And then she began to sob. She did not think she would ever stop.
CHAPTER 59
The dingo watched from the cover of the brush as the old man began to cross to the goat pen. His legs winding as he sang to the sky and staggered in a wide loop to catch the nanny with the bell around its neck. Dragged her out of the pen and began to dance about with her. Continued to sing, Abide With Me, as the goat tried to pull her feet away from the old man. Sung this a thousand times in Belgium, know the fuckin’ words off by heart Eunice. The bell around her neck clanked and her udder was flopping about between her back legs. For the boys. Abide with me fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens. Off by heart, the words, the boys.
The young red dingo stared and blinked, opened his mouth and began to pant; he too had cried and despaired as he looked out at the havoc of the yate trees. They both turned away.
When the two dingoes left the outskirts of the abandoned town and the house of the old man, the bitch felt the heaviness of her belly. It was the first time since she had known she was carrying the black dog’s whelp that she was slowed by them. Almost milk come on and she was when she cleaned herself, coming on, the knowledge pressing. She knew she would soon have to find a safe den; somewhere near water and away from men who would shoot her. She lay down and waited in the mulga scrub of a gully they were crossing. The young red dog’s leg was strong enough now to carry most of his weight and he had run ahead.
He stopped when he noticed her absence and ran back looking for her. He had smelled the smoke, the fire in the scrub. Saw the rising white and grey smoke boiling ahead of the flames, coming through the grass as fast as he could run and he had no idea what to do.
The bitch was lying in some shaded sand, her back legs pushed out by the growing bulk of her belly; her teats were beginning to swell and they itched. The young dog stood and yawped at her. The bitch rose and watched with astonishment as he spun around and began to sprint ahead of the encroaching flames, looking at her to follow him. The smoke was thickening and she could feel the heat, the cracking and hissing sounds as the scrub began to catch and burst. The fire came into the eastern end of the small gully and began to roar as it came up towards her. She knew as her mothers had shown her what to do and immediately ran until she saw a thinning in the flames. Turned and ran directly into it.
In a moment she was through the fire front and was loping across the black burnt-clear ground, the earth hot beneath her feet. She began to increase her speed until she found a hollow where the fire had passed over. Stopped there and waited.
Then she heard the red pup’s dismal howling. Dirging at his loss of her. She listened and crossed back through the swirling grass smoke to where he was. Somehow he had survived, but his whiskers were burnt off and his fur was charred. He looked even more stupid without whiskers. The charred fur on his body and cat-scratched face.
She ran to him, licked his face and he glanced at her and continued to howl. It was as if he would not believe she was really there. She nudged and licked him again. Put her mouth over his head to shut him up. Aware, always aware of other men, other cars. The rifles in their hands.
CHAPTER 60
As Lew drove back towards Drysdale Downs he knew there was nothing to do but follow Abraham’s advice. To know and wait where she would return to. Best place to find and kill her.
In just over two hours he saw the outcrop of shining red boulders that marked the turn-off to Daybreak Springs. He drove to the south and found a gully in which to park the Land Rover. Taking the rifle, he walked back to the fence boundary. He came across the rotting body of a wombat and several traps that had been tripped. Came across three more traps still set.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered, sprang them and kept walking. He found yet another unsprung trap and pushed a stick on the footplate. This trap shut with a savage snap, breaking the stick. Lew looked for the poison baits but they had all gone. Eaten or washed away in the rainstorm. He thought about old man Smith showing him the tracks in the sand. How the horrors made his hands shake.
He opened the gates, left them open and cut around to the south and climbed a small ridge rising up to some flat boulder-strewn ground. He found what appeared to be the highest point of the surrounding area above the springs themselves. Checked the position of the sun and looked at the time. He went about clearing the area and using fallen scrub to camouflage his position. As he finished, he took note of the wind direction and, again, the time. Where the sun was in the sky. The shadows of the trees and where she would come, if she came. He then backed out to the gates and used a branch to cover his tracks. Within a day and a night, the wind would erase any evidence of his being here.
He took the road to Drysdale Downs knowing he would have to return to Daybreak within the week. The bitch should have whelped by then. Coming to the fork indicating the homestead to the left and woolshed and shearers quarters to the right, he thought for a moment how things had changed. He took the left-hand track and drove up to the front of the homestead.
Jimmy was sitting with John Drysdale on the front veranda, leaning forward with a spoon. He glanced at Lew, nodded to the old man before him and opened his mouth in an encouraging manner, the way a mother would feed a baby in a high chair. Lew could not hear what he was saying but he noticed John had a white napkin around his neck and was opening his mouth in response to Jimmy.
Lew looked away as Jimmy quickly spooned in some mashed potatoes and gravy. Wiped under the old man’s bottom lip with the spoon and nodded towards him. ‘Good boy.’
