Limberlost

Robbie Arnott

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ABOUT THE BOOK

In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat.

His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.

Desperate to ignore it all–to avoid the future rushing towards him–Ned dreams of open water.

As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.

The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land: of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.

DEDICATION

For my family

EPIGRAPH

In the economy of Nature nothing is ever lost.

—Gene Stratton-Porter

1

IT WAS BELIEVED a whale had gone mad at the mouth of the river. Several fishing boats had been destroyed in acts of violence so extraordinary they were deemed inhuman. Each attack had come at dusk, while the boats were passing the heads on their way back to port—the same area where plumes of spray were supposedly erupting from the water. Transport ships reported powerful, mournful vibrations ringing through their hulls. Gulls flew strangely; cormorants seemed skittish. Ocean swimmers’ strokes were thrown out of rhythm by a high, ancient melody that rose through the brine. A fluked tail had been seen troubling the waves.

Ned was five when all this happened. In later years he struggled to remember the incidents clearly, but at the time it was all anyone was talking about. The animal had been harpooned far down south, someone’s uncle said, and after fleeing north was now visiting vengeance on any ship it encountered. Another version of that story claimed the harpoon had lodged in the whale’s brain, turning it feral and vicious. Another was that the whalers had missed the beast but not its pod, and the creature had been driven insane after witnessing the slaughter of its family.

There were other theories too, ones that didn’t include whaling, ideas of lunar imbalances and divine judgement, although they weren’t paid much attention. Most held the southern whalers responsible for fouling the animal’s mind. There was talk of writing letters, demanding reparations, getting the council involved.

‘It’s nonsense,’ Ned’s father told his children. He’d caught them whispering about the wrecks at the dinner table, unaware he’d returned from the orchard.

‘There is no whale,’ he said. ‘No monster. Fishermen do three things: they drink too much, and they make things up.’

He took off his coat and hung it on a hook by the door.

‘What’s the third thing,’ asked Ned’s eldest brother, Bill.

Their father levered himself into his chair. ‘Occasionally they catch fish.’

But their father’s words did not convince them; the story of the mad whale had sunk too deep into their minds. Ned’s sister, Maggie, was old enough to restrain herself from contributing to the gossip, but Bill and Toby, their middle brother, talked about it constantly.

Ned heard everything, and their conversations filled him with obsessive dread. All day he thought of the smashed ketches and skiffs, of an unseen giant with a blade snagged in its brain. At night his dreams were flooded with blood-foamed water. For a week he woke sweating and screaming until, when his exhausted father demanded to know the cause of his turmoil, he revealed that his nightmares were of the murderous, hellsent whale.

‘Right,’ his father said the next morning, toast cooling on his plate. ‘We’re going to the river mouth tonight. I’ll show you the truth of this so-called man killer.’

Late that afternoon he took his sons to a nearby jetty, where they piled into a small boat their father had borrowed from a neighbour, one of the only boats in the area with a motor. Their father fiddled with the greasy machine, and his solemn care gave Ned and his brothers the sense that a large favour had been called in. But none of them said anything. They were all thinking of the whale.

Soon their father got the engine working, got it growling, and for the next hour they motored along the river until the course of the water straightened and the sea beyond it widened to fill the dusk. When they reached the mouth, all that remained of the sun was a half-disc of orange light over the western hills. Their father killed the motor.

They stayed there, bobbing on the light swell. The last sliver of sun vanished and the sky darkened into a clear night. Their father leaned back in the boat, appearing to contemplate the thick pattern of starlight above them. The wind was cold. Ned and his brothers shivered into their collars as they waited for the whale to explode out of the river and paste them into the waves.

2

A DECADE LATER Ned lay on a wet bank watching a rabbit graze. It was dawn. The early light spread through the fibres of the animal’s fur. Ned aimed his rifle, took the shot, missed. The gun’s crack threw his prey into a sprint, and it blurred into the bracken gathered beneath a stand of nearby blue gums. Beyond the trees the land fell away, lowering to meet the river, whose wide teal face was here and there dragged apart by deep and changeable eddies.

