Watching the Climbers on the Mountain (4 page)

With the whiskey bottle eventually empty Ward Rankin had drifted into an uneasy alcohol-induced sleep.

An hour and a half later he had woken with a start into the deep silence of the sleeping house, his heart shuddering in his chest. The instant he had moved he had experienced the onset of an acute bout of indigestion; so severe was it that for a terrible few minutes he had thought he would be engulfed by a violent and suffocating sickness. He had managed to get himself out onto the side verandah, where he had leaned against the railing for a long time fighting his nausea.

When the worst of it had passed he had wiped the sweat and tears from his face and had stood there holding onto the rail. The night air seemed scarcely to have cooled since sundown and was hanging in a suffocating blanket over the dark landscape. An early moon was obscured by high cloud and it was just possible for Rankin to distinguish the darker bulk of the distant ranges against the sky. Further over the horizon intermittent lightning flickered along unseen ridges. Ward Rankin gazed into the night. The attack had left him in a strangely heightened mood in which his senses seemed to be on the verge of either acute perceptions or exhaustion.

He had fancied that he could hear sounds close by which did not belong to the night, and gradually an image had formed in his mind of the stockman working at the shoeing area. Without any specific intention in mind, he had stealthily made his way around to the side of the shed. From here he could observe the dead stringybark under which the horses on the station had been shod for generations. There was no light and nothing to be seen, and soon his own skulking presence there had begun to disturb the dogs. He had returned to the house, his suspicions still unresolved.

Now, as he came round the corner of the machinery shed this morning, preoccupied with the urgent pain in his bowels, he saw Robert Crofts under the stringybark. The stockman was stripped to the waist and sweating heavily, grunting to himself and totally absorbed in his task. Rankin stopped dead and stared at the stockman, who was staring back.

‘What?' Crofts asked uncertainly, clearly impressed by the intensity of Rankin's manner and by his unexpected appearance there at this early hour.

The station owner did not recognise the old shoeing area. For more than a hundred years the Rankins and their stockmen had shod the station horses under this tree. In less than three days Robert Crofts had removed every trace of their labours. Ward Rankin stared, the pain in his bowels forgotten. The mound of charcoal ash overgrown with weeds, the intricate confusion of half-buried implements, the variety of disused smithing tongs that had garlanded the tree since before his earliest memories and which had been hung there by men whose names would be forgotten forever, the rotting collars and hames and even the broken forge itself—it was all gone. In its place was bare earth, over which Crofts was in the process of erecting a tin shade-roof on freshly cut poles. Along one side of this arrangement the shoeing tools—usually left haphazardly in the grass until needed again—were arranged like a row of surgical instruments.

Rankin stepped into this freshly cleared area. He looked with astonishment at the stockman. ‘Cleaning up, you said!'

Crofts' expression was one of concentration as he surveyed his handiwork, for in his mind there was a vision of the orderly workshop that he was labouring to complete. He had not considered whether this would be welcomed by his employer or not.

‘Why don't you cut the old stringy down while you're at it?' Rankin pointed at the ancient trunk, his voice strained with anger and fatigue. And when Crofts was about to speak, Rankin shouted in his face, ‘Isn't it dead enough for you?'

At this moment Ida Rankin approached, followed closely by the two children, who had come out to do their early morning chores. They were keen to inspect Crofts' new arrangements.

‘What a terrific job, Robert!' Ida Rankin said at once, gazing about her enthusiastically. Then to her husband, though without looking at him: ‘What you've been threatening to do for the last six years . . . Ever since the tree died.'

Watched closely by the two silent children, Rankin turned to confront his wife. But at that moment the pain in his bowels returned with a redoubled violence.

‘You look terrible,' Ida Rankin said to her husband with concern. ‘Is something the matter with you?'

But he did not reply. Instead he turned and hurried away in the direction of the toilet.

