I was standing on the rim of the grave, swaying with the movement of the people while they gripped onto each other and to me for support, mourning and wailing. The men began to lower the coffin. I was feeling emotional myself, my eyes misty with tears as I thought of another coffin, a much smaller one. Suddenly, the coffin stopped, jammed on a terrible angle, and so did everything else, hymns, wailing, and crying. I looked about me at all those eyes peering over each other and into the grave. I was torn between laughing and crying.
‘Everyone leave now, burial finished,’ I called, shooing everyone away from the grave. The men pulled the coffin out, knocked out the boulder, then lowered the coffin successfully and filled the grave. I retired to the kitchen for a pannikin of tea. How many more deaths?
CHAPTER 8
A Dark Shadow
Molly left about seventy years’ worth of personal papers and letters for me to dispose of. The afternoon before her passing she had held my hand and looked at me with pale and distant eyes and asked me to do this myself. I promised her I would. I began the work of sorting through them, but had trouble settling into Molly’s house after her death. Out of the corner of my eye I sometimes glimpsed a dark shadow passing through the family room as if heading towards the carport. This happened to me three times, but it really got to me when Leisha, visiting with Adam and their baby, saw it as well. Is it possible that Molly had come back into our lives? Could she be a ghost now and visiting me? I was ready to freak out. Should I pack my suitcase and get the hell out of here? Then another day my young grandson Brock was playing with his toys in Molly’s bedroom doorway, he then started laughing and giggling while holding his toys high. Was Molly’s ghost playing with him? I believe that our lost loved ones are constantly around us. This is how I have come to terms with my beloved son Kelly’s death and McCorry’s death. I’ve convinced myself our loved ones live in another place, so in my mind this shadow had to be Molly and the fear left me. Despite these events though, the house was peaceful and after a while I managed to get the job done.
Terry jumped on his tractor and didn’t get off it until all the firebreaks were completed. I wondered if that was his way of grieving his mother’s death. I never saw him cry.
The next job was drafting the last of the Friesian steers out of the paddocks to be sold to the meatworks. This was some draft! These tall, leggy steers were new to me, some were as high as I am tall, but they were reasonably placid. Terry was trying to draft out the heavyweights in a round yard that had a three-way draft — meaning he could draft out steers and heifers separately, and bush the rest. He was dancing from one foot to the other and never left off shouting abuse, whether to the cattle or to me, all the time waving a lump of poly pipe about his head.
‘Push them up!’ he bellowed while performing what looked like a Maori war dance. ‘Push the fucking things up!’ He was waving the poly pipe, dancing and swearing at the top of his voice. He seemed quite out of control.
I stopped in my tracks and watched him, amazed. The cattle were stirred up too, and the animal closest to me kicked out with its left hindquarter and came close to wiping my face from my head. Worse, I was now covered in yard muck that was a mixture of urine and shit. Dodging cattle while trying to wipe the putrid mess from my face, I had another close call as the steers rallied around the yard.
‘Push the fucking things up!’ Terry yelled again.
That was it. I wasn’t risking my life for his rampant incompetence, getting the animals unnecessarily — and dangerously — wound up. ‘Push them up yourself!’ I yelled, then turned and walked away. If I was running this show you wouldn’t have a job in a cattle yard with me, I was thinking as I pulled out my thermos and sat on a log under a shade tree for a cup of tea.
During the haymaking Terry loaded the truck while I carted it to the fenced-off hay site for stacking. One day amongst the hay rolls I was bitten by a spider on the back of the neck. In no time the bite was the size of an egg and I felt as if I had a sudden bout of flu coming on. All hot and cold with fever, I should have given myself a rest until the poison had left my system, but I was angry with my husband, who was sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of his tractor listening to the horseraces, oblivious to my reaction, and so I kept on at my job, determined to show him how a person pulled their weight.
