River Run

by Alexander, Nicole

  ‘None taken,’ replied Eleanor.

  ‘So it was real good you were there, stepping in for her.’

  Dawson was washing knives at the sink. ‘She ain’t her mother.’

  ‘Routine. People like routine when they’re going about their business,’ Fitzy said with authority. ‘Besides, she’s next in line.’ He gestured to Eleanor. ‘The girl should be stepping in occasionally.’

  Eleanor wanted to remind them that she was just visiting, that she had a life of her own. This world was her mother’s. ‘Mum’s got her hands full at the moment.’ Eleanor expected everyone to agree. Instead there was a moment’s silence.

  ‘And Christ himself wouldn’t have thought that young Robbie would do such a thing.’ Rex gathered all the meat scraps and set them to one side. ‘Dog tucker.’

  The cook upended the cooled cakes on the wire racks. ‘Bit of custard, tinned fruit. Beautiful.’ Opening a bottle of vanilla essence, he swallowed a good slug of the liquid.

  ‘Don’t you go getting tipsy on us,’ Dawson warned.

  The cook scowled.

  ‘You should have seen him, the bloke that young Robbie shot. Laying out there in the dark, a mess of blood, looked dead to me, he did,’ said Rex. ‘Even Goward thought the poor bloke was buggered. Then wouldn’t young Robbie have been in a world of hurt.’

  Fitzy, in the process of wrapping the cakes in grease-proof paper and placing them in battered tins with lids, clucked his tongue like an old woman. ‘If your father were alive, Eleanor …’

  Rex completed the sentence. ‘Never would have happened.’

  ‘Never,’ repeated Dawson. ‘Got him locked in his room?’

  Eleanor accepted a triangle of half bread and butter from the cook. ‘He sure is.’

  ‘Ah, the young fella won’t take kindly to having his wings clipped.’ Rex stretched his back. ‘And the bloke? How’s he doing?’

  ‘Still unconscious,’ Eleanor answered, licking dripping butter from her fingers.

  ‘And nobody knows nothing about him?’ Dawson had positioned himself at the opposite end of the table and was busy peeling and chopping onions. Once a pile had formed, he gathered up the vegetables and dropped them in the boiler with the chops. ‘What about the neighbours? They know anything?’

  ‘Uncle Colin rang them all yesterday but they had no idea who he could be. His picture will be in the papers, eventually.’

  ‘Strangest thing,’ Rex commented, ‘a bloke like that just appearing out of the blue. Like a stray dog looking for a home.’

  ‘We’ve seen ’em before.’ Dawson picked at hairs in a nostril. ‘Drifters, plain turkeys, that’s what he’d be. Move from shed to shed. Get some decent tucker into them, and then move on. Bit of burr-cutting, nice comfy kapok mattress in a hut. Must have been further out west on another station, heard we were next on the circuit. That’s why he’s here.’

  ‘So, you reckon he’s a scab?’ asked Rex. ‘Like his hide to try to get work at a Grazco’s shed.’

  Dawson rubbed at his flattened nose.

  ‘Well, one thing’s for sure, I don’t think young Robbie needs to worry about the place being invaded by communists.’ Eleanor’s comment was answered by a wry grin from Rex, while Dawson muttered something about going back to the homestead to wash out the meat-house. The flyscreen door clanged shut with a bang.

  ‘Don’t mind him,’ Fitzy told her. ‘Dawson doesn’t hold with any politics, but he’s right straight when it comes to people trying to kill another. His own mother was chased down on horseback and hit in the back of the head with a stirrup-iron when she wouldn’t lift her skirts for a whitefella up north. It should have been a quick one in the dirt before the gin woke up, but she was laid out cold. Never recovered.’ He tapped his head. ‘Dawson don’t believe in hurting nobody. Not since that day. So politics ain’t got much to do with anything, not where Dawson’s concerned.’

  Eleanor felt awful. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that Robbie honestly did think that –’

  ‘Damn would-to-Godders.’ Rex wrapped some knives in a length of calico, carefully folding the ends of the material inwards. ‘I remember getting on the train with your father, Eleanor, when we enlisted in ’16 and the local member standing there.’ Rex lifted his hands as if he grasped the lapels of a coat, tilted his chin. ‘“Would-to-God I’d be going with you if I could, boys. Would-to-God.”’ He dropped his hands which had curled to fists. ‘Never was one for politics. Black, white or brindle, you either live a clean life or you don’t. Anyway, what the young fella thought and what everyone else thinks doesn’t matter. The truth will out. It’s a pity it happened though. Especially now at shearing.’

