Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

  I read in the lamplight. The young Karadji can grow feathers on his arms, which, after a few days, develop into wings. Postulants see into the underworld, observe spirits of the dead all bunched together. Did I underline that, or did the boy? Karadji: One to whom the cleverness has been handed on, who has contact with the Dreaming. A magician who follows the aerial rope of time.

  The imaginary games I played in the paddocks, riding bareback in the night with no bridle or saddle, just wrapping my hands about Thunderfella’s neck with my face in the smell of his crest as the ponies galloped in tandem in the wind then propped to a stop on the hill. Spying on Walker as he stole a calf from the yard, a bridle from the tack room, telling my father in the morning.

  I start at a shadow in the hall; Reggie emerging silent in the doorway. A coppery green in his eyes—not just Sharen, but something wilder, of his father’s making. Reggie who knows when to come and be near her.

  “That’s my book now,” he says calmly, unfolds his fingers to reveal a small shape in his hand. The carved bird earring my father brought home from New Guinea, more ornate and delicate than I remember. “I found it in the garden,” he says, places the carving between the open pages and quietly eases the book from my bandaged hand. He stands close beside my mother’s bed, reaches and touches her blanketed foot.

  “She’s not well,” I tell him. “Maybe it’s time you went back with your father to Yarram.”

  But Reggie just reads from the book, mouthing shapes of words as though he’s telling her a story in her sleep. Maybe that’s what he does when she’s struggling. His eyes seem to shine. He says without taking his gaze from her: “I belong here,” he says. “You think I don’t but I do.”

  He may think I’m back because I have to be, but I dream of this place too, the way the sun is rising above the lip of the boundary, ready to eat up the day. The horses grazing, swishing tails, the early-morning sparrows prancing along their backs. I’m not just from but of here. The place belongs to me, or will.

  “Ruthie taught me this,” he says. He turns to the back of the book, reading aloud in a kind of fitful English. “‘Moving through the dark . . . as if there are no farms or houses . . .’” He reads but his eyes strain on my mother. He’s learned it by heart. “‘Men in single file through the rough milk thistle field, under the white mouth of the moon.’” Familiar words, written longhand by me on the last blank pages in the book. About his age, fourteen, inspired and some plagiarized from the front. I won the essay prize at school. Dreaming of Bones, I called it. A hum and rustle through the Dutchman’s market gardens . . . land furrowed for the crops that haven’t been picked . . . Horses always waiting at the fence. As he reads it sounds more him than me. I stare at his dirty singlet, a shiny keloid scar on his upper arm, the way his chapped lips move. My mother laid out like a wrinkled queen, calmed by him, it’s true. The intervals between her breaths slowed but regular now.

  “She don’t want no doctor,” says Reggie, then reads on haltingly, ministering. “‘The sound of men shifting up the lane . . . the Karadji in his possum cloak . . . his emu bone with hair and blood . . . It is amazing how the old men run . . . almost as if they are floating.’” He reads as though the words of two sons can be spoken at once.

  The sound of a chainsaw and he stops. We both look out through the undulated window. The way his big eyes twitch, I can tell he’s on edge. The chance of Walker.

  “It’s just Nev,” he says. “Over the road.”

  We stare out as the sun creeps orange above the lavender distance. “What should we do about Walker?” I ask.

  “Keep out of it,” he says.

  I look over at charred documents, feathered black in the embers of the fireplace. They’ve had their own burning ritual. I wonder if he knows I plowed his mother, that I’m no better than any of them, except perhaps him.

  “He beats up Sharen,” I say.

  The kid nods as if that’s not my concern. My mother’s eyes half open. She frowns like a child, making us out, removes her blotched hands from her chest and places them down at her sides. A pink-orange drift of light dusts the room. “What are you two up to?” she asks; her voice hoarse but unslurred.

  “Old Rags and Juniper have disappeared,” Reggie tells her. They look at each other as if only they know what that means.

  MONDAY

  In the morning I wait until there’s movement over in Ruthie’s room before I go in to check. She’s in her jeans already, maybe she slept in them; her powder-blue nightie over the top. She studies the sleeves of a Fair Isle cardigan she’s managed to wrangle over her head, but she looks confused about which arm should go where.

  “How are you?” I ask, unsure if I should broach a visit to hospital.

