Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

  “I mean, how’s it going with her?” he asks.

  “Splendid,” I say flatly. As if I’d talk to him about it anyway. The ways she tries to polish me. The kundalini class in Hollywood, its teacher with Coke-bottle glasses talking about Jesus visiting India during his unaccounted years. The students’ vacant faces in their culty white linens and headscarves. A hundred frog poses and still I’m stiff as a pylon, the dirt from here in the creases of my knees. And now I’m digging myself back in.

  We gaze out at a stark café in the field, a manmade pond and picnic tables. “I’m sorry you didn’t bring her with you,” he says. “You might have had more fun.”

  I remember the dream. “You mean you might have,” I say. “I wouldn’t subject her to you.”

  He nods as if he understands but then his head shakes, refusing to let the meaning in.

  “Let alone Walker Dumbalk skulking around,” I add.

  My father shakes his head in a kind of distant disbelief, as if that’s not so unusual. “I was twelve when Bunny drowned,” he says as if his brother’s death is somehow relevant. “After that my father started to bring me here. He fancied one of the Greaves girls. They milked by hand then.” He talks like infidelity is generational, dropping by the local divorcees and wives, leaving your own wife at home. My grandmother sitting alone in the Moorooduc house and laying it all at the bleeding feet of Jesus while her husband went out philandering. I come from a line of men for whom fucking around is a form of mourning, a way to forget the dead.

  “Last year the buggers pulled the old homestead down before we could stop them,” my father says. I know this time “we” means the Tooradin Historical Society, the local paladins of the past. All I remember is a weatherboard house under that empty stand of dying conifers. Falling down twenty years ago. Everything quietly falling down. But he remembers it as the place he came with his father who visited some blowzy young woman in a print dress and apron. Not prim and English like my grandmother, but a smiley Australian dairy farm girl.

  “They do Devonshire teas now,” my father says. “And they built a rotary dairy. Fifty cows milking at a time. It’s quite an attraction.”

  We pull in. Only two other cars in the parking lot.

  Adjacent to the café juts a shining silver shed, its oval roof slightly domed, a giant spoon. Is this what he wants to show me? A corrugated iron eyesore? A mob of angular Holstein and Friesian cows, patched black or brown and white, filing in from the thistle-dotted pasture.

  I get out into the manure-scented air and think of Sharen bucking beneath me. He doesn’t deserve to fuck a woman like that. Even she’s too good for him. And I’m no better than any of them. The way I please others when I’m in America, pretend to be solid and worthy, when I have trouble caring much at all. Well, I’m back to basics here.

  Heading over to the shed, I don’t witness him hobbling over the gravel behind me; don’t want to feel sorry for him. Up a wooden ramp, through a large swinging door, to a platform that overlooks a monstrous metal machine. A deafening sound of suck and pistons. Rubbery tendrils attaching to hundreds of teats simultaneously, cows hungrily pushed inside metal chutes so their buttocks are forming one great circle, a giant pulsating propeller of them.

  A sign on the viewing platform says: It comes from a cow not a carton. Two Japanese women huddle at one end; each covers her nose with a handkerchief. My father’s standing right beside me in his wide Akubra hat. “It’s a big deal they’ve got here,” he says. It has me confused how he’s climbed up to this platform so quickly. “We could set up something like this,” he adds. “You’re the lawyer. We’ve got the land. You should come back so we can go into business. You could bring your girl.”

  I look at the udders, the cups on the teats and the milk swilling through. Think of Sharen’s untethered breasts and how she fed one to me then the other, asked me to bite them.

  “We could do a bed-and-breakfast riding school,” he says.

  I feel the collective pressure on all of those teats, a sudden post-coital confusion, and need to get air, walk to the door and stand atop some wood stairs for relief from the noise of my father’s return to the fold ideas. I imagine the business, my father limping round the unwitting women, Reggie up in the trees, creeping them out.

  My father shadows me still. “What do you think?”

