SPOT FIRES TRACKED ROADS LEAPING towards ridgetop estates with tongues of flame pacing Major General Wayne Hovell’s slowly moving car from kilometres away. Helicopters thudded in smoke, taking turns dropping water into crazed balls of heat and banking steeply off. At an arranged rendezvous an escort tanker appeared from a side road leading the car on, emergency lights flashing in the daylight dark. Three hundred metres altitude up from the railway line the Friendly House, restored to its greatness by Fred Donovan, burned to the ground.
Wearing a maroon beret tugged low on a weathered forehead, Wayne Hovell followed the tanker with the same quick attention he gave to everything in his late age, a bit careful on steep corners with smoke stinging his eyes but otherwise doing all right. At the last road barrier he unfolded himself from the Subaru like an intelligently designed but slightly rusted all-purpose pocketknife, and looked around for a known face.
They brought Damon Pattison forward, a cop at each elbow steering him up from a gully. Ever since Pattison’s release after serving eight years of a twelve-year sentence, Hovell was the one called when the poor bugger’s name appeared in police files cross-referenced to serial pests. If it hadn’t been for a contact in the force there were three, maybe four occasions when Pattison’s refusal to explain himself would have landed him in court for break and enter or arson – crimes inspired by the basic needs of food and warmth, it might be argued, but in Pattison’s case no margin for excuses allowed as a lifer on early release.
An odd case, Pattison, having pleaded homicide when manslaughter was more the act he’d bungled when Claude Bonney was shot dead, a poor joke gone wrong – everyone seeing it, even the afternoon editors – all except the judge who underwrote Pattison’s self-condemnation and gave him twelve years. After his time in the slammer he’d emerged a stubborn survivor with terminal unwillingness to explain himself, like a rock or a tree, just being in the world and resisting by nature. Bonney’s widow and family wanted nothing to do with him, but he was still in character as an agent of fate and was just as bent on making amends as he’d been former bent. Just give him his chance.
After leaving the army Wayne Hovell had spent the next twenty years in public service – with the UN in Africa and then with natural disaster and firefighting coordination teams at home and interstate. He was called to Sydney from beach holidays almost every January and February as New South Wales either flash-flooded or burned. Supporting campaigns for the homeless, the vagrant, the outcast, the friendless and destitute without any fanfare, at least, that he generated himself, was Wayne Hovell’s way. A few times each year he spoke from the pulpit of St Stephen’s Uniting Church in Macquarie Street, giving the lunchtime sermon. Whatever the text, his theme came back to courage in action, how there was no giving without forsaking. ‘Renounce the Hidden’, 2 Corinthians 4:2. It was something easier to encourage in others than to apply to himself. He was one of those finished products of a respected value system, the best a society could offer back to itself. What was his lack, then, his hidden? It was time at the age of eighty-three to bring it out.
Come Anzac Day Hovell marched with a breastful of ribbon at the head of a limping column. Defence planners and those he’d commanded sought him for guidance on the principle that anyone who’d commanded a platoon and a division had something worth saying on anything. Every three months meetings of the Lady Margaret Hovell Trust in an office high above Martin Place called for his judgement as money was portioned to community organisations fallen between government cutbacks and financial oblivion. A particular interest was prisoner rehabilitation but the net spread wider. On committee days Hovell quizzed investment advisers and chided his sons, in their fifties, about the contents of their portfolios and the degree of ethical consideration going into their share parcels – bluntly, never enough.
A late-flowering interest was art. Hovell attended painting appreciation classes encouraged by Tabitha, his wife, and developed that dimension of being, the privately intuitive, he’d underplayed in the name of the service-collective.
Since beginning prison visits a few years back Hovell thought that if the distorted energy Damon Pattison generated could be put to use the world might be a better place. This was after the example of Hovell himself, but so blindingly obviously so that he was for long years unaware of its origins in an episode of schoolboy bullying and the complex fractured jaw that jammed on him, sometimes hourly. That moment, sixty-eight years ago, awaited an act of redress for which Hovell’s distinguished military career had been merely a diversion. It was no coincidence that Hovell’s old quadrangle bully, Colts, had played a role in Pattison’s teenage years but hardly decisive. When Pattison spoke of Colts, Hovell had the impulse to better Colts even yet: to break what was broken. It was a vengeful example of the shamefully hidden. But there you were.