Leisha and Adam were still in Perth with their beautiful baby, and we all had Christmas together, Terry too. Robby stayed in Broome, which bothered me. I understood why he preferred to be away from us, but still it hurt me, not least because I realised that if I left Terry there would no longer be a barrier to seeing my son. It was in my hands.
In January and February, when the hay was done, we were preoccupied with cows having trouble calving. Calves were being born with some sort of deformity, their front quarters buckling under towards the body, leaving them unable to stand or suckle. Talking to other farmers, we discovered we were not alone with this problem. Presumably it was some sort of mineral deficiency. We dosed them with everything we could think of, and after a month or two most managed to gain sufficient strength to be able to stand and drink from their mothers.
That summer I was quite unwell with nausea and stomach pains. I was bleeding internally, and after many blood tests, bone scans, a colonoscopy and a trip to the operating theatre, they had come up with zilch. As a last resort, my breast cancer medication was changed. Within hours I was suffering an excruciating headache. The light was intolerable to my eyes, and the pain was so unbearable I could feel every follicle of hair prickling on my scalp. Even so, that afternoon I was at a heifer sale, right back in the thick of it again. It was totally self-destructive of me; but I told myself I had to pull my weight beside my husband. He wanted me with him at the cattle sale, so I would be there, even if it killed me. I knew Terry well enough to know that he hated being alone, so as his wife I felt it my responsibility to be by his side and help him if needed. I’d made my bed and I had to lie in it. In retrospect, it is clear that I had lost all confidence in myself and was no longer able to see things in perspective. I was losing my will to stand up for myself, it was easier to simply follow. I was following him in the fog.
On the other hand, I was getting really angry over the way Terry used my Landcruiser on the farm. The mats were full of cow shit, the car filthy inside and out. It wasn’t as if there were no other vehicles available on the farm — there was an old Commodore and a Statesmen, both in excellent condition, yet he chose to drive my Landcruiser through the mud and slush around the farm. I hated the thought that he was running my vehicle into the ground for no good reason. He said he would pay the difference on my next trade-in on another Landcruiser, but I had no reason to believe that he would keep his word. He never had on such things before. It seemed he could always find money for racehorses and to gamble, but he could never play fair with his wife.
It was costing me money being married to Terry — and it seemed I was getting a lot less return than he was. I could not farm the Shiralee the way I wanted to because I wasn’t there. My own operation was going backwards while I helped my husband with his empire. He advised me to sell the Shiralee and buy a farm closer to Wildwood so that I could run my own cattle and not rely on someone else to do it for me, but I didn’t want to sell the Shiralee. It was my sanctuary, a place to rest and heal when my marriage became too difficult for me to deal with.
Somewhere in the middle of February 2002 was such a time. After a day at the Wildwood farm, mentally and emotionally exhausted and pig-headedly working my guts out by my husband’s side, I was suddenly tired of the anger that surrounded me. Terry’s house on the farm was rented out so whenever we were at Wildwood, we would stay in Molly’s house — it had always been that way. In anger one day he told me if I wanted a home of my own I would have to sell my farm and build one myself on his farm. Not bloody likely, I thought. Molly’s house was solid brick and sturdy enough, but the inside had never had any work done on it. I tried to express to Terry my frustrations o
ver living with perished curtains and water-rotted carpet, but that was useless and in the end I gave up.
I packed my suitcase, put the dogs in the Landcruiser, and three and a half hours later I arrived at the Shiralee. I went straight to bed and slept until ten the following morning when I woke to the little blue wren tapping on my bedroom windowsill. I felt calm and at peace. If only my life could always be as free of stress. Nothing I had ever done before made me feel so insecure and constantly uptight as my marriage did.
But on the morning of my third day back at the Shiralee Terry telephoned. He wanted me to come home to him and, just as I had done before, I left the same day and returned to Wildwood. I don’t know why. I wasn’t happy and it seemed as if I was being led. Terry needed a helping hand so I would oblige. When I was down and very low, it was just easier for me to follow. I never had the energy to argue or the will to stand up for myself. I couldn’t see what was happening to me.
