When Colts Ran Read online

  Today’s letter came in the same rounded, backward-sloping, resentfully particular hand. It stated for Mrs Buckler’s ‘private information’ that Buckler was ‘making a run’, was ‘released from ties’, was ‘consorting with freckled Irish barmaid types’.

  Oh, the awful petty victories of the tittle-tat. So fleeting to the teller, so branded upon the told.

  The venomous phrasing had Veronica recall a woman’s name: R. Donovan, and Buckler’s nonchalance around that name when they’d entered cheques-paid in the monthly ledger.

  ‘R is for?’ she’d wondered, as Buckler deprecated while colouring.

  ‘Rusty – a charity case with a snotty-nosed kid sister in tow. They’re on the wallaby.’

  Closing her studio door Veronica turned the key and, tapping the window glass, looked back in. The old tom she trusted through a leather-hinged flap to rid the room of mice stared past her. It showed how little she mattered to creatures of instinct. Promises made, banns posted, ceremonies gone through, life lived, love played out – what a circus.

  Her painting looked back at her, roughly right: a stone verandah, a distant view reflected in tin cans and acetylene lamps, veined eyeballs of a boy being attacked by a goat, its hoofs balanced on his skinny shoulders. In the opposite corner a woman in a torn raceday suit chewing on a feathered hen leg. Climbing around the frame a pumpkin vine and a pile of Queensland blues. Flying overhead a small bird of nocturnal disposition, the Australian owlet-nightjar, her figure or mark of integrity she sometimes thought. One had sung at her birth at two a.m. on a winter’s night.

  She called the painting Goats and the boy was Colts – the same bleak, smitten and fanatical concentration of gaze, the lick of devil’s curls at the forehead, the mocking flat smile and the squared dimple on the chin with a pattern of goosebumps. The ravenous woman was Pansy, Colts’s dear mother, locked down in pomegranate shades of oils, denied her fullest expression of love by early death. She’d enjoyed a day at the races, eating the raceday lunch of cold poultry, wearing a suit of fine-cut linen with a straw hat and fake cherries. Laughter always so quick. And then so finally gone. The verandah posts of the homestead framed the track to her grave on a rocky ridge. Small as a postage stamp, it was drawn in every detail.

  Expecting the boy since the telephone call from the Headmaster, Veronica heard noises in the house and followed down to his room, watching from the door as he packed a kitbag with Buckler’s initials stencilled in flaking black army lettering.

  He was sniffling, crying, turning his face away.

  ‘It’s all right, Kings, I know everything,’ she said in her whimsical, flutey voice so ill-matched to any sort of energetic undertaking or seriousness, although that was deceptive.

  He didn’t reply, of course. Worst thing known was to tell a boy what he felt, that he wasn’t the first on earth to bust with a feeling. The offence was bullying a younger boy, inflicting physical damage. Veronica had little doubt that Colts was in the wrong. Intimidation was the counterfeit courage of sixteen. He’d learned it when younger, uncritical with awe: Buckler and his returned-man cohorts breaking up meetings, confronting strikers with clubs and following them round in cars, sending men to their houses when they weren’t at home to wise up their wives. Buckler was no coward but his politics were craven. Here was Kingsley caught in the same old trap; you had to feel sorry for him.

  They sat at the kitchen table while she spread pikelets with honey and poured tea. With just the pair of them it was all right like this – only when Buckler was present did Veronica feel barred from the boy’s attention. Now under his burning gaze she felt herself exist.

  They needed to be allies for a time. She could not do this on her own – pump out from the damaged heart what love she had for Buckler and save the boy from the vortex of second-hand experience, which Buckler had roused. Because of something Colts once said to her in a blessed moment of childhood innocence, she knew him as a seeking soul. Such figures walked through the world half in, half out. Could it ever be proved to Kings that the world was enough? Through despair of him, with paints to hand, she’d attacked him by the goat to bring him back – to show him what pride was doing and too much prancing maleness. Look into the goat’s vertical irises and see Dunc Buckler staring back. A goat was a proud, foolish, selfish and beautiful thing. It had its own stink about it, too.

