Mateship With Birds

by Carrie Tiffany

  If a cow is empty after two attempts at bulling (or artificial insemination) the best place for her is the butcher. A cow is full for two hundred and eighty-three days before she has her calf.

  The udder of the cow is made up of four glands or sections, each with its own outlet or teat. The orifice of each teat is controlled by the purse-string muscle. How the cow controls this muscle determines if she is a hard or an easy milker.

  If a cow aborts, due to contagion, the calf and membranes should be burned, buried where they lie, and a fire lit over the whole area. Unslaked lime should be spread over the charred calf before the hole is filled in. The cow is now a carrier. On aborting she will have licked her mucus-stained hindquarters and then her shoulders and sides. Other cows will lick these areas. The whole herd is now infected. Expect heavy losses.

  An easy milker in the flush of her first lactation may need milking at lunchtime. A drop of collodion applied to each teat will prevent leakage.

  Mastitis: prevention is better than penitence – be vigilant, follow the gospel of hygiene.

  Rumen inoculation: take a partially chewed cud from the mouth of each mature cow and place it in the mouth of each calf; when it is swallowed the calf will ingest the correct germs for rumen digestion.

  The milker should be encouraged to consider his hands as an extension of the udder. The same scrupulous standard of cleanliness applies to both.

  A quality milker demonstrates a calm authority. He milks the herd fast and dry. The atmosphere is of relaxed arousal.

  Two huntsmen spiders prowl Harry’s bedroom ceiling. They’ve been hanging around for weeks in their opposing corners like boxers waiting on the bell. Both of them are dark and plump, the size of bread-and-butter plates. When he wakes up one of the spiders is on his pillow. ‘Frankly,’ Harry says to it, ‘this is going a bit too far.’ Edna’s favourite cup tips off the draining board and smashes in the sink, his bootlace snaps in his fingers as he is tying it. Leaving the house to go out to milk he traps his thumb in the fly-wire door.

  But here comes Pauline; her pleated feet, her thriftiness, the bunched flesh behind her knees, her pudding chest, her liquid eyes. The shy way she has of dipping her head as she steps up into the shed each morning, as if she thinks she must push against the dimness to be let in. He reaches for her udder. The first milk spurts over the back of his hand and drips between his fingers. It’s as warm as blood.

  The first egg was laid on Sunday,

  by Wednesday

  there was another.

  It takes only a few days to make an egg,

  and comparatively it is much smaller,

  and no doubt easier

  to birth,

  than a child.

  *Mues assisted with the mirror stick.

  He’s not much chop at holding it still.

  And looking through binoculars

  is dangerous at height

  – all of your weight seems held

  in the eyes.

  I nearly toppled off

  the dairy roof.

  September 10

  4.50 am – just after dawn.

  A few stars still linger as I climb.

  Mum is absent.

  There are two white eggs

  of roughly equal volume

  on the floor of the hollow.

  The eggs are warm and the air too,

  her body heats the hollow

  – makes a woody oven of it

  so the eggs continue baking

  even when she is away.

  I don’t pick them up,

  just mark them with the crayon,

  one, two,

  and climb down quickly.

  The day feels a bit special

  and I keep thinking back on them,

  the family clutch

  – two pale moons baking in a tree.

  Club-Toe is a poor incubator;

  sloppy,

  reluctant even.

  She hops inside dutifully at the change of shift,

  but once Mum or Dad

  have flown away

  she’s off;

  loafing,

  preening,

  falling into a mid-afternoon torpor

  on some distant branch.

  When the parents return

  she darts back in again,

  pretending

  that she never left.

  September 26

  5.10 am

  Mum leaves the nest

  just as I climb.

  There’s a decent breeze;

  the threat of rain later.

  The noise of the wind in the leaves

  sounds like washing on the line.

  I suppose the egglings

  can hear it all

  – maybe a little muffled through the shell?

  They are grubbier and moved in position,

  all in good nick though.

  Did you see the morse code lightning

  when that storm came in last night?

  I worried that the nest tree

  would be struck,

  and when Sip finally stopped howling

  I fell asleep

  and dreamed the eggs were in my bed.

  October 7

  I climbed mid-morning

  with Dad on duty

  – watching from a nearby tree.

  Egg one is still largely intact.

  Egg two has a large fracture

  and I heard,

  distinctly,

  the tapping of the egg-tooth against the shell

  and the imprisoned bird

  croaking

  as if requesting assistance.

  It is the first time

  I have been addressed by an egg.

  A lot of action today;

  comings and goings.

  On the ground, directly beneath the hollow,

  a small rubble of shell.

  Even considering some shell

  may have been eaten,

  or not ejected from the nest,

  or carried off by another animal,

  when I attempted a reconstruction

  one egg

  was all I got.

  I think we can safely say

  that egg two was never fertilised

  and didn’t hatch.

  The tink tink of the bellbirds

  is a constant backdrop

  to the day.

  The kookaburras assemble and call

  as the sun slips from the trees.

  Then there is quiet for a while.

