Da said, ‘That money is yours, Devon.’
Devon hitched from one foot to the other, awkward and overgrown in his too-short clothes. His arms were sagging under the heft of the box; his pale cheeks were blotched and his look kept sliding away. ‘I want to give it to you. I can do that, can’t I? I didn’t know Grandda, and I didn’t earn that money from him. I mean – he never gave me trouble in my life – that’s what I mean.’
Da’s gaze went to Mam, who was leaning watching in the door. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose he gave you much trouble.’
‘It doesn’t matter about the pony. There’s other things we need. I’ll get a pony another day.’
You could see it almost strangled Devon to say it, that he had to wring the words out of himself, that it made him weak at the knees. Da took the box and stared at him. I thought he should be happy, but instead he just seemed sad. ‘That pony of yours,’ he said. ‘That’s the first thing I intend to buy.’
So the rest of us stopped at home while Da and Devon were gone three days, spending in the town. The wait was exciting, Mam was laughing and I was rowdy and even Audrey joked and played. But when the pair of them came home there was no cloth for making dresses, and there were no new boots for me. There was a cage holding two aggravated chickens and there was a tall grey horse for Devon and, astonishingly, there were three hefty Red Poll cows. I remember Mam standing stock-still in the yard while the creatures milled, heads hanging, her skirts weighted with a hem of muck and her voice scarcely rising above a whisper. ‘Court,’ she said, ‘what have you done?’
‘It’s all right, Mam,’ said Devon, the words twanging nervously. He was holding the reins of his horse and it was a fine horse, but his face was bright with shame.
‘Look at them,’ Da said, waving at the cattle who were sniffing at the mud. ‘Aren’t they beauties, Thora?’
Mam looked him over slowly, as if her last hope was that he was hiding the things she wanted to see. Da tried to lift the head of a heifer so she could admire it but the animal grunted and pulled away. Mam’s lip curled.
‘We needed to plant a vegetable garden. We needed seeds for a crop.’
‘But where’s the sense in growing crops, when beef cattle grow themselves? That’s what I started thinking.’
‘We needed blankets for winter. All the children need shoes.’
‘And we will get them. In a year or two, when these cows –’
Mam clutched her hands in her hair and Devon cringed against the horse’s chest. ‘A year or two?’ she cried. ‘A year or two! My God, do you think we can go without blankets and boots and Lord knows what else, for another whole year or two?’
‘We’ve survived so far, Thora, and we’ll survive a while longer –’
Mam caught my collar and brandished me at him. ‘This child hasn’t had a new piece of clothing in her life,’ she said. ‘Her shoes are tied up with string. She hasn’t a coat to keep the weather out of her. You’ll remember that, Court, for your while longer, won’t you?’
Oh, she was ropeable. She shook me and I flailed inside my dress, my tiptoes scraping the ground. Then she turned and marched into the shanty, swinging fast the door. We stared after her but she was gone and there was nothing, as if she’d never been here, and Caffy started instantly to cry. Audrey hoisted him out of the mud and I reached for her free hand. Devon looked at Da. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I told you!’
‘She’ll come round,’ said Da, but I didn’t think he sounded sure. ‘She’ll be pleased in a year or two.’
We hobbled the cows and the horse and left them to graze the high land, and set up a wire for the chickens just beyond the kitchen door. Da sat outside until evening watching them, sipping whisky from a flask. That night, when I crept under the shanty to hear him and Mam talking, there was the quiet of the grave. I looked out into the moonlight at the dark shapes of the cattle, at the lean grey browsing horse. I wished, suddenly, that Devon could have done the skiting I had been dreading for so long. With the horse should have come the bragging, the two happenings twisted like twine, but what Da had done had soured everything, and nothing was as I’d imagined it would be. Poor horse, I thought, how can Devon love you now, poor thing. Tin touched my ankle, passing me the knot from the floorboard. I plugged it into place and then lay for the longest time without moving, against the freezing earth.
