by Stephen Orr
Still, some hope was better than none. So, they made up a bed in the sleep-out and Barry moved in. They fed him and provided a radio and magazines and a comfortable couch to sleep away the long, hot afternoons. Boxing Day. New Year’s Day. A full week into one of the hottest Januaries on record. As he kept repeating, ‘I really appreciate your hospitality.’
As they tried to draw Fay from her room. ‘Come on, darls, he just wants to have a quiet word with yer.’
‘No.’
‘I’m sure he’ll say he’s sorry.’
‘I don’t care.’
Soon Fay was writing notes and sending them, via Chris, to her husband. Please leave; you are not welcome here; I have no intention of talking to you … As she thought, Once Strayed, Will Stray Again.
Chris was happy to have his dad around. Fay insisted he stay with her, but he wouldn’t. She’d hold the door closed but he’d kick her leg. She’d only leave the room to go to the toilet, but only after she’d asked someone to check if he was around.
Early January, February, as Barry told the others there was no way he could go out and work in hundred-degree heat.
So, eventually, in a machinery shed conference, the Wilkies decided their experiment was a failure—that two rotten carcasses were preferable to three.
It was time.
Murray volunteered to tell Barry. Waking up one hot February morning, he looked over to the bed where his brother-in-law had lain for so many weeks and said, ‘Hey, Bazz, you awake?’
No response.
He’d gone. Packed his few things and left, leaving nothing except a note on his wife’s bedroom door.
That sort of makes us even, I guess. Good luck with the boy. I don’t know that I’m up to a lifetime of all that, anyhow. Also, if you’ve had concerns, I suggest you see a doctor. Me and Trish had started up before I’d finished with you. Then it turns out she was full of it. A few pills and I was all better anyway.
Luckily, Fay found the note first. She knew he was lying. She’d never had so much as an itch. Still, that’s the sort of man he was, she concluded. Bad. Led through life by the tip of his purple donger.
The Wilkies feigned disappointment for a few hours before settling in for the long haul: life with Fay and Chris, still out picking lavender, as his shoulders burned and blistered and Murray tried to call him back in. ‘Did you even bother with sunscreen? Idiot.’
‘Murray!’ Fay called, from somewhere deep inside the house, although she was used to this sort of talk.
‘Look at him,’ he called back. ‘He’s like a bloody lobster.’
‘Chris!’ Fay tried to shout. ‘Listen to your uncle. Come inside, please.’
‘I’m not finished.’
‘Now!’
Chris kept picking. Murray lit another cigarette. ‘Listen to your mother,’ he said.
Nothing. The sound of Fay shelling boiled eggs.
‘Hey, Fay, you gonna come out here and deal with this? He doesn’t listen to me.’
‘Well, he doesn’t listen to me.’
‘He’ll end up in hospital. He’s not all there.’
‘Do you mind?’
Carelyn was at the door, glaring at her father-in-law, holding a dessert bowl half-full of his old cigarette stubs. ‘What’s this?’
‘What?’
‘This is for eating food, Murray.’
He looked at the bowl and shrugged. ‘Looked like an old one to me.’
‘It’s not.’
‘You told me you were sick of seeing my butts in the—’
‘Not in a bloody bowl, Murray. It’s a filthy habit.’
No response.
‘And in the toilet. I told you not to smoke in the house.’
‘It’s my bloody house.’
She glared at him.
‘The toilet’s not inside, is it?’
‘Of course it is.’
He took the bowl and emptied the butts in front of the house. ‘There,’ he said, returning it, ‘just gotta soak it for a bit … good as new.’
She sniffed it. ‘You’d eat from this?’
‘When it’s clean.’
He inhaled, but she took the cigarette from him, put it out in the bowl and said, ‘Keep it.’
He shrugged again. ‘It looked chipped to me.’
Then she looked over at Chris. ‘Chris, get in here now. You should know better.’
This time Chris seemed to understand. He stood, gathered his bag and walked towards them.
