Harry lets the first heifer out of the bails and admires the clean way she picks up her feet. Her mother was a fine cow. There’s every indication she’ll be a fine cow too.
On his next trip to Echuca to buy a part for the Waratah, Harry visits the municipal library and spends a morning in the adult section reading the famous English sex doctor, Havelock Ellis. In Studies on the Psychology of Sex, Harry reads about hermaphroditic slugs, the courtship rituals of spiders and a peculiar balloon-making fly.
But it is the intimate case histories at the end of the volume that interest him most. Ordinary folk from around the world, both men and women, have submitted to Dr Ellis a summary of their sexual history from their first childhood stirrings. Harry makes a few notes and stores them carefully inside his wallet. This is where he decides to start with his advice to Michael.
When very young I was fascinated by the waterworks. I liked to pee outside and have my mother watch and remark on my skill. At the age of four or five I remember trotting off with a cousin of similar age to see a girl’s legs. I don’t remember the outcome, but there was certainly some early excitement at the prospect. Around this age I got considerable gratification from rubbing myself stomach-down along my aunty’s new carpet. The carpet had a floral pattern and I squirmed around from vine to vine. I remember my mother telling my aunty that I was having fun ‘playing with the dog’, I’ve never been sure if they were both aware of what I was up to. For the life of me I can’t remember if my aunty ever had a dog.
I had an early distrust, fear even, of public toilets and unfamiliar outhouses. I think this was due to the foreign smells. One of my mother’s friends saw me putting myself away after peeing in her garden. She said, ‘Better be careful with that. A bird might get it.’ I was ashamed and humiliated. I told my mother we had to leave immediately because I was sick.
Several years later the boy next door told me the basics of sexual relations between men and women. His explanation bored me – the whole apparatus seemed overly complex and technical. I dismissed it out of hand as being too ridiculous to be true.
Don’t recall age at first erection, but I do remember a distinct defensive or counter-erection from very young. The member shrank inside itself with tension and local discomfort due to physical distress or revulsion. Swimming in a cold dam, undressing in front of the school nurse, visiting the dentist, having to kiss old people … This settled once erection was achieved.
Not much early interest in girls. In grade one a very fat girl sat behind me and often had her legs open when I turned around. Her knickers were grubby. I formed the impression she had an extra stomach between her legs – something like the dumpy leather pouch of a train conductor. I thought it probably opened at the top, near the navel.
At the age of eight I was playing at the house of a school friend when we approached his younger sister and demanded to see her legs. We told her we needed to see if they were strong enough for her to be allowed to play our game. She refused, but agreed to let us watch her pee in exchange for a strap of licorice. I was gobsmacked at what I took to be the little mouth, the undeveloped beak, she peed with. I’m not sure what I expected, but I couldn’t have been more surprised.
First erection at age eight or nine and self-handling began at this time. By the age of ten or eleven I was eager to inspect the genitals of girls and women. On a seaside holiday I attempted to look between the skirts of girls while they were swimming by lugging a piece of driftwood under the sea and using it to anchor myself to the bottom. The current made it difficult and there was often a lot of seaweed in the water. I also pretended that my concentration was being taken up with building miniature sand tunnels along the tide line so I could look up at women and girls lying, sitting and standing on the beach above me and see what I most desired to see. These attempts were clearly quite feeble, but at the time they were utterly consuming. I remember trembling with anticipation as I set out for the beach each morning.
Night pollutions started around the same time as first emissions. I never had any sense that I was doing anything wrong. I’d say to any boy now that there is nothing wrong in an empty-out. It is best not to fret about it, just get on and get it done. When I was staying with my aunty she often commented on how bright I looked in the mornings – and it was always after an emptying the night before.
By thirteen I’d be hard at it before falling asleep and back for some hair of the dog immediately on waking. Around this time a boy at school suggested we think of each other while doing it. He’d borrowed my set square during mechanical drawing and hadn’t given it back. I kept thinking about the set square and was unable to produce any effect. He told me at school the next morning that he’d gone off like a rocket. I can’t remember what I said. I probably lied. We (the boys) were sent to the vicar for a special talk about this time.
At fifteen I saw a fully naked woman standing behind a tree on the banks of the Gunbower wringing out her bathing costume. It was a blue-striped costume with a skirt and gilt buttons.
At sixteen I was swimming with a group of friends in the Murray near Echuca where the banks are steep and a rope ladder had been strung from a tree to help swimmers climb out. We were treading water underneath the rope ladder while a boy’s mother hauled herself up the ladder over our heads. We all looked up, even her son. She had a sodden bulge at the front of her bathing suit and a riff of thick black hair springing out of the elastic around the top of each leg. Quite long tendrils of hair were flattened wetly to the insides of her thighs. I was tremendously excited (and also somehow disgusted) by this – I couldn’t look her in the face afterwards without blushing, even refusing her offer of sandwiches. I’ve always appreciated a woman with an ample bush and I date it back to this time. The image hasn’t dimmed. It still pops into my mind from time to time.
