The kids are about ten or twelve years old, two fair-headed boys and a dark girl. They look at me with wide eyes; the girl has her hands over her mouth, hardly able to contain her excitement. I grasp the flowers in my right hand and look at the kids; I leer and reach out with my left and waggle my fingers at them in a ‘casting a spell’ fashion; they squeal and bolt away. I hear, a little farther off, the clatter of bikes being picked up and kicked into motion. I take my flowers inside and put them in the crystal milk jug, which has been a makeshift vase now for sixty years even though I still call it a milk jug. I wonder if Jacob Ghost gets flowers.
Jacob Ghost is supposed to haunt the trees by the edge of the Horse Head Lagoon. Horse Head Lagoon, a crooked little watering hole that starts at the farthest edge of this property, sits near the cattle bridge that crosses the Murrumbidgee and leads over to the Sturt Highway. I don’t know when the story started up; it must have been sometime during my twenties. I remember a sign just appeared one day. It was handwritten with black paint on a piece of white fence post and had been nailed to a tree down by the lagoon; ‘Jacob Ghost walks here,’ it declared. The handwriting was heavy and childlike with dried runnels of black paint streaked from each letter. I never knew who put it there. Mother was tight-lipped about the whole thing; even when I was excited and bursting to talk about the great mystery of it all, she dismissed my eager wittering.
‘You’re too old for such nonsense, Maggie,’ she’d snapped.
When Mother snapped, that was that; we didn’t speak of it again. I think of it now only because, since I have become the local witch and a famous spook myself, I feel a kind of kinship for old Jacob. I hope he’s getting flowers too.
*
The howling starts again, a few hours after the darkness falls. It’s getting dark faster now, with the heart of winter coming, and don’t my bones know it. My knuckles, knees and hips scream with pain and I swallow some of the pain pills the doctor brought up for me last time he came. They are supposed to make it easier to sleep, but they just fill my head with a cottony fog that further blurs the edges between my sleeping and waking.
I wish whatever it was groaning out there would just die, or come for me, or do whatever it damn well has to do so it would shut up. Sometimes, when I can think clearly, I tell myself, It’s just a cow or a calf, you’ve heard the sound of a bovine in distress before. You grew up on a cattle station for God’s sake, stop being so imaginative. I say this to myself in Mother’s matter of fact voice; the voice she would use to admonish the actors on TV if she thought they were being silly.
Some years after Father passed, Mother went down to town and ordered us a TV. It was the late 50s by then and a few young men brought it here on a truck. It was an extravagance. We were among the first in Wren to have one of our own and we pretty much settled in to watch it as our main pastime. Oh, there was plenty of gossiping and sewing, knitting and the brewing of tea, but all of it took place under the pale glare of that TV light. We developed a taste for it, sure enough, and it has kept me company in my solitude, though the set itself is new and the third since that hulking first box. I can’t count the times I have fallen asleep in its company.
*
I’m awake again; it’s late as hell. The howling is worse; it is deep, urgent and afraid, and I just can’t stand it anymore. It’s the bunyip; I will have to go to it. It’s stuck down there somehow. It is waiting for me. It is Jacob Ghost and Father’s angry ghost. I know it is not any of these things. If I could make it quiet I could get some sleep and I could, I don’t know, I’m forgetting what I need.
Mother is sitting in the kitchen, she is sewing, her lap is overflowing with black silk, she looks up and her hair as all white now, her face a series of folds and hollows. She is hunched over so far that her back is a full half circle and her face is bent close to her work. She pulls the thread taut, out come the silver scissors and with one clean snip it is done.
‘Mother!’ I cry, but no sound comes out because Mother is not here and I am not quite awake. I want to cry and I get angry with myself for the thought. ‘Mother, please. I am done with it,’ I blubber and I know I’m talking rubbish. If I could just get the awful noise to stop I could collect my thoughts, I could sort myself out. Even the TV can’t soothe me now, and it can’t drown out the keening.
