But Laura was distracted by the distinctive clop of hooves. It was not the casual syncopation of a free animal, the gait of a horse gotten loose from its pen, Laura could tell. It was the clipped pace of a horse urged on from above by the sharp jab of heel in rib. She looked around in a panic, scrabbled with the door handle. Bruce shimmied on the carpet, trying to work his way out.
‘Hang on, love,’ he called. ‘Just a tick.’ Tools clattered to the floor. Laura slipped down from the cab. Against the glare, she made out the sight of her old horse approaching, slowing to a trot. She knew the shape and sway of Posey’s rump, the stutter in her stride – the ghost of an old knee injury. ‘Make her pick her feet up,’ Bruce always said. ‘She’s walking like a donkey. She’s takin’ you for a ride.’ But Laura didn’t like to dig her heels in, the way Bruce said she should.
‘Posey! Posey girl!’
The horse didn’t flinch, walked past, ears rotating against flies. Was she deaf? Laura drew a fist across her face, smearing snot. Her world had broken down to strobes of colour, and lurching blurts of sound: the glossy caramel of the rider’s legs, hot snort of horse breath, a whinny. A brilliant wedge of sun came streaming down between clouds. It fell, a spotlight, squarely across the drive. The rider and the horse rode through it.
‘Stop!’ Laura yelled.
The rider turned on the horse’s bare back. Laura locked eyes with Joseph. He raised an uncertain hand in greeting, even as the horse walked him away. He struggled to smile, disfigured by emotion. Laura felt cold. Arrested by the look on his face, she skidded and stood, watching her friend ride her horse as though it hurt him. Joseph’s blanched knuckles, like bones against the sweat-darkened leather of the reins. His other hand was knotted in Posey’s mane. Laura recalled the envelope Bruce had handed Skinner for the ute. The word he’d used: ‘arrangement’.
‘She’s mine!’ Laura cried out. ‘Joseph!’
She threw herself along the drive then, stumbling. Rain had worn rivulets in the dirt to trip her up. She’d seen Skinner’s stock. Didn’t give a toss. A horse like Posey, no good for shows or racing, not even good to ride, wouldn’t get special treatment in a place like that. What good was she to him? Laura felt a rush of air on the back of her coat – Bruce swiping for her shoulder and missing. Gravel crunched. He caught her, held her arm above the elbow like a cuff.
Laura cried, ‘Get off.’
‘Sorry,’ Joseph’s voice cracked. ‘Dad sent me back for her.’
‘She’s mine, but! Not Skinner’s!’
‘S’alright, son,’ Bruce firmly called. ‘You go on. Blokes’ll be waiting.’
He loomed down over Laura, fingers firm. The chest of his coveralls was splattered with engine oil. Laura stared after Joseph and the horse, growing smaller all the while. She tried to drag the dead weight of Bruce along the drive. He stood firm. A sound tore out of her. She strained for the horse; Posey kept walking, rhythmically bobbing her head, as if nothing was going on.
Laura turned on Bruce, flailing. ‘You!’ Her arms windmilled his gut. ‘You sold her!’
Bruce squatted until they were the same height. He pulled her in hand over hand, like reeling in a fish. ‘It’s oh-kay,’ he whispered in the lilting voice he used to get the bridle on the horse. He stroked her hair. She struggled, then went limp. They swayed together, rocking.
‘Skinner’s not gonna look after her properly.’ Laura sobbed. ‘Posey!’ The word came out all mangled.
Bruce smiled sadly. She watched him look out over their place, from the house to the shed, the trees to the low, cold sky. ‘Funds came up a bit short, love. Had to trade her.’ A muscle tightened in his jaw. He sighed. ‘How else we gonna get ourselves a ute?’
The months broke across the year in alternating tasks: clearing, fencing, cutting wood. When the bully Blake Davies challenged Laura to an arm-wrestle at lunchtime, he got what he deserved. His fist hit the table hard enough to bruise. Everyone laughed. Blake’s face went dark.
The next day, Joseph wasn’t at school. Laura knew she and Joseph couldn’t shadow each other every second – she had too much work to do – but she still felt guilty. She had made no easy target: Joseph was the next best thing. Blake’s cricket bat had found her friend’s face, splintering. The injustice of it burned. Every time Laura looked at the rough nubs where Joseph’s two front teeth had been, she hated a little more hotly.
