Grassdogs

by Mark O'Flynn

  ‘A-hubba hubba hubba, a-hello Jack…’

  He learned in that moment that his life was his own, that with this independence, consequences only applied if he was caught, and in this way he was able to uncover the strange pattern to the town. The dogs were silent in their conspiracy. The parents, after tossing their supplies into the back with barely a word to Edgar, fell laughing into the cabin.

  ‘Yer great lummox.’

  ‘Yer great heifer.’

  ‘Bag yer head, yer drongo.’

  ‘Bag yer own.’

  It had been a good afternoon. As they pulled out of the carpark he found the biscuits and shared them with the dogs. Consequences often came too late for the lesson to be learned.

  The wind flung Edgar’s hair about and dried out his tongue. At speed he could not face directly into the wind the way the dogs could. They enjoyed it. The father had told him if he was thirsty then he should suck a stone, one from the river, nice and cool. Edgar had a couple in his pocket for this purpose. Also for pinging at birds or other targets. Smooth pebbles of quartz that felt snug in his hands and in his mouth. There was nothing so useful as a stone.

  He loved the sound of the tyres rumbling over the bitumen, the tilt of the ute as they braked into curves. Peering over the edge at how the wheels spun, how the rubber pancaked on the road, he could tell if one had more or less air in it than the others. As they left the precinct of the town proper, turning off the Sturt, down the Olympic Way, Edgar looked for, and found in the distance the familiar silhouette of the Rock, lying along the horizon like a sleeping beast. The Rock was the only feature in their landscape which could approximate a landmark, although to Edgar the clumps of trees, the corrugated furrows of the paddocks, the passage of seasons, and smells, were all as good as landmarks.

  The Rock in the distance resembled the crouching outline of a lion, or else, Edgar preferred to think, a dog. The sphinx, although only the father had seen photos of the sphinx. It was too small for a mountain; however, in relation to the placid ripples of the bountiful farmland hereabouts (most people just said it was flat), the Rock took on the proportions of a mountain.

  Many times around the table, the silky asleep on a mat by the Bega Meters combustion stove, Edgar listened to the father retell the story of the Rock. How the crows came from its nether regions; and this being a district of crows, even a farm boy could see the importance of that. The blacks called it Kengol and did their funny business up on it at night. How, in those distant days, the sphinx had once possessed a head, giving it an even more prominent lion-like outline, and had gone by the name of Hanging Rock. Who had they hanged there? the son wondered. Morgan the bushranger was said to have used it as a lookout, and sheltered in its caves. Leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his shaggy head, the father told how his father, or his father’s father, or someone’s father had, in the spirit of sons, broken into the shed one heated evening after shearing. How a mate, let’s call him Davo, stood cockatoo and bore witness. How they took the dynamite and detonators and all the other accoutrements that go with dynamite: a case of longnecks, matches, and enough ambition to get them through the night. Did they pedal? Or did they take the sulky and old Dobbin? Or did they grind close together in a single saddle? It would have been a dirt road in those days. It certainly weren’t no picnic. Alf’s chair creaked. By hook or by crook they made their way to the base of Hanging Rock. A township had sprung up there. A butcher’s. A red-brick School of Arts hall. A line of bird-filled trees spaced up the wide main street, thriving in the heat of those summers, much hotter than what pass for summers these days. It was an hour’s climbing up the winding, narrow track, through hissing she-oaks, to the top. And at night? Even longer. Easy to lose the track. In the moonlight the shadows of the surrounding hills, particularly the ridge falling gently to the south, wormed their way into the distance like a great vein beneath the earth. The stars much brighter than the stars we get these days. After sweating their way to the top the farm boys lay and drank. Edgar’s father leaned back and drank. Edgar heard the bubbles rise in his throat. Did he mention it was New Year’s Eve? Did he mention the year was 1899? Or was it just the 1870s? No—the end of the old century, one of sweat and toil, sounded much more plausible. Whose father was it again? Edgar looked at the father telling the story as if it had been him doing the climbing, the drinking. They planted the dynamite in crevices and cracks about the lion’s neck. A precipitous cliff dropped beneath them. They lay back and waited, counting down the century on a silver watch borrowed from Davo’s old man. No lights of distant station houses pricked the darkness. They drank the warm grog. Eventually they struck their wax-coated matches and scampered across the rocks, down their planned escape route as fast as their drunken stumblings would let them. They hid behind some boulders. Waiting. They had forgotten the watch. Where was it? They looked up at the lion’s head, hanging out over the precipice, dark against the purple night sky. Had the fuse gone out? Go and check. No, you. Did one stand up? Poke his head above the ledge of their shelter? The explosion rent the night. The sound of crows erupted upward. Rocks and stones rained down. Did they embrace? Did they sing Auld Lang Syne? No one knew if they had timed it for exactly midnight. Apart from some splintered trees and the obvious decapitation, the small rock-fall left no sign of itself. The cloud of dust soon settled. The farm boys went home. The following year they said it rained fish.

