Cleanskin Cowgirls

by Rachael Treasure

  The cattle in the yard started and crushed to the far railing, but settled quickly. The sound of the gun, the smell of the manure, the steel yards and truck, brought memories of the abattoir house rushing back like a kick to Tara’s head. It wasn’t just in her bedroom in the dead of the night that Dwaine had preyed on her. She suddenly remembered the chilling room, where, in the icy air, Dwaine, hot, fatty, sweaty, had cornered her and groped at her budding baby breasts and gripped at her crotch. He would then take up the rifle and put it under her jaw, telling her she’d be dead meat if she told. Like the tats on his fingers that had L-O-V-E and H-A-T-E, he would spell the word D-E-A-D. After he was done, he’d leave her in the chiller and go out and shoot the next beast waiting in the bloodied, shitty yard. Suddenly giddy, Tara tried to drag a breath in. Panic choked her. As she moved to get down off the truck, she dropped the torch. Grappling for the railing, her fingers missed, then she slipped and fell.

  Her back hit hard on the rocky ground. Her breath was shocked from her. Gulping from a black-hole open mouth, Tara’s eyes were wide with surprise. Pain shot from her lower back down one leg. She tried again to breathe but couldn’t. She could hear the metal clang of the yards as Gordon ran to her, calling her name. Next he was kneeling beside her, concern on his face in the darkness. She thought of the yoga breathing she had practised in her room on nights she couldn’t sleep in the abattoir house. She began to still her mind and drift light throughout her body. The first breath came. Gulped in like a newborn baby. Then another and another until she was laughing.

  ‘Far out, Tara, you scared the shit out of me!’

  She began to sit up.

  ‘Woah, take it slow, that’s a high fall you just took. I’m surprised you’re laughing. Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Because it hurts like hell and if I don’t laugh I’ll cry.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with crying?’ Gordon asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Tara’s face scrunched with pain. Physical pain, and the pain of the past, which washed throughout her body as though a dam bank had given way. She began sobbing and, gathered up in Gordon’s arms, released all the hurt, the shame and the guilt from her body, crying over those black-death times at the abattoir house.

  He shushed her. ‘What is it, girl? What is it?’

  She felt him stroke the back of her head. ‘I remembered something. Up on the truck. My, uh, stepfather. He was a bad man.’ She swiped her tears from her face. They sat for a time. ‘A real Barry Crocker.’

  ‘I’m hearing you, girl. It’s OK. You’re away from it now. You’re safe now.’

  ‘But I’m not. It’s with me every day. I try to read books. I try to be sunny and happy, but it’s like a cloud. It sits there; it makes my world black.’

  ‘Gawd, you poor darlin’. Don’t worry, love,’ Gordon said. ‘After Christmas when Vera’s back, she’ll get you in to see someone in Mt Isa. Help you out about it. OK?’

  ‘Sure, I’ll go see someone, but at the moment,’ Tara lifted her face and turned her large green eyes up to Crack’s, ‘I-I . . .’ she stammered, ‘I just want to see you.’

  She moved her face nearer to his, giving him every opportunity to kiss her, but he turned his head to the darkness. ‘Sweetie,’ he said, looking up to the stars, but did not release his hold of her. ‘I can’t, mate.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Awkward,’ said Tara, shuffling away from him with her sore bones.

  Still Crack did not let her go. ‘I’m married, mate, and that means something to me. I love my wife. You’re the best girl that’s landed here in my time, but you have to see you’re feeling this way because you’ve found the first fella in your life who’s been good to you. But I’m an old bloke who made a choice a long time ago to live with integrity. That comes with control. I’d hurt you. I’d hurt Elaine. I’d hurt myself. I can’t do it.’

  Tara smiled sadly. Of course, she thought, he’s right. She would lose all admiration for him if he was led around by his desires like Jake was. And besides, she suddenly realised, he wasn’t the first man to be good to her. It was Amos. Amos. Her heart sang his name.

  ‘Well, I’m a little embarrassed then,’ she said, pulling away from him.

