by Sarah Hay
‘Do you know what time John’s leaving tomorrow?’ asked Laura.
Susannah realised with a start that she might have been staring. God knows what Laura thought of her.
‘Um, probably around five,’ she said, turning away. But then she paused in the doorway. ‘I hope everything works out.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Where would you like us to forward your mail?’
Laura’s eyes flicked to the side of the door. She suddenly looked uncertain.
‘Oh, I guess just to the GPO in town.’
‘All right then. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
Sitting now with her cup of tea, the air in the kitchen beginning to heat up as the sun rose higher in the sky, she wondered what it would be like to be Laura. Is that what she wanted? To be leaving? Was she envious? She’d like to have been in her skin, to be able to feel what she was feeling, but she wouldn’t like the uncertainty. Perhaps it was why she married John. So she didn’t have to think about the future, about what was to come next. Marriage saved her from that and so did the children. She just hadn’t realised there wouldn’t be much room to breathe. Her mother would say she was thinking too much again. It was time to get the children up.
She drained her cup and rinsed it underneath the tap.
Ollie was awake. He had pulled the sheet from his bed and draped it across to the chest of drawers. He was sitting underneath it as though in a small tent.
‘What are you doing, Ollie?’
‘Shush,’ he said in an exaggerated whisper.
‘It’s okay, it’s time to get up.’
Ollie looked disappointed as he watched his brother stir. He probably liked those moments to himself.
‘Come on, breakfast,’ she said and helped them into their clothes.
Back in the kitchen she was trying not to think about the two who had left. Laura and Texas had made life bearable because even when she wasn’t watching them, she knew they were there. They were like a story she could dip in and out of
Texas and now she wondered how it would end. She missed Irish too but she had no idea who he was. And she wasn’t the only one. When she saw the police vehicle parked at the gate, she almost took off to the hills herself. But they just wanted to look through his belongings to establish his identity for the coroner. They didn’t find very much. Some old Christmas cards from people without return addresses and photos without captions. There were mostly Post magazines from the 1960s but amongst them they found a note from the Commissioner of Native Affairs dated sometime in the 1940s. The ink had faded too much for it to be read clearly. It was headed Notice of Objection to Application for Certificate of Citizenship and the person it referred to was a woman called Charlotte but the surname was impossible to decipher.
‘Why would he have something like this?’ she asked.
The policeman who found it didn’t know but the other one said, ‘They probably wanted to get married.’
‘So why would he need that?’
‘Well presumably he was Australian and with her being Aboriginal she’d have to be a citizen for them to be legally married.’
‘Really,’ said Susannah, puzzled. ‘Surely she was more Australian than anybody?’
‘You’d think so.’
‘Why would it have been refused?’
The policeman shrugged and looked closely at the document. ‘They’ve got the reasons written here. You just can’t read them. I’ve seen it before among some old records. Probably for associating with her family, other Aboriginal people. The idea was to get them to behave more like the whites.’
‘It’s sort of crazy when you think about it,’ said the other policeman. ‘There were some pretty undesirable white blokes around in those days.’
She remembered Irish’s stories of men who held head-butting competitions and played Russian roulette for fun at Christmas; men who drank themselves to death before anything worse could happen. They were the frontier men who followed the cattle into this country.
When John found out that Irish had died, he shouted at her. ‘Don’t you realise it is illegal not to report a death. You can’t leave him to rot on the hill. It’s not allowed.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ she said.
‘Well if everyone did that, the whole country would be filled with dead bodies.’ He spoke as though he was talking to a child.
‘Probably already is,’ she said. ‘Who would know?’
He looked at her strangely.
But the policemen had been very nice and waived the fine she’d incurred for not reporting his death immediately. One of them said there had to be some compensation for living so far from anywhere.
Her gaze returned to her children. She sighed loudly. Ned looked up from his bowl of cereal.
‘Mummy, can we take the duck swimming?’
‘Can we, can we?’ squealed Ollie, wriggling off his chair.
‘When you finish your breakfast,’ she said.
Texas But they were already out of their chairs and she didn’t have the energy to make them come back. It was too hot. The fan was on full speed but all it did was make the air more noticeable. She really should put on a load of washing but instead she followed them out into the garden to where the plastic wading pool was resting against a tree. She pulled it down and placed it in the shade. She gave the boys the hose and turned on the tap and then went inside to get some towels. As she settled on a towel under the tree, she thought briefly of snakes and decided that with the amount of noise they were making, they’d scare them away. They sprayed her with the hose but she didn’t object until it looked like the water might ruin the book she was reading. It was called By Sundown and she could tell from the cover that there would be a big shoot-out and the men would get their women. She’d only just started it. There was something about the books that compelled her to read on until the end. Perhaps it was the words ‘The End’ that appealed; you knew everything would be put right by the time you finished reading the last page.
One of the women was called Laura and Susannah was nearly distracted from the story into thinking about the other Laura.