Her angry loathing went beyond the bully; beyond a school that did nothing to punish; beyond a town that didn’t care. It found its anchor in the grind of her daily experience: 5am wake-ups, endless lists of jobs. It wasn’t the work that she minded, not really, though her exhaustion was crushing and she felt doused in jealousy, cold and chemical as petrol, every time she overheard townie kids talking up the free time they enjoyed after school. What made Laura livid, the target she found for her rage, was simple. The soups she stirred, the sheets she changed, the fires lit and socks paired and windows washed were meant for someone else. But Kath wasn’t there.
Laura knew how to break a rabbit’s neck in one swift move; Bruce had taught her well. Blake Davies cried like a girl when she cracked his little finger.
‘Leave me and Joe alone,’ she snarled. The sound of the bone, like kindling snapped across the knee.
Laura was strong and capable, good with hammer as with axe. Bruce was bent to his dream, driven as a man recently converted to God. Their workers’ sweat wore rivulets in skin. Truck after truck loaded with logs rumbled away down the drive. They rose early and stopped working after dark. They made small gains, day by day. Even so, Laura feared that the task was simply bigger than they were.
After a couple of weeks, when he could barely stand for the ache in his back, Bruce had relented and hired more men. The trees came down. Laura liked the smokos, the way the fellas leaned up against the fallen trunks, or squatted on their haunches like rabbits, sipping thermos tea. She laughed when the men laughed, although their foreign jokes, braids of language, were mysteries to her. Still, it felt good to smile.
She kept listening for German, but none of the men spoke it. Laura wondered if she would hear those words again. She could feel her knowledge dimming with disuse, whole strands of thought gone dark. The words she remembered, shafts of light, revealing cracks.
Each night, Laura sat slumped at the kitchen table opposite Bruce and Vik. They were too tired to talk, hardly lifting their forks, muffled by ever-present sadness. But during the day, Bruce’s workers kept silence at bay with their rapid-fire banter, liquid and rolling. As they cleared each acre, Laura sensed the land growing quiet. There were fewer birds. The cockies passed overhead and kept going, heading for the far hills, still forested.
‘Good to go, I reckon,’ Bruce eventually said, when a sizeable patch of the foothill was bare. But the work did not end there – would not end, in any case, until all the hills were clear, the paddocks fenced, the sheep brought in. Then they would have a farm to run. ‘You know how it is,’ Bruce said gleefully. ‘Always another bloomin’ job to do!’
One morning Laura walked with Joseph along the part of the creek that ran down behind town, looking for a good spot to catch tadpoles. She smelled smoke; she stiffened.
Joseph happily called out, ‘Hey, Aunty!’
Laura saw them then, the group gathered at the water’s edge, fanning flames. A small campfire burned languidly. Clutching bottles of Coke, sitting cross-legged and squatting and perched on the esky with elbows on knees, they were laughing, probably at some joke. Laura fixed on the woman prodding the fire with a blackened stick. Her head was thrown back as she chortled. The mirth on her face was so absolute that Laura came to a stop. How long it had been since she’d seen a smile that big.
On the way home, she asked Joseph what had made them laugh.
His eyes did their trick, sliding away from her face. He examined dirt.
‘Nothin’,’ he said, but she pressed him until he grinned, sheepish. His smile, Laura knew, was another kind of no, just like hi
s downcast gaze. ‘It’s just. This thing of your dad’s. The farm.’ Joseph jiggled as though his skin hurt. Laura’s face felt hot. When he spoke again, his words rushed out. ‘Foolish thing to do with that place, my uncle says.’
Laura was shocked into striding ahead, as though she could walk the comment off. It was only later, while stirring soup for lunch, that she allowed the thought: Why?
That afternoon she stood with Bruce on the hill behind the house, breathing hard, staring up at the hole he had punched through the dense trees. The fallen bodies of three big gums, crashed down through growth, had left a clear view of the sky. A day’s work in felling, more in cutting and carting wood, still more in burning back the stumps.
She expressed fear: that this was to be their lives. This year, and each one after, they would do the work, and still there would be more trees to ring and fell; it would go on forever. In any case, she muttered, was the farm a good idea?
