the hard Y sound.
‘I scarcely remember him’, she went on, ‘I was only seven or so when he left.’
‘Why did he leave and where did he go?’
Hiram looked over my head out at the fierce summer sky. ‘Robert and I didn’t get along. I’m a farmer, he wasn’t. I’m a Christian, he was a sinner.’
‘What sort of sins?’
‘Theft, drunkenness, loose living.’
I thought I had the picture. ‘When you say theft, do you mean robberies or…’
‘Cars.’
‘Right.’ It sounded familiar, a country boy out of his mind with boredom pinching cars, getting pissed and screwing girls. It happens; some of them become public servants.
‘Robert came to Australia, Mr Hardy, to Sydney. My mother, she died three years ago, said that he always talked about the big city and he meant Sydney.’
‘He might have moved on; New York’s bigger, so’s London.’
‘No.’ Hiram said the word harshly. ‘Robert sent his mother a postcard every few years. After she died I found them; they were posted in Sydney.’
‘Do you have them?’
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a slim stack of postcards held by a rubber band. He passed them across. The cards were mundane-the Bridge, the Opera House, the Zoo. The messages were minimal and written in a firm, round hand: ‘Dear Mum, Hope you are well. All’s fine with me, loving it in Sydney and doing very well. Hope to get over to see you before too long’-that sort of thing. They were dated at two and three year intervals, with a gap of four years in the middle of the sequence of seven. The last card was dated one month ago. Dempsey watched me examining it.
‘He didn’t know his mother had died’, he said.
I looked at him, there was something unyielding about him and I decided that I’d been wrong about the pipe, the prop he needed was a Bible. ‘Can you tell me why you want to locate your son now, Mr Dempsey? I gather you haven’t forgiven him his trespasses.’
‘Don’t blaspheme’, he snapped. ‘I have less than a year to live Mr Hardy. I’ll be joining my wife before long. I have a growth. I’m hoping that my eldest son will farm my land; it’s been Dempsey land for five generations.’ He let out a sound that in a weaker man would be called a sigh. Some of the lines around his eyes which I’d taken to be marks of country hardiness now looked like tiredness, and there was a fragility beneath his resilience. ‘It’s unlikely I know’, he went on, ‘Robert was a wastrel but he might be redeemable.’
‘Sure. Well, we need a starting point. I gather you have another son; would he have had any contact with his brother?’
‘No. William is thirty and settled. He lives in Wollongong, he’s an academic’ He spoke the words without much enthusiasm; Old Dempsey must have been a hard man to please, any son who didn’t have cowshit on his boots wasn’t a son at all.
‘He’d remember him, though. Could I have his address?’ Susan gave it to me as the old man seemed to withdraw into himself. Maybe he was hoping that his Creator was a farmer. I asked for a photograph of the prodigal and she produced an old snapshot and a newspaper cutting. The photograph, which was yellowed and creased, showed a youth in his late teens standing beside a motor cycle. He was smiling broadly and he had a mop of dark curling hair; he was a good-looking lad.
‘That was taken of Robert just before he left’, Susan said quietly. ‘The motorcycle was stolen.’
I nodded and looked at the cutting. It was a press photo of a picket line outside a shop or an office. The caption had been cut off but two words remained of a headline above the picture-’sacks Clarke’. The picketers were carrying placards which were too blurred to read; the head of one of them had been circled in red ink.
‘We found this in mother’s things’, Susan said. ‘We think she believed that to be Robert in the picture.’
I studied the faces; it was possible, some weight had gone on and some hair had gone off. Maybe. The mother’s eye plus intuition could have been right or it could have wishful thinking.
I turned the cutting over, on the back was part of an advertisement for motor cars. There was a picture of a Ford Falcon and the showroom’s address was in Chatswood. I know a bit about Falcons because I own one; this model was a few years younger than mine, say in the early 70s.
‘How would your mother have got a Sydney newspaper?’
‘William used to send them when he thought there was something in them that might interest her. She was a great reader, and he sent the book pages and articles on writers and films and things.’ Susan looked at her father, who was sagging a little from the ramrod position.
‘My father is tired, Mr Hardy. Will you help us?’
I said I would, collected a retainer and their address in Sydney for the next few weeks. They were visiting a few relatives, winding up the old man’s life.
I ushered them out, and set about earning their money by calling Harry Tickener at The News. He confirmed that there were people in the organisation who could identify a newspaper from the type and lay-out, and that if the cutting was from one of the half dozen papers published by his employer I could find the issue in a bound copy or a microfilm.
I walked the mile and a half to The News building, stopped to deposit the cheque and to buy some fruit for my lunch. These days I try to walk for an hour and eat fruit for lunch instead of sitting and drinking beer; I still miss the beer. The citizenry of Sydney were out in force in their light summer rigs; it was early summer but a lot of the women were tanned and it was a pity to take them off the beaches. Susan Dempsey had a good tan, I recalled, and looked like she’d play a great set of tennis; I’m pushing forty and the regimen has kept the fat down, but I still feel furtive when I have randy thoughts about females twenty years my junior. There’s a bit of Hiram Dempsey in us all.
Tickener was too busy to talk as usual. He introduced me to a sub on one of the papers, who instantly identified the cutting.
‘The Sunday Post’, he said. He was a little roly-poly man who scratched his head a lot with a pencil. ‘Only ran for a year or so, that narrows it down.’
‘Still a lot of looking.’
‘Yeah. Hold on. Who’s this Clarke?’
I said I didn’t know.
‘Rings a bell’, he said. ‘Yeah, around that time. Come on we’ll look him up in the cuts.’
We went down to the library and he pulled out a metal drawer crammed with quarto size manila envelopes. All had names on them followed by occupations. Some were thin as if they could contain only a single sheet, others bulged fatly. Thomas Clarke’s file was thinnish. He was a unionist involved in a strike at a food processing plant in Wollongong in 1972. Clarke had refused to work with non-unionists and had been sacked. Reading between the lines of the cuttings, the message was that Clarke had been trying to unionise the plant and had run foul of the management. The strike lasted two months, and the unionists won. A large item on Clarke’s sacking had been published in The Sunday Post, and it included my photography. The men were picketing a supermarket in Wollongong which stocked the company’s products; a heavy man in the centre of the picture was identified as Clarke, the others shown were described as his ‘supporters’.
The sub made photostats of a few of the cuttings for me; I thanked him and left the building. Outside it was hot and cheerful, I felt pretty cheerful myself; I like the south coast, especially when someone’s paying me to go there. I walked back to the office, drove home to Glebe and packed a bag. I put in swimming trunks and a towel but I left the snorkel and speargun behind.
If you stay on the highway the drive to Wollongong is a two hour bore, if you turn off and go through the national park and the string of mining towns along the coast from Stanwell Park it’s a lot better. I took the slow route and drove past the camp sites and beaches that would soon be filling up with holidaying hedonists. Packed in between the sea and the scarp on which the land slips so that people can’t hang their timber and glass fantasies off it, the coal towns don’t seem to have changed much in the past twenty years. The ocean was a deep blue and crashing in firmly as if rehearsing for a long, hot summer. There were one or two caravans already in place,
