Hope's Road

by Margareta Osborn

  She picked up the wrapped packages one at a time and wrestled them into the formal lounge room. It still looked like a tip after Shon’s exodus. She checked out the walls. Lots of dead relatives and landscape prints. Nup. Not in here.

  She dragged the prints into the family room with its saggy, worn leather chairs and dining table piled high with mail and farm journals. Last week’s papers, The Weekly Times, Stock and Land – Shon liked to keep on top of what was happening in the farming world. Tammy would have liked to as well but she rarely had the time. And like most dairy farmers, once she sat down she inevitably fell asleep.

  A Coonara heater stood solidly in the fireplace. On the mantle bride and groom beamed from their wedding photo. Correction: she beamed at the world, Shon just looked smug. The cat who had finally got the cream.

  Tammy hauled down the picture, throwing it onto the floor, face first. It was destined for the big skip-bin at the dairy.

  She dusted her hands together and unwrapped one of her new purchases. And there was the angel in all her glory, standing on the edge of a cliff, leaning into the wind. Scenting freedom. The second print was next. The sphinx-angel flying. The expression on her face was still one of happiness and love, just as Tammy remembered. She herself yearned for those feelings.

  She went to the kitchen and riffled in the pantry until she found a few solid hooks, measuring tape and a hammer. Back in the family room she marked the right spots and hammered three hooks into place. Then she wrestled the prints up on the wall. Hands on hips, she stood back and studied the results of her labour.

  The prints looked perfectly at home. They belonged there. Now all she had to do was wait for Alice to get number three and the set would be complete. In the meantime she could start doing what the pictures were surely telling her to do. Get her life back. One step at a time.

  Tammy walked over to the answering machine, which was flashing a message, something she hadn’t noticed when she first came in. Hitting the replay button she heard the voice of one of the irrigation district’s water planners.

  ‘Hi, Tammy. Just ringing to let you know your irrigation water has been brought forward to start at ten o’clock tonight. Any queries, ring the Irrigators’ Line. Thanks.’

  Damn! In all the drama of Shon leaving and Joe’s accident she’d forgotten about the water. She checked her watch. Nine-thirty. She’d better head to the paddock and set things up to irrigate, especially now it was coming earlier than she expected. She could check the cows while she was there. Some people in the district had been having trouble with bloat, thanks to the out-of-the-ordinary amount of humidity they’d been getting this season. The sultry conditions were conducive to producing heaps of clover in the pastures. The hollow stems of the plant caught lots of air, which fermented in the rumen and caused the cow to almost strangle.

  That afternoon, before he milked, Jock would have sprayed the overnight pastures with anti-bloat oil mixed with water using the boom spray. All the same, it didn’t hurt to check.

  Tammy grabbed a quick drink of water then headed back out the door, shrugging into a short coat as she went. The wind would be damn cold on the motorbike.

  After turning the four-wheeler’s engine over and pulling on a helmet, she swung the vehicle out of the yard and headed up the laneway towards the Billabong paddock.

  She found her big no-nonsense spotlight in the old milk crate strapped to the front of the bike. Plugging it into the power, she swung it out across the paddock. A couple of cows moved into view. They were sitting down, not doing too much. A few more passed through the beam, then they were gone, and the light slung itself across an empty paddock.

  Where was the rest of the herd?

  Tammy pivoted her spottie back and took a closer look at the small mob standing in the light. They were staggering sideways, looking for all the world like they were trying to belch.

  Tammy swore and focused the torch back on the cows not doing too much. Realised they were stock still. Legs stuck straight out, parallel with the ground, stomachs distended like big round balls. Big, round dead balls.

  Fuck!

  She spun the four-wheeler on a fifty-cent piece and roared up to the gateway that led into the Billabong paddock. Grabbing a Dolphin torch from the carry-all, she leaped over the gate and ran down the hump of the delver channel to where the cows lay – on the wrong side of the electric fence. Three of them. Stone cold dead.

  Fuck! Fuck!

  The bastards had got through the electric tapes which acted as a gate into the next paddock. Tammy hurdled the remaining tape that sat a foot off the ground and into the offending pasture.

