The sun walks down, p.10
The Sun Walks Down, page 10
Bess says, ‘We haven’t had fresh meat in days.’
‘We haven’t had fresh meat,’ says Karl, imitating her voice. He leans over to wash his hands in the waterhole. ‘You were drawing,’ he says accusingly. ‘You were working.’
She’s still working, in fact: taking note of the thickness of the stripes on the wallaby’s tail. A wallaby with a striped tail would make an excellent companion for a child’s adventure. She knows it annoys Karl that she was working—that she can work anywhere and at any time, that in the middle of the work she killed the wallaby, and that if she wanted to she could leave the wallaby on the ground and go back to work, and the work would be unchanged. And yet here he is, full of grief for the wallaby, washing his hands like a woman who’s just finished dressing a corpse. If he were to pick up a pencil now, if he were capable of working after such violence, then every line and shape and colour would be the death of the wallaby. So she says, ‘Just a sketch. I want to remember this place.’
He’s pulling his boots on. ‘I’m going to walk,’ he says, and makes his way down the gorge towards the plain. He’s going to watch the evening’s lurid sunset, dressed in nothing but his boots.
Bess lays the wallaby out on the Art Critic and does some quick sketches of its face and paws. Then she builds a fire and skins, cleans and butchers the wallaby, much as she would a rabbit; the blood runs down to stain the sand and the flies form a fuzzy cloud. Karl often teases her about her proficiency at shooting and skinning, which he considers particularly English; she allows this because she pities his having grown up in a city. His childhood nickname was Lada Katt because he caught rats with his bare hands: rats in the kitchens and alleys and attics and stairwells of Stockholm. She roasts the meat, boils water for tea, checks on the horses, and when Karl comes back he kneels beside her, smiling, and oh, he’s beautiful, and happy now, as if he met some woman out there in the sun, some desert nymph—he’s so pleased with himself.
He kisses her and says, ‘My huntress. My Diana.’
‘What news from the sun?’ she asks.
‘Redder than ever,’ says Karl, but he is the sun; and he says, ‘Look!’ One hand is clenched shut. When he opens it there’s a shining beetle on his palm: a green beetle with a horned head crawling on the pink of Karl’s hand.
‘This is the green light I wanted,’ he says, angling his hand so the beetle walks off it and onto a leaf, then under the leaf.
They sit to eat by the fire. She gives him the best parts of the wallaby and he eats them all down to the bone.
SECOND NIGHT
Just before sunset, Mathew Wallace and Billy Rough make camp by a dam. Mathew doesn’t want to stop, but they haven’t slept in two days and are struggling to stay upright in their saddles. The country here is low and flat, largely grassless thanks to the animals that come to drink at the dam, and the trees are red gum and native pine. Mathew, clearing space for a fire, notices a fresh cut in one of the gums—a gash made by a small knife. He calls Billy over.
Billy looks at the cut and says, ‘It wasn’t Denny.’
‘He has his knife with him,’ Mathew says.
Billy steps forwards and mimes the cutting of the tree in order to demonstrate that it was done by someone taller than he is.
‘I told him to make marks on trees if he got lost,’ Mathew says.
Billy nods, and Mathew remembers that Billy was probably there when he gave Denny those instructions, or Billy gave them to Denny himself. One of them, maybe Billy, said to Denny, ‘If you’re ever lost, then you look for water, you make big tracks, break branches and stomp in the dirt, and when you find water you stay with it. Make it easy on us to find you.’ Surely someone had given Denny that advice. But they haven’t found broken branches or boy’s footprints, and here is this mark in the tree. It was made in the last day or so, and is very noticeable in the smooth upper flesh of the gum.
Mathew says, ‘He’ll have climbed up to get above the lumpy bark and make the cut where I’d see it.’
Billy looks around the tree, and Mathew looks with him. There’s nothing nearby on which Denny could have climbed. And still there are signs, to Mathew, that Denny made the cut: something about the length of it (it’s deep but short, as if made by someone whose strength ran out); the way it faces towards Undelcarra; the fact that Mathew saw it before Billy did; and its proximity to the dam. How likely is it that someone else has been out here in the last day and cut this tree?