Pattison’s genius for trouble was astonishing in Hovell’s view. Turn it around, face it the other way, what then? At the time the two met, soldier and inmate, Hovell was guest-lecturing at Staff College where he’d developed a few ideas crossing over from the field of battle into managing peace accords. He’d found his ultimate conflict resolution collaborator in the person of Normie Powell looking at competing tendencies in natural communities. Public Health: what a great category heading that was, symbolical of more than sewerage works and anti-malarial fog machines. It allowed viral opposites to join in the name of unforeseen solutions. There was no point kidding yourself dealing with rabbits when your subject was snakes, Normie liked saying. Then he illustrated the sadness factor by dropping off the map when best loved, most appreciated.
‘I’ve got a question for you, Damon,’ said Hovell.
‘What’s new?’ grunted his passenger.
‘How’d you get into this particular scrape?’
Pattison held off answering while they drove through crossroads where people stood at their gates in weird yellow light, gazing north at smoke climbing into the stratosphere. The long ridge was once farmland, with the Friendly House used as a hayshed when it fell into ruin.
‘I was up the road, on the housing estate, helping a bloke who does garages. You get the slab in first, then Mike rolls up. You hold one end of a rod while Mike bolts the other. You look for the missing packet of screws – they come in plastic bags with numbers. I was up at the shops getting smokes, standing outside watching the Friendly House burn.’
‘That’s all, Damon, just watching?’
‘I dropped a match.’
‘Intelligent,’ Hovell sighed, unable to help himself.
‘A dead one,’ Pattison said.
Hovell pictured Pattison, the self-appointed deus ex machina catching the eye of a watchful emergency worker or cop, flame feathering his fingertips – Pattison going to the edge of self-destruction on the wildest day of the year, extinguishing the provocation almost too late, only when it was interesting to do so by scraping backwards with a boot heel, perhaps.
‘You think I did it. Why’d I go and do a thing like that? Stuff a few leaves up their drainpipe, break a window, let the sparks fly in on all them beautiful Veronica Buckler originals gone up in smoke.’
There’d been a Buckler Retrospective in the restored Friendly House. It had opened a month before the fires.
‘I know one that’s safe,’ said Hovell. He swallowed, picturing the gawky truth of his appearance. ‘It’s called The Chook.’
Tabitha had bubble-wrapped The Chook, sending it off to the National Portrait Gallery, an exhibition on loan from various sources (‘Those Who Made Us’).
‘That makes two,’ said Pattison, surprising Hovell with his information. ‘Two that’s safe.’
Being wise to never pushing, Hovell said nothing but waited to be told. He sensed a change in Pattison equivalent to something Hovell often hoped for, it came about in men, God alone knew how.
They turned off the main road heading south. Pattison rolled down the window, inhaling thinning smoke. ‘Next stop Isabel Junction,’ he said.
Last time from the St Stephen’s pulpit Hovell looked into the scattered congregation and saw Pattison trying not to draw attention to himself by sitting in the back pew. Grizzled head bent, grubby hands steepled and covering his eyes like a small, vulnerable yet hopeful child’s bedtime petition. I can help you, decided Hovell. You shall allow it.
Now it felt like the other way around as Pattison angled in his seat, staring at Hovell from the side. He’d seen Hovell palming tablets into his mouth, swigging on water. Via peripheral vision Hovell looked back at the mat of orange whiskers and the glint of saliva on cracked lips – leave to the imagination the sullen weight of Pattison’s reproachful, mudfish eyes.
‘You’re skinnier than you were, John Wayne.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You’re sick, you’re crook – and you still pester me.’
This was a kind of praise.
‘Everyone’s on medication at my age, Damon. It’s a given.’
‘I’ve got a question.’
‘That makes a change,’ said the old man.
‘You’ll say yes?’
Hovell adjusted his grip on the wheel.
‘I mean you’ll have to,’ said Pattison, betraying uncertainty for once.
