He woke. Painter was somewhere nearby, snoring softly. Occasionally he would mumble something. The dream was as clear as memory. It was as if he could hear his mother’s voice yet. Couldn’t see her face, not much of it anyway. Remembered mostly her hands and the feeling of becoming weightless when she lifted him up onto her hip and kissed him on the mouth. Everybody had bare feet then. Her hands smelling of wet potatoes and flour.
A shearing contractor who knew his father had asked his mother if the oldest boy needed a job. Price of wool going through the roof, see, be a pound a pound before long and you with all those kiddies missus. Smart thing to do, with a wink and a finger tapping the side of his nose. Smart thing for you all. A lot of the men not right still or away over there. The country will be riding on the sheep’s back after the war, the newspapers reckon. A boom.
‘On the sheep’s back,’ she said. ‘I have heard that. That’ll be good, won’t it?’
The contractor left a letter from their father, a brown paper parcel and a white carton of tailor-made American cigarettes with a big red circle on them. Lucky Strike Toasted plain cut. Lew would remember his mother holding the carton as she hugged him and told him to do his best. The crinkly sound of the cellophane. The other kids around them like chooks as he tried to say goodbye Mum. She was holding the carton of cigarettes to her chest. No tears in her eyes this time, nodding and trying to smile. Then, breathless and coughing, with her wrist up to her mouth.
The contractor dropped him off at the shed and nodded to the drunk Painter. He seemed to be always drunk in those days. He was the Ringer, the fearful head shearer. Lew could not look at him and stared instead at his feet. The contractor seemed nervous and left quickly, speaking over his shoulder. ‘Show him the ropes will you Painter? He might be all right if he’s anything like his father.’
‘Son,’ Painter ignored the contractor and spoke to him, ‘do you know a shearer is just a rousie with his brains knocked out?’
Looked to where Lew was looking at his feet and shaking his head.
‘What’s your name boy?’
‘Lew.’
‘Lew who?’
‘Lew McCleod.’
‘Well now Mr McCleod. You got nothing on your feet son?’
‘No mister.’
‘Come on then.’
Painter took him to the end of the shed near the Ferrier wool press. ‘Put your foot on there. I’ll make you some dancing shoes.’
Painter doubled a jute sacking fadge top and placed it on the floor. Lew stepped on it and Painter cut around the outline of his foot with a pair of crutching hand shears. He left a wide overlap at the front, sewed up the heel, tied it off and gathered the sacking around Lew’s toes. Then, using a blanket stitch, sewed it all together. Pulled it tight. ‘How’s that feel son?’
‘Good thank you Mr Painter.’
‘Well you make the other one. I haven’t got time to fuck around with you.’ Winked at Lew. ‘Boy turning up to work barefoot, like a Kalgoorlie orphan. You ever had shoes boy? Shoes for church?’
Lew, silent.
‘Jesus son.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t fuckin’ sorry me mate. I’ll knock you down.’ Painter winked and waited, studying Lew’s face before he spoke again. ‘Don’t worry, you can’t help it son. I don’t go neither. Mob of cunts. Don’t reckon the other bloke would recognise a single one.’
First man that ever called him mate or son or Mr McCleod and he didn’t have a clue what the tattooed drunk was saying most of the time. He made the other woolshed dancing shoe but it wasn’t as good as Painter’s.
It wasn’t long after that Painter began to teach him to shear. ‘Don’t try,’ he would say. ‘Let the handpiece do the work. The old lizard. Feel it become the end of your arm, your natural hand. Soon enough you will be a gun. A two hundred a day man. Ringer in the shed like me. Now the best thing you can do is shut your mouth and do what you are told.’
He learned to curse. To use foul and profane language as a matter of course. To lie to tell the truth and distrust the truth as a lie. He learned to survive. To fight. Discovered an affinity with mechanical things. The workings of motors. He was taught to use a rifle and a shotgun by an unmarried station owner who asked if he would stay on. He said he needed a mate and could teach him to shoot kangaroos, fox and dingo.
The smell of beer and whisky on Painter. The stink of his old sweat. Tobacco. And how he would say, over and over, let the handpiece do the work boy. Don’t think about your hand or yourself and the pain you feel, just let it know by itself. And bloody keep going young Mr McCleod. Never give up boy.
In the mornings Painter would vomit in the catching pen before he started shearing. Shaking. Got the ta-tas, he would say. Then he would start drinking from the bottle wrapped in wet newspaper and rubber bands. Sometimes he would shit himself. Blood too, but he never stopped working.
By the time Lew was sixteen he could shear one hundred and eighty sheep a day and Painter had become extraordinarily proud of him. Almost always called him son. And sometimes Mr McCleod. By the time he was twenty-one, two hundred and fifty a day. He never saw his mother again.
CHAPTER 6
They drove through the night. East into a rising moon. A faint white light under the speedometer in the dashboard. Occasionally the cab would flare bright around Painter’s head as he lit another cigarette. Otherwise it was the moonlight and the reach of the truck headlights through the country as they travelled into the marginal wheat and sheep lands.
