The Girl from Snowy River

by Jackie French

  The wind muttered down the valley. It almost sounded like Jeff’s voice. I remembered that time my loose tooth came out, and I was wailing that now the tooth fairy wouldn’t come, and he grinned and got me a sheep’s tooth and said, ‘There. Now the fairy will have to give you twice as much.’

  I suppose you’re always closest to the brother who’s just older than you. Me and Jeff, and Sandy. We all sort of fitted together. Now there was just me left, on the Rock, with Mum.

  At last we walked back to the house. I served out the shepherd’s pie and Mum pretended to eat.

  The marchers will have camped again for the night now. They are going to stop in every town, all the way to the training camp in Goulburn. I hope there are hundreds and thousands of volunteers marching then.

  And because this is my diary and no one will read it ever except me I can say here ‘I love Sandy Mack’. I wish I had said the words to him. I will say them when I have an address so can send him a letter, and socks, and a cake. Mrs Mack will send him those but I want him to have them from me too, because I am his girl now, forever and ever.

  Here is another confession too. I feel jealous. Just a bit. They are off to fight the Huns and I have to stay here, and go to school. It’s always been the three of us, collecting wood or swimming in the creek or riding down to the Snowy to go fishing. Now it’s just Sandy and Jeff, and me back here.

  I love you, Sandy Mack. I always will.

  ‘Now you sit down and tuck in, Flinty love,’ said Mrs Mack comfortably, wiping her buttery hands on her sacking apron and shoving an extra chair in next to hers at the kitchen table. ‘There’s two apple teacakes just out of the oven.’

  Flinty forced herself not to look at Sandy, down at the other end of the table. Mrs Mack had seated her next to where Sandy usually sat, but when he’d seen her he’d sat down near Mr Mack instead.

  It hurt. Seeing Sandy always hurt now.

  Why had he changed? He’d written ‘All my love, Sandy’ in his letters, right up to when he had been wounded, that terrible time when Jeff had been killed, and Mum had her heart attack. They hadn’t even known Sandy had been wounded for weeks — there’d been a mix-up with his name — and by then he was recovering, safe back in England.

  She’d sent Sandy a pair of bedsocks she’d knitted, and a stomach warmer, and a ginger fruitcake because he loved ginger. But he didn’t write any more letters after that, or not to her, just notes to Mrs Mack, not even saying ‘thank Flinty for the cake’, and a letter to Mum saying he was sorry about Jeff, how he was a good mate, and had died quickly, with no pain.

  She’d tried to tell herself it would be different when he got home. She’d even gone down to Gibber’s Creek with the Macks to meet his train, in her blue dress with a bunch of everlastings, all of them wearing masks because of the influenza epidemic. And there was Sandy, looking taller and thinner and sort of bent, from his wound in the war she supposed, but still totally and always the Sandy who she loved.

  Their eyes met for half a second, then he looked away.

  He hadn’t met her eyes since.

  He’d hugged his family. Not her. She’d thrown the flowers away in the station rubbish bin, and hoped he hadn’t noticed.

  That had been eight months ago now. And it still felt like a knife slice every time she saw him, even here, in the warm comfort of the Macks’ kitchen.

  Mrs Mack plonked the cakes next to the loaf of bread sliced into doorstops, the piled, steaming pikelets, the dish of butter freshly churned that morning, the five pots of jam (strawberry, plum, apricot, blackberry and crab apple), the apple chutney, the hunk of Mutti Green’s cheese and the sliced cold mutton — the dishes the Mack family regarded as a normal afternoon tea.

  Nine pairs of eager hands reached for bread or passed the butter. The Macks’ kitchen table always had as much food as you could cram onto it, and as many Mack sons and grandsons who could be crammed about it too.

  There were no empty places at the Macks’ table, not like there were at Rock Farm, despite the loss of the Macks’ daughter Valma early this year in the influenza, and their Rick at Passchendaele. Today the table was crowded with five Mack sons and one grandson — even married Johnno Mack ate lunch and afternoon tea at his mum’s, going back home for tea with his wife and younger children — as well as Mr Mack with his straggly grey whiskers, skinny as a rake despite his wife’s good feeding.

