‘We have sacred places, our people,’ Captain Bob whispered. It was as if his words were gathered by the branches and flung back and forth through the air. ‘Some are ceremonial for corroborees. Other areas are used for our living needs. Some for the carving of women’s cooking things and some for canoes.’ He gestured to the trees surrounding them.
Squib noted that the woody plants were aged and knotted, many scarred with great pieces cut from their trunks. ‘For canoes, for the flood you talked off?’
‘For past floods and those to come.’ Captain Bob nodded. ‘We don’t own the land, little one, the land owns us. The land is our mother. You know this, yes?’
A number of wallabies, crouching on their stubby front legs, ambled slowly from Squib’s path as she walked across the clearing. The fire was hot and pungent.
‘The Dreamtime all around us, little one. We exist in it and beyond it. Listen to your heart.’ He gestured to a rock and a wallaby, then scooped dirt into his palm and let it trickle freely back to the ground. ‘Feel what they feel. We share their spirit.’
A lady beetle settled on Squib’s hand.
‘This is not the time for the black man. The white fella’s time has come and we must be like the animals when the cold comes. So build your nest, little one, and do not venture far, for the whites would see you taken from the man who would be your kin.’
Squib thought of her long dead mother, of her brother. A vision of Ben in a room crowded with boys drifted with the heady smoke. There were large wooden crosses on the pale walls and many of the children were crying. ‘Ben? He’s lost too?’
Captain Bob sprinkled the fire with water.
‘And my father?’
‘You will meet again, but it will not be as you imagined.’
Squib bit her lip. ‘So I have to stay with Jack? I knew I did.’
‘And now you have something for me, but remember the spirits cannot protect you from another man’s judgement.’
Squib considered Captain Bob’s words. Only one man knew the secret of her family. She looked Captain Bob directly in the eyes. ‘The man who brings the mail, Adams, he’s the one who is killing the sheep.’
Captain Bob displayed bright pink gums and partial stubs for teeth.
Squib looked at the dwindling fire. The hollowed dirt that protected it provided no fuel for the dying flames. She looked back to the place where Captain Bob sat. It was empty.
Chapter 38
Absolution Creek, 1965
The twins were poking their fingers in the air vents on the dash.
‘Now, I want you girls to stay very quiet. Remember what I told you?’
They nodded obediently, elbowing each other into submission, and wiggled back into the bench seat. Meg turned the ignition, and placed her foot on the clutch. She slowly moved the column gear stick into first and accelerated. The station wagon gave a series of hops forward and the twins slid off the seat, squealing excitedly as the vehicle stalled.
‘What happened, Mummy?’ Penny asked.
‘Damn it all.’ Meg mentally retraced her steps. At least Sam’s station wagon was clear of the garage. She had managed to reverse it out of the narrow timber structure without any damage, although her stress levels weren’t faring as well.
Penny elbowed Jill back against the seat. ‘Stop it.’
‘You’re hurting me,’ Jill complained, pinching her sister.
‘That’s it.’ Meg turned to them. ‘Out. Come on, hop out. It’s hard enough trying to teach myself how to do this. I don’t need you little scallywags distracting me.’
Penny and Jill stared at her in dismay, bottom lips drooping.
‘That look might work on your father, but not me.’
The girls scrambled out of the vehicle. ‘It’s your fault.’
‘No, it’s yours.’
‘Inside the back gate where I can see you, thank you, and I don’t want you two moving from there until I return.’
‘Yes, Mummy.’
Meg waited until the girls were safely within the homestead surrounds before trying again. It couldn’t be that difficult. She’d watched Sam drive on numerous occasions. ‘Clutch, gear, release clutch, accelerate.’
Once again the vehicle hopped a few paces forward. This time Meg was ready. Her feet moved swiftly to the brake and clutch, and she flicked the gear stick back into neutral before it stalled again. ‘Progress.’ She rubbed her hands together, checked to ensure she was still alone. The station outbuildings were quiet. No one was around and Meg didn’t expect Cora or Sam to show for at least another hour. There had been fights aplenty since yesterday, what with the dozer, timber and iron arriving and Horse’s entanglement in the tree. Meg expected Cora to be in full lecture mood by dinner. Until then the afternoon was hers.
This time the station wagon moved forward with a single jolt. Meg squared her shoulders, depressed the clutch and went up a gear. Swerving to miss the poddy lambs nibbling grass by the roadside, the vehicle whizzed along the dirt road past the dam and was soon heading out towards the silos. The gate was open and she steered the vehicle through it cautiously before trying her luck and going up into third gear. A satisfied smile crossed her face. Turning left she drove up onto the main road. It was a good few miles until the boundary gate and Meg practised going up and down gears, accelerating and decelerating. Soon she was driving like a pro, the window down, her elbow resting on the door frame. The wind was freezing and her cheeks turned numb quickly in response. Meg didn’t care. She threw her head back and gave a yelp of pure joy.
Driving wasn’t so hard. Wow, at the rate she was progressing a driver’s licence would be hers next week. Meg visualised driving to Stringybark Point to do the shopping, maybe even going further afield for a bit of sightseeing. No more days filled with housework now; all she had to do was pack up the girls and go. Everyone else had a life so why couldn’t she?
The boundary gate appeared before her like a brick wall.
‘Damn.’ Meg pressed the brake pedal to the floor, and the car skidded on the dirt. Trying to right the vehicle’s path, she over-corrected and within seconds the car hit the gate, smashing it to pieces. Meg came to a stop a couple of hundred yards onwards, the engine running. She looked into the rear-vision mirror, her white knuckles clutching the steering wheel. The gate was ruined and the Absolution Creek sign lay in the dirt.