  Compared with that man’s rule, what a weak, blind, uninspirational impression Kingsley had of her love and its power – nothing seemed able to convince him otherwise except that she loved his sister Faye best when the two of them, boy and girl, sad orphans and cuckoo chicks in her nest, were the definition of love as much as dependents could be. They were the children she’d been unable to have with Buckler, who’d won their care in the toss of a coin over the claims of his Anzac mate, Birdy Pringle.

  Going to the sideboard Veronica opened a drawer, taking out a ten-shilling note. It was a situation needing manipulation. Kingsley guardedly watched her; he was amusingly tight, hating to spend his savings, wanting more.

  She surprised him by handing the money over. Was it to shut him up and send him away? If so, good on her, his eyes seemed to say. Pies, lemonade, ginger nut biscuits and tins of sweetened condensed milk. Just don’t stroke my hair and tickle the inside corner of my lips and say you love me.

  Later they sat listening to the radio, getting the tally of stab and feint on land and sea. Colts doodled down the margin of a newspaper map of war zones. Fear, isolation, loss and bravado gave national defiance a personal cast. Veronica looked over to see what Kingsley had drawn, glimpsing a sketch of their old horse-drawn caravan.

  Interesting that, because the product of Veronica’s own incessant pencilwork was a doodle of the same darned cart. So much for Europe in flames, North Africa scorched, Greece fallen, the victorious Japanese knocking at Australia’s dunny door – it all came back to a woman, a man, a boy and a bleached sky beckoning their hopes. To a place called Limestone Hills in the Central West. To an old horse-drawn caravan on the Darling. Buckler had poisoned the mood of their happy lives, but Veronica had the energy to split the earth like a seed and gather the growth, taking back whatever fell tangled into her arms.

  She found Colts looking at Goats, staring through the cobwebbed glass at her crowded canvas.

  ‘It looks like scrambled eggs,’ he said.

  ‘It’s you, darling. It’s yours.’

  She watched him deaf to the idea.

  ‘Kings, I’ve decided. Goats will be yours one day.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he said, fists clenched tight against his trouser seams, and she was satisfied because in denial he always went to the heart.

  Colts left first, heading off when she honestly thought she had him. Give him twelve hours, eighteen at the most, to get to Limestone Hills.

  The whole train was drunk and singing, rattling along, all seats taken, aisles blocked, corridors crammed, the engine far ahead and visible rounding a curve with the firebox flickering red. A boy with dark, alive eyes cupped a hand to rattling window glass and his hopes went out like a radio call, out to the stars and into the constellations. Are you receiving me, over and out. Wilco, wilco, wilco went the pounding engine on its iron tracks, making its way over the Blue Mountains and onto the slopes and plains under starshine.

  A green jumper peeled back his thoughts. She was a young mother with red hair and white skin, her baby’s fists in the way as Colts slid around to get a better look. When she saw him looking she stared back and he left his seat and stood in the corridor feeling beaten.

  Before leaving home Veronica took a pair of scissors and rough-cut her hair short enough for regular basin washes. From a high shelf she took overalls she’d worn in her tomboy years, nipped to the waist and still needing no letting out. Barely eating, she was back to smoking, bundling hoarded tins of quality cork-tips. Following Colts mere hours behind, she
took her husband’s old Bedford, roll-starting it in the street – sitting on pillows with cushions at her back and double-shuffling the gears, wearing chamois leather gloves and looking exceedingly important, like a child. She had enough rationed petrol to get her to Limestone Hills, where she guessed there was more fuel stored through the reasoning of squirrel-minded Buckler.

  When Veronica was Colts’s age, before studying painting at East Sydney Tech, she’d gone with her dad to Riverina cattle sales. At sixteen she’d looked eleven, sitting up driving a one-horse dray. They’d returned droving store cattle over the dry ridges and steep gullies of the Dividing Range, taking weeks to reach home on the reedy lagoons and saltwater estuaries of the Isabel River emptying to the sea.

