The Girl from Snowy River

by Jackie French

  Joey looked at the bed, considering. ‘We could move the kitchen dresser into the dining room,’ he said. They never used the dining room now.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Kirsty’s bed is lighter. Takes up less room.’

  ‘I’ll swap beds with her then.’

  He nodded. ‘It’s a grand idea, Flint.’

  And it was. For the first time since her accident dinner almost seemed normal, Joey and Kirsty sitting at the table and her with her tray on the bed. She’d peeled the potatoes for dinner and chopped the carrots for the stew.

  I can help shuck the corn when it’s ripe, she thought. Plait onions, pod the beans for seed. Now they didn’t need a fire in her bedroom, didn’t need to light an extra lamp. She could supervise Kirsty’s attempts at cooking too. Above all she had company; she was part of it all again.

  For now, it had to be enough.

  Dad always said the third snow was the one that stuck. They woke to find the world white, the snow hanging heavy on the gum trees, carpeting the ground in long white drifts that grew thinner as they passed the Rock. Snow never lingered in the valley, but it could lodge up here for weeks, until the wind warmed and brought rain to send the snow gushing into the gully, the creek swelling to a river, speeding silver between the she-oaks down below.

  She saw a glimpse of the newly white world through the window, then through the kitchen door, as Kirsty slipped out to get more firewood. Already the novelty of being in the kitchen had worn off. Day by day she saw Joey’s face grow more set, weighed down by the burdens of the farm and household.

  How long had it been since Kirsty had laughed? Kirsty should be playing with friends down at school. Joey should be planning his life, not living with the burden of a useless sister. All his dreams needed school to make them real. But how could he get there with a crippled sister to care for?

  Even if they moved down to the Macks’, she knew Joey would feel he owed them his work in return for all their help, and the Macks would accept it. None of their boys had ever gone to high school, much less taken an apprenticeship or gone to university. It would never occur to the Macks that a young man might feel confined in the valley, instead of free.

  She picked up her sewing. She’d already darned the edge of nearly every sheet and tea towel in the house; pulled apart an old jumper of Dad’s, worn through at the elbows and tatty at the hem, and used the best of the wool in new socks for Joey. She had read every book twenty times, even the Shakespeare.

  It should be Joey and Kirsty who were reading, not her!

  Kirsty slipped back into the kitchen, opening the door as little as possible to keep out the cold. Flinty wanted to yell at her to leave it wide open, so she could smell the wind, not the stale kitchen air, so she could see the sunlight and the hills. But any complaint would just make Kirsty’s face bleaker.

  The sky began to weep again by mid-afternoon. Joey put his wet boots by the fire to dry. He sat silently, his hands on his legs, his still-thin frame exhausted.

  ‘Is there water in the trough for the horses?’

  ‘Yes, Flinty.’

  ‘Did you give them some corn? They’ll need extra in this cold wind.’

  ‘It’s all done.’ His voice seemed to echo with what he didn’t say: All that I can do.

  She wanted to ask more: not from any real fear that he had left things undone, just to remind herself of the time when she’d been able to do it. But any more questions would sound like nagging.

  ‘If you can pass me the flour and the dripping and a bucket of apples from the larder I’ll make a crumble,’ she said.

  Joey smiled at that. She saw the effort that went into it, knew how hard it was to give a smile back. It wasn’t just the sky that was grey now. The light and warmth seemed to have been sucked from their lives just like it had from the winter world around.

  The apple crumble brightened up a meal that consisted of a tough haunch of kangaroo — not even a day’s boiling could soften it — with boiled potatoes and cabbage. They ate as the shadows lengthened, partly to save lamp oil and partly because there was nothing else to do, and the wind played hide-and-seek around the shutters.

  Six months earlier they might have played knucklebones or checkers after dinner, but the last eight weeks had left her brother and sister too tired for after-dinner games.

  Suddenly Joey halted, his fork halfway to his mouth. ‘You hear that?’

  ‘No,’ said Flinty. All she could hear was the wind.

