The Last McAdam

by Holly Ford

  ‘Morning.’ Stan appeared in the doorway, drying a plate. Leaping up – or rather, trying to – from a sack beside the door, Peg let out a bark, sniffed, circled, and settled again.

  ‘Good morning.’ Tess looked around. ‘I like your place.’

  ‘She’s a good spot,’ Stan agreed. ‘Seen me right for a year or two.’

  It certainly looked that way. ‘How many?’ she asked, thinking of the homestead’s empty rooms.

  ‘Moved in here when I first got out of the hospital.’ He paused, apparently reading her mind. ‘Dinah – Nate’s grandmother, she was – she wanted me to live in the house, but it was already pretty busy in there back then, and’ – he took a deep breath of orchard air – ‘I’ve always liked a bit of space.’

  Vanishing briefly into the shadows again, he returned with his boots. Away in the distance, there was a flurry of barking as the working dogs were let out to begin their day.

  ‘Thank you,’ Tess said, ‘for making up the room for me yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, that was no bother, love.’ He paused. ‘Everything alright in there?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘Well.’ Having dealt with his bootlaces, he straightened. ‘I was just about to head off.’ Peg tottered to her feet as Stan stepped down. ‘Still morning like this, I thought I’d get some lettuces in.’

  In the dense shelter of the orchard, there wasn’t even a breeze. She glanced up at the tossing macrocarpa fronds, surprised that he couldn’t hear them. ‘Actually,’ she felt obliged to point out, ‘there’s a bit of wind out there already.’

  ‘Oh no, love. That’s not wind.’

  •

  A few hours later, Tess was in the middle of inspecting the woolshed – one of the few things she’d seen at Broken Creek that looked relatively shiny, straight and new – when she heard a ute pull up outside. Harry strode in, a woolly hogget slung around his neck. Judging by its sorry state, it had managed to evade all previous attempts at capture.

  ‘Get in there, you bugger.’ Unceremoniously, he dumped the sheep into a pen, where it quickly struggled back to its feet and regarded him wide-eyed.

  It wasn’t until Harry straightened up and moved to switch on the shearing stand that Tess noticed something was missing. His left arm. Turning, Harry caught her in the act of staring.

  Well, there was no point in pretending she hadn’t noticed. And clearly, given the hilarity at Nate’s joke last night, he wasn’t sensitive about the subject.

  ‘What happened to your arm?’ she smiled.

  ‘They cut it off.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tess agreed gently. ‘I thought they might have done.’ She paused. ‘I suppose I meant, what happened to it before that?’

  Shearing piece in hand, Harry stared at her nervously. ‘Nate told me not to tell you.’

  Oh, had he just? She hid a frown. ‘I’m sure it’s okay for you to tell me now,’ she said. ‘You know, since I’ve already noticed.’

  Harry looked dubious.

  Tess waited.

  ‘It got burnt in the fire,’ he muttered, finally.

  ‘The fire,’ she repeated, unable to stop her forehead furrowing this time. Oh! The fire? The one that had taken out the tops? ‘You got caught in it?’ she asked, horrified.

  ‘I was trying to put it out,’ he explained.

  ‘Yes,’ she stammered. ‘Of course.’ Bloody hell, this place wasn’t a business, it was a veterans’ home. At a loss for anything further to say, Tess stood watching as Harry clamped the hogget between his knees and set about relieving it of its ruined fleece. He wasn’t about to set a new speed record any time soon, but he was doing a pretty competent job.

  Releasing the handpiece, Harry glanced up and over Tess’s shoulder. ‘Gidday, Nate,’ he said, his voice full of guilt.

  ‘Harry.’

  Tess turned to find Nate standing behind her. Over the buzz of the handpiece, she hadn’t heard him come in. His gaze moved slowly from Harry’s face to hers and back. Harry, blushing, dropped his eyes.

  ‘Where’d you find that?’ Nate nodded at the hogget.

  ‘Cast in some matagouri by the track up to Luff’s.’ Harry shoved the shorn sheep down the chute into the yards. ‘Ewe was already a goner.’

