The Cattleman's Daughter

by Rachael Treasure

  ‘Sam’s album will be out next year,’ Bridie said. ‘Ike reckons Compass really like the demos we recorded and they’ll sign him!’

  ‘And Bridie’s going to get paid as my PA and wardrobe assistant,’ Sam said, clutching her hand, clearly proud of her.

  ‘Stylist,’ Bridie corrected.

  ‘Stylist. That’s it! I couldn’t do it without you, babe.’

  ‘And we couldn’t do it without Bob,’ Bridie added, casting Bob a wink.

  ‘We needed cash fast to help pay for the rental house and the studio, so Bridie coaxed me into a couple of pub gigs,’ Sam explained. ‘Before long we had bookings every week, not just weekends either. I started to feel a bit, you know, over it. With that pressure back on I was about to turn it all down and give it all away again, when Bob walked into our lives.’

  ‘Bob was touring up the coast,’ Bridie said, ‘weren’t you, Bob?’

  Bob nodded. ‘I blew a fuse in me head around the time of the grazing bans. Thought, I can’t do it anymore.’ He shivered at the memory, but his eyes lifted and settled on Evie. She smiled at him.

  ‘Luckily Evie suggested I go walkabout for a bit. To find what really floated my boat. I was just about to give up when I bumped into Sam and Bridie in a pub in Coolum.’

  ‘Man, did we do some drinking that night!’ Sam said. ‘And some D&Ming. We sorted out all the crap between us.’

  ‘In the finish,’ Bridie said, ‘Bob came on board as Sam’s band manager and roadie. He’s the one who rounded up the best musos to play with Sam on his pub gigs, and he’s the one who’s organised all the gigs. It frees Sam up and takes the pressure off me.’

  ‘He’s a natural,’ Sam said. ‘One of the best I’ve worked with and he’s still a new kid to the muso game!’

  Bob grinned. ‘You can’t help be good at doing something you love!’ His round red face softened for a moment and he looked earnestly at Emily. ‘I’ve worked out I hated being a cattle farmer. Hated it with a passion but felt obligated to do it. And that’s why I’m crap at it. I’m so sorry I’ve wasted so much of my life, and wasted so much of your time, before I figured that out.’ Emily was about to soothe things, but Bob held up his hand to silence her.

  ‘I’ve been an arse. But with things taking off with Sam in the next twelve months, we know the three of us are going places. United States or bust.’

  ‘And this time we’re doing it drug and dickhead-free,’ added Sam.

  Emily smiled at Sam.

  ‘There’s more, though, isn’t there, Bob?’ Bridie prompted.

  ‘You bet,’ he said, turning back to Emily. ‘You’re good at what you do because you love it too. I can see you’re a bloody good mum and a bloody good cattleman. That’s why I’m leasing you my land up on the plains and down here on the lowlands. If you’d like.’

  Emily’s mouth fell open.

  ‘You don’t have to say yes right away,’ Bob said. ‘You do your sums, work out if you can make a go of it. The lease payments won’t be huge, because one day I’ll be leavin’ the lot to you and your girls anyway.’ Bob shrugged. ‘Because you’re the one the land deserves the most. That’s why old Hughie upstairs spared your life after that horse accident. Least that’s what I reckon.’

  A smile lit Emily’s face. Bob was giving her a go on the land. She loved the way he’d put it too; that the land deserved her. Not the other way round, that she deserved the land. It didn’t work that way in her mind. The land did deserve someone who not only loved it, but could read its messages, understand it and above all respect the balance needed in its management.

  ‘Thank you, Bob,’ Emily said, tilting her glass towards him in a toast. ‘Thank you so very bloody much!’

  Emily beamed. Her dream was alive again. The life of a cattleman now stretched out before her, like a road suddenly cleared. She glanced over to her father and smiled at him. He was never one for noise or fuss, but Emily could see the happiness he felt.

  She looked at Evie and she, too, had a calm expression of satisfaction on her face, as if she had orchestrated the whole thing. Then, suddenly, Emily realised that in many ways Evie had made all these miracles happen.

  ‘A toast,’ Emily said. ‘To us! The Flanaghans – that includes you too, Evie.’ And they all chorused Emily and drank.

  When the meal was done and the table cleared, Rod delivered a pile of mail to Emily’s lap.