  ‘Don’t be. You’re not the first kid to get a crush on his or her boss. And you won’t be the last. I understand, String Bean.’ His voice was so kind. So gentle. His face so sad. He looked suddenly like an old man to her. A handsome man, but one far too old for her. What had she been thinking?

  He took her hand and helped her up. She realised she couldn’t read about these sorts of things in a book. She had to learn about her feelings herself. Life was excruciatingly painful, and ridiculous at times. But funny too. She swiped a grimy tear from her face, her hands still shaky.

  ‘You sure you’re OK?’ Gordon pulled her to him gently and gave her a squeeze.

  She stepped back and nodded. ‘You’re a good man, Gordon Fairweather. I wish more were like you. The world would turn gentler.’

  He chuckled and she wrapped her arms about herself and watched him put the rifle back in the lockable box in the truck cab.

  ‘C’mon, String Bean. Off to bed. A sleep-in and light duties for you in the morning. Gracie normally is our first-aid girl, but as she’s away you’ll have to be checked over by Mrs Simpson. Come with me and stop by the kitchen and we’ll get you a packet of peas. You’re going to be sorer than a buckjumper that’s come off in the chute tomorrow.’

  Feeling as though some kind of twisted knot inside her had let go, despite the pain from the fall, Tara followed Gordon, looking up at the stars and thanking the angels she had been sent one in dusty denim and a big stained hat to guide her here on earth.

  Thirty-seven

  Tara woke up the next morning, aching all over, unable to shake a vague feeling of unease. Something in the night had settled inside her like a dark cloud. Something misaligned. It wasn’t over Gordon. She felt at peace with that.

  She searched in her mind’s eye, but got nothing. Sighing, she reached under her bed for her numerology chart, feeling a searing tug in the shoulder she had landed on. Next month she would turn seventeen. No matter how she played with the charts, the numbers looked good for her. Opportunities abounded. Maybe, she thought, as she got up from her bed, it’s just the fall from the truck. Her jarred back and body were rigid and sore, so her chakras would have been jolted too. She lay back down and spent some time bringing light through her body like she’d taught herself from a book she’d read about ‘energy centres’.

  She looked through the gauze screen door at Marbles, who was sleeping in his usual nest of old hessian feedbags. He barely flopped a tail in greeting as Tara dressed and went outside to a low grey sky and heat that clung to her skin. Stooping to pat him, Tara looked up and wondered if it would rain. If it did, would the cleanskin stock-camp crew be stranded? Elsie stuck out there with Jake. She here, alone at the station. She dragged on her boots, wincing a little, and clumped down the steps. The old dog didn’t even make a start to follow her to the kitchen.

  ‘Not coming, Marbs?’ Tara called over her shoulder. ‘Is it because Mrs B’s on holidays? No cook-up for you?’

  The dog sighed and laid his head between splayed feathered paws. She trudged back to pat him again. The day was already muggy.

  ‘Dear old boy,’ she said, ‘I’ll sneak you some bacon later.’

  Not long after, as Tara sat in the breakfast room eating cereal alone, she heard the gate swing open.

  ‘How are you?’ Skye asked, arriving in the kitchen, freshly showered in a cornflower-blue sundress and flats. ‘Gordon said you had a fall.’

  Tara’s grin held a bit of a grimace. ‘I’m all good. Just slipped.’

  Skye looked at her with a questioning expression.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Tara said with conviction.

  ‘I’ve still got to check you over, then if you’re fit enough, would you be up for some more fenging around the station?’ />
  ‘More fenging! Yes please!’ Tara said excitedly, all sense of unease fading away.

  She remembered one day after school when the Poo Crew had stolen through the shit-ponds fence and adventured beyond as far as the tip site. There on the rubbish piles they had found all manner of treasures. Elsie, an old cream can filled with cobwebs; Zac, a Holden wheel hub with a lion emblem; Amos, a perfectly good screwdriver with a pink handle; and Tara, a big folder containing Marie Diamond’s notes and CDs on feng shui.

