The Cowgirl

by Anthea Hodgson

  ‘Do you want to touch them?’ Teddy asked gently, after a few long minutes had passed. Deirdre reached out and touched the painted hair on one of the little doll’s faces.

  ‘Hello, Gypsy,’ she whispered. Gypsy looked back at her silently, her eyes wide with surprise at how Deirdre had aged, how low and hard her voice sounded now with the laughter gone. ‘Hello,’ she whispered again, as if Gypsy was going to answer her, because the last time they’d met Gypsy had been off to a birthday picnic, and she’d promised to tell her everything. Teddy got up and made tea. It was always time for tea. She moved swiftly around the kitchen, listening to the hiss of the kettle and the clink of the china as she pulled it from the cupboard next to the fridge. Eventually, she couldn’t stand it any more.

  ‘Grandma, are you okay?’ she asked, and the old woman finally looked up and saw her there, sitting with her doll as if she’d been travelling through time, and she was surprised to be eighty-five already.

  ‘Oh, I was just surprised. That’s all,’ she said gruffly. ‘I haven’t seen Gypsy for over seventy years, and she hasn’t changed.’ She touched her cup and then removed her hand again, as if she couldn’t remember if she liked tea. Perhaps she was Deirdre before tea. ‘She was a good friend to me,’ she said. ‘I told her many secrets. I wonder if she knows them still.’ Teddy fiddled with her teacup. Deirdre wasn’t given to flights of fancy. She was a woman without artifice or imagination. But, as she sat considering her doll, she appeared to have forgotten that.

  ‘Was she your favourite doll?’ she asked gently.

  ‘Oh, yes, she was. Such a pretty doll. I liked the others well enough, of course. My mother bought them for me and Vivian. Here’s Gladys, Freida, Sheila and this one with the missing arm is Betsy. We had such fun together. All of them had different personalities and different outfits. I suppose they’re well and truly gone now.’ She finally took a sip of the tea. ‘Of course I used to worry about them. When it first happened, when my father went quite mad that day and knocked over our house. We were so frightened.’

  Deirdre stared out of the window. It was as if she needed to know she was still here, that the farm was still around her, keeping her safe; her history had flown away, had gone, and she could speak of it without being dragged back down the road to the past, where her father dwelled in all his shame.

  ‘How old were you?’ Teddy asked. ‘When the house went down, I mean?’

  ‘I was eight and Viv was six. We couldn’t understand it. But of course Dad was a drinker, he was always going off on a bender. So when Mum finally left him . . . Well, he just exploded. Everything went.’

  ‘And you really never heard from her again?’

  ‘We really never did. We waited for a long time. We looked up the front drive every morning and talked about what we’d do when she came for us. But she never did and we never found out why. As you know, Viv said she’d married again, and she couldn’t find us because she still wasn’t divorced from Dad – he’d never have allowed it. Despite that, I always hoped I’d see her again. But she left us here, Teddy. Left her own flesh and blood with that man. I can’t tell you it didn’t hurt us.’ Teddy nodded. She knew. Dolly had been a silent figure in her life for as long as she could remember. She had left her girls to the farm, to her grandfather and to the community. And Deirdre had been happy there, she supposed. Sometimes it felt hard to tell. Deirdre’d never shown much interest in the outside world. She’d woken each morning in the same bed, listened to the ABC, milked the cows, driven the tractors around the same paddocks, fed the shearers, cleaned the house, turned up at busy bees with secateurs or a broom in hand, and slept well at night, ready to do it all again the next day.

  ‘Well, Gypsy,’ Teddy said. ‘I’m pleased to meet you. Any friend of Grandma’s is a friend of mine.’ She looked up at Deirdre to see her smiling back at her, and although the expression was almost foreign on her face, Teddy found that it suited her very much.

  Within the next couple of hours, Teddy and Will had a small collection of items from the old bedroom and kitchen. Teddy was unsurprised to find a lot of old glass. She figured much of it was from beer or liquor bottles. There was a load of old china as well and some plastic door handles. As these things turned up, they knocked the worst of the dirt off and tossed them all into a crate. Occasionally they’d find what may have been a piece of furniture, but for the most part these items had rotted and dissolved back into the earth.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Will called towards the end of the day. ‘We’ve got something.’