  Kirsty’s eyes were wide. ‘It’s not that man again? The man who hurt Flinty…?’

  Flinty clenched her fists. Kirsty wasn’t supposed to know about Sergeant Morris, but she supposed people whispered about what you weren’t supposed to talk about. She wondered what her little sister had overheard. She forced herself to speak calmly. ‘Sergeant Morris died falling down the rocks. He can’t hurt anybody now.’

  ‘Maybe it’s his ghost —’

  ‘There are no ghosts —’ She stopped. No ghosts, except on the Rock, in the mist. Instead she said, ‘Ghosts can’t hurt us. Anyway, all the ghosts here would be kind ones.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Shh,’ said Joey, and now Flinty could hear it too: Snow King’s whinny of challenge to another horse, the clomp of hooves. Well, ghosts didn’t ride horses, unless there were ghost horses too, and none of the neighbours would have come up the mountain as late as this.

  It must be a stranger, though few swaggies rode horses… They’d have to offer a stranger hospitality on a night like this. But in the barn, she thought, with two quilts, never mind if he steals them in the morning. They weren’t having a stranger sleeping in the house.

  ‘The shotgun,’ she whispered. ‘Joey, put it under my blanket.’

  Joey nodded, eyes wide. He fetched it quietly. She felt the shotgun’s reassuring coldness as he slid it down beside her. She’d stay on watch with her hand on the trigger all night if she had to.

  They waited for the knock on the front door. Instead she heard footsteps on the side verandah. The stranger was coming around the back. Everyone would know on a night like this the family would be in the kitchen, at the back of the house, and anyway, whoever it was out there would have seen the cracks of light under the shutter.

  The footsteps sounded like a man’s. Kirsty shrank back on Flinty’s bed. Flinty put one arm around her, the other hand on the hidden shotgun. ‘Who is it?’ she yelled.

  The back door opened with a flurry of snowflakes and wind. ‘Well, that’s a fine welcome,’ said Andy. ‘Any dinner left for me?’

  Chapter 28

  15 May 1920

  Dear Diary,

  Until tonight, when I realised just how much we’d missed Andy, it had never really bothered me that we didn’t have aunts or uncles like other people. Even the Whites have cousins, though they’re mostly in prison.

  Mum was an orphan — she didn’t even know where her people came from. Dad’s parents were dead too. His father had been in the Indian Army as well — I think that was one of the reasons he let Jeff join up early, because he’d always hoped Jeff would follow his family tradition. I don’t know how our McAlpine grandparents died. I think from something he said once it may have been in some battle or raid on the North-West Frontier, but Dad never told me, though he may have told Andy. He did have cousins in England, but I think they lost touch when he became an officer and went out to India again.

  So it was just us. But everyone in the valley was family, really, even the ones who didn’t like each other, like me and Amy, and Snowy White and Barry Brown. They even had a punch-up after church one day, till the Reverend Postlewhistle put off his surplice and punched both of them on the chin. They hadn’t known he’d learned boxing!

  The next week one of the Browns’ haystacks caught alight, and Snowy saw it first and burned his hands lashing at the fire with green wattle branches so it didn’t spread to the rest of the haystacks in the paddock. Although that didn’t stop them having a punch-
up three Sundays later, but down at the creek that time so the Reverend didn’t see them.

  ‘I came as soon as I heard.’ Joey and Kirsty were bathed, in bed, their excitement turned to exhaustion, as though the responsibility of caring for their sister had been a boulder they could only now set down, after two months.

  Andy sat by her bed in the kitchen, tall and sandy haired, more freckles than ever. He’d grown a moustache too: a big red one that turned up at the ends as though he waxed them. He looked tired, but the bruises under his eyes, the ones that looked as though the war had left him bleeding inside, had gone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. It was the seventh time she’d said it since he got back.

  ‘Not your fault, Sis.’ He’d been saying that over and over. It was good to have him call her ‘Sis’ again. He’d brought his new name for her back from the war. He took her hand. It was a sudden shock how much his hand looked like Dad’s, the rider’s calluses Andy had lost in France back again. ‘It’s my fault. I should’ve been here for you.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference. I’d still have slipped.’ She carefully didn’t mention Sergeant Morris.