  “Feral,” she says, twisting one side of her mouth as if the cardigan won’t do what it’s told. Her arms seem to have minds of their own so she doesn’t complain as I move in to help, guide an errant freckled hand into a sleeve. If she remembers what transpired in the night she doesn’t let on. Her body will do the telling. She relies on her usual fortitude to get to the dresser and leans, preparing for a move to the hall, but there’s a banging on an outside door and she jerks.

  “I called a carpenter from Clyde,” I tell her, loud enough so she might hear over the noise. “He’s putting slide bolts on the doors and windows.”

  My mother looks distraught, rubbing at the sore on her forehead. “Why on earth?”

  “So we can at least lock ourselves in,” I say. An odor, not unpleasant, just stale, like my grandmother’s skin in the mornings, except my mother relies on the dog’s tongue for moisture, not Pond’s. But she doesn’t seem different from yesterday.

  “How will Pip get out to lift a leg?” she asks; her speech seems fine. She really means: How will Reggie get in? Will she wait until I’m gone and have Old Nev removing bolts, twenty-nine of them? I counted up the doors and windows before I rang the handyman.

  My mother picks up a silver-plated hairbrush from the chest, tries to brush her hair but she seems to approach it backward, brushing her gray waves forward to create a kind of fringe. “Who’s paying for it?” she asks.

  “Me,” I say. “He’s also going to patch up the hole in my room.”

  “So you’re staying,” she says, a ripple of sarcasm from the side of her mouth. She replaces the brush on the matching silver-framed hand mirror, gives up on her hair. She takes the mirror and examines herself.

  “I just wish it was the same as always,” I say. “Without these people around.” A drilling sound from Deneray the carpenter, making holes in a doorjamb. No sign of Reggie.

  “You want us to be here,” she says. “But you don’t want to be.” Her eyes bead as she turns; she knows she’s landed on a truth. How my place in the world feels safer when this place exists as I want to remember it. My mother alone in the house and my father in Blind Bight, making his crumpled way over each day in the Camry to give Old Nev his orders and drive my mother to town.

  “Did Walker steal those two ponies?” I ask. The truck without lights I saw on Tuesday, along Genoni’s Road.

  “Why don’t you go take a look in the Lagoon Paddock?”

  As I turn to leave, I notice her old tweed suitcase is open on the floor by the end of her bed. Years ago she asked me to reorganize it, her pile of old manila folders, Bendigo Bank statements, car insurance, shares. Now her will’s on top, out of its envelope, torn free from its ribbon. THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF RUTH BRAILSFORD RAWSON. The version I arranged with the lawyers in Cranbourne, disinheriting Earley as she requested, so no Elsie or any of his others could stake their claims. Done as much for myself as her. All property, real and personal, her hereditaments, passing to me, but on the second page in the margin. Shaky blue pen. No Doctor. Her initials, and then, Witness: Reggie Don, scrawled in the same. More smudged writing in my mother’s looping hand, below the original seal, a second codicil. I, Ruthie, gift the bush block to Reginald Donald Dumbalk (Reggie Don), and all Brok
en Hill shares. Her signature, he’s the witness. Did it happen during the night? Did she leave the case open so I’d see it? Thoughts cascading. You can’t witness a bequest if you get the benefit, but is this what she wants? And what does it leave? A few hundred acres and this open house; not the cottage out the back. Her current account if there’s anything left and the acreage over the road. “And what’s this?” I ask.

  She eyes me evenly, her shoulders pulled back. “Reggie will take care of the land,” she says. “You’ll just sell it up.” She’s far too sharp to have had a new stroke.

  “How do you know I won’t get married and move here?”

  “And live with Sharen?” she asks. The two of them out there picking up dung. Or maybe Reggie told her. I shouldn’t have left him ministering in the night.

  “You should be pleased I escaped from this,” I say.

  My mother breathes and closes her eyes as if to garner strength. “You left me with your father.” What she means is: I left her.

  I NEED TO be alone. A bath in the good bathroom that nobody uses, the tub cream-painted iron and narrow, almost four feet deep. Stains beneath the taps the shape of rusty tears. A window but not much of a curtain, so far from the boiler it was deemed a waste to run water this far. The giant showerhead I don’t turn on because the tap is wrapped with red electrician’s tape. It always poured rusty water and couldn’t be turned off, dripping once every few minutes for twenty years. I’d lie here to escape, listening to the pipes groan and waiting for that moment.

  The bath runs brown then clears as I wait for the water to warm, hoping no one finds me here. Undressed, I slowly remove the bandage from my hand, the red ridge along the stitches like an angry mouth. The scratch of a twig on the roof and the handyman drilling and banging echoes in here. Reminds me of LA and how they’re always building in the canyon, the echo of each nail strike reverbing through the hills. I can’t sleep through construction there. Here I can’t stay awake, up half the night, the dreams that won’t stop coming even when I’m only half asleep.

  My grandmother washed me here when I was a boy, reaching in with soft soapy hands. Rinsing the farm from my hair and her thumb pressing a track along my brow to keep the soap from my eyes. She finger-painted in the suds on my tummy, shapes I had to guess. A horse and then a house I guessed was a pair of hats. “Wash up as far as possible, and down as far as possible,” she’d say. “But for heaven’s sake don’t touch possible.” She did her English laugh as though it was the first time anyone had ever said it.

  I wash myself with the aged remains of glycerin soap, but can’t make myself feel clean. The thought of Isabel on the beach at Sea Ranch, wherever that is, with her new girlfriend. She’d be swimming in the icy ocean, bodysurfing and collecting shells, conches, cones, baby’s ears. Arranging them the way she does.

  Back in the bedroom in just a towel, there’s already a bolt on each window, shutting out the heat. The dog trots in then leaves so I shut the door and collapse on the bed in broad daylight, the altered will beside me on the sheet, as if custody makes a difference. Reggie has the book and now I am left with this. I’d planned to bring Isabel here on our honeymoon. Circle the Pacific—Tahiti, Fiji, New Zealand, Dunk Island . . . then the mysterious farm she’s seen in pictures. She’d look up into these cobwebs, the blistered paint, and the hunting scene on the mantel that’s just a print. She’d be disappointed. The place not how I’d rendered it. My father hitching past the dirty window, peering in. She’d be staring out the screen’s ripped edges, flies buzzing against glass. Spritzing her face in the heat, the familiar waft of rosewater. I’d lift the soft linen of her skirt, her slightly musty traveling smell. I’d nuzzle the narrow elastic silk, kiss her there and she’d make a small sad sound and push down against my tongue, a quiet back and forth. Not like Sharen, but lovely still.

  Isabel’s grandmother said I’d be a betrayer, a traidor, because I resembled Isabel’s Dutch father. El Abandonador. Now I resemble my own, dreaming of Isabel here.

  WHEN I ROUSE myself the banging has stopped and all is quiet, but the day is already fading, pinks and purples hang like lips on the edge of the sky. All I can think of is Sharen, my body wanting more. Drunk with sleep and dressing without undies or socks, just a shirt and jeans and Blundstones. The comfort of dusty toes against leather, my feet reverting to dirt.

  The silent Prius without lights feels as if it drives itself. No traffic, just an occasional reflector on a milepost, everything turned a ferocious purple, falling off the horizon. Avenues of poplars line the drives of hobby farms; sheds and treated rail turnout pens. Angora goats and llamas, Welsh Mountain ponies. I turn up Wedding Bush Road where the sand on the track beneath the tires is quiet as the trees. I park up near the open gate and wander down the eroded slope to the cottage, over the shallow gullies formed in years it rained, hungry for the heat and the smell of her. The chance of finding her naked in the rocking chair or lying in that bedroll in the bare sitting room sets my body humming. I can just make out the distant hump of Sharen’s blackened car. Indifferent about the Munnings now, the rocking horse; all I want is to pump her stupid, stamp her rough into that burned-up grass.

  But the porch light’s off, the house dark as the carport. I head around to the back, to a silhouette near the garden fence. “Sharen?” The figure picks up a loose wooden slat and retreats beside the water tank.

  “Not here.” Walker not thirty feet away snarls from under his hat, hoicks phlegm and spits into the hibiscus. I tread closer. He must be in his mid-forties now, broader, heavier than I remember, stiff-necked. Ten years older than I am. He drops the narrow plank from his hand, as if he doesn’t need it. “What you want here?” he asks, his stare barely visible under the brim of his Akubra, eyes that don’t hold light.

  “It’s my place,” I say, resting my gaze on him. I could take him if I really had to. Maybe. I was never a fighter but in LA I’ve been training, lessons I took with a guy called Kiwi Thunder at the boxing gym on Vine, it’s all the rage now, fists up high, the uppercut and jab. “You know we’re missing a couple of Ruthie’s riding school ponies,” I say. “Thought you might have seen them.”

  His grip seems to tighten near his pocket. The small flick-knife holstered on his belt; I saw it in the bathroom. Even a good punch and my hand would be ripped right open, or worse. I eye the garden fork ten feet from me. Nice to know it’s there. “Where do you take them?” I ask.

  He makes a hissing sound, gestures with a flick of his head, and the night seems suddenly silent. Out past him over the bracken-covered rise, toward the housing tract, once sat the corrugated shed where Gracious birthed him; before his father fled. Gordie was a good man with sheep is all I remember.

  I take another careful step nearer. Sweat on my back and neck. He once killed a rabbit with a slingshot in the dark.

  “You don’t come near me.” He spits, raises his unshaven chin as he kneels, grabs the plank and beats the corrugated iron tank. So empty it echoes like a bell in the bush, has me jump back, the ant-eaten wood as it splinters about him. He picks up an old rope halter and drapes it on his arm, retreats into the night. “She’s probably at the pub,” he yells from the shadows. My hands trembly as my fists unclench.

  I PULL INTO the gravel parking lot by the Tooradin Pub, the Drive-Through Bottle-O lit up like an all-night carwash. As I get out I listen to the cupping of the waves on the dense gray sand and the water birds squawk—ibis and blue cranes. The thrum of frogs from the eerie black inlet, the blood as it runs through my veins. The town’s empty save the trucks that trundle through and I’m staring through the pub’s new picture window into the gussied-up lounge.

  Ted and Roxy McDonough sit on chrome stools at the bar. Mavis Pipes pulling beers as always, her hair swept back but silver now, red cylinder earrings, everything the same but different. This pub where I once watched my father work the girls. Now it’s me leaving Isabel on the end of the phone, my mother alone in the house. Just as he used to.


  Through a new glass door frosted with a colony of seagulls, I notice poker machines now light up the far wall, a row of miniature hot rods. What was almost historic converted to gauche. A multicolored all-occasion carpet, cheap blond wood for the bar. No Sharen perched at the bar, bare legs on show for the evening. Just Tony Genoni, who swivels on his stool and catches me, watching. I enter anyway.

  “Earley’s boy!” says Mavis as if I’m twelve. She gathers glasses. “We heard you were here.” Her pale crystally irises. “What’s your fancy?”

  A television hangs from a metal perch, everyone glued to a game of night cricket at the MCG. “A Crown Lager,” I say. “Thanks.”

  The McDonoughs ignore me, still nursing a spat they had with my father years ago, a missed appointment or cattle through a fence. Joe Madragona, the market gardener who lives over on Genoni’s Road, tips back a bottle of Victoria Bitter. His rusted machinery and car chassis piling up in the gullies behind his house. “Joe,” I say as if I’m here to see him. “We got a vehicle for you in the Back Paddock. A nice Mitsubishi.”

  Tony Genoni laughs. “It’s a nice smoky black,” he says. “Thanks to Sharen Wells.”

  Joe smiles in wry acknowledgement, he knows what goes on; then gets swallowed back up by the cricket on the screen.

  Mavis slides my beer onto the counter; specs hang on the chain round her neck as if she has a second pair of eyes. “Be careful,” she adds with a mascaraed wink from behind her pink and white frames. “She’s a bit of a one.”

  I take a swig of cold ale and look down into the stitches scabbing on my hand, the vomit-colored carpet, as if I’m unsure what she’s talking about.

  “We went with wall to wall,” she says and Tony yells “Fuckin’ moron” at the television. Bessie Slaughter in her usual dark corner knitting gray socks for the hospital, staring at me. What did we do to her? Grumpy Unthank drinking on his own, just older, winks. Through the paneled glass into the other room, I catch sight of Bobby Genoni, leaning over the pokies, playing them alone. From behind he’s pudgier than he used to be. Sharen speared him too. If only I’d known her back in the day, a girl a bit older who knew what to do. That’s how it should have been. Not now, with Isabel waiting, me hunting Sharen along with my father and Bobby, Walker skulking around. The alarms in my head muted by animal craving.