by Kate Lyons
He’d left it there in the end. It had seemed right somehow that she would go on remembering a boy taller, blonder, broader than he ever remembered being. Yet never bigger than his father, a man who filled any foreground even in absence. His shadow pitching forward into the yellow desert of the photograph, outpacing Ray, the tree, even the wolfish shadow of the pig.
No shirt or frame could fit his father. A mountain of a man.
In the end, he took only the money from the pantry, his dog and his rucksack. Dad’s shirt, which he’d worn for years, the blood on it fading slowly, becoming a map to memory he wanted to forsake but could never quite leave behind. Tilda’s blood on the collar, until the collar too fell away. For years he tended his memory of that day and of all the days between himself, the photograph, the day it was taken and the day he left, puzzling over them even as the past receded and the shirt itself tattered into an old blue rag. Half of it made into a bandanna, half torn up and tied round a sheep skull, left fluttering out there in the desert as the sign of a job well done.
In this way he kept himself tied by the sheerest skin to a hole in his past. A thread of blue drawn across the years.
When he got back home, the lamb was gone. Following a gut-stained trail into the scrub by the road, he found a flurry of feathers. Under a bush, two more chickens, bloody and gutted, and the missing head of the rooster, looking cranky even in death. Near the dam, a pile of scat, rank and thick as his arm.
Behind the pump house, his first clear prints, narrow, deep, strangely splayed. More prints around them, smaller, ticking, rabid, legion, leading down toward the creek and his new boundary fence. He squatted over the larger prints, wondering what could make a mark like that. What sort of jaw could rip a hole in brand-new steel mesh. He almost looked up, to see something crouched above him in a tree, before remembering he didn’t believe in those old stories, told by his father at dawn over camp fires. The evil in them laboured, gloating, cartoonish, compared to the sins of ordinary men. Men with dogs and guns. Men like the neighbour or his father. Men like him.
Heading back up the creek bank, he smelled rot. A mound of leaves, marked by a haze of flies. When he nudged the dead sheep with his foot, it fell apart as if he’d undone a zip. An old kill this one. He saw an ear, torn, barely healed. Lily’s dry ewe, the one she’d fed by hand. The rest unrecognisable. Hollowed of organs, she’d been ripped limb from limb.
By the time he got back with the shovel, it was dusk. It fell quickly out there, on those poor boundaries, flowing fast up the creek gully, striking down sharp from the ridge. Out there, on the edge of night, a grown man with a dog and a gun, he felt small and afraid.
Next morning, he counted over and over, trying to make that huddle of ears and tails come out right. He’d found two more dead at dawn, a lamb in the far paddock and one of the pregnant ewes, opened breast to hind. Four gone all up, including the old ewe and the first dead lamb. Five ewes left in the home paddock, one still pregnant, three with lambs at heel. But he didn’t know how many had lambed while he was away up north or at the hospital and if they’d been singles or twins and where the other ewe was and whether it was the mother of the dead lamb. How many he’d have to find or bury before all this was done.
Dawn and dusk was when they hunted. He started getting up well before the sun, moving sheep between creek grazing and home paddock three times a day. Almost as soon as he got them there, he moved them back, like a man shifting piles of lumber from here to there, with a wall of bushfire on its way. If a paddock was more open with less scrub for stalking and hiding, it was also more badly fenced, with less feed and further from the house. Back and forth he went, the poor sheep following, exhausted. Couldn’t settle, couldn’t decide what was worse. Sheep starved, sheep missing. Sheep torn apart.
For two days, nothing. He chopped wood for a hundred fires, fed his five remaining chickens, herding them back to the coop as soon as they’d finished pecking the grain. In the long middays, he jumped at every sound. The dog scratching. The windmill sighing. A tic started up in his eye. A dead hen the third morning, headless and wingless, but she was old and broody. Could have been a fox.
He did the rounds again anyway, patching wire and checking gates, shoring up rotten posts. When he was done, too jittery to sit still, he went back to clearing the already empty shed, hauling out the leaves and rodents that had collected there in his absence, even sweeping the floor. In a dark corner he’d missed, inside a rotted hessian sack, he found a few of the husband’s old traps. Small, blackened, flimsy, meant for fox or rabbit, but he buried them in a childish necklace around the house.
