by Sue Orr
Bounce saw them first. He crouched low to the ground, ears flat against his head. A guttural growl came from deep inside the dog. One was a Friesian, the other a Jersey. They were huddled by the fence line, halfway down the paddock.
There were more. Four bedraggled, scrawny calves in all. All of them thin and shaky on their feet.
Ian sprinted ahead of the herd and swung a race gate across in front of the leaders, stopping their progress towards the shed. He did the same behind them, locking them inside a small section of the race, before separating the calves off from the herd.
One calf — one, or maybe two — he could understand. The fences were not completely fixed. It was possible that a cow had had twins, or even triplets, and two of the calves had wandered through to another paddock, escaping first muster. But four?
Ian milked, then went home and phoned Jack Gilbert. They met at the shed half an hour later.
‘How’s the dog working out?’ Jack asked, as he slammed the door of his truck shut. Bounce was tied up at the fence. ‘He’s smart, eh?’
‘He’s keen, alright,’ said Ian.
Bounce had belonged to Jack. Jack had offered the dog to Ian, proposing a weekly deduction in wages until the animal was paid for. The price — $60 — had sounded reasonable to Ian, until he tried to work him. Bounce was vicious, snapping at the legs of stock, drawing blood if he could. Once he’d tasted it, the dog turned rabid, worrying the beast until he was close to bringing it down. Ian had to wade into the dangerous frenzy with a stick, beating the dog away before serious injuries threatened the livestock. Bounce therefore spent most of the time tied up, and Gabrielle was forbidden to go near him. Ian knew the alternative was buying and training his own dog, but this felt like commitment and commitment felt suffocating.
‘It was hard to part with him,’ Jack went on. ‘But I believe in doing a man a favour, when you can.’
‘Too right, Jack. Thanks again,’ Ian said.
They walked down the race together. Jack picked at his teeth. ‘So what’s the problem?’
‘You’ll see in a minute.’
Ian hadn’t said, on the phone, why he needed to meet Jack. Six months of watching Gabrielle playing on the party line had taught him there was no such thing as a private conversation in Fenward. He couldn’t make sense of where the calves had come from, but he was sure others, listening in, would have their views.
The calves were still huddled in the far corner of the paddock. He leaned his stick against the fence and rested his hands on the top wire, between the barbs.
‘They were just there, this morning,’ he said. ‘Four calves, turned up out of the blue.’
He unlatched the gate and the two men slipped into the paddock. ‘Nowhere near the herd, the cows weren’t interested in them,’ he added.
They were close to the calves now. Jack pulled one away from the cluster and looked it over, head to tail. He did the same to the rest.
‘You must have missed them, when they calved.’
Ian shook his head. ‘That can’t be right. It’s just not possible … Not four appearing from nowhere, all on the same morning.’
‘Are you saying your fencing’s finished, Ian? Because guess how it looks to me? It looks to me as though you’ve put the cows in with the herd after they’ve calved, and these calves — these twins, triplets, fucking quads for all we know … that you didn’t even know you had — have bellowed and bawled and eventually found their way to their mothers through God knows how many broken fences.’
Ian took a deep breath. ‘Jack, the cows haven’t gone anywhere near them … they’re not their calves. Come on …’
Ian laughed, and Jack’s mood switched. He shook his head, grinning widely. Ian would never get used to how quickly it happened.
‘Someone put them here. Someone’s brought them here and put them in with the milkers. That’s the only logical explanation for them all turning up overnight,’ Ian said.
Jack straightened himself up tall and ran his fingers through his hair. He scratched at the back of his neck and bent down, running his hands over the calves’ bellies, down their legs, and then inspected their tails.
‘No markings on them,’ he said finally. ‘Stick them on the truck. Might as well get something for them.’ He turned again to leave. ‘Oh, and Ian — they are my calves.’
That was it then. They were Jack Gilbert’s calves.