  A couple of older cows were propped on the delver channel bank, head up on the high side, bum down on the low, mouths open, trying to belch. That they’d had experience with bloat before was obvious and, even though she was in a panic, a tiny part of her brain applauded them for their ingenuity.

  Further across the paddock, at least four cows were staggering, heads out, mouths open and in extreme pain. Two others were down but still moving. Not dead. Yet.

  She hurdled back over the tape, ran the delver again, leaped the gate and rushed back to the motorbike, hoping her pocket knife lay buried in the milk crate among baling twine, irrigation pipe plugs, poly-fittings and cattle tags. It wasn’t there.

  Fuck!

  Tammy jumped back on the bike and took off towards the dairy, spinning wheels and throwing dirt and gravel into the air. The spotlight jumped crazily up and down on her lap, still sending out light beams on the water pooling in the irrigation channel to her right. She ignored it. Her eyes and mind were set on the dairy.

  She had to find a knife.

  Chapter 19

  Travis Hunter was tired. Plum tuckered out. Whoever said sitting around waiting didn’t bugger the hell out of you had never sat in a hospital.

  He looked across at his son. The boy was sound asleep, head slightly cocked back and tilted to the side, resting on the ute’s window. His mouth was open and a delicate snore wheezed from his throat every second or third breath. The boy had done well. Not too many kids would have taken an afternoon and a night sitting around a hospital with such grace, let alone good behaviour.

  Trav sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. He could see McCauley’s Hill. Only a few miles to go, then home and bed.

  Old Joe had come out of his operation okay. Groggy, in pain, but still slinging abuse at anyone who came within earshot. Demanding to be allowed to get up and walk out that hospital door. Finally someone had given him a shot of painkiller, which sent him to sleep. Trav never thought he’d be grateful for drugs. But tonight he was. It’d been awful to watch.

  A light out to his left caught his eye. It was bouncing a few feet above the ground. A motorbike, perhaps? Trav checked where he was. His mind had gone onto auto-pilot and numbed out all geographical markers a half-hour back. It was a wonder he’d even caught McCauley’s Hill. Although the hulking great monstrosity was kind of hard to miss. He must be level with Montmorency Downs because just up ahead of him was the section of boundary fencing, replaced after an accident that killed a young girl.

  The light bounced some more, then stopped. Hovering. Trav pulled the ute over to the side of the road and turned off the headlights. He checked his watch: nine-forty. Late enough, especially for a dairy farmer. What was going on? Her fool of a soon-to-be-ex-husband causing mischief? Although by the sounds of what Mrs Parker had said, he’d have better things to be doing at this time of the night. Trav shuddered. Joanne Purvis certainly didn’t do it for him.

  Was the light moving once more? No. Not quite. A light was moving, but it wasn’t the same one. This one was dimmer but no less energetic. Bounce, bounce, halt. Swing around. Bounce, bounce, halt. Swinging the other way. It was heading back towards him, moving faster, bobbing across the air like a ball in motion. Then the stronger light was back, zooming across the bla
ckness of the night. Weird. It might pay for him to check it out. Casting another look across at the sleeping Billy, Travis started the ute again and headed towards the gate of Montmorency Downs.

  He peeled off the road and up the gravel into Tammy’s farm. Cautiously at first, simultaneously watching the light. Suddenly it struck him: the brightness was coming from the headlight of a motorbike that was belting towards the homestead, flat out roaring towards the dairy, which he had in his ute’s headlights. He brought the vehicle to a halt outside the milk-room roller-door, the access for the tanker to collect the daily load of white liquid gold.

  The motorbike screeched to a halt beside him and Tammy flung herself off it, running towards the air-space between the milk-room and the dairy itself. He was sure she clocked him in her peripheral vision but she didn’t stop. ‘What’s up?’ he called. Silence. He moved into the gloom after her and was suddenly blinded as a brilliant floodlight came on somewhere above his head. A sensor light. Tammy hadn’t tripped it off, but something he had done sure had.

