Colony of South Australia, September 1883
The boy met a god by the hollow tree.
‘Go away,’ said the boy, and the god, formless, passed on in the direction of the red hill. Then the boy was free to hunt in the scrub for roosting hens. When he came upon the hens they flapped up as if they could fly, and he gathered their eggs in a basket. The boy was six years old and thin, with a vivid pointed face. He wasn’t pale, exactly—his skin browned in the sun—but the visible veins at his wrists and ears suggested a delicacy that the people he knew associated with pale children. There was so little of him. When his mother held him, his heart felt near. Light hair, lifting in the briefest wind. And not so delicate, in fact—a strong boy, a good runner. The name people called him was Denny, and he answered to it.
The boy was gentle as he settled the eggs in the basket. Then his mother wanted him close—he knew this, even though she hadn’t called his name. Nobody had ever told him about his mother’s deafness; she was simply his mother, which meant she heard little and spoke less. But the boy knew when she wanted him to go to her. She had finished hanging the sheets on the line behind the house, and the boy went to give her the basket of eggs; she took it, bent down to him, and pressed her face against his neck. Today she belonged to him entirely—all his sisters were at a wedding in town and his father was out planting parsnips.
The boy and his mam were alone and loving among the sheets. Then quick as a blink she straightened, turned her back, and went into the house, which always ate her up. The boy, following, wanted to help her churn the butter, but she made him put his boots on, she laced them tight, and she sent him out with a sack to gather grass and bark and twigs. He liked to collect things for the fire, and he liked to please her. The black dog, Mopsy, woke from her nap in the sun and looked as if she might come with him; but she heard Mam start the butter churn and went to supervise that instead.
The boy walked away from the red hill, although it was from behind the hill that his sisters would come home from town. The country he walked into was red and brown—desert country—but there was a haze of green over the top of it, because it was spring. At this time of day, the surrounding hills were white and yellow and green. A shrub scratched the boy’s shin and he followed, for a while, the deep course of a dry creek. He kneeled on its stony bed and saw ants carrying a large dead fly. The word that came to him was ‘housebound’, maybe because he’d heard his mother use that word about Mrs Baumann, who had large eyes, like a fly, and clean, folded hands, and sat in a chair with wheels on it as if she had neat grey wings tucked behind her. But the boy didn’t think of Mrs Baumann exactly; the word ‘housebound’ just dropped into the boy and went away again.
He rounded a curve in the creek and surprised a kangaroo. He knew the story of the kangaroo: once upon a time, it argued about food with its cousin the wallaroo, so now it stayed here on the dry, flat plain while the wallaroo lived up in the hills. The boy’s heart was big with sorrow for the kangaroo, which crouched very still and looked at him. It seemed to be waiting for something to happen. Then it turned and flew from the creek bed and the boy climbed out to follow it for its dung, which also burned. Really, he followed it because it was fast, because the boy was also waiting for something to happen, because he was six years old.
Soon, things would happen. Men would call his name in the night; there would be blood on a handkerchief, and fire on the red hill.
The boy looked north and saw a high dark wall over the ranges. The wall was moving towards him. It was made of dust, and when the dust reached him it hid the sun. The sun was there, the boy could see it through his narrowed eyes, but it was brown now, and silly: only as bright as a lamp or the moon. The dust rolled down from the north in secret colours, very soft, until the wind came up behind it. Then it stung. The boy held the sack across his face, as his father had taught him to do when the dust storms came, and he turned around and began to walk, and that’s how he got lost: trying to walk home in the dust.
When the storm had passed, his mother went out into the yard and spat red onto the red ground. She looked for him in the direction he had gone and saw no sign.
First Day
The dust storm rose up in the central deserts. In order to reach the boy and his mother, it passed over the ridges, valleys, and gorges of the northern Flinders Ranges. These ranges were laid down, long ago and slowly, in layers of rock: limestone, for example, sandstone, quartzite, also other types of rock that exist only here, in the arid middle of South Australia. They were laid down by time and water, folded into great peaks by the movement of the Earth, and in the aeons since then have been worn by time and water back to stumps. The European settlers, who came to the ranges in the 1840s, sometimes refer to them as hills, but this is too reasonable a word for the serrated ridges and startling inclines of this dusty, dry country. These are ancient mountains—so old that they’ve collapsed in on themselves, as stars do.
