‘Tara,’ Gordon said, coming purposefully into the room and glancing at Amos. ‘Mrs Cloudhead needs ya. I’m sorry, but she wants you to be there when Simmo rings Jake’s parents with the company’s condolences, and then she wants ya to help write them a letter.’
Gordon extended his hand to Amos, shaking it warmly, introducing himself but with a grim expression on his face.
It had been the worst night of his life. He’d seen plenty of people busted up in station accidents, even lost a couple of older, boozy staff to heart attacks, but never a youngster in such a tragic way. He knew Jake would’ve been driving too fast, and he’d broken station policy by not wearing a seatbelt, but it was under his orders that the boy was on that water run.
Jake had completed two and a half years on Goldsborough and it wasn’t as if he were some newbie who didn’t know how to travel on a dirt road and look out for kangaroos on the verges. Gordon was angry with him for being careless with his life, and with Elsie, because together the two of them had behaved so unprofessionally and dangerously tired themselves out on camp. He gritted his teeth. He knew he was being too harsh, particularly regarding Elsie, who was so seemingly naive; she couldn’t be expected to fully understand the station’s unwritten rules about ringer relationships. They were young. So young.
The guy visiting Tara was equally as young, but as far as he could tell, was a good one. He’d better be. Self-aware or not, Tara was still vulnerable, and no surprise. He smiled apologetically at Amos.
‘Under normal conditions, we’d be giving you a slap-up Christmas welcome to Goldsborough, but it’s all gone pear-shaped, I’m afraid. Our worst of worst nightmares.’
Amos, with his open kindly face, smiled comfortingly. ‘I understand completely. I’ll help in any way I can.’
‘Well, you can start by telling String Bean here to get her arse off Mrs B’s kitchen bench. Mrs B goes nuts if she catches the ringers sitting up there.’ He gave the young couple a wink. ‘String Bean, maybe Amos would like to go sit with Moody Blues for a while. Just until your work is done. We got the copper heading out to the accident site, and Amos, I may need a hand to tow the vehicle back in, if it’s not too gruesome for you, son.’
Amos nodded. ‘I’ll do whatever’s asked. I’m just grateful the company allowed me here for Christmas.’
Tara at that point almost had to pinch herself. Her Poo Crew buddy, her lover, her friend was here, just to see her.
When they knocked on Jake’s door, Elsie muttered a ‘come in’. Tara turned the door handle and nudged Amos in front of her.
‘Elsie?’ he said, squinting into the gloom after the brightness of the day outside. The air conditioner was turned up and the room had a chill. The curtains were drawn and Elsie was curled up in a ball, still holding Jake’s shirt.
She looked up in shock, then leaped at him, her arms outstretched. ‘Zac! Oh, Zac!’ She threw her arms around him, but Amos began prising her away from him.
‘No, Elsie, it’s Amos,’ he said, searching her eyes.
She looked startled, like a deer in headlights, and chewed her lip, confused, dazed. ‘No, no. You’re Zac.’ She frowned.
‘Jeez, Else, what did those RFDS guys give you?’ Tara asked. ‘You’re tripping. Zac’s face. His burns. Remember? This is Amos.’
Elsie drew back and glanced at Tara, and beyond her out the door. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded.
‘I’m sorry, Elsie,’ Amos said. ‘He still has to have wound dressings every few days.’
‘But . . .’ She shook her head as if trying to shake it on straight.
Tara thought people were supposed to grow as they became older, but in Elsie’s case, now she was out in the world, she was only finding ways to shut herself in.
She wanted to say: ‘Oh, so now you want Zac. Even though you’re so heartbroken. Even though you barely knew Jake.’ But instead she touched Amos on the arm, a spark running from his skin up her fingers. His body felt so firm. She turned her knowing green eyes up to his. ‘I have to go to work now. Are you OK here?’
Amos nodded. ‘You go on. I’ll catch up with you.’
He put his hand on Elsie’s shoulder and steered her out to the bench seat on the verandah. ‘Let’s sit here for a bit. Get you out in the light.’
