She felt a jolt through her body as if she herself had been shot.
‘You’ve shot my horses?’ she said, her voice barely audible, her body shutting down from shock. She kicked a chair out of the way, put the pup on the kitchen floor and ran to the window to look for Hank and Ink Jet in the paddock. It was dark outside, the last faint glow of the sun hidden by the pitched peak of the western mountain, so her gaze was met with blackness.
Charlie stood behind her, defiant, drunk. ‘Bugger all meat on them for the dog. Should’ve done it years ago and sold them to the knackery.’
Bec let out a muffled cry.
‘While I’m at it, shall I dig a grave for the past, Rebecca? Because that’s all you hold onto, the past and your days with Tom. I can’t compete with a dead man! I’ve tried, but I’ll never be like him. I’ll never be sensitive or artistic or forever young like him.’
‘You leave Tom out of it!’
‘It’s true! I’m just here as your whipping boy. Nag, nag, nag. Never good enough. You just want to control me. I might as well leave the fucking collar on and you can zap me each and every time you want to have a shot at me about what I have or haven’t done.’
‘Well, I know what you have done. You’ve not only had an affair, and killed all my animals, but you’ve also got me pregnant!’
Charlie’s mouth fell open at the revelation. He paused as he took in the news. She could swear she saw his eyes roll from so much alcohol. He was really blind.
‘Woah!’ he said, holding up both hands, a look of confusion clouding his face. ‘I what?’
Rebecca took a deep breath and blew air from her lungs. She sat down and spread her hands out on the table before her. ‘I’m pregnant, Charlie,’ she said tiredly.
Charlie’s frown deepened even further. ‘But how?’
‘How do you reckon?’ she said sarcastically.
‘I’m cut and we never have sex.’
Rebecca almost burst out with frustrated laughter. ‘It was that one night. The night before Archie’s accident. Anzac eve. Not that you’d remember much. You’d been on the beer again. You were supposed to be joining the ewes and rams. Not me. It was pretty crap sex. It felt to me as if she was in the bed with us too. But up the duff I am, like it or not, Charlie.’
‘Bullshit. Tell me the truth. Who are you pregnant to?’
‘Don’t be a dick. With you.’
‘But I can’t get you pregnant. You had me cut.’
‘The doctor says it happens. And it’s happened.’
‘Bullshit!’
‘It’s not.’
‘You’re lying!’
Rebecca saw fury flash in his eyes. His cheeks flamed red. With a violent burst, he knocked a wooden chair back against the slate floor. Its old spindle frame shattered into shards. The pup whimpered and crawled under the kitchen dresser. Nerves jolted in Rebecca.
‘Who else have you been screwing?’ he yelled.
‘Oh, that’s fine coming from you! No one!’
‘Liar!’
‘Dr Patkin said he’d see you. To explain,’ Bec said, trying to keep her voice calm.
‘Explain?! Oh, so it was him? Dr Patkin? You’ve been doing him behind my back.’
‘Charlie! Are you for real?’
‘It’s that Andrew bloke, isn’t it? Or maybe that wog Stanton? How could you, Rebecca? How could you?’
‘How could I? It’s your baby, Charlie.’ She searched his eyes, but there was not a flicker of belief within them. She gave up. ‘What about you?’ she said, matching the harshness of his energy. ‘What about you and that toffy-nosed scrag of yours? I’ve had enough, Charlie. Enough! I’ve done nothing but love and nothing but give! And be a faithful fucking farmer’s wife! Fuck you!’
Charlie was towering over her now.
‘You’re lying. Just to fuck with my head. Aren’t you?’ He hauled her up by her wrists and began to shake her. ‘Aren’t you?’ he repeated through gritted teeth. Her head whiplashed as he raged at her. ‘Who was it? Who have you been screwing? Tell me!’
‘Let me go!’ She tried to wrestle free of him, but he was too strong. His jealousy was fuelling some deep-seated anger, buried far within his being.
Next Charlie had her by the upper arms and was slamming her into the cupboard. ‘Bitch!’
The doorknobs pounded painfully into her back. The air was knocked from her lungs. She could smell the grog on his breath. In his face, she saw madness. The madness of a cuckold. And a drunk. He dragged her forwards and swung her about.
