At dinner that night there was a great, excited story told about a snake, how Irene had been playing naked on the floor as the snake slithered past, and it had seemed like two snakes on the shinily painted boards. It had been bailed up finally in Marie’s bedroom behind a stack of her clothes in the back of a cupboard. Sharon had gone driving to a neighbour’s for a gun, but had come back with a different neighbour she met on the road, who used a long-handled shovel to reach the snake and delicately crush its backbone, before it was lifted outside.
Since then, Sharon kept the shovel at the back door, ready to use if necessary. She would too, although she hated the thought.
During the flood rain the family had been stranded by swollen creeks for three days and the children hadn’t been able to get to school. They had a great time. Whole trees, dead calves, uprooted fenceposts had come riding past like debris in Huckleberry Finn, and across the causeway the water was thrown up like a huge, continuous surfing wave. He had missed all that. It had happened while he doled out meals to strangers, when lightning played below the horizon. He had always loved floods, fires, storms. Now he was pretending all over again that it wasn’t some kind of conflagration happening in himself, that he wasn’t finding fuel for it in the world outside his family, and as if what happened out there wouldn’t have an effect on what happened here. He poured himself another glass of wine.
Around the meal table the story of where he had been acquired polish, becoming the quest of a boy remembering he was a man, who fell in with a bunch of rough characters, the good, the bad, and the lost, the dreaming and the practical, and set off on the road with them, camping by the wayside, living a smoky life under low, galvanised iron roofing, setting off again one day, and reaching a glittering highway motel, where he was abruptly forced to leave their company, hoping to find them again when he could, and rejoin their story, following it through to an unpredictable end.
‘Is this true?’ said Irene, looking at her sisters for confirmation. The nightly bedtime stories they read her had this lilt.
He told them more about the trials of Louella, her rebellion, her exile, and her poolside reappearance; he described Christian T, who when he left Leopardwood Downs held a resentment against him, believing he had stolen his radio batteries, believing that all cooks were thieving bastards, and this Aussie one a special prick — so he had stolen three of his Coopers from the freezer just to show him. He told them about Davo and Barb, his first shed friends, who would always be his friends, he felt, and were sure to appear at the farm with their caravan one day, because that was the kind of friends they were. Practically family.
‘Well, we don’t know them,’ said Marie.
He spoke about the sudden invasion of bodies at lunchtime in the hot, silent kitchen, the coughs and groans at night, the nightmare yells through the plywood walls of the huts, and the stars at night, how he had slept under them, and the landscapes that had returned him to childhood recollections.
He talked about Bertram Junior. The game-playing that kept his interests up. The effervescence, the stubborn charisma: his refusal to smile unless he really, badly needed something from someone, or else when he forgot his responsibilities totally, and lifted into a state of pure joy, when he seemed to float clear of the ground, hiccupping with giggles.
He told how when he was cooking he had remembered, for the first time in years, that he had owned a fox terrier pup as a boy. The dog called Dirty who had died of tick paralysis, and his mother had comforted him with words that created an image of shattered calm. Spilt milk. Tears. Stiffened back leg, where the vet had shaved the hairs off to reveal where the tick had gone in, creating a neat clean hole. How he had never been as close to a dog since — but how when he thought back over the shed he had cooked at he wished he’d had one with him.
‘What sort of dog?’ Ella traced fingers on the linen tablecloth in the flickering candlelight.
Sharon smiled. ‘I can’t see you with a dog.’
‘Well, I had one once. So that proves something. I dunno — a terrier? You know, a rat catcher, Jack Russell. That’s the sort of dog I mean. I could feed it on scraps and I wouldn’t have buckets overflowing all the time.’
‘It would get too fat,’ said Ella.
‘I’d take it on walks. Train it to put its front paws on the open window while I drove along. It would bite anyone who touched my Coopers. It’d sleep on the back of the truck with me.’