  ‘Unsettling.’ The cook wiped the table down with a damp cloth, skirting the pile of buttered bread and flicking bits of meat and vegetable peelings onto the timber floor.

  Rex continued, ‘But if the man’s up to no good, well, he won’t get very far laid up down the hall from old Mrs Howell. Locks the bloke in day and night,’ he told the other man. ‘And the old boiler has the ear of the Boss. Mrs Webber marched up to me straight as you like and said, “Rex, I’ve been speaking to Mrs Howell and I want you to get something on the window outside the sickroom, something to stop a person from climbing out, just in case.”’

  ‘Did she?’ asked Fitzy. He lifted the two large baking trays and slid them into the twin ovens, one at a time, kicking the doors shut.

  ‘She did, I tell you. So, I did it. Course I did it. The Boss, well, she didn’t come down in the last shower. Can’t say I thought it was needed, him being busted up pretty bad and all. Benefit of the doubt, I always say.’

  ‘The depression.’ The cook upended a loaf of bread, spread the slices on the damp table and began to butter a second loaf. ‘About twenty years ago. Don’t you recall, Rex? It got real hot and every man and his dog was down-at-heel.’

  ‘Yeah. Stinking summer it was.’ At the sink Rex washed his hands. ‘Sheep dead from lack of water. Most of them too weak to shear. Men appearing out of nowhere looking for work, hoping for something to fill their tucker-bags. It was your first year here, Fitz.’

  ‘Got dropped off the back of the truck with ten other men at the boundary gate. The boundary gate.’ Sweat dripped from the cook’s face onto the table, the bread. He swiped at his skin with a tea towel. ‘Miles away. So we took to the road with our swags over our shoulders and bugger me if we didn’t come across two blokes trying to thieve ten head. They were struggling to round the sheep up using one mangy dog and a bashed up motorbike. Well, the poor bloody animals just lay down in the dirt and when those young fellas nabbed one, they busted a back leg to stop ’em from running away. As if they’d run.’ He dug the flat side of the wooden spoon into the butter and smoothed the dollop down across three slices. ‘Real black thing that is, maiming animals, not that I have a thing against the blacks, no, I’ve had better blacks as friends than whites. But the old-people stuff, the old ways, well, I don’t go much on that. Anyway, this blue truck came screaming down the road towards us, throwing dust and dirt and God knows what else across the flat. We all took to the scrub in terror. But the truck, well, it spies the thieves and takes to the bush straight as an arrow, spitting gravel and grime in its wake. And it bashed and whined and got airborne and finally rounded on them as if it were a horse and the man inside were Clancy-of-the-overflow himself. Steered them fellas, your father did, Eleanor, steered ’em both out of the scrub and straight towards us. And we nabbed the thieving buggers.’

  ‘One ended up being Billy Wright.’

  ‘Billy, who’s stitching up Johnny?’ questioned Eleanor.

  ‘Got cut, did he? Figures. First day. No grog,’ said Rex.

  ‘Right you are,’ the cook told her. ‘It were Billy himself. Your father offered them both a job, taught Billy how to shear. A gun shearer if ever I saw one. The other fella only lasted for a year or so. I heard he died of blood poisoning up near Blackall. Cripes, she’s hot i
n here, Eleanor,’ the cook complained. ‘You reckon you could spring us a fan?’

  Eleanor didn’t know if she’d ever be able to get up from the chair. She was stuck to it. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Good on you. Might just step outside for a breather.’ The cook walked outdoors.

  ‘The thing is, Eleanor,’ Rex waited until Fitz left, ‘you gotta give everyone a chance. Including the fella that’s been shot. That’s what your father would do. Trust. Trust is important.’

  Kindness lay at the heart of her father’s personality while trust, in Eleanor’s experience, was overrated. ‘And the men in the shed, Rex, they’re not bothered by what’s happened?’