  Dear Mrs Mack, thought Flinty, with her bottom as big as a sofa and ankles bulging over her laced shoes. She fought down the guilt about Joey and Kirsty at home up on the mountain, with only two-day-old bread and golden syrup for afternoon tea. She hadn’t had time to make fresh bread today, not and come down here. The jam she’d made last summer (a lonely task without Mum to sing with and share stories while they chopped and stirred) had been eaten, and there was no money to buy sugar to make more, or fruit on the trees yet, for that matter. If only you could make jam from rock and rabbit skins…

  ‘Eat up, Flinty love,’ said Mrs Mack encouragingly. ‘You’re thin as a match with the wood shaved off. Isn’t she, Sandy?’

  Sandy didn’t look up from his strawberry-jam-laden pikelet. ‘She looks all right,’ he said.

  He still looked like the Sandy who’d ridden after brumbies with her and Dad and her brothers, the Sandy who’d helped her with her mathematics, the Sandy who’d kissed her; although he still had that strange crouching twist to his shoulders, from the wound he’d never speak about.

  But he was still freckled; his hair was still the same colour as his name; he was still all knees and elbows. He was still her Sandy.

  Except he wasn’t.

  She took a pikelet from the dish Toby passed her, trying not to look at the two missing fingers of Toby’s left hand. He’d lost those at Passchendaele too. A sudden memory slapped her: Toby and Andy grinning as they posed for a photo when they enlisted together the week war was declared.

  This is still the world of war, she thought, even here, despite the generous plenty of the Macks’ kitchen and the full table. But outside there were wombat holes in fences left unrepaired while so many men were at the war, the plagues of rabbit, with none to shoot or trap them, and no horses since the army took them all.

  It was as though the families in the valley struggled to be free, to make their lives again. But the war wouldn’t be left behind.

  ‘How are you and the youngsters doing up top there?’ asked Mrs Mack, a bit too casually, pouring her husband a cup of tea strong enough to melt the teaspoon. Mrs Mack may have lost her second son to the war, and cared for her crippled daughter till she’d died in the influenza epidemic that had taken Captain McAlpine, but she still had a heart big enough to care for the whole valley.

  ‘We do all right,’ said Flinty.

  ‘Heard your Andy’s gone to Queensland droving for Miss Matilda,’ said Mr Mack, around a mouthful of bread and mutton. Mr Mack was as strong as the draught horses that pulled his plough, but too old to have gone to war. ‘Drinkwater’s goin’ in for sheep again now there’s no need for cans of bully beef, I hear. Well, she’ll get a better price for them cattle up in Queensland.’

  ‘What’s your Andy doing, going so far away again?’ demanded Mrs Mack. ‘Seems like he’d have wanted to be at home after all those years away. It’s the lad’s duty to look after his brother and sisters.’

  ‘We manage,’ said Flinty.

  ‘That’s as may be. But when the young ’uns go back to school after the summer holidays you’ll be all alone up there. And Joey’s what? Twelve? Not old enough to be the man of the house.’

  ‘Joey and Kirsty aren’t going back to school.’

  Dad’s pension from the Indian Army had stopped with his death. Selling rabbit skins was the only way they had to get money just now and she couldn’t do the chores by herself as well as keep up Joey’s traps. Kirsty was too young to ride down the mountain and back every day by herself.

  Nor were there horses to sell any more. Rock Farm’s horses had been
sold to the army in the first year of the war. Now the proud animals lay dead in Palestine maybe, or drudged in the Indian Army. Only roos and rabbits roamed the mountaintop paddocks now.

  Flinty bit her lip to try to stop the sudden tears. Tears always seemed to be lurking these days. The horses had trotted off so bravely, Prince Henry and Good Queen Bess and all the others, bred with such dedication ever since Dad had been invalided out of the Indian Army with fever, thirty years back. The mountains had given Captain McAlpine life again, he’d said, and given him a family and his horses too.

  Till early this year, and the influenza.

  She looked up to find Sandy passing her the apple teacake. ‘Better get in quick or it’ll be gone,’ he muttered.

  She took a slice and sniffed instead of blowing her nose, hoping no one would notice her wet face. There was tenpence halfpenny in the jam jar under her kitchen floorboards. Dad’s funeral had been paid for, and the doctor’s bill…but the rates…

  Flinty tried to shut her mind to the rates bill, sitting accusingly under the clock on the mantelpiece. It was only three pounds two shillings, but three pounds two shillings was as far away as the moon.