Elsie drifted to the seat like a ghost. Just before Tara left, her small voice clutched at Tara’s heart.
‘Where’s Marbles?’
Amos cast Tara a desperate look. She took a breath. ‘He died, Elsie. I’m sorry. In his sleep.’
‘What? When?’ Elsie’s voice was a shadow, her eyes back to staring blankly at the fog in her mind.
‘In the early hours . . .’ Tara began, but Elsie was already turning towards Amos, putting her slender arms around him and burying her face into the perfect hollow his shoulder made as he put his arms around her. He cast Tara an apologetic look, but Tara was already walking away again from Elsie Jones.
Forty
After lunch, the station was quiet. A hot gusty wind blasted from the north and rattled the gate chains in the yards. It stirred mini whirlwinds of dust through the work area, flinging tiny rocks up onto the tin sheds, veering off through fence lines and away across the parched home paddocks. The droving dogs dozed in stifling heat in the deep shadows of their kennels, getting coated in a film of dust, barely raising an ear to the willy-willies that passed by. The place felt abandoned, its remoteness suddenly feeling to all who remained there more a burden than a blessing.
Tara made her way to the office. Inside were Skye, the RFDS doctor and nurse and the Mt Isa police officer. Hinchie, looking older than he had ever done, was sitting in the corner on the big soft armchair Tara had placed near the window. His Santa hat rested on the arm of the chair. So much for the rearranged furniture inspiring good energy, Tara thought, deflated, looking at the grim faces. They were clustered around the computer, the constable typing a report on the accident, estimating the time of death, the cause, detailing the injuries in cold clinical terms. The board of directors, the coroner, the lawyers, the family, would need these things.
They glanced up at her and hesitated. She knew the people who were now part of this death-trail system really needed other things than paperwork and practicality to soothe them. Things like hugs, healing and an opening of their minds and hearts to the bigger view of life in this universe. But, as Tara had discovered when her mother had died, people had scuttled from the dark shadows of death that clung to the loved ones left living. People passing her in Culvert had resorted to clichés and uncomfortable looks, as if they wanted to deny that Nora’s fate was their destiny too.
She wanted to tell them she had been around death all her life. She had seen in the abattoir the way a bullet could enter skin and bone and leave a perfect circular hole that barely bled red. The way a living thing would buckle at the knees and fold itself to the ground, the life-force energy that helped defy gravity and decay vaporising out to a place that somehow Tara innately knew. She had seen knives pierce skin and sever veins and watched the light fade from eyes. She had leaned closely over the sheep, calf or deer so as to hear, or feel or witness, that great moment when the giganticness of life was released from the meat bags that the creatures inhabited. She knew what death was. And she no longer feared it.
It wasn’t death at all. She saw it was simply a transition of energy from one place to another. She could see the energy of the sheep, or the carrot grown by Gwinnie, or the wheat grown by Mr Jones turned into grain and then turned into bread, was all cycling around and around to feed other energies, like the people who ate them. Death was a gift of energy to another. Tara watched the world in that way.
But the older people in the office didn’t know about her enlightenment, so Skye jumped awkwardly from the group and steered Tara to the tea room, asking her to help her make some cuppas as if guiding a child away from something shocking.
‘You can tell me what’s going on,’ Tara said gently. ‘I’m fine with it.’
Tara stopped filling the jug and turned to look at Skye’s open, round face. ‘Did you say his girlfriend?’
Skye nodded. She laid a sympathetic hand on Tara’s forearm, both of them thinking of Elsie as they began to make tea for the men.
It took Skye and Tara an hour to get the words just right and even then they didn’t know what could be right in a situation like this.
Dear Mr and Mrs Cleveland, the letter began.
Skye wrote the letter in her large classically looped hand three times so that there was not a single error on the page. They were about to put the letter in the envelope, but it just didn’t seem enough. As Tara looked down at the forlorn folded page, she remembered Gracie hovering about the yards with a camera as they loaded the horses for the cleanskin muster. ‘Photos,’ she said suddenly. ‘Let’s make up a little album. Show Jake’s parents what a ball he was having. That his life ended at a point where he was totally happy.’
