Beyond the Black Stump (22 page)

Presently Stanton said, “You know what? We’re going to be mighty hungry before that truck turns up.”

She laughed; now that night had fallen their bodies craved the refreshment that they did not need in the heat of the day. “I’m hungry, too,” she said. “We’ve just got to grin and bear it, Stan, unless you like to eat a bit of one of the saddles.”

“Might be kind of tough. How would it be if I was to ride back to the homestead, ’n bring out a truck?”

“It wouldn’t be so easy to pick out the track, Stan, in the darkness, without lights. It wouldn’t help at all if you got lost.”

“I don’t reckon I’d get lost.”

“I’d rather go myself,” she said.

They discussed it for a time, sitting together by the fire. They were only twelve or fifteen miles out from Mannahill Station and not more than a mile from the road, but the moon would not rise for some hours and in the starlight the danger of wandering off the track was quite a real one. It was urgent, however, to get the boy into the hands of a doctor as soon as possible, and imperative to get him to the station and in shade before the sun rose again. They decided to wait till midnight and see if a car turned up to look for them; by that time the moon would be up and one or other of them could follow the track back without much danger.

They sat together in the firelight under the stars, rising every now and then to feed a little more water into the boy, or to put on more wood. Once Stanton said, laughing, “I guess I’ve never been so hungry in my life.”

She laughed with him. “It’s the way it is here,” she said. “You aren’t a bit hungry in the daytime, but then as soon as it gets cool you’re famished.” She turned to him. “Come on and sit down and let’s talk about something to take our minds off it.”

“Okay,” he said, settling down beside her. “What’ll we talk about?”

Her mind turned to the magazines she had been reading and to the many things that she had wanted to ask him about America. She said, “Stan, have you ever done any water-skiing?”

He glanced at her in surprise; it was a far cry from the Lunatic, and a boy dying of thirst beside them, to Wallowa Lake in the cool mountains, the flying spray, the weaving flight over the surface. “You mean, behind a motor boat?” he said. “I used to do that summers, when I was in college.”

“I’ve only seen it on the movies, and there was an article about it in one of the magazines,” she said. “Tell me, is it tremendous fun?”

He smiled. “It’s quite a thrill,” he said. “Don’t people do that here?”

“It’s not very easy without water,” she informed him. He laughed. “I did see somebody doing it once, at Perth, in the distance. I’d just love to learn to do that.”

“We do quite a bit of it at home,” he said.

“On the lakes around Hazel?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you get the boat? Can you hire them on the lakes?”

“I guess you can rent a boat, most places,” he said. “I wouldn’t really know. You want an outboard boat with a pretty big motor, twenty-five horsepower or so. Most people take their own boat along.”

She wrinkled her brows. “Take their own boat? Have you got a boat like that?”

“Why, surely,” he said. “Most people in Hazel seem to have a boat in the backyard. On a trailer. Hitch it on behind the car when you go fishing.”

In the aridity of the Lunatic such a possession was beyond her wildest dreams. In the dream world of the magazines people had motor boats and sat about in them in bathers, and fished from them, and tore over the water with hair flying. She said, “People—ordinary people—really do have boats like that, do they?”

“Why, yes,” he said. “Folks with families mostly have a boat on a trailer, back home. It’s somethin’ for the kids to do, on a vacation. We always had one. Used to get a new boat every three years or so, ’n trade in the old one.”

The real world was merging with the dream world of the
magazines. “Did you learn water-skiing behind your own boat, then?”

“Why, certainly,” he said. “Dad got a big motor, ’n taught us all one summer, up at the lake. We kept that motor for a while, but I guess he’s swapped it for a smaller one by now. I don’t remember seeing it around the basement. A small motor’s better for fishing, ’n lighter to handle when you put it on the boat.”

“Tell me,” she said. “How
do
you water-ski? What do you do?”

They sat together in the quiet of the outback night before the glowing embers of the fire while he told her. She kept him talking, and he needed little encouragement to keep on talking about the country that he loved so well. He told her about water-skiing and about trout-fishing, about the long horseback trips up into the mountains, about deer-hunting, about the deer that he had shot with Chuck, about his bow and arrows, about the head and antlers that he had not seen, that had now been delivered to his father’s house in Hazel. “Dad wrote that the Bowmen of Hazel elected me a member,” he told her. “That was certainly mighty nice of them.”

