Beyond the Black Stump (7 page)

His wife put on her iron-rimmed glasses and opened the letter. She read it through in silence. “It’s from that man Bruce who was here before,” she said. “He says he’s coming here again about the first of the month and bringing with him six Americans belonging to the Topeka Exploration Company to make a seismic survey. I don’t know what that is, or how you say it. He says that they’ll be working on our land about fourteen miles west of the homestead. He says they’ll be a party of seven, with three trucks.”

“Did ye ever hear the like of that!” exclaimed the old man angrily.

“That’s what he says,” his wife remarked equably. “He says at the end that the something survey will decide whether they drill a test well here or not.”

The girl came back carrying a tray and set it down on the table. Her father said irritably, “Will ye write straight back and say that they’re not wanted here. I’ll have no part of them, no part at all.”

“Go easy now, and have your shot of rum,” his wife said quietly. She laid the letter down and reached out for the bottle and poured out half a tumbler of neat overproof rum into one glass, and half a tumbler of ice-cold water into another. “Take that, and then come on and sit down in the shade.”

The old man lifted the mouse carefully down from his shoulder and set it down upon the ground at the end of the verandah; he gave it a gentle pat behind and it ran under the house. Then he came up on to the verandah and took the glass of rum his wife held out to him, shot it down in one swallow, and followed it with a chaser of water from the other glass. Then he sat down heavily beside his wife. “Give yeself a rum, Judge?” he said. “Give yeself one, David. Americans, is it? Americans on Laragh Station!” He spat scornfully on to the withered grass lawn of the homestead. “If there’s money to be gathered any place in the wide world those boys are after it, deep down in the earth on other men’s land, ten thousand weary miles from their own rightful place. They’ll be after the smell of it, like a pack of rats will find a bit of stinking fish.”

He flared up suddenly into a fury. “Go on and write the letter, Judge. I’ll not have Americans on Laragh Station, not if the Holy Father was to write from Rome itself.”

The old man that he called the Judge snuffled and rubbed
a hand across his nose, a habitual gesture when he was perplexed. “I doubt if we have any right to refuse them, Mr. Regan,” he said gently. “We hold this land upon a pastoral lease. There is a clause in the agreement that reserves the mineral rights to the State of West Australia, and that binds us to give reasonable access to any part of the land for the exploitation of the mineral resources.”

“And would ye call it reasonable that they should bring Americans to Laragh? Will ye answer me that, now?”

The Judge poured himself a rum and shot it down, following it with a chaser of water. “Some Americans are very pleasant people,” he observed. “I met a bishop once, an Episcopalian, who was quite charming. But mundane, I am afraid. Very, very mundane.” He sucked a drop of rum from his thin, straggling moustache.

David Cope poured about half an inch of rum into the bottom of a tumbler and filled it up with water. He did not dare to risk the old man’s displeasure by refusing a drink, and he had not yet learned to drink rum neat. He said, “They’ll be working not far from our fence, Pat. They’ll probably be nearer my place than they are to you, in fact. I think it might be rather fun, having some Americans around.”

“Fun, is it?” exclaimed Mr. Regan. “Would ye be after calling fun the way they carried on in Alice Springs all through the war? Glory be to God, no young girl living in the town that wasn’t raped, and no old woman safe save in the house itself and the door locked and bars on all the windows and Father O’Connor praying with her on their bended knees, with the American soldiers bellowing around the house like raging bulls! Is it fun ye call it?”

“It was not like that at all, Pat,” said Mrs. Regan placidly. “If there’s any raping done on Laragh it won’t be by the Americans.”

David Cope said in mock alarm, “I hope you don’t mean me, Mrs. Regan.”

“No,” she said tranquilly, “I don’t mean you. There’s going to be no raping here on Laragh Station. Heaven knows, the Judge’s got enough children in the school already.”

The old man rubbed his nose and snuffled. “That is very true. I shall have six more children in the school next month
than we have desks for—the Vogue twins, and Mrs. Stockton’s Elsie, and little Johnny Six, and Palmolive’s little girl, and the Yardley boy. I think we ought to order eight more desks. I cannot rebuke them for bad writing when they have to balance their slates on their knees.”

