week on the property they were trying him out to see if he’d let them walk over him. Bennet Kelly, one of the old settlers, an old island family, our next-door neighbour, had his cows grazing on Emerald grass within a fortnight, a fence down, a gate open. All this was before I was born, but it’s part of the legend now how old Black Jack started on the island.
He asked Kelly politely to take his cows out. He did, but they were back in a couple of days—a different fence, a different gate. This time the old man was less polite. The cows went again, and were back the next week. The old man took out the old 303 with a couple of clips and shot ten of them, left them lie. No more free grazing, and they all knew that they weren’t going to walk over him.
That was a couple of years before he got married again. Realised that he wasn’t going to make it on his own, so he took the weekly flight to the mainland. In Melbourne, he walked down to Flinders Street and fronted a copper on the corner, said to him, I’ve come to Melbourne to find a wife—you got any clues? And the copper, taking him seriously—everyone did, sooner or later—said, Well, there’s a place about two blocks along, just past the pub and up the stairs, they do that sort of thing…
So the old man trundled along, up the stairs, into this bureau, and told them about his problem. Within a day they had him suited with a big strong ex-Women’s Army girl who came from a Gippsland dairy farm. They were married in a week and back at work the day after. And oddly enough it worked out, the happiest marriage you’d ever see. But they weren’t young, and he was pushing forty and she wasn’t much younger, and she had a hard time when I was born. Ten years later having Chris killed her. The light seemed to go out of the old man then. Always hard, a hard man; but up to then he’d laughed a bit, just at home between the three of us.
No one said anything to the old man about the girl being in the club. You would have had to shout in his ear, anyway, and no one was about to do that. In fact it was a pretty quiet place, the old house, in those days, we got into the habit of eating our meals in silence, a thing we’d never done before, because meals were the times when you planned work, had a joke, caught up on things. Just silence now, and the chink of crockery. The old man would usually finish first and push back his chair, go out on the verandah, or if it was tea-time, into his room.
‘What are we going to do about him?’ I said to Elaine one night when Chris was a month gone. ‘He’ll just bloody fade away like this…’
She just shook her head.
The truth is that we missed Chris so badly—the bent nose, the incongruous violet-blue eyes, that bloody smile—that we just couldn’t seem to make any impression on the future at all.
And I’ll bet we weren’t the only ones that were missing him. There would be a sad lassie or two on the island. More than one or two. The truth is that I think Chris had screwed nearly every woman of screwable age on the entire island. They just seemed to melt when he smiled at them, he was so bloody lovely. Strange thing to say about a bloke, but he was. And gentle. That’s why he came back from the smoke after a single season in the VFL. I asked him about it, of course, why he came back, and he just said: They’re too bloody serious about it, mate, they’re just a lot of professional butchers. He didn’t want that, he wanted to play a game with his mates and get pissed with them afterwards and chase a few girls. It just wasn’t important enough to him.
He was a lovely boy, Chris, inside and out. And now he was gone, and the old man was sitting there every day on the verandah looking out at nothing, waiting to die.
‘She’s got a caravan down at the wharf,’ said Elaine one day when I came in for a cup of tea in the afternoon. Warm day, and the kitchen hot from the big AGA, fresh bread smells, scones and home-made jam, and it would have been all right except for the old man still sitting out there, silent, motionless, staring across the flats. Even when you couldn’t see him, you felt him there.
‘Who has?’
‘The girl—Lynne, you know.’
‘Oh.’
‘On her own, Mrs Pearn said.’
Usually they’re not on their own when they move into caravans.
I didn’t say anymore, but the next time I was down that way I drove past the old Harbour Trust office that hasn’t been used in ten years, and there behind it, in the lee of one of the wharf sheds, was this little green plywood caravan. And that was all I saw. No sign of activity, no movement. Just the van.
But somehow it reminded me of the old man on the verandah—I couldn’t see her, but I could sense her there. Sense life behind the tatty panels, the dusty panes. Knew that she was there, that she was going to have her baby there, away from the dirt and rubbish of the abo settlement. And from then on I always seemed to be conscious of those two, the old man and the girl, waiting in their own separate silences, just waiting…
At the tag-end of summer I had a blue with one of the local hoons. I’d been in to town to watch the cricket, a break from the place and from the old man, and after the match I went up to the pub with some of the blokes for a drink. We were standing at the long bar, and someone was grizzling about the bowling, and how they missed Chris’s legbreaks, and then one of the yobboes said something about a few wives missing him too, and I hit him harder than I’d intended—it was all right for me to think it, but not for him to say it—and I broke his nose. And that reminded me even more of Chris, and of how I’d tried to set his broken nose after the school match when he broke it, and how I mucked it up and it set crooked, and how he would never do anything about it, get it reset. So I drove too fast on the way home and nearly lost the car on the bend at the end of the long straight, and then had a puncture a mile from home and found that the spare was flat…
That was how I learned that the baby had arrived.