The slap came quick and fast and entirely unexpected. It wasn’t hard, but she yelped. Bruce had never hit before and never did again. Laura held the sting in place with hand on cheek, as though to cover up what he had done.
The truth was, Laura had enjoyed some parts of the clearing, as the farm in Bruce’s head began to grow in place of the bush. Chopping down, uprooting: it made the place look clean. It was a small mercy to be free of sap and splitting logs, though their lives were now reduced to the taut wires, the big spool and endless, evenly spaced posts. The men went home on Friday night; they worked all weekend. Their lives, framed by the act of cordoning off, segmenting. Laura endured dreams of tools, while Vik had nightmares – she got it into her head that the fencing would go on forever. Though it made her feel dirty somehow, Laura said nothing to calm her sister’s fears.
Up on the hill above the dam, Bruce leaned into the tray of the ute and hefted the massive spool of fencing wire onto its side. He squinted, appraising the land. Laura eyed the huge pile of arsenic-dipped posts in the tray, too-big worker’s gloves dangling from skinny wrists. Her fingers pressed the void of Bruce’s handspan. The gloves smelled of engine oil and soil. An ill-fitting second skin, they made her clumsy. A year on, they fit more closely than they had at the beginning. Perhaps that was some kind of birthday present, Laura thought ruefully when she stared at her twelve-year-old hands, roughly calloused, seeming so much older than the rest of her.
Their work had revealed something: with enough time and sweat it was possible to change the face of the land. Though its essential shape – slopes and valleys – remained, it looked vastly different from the place Kath had left behind. When Laura went through town on the way to school, she stared down at the neat dirt streets and quarter-acre blocks. Mostly she looked at the fences: picket, paling and wire. Before, it had never occurred to her that she might think of them as anything but intrinsic, even natural. Now she saw them for what they were: the consequence of human will. Of gruelling hard work.
Bruce’s checked shirt was dark beneath the arms, two wet crescents. He pressed his head into his forearm, blotting sweat. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Come on then.’
Vik sneezed, then moaned involuntarily with hay fever. Behind the glass her eyes were an albino rabbit’s – red, wet and rheumy. Twin slugs of snot lay on her upper lip.
‘Ready, Dad,’ Laura said. She forced a smile. The air was sweet with sun-warmed grass and pollen. Vik wheezed. Bruce unfolded a wrinkled grey map from his pocket, smoothed it on the bonnet of the ute. Laura looked at it again. It showed in broken lines where the fences should be built. The design was based, Bruce had said, on the sheep farm his father once owned and lost.
‘Never lived there myself,’ Bruce told Laura. ‘I was born just after they moved up to the “shitty”,’ he said with a little smile. ‘My old man talked about Cairnlea, though. Told me all about it from when I was a young bloke. Talked about it so much I reckon I could draw the place if I wanted to, clear as anything.’
And he had.
‘Here’s what we’re gonna do,’ Bruce said on the hill, as Vik and Laura climbed into the tray of the ute. He pointed to the image of the farm divided into squares by a neat greylead grid; he pointed down the slope. ‘This paddock’ll run from here to that stump over there. See it?’
Nodding, Laura squinted at the dead tree, a dot on the opposite ridge.
‘Right,’ Bruce said. ‘So from there, we fence down to the road and along to the drive.’
‘That’s a fair way,’ Laura said mildly.
Bruce grinned, chewing on a stalk of grass. ‘You remember what to do?’ he said, rubbing his hands together.
Laura ground her teeth. ‘Yes, Dad,’ she said. ‘’Course.’
Bruce took the stalk out of his mouth, spat pith and went on to explain the task again. Once the position of the fence had been marked, he would drive along the line while Vik and Laura stood in the tray and dropped posts off the back of the ute. Then there were holes to dig, posts to plant, wires to string and strain. Each paddock they completed was a record of their days: months measured in acres and wires.
‘My eyes hurt,’ Vik whispered. It was hard to tell if the forming tears were of frustration, or if it was the grass.
Bruce looked up, appraising. Laura hated the expression he wore, horribly devoid of warmth. ‘Who’s complaining?’ He went around to the driver-side door and pulled it open without a backward glance. The ute lurched.