  ‘Welcome back to the real world,’ he said.

  ‘Gee, thanks, Dad,’ Emily said dryly as she flicked through the envelopes until one caught her attention. The black lettering read Family Services Dept. Her heart leapt. She tore the envelope open anxiously and began to read.

  She sat for a time in silence as the rest of the family buzzed about the kitchen, washing up, stacking plates. Skylarking. It took them a while to notice Emily’s silence.

  ‘What is it?’ Bridie asked.

  ‘They want to investigate me as a mother,’ Emily said. ‘They say I’ve put the girls in danger and I have to go into Sale for an interview.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Bridie said. Flo grabbed the letter. Evie read it over Flo’s shoulder.

  ‘That’s a shocker,’ Flo said. ‘You couldn’t get a better mother than Emily. How could they? Bastards!’

  ‘It’s understandable,’ Evie soothed. ‘Anyone who doesn’t fit with convention is a threat to bureaucracy. Emily doesn’t fit into a neat little box. This is just the government men throwing their weight around, trying to justify their pay packets. It’s a storm in a teacup. Once the girls settle into school next year at Dargo, they’ll pipe down.’

  ‘But that’s not the point! Those mountains are our way of life. How can they condemn her for that?’ Flo said.

  ‘They’ll let it go. It’s just a power play by the man who saw her on the mountains. It’s a rap over the knuckles because they’re jealous of Emily’s freedom and oneness with the land.’

  There was that word again, Emily thought angrily. They. She knew they lived in a lucky land, but the era of the public servant was upon them and to Emily it felt stifling after being away from it for months on the high plains. Here was another letter in her hand in cold bureau-speak, threatening her very existence again.

  ‘Well, I’ve had it with the “them”. I’m going to find out just who started this and who “they” are.’ She thought of storming into Luke’s office over it, but she knew it was the men in Melbourne pulling all the strings.

  Evie shook her head. ‘Let it lie, Emily. Let them dig their own graves. You don’t need to jump in and finish the hole for them. Fight this with positivity.’

  Emily nodded, but Evie’s coaching gave her little comfort. If she lost her girls, her life wouldn’t be worth living. Could the government do that? Take her daughters from her?

  Deep in the night Meg came in and quietly curled up with Emily in the bed.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ Meg said, resting a hand on Emily’s forehead.

  How did Meg know she’d been lying awake in the darkened room for hours now?

  ‘Okay, darling,’ Emily said, pulling Meg to her. ‘I will.’

  ‘Sweet Mummy,’ Meg said sleepily. ‘The granny will be happy about Uncle Bob’s land.’

  Emily opened her eyes. ‘What granny?’

  ‘The granny that helps you.’

  ‘You mean Evie?’ She felt Meg shake her head.

  ‘The granny that follows you in the snow. The one that watches you when you split the wood.’

  ‘What granny?’ Emily said.

  ‘You know,’ Meg said. ‘You know, Mummy.’

  Thirty-three

  ‘Take it steady,’ Flo said as she hauled herself up next to Emily in the truck. ‘You gotta glide the gear knob gently into place, as if you were holding your fella’s precious one-eyed trouser snake. No grating gears. Okay?’

  ‘Okay!’ Emily rolled her eyes and looked at Flo’s squint of concern in the early morning light. She flicked the gear stick into neutral.

  �
��You gotta go easy on the clutch, too. Double clutch in the bends.’ Emily looked at Flo, beginning to regret asking to borrow Baz’s stock truck and trailer to take cattle up to the high plains. Flo was acting like a mother hen with their precious new red DAF.

  ‘I’ve got my licence. I know how to drive it! Stop panicking.’

  ‘It’s not an it!’ Flo said. ‘This big revvin’ baby is my Hugh Jackman.’ She patted the truck. ‘Aren’t ya, gorgeous? Huge Jack-man!’

  ‘If you’re so worried, you drive it, I mean him, and take the cattle to the plains for me!’

  Flo shook her head. ‘No, you go on alone. I trust you.’ She carefully shut the truck door and Emily wound the window down and looked over to her father’s house.

  ‘Tilly! Meg! You coming or what? Hurry. We’ve got a big day ahead,’ bellowed Emily from the cab. The girls slammed through the screen door, their packs in their hands and smiles on their faces as Flo helped them up into the DAF.

