by Sarah Hay
She followed Tommy’s lead and used the saddle blanket to rub the damp white marks from her horse’s shoulders and neck. It stood patiently, more subdued than when she first climbed on it. The horses were released into a yard with the others. Her horse lowered its head as though sniffing the dirt, then knelt and rolled sideways and onto its back. Squirming and turning in the dirt, and then standing, shaking the dust, as another horse came up to nuzzle it. She hung the bridle on a post and climbed over the rails. Tommy was standing by the fence.
‘You staying there with the horses?’
‘Is he angry?’
She fell into step beside him as they walked towards the glow of Cookie’s fire. The other men were already there. Tommy leant sideways and a long thread of spit fell to the ground.
He shrugged.
‘What you worried about anyway?’ he said, glancing at her.
‘Nothing,’ she said, moving away from him, towards the other side of the shed in the direction of her bed.
The air was cooling quickly. She placed her hat on her swag and found a jacket, her skin prickling with the strangeness of it all: the darkness descending and the bed out in the open, the sounds of cattle bellowing across the flat, the smell of a campfire, and Tommy’s rudeness, but she was determined not to let any of it overwhelm her. The only way to manage it in her mind was to exist in the moment. Everything else was too far away.
They ate fresh steaks from the cow that was killed that afternoon. Cookie fried up some sweetbread as a treat for the men. Texas told her it was the best part of the beast, the
Texas pancreas and the thymus gland. He was sitting on the flour drum to her right.
‘Sorry about before,’ she said to the side of his head.
He turned. ‘You ride better than when you were up at the station. When you were waving your bum in the air. If that horse stop or get spooked,’ he made a noise through his teeth like a whistle, ‘you go like this,’ making circular motions with his finger. ‘Sit back eh, with longer stirrups. That’s the best way, eh Maxwell?’
Maxwell’s features creased into a grin and he repeated, ‘Yeah, best way.’
She was conscious of the body beside her, the air in between. Sometimes he glanced sideways and his eye held a promise, but then it was gone and she thought she was mistaken. The same thing had happened the night before. She had lingered, after the others were gone, sharing a cigarette with Texas, but then he had stood up and said he’d see her in the morning. Tonight he hadn’t said anything.
Cookie was on the other side of the fire, the last man left. The light flickering on his face as he stared into it, revealing spots of redness on his skin. He looked up.
‘You like that horse-riding lark?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve always loved it.’
She was disappointed that Texas had gone but she wasn’t going to let it show.
‘Them beasts they don’t like me. I can see it in their eyes.’
She laughed. ‘You just got to show them who’s boss.’
‘Never been much good at that,’ he grinned. ‘They always know I’m a short arse.’
The fire spat sharply. Cookie stood up. ‘Sing out if you need any hot water or anything,’ he added.
‘Thanks.’
She heard footsteps behind her and Texas returned to his seat.
‘Hey Cookie, you’re not leaving us yet?’ Texas was grinning.
‘Surprise, look. Hot stuff.’
He held up a small bottle of rum. Cookie let out a low whistle and sat down again.
‘Mate, where did you get that from?’
‘Truck driver. He’s a beautiful good fella.’
‘Yeah I reckon,’ said Cookie. He looked across at Laura. ‘You know this place’s a dry camp. That bloody manager don’t let you drink, except when you’re up at the station. A can a night and then it’s only bloody Gold.’
Texas tilted his head back and drank from the bottle. She saw the outline of his neck, the bare skin of his throat. He offered it to her. And after she drank, and it brought tears to her eyes, she took it over to Cookie. Texas was watching, and the rum hit the edge of her heart, bringing warmth.
‘I’ll leave youse to it,’ said Cookie.
Texas moved closer to Laura.
His mouth tasted like rum and tobacco and his swag was far out on the flat. The ground was hard and unyielding, and their skin slid together and the heat within them combined.
