She saw something move out of the corner of her eye. She froze, then slowly turned her head.
It was a snake, a red-bellied black one, its tiny head peering into the dish where she kept her water. It stopped too, as soon as it sensed her movement, lying there as though to say, ‘I am a stick.’
She almost grinned. The two of them, both too scared to move. If she moved it might strike her, kill her. If it moved she might kill it — if she knew how to kill a snake, which she didn’t. But the snake didn’t know that.
Suddenly she heard steps shuffle up the steps, and breathed in relief. Hey You padded into the room, followed by Auntie Love, carrying an armful of dead branches for the fire.
‘Stop.’ Matilda nodded over to the water dish. ‘Snake.’
Hey You dropped to his stomach, staring at the reptile. Auntie Love smiled. She put down the wood, then made a short lunge. Suddenly the snake’s tail was in her hands, and the head cracked once, twice, against the floor.
The snake writhed, but Matilda could see that it was dead, its head smashed. It had taken about five seconds.
For a moment she felt like crying at the loss of its beauty. Because it had been beautiful, even though deadly — the shiny black, the flash of red like a flower, the silent grace of it. And then the loss faded, and she was just glad that her house was snake-free.
She’d check the bed, though, tonight.
‘Good tucker.’ Auntie Love grinned.
‘Errk! Not snake!’
Auntie Love laughed. ‘You got carrots, potatoes, big pot. Stew ‘em up.’
She couldn’t eat snake. But Aunt Ann had made breaded eel. Maybe if she pretended the snake was eel …
‘It won’t poison us?’
Auntie laughed again. She pantomimed horror, clutching her throat like she’d been poisoned, then shook her head. She took the snake to the table and grabbed a knife. She sliced off the head, then began to pull off the skin, her left hand still clumsy.
Matilda glanced away. Next time, she thought. I’ll watch how she does it next time. I’ll never eat it if I see how she cleans it now, and if I don’t eat it she’ll be hurt.
At least Auntie Love was wearing a dress again today. Matilda hoped she wouldn’t appear without her clothes again. It was embarrassing.
But why had she done it? It was almost a taunt to Mr Drinkwater, as though to say: ‘I am a wild native, and there is nothing you can do about it.’
And there isn’t, thought Matilda stubbornly. No one was going to shoot natives on Moura land — or Drinkwater, if she could help it. And there was no way Mr and Mrs Sampson or Auntie Love were going to be sent to a reserve, either.
Hey You gave a sudden yap, then trotted out the door. Matilda followed him, glad to have an excuse to leave the kitchen while Auntie Love dealt with the snake.
It was Mr Sampson and his two dogs, pushing the mob of sheep — now containing Mrs Dawkins and her two lambs — toward the open gate of the stockyards. The dogs worked either side of him, yapping and snapping to keep the sheep headed toward the gate.
Matilda ran down to him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Checkin’ for fly strike.’
‘What’s that?’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, missy. I do it.’
‘But they’re my sheep too now, aren’t they? I should help you.’
Mr Sampson looked even more shocked than she had been at the idea of eating snake. ‘Not right. Dirty work, missy.’
‘Call me Matilda. Please, Mr Sampson.’
He stared at her, then nodded. The sheep were inside now. He shut the gate, then picked up a pair of hand shears and a bucket of something dark and evil smelling. There was a strange-looking brush sticking out of the gloopy stuff.
‘What’s that?’
‘Bit o’ wattle bark, turps, tobacco. Kill the strike.’
At least he didn’t call her ‘missy’ this time, even if he hadn’t said ‘Matilda’, either. ‘What’s strike?’
He looked at her consideringly, then slipped between the slats of the gate into the yards. She followed him. His dogs stayed outside, lying on their bellies, looking cautiously at Hey You, seated imperiously now up on the verandah as though to say to the other dogs, ‘Just remember all this is mine.’
Mr Sampson lunged, grabbing one of the ewes by the neck. A sudden movement and it was seated on its bottom, looking stupid. Mr Sampson ran his hand through its fleece, then pointed at a damp-looking patch. ‘Strike.’
