Muck

by Craig Sherborne

  I sob such fat tears they land with a plop on The Duke’s sheets. I hold his hand. Chilled sweat has greased his forearms and flattened down their black hairs. I shake him to wake him up and tell him to vomit into the bucket by the bed and feel well again. I tap him with the back of my hand as if a joke might rouse him: “If you don’t get better, I really will think you’ve got no gumption.”

  The phone’s bells ding and ding downstairs—Feet banging the receiver down to punish its not knowing what to do without her.

  THE AMBULANCE DRIVER straps The Duke into a trolley though he pleads to be left in his bed. Pleads that he be let stay curled in his soothing S and not straightened into a painful shape. The driver injects him into acceptance.

  Feet pulls me close to her in time with saying that we must pull ourselves together, her and me. She lays her arm across my shoulders. She smells of fresh coatings of face powder and sprayings of perfume. Her eyes are newly ringed in brown from her bathroom pencils. Her hair bun is re-wound and stacked and sprayed erect. Chains snibbed to her wrists. Jewels clipped to her ears. She says we must pull ourselves together whatever the bastard of a future brings. We must not cry in public where people will see us and snigger that you can have all the money in the world but unless you’ve got your health. “The operator on the phone—she could tell I was rattled. She’s at the local exchange so you can bet the world she’s already spread the word: fancy pants’s husband is in trouble and she’s gone a bit funny.”

  We will travel to hospital in the ambulance with The Duke.

  Turning out of our driveway onto the road Feet notices the ambulance has dark windows and so if anyone’s got their binoculars out they’ll be sorely disappointed. She pokes her fingertips into her forehead. Red fingerprints smudge through the powder. She pokes her forehead and talks under her breath.

  “Are you praying?” I sniffle.

  She purses her lips and says, yes, she is. “The first and last time I will do it, I don’t mind telling you, because I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t know what I have done to deserve this. And I’ll be stuffed if I’m going to bloody well pray again if this is the way any shitting bastard of a God treats us.”

  She takes her compact from her handbag and re-dabs her forehead. A square of lace handkerchief is tucked under her watchband. She flicks it free of its folds and blots The Duke’s greasy brow. She winces and shakes her head wishing she had not said what she just said about God, just in case there is a God. It will bring bad luck on us. It’s asking for trouble. She wishes she had brought her four-leaf clovers with her to make up for it. She may have a spare one in her bag. She searches, but no.

  The Duke’s eyes are half shut as if drunk in restless sleep. I whisper in his ear in my own kind of praying, my eyes squeezed closed as if to squeeze out thoughts from my brain into the atmosphere for transmission. “You can’t leave,” I say. “I am not ready for Tudor Park. I’m out of place here.”

  I confess to him that his very sickness could well be my doing because of the calf killing. Just as strange things happen in Taonga such as water trickling out of sight when you tread the ground, there may well be a system of animal justice dealt to humans. Not any humans, but outsiders like us who do not have immunity from the terrible laws that nature spares its own. That is what we’re up against.

  I transmit that there are other things I want to do with my days, not take over Tudor Park. Not now, tonight or even tomorrow or whenever he dies from this sickness that makes him want to lie hunched like a fetus. Does he want Tudor Park to be my blessing in life or my curse? Die now and it’s a curse, a dreadful burden and a curse. Live, and not die till far off in the future, then that’s Tudor Park the blessing. “I want to sing,” I pray-whisper. I have a script I will learn. I want to sing on a stage, in my stomach and chest voice that the more I practise becomes strong.

  There is anger in my transmission now. Tonight my fate will be decided. If The Duke dies, would I have to leave school? Would I stay in Taonga, marry Bettina ? She is probably a gold-digger. She will leave me, and where’s his legacy then? What becomes of it if she takes half? “That’s what you are condemning me to. All because of my killing a calf and the justice that passed on to us.”

  If he loves me, he will live. If he loves me, he will face down the justice, face down death. What kind of father would do anything else but live in these circumstances! “I promise this: I will leave Tudor Park if I have to. Walk off and say to hell with carrying it on. Let Norman run it. Let Churchill beat your horses till they’re broken and fucking cowed. It will be your fault. It will be because of you.”

  I make this silent vow to him: if I must become the duke myself I will let my penis go to cock when feeding the calves.

  I will let them suck and slurp it so when he drifts above me with the other curious ancestors I will have my revenge on him for how terribly I’ve been wronged.