  ‘Or maybe you wouldn’t have.’

  He’s heard exactly what happened, she thought. Had Sandy written to him, or Mrs Mack? It had to be one or the other, because Mr Mack couldn’t do much more than sign his name, though he could read the newspaper.

  Suddenly she had to know. ‘What was Sergeant Morris like when you knew him in France?’

  Andy was silent for a moment, tweaking one end of his moustache: a new mannerism. Wondering how much to tell me, she thought. Wondering if he should tell me anything.

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘He was a good bloke. Did his share without complaining. Saw him give his bully beef to a stray dog once. He’d grown up in an orphanage, said he knew what it was like to be a stray. Jeff knew him better than me. I only met him that one time we were on leave together.’

  Andy gave an almost grin. ‘I spent my leave with a couple of mademoiselles. Right goers, they were. Caught up with Jeff and the others at this café where they knew the word for “beer”. Jeff and Sandy and Bertie told me all about the churches they’d visited, and this palace. Churches.’ He shook his head.

  It hadn’t occurred to her that Sandy would also know Sergeant Morris. But of course Sandy and Jeff had served together, after their march from the Snowy to Goulburn.

  ‘Were you there when Sergeant Morris was wounded?’

  ‘No. Heard about it though.’ She knew from his tone he wasn’t going to say more than that.

  ‘Did you ever see him afterwards? When he got better, I mean.’ Or as better as he ever got, she thought.

  ‘No. His wounds were what they called a blighty one. Got him sent to Blighty, to England, and then shipped back home. Except there wasn’t any home for him, I suppose. No family to take him in. Just the repatriation hospital. I should’ve looked him up when I came through Sydney. Didn’t even think of it. He was one of so many I met once or twice. They were in the same trench as you, or you met them in a café on leave, and then they were gone. That’s no excuse, I know. I suppose I just wanted to forget the war and all that was in it. Flinty…he was a good bloke when I knew him. Not the sort to hurt a girl.’

  ‘He was…confused. Not all there.’

  ‘Having part of your skull shot away does that to a bloke,’ he said, then added, ‘Sorry. Shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘No, I’m glad you did. I’m glad he was a good bloke. Glad that I wrote to him.’ It wasn’t entirely true. Part of her wanted him to be a villain, so she could rage against him. But even when she’d tried to run from him there’d been a desperate pity with her terror too. ‘I’m sorry that he died that way, but I think by then he was a different man from the one you knew.’ Or maybe he wasn’t, she thought. Maybe the good bloke had still been inside that poor fumbling shamble of a man, just hadn’t known what to say or how to say it, how to court a girl he’d once had a letter from, the only girl he sort of knew. Or perhaps inside the good bloke in the trenches had been the one she’d glimpsed, inside the one who’d force a kiss.

  Andy had never known Bertie Morris in normal times. She had a feeling Sandy wouldn’t want to look at churches these days, just as Andy didn’t cavort with mademoiselles any more. If he’d wanted that sort of life he’d have stayed in Sydney, not gone to Queensland droving.

  Andy wouldn’t speak of Bertie Morris again, she knew, just as he’d probably never tell her more about the day Jeff died, or what he saw in his nightmares. Well, she had her secrets now too. It was impossible to tell Andy about Nicholas, or the promise of something ‘very, very good’ that kept her going. He’d think that she was mad.

  ‘What’s that smile for, Sis? Glad I’m home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Never should have gone away.’

  ‘We needed the money.’

  Andy gave her a look she couldn’t interpret. ‘Well, I’ve got my wages now. Miss Matilda wired me extra too, when she heard I was coming home. She said her manager told her that they’d never have got Repentance back without you. They’re good people down at Drinkwater.’

  ‘They’re good people up here too. They’ve looked after us.’

