ROYAL BRIDGES
HE RODE THE LEAN mare up the sandy track. The sun burnt his eyes and the black flies clouded about him. The sand clogged the mare’s hooves as she bore him up the ridge; and to give her breath he paused upon the top.
The road went down the ridge like a ribbon of fire. The sandy paddocks, where the wheat had died in the spring, rolled mile beyond mile brick-red to the black pine clumps against the sky. At every swirl of hot wind the sand was blown up in yellow spirals merging into one ochre-coloured cloud, which crept down into the road.
But he saw none of this, taking in the mere impression of the Mallee around him, for his mind was elsewhere, visualising the lettering on the poster he had inspected back in town. Men needed for service overseas. Twenty thousand promised by the Commonwealth Government to England.
In a good spring the wheat should have rolled miles out as a sea of green and gold under the sun. On the Mallee fringe the sheep would have cropped the grass. Now sand, shaped like the oncoming waves of the sea, made great banks where it met the scrub. The sand leaked through wire fences into the tracks like iron-coloured water. When the wind died the mirage appeared, a flickering fantasy to right and left with lagoons of silver merging into the grey smudges of pine and eucalypt, shadowy and mystical.
He was thinking of fellows he knew, excited, gathered in knots at the railway station, at the post office, before the pub. Recalling the khaki-clad figure of one chap on leave from Broadmeadows—the popular hero, one who had been previously known through the district as a waster, now straight and clean, slouching no longer. The same chap telling him he ought to go!
And he was going. He was sick of the Mallee. Only he knew the Old Man would not let him go; and he couldn’t stand up to the Old Man. Never had been able to; couldn’t now. He’d stop him from enlisting if he could. There was something about the Old Man!
He spurred the mare on down the track. He passed the old Cocky’s shack. Mud brick and a shingle roof. The chap had got some straw left still; but his dam was drying. He was reduced to dipping the water into a bucket, and carrying it up to a rusty pot where a few fowls drank. Full of news of the war, he would have pulled in for a yarn.
The Cocky’s son was in khaki; and he wanted to know what his Old Man had thought, maybe get a hint from him how to deal with his own Old Man. But the black flies swarmed and a stinger shimmered, silver-winged, and the mare wouldn’t stand, so he rode on.
Mum might work it; but then Mum wouldn’t want him to go.
He pulled in by the gate a mile down. Leaning from the saddle, he pulled up the wire loop from the post, and dragged back the gate, two props and a few strands of barbed wire. He rode through and down the track between the dwarf gums and myall. Not a blade of grass, not a cicada piping, not a parrot chattering. Only the hard trees, a green mass above the brick-red sand.
The house lay a quarter of a mile back from the road. In 1911, the last good year, the Old Man had put up a new place, a weatherboard cottage, the paint now blistering pink upon it, iron roofs, with a couple of tanks under the chimney.
The black mud-brick house, where they had lived before, stood a bit to the left. A few sugar-gums shaded the yard. The garden had burnt up for want of water. The dam was holding out; but it was all wanted for the stock. Dead sticks and sand now—sand that drifted to the doors, and leaked inside.
Mum was standing out the front in the sun in her old blue print gown, print sunbonnet, and white apron. He pulled up by the gate as she came down to meet him, smiling to her smile. Mum might work it for him; but it would be horribly rough on her. She wouldn’t want him to go any more than she had wanted him to go to town for a job. Though she had tried her hardest with the Old Man, and failed.
‘Any mail?’ she asked, smiling up at him.
‘Only the paper,’ he answered. ‘Them Germans have cut the British up a bit—and Antwerp’s gone. There weren’t any letters. Where’s Dad?’
‘Cutting chaff,’ she said, taking the paper. ‘Put the mare in, and come for a cup of tea. Tell Dad! See anyone in the township?’
‘Young Banks, that’s all. Fancies himself no end! He’s in khaki—up on leave.’
She caught the bitter inflection; she gave him a look of apprehension, noting the discontent black on his face. She ventured: ‘It’ll make a man of him.’
‘It’s more’n I can stand,’ he muttered, flicking off flies. ‘To see that chap. War news is pretty bad, Mum . . .’ breaking off.
She said nothing for a while, her keen blue eyes estimating him—realising. Her eyes dimmed a little—the sun on the sand was glaring.
‘You want to go?’ she said at last.
‘Of course I want to go, I want to get out of this God-forsaken hole.’
‘Is that why?’ she asked, her voice trembling a little.
He hesitated and would not meet her look. ‘No—that isn’t why! I don’t want to leave you, Mum, stuck here!’
She said, ‘I’m glad that’s not the reason.’
‘Only Dad won’t ever let me go,’ he muttered savagely. ‘He wouldn’t let me go to town to work. He wants me here to slave for him. Mum, if he won’t . . .’ he paused, staring across the yard.
‘You’ll go? You’ll go still?’ she sighed, ‘I shouldn’t like you to go—that way.’
‘Mum, can’t you work it?’
She did not meet his eyes, but looked down on the sand.
‘D’ye think you can work it with Dad? Think you can? Will you have a shot?’
