She spoke first, ‘How are you Saul?’
He opened his eyes wide to stop the tears. ‘Mae.’ Just to say her name was enough, just to stand watching her, then he remembered what he had come to say, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry about what happened down the creek. I didn’t mean…’
She looked down and shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. It was nothing…’ She turned to Julia and motioned her to go inside.
His voice was soft. ‘What happened? I don’t understand what happened.’
Still looking down, she nodded. ‘I miss you Saul.’
He took a breath. ‘I just wish things were like they were before. If only this hadn’t happened…it’s just the thought of you with him…makes me…’ His voice rose, ‘I can’t understand it. I don’t understand why. It just feels so unfair.’
She squatted down on the verandah so her head was level with his. He could smell her sweat and a new sweetness. He longed to press his face against the slope of her soft breasts.
She looked straight at him and whispered with an unfamiliar ferocity, ‘It feels unfair to me too, Saul… It is unfair.’ Her dark eyes locked on his. The baby started crying inside and she put a hand to her breasts and looked away. ‘It’s just the way it is,’ she said. ‘It’ll all be okay. It’ll be okay in the end.’
Saul stepped back. ‘When’s the end? I just want it the way it was, it was okay then…’
She interrupted him, holding a hand up. ‘I have to go to the baby,’ she pointed over her shoulder. ‘I have to take care of her. I have no choice.’
He stepped forward and reached his hand out to touch her neck. She looked at him and whispered, ‘No. Please don’t… Saul. Please.’ Then she let him brush his fingers against the loose strands of hair falling from her clip. Her skin was warm and damp under his fingers. He wanted to tangle his fingers in her hair and pull her back to him. She leaned into his hand for a moment before he loosened his grip, then she stood up and moved away from him into the house and didn’t turn to look at him from the door like she used to.
chapter eleven
Julia walked down to the creek, naming the saplings out loud as she passed them. Quandong. Silky Oak. Native Tamarind. All her babies, growing taller and stronger now, populating the paddocks like the cows once did. She used to love the cows, so quiet and steadfast. She’d had a moment of regret as she watched the last one clatter up the ramp onto the cattle truck but it was time for the farm to sink back into the mud.
On the grassy bank, she stood watching the water tumble down the hill to join the main creek. She felt safest with her trees, digging holes and scooping the red earth with her hands. White Cedar. Red Ash. Foambark. She was calling them in, calling them back home. Their seeds would be carried along in the floods, like the big one she could sense coming. The tiny seeds tumbling through rapids and over causeways, waiting for the waters to subside so they could embed in a new land.
She squatted and hugged her knees. She wanted to hold a warm body, like she used to hold the poddy calves, wriggling bags of bones with liquid black eyes. She and Mae would sneak down to the shed to cuddle them, sure of their father’s scorn, but the one time he found them there he had simply smiled and gone to the bench for a tool.
Neal would hold her so tightly she could hardly breathe, and even if she’d wanted to escape his embrace, she couldn’t. She was never afraid of him, even the first time, when she woke in the forest and found him standing over her, looking down with those pale blue eyes. When he left to go up north, he had promised to bring her back jars of mysterious dark seeds. She liked to picture him walking silently through the forest, turning his big bearded head to look up at the massive trees.
She hadn’t been up to their cave since he left, afraid that the sand on the cave floor would still hold their footprints and the shape of their bodies where they had lain, the heat and weight of his body making her feel small. For years she had heard talk of him, the guy who lived in the forest and set traps for feral cats and foxes. She had even come across his hut one day, not long after her mother died. She was walking in the forest and smelt wood smoke, which led her to the hut tucked in at the foot of the bluff, with its neat tin roof and walls and chopped wood stacked under a small lean-to. Smoke drifted from the outside fireplace and she stood watching it for a few minutes, wondering if he would appear, then continued on her way through the bush.