‘You had me cut so we could do it more often! But you never fucking want it! You want some of it now? Do you? Huh?’ Charlie had her by the hair now and was forcing her to bend over the kitchen table, her swollen breasts pressed painfully to the wooden surface. Behind her, she could feel him reaching to unbuckle his jeans.
Crying, with no breath, she felt his weight on top of her back and his rough grab for her belt buckle. She heard him grunt as he grappled to drag her jeans down, the fabric burning her skin, leaving it welted and reddened. The strength of him was terrifying. The anger of him paralysing. As he was about to thrust violently into her, Rebecca swivelled around under the press of his angry weight. She saw flesh exposed by his rolled-up sleeves. Then she bit.
Like a Jack Russell, she bit and she hung on as he roared and howled.
Drawing her up, Charlie raised his hand. The blow was both a relief and a devastation. A relief because it was an ending, but a devastation because this man was the father of her children and the husband who was supposed to provide for and protect her. As Charlie’s fist hit, Rebecca’s head snapped sideways and her body careened across the kitchen, her skull hitting the cupboard door solidly.
There she lay. Her mouth bleeding. Looking up through blurred vision to the man she no longer knew. ‘Get out!’ she said through already swelling lips. ‘Get out.’
There was no murmured ‘sorry’. There was no stooping to collect her up. After he had stood over her for a time, Charlie left the kitchen, puffing from exertion, taking the stairs two at a time. She knew in the bedroom he’d be violently shoving his clothes into a PVC rodeo bag. After a short time, the slam of the door and the rev of the Hilux, followed by the angry stillness of the house, told Rebecca he had gone.
The puppy crawled out from under the dresser, sniffing cautiously. Then she came to settle next to Rebecca, leaning her little warm body against Bec’s stomach. She began to stroke the pup and cry. Eventually she crawled to the table and hauled herself up. Groggily she dragged herself along the wall of the hallway and stood outside on the verandah. She imagined Charlie’s tail-lights blinking red in the night as he drove away, far up high on the mountainside, along the curving lengthy drive away from Waters Meeting.
Holding onto the old wooden banister, Rebecca clutched her way upstairs, wincing at the twinges in her ribs and spine. She held the pup in her free arm, gaining comfort from her warm presence. She looked into their marital bedroom, where all the drawers and cupboard doors were flung open. Charlie’s energy still fuelled the chaos of the room.
She continued along the hall to Ben’s room. A globe within the globe, Ben’s nightlight of planet earth was glowing in the darkness, the American continents turned towards her son. She could see her poor little man had already fallen asleep, the pillow shoved over his head to block out the sounds of his parents’ shouting downstairs. Rebecca settled the pup onto her son’s bed and sat for a time stroking Ben’s dark hair, crying. Thinking of Archie in the Bendoorin hospital and placing her hand on her abdomen where her new baby was growing, she shut her eyes and told herself to breathe.
‘I’ll make things right,’ she whispered. ‘I will make things right.’
Silently, in a daze, she stood, walked downstairs, pulled on her coat and boots and went out into the black night. The stars dusted the sky and she felt the chill against her face. She tried to breathe in the crisp night air, but the tug of torn sinews and bruised muscles caused her to fli
nch. Instinctively she walked towards the kennels where once her three Kelpies had danced in welcome. As she approached, she saw in the shadows a lump on the ground.
‘Stripes?’ she called. Then she noticed the gleam of chain in the dust. Charlie had taken him. But what was the dark mound on the ground? As she neared, her hand flew to her mouth in horror. A sound escaped her, like that of a muffled wail.
There on the ground lay the hacked-off limb of a horse. She could see the rigid back hoof sticking out at an odd angle, the chestnut hide of her brother Tom’s horse, Hank. She realised Charlie had left the leg there on purpose. Her knees buckled beneath her. She sank to the ground and retched and retched. She held her throbbing head in her hands and pulled on her hair, crying. Feeling the suffering of the horse, who had been shot at last. Dropped in the yard by gunshot, then dragged by a tractor and chain to the pit Charlie had dug with the back-hoe. The way he must’ve used the sheep-killing knives to roughly hack off the limb, dragging it in the dust over to the kennels. Stripes, like a lion, feasting until he was sick.
