by Tony Parsons
‘Did you get the intervention order from the police?’ he asked.
‘We’re in the process, and Helen got hold of a camera at the hospital and photographed all of Bella’s injuries, in case she wants to pursue assault charges,’ she said.
‘Good show. And how is Bella now?’ Rod asked.
‘Quite good, really. Very relieved to be back home and away from Wally.’
‘I hope everything works out okay. I’ll be seeing Wally soon enough and I hope to convince him to do the right thing by Bella in terms of a divorce settlement,’ he said.
‘Well, please let us know how you’re going. We’ll be seeing you soon, under better circumstances, I hope,’ Dorothy said.
That night the Stafford family was together again for dinner, Bella and Beth sitting side by side as they had done since they were little girls. Jim sat on his own on the other side of the table and Dan and Dorothy at each end. It had been a hectic and traumatic day for each of them and, although the atmosphere was a little tense, they were all glad to be at Mattai.
Dorothy had gone to a lot of trouble with the dinner and had opted for dishes she knew Bella liked, such as cold pork and salad with mashed potatoes flavoured with chives, and fruit salad and ice-cream. There was beer and apple cider followed by cups of tea.
When it was over Dan sat back and nodded. ‘That was a good meal, Dottie.’
‘It sure was,’ Jim agreed.
‘Glad you enjoyed it,’ smiled Dorothy. She was determined to speak to Dan about Bella and Wally, but had decided to leave it until the next day.
‘Well, I must say it’s becoming damned dry,’ Dan said. ‘It’d be good to get some rain.’
‘It sure would,’ Jim agreed. He reckoned it was the first normal comment he’d heard anybody utter all that day.
The fact that Bella had chosen to flee to Glengarry rather than come home really hurt Dan. Wally had obviously been a big mistake and Dan was a fellow who liked to think that he didn’t make mistakes.
If he thought that his humiliation was over with Rod’s departure, he was wrong. The following day, Dorothy confronted him. She chose the ram shed so that they wouldn’t be overheard by the children.
‘The trouble with you, Dan, is that you won’t let go of your prejudices. You think you know what’s best for everyone else,’ Dorothy began. ‘You’ve wanted to run the girls’ lives ever since they started high school. Jim was allowed to go away to boarding school and they weren’t. They couldn’t do this and they couldn’t do that. That’s all right up to a point but you’ve carried it to the extreme. A man can’t dictate every move a girl makes. You can tell her what you consider is right or wrong, but it’s up to her whether she follows your advice.’
Dan was dumbfounded by his wife’s angry torrent. But there was more to come. ‘As much as you won’t like to hear this, every girl eventually reaches the age where she has to be the judge of her own actions. Now, for God’s sake, leave the girls alone and let them make their own decisions.’
Dan didn’t know what to say. ‘I thought I did the right thing,’ he said feebly.
‘I want you to make Bella feel she is very welcome here,’ Dorothy continued. ‘Sit down and talk to her – and listen to her, Dan. Ask for her opinion about things and make her feel she can come to you without being judged.’
‘All right, Dottie,’ Dan said wearily. He wanted to defend himself, but had no energy left. He wished Wally Osborne and Rod Cameron had never come to the Half Moon. Most of all he wished that Hector McLeod was still alive so that he could have a yarn and a whisky or two with him. The Half Moon wasn’t the place it used to be. Times were changing so quickly.
For the following few days, Dan stewed over what Dorothy had dished out to him and decided that maybe she was right. He had been a lot easier on Jim than on his daughters.
When Bella began to do a few jobs around the house and garden, Dan asked her to accompany him to the ram shed.
‘Sit down, Bella,’ he said and pointed to an upturned feed bucket. He sat on another bucket and looked into a pen of rams before speaking again. ‘Feeling better?’ he asked.
‘A lot, thanks, Dad. Almost my old self again.’
