When Colts Ran (17 page)

As Fred came bounding and slithering back down to where Buckler stood he'd taken the applause. Then they'd come here, to another small town, and a pub called the Five Alls.

Around midnight Fred woke and Buckler still hadn't come to bed, so he walked out onto the wide verandah in his pyjamas and leaned over the wrought-iron balcony into the night. The streets of Isabel Junction were quiet except for the bellow of livestock in the railway yards. Two men were sitting on a park bench under a peppercorn tree on a road divider, lit by a yellow streetlamp. One of them yawned loudly, bellowed, like a reply to the cattle. No need to guess who that was.

The other man talked in a loud plummy voice while peering back up at the hotel verandah where Fred lurked: ‘Traditionally pub names have a pictorial representation. All are welcome under the sign. The Five Alls are the king who governs all, the bishop who prays for all, the lawyer who pleads for all, the soldier who fights for all and the peasant who works for all. Isn't that just the thing? It sums it all up. Order in society.'

Fred pulled back into the shadows.

‘Oh, the sign is peeled off, how shoddy, frankly it's typical of the present publican.'

There was a pause in the conversation, then this: ‘Where is our young friend tonight?' said Buckler. For a moment Fred thought that was him.

‘Not so young anymore, Major.'

Fred heard the hostility and malice. ‘Our eternally
childish
friend, Major, it gives me no pleasure to tell you, cavorts with a woman called The Crow, wife of a communist who couldn't care less if she rutted with a goat.'

Buckler stood and flicked a cigarette butt away sending sparks skidding across the road.

‘On that generous note of animal engagement, it's goodnight, Randolph.'

Back in the room Buckler couldn't stop groaning and laughing.

‘Now I've heard it all, five divisions of everything under the sign of the squeaky tin. He'd like it if we had tournaments and jousting competitions, lutes, madrigals and folderol. It's medieval. There's goats and kings – Freddy, I know you're awake.'

‘You've still got one sock on,' Fred said. ‘Your nightshirt's inside out.'

‘I saw you up there eavesdropping.'

‘You woke me up. It sounded like drunks fighting.'

‘Tomorrow you go to barracks and I won't get any more cheek. But here's a tradition for you. The condemned man gives a breakfast order, he gets anything he likes.'

Buckler made himself comfortable on his lumpy mattress. Fred would have baked beans, tomatoes, bacon, sausage, kidneys and a chop.

‘Who's your childish friend?' said Fred after a dozy minute.

‘On the grounds that the eavesdropper hears no praise of himself, was it you, do you ask?'

‘It wasn't
me
,' said Fred.

Buckler said nothing more, until: ‘Still awake?'

Last thing, he told stories. Fred groaned in resistance and said, ‘Get on with it.'

‘The old campaigner came in for supplies,' said Buckler, ‘whiskers like wire, eyes beady as bottle bottoms. Reported he'd found a corner of dirt in the Top End and fancied to take up a station there. I argued him back: “Cattle go mad, horses fall to the staggers, sheep have nothing to drink, only camels and blackfellows smile over the spoils. Decent gentlemen go starkers or get religion. You'll end up selling it cheap to a Chink,” said I. “Don't stop me dreamin',” said the old campaigner. “ ‘Cool Wells', I'll call it.” “Obstacles inflame pioneering,” I supposed with an affectionate growl. But I warned him, seeing that I was getting nowhere, “It's bad luck to change a name.” “What – do I leave it as it wuz?” “What was that, old chum?” “Desperation Creek,” he mumbled into his honest whiskers.'

TEN

THE BIG MEN OF NORMIE
Powell's childhood lived on winding dirt roads following the Isabel River upstream to its source. Their acres were given over to fine-woolled sheep. The 1950s were good years and it seemed the new decade now upon them would match. The main men were Knoxes, and Randolph Knox the controlling influence over his elderly father and younger brother, Tim, who was the same age as Normie. In their long breaks back from uni, the two eighteen-year-olds showed up at rugby practice. The coach was Kingsley Colts, who said, when they stood and biffed each other, ‘Get down off your hind legs, you animals, this is a game.'