Sharon and his daughters loved dogs. They loved dog stories, dog antics, dogs with strangled barks, moon-mad howls, and craven whimpers; they loved wrestling with dogs on grass, playing dog-to-dog with them, shampooing them, dressing them in dolls’ bonnets, shawls, tea-towels, anything — taking photos of dogs smoking pipes, sitting dogs on their knees in posed groups. They loved dog baskets and dog runs, dog oddities and irregularities — it was all the same to them. Dog stories ran back in family history. Dachshunds being squeezed like bagpipes; kelpies balancing on motorbikes; dog after dog being killed by tiger snakes here on the farm. Snakebitten dogs were buried in graves marked by granite rocks. ‘They died before you were born,’ Irene was told. But it had happened more recently, too. It was practically an annual event. Irene would start noticing it now, and remembering. It would mark the dimension of time for her, shadowing her birthdays, and she would know down a long tunnel of possibility, the fact of death. There would be no use crying over spilt milk.
Look. There were the current dogs now, Minnie and Kate, the whippet and the German coulie staring in at the meal table with raised jawlines from the bricked verandah outside. Kate was the best sheepdog Sharon had ever had. Sharon took her to Goulburn where she ran across the backs of sheep in the packed saleyards, winning admiration from men who otherwise wouldn’t budge on the concept of a woman farming.
Wet noses smeared the sliding glass doors.
‘They know we’re talking about them.’
‘You think so?’
‘They always seem to.’
Dogs’ faces reflected his wife’s and daughters’ every mood, while he saw only impassive disinterest in their eyes, believing they lived out their dogs’ lives for dogs’ reasons, and were certainly only hungry. He forgot the emotions he had seen in his fox terrier pup forty years ago, anticipating the range of life’s possibilities.
A week passed and a stranger rang. He’d heard he could cook. He wasn’t a contractor or an overseer but a grazier from the stony slopes of the Dividing Range where fine wool sheep were run. Their wool, worth more by weight than gold, was auctioned in separate bales to Italian fine-wool suitmakers and Japanese woollen mills. The idea was that he would live in the farmer’s house, cook in the farm kitchen, and the shearers would come over and eat their meals there.
There was a kind of life he was after in the sheds, and this wasn’t it.
He was hoping for a soft Kiwi accent whenever he picked up the phone. ‘Thet you, Cookie?’ It didn’t come. He wasn’t just a cook, he realised. He was part of a story that would only get told through living. It might have started anywhere, but chance had started it somewhere, with a phone call to a hot inland town, and it was from there that he would pursue it. He didn’t want to mope around in a craggy-faced, penny-pinching grazier’s house while the grazier’s wife was in hospital. (Which was why he was being asked.) He used the excuse of family commitments, and declined the job.
‘So you’ll be here for Irene’s birthday?’ Marie and Ella questioned him fiercely.
‘Of course. Didn’t I say so before?’
‘No. You didn’t say. Not to us.’
‘All right. It’s a promise.’
Another week passed and Alastair rang. He had a major shed going. It was a beauty. It was a Wool Corporation training school, three weeks, an excellent kitchen, hard working, sincere young crowd of Aussie learners, men and girls, no playing up, no wild cards in the pack, early nights, regular as clockwork — and very small numbers at the weekends. Possibly even nobody. He had been given a high r
ating by Alastair’s Kiwis and if he could start in three days’ time then Alastair would be very chuffed.
He told Alastair he was sorry. He would like to go up to Warren and do that job. But he couldn’t get away. And Alastair was off the phone, leaving it dead in his hand practically before he finished speaking.
‘I wanted to say yes,’ he told Sharon. ‘I feel as if everything I want to do is slipping away, that I’m losing my chance at this, forgetting what it is that drives me.’
Another phone call came. It was from a woman in town to tell him she had a five year old Jack Russell terrier called Sadie — that Sharon had been asking around everywhere for a dog for him — and this Sadie was the perfect companion for long trips: loyal, tireless, an animal that would eat anything, crunch chicken bones, devour chop bones, and was house trained. He could have her on trial, and if he liked her, he could have her for nothing.
He looked at Sharon and understood something: that she was better at seeing people independent from herself than he was.