She lay on his arm and stared upwards, and the world curved around in a great arc from one side of the swag to the
Texas other and the moment became more than a memory, it was part of her.
III
Sitting astride a flighty chestnut filly, Laura looked down towards the timber that marked the meanderings of another river. Texas wasn’t in sight. When she thought of him, her body reacted in the same way as if he was there, as though he had touched her. On the first day of mustering she was told to follow a small mob of cattle on her horse. More cattle were being driven towards her by the men. Suddenly she realised she was in the wrong place and it prevented them from bringing the two mobs together. Cattle had gone in every direction. Tommy hadn’t let her forget it since. She was mortified, ashamed of not knowing where she should be, of getting in the way. It was an intense, sickening feeling low in her stomach, and it reminded her of that day she’d gone fox-hunting. Now she looked back, she wasn’t sure why she had accepted Chloe’s invitation. Her parents had been firmly against it. They were teachers at Mill Hill County High and had campaigned for years to have fox-hunting banned.
Chloe’s father drove them in his leather-seated Range Rover up the M1, towing the horse float with Samson and Princess, as the yellow eyes of cars penetrated the thick fog that began to lift once they passed through Luton. Winter-bare trees emerged from the mist and flicked past the window. They left the motorway for a slip-road that wound through the Northamptonshire countryside where low cream-coloured walls crisscrossed the fields, and eventually they reached the village green where the hunt was gathering. Her horse sidestepped and started at the red jackets and leapt a little with the baying of the hounds and the sound of the huntsman’s horn. Jodhpur-clad buttocks rose and fell to the trotting pace of the horses, and she followed, trying to control her horse, which was behaving badly, moving like a crab and sideswiping horses that tried to pass, attracting the ire of their riders. Chloe’s blonde bobbing ponytail disappeared into the distance. She was wandering through the Northamptonshire laneways, hearing the horn and the hounds faint in the distance, her horse lengthening its stride; the riders were nowhere to be seen since they must have turned off at some point before she was able to see where they went. The sun broke weakly through and if she’d only known where she was, she might have begun to enjoy herself.
Sometime later when she had turned down a lane which she thought would cut back towards the village, the baying of hounds grew louder and then the master of the hunt clattered over the wall in front of her and through the open gateway into the opposite field. He turned back and gesticulated furiously towards her. She had longed to be somewhere else. And it was like that when the cattle had gone in different directions and she knew it was her fault. It was worse in some ways since the men, or Tommy in particular, seemed to have expected that she would do something like that anyway. Since then Tommy
Texas had decided he was her teacher, a role he seemed to relish and there was often a patronising edge to his help. But most of the time he preferred to tease and remind her of the moment when she got in the way. The other men were still wary of her but Jimmy had started calling her aunty. She thought he was Texas’s cousin. He seemed to be too old to be his nephew. But she liked being called aunty. It made her feel included. When she asked Texas about it, he said it was because they were married, like kangaroo marriage.
She’d replied lightly, ‘So that means you love me.’ Wanting it to sound like a statement.
‘Yeah might be,’ he grinned back. And he h
eld his horse closer and leant across from his saddle to push the hair back from her face.
Tommy was from Queensland and he claimed to have ridden in every rodeo across the Top End, but Texas told her quietly that his old man was some mine engineer from Mt Isa and this was only his second mustering season. When they worked in the yards Tommy always insisted on riding the micky bulls that had just been cut out of the crush, and when she told him she thought he had an unfair advantage over the injured animals, he responded by slinging calves’ testicles at her. He was fair and freckled and long in the arms and legs but he wasn’t much taller than her. He copied the way the others talked, words running together and particular inflections. He also said fucking cunt a lot.
She urged the little filly to follow the cattle down towards the river. The cattle had caught the smell of water and were starting to trot. Men were riding out on the wings of the mob.
She stuck to the tail end. It was safer there and all she had to do was keep the stragglers from falling behind, urging on the young calves, the bony-hipped cows and those blind in one eye or with cancer.