‘The game played in heaven,' was how Normie's father, still turning out for the team at forty-one, described it. He would soon have reason to know.

In the previous century on the Upper Isabel, churches were built on steep clay ridges where preachers came on allotted Sundays. Nearby were graveyards arranged by denominations and separated by fences matted with windblown grass. Inside those weatherboard temples mud-nesting swallows and blowflies left traces requiring work with straw brooms and buckets of hot water and cakes of carbolic soap to clean out the gunk. Normie worshipped out of duty to his father's wishes. He never knew what to pray. Suggesting what it was, by observation, made nature Normie's subject in the same streak of questioning that turned his father to God when he was the age Normie was now. Silence and nature ruled under rafters in the weeks between services and Normie sitting in a pew while his father preached thought about that.

Vince Powell had been a naval officer in the war, then a chemistry teacher and now a muscular Christian with something to prove who loaded hay and drove trucks helping the big men out. His loudest sermon asked, ‘What Makes a Man?' and the answer was hardest to give, involving the Trinity and Apostles' Creed and mental gymnastics (and bending your back and taking the blows of your mates). Normie tried hard, but found it a game of words.

‘A game?' said Vince. ‘It is real.'

It embarrassed Normie the way his father swaggered with the blokes on the footy field, or in summer hit the lucerne paddock and bit crown seals from beer bottles after the hot work was done. That his father would take only approximately half a glass of beer or a small cut-glass goblet of sherry never escaped Normie's absorbing gaze. The son didn't want to see the father drunk but you didn't nibble at fire, you took the burn. A man could never be hero enough, on the Isabel, unless he was dead. Either you suffered or not, and Normie wished there'd been a real fire on HMAS
Thursday
such as other men had in their ships and planes, to burn off half a handsome face.

News of the burning Holden came firsthand from Claude Bonney and Eddie Slim when Normie was a kid and he never forgot the day. Claude Bonney was his friend, guide, nature-lover. They'd stayed in touch. Normie had the same professors now and they knew Claude as one of their best, except he'd never finished his degree. What did he need to learn that he couldn't find out when it came time to learn it? The famous Holden crash had the power to grow in the mind and haunt from the corners of sleep. Life was a blaze, the essence of carbon flung to its farthest intelligence in one moment, reduced to ash the next. That the doomed men in the car were sailors made Normie resent his father for being alive in one of those atavistic attacks of emotion devoid of reason that bedevil a son's mind. Tim Knox had the unspeakable satisfaction of having a dead brother to whom he owed his existence.

Vince Powell talked of mercy but the Upper Isabel men had an unforgiving streak. They never saw mercy required of themselves while seeking contrition from others. Normie flinched under the so-called humorous cuff of Randolph Knox's palm when Randolph called him useless in the hayfield. The bachelor seemed the ultimate representative of a truth that was force. So supreme were Knoxes in the nation's ideal of itself they supplied members of parliament from their family tree, judges, bishops and soldiers in two world wars. Lieutenant Sandy Knox had a memorial stone dedicated on a hilltop granite boulder overlooking the farm, and the elderlies with Randolph, when Tim was eleven, had made a pilgrimage to Greece to visit his grave.

Hard rations were good news for sheep on the Upper Isabel. That was the boast. It stretched to people as the Knoxes' erosion gullies displayed the ruthlessness of a struggle for dominance. Normie eyed this with a survival theorist's eye, a blue Pelican paperback of Marxist biology his Bible of choice. Those valued animals met the challenge of eating grass down to the nub; the harder they grazed the finer their wool became, or so Randolph claimed in his highest excitements in a conundrum explaining the desolation and wealth of the land. Knox flocks resembled dismal maggots crossing the hills but turned a profit enabling Knoxes to take their sea voyages and Randolph to drive a Jaguar two-seater regularly traded in for the latest model.