Carelyn looked at Murray. ‘What were you thinking, leaving him out there?’
3
Trevor drove along the edge of the road. Grass and bullock bush scratching the ute. ‘We need to talk about the loan,’ he said to his father.
‘You needn’t worry about that … it’s manageable.’
‘It’s not.’
Again, a silence of rattling panels and exhausted shock-absorbers as he prepared for the same, almost daily, argument. ‘It’s not what we owe today … it’s the future.’
Murray couldn’t see the problem. ‘My old man went fifteen years without a drop of rain. As long as you keep the pumps running. There’s enough water …’ He trailed off, his words diluting like a tea-bag he’d been using for years.
Your old man, Trevor thought, studying a forest of sheoak bending in the wind: the one who got us into this mess in the first place. And his old man’s old man, buying a dud property while so much green, productive land went begging across the rest of the state. ‘As long as the repayments are heading south.’
‘They’re not gonna do that, are they?’
‘Then we’re gonna have to ask for more.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Well, this afternoon, you ring Mercy, you ask ’em if they’ll take another term of half fees; ring Elders, ask ’em—’
‘Don’t be so bloody dramatic.’
Trevor listened to the land breathe. Eremophila, in clumps, and growing over the track, spreading sacrificial limbs; attempting to reclaim the land, his land, although Murray (for now) held the deed. ‘It was somewhere near here, wasn’t it?’
‘Eh?’
‘God-man?’
Murray almost smiled. ‘Bit further back, I think.’
They both remembered a hot day in 1992, coming across an abandoned bike saddled with two pouches of clothes, a Bible and empty water bottles. They’d got out and examined it and Trevor had said, ‘Do you know anything about this?’
They’d tried to remember if they’d received a letter from a bike club, a lone trekker, a survivalist, anything.
‘Buggered if I know,’ Murray had replied, and they’d thrown the bike into the back of the ute and continued.
Then, another three or four kilometres on, they’d found the rider: a Canadian fireman cycling around Australia. He’d been attempting to cross the Nullarbor, but when he’d ridden past the turn-off to Bundeena, God had said to him: Here, the Wilderness, enter this place (or words that that effect).
‘You would’ve killed yourself,’ Murray had said to him, but he’d just replied, ‘No risk of that, sir. Jesus was lookin’ out for me.’
No, he was fuckin’ not, he’d wanted to say. Instead, explaining, ‘Do you know where this track goes?’
‘I’ve lost a lot of weight,’ the Canadian had explained, ‘but I only ran out of water yesterday.’
‘Another two hundred clicks and you’re in the desert.’
God-man had just smiled, taken off his cap and wiped his matted hair, forehead and raw face.
‘I’m sorry, but if you’d kept going, Jesus wouldn’t have helped you,’ Trevor had explained.
‘You just keep driving, we’ll see.’
Murray had shaken his head. ‘That would be the same as us allowing you to die.’
No response.
‘I’m not gonna have that on my conscience.’
‘You’ve just gotta trust, sir. He’s watching us at this very moment.’
Murray had been tempted to leave
him there. ‘Go on, get in the ute.’
The man had just stared at him. ‘I think I might walk.’
‘I think you might get in the ute, before we put you in.’
Trevor had stood with his arms crossed, for once, agreeing with his father. ‘This is private property. Ours.’
Their visitor had yielded, climbing into the back of the ute. ‘I appreciate you picking up my bike. Can you take me back to the road?’
Father and son had climbed in; Trevor had said, ‘Eventually, after we shoot a few roos.’
Trevor pulled into a clearing beside the road. A marker showed the location of buried water containers. This is where they’d stop for the night if they were out working on the edge of their blue-bush galaxy. Where they’d open their swags and slide the esky off the back of the ute, wash blood from their hands and light the primus.
They got out and made their way over to a long, concrete trough.
‘As I suspected,’ Murray said, noticing it, and the bore’s storage dam, was dry.