  Rex snatched up a piece of bread, chewed thoughtfully, the dough balling in a cheek. ‘Some will be.’

  ‘And Mr Goward? He seems like a good person to me.’

  Rex lifted a finger. ‘A title doesn’t make a man respect you, Eleanor. Besides which, he’s new compared to the rest of us.’

  So there was the heart of the issue. Rex didn’t think Hugh Goward had done enough time on the property to be rewarded with such a coveted position. Compared to Rex’s tenure on River Run, the overseer would always be the import, the new chum.

  ‘Treat everyone the way you’d like to be treated, Eleanor. Fair, but firm. Like your father did.’

  ‘Benefit of the doubt,’ Eleanor replied, although Rex’s largesse didn’t extend to Hugh Goward.

  ‘Exactly,’ the gardener replied.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  That afternoon, as promised to Nurse Pappas, Eleanor went to the sickroom. On arrival, the room was stuffy and in semi-darkness. Afternoon light highlighted a tiny cobweb on the windowsill and she brushed away the empty nest as the patient emitted a small groan.

  The man was cocooned within sheets. The coverings were tucked in so tightly that Eleanor was sure that if she flicked the linen, it would bounce beneath her touch. Loosening the bedclothes, she rested a hand on the man’s brow. Propped up with pillows, his expressionless face was peppered with beads of sweat. ‘That’s better,’ she said softly. The patient was hot to the touch and the scorching temperature leeching its way indoors wasn’t helping. Another electric fan replaced the broken one and she turned it on, directing the flow at the stranger.

  The washstand held medicines and clean towelling. Taking a face cloth, Eleanor dipped it in the basin of water, listening to the splash of droplets as she wrung it out, before gently dabbing the man’s forehead, cheeks and chin. Refolding the cloth, she wavered a little before placing it in the hollow at the base of his throat. It was a deep indentation. Strangely intimate. Her hand lingered, the cloth warming.

  She wondered what he was like. How his voice would sound. If he would forgive Robbie for what he’d done. If he would ever wake up. The cloth followed the breastbone fanning out to dampen the muscles across a broad chest. Without thought, Eleanor spread her palm against the warm skin and then just as quickly drew away, dropping the cloth in the basin of water. Still, the man slept.

  Eleanor squeezed the drip, noticing the glass phials in a dish on the rickety bedside table. Morphine. How did they even know he was in pain if he was unconscious? She frowned at the sight of them. The ampoules brought back unwelcome memories, long buried.

  She may have been a young teenager when her father passed but Eleanor remembered sitting by his bedside as the morphine had been administered, day after day. It was a kind end, a deep, unending sleep of gradually increasing dosages that led to oblivion. Although she was yet to begin her training as a nurse, it was Lesley who’d explained that as well as aiding both sleep and pain, the drug could also provide an assisted end, one preferable to that of prolonged suffering and that under the guise of patient comfort, the medicine didn’t go against the church’s teachings or the law of the state. It was the right thing to do. All three of them, mother and daughters, had tearfully agreed that their decision on doctor’s advice only hastened the inevitable. And yet, and yet, even now it was a hard thing to remember.

  The man before her had only fallen from his horse and hit his head. The shoulder wound was minor. If Lesley were here, surely she would agree that their role was to try to ensure that the man recovered quickly, both for his sake and theirs. He needed to wake up, and morphine, no matter how low the dosage, wouldn’t help.

  She sat and watched the gentle rise and fall of the stranger’s chest, but the chair soon grew uncomfortable and her proximity to the patient combined with the cramped, hot room added to Eleanor’s unease. She wasn’t sure what caused this sensation as she listened to the sounds drifting through the flyscreen. Dogs barking. Distant, continuous. The whine of the wheelbarrow suggesting Rex roamed somewhere in the garden, while a series of bangs, perhaps cupboards being opened and shut, spoke of Mrs Howell busying herself down the hall in the kitchen.

  The main homestead was a foreign land compared to the rest of the station, especially at shearing time. It was as if two unique worlds existed side by side, having suddenly grown overnight into empires in their own right. Nearly every position on River Run was emulated by the invading hierarchy of the shed, down to Fitzy and his helpmates, although there was never as much energy concentrated in one place, at one time, for so many weeks, as there was within the throbbing aged timbers of the hand-hewn shearing shed. If their land was the body, the woolshed was its heart come shearing.