Janet laughed. ‘Why
don't
you cut the stupid old thing down?' she challenged Crofts in a voice loud enough for her father to hear. She jumped up and swung onto the newly fixed cross-pole behind the stockman, assisting herself by placing one hand firmly on his bare shoulder. It was a gesture that could have indicated either a special intimacy between them or simply a cheeky impulse on her part. From her perch behind the stockman's head she turned and looked down at her mother and her brother, her hand still resting lightly on Crofts' shoulder. His construction was now given a surprising legitimacy and permanence, qualities which it had not possessed until then.

‘Bits are always falling off the rotten old thing anyway. Someone's bound to get clunked on the head sooner or later.' She dropped to the ground on the other side and ran away in the direction of the night paddock to fetch the milker, yelling over her shoulder as she went, ‘Come on, Ali!'

Her brother hesitated, looking from the stockman to his mother, as though he wanted to say something.

‘Are you going or not?' Ida Rankin asked him impatiently.

Without a word he followed his sister.

Robert Crofts waited to continue with his job. The sudden rush of attention, the family rivalries, had broken the satisfying rhythm of his solitary work. He was conscious of Ida Rankin looking at his body. It made him feel awkward and he did not know how to respond.

‘What if a horse rears up?' she asked, indicating the inadequate height of the roof. Then she looked straight at him as if she required more than an ordinary explanation.

He pointed to the two sturdy ironbark posts that were securely buttressed in position. ‘I shall put ringbolts in these,' he said proudly, reaching out one strong brown hand to caress the neatly chamfered head of the dark post closest to him. His thumb suddenly gripped the timber at the point from which the steel ring would hang. ‘The horse will be in cross-ties,' he explained. Engrossed in the details of his work, he made it seem as if there were a restive animal already there, secured by his system.

‘Will horses put up with being tied like that?' she asked, finding his earnestness both impressive and rather tiresome. ‘The horses they bring in to be shod before the autumn muster are pretty wild you know.'

The stockman's gaze remained on the head of the post. ‘They put up with it in England.'

‘Oh well,' she laughed. ‘They'll just have to put up with it in Australia too then, won't they?'

He looked at her quickly, unsure whether she was making fun of him.

She thought, so you
do
see me, and not just that post under your hand. And she added rather brusquely by way of explanation, ‘Shoeing has never been such an ordered business here as it probably is where you come from.'

There was a long silence between them. She felt she was getting nowhere. At length she said, ‘Ward loathes it.'

Robert Crofts shifted his weight uneasily, changing his grip on the steel fencing bar he was holding.

‘He hates shoeing,' she said, ‘more than anything.'

A huge blue and black fly droned past them, purposeful and steady as if it were loaded and on a delivery run. They both looked at it. Their eyes met. ‘There will be a boxing tournament,' she said, ‘at the carnival in Springtown after Christmas.'

He lifted the heavy bar and drove it into the broken earth at his feet.

‘Will you go in for it?'

‘No,' he said, lifting and driving the bar again.

She watched him. ‘You look as though you might be good at it.' But he did not reply. ‘It's to raise money for the Red Cross,' she persisted. Sometime, she promised herself, she would ask him about his walk to the Pinnacles—stockmen did not usually explore the countryside. But the subject would fail against this mood. There would be another time she told herself. Now, she fancied—though in this she was mistaken—it was as if she did not exist for him, so deeply occupied did he seem with his job. So she left him to labour at his fruitless vision of a station routine regulated by the standards of an English workshop, and she went on towards the yards where the children were waiting for her with the house cow.

Ward Rankin stood in the deep shadow of the interior of the machinery shed no more than two metres away from where Robert Crofts was working and he watched through a small hole in the tin. He saw his wife leave the stockman's side and he hated her so much that he could scarcely bear to look at her. When she had gone he continued to stand there, watching, close enough to see the sweat trickling in grey runnels through the dust on the young man's body. Ward Rankin knew that things could not go on much longer for him as they were. He could visualise no change, however, that did not repel him.

