by Sarah Hay
The Hills hoist was covered in clothes. Nothing had changed since those first few months on the stud. Perhaps it might have been different if she’d fought harder in the beginning. But each event on its own didn’t seem that important at the time.
If she tried now to explain it to John, he wouldn’t know what she was talking about. She left the basket to soften in the sun and walked towards the kitchen. She lit the gas for the kettle and put away the breakfast dishes that were draining on the sink.
She made a cup of tea and sat down beside it, feeling the dust dry on her legs.
There was a light tap at the flyscreen door and the oily smell of unrubbed tobacco. It was a smell she was used to after cleaning the homestead of all the empty tins of Log Cabin. The people before them had been smokers and readers of cowboy stories. And sometimes, when the boys were having a nap, she read the stories too, for company. Behind the door was an old man, his face flushed with a network of veins. Two large sacks of skin hung beneath his eyes. They were eyes without eyelashes and they looked at her and watered. His hat was held at his
Texas side and with his other hand he smoothed wisps of hair across the top of his head. He nodded.
‘Yes,’ she said, realising he was the man she saw standing by the shed when she had passed in the truck. She had forgotten about him.
He cleared his throat and gave a small hoarse cough. She thought he was going to spit on her veranda.
‘It’s Irish,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘Me name,’ he replied.
‘I’m the manager’s wife. How can I help you?’
‘The other fella, he bank me pension and I buy stores from here.’ He nodded towards the stores shed. ‘I’m outa tobacca.’
He seemed out of breath too. She noticed his lips were slightly blue. He probably had emphysema.
‘I’ll have to speak to my husband,’ she said.
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out what she thought was a tin of tobacco but when he opened it they were sweets like the ones her grandfather used to have buried in his deep trouser pockets. Lemon-flavoured lollies covered in white powder. She suddenly had a strong memory of the way the smell of his cigars used to cling to his clothes.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said. ‘Kettle’s just boiled.’
He didn’t answer but he reached for the door she was holding open. She stepped back to let him shuffle through. She noticed one of his legs dragged a bit as though it were stiff. He pulled a chair out and placed his hat on the table. With the other hand he tucked the tin back into his shirt pocket.
‘My grandfather used to love those. My mum always complained it was the only thing he ever ate.’ She looked up from where she was standing at the bench. ‘How do you have your tea?’
‘Black.’
She placed it before him and moved the jar of sugar and a spoon in the same direction then sat down at her own cup.
‘He was a drover somewhere up here. I don’t know where.
Or maybe it was over in the Northern Territory.’
She watched him spoon five teaspoons of sugar into the liquid and stir it. Her grandfather had lived with them on the farm until about a year before he died. She was eight when that happened. She hadn’t thought of him in a long time. It hadn’t occurred to her this might have been the country he worked before he went south, before he met her grandmother and worked as a fencing contractor and then bought his bit of land, the land her father now worked. Both of them, she realised, had lost their women before they should have. She wondered about this old man who called himself Irish, whether he’d had a wife.
‘You live on the station?’ she asked.
‘I worked for the fella before the fella just gone, and the fella before him, and maybe even the fella before him. My memory’s not what it used to be.’
‘Things are a bit different since then?’
He looked into his mug and did something strange with his mouth, pursing his thin lips and then sucking them in.
Texas ‘This place here used to have good cattle and good horses. That station paddock there,’ he nodded towards the window, ‘had a stud herd with good bulls and good cows but it all changed in the sixties. Big mob of horses too, beautiful horses, there were too many for one fella to handle, started to shoot em for pet food. Got rid of all the good working horses, he did.’
He swallowed his tea.
‘Nowadays everyone in a bloomin hurry. They get jackaroos never seen this country before. Last fella he was using a helicopter, otherwise they’d all get lost and perish in the bush. I don’t like that helicopter mustering. Cattle are all knocked up by the time they get em into the yards. Cows leave their calves behind and some of those big old bullocks just lie down and die.’
She was surprised by his volubility. Perhaps he hadn’t spoken to anyone for a while. He gazed mournfully out the window, his eyes watering. She knew John was going to get a chopper pilot in. It was the only way to get stock out of the hilly country where they hid in the gorges. Irish turned to face her again.
‘Used to be a lot of people lived here in this country. A mob here and a mob there and fellas in out-camps and hawkers and drovers wandering through. You can see signs of them if you know where to look. Some of them big white gums down by the creek they’ve got scars where wire ate into the bark. Scars from a long time.’
Was her grandfather one of those men? All she knew of that time was when he’d taken some enormous bullock to the meatworks without it dying from exhaustion. There was another story too, one she was vaguer about since she wasn’t sure how she came to hear of it, about how, along the droving run, her grandfather, whose name was George, was known by everyone as Daddy.
‘There was a truck driver here the other day,’ she said. ‘He was talking about the timber yards around the place, saying the Aboriginals built them and that they were forced to . . . It sounded cruel. I wasn’t sure . . .’ She trailed off, not knowing what she wanted to say.
Irish drained his mug of tea. Thin vertical lines etched the corners of his mouth. His skin was mottled and stained. He seemed to be watching her.