My inclinations have always been towards the female. In Bendigo a lad started following me around at the races. He propositioned me quite blatantly in the queue at the pie van and later followed me into the public toilets. He started fondling himself at the next urinal and suggested we go back to his sister’s place at Specimen Hill together where I could help him clean out the goldfish pond. I think, Michael, this may be a code for homosexual activity. I got away by saying I had a certain train to catch. Keep this in mind if you are ever seeking an excuse while on your feet. Despite not wanting to take things further with him I noticed a slight arousal when he reached out and touched my arm. I liked the strength in his hand. I liked it that someone desired me. I was seventeen at the time and covered with pimples.
Instances of unexpected and sudden erection: when straining hard, for example tensioning a rope; once when opening an umbrella for a woman standing waiting for a train; when teaching calves to suckle using the fingers; assisting at the covering of a mare (I was holding the mare’s head and in a position to see the stallion’s eye roll back into the skull at the moment of release); when one of my mother’s friends touched my face at the age of fourteen. She was a big woman with an energetic bosom. I’d just seen her run across the street and she looked like she had a litter of puppies down her blouse.
Prior to spasm I sometimes see a very calming image of a well-irrigated pasture. I learned to whistle when very young and green has always been my favourite colour. If you want to borrow my Woman and Home, please take it home and store it privately in your bedroom.
Through the night the pain alters in form like an animal seen far off in the distance. At first it is fat and hot and lodged stickily behind his ribs, then, much later, it is a sharp beak or claw pickaxing into his groin. He forces himself up and into the sheds. The chug of the Baltic is fuel for the pain. He milks and follows the cows out into the yard, moaning. Walking numbs his mind a little. He starts to lap the dairy. Sip does a few circuits with him, but she can’t see the point of it. She lies down in the sun, lifts her tail at him encouragingly when he comes past again, then falls asleep. Michael finds him an hour later still walking, but buckled over, swea
ting and holding his side. His voice is broken into pieces. He waves Michael away with his elbow and whispers, ‘Colic. Got to keep moving.’
Michael runs home to fetch his mother. He’s hoping she’ll tell him to call the ambulance. Betty says it’s best that she examines Harry first. She trots back with Michael in her work clothes, being careful of her shoes among the cow pats. Harry tries to stand still for her, but his body has got away from him and he can’t stop his knees from kicking up and down. He marches on the spot while she lifts his shirt and presses the heel of her hand against his skin. The flies are bad. He can see the dark outlines of flies on his face, like scabs. They tamper with his vision as he looks down at the top of Betty’s head. She’s speaking to him, she wants answers, but Harry can only moan – his voice is going the wrong way, back inside himself. Michael and Betty take an arm each and walk him slowly over to their house. Sip trots along a few yards behind them. The hardest part is sliding him through the fence. Betty tells him he’s an awkward parcel and to puff through his mouth for the pain – she remembers it from childbirth.
Harry spends the day on the couch dosed up on Bex, a hot-water bottle tied to his middle with a tea towel. In the afternoon Little Hazel makes him toast with honey while Michael and Mues do the milking. Then Michael fetches his books and his glasses and he is able to sit up a little and read.
When Betty gets home from work she brings him scrambled eggs on a tray. He doesn’t normally see her at both ends of the day. All her lipstick is gone now and her hair has flattened against her head. She looks old and her breath is stale from drinking tea. He can hear the children in the kitchen talking in exaggerated whispers as if they have been told to be quiet. Betty sits on the edge of the couch and takes his temperature the way mothers do – a hand on the brow. Then she smiles at him and pats his shoulder. ‘I’ll let you get back to your birds.’ When she stands he notices the roundness of her belly, her dinner not yet digested.
Harry looks out of the window at the jasmine curling around the verandah posts. It is his cutting. He brought it over in a kerosene tin when they first arrived. Over the years he’s trained it up the posts, steering it away from the gutters and towards the front door. Sometimes Sip will come back from visiting Little Hazel with a garland of jasmine around her neck and sneezing at the sweet juice of it. Sometimes he’ll notice Betty with a few squashed flowers in her hair. It is worse to be here with them, in the house but separate, than to be alone. He insists on going home. Betty relents and gives him the tea strainer with instructions for its use. The stones will pass in a day or so and it is important that he collect them. She’ll put them in the outgoing pathology at Acacia Court and get them tested for anything sinister.
The pain is duller now. He carries Betty’s tea strainer in his pocket and mainly remembers to piss through it; increasing his proficiency at hitting the mesh rather than the rim and avoiding splatter.
It’s nearly a week later; he’s taking his last piss of the day under the sugar gums, looking up at the kookaburras engaged in a bout of family bickering, when the two stones wash out of his cock. The smaller, oval-shaped one could be a piece of the larger stone that has chipped off on its long trail through his organs. They are not really like stones at all, more lumps of hardened molasses rolled in chaff. He double-boils Betty’s tea strainer and places the stones in a clean Vegemite jar on the kitchen windowsill. In the morning he notices they have exuded a little watery milk and are stuck to the bottom.