“It sounds marvellous,” she said. “Aren’t you terribly anxious to get back home to see the antlers?”

He nodded. “I’d kind of like to see them,” he admitted. “It’s too bad that Chuck won’t be there, though.”

“I know,” she said gently. “When do you think you’ll be back in Hazel, Stan?”

He was silent for a minute. Then, “It depends upon the well,” he said. “Right now it doesn’t look so good.”

“You mean, you’re not going to find oil?”

‘I wouldn’t say that,” he told her. “We got some gas last week, and we thought maybe there’d be oil there underneath the gas, ’n we got all het up about it though we didn’t say anything. But all we got so far is traces in the shale, traces that show up on a water test or else in the laboratory, but not enough to get excited about. Nuthin’ to come up liquid to the surface.”

“If there’s no oil there,” she said, “what will you do?”

“I guess I’d resign my job with Topex,” he said, “’n go home and help my father.”

“Help your father in the business, like you told me?”

“Uh-huh. He wants me to help run the auto business, so he can go earth-moving.”

Sitting in the quiet night with her, he told her all about it again. “That way I might be home around July,” he said. “I’d kind of like to do that, go home and live in Hazel. I guess I’ve had my fill of hot countries, in the oil business.”

She said quietly, “And if you strike oil, Stan?”

“I guess if we strike oil here in the Lunatic it might be so important that they’d put in someone over me to take care of it and expand the field,” he said. “I’d like to have it that way, of course—to go out with a success behind me here. But I don’t somehow feel it’s going to be like that. I reckon this is a dry hole.”

“Even if you find oil, then,” she said, “you’d be resigning just the same.”

He nodded. “I guess so. I want to be back home.”

She sat in silence with him under the stars. The dream world of the magazines was vanishing away. If the oil well were unsuccessful, as now seemed quite probable, everything would disappear. The Americans would go away, headed by Stanton Laird; big trailer trucks would come and take away the oil rig to set it up again in some more promising location. Only a few concrete blocks and platforms would remain on Laragh Station to show where they had been. There would be no more ice cream or coca cola in the Lunatic, no more American magazines, no more firsthand stories of the living conditions on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. There would be no chance of a town arising in the Lunatic, a town that would be based on oil, with hairdressers, and shops, and cafés, theatres, and churches. The country would go back to what it was before, the worse for hopes that had been raised and disappointed.

She said quietly, “We’ll all be terribly sorry to see you go.”

“I guess I’ll be sorry to go, too, in some ways,” he replied.

She glanced at him. “Why do you say that? You can’t like living in a place: like this, after Oregon.”

“I dunno,” he said slowly. “I hated it when we first came here. But I guess you get kind of used to a place, and folks here have been mighty nice to us.”

“It’s made a tremendous difference to the Lunatic, having you all here,” she said. “You can’t think what it’s meant. But from your point of view, I do see it, Stan. In your shoes I should just be itching to get back to Hazel, and when I’d got there I’d never leave it again.”

“That’s the way I feel, mostly,” he said. “And yet in some ways I just can’t bear to go.”

“Why?” she said. “What’s so attractive about this place?”

He said simply, “You.”

She turned towards him, and he took her hand. “I didn’t mean to talk this way,” he said. “I’m eight years older than you, Mollie, and that don’t seem right. But ever since you let me come ’n tell you about Chuck I’ve thought about nothing else, and now that the oil well don’t look too good I just can’t bear the thought that I’ll be going away soon, and never see you again.” He paused. “I guess there’s one thing above everything a man like me wants in his wife,” he said, “and that’s that she’d be kind. And that’s what you’ve been to me—kind.” He smiled at her whimsically. “What your Dad would say—the kindest hopper this side of the black stump.”

She looked up at him, half crying and half laughing. “I didn’t know that you were thinking about me as a hopper!”

“I wasn’t really,” he said. “That’s sort of allegorical, like the black stump. But if I was to tell you, honey, that you were the kindest person that I’d ever met this side of the black stump—I guess that would be true.”