Lew opened the door of the vehicle, got out and closed the door. He saw old man John turn his head slowly to look at him. Still with his mouth open.
‘Mr John,’ Jimmy said, set the spoon down and stood. He raised his hand towards Lew. ‘Mr Lew,’ he said and walked down to him.
‘Jimmy,’ Lew said. ‘How’s Clara?’
Jimmy looked back at the house and Lew saw her face behind her window. She smiled and raised a hand. Then the curtain fell back.
‘She still getting over it.’
‘I should go to her,’ Lew took a step towards the house.
Jimmy stepped in front of him. ‘Please Mr Lew, not now. Please. Too early too early.’ His eyes were downcast but he stood his ground.
Lew felt his eyes harden as he looked at Jimmy standing before him. He closed his hands into fists. ‘Jimmy.’
‘Soon Mr Lew, but I have something to tell you first isn’t it? I’m sorry.’
Lew nodding. He flicked a glance towards the veranda. ‘And him?’
‘No good Mr Lew.’ Jimmy hesitated. ‘Like baby.’
Lew nodded. He took no pleasure in this.
‘But, I have also other things…news so sorry Mr Lew.’
‘What?’
‘Mr Painter is in hospital.’
‘Hospital?’
‘He go crazy too, ayo, gila in Gungurra, fight fight in the pub and fall down after. Big to-do, they all say, he almost died, sorry but it was him most probably.’
‘Painter?’ Lew leaned forward as he asked. ‘You sure?’
‘I am sure. Very sick for a while now, Mr Painter. Coughing all the time. You no hear him?’
‘No,’ Lew said, turned and walked away. He felt his mouth opening and no more words coming out. He did not seem to know how to close it for a while.
CH
APTER 61
The terrible heaviness in her belly decided her. That urgent imperative and for some unknown reason the smell of the sky. Perhaps it was the remembered insistence of her mother to be certain. Become the silence of waiting and the knowing that will come back to you. Little pieces of who you are will join, like a heart beating. Like the blood from a wound. A wild dog does not think such things.
The wind had come and it was full of the growing foul stink of the white men from the west country. It was heavy and coming from where the sun set every night; the moon died there every morning. Her reluctance to go had come from the fear of leaving the familiar country, the land she knew, but it had become unavoidable. The time for backtracking and evasion had come, escaping into the desert country.
When the moon rose, she too rose and licked the young dog awake. They began to lope towards the fine meeka rising. Black sky. Crisp horns of a quarter; an ancient weeping for Venus in attendance.
They kept running until it was above them and then they stopped and rested for an hour and rose and began to run again. Her thirst was testing her; the young red dog ran beside her, his strength growing. The wound in his back leg all but healed. After all it been just a grazing wound through the meat on the point of the buttock and now he ran with almost full use of all his legs. Close now as he sensed her waning strength; his shoulder to her shoulder to lift her up and continue on their way.
She snarled at him often but he was untroubled by her irritation. His devotion, like his growing stamina, did not waver. His burnt whisker-less face, showing only endurance. She glanced at the ugly blackened snout but saw he was there and he always would be. She had begun to sense now he could run strong and sound. Soon, with luck, he could also hunt. Become a male dog. She would mate with him.
They travelled through miles of mallee scrub and karrik smoke bush, blue bush and bush heather. Through sand and gravel and stands of mulga and gimlet. They ran through another emu-breached hole in the long fence and over ridges and salt pans. Along rock-strewn ridges and through gullies. They passed dried waterholes and crossed the tracks of emu and red kangaroo; the spoor of camels, brumbies, wild cattle and once the wreckage of an ancient biplane, burnt and half-buried by drifting sand. They ran and all they could hear was the desert wind and their own breathing and the sound of their running.
At last they stopped; she lay and panted until her chin sagged into the sand. He ran ahead and looked over the next rise. Far away, a campfire. Figures of the walking people moving around and through the light. The great spiral and showers of shooting stars flashing through the black sky.
She watched his reaction, yipped alarm and lifted her head. She rose and crawled forward to the edge of the ridge. Her nose raised and she smelled the walkers, the look-away wanderers, part of the country like the bungurra and yonga. The rocks and ground, the dust they covered themselves with. Older even than everything. The bitch crawled back from the lip of the ridge and lay and began to try to sleep for a while. Knew they must keep a wary distance, but follow their spoor. They would have to be very careful because the walkers would sense them, and call out and allow them affinity to bring them closer and seduce her and eat her fat pups. Laughing tricksters.
The red dog seemed worried by the desert mob and kept running to her and back to the rise where he could see the far-off fire. Their flames blew west on the east wind come out of the centre. Some bits of a chanting song.
