Harland's Half Acre Page 3

  The work, however, was harder than fruit farming. It had different hours and used other muscles.

  He and Jim got up with their father, just before five, and all three did the milking; he half-asleep at times, with his head against rough hide and only his fingers working the regular, dreamy routine. Later they helped with the separating, and while their father lugged the cans out and he hosed down the bails, Jim made breakfast – puftaloons – in a big black pan that filled the house with the smell of fat and added each day, along with woodsmoke and resin, to the deepening colour of the walls and roof-beams and to the stickiness of things, so that whatever you touched here showed your prints. (Frank’s were soon laid down over the rest, as his height-mark, with name and date, joined the others on the jamb of the door; but it appeared as from nowhere, four foot three, whereas the others, all mixed in together as they passed their old selves or one another, were traceable through months and years that he deeply brooded over and regretted.)

  The littlies would be up by then, and he learned to dress them while the seven-year-old set the table, laying out treacle, jam, a slab of honeycomb.

  He was called Clyde, and the others were Tam, short for Tamworth, and Pearsall. Even their names were of a different kind from his own and Jim’s and belonged to a different family.

  Then he, Jim and Clyde walked three miles to a one-teacher school that sat all alone in a paddock among blazing pebbles. Clyde without the others seemed diminished. He had nothing to say and his hair was too pale. The dog Jellybean, an old kelpie bitch who had her own litter of half-grown pups, waddled out and sat in the shade of the bench where the milk-cans waited, to watch them out of sight.

  After school he and Jim drove the cows in to be milked a second time, and afterwards they sat at the kitchen table and did their homework while the younger ones climbed on their knees and mumbled, and had to have snot wiped or their braces undone so that they could run outside to the dunny; and a minute later, one of them, usually Frank, would be called out to wipe an arse.

  They seemed to believe, Tam and Pearsall, that Frank had replaced their mother. They came to him for all their needs and were forever tugging at his sleeve or whispering into his ear or trying to snuggle up to him. He found he could push his pen quite easily through a copybook exercise while Pearsall, with a wet tongue at his ear, ‘told him things’. Pearsall, he thought, already resembled their father. He too told stories – most of them made up – of things that had happened to him, and was only content when he was burrowing into your shirt, or snuffling at your neck, or sucking the warmth from under your collar.

  It was a cosy world, and in its easy, disorderly way quite orderly and safe. Frank liked nothing better than to see their six places set on the oil-cloth under the lamp which he himself had climbed on a chair to pump, and to have them, all six, seated there with food before them, and afterwards, still in their places, to have their father tuck one bare foot up under him (it was a way he liked to sit) and play softly on the mouth organ or tell one of his stories.

  In this closed world, the boy felt, there was permanency. It was only when they went together into the little township to buy provisions or to shop for new pants or shorts or woolly jumpers that he would see, as they all trooped past, a look on people’s faces that made them in some way outlandish, and would catch in the men’s voices as they addressed his father a note of humorous scorn.

  ‘Hey Clem! How’s that fence comin’?’ someone might call, as if it could only be coming badly (it was, but that was bad luck), and some galumphing fool would snigger. His father took it good-naturedly but shooed them quickly on.

  ‘What about ice blocks,’ he’d coax, ‘from old Mrs French? Coconut and raspberry. What about it, eh?’

  He was easier with women, their father. Frank saw it and was surprised, then no longer surprised. Women were good to them, always. They got free barleysugar from French’s, to carry off after the ice blocks, and from Wilson’s, often enough, an orange to share or a stick of hard sugarcane. But only if May Wilson was in the shop, who had been in their father’s class at school.

  ‘We’re doing all right, eh?’ the father would say, leading them off with their purchases and the free gifts. ‘You happy there, Pearse?’

  But these trips into town were rare and Frank was glad of it. He liked the idea of their being outlandish, of their having only themselves.