  So the farm boys blew the hanging bit off Hanging Rock. In the logical light of a new century, and amid the repercussions for the act which have long since faded, Hanging Rock became known simply as ‘the Rock’. The scar in the earth was soon thick with regrowth. A new path had to be negotiated, but really, when you glanced at the view, for that was all it was worth, there was not much to look at. Wheat silos were built. The rail siding. More butchers. Bakers. The sun beat down upon them all during those relentless summers. Everyone prospered.

  Edgar looked at the father. Had he prospered? Where was this prosper? His father blew his lips and made a squeaking noise. He scratched his jowls, kicking off his boots into a corner of the kitchen.

  ‘Let this be a lesson to yer, my lad, not to go drinkin’ warm grog.’

  Was this man his father? Was it really just the three of them? What happened to the farm boys? Edgar hoped they got away with it, that they had copped no more than a hiding. And was this really the reason there were so many crows about?

  The mother piped up from the stove:

  ‘Stop fillin’ that boy’s head up with stuff and nonsense, and git yer feet off the bloody table.’

  And the father did.

  As he grew, Edgar climbed the Rock many times. Each time with a different dog, but always a dog. He climbed the spine of the lion, adding his tracks to an unformed trail. The main track wound up the forelimbs and shoulders of the beast. He discovered and explored the series of caves in the ridge which stood like a stone wave extending south from the lion’s forepaws. Maybe Morgan the bushranger had camped here. Maybe not. He knew every crevice and chink in the Rock. Or so he felt. The red-capped robin, the brown tree-creeper. Even down to the dams and the haystacks on the plains below, which crept right to the flanks of the monolith. That was the father’s word, monolith, like your head.

  He remembered the father telling versions of the story at the bar of the Quinty, beneath the leathery heads of a brace of gaping Murray cod nailed to the wall, his audience also yawning.

  Edgar camped and hunted and built forts on the Rock. He caught skinks and kept them for a while in a tin before releasing them. The dogs watched him curiously and sometimes Edgar asked them in his father’s voice to pass the spanner or the hammer or the salt. He accumulated stones and spent hours in target practice. He piled seven or eight rocks on top of each other in a tall cairn he did not understand. He loosened other boulders and took great pleasure in watching them tumble and crack and echo down the flanks of the Rock, smashing through woolly ears of ragwort. He listened intently until long a
fter the crashing sounds of trees fending the boulders off faded away.

  For a certain breed of boy, left to his own devices, it was a type of idyll.

  On one of his expeditions his dog paused, hackles erect at a low-slung fringe of she-oaks. There amongst the carpet of needles was a trapped fox. Its front leg broken in the trap’s clenched grin. The dog’s lip was curled back over its teeth, growl low in its throat. The fox barely had strength to lift its head. Edgar examined it closely, keeping a firm stick in his hand. Was he putting his face too close to the muzzle of the fox? Suddenly it bucked with its final instinct and seized Edgar’s arm, its needle fangs piercing his shirt and the skin within the shirt.

  Edgar cried out: ‘Sick ‘im, dorg.’

  Rex—or was it Bex?—leapt on the fox’s throat as Edgar tore his arm free. Soon it was a dead fox. Edgar gripped his arm and fell back as the dog shook the limp fox in its jaws. The trap jangled and seemed to be alive. He used his torn shirt to wrap his arm before he called the dog off.