‘Is it about me?’ Hovell asked.
‘You’re so bloody good, what’s your problem.’
‘Spit it out, then.’
‘This car’s got a roof rack,’ he reached a hand up, feeling the fittings.
‘Surprise me with what you mean,’ said Hovell.
‘It’s that painting – Goats,’ said Pattison. ‘I was a complete arsehole, don’t ask me why, and Colts bought our house for us. Saved my mum’s life. Used his last dollar and sold Goats to a bastard of a man, Ted Merrington, who let his son Harald serve time for him in Goulburn Gaol.’
‘The goat meant tragedy in ancient Greece,’ said Hovell. ‘In Ireland a goat king was crowned every year. When I was there I heard of a goat being caught in Ulster and stopped from being taken south.’
‘I want to do something for him,’ said Pattison. ‘For Kingsley Colts.’
This answered a prayer for Pattison’s wellbeing that Hovell had made, but only in a certain direction. ‘Lord,’ he said to himself, ‘does it have to be Colts?’
They drove along humpbacked gravel roads where the air thinned with increasing altitude and tussock grasses bloomed insect hordes in the late-afternoon light. Pattison directed the way while Hovell’s thoughts bore down on the next few days of his life. He could do without this diversion. A decision needed to be made on the purchasing policy of the small but useful lending library in a backroom of the old goldmining township where he and Tabitha raised Belted Galloways and kept bees. A fishing holiday in Alaska involving float plane connections needed finalising – it would be his last. Visits to grandchildren and great-grandchildren were called for – he’d made those a strong habit this year. The kids loved him for the presents he gave and for the interest he showed in whatever was happening in their lives, from a problem in recorder class with the youngest to an act of drug-using self-destructiveness with an older one. Hovell withheld judgement and was loved with devotion that was to remain a gift in the lives of those kids for a good long time. Light shone through his pink blood-vesselled cheeks like a torch held under a blanket recalling the deepest and most secure childhood moments.
Colts wasn’t good in the mornings but by dusk he was all right, tootling along with his fox terrier, Pat, angling the square blocks of the Junction on a favourite walk, banging up to the Five Alls to surprise himself with a nip.
The bar crowd was mostly kids new out of school, tattooed, singleted, bottle-blonded boys and girls, some of them calling Colts Kings or Old Kings to show they were in the know about a legendary old fart. ‘Good on ya, Kings, have one on us . . .’ Buying Colts a snort was like throwing a dog a bone, no trouble. Girls said Pat was so sweet they could eat her alive as they nuzzled her wet nose.
Colts went through the Five Alls and came out the other side pleasantly cheery, only reeking a little of brandy fumes. Last week, finding him stinking-trousered in Pioneers Park under a photinia bush, Randolph had nudged Colts with the tip of his walking stick when he would rather have struck him.
Down the main street greeting strangers with a blurred smile and peering through the smudged glass of the bakery, Colts spotted, between the community notices taped to the window, a man around his own age buying pies.
Didn’t like what he saw – a stirring of resentment as he picked the beret-wearer as the superior sort of traveller favouring the Isabel now, history-hopping as they expressed it and feeding from a crushed paper bag. A high court judge or retired governor with that casually cultivated tweedy look, so condescending to failure of the self-willed sort.
From a car Colts was watched in turn.
‘There he goes,’ said Pattison, hunching down in the passenger seat of the Subaru.
Then it was Hovell’s turn, with a surge of revulsion towards a man he thoroughly knew, as part of his bite, swallow and lifelong mechanism of expression: Colts. The sight of that flushed skeleton shook him, that doddery shadow enacting a ghost wish: He’s kneeling as I come up behind him with the offer of a tyre lever, and then, as he knows me, I bring the bar down.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Hovell, dumping the baked goods in Pattison’s lap.
Just out of town Hovell apologised and stopped the car, getting the door open even before it rolled to a halt. There to his burning-throated humiliation he barfed his guts out into a bush, wiping his mouth and looking around guardedly, blaming his oncologist for prescribing a stronger dose of cisplatinum.