  ‘Like I should have done. I could have got a job here, Sis. I have got a job, rouseabout three days a week down at Mullinses’. Won’t take me more than an hour or so to ride there and back each day. Might spend the night there sometimes. But I’ll mostly be here.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘There was another reason I had to get away.’

  ‘Because I kept questioning you?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Why would you think that? You always have asked questions, goose. No, it was just…’ He shrugged. ‘For four years I kept dreaming of home. The mountains. Mum and Dad and you lot. But when I got back —’

  ‘It wasn’t home,’ she said flatly. ‘Mum and Dad were dead. And Jeff.’

  ‘It was home all right. But it was too…sudden. That’s not the word for it. I’d had those months in camp and on the boat before I got back here. But I needed, well, space, I think, before it was all real. Does that sound barmy?’

  She squeezed his hand. ‘No.’

  ‘It was beautiful, Sis. Not like it is up here, ridge after ridge. Plains that go on to the sky, trees with no grass under them at all, just red sand as far as you can see. A flood came down while we were out there — just a little one, but one morning a dry gully was under ten feet of water. No rain. It just came up from nowhere, not even any sound.’

  ‘How can water come from nowhere?’

  He laughed. It was good to hear him laugh. ‘Not really from nowhere. It rained up north and the water flowed south, week after week, month after month, till it got to us. But my word was it good. We even had a wash.’

  ‘Bet you stank.’

  ‘I did at that. You should see Brisbane too — the river’s even bigger than the Snowy. You should just taste their bananas and pineapples. I’ll buy you all a pineapple one day, and the ladies of Brisbane…’ He grinned, and touched his moustache again. ‘Well, you don’t want to hear about that. I’m glad I did it, Sis. But I won’t go away again. Truly. I’m not just saying that.’

  There was too much that could be said between them both. Too much pain. Too much loss. He hadn’t asked about her back, her legs. She was so sick of telling the same lie, over and over: ‘It hardly hurts at all’; and the same truth: ‘I can’t sit up unless I’m propped up. I can’t move my legs either.’ She understood a little more now of why Andy and all the others wouldn’t talk of what they’d seen, what they’d been through.

  Instead he said, ‘That’s a grand horse out there, Sis. He came up to the fence to give us the once-over when I rode up.’

  She grinned. ‘His name’s Snow King. And he’s mine, remember. But you can train him. Split the money when he wins his first race.’

  ‘Sell him after that?’

  ‘Only if
we have to. Mr Mack says we should lease him to a trainer next year. I’d like to breed from him too when he’s older.’

  ‘We’ll get some grand foals from that one. Have to find a few good mares first though. Can’t see Empress as mother to a racehorse.’ He stretched and yawned. ‘It’s good to be back, Sis.’

  It was so good she didn’t even try to find the words. Instead she said, ‘Joey and Kirsty can go back to school again now. They’ve missed too much already.’

  ‘Sis…’ He hesitated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Joey can go to school. But not Kirsty. Someone has to stay here with you.’

  ‘I’m fine by myself.’

  ‘No, you’re not. And even if you were…’ He looked away. ‘I can’t do it all, Sis. Not work at Mullinses’ and keep the garden going and the housework too.’

  And care for her. Wash her, make her bed, bring her food. Flinty was silent. Andy was right. It was almost dark by the time Joey and Kirsty got back from school in winter. By then the fire would be out, the stove cold, the hens eaten by the dingoes.

  Girls married. Boys had to make their way in the world. If only one of them could get an education it had to be Joey. Girls were so often kept at home to care for frail grandparents, or even when there were too many brothers and sisters for their mother to manage. Schooling was still a luxury for girls. It isn’t fair, she thought. But then, nothing was. The world didn’t work on fair. In a fair world only those who made a war would suffer from it.

  ‘Joey wants to be a vet,’ she said.

  He looked at her steadily. ‘Sis, there’s no way we can manage that. He’d have to spend years studying. It’d cost hundreds of pounds.’ He shrugged. ‘It would be different if we had relatives he could stay with in a town. But we don’t.’