When Colts Ran (6 page)

They crossed an open width of ground under the hot sun wearing their slouch hats with leather chinstraps fitted. When Slim observed Buckler and Abe marching in step beside him, he gave a skip and the three of them were crisply aligned.

Then behind them de Grey's boys fell in, and de Grey was heard grunting ‘hep, hep, hep right hep'.

‘Look at the half-arse army,' said a watcher in the shade, and Buckler couldn't help it, he bridled at any slur on the band.

Eureka was five million acres give or take a few hundred thou, epitomising the old continent worn down and reduced to whatever nutrition could be wrung out in the name of sheep. It had a stone homestead with a wide paved verandah and a stone shearing shed architecturally huge under a sheet-iron roof. On average thirty shearers shore one hundred thousand sheep fed on saltbush that sprouted past all horizons. While a war went on somewhere, and our men were in it, a noted Australian battle was continued here between man and truculent beast, between men and men in the realm of boss relations. One of those fighters was Hoppy Harris from Broken Hill.

‘Harris the contractor?' said Buckler, his mouth going a little dry.

‘So you've heard of me?' smiled the hairy fellow oiling his handpiece.

There were only four shearers present, and the jackaroo Randolph Knox doing the work of ten, sweeping, skirting, fleece-rolling and pressing, wool piled on every side like mountain ranges. Harris roared over the engine noise, ‘I can't speak to you now, you can see I'm fucking flat strap shorthanded. Unless you happen to know your way round a fleece, push off.'

Despite the forceful language Harris eyed Buckler neutrally enough, perhaps only indicative of what he reserved for everyone he met. But whatever went on under the look was perhaps something else, on the theory that men suspicious of each other in the realm of sexual betrayal were inevitably polite until tactics declared otherwise.

Buckler being of rank was welcomed a mile away at the big house where there were linen tablecloths, silver cutlery, napkin rings and a saddle of mutton accompanied by hermitage wine from the Barossa Valley, the bottles packed in sheaths of straw with the heads of wheat still on them. Buckler had sherry with the manager, Oakeshott. The jackaroo Knox entered wet-haired and breathless as the clock struck seven, and Oakeshott and his wife eyed him for manners and to be sure, when he was invited to remove his jacket, that his shirt was buttoned to the wrists, covering the yolk boils on his forearms from too much delving in wool. Randolph Knox had the biggest jaw Buckler had ever seen on a bloke, like a sack of marbles. They sat in chairs with carved backs. This Knox, Buckler realised, was the Head Boy of Colts's school, the former schoolboy cricketing great – how the mighty were averaged, Buckler reflected, removed from their marvellous contexts, smitten with boils and made into anxious apprentices.

That night the men took over huts almost empty of station workers. De Grey and his band had their blankets unrolled under the stars.

Oakeshott took Buckler riding early. He said he was tolerant of de Grey's coons for the sake of the war push. The two riders seemed to be going nowhere with the dawn light on their backs until they came upon relics undisturbed since the overland telegraph penetrated last century. Old huts with rifle slits, rusted horseshoes dangling from white-anted boards, eaten away iron pots, amber rum bottles tumbled in heaps.

Buckler said, ‘Nothing to show the white man has any more claim on the dirt than the little yellow bastard brandishing his sword from Timor.'

‘Except we're here,' said Oakeshott.

‘
Je suis d'accord
.'

‘And look at our field of fire. Three hundred and sixty degrees and cleaner than the veldt.'

Oakeshott was a noted woolgrower and eminent sheep classer with reason to reflect on achievement but personally liverish. Each morning the jackaroos were given their day's jobs with barking precision. Stations were run as monarchies and, with his drooping moustache and silvered Pickelhaube haircut, Oakeshott added despotism. He wasn't an owner – that was a pastoral company in Adelaide with directors who interfered. What Oakeshott held was the hereditary impact he'd made on strong-woolled merino sheep over a lifetime of attentive breeding. When he retired his line would be spent unless he found a worthy successor. Young Randolph Knox, he confided, could be the one.

Back at the house tea and scones were served by Mrs Oakeshott's Martha, a girl around the age of Birdy Pringle's Dorothy, but luckier than her because she had these good people civilising her in a lace mob-cap and pinafore.