Recovered, pounding the steering wheel metronomically, a bit overdone, Hovell found he was able to function despite feeling harrowed and drained. You felt one way in military parlance, you fulfilled orders in another. You soldiered on. ‘The godhead in us wrings our nobler deeds from our reluctant selves.’ That was his code.
Now in a dark pit of himself Colts lay at the bottom, fit to be flayed. Never far from Hovell’s thoughts was the parable of the good Samaritan as a yardstick of action, helping decide when to reach a hand for the bloodied figure huddled beaten and lost, to whom Colts, Hovell cautioned his admiring conscience, bore no resemblance at all.
Pattison’s idea was to buy back Goats and give it to Colts, Hovell to supply the money.
‘It’s worth a fortune,’ said Hovell.
‘Depends who you are,’ said Pattison, ‘as to what a fortune is.’
Pattison looked at him then turned away. A profound, probing silence travelled between them. Hovell knew Pattison would never again touch firearms or express an enraged, extreme opinion likely to ignite any sort of fatal confrontation, the moral equivalent of arms. He was bound, tied and held to a life sentence of self-control. He would sometimes, however, make strange requests.
Pattison gave directions; Hovell, after some thought, obeyed.
They arrived at a homestead on the Upper Isabel, with abandoned cattle yards choked with thistle. A withering season of neglect lay over Ted Merrington’s Burnside. He now lived alone, keeping an ear out for cars crunching the side road.
The big ship’s bell door-ringer clanged.
‘All right, all bloody right,’ and Merrington wrenched the door open to find himself facing a known identity, the philanthropist big-spender, Chook Hovell.
‘Good evening, let me introduce myself, explain myself . . .’
‘Not at all, delighted, do come in . . .’
Merrington had never lost an electric effect on men of good judgement: Hovell felt for his sword.
Shortly afterwards Merrington found himself better off than he would have been selling Goats through the Macleay Street dealer he had already promised (make that half-promised) a sale. ‘If I had started that fire myself, creating a shortage,’ his satisfaction implied, ‘I could not be more pleased. Add to that the supreme satisfaction of having paid peanuts for the cameo in the first place, from a drunken sot.’
When Hovell and Damon Pattison left, the picture bound in an old blanket and tied with twine to the roof rack, Merrington held the cheque to the light and waved it in the air, fanning his cheeks before placing it under a paperweight. Something else to be done, then, for he felt charged up. There was still sufficient daylight to walk over the hills and gun a bunny, scare a wild pig, slug a mangy fox or disintegrate a wild cat deceiving him through the folds and declivities of the land. He filled a pocket with shells and set off.
After the death of Boy Dunlap, Faye Colts came east and gave a few half days a week as consultant researcher in West Australian languages at the ANU. Sorting Boy’s notebooks and transcribing his early ethnographic recordings took much of her time. Somehow the word got out. Colleagues in the research school loved the idea that the beautiful young model glowing in flower beds and radiating rings of golden bathwater in the lost Buckler masterworks (reproduced now in weekend magazines) was the same authoritative woman in her eighties putting young linguists in their place and arranging the assumptions of anthropologists on the basis of a lifetime of living in bush camps.
Isabel Junction was only two hours away and when she could, Faye drove out to see her brother.
‘You can’t go on living like this,’ she said, resuming a custom of care never quite abandoned on her marriage those years ago, but more intense, as if sisterly closeness could be taken up without question now that she’d got the more interesting claims of her life out of the way – ‘saying it was just yesterday you bunked in with Randolph, really!’
‘Not exactly “yesterday”,’ said Colts. ‘Not “bunked in”, either.’
‘All right, darling, but how long has it been, freeloading when you’ve wasted everything, and I think Randolph would never say so, but Stone Wall Cottage is getting a bit too much for him. It’s very unsatisfactory Kings, when you think of it.’
‘Only temporary . . .’
Faye trailed off, hating to use the word ‘waste’, that lascivious theme of the Isabel she had studied long distance – waste in men’s lives embraced with more passion than they gave to anything but dogs and sheep and the Five Alls Hotel.