Skye’s face lit up. She knew Gracie loved to step out of the office, kick off her little black flats, pull on her boots and with the company’s whiz-bang digital camera take hundreds of photos capturing life on the station. It was part of her job to provide pictures of the training days, the social events, fundraisers and the big work moments, like trucking cattle out for finishing, for the quarterly company newsletter. But Gracie’s beautiful portraits of the staff were scattered throughout the computer files too.
‘Oh, Tara, you are brilliant.’ Skye looked up from the letter with a fresh flush of gratitude. ‘I can’t help thinking that if this were me, getting a letter like this about Angus . . . it would make me more angry than comforted. But photos, yes, they would give me comfort. That’s what I would want the most. Pictures of my son.’
Skye clicked on the camera icon on Gracie’s computer and up flashed thousands of images of the rich and rewarding life on Goldsborough. Peppered throughout the images of sunsets, barbecues at the billabong and dust-swirling cattle yards was Jake. Jake in all his beauty. Swinging from a rope in his boardies, riding out on his rangy horse towards a trough as the sun dipped low in the sky, in the smoko room face smeared with mince and sauce in a pie-eating competition, raising a beer with a blonde girl.
‘Better leave that one out,’ Skye said dryly. ‘That was the last one. Before Elsie.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Tara.
When they were done, they found photo paper, printed them and mounted them in a book, Tara writing funny captions.
‘Shall we make an extra copy? For Elsie?’ Skye asked.
‘No. She needs to forget him.’ Jake looked glorious in the photos. Too glorious on the outer to be real. But Tara knew the photos didn’t show what was within him. Yes, as a young man he was charming and capable, but also as a young man, towards women, he was greedy and cruel.
‘He even made a move on me once,’ Skye said softly, almost wistfully, a dreamy expression momentarily drifting over her face as she remembered the moment, then she shut down again and shrugged. ‘But us women, we know players like him. Can spot them a mile off, so I woke up. And besides, Michael is a good man.’
Tara looked from Skye to the photo of Jake. She’s wrong, she thought. Some women, the ones like Elsie, who had a father as distant and untouchable as a satellite in the night sky, couldn’t spot players like Jake. Women like Elsie turned their faces to whatever sunlight men offered them and often the men they turned to were ones who burned.
No one spoke as the RFDS pilot and nurse wheeled the trolley with Jake encased in a body bag towards the plane, the wheels catching on rocks and shuddering over the red-dirt runway. Tyler had plugged an iPod into the ute and was playing Jake’s favourite Colorado Buck song, ‘Building Fences’, as a send-off. Elsie stood with her arms wrapped about herself, flanked by Tara and Amos, something about the tension in her body language keeping them from touching her. She drifted near the trolley, putting her shaking hand to her mouth.
Gordon, Tyler, Michael, Skye and Angus all hovered as the RFDS staff folded the trolley legs up and, like pall bearers, Hinchie and the crew helped load it into the open side door of the plane, where the nurse waited to help lift it.
Amos stood a little way off, not wanting to intrude though desperate to hold Tara’s hand, feeling sorry for everyone, including Zac back home.
As they began to shut the door, Elsie lurched forwards. ‘I want to go with him,’ she said.
‘Elsie,’ Gordon soothed, taking her by the shoulders.
‘Please. I have to. I have to go with him.’ Her voice was like a faraway scream from a cliff. It was high-pitched and heading towards hysteria.
Tara moved forwards. ‘Else, you can’t go.’
She turned to her friend, her blue eyes blazing wildly. ‘Why? Why can’t I?’ she asked through gritted teeth.
‘It’s time to say goodbye now, Elsie,’ Tara said. ‘You simply can’t go with him.’
‘What’s it to you? You’re just jealous. You never liked him and you hated the fact we were together. Now you’re gloating, Tara. Let me go.’ She shook off Gordon and ran to the plane, reaching up so she could lay her hands on the shape within.