The day she woke from her nap in the forest to find him watching her, he started speaking as if they were resuming a previous conversation. ‘Did you know that you don’t move when you sleep? Not at all. That’s very unusual.’
She sat up. ‘Is it?’
‘I don’t move either, apparently.’ He looked up at the tree above her. He had a wide bushy beard and sat with his hands resting in his lap, a great stillness about him. ‘You chose a good tree to sleep under. I’ve been collecting seed from her for years. She seeds in the summer.’
Julia looked up at the sinewy grey trunk and branches. She often escaped the farm to come and lie under this tree. This perfect tree. ‘Could I have some of her seed?’
He nodded and got up. ‘I’ll bring you some. Another day.’
‘How will you find me?’
He smiled. ‘I’ll find you,’ and he had walked off, disappearing into the shadows of the forest.
She glanced up at the house to see if Allie was back yet. Julia was waiting again, like she used to wait for Mae. The day after the funeral, she had walked over to Saul’s to warn him about Allie’s night-time visit but he wasn’t home. There were two empty teacups on the verandah—his mother’s old rose bone china—and hanging on the back of a chair was one of Mae’s thin crocheted cardigans that Allie had started wearing. Julia had picked up the cardigan, thinking she would take it home and drop it on Allie’s bed, but as she started down the stairs she had turned and tossed it back towards the chair.
Now Allie wanted Saul to come to the birthday party. He and Julia had seen very little of each other since he returned to the valley and she dreaded him coming to the party and walking around the house trailing memories of Mae.
Whenever Julia saw him, in town or when she collected milk from his Dad, she felt a flush of embarrassment for how much she had wanted him when she was younger, and how obvious it had been. How she had longed for his shining face, the perfect curve of his muscles, his innocence. Even Julia could see how innocent he was. It wasn’t fair that Mae chose him—there were other boys who wanted Mae. Older boys like the dark-haired second cousin from town who came, slim-hipped and knowing, to deliver gas bottles.
When Saul came back from Tasmania, Julia realised that nothing about him stirred her anymore. He wasn’t innocent these days, just unimaginative, still willing to get up at four a.m. to work for his father although Julia knew that they barely broke even. He was too willing to slip back into the valley ways.
A couple of weeks after he returned, Julia was collecting milk and cream from his father while Saul cleaned out the dairy after a long morning’s milking. She called across to him as he scrubbed out a vat, ‘What on earth possessed you to get back into this dreadful routine, Saul?’
He walked towards her, smiling. ‘There’s something about it I enjoy, you know, I missed it when I was away…the cows, the dawn…’
She shook her head and started out the door with her plastic jug of milk.
His voice sharpened. ‘You kept the dairy going after your father’s accident. What’s the difference?’
She replied as she walked away, ‘The difference is that I loathed it.’
‘So why did you do it?’ he called after her.
She crossed the yard, knowing he was leaning in the door watching her. She had once dreamt of telling Saul, telling everything to his calm smiling face and she had woken from the dream with her heart pounding and, for a moment, filled with an incredible relief.
He waved at her as she drove out, an amused smile on his face. It didn’t matter to her if they all thought she was c
razy, it kept them at a quite satisfactory distance.
She squatted and cleared the grass from around one of her trees. It had a flush of tender green leaves and she imagined its roots working their way deep into the soil. There were thousands of her trees now, spreading like a balm on the land. She wiped her hands on her pants, picked up her bag of lemons and started back to the house. Her mother would have known how to organise a birthday party for Allie. She tried to remember her own fifteenth birthday but couldn’t recall a thing. Mae would have been gone two years by then, and her mother was just starting to get ill, short of breath and tired all the time. On Julia’s eleventh birthday, Mae had tied a rope to the head of her bed, and when Julia woke, as Mae was getting ready for milking, she found it, a line of rough twisted hemp leading out of the bedroom, through the house and down the steps, across the yard, to a bulky parcel of newspaper. Inside layers of paper was the china doll of Mae’s that Julia had coveted for years. Mae’s rope had led her straight into the dark little dairy storeroom that Julia had long since boarded up. ‘Did you go in?’ Mae had asked when Julia came back to the house cradling the doll. ‘Did you go right into the storeroom?’ Julia had clutched the doll and refused to answer.