In the last week of November, Ian received a letter. The envelope was pink and big, the size of a child’s birthday card. It was framed, on both the front and the back, with tiny hand-drawn stars. The colours alternated purple and orange. His name and address was printed in Gabrielle’s careful scroll, and bore her signature sign-off: Fenward, Hauraki Plains, North Island, New Zealand, Southern Hemisphere, Earth, The Universe, The Solar System, Floating in Space. Space was barely legible, disappearing into minute letters and merging with the star occupying the bottom right corner of the envelope.
Ian opened it while he walked from the roadside to the house. It was an invitation from Gabrielle Baxter and Nicola Walker to attend a dress rehearsal of their planned performances at Calf Club Day. Your attendance is required at the Walkers’ cowshed at two o’clock on Saturday. Be there or be square. It was centred on the page, and on each side of the words were drawings of calves — a Jersey on the left and a Friesian on the right. Both the calves were wearing high-heeled boots.
Gabrielle ached for ribbons. In Silverdale, she’d looked on while the farmers’ and sharemilkers’ kids paraded their pets around the school field on Calf Club Day. They stood in proud-puff lines of first, second and third and collected those slivers of coloured silk. Pale yellow for third, royal blue for second, and the blood red of first prize.
Rhys, his Silverdale landlord, had offered Gabrielle one of his calves. Gabrielle had gone to the cowshed with him and looked over all the candidates. She came back and crawled under the covers next to Bridie and, with her face buried into her mother’s needle-thin arms, said that she didn’t like any of them enough to be her Calf Club Day pet. Bridie needed someone with her most of the time by then. Gabrielle understood it was her.
He stuffed the envelope in his trouser pocket and went inside. Gabrielle was doing schoolwork at the kitchen table, her books open, pencils and felt pens scattered. He glanced down at his trousers — the envelope was not visible.
‘How come,’ said Gabrielle, ‘we haven’t been to church here yet?’
She didn’t look up. Her hair hung over her face.
‘What’s your homework?’ His hand reached into his pocket, folded over the envelope and pushed it down into the fabric as far as it would go.
‘It’s not homework. It’s a drawing. Of Mum. In the gardens of Heaven.’
Gabrielle spun the sheet of paper around so that the picture faced him. He sat down at the table and looked. Gabrielle had filled the page with tiny, delicate flowers. In the middle she had sketched her mother. Ian was relieved it wasn’t a great likeness.
‘We had religious instruction today and I told Father Brindle about how we both have the same dreams as each other about Mum.’ She swung the page back to face her, and resumed the colouring-in.
Ian didn’t speak. It had been a while since they’d shared a Bridie dream. He’d been hoping that that little routine might have come to an end.
‘And that, therefore,’ she continued, her head down, ‘we knew for sure that that’s where she was. And that she was happy.’
‘What did Father Brindle have to say about that?’
‘He said that a good Catholic never needed proof of the existence of God and Heaven. But it was nice, all the same, to receive a sign from Him, and that we were lucky, the both of us, to share such a strong faith.’
Ian nodded. ‘We’re lucky, alright.’
‘And then,’ Gabrielle said, ‘he asked me when we were going to come to church. Because he said we’ve been here ages and he was very keen to meet you.’
Ian watched his
daughter busy over the paper; agile, elegant fingers reaching for pens, flicking their lids off, deftly applying them to the artwork. Gabrielle had the hands of her mother — long, slender fingers that never stopped moving — and there they were, easing fabric through the grip of the old sewing machine, flicking pins out, the sound of them dropping in the metal tin lost behind the clack-clacking of the puncturing needle. Bridie’s signet ring caught the light of the tiny bulb at the back of the sewing machine and flashed as those busy hands coloured purple, orange, purple, orange, purple, orange a border of purple orange pansies around the edge of Bridie in the gardens of Heaven.
And, of course, he remembered the last time he went to church, the occasion being Bridie’s funeral, and although the flowers were said to have been beautiful and the eulogy touching and the whole service a celebration, yes a celebration, of her life rather than a mourning of the obscene end of it, he remembered none of those things. What he remembered, with a shudder every time, was holding his wife’s hand as he stood in the front pew and running his fingers gently, lovingly, seductively up and down her long fingers and wondering what she had done with her wedding and engagement rings before she’d come to church that morning.