It was wet and sludgy that winter, just as Mr Campbell had forecast it should be, and the soles of Da’s boots would be baubled with clods when he came in from rabbiting, the kitchen wood had to be dried near the fireplace before it itself could burn. The road to town was washed out for almost a fortnight and Clarrie Gaston, who was as dippy as a scrub tick from being kicked by a dray, was dredged drowned from the creek and his wife was putting on her weeds when Clarrie sat upright and asked for tea. But the sludge and the water and the sheer coldness of the days couldn’t hold Da at the shanty, the smallness of which kept it warm: the beef heifers wanted a large fenced-off roam and Da was busy attending to it, a handful of neighbours arriving each day to help him. Jock Murphy, who had a natural talent for authority though Da said he was just a boilermaker before the war, issued directions because Da hadn’t built a fence before; Devon was always in Murphy’s shadow, watching and listening and jumping to commands. It was Jock’s idea that they strip the beams that lined the goldmine, scrub down the wood and knife out the decay, and use these strong pieces as posts. Tin came up to watch their progress, blinking in the daylight and wrapping himself in his arms. Winter in the underground had turned his skin a snowy white, but his clothes had stayed good and dry. Billy Godwin, the greyhound man, tried to talk him into digging the post holes but Tin only smiled vaguely, having none of that. For the railings the men cut bush timber, felling the few tall trees that had been left standing when the land was cleared long ago, and chiselled the wood by hand. From the scraps they made the gap-faced shelter and the neatly closing gate. It took weeks for the work to be finished and when it was the fence swept a graceful circle behind the shanty, and it looked magnificent. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this, Harper?’ Da asked me proudly and I said no, because I hadn’t. The land, for miles round where we lived, had once been a single and enormous crop property and it had not been fenced, there being nothing movable in need of closing in; fences were a rare sight still, although the land had a dozen different owners now. ‘No one has a fence as grand as this,’ said Da, and lifted me so I could stand on the top railing and have a broader view. ‘Every time you see this fence, chicken, you remember what it means, and how special it is, and how lucky you are to call it your own. No fussy and weedy old crops for us! Beef’s the way to go, you’ll see. We’ll be the envy of everyone, chicken.’
But when Vandery Cable came around sniffing, he said otherwise. Da and the neighbours stood silently while he cast his eye over the cattle. He leaned on his hands and gave the fence a violent shaking. ‘That should hold them, eh, Devon?’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see you shifting yourself, Court, but what, exactly, are your intentions?’
Da squared his shoulders and stepped forward. ‘Build up the herd until –’
‘Where’s your bull? All I see is ladies.’
‘I’m hoping to borrow one, to begin with. I’ll put the word around.’
‘I hope the word travels. You’ll find nothing nearby that suits your wants, I’m telling you now. What fool told you to buy into beef?’
‘No one told me,’ said Da. ‘I decided for myself. The stock-agent said –’
‘The agent said! I’ll bet he didn’t say, You look like an easy touch, I’ll offload these heifers onto you. Didn’t I tell you to put a crop in, Flute? I remember doing so. Did I ever mention beef to you? No. If you’d asked my opinion before going off half-cocked, I would have told you not to touch it. If you’d asked Jock Murphy his opinion, I’m damn sure he’d have told you the same. Red meat has never thrived in these parts. Look at the place: it’s green now but this isn’t usual,
it’s typically scabby and bone-dry. Come summer again and your cattle are going to be eating dirt and filling up with flies. You’ll have to buy feed if you want to keep them healthy, and have you got the means to do that year after year? What about water, eh? That creek’s a hike away and it’s a trickle at the height of the year – you’ll need a well or a dam if you don’t want your stock drinking air. I swear, it’s giving me a headache just thinking about it – why didn’t you stop him, Murphy, when you heard what he was up to?’
Mr Murphy was denting the earth with his heel. ‘Things might not be so bad, Vandery. It’s done now, anyway, so we have to make the best of things.’
Cable scoffed fiercely. ‘These animals are going to bring you nothing but grief, Flute. I’m sorry to say it in front of the children, but there it is. If any of you others are thinking about going into beef, take the advice of a farmer and plump for something else. I’ll take your advice when I need to know anything about soldiering.’
Da and the neighbours stared at their feet. Mr Cable pushed off from the fence, tossing words backward as he went. ‘I’ll ask around anyway, Court. See if I can flush out a bull for you. Someone might know someone who keeps one as a pet.’
‘That’s decent of you, Mr Cable.’
We watched Cable’s jinker jamble away and stood saying nothing. Art Campbell was stretching his braces and letting them snap back to his chest again. Da shook the fence, as Cable had done, and didn’t say what he was thinking. Then, ‘Things might not go so badly,’ said Jock Murphy, ‘as Vandery made them seem.’