‘Hmm, that’s good. I want you to know that if I’d had any idea Wally was… well, what he was, I wouldn’t have agreed to you marrying him. I’m really sorry for what you went through with him.’ He paused for a moment. He wasn’t used to discussing his feelings but needed Bella to understand his perspective so she never felt uncomfortable coming to him for help again. ‘You might have felt that I wouldn’t have looked after you when you ran away from Wally but you were wrong, Bella. I would have protected you no matter what. It hurt me a lot, still hurts me, that you went to Rod for protection rather than coming to me.’
‘I wasn’t sure, Dad. When I was growing up, you always said I was too independent. I thought you’d blame me for what Wally was doing,’ Bella said.
‘Well, I’m sorry you felt that way. I really am. Maybe I run a poor second to Rod Cameron but I’m your father. What I want you to know is that you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you’d like to. At least until you work out what you want to do – whether it takes one year, five years or forever. This is your home, Bella,’ Dan said emphatically. He got up off his bucket and held out his arm to help her up.
Bella, with tears in her eyes, stood up too and wrapped her arms around her father’s neck. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice choking up.
Dan patted his daughter’s back as he felt her wet cheeks against his own. ‘I’ll get a detective to check out your next bloke,’ he said dryly.
‘If there is a next bloke. It might be safer if I stick to horses,’ Bella joked.
Dorothy, watching from the kitchen window, saw her husband and daughter walking arm in arm. ‘The Lord be praised,’ she said to herself.
It was a very much harder task for Dan to talk to Beth. He could talk to her about dogs and sheep and wool and even about the vegetable garden, but to talk to her about Rod Cameron was something else. He still wasn’t sure about the man, but he had to trust his wife’s judgment. It was typical of Dan that he eventually chose to broach the subject in the sheep yards. He and Beth had just finished drafting sheep and he reckoned there would never be a better opportunity.
‘Hang on a minute, Beth. I want to have a talk to you,’ Dan said as he climbed onto the top rail of the drafting race.
Beth looked at him quizzically and wondered what was in store. Her father had been behaving very uncharacteristically ever since Bella had arrived back at Mattai. He’d been so kind and attentive to her that Beth wondered what had happened to her gruff, unemotional father.
‘What’s up, Dad?’ Beth asked.
‘I just want to get a few things off my chest because your mother reckons I haven’t been fair to you and Bella,’ Dan said. ‘She says I’ve been over-protective of you and that Bella married Wally by default. She says Bella didn’t love him. I told Bella that I thought I was doing the right thing by pushing her towards Wally. As it’s turned out, I was wrong.’
Beth sat on the rail beside him and wondered where her father was going with this. It sounded as if there might be an apology coming, and to her best knowledge he had never apologised about anything.
‘Your mother says I’ve got to give you more freedom to make your own decisions and that in future it’s up to you, and Bella, which fellows you go out with and who you decide to marry – if you decide to marry. So what I’m saying is that if you think Rod Cameron is the fellow for you, I won’t stand in your way. I can’t say that I like him, even though he’s probably fifty times the man Wally Osborne is, but I was wrong about Wally so maybe I’m wrong about Cameron as well. Perhaps I should read his book! Anyway, your mother says I should stick to sheep and keep my nose out of my daughters’ affairs.’
Beth couldn’t believe what she was hearing and was overjoyed by the news. Her heart beat a shade faster and with it her spirits lifted. She had
waited so long to hear these words!
Her first thought was how she could let Rod know about Dan’s change of heart. But she hadn’t failed to notice how vulnerable her father looked and rubbed her arm against his shoulder, then kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thanks, Dad. I really appreciate what you’ve said. But the fact of the matter is that I’m not even sure Rod likes me. There’s certainly no great romance between us. I’m not going to throw myself at him. If he wants me, he’ll have to make the running. But thanks for letting me know that it’s my decision.’
Beth got down off the fence and looked at her father. ‘Are we going to draft that next mob now or after lunch?’ she asked.
‘Let’s do them now and be done with them,’ Dan said. He took out his pipe, tapped out the remnants of tobacco and refilled the bowl. ‘Rod Cameron is going to be very hard to beat. If you and Rod ever team up, I might as well go out of business,’ he said with a grin.
‘After twenty-one years on this property, I finally get a compliment! Wonders will never cease. Dad, I think you’ve gone soft in the head,’ Beth said, and called Trump and Troy into the yard.