  Me pretending to care about groups of neurotic midweek ladies and their tragic unsound horses. “Didn’t we already lose enough on your ventures?” That herd of Charolais he imported from France. Half the cows dead en route and the rest stuck out in the paddock, bloated on some toxin in the silage. Eighty thousand dollars down the gurgler, according to Ruthie. Then money from the joint account he “lent” to Erica Jeffers to set her up in a townhouse in Elsternwick, houses put in his girlfriends’ names. Income from the farm drastically depleted so he might have some currency with women. Lucky Ruthie has a stash of her own.

  “If you dwell on what went bad, you’ll end up like your mother,” he says.

  The Japanese women look over, unimpressed by what they see and taken aback by the tone of my father’s voice but he’s oblivious, stares down into a steel pipe yard, a bed of fresh straw and a single Friesian cow with a full bag of milk. She bellows out toward the horizon where the dairy paddocks merge with the mangrove coast. My father in the shade of his hat, his skin marbled by the sun. I’m more afraid I’ll end up like you, I want to tell him, to reach into the well of this man for more than a bucket of emptiness.

  “You know the morning Ruthie took that turn in the little bathroom,” I say, the image of her on those cold cracked tiles. “She told me she pressed her medical pendant.”

  My father’s knotty hands grip the railing. He moistens his lips as if choosing words. “The alert people called but I couldn’t get over there,” he says. He sounds rueful but I’m not sure he’s capable of real remorse. An old desire to strike him, just knock the bastard down.

  “You know she’d had so many false alarms,” he says, “rolling over in her sleep. And I was heading out with Elsie on our way to Wilson’s Prom.” He’s captivated by the middle distance, the cars as they thread down the highway. The curtain of warm morning air between us feels viscous as water. I want to tear through it.

  “I didn’t want to ruin the trip,” he says then looks away.

  A dryness in my mouth, the word “unconscionable” fighting against the gate of my teeth. “Her head was stuck over the rung of a chair,” I tell him.

  A tractor motor reverberates. It has a front-end loader and a chain out the back, drags a dead calf through the grass. The cow is circling and wailing. My father closes his wrinkly lids. “Luckily she made it,” he says.

  The thought of Sharen there by happenstance ministering over my mother’s canted body. “Did you even call her?”

  My father pulls sunglasses from his pocket and puts them on, my face contorted in their bronze reflection. “You haven’t been here,” he says. “You don’t know what it’s like to keep the place going. Keep an eye on her. Getting calls in the middle of the night and going over to find her fast asleep.”

  I watch the calf being hauled by its throat, its neck extending unnaturally, mouth open. The cow pushes against the fence, agitated, bays out. Makes me wonder if I’m not capable of remorse either.

  “We all do bad things,” my father says. I feel him stare at me. The way he’s turned this around, the sound of the cow. I need to get away from him, head back to the car.

  “I never slept with one of my father’s girlfriends,” he says as I step through the swinging door.

  Busted, I stay. Is that who we are? People who get to say things like that? The pain stabs my jiggered hand.

  “I know what goes on,” he tells me. “I got men on the farm. They know when a bike goes down the lane. Old Nev was grubbing thistles in the bush—he saw you. As if I wouldn’t find out,” my father says taking off his hat and pushing his fingers through his sweaty mop of iron-gray hair. I watch th
e small heaves in my father’s chest, his lungs grasping bits of air, and remember how I once slept with a girl called April when I was too young and he tackled me like this. You just wish it was you, I told him then, but I don’t say anything now.

  The cow below us moans into the blazing day. The distant clinking of the dead calf being released from the chain and as the gears of the tractor grind, the cow below us bawls even louder, a fountain of her scours spurts fresh over the railing.

  “I loved your mother,” he says. “But she treated me like an unwanted dog.”

  A grave is being dug so the calf can be buried. The Japanese tourists scurry across the grass. They’ve smelled and heard and seen enough of things we see as normal.

  “Does your girlfriend love you?” my father asks, but that almost seems by the way now. How I want to please others when I’m in America. The calf being pushed in the hole by the machine. Still, I find myself nodding.

  “Then pull your bloody socks up,” he says. “Or you will end up like me.”

  THE LIGHT ON the message machine blinks in the dull living room, the couch smells of dog. Three messages, two eerie hang-ups and then Isabel from the road to San Francisco. She sounds as if she’s in a tunnel, an echo of laughter behind her. It’s already afternoon here. I need to call her back, pray she doesn’t answer. There’s a click and whoosh, the unlikely event of reception.