‘You can go away any time, whenever you like,’ he imagined her thinking. ‘It’s not a matter of our giving permission or anything like that, it’s your life and I’d feel terrible if I was responsible for fencing you in, or whatever it is you feel at this time. We’re your family, not your keepers. The only thing to remember is our feelings. That’s all. I know that’s the hardest thing for a man, you think there’s a contradiction in what I’m saying, and you think that the two things don’t fit together. But they do. They can. You just have to use your imagination to feel it, that’s all. So here is an expression of love for you, a small dog, please look after her, don’t do anything careless that would put her at risk, and as for yourself personally, stay happy, because if you don’t, what’s the point of anything?’
The phone seemed to have been ringing for hours through a long, difficult dream. There were torn party hats and stale slices of fairy bread, crumpled present wrappings and cold, fatty clusters of leftover saveloys in a saucepan on the stove when he groped through the house late at night to answer it. His tongue was thick from postparty recovery whiskies.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello there. I suppose you cannot guess who this is.’
The voice at the other end of the line had flattened, measured New Zealand vowels. It came from a silence that made the man picture a bare room, a slice of starlight across shiny linoleum, large bare feet on a cool floor.
‘Bertram Junior?’ The voice had an oceanic calmness about it, but no charismatic crosscurrents.
‘Heh, heh. No-oo. This is that man’s brother. Harold. I am the one who ordered your stores for Leopardwood Downs. I run the teams for Alastair. I have heard all about your cooking. Nothing untoward, I must say. You come with a high recommendation. My brother Bertram Junior and my best mate-shearer Lenny told me of the good job you done. The question I am ringing to ask you is, are you available for work? The location is Gograndli Station, on the Lachlan River, north of Hay. I have been left in the lurch by my regular cook, and I’m mad as a hornet with her. I don’t ever want to see her again. But that is by the by. We start three days from now. Does that give you time to get mobile?’
‘It does — just. I’m interested — yes.’
He was obviously to be the fill-in.
‘Excellent. Now we can see how we get along. Who knows. You might consider coming with us permanent. That’s how serious I am about changing cooks. And how mad I am at that person who was my cook before, Cookie.’ The voice seemed to expand, come close, and to hover over future work-prospects like a puffy fair-weather cloud, promising calm and pleasant days ahead, mutual understanding, serene relations. ‘The facilities at the shed we just finished were nothing short of luxurious but that cook of mine she chose to make endless complaints, and wouldn’t touch the dishwasher that was at her disposal, not to mention the run-in she had with the resident cook, a fine sort of woman. But there you go. There is no pleasing some people. After Gograndli, Cookie, we are booked to do some real travelling — all over the country. My brother says that is the style of work you are after, which is why I thought of you right now, even this late at night.’
2
IN THE LIFE
FINDING ANOTHER WAY IN
The day he went to fetch his dog from the farm where she lived she was digging holes around a chook-yard, head down and rump in the air, dirt flying back. ‘This is the problem,’ said the woman who owned her. ‘As long as there aren’t any chooks to bother she’s fine. But last week she killed my best layer and before that it was the bantams, and now there’s no holding her back. The pity is we love her.’
Sadie was a chunky, brick-shaped terrier, white with black patches and gingery splotches. Her teeth were sharp and her jaws powerful. He reached down and twitched her high, alert ears. She scrabbled her short legs to get up to him and nuzzled his face. Her breath smelt ancient. He lifted her into his arms, where she settled in comfortably, the black rubbery corners of her mouth trickling a muddy mixture of dirt and saliva.
A bloodshot eye rolled and engaged his. Man and dog seemed to know each other from a process of soul-searching that coincided just here. He hadn’t felt this way since he was nine.
The woman took him over to the shearing shed to demonstrate Sadie’s ability as a ratter. They watched from the gloom behind the wool bins. Sadie dealt with rodents with the nonchalance of an axeman-executioner, imperiously devoted, placing a paw on the neck of one victim while crunching another; tossing that one away while clamping the next as it scurried past, and making no sound except for a wheezy, urgent breath against the impersonal snapping of bones.
