A Long the River Run, page 1
A Long
the
River Run
Glenn Stuart
Beatty
*
First Published 2022
by Soap and Candle Press
18 Upfold Street
MAYFIELD NSW 2304
Australia
Copyright © Glenn Stuart Beatty 2022
Glenn Stuart Beatty has asserted his rights under Copyright
to be identified as the author of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Typesetting and cover design by Rack & Rune Publishing
rackandrune.com
ISBN 978-0-6454585-0-3
To find out more about the author visit
glennstuartbeatty.com.au
.
Glenn Stuart Beatty grew up in the Lower Hunter Coalfields of New South Wales. He was educated at the University of Newcastle, University of Central Queensland and Macquarie University. He has worked in labouring jobs in heavy industry, in the music and theatre industries as a sound and lighting technician and has had held senior positions in the public service in areas of housing, community services and disability services. His first volume of poetry, The Saxophone Injuries appeared in 1991 and since then his work has appeared in a number of anthologies. He has been a member of Newcastle’s Poetry at the Pub since 1988 and spent many years as President of this group as well as chairperson of the Hunter Writers’ Centre. As a playwright, Glenn has had works commissioned by Newcastle’s Mission Theatre and Freewheels Theatre in Education. A Loved A Long the River Run is the first of Glenn’s novels to be published.
You can find out more about Glenn at:
glennstuartbeatty.com.au
Angela Sees the Fire,
Raining in the Sky
A loved a long the river run – if there was any water left, it would run through it, but the river dried, was not a river if it had no water, no longer a soul if it had no spirit, and Angela McGregor had enough of drought and all that came with it. Okies, she thought, that film based on Steinbeck, Henry Fonda and Rose of Sharon, the daughter suckling grown men, her milk the only comfort for the dying, rib bones on them like the boy men from Changi, pictures kept by her grandfather, he who hated japs and nips and slaphead slopes and krauts and eyties too, an Sassenachs the most. And maybe loved her mother ‘though he never said and little Angela, ‘though he never said, and Rex his kelpie, ‘though he never said, and his old digger mates at the RSL, though he never said. He said, ‘I am the law’ and Angela says now ‘I am the law’ and wonders what that is, the law. We need a diviner, she thought, but look at the trouble Michael brought, and Andy Mac, she thought, and that perhaps he was Christ, Michael that was, not Andy Mac, or was that the Thane of Cawdor weltering in blood in the Trobriands or an old man up north, the Kimberleys perhaps? Too many gods and the river does not run, and the smoke is building in the north.
The fire flows like water, the man who lived in the block up the road told her once, ‘it pours across the ground, thirsty like water, long red tongue tasting at the bush until the bush explodes and the tree tops, the tree tops explode ahead of the fire and it is like something from God, something falling from the sky, the embers ahead of the snakewater flames.’ Angela thought that he thought that she thought that he was mad, a crazy coot with a big white beard and the King Gee shorts and old rubber thongs despite the brown snakes, and the chesty bond cliché blue singlet and the leather Barmah hat with the kangaroo hide band that’s turned black from his sweat and the oil that came from the band of white hair that hung from the back of his head as if to mock the shiny baldness of his pate. The locals called him Killer.
Five years she had been there, hidden in the bush in the foothills of the Barrington Tops. Five years, she often thought, is half a decade, half a decade for her sins, ‘pray for us sinners and now and at the hour of our death’ she remembers, Grandma and the big church near the river and the priest, whisky breathed smile and a pat on the head, but she thought she got it lucky because she was a girl and it was the altar boys that must burn deep in the dreams of the old priest in whatever gaol cell he sits in, weeping she hopes, and not just for himself.
Judgement, the fire is coming like water to judge, that’s what old Killer says. Killer the amateur self-taught butcher who was so named because the small holders, the city folk who hid in the valleys would raise a cow or a sheep or a pig and when it was time to despatch the beast, they would bring it to Killer who would knock the bleating beast in the head with a sledgehammer before cutting its throat. He took to the newly dead animal with a sharp knife and the owners let him keep the offal, the innards that he liked, Angela thought, much like Leopold and his kidneys. Killer said that he would face the river of fire and stand his ground, but that a woman like Angela had no business standing up to fire and besides, what business did God have in judging Angela.
The precious books, the books by Mick, the first editions were packed in a carton that had once held twelve bottles of a decent Hunter Shiraz she bought in the days before she had to count her money. Mick’s books, she had come to call him Mick because that was his nickname, the name he was known by to family and friends, but Angela never knew him and he wouldn’t invite her in when she made her trip after she saved her money, scrimped for years on her part-time tutor’s salary and was awarded a small research grant. Mick opened the door at Harwich and told her that he was busy, and she loved him even more for that and loved it the moment he divined her face, with his own face a mask of puzzlement, and she thought him some curmudgeonly Greta Garbo, without knowing that he liked the company of men in the pub, the fishermen.
