The Girl from Snowy River

by Jackie French

  It had been the longest day of her life. She had started out whole and ended it here, helpless on her bed, not even able to sit up unless she called for someone to help her. And she couldn’t stop the day by going to sleep. Her brain was as active as her body wasn’t.

  Surely Dr Sparrow was wrong! She tried to move her legs again, but she couldn’t even twist her hips. Only her toes responded properly, though she could wriggle her feet a little. But what use were feet without the legs to make them walk, run?

  Kirsty snuffled quietly in her bed across the room. A long snorting snore came from Mrs Mack down the hall.

  Cripple, she thought. Cripple. Cripple. Cripple. I’m a cripple now.

  What did life hold for a crippled girl? Nicholas had been crippled. Nicholas, who had told her that something bad was coming. This was bad…

  Life didn’t end when you were crippled. But it stopped everything she loved. Nicholas could dream of riding again, of walking with new artificial legs. But there was no artificial back for her.

  She’d never ride again, nor walk. Maybe they could rig up a chair for her, like his, so she could help in the kitchen, prop her up with pillows so she could sew.

  She hated sewing. Hated cooking too. Housework was what you did because you were a girl, what you hurried through to get to the good bits outside.

  Cripple. Cripple. No one would ever marry a crippled girl. When she’d dreamed of what her life would be it was always living in the mountains with a husband, children, horses. She’d have none of that now. That stupid, horrible glory box, sitting at the end of her bed. Kirsty could have it.

  ‘Flinty? Are you all right?’ A shadow that was Sandy appeared at the door.

  ‘No, of course I’m not. I’m a cripple!’ she wanted to yell and shriek. Instead she said, ‘I’m all right. Just can’t sleep yet.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ Sandy said softly, so Kirsty wouldn’t wake. He sat on the chair beside her. For a moment she thought he was going to take her hand. But he didn’t.

  He sat silent for a while. She didn’t try to talk either. What was there to say? But it felt good to have him beside her. The roof creaked as the night grew colder. A dingo howled, and another answered. At last Sandy said, ‘We’ll look after you, Flinty. Everyone in the valley will do what they can.’

  ‘I know.’

  Sandy hesitated, then bent down and kissed her on the cheek again. She watched him tiptoe out. Another kiss from Sandy, one that you’d give a child or an old aunt. Or a cripple, she thought.

  The tears finally came, as though her body had been too shocked to let them out before. How would they ever manage up here now? Mrs Mack couldn’t stay forever. She tried to cry silently, gulping down the sobs, so she didn’t wake Kirsty. Kirsty had school tomorrow…

  But Kirsty couldn’t go to school, not with her like this, nor Joey either. They’d have to stay to look after her, to do the chores that someone had to do, plant potatoes, fix the shingles, so they could eat and have a roof that didn’t blow away in the first winter gale.

  Maybe she should insist on going to a home for cripples, so Joey and Kirsty could be free — but they wouldn’t let her. You couldn’t just put yourself in a cripples’ home. You had to go or stay where you were put.

  Cripple. Not even able to sit up. Nicholas could sit, could move around. Nicholas was getting new legs, maybe a new life too. Lucky Nicholas.

  Slowly the tears stopped. Sleep nibbled at her, sweet and dark, but she forced it away. There was something she had to remember. Something about Nicholas. About his chair, maybe…

  Then she remembered.

  Something bad is going to happen, he’d said, or words a bit like that. But there’ll be good coming, and it will be very, very good. That’s what he said, isn’t it? she thought. ‘Very, very good’ as though he had to say the ‘very’ twice so she’d know how good it was going to be.

  Good. This was the bad. But there’d be good and she’d be happy. And that meant staying in the mountains, because she never could be happy down below.

  They’d manage. Her ghost from the future had said so. He’d been right about the bad coming. Now she had to trust that the good would come as well.

  The cuckoo gave its warbling three notes out in the maple tree. Dawn must be coming. At last she slept.

  Chapter 26

  20 March 1920

  Dear Diary,

  Kirsty propped me up on pillows and brought me my diary and the ink and pen. It’s hard writing like this. I don’t know what to say.