Inside the house, Julia put on an apron and started squeezing the lemons, imagining Mae making lemon sponge pudding for Allie in that poky little kitchen in Sydney. She had been surprised how little evidence there was of Mae in the house, surprised that they had been living there for six years. It seemed like they had just moved in, with no pictures on the walls and cardboard boxes still stacked in corners.
She separated the eggs, sliding the bright yolk from shell to shell. She was making the pudding from memory. Before she died, her mother had destroyed her handwritten recipes and written them in code on index cards. Julia still couldn’t interpret some of the symbols, strange curling shapes obscured by an old butter or jam smear. Julia’s grandmother had given her some of the recipes but Julia suspected that she had changed a few key measurements, because they never turned out quite right. If Mae had asked, she would have been given the correct recipe. No-one ever denied that Mae was the favourite.
When their father came back from the hospital after the accident, still drugged, he couldn’t believe that Mae had run away while he had been gone, and he kept asking for her. ‘What do you mean she’s not here? That’s crazy.’ It was when he came off the medication that he got angry and forbade them to speak of her. Years later, just before he finally died, Julia would wake in the night to his ramblings and sometimes stood at his bedroom door, listening. ‘Mae, Mae, sweetheart,’ he said in a voice that gripped her heart. He fought death all the way, railing at it in his sleep, rearing up in bed, his thin arms flailing.
She went to the chook house for another egg and saw Allie coming up the paddock, the wind pressing her dress against her body. She was smaller than Mae, but had her same loose-limbed walk, as if she was gliding across the ground. Julia called to her, ‘Come and grab these for me, will you?’
Allie held out her skirt for the eggs that Julia passed through the wire door.
‘I’m baking a trial lemon sponge pudding, to be sure I get it right for your birthday. Can’t think of the last time I made it.’
Allie nodded. ‘We used to have it lots. Usually on Sundays.’
Julia reached into a straw-filled nesting box. ‘Have you been at Saul’s?’
‘Yeah.’ Allie lifted a still-warm egg to her cheek.
‘So he knows you were there?’
‘Yes, of course he does.’ She widened her eyes at Julia.
‘What do you talk about?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Just curious,’ Julia felt her face reddening. She flicked dried chicken shit from an egg. ‘You’re not hassling him, are you?’
Allie glared at her. ‘No!’
‘Just lay off a bit, huh? Don’t go there every day. He’s got his own life, you know.’
Allie spun around and let the eggs fall from her skirt as she stalked across the yard to the house.
Julia looked at the glistening mess of yolks on the ground and leaned back against the door to the chook pen. She fixed her eyes on the birds pecking for grain in their muddy yard, their beaks and combs bright and glossy. Then she bent the wire catch shut and pushed her finger into the sharp end until a pearl of blood came.
For months Mae had lain in the bed beside Julia’s, keeping it to herself. The morning that it all came out, Mae wouldn’t get out of bed to do the milking. She lay still and silent when her father lifted the top sheet off her.
‘Come on, Mae. No games this morning, please.’ He folded the sheet into a neat square while he waited.
Julia watched through almost-shut eyes, the overhead light blinding.
Mae rolled over. ‘I’m sick, Dad.’
He reached down and pulled her up by her arm. Instead of gathering herself and getting up like she usually did, Mae let her body swing out from her father’s grip. The sleeve of her yellow nightie caught on the bedpost and ripped. She started to cry, which shocked Julia more than the way her father suddenly dropped Mae to the floor.
‘Fine.’ He pointed at Julia, ‘You can help with the milking, then. It’s about time you pulled your weight. Helping your mother is not enough.’