By the end of the three days it took Lily to die, he was rising at first light, going to bed with another dawn in the sky. Sometimes between last round-up and morning head count, he felt he had barely closed his eyes. When he did, sitting on the verandah, or lying in his little sleep-out bed, he felt himself pitched always toward various shades of darkness. Brown, brindle, dun-coloured. His whole body an unpeeled eye.
The last night and day, he didn’t go to bed at all. Just sat on the chopping block by the shed, gun in his lap, facing the direction of the coming sun. At midnight he felt frost forming in wrinkles of earth, between the joints of his toes. Before dawn, in the deepest dark, shadows of leaf and branch turning to tail and claw, he heard a high howling. Jumping up, he fell straight over. An old cold man lying in darkness. Peering sightlessly toward the sound, hearing only the growl of a possum. Sheep shuffling against the greying sky.
The morning he got the call from Cheryl, the worst so far. Two lambs at the far end of the home paddock. Half-eaten, but still alive.
After he’d shot them, he set to work, hauling, digging, burning, burying. Except for Lily’s old ewe, which he dug up. So ripe by now a nudge of his shovel made what was left of her head come away. He held his breath and closed his eyes, hacking blindly, metal breaking hide with a buttery hiss.
Shovelling the flesh into another hessian sack, he hauled it up toward the house. From the shed, a sprinkle of mice bait and weedkiller. From Lily’s empty vegetable patch, handfuls of blood and bone. He followed the dog for half an hour, waiting for it to lift its leg, then soaked the bag and its contents with kelpie piss. Old Alf in his head this time, that summer they were losing sheep to wild dogs at Twenty Bends. The old man outside his bush shack, scratching shapes with a stick in the earth. Square house like a child’s drawing, fat wiggle for the river, ribbed lines for fields. Here the sun, here the moon, both rising together in Alf’s universe, his secret duskless topography. Then bang bang bang with the stick, deep, hard, vicious. Dot dot dot on the ground, the man’s little face drawn up in a snarl, waiting for Ray to nod at something he hadn’t understood.
When Ray shook his head, Alf leapt up on those old chicken legs of his. Mimed digging, then hopping, then growling and howling, cocking one skinny leg above a bush, pointing urgently toward Ray’s blue heeler puppy and then back to himself. Grinning his toothless grin. When he’d started undoing the rope that held his trousers up, Ray had backed off, thinking the old man was mad or bad or both.
Old Alf knew things though, beyond the shape or sound of words. How to grow the best tomatoes, with little water, in rabid frost. How to mend a wound with spider web, laying a fine cocoon to drown the blood. How to milk a bruise with leeches then pale it with parsley, leaving only the faintest imprint of belt or fist. How to hit a man twice your size and weight so he went down and stayed down, a dark bruise of your own blooming in the hollow of his throat.
Stripping off his clothes now, knotting his old blue bandanna round his throat, Ray rubbed himself with dirt, leaves, blood, chunks of rotten sheep. Set off to walk Lily’s boundaries, laying bait as he went. After a while he forgot the smell, the scrub flaying arms and thighs. The grief that was making it hard to breathe. Under his bare feet, hot dust, sharp gravel, broken wire, a map of his own, blooming against his skin. Coiled snake for the creek, three lines for the fences. Squashed egg for Lily’s
orchard. A double noose of dots, bang bang bang, for where he should lay the bait, just beyond their killing highway, within sight and sound of home.
See what they see. Think what they think. The old man on all fours, sniffing and pawing, his yellow neck stretched to howl. Be snout and tooth and claw.
Crawling naked through hot tunnels of scrub, the world was hot, sepia, intricate. Himself a yellow eye.
Too much blue sky.
He sat on the verandah step with his back to Lily’s chair. From here he could see all directions. Creek, ridge, both sides of the track. One arm flayed and potholed, bumping toward the front gate and the grave of the lamb. The other side lined with trees and pooled with shadow, disappearing toward the neighbour’s hill. In between, brown paddocks, the henhouse, Lily’s orchard, where the last of the sheep butted at yellow stub.
Beyond that, the ridge, circled by hills. In front, the burnt scar of earth where he’d made a bonfire of carcasses, dousing and lighting, adding bits of the shed he’d torn down, a splash of petrol and Lily’s clothes, until he had a line that, in his mind at least, nothing could cross. Anything breaking cover from bush or creek would be outlined at sunset against the ridge. Geometry, that was all. Two sides of a triangle and those killers didn’t know it yet but Ray and his gun formed the third.
