After the noise of the motor, the wind tearing at the metal and canvas of the car; after the jolting, the shifting, the being thrown together and the final slewing of the car that brought them to this stop it was silent.
Silence.
Ern uttered clipped and strangled sounds. Barely audible curses.
Kathleen looked into the distance. She might have laughed, but she knew his anger. He had wanted to get her away from Harriette, and to himself. Now this.
The sound of insects, the earth moving. She breathed the light and the heat.
Ernest returned from his inspection of the car.
‘The front wheel. I knew it. Soon as we lost the spare.’
The wheel was no longer a circle.
Kathleen lit a fire a short distance from the car to boil a billy, and sat in the shade while Ern removed the wheel. Even after replacing some of the spokes, he was unable to return it to its original shape.
Kathleen watched him. Occasionally she stood and turned around in a slow circle, her eyes following the horizon. The sandy track they had been following curved in the middle distance, and then she could see only mallee scrub. But there, in the far distance, something a little taller, bobbing in the heatwaves.
Ern’s shirtback was dark with sweat. He bumped and grazed his knuckles. Each breath, each curse, was louder than the one before.
The shade had grown to embrace the two of them before Ern sat back, and placed his wrists on his knees. Even in relenting, his mouth remained tight. He couldn’t fix the wheel, and without it they might never be able to roll away across the flat land which surrounded them.
‘I can’t unbuckle it enough to tighten the spokes,’ he said, half to think it through, half to complain of the injustice. He might perish, shrivel, be forgotten.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I could sit on it. Like this.’
She did so, and her weight held the rim so that it formed something more like a circle.
Kathleen saw the relief in Ern’s face. She bounced up and down on the wheel.
‘Stop.’
She waited, patiently, until it was all but done, and then began to bounce again, lightly. Bouncing, she looked over her shoulder at him, at the patch of pink scalp at his crown, the grazed knuckles. The concentration.
He was aware of her buttocks bouncing on the wheel, her back, the twist of her neck and her throat. He thought of that policeman, and squinted up at laughter which fell upon him as if from the dazzling sun, the vast pure sky.
Kathleen stood. Ern held the wheel. He ran his fingers around it, felt the weight of its circle. He clung to the technology of hub, of spokes and the arch of a rim from which the weight of a car could be seen to hang. Civilisation.
He replaced the wheel.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said. ‘What about you show us what you’re made of, be a good darky and find us a camp and some water.’
But she was already in the cab, and pointing ahead.
The sun was low, and it was as if the earth had tinted the sky. A pink light bathed them as they approached a crowd of trees.
These trees stood tall, and their reaching trunks and limbs were a creamy white, were mottled; in places their limbs were the pink of the sky.
Ern saw limbs of flesh almost like his own; a little warmer in colour, and so lithe, so long, so slender. The trees’ flesh swelled as the sap moved in them. There were folds, and clefts where limb and trunk met.
‘I came here with my mother, once,’ Kathleen said. ‘I think, she brought us here.’
‘Your mother!’ Ern snorted.
‘Harriette. I mean Aunty Harriette.’
Ern was thirsty.
Again they sat in a relative quiet. The engine creaked as it cooled in the shade of these surprising trees. There was a lot of good water underground.
‘This is a good camp,’ he said.
Kathleen smiled, still looking at the trees, not at Ern.
‘Now,’ Ern grinned. ‘What about that fresh water?’
‘I think...’ Kathleen walked in among the trees.
‘How do you know this stuff anyway?’
‘I don’t know. From when I was a little girl, and Harriette always ... You need a big knife, or a little axe.’
She was circling a tree.
Ern, head down and stepping toward her with the small axe in his hand, looked up and saw a native embracing Kathleen. Ern saw two natives, embracing. It was a man, a black man. And his own wife.
Kathleen freed an arm and beckoned Ern to her.
‘This is my brother,’ she said. ‘Jack, this is Ern. You remember. He is my husband.’ Again there was a little silence as they all adjusted themselves.
Jack dug around the tree to expose a root. They cut one off, and Jack held it above Ern’s mouth. Ern knew it was the coolest, the clearest, the purest water he had ever tasted. But he couldn’t savour it. It seemed somehow tainted.
‘I had to get away from there,’ said Jack. ‘Find somewhere where no one knows me, maybe then I’ll be all right.’
Like a sister, he had said, like a sister to me. Not a sister, not really.
Ern thought they had been very slow to take their arms from one another. But Kathleen had returned to him and taken his hand.
She knows me. He had looked over her shoulder and seen, even as his glance slyly swept on, Jack grinning. At him. At them.
She wants me. Me.