The first car past was a rusty old FC with four young boongs in it, and before they dropped me at the gate one of them told me, nudging his mate, that the Marsden girl had had her baby.
‘Dropped her kid,’ he said…
‘Yeah,’ said another, ‘and a light-skinned little bugger too…’
Then the driver said, straightfaced: ‘How’s the old man taking it? About Chris?’
And I couldn’t do anything, because they’d given me a lift.
So when I got out at the gate I was in a mood. But when I walked round the corner of the house, there he was, still sitting there, staring out across the patch of she-oak and sand and native heath at the sunset. And I saw him before he saw me, and there was a terrible emptiness in his face, a look of enormous sadness and loss, and he seemed suddenly so old and tired and beaten that it nearly stopped me dead in my tracks. Then he saw me, and his face set into the old lines again, hard and bitter and proud. I wanted to go up and touch him, just put a hand on his shoulder or something. But I didn’t, because we’d never been that way.
So instead I went inside and made myself a cup of tea, then got out the account books and started going over them.
Elaine knew, of course, about the baby.
‘It’s a boy,’ she said that night, after the old man had gone to bed.
‘What is?’
‘Lynne’s baby.’
‘Oh, that…’
There was an awkward silence while she stacked the dishes.
Then: ‘Are you going to go down and see her, or anything?’
‘Why should I? None of our business.’
‘The baby’s got blue eyes, they say…’
‘All babies have blue eyes when they’re born.’ And so they have.
She didn’t say anymore, and I felt bad about what I’d said. Because really, under it all, that was what I wanted to do, go down and see her, do something, say something. Because I hated to think that Chris’s kid—if it was his—might end up crawling round in some abo camp…
But I couldn’t bring myself to do anything. Because I just didn’t know what to say, how to act, how to ask her…
So I just grumped and growled and refused to talk about it.
It must have been six weeks later, maybe a couple of months, because the autumn winds had started, sweeping in across the Southern Ocean, lashing the tea-trees into wild spasms, laying the clover flat, drifting mist over the granite tops. After a week’s blow the wind finally eased, and the clouds got smaller and smaller as they wound their way across the island, and the sun was bright again, and warm, and there was only a hint of frost in the evenings.
I’d come in for morning tea, and as I sat down I heard the old man coming into the house from the verandah, going off down the passage to his room. I frowned a bit, because there was something odd about the sound of his steps. Kind of purposeful, a marching sort of feel to them after all the months of just dragging along. But it went quiet, and I sat there sipping my tea and wondering if we could afford a new tractor this year, and whether the compressor really needed a new set of head gaskets before winter. And the next thing I knew the kitchen door swung open and the old man was standing there, looking at me, dressed in his best blue suit, collar and tie and all, his grey Akubra with the quail feather, and a mean hard look in his eye…
‘Get the car out,’ he said.
When he has that look to him, that tone in his voice, well, you jump. So I jumped. I went out, checked the oil and water, drove round to the front and parked. He was standing there waiting, rubbing his toecaps on the back of his calves to give them a bit of a shine, face set as hard as concrete.
He climbed in beside me.
‘Get going,’ he said, staring straight ahead, hands resting on the crook of his stick.
‘Where to?’
‘Down the wharf.’
Just like that. Deaf as a post, hadn’t had a visitor in months, hadn’t heard a word from us, but he knew all about it. That’s the thing about the old man, what makes us feel the way we do about him—he always seems to know every bloody thing…
I was half tempted to drive him onto the wharf and park in front of the super shed, just to see what he’d say. But the truth is I wasn’t game. So I drove very carefully and sedately up the road to the old office where the green caravan stood, and rolled to a nice neat stop, just like a bloody chauffeur. But he didn’t seem to notice, just opened the door and got out, stood there a minute looking round him like a bloody general on parade.
It looked different, not what I remembered or expected. She’d tidied up the rubbish, and made a little path to the van’s door and bordered it with white stones. And there were a couple of red geraniums planted in paint tins beside the door, and neat white curtains at the windows. Someone had levelled the van up, set it on blocks, and there was a line full of nappies stretched between two she-oaks up the back.
I saw him straighten his back a little, then off he marched up the path to the door. Rapped smartly a couple of times, stood back waiting.