  In the emergency ward The Duke resumes his S.

  A rugby-sized male nurse wrestles him open to change his clothes from pyjamas to paper smock. A doctor questions him loudly to penetrate the deafness of drugs. “Where exactly is the pain? Point exactly to where there’s pain.” He politely insists that Feet and I make ourselves comfortable in the waiting room down the corridor, or in the cafeteria to the right and follow the signs. He will visit us when more tests are done. Feet raises her chin as a challenge to bad fortune. Her lip corners turn up a smile of fake confidence. She puts her arm around me as if I might be too frozen to steer my own walking.

  In rooms along the corridor humans lie with mouths gaping in snoreless sleep, yellow soles protruding from blankets. Tubes in their noses or the crooks of their arms as if creepers from the walls have got in under them. The paper smocks have a back-split that leaves people’s privates glimpseable. Feet refuses to look. She reprimands me that I shouldn’t look either. “Hospitals are so depressing,” she shivers in her graveyard way. “I can’t do anything but pretend I’m not here. The sickness just rubs off on you.” She wishes there was a private room we could go to. “I don’t mind paying for a little room away from people’s staring, people saying with their eyes, ‘What’s she doing here? She looks a cut above the rest of us, but cut down to size now. She’s just like the rest of us now.’”

  She unzips her sunglasses from her bag. “I’ll be damned if I’ll have all these eyes see the state of me.”

  Kidney stones.

  “All the worry. All the fuss.” Feet slumps in the chair beside The Duke’s hospital bed. She removes her sunglasses. She says that we will be laughing stock of Taonga: an ambulance and all that fuss. “I’m even laughing at it myself. Well at least old fancy pants is lucky, they’ll have to admit.”

  The Duke slides up onto pillows. His dentures aren’t in. He points Feet to where they are wrapped in tissue. A stalactite of skin hangs like a tip from his pale gum. He sucks the teeth into his mouth like a mouth-guard and boasts that he is not ready yet to push up daisies. He’ll push out kidney stones but not push up daisies—we can’t get rid of him that easily. He has unfinished business this side of the sod. Such as winning a Melbourne Cup. And seeing his son married to a woman as beautiful as his own wife. There are those grandchildren he wants to see mucking around in the paddocks. A boy and a girl each, please. A boy to take Tudor Park forward into the years. A girl to help out with the book-keeping. “I’ve got some big ideas. Buying up our neighbours some day. Expanding our operations throughout the whole of Taonga,” he says, sweeping his hand across the air. “Let’s make us the biggest agricultural operation in the whole of Australasia. No, bugger it. The biggest operation in the world. A scrape with death just gives me a bigger appetite for being alive and making a mark that says ‘I lived here.’”

  He reaches for Feet’s hand. He clasps it in his.

  “Not so tight,” she winces because he has crunched her fingers together painfully against her rings. She leans on his shoulder, careful to settle her hair on the edge of his pillow and not dent
her comb-work: “The whole world! I like the sound of that. That’s more like the man I married talking.”

  The Duke reaches for my hand. The bottoms of his eyes are puddling. “And what about you?” he asks me. “What have you got to say for yourself?” Said not as true inquiry but as men speak heartily to men, and a father to his son.

  “What have you got to say for yourself?” I play along. I want to sing out the relief in me. A me who is not to be duke but freed. I take a breath to let out a deep stomach note for all the hospital to hear, but abort it—if I start singing, Feet will clap her hands together and say, “That’s all very nice and good, but what about a bit of Dean Martin? Something special and swoony I can hum.”

  There is no such thing as prayer transmission or else for what I prayed out to him, the threat of leaving, and cock and calf sin, The Duke would not have his satisfied grin. Nor is there an animal justice—he would not be sitting there if there was. He is hardly a fighter, a warrior to look at, unless you’re meant to face down nature with tears welling. Do it with your teeth just put in and talking toughly of owning the world.

  “How are those calves of yours?” He squeezes my hand.

  “I’m late feeding them today because of you there. I’ll have to do it before it gets dark.”

  The Duke rests his head against Feet’s arm and sighs to me, “What a good sense of responsibility you have. I couldn’t be happier with the way you’re turning out. What a credit you are to yourself, to me and to my lovely lady here.”

  He urges us to get on our way in a cab so his boy can do his chores, feed his starving calves.

