Salt Creek Read online

  ‘No,’ I said, blood boiling up in my cheeks. I shoved at his chest with my palms. ‘Charles.’

  He came to himself and fell away. ‘I’m sorry.’ His face was twisted with shock but still lovely to me; it was hard to see danger in it.

  ‘I can’t.’ I shook my head. I was shaking all over. Part of me wanted to see that look on his face again. I had frightened myself. I could see how it happened now, how without meaning to give anything up, I might, to get something else.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  ‘I believe you. We should go now.’

  He reached for my hand. I pushed it free and shoved it when he tried again. ‘No, don’t,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t touch you?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or be with you.’

  ‘It’s not safe. I can’t—’ If I said more, he would know how much every part of me but my rational self longed for his touch.

  ‘You don’t hate me?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Do you think I might … because I would not.’

  I shook my head and got to my feet.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  I looked down at him. ‘I can’t forget my mother. I swore I would not become like her. And now I can see how it happens.’

  ‘I won’t again,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We can’t come back here.’

  We just looked at each other. I didn’t smile or soften in any way. I would not yield at all and stood as tall as I was able, and he said, finally, ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘Want? It has nothing to do with that. It is what must be. Think ahead.’ I was shaking and held my hands tight together to still them. ‘We should go now. I must see to supper.’ I did not look at him in the boat, but rowed steadily, thinking only of scooping the water cleanly, and feeling my strength put to this familiar work.

  When we had almost reached the home shore, Charles said, ‘I’d best be leaving for Melbourne.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

  The day after that he rode out. At the veranda steps he kissed me lightly on the cheek. ‘I hope I will see you again on my return.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That would be nice. If you journey this way another time, do stop and see us.’

  I was sure I would never see him again. I thought that was the kindest thing – for us both. There would always be someone else for a person such as Charles; I wanted there to be no one for me. I did not presume the worst of him. But men did rule over women and tell them what to do, as if it were their nature to. No one said they should do otherwise; not the world or anyone. It was not Charles that I did not care for. It was the thought of giving my life away, what I might allow myself to do, and the future that would then unfold. I would not risk it. And the only way to escape such a fate that I could see was to become independent, to keep myself from temptation and never to marry.

  By the third day of their homecoming Hugh and Stanton were restless for excitement. Perhaps it was the weather: the first warm day of September. Somehow, while out working that morning, they had persuaded Fred to visit the Travellers Rest with them later that day.

  Fred did not look comfortable when the subject came up in my presence. His glance flickered from Hugh and Stanton to me. He seemed trepidatious, which I could not understand.

  ‘What is the purpose of the expedition?’ I said.

  ‘A visit to the Travellers Rest is all. The joys of life,’ Hugh said. ‘Not that you need to know.’

  ‘And I say that Fred may not go,’ I said.

  Relief flashed across Fred’s face.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Stanton said in his jeering way. ‘Freddie has to stay home with Hester.’

  Of course Fred’s temper flared up. ‘You be quiet, Stanton. I will go. You can’t stop me, Hester.’

  ‘You may not,’ I said. ‘Papa left me in charge.’

  ‘He did not know at the time he left that we would be here,’ Hugh said. ‘In fact it is I, and not you, Hester, who has guardianship over Fred at this moment, since I am the eldest here, and a man.’

  Stanton gave one of his insolent grins.

  ‘Fred is seventeen, which I should not have to remind you,’ I said.

  Hugh leaned in the doorway and folded his arms. ‘I think I know my duty,’ he said.

  ‘So I would have supposed.’

  Hugh’s eyes narrowed at that.

  ‘Only perhaps Papa would prefer us not to leave Hester and Addie here alone,’ Fred said.

  The rage was a hot red weight in my chest, but I would never show Hugh and Stanton that. ‘No, you go along, Fred. I know how to use the musket quite well. We will be quite safe.’

  ‘You can fire a musket?’ Stanton said.

  ‘Charles taught me. I am quite a good shot.’ I took a chair from the table to the doorway so that Hugh and Stanton were obliged to move, and climbed up and lifted the musket from its pegs and fetched the cartridge box from its hook and began attending to it. It was like an equation. I had only to remember the sequence and the result was assured. I loaded the musket and rammed the ball, doing it without haste to make sure I had done it right, swinging the muzzle past them – they flinched – before setting it on the table. The boys continued to watch. It was as if they were waiting for me to release them.

  Finally, Hugh took hold of the door handle. Fred looked at me.

  I said, ‘Be careful, Fred,’ very calm. ‘Take Birdie. She’s sensible. I’ll leave the lamp burning.’

  He said, ‘If you like.’

  Addie came from the parlour to watch them depart, Fred trailing behind, and we went for a walk around the curve of our point late in the afternoon. Birdsong increased as the sun reached towards the peninsula, swooping and ricocheting all around, from the lagoon too, and finally the shapes of the birds turned to shadow rather than substance: trailing parabolas of flight above us.

  We strolled home. I lit the fire in the dining room to make it cosy, the wind having turned south, and we spent a pleasant enough evening: Addie sewing, and I reading. Addie sighed over her stitches. ‘Do you suppose Papa and Tull will be much longer?’ she said.

  ‘Not much longer.’

  We played a game of chess and a game of draughts and when Addie went to bed, I hung a lamp on the veranda and put another in the parlour window. I took a quilt and settled myself in Papa’s big chair before the dining room stove with the dogs at my feet.

  It was the middle of the night when Fred came crashing through the door. I had never seen him in such a state, poor boy. He fell back against the door and shut his eyes for a moment. Skipper rushed to him, whining at his feet and sniffing at him.

  ‘Fred. Are you all right?’ I threw the quilt off and hurried over, and felt his arms and inspected his face for bruising or injury, for anything. He was dishevelled and stinking of ale and having been sick, and of something else, but that was all that I could see. ‘Come over here, close to the fire.’ I sat him in the chair and wrapped the quilt about his shoulders. Once I had brought the lamp in and turned it up I began to see him more clearly. He was pale and trembling, with distress as well as cold, I thought. ‘What’s happened? Where did they take you?’

  Fred shook his head. ‘Could I have some water please?’

  He drank two glasses of water, retching once or twice between mouthfuls, but shuddered each time I questioned him. ‘I’m so tired, Hett. Just let me sleep. Please.’ His eyelids were drooping. There was no point in asking further and he groaned when I tried to make him stand and go to bed. By the time I turned the lamp down his eyes were quite closed. Skipper curled up on the rug at his feet and I left them there.

  He was still asleep next morning when I went to milk the cows. I set the milk in the larder for the cream to rise and went inside. Fred blinked and looked around, his gaze resting on the table, the window, the stove, me, until comprehension began. His look was of such naked pleading that I did not have the heart to ask him
about the events of the night. I put some wood on the fire and went out to the kitchen and stoked that fire too and put the kettle on and began a bread dough. Presently, Fred came through the door, looking a little better. He had washed himself and changed his clothes. He sat in a chair, quiet, watching as I kneaded the dough on the table. I made him a cup of tea and he clasped the mug and shivered and drank a little of the hot tea. His wet hair had begun to spring into curls around his face before he talked.

  ‘I hate them. I wish I had not gone. I wish it.’ He shuddered and was quiet for several more minutes. ‘We went to the Travellers Rest. It was nearly dark when we got there. Mrs Martin was there and I met Mr Martin. I didn’t like him very much. He’s like a wolf. Mrs Martin had a bruise on her face. She’s nice. You know the way she talks: “Come inside, my ducks. You’ll be after refreshment and a bite of my pie, am I right?”’

  His Irish accent was quite good; I would have laughed at a different time. ‘I like her,’ I said.