‘And he’d get good dogs for nothing too,’ Dan added.
‘Let’s not count our chickens, Dad.’
Dan stood at the drafting gate and waited while Beth and her dogs filled the race. There was nothing that his daughter couldn’t do on the property. Bella had been missed when she’d left for Mattai and he would miss Beth too if she ever left.
He knew how fortunate he was to have a son as good as Jim but to have two daughters like Bella and Beth far exceeded what he had ever expected. The girls certainly weren’t as easy to understand as Jim – he doubted that he’d ever properly understand them – but he was damned pleased he was their father.
Chapter Twenty-five
As the days grew hotter and there was no sign of rain, Rod made the decision to plough firebreaks wherever he could. Many fine-wool growers, including Dan Stafford, were reluctant to plough firebreaks for fear of getting dust in their precious wool, but it was too much to expect that they’d get through such a dry season without a fire somewhere in the Half Moon. There was always some idiot who’d flip a cigarette butt out of a vehicle, or during a dry storm lightning could ignite powder-dry grass.
‘Alec, I’m going to start ploughing firebreaks along the boundary fences. Anywhere we can do it. I’ll try to keep going after dark and get up early and go again. There’s a lot of dry feed after that flush spring and anything could happen,’ Rod said. The boundary fence might burn because his neighbours hadn’t ploughed breaks but at least he wouldn’t lose his internal fences and hopefully he wouldn’t lose his sheep and buildings.
The two men went at it night and day and Rod sighed with relief when they’d done all that was possible. When a big fire broke out in the Paul’s Creek valley, he was more convinced than ever that he’d done the right thing. This fire was accompanied by strong winds alternating from west to north-west, which brought thick dust into the Half Moon so that the sky was rust-coloured and the sun a peculiar shade of blue.
It was Sunday, a hot day with a north-westerly wind that was blowing stronger as the hours crept towards midday. Dorothy and Beth had gone to church and left Bella on her own at Mattai. Dan had decided to accompany Jim to Bathurst to watch the cricket. Dan had been a halfway decent cricketer in his day and occasionally enjoyed watching a match. There was a former Sydney first-grader playing for Bathurst and this promised a good contest with the Mudgee team.
As the wind shifted for a time from north-west to west, a small grass fire broke out and began making its way along the roadsides towards the Glengarry–Mattai boundary. It quickly reached a larger area of tall grass interspersed with scrub and pine trees. When this area caught fire, nothing short of a couple of fire trucks would have been sufficient to combat it. But most of the fire wardens were at church and nobody noticed the smoke.
The westerly blew the fire from the road into Mattai, where there was no firebreak. It couldn’t burn back into Glengarry because of Rod’s firebreaks so it tore up the rise parallel to the boundary fence. There was nothing to impede its progress there and it burned steadily towards the belt of pines the Staffords used as a shelter break for sheep during spells of bad weather.
The fire was half a mile wide before the large cloud of smoke was noticed. Bill Drake, who was a station hand for John Stevens at Cherrytree, adjoining Glengarry, was the first to spot it. He could see that Mattai was being encircled by twin pincers of fire. Bill tore back to the Cherrytree homestead, found nobody there, went in and phoned the police and fire headquarters. The police duty officer sent a car to the churches to advise people from the Half Moon to head back to their properties. Within a couple of minutes, several cars were racing for home and the prayers of their occupants were of an entirely different nature to their prayers of the previous hour. They were now praying that they would find their homes intact and their stock still safe.
Dorothy and Beth drove home under a sky filled with smoke, ash and dust. It was so other-worldly that they couldn’t believe it was the same road they had driven along only two hours earlier. When they reached their turn-off, they found that the fire had burned through the fence beside the road. It had been stopped on the right wing by the firebreaks on the Glengarry boundary but the other wing was now well up the hill and heading towards their back country.