This particular storm contributed to the long, slow erosion of the Flinders Ranges by picking up more dust from the kicked surfaces of the sheep and cattle stations, then pouring over the jagged rim of Wilpena Pound. From there, it rolled down into the narrow northern neck of the broad tableland known as the Willochra Plain; it rolled on into the bristling wheat country, where it hid Denny and sent his mother running for the freshly washed sheets. That work done, the storm now continues south across the widening Willochra, which is surrounded by ranges on every side. The dust flows over the plain like a beery tide until it reaches the town of Fairly, where Denny’s sisters are attending a wedding.
Fairly is used to these vast dusts. Its sharper edges blur, its few trees tremble, and the polish of its windows dulls a little, but even under dust it’s active, alert, and eager with proprieties. It boasts a neat school, four trains a week, a debt-free church, and, in that church, a new harmonium. There’s also a discreet German prostitute who keeps a piebald donkey and is tolerated because she is known to sleep only with white men. Fairly has huddled under storms like this one for the eight years of its existence. It was itself tricked up out of dust. The whole town, with its grid of ten streets, seems to turn away from the north, where the storms come from; it draws its shoulders up and looks south, as if Adelaide, three hundred miles away, might be visible over the crest of the next hill.
The dust, engulfing Fairly, could ruin Minna Baumann’s wedding ceremony. When the first gusts start, Minna’s brother unhitches the pony from the wedding wagon and leads it into the church. The storm lowers the light, batters the iron roof, and makes a fine, grainy sound against the windows; but all of this ends up increasing the solemnity of the occasion, at the centre of which Minna burns in her ivory dress. The pony snorts with fright, Peter Baumann quiets it, and even this seems reverent: after all, as Mrs Baumann will later remark, there was at least one donkey present at the birth of Christ. The vicar, Mr Daniels, does have a coughing fit, but he’s known to have trouble with his lungs.
By the time the ceremony is over, the storm has moved on, bringing some spitting rain behind it. The dust sweeps across Thalassa, the last big sheep station in the wheat country; it throws itself south, as if it’s determined to travel all those miles to Adelaide. But it’s only, after all, a minor storm, and the Willochra Plain becomes so broad and flat the further south it goes that the dust spreads, tumbles, meets other winds and weathers, and eventually blows itself out.
When Minna Baumann steps out of the Fairly church and sees the red dust gathered on the road, against the few gravestones, along the arms of the young trees, and among the garlands on her wedding wagon, she chooses to feel as if it’s been offered to her as a gift. Her hair is tight at her temples. People press against her and take her hands. Mr Daniels has informed every one of these people that Minna and her husband are now one flesh. Her husband has found a handkerchief—not his own—with which to dust the seat of the wagon. He’s dusting it for her. He, Mounted Constable Robert Manning, First Class, with his red hair and freckled face, is turning to her and laughing; is helping her into the seat; is going to drive her the few minutes to her mother’s house so that Mrs Baumann can see her married daughter arrive in a German wagon covered with flowers. Minna is eighteen and ready for the world to be larger than her mother’s house—but not too much larger.
‘Well,’ says Robert as they drive from the church. Children follow after them, yipping and shouting like dogs, as if they know what it all means. Robert says, ‘Well,’ again and clears his throat. ‘Wasn’t that a lovely storm?’ Which Minna likes about him—the way he calls things lovely that aren’t. He only means it was a good example of its kind.
Minna pulls petals off the roses that cling to the wagon. ‘Let’s go now,’ she says.
‘Go where?’
‘To your house—where else? Alone.’
The wagon tilts in the road.
‘Little Minnow,’ says Robert. He holds the reins with one hand and puts the other on Minna’s leg, just above her knee, and squeezes. She leans her head against his shoulder and it’s as if they’ve been married for years and are coming home from the wedding of some other girl. Cheers rise from the people behind them. Robert puts his arm around her—more cheers. She misses his hand on her knee.
‘It was a lovely storm,’ she says.
Robert begins to hum, and Minna feels the hum pass from his body into hers.
Minna’s mother is waiting for them on the verandah; her maid, Annie, has swept it clear of dust and pushed the wheelchair out. Mrs Baumann is dressed as usual in her glossy blacks, all complicated pleats and stiff corsets, so that, propped in her wheelchair, she resembles a fussy umbrella. She’s issuing further instructions to Annie, who will have been opening doors and windows, shaking dust from the trees and chasing it down the front path with her broom.