  Every morning I wake up and then remember that I’m crippled. I think that is the hardest moment of every day — when I have to remember it again. Last night was hard too. I could see the sky turn that pale blue-gold that means the full moon is rising from behind the ridge. I wanted to be outside to watch it bob up from the dark, its light eating the stars. I have watched the full moon rise every month of my life, I think. One of my earliest memories is of sitting with Dad on the verandah waiting for that final jump from behind the black ridge into the sky, as though the moon was too excited to be held down any longer. But I can’t watch it now unless someone pushes my bed around. I am enough bother already without that.

  I think that without Nicholas’s warning and his promise I’d have turned my face to the wall, and tried to pretend that none of this was real. But Nicholas said that something ‘very, very good’ is coming after the bad. I have to think of that. I have to.

  Sandy has put a jar of everlastings by my bed. I touch them sometimes. They look like a glimpse of sunlight from the mountain. He comes and sits with me at night too, when the pain is bad and the others are asleep. It is funny how he knows just when it’s at its worst. Last night he said that when he was wounded an Australian nurse told him to tell the part that hurt that everything was being done to help it. The nurse said that pain is the body’s way of saying help and you had to reassure it. After that you should think of things to look forward to, never what you might have lost.

  Maybe that was why Sandy said he thought of pikelets. No matter how bad his wound was — and he still won’t speak of it — he knew that all he had to do was think of pikelets and get home.

  I said I’d rather think of apple pie and we laughed. It was the first time I had laughed since it happened. Then we had to be quiet in case we woke Kirsty.

  Sandy went back to bed. I managed to roll a bit — I’ve learned it hurts if I stay in one position for too long — and thought of apple pie, and Sandy and Kirsty and Joey and Andy and me all eating it. It’s funny, but it did sort of make the pain a bit better and I could sleep.

  Mrs White brought Amy in the sulky up here yesterday. They had made scones but they weren’t as good as mine or Mrs Mack’s. Amy wanted to talk about her glory box and the house her fiancé is building for them. Mrs White said they’d ‘buried that poor soldier who fell down the rocks’ last Tuesday. Mrs Mack hadn’t told me, though Mr Mack must have told her and Sandy when he came up here with the milk and papers and meat. Which means that even Mrs White doesn’t know it had anything to do with me. I’m glad Amy doesn’t. She’d tell everyone.

  I just feel empty when I think of Sergeant Morris now. It’s as though he was killed in the war, but it just didn’t catch up with him till now. It’s as though it had nothing to do with me or the valley or Snow King at all. I’d ask Joey to put flowers on his grave but someone might wonder. I’ll keep him in my prayers.

  It was strange how well they did manage. Flinty had forgotten that Mrs Mack had ‘managed’ for so many years before, when her Valma had the polio.

  After only three days it was almost routine. Mrs Mack showed Kirsty how to wash her, rolling Flinty to one side and then the other in the bed; how to use a big soup bowl as a bedpan; how to prop her up and put a tray on pillows, so she could feed herself or write in her diary or read a newspaper; even how to make a bed with her still in it, putting on half a sheet and rolling her back and forth again.

  Flinty couldn’t move much her
self — she could roll a little to each side, using her elbows and feet to move her unresponsive back, but every time she tried to sit by herself or roll right over her back screamed pain and refused to obey, though she remembered forcing her body to roll down the hill after her fall. (Even she called it a ‘fall’ now, pretending poor mad Mr Morris had never met her. Like Andy, like Nicholas running from the memory of war, she thought. And then: maybe they were right. It was easier to put those minutes with Mr Morris behind a door, somewhere in her mind, and never open it. Her life held all the pain she could bear right now.)

  It hurt. Lying on her back hurt, and the longer she lay still the greater the pain grew. The only relief was being rolled on her side, till the pain began again, an hour or so later, and she bore it until she could no longer and had to call and ask to be rolled over again.

  The nights were the worst. She’d sleep for an hour, perhaps, after Sandy had crept into her room and out again, but then the pain would wake her again, in her legs this time, from her hips to her knees, instead of her back. She didn’t like to call for help. And so she lay there, she and the pain, counting the chimes of Mum’s clock in the parlour, waiting for the cuckoo’s call outside, and then the kookaburras, till someone could move her body, her stupid, horrible, pain-filled body, and make it bearable again.