Man and dog crossed a saltbush plain as wide as the sea. The sun rose, blazing out over the flatness of the Riverina. Far ahead, sunlight clipped a line of trees showing where the river was. A plume of blue smoke rose above the trees; homestead roofs glinted; windmills shone; and he glanced at the map on his knee. A long way to go yet to Gograndli Station.
The river came close. Edged closer. The truck entered a narrow forest fringing the banks, flickering past red gums and wattles. He sighted a roadside breakfast fire, the source of the smoke, and a cameo of still, standing men and women and parked vehicles — roo shooters’ Landcruisers and chiller trucks, with rifle racks visible at back windows and green canvas swags on the ground. The riverside looked the place to be, parklike and dappled. He hoped Gograndli shed would have a setting like it.
The river itself was a chain of scoured, milky ponds, where the flood of the month before was marked by serried waterlines on clay banks. It was overhung by red gums, jammed with fallen logs.
The truck crossed over a cement bridge, and then snapped out the other side into clear light again, and they were back on the saltbush plain riding an elevated roadbed, traversing in a few minutes a stretch of swampy ground that bullock teams in the last century would have taken all day to cross.
Sadie slipped down from her window and plopped onto the car seat next to him, looking up at him expectantly. She farted silently, with rich, foul fullness. ‘Did you do that? Did you fart, you little bastard? Bugger me you did, and don’t lie, it was you and you can’t pretend it wasn’t. Just don’t fart again or it’s curtains, the long hike, hooroo and goodbye. Understand?’
He could not believe this. It was his own voice talking. Communing with a dog.
It was easy to get into the habit. ‘Just listen to me.’ There wasn’t any mystery to it. ‘What are we going to find this time?’ — the dog absorbing part of himself he couldn’t handle at any moment, blotting away boredom and irritation, nervous anticipation, second thoughts about where he was going, what he was letting himself in for again, convincing him there was more to himself than he guessed, that he was a whole world in himself, he would get along, because look at him, he was into the work again, and the life meant something, didn’t it?
He had only to reach out and rest the palm of his hand on her small, chubby neck, and the restless anxiety that was his m
ain mode of thinking would quieten.
Way out on the saltbush plain they took a dirt road turn-off and followed the river. The approach to Gograndli was mysterious, smoke-wreathed, enticing. It was his image of re-entering the life. But seen closer, many trees had been cut down over the years, leaving grey stumpy clearings. Peelings of bark lay on overgrazed ground. Shade was meagre in the morning heat. Sheep lifting their gazes as the truck went past were like skeletons in overcoats.
Gograndli homestead was wide and low, surrounded by lawns and shade trees. It was an early pisé or mudbrick construction on a shady rise above the river. Whoever came here last century had meant to stay. It had an extensive galvanised iron roof, shuttered rooms opening out onto a flagstoned terrace, red-gum verandah poles, a mustard-coloured wash on the walls, and dark, green-painted eaves, guttering and downpipes. There were rifle slits in an outhouse. Maybe originally it had been a wayside inn. Now it was a place photographed for style magazines. Inside would be French-polished furniture. Fine books. (Maybe even one he’d written himself.) There would be the whiff of air molecules in there absolutely stationary from year to year. An area of startling green lawn hung over a bend in the river, where there was a reedy waterhole. Ducks, black swans, ibis, and pelicans swam there. Crows milled overhead. Projecting down into the waterhole was the inlet pipe of a diesel pump, which thundered as he went past, sending out black smoke through a thin, rusted chimneypipe, supplying a lawnspray that sent out silver kicks of water in a wide, sumptuous arc, splashing the dusty windscreen of the truck.
He saw a man dragging a length of polypipe across the grass, putting his back into it. A man wearing a straw hat with a crisp white hatband, his shoulders strained to the task. He supposed this was Winston Didale, who had answered the phone at Gograndli the night before last when he called ahead to find out if there would be station meat ready for the shearers’ first meal.
Shearers' Motel Page 10