Over to the men's camp Buckler went to make himself felt. All was in order and he thanked Jack Slim.

‘Bugger thanking me, it was de Grey.'

The truck was unloaded, gear stacked, and de Grey and his lads were at the shed with Harris, helping with the shearing now their own work was done, all except one worker – the lean boy who kept his distance as if by reverse magnetism. When Buckler walked around the end of the men's quarters verandah, the boy sloped off around the other so that Buckler only saw his legs. Then through a window Hammond Pringle could be seen sitting on a tool trunk cleaning his rifle.

Abe had the kitchen range going. In a side room Slim had the radio set up.

‘You two have fallen on your feet,' said Buckler. ‘I'd call it over-comfortable. Won't be for long.'

‘What have you got for me in the way of loot?' said Slim. ‘Anything special?'

‘Oakeshott's a good man. I haven't pressured him yet.'

Slim said, ‘It's all right supporting the war effort but better if your neighbour does it, and there are few exceptions to that golden rule not excluding managers protecting their patch for the sake of city slickers. Have I got that right, Major?'

‘Something like it.'

‘Here's my selection,' said Slim, handing Buckler a list he'd made after poking around in the Eureka sheds.

‘That's not a lot either,' said Buckler.

‘Prime stores,' agreed Slim. ‘Pastoralists pay peanuts, but when it comes to gear they really know how to stint.'

‘Get over the resentment factor, Lenin.'

‘There's a lorry, a pump engine, and what about this adaptable trailer with fuel drums strapped on? I think we should grab it. Then we could really go the distance. De Grey thinks so too.'

‘Who's running this army – corporals?'

‘They say Hitler's one. We could go for weeks on end,' said Slim, ‘just think of it.'

Buckler stared through the window at the half-dark boy sitting guard.

He went out to him. ‘Everyone else is at the shearing, why aren't you lending an elbow, Hammond?'

It was said with a good smile. The boy scrambled to his feet.

‘Wouldn't know what to make of a sheep,' he mumbled, looking down at the dirt.

‘Say if it was buffalo hide?'

He looked up.

‘That would be different, sure. No-one'd go up me for leaving cuts.'

‘Seems just yesterday you were skinning them at ten.'

‘I was, and younger. Pop had me working for it.'

Buckler peered inquiringly, sympathetically at the kid.

‘Why didn't you say it was you, Hammond?'

‘I've let ya down.' He lowered his head.

‘Don't know anything about that,' said Buckler, who'd been sending school fees to the Marist Brothers, Townsville, on the quiet, and when it came to priorities, putting Hammond's share ahead of Colts's for the simple reason that Buckler thought Presbyterians, because he was baptised one, would stretch understanding further than would the Micks. A recent final demand showed he was wrong.

Buckler summoned Abe to bring them a smoko box. Hammond picked among the cupcakes and drank tea.

‘You're a second-chance boy, Hammond. Give it another try, that's your luck. Us – me, your father, Corporal de Grey, all the good men who came through the first war show – we got it sorted out for you and Colts.'

The kid nodded. ‘I know that bull. There was the time you crawled down a trench and tied a rope round his waist.'

Buckler said, ‘Call it a trench, it was more like a river of mud. Then there was the time he lifted the spar off me, when my legs were jammed. Only they weren't crushed. Not quite. He got me back walking and I was right as rain. That was Messines.'

‘I grew up on them bits. Like the time he felt the spent shell stroking his face. He talked about that. It landed like a ghost, he said. It would have been curtains in the mud, he would have been pushed in. The mud would have filled his face, but you had the jack and the length of four be two.'

‘Can you imagine it?'

‘Can't.'

‘We knew worse, Hammond.'

‘I know. He never shuts up about it.'

It made Buckler smile.

In the stillness came a pizzicato of crickets and men snoring with cello richness. Over several nights Buckler waited for the visit from Hoppy Harris. Percussion would come with the crunch of boots on gravel. At meals the atmosphere between them, their nodding politeness, started working on him through gaps of hefty silence. Someone wasn't eating. A fellow insomniac stood out in the dark smoking. Shape of that contractor under the stars.

