River Run

by Alexander, Nicole

‘But …?’ She knew she should tell everyone immediately, although Eleanor also wanted to keep his confidence. He was injured after all and she was partly to blame.

  ‘The nurse will ask questions. Everyone will ask questions. Tired.’

  The stranger was awake and a world of people wanted to know who he was, but his fingers were still curled harmlessly around hers.

  ‘Promise me?’

  When a voice sounded in the passageway he drew his hand away. Athena entered the sickroom, singing a song in her native language.

  ‘If you keep chattering on like that the poor man may not want to wake up.’ Athena stood in the doorway, a brown paper bag in her arms. Sitting the shopping on the end of the bed, the nurse bustled past Eleanor and briefly checked the drip. ‘He needs rest and quiet,’ she chastised. ‘What’s the matter? Is everything alright?’

  ‘Fine, everything’s fine,’ Eleanor replied uncomfortably. Why was she lying for this man?

  Athena didn’t look convinced.

  ‘Talking to him may help wake him.’ Why did he say that Athena didn’t like him? Eleanor wondered.

  ‘He has a head wound.’ The nurse proceeded to take the patient’s pulse.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to give him morphine, Athena. That will only stop him from waking and –’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d trained.’ Satisfied that her patient was comfortable, Athena unpacked the bandages and antiseptic cream.

  ‘I haven’t, it’s just that –’

  ‘Well then, perhaps you’ll leave this man’s care to me. Yes?’ Athena washed her hands thoroughly.

  ‘I’m only trying to help,’ Eleanor persisted, ‘and by giving him morphine –’

  Athena sighed and began to change the dressing on the shoulder wound. ‘He is not being given morphine,’ she announced without turning from her task. ‘The doctor left it as a precaution.’

  ‘Oh.’ How silly she sounded.

  ‘Now please, Eleanor, I do appreciate that your entire family is hanging on tenterhooks waiting for this man to make a full recovery, but let’s not try and play doctors, alright? Now come here and help me sit him up so I can change the bandage.’

  Athena deftly replaced the dressing on the back of the stranger’s head and then applied a clean bandage. Together they lay him back carefully on the pillows. It was the strangest of sensations, holding someone closely, knowing they were awake but pretending to be asleep.

  ‘It’s healing nicely,’ the nurse told her. ‘Although Dr Headley isn’t known for his neat stitches, the result will be the same.’ She shook out a mercury thermometer, checked the reading and then placed it under his tongue. ‘We just need you to wake up.’ She looked down at the patient. ‘I can see no reason why he isn’t awake now.’

  Eleanor gave the man the briefest of glances.

  ‘Granted, he has an indentation to the back of his head the size of a chicken egg and there’s some messy scarring, which reminds me of some of the injuries I attended to during the war, but all in all he seems healthy. Mind you, I’ve also seen a soldier live for two months with half his brains missing and another die within a day after falling in the ward. And him with only a few bits of shrapnel to worry about. So it’s like Dr Headley says, you never know with head injuries.’ Athena checked the thermometer. ‘Normal. Well, that’s a start.’ She washed her hands again, the tar-like scent of the carbolic soap strong in the room. ‘I can stay with him now,’ Athena told her. Her voice had lost some of its efficiency. ‘And I do appreciate you helping out, Eleanor. Really I do.’

  But Eleanor wasn’t listening, her thoughts were centred firmly on the man pretending to be asleep, and on his request for secrecy. Who was he? Her hand rested on the doorknob as she left. ‘Athena, can I ask you, well, do you know any communists?’

  The nurse let out a gasp of surprise. ‘Out here?’ She was rolling a length of clean bandage and it dropped to the floor. ‘Damn.’ Picking it up, Athena placed it in a bowl with the soiled dressings. ‘I’d imagine what with you being in Sydney that you’d have more cause to mix with them, whether you realised you were or not,’ the nurse replied, her tone verging on dismissive.

  Eleanor thought of the unknown man in the woolshed and the comments she’d overheard.

  ‘Eleanor, who planted the rose garden?’

  ‘My father. Why do you ask?’