Randolph's singleness of mind precluded marriage in favour of work. There'd been women who'd tried unbuttoning his duds, but no dice. The person who broke with Randolph and his rule was that lean stick of a sporting bloke who was said by Randolph to have formulated his animal experience on goats. Their feud was vituperative and humorous and entertained the town. Colts worked for Careful Bob Hooke and Randolph walked out the swing doors of the agency if Colts walked in. Randolph retreated to Homegrove while Colts stayed on in Woodbox Gully, in the cottage they'd shared when younger. Colts drove in every direction called upon by Careful Bob, buying and selling rams, and was said by Randolph to be a scabby ram himself, having a sheila in every half-arsed town primed and ready to be served without respect. Randolph couldn't stand it: the rougher Colts lived, the fussier Randolph became, the more outwardly respectable the more Colts reserved his morals to himself. Randolph wore cravats and used a shooting stick when watching the game on Saturday afternoons on the Isabel Junction Oval.

Scalded as they were, bare as they were, the Knox hills were wild and beautiful in their bleakness. They were bordered by cold forests of eucalyptus extending from peaks rarely trodden. Sometimes Normie trod them, a lone walker and rock climber. The organ pipes and flatiron slabs of the Isabel Walls drew him. Nobody else ever went there. From the trig, its pile of stones a kind of fort, the ranges marched away east in folds of blue-smoked haze to the distant sea and west in darker ramparts to the Great Divide. The older male Knoxes despised these eastern reaches as mere cattle runs and barely saw them against the needs of fencing, dogging, rabbit eradication and soil erosion repairs relating to sheep. It was in the overstocked, hard-bitten hills and down to the sparkling river flats they found beauty most, in irrigated paddocks given over to lucerne, deep-rooted and hardy, in drought years lit jade against the dried-up rapids of the Isabel. There Randolph conditioned his rams with the big jaws he called royal.

During haymaking Normie rode with his father from before daylight until after dark, spiralling the paddocks while men on casual rates of pay hurled rectangular bales onto the flat top. Normie would have to say that he and Tim Knox were not so much friends but rather observers of each other's pitifulness by going as hard as they could. Tim was paid nothing being a Knox and Norman paid nix alongside his father. He didn't see his father being used up, that his energy was a flame consuming itself to a purer burn. He thought that way of himself, and his poor mother saw that was right for his age, not Vince's.

Jenny Powell had never wanted to be a vicar's wife but once loved a sailor in a roll-necked sweater, Sub-Lieutenant Powell, RANVR, and said she would voyage with him anywhere. Lately when mail arrived she knew there were limits.

For Vince started tearing up correspondence, often before he'd even come down from the post office verandah, looking around for a bin. It was a lucky day when he found a bin smouldering and already alight. To see the mail flaring and turning to ash worked like a Bex on Vince. Silently he thanked Tub Maguire, the figure in the torn black overcoat who kept the town's rubbish alight with crafty cigarette butts and furtively cupped matches.

Vince walked under low sticky peppercorns remembered from his youth. Down the next street plane trees reached across the white dust road, almost touching. Roses thrived in gardens watered by tea dregs and washing-up slops. St Aidan's came into view, its belltower copied from an original in East Anglia and paid for by Knoxes in 1878. The forecourt of the churchyard had enraptured Vince at the age of five, a pattern of herringbone bricks. If he ever wrote his own story, his spiritual account, it would be those old red bricks with their crumbled edges and stubborn dry remnants of rosemary that would get credit for swaying him towards God.

If he said God lived in the stones and late after turning off lights and locking doors fell to his knees and prayed on them, who would know? His wife wrote to their son at St Paul's College expressing alarm. Normie wrote back with the opinion it was par for the course, but he'd be home next weekend.

Around a corner Tub Maguire lurched from the shadows, the tails of his overcoat flapping.

‘If only two days was the same,' the metho drinker slurred, tilting a hat brim chewed by mice.

‘Too right, Tub,' said the man of the cloth, hearing the rattle of matches as Tub limped away.

Up near the stone quarry a fire burned, eating dry underbrush in a jaggedy line and harmless in winter.