Ned had wasted a bullet, and the sound of his shot would have sent any other rabbits into hiding. He stared at the distant water, wrestling his frustration, feeling that he had ruined the morning. His mood eased on his way back to the house, when he checked a trap he’d placed in a run beneath one of the fences.

When he’d set the trap the previous evening, he’d worried that its trigger was too light, that any passing creature would set it off before entering the radius of its jaws. But a fat rabbit lay in the dirt of the run, metal teeth sunk into its neck. Except for the puncture wounds, its coat was unmarred. Ned removed the animal, then reset the trap. He ran his fingers over his kill, noting the thickness of the fur, the rigidity of death. Felt bright heat in his throat.

He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the glow of dawn. At Ned’s back the river shone, teal blinking into slate and cerulean, revealing a greater truth of colour.

It was summer, and in the long blond light of the season Ned aimed to kill as many rabbits as he could. Their pelts could be sold to the army, who made them into slouch hats for soldiers. He had no other way of making money. In previous summers his father might have paid him for helping out on the orchard, but with the war on that was no longer possible.

If he killed enough rabbits he might earn enough to buy his own boat—something he’d imagined ever since his father had taken Ned and his brothers to meet the mad whale on that clear, star-rich night. Nothing fancy, just a small, single-sailed dinghy he could run into the river. Out on the water he could sail wherever he liked, from downstream where the current ran fresh to the broad estuary in the north. Squid-filled reefs, forested coves, schools of flashing salmon, trenches of snapper, lonely jetties, private beaches on whose cold sands he could burn hidden fires—all would be open to him if he had a boat. If he killed enough rabbits.

It was already January. Fewer than ten had found his traps or caught his bullets—barely enough to buy an oar, Ned suspected. Yet already his thoughts were wet and salty, his mind roughened by windburn. Always he thought of the boat: how he’d care for it, where he’d pilot it, what he’d feel in the grip of its planks, against the whip of the wind. Most of all he wondered what his brothers would say when they returned from the war and saw him out there on the water, riding the rips, guiding the rudder with a practised palm, not looking back to acknowledge their presence on the shore until he felt ready.

As he neared the house Ned saw his father on the porch, a mug of tea in his hand. Steam lifted from the cup. He was looking out at the trees, but as Ned approached his gaze shifted to his son’s hand. He saw the carcass. Sipped at the steam.

‘You’d be happy with that.’

Ned nodded, held the rabbit out for inspection.

His father took the corpse and stretched it by its rear legs and ears, pulling it taut. He studied the fur, the wounds. Subdued approval showed on his face.

Ned felt pride heat his cheeks. Impressing his father couldn’t compare with impressing Bill, or even Toby—the old man was too strange, too distant in his quiet moods and shifting habits—but the approval was still important.

As the rabbit turned in his father’s hands, Ned thought of what he’d do next: how he would slide a knife into its belly fur and untether the skin from the flesh. He’d drape the pelt over a wire hanger in the empty apple shed—every piece of fruit his father had grown last season had been requisitioned by the army and taken to the new cannery in Beaconsfield—where it would dry, alongside the others he planned on collecting that week. He thought of how he’d harvest these other pelts, his mind roaming across the orchard, remembering paths that resembled the one where he’d set his successful trap. He pictured the bracken that the rabbit he’d missed had run into, thought of ways to position himself closer to the scrub. He imagined himself breathing slowly, squeezing the rifle’s trigger with an ease that approached boredom. He saw more traps springing, more iron fangs. His dreams inched to their inevitable conclusion: the boat. The lap of dark waves against the hull, the hoisting of a stiff sail…

‘It’ll make a fine hat.’

His father’s voice cut through Ned’s visions. The old man was looking down at him, a new crease in his face. His fingers were deep in the rabbit’s fur, combing back and forth.

Ned cooled. ‘I hope so.’

Unease sank through him. He hadn’t told anyone why he was hunting rabbits—not his friends, not his father. When he eventually brought the boat home, he imagined the occasion would be a double surprise: his acquisition of such a thing, and that he’d kept his mission secret. He’d have his boat, and he’d have people’s shock at the casual totality of his competence. Two victories.

