I SAT BY THE STONE LIONS THAT  preside over the entrance of the staircase. It was scorching hot. I reached the New South Wales station at three, and my train wasn't leaving for another hour. I wandered around for a while, looking in shop windows. I noticed a nice writing pen and bought it, along with a nice suede notebook and a sunhat. I thought it might save me on windy days in the country’s open air. Gum trees and red dirt. Before and after exams I suffer from anxiety and sleeplessness, and I hoped some time away would calm my nerves.

I boarded the train quickly. The burning light of day threw its blue brilliance on the glass and the brass handles. I chose a compartment to the rear, and an old woman and a girl took seats alongside me. They were carrying a basket of flowers and candies. They placed the flowers in the rack above and began talking in low voices, and I suspected it was about me, because the woman was watching me from the corner of her eye. She leaned toward me and spoke in a conspiratorial tone.

“If I’m not mistaken, you are Commander Pryor’s son?”

Unsure of myself and her intentions, I cleared my throat. She didn’t wait for my answer.

“Your father and I were as close as a brother and sister in school. I don’t suppose you remember when your Mother, Father, and I would meet at Kestrel at holidays. You were only a boy then.”

Memories came to me of Kestrel: the huge boulders in the courtyards, the hammock, the wicker chairs and tables of the verandahs, and its cool natural rock pool. We had spent a lot of time there when I was a child, but I didn't remember the woman. I had been initiated there in the forbidden ascent of the mountain some years ago. I nodded.

“I was newlywed when your Mother came with me to the coast. We swam and played tennis.” She seemed lost in her own fond memories. Then, as if to change the subject, she waved to my books. “You like to read? Are you a student?”

“Yes, Mathematics,” I answered without enthusiasm.

“Going far?”

“Merrigan,” I said.

“Merrigan?” She looked at me, surprised. “You don’t know the legend? Jack Merrigan. The mounted police shot him near the town a century ago.”

What an odd woman she was.

“Can I ask where you’re staying?”

“Yanga Station.”

“But isn’t that rented out? Who's there now?”

“Jago Treloar,” I answered impatiently.

The lady whispered the name several times and finally asked, “Jago Treloar, the son or the Father?”

“Jago the younger, of course,” I answered, looking out the window.

“Yanga is a sad place. The homestead’s abandoned, and the brumbies still come down to the dam at night. Is Jago Treloar a classmate of yours?”

“I don’t know him.”

“You don’t know him! They say the boy’s strange. They say he blinded and beat a horse because it wouldn’t obey him. They say he will not sell ponies to anyone, that his methods are cruel. I was told He tied a horse to a post, beat it, all for disobeying. But who can say? I’m sure that’s not true. People like to invent stories. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

I nodded. Stupid women usually are jealous of independent people, and they do love exaggerated stories. I doubted any of it were true. Told me more about her than it ever could have about Jago.

Could it be that he did have sense, was maybe even more sensible than his Father and his Family? My mind ran wild with little more than the name Jago. The imagination can craft an entire personality from only a few images, a few snatches of information. When the boy's Father had described him to me, I felt some recognition and affection. Even the Woman's claims didn’t put me off him. I admit I respected him—his solitude, his unwavering nature, his courage—alone on that abandoned station, living there by choice, and revealing to no one why he had. He was a mystery to me… What would he be like? What would the Station be like? I was visiting under the pretense of needing rest and to study. He didn’t want me there but he was gracious and respected my desire to be alone enough to allow me to come at his Father's insistence. Although I had no illusions he would welcome me or that I would have anything to report back to his Father. How would he receive me? I wasn't exactly comforted by the fact that he was allowing my visit. I had been warned again and again that Jago was a manipulative person and that his motivations and behavior rarely made sense. If he wanted to make it hard for me he could and most likely, would. It would be a long summer of utter remote solitude if he refused to speak to me, but I felt prepared for that, he was underestimating me if he thought a summer in the country would break me. I would be perfectly contented to sit and read for two months. Nothing he could do would rattle me, and nothing he could neglect to do would affect me. I was going to call his bluff.

Mr. Treloar gave me the instructions when I agreed to come.

“My son Jago is very solitary, even as a child he was happiest on his own,” he said. “You will hear that he is a genius. It is true, and it is the least of it. He has lived at Yanga Station since last year, and I think he’s fairly well made his point, whatever that is. It is a derelict run. We have not stocked it in ten years. I have written to him and he has answered every letter but none of those letters answer anything. I told him I would cut him off unless he left the station, and I have. He still refuses to return home or say why he is living there.”