‘That man ain’t got a generous bone in his body,’ said Mr Osborne, and spat over the fence. ‘He thinks no good about anything but something of his own.’
‘He knows about farming, though,’ said Da.
‘Thinks he knows everything, is what he does. Who knows everything? I bet there’s plenty he’s yet to learn.’
‘In summer,’ said Mr Murphy, ‘if you let the cattle wander, they’ll find enough grass to keep going. It won’t be the best feed, so you won’t get the best meat, but at least it won’t cost you anything, and the beasts will stay alive.’
‘There you go, Court!’ Kindly Mr Robertson, who had been still and very pale, burst into sudden life with tumbling, hopeful words. ‘What does it matter if the meat isn’t the best in the world? Which of us is so grand that we can only have the best? I know I’m happy with something flavoursome and filling, I don’t need it melting on my tongue. In fact, I’m happier if it’s got a bit of chew to it. You know you’ve eaten, then.’
‘I’m willing to taste your cattle, Court,’ said Mr Campbell. ‘Beef is beef, far as I’m concerned. I don’t care what it’s been eating before I start eating it.’
‘That Cable’s a green-eye, is all,’ said Mr Robertson. ‘He’ll be herding a hundred head of beef before the week’s out, you’ll see.’
‘But we’ll only buy from you, Court. Cable can keep his green meat, I say.’
And they talked on like that, standing in a circle smoking cigarettes and grinding the butts into the churned-up ground, until what Vandery Cable had said didn’t worry me any more than a crow would, passing overhead. But Da must have listened to what Cable said, or maybe Mr Murphy did some friendly advising, for near the end of the winter Da announced that we were sinking a well. Mam brooded on the cost of it, Da swore it must be done. Mam said the cattle seemed to need a lot, considering they were only cows. The well-sinker came with his broad corkscrew and drove it deep into the earth, coming up dry the first time and having the same thing happen again. Smiling into the man’s damp face, Mr Murphy said casually, ‘What about that mite of yours, Court? If anyone knows where the water’s underground, I reckon it would be him.’
‘Fetch him, Harper,’ said Da.
I hollered down the tunnel for Tin and after a time he appeared, Devon’s old shirt reaching to his bare knees and the cuffs hanging past his hands. He stood in the drizzle while it was explained what needed doing and the drizzle stripped the colour from where it touched his face and legs, leaving behind a streak of white. The well-sinker stared suspiciously and rather fearfully at him, clutching his auger close while Da did all the talking. Tin wasn’t dancing with eagerness to be helpful but he did what was asked of him, hunting about and eventually tapping the dirt in the shadow of the fence, a place some distance from the first two holes. The well-sinker declared himself doubtful but he dug the probe because Da was insisting that he do so, and promising he would pay. The auger, it didn’t need to go deep before it came up dripping, and I leapt off the fence with glee. Tin had disappeared by then, knowing all along he was not mistaken. The well-sinker looked after him, wrestling with peevishness and awe.
Once Mam let up cursing the sight of the heifers and we resigned ourselves to owning them and were even proud of them, despite what Cable had to say, Devon did not feel so badly about showing off his horse. No one had ever taught him to ride but he turned out to be a natural, he sat a saddle as if he’d been glued. Champion was better than a pony, he was a full-grown horse, and when I pressed my cheek against his warm grey chest his ears, pricked upright, turned and quivered high above my head. He was in disposition a gentleman but he would kick up and spring about to please Devon, and pretend to be half brumby. He was about ten years old when he arrived at our place and someone had treated him cruelly in those years, he had scars on his flanks and a mouth so hard he couldn’t be guided anywhere he didn’t decide to go, but he never misbehaved for Devon, whom he loved. He would pluck his bridle from its hook and rattle it to catch his master’s attention and together they would rove the district for hours. Several times Champion came to the door after dark and stood waiting patiently until Da dragged sleeping Devon from the saddle.
One day I was watching Devon brush the horse down, sleepy myself in the evening air. It was spring, I remember, and the earth was warming, already being dry enough for me to lie upon. The horse was smacking his lips and rippling his coat with each sweep of the brush. Devon was speaking to him and I could hear him distantly, a purr floating through the haze.