In the ministers' fraternal of country towns it was said that Anglican clergy did not have a hard road to the pulpit. Rather too easy it was for them to slip on the gaudy vestments and gesture towards the choir stalls for a bit of tra-la-la. Presbyterians did higher degrees in New Testament Greek, Cattle Ticks had the celibacy row to hoe, but after the navy Vince had been a high school teacher one year and a preacher the next. QED as they said in the science staff room, that was the whisper, it was all too quick, but ask Vince and he might tell you differently if only he could find the words to describe his appetite for change and the pressure of attaining it.

Back during teaching Vince had almost exploded test tubes in thought, watching sulphur and silicone bubble. There was a part of him convinced despite physical laws that reality was a deception requiring less than acid, heat or sugars to melt the division between spirit and material. His son, a materialist, might see it in an electron microscope if only he looked hard enough. There was no division, there was never a void beyond, Vince said, when he and Normie debated. ‘Wordless harmony a condition of matter,' said a sermon card being drafted. It was Vince's innermost syllabus, which he'd protected from his pupils in the state system but always wanted to teach Norm. The ring around the atom: inwards was where Vince headed when the time came – surrendering his superannuation and sure climb up the Departmental ladder, pinning the gold cross of the bush padre to his shirt collar.

Sceptics and hard-bitten refusers – even Normie, you might say – had Vince's understanding more than fellow clergy who branded this reverend rather too sporty, therefore thick, as he settled into the outdoor Christian role that winter by getting out with Colts on cross-countries. He'd turned forty-two, Colts was thirty-seven.

Scoring a try Vince flew with horizontal momentum, man of the flashbulbed moment on the sports' page of the
Isabel Gazette
, ploughing into the churned earth under the goalposts with his arms held up until the very last moment when he slammed the ball down. Every time Vince got back on his feet he was glad to be alive, and unwillingly, oh so diffidently, saw admiration (a love of the game) gripping Norman.

Vince's sermons, crafted and filed away, often praised by Jen as more than just fine, felt wooden, he told his son. It was why he'd lately abandoned sermons and improvised from a book of Psalm interpretation. It was certainly a gain. Heads snapped from slumber and ecstasy glowed in men's faces and more or less as usual in women's when Vince hit his tonsils hard. The choir doubled in number and Saturday Evensong became a haven of swaying, trilling chanters, Randolph Knox's the finest voice among them. People travelled from distant towns to experience the rumour. The triumph was Randolph bringing a bunch of blokes down from the Upper Isabel.

During Evensong Normie and Tim Knox slipped away, took a Dally Messenger across to the town oval and played force 'em backs with high punts until darkness fell and each claimed a win and came back covered in mud to prove it.

Vince with fifty pounds cash went to Hooke & Hooke and paid six months' rental on the Buffalo Hall, a 1920s fibrolite job lying empty. There in a khaki shirt with the sleeves torn out and wearing footy shorts and sandshoes without socks, he set up trestle tables and accepted donations of food, helping the poor who joined the ranks of his acolytes calling him the best good bloke ever.

This was all very well and interested the bishop, who came to inquire why his letters drew blanks. Excess enthusiasm rather showed other men up. Allowances were made for the phase in any man's life when the scriptures needed living out. ‘We all went through it,' said the bishop, smilingly over his athletic colleague's lapse, ‘except never as pronounced as Vince.' Contingency plans were made for the next move for an errant vicar – sideslip Vince into the practical side of the Anglican show, second him to a property management working party.

‘Not me, I've something to prove.' Vince tore up the letter.

The part of Vince's mind presiding over his being was a relentless taskmaster. He talked about suffering – about being nailed to the wood – but did not talk this way to the bishop. That would not be wise, said Vince, with a strained, crafty laugh.

Jenny felt this invading from where it shouldn't, right into their lives from the holiness plane. Cooling from Vince's enthusiasms she took sides with those parishioners who felt their leader was ignoring them after years of faithful attendance and social contentment as stalwarts. They were the ones who put money into the collection plate and maintained the paintwork and churchyard rose beds after all. The evangelical style made a mockery of their devotion.