Matilda peered closer, then drew back. ‘Ohh.’
The damp patch was rotten wool, stinking and yellowish. But worse was underneath — raw flesh, filled with tiny maggots, burrowing and crawling. She patted the sheep’s nose, startling the animal still more. How did it bear the pain?
Mr Sampson nodded at the bucket. She picked up the brush, and saw it was a big grass tussock, trimmed to bristle length. Liquid dripped from it.
‘Put it on thick,’ said Mr Sampson.
She gritted her teeth, dipped the brush one last time, then thrust it into the sheep’s side. The animal struggled in obvious agony.
‘Again,’ said Mr Sampson.
Once again she dipped and thrust. Mr Sampson let the sheep go.
‘It’s … it’s horrible.’
‘Worse if we don’t, eh?’ said Mr Sampson gently.
Matilda nodded. She thought she would be sick — sick from the pain in the sheep’s eyes, sick at the red flesh, sick from the smell of the stuff in the bucket.
But these were her sheep. Half hers, anyway. If this wasn’t done they would die — in even worse pain than they felt now, eaten at by the strike.
She took a deep breath. ‘Easier to do this with two.’
Mr Sampson nodded.
‘You hold them. I’ll splash on the wash.’
He looked at her for a moment. ‘We got to take the tails off of them lambs too.’
‘Why?’
‘Stop the fly strike on their bums.’
‘But … but won’t they bleed to death?’
‘No,’ said Mr Sampson.
Matilda glanced at the two lambs, butting Mrs Dawkins’s sides, their tiny tails wriggling in the air. It seemed impossibly cruel to hurt them. But she had never seen a grown-up sheep with a tail, she realised. Mr Sampson must know what he was doing.
She nodded slowly. ‘I’ll help with that too.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
He smiled. ‘Good-oh,’ he said, then added, ‘Matilda.’
Chapter 27
Dear Mrs Ellsmore,
I hope you are well.
Thank you very, very much for the clothes. Mr Sampson liked them, and so did I. I had to take in the trousers. I think your husband must have been fatter bigger than Mr Sampson. I am keeping the beautiful dress in my chest for the next time I go to town.
Yes, Miss Hills was my Aunt Ann. I am very grateful for your offer of help, but this is my farm now, and I do not want to leave it.
I am learning a lot about sheep. There were lambs in my picture book when I was small. Real ones are even funnier. They jump up and down playing ‘king of the rock’, trying to catch butterflies and darting about with the wind. I love the mother sheep too, their patience as the lambs butt under them for milk, and how they stand with their backs to the wind, looking like grey rocks.
We have twenty-two sheep now, after lambing. We have one ram too. He has a long nose and looks down it at us as though he disapproves of us.
The sheep come back to the valley where my house is every night, so they can drink, then go out every morning to see what they can find beyond the cliffs.
The sheep keep trying to get into my vegetables, but Mr Sampson and I have finished a fence to keep them out, and Hey You barks when the wallabies get under the railings. Hey You is a dog. I think he might be part dingo, but he is very well behaved.
Thank you again for the clothes, and your good wishes. I am looking forward to wearing the dres
s with lace.
Yours respectfully,
Matilda O’Halloran
Matilda finished her letter then glanced out the door at the shadows. It would be midday soon. She should go and weed the vegetables, dig up new plots for the seeds Mr Doo had given her, each kind wrapped in white paper, with a drawing of the vegetable on the front — useful, she suspected, for his customers who couldn’t read. Lettuce, cabbage, carrots, beetroot, leeks, radish, a big bag of corn seed, so she could grow extra for the hens as well.
She glanced at her hands. There was dirt ingrained in the fingernails, and different calluses from the ones she’d had in the factory. They weren’t the hands of someone who wore a lace-trimmed dress. They were hands that cut the smelly dags off sheep, that hoed the ground for vegetables, that tipped mutton fat into old treacle tins and dipped wicks into saltpetre bought from Mr Doo, to make slush lamps instead of buying candles.
Why was she lingering when there was work to do? Dreaming of a white-dress life?