  ‘In my country the rose is associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. A rose bush grew within the pool of blood spilled from Aphrodite’s slain lover. So the rose is the most precious of flowers, it symbolises an immortal love that will never fade. Your father he must have loved your mother very much.’

  Eleanor thought of the time her father had spent in the evening tending the roses when she’d been a child. ‘Yes, he did.’ With a final glance at the stranger who feigned sleep, Eleanor left the room.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Robbie patted the balcony door key in his pocket and peered through the newly installed trellis across the pond to the house. He could smell it. Freedom. Opening a sweaty palm, he examined the object briefly before tucking the thing away for safekeeping. There was movement in the room where the stranger slept, a shadow across the flyscreen. His sister perhaps or the nurse. On the night of the shooting, after he’d been sent to his room, Robbie had lain awake longing to see the man up close again, to shake him awake and make him tell the truth. The closest he’d come to seeing the stranger was last night, however, when after shimmying down the tree he’d glanced through the window; a snaking tube bandaged to a brown arm and the mound of a body under white bedclothes, haunting him until daylight.

  Now Robbie was occupied with other matters. Since the shooting two days ago, no-one really bothered to check on him out of school hours, other than at mealtimes. And today the governess had given him an early mark due to the scorching weather. There were three whole hours left before Mrs Howell delivered his dinner tray at 6 pm. Why would things change now? Three hours. Three whole hours before fish fingers and peas, a Monday night favourite.

  With a final glance at the house, Robbie ran as fast as he could towards the shearing shed, stopping frequently to hide behind buildings, trees and bushes and reassure himself that nobody was around. The wind struck his face, his heart beat hard. It was good to be outside, to feel the sun and dirt layering his face. To be free. Bluey barked, the pup straining at the chain, muscled shoulders taut. Freeing the animal, they sprinted onwards, Garnet whinnying, racing along the horse paddock fence towards him, but Robbie kept on running, past the machinery sheds and the jackeroos’ quarters until the two rectangle buildings where the shearers and shed-hands camped came into view. Here he stopped to catch his breath, the smell of vegetables and roasting meat signalling that Fitzy the cook was hard at work. Ahead the shed rose enticingly, the dull hum of the engine rising and falling on a lifting wind. The cattle-pup lay in the dirt, red tongue hanging.

  A row of timber provided excellent cover as Robbie ran from trunk to trunk, avoiding the front of the shearing shed. At each tree his palms touched the comforting protection of knotted bark and as the spaces between timber grew, he took a zigzag route past the plunge dip. The men were engrossed in their work. Murph, Stew and Wormy were keeping an eye on the shorn ewes as they swam along the sunken channel filled with water and Coopers Yellow dip. Sodden, the animals climbed out the other end, cleansed of parasites. Robbie skirted the jackeroos, ducked through the railings of an outer fence and, with a surge of energy, ran the last few yards to the shed flat out, his lungs bursting.

  He wiggled between the stumps of the skillion shed that provided additional cover for the sheep if it rained, crawling beneath the slats of the pens across years of sheep droppings. The space was musty and dark. The air was heavy with the scents of manure, wool and urine. The odd thick white cobweb hid small black spiders and Robbie did his best to avoid the sticky nets as he edged his way forward, the pup following. Only a couple of feet above him, sheep waited to be shorn. H
undreds of hoofs clattered nervously. The ground vibrated with the hum of the engines and the movement of men and animals as he wiggled under one of the twin boards and continued on beneath the catching pens that ran down the middle of the shed.

  It was hard going. Another year had passed since Robbie had last sneaked into the shed this way. He’d grown, of course, but this area was rarely used to house sheep in wet weather now and the space had dwindled in size with yet another layer of manure having fallen through the slats to the ground below. The warm plop of sheep pooh struck his neck as Robbie wormed his way through the narrowing space. Brushing it away, he slipped down into a depression created by Rex, who shovelled out the manure to fertilise the homestead vegetable garden. At the edge a skillion joined the shearing shed proper and it was here that he crawled out into daylight, blinking at the brightness. The low-hanging branches of a leafy peppercorn tree grazed the tops of wooden railings and through the fern-like leaves, the sheep-yards were a haze of dust where men called to dogs and flying dirt rendered the moving figures ghostly. The cattle-pup growled.