Killer carried the books to the car and wondered why it was that the flame haired girl would want to save, of all things, books, old books that smelled of dust and forgotten rooms in houses full of people.
The afternoon sun was falling towards the ridgeline to the west in a struggle against the smoke that turned the sky to grey and white and black and red. ‘It won’t be long’ said Killer, heading down the path to the gravel road that climbed another three hundred yards uphill to Killer’s rough sawn timbered house and Angela laughed at the way he always talked in yards and miles that stretched across the uncleared hills.
There were no birds at all today. The only sound was a rushing, roaring noise from some distance to the north west, out beyond the second ridge, the higher ridge of spicy smelling eucalypt and ferns that fronded in the valleys in between. Angela liked the valleys in the winter when the dew hung heavily and the frost would not thaw in the hours before noon and when, in August sometimes, snow would fall in thin white sheets upon the grass. It wasn’t even summer and yet the land was burning and she knew that she had to leave, drive down the narrow road that followed the river until it met another river and then looped lazily to the sea and the city by the sea that she had left some years before in order to heal and she wondered as she listened to that roaring, watched as the sky turned red, whether she had found enough time to heal, if she had healed enough to face the town by the river’s mouth.
Once upon a time. She laughed at that and thought that Mick would never start with once upon a time even when he was being as ironic as the horseman. Mick would have started with an image, perhaps simple and startling or perhaps an observation.
By time she reached the age of fifty-six, Angela McGregor had grown thick around the ankles and the red of her hair was mingled with grey. She lived alone since the brown snake, the summer before, had taken her tabby cat Osana, who, in old cat age, had lost his ability to wile and scheme. She cried for him sometimes at night. On other nights she cried for different things, worthy of tears but not more worthy than her companion cat Osana, with the yellow eyes that followed her around the little mud-brick house on the overgrown five acres of scented bushland backing down to the river that no longer ran. Springwater has burbled surfacewood some miles up the road so that here, at Angela’s back door it was always just a river in name and little more than a creek or perhaps, in Suffolk, Clare might have called it a brook, but it no longer burbled bubbled and the drinking water tank had turned brackish and had to be filled by a gruff ruddy skinned man who had a large yellow plastic tank on the back of a Bedford truck and always said he charged a fair price to cart the water from the dam five valleys towards the sea where the river that hadn’t dried up yet.
Killer killed the brown snake for her the day after the snake had killed Osana. He had taken the snake’s head off with a long-handled scythe, as cool as anything. Angela asked Killer ‘how do you know that it was the same snake that killed Osana?’ ‘Does it matter?’, Killer asked, ‘it’s a bastard snake close to your house, better off dead for everyone concerned and if you see any others, give me a hoi’. And Angela was glad to see the snake dead and felt bad because she had hoped that the snake had suffered, had felt fear even if just for the second the rusty but deadly scythe arced through the air in Killer’s steady hands, guided by Killer’s steady brown eyes to remove the snakes head from its body just as it rose it off the ground to strike out at Killer’s bandy bared legs.
Angela had neve
Bluestocking, that’s what someone said to her years ago, ‘I always knew that you’d end up a bluestocking’. That was when she had a job, at the university before austerity – tenure had once been the dream but then, the muckle financial crisis. Bluestocking, she never owned a pair of blue stockings. Had a black pair once when she thought that some young man or another might find them erotic, but they never commented. Young men seemed to be such a long time ago, long before she came to these mountains where now the brook had ceased to run, the dried up gully that had once been verdant, life giving and affirming, a dusty useless thing, a string of disconnected muddy puddles that might remember what a brook might have been, what it might have been to flow brookish. ‘Bookish’, Angela remembered that’s what her mother called her when she was a teenager and it wasn’t meant as a compliment. Babies, her mother talked of babies, weddings, engagements, petty affairs, betrayals, divorce and death as they sang out from the Herald classifieds each day with their little life stories in microcosm, the fathers’ funerals with the mention of children by name but not of a wife, or the old women with three or four surnames proclaiming earlier widowhood or divorce and Angela’s mother worried that unless Angela found a marrying type of man that she’d grow old before she had time to worry the classified compositor with any announcement other than for her funeral, and that there were no men to be found between the pages of a book who could later be found between the sheets of the marital bed in a consummation of happy suburbia.
Up here, the mud brick house had not seen a man between the sheets since Angela bought it from the couple who thought they’d like the bush until they realised it came without the theatre, music, pubs and cafés, and before illness clouded over their dreams.
In the first few years the herb garden prospered – the bitter herbs she liked to chop and spread on hand made pizza dough and hand cut pasta or in the sauces she made with the bits of animal innards Killer would share with her when had done a kill for the young folk down the road. She grew tarragon for the chicken that she’d sometimes get from Killer when an old hen had gone off the lay. Killer didn’t like chicken all that much, which is why he didn’t cook his own chooks, but Angela would give him half when she had roasted the old hen in garlic, butter and herbs and he seemed to like the way she did it. That was in the easy years when the brook ran, and the tank was full before the end days when the garden died, and Killer’s chooks stopped laying eggs for good.