  Nate nodded again, his eyes thoughtful. ‘We can head up to the Mill now,’ he told Tess, ‘if you’re ready to go.’

  ‘Sure.’ Leaving Harry sweeping up, she followed Nate outside, pausing briefly at the top of the woolshed steps to shade her eyes against the glare. The wind was raising small eddies of dust from the bare earth inside the sheep yards. In one corner, the shorn hogget pulled hungrily at the clumps of long dry grass below the rails, and high above, the white-patched caps of the Southern Alps stood hazily against the pale blue sky. Making her way down, Tess moved towards the door of the HiLux.

  ‘Not much point taking two vehicles up,’ Nate observed evenly. Casually, he inclined his head towards the passenger side of the old yellow Mazda. ‘You may as well come with me.’

  Shit. Desperately, Tess tried to think of some excuse to take her own truck. There must be something she needed in there, mustn’t there?

  Settling himself behind the wheel, Nate leaned across and opened the passenger door. From the flat deck behind him, two heading dogs regarded her curiously. Defeated, Tess got in.

  As the track left the valley and cut into the hills, she strove to concentrate on what she was there to see – the rough brown land rocking by outside her open window. The gully they were climbing was empty. For the most part, Broken Creek’s sheep and cattle were high on the tops, where the sheep, at least, would remain undisturbed until the autumn muster. Looking around, Tess couldn’t see a lot for them to come back to. Either side of the track, thin grazing gave way to none, bare rock buttresses jutting from hectares of shingle scree, the air above them shimmering with the fierce heat of the summer sun.

  Eventually, she caught the glare of a tin roof up ahead. At the base of two massive screes, the track petered out in front of a good-sized hut. Tess stared at it in surprise. It looked brand new. Behind its roof, a few charred tree stumps rose from the tussock, and the bluffs above the shingle were black. A painted sign above the door of the hut read ‘Harry’s’.

  Driving around the hut, Nate pulled up at the edge of the basin. Tess looked out at the new fingers of scrub creeping back up the blackened bluffs.

  ‘Tell me about Harry.’

  ‘Harry,’ Nate repeated. ‘That’s what you think we should talk about.’

  Blue. In pure daylight, his eyes were blue. Quickly, she looked away again. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’ she asked him.

  ‘No.’ Nate leaned forward, resting his forearms on top of the steering wheel. ‘We can talk about Harry, if that’s what you want.’

  Tess waited. Silence filled the cab. Oh for god’s sake. She didn’t want to sound like a heartless bitch, but if there was some sort of health and safety charge in the wind, a compensation claim, fines … Whatever it was, she needed to know.

  ‘He told you, then,’ Nate said, at length.

  ‘About the fire?’ She nodded, watching his profile. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course he did,’ Nate sighed, his stubbled cheek dimpling into a little smile. ‘That’s our Harry. I did think he might have got through day one without opening his mouth, but there you go.’

  ‘Why didn’t you want me to know?’

  ‘I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea about him.’

  ‘The wrong idea?’

  ‘It was just an accident. Could’ve happened to anyone. It wasn’t like he started it on purpose.’

  Tess caught her breath. It was Harry who’d started the fire? And he still had a job here?

  ‘What happened?’

  Nate sighed again. ‘We’d been pushing the dry stock up to the tops, and we were headed back down. Harry stayed behind to help Stan pack up the hut. He took a bucket of ashes out, tipped the billy over them, went down to the creek for another buc
ket just to be sure. By the time he got back, the wind had blown the ashes up and the fire was away. He tried to beat it out with a blanket, but once it hit the scrub it started to burn pretty hot. Nobody’s too sure what happened after that, but I guess the blanket dried out and Harry got it wrapped round his arm somehow …’

  Jesus. Tess swallowed. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘Anyway, the rest of us hightailed it back up here as soon as we saw the smoke, but by then it was too late to do much except pick up Stan and Harry and get the hell out.’

  She nodded, looking out at the tinder-dry grass. It was terrifying to think how fast a fire would spread across this country. ‘And you – your dad – you never blamed him?’ she asked softly. ‘Harry, I mean?’