  ‘You just be quiet,’ Robbie warned, ‘you’re lucky to be here. Remember what Mr Goward said.’

  The pup sat and stared, one ear erect, the other floppy.

  Robbie began digging at the base of the tree until a mound of earth formed on the ground and a glass jar became visible. He pulled it free of the tightly packed soil, twisted the lid open and tipped the container side on. The contents rattled as they slipped into his palm; a tiny piece of shrapnel saved from his father’s surgery, a cat’s-eye marble, a white feather from a cockatoo and the skeleton of a mouse. He examined these objects slowly, reverently, one by one, as if seeing them for the very first time before placing them carefully in a line at his feet.

  Sitting crosslegged at the base of the peppercorn, Robbie removed an object from his pocket. Sunlight slanted through the branches, catching the coin so that the metal glimmered. On one side was the head of a woman wearing a crown, with the words Liberty and In God We Trust etched on the surface. It was dated 1934. The opposite side depicted a bird holding a branch.

  ‘United States of America. One dollar. Peace,’ Robbie whispered, reading the words. A coin he’d spied in the dirt next to the man at the river. ‘An American dollar.’ Robbie dropped the coin into the jar, replaced the other items and then set about reburying the container. When the glass jar was covered with dirt he thought of the man in their house who wouldn’t wake up.

  The discovery of the coin worried him. It meant that Eleanor was right and he was wrong. For if the man was a septic-tank, a Yank, then he was on their side. But if he didn’t ever wake up, and if no-one ever knew who he really was, then nobody would ever know for sure that he’d shot a harmless man and eventually he would stop being in trouble. Maybe he’d be lucky, Robbie thought. After all, the stranger was pretty crook.

  The problem, of course, was if the man did wake up. If he woke up and he was one of the good guys. On their side. There was nothing Robbie could do if that happened.

  With this sobering thought, Robbie bent back a small piece of flapping iron on the side of the woolshed. Within the shadowy building, shearers were walking in and out of the catching pens as they selected sheep, grabbing the animals and tossing them on their backs, before dragging them through swinging gates to be shorn. Two men were standing in one of the pens. They walked through the sheep, climbed over wooden rails and moved down through the enclosures of waiting animals, away from the board and the catching pens. The men were deep in conversation, moving towards the corner of the building. Robbie stood on the other side. Pushing aside massing sheep with their knees, they came to stand near the side of the timber and iron shed, sheep squashing into corners in protest. In the half-light Robbie recognised Mr Lomax. He was talking to the gun shearer, Billy Wright, who’d sharpened Robbie’s pocketknife last year. The shearer scratched his crotch vigorously.

  ‘You see what I’m saying, Lomax, don’t you? You can’t tell me that you wouldn’t mind eating something with a bit of fat on its bones. I mean, Fitzy isn’t the world’s best cook. You and me, well, we’re on to him. I had myself a sandwich this afternoon that was covered with dirt. Dirt. All I’m saying is that if the man had some decent meat to work with, well, he’d be happier and I’d be a damn sight happier and the shed would be happier. There’s been some talk, you know, more than the usual …’ He thumbed at the board. ‘Grumbling.’

  ‘Ah, the boy shoot the man off the horse.’

  ‘Yes, he did. I mind my own business, I do, and I ain’t got nothing against the communists, though I’ve met some silver-tongued stirrers in my time, yes I have. But that don’t mean you go out a-shooting the poor bastards. And something like this, well, it puts the wind up a bloke it does.’

  Robbie flattened his shoulders against the shed wall.

  ‘Bad business.’ The Chinaman patted a woolly ewe. ‘But it was accident.’

  Billy didn’t answer immediately. He rubbed a stubbly chin. ‘That’s what the Webber girl said, but she wasn’t up the tree at the time, nowhere near the place, she told me.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘There’s more. The boy nearly killed that young jackeroo with his shanghai a couple of days ago. ’Course nothing happened to the lad, but young Archie, well, he got put on the wood heap this morning.’ His head sunk between his shoulders as he leant forward. ‘’Course, if the old man had been alive, none of this would ever have happened. The boy would have got the strap two year ago. But that’s the problem with life, eventually you gotta die and old Alan, well he was about the best of them. Never came near the shed except on Mondays. Left us to it. And that’s the way it should be. The squatters ain’t got no business messing about with shearing excepting for a good day to you, boys and giving a bit of an encouraging nod to the younger men. That’s all that’s needed. We’ve got men like you, Lomax, to keep things shipshape. Now we’ve got the brother poking his head in every day, keeping an eye on things, when he don’t even wear the pants around here. No, the bush ain’t been the same since Alan Webber kicked the bucket.’