  “You sound like you’re in a helicopter,” I tell her, feel a pang at the sound of her innocent voice.

  “We took off the ragtop,” she yells.

  “With the heater on blast,” shouts someone else, then a squall of laughter.

  “Who’s we?” I ask, aware of the drag in my voice, my vowels flat and dying.

  “Lauren,” says Isabel. “She did that dress installation at Big Sur. Remember the tree?” When Isabel pinned a prayer and I didn’t. “She’s got a cabin. A place called Sea Ranch.” Another whoop in the background and I imagine them on that Big Sur coast, cold wind off the ocean biting at their faces, the swoop around the curves. At least they’re having fun.

  “How was Esalen?” is the best I can do. The thought of some stranger driving my car. I suddenly hate those dresses.

  “We whirled like dervishes,” shouts Isabel. “It was amazing. I was almost the last one standing.”

  “She fucking was!” says her chorus. Another dyke in love, no doubt, leaving poor Mona for dead. I know I should feel more possessive; I’ve fucked up something precious.

  “This Turkish guy Oresh led in a cone hat and white robe.” Isabel all breezy. “You really missed something.” Missed the dervish lusting after her in his floating kimono, the sound of twangy strings repeating as they spun their feet off the ground. It probably was amazing but I can’t feel a thing. I bite my lip until it hurts.

  Out the window, my mother’s in the Pond Paddock with Sharen, picking up manure in the wheelbarrow. Sharen in a bikini top and cutoff shorts with the wide manure fork, the smell of her still loiters about my fingers. While Isabel was spinning I was low in the dirt with the local skank. She felt so strong and Australian, capable of anything, unafraid of pain. I can almost make out her bruises from here, her breasts as they struggle at the edges of her string-tied top.

  “It was like we were standing still with the earth whirring around us,” Isabel calls out from the other end. Some dark-eyed Sufi with eyebrows of death. I wonder if he screwed her, and why I’m only suspicious of her when I’m guilty. My eyes on a wet pink rut of my own, remembering how I lost myself in Sharen in a way I can’t quite remember. In that same grass clearing where I felt up Brenda Furguson, felt the hungry moisture the first time.

  “It was like flying,” adds Isabel, while I’m in another hemisphere feeling the opposite. Wanting to dive my nose into the ground. If I were there we’d sneak out of the yurt and climb down to the beach, hide in the caves and I’d want to smoke weed. She’s better off without me. Twirling to drums and sitar, she and the Turk the only ones left. They’d have made love among candles and cushions, sacred sex and mantras, tantra. But if he fucked her in his cone hat would she really tell me all this?

  “Better come home soon,” the enchanted lesbian shouts. They both laugh like kookaburras.

  “Do I need to worry?” I ask, wishing I could just get on a plane and take my injured hand back to her in the canyon.

  Out in the paddock, they’re cleaning up around the old pine tree where my mother wants to be buried. Sharen’s calf muscles jut from the top of sockless elastic-side boots; she bends down low as if she knows I’m watching. How she brings out the primitive in me, the animal I try to keep stored away. But what if that’s who I am, if in America I’m just fronting? Poised and respectable, slightly rough around the edges in a way they find appealing.

  “Well the Budokon teacher from Brazil was pretty cute,” says Isabel, “What about you?”

  “I’m here with me,” I say. I don’t ask what Budokon is. The dog comes in and jumps on the couch, leaving my mother out there with Sharen. I wonder if Sharen really slept with my father or just led him along for rent.

  “What’s wrong? You sound so weird.”

  I clear the thickening in my throat. “You sound high.”

  “Maybe you should be too,” she says. “Why don’t you come home?”

  “My mother’s going to die soon,” I tell her. “There’s people all over the place. I need to be here.” I don’t tell her I dreamed she arrived right out there on the drive like a warning. So clean and neat and tall. “You can come out if you want,” I say, my mouth drifting from the receiver.