She and Tommy had ridden out that morning behind a small mob of coachers, the quiet cattle that would hopefully make the wilder ones easier to handle, while the more experienced stockmen had ridden off in different directions to hunt out more cattle. Texas apparently knew where to find them. He’d mustered this country before. The animals followed a fence line and Tommy rode the flank to stop them breaking away into the bush. Parrots chattered and squabbled and a flock would suddenly leave the branches of one tree to settle again in another. Little coloured birds ran across the ground, eventually taking off and flying in sharp formation to land again on the track further ahead. As the sun rose higher, it became warmer and the noise of the birds subsided except for the persistent call of a distant dove, although no matter which way Laura turned her head, she couldn’t seem to work out where it was coming from. The grass was dry and sparse and the sand between the bushy shrubs was splattered with old manure and ridged and cratered with the cloven feet of cattle. Eventually the country opened out, lumpy with grass, and they left the fence behind them. The cattle spread apart, occasionally stopping to graze, and she let her horse have its head and it walked backwards and forwards behind the mob, turning without any urging. Dust swirled above the backs of the animals, and
Texas through the haze in the distance was a line of hills. Perhaps the homestead was on the other side; she thought of Susannah and John and decided that she was lucky to be with Texas. She wondered why Susannah stayed with John and then she remembered sitting with Susannah on the edge of the veranda, watching the children play. It was during one of her friendlier moments.
‘You know that song, Stand by Your Man?’ Susannah had said, her eyes half closed to the sun. ‘It always reminds me of my mother.
‘She had this thing about women leaving their men. One time we were in the café in the main street of town and there was this woman, Nola, who played golf with Mum. She’d taken off with the men’s captain, leaving her husband behind. Mum says, “Don’t look now but it’s that woman.” I said to her, “How do you know what her life was like? He could’ve treated her really badly.” She said, “That’s no excuse; you’ve got to make an effort. Women these days, they only think of themselves. They don’t think how their actions might affect those around them.’’
‘She died, my mother. A bit over three years ago. She was fifty-nine.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Laura.
‘My mother wasn’t a romantic.’
A cow and a calf and about five other animals trotted into the mob. Laura looked behind but there was no sign of the stockmen. Gradually more cattle joined them and then Jimmy appeared and so did Peter and then eventually the others, bringing with them a big piker bull with horns that curled menacingly into a fine point. Its head swung from side to side, watching every horse and its rider, and her horse stepped nervously, sensing the tension. As the mob moved forward, it stood still, and then it seemed to settle on Tommy, flicking dust with its front leg, jogging towards him. Tommy spurred his horse into a canter and swung around wide of the beast and the bull galloped off in the direction it came. Gary chased it but returned to the mob about ten minutes later.
Gary was from Broome and it was the first time he’d worked in the east Kimberley. His wife had come over to be with her family. Laura had had trouble shoeing one of her horses and he’d helped her. That’s when he told her his wife was Peter’s sister. Laura was glad he hadn’t been able to turn the bull back in to the mob. It could be terrifying watching and waiting to see what it would do next. There had been other times when either Jimmy or Texas galloped after the animal. One of them would leap from his horse, holding the bull’s tail, and when it turned to spear him with its horns, the man tugged on its tail until it toppled over and he quickly leapt to secure it with hobble straps, tying the front leg to the back. Using the small saw attached to his saddle, he’d hack off its horns. The battered creature was carefully released in the hope he’d be subdued by the pain and the presence of the mob, but sometimes the animal, blood draining black on each side of its head, trotted away from the other cattle, eyeing them all, and the men’s horses would sidestep and bolt. Then they allowed it to retreat to the cover of the bush, telling each other they’d catch it the next time they mustered.
Texas Maxwell steered his horse alongside hers. ‘We water the cattle before dinner camp.’