‘I could tell you a few stories,’ he said, and turned away.
She waited. And perhaps because she didn’t say anything, he began.
‘There was this fella called Kelly. His place was just over the river here, a battler’s block, the country in between the big holdings that were too hard for the big fellas to get into. Kelly and the likes of him used to help cleanskins wander into their country. They call it poddy-dodging. With the branded cattle, they’d make a new brand to cover the old one. Kelly was real hard on a young fella he had working for him. They reckon he used to knock him around or throw him in a waterhole early in the morning. Sometimes he put him in a big sack bag and hung him up in a tree. The boy grew bigger and stronger. By and by he got fed up with Kelly so he belted him.’
He paused, coughing, and Susannah thought it was going to be the end of it. But he continued.
Texas ‘One day—’ he croaked and cleared his throat—‘a policeman rode into Kelly’s stock camp. He got off his horse and walked over to Kelly. Kelly’s men were holding a small mob of cattle out on the flat. Kelly gave him some tea. The two men had a bit of a yarn. They call it Moonlight Valley that run of Kelly’s and back then it were wild blackfella country which was why that fella was there yarning to Kelly. He had rounded up six myalls for spearing some cattle. Kelly would normally hunt coppers off his block. That day he was pretty friendly, finding out from the copper what he was doing. They reckon it gave him an idea. To get rid of the boy.
‘“But what’s he done?” asked the copper.
‘He’d heard all the stories, how that boy had saved that fella’s life, how he was a bloody good stockman and a bloody good tracker. He knew he was no outlaw like Kelly said. Well, he took him like he was told to, and wrapped one of them collars around his neck and joined him up with the others. It took ten days to walk to t
own. The main street was just a track with the crocodiles below waiting for the cattle to slip off the side. There were no meatworks back then. They reckon it was a town full of madmen and fellas from the government. The road ended at a two-storey pub down near the jetty where they loaded the cattle. Now this copper was heading south by boat the next day. They reckon he wasn’t too bad for a copper and his conscience was worrying him about that boy. He walked out onto the veranda of the pub and looked into that bright iron light. The water and the mudflats and the dead-looking scrub shimmers and jumps about in the heat. That bloomin place can be hotter than hell. He wasn’t sorry to be leaving. He knew there were a lot of wrongs done in that town and this one he could put right before the morning.
‘“You’re a pretty good fella,” he told that boy. “Here’s a rifle and half a pack of bullets to protect you on your way back.”
‘In those days there were wild blacks along the river and he’d need to watch out for himself. The policeman sent him off thinking he’d go back to Kelly and that Kelly’d realise what a good fella he was and there’d be no more trouble. Before that boat pulled away on the full tide that young bloke must’ve been thinking, I’m going to shoot that old bugger Kelly. He followed the tidal flats out and then upstream, along one of the five rivers that fed it and into the wide river valley where all that good cattle grass grows.’
‘Sorry,’ interrupted Susannah, ‘I just remembered, one of the sprinklers.’
He cleared his throat again and took a mouthful of tea.
‘Ah you don’t want to hear any more,’ he said into his cup.
‘I do,’ she said, stepping through the doorway.
She hurried back from the far end of the yard, thinking he might have gone. But he was still there, smoking. She made them both another cup of tea.
‘Go on,’ she said.
His eyes became more distant, and he started again.
‘By and by that young fella came to a big old bottle tree and they reckon he watched one of Kelly’s stockmen for a while and then put that rifle up to his shoulder and shot him. That bloke buckled like one of them new cans of grog but he wasn’t dead.
Texas He called out to his gin and she caught his horse and they bolted for the main camp. That fella died from his wounds the day after he reached Kelly’s homestead. All of them at that place were watching the shadows and looking out for the boy. They knew he was coming and Kelly stayed locked inside, the old women bringing him his food. For a few days the boy made tracks around the house and then he left. But that wasn’t the end of it. At another place two men were found dead in their swags. They reckon it was the work of the boy and a couple of wild fellas that joined him. He stole ammunition, guns and tucker and took all the girls from there into the bush. For the next year or so he hung about in a cave on a big hill not far from here. He made a ladder he could pull up so nobody could climb up. From there he had a view of the river snaking its way through the country. All that year and all the next, stock camps were surrounded at night and robbed and travellers held up. Word went from station to station that the bushranger and his gang were going to kill all the whites. The coppers were buggered. They couldn’t find him. No one could. There were stories flying around as to where he was hiding but only the old women at Kelly’s place thought he might be close by. It was one of Kelly’s old girls who spotted signs of him one day. That boy, they called the bushranger, had been terrorising for near two years. She was looking for some stray goats along a dry creek bed when she saw marks of someone trying to cover their tracks in the sand. She went back to the homestead and told Kelly and he sent her and one of his men on to a coppers’ outpost. They flew there, horses’ hooves clattering on the stony ground, riding hard through them rocky creek beds, their horses lathered and footsore. At daybreak that old woman led four coppers and six trackers on the hunt for the bushranger.