  It’s only later

  that an owl announces herself

  out of the dark.

  A change in the family is noted.

  An added excitement and cohesion,

  a lot of chorusing in wild bouts

  throughout the day.

  As if they are announcing to the district

  this addition to the family

  and congratulating each other

  on the hatching.

  I won’t climb again

  so as not to disturb the bub,

  or risk a beak

  in the back of my skull.

  It seems plausible to consider

  that birds were the architects for trees.

  A hollow,

  or a fork,

  for every nesting cradle;

  a branch for every grip.

  And they designed a structure

  to which insects are naturally attracted,

  like women to the shops.

  Twenty days it takes,

  before the bub

  appears at the lip of the nest.

  Squat and glum

  – a greasy piece of equipment,

  more echidna than bird,

  with its pin feathers sheathed in their quills.

  Mum makes no attempt to clean the nest chamber.

  It must be bedlam in there

  after a month of shit

  and leftovers.

  Club-Toe is an atrocious feed
er.

  She drops her catch

  just outside the nest,

  or brings up a leaf or a twig.

  When left in charge she deserts her post.

  But sometimes I see her,

  staring dolefully into the chamber,

  nest-struck,

  love-lorn,

  jealous?

  Dad caught a fence skink this afternoon,

  a good six inches long.

  He flew it home

  stopping twice for a breather,

  and perched on the edge of the nest

  to feed it in.

  Then he sat and watched

  as every few minutes an inch or so

  of skink

  was hoicked up

  into the nest.

  I didn’t get a good look at the bub,

  but it must be a corker

  to swallow such a meal.

  Betty had a rabbit knitted out of grey wool. Her brother had a parrot, only he wasn’t meant to have it, being a boy and being older, so the parrot had no name. The outside of the parrot was covered in green corduroy. Inside there was sawdust that smelled musty and damp when it rained and made them sneeze when they threw it around. Mostly they had the rabbit and the parrot in their beds, but if they went out playing a pretend picnic, a pretend family, or some sort of pretend sport, they took them with them. The rabbit was called Kit and Betty loved it.

  Betty’s mother had a long, sad face with wide-set eyes. Betty’s father said, ‘Mother, you have a face on you like a camel. Can’t you smile, Mother?’ Her teeth were bad from cough medicine so she tried not to smile and if she did smile she put her hand up so it looked instead like she’d had a shock.

  There were curtains with marigolds on them and a hallstand for hats and umbrellas. The tips of the umbrellas sat in a metal cup. After it had been raining and a wet umbrella had been dripping Betty and her brother would take turns in drinking the tinny umbrella water from the cup. They were a year apart. He was older, but he was slow to talk and she was slow to walk which evened things up.

  The father sold curtains in a department store in Melbourne and walked to work or, if it was threatening rain, caught the tram. He didn’t have a briefcase; he had a newspaper folded long and slim in his hand like a bat. Sometimes he brought material home folded up inside the newspaper. He unwrapped the newspaper on the kitchen table and showed Betty how it had been folded just perfectly so it came to the edges, but not enough so as to stick out. The material was smooth again as soon as he unfolded it, no wrinkles. There was a green and blue check which became her new pinafore and more of the marigolds for cushion covers. When Betty saw a man on the street with a flat newspaper she tried to guess what colour material he had in it and what it would be made into.

  Betty was the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow. She sat on her father’s lap when he got home from work and held the ashtray for him. On Sundays he did things around the house. Even Betty could see the way he held the hammer down near its ears was wrong. He told her brother to hold the nail while he hit it and then he hit it hard so the top of the nail – the hat of it – pushed right through the skin of the boy’s finger and gripped it tight against the wood. The boy screamed and the mother came with a cloth for the blood. The father said, ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ He smiled at Betty. The deep lines on either side of his mouth looked like cuts.

  Betty and her brother stood on the step in the morning to say goodbye to him before they got ready for school. The boy never said goodbye so Betty said it lots of times in different sorts of ways to cover up. As the father went through the gate he looked back at them and he said, ‘Buy! Buy!’ because he was going to work selling curtains and it was a joke.

  The lady next door went away and they had to feed and water an old carthorse she kept in a paddock across the road. The horse belonged to her dead husband so she didn’t like to get rid of it. The horse had patches of white fur on its back where harness sores had been and yellow teeth permanently on show between its floppy lips. When they put the hay in the hay net the horse didn’t walk towards it or even blink at them, but the hay was gone the next day. They called the horse ‘The Husband’.

  The father told them they should clean out the paddock. One corner, where the horse stood, was platformed with layers of hardened manure. It was impossible to break through the manure and they didn’t want to get too close to the horse. Instead they trawled around near the fence collecting pieces of broken glass. They had a small pile of green glass when an older boy rode past on a bicycle. He rang his bell at them, it was shrill and jangly. The sun went behind a cloud. Betty’s brother was suddenly frightened. He said they had to get rid of the glass. He started to pick it up and throw it into the old bath the horse drank from. Betty came and helped him. The glass floated for a few seconds on top of the water and then sank. It seemed mysterious, sacred, watching the glass sink. It felt to Betty like a kind of return. Betty said, ‘Water to water, rust to rust,’ like she had heard in church, then they put hay in the hay net and filled the bath up with water. The rabbit and the parrot had been watching them from the gate. They collected the rabbit and the parrot and went home.