  “You need me?” she asks. My mother walks with her carved stick toward the narrow woven-wire gate into the garden. “We could go somewhere nice,” Isabel’s voice straining. Sharen pushing the wheelbarrow through the sand to the giant pile under the draping shade of the trees. Her biceps taut, she tips the load. I listen to the wind howl in my ear as she stares up at the house, shading her eyes with her sunburnt forearm. I don’t want to go anywhere nice.

  SUNDAY

  A dream where I’m out in the sand near the old dressage arena, digging the earth with a stick for the sound of a telephone ringing. My ear to the grit and it’s loud so I keep gouging with my stick, hit upon an old Tarax bottle then bones of what could be a dog and the ringing gets louder but there are just bones and clouded glass. A man at the foot of the bed, dark river eyes that pierce inside me, but as I rise the figure melts through the rippled glass window, and it feels as if I’m awake, staring out into the crow-black dark. But I’m already standing.

  At the window, what looks like a distant fire are just floodlights that flank the new roundabout way out on the highway. Then I hear words from somewhere behind me, floating down the hall: Jehovah Raffa Elohim. An American preacher’s voice. Now I know I’m awake. My mother’s radio in the other room picking up a different station. All-sufficient Perfecter. Hallowed Standard. The warm window against my face, the orange glow as if the edge of the world is burning. Stars hanging as ornaments. I rub my eyes; the bandage smells. The croaking American accent calls through the thickness of the walls, Jehovah Nissi, our banner on the battlefield. Searching out for the man from my half-sleep, for a shape on the lawn, in the trees that stripe the blackness, the glinting horizon—a face I know from dreams before in the tongue-in-groove wall of the shearer’s quarters, as a teenager waking with night terrors. Walker down in the fields, rounding up the cattle in the night.

  The triad of those dark horses canopied under the trees. Their glossy eyes burning, keeping watch. Why are they up near the house? The gilded distance from the highway behind them, manes holding light. The sense of everything shifting, as if I were truly to wake I’d not see these scenes, horses with the heads of men and the hills that sway about, but I need to turn off the radio.

  I feel my way across the dark hall, a woman sings, Elijah Rock, shout, shout, repeating. A slice of light seeps through the crack into my mother’s room. The door makes its usual creak; the i
ll-fitting green curtains hang. Heading for her old Panasonic, past her narrow bed, I turn on her reading lamp. She’s half-sitting up with pillows bunched about her neck, her beaky face enveloped in a bonnet of clouds. A faded blue sheet is pulled over her shoulders, one limp arm raised with its fingers splayed about her nose. Her specs still on. As I switch off the endless names of God, the dawning creeps up through my chest. I reach to touch her cheek. It’s cool. No air from her nostrils against my fingers.

  “Mum?” I remove her hand from her face and her fingers swipe her glasses from her eyes. She snuffles, drawing me back with a quick rattled breath. My eyes feel unnaturally dry, but a weight sinks inside my belly. Me and the night and my breath reignites as her arm reaches up to her nose of its own accord. The rise and fall of her chest returning like an afterthought. The moment I’ve always dreaded and occasionally prayed for passed, yet the guilt of it drags me down beside her, to her withered little frame. The body I somehow appeared from. Would she have wanted me to try to save her? Part her narrow lips and breathe into her coffee-stained mouth, pump her weather-beaten chest? My fisted hands would break her.

  Placing her glasses down by the lamp, I slump into her bedside chair, unsure of what I’ve witnessed, another little aftershock? Unsure if there’ll be fallout. A book underneath me in the folds of the cushions. I pull out the cup-stained cover. Snake art framing a wrinkled indigenous face carved in a red rock escarpment. The Ropes of Time. My Grade 6 English prize. Haileybury stamped on the inside and my name typed in: Daniel Parkes Rawson. Below it in my mother’s hand: Reggie Dumbalk. My mother, innocent there, breathing again, giving my things away.

  The book opens to a page where a worn red Staedtler pencil rests. Aboriginal Spiritual Discipline. The details of bone-pointing and the cure for illness are taught to the novice Karadji by his elder. Browned paper edged by the ring of a cup. Pictures of a corroboree, men dancing painted. Headdresses and chalk. How I was fascinated by this as a kid, spooking myself so I couldn’t sleep.