  And into this world came this man, Eleanor mused, her thoughts returning to the stranger. She’d brought a book with her from Sydney, Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. The library at River Run was filled, floor to ceiling, with novels, the majority of which were written by British authors. Her parents’ reading tastes rarely included Australian tales, apart from the works of Miles Franklin and Jeannie Gunn. Eleanor glanced at the cover. Red-roofed houses surrounded by bland countryside, blue sky contrasting with white clouds. She read the description on the flyleaf: a novel of war and romance. Instantly she thought of Lesley and Marcus. ‘War, everything is about war,’ she said aloud. The book remained in her lap as she stared at the man opposite.

  Benefit of the doubt, she thought.

  ‘I think you’re from a property,’ she began, ‘and you lost your way. Maybe you’re a stockman.’ She tilted her head, studying him. ‘No, you own land. Somewhere.’ She pulled her chair closer. ‘You’ve been to war.’ She felt sure of this. ‘Fought for us, for your country and survived. The doctor said you carried an old wound on the back of your head. That’s how I know that you’ve returned from the front. It makes sense. My father and uncle both fought and my sister’s fiancé, well, he was a casualty too. So we understand. When you do wake up, you don’t have to talk about it.’ Rising, she rinsed out the cloth, running the material down the length of his arm. ‘My mother used to despair of Lesley and I ever marrying,’ said Eleanor thoughtfully, lifting his hand to wipe the sweaty palm. ‘So many of our young men died in the Great War, but we can’t call it that anymore, not now there’s been a second one.’ She stretched out his fingers on the bed. ‘I suppose you’re married,’ she considered. ‘Of course you would be.’ Eleanor’s cheeks grew red and she fussed with the washcloth, wringing it out repeatedly. ‘If it wasn’t for the wars I’d probably be married by now as well,’ she explained a little more brusquely. ‘It’s what’s expected. You know, women and motherhood being at the heart of society.’ She tried to sound flippant. ‘That’s Menzies’ line, anyway.’ She washed the other arm. ‘I had a friend in Sydney who married and moved to the suburbs. We haven’t seen her since.’ Eleanor thought of this woman on her wedding day, aglow with love and hope, eventually swallowed by the chores of home-keeping and the simple fact that her husband needed their only car for work and there was no public transport where they lived.

  ‘Anyway, if there hadn’t been a war I certainly never would have met Dante and … but you don’t want to hear about that.’ Eleanor put the washcloth aside, brushing away a tear. ‘So, here we are,’ she said a little more brigh
tly. ‘We’ve just started shearing. It’s very busy. Our overseer, Mr Goward, was teaching me a few things about ram selection this morning, which I enjoyed. Actually, I haven’t had much to do with him until now, but he’s a nice man.’ Eleanor drew breath, she knew she was rambling but it was better than sitting in silence. ‘I’m sorry about what Robbie did. Truly I am. If I’d known what he was going to do I would have stopped him. But I’m sure you’ll be better soon and once you wake up and are able to tell us who you are, well, then you’ll be able to go home.’

  ‘Home.’

  The sound of his voice startled her. Eleanor moved back from the bed as the patient slowly opened his eyes. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

  ‘Water?’

  Eleanor reached for a glass and filled it from the jug. Hesitantly, she moved forward holding the glass to his lips. His head lifted ever so slightly from the pillow as he took small sips, his eyes remaining sleepy.

  ‘Have I got one hell of a headache,’ he muttered groggily.

  The man drank more water and then rested again, his eyes gradually clearing, focusing on her.

  ‘The Greek?’ His words were stronger.

  ‘You mean Athena? The nurse?’ asked Eleanor. ‘She’s not here.’

  The man nodded. ‘She doesn’t like me.’ He had an accent. ‘You’re Eleanor?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyebrows knitted with curiosity. ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘I heard you. You were in the paddock.’ The answer was thoughtful, as if he were sharing a dream. ‘And then in this room.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I was.’ Eleanor sat by his side, leant forward, a hand on the edge of the bed.

  ‘I’m not ready to talk.’ His fingers found hers. ‘Don’t tell the others I can talk. Not yet. They won’t understand.’