‘It’s too hard to get there just yet.’
‘Other people get there. Nickie and her family go most weeks.’
‘They’ve got sharemilkers to do all the jobs in the weekends. Who do you think does it when you and Nickie have a morning off?’ Ian asked.
‘The Janssens, I suppose.’
‘Correct. And what are we?’
Gabrielle put her pen down and stared at him, her brow creased in puzzlement. ‘What do you mean, what are we? People. Obviously.’
‘What sort of people, Gabrielle?’
She chewed at her bottom lip. ‘I give in.’
‘Sharemilkers. We’re sharemilkers, Gabrielle. We get to feed the calves, the owners get to sleep in and go to church on Sundays and any other days too, if they feel the urge.’
Ian was sure that the next time he entered a church, he’d be inside a box, on the receiving end of eulogies and prayers that wouldn’t be answered.
On Saturday afternoon, just before two o’clock, he drove over to the Walkers’ cowshed. Gabrielle had gone on ahead, her bag stuffed fat and bouncing against her back as she cycled away from the house.
‘Don’t be late,’ she called out. ‘And don’t be early.’
His truck rumbled over the cattlestop and he pulled up to one side of the tanker track. In the distance, in the calf pen, he could see Gabrielle and another girl. He wandered towards the girls, blinking in the strong light, his steps faltering.
Their clothing. Bridie’s clothing. He recognised everything, every item on both of them. Bridie’s dresses, her shoes, her cardigans. Bridie’s things, being worn in a calf pen; her scent oh the smell of her overridden — defiled — by the smell of calf shit and milk powder.
Fury bubbled in his chest. He shouted out Hey and started running, slowly at first, still disbelieving what he was seeing, then quickly, sprinting towards the pen. Gabrielle and the other girl both looked up at his call. He was just a few feet away from them. He glanced at the girl Nickie, saw her smile start to fade, then he let his gaze fall on Gabrielle.
Her smile didn’t fade. For the first time since Bridie’s death, she was deeply, utterly happy.
A leather lead was clipped to the collar around Gabrielle’s calf’s neck. Gabrielle stood next to the animal, her back straight, her smile so wide he thought it might be hurting her.
‘You have to watch, Dad,’ she said. ‘Pretend you’re the judge. Go over there. Further than that.’
Ian followed the directions. He leaned on a fence post.
‘Introducing … Gabrielle Baxter and her calf, Vincent.’
Gabrielle took two steps forward, the calf took two steps with her. She paused and adjusted her pose, putting her free hand on a jutting hip and the other on the calf’s back. The calf waited patiently.
Ian recalled seeing an advertisement for a new car in some newspaper, a pretty girl posing exactly the same way. He smiled. Gabrielle resumed her walk, leaving her hand on her hip, mincing her way towards an electric fence standard pushed into the ground about ten yards away.
When she reached the standard, Gabrielle paused again then stepped in front of the calf. She turned a full circle, switching the lead from one hand to another, her arms outstretched. Her feet performed the three-step of a waltz. She walked back to where she’d started, her smile constant for the entire performance.
‘Introducing Nickie Walker and her calf, Laurence,’ Gabrielle shouted.
Ian swallowed hard as he watched the show repeated. This girl wore a tan-coloured dress, a pretty muslin smocktop that Bridie had loved to drag out on the first warm day of summer. On Bridie it had been a mini, but on Nickie Walker it touched her knees. The shoes he wasn’t sure about … brown sneakers … Bridie had had some of those but he’d seen them on many women.
Ian remembered the morning in the school yard, when he’d touched Bridie’s scarf on this same child. How frightened he’d been — at how he’d scared her and scared himself. He fought hard to stop himself shouting at this girl, lunging at her, stripping his wife’s precious, beautiful clothes off her body. He nodded, and smiled, and clapped when she, too, reached the end of her catwalk performance.