‘Too much blue sky. That’s what did for Len.’
At noon, a silence so deep, he could hear ice cracking in the empty freezer, a blue chink-chink. No radio, no burble of weather or stock prices. No sound from her as she stood behind him in her teapot shirt. Her hair dark and full again, her creamy throat obscured. Fading even as he turned, the house absorbing her to its old seam of darkness. The wind picking up. That hinge loose again.
‘He said that, just before he died. It was like the sky was choking him. Like he couldn’t breathe. Like someone was squeezing his throat, a little more each day.’
When his mind started to wander, becoming rootless as the dust blowing along the road, Ray brought the tip of his smoke to rest on a tender part of his arm. When his eyelids started to go, he told himself stories, the old comfort, childhood tales of mutiny, shipwreck, empire cannon. His hat a pith helmet, casting brave shadow along his boot. His enamel cup of beer a sailor’s ration of dark rum. Raising the gun, sighting out, he saw, amid the tracery of bare winter trees and flickers of shadow, a horde of Zulus storming the neighbour’s hill. His sheep a huddle of redcoats, flanked to defend the fort. Another swig, another lift of the gun, and the shadows muscled to the vicious shapes of men on the swag. Grandad’s tales of the Depression, hobos and robbers, cutthroats all. His cup filled again and he drained it again and Dad was laughing now, his smoky chest rumbling, coughing deep and throaty, and Ray could hear the clink of frypans, smell camp smoke rising. See branches shuffling through shadowy hide.
‘Mate of a mate, you know, out west. While ago. He had four hundred head ready for market, but they were too thin to hold themselves up in the truck. Had to shoot them all. Then he shot himself.’
His father, a man of such long silences, such sudden stories. Words etching deep as acid. Never going away.
‘Pity of it is, this place would have been OK, you know, if we’d got rain. Down at the creek, there’s red box, belah, pine and white gum, and up there, in the rough, leopardwood, bimble box, bit of pasture. Sandy loam toward the river, some red soil, and edible timber. You tell them that Ray. Put it in the ad. Don’t let them rip you off. Stony mulga, high mulga, here and there, heather brush. Further out, just on the boundary, ironwood, rosewood, supplejack, beefwood. Sounds good on paper at least.’ A big laugh, ending in a croak, a spit, drying in the dust.
‘Dad? What do you mean?’
‘And the bore. Don’t forget the bore. We got the windmills, and the ground tanks, not to mention that bloody wool shed. Nearly killed me, that shed. All timber framed. That stockyard, it’s bugle style, three-way draft, water laid on. If we had any of course.’ Another long-parched swig of beer, his cigarette butt flicked sideways in disgust, out to where it might have caught something, if there’d been anything left to burn.
‘Green drought. That’s what we got here, Ray. That’s the worst.’ Dad staring out from inside Ray’s head, speaking to some blue and heartless sky. ‘Bit of rain and you think, we’ll be right, for a while at least. But there’s no bulk to it, see? No moisture. No heart to it, deep down.’ Dad thumping the earth with his boot, then his chest with a fist.
‘Dad? What’s wrong?’
In some future, his father had said. In the light at the end of some tunnel Ray didn’t know about. At the end of some day.
‘Right. Can’t sit around here all afternoon.’ His father slapping his palms down on his trouser legs, springing up from his thighs. As if he’d decided something, drawn himself to some sticking point.
‘Gotta go check the dam.’ Dams were dry. Creek was dry. Had been for months. ‘You keep an eye on that fire.’ He jerked his head toward some plume of smoke on some other horizon. ‘That wind changes, be here before you turn around.’ Halfway down the verandah stairs, he’d turned back to look at Ray, the old glare in his eyes. ‘And watch those sheep Ray. I counted ’em,’ Dad tapping a finger on his iron-grey temple, leaving a dusty mark. ‘All up here.’
‘But Urs isn’t here. What about Mam? The toilet and everything. Her pills.’
‘She’s not your mam, son. Your mother’s a slut.’
And leaving Ray reeling, he’d walked off, rocking through heat haze, drunkenness, waves of dust. And Ray had been so busy putting those words together, feeling the shock settle in him like cancerous grit, that he didn’t hear what lay in the silence between and behind. Didn’t notice the gun missing from its place in the wood box. Failed to see the dusk was coming in.
Gun, dusk, landscape. So deep in that old puzzle, even now, that at first he didn’t see the low shadow detach itself from the shadows along the road. Only when the screen door banged, once, hard, into the old sore dent, did he jump, pick up the gun, sight out through it. See the shape outlined against the ridge. Slinking at belly height, heading for the home paddock and the ewes. Other shapes flaring out behind it, smaller, more ragged, a dirty mottle flickering through spent seed heads, spun dust, smoke from his funeral pyre.
He leapt the steps, vaulted the fence, going at a loping crouch through what would have been Lily’s orchard. Head bent low beneath a vault of remembered trees. Those big old gnarled apple trees at Twenty Bends. The ground a carpet of rotting apples the day he left. Something crunched beneath his foot now, and as if memory could conjure it, he smelled rotten sweetness but it was meaty, not fruity. A possum head, jaws snarled with rot. Next to it, a hank of fur, coarse and peppery. In a flattened hollow near the fence, more fur, brindle, blue-spotted, white and fluffy, and scattered here and there among it, yellow bones. Possum or joey, too small for sheep. Prints led away, up toward the creek. A sound behind him and he spun, half-expecting to see a little girl, blonde, curly, milk-smelling as a lamb. But it was just his kelpie, feinting at shadows. He thought about tying it up or taking it back. No rope. No time. He ran on, carrying the gun like a spear.
For an hour he trawled the creek boundaries, following wombat paths and roo tunnels, losing the trail in pebbled shallows, finding it again in the soft earth beneath a lattice of fallen trees. Taking his boots off, tying his bandanna round his head, he waded into the water, became part of its brown rippling glare. That noise behind him again, but he didn’t turn. Knew who it was. Wasn’t afraid.
Sharp stones ahead, he warned her. Glass here, barbed wire there. Together they walked the shallows, her bare feet on his big white ones, losing scent. Tadpoles darted, pretty pebbles of light under an overhang of rock. Fish shapes in the deeper water, footprints minus the toes. At some point he left his shirt on the bank, his trousers in the mud. Her shirt fluttered yellow from a tree. Time slowed, spread to a shining line between them, her before and behind him, seeing that fringe of old scars on his thigh, his skin sing
ing with the notes of his old bravery, in puckering light. He told her all about it. The horse, the fence, the wire, the chunk of flesh with a horseshoe stamped in it. The leaping firelight making something primitive of the kitchen as Dad stitched shadow to skin to blood to memory.
She brushed it with a finger, a touch soft as a leaf, quick as a fish, and he was turning to look, to see and welcome her, when up ahead, from the corner of his eye, he noticed the kelpie freeze.
Wind had changed. Bark scuttling up the bank, not down it. Saplings along the road straining like young white bones.
He dropped to his belly, smashing his chin on the gun. Another noise, and the kelpie fled, a quick red curve into undergrowth. Ray stayed where he was. Stones in his knees, water soaking his crotch, bullets sleek moulded to the bone of his hip. Swallowing blood from a bitten tongue, his mind going fast and pure. Calculating distance, angle, trajectory, the time it would take to load, stand, brace, take a sighting, against failing light, an unoiled trigger, the size and scale of the thing.
An outline bristled up in his mind, in grainy light. Coat of a wolfhound, from the fur on the branch. Skull and jaw of a mastiff, from that hole in his fence. Craven hindquarters of an Alsatian, from those strange deep prints he’d found near the pump. The rest of the pack smaller, slyer, more dingo-like. Rust, sand, butter-coloured, curling through stands of white gum, messy silver light.
See what they see. Think how they think.
Closing his eyes, he parsed the breeze. Leaf rot, sheep shit, water must. Preen smell of someone burning fence posts. The neighbour perhaps. Old bushfire stink, dark and sour. Just smoke from his pyre probably, drifting on the wind. Just his imagination, the past rising up, that old frantic circle of his on the verandah, when Dad walked off and he knew something wasn’t right and when he realised about the missing gun. Urs not there, Mam sick, Tilda calling, his feet slapping, smell of smoke rising, and all those doors locked against him. Dad missing. Fire coming. Dusk coming. Sending him spinning off in a panic, at the wrong moment, the wrong angle, a boy falling through a blur of sky, earth, paddock, into a new and faltering geography, out there where the creek met the river. Finding something he had no equation for. His father, sitting propped against the old white gum where all their names were carved. A big man leaning like the broken upright of a name. The only thing holding him up the muzzle of the rifle braced inside his mouth.