  Now it was time to reclaim that capable part of herself consigned to Buckler when they wed. She would make a loop of a thousand or even two thousand miles, if needed, attend to her questions of that goatish man and return to the sparkling estuary; its snapper, flounder, sweet prawns; its beaches eight miles long with curved waves thumping in hard from the Tasman Sea. There she would become whatever she might have been before Buckler claimed her. If Buckler came back with her, it would be on those terms, that she would be herself – except what those terms might be in the sense of an agreement she could not imagine. The whole circumstance made her sad from the wartime situation with cousins and friends dead or in Japanese hands to the sexual insult of not being wanted by the fool she loved.

  Colts came to a cold siding and spilled out while the train barely slowed. Crawled under a wattle bush, shivering and damp. Drank water from a brass tap at a ringed water tank as the sun came up. Train-song was audible when he put his ear to the rails, the razor-thin hum of departing carriages. There he stood exposed, broken open, newly hatched, a sore-eyed long-necked boy in a rumpled army greatcoat.

  Wrong place, wrong siding, he’d made a mistake in the half dark and stepped from the train a stop early. Limestone Hills siding was the next along.

  Sensations poured in, not of Colts’s own bothered self so much, now that he started walking and hoping, but of a time that was always there without him – a country place that was the truest part of him: the smell of dry grass and morning dust in his nostrils, the clamour of flocking galahs and the bells of topknot pigeons, with always the light lengthening, fingering through bushes and rocks, seeking, he sometimes imagined, the quartzite at the old cemetery where his mother was buried.

  But he wouldn’t think of that. Not in a thousand years. Not of the streaks of gold in the hard white stone.

  The sun burnt off cool distances. Hills that seemed close weren’t anymore – they were slammed away in hardness of light. Colts was part of this world as he walked, being swung by Buckler in a game of being let go, of knocking Faye flat as he rolled through the dry grass, laughing so much he spewed. How did you take hold of life again? What was the trick? When would it happen? Yell him the secret!

  ‘Climb up, sonny, I’ll give you a ride.’

  A farmer going the same direction drove him in a sulky to a house along fencelines with tight, right-angled bends and stock laneways running with skinny sheep. The farmer said he wanted to improve a lot of things but there was the drought, the manpower shortage, all the odd-jobbers away in the army, men chewing sand in Palestine or studying Bushido in Changi Gaol, only oldsters left now, crocks and whatever greenstick boys fell from the sky. Looking sidelong at Colts when he said that.

  In a yard protected by rolls of hessian, a leggy foal stood with its mother glistening with new life.

  ‘She’s one day old. I’ve been up all night,’ said the man, easing the sulky to a stop, his cheeks colouring and something getting into his manner as he told Colts about the distances foals travelled following their mothers in mile after mile of loyal pursuit. They would never run as far again in all their born days with so little to fuel them. They had the whole greatness of their lives in them from the start.

  ‘You’d know that.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Because you’re a runner,’ said the man a bit slyly. ‘Streaky as bacon, speedy as a wheel.’

  Colts turned aside, admitted nothing. But it was the greatest feeling a boy could be given – being known but not pinned down.

  In the kitchen a tall wife greeted him and he was fed on mutton chops, eggs with hard skirts fried in fat, cups of dark tea with sticks in them. Toast was made by burning slices of bread on the hotplate of the wood stove. He was hungry and grateful, but he hated that kitchen. You didn’t always have to do your washing up in a kerosene tin cut at the diagonal, saving the soapsuds for the roses, all eaten by bugs.

  They asked his name.

  ‘Kingsley,’ he said after a struggle.

  ‘Just “Kingsley”?’

  ‘Colts.’

  The two looked at each other and their eyes said, ‘Limestone Hills, Dunc Buckler’s kid.’

  ‘What about a day’s work,’ said the woman, ‘because we’re a bit stuck.’

  ‘Only if he’s keen,’ said the man, ‘before he pushes along.’

  ‘I’m ready,’ said Colts, lifting his jaw.

  The woman looked round startled when he came back into the kitchen to get his hat and heard her on the telephone asking for Limestone Hills, Mrs Buckler.