Vik’s face crumpled. She got to her knees in the tray, groaning up like an old woman resigned to certain death. Sneezing pink mist into her hand, she didn’t look at Laura, whose chest was tight as tape.
‘I’ll see if you can stop,’ Laura said quietly. ‘I’ll ask him.’
‘No,’ Vik said, fearful. ‘Don’t!’
But Laura banged on the roof of the cab: their signal. Bruce rolled his window down.
‘Vik’s not well, Dad. Her hayfever’s real bad.’
Sighing, ute idling in neutral, Bruce heaved out of the cab and stood to look at Vik. Laura watched him weighing up. ‘Not fit for work? Best get yourself back to the house.’
He lifted Vik down as if she were a doll, set her in the grass. The engine coughed. Vik’s eyes, pinched with tears, found Laura’s face and narrowed.
Sorry, Laura mouthed, stomach sinking. It was a long walk home across paddocks, and while Vik had covered this distance a thousand times, Laura felt bad imagining the little girl trudging home alone and unwell. She hoped Vik would have the sense to put herself to bed when she got back, to brew tea: jobs Laura normally took care of. But there was no time to give instructions before the ute moved off again.
Laura called urgently, ‘Bye!’ but Vik didn’t respond. She watched her sister recede.
Warm air whistled across the ridge. Laura thought she heard something, a sound resonating just below the regular range of speech, like a voice carried a great distance; words whipped into tones by wind. She turned, stared down at the house, out along the delicate twine of road, straining to make it out again. All was quiet. Laura remembered then, clear as if her mother was with them, Kath singing a German lullaby. Vik a pink-faced baby, clamped at her breast. Steam of drying nappies hanging by the stove dampened Laura’s skin.
This happened a lot, Laura having visions. A memory would slice through, so sudden and unexpected that spit would fill her mouth. While standing in the shed, Laura saw Kath hunched over her wheel, clearly framed in the studio window, obscured by dust, hem hiked and knotted above the knee. On the bus – Vik’s first day of school – Laura caught a flicker of rosewater, an eddy of scent, and she saw her mother’s mouth: the creases that formed when Kath smiled, quotation marks in her flesh, and the crooked eyeteeth crossed like fingers. She could almost smell her mother’s particular scent. Down in the gully, floating her bark boat and trying to sink Vik’s, Laura had caught sight of her reflection. Recoiling from the image of Kath’s face, she fell gasping on the bank. Her boat, carried into the stream, went under.
The following day, a Sunday,
Bruce hauled Laura up over the gutter and set her down on the roof.
‘Take a break from fencing you reckon, love?’ he had said over breakfast, lip curled, an unfamiliar sneer. ‘While the precious invalid recovers?’
The roof was corrugated, like desert sand shaped by wind. Laura looked out at the crisp view. Wisps of mist clung to the trees, draped over boughs. Dissecting the valley, the twist of dirt drive wound down towards the road.
Laura noticed for the first time how the garden had sprouted in new ways. Kath’s lawn was long dead, but native grasses had crept in through the shabby palings that separated the bush from the yard; it was harder to tell now which was which. Laura sensed that it was only a matter of time before their house itself was engulfed.
Bruce stared hard at the landscape, as though calculating a sum. Laura could tell he was looking at the place in the distance, felt rather than known, where he believed Kath had gone in and disappeared. He glanced down at Laura with an expression that was part surprise, part something she couldn’t name. His uncomprehending gaze was focused on the knot of hands between them, her small white fingers entangled with his, big-knuckled and brown. He smiled cautiously, and for a second some outer layer of his face, a mask that had long been deforming his features, cracked away. Laura caught a glimpse of her real father, before his smile faded and the haunted weariness fell back down around his eyes.
Bruce eased himself into a squat. He had to reach out over the precipice of the verandah to remove the leaves from the gutters; an important job, he said, so that rain would run cleanly down the pipes into their tank. The spring-cool breeze brought up the sugared scent of growing things.
‘Ah, bugger it,’ Bruce said, clicking his tongue with displeasure.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Birds, love. In the eaves.’
He brought his hands to his hips. Laura waited. Down on the ground, Blackie lay in a pool of pale sunlight, looking up.
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