‘Annie,’ Mrs Baumann says, ‘you will go now and change your apron for a fresh one.’
Mrs Baumann kisses her son-in-law and shoos him inside to wash the reins off his hands, but she has questions for Minna. The first thing she wants to know: was the Swedish painter at the church? Minna expected this enquiry. The Swedish painter has preoccupied her mother since he appeared in town a week ago.
‘No, Mama, I told you, they’ve already left for Wilpena.’
‘The wife also?’
‘Yes, both of them.’
‘Psh,’ says Mrs Baumann. ‘And what are they going to do out there in the desert?’
‘Paint, I daresay,’ says Minna. She looks down at the top of her mother’s head and feels the urge to kiss it, but Mama would shrink from that kind of affection.
‘What about the storm?’ asks Mrs Baumann.
Minna says, ‘He promised us he would be all right.’
And she’d believed him. The Swedish painter had dazzled her the way an angel might, wandering into a village and asking for a meal and a place to sleep, seeming ordinary, complimenting someone on their bread, and leaving the next morning in a cloud of light so that everyone could see his wings. The enormity of the angel would humble the village; they would worship it and be glad to see it gone.
‘Drowned in the dust,’ Mrs Baumann says, abandoning the Swede to his fate with a shrug. ‘But at the church, I was meaning—how was the storm at the church, Hermina?’
The guests are arriving. They gather at the gate to make way for each other. The men clear their throats into their fists and the women lift their skirts away from the red dust on the ground.
‘Peter brought the pony inside.’
Mrs Baumann nods. ‘Well, what else was possible?’ she says. She reaches up and takes Minna’s hand in her own, which feels furred and soft, like an apricot. If Minna had married in a Lutheran church, her mother might have made the effort to leave the house. The way Mrs Baumann holds Minna’s hand, laughs, and says, ‘What else was possible?’ communicates all this: no pony would have been allowed into a German house of God. But Mrs Baumann is a long way from Germany. She and her husband left that fine, green country in their youths and came blazing into the Australian desert. Minna has heard the story many times. She is the result of it, and so is her brother Peter, and this house—the first in town with wooden floors. The wooden boards hide spiders, dust, lost needles, beads, which Annie must ferry out with her long broom. Other houses have wooden floors now, but the Baumanns’ are important, because first. Minna has seen her mother summon strength from the wooden floors. She’s insistent that they should never show the tracks of her wheelchair.
‘Tell me,’ says Mrs Baumann, ‘did the Axams show their faces?’
When Minna says no, there were no Axams at the church, Mrs Baumann shakes her head, unsurprised. She closes her eyes and opens them again, and Minna knows that in that moment her mother has equipped herself for battle: her long, tedious battle with the Axams, who have insulted her by having good breeding behind them, property, sheep, while Mama (whose father owned a draper’s shop, a substantial one, in Dortmund, but was not, you understand, a Jew) rolls in her chair over the wooden floors.
‘So, you are now married,’ Mrs Baumann says. ‘My Liebchen. To a constable!’ She glances at Minna’s stomach, which remains flat beneath the ivory dress. ‘And all things will be well.’
Mrs Baumann settles her skirt over her knees and turns a cordial face towards the gate, so Minna goes into the house to look for Robert. She finds him sitting on her bed with his elbows on his knees, his hands and head hanging so that she can see the slight thinness of his topmost hair. He seems almost dainty from this angle, despite his bulk and the size of his hands. She loves his hands. They look as if they’ve been baked, or as if he coated them in pink clay one day and it stuck. It has only recently occurred to Minna that men can be beautiful—during the Swedish painter’s visit, in fact. She wouldn’t call Robert beautiful. He’s something else. He’s desire itself.
‘Hello, Mr Manning,’ she says.
Robert lifts his head and smiles at her. It’s a real smile—tired and loving. ‘Mrs Manning,’ he says. He puts his hands on his knees and stands, slowly, so that she sees him in thirty years, an eternity away, creaking up from a chair. He’s so much larger than her bed, this room, the house. But not larger than the town. The size of him, next to her: just large enough. And red, white, pink, brown: the colour of local rock.
‘Put your arms around me,’ she says.
Robert hesitates. ‘Your dress. And this, here, I don’t want to squash it.’ He points at the spray of orange blossom on her bodice.
Copyright © 2022 by Fiona McFarlane