A slight tremor to the van as someone moved inside, shifted the weight a little, light footsteps. The door swung back, and she was standing there, pretty as a picture, white blouse and tight jeans showing off her figure, all slim and clean and neat. High cheekbones, big intelligent eyes, dark wavy hair cut short. Her mouth went a bit thin at the sight of the old man.
‘Where’s the baby?’ he said, before she could open her mouth. I think that’s the only way he knows how to go about things. And he moved forward up the steps, crowding her back.
She made the best of it, backed off and smiled a tight furious smile, made a little gesture with one hand, like a hostess, you know, do come in Mr Barton, you’re a bloody rude pig, but come in anyway…
I followed him a bit sheepishly, and she didn’t even look at me.
The old man was standing by then over the old wicker bassinet at the end of the van. It seemed very crowded with all of us in there. But it was clean, clean as a hound’s tooth, neat as a pin. Kettle on the little kero stove, more nappies soaking in a bucket of disinfectant, a little bowl of flowers on the tiny table. She had her head up very high, chin pointed at the old man as he looked around.
Still no one said anything. A bit belatedly the old man took his hat off, kind of bobbed at her once, then leaned down over the bassinet.
I edged up quietly so that I could see over his shoulder. The baby was fast asleep on its back, all pink and plump and shapeless, the way all babies look. Oh, there was a faint dark blush to the skin, all right. But not black, not black by a long way. Then the baby seemed to sense something, maybe the old man’s shadow over him, and he opened his eyes, and they were bright soft blue, almost violet, and I got this shivery feeling, and I wanted to move, to do something, but I didn’t know what. And I looked very carefully at the baby’s face, but the truth is I couldn’t really tell if there was a likeness there at all, not with the baby so young and maybe the eyes not their final colour yet…
The old man looked at the baby steadily for what seemed like a long time, and the baby stared back at him. And then the old man turned his head, looked at the girl a moment, very hard and intent, but not unfriendly. Then he sort of relaxed, and there was almost a little smile on his face. And he leaned over, and with the tip of his finger he pressed the baby’s nose to one side, and in a flash I saw that it was Chris there, his face, his eyes, his broken nose, everything…
And the old man straightened up and turned to the girl again.
‘He’s one of ours,’ he said. ‘Bring him home.’
If you didn’t know him well you’d never pick the softness in his voice then, a matter of tone too slight for strangers, and the girl bridled, started to say something. But he leaned forward and touched her lightly on the shoulder. I couldn’t see his face, but the girl could, and there must have been something in it, because she started to melt a little, her eyes got very soft and moist, and all the starch went out of her suddenly. And he put his arm round her shoulders and bent down and kissed her lightly on the cheek.
And then I saw his cold grey-blue eye on me over her shoulder.
‘Help her pack,’ he said.
So I did.
On the way back up to Emerald she sat in the back with the bassinet, the old man beside me in the front seat. She said nothing, just kept her hand on the basket. The old man said nothing either, just sat there staring straight ahead. But occasionally I could see out of the corner of my eye that his lips twitched a little. And that’s high good humour for the old man, so I relaxed a bit, and even whistled a bar or two of ‘The Stone Outside Dan Murphy’s Door’, which I know he hates; and he never turned a hair. And as we swung in over the grid it seemed more like a homecoming than it had for a long time.
Well, it wasn’t smooth sailing, especially not at first. The two women were a bit cool to each other until they sorted out the running of the house and the looking-after of the baby; and both Lynne and the old man have got sharp tempers and sudden tongues and now and then they let fly at each other; and sometimes Lynne’s relatives came to call and sat in the kitchen with her, all fat and black and doggy, and the old man would go out grinding his teeth; and sometimes I would see that look in the girl’s eyes, a sudden panic as she realised how alone she was, how cut off from everything that’d been her life before…
But after a while it seemed to calm down. Still, there was a sort of uncertainty in the air, as if none of us was quite sure of our part in the old man’s scheme of things.
And then, a month after we brought the baby home, we had visitors. A nice enough couple who owned a property at the other end of the island who came down to look at some ewes. They were well-dressed, middle-aged, old settlers, and their kids had all gone to grammar school. And when they came inside the old man stood there in the living room with his hand on Lynne’s shoulder, and he said to them, ‘I’d like you to meet my daughter-in-law.’
And—to their credit—they said all the right things and their smiles were just casual enough, their handshakes just friendly enough; and the old man smiled at them like an ancient crocodile, and God knows what he would have done to them if they’d wavered…
But they didn’t. And I knew then that somehow things were going to turn out all right.