  She appeared again, helmet still on her head, a cracker of a knife in her hand. Now he understood why she hadn’t heard him. The helmet. But to come at him with a knife? And she still kept coming, knife in the air. She was crying. He shot a glance towards the still-running ute. He hadn’t wanted to turn it off in case the boy woke up. He calculated his chances of making it inside the cab before she got to him. Not a chance. He’d have to face her down. Like a wild dog.

  She was saying something. ‘Travis. Hunter!’ And then she was in front of him, the dagger glinting brightly in the glare from the floodlight. His arm was moving to block the blow, knock the knife from her hand. She spoke again, ‘Help me! The cows.’

  Cows? ‘They’ve got through the tapes into the next paddock. Three dead, another just about. Others are staggering. It’s bloat.’ Then she was gone, back on the bike, roaring out of the yard.

  Trav let out a huge sigh. To think he’d thought . . . ? Hell, he must be really tired. He slung a glance up towards McCauley’s Hill. Visualised his bed. Warm, comfortable. And then he thought of the face of the woman who’d just lit out of the yard like all the demons of hell were on her tail. The tears. The look of devastation. He ran back to his ute – his son was still sleeping – got in and took off after Tammy.

  When he found her she was down on her knees, like she was praying. That wasn’t going to do her much good, he thought, looking at the mayhem in the paddock. Cows seemed to be suffocating all around him, not to mention the couple on the ground already dead.

  Again he left the ute running to keep the boy asleep, climbed through the fence and set off across the paddock towards her. When he got there she was kneeling in the most disgusting mess of fermented green stuff he’d ever seen. The contents of a cow’s first stomach – the rumen. She’d used the knife to puncture the cow’s side in the centre of a triangle between the last rib and the hip. Tammy had her hand through the slit, inside the cow, and was pulling more and more green muck out of the stomach. ‘Can you do this for me while I do another?’ Her tone was urgent, her breath came in short pants. ‘You just need to make sure the air keeps coming out the gash and the hole doesn’t get blocked by all the fermenting grass.’

  Trav nodded, kneeled down in the muck beside her and took over the job. The stink was putrid, but he’d smelled worse – far, far worse – in his line of work. Tammy had moved quickly to the cow she obviously judged as the next worst. This one was still standing. He watched as, by the light of the torch, she assessed where to stab with her knife. Then a dull thunk. A hiss of air, like a football being let down or a deflating car tyre. Almost instantly the cow could breathe again. The gagging mouth seemed to close and the need to belch didn’t appear so urgent.

  It was a few more minutes before Tammy spoke. ‘I’ll have to get them all up to the yards at the dairy and give them a drench of bloat stuff. And then there’s these two to sew up. I’ll have to call the vet.’ Her voice seemed to catch on the end of the word ‘vet’. Trav couldn’t imagine what the bill was going to be. ‘Can you help me?’ she asked.

  And he wondered, as well, how much that particular plea cost her. He could hardly turn his back on her now, could he? ‘What do you want me to do?’

  The vet had been and gone. Billy had slept through the lot and was now sitting in Tammy’s family room watching late-night telly. Not the best place for an ten-year-old to be at two in the morning but, hey, he couldn’t do much about it.

  ‘So what happened, exactly?’ Trav asked, curious.

  ‘The fence must have a short in it. There are electric tapes in all those paddocks along that side of the farm. It’s cheaper and easier than hanging gates. Especially when I’ve only got a single electrified wire separating one paddock from the next.’ Tammy sighed loudly as she set some solid chunks of fruitcake on a plate. ‘I swear cattle have a sixth sense when it comes to knowing there’s power down in an electric fence.’

  ‘But don’t you use bloat oil or something? Spray the pad­docks before they’re grazed?’

  ‘Yes, but they have to be sprayed just before the cows go in or it’s a waste of time. Jock would’ve sprayed the paddock they were supposed to be in, but not the one next door. And rightly so. It’s my own stupid fault. I should have run the volt meter over those fences, damn it.’