Dorothy and Beth faced a fearful predicament. They realised that if they drove up to the homestead they faced the very real possibility of being engulfed by the fire when it broke out of the timber nearby, which was already alight. As things looked from the road, some of the Mattai sheds were as good as lost, and with them the show and sale sheep. Their lives would be in grave danger if they drove for the homestead and got cut off; if they made it to the homestead, however, they could run out hoses and sprays and try to save what they could. But above all, one question burned in their minds: where was Bella? Was she trapped in the house?
Dorothy looked at Beth, who didn’t hesitate. ‘We’ll have to risk it, Mum.’
Dorothy nodded and put the Fairlane into motion. She tried not to think about the dead and dying sheep on their left and right, and concentrated on getting to the homestead as quickly as possible. Her heart was in her mouth as they drew closer to the house. It was still well clear of the fire but the flames were looming closer.
Bella’s presence was very much in evidence. She had run out every hose and spray she could lay her hands on and had soaked the ground around the house and sheds. She even had one spray misting onto the ground behind the shed where Dan’s most valuable sheep were housed.
Dorothy quickly realised that even if they stopped the fire at the sheds, they could not defeat it. It was burning a half-mile away and would sweep around and hit them from the rear. They would need a miracle to save anything.
‘Mum, we’ll never hold it on our own,’ Beth said, barely able to conceal the panic in her voice. ‘I’ll ring Rod and see if he knows how bad it is here. He might be able to come down and help us. There are firebreaks all around Glengarry so he should be safe.’
Rod had seen the smoke and thought at first it was coming from the big fire in the Paul’s Creek valley. That fire had generated a lot of smoke because it had got into timber country. Because he couldn’t see the Mattai road from the homestead, he had no idea there was a fire much nearer by. He was confident that his wide firebreaks would hold up any fire long enough for him and Alec to deal with it. He had irrigation sprinklers in the small paddocks about the house and various sheds and, as a precautionary measure, these were all turned on. He had asked Alec to fuel up their John Deere tractor and tanker truck just in case they needed them for any emergencies. He was just finishing a cup of tea and a sandwich when the phone rang. It was Beth and she sounded very worried.
‘Rod, we’ve got a huge fire on our hands down here. It’s burned up your boundary fence and is heading for the timber. A wind change is pushing it out into t
he paddocks and it looks as if it’ll come round in a big semicircle behind us. We’ve already lost sheep in the paddocks near the road. Dad and Jim are in Bathurst, so there’s only the three of us. Can you come down and help?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Of course. I’ll be there right away. Have you got any breaks around your house and buildings? Anything to stop it reaching you?’ he asked.
‘No breaks. We’ve watered the lawns and have a spray going on the show shed, but we can’t water everything.’
Rod could hear the urgency in Beth’s voice. ‘I’ll come straight away,’ he repeated. Then, without hesitation, ‘I’ll have to try to plough a break between the fire and your house. I’ve seen it done at Yass before. If I’m going to do any good, I’ll have to come cross-country and cut the fences. Watch for me on a green tractor. If the worst comes to the worst, and you can’t get away, pile into a water trough – the bigger the better. I’ll be there as soon as I can, Beth.’
‘Please be careful, Rod.’
‘Get your tractor out, see it’s fuelled up and put a disc plough on if you can manage it. Two tractors will do the job a lot quicker, but wait until I get there!’
Rod grabbed a thick grey blanket from the linen cupboard and rummaged in the medical kit for a large safety pin. The door banged behind him as he bolted from the house.
‘Alec,’ he shouted. ‘Alec, are you about?’
Alec Hannaford appeared from the tool shed. ‘What’s up?’ he asked calmly. Nothing fazed Hannaford. He’d fought in North Africa and then the South Pacific and had come through virtually unscathed.
Rod spoke urgently but clearly. He and Alec understood each other well already. ‘Alec, that smoke is from a fire on Mattai. It’s just about surrounded the homestead. Beth said the fire is above them. Dan and Jim are away. I’m going to take the big tractor and plough and head off cross-country. If I can get between the fire and their homestead, I might be able to plough a firebreak that will stop the fire. I’ll have to cut the fences and I want you to follow me with the Ferguson and repair them as I go through or we’ll have Dan’s sheep boxed with ours. Grab the fencing gear and let’s get cracking.’