The Following by Roger McDonald Page B

shook wood shavings from his hair and took the sharpening stone from the toolbox – a smooth grey block, chisel-scooped. Don had carried it in his carpenter’s pouch since his apprenticeship days in the 1920s, when his father had given it to him after his father’s father had passed it on.
    ‘It’s from the old country,’ said Ross, showing it to the bloke.
    ‘The Emerald Isle,’ said Marcus. ‘One day you’ll go there.’
    He made it sound like a promise, a prediction. He had that sort of faith in his own statements. You could see why. The smallest impulse he’d ever felt had been magnified into proof of it.
    The men coo-eed for their billy. Ross left the bloke holding the stone, warming it in his hands. As the hours went by Ross did not know how to ask for the stone back. He did not want to ask for it back! Over the weeks that followed he felt a satisfaction. The bloke could keep the stone for as long as he liked, leaving Ross with a feeling of being big in the world, just to know the bloke had something of his and was warming it.
    ‘Where’s that sharpening stone?’ asked Don after a couple of days.
    ‘Back in the toolbox,’ said Ross, waiting for his father to say otherwise. When he didn’t, Ross felt his place in the world expand out from his father’s, more, out from the bloke’s even, and the world the bloke knew, expanding the wishes of a boy to make a life unlike theirs but without betraying them (although he did not think of that).
    The men didn’t gossip about Marcus Friendly much to anyone – not to their families, not to their mates. Around him they displayed discretion, although it became fairly widely known who they were building for. Not just the bloke, either, but for a woman.
    The site was in New South Wales across the Federal Capital border, east of Queanbeyan near the railway line. It was on farmland, on a rocky ridge. In the mornings when the men came to work they found sheep droppings all over the place. The bloke was paying for the job out of his own pocket. He’d bought the land from a woman called Rosemary MacKinlay and her husband, Bruce. Farther back in the title search it was owned by a prominent swell, Sir William ‘Billyum’ Wignall. Before that, by the bantamweight bigmouth, Bounder Morrison.
    The MacKinlays were landed types, cousins, they let you know, of ‘the Bounder’.
    They rode up on the next ridge, using binoculars to see what was going on. They were not the sort who’d ever voted for Marcus Friendly – they were the sort who had voted him out. The day he’d lost the election to the other side was the happiest day of their lives. ‘The Bounder’ was not the poet of the working class. He’d taken to workers with a poisonous pen, mocking them as lazy, venal, whining and quaint.
    The MacKinlays’ liking of a curly-haired Irish Catholic boy of working-class attachment was however unrestrained. They played on his excitement, the light in his eyes when Ross first saw equine flesh with its mahogany hide. The horsey young wife, Rosemary, put him on a biddable mare and trotted him around in a circle. Soon enough Ross jumped logs, pranced and reared.
    ‘You are a natural rider,’ said Rosemary MacKinlay.
    ‘It’s great,’ said Ross.
    ‘Bless you,’ she said.
    ‘Watch out for those people,’ said his father. ‘They’ll suck your blood out.’
    Another of them, a visitor from up north, was Bounder Morrison’s son, Kyle, the original in the ten-gallon hat, ‘Prince of the Dryblow Races’, a born-to-the-saddle, handsome young coot (as his father once described him), now sun-wrinkled and approaching middle age.
    The men good-dayed him riding past. Tugging his hat, Kyle Morrison angled his head as if they’d thrown a bucket of water over him. His horse stepped over timber offcuts by lifting its knees and putting its feet down like half-shelled coconuts.
    Marcus said, ‘Why should a man, whose blood is warm within, sit like his grandsire cut from