When Colts Ran Read Online Free Page A

handed hers over when he wanted more.
    The first time they were brought there it was as if Colts had been born there. A gate clicked behind them. Limestone Hills. Whatever feelings had filled his heart on the other side of four years old were left behind. Except there were scenes of them walking together. She had such dreamless eyes he couldn’t find them ever again. There were rounded rocks like giant eggs in the bush behind the house, where she took him in his stroller. It was where she was buried: he knew that. His mother. Yet every surge of his feelings denied the oblong mound of earth that was stuck in his heart and would never shift. He remembered a room, how he’d looked into corners finding spider webs of interest, but not looked at her lying blue, pale and alone in a pleated nightdress. He must have looked, though. Otherwise how did he know it was her, dying, and he’d felt nothing? Nothing .
    Standing at the edge of the dry garden at Limestone Hills, he’d eaten a fig. They grew wild there, fat and purple, splitting their skins with sweet red jam. He’d set off climbing the rocky creek, looking for goannas, hitting puffballs with a stick, the landscape fitting around him like a skin.
    After his basin wash he lay naked on the starched clean sheets and touched himself. He gazed at the stars until he was no longer able to tell who he was and slid from the bed to the cotton rug on the cement floor and lay there with his eyes jammed open.
    Even after Colts was too old for baby things he’d carried a tin truck and a stout, bedraggled teddy bear under his arm, and when the truck gashed his knee Faye asked the teddy to make him better, on account of the red cross stitched to its chest. The last time she did that he threw the playthings away, but she gathered them and put them somewhere safe.
    Loose soil and road ruts baked in the sun were the material of his playground then, soil blunting his hearing as he wiggled a finger in his ear imitating the way men did, at the same time as holding their pipes. The grainy feeling of Limestone Hills dirt, the taste of it spat from his tongue, clinging to damper cooked in the ashes, dirt stuck to a boiled lolly taken from a paper bag, was the medium Colts was born into, as far as he could tell. A fly got stuck in his ear, sizzling deeper. That was the feeling too. He’d never get over it or past it either. The hum of the dry bush, crickets, Christmas beetles, cicadas.
    Faye wasn’t so smitten by their country life, but now, thanks to a passionate love match, lived on a mission station in the wild ranges of Western Australia, a place as rough and remote as any in the world, where there were only four whites – herself, her husband Boy Dunlap, a mission mechanic and a mission nurse – and a tribe of wild blackfellows who nobody except Boy understood. So Faye wrote in love and praise of Boy Dunlap and his anthropological religion.
    In the returned men’s magazine Reveille , Buckler wrote about missionaries – ‘malarial young reverends, dithering sky pilots, poodle fakirs of the worst order, defeatist milksop hem-clingers living in the wide-open, undefended north of Australia peddling pork-pie caps and pipe-clay dreams to demoralised savages’. That was when Faye had informed him she was marrying one.
    Before Faye left Sydney, Veronica had painted her bare-headed, gold hair a halo, in a white-spotted blue dress in the garden with a branch of wattle bloom dipped over her shoulder. There were many such paintings of Faye bundled up awaiting their future: just the one of Colts.
    Faye’s letters spoke of difficulties, hardships for which her whole life had waited. She had previously been too blessed – each had been by the guardian of their own sex, leading to opposite impulses. Faye turned outwards dealing with the world, believing she went inwards to God, while Colts battled the world clambering over material reality from