But with his father closely inspecting his kill, he realised he hadn’t accounted for how the old man would perceive Ned’s hunting. Now he saw it: how his father’s oldest boys had been pulled to a distant leviathan of a war, beyond scope or comprehension. This very morning—as every morning, wherever they were—their faces were hardening into rough shapes beneath the shade of rabbit-pelt hats. Such smart hats, both stiff and soft, so similar to the one their father had worn in his own war, a quarter-century earlier, on his own foreign battlefields—highcliffed coves, grey worlds of ice-mud—a hat that had darkened his eyes as he was torn apart and recast into this quiet, strange man who remained out of reach and unknowable to his own sons.

And all the while his youngest remained at home, spending his free months selflessly avoiding leisure in order to provide rabbit pelts to the army for the production of slouch hats. Ned saw how it looked, how he had misrepresented his intentions. How he’d drawn a nobler image of himself in his father’s eyes than could ever be true. The tea steam snagged in his nose, bitter in the dew.

His father’s hands were still running over the corpse. He was no longer looking at Ned, or at the orchard, or at anything in particular.

Ned felt a quickening in his blood. His eyes itched. With slow, unspoken statements, he began convincing himself that his father had not been deceived. That he really was going hunting for the sole purpose of producing those proud, necessary slouch hats. That while his brothers were at war, he was playing the only part he could. The pelts were for hats; the boat was incidental.

After breakfast he went to work in the orchard with his father, and the two or so hours he spent among the trees, working with his eyes and hands—checking fruit, looking for blight—slowly reordered his mind. Things became clearer. He was spending his summer hours hunting, and his father approved: that was all that was happening. It did not require overthinking.

That afternoon he went fishing with his neighbour. Jackbird was short for fifteen, even shorter than Ned, with a habit of fidgeting. They’d been neighbours their whole lives, and outside summer they shared a class at school. Ned had once dragged Jackbird from a rip current and squeezed the ocean out of his skinny chest. A year later Jackbird had pelted a rock into the cheek of an older boy who’d thrown Ned to the ground in the schoolyard. Dashed a wet hole in the flesh that whistled whenever the boy breathed, until it healed a couple of weeks later.

They fished from a jetty that pushed out into the river. Ned held a finger on his line, feeling for the tremor of a bite that did not come. Perhaps the day was too clear, the sun too bright. Bill had once said fish didn’t feed in good weather, and Bill was the best fisherman he knew. It was something to do with wind stirring them into action, or rain flooding oxygen into the saltwater, or that direct sunlight made them sluggish. Ned tried to remember, but he’d only ever overheard Bill saying these things to Maggie, or maybe Toby.

Jackbird flicked a thumb against his line. ‘Any bites?’

‘Not a nibble.’

Jackbird kept fiddling with his rod, lifting and dropping his sinker, trailing it across the bottom. He checked his bait. It hung firm on the hook.

‘Be better with a boat.’

Ned flinched. ‘Where would we get a boat?’

‘Just saying. Better with a boat.’

‘Course it’d be better with a boat. But we don’t have a boat. And unless you know something I don’t, that isn’t going to change.’ His voice was flat, even as his blood thumped.

They were quiet for a while after that. Ned hadn’t wanted to think of boats. He remembered his father’s fingers, roaming through the fur. His brothers. He was angry that Jackbird had mentioned it, wished his friend would be content with what they had, with this sunny, windless day.

Jackbird reeled his line in again. ‘You heard from Toby?’

‘Not for a while. He should still be in the reserve force. They’re only meant to be sent in if things get worse.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Jackbird cast out, let his sinker drop. ‘Reckon we’ll get called up?’

‘Papers say it’s winding down.’

‘True.’ He raised his rod to his shoulder. Held it like a rifle, aiming at a cluster of yachts that were tethered to buoys just off the shore. ‘What about Bill?’

Ned was watching Jackbird’s line tangle. ‘What about him?’

‘Anything in the paper about his division?’

‘Not since Singapore fell.’

‘Any letters?’

‘Not that I know of.’

Jackbird jerked his rod, swung his feet.

Ned saw the hesitation in him. ‘If you’re going to say something, say it.’