  ‘Hugh bought me some ale and said I should drink it, so I did. I didn’t like being there. It’s not very clean now. The tables were sticky. I thought we would go home after that, but Hugh and Stanton bought some more ale and liquor to take with us and said the night had just started. An adventure, they called it. We just rode into the bush. I wanted to turn around, except I didn’t know where we were. I didn’t feel very well. I am not accustomed to drink.’

  He stopped talking again. I put the dough in a bowl and a cloth over the top and set it to rise at the side of the stove. Fred cut a slice of bread and opened the fire door on the stove and held the bread over the coals with a toasting fork. He scraped some butter over it and ate it slowly, then had another cup of sweet tea.

  As if he’d never stopped talking, he said, ‘I kept thinking of a drawing I’m working on, of some little fruits – muntharies, Tull calls them. It’s hard to get the blush on them right’. He stopped and rubbed his cheek before gathering himself. ‘We went to a native camp. I heard the dogs first. Hugh and Stanton weren’t worried about them. It was horrible. There were a lot of sick people. I thought an old woman lying by a fire had died. She stared so fixed. The shelters were falling apart. Their weapons were lying about. Hugh and Stanton got down. I thought I would stay mounted until we left. A man came out of a wurly and they made me bring the drink over, so I had to get down. The native was quiet until he saw the drink. He wasn’t well, coughing and so on. He called two girls out of the wurly. They were only young, a little younger than me perhaps. They went into the bushes with Hugh and Stanton.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said.

  ‘I couldn’t do it. Stanton came out after a while. He said it was my turn.’

  ‘Stop.’

  It was as if he didn’t hear me. ‘She had scars across her front. I remember that.’ He inscribed three lines across his chest with a light stroke of his fingers. ‘I would not have expected them to feel like that, hard and smooth. She smelled strange.’ His breath came rather short. ‘I was sick. I couldn’t help it. It was the drink. Hugh and Stanton laughed. That’s when I ran away. I found Birdie and sprang up before they could stop me. I didn’t care where we went, but she found the way home. Thank you for putting the lamps out.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Hett.’

  ‘I suppose you are.’

  Hugh and Stanton arrived home in the middle of the morning, sauntering in as if there could be no doubt about Fred’s safety. (Perhaps they had been concerned. Before they came inside they would have seen Fred’s horse, unsaddled, and known he had come to no harm. I will allow that that might have been true.) There would be no work that day – Sunday – or worship service with Papa not there. A working day would have been easier – a distraction. Addie hung about like Skipper when in need of reassurance. When she asked me what the matter was with the boys, I told her it was nothing.

  Fred sat on the veranda. Hugh and Stanton clattered about the kitchen, banging pans to the stove and cooking eggs and thick slices of salt pork and sawing hunks of bread as if they were a conquering army in need of victualling. I left them and went inside to the dining room. Hugh and Stanton clattered up the stairs to sit near him. I could hear them quite well through the window.

  ‘You’re a man now, I hope, for your troubles,’ Stanton said.

  ‘What was it, Fred?’ Hugh asked, mopping his egg with bread. ‘Not what you imagined?’

  ‘A spree,’ Fred said. ‘That is a spree?’

  ‘What did you think?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘Something different. What should I have thought? How would anyone think such a thing?’

  ‘Oh, I think there are many who would,’ Hugh said. He sounded quite mild, considering the matter with distant interest.

  ‘It turned my stomach,’ Fred said.

  I peeped through the window then, since he seemed rather desperate. I should have gone out to stop them. I was shocked, and I confess I was curious.

  ‘The ale?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘The smell.’

  Stanton leaned towards him. ‘Of her? Because of that? Her flesh, her titties, her sweet girlish—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Fred roared and there was a thump and scuffle.

  ‘Oh brother dear, dear Fred. I begin to know you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Can it be that you do not know? I may not be your equal in intellect or in learning, as people do not tire of reminding me, but I do know what is right. It is right to want that, even with one such as her.’

  ‘And I begin to know you. It was the stink of Hugh on her. I should tell Papa.’