‘Jake,’ she whispered. She conjured the past few days of him. The feeling of him thrusting into her, alive with desire, hard with passion, the searing heat of his skin on hers, the grip of his beautiful hands on her thighs, her hips, her belly — it was all still so real. How could he be gone?
‘Jake.’
Gordon took her by the shoulder and gently tried to steer her away.
‘Let me go!’
It was Skye Simpson who stepped forwards.
‘Elsie,’ she said in a gentle but firm tone. ‘You can’t go.’
‘Why?’ Elsie asked coldly, disdainful of anyone who didn’t understand the passion she and Jake had shared.
Skye matched Elsie’s glacier tone. ‘Because his girlfriend is flying in with his parents. Surely she and his family are going through enough?’
Tara could see the news blindsided Elsie, but Tara still couldn’t excuse Elsie’s behaviour; she knew their friendship was now strained to breaking point. All she wanted was the old Elsie back. Elsie Jones who was her friend. Her only girl friend. Surely she was in there somewhere, under the drama and self-involvement. She reached out to touch her arm, but Elsie spun from her, stumbling, sobbing, turning and sprinting back towards the homestead.
Forty-one
It was just before sundown when Amos tapped lightly on the door of Jake’s old room, balancing a dinner tray on his arm.
‘Elsie?’ he called, reaching for the door handle and pushing it open.
The bed was empty, the sheets rumpled.
A note on the bedside table, in Elsie’s scrawling hand, read: Gone to the bong.
Amos recalled the billabong to the west of the homestead that Hinchie’d pointed out as the best place for Christmas lunch as they circled for landing. The lushness of the riverside in the deep gorge from the air had stood out green and vibrant against the pale vegetation and red dirt of its arid surrounds. He turned with the tray that Tara had so carefully set and headed for the river.
The path down was well worn and previous NP Co staff had built beautiful steps out of solid timber in the steeper places. Amos was concentrating so much on his footing and not dropping the tray he didn’t at first see Elsie. When he did glance up, she was in the centre of a deep green pool, cliffs of red stone rising up, a waterfall sliver dampening the rock from an upper pool just about exhausted from the summer dry. She duck-dived beneath the surface: she was naked. Her clothes were cast off on the banks of the billabong, draped on a giant stone. Amos turned back, but then coming to the surface, she spotted him and called his name. He grimaced but turned towards her.
W
hen he made it to the bottom of the pathway, Elsie was out of the river. Like a siren she had settled herself on the rock, and with no shame about her nakedness had picked up her guitar and, with hair still dripping billabong water down her slender back, she began to play. Her voice rose up around the cliff faces and lifted to the paling sky as it faded into purple and orange and the sun sank in a big orange ball behind the clifftop scrub.
‘Tara sent you some dinner,’ he said, setting the tray down on a stump. She didn’t answer, but smiled gently at him and kept on with a haunting version of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The River’. Instantly Amos was transported back to the shed. He felt desire stir in his body and tried to pull in the feeling of Tara, but seeing Elsie there on the rock . . . He told himself the science behind the reaction in his body. He thought of Zac at home, dealing with his healing. He took one more glimpse, then began to turn away, trying to shut out her incredible beauty there on that river’s-edge rock. Her voice climbed the cliffs and raised the hair on the back of his neck.
Elsie finished the song.
‘Amos,’ she said in the saddest of voices. ‘Please don’t leave me alone. Don’t go.’
Amos furrowed his brow and almost continued walking, but something in his heart cracked for her. She seemed such a lost soul. She was his friend.
‘Please,’ she demanded, the pain in her voice making it sharp. ‘Please,’ she added more sadly.
He turned to see her now standing on the grass beside the billabong. Naked, holding the guitar in front of her. She was shivering, although it wasn’t cold. He stepped forwards. She set the guitar on the grass. He grabbed up her T-shirt, draped it across her wet gleaming body.
Cleanskin Cowgirls Page 26