Billy says, ‘A man’s been through here a short while past. A tall man leading a lame horse. He went that way.’
‘Blackfellow?’ Mathew asks.
Billy shrugs. ‘He’s wearing boots.’
‘Maybe he’s seen something,’ Mathew says, and they leave their gear at the dam and follow the tracks of the tall man and his horse.
As they walk, Mathew can’t help thinking of his horses back at Undelcarra. Is Cissy watering and feeding them properly? Is she mucking out their shit? Who’s carting water to the big tank by the stable and filling the troughs in the yard? Who’s being careless with candles in the straw shed? Who will cart the stores to the stations and the wool to the railway, and who will pay the principal on the mortgage? If we find Denny, thinks Mathew, none of that will matter. He offers God the horses and the harvest and every inch of the farm.
Once the sun sets and it’s too dark to see the tracks with any certainty, Mathew and Billy are forced to return to the dam. While Billy prepares supper, Mathew takes his lantern over to have another look at the cut in the tree. All day he’s been afraid that he’s missed Denny because he’s chosen one creek bed over another, looked west when he should be looking east, gone one measly mile in the wrong direction. Mathew, running his fingers over the cut, feels that it confirms his course. It seems to swell with urgency up out of the tree, as if the trunk has split itself open in order to expel something. The tree’s dark, secret life swarms deep inside. Mathew takes his knife and makes another cut next to the first one—its exact twin—so that if Denny comes back he’ll know Mathew was there.
Now Mathew and Billy do what they always do when they’re camped out away from home: they eat, and then they fight. Mathew began the tradition; his father trained his boys in bare-knuckle boxing, and Mathew used to fight with his brothers when they worked together as watermen on the fens. At night, while travelling, Mathew often gets a brimming feeling in his limbs and finds it hard to sleep—then only a fight will calm him down. Mathew would never fight a man who wasn’t equal to it, or hit anyone who couldn’t hit him back.
His fights with Billy are always the same. They know the steps and repeat them, feinting, waiting and trading blows until Billy tires, as he always does. After all, he’s older. Tonight is no different: they keep the tempo even, they know each other’s weaknesses, one-two punches from Mathew, strong compact shots from Billy, Mathew feints but Billy won’t be led, Billy is lighter on his feet, Mathew waits to hear Billy breathe through his mouth rather than his nose. A straight punch to his left cheek and Billy’s down. Mathew waits a moment before extending a hand, which Billy always takes. Then they begin another round. Mathew is stronger, but Billy is faster. They shuffle and dance in the dirt while the horses graze just beyond the firelight, and Mathew takes note of every chance he sees to inflict real damage—he finds himself wanting to hurt Billy for being so sure that Denny didn’t cut the tree. But he holds himself back.
After two rounds, they settle by the fire. Mathew falls asleep immediately, but is woken in the night by the sound of cattle coming to drink at the dam. Many of the heifers are in calf. They seem strangely dainty as they step down to the water, and the moonlight turns their hides silver. The cows are sure-footed in the dark. Mathew wants to chase them off, but that would be dangerous. He’s left to watch as their hoofs churn the ground, knowing that, by morning, there will be no sign of the tall man’s tracks.
The sun has not yet set when Joanna Axam calls her whippet, Bolingbroke, and goes out to tend to the Thalassa garden. She disapproves of the garden, which is thirstier, more beautiful and more expensive than it has ever been in the forty years since Henry planted it, but she’s never been able to bring herself to let it die. Henry wanted a biblical garden, not because he was devout but because the idea tickled him. He’d visited the Holy Land and said that the dryness of Thalassa was something like it, and he planted olives, roses, pomegranates, lilies, figs—Judas Iscariot hanged himself from a fig tree, which was, apparently, a reason to have four in your garden.