Jack could not help shaking his head and grinning, and was still doing it even in the light of a campfire late that night. He had only just got here, he said, after being sent to a wheat farm. But ... You couldn’t go into town. They set one day aside for Aboriginal people to do their shopping, and told him that was his day off. Not that he had money, most of it was banked for him, somewhere. He never saw it.
And had they heard what that Mogumber place was really like? Anyone can be put there, just about (unless, maybe, you got yourself married to a white man). Criminals, black trackers with whips. They chase you down. It’s a prison there, it’s like a dog kennel.
He was just trying to get away, find some peace. But he needed work, really. Keep to yourself, that’s the way, if you wanna live.
They drove off with Jack’s bicycle roped awkwardly on top of a neatly interlocking stack of boxes, tools and luggage behind the cab.
Ern had a job in Norseton, building, for the publican. It was verandahs, some further rooms.
The publican’s voice and belly introduced the man an instant before the rest of him came out into the sunlight, with Ern at his back.
The man said he had a room, for Ern and ... his missus.
His eyes stayed on Kathleen as she came close to him; as she brushed past him, through the door, into the gloom of one of his own rooms. His gaze swung back to Jack, who still leaned against the truck. The man scratched himself, and Jack did the same, for his own amusement, but was grateful the big red man did not notice the mockery.
‘The woman, yeah. Long as she doesn’t cause any trouble. But not him. Haven’t got room. Yeah, I know, I’ve heard that some of these coons are all right but I haven’t met any.’
It was convenient, Ern said, that Jack sleep on the tray of the truck.
Ern had no dog to guard the vehicle, and he worried for his tools.
Jack wrapped himself in a blanket and canvas, and lay with his head pressed against the locked toolchest. He listened to the voices in the pub, felt the cold night air on his face. And now the voices were close, suddenly intimate. He heard glass clinking, and slurred boasts were murmured, it seemed, into his ear.
‘See that builder? Taking his about with him. You reckon he really married her?’
Jack’s hand roamed his body, found the stiffness, relaxed himself.
Ern, conscience clear, rocked to and fro upon the not-his-sister’s body.
Most of the building materials were on site. Ern set up a small bandsaw and cut planks from the seasoned logs the publican had stored away.
There was a claypan near the edge of town and, not far away, an assortment of humpies and tents. Women and children came to the far edge of the claypan and, scooping the clear water from just above the mud, slowly filled old kerosene tins. Some balanced a stick across their shoulders, and hung a bucket from each end.
Not our people, thought Kathleen, watching from the corner of her eyes. Jack, remembering the camps, was not so sure. There were larger groupings, and what was that saying? There, but for the grace of God...
Jack and Kathleen made a crude kiln to bake the bricks, and then spent days culling the surrounding scraggy scrub of firewood. They used picks to break up the clay and, pouring in more water, set a horse to working the earth. Kathleen walked at its bridle, around and around in a small circle, and the clay was stirred to a thin, muddy consistency which would swallow anything placed in it.
They poured the soft earth into a mould, shaped it into bricks.
The fire glowed day and night until the tangled pile of wood became a few straggly remainders, and there was only white ash; soft, fine, and somehow soothing. The wind lifted it, and spread it across them.
Jack and Kathleen stacked the bricks as high as they could reach. They put handfuls of fine sand between each layer and the wind blew grit into their eyes, nostrils, ears, between their teeth; dust coated their skins, changed their voices, settled in their hair. The sun rose over the wall and, tired and dry and irritated by the dust, Kathleen and Jack turned away those who came visiting from the camp.
Kathleen and Jack heard Ern’s motor as if from the sky, or from somewhere else altogether. They could see only bricks, a high wall before them. And when they turned away from the wall there was only the sloppy-holed earth and the blackened kiln, already crumbling.
Jack dug trenches for the foundations in the earth behind the pub, while Ern and Kathleen began carting the bricks and soon the great stack of bricks was only a neat and diminishing ruin which they drove the truck between.
Kathleen kept to the room they’d been given while Ern and Jack built the walls, and then she was enlisted once more.
Jack slept on the ground inside the walls. In the evenings he heard the men leaving the pub in small groups, and heading out to the claypan on the edge of town.
Jack slept inside a doorway so that the sun fell upon him as soon as it rose, and he let the light draw him up. He splashed the sleep away at the rainwater tank, and made tea on a little fire in the yard. The publican sent a meal out to him; bread, tea. He and the girl snatched at one another’s words before she hurried back.
Waking with the taste of metal in his mouth and his jaw tight, Jack heard Ern’s voice among the others escaping the walls of the pub and—to the accompaniment of bottles clinking, a motor coughing, a couple of horses clip-clopping—disappearing in the direction of the claypan at the edge of town.