  Nate shrugged. ‘When we got up here, Stan had managed to get Harry into the creek. He was rolling around in there begging us to shoot him. My stepfather Bob had brought up a .308 for tahr. By that time, the fire had jumped the gully and was into the saddle where we’d just pushed the stock, and I think Bob considered it.’

  She watched his face. ‘But you kept him on.’

  ‘Nobody paid a higher price for that fire than Harry did.’

  Thinking of the millions of dollars the station had had to pay out in damages, Tess wasn’t entirely surely she agreed.

  Nate turned his head to look at Tess, his eyes holding hers as his forehead creased. ‘You know how a rabbit screams? You ever heard a human do that?’

  Tess shook her head.

  ‘It isn’t something you forget.’ He turned away again, staring up at the tops. ‘It was a dumb thing to do. But any of us could have done it.’

  Following his gaze, she chewed the inside of her upper lip. He was right, of course. An accident like that could happen to anybody. All it took was a moment’s inattention. But … a one-armed stockman who’d started the biggest grassfire in living memory? Harry wasn’t exactly going to top anyone’s job candidates list when he left Broken Creek.

  ‘You do realise,’ Tess said slowly, ‘I couldn’t fire Harry for something that happened before his contract started. Even if I—’ She broke off.

  ‘Even if you wanted to?’ Nate stared at her drily. ‘Yeah. I know that.’

  Tess felt herself wilt a little under his gaze.

  ‘I just didn’t want you to make up your mind about him,’ he said, ‘before you got to know him.’

  Catching the edge in his voice, she blushed. Were they still talking about Harry? ‘I make up my mind,’ she told him, ‘when I know all the facts.’

  Abruptly, Nate pushed open his door.

  ‘This snow fence,’ he said, leaning on the roof of the cab as Tess clambered out of the other side. He paused, allowing her time to take in the huge vista of endlessly shifting shingle screes. ‘Show me where you think it should go.’

  Well, lower, obviously. She looked back the way they’d come.

  ‘Those two creeks there,’ Nate said, nodding at the dry, tumbled beds descending from the base of each scree, their courses strewn with massive boulders. ‘They scour out every spring. That’s why this block is called the Mill. The snow melts, the rocks start coming down. You can hear them grinding from the woolshed.’ He paused. ‘A fence wouldn’t last a season.’

  Tess narrowed her eyes. Why hadn’t he just said that in the first place? And anyway, what if it didn’t? It could always be patched. The man-hours involved would be—

  ‘It’d cost more to fix the fence,’ Nate said, ‘than it does to get the sheep back.’

  When you had three guys sitting around on the payroll with nothing better to do than look for missing stock every time it snowed, maybe, yes. But one man could make a scheduled repair to a fence once a year. A bit of wire and a few fence posts didn’t add up to eight months’ salary. That sort of logic was a perfect example of what was wrong with this place.

  Tess’s thoughts scattered as Nate walked around the cab to stand beside her. Horrified at her body’s response to his nearness, she turned her back on him, trying to concentrate on the topography of the narrow valley below. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his shoulders hunch as he thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  His voice, just behind her right shoulder, raised the hairs on the nape of her neck. ‘Things aren’t always how they seem on paper,’ he said.

  ‘I know that.’ Tess tried not to snap. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Where did you go?’ Nate’s voice was low. ‘That night – Ash’s wedding – what happened to you?’

  Oh god. They were doing this, were they? Now? ‘I …’ Tess shook her head. What the hell could she say? ‘I went home.’

  ‘Why? I thought …’ The bafflement in his voice made her squirm with guilt. ‘I was looking for you. I didn’t know if you were okay.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It just … I … it didn’t feel right.’

  ‘You could have said that,’ he said softly. ‘We could have gone back inside. You didn’t have to run away.’

  ‘I know,’ Tess said quickly. ‘I know that. I’m sorry.’ Taking a deep breath, she turned back towards him. ‘Thank you for – for not telling anyone. The other guys, I mean.’

  Nate sighed. ‘You don’t have a very high opinion of me, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know you.’ She steeled herself to look him in the eye. ‘And you don’t know me.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he nodded, his expression serious. ‘How about we take it from the top, you and I?’