  Tara had gazed at the folder with wonder, as if angels were handing it to her, and deep within her pre-teen body, she knew they had. This tatty Diamond Feng Shui was her jewel! She had taken the folder home, hidden behind her back as she scuttled past her mother, then later in her bedroom sponged off an oily substance that smelled a lot like tuna and delved into the rather sticky pages. She hid the book under her bed and at night drew charts and diagrams, then on her mum’s old Discman listened to the CDs stored in plastic in the back of the folder.

  She learned to escape what she now called ‘her Dwaine Pain’ through Marie’s meditations. And then, so she could at least control some aspect of her life, she began to empower herself by changing her bedroom using feng shui techniques. With time she started to move things about and clean in the lounge, bathroom and kitchen. Dwaine of course cursed her, but Tara knew the book was the foundation for her survival. She knew she wasn’t just cleaning for the sake of it. She could now see it was all part of an energetic flow. If she changed the energy of the house, she could some day soon escape. The world would propel her forwards to beautiful places she had only ever dreamed of.

  Now, on Goldsborough, as she cleaned and decluttered in Gracie’s office with Skye, Tara moved into a kind of flow. All morning the radio had crackled and buzzed with the excitement of another muster on the northern boundary. Voices came and went. She knew Gordon was making his way back out to the stock camp in the truck. On the radio, the bull-catcher boys and Dunk reported to Michael an estimate of how many more bulls had been spotted from the chopper and how many could be run in by that night.

  Tara was glad to be away from Elsie and Jake and free of the delusional crush she’d had on Gordon. She could now admire him without the clutter of a love-sick hormonal teenage brain and here she was, getting paid to practise her calling. She didn’t have to be on a horse to be a cleanskin cowgirl. She was still being one now. She flung open the door of the room that held many of the station files and was met by a blockbuster hit of stench. Tara wrinkled her nose as she entered, searched and at last retrieved a somewhat mummified mouse from behind one of Gracie’s filing cabinets.

  ‘You’d think a wildebeest had died in here. How do such little teeny creatures give off that much pong?’

  Skye looked up from where she was rearranging the stationery supplies into a cupboard and laughed. ‘Gracie will be so grateful you found it. It was driving her mad. She can’t cope with them.’

  Elusive dead mice were common on the station and during plague times bed legs had to be sat in ice-cream containers filled with water so that the tiny rodents didn’t join sleepers overnight. Newbies soon became immune to the sight on waking of several drowned nightly visitors. Even Dorris, Gordon and Elaine’s Jack Russell, got bored with diving on mice and flinging them with one chomp to their death. The incessant numbers and pestering of the mice during a plague meant a mouse could scuttle under her nose without her even opening an eye. The crew had got so immune to the smell of mice knocked over by bait that they often went for days enduring the pong before someone bothered to look behind a fridge or under a wardrobe. Goldsborough people learned not to breathe too deeply when in the vicinity of the tiny hidden corpse. But not Gracie. She would pincer her nose, squeal and complain until the office had been turned upside down. As she was away on holiday, dead-mouse search and rescues in the office were not so urgent. But this one, Tara thought, has to go.

  Carrying the mouse by the tail, she dropped it in a garbage bag, then looked about the office. Things always seemed more chaotic before they began to improve in a clean-up like this, but with Gracie’s desk now facing the door, she felt that things were set right. She knew the new energy of the furniture placement and the changes would bring prosperity to the airy office, which was the working hub of the station as much as the yards.

  ‘I put your before-and-after photos of the house on the company blog last night,’ Skye said, ‘and everyone’s gone nuts with comments. They all want you to help them with their own homes, Tara.’

  ‘Me?’ Tara asked as she hung a mirror on the back of one of the office hallway doors.

  ‘Yes, you. You can’t stay a ringer all your life. You’re too smart and talented for that. What plans do you have after here?’

  Tara shrugged.

  ‘Well, I can help you. Will you let me help you?’

  Tara looked at Skye. She remembered a book she’d read once by Louise Hay that said if you want your life to change, you have to clean out the mental rooms in your mind. The door so far had been locked on her self-esteem, being the girl from Dwaine Morton’s abattoir house, but now, if she unlocked it and began to dust away the beliefs that no longer served her, Tara could see a path to a life she wanted.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I’d love you to help me. Thank you.’

