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CARRS CREEK

POOR BILLY KEEPER, HANGIN’ IN THE BARN, DISCOVERED on Empire Day, the afternoon making its long eventful way on to cracker night. In truth something hangs low over the grown-ups all day, like they all knew, like they had a delegation secretly doing it, everybody waiting, then the early afternoon siren sweeping out from town, the yellow ambulance through the railway gates, through the picnic ground and down to Keeper’s farm. After a while several leave the now-dead festivities and follow, the ambulance crawling mournfully back up again, siren silent, Sainsie called over, words spoken with the family, father dead, she does no more than bow her head, like she too knew all along that today was the day this was gunna happen.

Walk a straight line deep into the corn, the long corn leaves whipping weakly at the face and legs, heading deeper into the field listen, everything around is listening too, a thousand things going on now interrupted. Lie in the dirt, the quiet business and joy of pull and growth, the corn stalks, the melon vines siphoning the soak outa the sub-surface mud to pump into swelling melons, the grubs and twig insects bathed in rays of the temperate sun and sky singing praise back, and if you stay here long enough the shadows stretch and dim and life goes on but it’s another thing, hotter and more frantic under the wind and when the moon comes up more of a shifting, no more noon-day lazy, an ache, a yearning, whispers and leaning to connect with something far away, regret for what is lost and what else may be regained if we hurry, this night and chance will not come again.

From the front verandah looking out across the creek to the East there are thunderheads off the coast forty miles away. The horizon is the rail line running by the school and the School of Arts hall north to Casino, south to town, the little shunting yard and the railway station. At night when small noises travel flat and clear across the fields you can hear an angry little shunting engine in there choof like a machine gun as the iron wheels slip and then take hold, and later on still the big interstate engines haul a goods train or the Brisbane Daylight Express north or south, sometimes blasting a call like a huge iron cockerel out across the world, the creek, the farm and the sleeping family, the river and the bush west to the Great Dividing Range.

Every day just on dusk me and my brother get out to the wood heap behind the chookyard and split kindling with the axe for lighting the fire next morning. If there are onefoot log sections we have to cut them too, but it’s not as hard as it sounds. With the axe swinging down into the grain it can be fun unless the piece has knots in it, or the shoulder of a branch. When we’re finished we each have to carry three armloads of wood into the laundry for which we receive one penny. We used to have a black iron stove here but now our mother has a new slow-combustion one, still fuelled by wood but a lot cleaner and easier to control. Each morning just before dawn our father stokes the coals and lattices the kindling in. On winter mornings the kitchen’s already warm when our feet hit the cold linoleum.

On the walls of our grandmother’s house in the town there are framed prints from Egypt and the Sea of Marmara fifty years old, date-palms and the pyramids, and a print of a towering cowl and scythe stalking the moonscape of Pozières. On the mantelpieces are pictures of my grandfather, always taken from the right, with his high collar and high remaining cheekbone. The eyes are all implacable temper, aloof and anti-social. He has long gone, but his evidence is everywhere, his life printed on the lives he ruled. There are many stories up and down the river. One evening in the years after the Great War he stopped in at a public bar in Harwood on his way home from Maclean to his young family on Palmers Island. Somebody said something, probably innocent. He walked on, rowed home in the dark, returned with his service revolver and for three hours kept the pistol steady on them, telling them quietly of their maggot lives, their mothers, anything else his bitter mind could sculpt, telling them if anyone moved he’d kill them as they sat still under those eyes and he wouldn’t be keeping the last bullet for himself.

I got the oars in the rowlocks post-holed in the semi-waterlogged wood of the boat, pulling across the creek and nosing in through the reeds for the leap beyond the mud to the hard ground of the bank, the smell of life and the faint smell that never fades of old floods, the long walk up through the dew in the paddocks with a leather school bag, the shoulder straps we chew, which paddocks hold the bulls and which are dangerous, the long two-wheeled gravel road up from Kelty’s and Keeper’s farms to the school, the one room and wood’n’cast-iron desks forged under Queen Victoria you might say, the wall-wide map of the world with the British Empire in pink long before any of us uncover the sexual proclivities of the English ruling class, less fortunate nations in alien shades of green, grey and yellow, the single ancient teacher snoring on his desk, lifting his head out of its dotage and mumbling The Village Blacksmith, and the dozen or so silent standing students ranging five to fifteen, bare feet and farm hair shaved and hay-stacked in all directions, begin to chant Under the spreading chestnut tree the village blacksmith stands … I know what’s unnecessary and don’t clog my head which at such times flies out through the trees, the church and the tiny community hall nearby to the railway track, north to Brisbane, south to Sydney, so many long slow fly-blown summer afternoons, so many years away.

On the cooling clear night of the Autumn Equinox see the headlights come through the railway gates, rock up then down over the line, park in the circled cars around the School of Arts hall, counter the full moon caught in the wires above then wink out, doors slamming, shouting, the little family parade, children peel off and run in the dark, fathers, greetings, the low talk, sullen teenage youths with Johnny Cash quiffs and a curl on the lip. Inside the wives and mothers unwrap tea-towels and compete in the preparation of food, the old men in hot black and grey and brown forties Sunday suits shaking flakes on the floor for the dancers. Mrs McCallum’s dance band fires up on the stage under the streamers, accordion, saxophone, ten-yearold drummer and Mrs McCallum herself playing the standards stride-style strict time, Red Sails in the Sunset and Sentimental Journey for the barn dance, the waltzes, the Pride of Erin, hot fat farmgirls upholstered to the gills and packed into pink and green party dresses, hankies clutched in the right hand to mop the sweat, younger boys in school shoes and white socks swung outa control outa their weight class till they learn the steps, and the older couples full of grace, balanced and sailing like ships of the line out of the circle and down the centre of the hall, the long tables on trestles for supper groaning thanks and plenty under God. Outside the youths smoke, talking rock’n’roll motorbikes and cars, drinking, sometimes a fight in the dark broken up by the older men, the women patch the wounded and disapprove and thrill at the gossip and the feud, and after midnight the fathers are dragged belching silently out to their cars where the children have been wrapped and sleeping in the back seat for the long drive home, the miles of country lanes to the farmhouse, cold, dark and quiet, waiting by the creek.