  ‘Good dorg, good dorg,’ he patted it. Pain burned in his arm. Edgar took the wadding of his shirt away and was interested to watch the blood well from the puncture marks in his flesh. If he clenched his fist the blood welled faster. Pain flashed to his shoulder. When it subsided he wondered if he should take the brush as a souvenir. It was pretty mangy. He turned back down the track, his arm pulsing at each step. The dog bounding ahead, and then back, to hurry him along. When they reached the bottom they rested. His arm throbbed. Edgar found movement more comfortable. If he sat down he would never want to get up again. The pain urged him on. From behind the Rock in raggedy formation above him, like car doors opening and closing, came the proverbial croaking of crows.

  The father gripped his arm in his hands and studied the wound. A flap of skin hung loosely between two gouges. The bleeding was slow to stop. He cuffed Edgar gently over the side of the head. The mother washed the wound and wrapped up ice in a bit of linen and made him hold it against the broken skin. He wanted her to hold him, but there was drinking to be done. That night he heard them again arguing over their clinking bottles. He knew it was about him, even though the words were no more than a buzz through the walls. The boy was always doing things like this. How many shirts was she expected to mend? Then don’t mend them. When the pain was too great they gave him a glass of brandy, which burned his throat, but finally made him go asleep where he dreamed of the father sitting at the end of the bed, watching over him.

  In all this, school had been a fleeting abstraction in Edgar’s experience. His memory of it was limited. Children laughed and sniggered on the bus. No one wanted to sit near him. He was confronted in the playground by the two churchboys who had accosted him on the streets of town. They liked him even less than when they recalled him burrowing about in a bin. They told everyone. The girls stared in revulsion. They swung their plaits and pinched their noses. Someone accused him of looking at her underpants. He was reprimanded by the principal. The teacher, in a placatory role, swiftly learned to ignore him. Edgar remained quiet in class and stared out the window at birds; at a tractor mowing the oval; at the arc of the sun. If they did not want him here, then why was he here? If he spoke they all laughed. One girl in particular took pity on him, so it seemed. Her name was Ivy Cornish and she spoke to him in the playground, where the asphalt basketball court radiated the lunchtime heat. He sat on the hard ground, panting a little. He was having trouble undoing the plastic wrap of his sandwiches. The girl approached and asked his name. Edgar noticed the ribbons in her hair, their baubles.

  ‘Ed,’ he told her, ‘Edgar Hamilton.’

  She took his sandwiches and unwrapped them. She was an expert.

  ‘I’m Ivy Cornish,’ said Ivy Cornish. ‘My father owns Cornish’s Newsagency. Where do you live?’

  ‘I live—’

  Before he could finish a group of girls floated their laughter across the basketball court. One of them, he knew, was called Sophie Trelawney. All the boys liked her. She was the sister of one of the Sunday school boys. Sophie and Ivy. He looked at Ivy’s pretty face, its splash of freckles. Was she hiding a smile? Had Sophie dared her to come and speak to him? Were they trying to imagine what he might say? Edgar thought he could smell her toothpaste. A boy called Doug Medson wandered past bouncing a ball.

  ‘What are you talkin’ to that halfwit for?’

  ‘’Cause I wanna,’ Ivy Cornish snapped back.

  ‘If you talk to that spaz, then you’re a spaz.’

  The boy moved on and Ivy Cornish returned to Sophie and her friends. Giggling Gerties, the mother would have called them. Trumped-up little sluts, the father. Edgar did not know what those things were. They were just things parents said, which stuck in his mind like grains of glass. (‘Life’s a bucket full of nuts and bolts, my lad,’ the father said, ‘but it’s still got a bloody great hole in it, and at the end of the day there’s just nuts.’) Sometimes he sat next to Ivy Cornish in class and she whispered the answers to him, but still he got them wrong. The teacher made Ivy move away from him. In the playground he heard the boys, egged on by Doug Medson, singing:

  ‘Ivy’s in the cellar

  By Glory can’t you smell her

  With snot dribbling down her nose

  Dribbling down her nose to her toes.’