  ‘Don’t you go spilling food in Auntie Flo’s cab, you hear! Or put grubby fingers on the windows.’

  ‘Flo!’ barked Emily.

  ‘All right.’ Flo threw her hands up in the air. ‘I know you’ll look after it.’

  As Emily pulled onto the Tranquillity driveway she deliberately bunny-hopped the truck for a few metres, watching the horrified look on Flo’s face. Then she let rip with two good blasts of the air horn and stuck her middle finger up at Flo before rolling the rig away down the drive.

  Since she’d taken over the lease of Bob’s land, Emily hadn’t stopped working. She had set out to restore not only his land, but also her father’s tired old Dargo house.

  Any spare time she had she spent scraping flaky paint from the walls and puttying, sanding and painting. On the plains she began fencing, and on the lowlands ripping trenches for poly-pipe in a new watering system that would keep the cattle out of the river that ran through Bob’s Dargo property. At night she tallied cattle sums, trying to work out how much she could make to spend on the land and during sleepless hours she tried figuring out drought strategies. In between it all, she was forever busy with the girls. She no longer cast her mind to Clancy. She’d heard he was living in Bairnsdale with Penny, and it was Penny who was urging him to get in touch with the girls – but so far he hadn’t called. Word was out he was a changed man. Perhaps he needed a bossy nurse to make a fuss of him, Emily concluded. Instead of worrying about bumping into Clancy around Dargo, Emily now worried about running into Luke and went to all kinds of measures to avoid him. So far, so good. She’d seen neither man. It suited her that way.

  As she rolled along in the truck, the girls singing to an Adam Brand CD, Emily’s mind was miles away. In a good year she could still run three hundred head on the lowlands. But that was in a good year. Since the rain in autumn and only a few inches in spring, no more had fallen and the landscape around Dargo was barren, with dams in some paddocks running dry. It wasn’t even December yet, and already they had endured some hellishly hot, windy days.

  In a year like this she could run, at a stretch, two hundred head of cows on the lowlands, but she needed to help Bob’s land on the plains recover. She planned to stock it lightly in the first two years of summer with just a hundred and fifty cows. She didn’t want to stretch her lower country, so she opted to sell fifty head. The cows were in good nick and the extra money would go towards fencing up on Bob’s. Now was her chance to make amends to the run up there. To set it right.

  Instead of droving, Emily had chosen to truck the one hundred and fifty cattle up in several trips, so small were the numbers now due to the bans. While she was sorry they weren’t droving, Emily reasoned she could use her days more efficiently this year, fencing cattle out of areas that needed rehabilitation. Emily told herself they could always return to droving once the seasons were more generous and Bob’s land was in better shape.

  She looked out at the garden that would swelter once the sun was up. Yesterday the girls had been playing in a pitiful few inches of water in an inflatable pool beneath a weeping willow. There wasn’t enough water in the tanks, nor the river, to warrant the sprinkler being on much at all, but the garden from the road looked like an oasis of green in a frazzled landscape. At least the prospect of an intense fire season had allowed them to justify running the taps a little around the house for the girls to play with. That small buffer of green could be a saviour should fire come this summer. She revved the truck up a gear and rattled on to pick the cattle up from the yards.

  Luke Bradshaw frowned when he saw the giant dusty red truck with stock trailer pulled over in the middle of seemingly nowhere. He stopped the VPP vehicle behind the truck and looked about, sniffing the pungent waft of cow dung coming from the empty truck. He heard a dog bark to the west of the road and saw someone over by a stream. He started striding over the tussocky plain towards them. Soon Emily’s black and tan kelpie was bounding over to greet him, a big kelpie-grin on his face and his tail wagging frantically.

  Luke saw Emily standing beside the stream. She looked gorgeous in her grubby jeans, a thick leather work belt and a tight blue singlet that showed her curves. Her brown shoulders, wet from the river, glistened in the warm afternoon sun. An Akubra hat shaded her pretty face. Luke knew she would be nervous she’d been ‘sprung’ with a dog in the national park. Her goldy-haired girls looked up from their panning and he could read the fear on their faces that their mother was about to get in trouble again.

  Luke wasn’t going to play by his ranger rules today.

  ‘Hi!’ he said, as best he could to convey a friendly casual air. ‘Struck gold yet?’ He stooped and ran his hands over Rousie’s ears.