  Through cleaning a feed bin and hauling heavy sacks of seed wheat onto a horse-drawn wagon, Colts’s fingernails bled, his eyes ran red-rimmed and sore that day, and he developed a rasping cough. Through digging a post-hole to a depth of three feet, his hands were raw by smoko time.

  The farmer was a First War man. ‘You’re looking for trouble,’ he said as they yarned of the scrap, leaning on shovels. ‘You’re scared you’ll miss out. You think fighting will give you that. Well, it might, so get on with it, son, and you’ll soon find out.’

  A rabbit plague was on and the man handed him a pea rifle. There were so many bunnies coming in for a drink they barely stirred when Colts walked through them shooting from the hip, rippled hunched furry nothings with nowhere to go.

  In the full day’s work Colts understood something about labour that seeded a thought in his brain. The heave of a strainer post made its own dumb impact down the end of its hole and stood there throwing a hard shadow into the day.

  When he came back to the house there was a figure on a motorcycle waiting. Not a male, he saw when he came closer, but a woman in trousers with a hat and the front brim turned up. He recognised the bike, too. It was Buckler’s old BSA 250cc with sidecar from Limestone Hills, which Faye – hair flying back – had so loved to ride, spinning around like a willy-willy as Colts sat in the sidecar laughing and hanging on.

  TWO

  THEY HADN’T SPOKEN ABOUT FAYE but her presence was everywhere at Limestone Hills. They reached there on dark. Mementoes of past holidays lay where she’d left them over the years – a play table made of twigs, arrangements of fossilised shells, a book with a gumleaf bookmark, The Green Hat by Michael Arlen with a sentence underlined and the word ‘sigh!’ pencilled in the margin. That night Colts carried a hurricane lamp, sweeping its bars of light into corners of his old room. It was a whitewashed cave with fig trees over the window, where a tawny frogmouth came and sat unblinking.

  A smell of warm fat was in the air. There was a leg of mutton in the oven. Veronica promised the crunchy burnt outer slices he loved, which he called Vegemite. Faye always handed hers over when he wanted more.

  The first time they were brought there it was as if Colts had been born there. A gate clicked behind them. Limestone Hills. Whatever feelings had filled his heart on the other side of four years old were left behind. Except there were scenes of them walking together. She had such dreamless eyes he couldn’t find them ever again. There were rounded rocks like giant eggs in the bush behind the house, where she took him in his stroller. It was where she was buried: he knew that. His mother. Yet every s
urge of his feelings denied the oblong mound of earth that was stuck in his heart and would never shift. He remembered a room, how he’d looked into corners finding spider webs of interest, but not looked at her lying blue, pale and alone in a pleated nightdress. He must have looked, though. Otherwise how did he know it was her, dying, and he’d felt nothing? Nothing.

  Standing at the edge of the dry garden at Limestone Hills, he’d eaten a fig. They grew wild there, fat and purple, splitting their skins with sweet red jam. He’d set off climbing the rocky creek, looking for goannas, hitting puffballs with a stick, the landscape fitting around him like a skin.

  After his basin wash he lay naked on the starched clean sheets and touched himself. He gazed at the stars until he was no longer able to tell who he was and slid from the bed to the cotton rug on the cement floor and lay there with his eyes jammed open.

  Even after Colts was too old for baby things he’d carried a tin truck and a stout, bedraggled teddy bear under his arm, and when the truck gashed his knee Faye asked the teddy to make him better, on account of the red cross stitched to its chest. The last time she did that he threw the playthings away, but she gathered them and put them somewhere safe.

  Loose soil and road ruts baked in the sun were the material of his playground then, soil blunting his hearing as he wiggled a finger in his ear imitating the way men did, at the same time as holding their pipes. The grainy feeling of Limestone Hills dirt, the taste of it spat from his tongue, clinging to damper cooked in the ashes, dirt stuck to a boiled lolly taken from a paper bag, was the medium Colts was born into, as far as he could tell. A fly got stuck in his ear, sizzling deeper. That was the feeling too. He’d never get over it or past it either. The hum of the dry bush, crickets, Christmas beetles, cicadas.