  That night, at the Simpsons’ homestead, with Tara again at the family table, the crackle of the radio sliced through the dinner conversation. Michael laid down his fork and wearily got up. He was not long back from checking the waters, as Ron had headed off in his van for his holiday fish. It had been a short water run as the herds were being grazed nearer the homestead for the Christmas break. While the staff were thin on the ground during holiday season, their practice of driving stock daily on outreach camps to fresh country had been put on hold for a month.

  Tara set down her knife and fork to listen. It was Crack radioing in to say they’d gathered another twenty-six head.

  ‘We got twelve ear-tagged and micro-chipped steers,’ his distant voice said. ‘A few old cows and the rest cleanskin mickey bulls. I’ll truck them in tonight to the homestead, then snuggle up with the missus for a nanosecond of sleep, then head back out to pick up the horses and the crew first thing tomorrow. Over.’

  ‘Roger that,’ said Simmo. ‘The mission’s been a success then? Over.’

  ‘Affirmative. Dunk couldn’t see any more beasts from the air, though he said the wild donkeys and goats were getting up in numbers. Over.’

  ‘Thought they might. We’ll deal with that another day. Over.’

  When Michael came back to the table, he looked at Tara. ‘You up for cooking for the crew when they get in tomorrow night?’

  She nodded and beamed. ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ Skye offered.

  Michael glanced at his wife and then Tara, a faint expression of surprise on his face. This bright, friendly young lass had made such a change in both Angus and his wife. Angus had been surly, and Skye beyond depressed, about their impending separation. He knew neither of them was the type to make distance education work for Angus’s high-school years. He’d been wracking his brain for a solution, and one seemed to have driven itself up from country New South Wales. If Tara kept tracking as well as she was, perhaps he could ask head office in Brisbane if she could stay on and oversee Angus’s School of the Air high-school education, at least for the junior years, as well as step in as a general roustabout for the station? She knew her way around animals and the yards. He had witnessed it himself. She was gifted, this one.

  That way, Simmo thought, Angus, who was not at all ready to leave home, could stay, and they could remain a family. Michael decided to keep the idea under his hat at risk of getting false hopes up in Skye. There was also the issue of whether Tara wanted to take on being a govvie and teacher to one boy. He’d have to ask her. She seemed to soak up the world around her — it’d be well worth having her about the place.

  ‘Can I help cook t
oo?’ asked Angus. Michael had to stop himself running to call headquarters on the spot.

  ‘The more the merrier, I say,’ said Tara. ‘As long as you don’t make too much of a mess in Mrs B’s kitchen, Angus.’ She looked over at Skye. ‘I’ll get some chooks out of the freezer on the way back to bed tonight. I reckon the team’ll be about sick of beef.’

  ‘Brilliant, Tara, brilliant,’ said Skye as she reached over to clasp her husband’s hand.

  The next evening the smell of roast chicken drew the weary but cleaned-up crew to the mess. Tara had been too busy in the kitchen to see them arrive and unload the horses and all the gear. Gear that would need a good clean and sort-out before everyone shut down for Christmas. Tara knew the job would be given to her, but she mentally shrugged her shoulders. She had a talent for cleaning and organising, so she might as well use it. And it seemed now, after following Mrs B’s old CWA cookbook, she had a talent for roast dinners. The screen door banged and she glanced up as she hauled a giant baking dish sizzling with three golden chickens from the oven. Another three were waiting, along with two dishes of roast pumpkin and potato. On the stove, peas, corn and carrots simmered beside a giant pot of gravy that tasted even better than Mrs B’s, although Michael, after dipping a piece of bread into it for a taste, said he would be swearing all of them to secrecy on that fact. Mrs B could be touchy. Skye and Angus were busily setting out plates and cutlery.

  ‘Hello,’ Skye called. Tara saw looks of surprise on the faces of the crew that the Boss Lady was in the kitchen with her boy helping out. They greeted her politely. Tara also saw Elsie arrive, looking tanned and beautiful in her crumpled clean jeans and pink Wrangler T-shirt. Tara could see she was travel weary — or most likely sleep deprived. She expected Jake to come in behind her, but he didn’t.