  They both laughed. ‘Speak to Papa, eh, Hugh. Oh no,’ Stanton said, as if Fred had said the drollest thing. His laugh stopped as sudden as musket shot. ‘Who do you suppose first took us?’

  Papa returned and was happy to see Hugh and Stanton. He did not mention them running away. They were able to give him a little money, which softened him somewhat towards them. It was as if he had given his blessing to their departure the year Mama died, and in this way could take some credit for their modest success. A big strike would have been more difficult; it would have shown him to have been wrong. I hardly knew how to look at him after the conversation I had overheard. I thought of those girls and wondered if they ever ran from their lives, and where.

  Worst of all was that Papa had left Tull behind at the Point McLeay mission. He was to study with Reverend Taplin at the mission school for native children, which any sensible person would know was an absurd idea even if Papa did not, but at least it meant I would not have to talk to him of the connection growing between Tull and Addie.

  ‘To do such a thing without telling us, without telling Tull,’ Fred burst out. ‘What are you thinking? He knows how to read and figure and more besides. They won’t know anything.’ He spoke with such passion. I had not seen him so before.

  I glanced up again from my sewing at Fred all flushed and Papa fiddling with his watch chain and not looking at Fred, and not remonstrating either, and I said, ‘But it could be an opportunity for him. We shouldn’t stand in his way.’

  ‘I thought you liked Tull,’ Fred said.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘He doesn’t need school. He’d learn more here with us than at some school for—’

  ‘Blacks?’ Stanton said. ‘Tull is black, Fred. He needs to be reminded.’

  ‘You don’t know him. You’re the one who needs reminding,’ Addie said. ‘Not Tull. Tull never forgets a thing. Only say something once and he remembers it forever.’

  ‘Of his colour and his place, I mean.’ Stanton imagined himself a man of the world now. Hugh always had, so the change was less marked in him.

  ‘I think it’s an excellent notion,’ Hugh said.

  ‘As if we cared what you think,’ Fred said.

  ‘Now, now, Fred,’ Stanton said softly. His mouth curled up a little as if he were toying with him.

  Fred made a furious growling sound in his throat.
‘What do you do each morning, Stanton? Throw a dice to decide what you’ll be that day: adventurer, libertine, oaf?’

  ‘Boys,’ Papa said.

  Stanton turned his hands into fists. Hugh held his arm. ‘Very droll, Fred,’ he said.

  There had been a strange dance of feeling between the boys since their expedition. Contempt and loathing and rage and other things besides. Addie could not understand, and I would not tell her; I did not perfectly understand it myself, despite what Fred had told me. ‘Not a matter for young ladies,’ Stanton told Addie. Really, I could not wait for them to leave.

  ‘Tull wanted to stay,’ Papa said. ‘And he might be of assistance to Reverend Taplin in his work. It was because of my high regard for him, which I spoke of to Taplin, that he thought to ask whether Tull might be willing.’

  ‘How did you persuade him?’ Fred said. ‘What did you say?’

  Papa drew himself upright in his narrow black clothes and set his narrow face. ‘I do not have to answer to you and neither does Tull. Think of the good he might do, the service he will be to his people. I wish only good for him. Believe that.’

  ‘He belongs here, with us,’ Addie said, almost sobbing with rage.

  ‘Addie’s right. They’re not his people there. Why would they listen to him?’ Fred said. ‘If Tull stayed of his own will it’s for his own reasons, not yours.’

  ‘He is there, and there he is staying for the time being and let that be the end of it. I consider Taplin’s work to be truly Christian and I will do what I can to support it.’

  After supper, Papa sat on the veranda writing in his journal and I pulled a chair to the veranda edge where the light was still good for sewing, and presently Hugh came out and sat with him. Neither of them said anything for a while and it seemed quite companionable. Papa had never mentioned missing Hugh and Stanton; perhaps he had though, or missed talking things over with them. He and Mama had enjoyed their conversations.