Still Jackbird hesitated. But he couldn’t stop the question coming out. ‘Your old man all right out there on the orchard?’

The thump returned to Ned’s pulse. ‘You want the Christmas letter in January? You want the family teacake recipe?’

‘All right, all right. Just asking. People talk.’

‘That they do.’

Again they went quiet. The sun lowered and its light began filtering through the trees, shadowing the water. Jackbird got a few nibbles, or convinced himself he did, but didn’t bring anything to the surface. After a while he began talking about how a hawk had been taking their chickens, and how his little sister, Callie, had taken to parading through the paddocks with their father’s shotgun, determined to scare it off or even blast it from the sky.

Ned tried to picture Callie with the iron heft of a shotgun in her arms. She couldn’t have been older than thirteen. Strawhaired, straight-faced. Hard as a walnut. The shotgun almost made sense.

The whole time they were at the jetty, Ned felt nothing trouble his hook. He told himself that he did not mind—this summer he had cast himself as a rabbit hunter. A lack of fish did not matter. But still he felt sour. Twice now he’d spoken sharply to Jackbird. And there was the matter of the slouch hats, of his father’s misplaced pride, of his brothers’ faraway war-shadows. And that he really did want a boat: wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything. The thirst for it was thick in him, and no amount of shame or resolve could shake it from his veins.

So as the river darkened, as the fish remained untempted, Ned’s boat dreams returned to where they had begun: the evening of the mad whale. The memory gave the rest of his afternoon—which was otherwise biteless and golden—a deep pull of terror, of strangeness and starlight.

3

TEN YEARS LATER, Ned again thought of the evening of the mad whale. By then he’d left Limberlost for the forests of the east. He was working in a logging crew to fell a large copse of manna gums—ancient hardwoods ghostly in colour and immense in height, some rising a hundred yards into the air to flail their leaves against the sky’s cheek. Aromatic, bloodlike sap ran from the wounds the men hacked into their trunks.

Ned was the youngest in the crew. He was also the foreman. He’d got the job because he didn’t drink much, and the other loggers drank like they were being paid to. At the end of each day they returned to their bush camp, where the foresters mirrored the violence they’d wreaked on the White Knights—the name they’d given to the pale, towering mannas—in the way they treated their own bodies. They poured lakes of beer down their throats, as well as rivers of brownish, burning rum. Spread out in the shadows of the White Knights, they sang and fought and screamed until they vomited, cried for their wives and crashed into their swags.

When they’d put him in charge, Ned’s superiors had given him a simple mission: stay sober enough to make sure chaos didn’t overwhelm the camp. During the working day he was nominally in charge of operations, but the loggers were experienced men, leathered by decades of warring with the trees. They rarely felt the need to speak to each other, not even when they felled the largest of the Knights, lopped off the limbs and hauled the pale-glowing trunks onto their flatbed truck. None of this required Ned’s oversight, although the loggers usually remembered to squint at the dropping sun and wait for his nod before knocking off for the day.

Ned drove the truck back to camp as the men began drinking in the back. Through the night he’d smile and recline and sip at a single bottle of lager as the men twisted themselves into goblins of the forest, drunk as much on the sweet-sticky sap that leaked from their vanquished foes as the liquor they gulped. Ned woke them at dawn, rolled them into the truck, drove back to the latest patch of mutilated forest and poured them onto their cold axes, their sap-bloody saws.

One night, after a particularly arduous day battling the Knights, the talk at camp turned lewd. There was talk of whores, of cunts, of buggery. It was intimated that splinters suffered in fucking a waxed tree hollow were ultimately preferable to the long-term wounds inflicted by a marriage. Ned did not consider himself prudish, but he did not feel comfortable listening to this talk, especially while sober. After throwing a log on the fire he walked back to his seat, then kept walking into the night, unnoticed by the hollering loggers.

He moved slowly through the trees. With each careful step he could hear less of the raucous conversation. Voices faded to barks and yips. Starlight filtered down, revealing lumpen shapes, wet foliage. Soon he reached a swollen creek, and its heavy trickling washed away the remaining racket of the camp.

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