‘You’re the colour of the moon, aren’t you. You’re a good horse, a wild horse, a dangerous mad-eyed horse. You can fly. You fly like a bird. You’re an eagle horse, you are, a wild-eyed eagle demon horse. You’re as tall as a tree and strong as a mountain. No one is faster than you, you can thrash them all, you could do it on three legs …’
He knocked the brush clean on a post and the noise roused me, blinking. ‘Champy can’t understand you,’ I said blearily. ‘Why do you tell him how special he is, when he can’t understand you?’
‘He can understand me,’ said Devon gravely. ‘He understands everything I say. Don’t you, Champ?’
Something made the horse wag its long grey head and although it must have been a fluke, maybe his mane tickling his ears, it looked like Champion was agreeing that what Devon said was true, that he could indeed understand. I took a fancy to believing that he could, anyway. I was nine years old, still young enough to believe as I pleased.
The world you live in when you are nine is different from the world that other people live within. My home was my empire and the only place that mattered and I never gave a thought to other empires beyond the horizon, so I couldn’t understand why Mam and Da seemed so concerned when Billy Godwin, back from the city near the end of that year, told them that the stockmarket had collapsed and there was too much coal and that the price of wheat and wool had dropped like a stone. I didn’t know what a stockmarket was and I didn’t see how too much coal could be a bad thing, coal being something we never had. The price of wool and wheat shouldn’t matter to us because we were farming beef. Things seemed good, to me. There were endless rabbits for eating, Devon had his longed-for horse and the heifers had made it through the winter unscathed by Cable’s jaundiced eye. So I didn’t understand why Mam and Da and Mr Godwin should be interested in things happening so far away, and sit up discussing them into the night. I didn’t underst
and that something was coming like a tidal wave around the earth and that we had no hope of outrunning it; nor did I know that the only shelter we had to protect us from the worst of it was what we owned that night and nothing more. And when the shanty collapsed one breezy December morning I did not know how bad that was for us until Da raised a hand and slapped me across the face.
DEVON, AUDREY AND I were walking down the hill when it happened, on our way to school. Audrey was carrying a handful of books but Devon and I were swinging our arms with nothing. Devon was saying he planned to ride Champion to school when classes went back after summer and I was seething at the idea of him disappearing down the road because I knew he would never let me climb up behind him, never. I’d be forced to walk all the way alone, given this was Audrey’s last year of having to go. Even now, she was helping the teacher more than she was trying to learn. I was picturing myself walking lonesome and unaided, choking on road-dust and staggering with snakebite but reeling gallantly on, and I was almost in tears of pity and admiration when the noise, behind us, made me whirl.
For a second, nothing looked changed: the clouds were still floating and the trees were still crooking and the ground was a patchwork of silver-green and brown, shoots of new grass squeezing past mattings of old. But the noise had been terrible, as if someone had taken a hacksaw to the sky, and one hundred birds were screeching and dashing madly from cover, so it hadn’t been our imaginings. And then, it was as though my eyes were wrong, rather than what I saw. The shanty was tipped at an angle. I tilted my head to balance it and for a moment this worked. Then the roof of the house tore through the centre and the room where we slept and ate and did most of our living vanished – vanished as if the earth had eaten it and the planks that went flinging were like spitting out the bones.
Audrey screamed at me to get Da but it was Devon who took off running; I sprinted up the hill after Audrey. Mam and Caffy were standing at the clothes line, Caffy with his hands clamped to his ears and Mam staring stupefied with Da’s Sunday shirt dripping in her hands. The roof of the shanty was lying on the earth like a hat blown from the head of a giant and although there were bristles of wood standing up around its edges, the walls appeared to be gone. Pressed kerosene tins and strips of corrugated iron were thrown all around and in the roof you could see holes from where they had been. What was left of the veranda was groaning and shuddering, its stumps pulled clean from the ground. The wall of Mam and Da’s bedroom had been peeled like the lid of a fruit can and the hem of the bed’s drapery was frippering in the breeze; in the midst of the bed was a great dirty smear of grit and more was showering down. Everything was moaning and snapping and tumbling, the whole house cussing and swearing. The chimney, though, stood sturdy, and the fire burned serenely below the simmering kettle. The sight of it made me blink, it being so strange.
Thursday's Child Page 6