  Sitting on after tea, with the plates cleared away and scraped of their fat, and the mouth organ restored to its box, their father would begin on one of his stories. The man’s dreamy manner and low resonant voice soon put them, one after the other, to sleep.

  The little ones dropped off almost at once. Then Jim, who could never hear any story out, sitting bolt upright and with his eyes open, would begin to tilt and sway. His eyelids would droop, flutter, close; then suddenly jerk up again with a wild look in them, as if he were miles from where he should have been. Then he too would give in. Laying his head down on a lean arm, he would descend into sleep.

  Frank listened and drew. While his father went romancing he let his hand move over the pages of a fat little pad, catching to his own satisfaction the roundness of Tam’s cheek where it dented a plump forearm, or the angle at which Jim’s head, rolled back as if supported on a cushion of air, exposed all the bare throat and the prominence, below the fine and slightly crooked chin, of his adam’s apple. Mouth half-open, eyes showing just a gleam under the lids, the dozen strokes and shadows of a chestnut fringe – this was Jim dozing, Jim abstracted and removed to a distance, but for a moment most touchingly vulnerable, and closer, because less defensive, than when he was awake.

  Frank drew, exploring the differences and odd resemblance between them all that so attracted and moved him, while the vibrancy of his father’s voice, a melodious sing-song, cast its spell upon him. He idled upon it. And this was easy since the voice was no longer directed at their little group under the lamp (which is why it didn’t matter that four of them were already asleep) but like Frank’s doodling, moved off on a line of its own. You could tune in or not as you pleased.

  ‘Once,’ it told, ‘I saw a ghost – you know, up there at the homestead. A lady in a yellow frock. Very beautiful but sad-looking. She was walkin’ up and down in the long grass as if it was still a clipped lawn – I mean she was walkin’ right through the grass as if it didn’t hold her back, her long skirt, any more than water would – or not even that much. I was sittin’ on the edge of what was the verandah. Just sittin’, n’ thinking I ought to start back, it was getting dark. And she kept lookin’ towards the house as if she expected someone to come out of it. As if the house was still there, all solid walls – you know, weatherboard, n’ glass in the windows, the way it must have been – like she ’ad just stepped out of it upset or angry or somethin’, or hopin’ some man would follow, an’ didn’t realise the years had passed and it was a ruin.

  ‘It was weird, I can’t explain it. She didn’t seem like a ghost. That’s the odd thing. I mean, I didn’t feel her as a ghost, she looked so real. The yellow of her dress, and her shoes with dust on them where she’d just stepped out into a cleared space. And ’er shoulders. You could feel the droop of them. That was ’er sadness. And she gave such a sharp look backward when she turned that you knew the house must be just the way she thought it was. It made me feel like the ghost. I mean, I was sitting right where the verandah rails should’ve passed through me, and I wasn’t aware of it any more than she was of the long grass. Do you reckon there can be ghosts of the future as well as the past?

  ‘There must have been a time, you know, when it was all so solid and settled, their life up there. Well-to-do people with aristocratic connections, silver on the table, n’ big vases n’ marble statues and that. And in my time it was all gone, and I was grubbin’ away at a few acres of what was left, milkin’ seven days a week and always dog-tired with never a spare penny to buy a bit of luxury, and no real kno
wledge of anything except a few Latin verbs they taught me at Toowoomba, and algebra! The prospect of it was enough t’ make you cut yer throat.

  ‘An’ maybe I already have, I thought, and that’s what she’s lookin’ at. A bloke who’s taken a razor, set a basin in front of him and slashed. I don’t know.

  ‘Well, I didn’ do it, of course. I married your mother instead. I don’t know how I thought that would help. It only made things worse. I wasn’ cut out to be a dairy farmer, that’s the real truth, but I wasn’ educated for anything else, so there I was. I used to look at pictures we had of my grandmother, all dolled up in satin – even in this climate! – with pearls n’ stuff – God knows where it all went! – and then I’d think of the life we were tied to. Me up at four t’ milk the bloody cows, yer mother scrubbin’ clothes on a washboard, an’ not even a proper dunny to the house or any ceiling or coverin’ to the floor. It’s a hard life if you’re at the bottom. Once –’ And his complaints, or musings, or odd moments of wonder at his own experience, would soon come up with another story, more wonderful, more inconsequential than the last.