Laura was the pretty girl in the blue bonnet that was promised to the deputy sheriff in Jonesburg, Kansas. Then there was Brooke who dressed rather too colourfully for a respectable woman. She had a superb figure with a tiny waist, rounded hips, long silken-clad legs and full breasts and had just arrived in town on the stage coach.
Every story was the same. There were two women, one of whom was desired by all the men and the other who was the good little wife. It could be her and Laura, except the other way round, but Susannah didn’t feel like the good wife either.
The deputy, called Clint Messenger, was the sixth man to wear the badge within the space of a year. The others had either been shot or ran out of town by the Texas cowboys. And the news was the cowboys were returning to Jonesburg—lean, lithe-hipped men with tied-down guns, some of them as wild and unpredictable as the longhorns they hazed up over the Texas Panhandle.
Susannah looked up from the book to check on the boys.
Ollie was sitting in the pool playing with his plastic duck and nearby Ned was hosing water over the trucks he’d lined up on the grass. The water sparkled in the sun and the light behind the boys was so bright that it seemed to white out the view beyond the fence. She blinked to clear the spots from her eyes so she could focus on the words, but they leapt around a bit until her eyes grew used to the page again.
Clint Messenger looked south and saw a blood-red moon climbing into the sky. It was shining through a great haze of red alkali dust. There was no wind. The dust was lifting from a thousand plodding longhorn hooves eating up the last dry miles between Texas and Jonesburg, Kansas. The Texans were coming. Susannah put the book down. She realised why people read these stories when they worked on stations. The ringers who went into town to spend their cheques when the mustering season was over were not that different from the Texas cowboys, although they didn’t sh
oot each other. Not that she’d heard
Texas anyway. She remembered the woman from the co-op saying you knew when the season was over because the pub and the tavern were full. In the story the young deputy was going to have to control the drunk and trigger-happy Texans and meanwhile he was neglecting his fiancée because he’d taken a liking to the other woman, Brooke. Susannah sighed. Of course he had. She really should put the book away. There were things to be done in the house. She remembered she didn’t have to bake any bread today since John would be bringing some home from town. But she needed to sort out the clothes and clean the bathroom and check the meat supply and plan what they would be having for dinner. She wondered when Gerry was returning. He was another person she would have to feed. She picked up the book again.
Tall, hard-bitten men turned to stare as the man with the badge strode up. It was three days since the first herd had arrived but there had been no real trouble so far. A few scuffles, one or two arrests for drunkenness and a few half-hearted insults between Kansans and Texans. Clint had managed the Texans far better than most had expected. He found them suspicious, pugnacious and wild in drink, but not mean and vicious as he’d been led to believe. They were spending their money on drink and gambling at the Texas Palace Saloon.
Susannah looked up.
‘Where’s Ned?’ she asked Ollie.
And then she saw him on the veranda. The shade had moved so that part of the pool was in the sun. She stood up and told
Ollie to get out so that she could bring the pool back into the cooler part of the lawn.
‘Are you hungry?’
She picked up her book and they followed her into the kitchen. She gave them cordial and a biscuit each. Ned started crying when he dropped his on the floor.
‘You won’t get another one if you don’t stop.’
He looked at her blackly but was silent and she handed him another biscuit.
It wasn’t until after lunch that she was able to pick up the book again. The boys were in their room resting. They were feeling the heat too. She’d done two loads of washing so she allowed herself the luxury of lying under the fan in the bedroom.
Things had come to a boil with the Texans. Full of whisky-bolstered courage, they were looking for the gambler Race Buchanan. Laura came to the jailhouse to find Clint. She met Buchanan and asked him about Brooke.
‘We were lovers in the south, Laura, nothing more, nothing less. I was content to continue the way we were, for I had no illusions about eternal love and such nonsense. Brooke wanted wedding bells and orange blossoms. So I left her. Decamped, I heard Brooke was distraught. I didn’t hear until much later that she had also lost the child I didn’t know she was carrying . . .’ His voice had grown softer and softer.
‘She must have loved you a lot to be hurt so deeply.’
‘There’s no such thing. Or if there is, I’ve never encountered it.’
Laura felt challenged. ‘I love Clint.’
Texas ‘Need, want, desire perhaps. It’s all selfish, Laura, it’s a great sham.’
‘I’d rather die than feel the way you do.’
The shooting started. Susannah skipped over most of it now that she was nearing the end. The women joined in, placing themselves in the line of fire, to be near the men they loved. Susannah reached the part where Race Buchanan realised he loved Brooke. It had taken a woman to show him that life was about self-sacrifice, nobility and dedication to duty. Susannah couldn’t read any more. She didn’t even want to get to the end. Instead she ripped the book in half, tearing it into pieces easily. There wasn’t much to it and she let the scraps of paper fall all over the bed. Lying back on her pillow, she watched the fan rotate above her head; round and round it went. Her mother had the same ideas about sacrifice and duty and at that moment she decided that everything she hated about her life was her mother’s fault. She was not going to live her mother’s story. She would create a new one for herself.