Painter leaned forward, turned his head and looked up at the black sky above them. The huge arch and swirl of stars across the night. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘A blackfella once told me they up there…the stars?…Babies hiding in an old woman’s hair.’
Lew stared straight ahead at the narrow road and nodded. Said, ‘Hold on a bit.’ Slowed down as they ran into a badly potholed stretch of road. The truck juddering as they passed over the corrugations.
When they had cleared it Lew glanced out at the sky. ‘Babies hiding in an old woman’s hair you say.’
‘That’s the story.’
‘You could see why, if you thought about it like that, couldn’t you?’
‘You could.’
‘Henry would see it Painter. He would.’
‘You think he would? Bit of a no-hoper, old Henry in his day.’
‘That’s what the lifesavers at Cottesloe called us mate. No-hopers.’
And Painter was laughing. ‘Well they got that right then son. Didn’t they?’
Ten minutes later they stopped. Lew refilled the petrol tank from a forty-four-gallon drum secured on the tray behind the cab, then walked a little way off the track to urinate. He heard Painter get out of the truck and he too walked to the side of the road to piss. When he finished he buttoned his moleskins.
Painter had put his hands on his hips and was again staring at the brilliance of the night sky. It was such as to be impossible to ignore, spangled, silent and violent for as far as they could see. Just the sound of the wind in the night. ‘You can see the Seven Sisters Lew.’ He pointed at the Pleiades constellation. ‘And the Flat-out Emu.’
Lew walked to the truck and looked back at Painter in the glow of the stars and the rising full moon. ‘Come on mate, we better keep moving.’<
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‘Would you look at it?’ Painter had his head back and was staring at the sky. ‘It doesn’t go away. No matter what.’
‘You all right?’
Painter didn’t reply for a while.
‘Yeah. It’s just the sky. Won’t leave me alone tonight it seems.’
‘Come on.’
They got into the truck and closed the doors. Lew turned the starter motor, the engine fired, began to run. They sat and listened to the running of the Ford, a rumbling low steadiness. Painter nodded and cleared his throat. ‘You heard about the man in the moon son?’
‘Always looked a bit like a rabbit to me.’
Painter laughed and Lew glanced at him and grinned as they drove off.
The old man kept staring at the moon. It had grown larger and was blue-white and in places shaded, covered in scars. The craters formed by the impacts of meteorites. The still mountains, and dark seas of sand.
‘I heard more of them blackfella stories, one of a sun woman,’ Painter said. ‘Makes the moon run away, she does. The night go. Sister sun he called her. No more blackfellas out here but. Used to be a swag of them, camped out around Daybreak Springs used to be Winjilla.’
‘What?’ Lew raising his voice over the noise of the engine. ‘Did you say sun woman at Daybreak Springs?’
‘That’s part of Drysdale Downs station. Old man Drysdale took it when he come up from Kalgoorlie. Hundreds of thousands of acres given away mate, you just had to show proof of improvement. Old Jungle Forrest did that to open up the show for farming. Before the Boer War.’
The moonlight on the bonnet and both halves of the cracked windscreen glinting.
‘And no blackfellas workin’ on the Drysdale station now, you say?’ Lew asked. ‘Some of the best shearers but. Top blokes, women rousies too, they like shadows laughing in a woolshed. Never seen better.’
‘No blackfellas on Drysdale Downs. Never will be. All gone.’
‘Why’s that mate?’
‘Old man Drysdale and Dingo Smith persuaded them to move down south to round Boddington just after the first war,’ Painter said. ‘Never come back.’
‘Persuaded.’ Lew glanced over at him in the light coming from the dashboard. ‘How’d they do that?’
Painter, in shadow, held up his hand, cocked his wrist and pulled a trigger with his index finger.
They were quiet, listening to the sounds of the truck travelling on the dirt road. The gravel whipping under the mudguards. The headlight beams searching out in front of them.
‘You believe that?’
Painter wound down the window, cleared his throat and spat into the passing night.
‘I do believe that.’
Wound up the window and after a few minutes he turned his shoulder into the corner of the cab and tilted his hat over his eyes. A rolled towel under his head. Folded his arms. ‘I might have a sleep. You right?’
‘Yeah I’m good. You sleep.’
Soon his breathing lengthened and he began to snore. Every now and again he would unfold his arms and touch what was left of his nose with his thumb. Open and close his mouth, fold and refold his arms. Murmur something and cough with his eyes shut.
Lew watched the road and the headlights playing over it and the scrub and smoke bush. White wandoo gums in groups alongside the roadside. Ghosts, journey watchers. He thought of Maureen at the beach, scooping up handfuls of sea water, placing her flat hands on his chest, and then he did not want to think of her and he drove and looked out at the passing land in the moonlight. Hummed a tune he had heard on the radio, Streets of Laredo.
