I couldn’t see Lou anywhere. I went to the hayshed. I walked around the tractors and truck. No sign. I went back to the hut. I opened the door and Lou jumped back from my pack. His rifle was leaning against the wall. It all looked really weird.
What? I said.
Sorry, Lou mumbled … I thought you might have some …
Some what? I asked, closing the door behind me.
He just repeated, Some, some, then changing his mind and demeanour, went across to his rifle. There’s a sick cow. Papa wants me to shoot it. I hate shooting cows. It’s down in the yard behind the dairy. I hate it. Papa knows I hate it and he makes me do it. He says it will toughen me. That I will be head of the family one day. That Vince isn’t responsible enough. He never makes Vince shoot the sick cows.
I was speechless. I was looking for some grass, he said. Some marijuana. I know you smoke it with Vince. I always know. I know what Vince does. I thought it might make it easier. Easier to kill the cow, you know.
It won’t make it easier, Lou – it will make it harder, if anything. I grew up on a farm, as I’ve told you. I killed lots of things and never liked it. Swore I’d never do it again.
I’ve gotta, said Lou. There’s no choice. I’ve gotta.
So I blew Lou out, and Lou got silly, then sick, and I knew there’d be trouble. I knew before I rolled the joint. I knew I’d be excommunicated, that I wouldn’t be working for Joseph.
Papa will be back soon, I said to Lou. Come with me.
I picked up his rifle and led him swinging back and forth out of the hut down to the dairy. I could hear Vince still swishing away and we sidetracked around to the holding yards. The sick cow was actually a fair way from the dairy. It was a walk through manure and slush.
I’m not going to do it, Lou half cried and half laughed.
Neither am I, I insisted.
Lou snatched the rifle off me and buggered around with the bolt. Somehow he loaded it.
Don’t swing it near me, I said.
He started to aim at the cow then lowered it again. Nope, I don’t care what Papa thinks, I’m not going to do it. And it doesn’t even make sense. It’s not good business. That cow could be saved by a good vet. Just because the old methods haven’t worked, doesn’t mean modern medicine couldn’t bring it around! It’d be good business to save it.
The gun swung about all over the place as Lou staggered around, raging. By this stage, Vince had abandoned the hose and was standing nearby, watching on, hands on hips, a wry, almost gloating smile on his face. I reached to grab the rifle, to eject the bullet from the chamber. Then we heard Papa yelling at us from across the paddock. I wasn’t even sure what he was saying. Lou looked up, panicked, wrestled an imaginary figure with the gun, and it discharged.
That was twenty-five years ago. I could have been a rich man out of it. Papa offered me a huge bribe to keep my mouth shut. Mamma wept and threw herself on me. Nonna offered to nurse me forever. But I didn’t want anything. My head was crowded with the vision of Lou clutching remorsefully at my bleeding hand, while Vince strolled over, lifted and reloaded the rifle, and shot the cow.
A SEASIDE BURIAL
Estranged though they’d been, the family – most of whom had hated the dead man, their father and grandfather, even more vehemently than they did their mother – turned up to see him buried. The ‘new’ wife of thirty years mourned with real tears; the ex-wife who hated him turned up with her entourage, reinforcing them reinforcing her, still the Queen. And then there were the great grandchildren and their hangers-on, who stalked and lurked like a murder of crows.
At that time of year, the sea was choppy and grey. And that was on an azure blue coast when for most of the year it glowered. Yet with this grey it wasn’t being mournful but more honest – heavy metals and other pollutants just swirling around in the mix, silt of dredgers emptying the river’s mouth, the harbour, of its poison residues, out into the deep, to be swept back onto the shores. Gulls were raucous. They will be, right to the end.
One of the small children, innocent of the hell brought to the occasion by the embittered ‘family past’, worried that the sea might come up over the sand, up this hill, and into the cemetery. It might wash great-grandfather away? Don’t worry, said an aunt, dressed in trendy black with witchy lacework, the fish won’t be interested. Nothing tasty there. The girl stared at her aunt, whose midriff showed, G-string eating into bare thighs, and wondered what would happened if she pinged the string. She was a distractible kid.
The widow didn’t know where to stand, closed in by a semicircle of hostility, until an in-law went and stood by her: a tall, angry-looking man, husband of the ‘black sheep’ daughter. Don’t worry, he said, J (the ‘black sheep’) will be here soon – she’s just parking the car. And sure enough, a minute later, the ominous cliffs broke apart and J walked through. Her family, her real family, stared hard at her, trying to penetrate the foreignness. It’s that terrible man she’s with, they whispered. He’s like Dad, Pop … They hung in the breeze, which was blowing steady from Antarctica now, cold with winter. They hung like seagulls. Or maybe birds of prey hanging over the hanging seagulls. Less likely, they were scavengers for souls and didn’t believe the father’s dead body was going to yield anything up. What had been left was taken by that woman, the widow. But they felt good knowing that, though they’d never visited before, they’d driven hundreds of kilometres inland to go through his possessions while she was delirious in the hospital. They were helping her.