IV
It was about eight o’clock when Susannah heard the sound of a vehicle slowing for a gate. It was quite far away and even though it was most likely John, she turned off the light in the kitchen and waited in the darkness for it to arrive. She’d put the children to bed about half an hour ago and she was on her second can of beer. She wished they were full strength because they didn’t seem to be doing anything to make her feel more cheerful. It was John’s four-wheel drive and it stopped in front of the yard. The lights flicked off and she watched him get out of the car. For some reason she stayed where she was, listening to his footsteps on the veranda and the sound of his boots falling to the floor. The door squeaked open and his shape filled the doorway.
‘I’m here,’ she said flatly.
‘Shit. What are you doing? Frightened the bloody daylights out of me. What’s happened to the light?’
‘Nothing.’
The fluorescent tube flickered and she caught glimpses of him, hatless and uncertain. Eventually it became solid light and she saw that his eyes were red and he was unsteady on his feet.
‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked.
He shot her a glance. ‘Looks like you’re doing all right yourself.’
She brought the can up to her mouth and swallowed and then set it down again. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’
He shrugged. ‘Never thought you were really into it.’
He pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘What’s for dinner?’
‘I haven’t cooked any.’
He nodded slightly as though it was nothing unusual. Then he leant forward on the table and rested his elbows, supporting his chin with one hand and holding his forehead with the other, as though the weight was too much to bear. He looked up at her. ‘Do you want to leave, is that it? You can if you want.’
Texas She was finding it hard to maintain the anger when he wasn’t giving her anything to fuel it. She was angry with herself, and perhaps with her mother most of all, for creating the ideas that were suffocating them both. He looked small in the chair with his shoulders slumped forwards.
‘Where’s your hat?’
‘Dunno, might have left it in the bar.’
‘What happened in town?’
He sighed. ‘There was a message at the co-op. Arne’s on his way up.’
‘Does he know about the cattle?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘I’ll have to tell him when he gets here.’
She realised they’d both been trapped. He was just as constrained by the idea of how he was supposed to behave as she was. He should be able to make mistakes and she should be able to move away from the kitchen.
‘You know it’s only a job. Being on this place, out here.’
He frowned. ‘You’re not making any sense.’
‘I was just thinking. It’s different now. From the way people used to be in this country. It’s not about being a bloody hero. We’re just doing a job. And we can do it in another place if we have to.’
He sat up a bit. ‘Yeah,’ he said quietly and his eyes looked away and then came back. ‘Yeah,’ he said more firmly. ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘Just talk to me, like this.’
‘I can’t do it on my own.’
‘I know.’
And her fingers reached across the table towards his, touching the tips. She noticed the creases around his eyes and thought that perhaps age would suit him.
By sundown
I
The bitumen road widened and where it began to curve away to the west, the vehicle slowed for the turnoff into town. Laura caught glimpses of rooftops between trees and flowering bougainvillea and everything was shaded from the sun in the east by two jagged-edged hills. John hadn’t spoken for the entire journey but now he asked where they wanted to be dropped off. Texas answered but she didn’t hear what he said. They passed square houses, pale green or grey, all mounted above the ground and in front of them were colourful gardens of frangipani and oleander, or there were yards of dirt with toys and broken bikes and cars
that looked as though they wouldn’t start again. After several turns through gravel streets the vehicle stopped near a house with a wide palm out the front. Texas lifted their gear from the back of the vehicle. Carrying her backpack, she followed him up a couple of steps and a woman greeted them at the door.
‘Look who’s here,’ she said to someone else in the room. She smiled at Laura, adding: ‘I’m Billie, his cousin.’
‘Hi, I’m Laura.’
‘You belong to that yeller fella, eh?’ She laughed warmly.
‘Come inside and have a cup of tea.’
Laura followed. Billie continued: ‘See that lump over there, that’s my husband, Wal.’
To Laura’s left was a lounge room, and on a couch was the man Billie referred to. He looked up and nodded, a shiny-faced man with a stomach that rested on his lap. Texas went over and sat down beside him. A television was on without any sound. Billie was behind an island bench with shelves above it, filling the kettle with water at a sink against the wall.
‘Chuck all that stuff out the back,’ she said, noticing their gear.
Laura sat at the table and Billie joined her with two mugs of tea. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her face was soft and round.
‘I saw Jimmy the other day,’ she called over to Texas. ‘He said that fella out there, that one you been working for, he’s no good.’
She paused. ‘And that old fella Irish. He’s gone. There was a bit of a funeral for him. In town. That’s right, eh Wal? Remember that old woman of his. Grace. Well there was a daughter that come up from Perth. Did you know he had a daughter?’
‘He had plenty of them,’ said Wal, turning his head sideways towards the women at the table. ‘Remember, what was her name, Janey O’Brien, she was out of him. And they reckon there was a son too.’