Would somebody please explain to her what it meant? she’d asked, carrying the question into the anthrop tearoom one day. ‘And don’t start telling me anything specious, as favoured in postgrad speculation, along the lines of men having completed their reproductive function and finding there is nothing left for them so they might as well go off. There’s spirit, you know. There’s love.’
This from a woman who’d known happiness in her married life, in extreme circumstances of geography and material reward. She’d believed in love, having fountained that particular emotion through all her days and suffered to prove its truth. Wasn’t going to give up on love quite yet, then.
Boy had nosedived the Cessna on the 13th of June, 1991, on his seventieth birthday, stalling on take-off from Nullagine, heading back for the big happy all ready and waiting for him, people coming in from a thousand desert kilometres in all directions, driving all manner of strange contraptions. Never had celebration turned into funeral so abruptly.
Colts waved an unlit cigarette around, then hunched in over it, flicking a lighter peevishly.
‘I do give Randolph a hand round the place, don’t say I do not.’
The most she’d seen him do was track up through Randolph’s olives lifting rocks and getting down on his knees under weed mat looking for a bottle he’d hidden that had probably been smashed by the slasher. Then he came back to the walled garden and his wooden bench, his tobacco tin and transistor radio tuned to rural roundups.
‘How long has this been here?’ said Faye, shuffling through a pile of mail. She showed Colts a letter, one of dozens that lay around in a mess – she’d forwarded it to him months ago.
‘A while.’
‘You know what it says, then?’
‘Buckler is “in”?’
The chairman of a working party on the Australian Dictionary of Biography advising on subjects for inclusion had recommended that the racist, utterly forgotten, troublesome, egomaniacal, warped but peerlessly brave Major Dunc Buckler, MC (1894-1985?) was worthy of inclusion.
‘You were his shadow, his footprint, his little sidekick and pal,’ said Faye.
‘So I was.’
Colts made something of watching an ant clambering over a splinter of wood on the seat beside him, leg by thin leg.
On her next visit Faye spoke decisively: ‘Your friend Kingsley is taking a holiday from the Isabel,’ she told Randolph, after working out that although Colts would agree to almost nothing, he would do almost anything, now, if she led.
Randolph sat under a pool of lamplight with the volume a fellow-royalist, Eddie Slim, had given him for Christmas, which he pored over like a studious monk – Prince Charles at Highgrove, a name so like Homegrove it thrilled, a book of organic farming on biodynamic principles, which Randolph loathed as a rule.
It wasn’t until the next day, and they were threading into the late afternoon sun on a back stretch after many hours that Colts felt his stomach lurch, and cursed not taking a last look around his hiding places. A line thinner than saliva reached the back of his brain to the last drink he took, two days ago, passed over the dry-stone wall by Gilbert Dalrymple, no longer a partaker but soft landings his wish for the incorrigibly desperational.
‘Where are we going?’ Colts blinked. So far he’d dozed, cocooned in a mood taking him far back past any beginning of what could sensibly be called his life. He’d assumed they were going to the comfortable flat Faye had been given in University House (above the garden bar), or possibly headed in the opposite direction, to the far South Coast, where Faye proposed visiting the rural cemetery south of Narooma where Veronica was buried.
Instead they swallowed a sun of boiling fire, and came towards nine down a dirt road and then to a recognisable place (whitewashed stone in the headlights) where Faye led Colts by the hand up a gravelled pathway, into a room where there was a bowl of ripe figs, a jug of water with a beaded glass cover, a narrow bed with a cotton bedspread and theatrical posters on the walls, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard III, Waiting For Godot. It was a boy’s bedroom kept for a boy’s return, intensely familiar and old, a cool cellar in the hot night. But Colts wasn’t that boy he found himself confusedly thinking. After fumbling with his glasses and beaming the bedside lamp around he saw the name Fred Donovan featured on the old posters.
Because of this room, because of the purple split figs, the deeply recessed windows, the hot night and loud crickets, the stars caught in the angle of narrow window glass, Colts began to understand something about fragments of importance in a life, how they flew apart and kept their distances life-long. How they were that life in the end, such as the stars were, in their cold distances.