Killer said to leave when it started raining fire from the sky and Angela thought that those words sounded like a line from a song she vaguely remembered from when she was a child and there’d be 2KO in the kitchen and some American man singing and then she remembered the night she spent some years ago in Longmont reading Kerouac and she didn’t know until she read the page that night in Longmont that Kerouac too had come to Longmont and she read the page while she was there and felt the Goosebumps, and Longmont was in Colorado and she remembered then the song was from John Denver and she remembered looking out at the Rockies in late Fall and they had their caps of snow and that was five years ago and there is no snow here although it would be a blessing rather than the sky the colour she imagined the open doorway would be in a crematorium furnace when they push in the casket and she remembered funerals, far too many, friends and family gone in puffs of smoke and the smokes are puffing wildly over the next ridge plus one like a thousand angry grandfathers, jap broken in their clubs all sitting around puffing Borkum Riff from bent Peterson briars clenched between their yellow teeth, or with white dentures coming loose as their old heads shrink.
The roar slowly growing, Angela remembered playing down near the railway line when she was a little girl and her friend, the strange boy called Dean who went each day in a little white bus to the special school in another suburb and who never played with the other kids in the street because they called him a spazzo and threw stones at him if he came to play with them on the vacant block on the corner where Mrs King’s house burned down in a fire one night when Angela was very tiny but could still remember the people in the street shouting and sirens and the noise and the smells and she remembered Dean daring her to stand on the railway track where it curved around the hill on its run into the city and to stand there until the last possible moment and she remembered the white panic stricken face of the man driving the flyer when he brought the locomotive hurtling around the corner and before he could blast the siren or hit the brakes she jumped and rolled down the steep embankment where Dean laughed so hard that he wet his grey school trousers that he seemed to wear everywhere.
She thought she remembered the night that Mrs King’s house burned down even although her mother told her, years later, that she was too young and could never remember these things, but she described lying in her little wooden bed that was a step up from a cot and meant that she might have been three or so, and she was bedazzled by the beams of red and blue lights as they danced around the walls of her room passing over the pictures of fairies and puppy dogs and she remembered what had woken her, before she saw the lights, was hearing the man next door, Mr Collins, yelling loudly and her mother and father talking urgently in the hall and her father on the telephone and that must have been why Mr Collins was yelling because they had the only telephone in the street and her mother later told her the neighbours always wanted to use the telephone and she said only in extreme emergencies but that didn’t stop the neighbours giving their families the McGregor’s number and her mother said that for years it was her job to trudge up and down the street bearing news of deaths and births and accidents and sickness and crimes and celebrations so that Mrs McGregor became known in the street as ‘The News’.
Angela had a mobile phone at the mud brick cottage but to use it she had to drive further up the hill to get reception, not that it mattered all that much because nobody ever called her and she had no desire to speak to anyone and if she had something to say she preferred to put it into a text message so she didn’t have to indulge in meaningless chit chat, and in a text she could get straight to the point using as few words as necessary. She thought she should have texted her friend, Ingrid, to say that she was running from the fire and ask if she could stay in Ingrid’s glistening glass fronted flat that reflected the green grey water of the harbour and where, at night, the tug boats with their mournful fog horns seemed to cry for something lost but not forgotten out there, across the water. It was too late to send a text now, for to drive up the hill, to climb the ridgeline would be to face the rushing, breathing fire as it ate ravenously through the bush.
A man had come to her door some minutes before, dressed in yellow and red with a big red helmet and she recognised him as Kevin Cutler who ran the general store in the little village five kilometres down the road and Kevin was the captain of the fire brigade or whatever they called the volunteers who fought the fires in the bush. Kevin Cutler told Angela that she had to leave, that the fire was coming from multiple sides and if it reached the road below her, she could not get out. He was a gruff man, Kevin Cutler, and spoke with the authority of someone who had lived in the valley all of his life and whose ancestors were buried in the yard of the tiny stone Anglican church, their graves with headstones covered in lichen sitting inside a blackened wrought iron fence under the shade of an oak tree planted to make the little church look more like England, or so Angela thought. Kevin Cutler organised an annual Settlers’ Day with a fete and a parade and a Cutler family reunion to celebrate the way the Cutlers pioneered the valley and settled the land. It was a day of drinking beer and rum and singing songs and having fistfights by the bonfire with the loud men shouting in their loud voices and the children screaming out on voices fuelled with fizzy drinks and lollies and the women watchful, careful, measuring their words so not to inflame the conquering blood of the sons of settlers. The black people stayed away. Killer said there’d been a massacre once, not far away and up upon the ridge where the big cliff dropped into the other river, the one that ran to the north. Killer said that some nights he could hear the black children crying. Killer said that he was part blackfella himself on his mother’s side. Killer said he hated Kevin Cutler.