She was scraping a semicircle with the toe of her shoe. ‘Go and put the mare up,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll see . . .’
After tea he lounged against the gate post, smoking a fag.
The Old Man was sitting on the bench by the back door—the paper before him, puffing his clay pipe. He’d been grumpy at tea, wanting to know why his son had been loafing in town all the day when the sand needed scooping from the track.
The sun had dropped into the sand like a great live coal, another burning day tomorrow. Mosquitoes buzzed and he turned and slouched towards the door. He’d tell the Old Man straight out that he was going; and if he didn’t like it, he could lump it.
Staying here; and the Germans burning through Belgium, murdering women and little kids! He would tell him straight—now! Mum had been yarning to him after tea: but the old chap said nothing, only sat down with his pipe and paper. His son slouched towards him, scowled and hesitated.
‘Mum was sayin’,’ the Old Man suddenly growled, knocking the ashes from his pipe, and breaking off to blow though the stem. “Mum was sayin’, you wanted to go to the war.”
His son did not meet his eyes. ‘Got to go, Dad.’
‘Got to! Well, you got to do something. Ain’t work on the place for two—not this year! Not a drop o’ rain—nor a blade o’grass. I can’t keep you. May as well be there as ’ere! Earnin’ a bit for yourself . . . doin’ a bit for . . . you know . . .’
He blew hard into his pipe, and his son nodded and went past him.
Mum was sniffing a little to herself and putting away the dishes.
‘Mum,’ he asked a little huskily, ‘how did you work it?’
‘I didn’t,’ she sniffed, her back turned to him, ‘I just started to tell him that he couldn’t get along without you and he shouldn’t let you go. Only . . . only . . . he said . . . he said you should go . . . every young chap should . . . though he didn’t want you to . . . any more than me.’
A saucer slipped from her fingers and smashed on the floor.
She put her apron to her eyes.
* * *
And the rain did not come through the spring, when the sun was a white fire in the sky of blue glass and the springing wheat grew yellow and withered away.
Through the summer, when the sun burnt like a scarlet ball in the smoke of the bush fires and the north winds bore blackened gum leaves and scraps of fern down into the paddocks and whirled up the sand, the stock died.
Through the autumn, when the plains were a brick-field; and the sand storms whirled up over them and the sun burnt yellow from its rising to blood-red at its going, paddocks burnt up, dams dried and water was carted from the railway station to supply the house.
All this while, the boy was in Egypt, writing home cheery letters filled, as his mind was filled, with the wonders of the country.
And then the last letter came from him, written before they sailed from Egypt for the Dardanelles.
After that no more letters.
Perhaps he wasn’t allowed to write.
No promise of rain.
‘It’s to be hoped it rains, before he gets back,’ his father said. ‘Otherwise he won’t know the place. Scarcely a thing left on it.’
He’d laugh mirthlessly to the mother, trying to cheer her up and realising all the while that the boy’s absence was more to him than the drought—the loss of all things.
He wanted him back badly, he admitted to himself, wandering out to the stable to fling a few handfuls of chaff to the horse. All the time hoping to himself that the rain would come before the boy came back. Not wanting him to come home to find everything burnt up by the drought.
He had read in the local papers that when bad news came through it was always broken to the family by their minister. He should be afraid, if he saw the minister even coming to call. He hoped that he would not chance to come any time while he was away from the house, because the mother knew; she read the papers too.
* * *
The year drifted into May and still the rain had not come. Days were warm and still now, evenings too, in a muggy, clammy sort of way, as if baked plains sent out the heat of the dead summer day.
It was looking very black to the north in the mornings and the wind was getting up now and then. It might rain.
For almost a week the cloud built up and broke up in the evenings and mornings.
Then the day came when the blackness kept growing over the day and the wind sighed drearily.
The leaves from the blackened gum trees fell on the stable like drops of rain.
He fed the horse and, going out to the stack-yard, stood peering out at the growing blackness. The sand was whirling across the wastes and a sudden shining fork of light flashed from the profundity to the north—like the tongue of the snake.
Thunder afar.
‘It must rain,’ he said aloud to himself.
He noticed a shovel that he’d left out against the fence. He walked over, picked it up, walked with it into the stable and hung it up in its place.
He felt the wind buffet the tin shed and something pattered on the roof. ‘Just leaves perhaps,’ he thought.
As he walked to the house cool wind gusts caught at his clothes.
He walked through the house to the kitchen as the first drops hit the roof.
She was there.
‘It’s here,’ he said.
And then it was raining!
At first it pattered in big drops upon the roof, a broken pattern, then it picked up quickly into a roar of noise.
Conversation was not possible. They sat and listened until it settled into a steady drumming.
Though it was only midday, it was dark almost as night, until the lightning burnt in blue flames out of the blackness.
They were sitting together in silence, the mother and he—listening to the steady din on the tin roof. And the regular thunder—the guns at the Dardanelles must sound like this thunder.
They sat, understanding that the drought was broken and what it meant to them. Understanding what it meant to the boy when he came back . . . listening to the drumming and the thunder . . . or was it all the drumming and the thunder?
Then they realised at once that someone was rapping hard at the front door, shut against the pelting rain.