  Teddy had been halfway to the kitchen to put the kettle on but she turned back to the hole and sat on the edge. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘show me what you’ve got.’

  He grinned. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s big.’ He whacked it with his shovel and it made a dull clang. ‘And it’s metal.’

  ‘It’s a fridge, Will.’

  ‘Well, it’s a Coolgardie safe, actually, but yeah, okay. It’s a fridge.’ One side of it appeared to have collapsed under the bulldozer all those years ago, but the other was still standing up, filled with earth and glass. Despite herself, Teddy was disappointed. ‘Time for tea.’ Will sat back on the crushed safe, positioned there like a particularly unimpressive monolith from a twentieth-century Stonehenge. She got up to go.

  She could feel him watching her retreat to the house but she refused to look around. She made tea and dragged a packet of chocolate biscuits out of her secret stash. A Coolgardie safe was kitchen crap. It was banal and everyday. Why did she sometimes find herself wondering if there was something exciting to be found hiding under the earth near the shearing sheds?

  Her grandmother’s life was utterly unremarkable. She had raised her family, buried her husband, then buried her son. She had stayed on the farm and had never tested life out. Never asked anything of it, and life, in return, had never noticed her.

  It had swept by like the cold blue sky above them, ripping through the lines on the map, scorching over the deserts, pouring warm monsoon rain down the streets of New Delhi and tossing cold white snow across the mountains of Canada. And here was a Coolgardie safe stuck in the mud and what difference did it make? Her grandmother had a fridge now, and what difference did that make either? It was all the same. Cold milk.

  Teddy backed out of the house with an old tray and set it down on a 44-gallon drum where Will was tending the fire. ‘Come and get it,’ she said and reached for a biscuit.

  ‘So you don’t like my fridge?’ Will asked.

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I was hoping for something a bit less – boring.’

  ‘Sorry it’s not all diamond tiaras, but if there’s anything good we must be getting closer.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because we’ve found all the crap already.’

  She handed him a cup of tea.

  ‘What do you think Deirdre will do with her dolls?’

  ‘Dunno. She was very pleased to see them, though – no doubt she’ll introduce you later.’

  ‘Good. I’m kind of relieved. Even if we find nothing else, at least she’s found one thing she’s happy to see.’

  They sat by the fire in companionable silence.

  ‘Hey, Teddy, about last night . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘Okay. We won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Except to say – I like you.’ He took another sip and pressed his luck. ‘And I hope that doesn’t scare you.’

  She didn’t look back at him, but she stayed next to him watching the fire burning though a jam post as if it had all the time in the world.

  It did scare her, she decided. Quite a bit.

  The next morning it seemed to Teddy that, regardless of the whole automotive assault thing, the dig would soon have to come to an end. She felt a sense of relief and disappointment at the same time and, as she towed Will’s car into the workshop, she wondered if Deirdre was as underwhelmed by the treasures they had
found as she was.

  The vase that Deirdre had thought she’d like to see again hadn’t materialised, if it ever existed at all, and it began to look as if even Will was giving up hope of finding something of real value. As he unearthed more kitchen stuff, Teddy watched, unimpressed, while some old chairs came out of the ground, and a table top with broken legs was found somewhere nearby, then the remains of a crushed piano. Utensils seemed to survive quite well, although they were mostly solid rust and filled with clods of dirt. Teddy had been up early milking Cow, so by mid-morning she’d finished her chores and she was settled in at the kitchen table with the farm accounts and a cup of tea.

  The winter sun was weak, but it had warmed the grass outside so that it glowed and its reflection glinted in the windscreen of the ute. She watched Will for a while, moving between the hole and a heap of stuff he was piling up on the edge of the dig. He was muttering to himself, and she wondered what it was that he had to say. He looked at peace working away among the detritus of someone else’s life. His hair needed a cut, but it suited him, it gave him something to ruffle with his large hands while he was thinking, and it acted as a sort of weathervane when the wind was blowing.