From where she lay in bed, Julia looked up at him and at her mother who had appeared in the doorway, a questioning look on her face. Her mother stopped tying her apron. ‘Mae? What’s wrong sweetheart?’
‘Nothing. Nothing. I’m getting up,’ Mae’s voice was shaky with tears and she got onto her knees. Julia wanted her to stand up and not stay there on all fours like a dog.
Julia went out onto the verandah and stepped into her gumboots. Mae appeared and followed her father down the steps. He unchained the dog and the two of them walked across the dark yard as they did every morning.
Julia went after them, the damp air cooler than she had expected. Her mother appeared beside her. ‘Are you going to help with the milking too, Mum? Why does he need all of us?’ Julia longed to be back in bed.
Her mother called out, her voice unusually commanding. ‘Mae!’
Mae turned back.
Their father looked at his wife, his eyebrows raised. ‘Well, I’ll get the cows in! Julia, seeing you’re here, you put the barley out.’ He opened the gate and walked into the dark paddock, his torch sweeping before him.
Their mother walked over to Mae and took her arm. ‘I think I know why you’re sick.’
Mae started to cry again, her head dropping down.
‘How long since your last menses?’
Mae’s voice was quiet. ‘Four months, maybe five.’
‘Five months! Mae! Why haven’t you said anything? Does Saul know?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not him.’
‘Go down and do what your father asked, Julia.’ Her mother pointed to the dairy, where the cows were waiting. Julia could hear her father calling to the barking cattle dog. She couldn’t move. Nothing seemed real, this conversation her mother and Mae were having, Mae crying. All four of them down at the dairy in the dark.
Mae took a breath. ‘It was a man from the Show.’
‘Did he take you by force?’ Her mother’s face was shocked.
Mae shrugged then shook her head and lifted her hands to cover her eyes. Her mother took Mae into her arms. ‘What a mess.’
Their father came into the yard. ‘Julia! Have you put the barley out?’ He stopped at the sight of Mae in her mother’s arms. ‘What’s going on?’
No-one spoke. Julia slipped past him and in the dairy door.
‘I said, what…is…going on?’ When there was no reply, his voice turned hard. ‘Mae, go and start the milking.’
Mae pulled her mother’s arms off her and walked silently back towards the house.
He roared, his voice shocking in the still morning. ‘I said get inside there and start work, Mae! Do you hear me?’
‘I’ll do it,’
Julia’s mother took a step towards the dairy. ‘I’ll do it.’
He shook his head and grabbed her arm. ‘Stop, Bess. I want an explanation. Now.’
Julia watched from the dairy door as her parents looked at each other. Behind them Mae was already walking up the steps into the house.
‘She’s pregnant.’ Her mother looked away.
There was a long silence. Julia waited, fear for all of them tightening in her stomach. The cows shuffled behind her and the dog slumped at her feet and scratched itself. She wanted to run after Mae.
Her father was still staring at her mother. He turned and walked into the dairy. ‘Get out of here Julia. You’re bloody useless. Get back to the house.’
Julia ran across the yard. At the top of the steps she turned and looked back—there were the familiar sounds from the dairy and in the sky, apricot streaks and a light blue glow. It was one of the most beautiful and most awful sunrises she had ever seen.
chapter twelve
The old woman stood waiting at the front door, looking around her at the plastic pots piled high on the verandah and the weeds growing up through the boards. Her disdain was clear to Allie even from where she sat perched in the branches of the mulberry tree.
‘Grandma!’ Julia called from the paddock.
‘Oh,’ the old woman walked to the end of the verandah. ‘There you are. I’ve tried to phone you a thousand times, Julia, but you don’t answer.’
Julia came up the path shaking her head. ‘No, no. I’ve been planting down the paddock. Come inside. Time for a break anyway.’ She pulled off her boots and pushed the door open.
Salt Rain Page 8