As he walks across the paddock with the jar in his hand he thinks of all the things he has walked across the paddock to Betty’s with – milk, binoculars for Michael, tools, guttering, records, brake oil, Christmas presents, an orphan calf, cuttings from the garden, various veterinary ointments, articles from magazines for Little Hazel, lemons, and now an intimate letter for Michael tucked into his sock. He looks at the stones through the glass. This is what I gave birth to, he thinks. They look obscenely sexual – testicular perhaps. He feels disconsolate and ashamed.
Just before breeding
the family tilts
on its axis.
Dad and Mum are selfishly involved.
There are outings together
around the territory;
the viewing of several nest options,
although,
for as long as I have known,
they always use the same hollow
in the red gum behind the dairy.
Club-Toe skulks;
flies solitary around the border,
sometimes ventures into rival country.
Or she just sits, torpid,
beak down,
eyes glazed.
I can only interpret it
as glumness.
An understanding, perhaps,
that she’s missed the boat again
and won’t be breeding this season.
A honeyeater,
tongue drunk
on nectar,
sleeps it off
beneath a flowering gum.
Until Dad, perched above,
notices the jerky
intoxicated cycling of its twiggy legs.
That’s supper sorted.
More border antics
with the neighbours today.
Mum and Club-Toe fly between
a sugar gum and the bundy box
watched by two scruff-heads from Mues’s.
One at a time
Mum,
then Club-Toe,
launch from a branch of the sugar gum
and fly towards a scar
on the box
doing an open-winged
bellyflop into it,
before pushing off again.
This goes on for some time
– the birds taking turns,
crossing in mid-air,
until they stop
and watch politely as the neighbours
mount their own display.
Kookaburras
are more likely to fly into windows
during the breeding season.
The mirrored reflection
is mistaken for an intruder,
and attacked,
without thought for personal safety
– or any concern
for the cost of glass.
Dad is attentive in the breeding weeks,
he takes Mum on outings around the farm,
chatters, brings her beetles,
jollies her along
while she ripens.
Until, this morning,
I hear her keening in agony
and rush out of the kitchen ready for rescue
to see her being
bored,
skewered,
on a low branch of the angophora.
Dad grips her neck and back,
tries to fly himself
inside of her.
The force of it tips them from the tree
and they tumble
in a double-winged free fall
to the ground,
where he pushes her against the cape weed.
And when he’s finished
flies away,
in silence.
They work in pairs
against a fairy wren.
Dad buzzes the nest,
the wren throws herself on the ground
to draw him away.
She pluckily performs her decoy
– holding out her wing as if it is broken.
A small bird on the ground
is easy picking,
Club-Toe finishes her off.
Mum went down in the dam today.
She miscalculated on the descent
and instead of braking
to pull a dragonfly
from the surface of the water,
she went in
and almost didn’t come out again.
This mistake must be easy enough to make
at the best of times,
even easier when you
are egg-heavy
and hungry with it.
There is a trick they do,
an optical illusion,
when a goshawk flies overhead,
or a kite.
They sit perfectly still;
their head feathers erect,
their beaks wide open.
It breaks up the plump
bird-outline
and from above
gives the impression of a stick.
The rule of thumb
is to catch something
of a size to be swallowed,
or better still,
steal it.
A good-sized copperhead
down by the channel,
its jaws blocked up nicely with a rat,
is defenceless
– just a length of muscle.
Mum and Dad work together
harassing the snake about the head,
stabbing at its eyes.
Dad, a fat jockey on its back,
grasps with his claws
and drills with his beak
until,
in exasperation,
the snake drops the rat.
Dad lifts instantly,
Mum a second later,
kicking the rat up into her beak.
I’ve noticed a vibration just before the call,
as if the air is being tuned
to take delivery of the sound.
Perhaps I’m listening
too keenly
– perhaps my ears tense
as soon as they open their beaks
because I know
the air is about to flower?
A fracas in the bundy box.
Dad again.
The air is no good for sex,
you need gravity,
you need a sense of weight
and purchase.
This time I leave them to it.
I’d prefer he didn’t hurt her,
or at least,
I’d prefer not to see it.
Father Mulvaney comes to Acacia Court once a month to bless the Catholics. He’s from Dublin, via Swan Hill. Little, like a jockey, with dyed black hair and sharp lines on his tanned face, he talks non-stop and does a bit of singing and enjoys a port with lunch. Betty is cleaning the dentures with baking powder when he comes up behind her and slaps her on the rump. ‘Don’t get bitten by those choppers, my lovely,’ he says. He takes one of her wet hands in his. ‘You’ve beautiful hands, Mrs Reynolds.’ He strokes the back of her hand right down to her fingers like he’s patting the head of a dog, then he turns it over and stares down at the palm.
Mateship With Birds Page 6