I’m lonely, she realised. Not alone, but with no one really to talk to, no one who knew the world she had grown up with or who was even close to her own age. Auntie Love and Mr Sampson sometimes talked to each other in a language she didn’t understand, even when she recognised English words like ‘sheep’. Even Hey You was really Auntie Love’s dog.
As though it had heard her thought the dog gave a high howl from the rocks below the cliffs behind the house. Auntie Love spent more of her time outside now that she was so much better, though she still slept in the house — or on the verandah — each night. This morning when Matilda woke up there had been a bucket of gum blossom soaking in water: it made a cordial, sweet and slightly bitter too, a bit like lemonade.
Hey You howled again then ran down toward the track, the sheep scattering with indignant baas.
Matilda grabbed her hat. Hey You had never behaved like this with visitors. What was wrong? She reached the bottom of the stairs just as two men ambled between the cliffs.
They were no age, their beards were dirt coloured, their faces too. Even their clothes and swags were the colour of the dust. Only their eyes showed blue and white. The tallest held up a hand in greeting. ‘Hello, missy. Lovely place you got here. You made it real nice. Your ma or pa around?’
They know, she thought, as Hey You ran to her heels. They know it’s only me and Auntie Love.
‘You got any work for a pair o’ swaggies down on their luck? I’m that hungry I could eat a hollow log full of green ants. Chop you a whole woodpile for a bit o’ dinner.’
The dog sank to its belly and growled.
Matilda didn’t quite trust them either. They were too innocent, too friendly. But she hated asking Mr Sampson to chop wood for her — he had enough to do already. The axe was sharp, and there were the ringbarked trees up by the cliffs ready to be felled. And she could cook them dinner.
The taller one shook his head mournfully. ‘Ain’t had a crust to eat since day before yesterday.’
This could have been her and Dad, begging for work to fill their bellies. Suddenly she felt ashamed of her suspicion.
‘Wait here. I’ll bring you some damper and cold meat before you start work — that all right? And the axe.’
‘Ah, you’re a good girl. Yes, a real good girl. You got a wood splitter and wedges too?’
She nodded.
‘We’ll do you a right good wood heap.’
His mate grinned, showing three long yellow teeth in a mouthful of gums. She could smell the stink of his breath. ‘Too right,’ he said.
The sounds of axe blows rang around the cliffs while she mixed up a fresh damper, put the haunch of roo Mr Sampson had brought her the day before on to boil with precious onions and potatoes. If the only way she could repay their work was with dinner, she’d make it the best she could.
A whole pile of properly chopped wood, instead of twigs and sticks and branches. She could make it last for weeks, months maybe …
Hey You gave a woof. Auntie Love appeared, silent as always. She gestured out toward the sound of chopping.
‘It’s two swaggies.’ She realised she didn’t even know their names. ‘They said they’d chop wood in return for dinner.’
Auntie Love’s lips grew thin. She stared outside for a moment, then shook her head.
‘It’s all right. Really …’
Suddenly Matilda realised the sound of the axe had stopped. ‘They must be stacking the wood,’ she said uncertainly. They weren’t stealing the axe, were they? And the wedges and wood splitter?
‘I’ll just run down and check on them — no, Auntie,’ as the old woman made to come too. ‘I’ll be faster by myself.’
She was glad she was in trousers, not a skirt. Impossible to run in a skirt. Hey You followed at her heels, for once staying with her and not his mistress. She stopped, a giant pile of wood in front of her.
How had they managed to chop all this in such a short time? She had misjudged them. They were just what they had said — two swaggies down on their luck, and hard workers too.
She looked around. ‘Hello?’ she called.
No answer. They must have headed up to the spring for a drink. But then she’d have met them on the road. She stared around again, then on impulse looked down at the ground.
Suddenly it was just like tracking the goanna with Auntie Love. There were their boot marks — two different sorts of boots, one with a hole in the heel. A whole mass of prints around the wood heap, then two sets heading back toward the house and spring, but around the cliffs, not toward the track.
They must have decided it was shorter that way, she thought. Or shadier. She’d catch them up, offer them a cup of tea, more damper, before they started work again. She reached for some wood to carry back for the fire.
The heap collapsed. She stared at it, a stick of wood in her hand. They had built it hollow. How many farm women had they conned, she wondered, to get so skilled in building hollow stacks?
And where were they now?
She dropped the wood then began to run again, back toward the house. No time to find Mr Sampson. Hey You was silent at her heels.
The house was quiet. Too quiet, no sound of Auntie stirring the pot. She peered inside the door.
‘Wondered where you were, missy.’ The smaller man grinned his gap teeth at her. He held a bulging sack. A piece of cloth poked out from the top. Her sheets …
‘How dare you —’ She stopped, as the other swaggie held up the axe.
‘Cunning as a dunny rat, that’s me. Now you be a good little missy, and maybe we’ll leave you and the old darkie in one piece.’
Matilda stared around at Auntie Love, sitting silent in the corner. Auntie met her gaze as though to say: be quiet. Don’t anger them.
Matilda edged toward her. Auntie was right. What could an old woman and a girl do against two men? Especially when one man held an axe. If only she had gone to find Mr Sampson. If she had screamed for help down at the fake woodpile he might have heard her.
And maybe they’d have used the axe against him too.
Her axe. Her sheets. Even the hessian sack was hers.
No, she thought. I have lost too much. Lost Dad and Mum, Aunt Ann. This place is mine …
It was as though the land itself sent strength up through her boots. She had fought bullies before, and she had won. She could win now too.
She clicked her fingers. Hey You sat up, still staring at the strangers.
‘You see this dog?’
‘I see him, missy. So what?’
‘If I click my fingers again he’ll tear out your throat.’
It was a lie. The dog obeyed Auntie Love, not her, if it obeyed anyone. But the man looked at the dog uncertainly. ‘Don’t look savage.’
‘He isn’t. Just well trained.’
The man held up his axe. ‘Just let him try it then.’ But his voice held fear.
Matilda forced her lips into the smile she had used on the Push. ‘Will we see what happens then?
I’ll click my fingers and one of you will be dead. You or the dog.’
‘Let’s get out of it.’ The taller man used a rag to grab the handle of the pot from the fire. ‘We’re going, missy.’
‘Put my pot down before you go. And the sack.’
‘Don’t listen to her —’
Hey You growled.
It was a low rumble, almost too soft to hear. The man hesitated, then slowly put the pot down.
‘Now the sack. Where’s my wood splitter?’
The taller man pointed to the tools on the table.
‘Get going then. And don’t come back. The dog and I will track you off this place. And if I see you again anywhere near my land,’ she put the smile back in place, ‘I’ll click my fingers. And you know what?’
‘What?’
‘I’m not a good little missy.’ She let the anger take her. It felt wonderful. ‘I’ll see your throat ripped out and I’ll enjoy it.’
She could hear their feet pound down the track as they ran.
Chapter 28
Auntie Love made tea. Matilda felt that the cliffs could shake into tiny pebbles and Auntie Love would make tea. She watched the old woman put out the thin china cups, the saucers, pour hot water into the pot, then add two spoons of sugar to both their cups.
Matilda’s hand shook as she lifted the cup from its saucer. But the tea steadied her with its warmth and sweetness.
Auntie gave a short laugh over the table. ‘You scared ’em proper.’
Claws clicked on the steps. Hey You reappeared. Somehow Matilda was sure he had been following the men down to the road.
She looked at Auntie Love, calmly sipping her tea. Had her words really been a bluff? Would the dog have defended them if Auntie had given the command?
She was glad she hadn’t had to find out. ‘Good dog.’ She reached down and rubbed Hey You’s ears. The dog accepted it.
She grinned, the strength coming back to her, and buttered a hunk of damper, and put it on the floor for the dog. Hey You gulped it, sniffed for crumbs, then lay down next to Auntie, his nose across her feet. Suddenly his ears pricked up again. He gave a growl, then raced out the door again.
A Waltz for Matilda Page 16
