Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

Suspense

HISTORY repeats itself!

It was dreadful how the phrase recurred in her mind, as though in it there dwelt an imp determined to torture her with its incessant repetition, as though the imp knew that this night would be one of tragedy as that other night had been twelve years ago.

Twelve years ago, almost on the same date of the year, Mary Gordon had walked about this pleasant room in the rambling homestead of Meena Station waiting for her husband to come home. The same clock on the mantelshelf was chiming out the quarter-hours as it had done that night twelve years before. The same calendar had then announced the date, the nineteenth of April, as to-night it announced the date, the eighteenth of April. It was raining this night as it had rained that other terrible night of suspense, and the sound of it on the iron roof annoyed her because it interfered with the sound she longed to hear-hoof beats on the sodden ground.

Eight times the hammer struck the gong within the clock.

The dinner table was set out for three persons. The spoiling dinner was being kept warm on the oven shelves and on either side of the stove. Eight o’clock, and the dinner had been waiting two hours!

Twelve years before, Mary’s husband had not come home. Was her son, John, not to come home this night?

Mary found it impossible to sit down, to read or sew. The rain maintained a steady thrumming on the roof, and within this major sound were others, the hiss of falling rain on the leaves of the two orange-trees, just beyond the veranda, on the roofs of more distant outhouses. The early darkness was accounted for by the low rain clouds that had begun their endless march from the north-west shortly after noon.

“What on earth’s keeping them?”

Standing at the open door of this large kitchen-living-room, Mary strained her hearing to catch the sound of hoof beats beyond the sound of the rain, but beyond the rain she could hear nothing. This rain coming after the hot and dry months of summer had filled her with a kind of ecstasy and, breathing the warm, moisture-laden air, she had stood often and long on the west veranda watching the rain falling upon the great empty bed of Meena Lake. The rain held no significance in the long-delayed appearance of her son, but its first music was now a noise preventing her hearing the sound of hoof beats.

History repeats itself!

Twelve years ago she had stood in this same doorway, listening for hoof beats and hearing only the rain on the roof, on the leaves of the orange-trees, then so small, and on the roofs of the distant, night-masked outbuildings. She had waited hour after hour till the dawn had paled the sky. There were four hands employed on the station then. She had wakened them, given them breakfast, and sent them with two of the blacks to find her husband. He was lying beneath the body of his horse that had broken a leg in a rabbit burrow, and they had brought him home all wet and cold and smeared with mud. Now no men were working on Meena save her son and Jimmy Partner, and this night they were both somewhere out in the darkness and the rain when they should have been with her.

Well, perhaps she was worrying herself unreasonably. Her husband had ridden out alone to look over the cattle in South Paddock. John had gone to look at the sheep in East Paddock, and with him had gone Jimmy Partner. If anything had happened to John, there was Jimmy Partner to help him. And it might be the other way round. Still, for all that, what on earth was keeping them out so late, especially when it was raining and had been raining ever since two o’clock?

Tall and gaunt and grey was this Mary Gordon, a woman ill-fitted to counter the hardships of her early life, hardships suffered with the dumb patience of animals. Like an old picture, her face was covered with tiny lines. Her hair was thin and almost white, but her eyes were big and grey, wells of expression.

Life had been particularly hard upon Mary Gordon, but it had given her the love of two men to compensate for the years of unnatural harshness when, as a teamster’s girl, she had accompanied her father on the tracks with his bullocks and the great table-top wagon, doing the cooking, often hunting the bullocks in the early morning, sometimes even driving the team when her father was too drunk and lay helpless atop the load. After he had died-beneath one of the wheels-she went into service at the station homesteads until John Gordon married her and took her to Meena, his leasehold property of three hundred thousand acres.

She had never become quite used to John Gordon’s affection, for when one is thirty-four, and has never known affection, affection never ceases to be strange. Of course, she had paid life for it, paid in anguish over years which had begun when they brought home the poor body and the minister from Opal Town consigned it to rest beside John the First in the little station cemetery.

John the Third was at school down in Adelaide, a mere boy of sixteen. He had at once returned home and demanded to stay at home to learn the management of sheep and the affairs of this small station property. Like his father in so many things, the son was like him in his steady affection for her.

History repeats itself! Time to pay again!

Ah, no! No, no, no! It won’t! It can’t! It mustn’t! Oh, why don’t they come home?

No longer could Mary support the intolerable inactivity. Turning back into the room, she slipped on an oilskin coat and lit a hurricane lamp, and with this small light to assist her she stepped off the veranda down to the wet ash path of the small garden and traversed it to the low gate in the wicket fence. Away from the iron veranda roof the night was less noisy and permitted the little sounds to reach her ears-the pattering of the rain on the gleaming coat, on the trees, on the ground. It thudded on her hands and on her face like the tips of nervous fingers urging her to go to him she loved. Besides those made by the rain there were no other sounds, no sound of creaking saddles, of hoof falls, of jangling bits in the mouths of horses eager to be home.

No longer hesitant, she walked across the open space to the out-buildings of which one was the men’s hut. In this there were two small rooms. In the outer room was a rough wood table, a form and several cases serving as chairs. On the table were weekly journals, a cribbage board, a hurricane lamp. Within the inner room stood two beds, one without a mattress, the other with a mattress and with blankets tossed in disorder on it. It was Jimmy Partner’s bed.

Mary’s mind seemed partitioned to-night and one part of it noted that the interior of this room smelled clean despite the fact that its tenant was an aboriginal. But then Jimmy Partner was an unusual aboriginal.

Again in the rain and hemmed by the menacing darkness, Mary walked to the wire gate in the low wire fence enclosing the whole of Meena homestead. She was unable to see it, but to her right stretched away the great bed of the lake that she had seen thrice filled with fifteen feet of water, giving life to countless water birds and heavy blackfish. Passing through the wire gateway, she began to follow a path winding away beneath the wide ribbon of box-trees bordering the lake’s shore, and now into the lamplight came wide-eyed rabbits to stare at her approach and vanish to either side. The rain was to give the rodents another lease of life.

Without a flicker the light went out; unexpectedly, because there was no wind. The night’s blackness struck her eyes like a velvety blow; and, her mind momentarily confused, she halted, the rain drops on the leaves and on the trees like the footsteps of gnomes.

But Mary knew exactly where she was on this path made by the naked feet of aborigines connecting their camp with the homestead, a path first formed more than sixty years ago. Gradually the blackness waned to become faintly luminous, and when her eyes became accustomed to the night light, she continued along the path she was unable to see but on which she was guided by the shapes of familiar trees.