I spent a good part of Sunday
with the binoculars
watching the bub coming
back
and
forth
to the rim of the nest
– looking out at the world,
with an attitude of thought,
and then retreating.
Bub
spent hours today
testing his bolero wings;
unfurling them
and looking out across their tiny span
as if checking twin umbrellas
for weather-worthiness.
There’s a month still before fledging.
Bub jumps the cradle
just as the family goes on the moult
and are markedly out of sorts.
The pretty pup
(think two woolly pompoms, tacked together)
is parked in a thicket of low acacias
in case he falls
and he does
regularly fall.
For no particular reason
he unbalances
and tips off the branch,
tumbling over and over in the air,
barely stretching his wings
before hitting the ground.
His cries gather the family
in the branches all about.
They demand he get back in the air again.
Sometimes
one of them
will fly down
and beak-whip him around the head
for encouragement.
I’m thinking of building him an airstrip.
Just a cleared bit of dirt
for take-offs and landings
so we don’t,
all of us,
have to put up with his crying
and the fear he’ll be grounded
for good.
If a kookaburra damages
or loses
a feather
in mid-winter,
or even at the start of spring,
it must wait for this one annual moult
to repair
or replenish it.
Several weeks are spent
torpid,
dull-eyed,
introspective,
waiting gloomily
for the new feathers to form.
The owl lands on the guttering
above my bedroom window.
The sound of the tin under her claws
wakes me up.
An infant kookaburra is easy prey
so I’m awake
for a while,
worrying,
in the dark.
You wouldn’t say they were good parents,
or good siblings,
nevertheless,
they keep the bub alive.
They tolerate his whining,
his feeble attempts to fly
and hunt.
And as soon as there is danger
they are fierce to protect and defend.
Instinct,
from where I stand,
from on the ground,
looks like love.
The latest on the family diet:
worms,
snails (they crack the shells against the anvil
outside the dairy),
rats,
mice,
yabbies,
skinks,
moths,
millipedes,
dragonflies,
spiders,
lizards,
cicadas,
eels,
frogs,
hatchling birds,
fish,
snakes,
dog biscuits,
sandwiches,
chicken drumsticks,
sausages prepared as picnic food,
and other dainties.
Mum has a large mood on her
when she’s on the moult.
Breeding must be exhausting,
then there’s a whole new kit of feathers
to grow
year after year.
She’s the only bird
in the family
who gives her all.
They run in their new feathers
with flights around the boundary,
with trapezes
between the peppercorn and the creek trees.
Dad does the stick
– testing his new coiffure from above?
In the afternoon
the ladies hunt for frogs.
Laughing lessons
are provided for the bub.
His first attempts are chirpy;
fractured.
It’s a good few months
before he contributes
with the maniacal intensity
of the others.
What sounds insane to us
is probably just their daily newspaper –
weather forecast,
births deaths and marriages,
bragging sports reports,
general news.
Bub is losing the muddy look about the head.
His top-knot is coming in white,
his eye-stripe dark and sharp.
The rubbery
black
baby’s-beak
is maturing into bone.
He hardly begs
unless he sees the others with something tasty
and then it is only a reflex
that he’s able to override,
and get back quickly
to hunting for himself.
For the first time
I see the son
feed his mother.
He brings her a beetle
and landing inaccurately on the branch
walks sideways
claw-to-claw
in shy delivery,
in his opening act
of bird desire.
By coming early on a Sunday Harry can watch her ironing in the kitchen before tea. It’s dance hour on the wireless. The doors to the hall and the front room are open so the sound carries through to the kitchen. The smell of roast meat and scorched cotton: the pump and jiggle of her arms. She sways her head to the music, her cheeks are pink and her nose and chin are shiny. A bowl of water balances on the end of the ironing board; her stomach presses against the board, but the water doesn’t spill. Every now and then she dips her fingertips into the bowl and flicks them over the cloth. Sometimes she forgets that Harry is watching and she allows her free hand to float up next to her and move from side to side – as if she is smoothing out the notes as they waft up to meet her on the moist, beefy air.
For his birthday Harry gets a birdwatching book from Betty, a poem about insects written by Little Hazel and a handwritten docket for three days’ manure spreading from Michael. There’s a roast dinner where Betty’s potatoes are, they agree, the best of her lifetime. ‘Enjoy them,’ she says, basking wryly in her achievement. ‘It’s all downhill from here.’
When Harry gets home he places Michael’s docket and Little Hazel’s poem in the biscuit tin under his bed. His wedding ring is in there, with some sewing pins and a photograph of his mother. The bird book is English. Kookaburras aren’t mentioned and it has a grating tone – as if birds exist for the sole purpose of providing gentlemen of the educated classes with a diverting interest.