  Tess’s mind flew back to his hand enclosing her wrists, her all-but-naked body opening to him. God, what was it about him that did this to her? The pull she felt to him was very close to overwhelming. If he moved a centimetre towards her now it was going to be all over bar the regrets. ‘Okay,’ she managed, her voice hoarse in her own ears. ‘From the top.’ She dropped her gaze to the grass.

  Slowly, Nate took a step back. One of the dogs trotted up to press itself against his knee, and he dropped a brief hand to its upstretched muzzle. ‘I’ll go check the hut,’ he said.

  Finding herself suddenly able to breathe again, Tess folded her arms beneath her breasts, her hands hugging her ribs as she watched him walk away.

  Four

  On the homestead’s peeling veranda, Tess paused, quietly assessing the Broken Creek men talking among themselves on the lawn as she readied herself to join them. Nate, Harry, Stan – and Mitch. What was his story? He was standing a little apart from the rest, his thoughts appearing to be elsewhere even as his dark eyes moved from man to man, following the conversation with a concentration that creased his forehead. The lower half of his face was hidden behind a short beard, and he held his neck low, his broad shoulders slumped, as if to apologise for being taller than Nate. Tess chewed her lip. So the station owed Stan his sight and Harry an arm – what did it owe Mitch?

  She averted her eyes as Nate turned her way, busying herself in breaking open the fresh sixpack of beers she’d brought out from the kitchen.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about Mitch.’

  Tess looked up to find Nate leaning on the post beside her. ‘What?’ she frowned.

  ‘You were wondering what’s wrong with him.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes you were.’ Nate’s voice was matter-of-fact. ‘The answer’s nothing.’

  ‘Good,’ she told him acidly. ‘I’m pleased to hear that.’ Very pleased – at least there was somebody here she could fire with a clear conscience. She handed Nate a beer. Taking it from her, he settled down on the veranda’s top step. Seeing how at home he looked there, Tess felt another pang of guilt. He’d been doing that all his life, she supposed. Now he was a visitor in his own home.

  Cautiously, Tess seated herself on the other side of the step. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the knees of her jeans as she watched the men on the lawn below. ‘How long has Mitch worked here?’

  ‘He’s been back nearly’ – there was a pause as Nate worke
d it out – ‘five years now.’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘He grew up here. His dad was stock manager for the best part of ten years.’ Nate sipped his beer. ‘Mitch and I went to school together.’

  ‘Primary school,’ Tess guessed, thinking of the single classroom she’d passed out on the main road.

  ‘Boarding school too,’ Nate nodded, his eyes on Mitch. ‘Right through to the end. Mitch’s family had moved on from here by then, bought a place of their own.’

  ‘But you kept in touch?’

  ‘Yeah, off and on. When we left school, I went to uni at Lincoln, and Mitch was up north doing his Air Force training, so it was mostly through Bob and the family. You know how it is.’

  So that was how Mitch had wound up with the job of flying the station’s Robinson R22.

  On the lawn, Harry glanced back at them over his shoulder. Seeing Nate there, he and the others began to make their way up the lawn to the steps, Peg in the lead, Harry keeping an eye on Stan and the dog, and Mitch bringing up the rear. Tess got to her feet. Right. Time to get on with organising the calf-marking muster.

  She’d meant what she’d said to Nate the day she’d arrived. She had no plans to rush into any changes. She had to know how the system worked before she could make it more efficient. Tomorrow, they’d muster the cattle as Broken Creek always did, with horses and dogs as well as Mitch in the helicopter. Next season, Tess very much hoped, would be a different matter.

  In no position to direct stockmen over country she’d barely seen, she handed out the beers and stood back to let Nate do his job. He was good at it, she had to admit. He was assigning the same tasks the men did every year, but Harry and Mitch gave their full attention to every word.

  As he finished, he turned to her as if – Tess swallowed her surprise – he was seeking her approval. Which he already had, since they’d been over his plan before she called this evening’s meeting. She nodded, wishing she had something useful to add. Oh – there was one thing.