  She just had to keep going as best she could. In a few months Andy would be in Brisbane, the Drinkwater cattle sold and sheep filling Miss Matilda’s paddocks again, paddocks half empty since the men went to war. Andy could telegraph them a money order from his first wages. And maybe Joey’s rabbit skins would bring in a pound or even two as well. How long could rates go unpaid before the government took away your farm?

  ‘More mutton, Flinty love?’

  ‘I beg your pardon? Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs Mack.’ Flinty was suddenly aware that Mr Mack and the boys were getting up for a last few hours’ work before sundown. ‘No, thank you. I wondered,’ she took a breath, ‘I wondered if I could speak to Toby. Privately,’ she added.

  ‘Toby?’ Mrs Mack gave Sandy a quick glance. Sandy stared at his jam-laden pikelet, expressionless.

  Toby pushed back his chair from the table. ‘No time to sit round yakking. Need to fence the river paddock. Spring flood ripped out the floodgate…’

  Mr Mack looked at Flinty, then at his Toby. Mr Mack knows what I want to ask, she thought.

  ‘Nothing that can’t wait till tomorrow, lad,’ said Mr Mack gently. ‘You have a talk with the girl.’

  ‘But Dad…’

  Mr Mack laid a cracked and calloused hand on his son’s arm. ‘She’s owed that,’ he said quietly.

  Toby stared at his father. He was as tall as Sandy, broader across the shoulders, his nose still crooked from where Bluey White had broken it when they were eight years old. ‘What would you know…?’ he began. He stopped at a cry, almost a sob, from his mother. Mrs Mack’s hands were suddenly busy with the teapot, her face resolutely intent on refilling it with hot water.

  Toby stood up. ‘All right then,’ he muttered. ‘Out on the verandah?’

  Flinty nodded. She glanced again at Sandy. For once he was actually looking at her, his expression impossible to read. Well, Sandy wouldn’t talk to her. Toby was her last chance. She followed Toby along the passage, smelling of Sunlight soap from Mrs Mack’s spring-cleaning, then outside. She settled onto one of the shaggy armchairs and looked out across the valley, the silver thread of the creek that led down to the broad flats of the Snowy River, the mountains purple against the sky’s blue.

  You could see the other valley houses from here, the Mullinses’ cottage with its shingle roof, the one-room schoolhouse, with the schoolmaster’s house beside it, the hint of heat rather than smoke from the Greens’ chimney. The Greens had been the Grünbergs till the war, but no one in the valley remarked on their sudden change of name when Germany became the enemy. Beyond them were the Browns and then the Whites.

  Dad said that Mr White had been ‘Bruiser Snodgrass’ and wanted for cattle theft in two states before he’d changed his name and come to the valley. The White boys still stole any calf that wasn’t branded and assumed that any land not fenced belonged to them and their cattle, which included the thousands of square miles across the Snowy. You didn’t want to cross any White boy after a night on the booze — or even before it.

  But Ginger White was buried in France with Jeff and Rick now, and when old Ma White heard Dad was sick the other White boys had ridden up and chopped enough wood to see them through a month. The Colours of the Valley, Dad had called them all, when the Grünbergs changed their name to Green.

  One of the sheep dogs gave a sharp bark. It jumped up onto the verandah and onto Toby’s lap. He patted it absently. Flinty kept her eyes from the scar where his fingers had been lost.

  ‘What do you want?’ Toby asked shortly.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I want to know about the war.’

  Toby glanced up at her defensively. ‘Sandy wrote to your mum all he knew about Jeff’s death. It was quick, like Sandy said. Jeff didn’t feel a thing.’

  Her brother’s name still had the power to hurt. ‘I know. That’s what his captain said in his letter too. That it was quick. That Jeff felt no pain.’ She clasped her hands together, digging the fingernails into her wrist. ‘Toby, that’s what the letter your mum got said about Rick too. And what they said about Ginger White. That it was sudden; that they didn’t feel a thing.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘The letters can’t all be true,’ she said softly.

