ERICA WHO was holding onto the door – just his thumb and forefinger keeping them on track – hand closest often changing down to first – saw how his way of conversing, which had plenty more stops and starts and false trails than actual words, followed the contours of the meandering landscape. Having to negotiate the unevenness on a daily basis had infected his speech. And when coming out with a sentence of more than three words he closed his eyes, the eyelids fluttering slightly as he spoke. The last person she had seen with this visual stammer (if that is what it is) was a Methodist minister with ginger eyelashes who visited her mother in Adelaide, and so remained fixed in her memory seated in the lounge room with cup of tea balanced on a floral saucer in one hand, while taking a bite out of a piece of sponge cake.
As for Roger Antill, he just then wasn’t about to look across at this woman from Sydney. After getting her out of the house he began to ask himself if it had been a good idea. For one thing, he wondered whether she wanted to see land and more land, and hear about the never-ending tasks of a grazier. City people had their own interests, own areas of expertise. He didn’t want to bore or confuse her, even though boring another person could sometimes become interesting.
Roger Antill stopped. Looking down over the steering wheel he indicated with his chin the original property. Chimney the only thing left of a hut, ironbark posts as grey as newsprint, lines of fence wire here and there – signs barely decipherable, as if under water.
These were the traces left by his ancestors. Roger A. mentioned some of their solid English names, and how they died – headfirst over horses, diphtheria, as cannon fodder in Belgium and France. Daughters who went to Sydney, then onto London, came back only for visits, if at all.
Turning off the track, the homestead well behind them, he swerved over the bare ground which fell away to the left, where there was an overflowing creek, rattling and frothing, clotted with wet-black sticks, leaves, branches of trees. At one point he banged into a waterlogged burrow and swore. ‘Now what do you make of that?’ Still steering with one hand, ‘By myself I wouldn’t have said anything, not a word.’
How nature erases the previous day. After rain it returns changed, but basically the same.
Sheep stood about in the paddocks on either side. Many lambs, pale.
It was a curvaceous part of the earth, displaying the most natural declivities, casual harmony over gradual distances. Erica allowed herself to blend into gullies, where the same land allowed itself to rise into a nicotine-stained hill spotted with white-trunked trees.
‘Amazing what you see when you look at something long enough. We have hills here that look like a woman’s bum, and what-not. That gully over there. What does it look like?’ For some reason Erica felt respected, and she smiled. ‘The knees, elbows. I pointed to these…eye associations…pointed them out to my brother, Wesley, not long after he came back. He said to me, “Yes, all right. The trouble is you’re not the first in the world to notice this. It follows that as an idea it becomes reduced to the ordinary.”’
To lighten the conversation, Roger put on a stifled yawn.
‘After that,’ he said in an extra loud voice, ‘I thought it best to leave the fancy thinking to him.’
Erica was laughing.
‘I decided to stick to what I know – whatever that is. Opening gates! I can do that.’
He got out, opened it, drove through, closed it and got going again. At the next, Erica leapt out – ‘I’m going to do this’ – to give him a hand.
The irritating gate, it was being difficult. As she struggled she imagined his eyes wandering over her waist and hips. He had nowhere else to look. Joining her at the gate he was patient and jokey as he demonstrated the slight twist to ease the chain and washer over the bolt.
‘I never got to ask Wesley how it was philosophy got the better of him. There’s no other sign of it in the family.’
It was as if philosophy was a disease. Erica asked if his brother had worked on his papers all day.
For a while the remaining brother said nothing. It looked as if he had gone back to hardly-talking.
‘I suppose you could say Prodigal Son. There were aspects of that. I was…fifteen when our brother shot off to Sydney. I didn’t see much of him after that. We’d get postcards, snow on mountains, little houses, that sort of thing. He was in Europe, you know. With the death of our father, he telegrammed to say it was time to come back. Fair enough.’ As if his memory was attached to a well-oiled spring, his eyelids began fluttering. ‘The day he stepped off the train…I walked straight past him. I couldn’t fit a face to him. It also had something to do with the hair. It had turned white.’
Stopping and starting – fading too – these sentences drew Erica into listening carefully, which she did while noticing the many new shapes, objects and compositions appearing mid-distant and far, on all sides. There were long puddles and stretches of mud.
Here Erica pointed across the driver to a bend in the same overflowing creek, to where a ewe was stuck, just its head showing.
Before Roger stopped she was out onto the muddy ground. She rolled up her trousers, and waded out to the animal. The cold rush of water made her feel determined. It was a demonstration. All around her was brown swirling.
‘She’ll weigh a ton,’ he called out. ‘Leave her for me.’
Taking one more step – an animal was life – its bulging eyes – the weight of water shifted her foot off a slippery rock. She fell forward onto the net of wet branches trapping the ewe, and the animal sank under her weight. As Roger took her by the arm and pulled her out she saw the sheep floating away, rolling in the current.