  Feet kisses his cheek. He and I shake hands. He compliments my handshake for its controlled power. “Hard work is making a man of you,” he says, waving us to get going out into the corridor and back to Tudor Park.

  Feet clip-clops along the shiny floor so fast I have to skip into a jogging stride to keep up. She hums as she passes people as if to let them know she is not one of them—poor unfortunates with faces longer than a mile.

  She holds out her arm for me to do the right thing and come in under her wing. I let her hold me for a few strides.

  “We’re back to normal,” she says. “That’s the main thing. I’m going to have a victory champers the very second that I’m home.”

  I MIX MILK INTO the vat on wheels, drive the tractor down the cow race to where the moaning huddlers are paddocked. Miss Beautiful, the loudest of them all as usual. I answer her with singing. I don’t care if Norman catches my voice upon the air and performs an off-with-the-fairies eye roll. I let out lungfuls of notes from down in me, so joyfully released that I could bawl in ecstasy. Is this what bliss is? Is this the happiest I have ever been?

  I wade through the nuzzling moaners. I knee their mouths from my fly. They seize my fingers and suckle. I have no penis-cock sensation. Is bliss so pure that it washes our imagination clean?

  I finger-steer mouths to the vat’s boom and tell Miss Beautiful—singing the telling instead of plain talk—that she is as greedy as always; there won’t be enough left for others.

  But let her be greedy today. Today in my bliss state I can’t refuse my darlings their gorging. Today I will mix another batch so they can share my bliss as well. A celebration with milk as their very own champagne toast. I drive back to the milk shed. Re-fill the vat. Return.

  The toast for some mouths only lasts a minute before they slide from the rubbers, white saliva suspended to the ground. Others stay a minute more. Miss Beautiful and three larger calves are left to drain the dregs dry.

  I stretch out my arms and sing, “Toast that I am free, Miss Beautiful. Free and so you must toast my life,” walking towards a ridge where wind pushes me, tries to shove itself inside my body past my voice. The current from inside me is stronger than any wind’s power. I win the combat: my voice versus the wind which is reduced to having to grab at my coat and hair. It can’t gather enough strength to buffet me backwards.

  I walk over the ridge and down the other side as if advancing on the wind to capture it. I stomp dirt-clumps down, leaves, twigs, as if these are the crude weapons of the wind discarded in its hurry. The sun has slipped away at the sight of me. It has ducked behind a tree top slowly as if any sudden movement breaks its cover. But I already saw it and sing so— “There you are, a sun behind a tree.” I will leave it to sulk there. I salute it goodbye and sing my way back to the calves.

  They are gathered a small distance away from the vat. Gathered in a circle as grown-up cows might ring a water trough and sniff and snort at the surface. They are competing, heads low, to be included in the circle, butting for a place in the crowd. I walk closer. There at the bottom of the circle, a calf on its side, belly globed. A bloated calf. Not any calf. Miss Beautiful.

  I slap and screech to be let through into the ring. Miss Beautiful. Her mouth wide open. Milky tongue dangling dead in the grass. Her eyes turned up into bloodshot whites. Legs stuck out like a rubber glove inflated.

  I hit her to get a breath back. I twist my fist into her throat to clear a passageway. “Get up. Get up,” I hit. “Miss Beautiful. Not you. Not you.”

  I vomit brine. I chant her name, a howling chant that burns my throat with the strain. I chant that I have killed Miss Beautiful. I punch my head to pass the death down to me. My temples, my jaw, my nose. I punch till blood-snot slimes my lips. I tear my shirt open at the buttons to ram my knuckles into my bare ribs, where the heart is so as to stop it. I fail. I sit. Calves come closer to smell me once I am silent. I am heaving. I have the extra breath again. The scales are even. The Duke survives but the death is passed to Miss Beautiful.

  I must drag her with a chain now for the dead cow lorry. “Just a calf. Put it out of your mind,” Norman will say. But my mind has no door that goes outwards.

  To have one moment with no thought in it. Two moments when I haven’t thought a word. A day. A week. A year. No-one could fail at something so easy. Not if they had a brain, could they?

  CRAIG SHERBORNE’s books include The Amateur Science of Love, Bullion and Necessary Evil. His memoir Hoi Polloi was shortlisted for two literary awards, and its sequel, Muck, won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Sherborne’s journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies.