One more Christmas, she thought, that mingling of hot air up from the plains and the mountains still breathing the last of the ice. One more thaw with its drip and trickle and roar. One more spring of mountain daisies and billy buttons and tiny pink slippers, and then the hot Drinkwater plains down below.
No Rock, she thought. Never to see Nicholas again either, or not for fifty years. Not to see the swallows arrive each spring. No native cats hissing under the windows. No echoes of Jeff cantering down from the top paddock, or Mum’s laughter or Dad’s boots on the verandah. No Sandy.
I want my ghosts, she thought. I want my life.
‘I’m sorry, Flinty. I wish it could be different.’
She looked at him. Her kind big brother. But all at once she realised that the brother she’d known never had come back from the war. This man needed a new challenge, needed a place where memories wouldn’t bite him, needed to forge a life of his own.
He was still her brother. She loved him; she knew he would always do his best for her — had tried his best to find a way she might stay here. But the old Andy had disappeared, just as the Flinty she was now would on the plains.
Chapter 36
24 September 1920
Dear Diary,
No one has come to see the farm but Andy says he doesn’t expect anyone till summer. Joey is looking forward to moving, especially the motorcars. He is already planning to learn to drive. Kirsty is excited about shops and dances, but she came in red eyed from the chooks yesterday, and I’ve even seen Joey look wistfully at the mountains, as though he doesn’t want to say goodbye.
It’s only a day’s drive to Drinkwater, so they can come back and see their friends. I suppose I could come back in a motorcar. I’m not sure I could bear to, even to see Nicholas, and anyway, I couldn’t meet him if other people were in the car, looking on. Couldn’t even bear to see the mountains, knowing I’d have to let myself be driven away again.
Used the last of the bottled tomatoes. The potatoes in the sacks in the shed have begun to sprout — will leave the rest for seeding. Andy is still going to put in the corn and potatoes and other vegetables. Even if we don’t get to harvest them, Andy says it will make the farm look more prosperous.
Sandy says he will caretake the place if it still hasn’t sold after we move. I asked him if he would consider buying it, but it’s just what I thought. He can’t afford to. Somehow it wouldn’t seem quite as bad to know that Sandy bought Rock Farm, even if we’re not here. But that won’t happen either.
Made dumplings for the lamb stew. No more stored quinces or apples. Jam roly-poly for pudding, a big one made in the big stew pot so that the others could take some for their lunches.
Still no sign of Nicholas. If he doesn’t come back till after Christmas I may never see him again. Maybe I can scratch a note on the Rock. But what would it say? Gone to Drinkwater. Goodbye. Flinty. I want to say much more than that, but those are things you can’t scratch on a rock.
The hardenbergia bloomed first, mauve blooms twisting through the thorn bush. The native sarsaparilla turned the hillsides into purple flame next, then the orange and yellow of the bitter-pea and then the billy buttons. Wonga vine hung its cream and purple cups from the kurrajong trees, and then the clematis shone like a white arrow up the mountain.
Later the everlastings would flower and the yam daisies and the bushes Mum called red shaggies. The red-capped robins and the swallows would come back, and the black cockatoos to tear the old bark from the trees. But would she still be here to see them?
The echidna that lived in the front garden emerged, nosing around the walls for ants. The plovers nested up by the chookhouse — trust plovers to nest where humans went every day, shrieking and bobbing at Kirsty every time she collected the eggs.
The creek burbled and babbled, loud enough to hear from the house but not a roar. The ‘melt’ was gradual this year, thin seeps from snowdrifts and icicles each warm day, but no sudden heat to send the melted snow and ice roaring in one great torrential swoop down the creek.
Instead two warmer than usual days sent a small flood gushing and grinding loose rocks, big enough by the time it reached the valley to push down the floodgates with its accumulated logs and debris. There were none of the great washes Flinty had seen when she was small, after the drought years before her birth, the great past floods when all the lower paddocks were brown water and white froth, and the smell of melted wombat and roo droppings had seeped into every crevice of the house for weeks.
Joey saw the first snake of spring — a big red-bellied black sunning himself on the Rock, as though borrowing the Rock’s stored heat to give it strength to hunt the bush rats or the tiny mountain mice that scurried between the tussocks — but never inside the house, not with Dad’s stone walls and well-fitting doors.
Flinty longed to be out in it. This might be the last mountain spring she’d ever see. But all she could do was wheel herself onto the verandah, trying to store each memory, stretching each second to make it last. Perhaps the mountain spring would come to her in dreams, down on the Drinkwater flats. At least she’d have the memory, when the miracle of the experience itself was lost to her.
Spring brought more visitors: Sandy, of course, almost the old companionable Sandy, telling her about the two giant eagles that had built their nest in the old red-gum tree, how Toby had wanted to shoot the pair of them but he’d persuaded him not to. The eagles didn’t take chooks, and the only lambs they carried off were the dying ones. Better the eagles took them, said Sandy, than the smell of dead sheep attract the dingoes.
Now the track was clear of snow he drove Mrs Mack up in the cart again each Sunday afternoon too, bringing a couple of her pies and even more gossip. Sometimes Mutti Green came along, with an apple cake or her delicate almond biscuits covered in icing sugar, which dissolved almost before you had a chance to bite them.
Dusty Jim emerged from his winter hibernation with his usual smell of old dog and dunny — all Dusty Jim needed to see the winter out was a case of rum and a sack of flour for damper. Flinty suspected he didn’t remove his clothes from one year to another, simply putting on another coat or two in winter. Dusty Jim built up the woodpile again in return for a pot of stew and dumplings and a giant gingerbread.
But there was still no ghost upon the Rock. Andy pushed her bathchair down there every Saturday morning. It was almost a ritual now. But her only companions were lizards, golden skinks darting after mozzies and the first of the season’s flies.
Had she dreamed him? So much had happened since. Maybe her memory was playing tricks, confused by pain and tiredness in those first weeks when agony refused the retreat of sleep. Easy, perhaps, to dream of a soldier, lost in time like Jeff was lost forever, crippled as she was crippled.
Maybe in those nights when she seemed never to properly sleep, she had created his promise that good things would come. The story she’d made up for Kirsty, that even now might be sitting on a publisher’s desk, had seemed so real when she created it. Had her imagination made Nicholas real too?
Visitors came at weekends, the Sunday afternoons that even cocky farmers allowed themselves off, to sit in their socks digesting their lunch, or mooching over to their neighbours to inspect a new bull or plough or litter of pups. But it was midweek when her most unexpected visitors arrived.
It was one of Kirsty’s days at school — Andy now allowed her to join Joey three days a week, as long as she did her chores before they set out and spent the other days catching up on the scrubbing and clothes washing and whatever else Flinty couldn’t manage from her chair.
Flinty heard the horses canter up the track, not the slow plod of the Macks’ carthorse or the well-known gait of Sandy’s Bessie. Snow King whinnied a challenge as she wheeled herself down the corridor and out onto the front verandah. The front door was open, to let the spring breezes warm the house and rid it of the scent of winter soot. The shotgun always stood behind the front door now — since the tragedy with Sergea
nt Morris she had lost her confidence with strangers.
But these were not strangers, she realised, as the couple dismounted, unsaddling their horses but leaving them unhobbled as they left their saddles and blankets on the front fence for the horse sweat to dry.
It was the Clancys: Mr Clancy with his white beard, freshly trimmed, and Mrs Clancy, still wearing her dingy drover’s boy’s shirt and much-washed trousers held up with baling twine. The big hat hid her long hair.
‘Just passing,’ said Mr Clancy, standing just outside the front gate.
Why don’t they come in? thought Flinty. Oh. Stockmen might accept Mrs Clancy out droving, but even those who had eaten her roast ducks around a campfire wouldn’t ask a native — man, boy or woman — into their homes, to sit with their wives and family.
‘Come in!’ She was glad she and Kirsty had been spring-cleaning, that the parlour was freshly swept and polished, the ornaments dusted, the carpets beaten and left to freshen in the sun. Mrs Mack and Mutti Green might sit in the kitchen, she thought, but the Clancys would sit in the parlour.
