The Far-Back Country

by Kate Lyons

  As he talked, Mick was twisting what little was left of Lily’s hair into scrubby little hillocks, like you do to a kid in the bath. With her tufty head and those poor brown ribs, she looked like a woodcut of some medieval saint.

  ‘And what did his mother have to say?’ Lily asked, eyes still closed. ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘Nothing. She’s dead.’

  A long moment, the boy frozen, crouched there above his mother in his silly frilly apron. His face blanched to the old sandshoe colour of the bathroom tiles. Lily still and quiet, a nerve ticking in the skin between her shoulderblades. Then the dog erupted into a volley of barking, there was some startled bleating and she cocked her head toward the window. Saying what’s that, splashing at the water in the bath. Wondering idly whether this stuff might work on the shower grout.

  Ray took the bowl from Mick’s hands. ‘Go and see what that dog’s on about. I’ll finish up in here.’

  Mick just kept standing there, his rubber fingers dripping white stuff. Ray slipped the gloves off him and pushed him out the door.

  ‘While you’re at it, fill up the trough in the paddock.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see. Go on.’

  As he cupped and rinsed Lily’s head, feeling the poor egg shape of it under his fingers, the way the little bulge at the back fitted so neatly into his palm, she lay sighing, rubbing her skull across his hand like a cat. Flakes of raw-looking skin in the water, but she had her eyes closed again and he scooped them away.

  ‘Mum! Come and see what Ray got.’

  ‘Yeah. In a minute, love.’ Emerging from the towel, she blinked up at Ray, her hair hot yellow, her scalp bright pink.

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Yeah. Not bad.’ Once it grew out.

  He was in the yard, trying to coax the reluctant sheep out of the trailer with a handful of feed and no help from Mick or the dog, when he heard the back door go. A sharp intake of breath.

  ‘See Mum? What you reckon? There’s not many but all those ones over there are in lamb. I separated them out. Ray says we could put them down there, near the creek, where Dad had that other lot. Should be a bit of feed down there, if we get some more rain. I’m gonna fix the fence.’

  Ray waited for it, the slam of her feet on the boards, the slap of the door. Nothing. She must be in shock. Feeling shame-faced, he kept herding ewes off the trailer and through the gate, carefully, slowly, as if it required great skill and concentration. The sheep were so exhausted, they put up no resistance as he heaved them around. Just woolly bags of bones.

  When he finally got the courage to look, he found Lily kneeling next to the trailer, stroking the flank of the oldest, skinniest, most pregnant ewe.

  ‘What’s the matter with this one?’

  ‘Nothing.’ A lie. He cleared his throat. ‘What do you mean?’

  Lily flipped her ear over. The underside was a mash of flesh and flies.

  ‘Oh. Probably just caught it in a stock gate or something. It’s not deep or anything. I’ll put some stuff on it.’

  ‘Flies are getting at it. I can do it, if you tell me how.’

  While he went to work on the fence, footing posts, fixing the gate catch, restringing wire, she stayed kneeling by the old ewe, painting the ear with antiseptic. Scratching and fondling the sheep like a dog. Murmuring, ‘Poor old girl.’

  ‘They look pretty sick. Is that why they were so cheap?’

  A gust of wind, hitting the bedroom amidships, shivering the window frames. Roof tin chattering and groaning, but his rivets held.

  ‘They’ll be OK. Just need feeding up.’ He remembered the man’s harsh voice, his empty eyes. The words he was echoing, said by rote.

  ‘That last lot Gary bought? Before he took off? When they gave birth, the lambs were all too sick to feed. Something wrong with their mouths. And then something started getting at them, dogs or foxes or something, and we had to shoot the rest and burn the carcasses, just in case. I’ll never forget the smell.’

  ‘I can take them back.’ He couldn’t. ‘Or sell them on.’

  ‘No. That’s worse. They’d be dead then for sure.’

  More wind, harder this time. A storm was on its way. A dry one though, from the feel of the air. Something whispered down from the ceiling. In the morning the bottom of their bed would be covered in a scree of white.

  ‘We’ve got to do something, Lil. Sell something, grow something. At the moment all we grow is dust.’

  ‘Yeah. We will. The citrus, like we talked about. And we’re doing all right, aren’t we? You got those jobs. And after next week, when I get the go-ahead, I’ll get one too.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  She picked fastidiously at the bits of plaster on the sheet, throwing them on the floor.

  ‘I don’t know. I always wanted to teach, but I’d have to go back to uni for that. But I could do distance learning, maybe. I read about it. And I could work for Cheryl at the hairdressers in the meantime. Or cleaning. They’re looking for cleaners at the hospital. I saw an ad.’ The thought of it, Lily in a plastic apron, lugging buckets down shiny corridors. Pausing at doorways to rooms containing women like her, sitting small and thin on the edge of beds.

  ‘Yeah. We’re not that desperate. Not yet.’ He took her hand in the dark.

  ‘I might even like it. I’m sick of sitting round here, I know that.’ She shifted closer, hooking herself under his arm. Still thin, her body swimming in the flannelette nightie, ribs clear under his fingers, but there was a little of plush of fat now on her hips and thighs.

  ‘Or what if we just sold up, like you were saying before? Just do it. Just piss off.’ He could feel her tense with excitement at the idea. ‘We could go to the city. Not Sydney, I know you hate it, but Adelaide or something. I’ve got relatives there. Or we could live on the coast. A house by the sea. Imagine that.’

  ‘What about the orchard though? I thought you were keen.’

  ‘Yeah. Not really. It’s not a big deal.’ He thought of all the work he’d done, that poly pipe he’d bought. ‘It was always more Gary’s thing, this place, not mine.’

  ‘You’d have to find the bugger first, if you want to sell. Isn’t it his name on the deeds? And Lily, face it. No one’s going to buy this place the way it is. You’d have to show it can pay its way. Another thing, too. The rates are due.’

  As always, at the mention of money or bills, he felt her glaze over, drift off, her body gone soft and heavy under his arm.

  ‘Yeah. Grow something. OK.’ Limes, lemons, vegetables, she murmured. Almond trees, for the blossom, apples and apricots. Her voice rose and fell on waves of greenery, tides of sleep. Beneath the smell of the dust, a faint scent of apricots, from the body lotion she used. Peaches, nectarines, her voice conjuring them, ripening them, hoisting him high up a ladder, her below in her yellow dress, plump and brown as a nut. Walnuts, sitting on the back step with his father at Christmas, cracking them with a hammer, his lap full of nuts. At the moment, that lap of hers wouldn’t hold much at all.

  He lay awake for a long time, swallowing at the scour of dust in the back of his throat. Quietly thinking, against Lily’s snoring, the glow of the alarm clock. Planning things with pumps and pipes while his body lay rigid, trying not to wake her up. Pale glimmer now at the window, dawn coming through the curtains she’d run up from an old tablecloth, or the marital bedspread, he couldn’t remember which. Both pink. Lily liked pink. She liked little things. Lambs. Earrings. Baby vegetables. Baby carrots, baby eggplants. Micro herbs, for the restaurants. Organic, of course, and he thought about the frozen bags of cheap crinkle-cut veg he stir-fried every Saturday at the local Chinese. Finger limes, she countered, or jojoba, and he almost asked what’s that into the dark, forgetting she was asleep. She’d read about it, and that clinched it. Lily had this strange unshakeable faith in anything she’d read. And some of it might happen but most of it wouldn’t and it didn’t matter, because it made her happy, and at that
moment, with the apricot smell and the sun coming up, tinting everything in the room dull pink, everything seemed possible, even a house by the sea.

  He fell asleep to sheep bleating somewhere, faint as gulls.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  By mid-morning, sorting pipe and checked gradients, running hoses between tap, tank and vegetable patch, the dream was receding. Instead of bright fruit, white blossom, brown skin and spangled trees, it was Mick forking through half-digested compost, a grid of dry black plastic on bare red dirt.

  There’d been some rain in the night, enough to flood the septic and turn the dust gluey. Not enough to grace the tank. By lunchtime, grubbing channels and jimmying rocks, just the bare shoulders of what he’d imagined last night, dipping lower. A faint smell of apricots on his fingers. Slick of grease on his belly skin.