As her sobs lessened and her normal breathing returned, she remembered the night, years before, when in a craze she had chainsawed, bulldozed and burned the giant old pines that had kept the house in shadow. She had been deranged by the death of her brother and in a rage against her parents back then. Particularly her father.
For a time there had been some relief from the letting go of the madness the eerie sound of the pines caused, but soon the shadows came back, despite the cutting of the pines and the burning of the shed where Tom’s lifeless body had hung. After she had raged and burned the old away to dust, sunshine had poured in for a time, but the house and garden always, even on summer days, felt broody. For her, even now, there were still shadows about the place and a darkness that seemed more sinister than blackness. And now Charlie’s shooting of her dog, his butchering of her horses and finally the beating and attempted rape reinjected that sense of foreboding. She saw that she blamed no one else for the darkness, the darkness she herself had allowed in. She had chosen him. It was her own fear. A fear of her own power and freedom. A fear that had been passed down through the ages from woman to woman.
She was still allowing herself to be brutalised by the past. By her father’s coldness and negativity, which hung over the entire landscape. She thought of the haughty look of disdain in her father’s eyes that she had endured as a child and young woman and realised now, devastatingly, that Charlie had been a carbon copy of him. She had married her father. Or a version of him.
A spark fired in her. A fury was lit. She was repeating a pattern decades later, but she knew when done this one last time, it would be the breaking of the past. The mending of the past. The letting go. A moving forwards to a new way of following her bliss. Not for the men in her life. But for herself. She would reclaim herself this night.
No man could make her cower on the kitchen floor or yell her into a corner with put-downs ever again. Tonight she decided she would no longer be a farmer’s wife. She refused to be. She would be a farmer. She would again be a woman with a dream of making her life count. For herself, for her children, for her land — and for all women who had been brutalised or oppressed. She would do this for the women through the ages who were burned at the stake or stoned, or beaten with sticks, or crushed by words of derision. She heard their screams and smelled the torturous scent of hair as it frizzled to smoke and skin bubbling from beauty to ash. And what had these women — the healers, the wise women, midwives and Wiccans — been persecuted for? For having the power of birthing life. For living by the guidance of love. For healing with natural plants. For worshipping Mother Nature. For reading with their intuition the cycles of life and the seasons.
At that moment, under the dome of the starlit sky, Rebecca realised she had grown up. She would face the passed-down fear of the ages. She pushed the physical pain aside, summoned Evie’s energy in to help her and stood. Then she trudged over to the back-hoe, climbed into the cab and started the engine. She drove over towards the silage pit and set the scoop down, leaving the machine to idle.
Next, in the glow from the machinery-shed floodlight, Rebecca stooped at the dozer, looking for the pilot motor crank start in the toolbox on the side of the machine. It had been a few years since she had driven the old dozer, let alone started it. When she wrapped her hand around the cold steel, she felt a jolt. A bar of metal once held by her grandfather, her father, her husband. As she clutched the crank lever, she vowed she would no longer allow herself to be beaten by their steel and hardness. The land too needed that same protection.
She found the fuel tap, ran petrol through the lines, then cranked the motor over. The kickback from the crank spun savagely, collecting her painfully on the wrist. She cried out, but with gritted teeth she gave the pilot motor another turn. With a rumble, it gave in and started. She set the choke and hauled herself up onto the dozer. The seat felt cold, seeping through her jeans, and the gear and clutch levers in the palms of her hands almost burned from the chill.
‘C’mon,’ she said as she waited for the oil to creep through the system. Then at last, as she pressed the starter button, the old beast chugged, coughed and at last roared, and diesel plumes puffed into the night air. She put on earmuffs, then toyed with the steering brakes and levers, hoping the memory of how to drive the thing would come back to her. Fuelled not so much by anger as by determination, Rebecca put the dozer in gear and, with the blade lowered, she chugged towards the gleaming new yellow disc plough that was Charlie’s pride and joy.
She felt her body jar on impact as metal hit metal. There was a shudder, a screeching of blade upon steel. Then the offset discs began to give way to the force of the dozer. The plough lurched a little to the side so Rebecca upped the throttle, skidding along the dry soil towards the silage pit.