She slept, and in the morning they would return to the caves above the freshwater springs.
CHAPTER 62
Painter was in the men’s ward of the Gungurra Public Hospital. Bed 12.
‘Mate,’ Lew said.
Painter looked up from his Bible. Tried to take a deep breath and looked at Lew over his glasses. ‘Son. Sit down. Sit down. Good. Jesus, good to see you boy.’ He took off his spectacles. ‘Finally got the glasses.’
Lew was holding a bag of grapes. He could hear the wheezing in Painter’s chest, the catch and small cough after each breath. He sat down. It hadn’t been that long. Maybe a month. Lew sniffed, looked at Painter’s emaciated right arm. ‘What happened?’
‘I came to town and got bad on the drink,’ Painter said and lost his breath. He held up a finger. They waited.
‘Y’know, after old man Drysdale shot the dogs.’
‘You start fightin’?’
‘Young Mr McCleod, my you look good boy,’ Painter said and coughed. Turned his head to one side and spat into a white enamel bowl. He lay back in the bed. ‘What you looking at?’
‘You?’ Lew looked at Painter as if to ask him, did you hear what I just said?
‘Yes I did. It all happened again. Then I was out the monkey.’
‘How you now?’
‘No good son. No.’ Painter coughed. ‘Bugger it. Cunt of a thing this. How do I look?’
They were silent. Lew shook his head. ‘Not too…y’know. No, not too flash mate. Lost a bit of weight there.’
‘It’s cancer,’ Painter said. ‘Jack the Dancer.’
‘You sure?’
‘Well, they are.’ He tried to laugh. ‘So there you are.’
‘Painter,’ Lew said.
‘No.’
‘All right, you sure?’
‘I don’t want to talk for a while. Let me get my breath here.’ He closed his eyes.
Lew got up, went to find a nurse to ask where the toilets were.
When he returned Painter had woken. ‘My young mate the idiot,’ he said. ‘You ever heard of Hank Williams?’ The Bible sitting open on his chest. Spine up, pages down, like spread wings.
‘Yep.’ Lew sat. He pointed at Painter’s chest. ‘You reading your Bible mate?’
‘You got one?’
‘No.’
Painter nodded. ‘You can have mine.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘You take it.’
Lew shook his head.
‘I can’t read son,’ Painter said, holding the Bible up and pointing his finger into the pages. ‘Never could. All that time.’
Lew stared at the old man lying on the bed like a broken shape. He recognised the tattoos and the voice but that was about all. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘How’s Drysdale’s daughter?’ Painter coughed. ‘That Clara girl?’
Lew studied the old man. ‘I love her.’
Painter closed his eyes and repeated what Lew had said. ‘You love her. I saw trouble that day. You passin’ nyarnyee up to her when she on that horse, like you passin’ a baby to her.’ He coughed and spat. ‘That was the future I saw Lew. Trouble and no doubt about it.’
Lew stared at the linoleum floor. Painter had begun to ramble. Like he was drunk.
‘You talkin’ shit Painter.’
‘Bastard of a thing that old man did out there boy, Winjilla. There was not even burials. Mad when he come back.’
‘It was the best day of my life Painter. The day I knew.’
‘Knew?’
‘Knew who she was. I was. She, me.’
‘No…no I was not talkin’ about that. You and her swimming is all Jimmy said. Like that.’ Painter made the sign of a middle finger going in and out between the thumb and index finger of the other hand. ‘He should not have done that son.’
‘No,’
Lew said.
‘Oh Jesus,’ Painter said. ‘Old man Drysdale and Dingo Smith cleaned them up and made a bonfire with what was left. All dead, nortj.’ He coughed, leaned over and coughed again as if he would never stop. Dry-retched and raised a trembling hand. ‘Never lay a finger on her in anger will you now?’ he said.
‘I don’t know how you could.’
‘Well there is a lot you don’t know son. About a lot.’ Spat spooling blood into a stainless steel bowl.
Lew stared at him. ‘Now is not the time to be telling me off again.’
Painter leaned back and held the Bible on his chest. Closed his eyes. ‘Not a bloody finger.’
‘Mate,’ Lew looked at the pale walls of the ward. There were three other beds, separated by curtains. A ceiling fan was circling above them and the edges of some of the curtains moved. The smell of disinfectant and floor cleaner. Green and black linoleum beneath his feet. A white enamel bottle under the bed with a handle and a long neck for Painter to piss into. ‘I don’t know Painter,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’
He must have said it a few times because after a while Painter said, ‘You can shut up now son don’t need to keep saying the same thing over again.’
Coughed and again dry-retched, breathless. ‘Over and over you repeating yourself. It’s embarrassing. You got shoes on?’
‘Yeah mate I got shoes on. Boots.’
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