how did you two girls sleep asked mother pulling the curtains apart on the blue morning. fine thank you mrs rose. mr shearsby was waiting in his truck when we went out to the verandah after breakfast. he lifted his hat and dad bumped up behind us with a picnic basket and the tartan rug tucked under his arm. grandfather was putting a satchel on the pan of the truck. ladies ready. mother carried out my sunhat and x went back to the bedroom to get hers. she looked very smart in a sort of linen smock sensible little boots. grandfather pointed at me and said think you can hold on all the way to the corner. he tipped his head at the truck. oh no dad said mother. ill keep her on my lap. there wont be room enough for all three of you up front with mr shearsby. thats true im afraid mrs rose said mr shearsby, the other will have to ride on the back with your old man. mother straightened and opened her mouth but uncle jim had just arrived in the sulky after spending the night with friends in town and he said, ill take her. so mother and i sat next to mr shearsby and grandfather and dad got up on the pan and when x came out with her hand on her hat uncle jim jumped down from the sulky and helped her over and they followed us at a distance to keep out of the dust.
we pulled up at a bend in the river. the ragged back and forth deposits through the marl grass. rillenkarren. then the brittle red gums returned to the river margins. dad unrolled the tartan on a grassy patch under a gum tree and mother put out the crockery. x and the pilot pulled up in the sulky and he helped her out and x got to helping mother with the picnic and uncle jim unhooked the piebald and took it down for a drink.
what a lovely day. dad lit his pipe and lay down his back to a rock. the woodbine curling in the heat. pardon said x. i said did you have a nice ride. oh, yes. of course you understand it isnt that i distrust your driving mr shearsby. i understand, i understand completely mrs rose. a mother has a duty. it wasnt too rough for you was it greg, youll stand the ride back, wouldnt want to have to call on english to sew you up again either. ive fallen off faster horses. its a nice set of wheels dad slurred from halfway under his hat. got them here from our own delaney. will you have some cold lamb.
after the cabinet pudding mr shearsby went down to fill up the waterbag and grandfather took his satchel from the truck and shook out the little pick axes on the rug. this is the best place before wee jasper to find them. farmers around here been rooting them up for seventy years. one time we rode through wee jasper to give a message to one of grandfathers shearers who was working the off season finishing the dam at burrinjuck. he pointed along the valley to the rock shards jutting either side in broken rows, like the lean to wood and iron churches further in on the ridge around the dam. they were laid down flat i dont know how they got up like that. grandfather had shearers all over the country, building roads, planting pine trees, the carpenters in canberra in the early decade. he took a swig from the waterbag and put his hat on again. mother declined to move. she shook her kerchief at us from the shade and grandfather and mr shearsby walked ahead into the sunshine of the riverbank. dad and i followed close behind with x and uncle jim. we didnt have to go far. limestone. generally less valuable than the goldfields and nickel fields of kalgoorlie, kambala and norseman. theres much more of it than there looks isnt there. grandfathers and mr shearsbys imaginations were easily provoked. who was it said the art of digression. sills. of greenstone. meandering granite. archaean nodes. the geologists call them ghosts i believe or plutonic intrusions. or was it lava, fast as water. depends how viscous. a laccolith then. wha wha. with the. what are they called full of air. crows chasing one another in the empty sky. the marl grass crackling under our feet. grandfather pointed to a whorl in the rock. why these are sea creatures, said x.
indeed its a tidal deposit.
one doesnt know.
the river.
no.
the flood.
that was six years ago.
i think she means the other flood.
well hm, yes, the catastrophe theory. . would. . bring it into a more. . recognisable time frame. still a great wave should have crushed
we are as we were created.
dad lifted his eyebrows. he took his pipe out of his mouth then put it back in. grandfather began his diplomatic assault. he tapped at the rockface with the blunt side of the pickaxe. there was more water then. then there was less. now there is more again. no the same amount of water. well he explained it anyway. how its beds laid down by rolling, leaping, suspension, colloidal and otherwise. little charges. a cement not a matrix. crushed trichite. dinosaur bones, plant leaves, shark teeth, cetotoliths, insect legs. softly softly. the encroaching surf had available for sorting a wide variety of material. erratics inward. waves lay down in better order than you will find in a poorly sorted till. the finer things have still not been deposited when the water reaches its highest point. the rock flour floats. receding only the coarsest material is left. and then effects of hardness. the broken shells round out against the angular quartz. and the limestone. minimising fading. wonderfully preserved, some of the detail, unheard of in the more delicate parts. unfortunately the brain rots before fossilisation can occur but not the eyeball, if youre lucky. used to think it fell out of the sun. but just here, how is it that they sit high up here all this time. its the nature of the basin. the crust is subsiding. its cyclic. then will come burial and metamorphosis. and the organic material will be burned off and it will become coarse, like sugar. fresh quarries. the bricks and limbs of the future, and so on. radiate fingers of error.
maybe later we could go to cathedral rock said uncle jim, the cad. he may as well have said hatchery creek. dad had gone down to put his feet in the water and grandfather and mr shearsby were equally out of range having found an echinoderm or a nautiloid. its only rugose coral said mr shearsby but grandfather elbowed him out of the way to get a good angle with the pickaxe. he landed the point too hard and it cracked. mother sucking bitch of a whore. we all went down to the water.