He turned the glass a quarter turn on the desk.

“I sent him to Edinburgh at sixteen,” he said. “He was going to be a doctor. How does a child like that come to live the way he is?”

He looked at the window.

“He is not studying out there. He is not farming and he is certainly not keeping cattle. He lives with bats and snakes and illiterate selectors.”

I said perhaps he wanted quiet. His father remarked he had better.

“Be careful of him,” he said.

At the door he said, “Don't tell him I sent you.” Then, after a moment, “He’ll know anyway…”

His father’s letter said a student was coming, and the reply came by return post in that careful hand. “Let him come. I would be glad of the company.”A man who resists you is still treating you as a variable. There is only one reason to be calm about being watched. It is that you are certain there is nothing to see that you have not chosen to show.

I imagined him broad shouldered and polite, maybe smelling of alcohol, a daring profile I had invented entirely. He had given up so much and seemingly for nothing. The lights on the train were low as we stopped. In the windowpane I saw a reflection, a young man on the platform. He had sent a station hand to collect me, and the hand was there, holding the horses at the far end, but Jago had come himself and stood apart from him. He was thin. He didn’t wave or step forward. I stared and he stared back, and nothing, not a comet or a lightning bolt behind him, could have justified how long it went on. I told myself it was travel fatigue and kept staring long after it was decent. He broke it first. He turned and climbed into the closed coach without a word, and I collected my bag and followed. Inside, I laid my forehead against the cool glass and had some relief at last, because the dark hid his face. He was nothing like I had pictured him.

We rode in silence toward Yanga Station for several hours. He offered no conversation, but he was not rude. We passed nothing but flat red land, saltbush, the odd stand of mulga, and windmills. He stayed awake the whole way. I did not. When I woke it was the darkest part of the night and the house stood in front of us, larger than I had expected, built of hewn white stone Local, he said.

“We don’t use lanterns or candles by night,” he said. “No one can know that this house is occupied.”

The door was unlocked. We walked in total darkness from the parlor to a long room with a few collapsed floorboards.

“This is the dining room,” he said. He pulled the shutters closed, lit a kerosene lantern, and held it to his face. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t place the resemblance. I racked my brain and came up empty handed.

He showed me to my room, which had been built onto the side of the house and later closed in, so that it belonged to the house without quite being part of it. The ceiling was low and the room wide, and its windows had been added over the years from whatever glass could be found: a tall narrow pane beside a square one beside a small round porthole. I couldn't work out what it had first been for, but it suited me, and I told him so. He smiled. "This was always my favorite room too. I’m at the far end of the house now. I wanted you to have it.”

He seemed to mean that. I thought I had gained some ground with him since the ride in.

We then ate dinner by the light of a single stub of candle, all the shutters drawn, the silvery moonlight like a beam, in silence.




The next day the hot white sun was merciless and high in the sky. A hot wind blew, smelling of dust and eucalyptus. Here and there a clump of daisies sprang from the roof. Vines covered the doors and the eaves of the windows, and except for Jago I had not seen another living soul since I arrived. Breakfast was a thin porridge. It was completely and utterly silent and still. The silence astonished me. I had thought I knew silence, from libraries and reading rooms, but here I caught myself listening for my own breathing. The sun bewildered me.

We walked the perimeter of the station together, past a dry creek lined with river red gums, three black dogs trailing behind us.

He seemed content to walk in silence, just passing the time of day. I didn't know where to begin. He dismissed my attempts at polite conversation and even the most basic inquiries with a wave of his hand, and after the third I stopped, annoyed with myself for minding. My eyes couldn’t adjust to the blinding light of the sun. I felt I would never see, never have any relief. I was in awe of how he stood up against the conditions of the station, which I had severely underestimated, but I tried not to let on. By day the sun blinded me totally and by night I could not see my hand in front of my face so complete was the darkness. I didn't think there was any getting used to it, I didn't see how there could be. I wondered whether he had, or whether he had simply decided not to notice. There was nothing there but the two of us and, somewhere beyond the fence row, the sound of horses. A snake slid by in the grass. It was just as his father had described it. He really was living among spiders and snakes, and it was an insane prospect, quite senseless. I had expected to find his father exaggerating. If anything, he had underplayed it. The station was worse than he said, and so, I was beginning to think, was the son.

He offered me a cigarette. As we stopped, I observed him.

“Are you afraid?” he asked.

I looked at his worn clothes and shoes. His worn belt, his Roman profile. Usually the question would've offended me but it made pretty good sense all the way out here, a day's ride from anyone and anything.I laughed it off, but I was scared. Anyone in their right mind would be.

I asked him about the wild horses at the station. I could hear them but not see them. They were probably frightened of an unfamiliar presence. Perhaps they would come closer in time. Jago threw his cigarette to the ground. I feared the charred grass would ignite.

“The horses have mostly gone,” he said. “A wild horse won’t come to you in a few weeks, whatever you do. People say they'd like to see Yanga. The quickest way to cure them of it is to let them.” He looked out over the grass. “Do you know how the horses came to be here?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Should I?”

“They fled uphill. After the valley flooded. That’s what created the lagoon. It’s blocked now by a collapsed bank, and they were trapped here.”

I looked toward the water, tried to picture a herd of horses stranded on a hill, watching it rise.

“The reason most of the horses are gone is that my maternal Grandfather killed them. Everyone in the family agreed with his manias. No one opposed him. He came to believe they were bad luck. People wanted them rounded up. Said they were starving. My mother’s sister- the youngest of my grandfather’s children-, loved the horses. She saw to it that they were fed, but it was a huge undertaking. She fell ill, and many of them did die during that time of malnutrition. In her delirium she begged for the horses to be fed and cared for. She claimed a black horse was biting her in the night. She recovered, but by that time my grandfather had shot most of them. A few weeks later she died anyway. This was after the last horse of the herd she cared for was shot. In the end she died anyway but not from the fever, she died from a heart attack a few days after she was up and walking around again.”

So that was the horse story. The woman on the train had told me another.

“That terrible story and others gave this family a bad name.” He signaled with his whip, pointing beyond the fences. “That desolate mess doesn’t help matters.”

I looked where the whip pointed. There was only scrub and the heat coming off it, and I could not tell whether he meant something out there or just the place itself.

“My aunt died in the bed I sleep in now. My father is pathetic. He was only ever here a few weeks, but he’s attached to the place. Some romantic notion about my Mother. She’s the same way about this land, she won’t set foot on it but wouldn’t ever part with it. To hear them tell it this place is mystical, but they would never spend so much as a night here. They’re both idiots.”

I thought of Mr. Treloar. I could not picture him as pathetic, and I could not tell which of them I believed.

“My father offered the tenant of the fields my house, and he refused it, said his own is better. Let’s go inside, you’ll get sunstroke.”

Inside the house it was dark even with the noontime sun. I devoured the thin soup and bread we served ourselves at lunch. We were setting out on a horseback ride, our second since I had arrived. I liked it more than I expected. I awaited these walks and rides eagerly, and Jago seemed glad of the company. Maybe I had misjudged him. Crossing the streams on horseback exalted me. Night came on quickly. We spent our days playing chess and cards, and in the afternoons we went through the house, opening the rooms he had kept shut. One afternoon I walked into a deep, dark pantry that smelled of herbs. In the back stood a vase, and I felt I had seen its exact twin: the same two swans curving toward each other, cracked in the same way down the middle. I pushed the thought away. Feelings and vague impressions of recognition passed over me so many times throughout the day that it was distracting and distressing.

We shot bottles off the fence, and I was the worse shot, though Jago never seemed to aim.In the evenings we read aloud. We also spent time rummaging the closed off rooms of the house. It was during this time that I felt, with frightening clarity, the depths of the intelligence Jago’s Father had spoken of. It wasn’t anything he said or did, but how he passed through the days in silent reflection. There was no other explanation for his composure.

We rode the fields. I asked him who owned the lands and houses in the distance. He explained that most of the land belonged to a grazier who had a daughter around our age named Anna. His face changed at the mention of her name.

Our friendship slowly progressed as we got to know one another. I spoke of my disdain for my parents and my older brother. My Mother had reacted foolishly to what I felt was a natural attitude toward him. She wanted us to spend more time together, but I was content to lead my own life. We were brothers, but we weren’t friends. I don’t know why my parents couldn’t accept that.

He finally spoke to me more about his Father. “He’s furious I’m living here. He thinks I’m hiding something. One week he thinks I’m in love, the next he accuses me of gambling, or drinking. Even if he were to come out here, he wouldn’t figure it out. And yes, troubling him and my Mother does amuse me. What claim do they have on my life or time? Same as you and your brother. We’re family, but I don’t owe them companionship, and I don’t care for them beyond what is absolutely necessary.”

“That’s cruel,” I said after a long while.

“How is it cruel? Hypocrites like my Father deserve to be punished. If I were to introduce him to you or to any of the friends I have made here, he would treat us both like imbeciles. If I showed him the women I like, he would treat me like a criminal. A girl like Anna he would never give a chance to or try to understand.”

“Is that the situation with you and Anna, why you are living here?”

“No, I’m just telling you what my Father is like.”

The days passed. The rains came at the same time each day and Jago’s horse galloped off at the same time each evening. He didn’t return until I was deeply asleep each night. My sleep and dreams became bound up with reality. I had only been at Yanga a few weeks, but it felt as if I had lived there all my life. In the night Jago knocked at my window to say goodnight. This felt as if it had always been. I felt I had always known him.

We rode each day and swam in the rivers and streams, or in the large watering trough in the middle of one of Yanga’s abandoned orchards. We were contented in each other’s company. It was an outcome I don’t think either of us had planned for. When I imagined the summer I didn’t consider the two of us becoming friends, and I hadn’t considered that I would enjoy my time here. We dried off and lay in the shade of a huge willow.

“At first when I refused to come home my Father thought I was crazy,” he told me. “Even if he never gives me a cent again, I won’t leave here. His main request was that I see a doctor, which in the end I obliged. I told him that I suffer from migraine headaches and sleeplessness. That wound him up, he loved that. Comical in a way, don’t you think? Both the doctor and my father ordered me to be honest with them in those meetings, but how can you operate honestly with people like that? It was operating honestly with them that got me in that position. The doctor gave me a notebook and told me to record my dreams. And I promised in honesty to satisfy that request, but I don’t dream, I never have. Do you dream?”

“Yes, but nothing of interest. Sometimes I dream of people and places I haven’t seen, and my dreams feel like they don’t belong to me. Absurd things that aren’t tied to reality. I seldom recall them.”

“My doctor would find this fascinating. I wish especially to have dreams with no link to reality. Not dreaming is like being dead, in a way. It really is. Think of the dreams of Jacob or Joseph. To be a man who doesn’t dream is to be passed over. And as for dreams of people I don’t know or places I haven’t been, if that were me I would devote  myself totally to finding those places and people. At least you have some idea of another life. I haven’t. Tell me some of your dreams.”

“If I tried now I would be making most of it up. I would have to tell you first thing after one of them. You can’t trust what you add to them after.”

Jago barely ate, and didn’t drink at all that I could see. His behavior was correct if not normal. He was kind to the horses and I was fond of him. I had little to report to his Father.

“My father has written to say he intends to send one of his friends to visit here. If he sends someone to force me out I’ll kill them. All I have in life is my peace and I don’t want it disturbed.”

“Do you even have a pistol? If you kill them, you’ll go to prison.”

“Of course I have a pistol, and is life in jail so different from how I am living now? I am not afraid of prison. Isn’t this exactly like jail as it is?”

“You tell me.”

“I’m telling you, in many ways it is. The best thing for my father and his friends is to keep away from here.”

Why didn’t he ever ask me to go to town with him? Where did he go each evening? Why had he never asked me into his room, which was on the opposite side of the house and locked with two heavy padlocks? How did he knock at my window just as I was falling asleep every night?

“Mail for you,” he said, dropping a pile of letters. The rain began. He waved to me and walked away, leaving me with the mess. One of the letters toward the center was from Jago’s father, whom by that time I had more or less forgotten. The letter’s quarrelsome, pleading tone repulsed me. He begged for any word of his son, even a physical description of him. His script was large and slanted and smacked of pretense and ego. I moved to throw it into the fire. Jago stood watching in the doorway.

“You’re in correspondence with my Father.” He picked up a glass from the table and threw it against the wall with force. Glass flew in all directions. In his anger he threw its twin to the floor at his feet.

“That’s fine,” he said. “It’s not as if you’re smart enough to have told him anything he can use.”

With that he slammed the door and headed to his own room, slamming its door as well. I began to pack, remorseful. How would I get to the railway station? What could I possibly tell my parents or Jago’s? I asked the one housekeeper I could find, but she seemed terrified to speak to me. The rain was still pouring. I walked outside and into a pine grove where the ground was relatively dry. There I found a place to sit, unseen, in where I could watch the entrance to the house. I watched as Jago rode off as he did each evening, and I thought of riding after him to see at last what occupied him. I thought of the months I had spent at the Station, of Jago’s cruel insults, the high and the low points of our time. Right before nightfall a man and woman arrived in a black coach. They carried Jago’s body from the coach into the house. I made my way inside. The couple had laid Jago on a long chaise. For a moment I thought he was dead. He sat up and asked if I could go into town and buy painkillers and antiseptic. He had fallen on the wet stone from his horse, going wherever it was he went every night, and some neighbors passing by had seen him and brought him home.

“I was wrong to react that way,” he told me and within days we were laughing about that night, as if it had never happened. I asked him why he had never had me into his room and he said I never asked to be let in, which was true, but I knew that wasn’t the whole of it. I helped him move back into his own room once he had recovered from his fall. Once inside, I looked around with interest. It was very dark, darker even than the rest of the house. Heavy curtains were at the windows and the angles of the room seemed askew. The furniture was mismatched. The bed was iron and had an oval landscape above the frame with a horse’s head centered within. The walls were whitewashed. An old farmer’s almanac was nailed to the wall. There was a reproduction print of a fox hunt.

“I’ve been in a hunt like this,” I told him. He couldn’t hide his interest. He wanted to know how and under what circumstances. I couldn’t give him an explanation, and even though I told him I didn’t know why I’d said it and that it wasn’t true, he seemed to have more respect for me after that, like when I told him about my dreams. Why did I lie about something so foolish? In trying to talk about the print I realized it was a false memory, but in the moment it had felt real.

I was cranking the well to bring up a bucket of bottles from the bottom. This was how we cooled our drinks, this or the spring. I felt confused again. Everything at this Station reminded me of something else. Jago said it was like that any time he traveled anywhere, but it was never like that for me anywhere else.

It felt to me that my soul was a cast off garment or a wrecked ship, that my soul had abandoned my body, and worse yet that the souls who had abandoned their own bodies were near to me, and I could sense them trying to overtake mine.

“I know you from before.” I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. “I know you from a century ago. The soul never dies... You’re  so transparent. That story about your grandfather, do you think I don’t  recognize the story of Ajax. All you have done is lie to my face since I arrived.”

He looked at the horse, then back at me. “You think I’m lying about the horses ?  Look, I never made the connection. For all I know that’s why my Grandfather did it.  He had a romantic steak a mile wide. Only someone like that would build a place like Yarga in the first place. If you’re through with your rambling let’s get the horses from the paddock, it’s getting dark.”

“You’re lying” I said through clenched teeth.

Jago sighed. “Look, it’s the solitude. You don’t need to think so much. It drove me crazy too, at first. You need to stay busy. Occupy your thoughts.”

Beyond the woods came Ajax, the blind horse. His name was how I was sure Jago had lied to me.  All of the animals at the station were blind, even the dogs. I had never seen a blind animal before I came here. The dogs were the first, with their opal dead eyes. I remembered the woman from the train’s words.

“Why did you do it? Why did you blind him?”

“I did not blind the horse. All of the animals are blind, do you believe I blinded them all?”

“Then what is wrong with them?”

“There’s a simple answer for that. It’s the flies. They carry a sickness from eye to eye, it clouds the cornea and eventually blinds the animal, and even some people are affected.”

The horse came closer to us.

“Why don’t you kill him? It can’t be much of a life.”

“You think he’s suffering?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know that that is true. I think he notices more than you think. I think he cares for his life more than you believe he does. Watch this.”

Jago lit a cigarette and placed it near the horse’s nostril. He startled and raised his neck, reared onto his back legs and ran into the forest. He looked like something out of a fairytale.

“Why did you do that?”

“To show you that he values his life.”

In the woods the horse resumed his slow, depressed walk. We stood under the palms, the latticed moonlight over our faces.

“How do you see with no lanterns, Jago. And who are you. Why do you refuse to leave this place?”

“I can see in the dark, like a cat. I'm used to it, you will used to it soon. And as for why I will not leave my home, are you prepared to leave here?” Jago shoved my shoulder with the butt of his rifle. I shoved back.

“That’s what I thought. Be up early tomorrow, we are going hunting, and leave Ajax, he knows the way back.” •



C. Hightower would be nothing without her steady hands.

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