Toby Grainger, alcoholic heavy-lidded watery lizard eyes, hook nose, thin, yellow pharaoh mummified skin and white wispy hair, husking corn with my father on the straddle in the barn, long rainy afternoons reciting Shakespeare soliloquies, Old Testament and Milton chapter and verse, bored with his succulent but limited missus goes straight from farm labouring each day to the pub, the Blue Goose on the hill, to take the edge off his mind with whisky and watching and dreaming and somewhere round nine, suitably dulled down, a dignified walk home the miles to his tiny farm and wife and sons, a melancholy god they can never sufficiently engage or satisfy.

The steady flood rain settles in and clamps on the tin roof, the tanks overflowing and the frogs through the night, the higher level of the creek at first light and still the heavy drumming of the rain unvaried, father disappearing and returning, animals herded to higher ground, farm machinery driven to safety, him stripping down and diving for the boat, tied to the bank and sucked under the swelling surface in the night, radio reports of the levels upriver, light fading on a leaden sea heading south at express-train speed clear across to the mountains, that awesome weight dragging trees and hills and the whole landscape. Then the light dies and we wait and check the speeding surface underneath the floorboards with each hour until some time after midnight, hope lost for the house, we’re loaded, children and dog, in the tiny boat and cast into the current hoping to maybe hit the next house downstream built on higher ground, nothing but a darker patch approaching rapidly in the rain.

When the sun comes again the whole world is an ocean, the safe haven neighbour’s house just a ship on the wind, patterns sweeping and playing across the unbroken miles of water rolling slowly now and then beginning to fall, the brown of the drowned trees below the tide mark revealed, the beginning stink of dead bloated water-logged flesh across the farms, carcasses floating and snared in banks and forks lying blown-up, legs up, eyes in dead panic, the flies and the drying mud, the trapped and shrinking stinken lakes, the soup sinking and evaporating away from drunken frogs and rotting meat and children running naked in the drying broken sticks that mark the savaged crops, blue with mud and laughing as the farmers’ wives scrape the filth out of bedrooms and living rooms with a piece of masonite, another year lost, the flow-off reveals the Banks another twenty acres closer to the back steps.

*

SUM STACKAWAY THE BLUE GOOSE, HOW MANY TIMES does one pub burn down. The name’s been there with the bar and beer since the blacks were bad as they say round here, when the Junction Hill was just a dirt track divided one to Casino, one to the river timber wharves of Lawrence, long before Thunderbolt rode down from the tablelands twin pistols under his black coat and booked a room to attend the July races a hundred years ago. Time and again through the history here the rum and the massacres of tribesmen for spearing cattle, the drinking, snakewomen and murder all build and the Devil himself slides in from the bush and the night and there’s a whirlpool of blood and whisky and flames and daybreak brings a still smoking ruin of ash and glass and brick chimneys and the giant ribcage of a strange beast, and the local community knows peace for a few months until a newer modern Blue Goose goes up in any era. Now as ever the men drift off tractors after dark and leave family dinners go cold for just the one and that stretches on with the laughter and the problem builds hour by hour at home and then it’s closing time and then an hour past and if ya ain’t got a room booked there ain’t nowhere else but home to go.

Hefting and shaking the heavy little two or three bullets in a hollow hand, feeling lead snack on lead, checking the little row of bumps around the business end and the harder cold of the brass before sliding one into the rifle, snapping home the bolt and seating the stock into what I was always told was the wrong shoulder but there you go, there was never any question what felt right for me, sighting along the notch and spike to well above the head of a snake-neck shag sunning her wings on a log out across the Creek, pure luck really as the neck coils and she points this way, set still, then points that, the comfortable pull and power of the recoil, the little splash ten feet beyond the bird, not enough to disturb the peace, or else the horrifying smack, the frantic beating of the wings and belated decapitated panic, no shame lost in the applause from those few around, my skill, I’m alive, don’t it feel alright.

One day on the way to school we call in to pick up Joan at the other Kelty’s, the weatherboard house standing free in a paddock with grass grown fat over old farm machinery and cow pats and cattle grown fat on the rest. Up the wooden stairs at the back facing the creek we’re in the kitchen waiting with her father, sprawled legs under the kitchen table, ignoring us and sipping scalding sweet sugar-saturated black tea and staring at the floor. He comes awake to shoo off a chook that just squirted a brown and white shit on the dinner table. There are traces of dried earlier shits in the table cracks where they missed fat Mrs Kelty’s wipes. Joan comes out ready for school. She’s the oldest now that Shad and Tommy are in America. One of them’s got a scholarship to do mathematics at Harvard, the other one something similar, there ya go, don’t get too precious about that chook shit.

Meanwhile over the creek and up a bit Toby’s sister