Any birdwatcher will of course be interested in the question – how do birds recognise one another? Is it call, posture or colouration – or is it a mixture of these factors? Some American colleagues completed a recent experiment to try to answer this question on a pair of flickers – a kind of American woodpecker. Male flickers have a distinctive dark moustache. A pair of flickers was observed engaging in classic courtship behaviour. The female was caught and provided with a false moustache. When she was released the male approached her confidently from behind and began to mount her. A few seconds later she turned her head to the side and he saw her moustache. Immediately he disengaged and went into h
is full anti-male aggressive display. He pursued the disguised female for over two and a half hours, repeatedly attacking her and trying to force her out of the nesting area. The experiment proves that the moustache, i.e. colouration, has a very real significance in bird-to-bird recognition.
Harry marks his place in the book and goes over to the mirror. The top of the dressing table is stamped with overlapping circles where Edna’s teacups have scorched the veneer. Because he doesn’t shave, weeks can go by without him seeing his reflection. He removes his glasses and covers his chin with his hand. He tries to imagine himself beardless, but with a neat, curving moustache. It’s a younger look, a jauntier look, the look of a film star or a salesman. As he turns his head from side to side in the mirror he notices that the tide line of his beard has moved. While the hair on his head thins, his beard is thickening and encroaching, taking over new ground. Without even trying he is becoming a stranger to himself. He gets into bed and thinks about the flicker. Is she still flying around the woodlands of America wearing her tatty false moustache? The pillow kneaded and placed at just the right angle, he lets his head drop and finds himself speaking Betty’s words aloud: ‘It’s all downhill from here. It’s all downhill from here.’
Betty sits on the back step after work with a cup of tea and Louie stretched out beside her. There’s the sound of dishes clinking in the kitchen and a magpie warbling lazily from the fence. Her watch says it’s past seven. There are badges to sew onto Little Hazel’s brownie dress, smalls to rinse, sandwiches to make, homework to check. She touches her thumb to a single wiry hair sprouting from her throat, bending it from side to side. What if she stood up now and just started walking? What if she walked across the paddock and climbed through the fence and walked right up to his door?
Mervyn Plimeroll drives the milk truck for Gannawarra, Cohuna, Wee-wee-rup and Leitchville. It’s a seven-day-a-week job, but on Saturdays Mervyn’s boy, Leslie, comes along for the ride. Mervyn drills Leslie through his times tables and if they make up a bit of time on the open road, they stop and fish for an hour on the Gunbower, always making sure that the tray of the truck is in the shade. Occasionally Mervyn lets ten-year-old Leslie drive, which he does standing up in order to reach the pedals.
This particular Saturday is grey and overcast. A storm is rolling in from the plains. It seems to be passing overhead at height. Only the very tops of the trees are swaying and the odd raindrops that spatter against the windscreen land softly, as if they have fallen from a great distance. The truck is running hot. It struggles up the driveway from Harry’s and once they turn on to the made road again Mervyn notices the needle on the temperature gauge is in the red. He pulls over and switches off the ignition. Father and son look at each other then, as they register the sound of the motor fading and the whistle from the radiator taking its place. Mervyn gets out of the truck and starts to lift the bonnet. He tells Leslie to go into the house over there, motioning with his chin at Mues’s place, to get some water.
The house isn’t far away and Leslie trots off at somewhere between a walk and a run. He sticks to the road for as long as he can. The surface of it appears to be getting darker in front of him as the rain spots join together and blot out the dust. Leslie judges his task as important, but it isn’t the first time it has happened and it isn’t an actual emergency. The house he is walking towards is much like any other old farmhouse on the outskirts of town. A higher level of dilapidation is obvious out here. In town the houses have some evidence of paint and an attempt at a garden. If he could have chosen one of these houses, houses more likely to contain a woman with flour on her apron, he would have. He pushes the gate open and waits for a second behind it in case the sound alerts a dog. No dog appears. He picks his way up the path to the front door. There is an old cane chair on the verandah, next to it an upturned hub cap full of cigarette butts, hundreds of cigarette butts. It’s not something his mother would allow, or at least not so close to the house. He knocks on the doorframe, but he doesn’t wait long for an answer. He steps off the verandah and walks through the long grass and fruit trees along the side of the house hoping to find a bucket out the back, and a tap, hoping to carry out his task without having to speak to anyone.