  On the third day Joey worked out that if they propped her on either side with pillows she could lie back one way, and then the other. It helped a lot.

  Meanwhile Mrs Mack was ‘cooking up a storm’ as she said, in the kitchen, and teaching Kirsty at the same time, filling the food safe with long-lasting fruitcake and gingerbread and Anzac biscuits, making sure Kirsty knew how to feed the yeast each night and use half to make the next morning’s bread, how to rub the eggs with clean dripping to keep them through the winter.

  Outside Sandy and Joey filled the back verandah with split logs and piled the outside woodheap high, dug and bagged the first crop of potatoes, shovelled out the hen yard and spread the manure on the corn.

  But at the end of a week Mrs Mack asked Joey to saddle her horse again. It was time to go back to her own home and duties, and for Sandy to go home too.

  ‘But I’ll be up on Saturday and I’ll send one of the boys up every second day too. And if there’s anything you need, you come on down,’ she added to Joey. She bent down and kissed Flinty’s cheek. ‘There’s always room for you all with us.’

  Flinty shook her head, just as she had after Dad had died, after Andy went droving. There wasn’t really room for them all at the Macks’, even now the oldest boys had their own homes, and Valma and Rick were gone, though at least these days all the Macks left at home had a bed to themselves.

  ‘We’ll manage,’ said Flinty. But it was good to be asked, to know that if managing was ever not possible — but they would manage, they would — the welcome was there.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Mack dubiously. ‘Your Andy should be home soon.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell him.’

  Mrs Mack stared. ‘Andy has a right to know!’

  ‘No!’ How could she tell Mrs Mack that Andy had been hurt by the war too? Somehow getting to know Nicholas had made her see that Andy needed time for his own wounds to heal.

  Mrs Mack shook her head. ‘You’re stubborn as your father.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Flinty tiredly.

  Chapter 27

  5 May 1920

  Dear Diary,

  I thought there would be nothing to write about, stuck here. Maybe I notice little things more. A big tree fell over last night, up on the hill. No wind. I think it just decided it was time to fall, or it was long dead and a possum jumped on it. The possum must have got a fright.

  I heard the first shoosha as a native cat hissed out in the garden last night. They come down every autumn to try to get the hens. If we didn’t pen the chooks up the native cats and dingoes would get them the first night. Shoosha shoosha shoosha, the cat said. I’ve only seen them a couple of times. Once it was a mother with two kittens. They don’t look like real cats: more like tiny tigers but with spots.

  This morning I watched a daddy-long-legs eat a moth, one of the big fat ones with eyes on their wings. It took almost all day. I suppose a moth like that is a feast for a spider.

  I have read every book in the bookcases this week. At least in a book I am away from my body for a while. But I want to do things, not just read about them. I want my life.

  ‘You goin’ all right?’ asked Georgie Green.

  She’d heard his horse plod up the track, Joey’s voice yell a greeting, Kirsty’s excited clanging as she put the kettle on then dashed into their bedroom to put on her red shoes and check her plaits were neat, the soft thud of Georgie’s feet in socks coming down the corridor to her bedroom. (Mutti Green never let the men wear boots indoors, not on her spotless rag rugs.)

  ‘I’m fine,’ lied Flinty.

  ‘Good-oh,’ said Georgie awkwardly. He was fourteen and thin as a beanpole, with hair the colour of a winter fox. ‘I was just passin’, headin’ up the mountain. Goin’ rabbiting. Mutti wants some skins to make a blanket.’

  As though there aren’t as many rabbits down in the valley, thought Flinty. But the Greens would never make a visit look like charity. Georgie held up a hessian sack. ‘Mutti sent you one of her cheeses and an apple cake.’

  Flinty blinked away the tears. She cried at everything lately. ‘Mutti’s apple cake is the best in the world.’

  Georgie grinned. He might not know how to talk in a girl’s sickroom, but he knew his Mutti’s apple cake. ‘I know.’

  Flinty remembered Mum talking about Mrs Grünberg’s ‘German apple cake’ before the war. The cake had lost the German part of its name at the same time the Grünbergs became the Greens.