  He stared at her. ‘What do you know of it?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s why I’m asking. Sandy won’t talk to me. Not about anything. Andy wouldn’t tell me anything either. So I’m asking you.’

  ‘There’s nothing you need to know.’ He looked down at the dog, automatically caressing its fur. ‘Jeff was Sandy’s best mate. He was my mate too. You think I don’t miss him as well? And Rick? What difference does it make now how Jeff died? He’s dead, Flinty. Gone. Like Rick and all the others. And we have to go on living.’

  She had to force her voice to stay steady. ‘I didn’t come here to talk about Jeff. I need to know about Andy.’ And Sandy, she thought. But if Sandy won’t even talk to me maybe I don’t have the right to know.

  Toby looked up at that. ‘What do you mean? Andy didn’t get more than a scratch the whole four years. We called him Butter Boy, because he seemed to slide through any trouble. What do you need to know about Andy?’

  ‘I need to know what’s sent him away from his sisters and brother, why he’s run all the way to Queensland when we need him here. Why did he scream with nightmares every night? I found him crying out by the well once —’

  ‘And you want to know why the poor bloke’s gone droving?’ For the first time Toby’s voice rose. ‘Just listen to yourself, Felicity McAlpine. Maybe your brother’s gone because you’ve driven him away. Telling you would make him live it all again. It’s bad enough that we had to see it, day after day, year after year, without bringing it home for all you too. You and your questions —’

  ‘You leave her alone.’ Sandy stood in the doorway, in that strange new crouch, his lips a hard straight line. Toby stopped as though an axe had chopped off his speech.

  Flinty stared at Sandy, then at Toby, his face suddenly expressionless. ‘Got to help with the fencing,’ he muttered. He flung himself off the verandah and headed round the house.

  Sandy still stood there, not quite looking at her, but not looking away either. Flinty waited, forcing back tears again, hoping he’d join her on the verandah. But he didn’t.

  ‘Do you think I drove Andy away?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know,’ said Sandy. He seemed to consciously force his body straight. ‘Flinty, just leave it, all right? There’s some things women don’t need to know. Just give Andy time. Give him a bit of quiet.’

  ‘I see,’ she said dully.

  ‘No, you don’t. I’m sorry. Toby shouldn’t have said those things. Shouldn’t have said anything. I better go help with the fencing. Dad’ll put his back out with the crowbar if I don’t stop h
im. You doing all right for firewood?’

  ‘Yes. We spent all last week hauling branches home.’

  ‘You need some good logs to keep burning all night. I’ll bring the axe up next week.’

  ‘I don’t need more wood!’ she cried. ‘Why won’t anyone talk about the war?’

  ‘Because you’re better off out of it,’ said Sandy flatly. His boots sounded hollow as he tramped across the verandah and then off towards the paddock.

  Flinty watched him go, the tears cold on her cheeks. Sandy, who’d dammed the creek with her every summer to make a swimming hole, till the next spring’s floods hurled their mud and branches down and away. Sandy, who’d punched Tiger White’s nose when he tried to kiss her behind the school water tank. Sandy, who had written from Sydney, from Egypt, from England, from France: All my love, Sandy.

  If only he really was different, she thought. But this man was still the boy; more than he had been, but never less.

  ‘Sandy didn’t mean it, lovey…’

  Flinty turned as Mrs Mack came out the door.

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Well, maybe he did at that. But when you get to my age you realise there’s no point trying to make a man talk when he don’t want to. He’ll get round to it in his own good time.’ She hesitated. ‘Got some things for you to take home. Forequarter of mutton, some of my jam. Your ma always said I made the best apple jelly in the valley. There’s a knack to it, I admit. You sure you’re all right up there? What the captain was thinking of building so far up the mountain I’ll never know.’

  ‘Dad liked the view,’ said Flinty.

  ‘Well, he got a view all right,’ said Mrs Mack, looking at her own comfortable farmyard, the tamed paddocks of young corn and potatoes, the dusty hens clucking in the yard. ‘You’re sitting in the clouds half the time. And that big Rock. Spooky, I call it. I’ve heard stories…’ She stopped, as though realising that ghost stories weren’t going to reassure a young girl who’d lost her brother and her parents, who had an even younger brother and sister to look after in an isolated house. ‘It don’t seem right, three children on their own,’ she said instead.