At this moment she didn’t care that they owed the bank thousands for the new bloody plough. At this moment that piece of machinery represented everything that had hurt her and hurt her land. She hated the sight of it. The revs high, Rebecca cried out with a mix of determined freedom and reclaimed power as the plough tumbled into its dark grave.
‘Fuck you, arseholes!’ she yelled through her clenched jaw as she saw the circular discs glinting in the lights from the dozer, upturned like the hooves of a slayed beast.
Jumping down from the dozer, she made her way to the backhoe. There she lifted the scoop and began to drag black soil back into the giant pit Charlie had dug. She looked up to the stars and smiled at Tom. She felt so good to be burying the hideous plough and with it her old life.
Twenty-four
Rebecca awoke with a new energy. She pushed aside all thoughts of the pain that wracked her body from the night before. She barely paid any heed to her image in the mirror. She knew that the woman there with the fat lip and swollen brow was a woman of her past. Today was a new day. The relief of knowing Charlie’s energy had dissipated and he had gone from the place soothed her. There was no panic at being left alone on the farm, as she had thought there might be.
She knew deep down she was being falsely brave and her choices would lead her down a path that would be exceedingly difficult, but today she had the chance to make a new start.
In the shower, the cuts had stung, along with the reality of her situation, but she was determined to wash away all the grubby feelings she had about the ugly scenes of her life before this day. She towel-dried her hair and took the time to wind it into two pretty braids. She tried to smile reassurance to the image in the foggy mirror, telling herself she would never, ever allow herself to be in a situation like that with a man again.
Then she pulled on clean work clothes, knotting her shirt at the front of her jeans, cowgirl style. Ben wandered sleepily into her room, dragging his teddy bear behind him, the pup trotting along at his heels. She knew he wouldn’t ask, ‘Where’s Dad?’ The boys were used to Dad not being in the house.
‘What are we doing today, Mummy?’ he asked, cla
mbering up onto the high cast-iron bed and snuggling under the quilt. The pup sniffed gingerly about the room.
‘Um.’ Rebecca thought for a minute, then said, ‘No school for starters. Not today. We’re thinking up a name for our new Kelpie and taking her outside to do a wee, then doing a bit of sheep work, then we’re off to see Archie. Then we’ll see what the rest of the day brings.’
She turned to him, and when he saw the state of her face, a look of fascination briefly came to him, then a frown of concern settled on his brow.
‘Mummy! What happened? Did you fall off the ute?’
She touched her fingertips to her face and smiled, rolling her eyes. ‘No. Mummy had an accident in the kitchen. You know what I’m like, splashing water out of the sink. My socks got all slippery and I came a cropper. Silly Mummy. Now come on, let’s get this day happening.’ It was only then she felt the first sting of tears that she held within, but instead of succumbing, she took Ben by the hand, cuddled the puppy close and guided them down the stairs and out to sit on the verandah for a moment and watch the sun bring the new day alive.
In the blustering winter wind, as the sun rose prettily above the Waters Meeting mountains, Rebecca pushed her shell-shocked feeling away and instead tried to focus on right now. The old LandCruiser chugged and thudded its way over the paddocks like a Meccano-kit truck with square wheels. Each bump brought new pain and the same mix of both relief and devastation. Also came the thoughts of the baby growing within, thoughts which prompted both a comfort and an uncertainty. But she remembered what the woman on the CD had imparted: choose your thoughts, choose your life. By forcing herself to be in the very moment, the pain and uncertainty would leave and she would be struck with the clarity, and even the beauty, of the now. It at least gave her relief from the feeling that everything she knew was unravelling. She told herself to breathe.
Rebecca made herself notice the beauty of the millions of healthy gum leaves glistening in the slanting morning light. Each gatepost was an artwork of intricate patterns of lichen and lines, and each tree trunk a visual gift brushed with golden and silver hues. She breathed slowly in and slowly out. It had been years since she’d let herself just ‘be’. She saw now how she’d forced busyness and duty upon herself. She had let herself be spun so fast in life by the work on the farm and motherhood that she had forgotten to truly see her surroundings. And to truly see herself.
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