  When the hoses snarled for the third time and the connectors broke, he allowed himself one short sharp kick to the pump. Then he headed down to check the sheep.

  He smoked a cigarette, leaning against the wobbly fence. Mick’s repairs weren’t up to much. Then again, those ewes weren’t going anywhere. Once the feed he’d scattered was gone, they stood in an aimless huddle, looking down toward water that was just pools of mud. Above it, stuttering across the bank in a way that could accord to no legal boundary and bristling with barbed wire, the neighbour’s fence. Crooked, mad and brutal as the man himself. Nailed to a post, a new sign, in that same lunatic hand. Privet Property. Keep Out.

  Looking for tools in the shed this morning, Ray had finally found the sale contract. It fluttered out like a dead flower from between the pages of an old porno magazine. Two years ago, Mr G. Jones had sold Mr A. Ronson five acres of pasture along the creek. No mention of water rights. At the back, a diagram showed the shorn boundaries of Lily’s place. Ronson’s fence was a good ten metres from where it should have been.

  He was heading back up the slope to finish the hoses and maybe get his wire cutters from the ute when his boot kicked up something half-buried in the dust. White feathers, tinged with red. A bit further on, a yellow claw. Following the trail—more feathers, a shorn wing—he found the head of the old boiler which used to go broody on his chest. Dead chicken eye.

  He was digging a hole, going much deeper and wider than it needed, determined that neither the dog or Lily, on one of her walks, would come across it, when Mick wandered up.

  ‘Shit. Not another one.’

  ‘What?’ Ray turned mid-grunt. Mick had given himself a brutal go with the clippers too. His ears were sticking out like pink oven mitts.

  ‘Yeah. Forgot to tell ya. I found the rooster this morning, out behind the dam. You reckon it’s a fox?’

  Not unless it was a fox wielding an axe. Ray collected his hat and shovel, headed up toward the ute.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

  ‘Where? I’m meeting Davo. In town.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift. After.’

  ‘After what?’

  When Ray turned right not left at the mailbox, Mick went pale beneath his freckles.

  ‘Nuh. No way. This bloke’s feral. Last time Dad went over he took a pot shot at him. Said he’d kill us if we went up there again.’

  ‘Yeah. Well. I’m not your dad.’

  As they crossed the bridge, Ray saw water welling beneath the boards. Heaps of water down this end of the creek. Snarls of black plastic hose all along the bank. As they got closer to the gate at the top, they saw more signs lining the track, all red dripping variations on Piss off.

  ‘Ray. Deadset. This bloke can’t even spell.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you don’t go to school.’

  At the end of the driveway, there was no house. Just a collection of old caravans, most of them missing wheels and up on blocks. Ray had half-expected that, along with the jumble of broken motorbikes, the car trailers piled with fuel and garbage, the Australian flag tattering from an annexe pole. What he wasn’t expecting was the crude pulley rigged from a tree branch, which he told himself was for car or bike repairs. Metal hooks hung from it, with what he hoped was more red paint staining their ends.

  Next to the pulley, cage upon cage of birds. Rosellas, galahs, cockies, all crammed in together, even a bedraggled crow. Wire-ridden, their wings all crushed. Flight bent out of shape.

  As he got out, a dog barked faintly. He scanned the empty distance. He shouldn’t have brought the boy. Didn’t know why he had. To teach him something? And what would that be?

  ‘Stay here, all right? And lock the doors.’

  For once, Mick didn’t ask why.

  Ray had chosen the largest caravan and was knocking at the door, steeling himself to see some mad furry face appear at the grimy windows, seeing only himself, when he became aware of a faint sweetish tang in his throat. Realised it had been there since he got out of the car. Almost algal, getting stronger, forming a fur on his tongue. It was coming from a forty-gallon drum near the pulley. An oily slime on top of dark liquid. Something white and clean poking through. He’d turned away, stomach lurching, intending to drive off, when he heard Mick calling.

  ‘Ray! Come here.’

  He was down near the creek. Too much to hope he might have done what he was told. Dark shapes, strung along the boundary fence. Dogs, Ray realised, as he got closer, or used to be. Ten or so, if you reassembled the parts.