For an hour he stayed staring through the hole, his limbs tingling with inaction and fatigue, his mind at an impasse. How Crofts worked! As if labour were his god. He shone at it. And gradually in Ward Rankin's mind a decision began to form itself, a decision that in the end was to prove disastrous for him. As he moved away from the hole in the tin he did not examine this decision objectively, but in its tenuous outline there seemed to be the possibility of something that might lift him into a state of hope.

Standing by the tailgate of the International truck at the end of the shed, Rankin called Crofts and issued him with a series of detailed instructions. Rankin's appearance and manner were so unusual this morning that the stockman was careful not to ask if he might finish his work on the shoeing area before beginning the new job. Regretfully he left his uncompleted structure and began to prepare the truck for a journey.

The next morning at first light Rankin and the stockman loaded the truck. Then, with the station owner leading in the jeep and Crofts following in the International, they drove away from the homestead, heading out of the mouth of the fertile valley with its open forests of ironbark and turning west across a featureless plain of black speargrass. As the sun rose behind them they came in sight of a low grey line of trees on the horizon. Their little convoy moved on slowly across the speargrass plain for an hour, Crofts following fifty metres behind the jeep, keeping just out of its dust. The truck's heavy load of fence posts and wire creaked as the wheels rose and fell over the uneven surface of the long-disused track, and at last they reached the trees. Here they stopped. Ward Rankin had led them to the edge of a great scrub. Before them lay a silent wilderness of brigalow into which a narrow clearing had been driven, evidently some time ago. They got out of their vehicles and stood looking at it. Perhaps Crofts was starting to feel a bit uneasy about this whole enterprise by now because he said something to Rankin about what an intimidating sort of place this seemed to be. At this Rankin laughed in a dry humourless way. There was no reassurance in his tone, and he started to give orders.

Considering what lay in front of them Croft's observation was mild, for the scrub presented a menacing prospect. Dead and splintered trees lay one across the other in a hopelessly tangled confusion, the living trees growing through the dead and the whole festooned with a thorny drapery of tough vines. The ground beneath was bare and had great cracks in it through which the roots of the trees could be seen coiling downwards in search of moisture. Crofts could see this much; what he couldn't see was even worse—clinging to the undersides of the leaves were thousands of mosquitoes, poised to take flight at the first trembling of the vines.

This was one of the few remaining original scrubs in the locality and it had long been on the station agenda for clearing and developing as pasture. Almost two years ago, as a preliminary to this expensive undertaking, Ward Rankin had finally submitted to the persistent urgings of Doc Kavanagh, his neighbour on this western boundary, to jointly finance the construction of a fence through the brigalow from the plain to the sandstone escarpment. This line had been bulldozed and two earth tanks built deep in the timber for stock watering—one each side of the line. The fencing materials now piled high on the tray of the International were some of those that had been stockpiled for the job. But that was as far as it had gone. Old Doc Kavanagh had died and Ward Rankin had been glad to postpone the project once again. He had never been out here to inspect this fence line.

He stood now with his back against the faded red bonnet of the truck, smoking a cigarette and keenly squinting down the narrow avenue in front of him, examining the site. Crofts was right; it was intimidating. A chaotic wilderness unfit for human occupation—even the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Highlands had only reluctantly occupied this scrub when forced to seek a final refuge in their desperate war with the first pastoralists. As a boy Ward Rankin had never penetrated beyond its gloomy fringes. His only childhood memory of it was of himself waiting on horseback at the edge of the brigalow with a few head of quiet cattle, listening in an aching suspense for the return from the interior of his father and the stockmen. Rankin couldn't imagine being in a more unpleasant place. He felt thoroughly reassured. On the journey he had experienced doubts that maybe this enterprise would not live up to his expectations.

He turned from his scrutiny of the scrub and looked up at Crofts, who had obediently climbed to the top of the load and was perched there precariously, waiting for the work to begin. He thought he could detect nervousness in the stockman's gaze, an uncertainty about things, perhaps even a desire to voice his misgivings.