‘How did you know I was interested in Golden Soak?’ I asked her.
She had got to her feet and she stood looking down at me, a big, tough woman, her eyes bright as beads. ‘Emilio was delivering stuff here couple days back. Wasn’t it you that wired Ed Garrety’s girl to meet you?’ She was smiling, the creases in her dark face deepening. ‘There ain’t much to talk about here in Nullagine, an’ yuh being a mining man — bush telegraph you might say. Well, yuh gonna sit on your arse there all day?’ And she turned and strode out into the sunlight, moving with a gipsy swing to her skirt and light on her feet despite her bulk.
Looking back on it, I am reminded of Big Bill Garrety’s postscript to the discovery of Golden Soak — the beginning of all my troubles. That day was the beginning of my troubles, and it was the gipsy woman Prophecy who was the cause of it. Whether she had the gift of second sight or not I don’t know, but she was like a witch, and within twenty-four hours, riding the broomstick of her curiosity, I had become so caught up in the past of Jarra Jarra that nothing else has seemed to matter very much since then.
‘Your name’s Alec Falls, right?’
I nodded, the sun beating down on my bare head, the dry air breathless.
‘Then we’ll go to the post office first.’ She turned to the left, towards the petrol pump which was backed by a general store. ‘There’s a telegram for you. Don’t reckon it’ll have gone out yet.’
The telegram was from Kadek and had been despatched from Kalgoorlie: NEED YOUR ADVICE MINING DEAL. FEE AND EXPENSES BUT ESSENTIAL YOU ARRIVE HERE MONDAY MORNING. CONTACT CHRIS CULPIN PALACE BAR. I stood there for a moment, considering it. ‘Well?’ Prophecy asked. ‘You heading straight for Kalgoorlie or you wanta see Wolli’s sister first?’
It was now Thursday. ‘I’ll hitch a ride in the morning,’ I said. ‘But it’s Wolli I want to see.’
She nodded and crossed the road to a track that led up behind the wash-house. We found the black woman stretched out on a bed on the verandah of a dilapidated corrugated iron house halfway up the hill. She was small and bony, jet black, with strong hands and very thin wrists and breasts mat sagged under the bright cotton shift that was all she seemed to be wearing. In repose her face was ugly, the nose broad over a wide, big-lipped mouth, the brow so low that she looked as though she had been dropped on her head as a child. She got up from her chair on the verandah, a broad smile of welcome, and with the smile her whole face seemed to light up, the quickness of her movements suggesting extraordinary vitality, her whole body instantly and intensely alive. And those big dark eyes of hers bright with pleasure.
She gave us beer, cold from the icebox, and Prophecy talked to her in her own tongue, which was deep from the throat. Abruptly the happiness vanished from her face and her eyes became wary as she stole furtive glances in my direction. The conversation between the two of them went on for a long time. In the end Prophecy turned to me and said, ‘You know she was born there and worked on the station. Wolli left, of course, but she stayed on.’ She paused — as though that had some special significance. ‘Ed’s wife had gone by then, see.’
‘Gone?’
‘Nobody told you?’ Her quick brown eyes gleamed. ‘No, ‘course not. Ed wouldn’t want to be reminded of that. He married just after the war began — had to, they say — and then, when he came home on embarkation leave, there was this feller from the Ivanhoe station. He took a stock whip to him and rode him off the place. Should have larruped her instead, if you ask me.’
‘When was Janet born then?’
‘After the war. After Ed came back. Big Bill Garrety was still alive, see, and she was scared of him by all accounts. But then this fella Harrison turns up again — caught a packet in Normandy about the same time Nobby got his — and now they’re living down in Perth and Ed’s never been quite the same since.’
So Janet had hardly known her mother and, since Henry’s death, she and her father had been on their own. I looked at the black woman, seeing the nervous flicker of her eyes. It wasn’t easy to guess her age, but I thought she was still only in her middle thirties. ‘What’s her brother do for a living?’ I asked.
‘Nuthin’. I told you, Wolli’s a bum.’
‘What does he do for money then?’
‘That’s a question, that is.’ She looked at the black woman. Yuh gonner tell Mr Falls what Wolli does for money?’
The eyes rolled in the black face. ‘No get’im money now. All finished.’
Prophecy looked at me over her beer. ‘Ed pensioned him off. But they’re so broke down at Jarra Jarra now that the source has dried up.’ She was smiling, enjoying the sight of me working it out. It all added up and I was thinking of the terrible loneliness of a man in the outback with his wife gone, the problem he’d had to face with a young daughter growing up. It never occurred to me that the gipsy woman had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, which was a pity, because if I’d asked the right questions there on that verandah, I might have come at the truth. But probably not. Blackmail isn’t something you admit to a stranger and the woman knew enough about white man’s laws to keep her mouth shut. Instead I let it go at that, asking her about her father and whether it was true he’d been with McIlroy on that expedition into the interior.
‘Me no remember.’ And when I pressed her, she laughed. ‘Me liddle small girl, only baby.’
‘She wouldn’t have been more than four or five then,’ Prophecy said.
‘But she must have heard whether her father was with McIlroy.’
‘I thought it was Golden Soak you were interested in.’ She was staring at me curiously.
‘Well, that too,’ I said. ‘Does she know anything about the mine — anything I don’t know already?’
‘Her father worked there.’
‘As a miner?’
She nodded.
‘Ask her about the cave-in. Does she know when it happened?’
She knew all the details, but not the date. ‘Long time now. Me liddle girl.’ Five men had lost their lives — three whites and two blacks. Seven others had been injured. It had occurred late in the afternoon, during the wet after heavy rains. They were in a drift at the bad end of the mine, men still clearing fallen rock from the morning’s blasting and a team drilling into the face, which was badly faulted and running with water. Suddenly the flow of water had increased. Rock had begun to fall from the roof, and then the whole face had crumbled, water pouring out in a great flood and the miners running before it down the drift to the main gallery and the shaft. Her father had been one of the first up the ladders.
All this Prophecy got out of her in her own tongue. The mine had been closed again and after that it had remained closed ever since. ‘And what happened to her father?’
‘He was given a job on the station.’
‘And the other miners — were they given jobs, too?’
But the woman either didn’t know or wouldn’t say.
‘Ask her when it was her father joined up with McIlroy.’ That nervous flicker of her eyes again. She shook her head. ‘He was with McIlroy, wasn’t he?’ But she shied away from that, offering us more beer, turning quickly to the big fridge standing pale in the cavern of the bedroom. ‘When did he die? He is dead, isn’t he?’