If part of me had believed in the bed of roses he promised, I had no excuses for my delusions! The following morning I was Terry’s stockhand again, doing the dirty work of trucking new steers in to the dairy yards. The farmhand wouldn’t have a bar of it. The Friesian and Hereford steers were as wild as chicken hawks, having had little handling — in the Kimberley I would have said they were feral. The cattle yard was made from weld mesh and left a lot to be desired, and the yard posts were not secure in the ground.
‘Block them up, block them up,’ roared Terry as the cattle pushed each other about the flimsy cattle yard. ‘Get around the back, block ’em!’ he yelled. I was already putting every ounce of effort into the job, bar running around on all fours and biting the cattle on the heels. It was obvious to me the cattle yard could not hold these big steers if they really wanted out, and want out they did. The Friesians took the lead of the mob and one attempted to jump over the yard but got caught on the top rail, then fell to freedom. Another, pushed by the mob of rallying cattle and full of fear in the confined space, jumped clean over the top of me and the yard, hitting the ground heavily, and escaped. By this time Terry had worked himself into an absolute rage and was screaming, ‘Block the fucking things up!’
It was exactly the same story as before. I was in danger of getting my head kicked in by crazed beasts in their frenzy to escape, and Terry still couldn’t see it. Several more jumped the yard before the weld mesh was pushed over and then the whole lot got out. It was far too dangerous and I got myself well and truly out of the way. I was livid. Weld mesh I considered suitable only for penning in chooks. It was so frustrating to suffer the consequences of bad decisions I had had no part in making.
The gut-churning experience of being leaped over by a bolting steer brought to mind a memory of a young Leisha on Kimberley Downs. She spent every free moment she could down at the stables with Lady and Little Blue, and was preparing their feed bins one day when she was disturbed by a frenzied barking coming from behind the workshop.
Spider the dog (who belonged to Craig, the husband of our new governess) had bailed up a cow by the overhead fuel tank. The poor animal was unable to escape, with Spider hanging off its nose one minute and swinging from its ears the next.
Feeling sorry for the cow, Leisha raced through the yard and grabbed the dog by one hind leg. But while she kept a firm grip on the dog, Spider kept a firm grip on the cow’s nose. The three of them fought it out doing circles in the dust. My daughter’s love for animals had put her all alone and in a rather tricky situation, since the cow was now furious as all hell. Spider, who was hanging from the nose of the cow, was off the ground at this point and suddenly let go, leaving Leisha to take the full fury of the berserk cow. It hit her with an almighty kick to the head and knocked her out cold.
When she came to, she was confronted by a close-up view of the cow’s udders — the beast was standing over her. She panicked. The cow was shuddering with fury, snorting and blowing snot everywhere. Luckily Becky, our Thursday Islander cook, had heard the commotion from the kitchen and arrived at the scene in the nick of time. Thank God for her long legs: she raced in and pulled Leisha out from under the cow, literally threw her at the gate and simultaneously grabbed a lump of wood, belting the cow on the head with it. Then, before her luck changed, she joined Leisha on the gate. The cow attacked the gate, blowing and snorting, but Becky was able to help Leisha down on the other side, shocked but with no real damage suffered.
Towards the end of the calving season Terry suggested a week’s break in Albany. I jumped at the idea, thinking it would do us both a lot of good and would give me a chance to check on the Shiralee. In fact my function was simply to be the driver to get us home safely from dinners with Terry’s friends.
We didn’t get to the Shiralee at all and it was not a pleasant trip. On a visit to the Mungrup horse stud, whose owners, Jan and Gray, are good friends of mine, I got to talking with Jan about the Kimberley as we usually do, and after a while Gray and Terry came in. Gray joined in the conversation too, until suddenly Terry began talking very loudly over the top of all of us, describing my father in quite horrible terms. Our conversation came to an end in an awkward silence and I sat in shock, ashamed that he had behaved so badly in the house of my friends.