  Emily tilted her head and answered cautiously, ‘Nope. Not yet.’

  ‘How have you been?’ he asked gently, with an uncertain smile.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Em, I’m sorry. Okay? About last winter. Really sorry.’

  Luke stood before her, apology written on his face in a frown. He was gorgeous in his shorts, his fit, strong legs a deep brown, his lace-up boots looking worn and rugged. She looked into his dark eyes and saw the kindness in them.

  ‘I’ve left it too long, I know, but I …’ His voice faded.

  Emily stepped back. ‘I don’t think you’ve ever met my girls properly,’ she said, changing the subject quickly as she digested Luke’s apology. She watched as he crouched down to Meg and Tilly.

  ‘My name’s Luke. What are your names?’

  The girls looked at him, but remained silent.

  ‘Luke’s a friend of Mummy’s,’ Emily said. ‘Say hello!’ Tilly and Meg blinked at the man before them. He seemed nice now, but after their day in the snow with the cross old ranger, they were wary.

  ‘This is my youngest, Meg, and this is Matilda, but we call her Tilly,’ Emily said, speaking for them, her tone a little forced.

  ‘Hi, Meg and Tilly!’ He moved over to the stream. ‘You going to show me how to pan for gold?’

  Emily ushered them over to the stream and reluctantly they set about dipping their pans into the water. But soon they were laughing, splashing and chatting with Luke. Emily joined in cautiously, but part of her was still hurt by his presence there in his uniform on what had once been Flanaghan land. She knew Evie would say ‘forgive and forget’. Perhaps she should put that day in the snow behind her and allow herself to feel joy he was here, being so kind. She was grateful he hadn’t mentioned the fact she had a dog and a stock truck in ‘the Park’. He seemed to understand now. Standing near him by the stream Emily felt her heart flutter again. She had quashed her feelings for him long enough.

  The sun was dipping down beneath the treeline and the cold came in quickly.

  ‘Well, it looks as if we won’t find gold today,’ Luke said, winking at Emily but talking to the girls. ‘It’s time for me to go. We’d all better go.’

  ‘Can we go panning with Luke again tomorrow?’ Meg asked Emily, grabbing hold of her mother’s hand with wet, cold fingers, h
er eyes bright.

  ‘Luke has to work. And you’re going to Evie’s for a visit, while Mummy goes fencing. Maybe another day.’

  ‘Oh!’ Meg said, stamping her foot. ‘Mummy! You must let this nice Luke into our life. He’s one for keeps, like you said about the hairy guinea pig when we got him!’ She frowned up at Emily and Emily, shocked, frowned back at her daughter.

  ‘Back to the truck, now!’

  Meg and Tilly stomped off, while Luke, grinning, stacked up the pans and passed them to Emily. Their hands touched momentarily. Emily felt the zing. He caught her eye.

  ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’m not working.’

  ‘Well, I am,’ Emily said.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Luke said cheerfully. ‘Maybe I can help?’

  Emily couldn’t believe it. Here he was part of the group that had taken this land from them and he was offering to help! But Meg’s words stuck in her head. Let him in, Emily, she thought.

  ‘I’m riding out round Bob’s run to check the fences and do a few patch-up jobs.’

  ‘You got a spare horse? I could come with you and learn a bit about the place.’

  Emily looked at him, amazed that he would want to. Hesitatingly she nodded.

  ‘Yeah? You could ride your gelding, if you like. He’s coming along really well.’

  ‘I would like,’ Luke said. ‘I’d like that a lot! I’ll see you first thing, then.’

  And before Emily could change her mind, or warn him away, Luke was gone, jogging over the snowgrass plains towards the truck. There he cheerfully helped the girls into the cab and waved to Emily as he got into his vehicle and revved away.

  ‘He’s really nice, he is,’ said Meg, when Emily clambered into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Shut it, Meg,’ Emily snapped.

  ‘But he is really nice,’ Tilly added.

  ‘You shush too,’ Emily said, her nerves dancing.

  ‘Why is Mummy so cross about Luke?’ Tilly said, rolling her eyes and folding her arms across her body.

  ‘Because she likes him but she thinks she’s not allowed to because he’s a ranger,’ Meg said wisely. ‘And she’s worried about giving us a new daddy – when we still have an old daddy.’