He’d never seen Fred Donovan perform but remembered him from the Five Alls – a cheery, voluble, overweight young bloke greeting him with a beer and a whisky chaser. Then Randolph pompously started following Donovan in his next career, that of architect: Donovan’s name loudly dropped in company, his prizewinning designs clipped from colour supplements and into the scrapbook with them.
Now Colts remembered Donovan saying he’d grown up in pubs when Colts quipped he’d grown old in one, and so he recalled without the name Donovan ever teasing him before, that Rusty was a name snapped off a branch, and left as a flowered twig at Buckler’s memorial service by a half-familiar figure.
She knocked at his door, a thin, sharp-eyed old woman with the light behind her, leaning on a stick, introducing herself.
‘Are you comfortable, Mister Colts?’
Thank you, he was, because of this room, because of the purple split figs, the deeply recessed windows, the hot night and loud crickets, those stars caught in the angle of narrow window glass.
Limestone Hills was her retirement fund, she said, a piece of country living where city people could spend a night or two and explore the local attractions: gold panning, limestone caves, vineyards.
After she left, Colts swept the lamp around the wall and looked again at the tinted features of Fred Donovan, and saw Dunc Buckler written all over them.
Then Colts undressed and, using the towel and washing bowl provided, cleaned himself – face, underarms, chest, everywhere – and lay down on the tight white sheet naked as a corpse. Eyes open, lids peeled back, listening and wondering what he was listening for. Was it a machine breaking the gunpowder rocks, throwing sparks? Was it that?
At breakfast under a net of vines on a white-painted, wrought-iron table they deferred to Colts as if he trailed a dynamite fuse. ‘Tea, eggs, orange juice – we squeeze our own . . .’
Faye had been talking. ‘Watch him.’
Each day Colts was stronger on grilled cutlets and mashed pumpkin, on cheese pie and shepherd’s pie, a style of cooking Rusty brought from her pubs. Up and down the track and into the dry creekbed Colts walked, along the low rocky ridge of hardy plants, scraping their seed-heads in the dust. Of course it wouldn’t last, but while it held, this was the life and the definition of the life in Faye’s estimation.
These days a sealed road led into town, to a clinic where Colts was treated for the leg ulcers he barely noticed.
They heard the pallid cuckoo calling over paddocks of wheat sown by a sharefarmer who watched the wheat wither to nothing. They turned back time, remembering the first steps they took through the wire gate with the grimy spring that slammed back resisting sheep getting through. It was all Colts remembered, he said. The two of them back together. Entering there.
‘No, there was somewhere else . . .’ said Faye. ‘And you promised to come with me.’
Mornings were bad, evenings a test, Colts dodging the cocktail hour hanging over him. They had pineapple juice topped with cold ginger beer in schooner glasses. A line of foam was left on Colts’s upper lip. It looked like the moustache worn by a handsome old Greek café owner, said Rusty. Such a man the last and greatest love of her life.
So Buckler had a son. Faye had tracked him down this far, making the friendship with Rusty. The question was, had Veronica ever known about a family hived off, and the answer was that she had – of course she had – though she did not ever speak of it. Money sorely needed by Rusty at various times of need had come through from Buckler’s account. He didn’t have a red cent after his mining ventures drained him. So it was all from her.
They talked about 1942–43, when this had begun, the creation of who they were. Buckler had been on a foray when he left Colts at Eureka, some wild notion about investigating mysterious sounds – Faye told the story for Rusty, Colts listened, correcting this fact or that – rumbles of mining machinery reported coming from the broken ranges and long sea inlets away to the north, possibly from Japanese landing parties doing God knew what. Buckler crossed the continent to investigate. But there was nothing there, nobody there except three white people – Buckler’s own estranged wife, Veronica, his ward of legacy, Faye, her husband Boy Dunlap – and a headcount of ninety-three blackfellows of supremely doubtful loyalty, as Buckler characterised them in the report he wrote to the army chiefs who ignored it.
No doubt Buckler always loved Rusty in the stronger way, the wanting way, but she wouldn’t have him. Only those visits sometimes, when he saw Fred. How Veronica must have loved him to be satisfied with him beat the two women at the level of reason but not of the wanting heart.