  She saw Deirdre approaching. She was looking older now than she ever had; although Teddy doubted she’d ever really been young. Deirdre had been furnished with a cast-iron disapproval at an early age, and she wore it like armour. She stood and watched Will working in the hole. He was digging gently again, as he had when they’d excavated the dolls, bending to inspect his work, then pushing into the earth again. Her grandmother watched him intently, her arms folded. What was it she was waiting to see? Teddy wondered. Why wait all this time, without even mentioning the house, then demand it be dug up? Why now? The breeze was nudging at Deirdre’s cardigan and she pulled it closer around her stout frame, never taking her eyes from the hole in the ground.

  When Teddy went out later to check on progress, Will was leaning on his shovel talking to Deirdre about English treasure troves, and she was listening to him with fierce interest, eyeing him sharply like an inquisitive bird. ‘So someone buries their money, you say, and they never come back for it?’

  ‘Correct. Until maybe a farmer in Norfolk ploughs it up a thousand years later. It has to be mostly precious metals under UK law – so gold, silver, that sort of thing – and there has to have been an intent for the original owner to come back.’

  ‘What about the descendants, don’t they have a claim?’

  ‘The Treasure Act applies to treasure troves with no descendants – no way to trace ownership.’

  Teddy handed them each a mug of tea, which they both took from her with polite nods, sipping and smiling at each other as they talked like old friends over the rising steam.

  ‘So how often does this happen in England?’ Deirdre asked.

  ‘Occasionally. Probably more than you’d think.’ He took a large sip. ‘I love working on that sort of stuff, although it’s not often I get a look in. To get a glimpse of other people’s lives, to imagine what they wanted from life, who they loved, how they loved. It’s exhilarating.’

  Deirdre was regarding him with great interest, her tea quite forgotten.

  ‘So, Deirdre,’ Will said quietly. ‘What’s in your trove? Why are we really here, standing in this hole in the ground? What is so special about this vase of yours?’ Deirdre’s eyes fell to her tea, glittering like gold.

  ‘There might be something down there of value,’ she admitted. ‘But I’m an old woman and sometimes I don’t trust my memory. If the vase wasn’t taken by my mother, if it’s still there – if it even exists – then it may contain treasure.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If that vase is there to be found, Teddy, it is my recollection that it may contain gold, diamonds, rubies and pearls – or it may not exist at all.’

  Teddy held her breath. Deirdre had never uttered a single phrase in her life that had surprised her. Until now.

  There was a static hiss from the ute.

  ‘Channel five – you on channel, Ted?’

  She trotted to the ute and leaned in the window. ‘Yep.’

  It was Hamish. He was a man of few words, particularly on the two-way. Sometimes she liked to entertain herself by trying to beat him at his own game.

  ‘You busy at the moment?’

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘Want a job?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Can you pick up some drums of Ivermectin for me from the co-op? I need them over at Maylors Gate.’

  ‘Yep.’ She wanted to ask if he needed them immediately, but that would send her word count way up, so she didn’t.

  ‘Ted?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You good?’

  ‘Tops.’ There was a brief pause.

  ‘Good. See you in an hour or so, eh?’

  ‘Out,’ Teddy said.

  That was as brief as she could keep it, unless she just dropped the sign-off at the end, but then Hamish would be waiting for her to respond and that broke the rules. Teddy sighed as she climbed into the cab. Her grandmother had started talking about treasure and it was like hearing Jack Sparrow offer to bake a cake. She was dying to hear more. What treasure? The one her father had told her about as she’d drifted off to sleep? The one in the fairytales? She pushed her wild hair back from her face in frustration and wondered when she’d get Deirdre to talk about it again. She tooted the horn in case Dog was looking for a ride and watched him come racing towards the car from Deirdre’s verandah.