  Travis thought about that. The woman couldn’t be everywhere doing everything. ‘You weren’t to know about the fence just like you weren’t to know about the cows getting into that clover. You’ve been a bit busy.’ Trav tried his half-smile. He’d been using it a bit lately. He’d found over the years that it worked with most women. Made them smile back at least.

  But Tammy was oblivious, intent on pouring boiling water into the cups and splashing in some milk. He felt something kick deep inside his gut, and was shocked to realise he was irked. And disgruntled. And that pissed him off even more. So he sat back in the chair of this grandiose house with its stiff air of formality and tried to make himself feel comfortable. Told himself it didn’t matter that this woman hadn’t noticed his attempt to make her feel better about herself. They sat and drank their tea in silence. The only sound to disturb the night air, other than the quiet slurps of hot tea, was the TV murmuring to a young boy in another room.

  ‘We’d better go, it’s late.’ Trav got up and looked unnecessarily at the clock. He’d been watching the second-hand tick around for the last little while, not sure what to do, what to say. He couldn’t make inane comments like, ‘Nice house you’ve got here.’ It wasn’t his thing. Plus, her house was a tip. All kinds of shit spilled from drawers everywhere.

  ‘Right. Yes,’ said Tammy, looking uncomfortable. She got up too and stood watching him, her arms folded across her chest.

  ‘Billy! In the ute,’ he called to the boy. Billy jumped up immediately, turned off the TV and scooted on outside.

  ‘He’s a good boy,’ said Tammy, watching him go.

  ‘I know,’ said Trav.

  ‘Do you? Do you really?’ She was giving him a weird look.

  It was late, he was knackered, and clearly so was she. ‘I’ll see myself out,’ he said, finally.

  At the car he helped his son into the passenger seat.

  ‘Thank you,’ a voice said behind him. Trav spun round. Tammy stood in the shadows of the big old house. ‘Thanks for your help,’ she said again. God, that voice was a doozy. So sweet and sexy, playing around his ears like a song of seduction. And it seemed she had no idea of its power. Her brow was slightly scrunched in a look of despair. Her vulnerability made his toes curl with the desperate need to soothe. His hand went up, without him even knowing it was in the air, like he was going to tuck a piece of Tammy’s hair back behind her ear. The silky strands were weaving around crazily in the breeze. But he realised what he was doing before he made contact and his hand fell.

  He glanced at Tammy to see if she’d noticed. Her
face was still sad. From nowhere came the urge to kiss her. To wipe all the misery away. Make her forget the past few hours, in fact the whole day. Unconsciously he felt his body lean forwards towards hers. But then he pulled back. What was he thinking? She was hell on wheels normally. A fiery piece who was still married.

  Abruptly he got into his ute, gunned the engine, tipped a hand to an imaginary hat and took off, leaving Tammy standing alone in the moonlight, still rocking back and forth, arms crossed. As he made his way down her drive towards Hope’s Road, Trav wondered just what it was with this woman, why she made him feel so protective. He watched her in the rear-vision mirror as he drove away, until she became a dark shadow that blended with those of the old homestead.

  Chapter 20

  ‘I’m not having no fucking grab bars and what-not in my shack. What do you think I am, a bloody cripple?’

  It was a week or so after the operation and why in the heck Tammy had agreed to help organise Joe’s return home, she would never know. The nursing home option was looking mighty good at the moment. The old man was in full flight.

  ‘And as for having other people on me place, you can bloody f­orget it!’

  ‘But Mr McCauley, as I have been trying to inform you,’ Susan, the aged care coordinator, insisted, ‘you are entitled to a post acute-care package for six weeks that includes home help, visits from the district nurse and Meals on Wheels.’

  ‘But I don’t want it!’ Joe slumped back on the hospital pillows, exhausted from all the yelling.

  ‘Maybe you’d better rest, Uncle Joe, while Susan and I sort things out.’ Tammy was rewarded with an icy glare. She wasn’t sure if that was for calling him uncle or all the other stuff Susan was trying to force down his throat. A care package? It sounded like they were talking about a holiday, or a home loan. But at least he’d stopped yelling. That had to be a bonus.