Jack wondered if Kathleen was awake.
Now that Will had gone to be with his Uncle Sandy, Ern had Jack and Harriette collecting the nightsoil. Topsy was finishing at school, and Ern was reluctant that she take on domestic work, and thought it would be a shameful waste if she was to assist Harriette.
Since Kathleen seemed unable to bear him children, he took steps to have her earn some income from cleaning, washing and ironing for the townspeople. If not enough work came that way, then she could assist Harriette. ‘We certainly don’t need you going off into the bush with Harriette, hunting.’
Although he took no notes, Ern was—discreetly—observing Topsy, and—doubtless—did so as dispassionately as the scientist of whom Mr Neville wrote:
Little Topsy, he noted, was no longer so little; breasts budding, hips altering the way she walked.
He bought her books, and English magazines, and even engaged a tutor for her. It was obvious to him that she had outgrown what the school could offer.
Harriette tried to reassure Kathleen that Ern, in this way, was doing little more than what Daniel had done for his own daughters.
Ern took to buying Topsy articles of clothing and having her parade for him. He wanted, he said, for her to learn deportment, and how to dress like a lady.
A different policeman was stationed next-door, and Ernest was quick to advise the man of his part-Aboriginal wife and Aboriginal domestic. He gave the policeman the benefit of his own, progressive ideas on the best means to uplift and elevate the natives and of the manner in which he intended to raise his own children. ‘My wife...’ he began, and the new constable, staring at something behind Ern, finished the sentence for him: ‘...is very young.’
Ern noted the envy and admiration on the policeman’s face and, turning to introduce his wife, saw that it was not Kathleen who was the object of the official gaze, but Topsy. Never one to lose an opportunity, Ern said, ‘She is older than she looks,’ and introduced Topsy as his wife. ‘This is Kathleen,’ he said, looking directly at the girl, determined that she should not contradict him. Ern was thrilled, and just a little frightened, at what he had begun, had seen he could do.
It made sense. Kathleen’s child had been fathered by Sergeant Hall. Kathleen was too attached to her Aunty Harriette. Kathleen was tall, and Ern was already having to instruct her as to her diet. She had changed, and not to Ern’s taste. But Topsy ... Topsy was young, and small, and as fine-boned as a bird. She looked exotic, her hair sometimes seemed almost golden, and she spoke and moved with remarkable elegance given the limited tutoring he had given her. She seemed, my grandfatheras-scientist told himself, almost a new species.
When Kathleen found Ern embracing Topsy, bending her over their matrimonial bed with her skirts all bunched up, she could only give a little noise of surprise. Ern looked up and saw her. He pushed Topsy’s face into the bedspread, hissing, ‘Just a moment. Don’t move.’ Topsy lay still, her face hidden and limbs splayed like a discarded doll. She was so small. Ern straightened up, adjusted his trousers, and—walking across to where Kathleen stood in the doorway—closed the door in her face.
Kathleen did not slam doors, did not stamp her feet. She was in the dusty street, near where—so many years ago—her Aunty Harriette had run toward the violence, not understanding her own terror. Harriette had been only a toddler, and her father, Sandy One, had chased her, caught her, thrown her to Fanny who had quickly hidden her away.
Now it was Jack, who—seeing Kathleen striding into the distance—ran after his sister. My grandfather, Ernest, stepped from the front door of his house. Jack Chatalong was striding toward him. The way Jack was moving would have alerted Ern to danger, and—indeed—Ern’s own nagging dissatisfaction had quickened his perception. But for all that he would not have expected to be hit, so hard, so soon.
Sprawled on the steps, Ernest put one hand up as the constable rushed toward them from next-door. ‘No, no, it’s all right. As long as he goes, I’ll make nothing more of it.’
To be able to speak and behave in such a controlled manner made Ernest feel deliciously superior.
Harriette returned almost surrounded with the bodies of rabbits. They were heaped up behind her, and hanging from the sides of the old spring cart ready to be sold to the people in town, at three to the shilling.
‘I don’t know where Jack is, or Kathleen,’ said Ern, which was the truth. Harriette worried for them. Ern did not say that the policeman had taken them away. What else could Harriette do, other than stay near home? Topsy did not say anything of what had happened. She was very young. What difference could it have made, anyway?
Ern told Harriette he would allow her to live among the old water tanks in the yard, but she mostly stayed away, camping along the coast. Ernest, at least, was pleased because he realised Harriette could only be a bad influence upon the girl, Topsy, who he now called his wife.