‘Very good, young ladies,’ he said, scribbling on an imaginary clipboard. ‘If you could just line up here, as I announce the results?’
Gabrielle and Nickie stood side by side, their calves between them. ‘First prize in the Jersey section goes to … Laurence and Nickie.’ He shook the girl’s hand and was surprised to feel how rough her skin was, how her nails were ragged and dirty.
‘And the winner of the Friesian section? Vincent and Gabrielle.’
Leaning forward, he pinned the invisible ribbon on Bridie’s best black dress — the one she wore to weddings and every funeral but her own.
Joy Walker
Joy watched Nickie push the bacon off her plate and, grimacing, wipe imaginary bacon fat off her eggs. Nickie had made good on her promise to become vegetarian, announcing the decision over the big breakfast.
Joy went out of her way to prepare meals fit only for animals and hippies — dishes with weird ingredients like rice and lentils; all but impossible to find at the stores, outrageously expensive. She scanned the backs of packets, desperate for hints on how to cook the contents into something edible. Salt helped a little, but the final results, in Joy’s view, could never be described as food.
None of it mattered in the end. Nickie ate the first few meals, ignoring Eugene’s teasing, bravely defending her new stance on animal welfare. But once the fuss died down at mealtimes and everyone got back to concentrating on what was on their own plates, Joy saw that Nickie was eating very little at all.
Sure, she picked up her knife and fork and took a couple of mouthfuls. But as soon as the dinnertime conversation was under way, she stopped putting food in her mouth. Joy, sitting directly across from her, watched as Nickie separated the mashed potato out from the greens, then reassembled them. She watched as Nickie scraped boiled egg onto the back of her fork, then lay the fork down while she talked. Joy watched as Nickie picked up the knife and fork again, removed the egg from the fork, and started the whole routine over again.
Joy couldn’t fathom how Nickie was doing it, but somehow the overall pile of food on the plate looked as though it was disappearing. It was her job — her responsibility as a mother — to confront her, Joy knew that. Several times, she took a deep breath and tried to start the conversation. She failed, and she knew why. The conversation would start with food, but finish — as it had a few days earlier — with them screaming at each other about Jack Gilbert’s violence towards his wife. Eugene had gone out. Nickie had been sick and stayed home from school. She was washing lunch dishes and Joy was drying.
‘What do you think it is? This thing you’ve caugh
t?’ Joy asked.
‘Dunno. Some bug, maybe.’
‘Has there been something going around at school?’
‘No. I don’t know.’
‘Well, have other kids been away sick?’
‘Some. A few.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have they all had the same thing?’
Nickie took her hands from the soapy water and let them rest on the edge of the bench. ‘What’s with all the questions, Mum? I’ve only been sick for one day. It’s no big deal. God.’
‘I know it’s not a big deal. I just wondered, that’s all. It’s not as though it is the middle of winter. Everyone gets sick then. Just a bit strange, to get something in November …’
‘Well it’s nothing. Okay? So stop the interrogation.’
Nothing was something. Nickie plunged her hands back into the hot water, her eyes focused on the job of scrubbing pots. Joy put down her tea towel and put her arm across Nickie’s shoulders. Nickie flinched at her mother’s touch, but she didn’t pull away. They stood quite still together, watching soap suds collapsing on top of the dirty water.
‘Nickie.’ What? What should the next words be? ‘Is everything alright?’
Nickie turned to Joy. Joy saw that her eyes were glistening. Not tears, not quite. But nearly.
Nickie swallowed. ‘You know what it is, Mum.’
Joy sighed and shook her head. ‘Don’t start …’
Nickie turned back to the dishes, plunging her hands into the water.
‘For God’s sake, Nickie. It’s Gabrielle who has started this … this muck-raking, isn’t it? Before she turned up—’
‘What? What happened before she turned up, Mum? Nothing,’ Nickie shouted. ‘Mr Gilbert beat up Mrs Gilbert and she walked around with all those bruises and you … all you mothers laughed at her and said she was clumsy. So yeah … nothing happened before Gabrielle came.’