Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds Read Free

a bit crook. And being sick costs.
    â€˜Anyway, I’m sellin’ the headland side from that boundary to the woodpile. Half the block, it is. None of the graves are on it. Dad’s on the house side and so are the dogs. So’s the bench he built for the soldiers. Public land, the actual cliff edge. Like a riverbank. Anyway, it’s the half of our block I’m concerned with. I’m selling it.’
    Fifteen minutes later, shuddering back along the Dray Road beside the quarry, no-one in the cabin of the ute had uttered a word. He’d said what he had to say and Darren and Noel felt unqualified to speak. It was a gulf of time that silenced them. A whole lifetime of things as they were. From long before they were even born. Alifetime of looking after something your father gave you. And then doing away with it in order to care for your mother. Both Darren and Noel were more affected by all the trouble Ron had taken to tell them the news than by the news itself.
    In a clifftop life of weatherchange only three or four things had ever seriously altered for Ron McCoy. And this was one of them. The ute rolled down off the final ridge, out of the charry bush and back onto the outskirts of their riverflat. Ron flicked the radio back on. A man was reading scorelines from the soccer in England. As they came out of trees and into the clearing, the morning light was finally spangling upward from the sea. The two young men were both deep in thought, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, their eyes wide open.

TWO
T HE W ORLD THROUGH H EXAGONS
    T here was a bench in the clearing on the cliff made of mountain ash and his father had built it for the men he’d known but could know no more. Well, they were boys actually, boys he’d grown up with in Winchelsea who, unlike him, had not been diagnosed as colour blind, and who went away to war, destined never to swim under the bluestone bridge which crossed the river of their home town ever again.
    Len McCoy built the bench with judgement and care, sourcing the timber himself on the bush ridge out near the duck ponds, milling it by hand once it had dried on the long noggings down the eastern side of the house, and fixing it deep into the ground with concrete footings so as to withstand the Bass Strait winds which came in a direct line to them from the South Pole. He had intended to leave it then as it was, to silver in the weather, a mute testimonial to a tragedy beyond words, until his wife Min suggested he carve a note of its purpose in the timber, an eloquent phrase of memorial that would speak to those who might sit onthe bench opposite the Two Pointer rocks, long after they’d passed on.
    She dug amongst her things and in a leather-bound book which her father had read aloud from when she and her sister Elsie were small,
The Gift of Poetry
, and which he’d subsequently given Min to take when she decided to move out of the city to Mangowak and marry Len, she found some lines she thought struck a perfect note, blending a sense of the beauty of life with her own defiant anti-nationalist attitude to the war:
    Young men are for living not for dying
For laughing and working, loving and crying
Each man’s thought is his own country and home
True friendship’s the highest goal to attain
    Len McCoy didn’t say what he thought of the lines Min had chosen, on such an issue he would always defer to her, but immediately he began drawing up the template in grey-lead so that he could carve the words into the bench. It took him three full days of the utmost concentration to finish what in the end was a reasonable job, legible and quite evenly set, and luckily he had a fine brace of light winter northerlies to do it in. Below the lines from the La Branca poem which Min had chosen was added: ‘FOR THE FALLEN OF THE GREAT WAR 1914–1918’.
    By finishing the bench and the inscription, Min knew that her husband had done himself a great favour,