Had he ever come back east, that last time they went bush together? It was a question of interest along the lines of all unsolved disappearances. Faye brought out maps and Rusty perched her magnifiers on the tip of her nose, Colts peering over their shoulders and saying very little. When Buckler left the camp that day, they wondered, had he gone through the deserts to reach Rusty, to see Fred a last time? If so, it would have been an abandonment of Veronica, a piece of old-age nuttiness, inconceivable to consider even in a man attuned to a double-serving life. No, it was not to be considered.
Yet they considered it – the two old magpies, Faye and Rusty, as they gave each other foot massages in the window seat, did the washing up together and went about the droughty garden in the spirit of long-lost sisters.
Fred always said it was possible, reported Rusty – sometimes in the early years between Buckler’s visits he said he’d seen him in the flesh when he wasn’t supposed to be there. Fred’s earliest childhood had been a catalogue of imagined events interspersed with the rare enough too-real ones. Buckler influenced his imagination, made him what he was, a show-off loving attention and getting it without going to the extremes Buckler had gone to in two world wars and the contested peace between them. Since turning to architecture putting it into physical shapes, dwellings, shelters.
‘No,’ said Colts sharply, breaking a silence.
The women looked over at him, to where he stood forgotten in the room, sorting photographs from old shoeboxes and arranging them for Faye to decide which to paste in an album.
‘“No”? What do you mean?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Buckler never went very far. Look at these.’
They were taken at Boy Dunlap’s funeral. Colts fanned the photos over the table. Faye had gone around snapping people she’d known over most of her lifetime, from many far-flung communities, outstations and bush camps, catching them as they came into the place on the flatboards of trucks and clinging to various doorless cars – old men with prophetic beards, jelly-fat women sitting on the ground cross-legged and laughing, kids running up to the camera and splaying out their limbs, pulling faces, throwing wide grins. And there in the background of one of those shots could be seen the chassis of a vintage Land Rover, Buckler’s – hauled in from some side road among the trees. Desert oaks Colts imagined, a circle of them, the wind mournful in the needles of the branches but such a wind as would allow a man to tuck his skull under his arm and rise up and ride into the night sky.
Colts was down at the dry creek a day later when a car drove in. Dust billowed over him and drifted away. When he got back to the house a painting hung on the verandah wall. Colts stopped and looked. Indelibly stared, dumbstruck and sober. A corner post was in the painting and it held up the roof of the real house in the actual garden of Limestone Hills where he stood imagining himself back into the painting he’d sold for a song: Goats.
‘An anonymous benefactor,’ said a man wearing a beret, stepping from the shadows of the grape arbour, ‘wants you to have it, Mr Colts.’
Colts peered at the visitor, the man with that jarringly dislocated angle of jaw, with that long, sharp, weatherworn face of moral authority, freakishly sharp of nose and protruding chicken-chest, last seen in the street outside a small-town bakery.
‘You?’ he challenged.
‘No, if it was up to me, Colts, me,’ the man stepped closer, trembling-lipped, dropping his voice a couple of tones so that what was said would pass only between the two of them, ‘I would keep this great picture for myself.’
‘Hovell.’
‘Colts.’
Faye asked Hovell to drive them in his robust car and insisted on Kings taking the front passenger seat. It was not yet obvious to Faye that for the duration of their drive, which wasn’t far, the two men weren’t going to talk. Down a rutted road, up a rutted hill. The grave Colts had always believed was far from Limestone Hills was close.
Midafternoon and Hovell’s all-wheel drive navigated the track leading out to the abandoned cemetery on the rocky ridge where Faye had seen her mother buried long ago. A brave little girl wearing a seersucker frock, her hair pinned back by tortoiseshell combs, she had taken on so much.
She led Colts to the broken, weed-strewn gravestone, but when he began weeping she stepped back. Goats had been through eating everything. When Kings sat on the gravestone sobbing, kicking the bitter earth, she said nothing but went over to the only tree offering shade, a peppercorn where she unpacked Rusty’s picnic hamper and poured tea from a thermos for herself and Hovell.
‘He’ll be a while yet, I think,’ she said.