She owed them that, and more.
‘Like to see how the colt’s goin’,’ said Mr Clancy, as he followed her inside. ‘The wife here wanted to come up the mountain too. Says all those white flowers dripping off the trees were planted by her people.’
‘You mean the clematis?’
‘Like a road, I reckon. The wife says that the young girls used to follow the white way to get their stringy bark for baskets. So, the colt’s goin’ good?’ He had yet to comment on the bathchair. Mrs Clancy hadn’t spoken at all.
‘My brother Andy has come home. He’s training him. He’s shaping up well.’ She didn’t mention that any further training would be down on the flats, not here. She gestured at the velvet sofa and Mum’s chintz armchairs, a bit faded now. ‘Please sit down. I’ll just get the tea.’
She was glad neither offered to help her. She needed to do whatever she could by herself. The kettle would be on the boil, and she’d put scones into the oven as soon as she’d heard the hoofbeats, just as Mum had always done.
She arranged the best cups on a tray with an embroidered teacloth, the crab-apple jelly in a bowl, not the jar. There was no butter, but she didn’t think the Clancys would mind, or maybe even notice. She balanced the tray on the arms of her chair, wheeling carefully so she didn’t knock it, then allowed Mr Clancy to put it on the tea table in front of the sofa and armchairs.
They ate and drank silently. Mr Clancy as always had no small talk. He seemed focused on his tea and scones, less comfortable in the soft armchair than when leaning against a tree. Mrs Clancy looked around curiously, gazing at Mum’s clock, the statue of the sphinx Andy had brought back from Egypt, the postcards both boys had sent and the ones from Sandy too, still displayed on the mantelpiece, at the bookshelves, the footstool and the Persian rug.
At last Mr Clancy swallowed the last of the scones. He stood up and brushed off the crumbs as though the freshly beaten carpet was a patch of grass. ‘How about I see how the colt is goin’?’ he said. ‘While you and the wife have a catch-up? Heard about your trouble when we called in at Drinkwater,’ he added. Flinty wondered exactly what they’d heard — whether the story had included Sergeant Morris, or just the fact she’d fallen. ‘Thought maybe the wife could help.’
‘I don’t understand.’ She looked from one to the other. Was Mr Clancy suggesting his wife help them with the housework? They couldn’t afford to pay for help, or even to feed another couple for long, even if they lived on rabbit and roo. ‘I’m managing well now, thank you.’
‘The wife knows some native medicines,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘They do all right, some of them.’
Flinty shook her head. ‘A nursing sister from Sydney has already been up here. She says there isn’t any medicine that will make a difference.’
‘Yes. Well. Heard about that too. But I went to a doctor who said that about me rheumatism, must have been twenty year ago now,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘The wife’s emu oil fixed it a treat. How many men my age do you know still droving?’ He grinned at the question good manners wouldn’t let her ask, showing the gaps in his teeth. ‘I’m eighty-three.’
She’d taken him for twenty years younger. The grin grew wider. ‘You listen to the wife, all right? Now I’ll go see this horse.’
Flinty sat awkwardly as the sound of his boots headed out the back.
‘This is women’s business,’ said Mrs Clancy. ‘Don’t need men around for this. He’s a good man but. A real good man. Now, you hurt your back? Not your legs?’
Flinty nodded.
‘Yes. Well,’ said Mrs Clancy, sounding so like her husband that Flinty almost smiled. But of course Mrs Clancy would have learned most of her English from him. The old woman reached into her trouser pocket, then brought out what looked like a ball of dead grass. Flinty wheeled closer and saw it was a small woven basket, hinged at the top. Mrs Clancy opened it. Inside were lumps of dried tree fungus.
Mrs Clancy rose without speaking and went out into the corridor, turning towards the kitchen. Flinty wheeled herself after her in time to see the woman open the stove and hold the fungus to the flame. When it smouldered she placed it in the basket again. Mrs Clancy handed it to Flinty. ‘Smell,’ she ordered.