With the benefit of time and distance and the wisdom of some expert counselling, I now know that the use of criticism and humiliation are part of an abuser’s pattern, but I didn’t understand that then. His behaviour was simply incomprehensible — that, or he was the one who was ‘mad in the head’. Certainly he did not seem able to control his ranting, he was practically yelling over us.
I wish I could say things ended there, but some weeks later I returned with him to Broome where once again I sank into despair and ill-health.
Robby was working at the caravan park as a groundsman and he was still vulnerable to Terry’s jibes and ridicule. This was the worst thing, what was being done to Robby; I tried but I couldn’t stop it. Terry took no notice of me at all. For the sake of Robby alone, I should have left. He had the classic symptoms of depression, starting with not wanting to get out of bed.
Some days I, too, battled to get out of bed, but I felt I had to put on a good face, even though I had a constant headache and was feeling very unwell. I wanted to be strong for Robby, though he must have known that I was hanging on by a thread. It was too much of a burden for a young man who should just have been having fun with his mates.
In the end I went to my doctor, I felt so unwell. It turned out I had Ross River fever, which explained all the aches and pains. The virus is contracted from mosquitos, though, according to my doctor, stress and a hostile environment also play a large part in determining how badly a person will suffer from it. He asked me if there were problems at home. I was amazed. For the second time a doctor had picked it when I thought I wasn’t giving anything away. This time I decided I would speak. He was calm and courteous, and treated me seriously. It was a relief to be able to talk my fears through, and he assured me that I certainly was not mad in the head and that I would probably find it helpful to talk some more. If so, he would be pleased to recommend a counsellor to me. He didn’t urge me to leave Terry, as I thought he might. I think he realised that it was more than I could manage at that stage.
One evening, while giving my breasts a routine check in the shower, I found another small, pebble-like lump. I wasn’t particularly worried, but I made an appointment to have it checked out. I was sent to have X-rays at Broome Hospital to make sure that the cancer was still in remission. I began to worry when they told me I needed to see my specialist in Perth for further tests. I thought, Bloody hell, that’s all I need in my life right now, the cancer back in my bones.
It was a tense time down in the city, waiting for test results, but after four days I got the news I had been hoping for. Dr Ingram rang me to say I was free to go. He explained the tests had confirmed a benign cyst that was ‘likely inspissated material within a duct.’ Benign was the word I understood, and I was grinning from ear to ear.
For all the chances I gave him, Terry only got worse. At his request I organised a big party for his sixtieth birthday, and he ignored me all night until finally someone else asked me to dance. No sooner had I begun to relax in my partner’s arms than out of the blue my husband appeared, trying to cut in. Yet after only a few minutes dancing, he led me off the dance floor and went back to his friends. I was just a possession to him. He was happy if other men admired me, but he didn’t want them to touch.
Then in July, at the wedding of his cousin Alan on the lawns overlooking Cable Beach, Terry was knocking back shooters, wine and rum, his laughter getting louder and more raucous. He began openly flirting with a young married woman whose husband was also in the party.
As the evening began drifting out of hand I leaned towards him and whispered, ‘Do you think we should go? Alan looks so tired.’ Alan was a wonderful man, tragically battling a brain tumour, and he probably did not have very long to live.
Loudly and nastily, Terry answered, ‘Urgers are worse than bludgers, urgers are worse than bludgers.’ He repeated it again and again. I had to wonder if he had some sort of brain tumour himself, which might explain why he behaved so badly. There was such a hostile expression in his eyes, it was as if he really hated me.
Burning with humiliation, I sat for a little longer, trying to work out how best to deal with this. It was rare that he let this side out in public and I had no idea how much further he might go.
I leaned towards the wedded couple, wished them happiness and health and told them I was leaving. As I rose from my chair, I saw the flash of anger in my husband’s eyes. ‘Wait, I’ll have one more drink,’ he said. But I’d heard this too many times before. I said my goodbyes and suggested he stay if he wished.
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