  Around them, the shed rumbled. Robbie inched a little closer. He could almost see the straggly hairs on the back of Billy’s neck.

  ‘Some of these men, well, they’re true blue union men, workers just looking for a fair go, so you can understand that this business has made some of them very uppity,’ the shearer went on. ‘Done it hard, they have. Worked real hard to earn a quid. Like you and me.’

  ‘Australia very good place for me and my family.’ Mr Lomax moved and a flicker of light showed a round face and flat nose. ‘My grandfather, he come here with empty pockets. Now I happy man. I not want any trouble. I not like politics. I not like communists.’ His voice rose. ‘I hate communists. I spit on communists. I spit on Menzies, on this Country Party, everybody.’ He blew air from his mouth. ‘I work, I feed my family. I do good job in this shed. Not want any problems.’

  Billy winced. ‘Jesus, mate, what you been eating, eh? Dead dog or something? Now listen here and steady down. You’re one of us now. You’re alright. My grandfather had a chink on the goldfields, he did. Said he was the most honest bloke he ever knew. Honest as the day is long.’

  Mr Lomax wedged his fists in his trouser pockets.

  ‘You’re a good bloke, Lomax. And you’re top dog in this here shed. That’s why I’m telling you straight. Forget about the commos. If they want to cause trouble up in the big house, that’s their caper. I’m here to talk about important things, things that will keep the men happy.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Their stomachs. We could do with some decent tucker. Cheer the fellas up a bit.’

  ‘Tucker?’

  ‘Meat, Mr Lomax, meat. Meat so tender and fat and juicy that it runs down your chin and fills a man up as if he’s eating like a king.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘Stranglers, culls. That’s what we’ve been eating,’ Billy told him, his voice growing con
fidential. ‘Now I don’t blame that old gardener, or Dawson, but it wouldn’t hurt if we did a bit of choosing ourselves, if you get my meaning.’

  The Chinaman grinned. ‘Ah,’ he lifted a finger, waggling it at the shearer, ‘now I understand. But how will we do this?’

  ‘Nice fat ewe, that one,’ Billy pointed to a pen of sheep, ‘and that one. Pity if the old girls suffocated.’

  For a moment Mr Lomax didn’t appear to understand, then realisation dawned. ‘Ah, you very tricky, Billy.’

  ‘I’ll give you a call when one’s a-coming. Mum’s the word, eh?’ The two men pushed their way back through the sheep.

  Robbie slid down the shed wall, squatting in the dirt. Billy thought the man he’d shot was a communist and the rest of the shearers were angry about what had happened. But then Mr Lomax said he hated communists.

  Picking up clods of dirt, he threw the lumps up in the air, catching them as they fell. The pup watched intently, jumping up on his hind legs and snapping at the dirt. Maybe Robbie didn’t understand what they really thought about the Reds, but the one thing Robbie did know was that Billy and Mr Lomax were going to kill some of their good sheep instead of the ration sheep already selected. The branches of the peppercorn tree spread across to the shed’s guttering. Robbie loaded his pockets with clods of dirt and began to climb.

  From the peak of the woolshed roof, Robbie thought the country side resembled a patchwork quilt on a lumpy bed, many parts flat and open, others rising and falling amidst the afternoon haze as if the land itself were breathing. In the middle of it all, the shearing shed vibrated like a monster from another time. It ate up sheep at one end, spitting them out at the other, smaller, whiter, some showing red welts if they’d struggled under the comb. To the north, a smudge of dust on the horizon marked the progress of a shorn mob being walked to a holding paddock. To the southwest, half hidden by trees, the homestead blinked at him from two windows visible on the second floor. When the shed finally cut out for the day, he’d have to hightail it home.