J’s man was an enigma. He didn’t speak with them. Who does he think he is? they asked. All of them had heard whispers. He’d been a drug addict, once, and always had a runny nose (they were sure – they’d rarely ever seen him as J never appeared at family picnics, and even though she wasn’t specifically invited, should have had the fortitude to ask when one might be on). He wrote pornography and called it literature. They shuddered as one, and drew their children close. The Queen, struggling with her gold lamé top, sniffed in the widow’s direction and said loudly, These occasions are about family! She nestled into her brood, who knew J’s man was a clear and present danger.
The service was brief. J and the widow had chosen some music, but it wasn’t played. Old family favourites crackled over the PA and the Queen said loudly, Remember this, kids? He hated it so much! They looked solemn but smiled inside. It was good to feel warm on such an unpleasant day, weather-wise. Parents instinctively glanced down at the ocean, and at the great swathes of sandy beach, which, despite being blocked off in places by new Tuscan Splendours, looked inviting even in this weather. One thought: I’ll still squeeze into that bikini this summer … Another thought: The tailor will be running soon, be nice to get down there with some of the boys from the office (how rare it is for an office of blokes to share the same interest) … I could wear my new overalls and parka. He thought fashion worked everywhere. That day he wore a tasteful off-the-rack suit that looked designer, with a muted blue tie. His father always overdressed – those bright suits were unbecoming – and spoke like an ocker. Women should dress brightly, not men. His mother had taste.
The Queen thought, Well, she’ll get the house – and I got to carry all the babies.
And then the funeral celebrant struggled to give a potted history of the deceased’s life; said he was going to a better place, and that one had in mind those he’d left behind. He then requested any last words. The widow sobbed and looked around. One of the dead man’s sons recounted a story of his own childhood that was about a great time out he’d had with his parents, then corrected himself by saying, Actually it was only with his mum because his dad was away travelling as usual. He finished by saying: He was a flawed man.
The celebrant begged for anyone to say a word. Silence. J was too distressed, and tried to comfort the widow. The Queen sent burning hot eyebeams in her errant daughter’s direction, but J could only think how the rising and falling of her tears and those of the widow blended with the waves crashing against the beach,
dissolving into memories of her father.
The tall man stood up and went to the lectern. I have something to say … I knew Bill pretty well in recent years and he and I got on fine. He was a witty bloke who loved his footy team, the Sharks. He told a good yarn.
As he spoke, the family sent a tempest his way. They willed flames and death. They invented monstrosities and perversities they were sure he had committed. They burned to be outside so they could share their epiphanies. It struck all of them, as one body, young and old, how much the tall man looked like their father when he was young, when he was theirs, when they didn’t want him and knew he was a bad man. He’s a bad man a bad man a bad man! And then as the tall man babbled on and on, droning like the waves, the body-of-family felt suddenly relaxed, like pissing in a cold sea and feeling briefly blissfully warm inside one’s bathers. The Kraken had been awoken. The Leviathan had emerged again. Their father had been reborn and this time he wouldn’t escape their punishment. They were happy, and had the ocean to thank for it. Whose idea was it to bury him by the sea anyway? They all glanced over at the Queen, who loomed large as a thunderhead rising up over the ocean. They felt glad that her thunder and lightning were no threat to them, that it would always be directed towards mariners coming from strange lands carrying their cargos of unpredictability.
And they only half heard the tall man say: And though he thought of himself as an inland man, loving the great wheat crops and even the blank pitiless areas of salinity, he always talked of the sea, of raising his children within earshot of the waves. He used to say to visitors, See that shell over there on the mantelpiece, lift it up and you’ll hear all my kids and their mother laughing and playing on the sand, the water bluer than blue, the waves gentle but interesting. And what’s more, if you hesitated, Hilda, his second wife and dedicated partner of thirty years, would generously say, Go on, go on … take a listen … it makes him so happy when you hear who he is!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Agni, Westerly, The Literary Review, Meanjin, Story Quarterly, The Reader, The Kenyon Review (online), and The Kenyon Review.
John Kinsella’s most recent volume of poetry is Jam Tree Gully (WW Norton, 2012). His collection, Armour, won the 2012 Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry. His most recent volume of stories is In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012) which was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is poetry editor of Island.
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