  They’d been arranged by size and level of decay. Some were noosed to the wire, some spread-eagled, paws nailed to posts. Spotted ones, dun-coloured ones, a blue heeler speckle, some wolfish thing. Grey fur, a cracked yellow cranium rotting through. A red kelpie, like his. Mick breathed too loudly beside him. A fucking puppy, for God’s sake. The fur of its haunch and belly peeled up and over, revealing cords of red muscle and blue vein, a cowl of skin mercifully covering its head.

  Ray grabbed Mick by the shoulder, marched him away.

  As they got closer to the ute, more barking, growing louder, from the direction of the creek. Mick scuttled round toward the passenger door but Ray made himself walk, steady, measured, thinking of his empty gun in the ute tray. Even the sight of it might be enough.

  Before they left, as the barking closed in and Mick mouthed something at him through the window, his face white as a sheet, Ray got his tyre iron out and, one by one, bashed the locks off the bird cages. The crow stumbled, hopped, then took off, blue black and elegant against the sky. The cocky just sat there, one wing useless, until he went to pick it up and it bit him hard and flapped awkwardly away. As they drove off, an explosion of rosellas, high and bright against the grey horror of the place.

  At midnight, when most farmers, even mad ones, should be asleep, Ray drove his ute into the home paddock, bumping across the ruts and stones of Lily’s unborn vegetable patch.

  At the top of the ridge, his headlights found the sheep, huddled together against the fence. Parking up and leaving the lights on, he donned his head torch, strung a series of hurricane lamps along the bank. Set to work.

  There was a grim, fierce satisfaction in the wire giving under his snippers, the old rotten posts lunging out under a series of vicious kicks. Barbed wire caught him between glove and sleeve, a bracelet of blood on his wrist. He thought of broken flight and red feathers, a peeled puppy skull. Worked on.

  By dawn, the evil old thing was gone, leaving churned and bitter earth. Under lamplight, the raw crust of mud, crumbling off, rising steep and red up the other side, looked like something from the Somme. Carefully he stepped out the distance between the neighbour’s other fence, then laid his string line and checked his level, stopping every so often to consult the diagram in his back pocket and realign holes for the posts. Wondering how much of his life he’d measured out like this, with string and steps and wood.

  With the sky greying, he worked faster. Starting with the old augur at the eastern boundary, he dug post holes but they were too wide for the sleek modern posts he’d bought in town after dropping Mick off at Dave’s. So he went back along the l
ine, patiently tamping and refilling. When the headlights started to dim, he turned them off, working on in the dim glow of the hurricanes. Three times, checking the boundary on the contract, he found he’d wandered off course, waylaid by rocks or humpy ground. There’d be no mistake, no comeback. In answer to wavering greed, violence and madness, he would bring good workmanship. A cold slow calmness as he pulled out a two-metre run, unstringing, restringing, altering the trajectory of the fence by two steps either way. A job worth doing. A few feet of ground. Men had died for less. He thought of old Grandad with his medals, Dad and his stories, all that mud, blood and bullets, as he tackled the next post, the next hole, his miner’s light carving home out of frosty air.

  As the sky turned pearl along the ridge, his new fence finally met the other fence to the west. Settling the last post, testing the tension, adjusting the strainers and then tying off, he leaned panting against his new boundary. His defiance ran straight and true, on the right side of the creek.

  Before gathering up his tools, he took the photocopy he’d made of the contract diagram out of his back pocket. Stuck it to the middle of the fence with a twist of wire. Left it fluttering there, a declaration of war.

  When Ray drove Lily to the hospital for the results of her last check-up, Mick refused to come.

  ‘I should finish that henhouse, eh. With that fox around.’

  As they drove off, he saw that Mick was putting the henhouse door on backwards. A chicken would have to be Houdini to get in. He let him get on. He understood it, the need for all that hammering and sawing. A way to reduce the world to governable details involving hammers and nails.

  In the car park Lily asked if he was coming in. He pleaded errands in town but in truth he couldn’t face the antiseptic, gleaming indifference of the place. He sat in the ute watching her walk away. She was wearing old jeans cinched tight with a belt and a shirt he liked, pale blue with faded yellow teapots on it. Her figure dwarfed by the shining new hospital wing he’d helped to build.