Henry had been full of this kind of harmless perversity—mostly harmless. He liked to drive out to dry salt pans wearing a boating blazer; he filled the dining room with an enormous musical cabinet called an orchestrion, which shook the house whenever he played it; and he built a mock temple that he dedicated to Clio, the muse of history. By moonlight, when the gum trees almost resembled willows, the temple looked like something painted inside the lid of a harpsichord. One year, he ordered two dozen date palms, and they came from Melbourne via Adelaide as fledglings: frondy, stumpy things strapped to the sides of camels, and the gait of the camels—left and right and left and right but moving forwards all the same—set the fronds waving in an undecided wind. It was certainly a triumphal entry, with the shouts of the Afghan drivers, the swaying of the baby palms, the camels rumbling out their frayed complaints and, behind them all, a little dog, holy in his hairiness. Henry called it Palm Sunday (it was a Tuesday in September). Even now, kneeling by the iris bed with slender Bolingbroke sniffing at her feet, Joanna can hear the barks of that delighted dog.
Joanna was twenty years old when she married Henry Axam, and twenty-six when he died. He commissioned a portrait of her in her wedding dress: a shining buckle at the tiny waist, a stick of orange blossom in the buckle, endless white buttons, lace at the throat and wrists, her face rigid, and the lobes of her ears peeping out from her light, looped hair like plump pearls. This portrait hangs in the dining room at Thalassa. Only the blue shadows beneath her eyes are human.
Joanna married Henry because of his plans for a pastoral property on the Eyre Peninsula; because he promised she could breed racehorses; and because she admired his determination to make the world in his own image. And she loved him. He was the surplus third son of an earl, and when he was upset his voice let slip the Lancashire accent of his favourite nurse. She has wondered, now and then, how tired she might eventually have become of his capacity to find absolutely anything interesting.
Henry set out to establish himself as a pastoralist as soon as he and Joanna were married. Hearing troubling reports of Aboriginal resistance to settlement on the Eyre Peninsula, he chose to go north instead. He took men and seed and cattle and three thousand sheep, and he wrote to Joanna in Adelaide with news of the land he’d chosen. ‘There are fields of grass,’ he wrote, ‘for mile after mile; anyone would think the land was farmed, except that there’s no one here but the natives, who I expect to be no more than an annoyance and possibly quite useful.’ Joanna wanted Henry to call the property Mulla Mulla, after the velvety silver-pink flowers that grew there in spring (he sent her a cutting, which she pressed in the pages of her grandmother’s Bible). In typically contrarian fashion, he called his desert station Thalassa, after the sea. Perhaps it was just as well; within two years of Henry bringing sheep and cattle to the Willochra Plain, there was no mulla-mulla left on Thalassa.
Henry was at Thalassa when George was born. He sent his pocket watch down to Adelaide and commissioned a portrait of his wife and child to be painted on it. There were no enamellists in town so Joanna made do with an indifferent watercolourist; the resulting portrait didn’t resemble mother and son so much as a truncated swan cradling nine pounds of swaddled bacon. Henry wrote that he was delighted with the watch and that he was building her a house. He promised that the house would be sensible.
When his son was six months old, Henry appeared in Adelaide, kissed the rosy bundle that was George, and took them north to their sensible house, which was long and low, with stone walls eighteen inches thick and a pitched slate roof. The house lay always in the shadows of its deep verandahs. It stood beside a river in which were to be found several permanent waterholes, and Henry had plans for a garden. Around the house, the Thalassa headquarters were laid out like a small town. There was already a cemetery and a cricket pitch. Dingoes were a nuisance, but there was less native theft of stock than on other stations; Henry claimed this was because he had the good sense to provide the local natives with flour, blankets and the occasional ram, which he distributed from a depot a mile down the river. He apologised to Joanna for the temporary lack of racehorses, but here was a stud of Spanish ponies ready for breeding and exporting to the Indian Army.
For two years, Joanna oversaw a series of white housekeepers and their handyman husbands—each of them lazy, ingratiating or sly, and some so talented as to be all at once. Then, with the opening of the Victorian goldfields, every white worker left Thalassa for the diggings, and Henry had no choice but to replace his stockmen and shepherds with natives. Joanna needed a cook, so Pearl arrived from the depot camp, and Pearl brought her children: young Nancy, who became George’s nursemaid; and Billy, who, with his cricket bat, was already Henry’s shadow. The girls in the Aboriginal camp made passable housemaids, and would work for rations. Pearl managed them; Joanna managed Pearl. Ralph was born, made miniature growls, and they called him Bear. George was always simply George. He cut his teeth and walked and spoke and ran among the dogs along the creeks. The cattle raised the dust with their hard hoofs, the sheep sang in the saltbush. Joanna rode in the hills above the station where the rock was sometimes yellow, purple, sometimes red.