It’s around the back where things have come even more undone. There are five or six corrugated-iron sheds in different stages of decay and corrosion; a couple of them have lost their internal timbers to rot so the tin is askew, like giant sheets of paper. In between the sheds there are piles of engine parts, kerosene drums, broken farm machinery, tools, pieces of harness, chaff bags. An old piano sits partially cut up, an axe across the stained keys. There are more disturbingly personal items too: rotten rags, rusty cooking pans, brooms without bristles, fishing rods, clothes, women’s shoes of an old style not even his grandmother wears, books, hairbrushes, empty food tins, family pictures still in their glass frames. All of it brown and covered with dirt and being splattered by the rain. Leslie wonders what might be left in the house, if the house itself is empty with all of its contents strewn here in between the sheds. Looking at it makes him feel tired. A raindrop hits his arm and he licks at the skin where it lands. He looks in a couple of the sheds – empty, but with a smell of mould and manure. He’s aware that’s he’s taking too long, that he hasn’t found the water yet and his father will be wondering where he’s got to. The next shed along is in better repair. It’s larger and has a door. His attention is caught by a pile of dried-out cicadas that have built up around the doorjamb. The common ones, the greengrocers, are good for fishing. The papery bodies of the cicadas have lost most of their colour in death, but Leslie kneels down and fingers through them. He’s searching for some of the rarer types, a floury baker, or a yellow Monday. His father, Mervyn, is coming up behind him, so at the moment Leslie stands up and opens the shed door he’s startled by the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder and he looks up into his face to see if he is angry. Later Mervyn will tell himself that he arrived at exactly the right moment. And he will tell the police that his son did not see what he saw in the shed because he was standing behind him when he opened the door. In truth they both stood for several seconds adjusting to the dim light inside the shed. They saw the sheep lying on its side in the straw, its legs hobbled with a pair of reins and Mues behind it on his knees with his overalls down, the shoulder straps splayed out behind him like his own set of ties he had broken free of. They both saw the blue nightie lying in the straw next to the sheep. The sheep lifted its head slightly in the direction of the sound they had made with the door. Mues didn’t stop, he didn’t look up. He said, ‘Shut the door.’ And they did.
Mervyn walked Leslie back to the truck in front of him with a handful of his shirt collar gripped in his fist so Leslie thought he was in trouble and in some way responsible for what he had seen. His father told him to stay put in the cab of the truck. Leslie was too frightened to ask where he was going, or even turn around, but he watched his father in the rear-vision mirror as he ran back down the road and turned into the driveway of the dairy farm they had just collected from. Some time later he heard a motorcycle and saw his father riding behind the farmer who was also balancing a bucket on the handlebars. Rain was falling heavily now, but the two men stood behind the truck talking and made no attempt to stop themselves getting wet. A police car arrived. The policeman got out and talked to Leslie’s father and the farmer then he put his hat on and walked towards the house. The farmer filled up the radiator of the truck from the bucket, got back on his motorcycle and rode away. Then his father climbed into the cab and started the ignition. Leslie didn’t look at his father as they sat listening for the motor to catch; they both looked at the rain on the window in front of them. Then they drove away.
By the time the constable arrived at the house Mues had washed and dressed and was sitting at his kitchen table with a bottle of beer. The constable searched the outhouses and found an elderly sheep in the hayshed. A blue ladies’ nightie was hanging from a nail on the she
d wall. A drenching tube and a half empty bottle of Chinese brandy were found nearby.
Mues was charged with administering a stupefying drug with attempt to ravish, and committing an unnatural offence. The first charge was dropped before the hearing on the basis it was unlikely to succeed. It was considered unlikely a sheep could be further stupefied from its natural state, and the bottle of Chinese brandy was unavailable for chemical testing as it had disappeared from the police evidence cupboard. It was noted in court that Mues had kept the sheep for over ten years and it had been a full six-toother before relations commenced. Mues claimed he had not engaged in the act with any other of his sheep and he had no history of acting suspiciously with other animals in the vicinity. It was noted that he had never married or established a proper relationship with a woman and it was considered unlikely that any local woman would have him. In his defence Mues said, ‘It was a ewe. It’s not as if I’m a fucking homo.’ He was ordered to pay twelve pounds into the court poor box. A destruction order was raised for the sheep.
Sunday evening. It’s cold. Betty picks her way down the path to the outhouse. She can smell Louie’s urine on the base of the lemon tree – ammonia and citrus. A few steps’ detour to the chopping block and balanced there she can see across the paddocks to the outline of Harry’s house. His curtains are open. The front window is a white rectangle – an ice cube of light. He’s reading, probably, or writing, or listening to the wireless. There’s nothing much to see. She gets down and continues up the path to the outhouse, leaving the door open to the darkness as she pisses. Her legs are bare under the hitched-up skirt and she looks down at her thighs, appraising them; considering their effect on another. An envelope wedged between the weatherboards catches her eye. She tilts it from side to side to read the front. It’s addressed to Michael. The handwriting isn’t young – a careful copperplate – it looks like Harry’s. She thinks she might tease him about it. ‘Harry,’ she could say, ‘Harry, you have lovely hooks and hangers.’ She puts the envelope in her pocket. On the way back to the house she dawdles, her arms hugging her cardigan across her breasts. Without much thought she returns to the woodpile and mounts the chopping block again. She’s steadying herself on the rough surface, worrying about splinters in her slippers, when the light from Harry’s house snaps off. The window, the whole house, disappears instantly. She clutches her throat in surprise and blinks into the darkness. Cows are moving in the distance. She can hear the lazy stumble of hoof against dirt and can just make out their massed shapes floating behind the fence. The herd is heading for the trees and for sleep. She realises the cows have been watching him, too.
Mateship With Birds Page 12