Tim Winton - The Riders

‘Aw, Jaysus no,’ the man laughed. ‘Peter’s been talkin to me!’

‘He’s a good bloke.’

‘Ah, he’s great gas is Peter. Follow Pete, they say, for wherever Pete is the crack is mighty.’

Scully laughed. ‘Well they’re right.’

‘He says you’re doin a fine job of it up there, workin like a nigger.’

‘He’s been a great help,’ said Scully. ‘I’ll die when I get his bill, I spose.’

Jimmy Brereton kicked his dogs away apologetically and moved closer. ‘Just between us, you know, Peter’s the one keepin the show goin in there. He’s as good as feedin his brother’s family, God save him. Himself won’t get out of bed most days now.’

‘Conor?’

‘I’d buy a whole big box of candles if I was waitin on power from Conor Keneally.’

Scully must have looked stricken because the other man laughed good naturedly then and swung his twelve gauge about.

‘Ah, ye would’na been the first either, lad. Peter’s doin all but the stuff you need a ticket to do, and even some of that, but there should be laws for good men and laws for eejit bastards. That’s what I’d say if I was God.’

‘How can you tell em apart?’ said Scully with a smile. ‘Good men and eejit bastards.’

‘Well, if you were God and you couldn’t tell you’d be out of a job, no? Us poor mortal friggers have to find out by experience. We have to be on the receivin end of good and evil in order to figure it out.’

Scully looked up at the big two-storey place near the road where smoke tore from four great hewn chimneys.

‘That’s your place there?’

‘The auld coach house and stables. In the family, well God knows how long. By God, them horses had it good once.’

‘So the castle’s yours too?’

‘Aye, since the Troubles, friggin thing. It’ll fall on me one day, the bad-humoured heap of shite. The government won’t let me knock it over.’

‘Mind if I have a poke around it sometime?’

‘Go by on your way home, but mind yourself. It’s at your own risk, now. Bastard of a place. Should have done the job proper, those lads back then. Save everybody a lot of pain. Stop by one evenin, Mr Scully, and we’ll have a pint.’

‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’

‘Bring your gals with you when they come, hear? You see any thin movin down in them woods?’

‘Coupla rabbits.’

‘Come on, boys!’

Scully watched him go bandylegged down the slope toward the stands of ash and larch at the foot of the hills with the dogs streaking ahead into hedges and deadwood.

He heaved himself over the wall and walked up into the field below the castle whose foundation seemed to be a great granite tor buried in the brow of the hill. The closer he came and the deeper into its shadow he walked, the clearer its size became. He saw it plainly now. Scully had long thought that architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades because the land was long gone, the wildness was no longer even a memory. But this… this was where architecture became landscape. It took scale and time, something strangely beyond the human. This wasn’t in the textbooks.

It was not beautiful. The blunt Norman keep rose scarfaced between later gothic wings whose crenellations seemed afterthoughts and whose many tree-spouting windows ran on and on like a child’s drawing. Scully stood beneath the oak tree which grew at the foot of the entry stairs and spread its bare fingers into the air beneath the first windows. The stones of the steps were in-worn and puddled with rain, bristling with moss. Grass and ivy and bramble sucked against the walls to smother the single gothic door. Scully whistled through his teeth and heard the cattle complaining from Brereton’s sheds fifty yards away.

Scully pressed in through the vegetation and the half-open door into the rubble-strewn pit of the great hall whose floorboards lay in a charred and mossy pile in the cellar below. Everything had fallen through onto everything else. Great oak beams lay like fallen masts and rigging across cattle bones and tons of cellar bricks. Above it all, beyond the smoke-blackened gallery into whose powdery walls generations of local kids seemed to have cut their initials, loomed the vaulted ceiling, dark as a storm sky. He picked his way round a flagstone edge and heard the sickening burr of unseen wings high above. He came to the staircase built into the cavity of the keep wall. Walls twenty feet thick. A gust of wind angled through the place and stirred the scorched air. Scully got seven or eight steps up the spiral when he began to think of his warm kitchen and the iron kettle that would by now be hissing at its edge. Once around the first turn, the only light entering the staircase came from somewhere above. Grottos and torch niches became pits of shadow and his boots rang louder than he preferred. The light grew and a small chamber opened off to the side. Scully stepped up into its slot-like dimension and saw the huge bed of sticks and reeds left by the birds. The weapon slits let in planks of light and he looked down into the ash wood below his place. Birds wheeled down there, their cries rose plan-gently. He went on up the stairs, emboldened, and felt his way through the long damp curve until there was light again and a similar side chamber that he pushed on past to a long pillar of a door which yielded only slowly to his weight. Before him was a vaulted hall with long wide windows that let in blue light and illuminated the sea of twigs and marbled guano which stretched wall to wall. Rooks buffeted about, escaping as he came on, beating him to the glassless window where he stood looking out across the valley into the pass between castle and mountains where every puddle and window and flapping sheet of tin caught the light and rendered itself defenceless to the eye. The peaks of the Slieve Blooms ran with streaks of cloud and the ploughed fields fell away herringboned and naked. Scully crossed to the uphill window to look upon his little scab-roofed cottage beyond the wood. Its chimney ripped with smoke. Lanes and hedges and stands of timber and boggy boreens went out at all angles under his gaze as the wind tore his hair. From here it all seemed orderly enough, leading, as it did, to and from this very spot in every direction. It was a small, tooled, and crosshatched country, simple, so amazingly simple from above. Every field had a name, every path a stile. Everything imaginable had been done or tried out there. It wasn’t the feeling you had looking out on his own land. In Australia you looked out and saw the possible, the spaces, the maybes. Here the wildness was pressed into something else, into what had already been. And out there beneath the birds, in the gibberish of strokes and lines and connections of the valley was his new life.

AT DAWN NEXT DAY, when the ground was frozen thick and mist hung on him like a bedwetter’s blanket, Scully knew that his days of coming out behind the barn with a spade and a roll of floral paper were at an end. Like reinforced concrete, the earth yielded only after the most concerted flogging with the sharp end of the mattock, and the hole he made was no bigger than a jam tin. It smoked evilly and caused him to moan aloud. It took the hope from his morning, that nasty little bore hole, and he felt utterly ridiculous crouched over it like some ice fisherman dangling his lure. His backside froze, his hands screamed pain. And only yesterday he’d hunkered down in the mist to have Jimmy Brereton come by in his tractor, waving gamely across the hawthorn hedge and doffing his cap ironically. Top of the mornin, indeed.

It wasn’t even winter yet, and it could only get worse. Taking a dump was getting to be the most strenuous and cheerless occasion of the day, and for a languid outhouse merchant like Scully, who liked to plot and read and reminisce with his trousers down and the door ajar, the sacrifice had become too great.