The old man grunted. His wife said, “We will need the desks, Pat. Let the Judge write the order now, and Spinifex can take it with the mail.”

Her daughter said, “Here’s Uncle Tom coming.”

Tom Regan appeared around the corner of the verandah. He was a very thin man, recently aroused from sleep; he had not shaved for several days. He had not the exuberant virility of his brother Pat because he had gastric ulcers, aggravated no doubt by the rum he loved to shoot down neat. He now did little work upon the property, yet his was still the directing mind. He shuffled down the verandah. Mrs. Regan poured him a rum and a glass of water. He took them from her without a word.

“A letter from Mr. Bruce, Tom,” Mrs. Regan said. “He’s coming back with some American engineers to do another survey.”

“How many of them?”

“Seven, with three trucks.” She paused. “We can’t have that many in the house.”

“It’s all a part of it,” said Tom dolefully.

His brother Pat said, “Isn’t there the shearers’ quarters empty for them to sleep in, with wire beds for their bedding and a stove for them to cook on?”

“Aye,” said Mrs. Regan doubtfully, “they might go there.”

The girl said impulsively, “You can’t put Americans in the shearers’ quarters, Ma.”

“In the Name of God,” asked Pat, “why not?”

“They live differently to that,” his daughter said stubbornly. “I’ve seen how they live on the pictures, father, down in Perth. They live in lovely sort of flats called penthouses on the top of skyscrapers, or in big white houses about a hundred feet high with columns in front. It wouldn’t do to put them in the shearers’ quarters.”

“Did you ever hear the like of that!” exclaimed her father. “It’s a queer thing, I’m thinking, that the shearers’ quarters would be good enough for an Australian shearer and not
good enough for an American, with all the lechery and evil in the world in his black heart.”

David Cope laughed. “I see we’re going to have some fun and games around here in the next week or two,” he said. “I can put a couple of them up at my place if they can make do with the gins’ cooking.”

“They’d be better doing their own cooking in the shearers’ quarters,” said Mrs. Regan drily. “No, leave it, David. Mr. Bruce knows the way things are with us and that we can’t accommodate that many. They’ll have everything they need for camping by their trucks, or they can sleep in the shearers’ place. I might make shift to feed them if it comes to that.”

She turned to the other letters on her lap. The Judge went off to his desk in the store office to write an order for school desks and slates, and Mrs. Regan opened all the other letters for the two men. Spinifex Joe vanished in the direction of the kitchen; he would wait at Laragh till the letters were written before going on. The two half-caste boys began rolling the drums of kerosene and petrol towards the store. The aboriginals squatted motionless in the dust beneath the truck.

David Cope picked up his own letters and glanced them through. There was nothing that required immediate attention. He slipped the letters he had brought with him in the breast pocket of his shirt into the post bag, said good-bye to Mrs. Regan, and walked towards his jeep. Mollie got up and walked out into the sun with him, to see him off.

She was a red-headed girl like her father, and she had something of the same square line to her chin. She was wearing very light, loose khaki linen slacks and a khaki shirt; she wore soiled leather sandals on her bare feet, as he did. “How are you off for water at Lucinda?” she asked as they walked.

“Not too good,” he said. “We’ve got a little left in the big dam—last about a month. The bores are running well, though.” He had two bores that produced water from a depth of about seven hundred feet; a windmill over each pumped up this water to a raised storage pool from which it was piped to troughs. His property was chronically short of water. Though Lucinda Station comprised over three hundred thousand acres, most of this land was useless to him when the heat of summer had dried up the few natural
pools. The sheep then congregated about the two bores that supplied the only water left upon the property. They would graze for a radius of about two miles from the water; in a bad summer they would eat out every blade of grass within this area and then die of starvation by the water. For this reason Lucinda Station could only carry about four thousand sheep on its three hundred and twenty thousand acres, and a dry summer would imperil even those.

“Are you going to put down any more bores?” she asked.

“I’m not sure that it’s worth it.”

“They cost an awful lot of money,” she agreed. “What are they quoting now? Thirty bob a foot?”