  When Edgar found Ivy crying behind the toilets he felt a surge of anger rise through him. Edgar had a feeling that made his bowels go hot and watery. He became aware of a defence more powerful than indifference. He had an ally. He wanted to smash those kids, although it felt strange, perhaps unnatural, not to be the focus of their derision. He wanted to help her. He would do anything for her to prove his loyalty. But she did not want his loyalty. When Ivy looked up and saw him she ran away.

  Sometimes Sophie Trelawney asked him what kind of cheese he ate. Edgar knew whatever answer he gave would be wrong. There were other rhymes for him. Sophie chewed her nails to the quick. Or was it Ivy? They were best friends. He liked them both but they didn’t need him. Sophie showed him how to write his own name, but when he tried to copy the letters she formed, all he was able to conjure was Ebgr Ham. Nevertheless, he would have a long memory of her ravaged fingers as they held the crayon which formed the swoop of her S’s, like the path of a bird in flight. Edgar started chewing his nails too.

  Another time, it might have been the same day for all Edgar knew of time, he found himself within the rich aromas of the school toilet block. Such smells and sounds among the dribbling cisterns, the flushings, the footsteps in and out. Edgar was hiding in the cubicle where it was quiet. No one could find him here. At his feet, between his shoes, lay half a broken razor blade. He recognised it as an instrument to do with fathers. What was it doing here on the toilet floor? It was brown and rusty and cold. He turned it in his fingers. He heard footsteps slap into the toilet block and step up to the urinal. Edgar peered beneath the cubicle door. It was Doug, the boy who’d called him spaz, who had insulted Ivy for talking to him. Edgar recognised the boy’s smell. The boy shook himself energetically as Edgar stole from the cubicle. He crept up behind, holding the broken razor blade, and slashed twice, deeply, down the back of the boy’s bare knee. The boy screeched, and hobbled in pain and fear away from Edgar.

  Edgar followed him out into the sunshine where the children ran away and the grown-up-on-duty was obliged to intervene.

  He could not remember the look on the boy’s face. He could not remember the words the teacher, and later the principal used on him, apart from one which was:

  ‘Typical.’

  In fact he could not remember his teacher at all. When he tried to climb out the window during his interrogation, they seized him. Edgar bit and thrashed at them, kicking over a chair. He rather liked the noise the chair made. They held him until the father arrived. Smirked when they saw the battered ute pull into the school grounds. Hadn’t they been told a hundred times not to smirk? The father hurled Edgar about the room, until the principal asked him to desist from
corporal punishment and instead to remove his son from the premises. (‘Listen, boxhead, no one tells me how to discipline my son.’) The father hauled Edgar by the scruff of the neck out of the office, and the building, slamming doors, bellowing as he went: ‘Is that how yer keep yer dignity, is it?’ and tossed him into the back of the ute where he sat in the sun, contented. The son did not remember the words the father used when they got back home, or the lashings of the belt, confused as they were with all the other lashings. He realised, once his abrasions healed, that his time with school was over. The glimmer of this dawning filled him like a glass with honey, with a golden liberation.

  Edgar worked the farm with the father. He trained the dogs and rode with them in the back of the ute. His body grew strong, his bones firm. His knowledge of the world instinctive and ruled by reflex. Years later, the truant officer came to the farm, knocking loudly at the doors and windows. He walked about the house peering in. The silky yapped. The mother finally relented and opened the door, giving Edgar the chance to skip out the back. He jumped the yard fence and, in the company of dogs, whose chains he loosened at the tank, ran over the fresh furrows of the paddocks towards the Rock. The green stalks of wheat fell beneath his feet.

  He knew no truant officer, or anyone, would ever find him. He was big. He was strong. He knew things. He was faster than even the father. He ate fruit and vegetables plucked from Dungay’s house garden, surprised at the colour of unearthed carrots. He made a hidey-hole in one of Dungay’s perfect haystacks and slept there comfortably, huddled with his dogs for warmth. He listened to the postman’s farting motorbike delivering Dungay’s mail.

  He thought he was in for another hiding when cold drove him home two days later, but the father was catching up on his ploughing, and the mother was humming in the kitchen. Her spirits had been rejuvenated in his absence, though when she saw him, she gave him a hug, absentmindedly, smelling of dough and sherry, inspecting his shirt and patting his head.