  ‘Tea’s ready!’ Kirsty peered into the bedroom. ‘You want a cup, Flinty?’

  Flinty shook her head. She lay in her bedroom, trying to hear the voices in the kitchen.

  ‘…and Hannah’s had her baby,’ said Georgie. ‘A girl, but Vati says that’s all right, plenty of time to have a boy later. And the Whites bought a new ram at the sale in Gibber’s Creek. Well, they say they bought it but Vati has his doubts…’

  Life, she thought, and I am shut away from it.

  Time passed. The sun climbed the sky each day, then fell down into the night. Nights of pain and days of…managing, thought Flinty, but only just, only because all the work had been done for winter. Winter was the slow time, Dad said, the reward you got for working hard all summer and autumn, the time to make a new chair by the fire, or whittle a wooden spoon for Mum, a time to knit and make new trousers, all the picking and bottling and jamming done till the next summer.

  Joey exercised Snow King for her, keeping to the paddock, riding the horse round and round, which bored them both. He took Empress on longer rides, to check his rabbit traps.

  She had lost track of days and had to ask Sandy what day it was when he called by with a forequarter of mutton and a bag of flour he refused to let them pay for and a crock of butter well salted to last for weeks. She drew up a calendar after that: twentieth of April, twenty-first…

  The first snow fell at night, a thin scatter like flour on the kitchen floor, gone as soon as the sun was a handspan above the ridges. She saw it from her bedroom window, the only glimpse of the mountains she had now, and shut her mind to the possibility it might be all she would see for months or years, perhaps forever.

  She needed a bathchair like Nicholas’s. Joey was strong enough to help her into it and out again. But a chair like that cost money — as much as ten pounds perhaps, or even twenty, maybe even more.

  She thought she might have fallen into a grey hole of pain and despair those first two months, if it hadn’t been for neighbours. Sandy came twice a week, at least. Mrs Mack visited every Saturday, as she’d promised, always bringing some treat, coconut cream pie or damson pie or apple and blackberry. She brought books too, borrowed from every family in the valley. ‘Your d
ad was such a reader,’ she said, as though reading was something peculiar, like a white kangaroo. ‘I thought you might have a taste for it too.’

  Somehow every few days someone else ‘just happened to be passing by’, as though there was any real reason to come so far up the mountain. Even old Dusty Jim — ‘just out for a Sunday ride’ — stopped to help Joey bring in more firewood from the yard pile. Pat and Snowy White stayed to nail down a bit of flapping roof, and left a chunk of home-corned beef.

  She watched the patch of blue turn white, then grey. Rain oozed rather than fell. She knitted — socks, because that was the most complicated pattern she could think of — her fingers, at least, busy. She wriggled her toes, her feet. Sometimes in the afternoons she could move her knees too, but every morning they were just lumps again.

  More feet down the corridor, in boots this time. Joey.

  ‘How you going, Flint?’

  ‘Fine,’ she lied again. ‘How are the horses?’ She tried to keep the yearning from her voice.

  ‘Snug in their stalls. Reckon Empress showed Snow King what a stall is for. Don’t worry,’ he added, ‘there’s hay in the rack for them.’

  She nodded. They’d need extra food in the cold, but the hay would do for now. No need for corn when neither was being worked or ridden much. Suddenly the paddocks seemed further away than Sydney or Calcutta or London.

  ‘How are the onion seedlings? Have the peas come up?’

  ‘It’s all fine.’ He spoke wearily. ‘I know what to do.’

  ‘Joey,’ she said impulsively. ‘Please move my bed into the kitchen.’

  ‘The kitchen!’ It was as though she’d asked him to move the chooks into the parlour or Empress into Mum and Dad’s bedroom.

  ‘Please. It’s…’ She hesitated. She couldn’t say she was lonely: that would seem like a reproach. Joey and Kirsty had so much to do, with no extra time to spend with her. Nor could she say she wanted a better idea of what was happening on the farm. ‘I can do things more easily in the kitchen. We would only need the one lamp too.’ She dreaded the dark of the long winter nights, lying here unable to read or sew to save the cost of lamp oil or candles.