  The father’s shirtsleeves were rolled up, but he still had his hat on. He hadn’t put his hat on the hallstand yet and Betty thought that meant it was safe. One of his sleeves was wet. The line between the wet material and the dry material wasn’t sharp like Betty would have expected, it was blurry.

  The father took the boy by the arm. He put his other hand in front of the boy’s face. It was cupped full of the wet green glass.

  ‘Did you do this?’

  ‘No,’ the boy said.

  ‘Did you do this?’

  ‘No,’ the boy said and started to cry.

  ‘Don’t you dare lie to me.’ The father threw the glass at the wall, then he unbuckled his belt. He pushed the boy towards the kitchen. He said, ‘There are no liars in this house.’

  Betty went to get the parrot, but it was too late.

  Betty had a job in the food hall. She went to the cool room in the basement and collected the cheeses on a trolley that had PROPERTY OF THE CHEESE DEPARTMENT written on the side, and at the end of the day she wrapped the cheeses in white muslin cloths and put them away. The large cheeses sat on wooden boards and stuck to them and made sucking sounds like a tongue inside a wet mouth when they were prised free. The cheeses were heavy and when she was lifting them she thought they were as heavy as babies. All the young women were cutting their hair and taking up smoking and leaving their long skirts behind. They stood and smoked under the shop awnings before work in the morning. They leaned their smooth heads together and puckered their lips as they lit each other’s cigarettes. Betty had a green felt hat the shape of a melon with an egret feather on the side and no brim. The hats suited the women who had long necks; they looked like tulips. Women with short necks and square shoulders looked like they were wearing a bucket.

  Michael’s father liked soft cheeses that had to be cut with a wire. The first time he waited for her after work and saw her without her hairnet on, he said, ‘Thank God for that.’ They went to the pictures and ate spaghetti sitting on high stools at a bar on Bourke Street. They walked through the Fitzroy Gardens in the dark, the possums scattering away from their footfalls. He settled her at the base of a giant fig tree and removed her bra and placed his head and hands inside her blouse. He kneaded her breasts between his fingers, then rubbed his face against them, leaving the mark of his stubble against her where the skin was paper thin, almost transparent, where the blue veins twisted through the flesh towards the nipple like strings of ivy. She looked down at the dark silhouette of his face between her breasts. She heard his lips ping as they parted, as he opened his mouth and reached out for her nipple with the pointed tip of his tongue. He turned the nipple in his mouth, rolling it backwards and forwards. She whimpered. She looked up at the dark folds of the tree and then back again at his face. He wasn’t so young. The skin around his
eyes was crisscrossed with lines; she traced them with her fingertips. She wondered how people resisted. How was it possible to resist?

  He held her hand on the tram, behind her handbag. She stroked his fingers. She found herself telling him about a puppy her father had brought home for her tenth birthday: a black spaniel. The puppy didn’t grow and had to be coaxed, stiff and costive, out of its kennel in the morning. When she gave the dog its first bath in the copper the water pooled around his neck. Running her hand over the humid curls she had felt the tufted fur where a collar had been. They made another collar for the dog – out of a cut-down belt – and Betty remembered being relieved when the worn-down place on the dog’s neck was covered again. She swallowed to show that the story was finished. The man nodded and drew his lips back in a smile; he had nothing to say about this.

  It wasn’t the story Betty had meant to tell the man; she meant to tell him the funny thing about the dog – that when it was asleep it would start growling under its breath, then barking and then, while still fully asleep, it would jump up and run head first into the nearest wall and wake up shocked and affronted that they were laughing at it.

  Later, in her bed, Betty remembered the man’s hands on her. She remembered stroking his fingers on the tram and she knew why she’d told him the story about the black spaniel. A long-worn ring leaves the same braided indent on the skin after it has been removed as a collar. The mark isn’t visible to the eye, but it gives itself up to touch.

  When he was gone and she was pregnant with Michael and made the first of her moves away, she forgot exactly how it had felt; the unstoppable desire. Later still, when she was working nights in the hospital laundry at Bendigo and watching Michael play on his own, she was the one who took control. Every Tuesday and Thursday night for a month she made a bed on the floor of the storeroom and lay with the nightwatchman there. The humid smell of bleach rose from the clean sheets and from his spill, white too and milky like an expensive cleaning fluid. Bolder now, she drank it, she smeared it over her breasts, she felt it sticky between her thighs as she bicycled home from work. And stripping for her bath she noticed how it formed a coating as it dried and could be peeled like sunburn – like it was already becoming a type of skin.

  When Little Hazel was born Betty told Michael that his new baby sister had a present for him. She gave Michael the green corduroy parrot. The grey rabbit, her rabbit, she gave to Little Hazel.