  She glanced back at Will and decided, not for the first time, that she wasn’t sure about him. He had blown onto the farm for a couple of weeks and kissed her and he was going to blow away again soon, like the changing of a season. She didn’t want to be the sad chick hanging about staring at him. She wanted to be the chick who had stuff to do, chemicals to collect, an octogenarian to wrangle, a cow to milk. She wanted to be away and doing busy things, not hanging about looking at wastepaper baskets and old jars of marmalade. Dog jumped into the tray and Teddy pulled out of the yard with him barking happily on the back; he loved a trip to town.

  Kath was unpacking a pile of New Idea magazines as Teddy arrived at the co-op, and she smiled at her brightly as she walked in. ‘Hi, Teddy,’ she said. ‘How’s your grandma?’

  ‘She’s great, thanks. She’s supervising Audrey’s nephew like she’s Howard Carter.’

  ‘I bet she’s loving it. And how’s Will going, anyway?’ Kath was great with names; it probably came with the job, but she was so good it was kind of like a party trick.

  ‘He’s going well. I’m not sure if he’s finding what he expected to, or if he’s disappointed with what’s out there.’

  ‘Oh, I got the feeling he was in no way disappointed when he came in to afternoon tea last week,’ Kath said, labelling a carton of cereal boxes.

  ‘Well, he’s off to England soon, anyway, so I guess he’ll find plenty of more interesting stuff there.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Kath nodded wisely. ‘Hard to say what some people find interesting, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Uhh, I guess so. Hamish sent me in to pick up some Ivermectin – I suppose he’s already put it on the account?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Kath started heading out the back. ‘He called earlier . . .’

  When Teddy came back to the hole that had once been Deirdre’s home it was late afternoon and coldness had settled into the hollows of the earth. The sky was fading and the light that fell across Will’s face was a soft, quiet grey. She paused for a moment to watch him, feeling the usual rush that greeted her and the warmth that wanted to unfold in her timid heart. Will looked up and saw her.

  ‘I’m just about to light the fire,’ he said. ‘Grab a drink and pull up a pew.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. The esky was next to her; she pulled out a couple of beers, handed him one and cracked her own. He went about laying the fire without speaking. She liked it.

  There was a shrieking from the stand of
salmon gums near the old hay shed. Barnaby was back. She scowled at him.

  ‘Mate of yours?’ Will asked, flicking his lighter to life.

  ‘Nope. I wish he’d just go away, actually.’

  ‘He’s a good-looking bloke,’ he remarked. ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘He’s hanging around here instead of heading out to find a girlfriend. I think he thinks I’m his mother.’

  ‘Did you raise him?’

  ‘Yeah, a couple of years ago now, so it’s time for him to move on.’

  ‘Where should he be?’

  ‘Oh, Lake King, Esperance, somewhere where he’ll find some friends.’ She stood up and made shooing motions. Barnaby watched her, fascinated, moving his elegant head to the left and right. ‘Go!’ she shouted. ‘Go on! Away!’

  Barnaby stretched out his beautiful crest, and stayed put.

  ‘He probably likes the attention,’ Will said.

  ‘Well, it’s bad attention,’ Teddy grumbled.

  ‘Doesn’t matter if he’s a guy. It’s attention.’ Teddy sighed.

  ‘I feel guilty about him. I don’t want him to be lonely. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.’

  ‘Someone should tell your grandma that.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Will smiled at her. ‘Drink your beer.’

  She reached into the plastic crate that had been holding all the detritus from Deirdre’s life and began to fiddle with the bits and pieces she found there. She handled an old toothbrush, a hand mirror, some small white jars that had once held Pond’s Cold Cream and a jar of Cyclax Milk of Roses. She supposed it must have belonged to Deirdre’s mother. She imagined her hands unscrewing the lid and soothing the cream onto her face. There was an old needlework box, disintegrated over the years of interment and still holding the remnants of fabric and pin cushions, along with knitting needles and sewing scissors.

  Not for the first time, Teddy wondered about her great-grandmother who had left with no warning or apology to her daughters. Perhaps the shame of abandoning them had been too great and she had cut them out of her life like removing a limb.