A great thump hit the side of the truck and he saw two grey kangaroos bound through the headlights. Another thump and three more crossed ahead of them. The perfect curve of their backs, tails in counterbalance. He braked but it was too late. The truck collided with another in mid-flight. It came up onto the bonnet, smashing into the already cracked windscreen, shattering it. Disappeared.
They came to a sliding stop, sideways on the road. A single headlight shining away into the scrub through the dust.
‘What? Hold on. Hold on.’ Painter shouting as he was thrown awake. Broken glass falling over him.
‘Mob of roos mate.’ Lew was looking back. He put the truck into neutral and pulled on the handbrake. ‘We hit one.’ He was opening the door. ‘Maybe two heads there.’
Painter was moving also. Quick for an old man. Lew heard the opening and closing of his door, the crunch of broken glass. He was standing at the front mudguard. Running his hand over the bumper for damage. One of the headlights out. He disappeared and after a minute came walking back along the road, brushing at his clothing with one hand, stopped and stepped into the light of the remaining headlight. A haze of moving dust. He was holding something; lifted it.
‘She’s here son’. Held a baby kangaroo up by its back legs. ‘And this is your second head mate. It’s a little joey all right. Noongar call them nyarnyee.’
The baby swayed and tried to kick out. Jerking to be away. Painter held it away from his body, waited for a minute and then swung it up and in a circle to smash its head against a roadside gum. ‘Yeah, nyarnyee. Bye bye baby bye bye.’
‘No,’ Lew called out. ‘Don’t.’
Painter aborted the killing swing, lifting his arm so the head of the joey missed the tree trunk by a few inches. He rested it on the ground and it click-hissed and mewed, feet jerking, desperate to run. ‘What?’ He stared at Lew. ‘It’s kinder.’ He put a foot on the joey’s head to keep it still.
‘Hold on a sec.’ Lew walked to the truck and came back with an old grey blanket and a length of rope. He took the joey and bound it tightly in the blanket. Tied the rope around the bottom and under its front paws. Its head stuck out of the bundle. It shook its head and blinked. Little ears flapping, turning, moving independently of each other as to make you laugh.
‘What are you doing?’ Painter asked.
Lew ignored him and spoke to the joey. ‘You bloody thing,’ he said. ‘You beautiful little bloody thing you.’ He laughed. Its tiny nostrils opening and closing at him. Ears flicking back and forth. ‘Mum’s gone, dead, sorry little one.’
The joey blinked again and struggled in the blanket. The high-pitched clicking noise coming from its throat. Lew put one hand over its eyes and pulled the blanket across its head. Held it as you would a child and it stilled immediately.
‘I don’t know,’ Painter said and walked off into the scrub.
After a few minutes Lew saw him emerge. He was dragging the body of the mother by the tail. He pulled it into the road where it was lit by the truck’s headlight, dropped the carcass and walked to the back of the truck and returned with a butchers knife.
‘I’ll take her tail,’ he said, ‘she’s fresh enough.’ Bent over the carcass and used the knife to cut the tail from her body. ‘For soup. Beautiful. Look.’
He held up the dripping tail.
‘Jesus,’ Lew said and turned away.
‘What?’
CHAPTER 7
The sun woman’s fire spread across the sky as the moon fled and the red light came down and over them all. A great flock of pink and grey galahs flew above the road and Lew watched as the light rose and for as far as he could see, the earth turned pale blue and mauve in the smoky pink of early
morning. The sunlight coming over the horizon and into his eyes. It blinded him as he sat up in the truck. The sun rising quickly now. Painter also woke.
CHAPTER 8
The dingo bitch rose from her belly, squatted and pissed. Her tail flexed twice and then she turned and smelled the place she had pissed. Circled and flattened against the earth, all the time watching the carcass of the grey doe bloating in the heat. Suns reflected from shards of broken glass. The meeyal truck on the side of the road. The mob she had been chasing that night long gone, the desperate mother hit by the truck, the yonga, her tail cut from her, on the roadside.
She watched in the sunlight of the morning as the men got out of the truck and they too pissed. They were downwind of her and she lifted her nose to their kidney smell, the water flattening in the wind. How far it fell from their bodies. Young man old man. They got back in the truck and drove away.
She saw the truck disappear in the dust and lay motionless. Her nose quivering, testing the air, her ears pricked. There was only the ground and sky noise when the sound of the truck faded. The dust settled and the east wind came. Rivers of scent. The man road and the stinking vehicles. Blown dust crossed the road.
She stood, her mouth opened and she panted. Flies buzzed above the doe and she could see ants in the black seeping blood.
The old man had taken her tail and her young, had dragged the body off to one side. She crossed to where the two men had been that morning and smelled where they had urinated and then she squatted and also pissed over their markings. Her tail curved as she checked the spoor of her leaving. Defecated and repeated the circling. Scratched sand behind her to cover the dropping. The smell of the old man and young man were different.
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