She said, “Stan—you can’t be serious!” The dream world was flooding back again. Behind Stanton Laird, a better man than she had ever met before, came flooding in a wave the Safeway where you could do your housekeeping in ten minutes even on Sunday afternoon, the Buicks and the Plymouths, the hairdressers, the cokes and the milk shakes in the Piggy-Wiggy café, the mountains, the trout streams, and the cool mountain lakes with your own speedboat flying over them. “Oh, Stan!”

He drew her to him. “I’m terribly in love with you, Mollie. I guess I’m older than I’d have liked it to be, and too serious maybe. But I do love you very truly. Will you marry me?”

“I think I’d love to, Stan.” Of course she would; in all the world she knew, she would never find a better man than Stanton Laird. She turned to him, and kissed him very fondly.

Presently he said, “Are you quite sure, Mollie?”

She drew away from him a little, and said, “I think so, Stan. I think I could make you happy, and I think you’d make me happy, too.”

He said quietly, “What’s troubling you, then?”

She smiled. “I don’t think anything’s troubling me, Stan. I’m too happy to be troubled. Tomorrow, or some time, we’ll have to be practical, decide how and where we’re going to be married, and all that.” She was thinking that she was a Catholic and he a Presbyterian, and a very sincere one, too. Already she could see that there were problems ahead of them to be surmounted. She drew close to him again. “Let’s not talk about that now.”

Presently he said quietly, “I never thought when I came to Australia I’d go back with a wife.”

“Will your people at home think it very terrible, Stan? You marrying an Australian girl?”

He shook his head. “They’ll be just tickled to death. Of all the countries in the British Commonwealth, I guess the Australians would be the most like us—barring Canada, of course.”

She sat nestling close to him, his arm around her. “I
am
looking forward to seeing Hazel and meeting your people, Stan. Tell me some more about them, and how you live.”

He did so, for the next hour. From time to time he would get up and throw more wood upon the fire while she attended to the boy wrapped in the blanket. He seemed to be asleep now in the quiet darkness underneath the brilliant stars, or else in a coma; he was very hot to the touch. There was nothing more that they could do for him, however.

Presently he said, “What had we better do about your own folks, honey? Had I better go and see your Dad?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Let Ma tell him, Stan … I’ll tell Ma about us when we get back to the station, and then let you know.”

“He likely to be mad about it?”

She shook her head. “Not now. He would have been before you came to Laragh, but you’ve changed all that. He didn’t like Americans before, but he does now.”

“Well, what do you know!”

They sat there together, very happy, till about twenty minutes past eleven. Then, when both were beginning to think that one of them must ride to Mannahill, they heard the humming and the clatter of a truck, and saw headlights on the road coming from the station. They got up and stirred up the fire so that it rose in a great blaze, and Stanton pulled a bough out of it and waved the fiery brand. The
truck pulled up, and they heard voices hailing them, and they hailed back. Then men were walking up the river bed to them.

It proved to be Pat Regan and one of the coloured stockmen from Mannahill. Mollie and Stanton walked a little way to meet them. “We’ve got him here, Dad,” the girl said. “He’s terribly burnt, and he can’t talk. He’s taken a good bit of water, though.”

“What time was it that ye found him?”

“Just before sunset, Dad. It was dark by the time we got fixed up, and we didn’t want to put him on a horse because of his skin. So we camped here till someone came to find us.”

“Ye got water from beneath?”

“Yes. Stan dug for it.”

“There’s the good girl. There’s many a man died of the thirst beside a river the like of this, and clear, cool water beneath. Sure, his mother should be burning candles to the miracles of God, the way you found him.”

“Stan found him first, Dad. He saw his water bottle in the road, where he’d dropped it. I’d have missed it. I thought it was a stone.”

“May the holy saints reward ye, Mr. Laird.”

They reached the fire, and the boy beside it, wrapped in the horse blanket. Gently the red-headed old man turned the blanket back and examined the body. Then he stood up. “It’s the doctor himself is needed for this one,” he said.

“Where is the doctor?” Stanton asked.

“Sure, he’s at Mannahill Station, with the pilot, for the night. He flew to bring Cy Peters and three men from Forest Downs, and they riding the country every way save this, an’ the doctor cutting up the body out on the verandah with Fortunate to help, and him as crazy as an old Jew selling muslin. I sent Clem Rogerson a telegram in Perth by the Flying Doctor, the way he’d come back to sort out his station.”