  These tales, woven out of his life, out of the countryside and the past of their family, went down into the boy’s imagination, and as his hand moved on now from the heads of his sleeping brothers to freer landscapes of grass and cloud, answered yet again, when he put it, the question of how he came to be Frank Harland and how he had got into the world – at what point in time and place and through what bright hole in reality.

  Two or three times with his father and many times alone or with one or other of his brothers, he climbed the long road from the township, out past logging camps and the shacks of loners to the plateau, site of the family’s real and legendary beginnings.

  You moved out of the rich green of Killarney, where the air seemed half-composed of water, into blue-grey scrub. The trees were stunted at first, with trunks thrusting at all angles out of yellowish rock, some of them burnt black below and bursting into new leaf above, others a skeletal white from ringbarking. But on the plateau itself the timber grew straight and tall, you were in forest. Cool even at midday in winter, and in summer a glittering, sighing, shimmering ocean, it was its own deep blue this gum-forest, with a whiteish foam on the surface, and on still days it was glassy. Where a breath, high up, caught the furthest crest of it, turning single leaves, or a bird pushed off and a twig vibrated, ripples flushed through it that were felt below as a trembling of light over the steady earth.

  Their father’s stories had made this a haunted place. Or it really was haunted.

  Not far before the ruins there was a platform of rock. Aborigines had foregathered here, all the local tribes in their wanderings, and left crude rock carvings. Though far from the sea, turtles, starfish, even a giant whale lay stranded by time and the sun in spare outline on the scored rock-surface, recalling a time when all this country really had been covered by the sea. With their knees drawn up they would sit on warm stone in the very midst of it, among the sea-creatures and the flights of wallabies and paddymelons and every sort of bird; that other world would be all about them, abstracted into enduring lines that crossed and criss-crossed in an endless puzzle. The outline of a whale might be broken by that of a bounding kangaroo, the separate orders of creation, sea-beast and land-beast, interpenetrating in an element outside nature – the mind of whoever it was, decades back, who had squatted here and with bits of flint or a sharpened stone made the clearing a meeting place for separate lines of existence.

  Stepping back into the lives of those first creators, they would crawl about, retracing the lines with a forefinger, clearing out leaf-grist, pollen, fragments of bark, the husks of dead insects; or would themselves take a knife and scrape, so that figures only vaguely discernable would, as they shifted about on their footsoles, climb back to the surface and surprise them.

  ‘Look,’ one of them might exclaim, standing up to see what they had made. ‘It’s another whale!’

  Tired at last, they would lie spreadeagled on the sunlit surface, where old fissures in the rock made their own pattern, and doze off. In the midst of that still menagerie.

  Further on lay the ruins of the homestead. There was a single chimney-stack of crumbling brick, but the foundations of rooms could be made out if you cleared away the rubble with a bare foot: the original ground-plan of the house as it might have appeared when the elder of the three Harland brothers first sketched it on a sheet of notepaper or scratched it on the earth with a stick – the first rough vision of an empire – and someone with a bit of science in these matters had measured and drawn it all, with arrows and neatly printed specifications, on a builder’s plan.

  It had returned to that; on a larger scale and in broken stone. It was that plan in the elder Harland’s mind, drawn roughly on the earth, that you could lay bare by crawling about and removing the layer of windblown dust and leaves; revealing the flat elevation first, then raising it, out of Father’s talk, as an elegant and spacious homestead with windows and verandahs, quiet by day – while the men were out with cattle and the women sat inside in the cool, reading or sewing or preparing huge meals – but filled at night with voices, snatches of music from a little organ, then later with the beating in the dark of twin carriage-clocks and the odd, ­indecipherable murmurings of family sleep.

  Noble forebears.

  In fact it was the ruins of a folly. This had never been cattle country. And the three brothers, though tough enough, and filled with the heroic spirit of the times, and a vision out of their reading (and out of other fellows’ talk) of what was possible here to men of pride and limb, had been poor managers and no sort of cattlemen at all – dreamers too easily defeated. Within a decade the high place was deserted. Only a crazy sister was left to watch the verandahs rot and sag, then blow away as dust. She had taken up residence at last in a tin shed. The rusty-red sheets of it were piled up now under sprays of briar-roses in a thicket ten feet high, from which, at the expense of scratched arms and blood drops, you could pluck chipped enamel basins, half-plates and cups without handles, steel knitting-needles – inglorious relics.

  On one occasion, three of them, Frank, Clyde and Pearsall, eager to confirm a belief in spirits or to assure themselves that there were no such things, had camped there overnight. They ate their supper of bread and dripping, boiled a billy of tea, watched the sun sink down into the plain, where it was damped out smokily by a dozen lakes, then lay out their blankets and fell quiet.

  They were waiting for mad Maud Harland to appear and splash her face with moonlight from the basin they had set out, between the cindery remains of the house and her alive but ghostly rosebush.

  There was a moon. It was nearly full. Cicadas drummed in long waves, then faltered, then burst out again. They waited and no one came. But Pearsall after a time began to whimper. Behind them the forest was in motion: all the treetops had begun to sigh and fret and the night insects were stilled.

  ‘What is it?’ Clyde asked, putting his arms round the child and crouching to bring their heads close. ‘What are you scared of, Pearse?’

  ‘Abos,’ the boy told them, sniffling, and the transparent white spooks they had been expecting were there in negative. Black ghosts. Black.

  They reassured him and sat stiffly for a time watching the enamel basin but giving glances over their shoulders as well. In hollow trees back there, wrapped up in bark that must long since have rotted, were the bones of abos. They imagined skeletal feet dangling or a bony arm, and before too long, declaring disappointment and renewed scepticism, decided to pack up and go down.

  It hadn’t occurred to them till Pearsall saw it that the spirits of the place, born out of rocks and tree trunks and returned in their rough bark envelopes to the forks of trees, from which they would descend through tap-roots and rocks into the earth, might be more enduring in time, and in their numbers going back to the days of the first rock-scratching, than mad Maud Harl
and – who had lived with all this night after night half a century ago, and in trembling or not, become part of it.

  On Saturday nights now their father went to a dance. He took a bath in the round washing-tub in front of the stove, ironed a shirt – usually all their clothes went unironed, it was Frank or Jim who did the washing – cleaned a pair of old dancing pumps, did his hair carefully in front of a mirror over the sink, and went off whistling.

  ‘There’s no harm in a bit of a dance,’ he’d tell them over the last of their tea, as excited as a boy at the prospect of his night out, but shy of disapproval. Of Jim’s disapproval, that is, which he feared the others might catch.

  There had begun to be a kind of hostility between Jim, who was fifteen, and the boyish father. Jim’s face during his stories had a hard line about the mouth in which Frank recognised a likeness to his Aunt Else. He would shift uncomfortably. Rage grew in him. He would be on the point of bursting out.

  ‘Well,’ the man would say, ‘maybe that’s silly. Jim thinks it’s silly, don’t you Jim? He thinks your old dad’s a dill!’ He was wounded, but hoped by getting in early and making a joke of it to forestall whatever bitter, contemptuous thing the boy was preparing to say that would shame him before the rest. He preferred to wound himself. They recognised the ploy and were embarrassed for him.

  Jim declined at first to take the bait. He put his head down, gripped his cutlery in hard fists and chewed. But after a time his fury could not be kept in.

  ‘Bullshit!’ he would say fiercely. ‘Bloody bullshit! Can’t you shut up and let us eat our meal in peace? Just eat for once? I’m sick of hearin’ you go on. All that – bullshit!’