The bore itself was capped by a metal ring bolted onto a square of concrete. There was a pump. PVC pipes led into the trough and down to the dam.
‘Righto,’ Trevor said. He fetched his tool box from the ute and started fixing the pump. Murray moved to the trough, sat down, produced another rollie and lit it. ‘Old God-boy. I wonder what happened to him?’
‘You really care?’
‘Might still be out here somewhere.’
Trevor started wiping fine sand from the lubricated parts. ‘It was his choice. There’s only so much you can do to help some people.’
Murray studied the distant hummocks. ‘He mighta made it to Mount George, perhaps … with a bit of help from Jesus.’
As they both remembered the night, in 1992, cutting up a roo, looking up to see the stranger dancing in the bush before disappearing into the mid-distance. ‘Where the hell are you going?’ Murray had called, but all they could see was scrub, and all they could hear were branches snapping. ‘Christ … a complete bloody idiot.’
‘You’re gonna die,’ Trevor had shouted.
He tried to start the pump. Nothing. Murray finished his cigarette, walked over and squeezed the fuel line. Milked it as if it were some type of mechanical cow. ‘Go on.’
Trevor tried to start the pump, two, three times, and eventually it spluttered to life. He looked at his father and tried to smile. ‘Well … very good.’
As they waited for water, Murray said, ‘See, I’m not completely bloody useless.’
They drove to outstation ‘Number one’ (although, except for a pair of wooden rooms built by Murray’s grandfather, Bill, in the 1890s, it was their only outstation). The old shack measured thirty by twenty feet, four bunks, what passed for a kitchen and a spot in the middle to sit and eat and talk about the day. It still had its original floorboards, part-iron, part-wood walls, a pressed-tin ceiling and iron roof.
Number one was used until the late 1960s. Murray could still remember staying with his dad and the older men during the horseback musters. He could remember beef and damper and sweet black tea, and nothing else, for days on end. Playing cards and drinking beer that was kept cold in a rainwater tank that was kept full from a bore. He could still see and hear the men farting their way through an unsleepable night. And remember how they smelt after the fourth or fifth day.
Trevor stopped the ute in front of the old shack and looked at his dad.
‘Go on,’ Murray said.
‘You won’t come in?’
‘No.’
‘That’s stupid.’
Murray glared at him. ‘Hurry up.’
Trevor got out and fetched a jerry can full of fuel from the back of the ute. He carried it towards the shack. His feet sank and he put it down, lifted it, walked a few more paces and stopped again. He went in, sliding it along the floorboards. Then he left it beside a table covered with a dozen or so rabbit traps. Looked up at the ceiling. It was held in place (mostly) by two lengths of right-angled redwood, cut to fit into each other. Someone had wrapped an electric wire around one of the beams.
He wondered where. Studied the beams but there were no clues.
Outside, Murray sounded the horn. ‘Come on, what yer doin’?’
‘Hold on.’
No rope marks, no notches, from where his great-grandfather, Bill Wilkie, had passed a rope around the beam, tied it off, managed a rabbit-trapper’s knot as a noose, climbed onto the table and mumbled a few words. From where he’d jumped, unsuccessfully attempting to break his neck. There was no sign of where the rope had rubbed on the beam, no indication of the smell (after hanging undiscovered for six days), no signs of where his son, Morris, and two stockmen had taken him down.
And nothing, in this room at least, of the story behind it all.
‘What are you doing?’ Murray called, again.
This time Trevor didn’t respond.
No newspapers (September 1916) with a Cowards’ List—and the names of local men who had ‘shirked their duty’. No indication of what his wife, Mary, had said or thought when they brought his body back to the house. No explanation of how John Wilkie, their eldest son, born as a fat-cheeked baby in 1895, had gone missing on the Western Front (although his parents knew their son was no deserter).
Still, this is where Bill, father of Morris, grandfather of Murray, great-grandfather of Trevor, had come to kill himself. To keep everything neat, and private, to bury his shame in a thousand square miles of sand. To leave his body, as it left the world (seeing how the list had been made public, and had become a sort of unofficial gospel) in the little dog-box of a house he’d built.