“Two quid,” he said. “It’s not the money, though. We’re making enough from the wool cheque to put down one a year, say. But I don’t think there’s any water there. We’ve got the two along the line of Blackman’s Creek, and there’s no sign of water anywhere else. We might put one down between them to spread the feed, but it’ld probably reduce the flow of the ones we’ve got.”

She nodded. She had lived all her life on Laragh but for periods at boarding school, and in her short memory four graziers had tried their luck on Lucinda Station and had given it up after a year or two. When David had come, this young English boy so full of energy and hope, the Regans had been sorry for him, the more so because he worked so hard on his depressing property. He lived quite alone, being unmarried, with only his half-caste and aboriginal stockmen for company. By his enthusiastic energy he had achieved more than his predecessors; he ran four thousand sheep without disaster where the best of them had run a bare three thousand, by dint of herding them by night out to the fresh pastures and herding them back again to water after a few hours; he had a lucerne paddock where he grew a hay crop in the rainy season, an unheard-of innovation in the district. He had sheared ninety-eight bales of wool in the previous year, which had given him a wool cheque of nearly nine thousand pounds; after paying expenses this still left him a considerable income on his sixty per cent share of the property, good money for a boy of twenty-two. The Regans, good graziers themselves upon a million acres of very much better watered land, respected him and showed him kindness, while they waited for the years of drought
that would dry up his bones and finish him completely, and send him back into some city for a job, a ruined man.

“Any news of Charlie?” he asked.

“He’s still in England.”

“Is he coming back here?”

“I don’t think so,” she replied. “Not for a long time, anyway.” Charlie was her half-brother, for he had been born to Mrs. Regan in the days when she was married to Uncle Tom. “He’s still working on cancer, at the London Hospital. He’s setting up as a consultant now, in a place called Harley Street. That’s something good, isn’t it?”

“It’s where all the big doctors live,” he said. “He must be doing very well.”

“He’s awfully clever.”

He glanced down at her. “You know, you’re a pretty bright family. Is Bridget still in Canberra?”

She shook her head. “She’s still in the Department of External Affairs, but she’s doing a course of Chinese, somewhere near Melbourne.”

“I thought she was absolutely brilliant when she was here last year,” he said. “I was scared stiff of opening my mouth.”

She laughed. “Not like me.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “You took a second, didn’t you?” She had been home from Perth University for some months.

“Only in History,” she said. “That’s an easy school.”

“It’ld be damn difficult for me,” he said. “You’re a clever family.”

They paused by his jeep. “We aren’t really,” she said. “I don’t think so. Ma says it’s all the Judge’s doing. I think he’s a wonderful teacher. I got really interested in history before I left here to go to school. And Bridget was the same. She could speak French and German before she was ten.”

David blinked. It seemed incredible on Laragh Station. “Tell me,” he asked, “why do you all call him the Judge? What’s his real name?”

“I don’t know his real name,” she replied. “I suppose he doesn’t want people to know it. He’s called the Judge because he is one—or he was. I don’t think he was a very important one—County Court or something. He got the sack.”

He grinned. “I didn’t know a judge
could
get the sack.”

“Well,” she said, “there’s one that did.”

“What did he get pushed out for?”

She dimpled. “I’m not supposed to know. I think it was for taking too much interest in delinquent girls.”

“Too bad. When did that happen?”

“Oh, ages ago, before I was born. Uncle Tom found him stinking drunk in a hotel at Geraldton and took him on as book-keeper. He’s been here ever since.”

“Where was he a Judge?”

“In England somewhere,” she replied. “He talks about Dunchester sometimes—it might have been there.” She paused. “Ma says he was a schoolmaster when he was a young man at a place called Eton. That’s a good school, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” he said. “It’s supposed to be the best school in England.”

“Were you there?” she asked.

“Me? Never came within a mile of it. I went to the grammar school at Newbury.” He paused. “You were at school in Perth, weren’t you?”

She nodded. “Ma said all of us must go away to boarding schools. She’s Scotch, you see. Father and Uncle Tom wouldn’t have bothered if we went to school or not, because they’re Irish. Ma’s very firm about school. I think that’s why she’s put up with the Judge all these years—because he’s a good schoolmaster. He’s not much of a book-keeper, really. Mike checks the books over when he comes up for his summer holiday each year, and he finds an awful lot of mistakes.”