I will have to go out and stop it myself. But first, of course, I’ll need a coat. I’ll need something warm and thick, to keep off not only the night chill, but the bugs and whatnot that might be out there. There’s an old parka on the hall hook; I give it a few firm shakes to get the dust out and it still fits okay, even if it is a bit baggy. I button it down over my housedress. I wish I had some trousers, but I can’t think where any might be. I look down at my battered slippers, their sheepskin innards pilling and brown with dirt. I’ll need some sturdier shoes for walking out in the grass. I rummage through the wardrobe floors, the shoe rack and the laundry room. I have a ratty pair of slippers and a pair of Homey Ped sandals that I mail ordered about fifteen years ago. The sandals have a weak strap and are entirely inadequate to my purpose. I haven’t got any good sturdy shoes at all. But what would I need them for? I don’t go anywhere. Now I’m frustrated because I’m determined to sort this out, once and for all. I need to find out what is making that awful bellowing and I need to get it to stop.
I stumble around looking through boxes and cupboards I haven’t peeked into for many years, since Mother died, since before Mother died. There is so much clutter, so much rubbish and, oh, everything is loaded with the past. I pull out the coat that I lay on for that one tryst with Billy Bird and a lump presses upwards from my chest to my throat. How can this old thing still be here? But nothing has been thrown away so everything is here, of course. The ridiculous hat that Bess sent me in her first years away from home; a funny little cap made of a deep blue felt she must have thought I would like, but I stashed it away and forgot it, embarrassed by its stylishness and what it revealed about the distance that had grown between Bess and me. A bag of marbles that must have once belonged to Frankie clunks heavily along the bottom of another drawer.
There are boots that were Father’s in the piles of junk that have been stacked along the sleepout wall. I try them on but they are too large. I can’t walk in them. I haul open an old chest and scatter motheaten blankets and greasy stubs of candles and there! Boots. They are brown leather riding boots of the kind Father always wore, but these are a little smaller; maybe they were Frankie’s, but I don’t remember them. I pull one on and it is stiff with age and disuse. The dry air has hardened the leather and the inner soles feel like they have curled up a bit on the inside, but altogether the fit is not bad. I pull both on and stamp a little in the dark room, getting the feel of them. The hard wood heel makes three loud raps like the casting of a spell.
The air outside is still and cold. The moon makes an intermittent appearance between fast-moving clouds and bathes the landscape in flashes of silver. Each time the clouds roll back over I have to rely on the weak yellow beam of my torch. It jitters and jolts as I bump along. The long grass whacks wetly into my bare shins. The boots hold together, though, and for this I am grateful. I half expected they’d have sat so long untouched that they had perished and would fall apart and leave me barefooted in the dark grass and weeds.
I walk in a straight line and I am tuned in to the beast that bellows and groans in the night. I walk for ages. The cold air is getting into my bones and my hand is a vice around the old plastic torch. I think I couldn’t let go of it now if I wanted to. Maybe hours pass, maybe minutes; the holler of the beast comes and goes but it is getting louder, so I know I am getting closer. I see in silhouette the sparse line of trees on the horizon ahead and I know I am reaching the lagoon. The sound is coming from the lagoon and I become momentarily sure it is the bunyip after all and it is not hurt, but waiting, with its teeth gleaming in the moonlight and waiting, waiting and hungr
y, and even though fear spikes in my belly, I quicken my steps because an end is an end I am so tired now, so tired.
Something catches my foot in the grass, a rock or a tangle of weed, and I trip in the too-large boots. I fall flat, smacking my chin against the hard ground, the torch bouncing away. The dark falls over me and the pain is everywhere. I lie a while with the damp grass scratching at my legs. The pain in my chin and my scraped palms burns and I hear myself whimpering as though I am far, far away. Something flickers ahead, a whitish flash beneath the trees. It looks like a man shape and then I see the spindly legs, a pale elongated head. Jacob Ghost walks out from under the trees. I am stomach-down in the grass, propping myself on my palms and trying to summon the strength to get up as the willowy ghost walks forward. He has no face, but I know it’s him. ‘Jacob,’ I try to call.