‘Christ,’ Murray shouted, holding down the horn. ‘It’s getting warm out here.’
Trevor returned to the ute. ‘How long since you’ve been in there?’
‘A long time.’
They drove towards Bundeena.
‘Not since I … found out,’ Murray said.
‘Maybe it’s time.’
‘It doesn’t need discussing.’
They drove silently.
‘It was just too much for him,’ Trevor dared.
‘That doesn’t excuse anyone. He was a coward.’
4
Harry stood on the edge of the compound holding his stock-whip. He lifted his arm, flicked the tongue, moved his wrist back and forward in a fraction of a second and listened to the crack. It echoed and settled around the sheds and garden, on the house and down the hill towards the lavender. He smiled. ‘Dad,’ he called, but he didn’t know where he was.
He searched the horizon. Noticed a rusty gidgee tree in the distance. He often wondered why there weren’t others: perhaps there’d only been a single seed, a drop of water. Why it was there, what purpose it served, how it could survive apart from other gidgee trees. It couldn’t be shaded, or give shade, make other trees, even provide wood—because who, really, would have the heart to chop it down?
There were more trees at the back of the compound where their little world opened up to the road. One dead sheoak had become a bottle tree. An actual bottle tree, with old cans and bottles and jars placed over the dead tip of each branch. Some of the newer bottles and cans were still recognisable—spaghetti, creamed corn, Sno-Top—but most had lost their labels, rusted, clouded up and sand-blasted over the forty years Trevor had been decorating his desert Christmas tree. Since, aged six or seven, he’d found an old beer bottle on the ground. Every few days he’d come out with bottles and cans (and at Christmas, tinsel and other decorations).
Until, later, his sons had taken over. Until each of the branches were full, at which time Harry went to the kitchen drawer, found a roll of twine and started hanging the bottles, like baubles, along the length of each of the branches.
Now it was a giant wind-chime. No one really minded. Most evenings it made music. A few branches had fallen off and Harry had used more twine to reattach them. To him, the bottle tree was more than just decoration.
He tu
rned to face it, lifted his hand and cracked his stock-whip. A beer bottle dropped and shattered. ‘Yes,’ he sang, running towards the tree, looking at the broken glass sitting in ankle-high compost.
‘Harry,’ he heard his father calling, from inside his shed.
He gathered his whip and ran across the compound. Felt the temperature rise as he went into his father’s shed. Smelt a hot globe burning fine sawdust from the pine.
‘Is that you smashing bottles?’ his father asked, looking up from the hand in his lap, clutching a piece of folded sandpaper.
‘Yes,’ he replied, closing the door.
‘I need your help.’
Harry sat on a stool beside his father, placed his hand on the bench and spread it out. Trevor looked at it, and back at the piece of wood sitting in a singlet in his lap. ‘Right,’ he said, studying the two hands, using the edge of his sandpaper to help sculpt the knuckles.
It wasn’t a hand yet, he thought. Whatever made a hand a hand, it still wasn’t there. There were fingers, with the right amount of curve; each fattened by blood vessels, and wrinkles, and nails he’d polish so finely they’d shine. There was the meat of the hand, with its tendons and more arteries and veins, and there was a thumb, of course, coming up past the bottom of the first finger. But it still wasn’t there.
He’d followed the usual steps—chiselling, refining, sanding—but he hadn’t got the usual result. Like his wife’s and dad’s hand, sitting on the shelf above the unused fireplace. Seven hands, in all, and these were only the successful ones.
He had five photos pinned above his bench: side views, finger-tip, wrist and palm. These were what he’d use for his sculpture. Mostly, apart from calling Harry in every few days to lay his small hand (sauce-smeared, his ring finger calloused from his pen) on the bench, to sit for an hour as he studied his fingers, felt them, moved them closer together, further apart.
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Harry said.