Flinty lifted the basket to her nose reluctantly. The fungus smoked rather than burned. It smelled strangely sweet, almost of Nicholas’s roses, or even oranges. She breathed in again. Somehow her breath seemed to go deeper this time, then deeper again.
How could smoke help a back?
But there was something in Mrs Clancy’s gaze that stopped protest. Instead she breathed, again and again. Each breath seemed deeper still. Slowly her body lightened. She smiled, not knowing why she smiled, and Mrs Clancy smiled back.
Suddenly the native woman stepped forwards and put her arms under Flinty’s armpits.
‘No,’ said Flinty fuzzily, as Mrs Clancy began to lift. Did the old woman think that the smoke was magic, had made her light enough to stand?
Mrs Clancy ignored her. Her arms were as surprisingly strong as Sister Burrows’s had been. Flinty put a hand out to cling to the kitchen table in case she fell.
Mrs Clancy stepped back, leaving Flinty alone at the table. Yet somehow she wasn’t falling. Somehow her legs were standing, and she was on them, unsteady but upright.
‘Back can’t lift you up,’ said her visitor. ‘But once you’re up you stay all right.’
She was standing! Not quite straight, it was true — her back was bent like a roo’s — but on her own two feet, even if she had to keep hold of the table to steady herself. My back isn’t strong enough to get me to my feet, thought Flinty, but there is nothing wrong with my legs.
It all made sense. Despite the confusion brought by the fungus smoke — or maybe because of it — the bits all came together.
She tried a step. Her legs didn’t move. Mrs Clancy made a lifting motion.
Flinty let go of the table. She bent slightly, all her back would allow, and used her hands to lift her right leg and move it forwards a tiny step. Somehow she drove her body after it, pushing with her shoulders to make her left leg follow the first.
She pushed again and took another step, this time without having to lift her leg, grabbing the table again both for steadiness and to help push.
It wasn’t quite walking. But it was standing, and she was moving, moving without wheels, without anyone lifting her.
She wanted to cry. But tears wouldn’t come. Maybe her mind was too full for tears or the smoke had dried them up. Maybe, she thought vaguely, the fungus had smoked away her despair, planted by Dr Sparrow when he had told her she’d never walk again. The smoke had let her trust a native woman’s hands, instead of the mumblings of a drunk white doctor.
‘Well,’ said Mr Clancy from the doorway. He grinned. ‘When Pete Sampson told us what that nurse from Sydney said to your Sandy, the wife said she reckoned she knew what you needed.’
‘Yo
u got the jar?’ demanded Mrs Clancy.
Mr Clancy had evidently been to his saddlebags. He held out an old tin that had probably once contained tobacco. ‘Rub this green stuff on your back before you go to bed,’ he ordered. ‘Stinks a bit, but you get used to it. Brings the swelling down a treat.’
Sister Burrows had said that it was the swelling on her back pressing on the nerves that stopped her moving. Suddenly she was willing to believe that the ointment would help, just as the smoke had done.
‘Bring you more later,’ said Mrs Clancy. ‘Not the season for the leaves now. When the wattle seeds turn dark, that’s when you pick the —’ She added a native word, spoken too fast for Flinty to hear it properly. She looked at Flinty thoughtfully. ‘Might tell you more women’s business then. If you want.’
Mr Clancy nodded. ‘Got to get another emu too, to boil it down for fat. That’s what the wife uses for her ointments: emu fat. I’m running low meself.’ He grinned, showing every one of his remaining tobacco-stained teeth. ‘Glad you’re standing, girl. Who knows? One day you might even get on a horse again.’
And just then, with the solid floor beneath her slippers, the chair two blessed steps behind her, Flinty believed him.
Chapter 37
1 October 1920
Dear Diary,
I waited till after dinner to stand up again. I didn’t dare take a step, in case I fell in front of them all. Kirsty cried and hugged me so hard I nearly did fall over and Andy kept saying, ‘By Jove,’ over and over and Joey said, ‘Wait till I tell them at school,’ and then wanted to look at my back to see if the lump moves when I stand up (I wouldn’t let him). He wants to be a doctor now, though I bet it’ll be a vet again by next week.
The Girl from Snowy River Page 23