Then the moon clears through the cloud cover and the world is illuminated again and there is no ghost, but the white flicker is something: a beast, a creature with a white hide, thrashing under the trees. Not the bunyip, then, since my bunyip is an oily black, always black, unless of course the bunyip has aged too and is as white-haired as I am now.
I scramble up, my energy renewed by the light and the creature that is surely there beneath the trees. Its eyes are glowing in the dark; it thrashes and makes its terrible bawling. I brush the wet grass from my creased knees; they are grazed and bloody now and the stinging does not abate. My heart is hammering in the cage of my ribs and I feel so faint for a moment that I might fall again, but I collect myself and make it to the red plastic torch before the moon is obscured again and I am left with nothing but its weak beam. I stumble toward the lagoon’s edge.
The creature must know I am near; it has picked up its bawling and it is calling and mewling urgently now. I know what it is even before I shine the torch on it. It’s a calf, a big pale calf caught in some fence wire which is cutting into its leg so deeply that in at least one spot it is grinding against bone. The creature is mad with pain and distress and its eyes roll wildly. I try to calm it, but it is jerking its head in a mad panic. I count three or four days since the crying began, so I know it’s been down here at least that long.
I can’t think of what to do for it. I don’t know whose calf it might be. We haven’t grazed our own cattle since Father’s illness and Mother sold off two thirds of the land to sheep farmers. For the first time in my life I wish for one of those portable phones everyone uses nowadays. I can’t leave the beast here and I’m too bone tired to think of walking back just yet in any case. My body feels like a pile of sharp bones inexpertly packed into an old sack; they jangle about and sharp spears of pain slice through me. I am holding a palm out to the beast, whose nostrils are foaming with snot, and I try to make calming noises. I know I am grimacing in my own pain and tiredness and I think, If the cow has a thought in its bovine head, it is probably that I am naught but a scarecrow, a woman made of old branches. We sit together, this dying calf and I, and neither of us can do a thing for the other.
I am panting and the dark is deep and cold and the calf bellows and bawls away. I need to make it stop. I grasp at branches and anything I can to get to my feet. I sweep the torch over the area, looking for anything that will help. A darkness drops over my eyes, deeper than the dark of the night around me, and at first I don’t even realise that I have collapsed. The darkness is sleep, or something close to it, sleep trying to steal over me. But I still hear the crying of the calf until my hand, flung out now with the torch gone from my grasp, feels a slap of damp heat. The calf has stopped crying and is investigating my hand, licking the dew I have brushed from the leaves and grass in my scrambling. The calf is blessedly quiet as it snuffles and licks. I can barely open my eyes, but I do; I am lying on my back and the clouds are parting over my head.
The moon is gone and the black sky is deep and pinned with stars. The night is entering its deepest chapter. Watching the sky through the reaching branches I am reminded again of that night with Billy Bird, lying in the grass with the night over us and the soft grass underneath. As the stars wheel and the branches sway overhead I feel a pang of regret for the first time in my long life. Oh, is this what it comes to?
The calf has gone quiet, not nuzzling my hand anymore, not thrashing or bawling. It has gone still as a stone. I let my head fall to the side and I see, back the way I have come, across the wild weedy paddock in which nothing of use has grown for years, coming toward me from the place where the house sits like a hulking shadow darkening the horizon, a human shape is nearing, nearing. It is Mother. Her hair is flying, her face is young and old at once and her expression is gentleness, such infinite gentleness and in her hands are her silver scissors. I smile. I close my eyes and I wait.
A Lovely and Terrible Thing
Chris Womersley
What a burden it is to have seen wondrous things, for afterwards the world feels empty of possibility. There used to be a peculiar human majesty in my line of work: the woman with hair so long she could wind it ten times around her waist; old Frankie Block, who could wrestle a horse to the ground; the boy with a fox tail. There was a good reason we referred to ourselves as the Weird Police. Now it’s more likely to be a conga-line of Elvis impersonators sponsored by McDonald’s. Somewhere along the way the job lost its magic, but perhaps that was just me.
*
It was dusk when I pulled over to phone my wife. I would be gone for only two nights, but caring for our daughter Therese was gruelling, melancholy work, like tending to a fire perpetually on the verge of going out. More than once I had come home to discover Elaine sitting in the near-dark, weeping with the endlessness of it all, and there was nothing I could do but hold her until she felt better. It took hours, sometimes. At others, all night.
My phone didn’t have reception out on the back roads. I trudged into a cold and muddy field with it held foolishly over my head, but it was no use; I would have to call from the motel in Kyneton.
When I returned to the car, the damn thing refused to start. I fished out a torch, popped the bonnet and peered at the engine, but the mass of wires and pipes might as well have been Sanskrit hieroglyphs for all the sense I could make of them. No cars passed. There was not a house in sight. I cursed my decision to take the scenic route. At least on the highway someone might stop and help. On the highway my phone would have reception.
I jiggled a few wires and checked the radiator, but it was no use. By now the horizon was darkening and the wind had turned sharp and bitter. Again I stared at the mute, incomprehensible engine and it occurred to me that a mechanic might have fared better with Therese than any of her medical specialists had over the years. I held my freezing hands over the engine, but the heat it gave off was minimal and diminished noticeably as I stood there.
I was beginning to resign myself to the prospect of spending the night in the car when a voice startled me. I swung around to see a large man approaching through the gloom. ‘G’day,’ he said again.
Embarrassed to have been discovered warming myself over a dead engine, I took my hands back and greeted him.
‘Everything all right?’ he asked.
I gestured to the engine. ‘Car’s broken down on me. I pulled over to make a phone call and now it won’t start.’
The fellow was about my age, dressed in overalls, with a shock of grey hair that flapped about like a bird’s broken wing. He stood nodding at the roadside verge and considered me for a moment. ‘Want me to take a look?’
‘Yes, that would be great. Thanks.’ I held out my hand. ‘I’m Daniel Shaw, by the way.’
The man grunted and shook my hand, reluctantly, it seemed. ‘Dave. They call me Angola round here.’
‘Angola. Like the place?’
He started. ‘You’ve heard of it?’
‘Of course.’
He paused. ‘Well, I spent a few years there.’
He took my t
orch, positioned it on the rim of the bonnet where it would provide the best light, and set about poking around inside. After a few minutes he urged me to try the ignition again, which I did, but without any luck.
‘Dunno, mate,’ Angola said, wiping his hands on a rag he produced from a back pocket. ‘Reckon she’s stuffed for now, though. Where you going?’
‘Kyneton. How far is that?’
Again he looked at me as if puzzled to find me there at all. By now it was almost dark. The only light was that of the torch which, at that moment, splashed its light across the right half of his face. I imagined us from a distance – two men, strangers to each other, on a lonely road – and felt a jolt of fear.
‘Too far to walk,’ he said at last above a roar of sudden wind. He undid the bracket supporting the upraised bonnet, grabbed the torch and let the bonnet fall. ‘But you can stay the night at my place, if you like.’
‘I need to be there by 2 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. There’s something I have to verify. I work for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and there’s supposed to be a parrot that can count to 150. I have to check it’s true. We might use it in the next annual.’
That piqued his interest. It usually did. Angola sauntered closer and looked me over. ‘You work for Ripley’s? Like the TV show? Ha. You musta seen some pretty weird things.’
I laughed. The world’s most-tattooed man, the girl with eighteen fingers, the ultra-marathon runners. He didn’t know the half of it.
With his thumb he indicated the field beside the road, beyond which, presumably, he lived. ‘My daughter has a pretty special trick, actually. Maybe you should come and see her? Put her in your big old book.’
He said this in a mildly lascivious manner I didn’t care for but, as usual, that word pricked my heart, deflating it ever further. Daughter. I thought again of poor Elaine, poor Therese; my silent, waiting family. I hoped my wife had at least turned on the lights before pouring her first Scotch.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 10