Henry died crossing a creek in flood. Billy was with him and told him not to cross, but Henry did as he wanted and went in on his horse. He was thirty-three: the age of Christ. He would have called that poetry. Henry died, and the horse survived; the name of the horse was Barabbas, which might also qualify as poetry. But Joanna is of the opinion that, outside of books, there’s no such thing as poetry. There had been talk of killing Barabbas, but he was perfectly sound and Joanna wouldn’t hear of it. She rode him for years afterwards. When he was too old to ride she pastured him near the house and visited him every day. She continues to respect the way he remained indifferent to her until the end of his life.
Joanna has strong opinions about horses. They’re what kept her at Thalassa after Henry died, although her horse-breeding days largely ended with the droughts of the late sixties. If her sons, as boys, wanted to ride, they had to catch one of the calm old horses from the homestead paddock, ride it to the stable bareback, and saddle it themselves. She’s always insisted on the American method of breaking horses, much kinder than the British way of choking with a noose; she used to be skilled at this, too, and oversaw it all herself. She wouldn’t allow any Thalassa horse to be struck. It’s not that she was indulgent or soft-hearted; her methods made them, she maintained, better horses, better for human purposes. She used to be something of a tyrant about it all. Then, one ordinary day last year, she went out for her usual morning ride and, an hour in, found herself folded on the ground, bleeding, with one arm caught beneath her and no memory of how she’d got there. She’d fallen, obviously—from her own horse, which she’d trained herself—and presumably had hit her head; what she hated was not knowing whether she’d caused the fall herself. What mistake might she have made—she, who never made mistakes? Nobody crowed or scolded, but she saw her authority evaporate until she became the thing she’d always dreaded: the wife up at the house. And, even worse, a wife without a husband.
So that now, while everyone is busy preparing for shearing, while even the sheep are busy, Joanna has little to do. But she must work; therefore, the garden. Kneeling by the irises, which are showing signs of rot, she can hear men shouting in the stable yard; a boy drives a flock of goats along the other side of the garden wall. Joanna bends over the irises with sharpened scissors. Bolingbroke noses among the roots of an olive tree.
From the garden, Joanna has a clear view of the main road into Thalassa, and she keeps an eye on it as she works. When she sees two men in police uniform riding up to the house, one on an excellent horse, she stands and watches them, shading her eyes against the glaring redness of the sky. Shortly afterwards, Nancy appears in the garden with the news that the visitors are policemen from Port Augusta come to look for Denny Wallace, there’ll be four of them in all who need a bed for the night—two white policemen, two native trackers—and where should they be put? The trackers are easy but Joanna must decide what to do about the policemen, one of whom is a sergeant. The house is busy, they aren’t prepared for guests, and she’s tired. So the officers are, via Nancy, consigned to the bachelors’ hall, and Joanna returns to the irises.
Ten minutes later, straightening above the purple beds, she sees two more mounted men on the road—these must be the native trackers. One of them sits well in the saddle but the other is visibly uncomfortable, possibly because of the heavy cloak he’s wearing slung over his left shoulder and tied under his right arm. Despite his discomfort, there’s something proud about the way he carries the cloak. Beneath it, he appears to be wearing a police uniform, just as the other tracker is. The cloak is made of some kind of fur but the tracker wears it with the pale hide facing out, and there are dark marks across the skin. It falls to the horse’s belly and conceals the man’s left arm; no part of this arm is visible, it may be perfectly whole or it may be missing altogether, but Joanna can tell from the care with which the man sits in the saddle that the arm is incapacitated—perhaps in the same way as her own. Whatever has happened or not happened to the tracker’s arm is private and, at the same time, advertised by the cloak, and this seems honest to Joanna, so that she finds herself wanting to inspect the cloak—not to know what’s underneath it, necessarily, but to know what the cloak is made of, how it’s made, how thick the fur is, and what it feels like to wear over a damaged arm.
