Inheritors

Under the ferocious heat of the Queensland midsummer afternoon the
iron roof cracked and strained. The family sitting round the table
in the big dining-room of Cabell's Reach stared down anxiously at
their plates as though expecting the flimsy shell of rafters to
splinter over their heads. About them lay the debris of
festivities into which fear had intruded, petrifying them with
their hands full of tinselled paper and the gewgaws vomited by bon-
bons. Against the distress, anger, or resentment on their faces,
these wilted proclamations of "Peace and Goodwill" and "Merrie
Christmas" had the sardonic prominence of some monument of human
aspiration and piety left standing in a landscape rifted by war.

Derek Cabell, glaring at the bowed heads of his wife and children,
brought his fist down on the arm of the chair again and cried,
"Shams! Makebelieves! Lies, I tell you. Lies, lies, lies, like
everything else in the country." He sucked the breath back through
his lips and held it for another long silence before he growled,
"Christmas! In a hog-pen--in a den of thieves, upstarts, scum!"

Emma, at the bottom of the table, pushed a wisp of hair from her
damp face, glanced at him impatiently, a trifle defiantly, reached
out to pull the fly-cover over the remains of the pudding, and
edged into her chair again, primly upright with her hands in her
lap. Beside her Larry, their eldest son, lanky, morose, dark,
turned a cup of tea in his big hands, sunburnt, work-stained, with
the tar caked under the nails. Next to Cabell, Larry's younger
brother James fidgeted a finger under his high, stiff collar,
opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it, brushed a speck
of confetti from the lapel of his coat, and concentrated his
disapproving stare on the wall.

For half a minute longer the only movement at the table was from
the youngest boy, Geoffrey. His plump hand stabbed a fork into
pellets of bread and his washed-out little eyes flashed sly glances
towards his father. The girl, Harriet, on her father's right,
pressed herself back in her chair, with one hand on the edge of the
table and the other at her throat. Her eyes were fixed on her
father's hands, clutched round the arms of his chair, the knuckles
shining whitely. In the grip of those hands she seemed to find the
essence of some terrifying proposition. Her eyes widened looking
at them, and the heat flush deepened on her face.

Thus they awaited the next spasm of a familiar outburst--brought on
them, as always, by some trifle, some chance word--the bitterness
of which confirmed dim suspicions they did not want to have
confirmed, rumours that threw the shadows of a dishonourable past
across their young lives. Fights, bloodshed, trickeries, shameful
liaisons, and all the inhumanities of a time when men had struggled
for a foothold in the new land--out of this dark drama their
parents had come, scarred and stained by it, twisted and
embittered. Strange things were said of their father, Rusty Guts
Cabell, who arrived in this valley in 1847, forty-one years ago,
with a handful of sheep and cattle, slaughted the blacks, fought
everybody, dug himself in--very strange things that threatened to
burden them for life. But still stranger things loomed
intimidatingly behind the personality of the old landtaker himself,
behind his outbursts of irascible protestation. His shifty eyes,
always sliding sideways to door and window as though he expected
someone to come creeping on him, his secretive habits, the ugly
marks on his face, but above all the eagerness to justify himself,
which spoke through all his outcries against the country--these
things hinted at alarming mysteries, mysteries he seemed always
threatening to reveal, to concrete as inescapable facts, as
disgraceful episodes in their own personal histories, that would
shut them off for ever from their fellows and from all hope of
fulfilling life's bright promises.