‘I was all right. But thank you.’
Erica remained staring at the sheep.
‘It wasn’t deep. And I’m not entirely helpless.’ Also she could swim. She seemed to be talking to herself. ‘What are you laughing at? It looked as if an animal was in the midst of drowning.’
Now she’d lost sight of the sheep. And she wanted above all to keep seeing it. As long as it didn’t die under the immense, almost white sky. To one side, he was gazing in the opposite direction at one of the paddocks.
Suddenly she could have shoved or punched him.
‘You don’t care. Out here you become accustomed to the suffering of animals. It happens all around you – every single day. It’s part of the general situation. There might be an animal in pain, but you just get on with the job, don’t you? What does it matter to you? Each animal is merely a unit – I don’t want to say a cog – in the vast machine which is the producing farm.’
‘You sound like Wesley. Different voice, that’s all. All up here.’ He tapped his forehead.
In wet trousers and top Erica climbed into the ute, folded her arms. Once more a misunderstanding. And it had happened early. Breathing through her mouth, she asked herself why it typically had to be like this. A mismatch of opinion or the way of expressing it triggered in her a sharper observation of a person’s defects, which suddenly protruded the way rocks appear in a paddock. It was awkward now sitting next to him. She felt unsettled. What was that all about? If she brought her intellect into the situation she knew he would suffer; and so she hadn’t. Sooner or later every man presented difficulties; and those difficulties came forward and remained almost as physical shapes. The other person as obstacle! It was why she allowed herself to live alone. She felt unadorned.
Just the one hand resting on the wheel, Roger Antill appeared unconcerned. He didn’t have a clue what was going through her head. The men she came across were formidable for all the wrong reasons. An exception was Sophie’s father, the manufacturer. She was pleasantly hypnotised by the size of his head, and with it his experienced, deep-vowelled rotund way of talking. Her life was more placid in Sydney. She was holding onto the door again as they slowly drove downstream to where the creek widened. Seated beside her this man consisted of a large number of gaps. Everything he did or said was unsatisfactory to Erica, even when they saw ahead a sodden sheep struggle out of the shallows, and he said nothing.
By the time they returned to the homestead her clothes had dried.
From the veranda Sophie stood up from the planter’s chair and came forward.
‘Where have you been? Why didn’t you let me know? You know I would want to go. I don’t understand you.’
As Roger sauntered off, Sophie’s confusion overflowed into Erica.
‘Why did you do this?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Following her into the house, Sophie whispered, ‘What’s happened here?’
Now it was Sophie’s turn to examine her friend’s confusion and be saddened by it; or so it seemed.
‘Please stop it. We’ve been looking over the property, that’s all, the extent of it, the scenery. We saw sheep and trees.’
‘Yes. And?’
Erica couldn’t explain it either.
‘The creek’s turned into a torrent. Apparently it was a fox in the distance, running at an angle. Overall it was interesting.’
‘You’re not saying anything. Try me again.’
To get a result, Sophie occasionally used a small amount of dynamite.
For when Erica spoke it was as if she wasn’t interested in herself. She barely said ‘I’. Instead, Erica’s absorption in thought as a subject made her appear impersonal – which in turn was beginning to concern her. Already she was having doubts about her reaction to Roger Antill. She didn’t know what had got into her. If it had registered with him at all he’d see she was a stony, opinionated woman who flew off the handle – and she wasn’t like that, not really.
The smaller woolshed of unpainted corrugated iron, patched with lighter grey sheets, had a slight tilt and two blank windows (no curtains). A woman could never fail to be amazed at how close it was to the house. Imagine: during shearing and crutching all those sheep crowding the yards, as more and more arrived, the dogs running around in semi-circles, and the rich collective smell of sheep, the clouds of dust kicked up, and the extra flies – not to mention the constant foul language of men knee-deep in sheep that the women in the house could not block from their ears. For this reason, and as the property grew in size and the flocks multiplied, the shed in the mid nineteen thirties was replaced by a much larger one, positioned at a good distance from the house.
Machinery and buildings no longer used on sheep stations are left where they are. Over the seasons they change colour and subside, attracting rust, weeds and patient shadow, as they return to the earth, though not entirely.
On the afternoon Wesley returned in his lightweight suit, and after washing his face and hands he went over to the small woolshed with Roger and Lindsey in tow, and pulled open the door. They stepped inside. Lines of silver light from the loose-fitting sheets of corrugated iron, and the various nail holes piercing the walls, intersected the brown stillness, silent from its previous activity, and illuminated the wool table like an altar. Along one side the wooden pens were in shadow.
‘Almost, but not quite cathedral,’ Wesley reportedly said, which had Roger and Lindsey scratching their heads. Evidently, Wesley still had one foot back in the old world. If it was all right by them, he’d like to take over the shed as his place of work.