Over the next few days more coppers joined them until there was a big mob after him. The bushranger must have got bloomin careless cos they picked up his tracks not far from the river where he crossed it. It’s a place not far from here where the river curves almost at a right angle and then narrows to shallow rapids over grey rock. In the early morning those stones shine like silver, you know, like foil. The riders made their plans on that sandy river bank. Just above them there’s a hill that looks like a bloody big red head which has rolled away from the ranges. They rode up into the river gums and the paperbark and out into the open country of grass and ant beds and trees with no shade. They found him at a little jump-up. First they shot two of the fellas with him. The bushranger was behind an ant bed and he shot a bloody copper through the ears. They reckon he had a forty-four rifle, and a pistol and six-shooters, and that a woman was loading them for him until she was shot. And then one fella sneaked around and got him, shot him in the arm. When that happened he couldn’t hold his gun.
‘“You got me,” he said, throwing his gun away and coming out into the open. They shot him bit by bit. It wasn’t a clean death. They shot his other arm, then through his ribs. They came closer and put the finishing touch on him right in the forehead. They cut off one of his arms and took it back to town to show they got him.’
Irish wheezed a little. His eyes flicked over her and then focused on something she couldn’t see from where she was sitting.
Texas ‘Fellas come up here, they don’t know anything,’ he said as he took out the tin of sweets from his top pocket.
‘The policeman must have felt terrible letting him go in the first place,’ she said.
Irish didn’t answer and then he was pulling himself up out of his chair. The flyscreen door scraped closed behind him. She didn’t know whether he was just tired of talking or if it was something she said. She sat back in her chair and drank the last of the tea. She knew the world where she came from was small, a world where similar ideas and opinions found and fed one another. There was little difference from the talk at home on the farm, to the conversations in the boarding school common room and among the people she met as a journalist for a rural newspaper. Some of her friends had travelled to Europe. When they returned they married boys from brother schools who had either waited at home or travelled in packs of their own. She was told she needed to travel to appreciate where she came from. Irish’s story was from a long time ago but it made her think of other stories, stories she didn’t know that were connected to the place where she grew up. She thought of her family’s farm and imagined for the first time how the country might have looked before the chain was dragged through it. Before it was shaped and sowed. She remembered the Aboriginal people on the outskirts of town, their camps conveniently cornered into areas of little value to the town’s municipal leaders. It made her uneasy to think that while she was growing up they had lived in the swamp lands, the sinkholes of the country. Her eyes focused again on the view through the louvre windows. The heat mirage on the flat turned the dirt into liquid. But she couldn’t afford to think like that, to doubt her family’s right to belong in that place, otherwise there was nothing to hold on to.
V
They were fighting. Rational thoughts seemed to compress, one on top of the other, to become something else, something blinding and fierce. It felt like she was capable of anything but it never lasted and then she was left with nothing. John had his back to her. But he wasn’t finished.
‘You always, you and your parents, try to make me feel as though I’m not good enough.’
She wasn’t going to remind him that her mother had been dead for three years and she hadn’t spoken to her father since they left. He turned around to face her. ‘I’m sick of it. I’m not having it any more.’
She’d been telling him about Irish. How he’d come back after lunch for his supplies and told her that he was going to go like the old blackfellas; when he knew it was time, he was going to walk into the bush. She’d added to John that hopefully they wouldn’t still be around to see that. She didn’t realise her husband would be so easy to provoke.
‘I’m making a go of it here. For us, for the boys. Plenty of space for them. What more could you want?’
Texas ‘What more could I want?’ she repeated slowly and quietly. ‘Someone to talk to, that would be a start.’
She was trying to find in her that place where once there was fearlessness. So that she could continue. To tell him that she wasn’t putting up with this any longer. But she’d lost the ability to hold on to the fight, to pluck words and hurl them back without any thought of damage.
‘What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you happy?’
Their eyes met. She looked away. He had no idea how she felt and it made her think there was nowhere to go. How could she even start to tell him what was wrong when he hadn’t even noticed? Blinking away the tears that made everything seem like a mirage. He turned and walked out the door. There was so much space, she thought, so much space for them all to get lost in. She let the air out of her lungs slowly, it could be worse, perhaps. And she thought of her mother.
The cool air between the house and the kitchen was fragrant with frangipani. She stepped from one concrete paver to the next, the thought crossing her mind that a long-legged man must have laid them. Inside the kitchen she opened the windows, letting in the industrious sounds of the birds, and tore down the net curtains from above the louvres. Broken webs drifted with dust motes, sliding across the light. Falling, spiralling. She thought of Irish’s desire to walk into the bush and die; the moment at which he might decide to do it, and the walk, his last walk, the birds fluttering overhead, flickering beyond his vision, unthinkingly noisy; one step after another. Free of a past that might constrain his right to die as he wished. Unlike the way her mother had died, forced to sip water, fed with a drip in the twilight glow of a hospital room. Her mother hated to be any trouble. Perhaps it was why she stopped eating and drinking.
Because someone had to do it for her. Susannah knew that would never happen to John. Looking after him and the children was her reason for existing. Why did she think it could be any different?