Buckler didn't think Harris a man to negotiate or yarn. He was one who waited to strike a blow against the most satisfying material to hand, a wrongdoer in the flesh. Judgement circling closer tightened the fist and waited till work was done.

A principle of courage determined Buckler's mood as he considered the situation: don't get out from under it. Fall to the lowest plane of hope. There live or die as you did in her arms.

Around noon the following day Adrian de Grey left the shearing and Buckler failed to realise the meaning of the man's lorry heading a couple of miles out onto the flat. Later the sound of a plane taking off droned from the newly extended strip. Buckler felt wronged that de Grey was out there so smartly. First ever RAAF milk run down from the north, landed and then hurled into a hot sky and lost to Buckler's pride in greeting it as the most senior officer in a region the size of Great Britain, France, Germany and Scandinavia combined.

‘Pilot Officer Tarbett asked where you were, could have fitted you in,' said de Grey later.

‘What was he offering, a joyflight?' asked Buckler.

‘A flip to Adelaide.'

‘Bullshit.'

‘Dinkum. They'll take anyone if there's a spare seat. There was a politician on board, Marcus Friendly, the federal treasurer.'

‘Him,' said Buckler. ‘I'd a'pushed him out the window.'

‘Warner Tarbett's his personal pilot for the duration.'

‘Ooh la la.'

So much for Buckler's importance. But he began making plans anyway, sounding off a bit, puffing himself up, indiscreet when tipsy on Jack Slim's hooch.

Harris watched Buckler from the tin cathedral where so many shorn sheep spilled from the board that clean, white, long-legged lines of South Australian merinos made fan-lines to the horizon. Talk about Buckler planning to shoot through for a week or so's furlough from the godforsaken continent's extremest gravel plain reached his ears. Awaiting the moment, Buckler kept seeing the man's wife taking him by the belt and leading him thunderstruck into a small back room, a broom cupboard would do for what was needed as he yearned for her with the hardness of a rock.

Dawn found Abe at Buckler's elbow with a cuppa in a tin mug and a fresh-baked twist of sweet dough on a blue tin plate. The flies got up a crawl on the offside of the flywire.

When Abe left there was welcoming silence except for their bump and buzz.

But soon Buckler heard a plane flying low in the rippling hard distance, thrumming and fading. It circled without landing. Buckler swung to the floor, his wide feet holding to the floorboards. The sound of a truck pulled closer, brakes grinding, door slamming, engine idling. Nibble of footsteps and Buckler lifted his nose from Abe's steaming cup. A shadow fell on the gauze.

De Grey, with an air of interest, stood at the door with his slouch hat tipped back from his forehead and the leather chinstrap looking chewed, eyes taking in the organisation and personal order of a longtime military mate.

‘Tarbett aerial-dropped a fair bundle.'

De Grey deposited the mail with a lean of his arm and stood there fiddling with his hat. An envelope of hotel stationery topped the packet.

‘Dunc, I've got a question.'

‘Fire away.'

‘What is it between you and the contractor? What's the poison?'

Mistrust the wide but trust the narrow
, thought Buckler, assessing Adrian de Grey's honest features on this emotional text, the opposite of which too had often guided him as a man.

‘Why do you ask?'

‘Because of a feelin',' said de Grey, diplomacy dropped from his guard. ‘Come on, it's bloody obvious.'

‘That I know his missus,' admitted Buckler feebly.

‘Yeah, but is that all?'

‘That's enough,' said Buckler, holding de Grey's eye. ‘If you ever met Rusty. Anyway, what's it to you when you're at home, Corp?'

‘I could step in. You could give me a shout. Cover your back for you. Wouldn't want to see you damaged, say, by an iron bar at your age. There's those out there wouldn't agree with me,' he added with a scowl, ‘them that have heard you say a black man is up for treason by living a life where he was born.'

Buckler felt shame inassimilable, and brushed a hand in front of his eyes.

‘What's Harris said to you?'

‘Nothin'. That's the point. I don't like camp fever.'

‘Then do nothing. That's my point. Sweat it out.'

‘Whatever you say, then,' said de Grey, stepping back out.

It seemed likely, from the letters Buckler had, that he was never to have a life absolutely and utterly his own.