He returned to the corner of the mob to her left; Tommy was on her right. The others had disappeared into the trees. Texas would be up the front leading them all. The horse quickened beneath her. Her singlet was sticking to her skin and she looked forward to crossing into the shade of the river trees and the cool grassy banks where there was water that wasn’t a mirage. Cattle bellowed, tripping over clumps of grass and splashing through mud, and corellas left the treetops in a screeching white cloud. The banks were irregular and steep and in parts the grass was like lawn. Sometimes the bank fell away into a sandy cliff where the force of rushing water had carved its path during the wet and the roots of the paperbarks were violently exposed. She steadied her horse which had grown excited by the commotion, pulling up beneath a wide-girthed tree. She knew now to wait, to hang back a bit, to watch. They weren’t far from the junction, the place where the two rivers met, which was where they’d camp tonight, after they’d yarded the cattle. The animals started to move up the sides of the far bank. She steered her horse forward and down into the water. It panicked a little in the soft mud and leapt across, almost landing on the back of one of the cattle and nearly unseating her in the process. Her horse took a long drink before it followed the last of them out onto the flat. The men were about five hundred metres away holding the mob, keeping them moving in on themselves, riding alongside the one that ventured out, steering it carefully back towards the others. They would have been much harder to hold earlier in the day, but after walking all morning they’d settled.
Just to the right of the mob was the stock-camp Toyota which Cookie had driven to meet them. There was a thin ribbon of smoke beside it. The billy would be on. It had been hours since she’d drunk at a small stream that hadn’t been messed up by cattle. Texas rode towards her on a dun-coloured gelding.
‘You want to have first shift?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ll wait for the other fellas.’
‘I’ll wait.’
He nodded and his horse moved sideways and their legs brushed together. His horse, responsive to its rider’s touch, turned neatly away. Texas steered it towards the men, pausing to talk to each of them, and she forgot she was thirsty and found her energy renewed. She watched her section of the mob and every now and then she stepped forward to signal to the animal with its head turned towards her that it wasn’t to try to get past her. Usually if one made the dash then others would follow. When she could see their tails she could relax, but when one of them eyed her beneath their horns, she felt
the thick heat of adrenalin. Their hides were mostly blood red but there were others with splashes of white, and around their eyes was a pale-coloured ring which made them seem more threatening than perhaps they were. They were quite different from the small silky-skinned brahmans in the paddock near the homestead.
Tommy hoped that one of them would break away so he could chase them fast across the flat and wheel them back into the mob. She didn’t think she was courageous enough to spur
Texas her horse into a flat gallop, pressing hard for it to catch up to the animal when often the big old wily bulls wouldn’t turn anyway. The men had plenty of stories around the campfire each night of things gone wrong, of guts hanging out of their horses’ stomachs, stitching them up with whatever they could find at the time. The cattle seemed to settle and she rested her horse beneath a red-flowering tree that offered a little shade and she thought of water and remembered the duck pond in the park at the end of the street in Mill Hill and the terrapins that colonised it and how they would climb out and sun themselves in rows on the broken branches that had fallen into the water.
Laura led her horse towards the vehicle, walking awkwardly, the inside of her jean legs stiff from sweat. The sun had begun to drop in the sky. The wind held its breath and the birds were silent, even the peaceful dove. Distant hills shimmered blue. Leaves on the nearby trees hung sparely and the shade was sparse. She dropped the reins around the metal bar on the front of the vehicle and passed beneath a tree. She took off her hat and the movement of air cooled her damp forehead. Cookie had placed a grill over white-hot coals and rib bones roasted and sizzled, the fat occasionally catching. The men who hadn’t eaten yet were dismounting, their positions surrounding the mob taken by the others who had. They gathered in the shade away from the smoke and sat in the dirt with quart pots of tea and a rib bone each. Texas was beside her. He drew his knees up towards him and rested his elbows, holding the rib bone in both hands. The meat was charred and the fat melted. And although her face and hands were covered in grease, and bits stayed between her teeth, the meat was delicious. When they finished, the bones were thrown in the dirt behind them.