When her shock subsided a little, Meg inspected Sam’s car. The old Holden was invincible. Wiping a saliva-moistened finger on the bonnet duco, a tiny fleck of white paint was the only sign of her recent altercation. Could be worse, she decided, although the thought of fronting her aunt with the news was more numbing than the actual accident. Picking up the property sign, Meg pushed the still-attached nail into the hole on the upright post then proceeded to stack the busted gate timber into a pile on the roadside. One section of the gate was actually more damaged than the other. Meg figured Sam could probably drag a piece of mesh or even a spare gate if there was one lying around to block the hole. That was something.
Meg was still perusing the damage and procrastinating about returning to the homestead when Ellen appeared from the direction of Absolution Creek.
‘You right?’ she asked a little offhandedly.
‘All good here,’ Meg replied, trying to sound flippant. ‘Bit of a brake problem.’
Ellen surveyed the wrecked boundary gate from inside her vehicle. ‘Oh dear.’
‘Pretty much. How’s Harold?’
Ellen bit her lip. ‘Okay. I’d feel happier if he’d see a doctor. It’s all very well having James Campbell checking on him. It’s just . . . well, it’s a head wound. The same spot where that ram hit him when he was knocked over in the yards.’ Ellen shook her head. ‘I know Cora thinks the world of James, but he is a vet.’ She sniffed. ‘Of course, Harold’s just as bad. He keeps telling me it’s just a flesh wound.’
‘Ellen,’ Meg began, feeling decidedly uncomfortable. ‘What is the relationship between James and Cora?’<
br />
‘They’re friends. Although I think they care very deeply about each other. Why?’
‘Just wondering.’
‘He won’t cause any problems,’ Ellen advised her, ‘if that’s what you’re worried about. Cora would never put a personal relationship above the welfare of the property. James has his own responsibilities and Cora has Absolution, and that seems to suit the both of them just fine.’
Friends, Meg thought. She liked the sound of that word.
Ellen placed her hands on the steering wheel as if she were about to drive off, and then dropped them back in her lap. ‘I didn’t expect you to stay. You being a city girl.’
‘Oh?’
‘I guess the proverbial pot of gold has a fair bit to do with it.’
‘Pot of gold,’ Meg repeated, although she was pretty sure Ellen alluded to Absolution Creek. A guilty sense of excitement rushed her thoughts. It was the first real confirmation that the property would one day be hers.
‘Anyway, I just wanted to say that apart from your inheritance I admire you for hanging in there. That aunt of yours can be difficult, however people respect her, Meg, for what she’s done, who she is. You shouldn’t listen to gossip.’
‘Gossip?’
‘You go to town. You’ve got eyes and ears,’ Ellen replied softly. ‘I must go. I promised Harold I’d be home by dark.’ Shifting the vehicle into first gear, Ellen drove away.
Ellen’s words echoed in her head. It seemed Absolution would one day be hers. She’d said that Cora had a past Meg needed to understand, and that James and Cora were just friends. Remembering this, Meg felt both excited and intrigued, however her mind seized on the last point. Why was James hanging around Absolution if Cora was only a friend? Surely he had better things to do than be on-call for her aunt. Ellen’s vehicle threw up swirls of dust as she drove away. Meg knew why. James Campbell was interested, there was something between them. She may have married when she was a teenager, but Meg knew when a man was keen on a girl. With a smile on her lips she drove home carefully and parked the station wagon in the garage. Somehow the boundary gate’s destruction seemed unimportant.
Chapter 39
Absolution Creek, 1924
Olive heaved up a breakfast of eggs and toast. It was her second sickness of the day following weeks of nausea, and still she felt no better. Pushing the casement window ajar she breathed in mouthfuls of gritty air as sticky black flies buzzed about the room. She yearned for an orange to cleanse the bitter taste in her mouth, and silently pleaded for a day of rest. Sunday seemed so far away. It was only just past daylight yet the butter needed to be churned, the new vegetable plot dug, and a cooked midday meal was expected to be ready on the table, regardless of whether Jack remembered to return to the house to eat or not. Olive’s immediate concerns were a lie down and at least a dozen Aspro tablets. She knocked back a handful, her fingers resting briefly on her slightly protruding stomach.
‘You’re with child, aren’t you?’ Squib poked a length of wood into the fireplace and dropped another log on the dirt floor before hooking a pot of water onto the swinging arm above the flames.
‘Of course not.’ Olive busied herself, shaking dirt and leaves free from Jack’s and Thomas’s clothes. After a full day standing over the boiling copper in the sun, the clothes she’d hung over a makeshift line between two trees had broken, dropping the clothes in the dirt. ‘I’m not washing these again. They’ll have to do.’
‘You have all the signs.’ Squib closed the window, her attention drawn to the black flies buzzing about Olive’s sick bowl, which stuck out from beneath the curtain of the candle box cabinet. ‘I’ve seen them before when Abigail had my sister, Beth: the sickness and the tiredness and that.’ She pointed at Olive’s stomach. ‘How far gone are you?’ Squib counted out six large potatoes from the hessian sack on the floor and began to peel them with a stocky knife. ‘Whose is it?’
‘I’m not gone anywhere.’ Olive tugged at the ugly frock made by a dressmaker in the village last month. It was difficult to believe that the calendar was inching towards late May. She’d been on Absolution Creek for three-and-a-half months. With a final straightening of the dress seams, Olive squared her shoulders. ‘It’s the change in diet. I’m a city person. I’m not used to this kind of food.’
Squib dropped the potatoes into the boiler. She really couldn’t understand why Olive didn’t just pack up and leave. ‘Why’d you come, then?’ She fished out a piece of corned meat from the bucket on the wooden table. It had been sitting in brine for two days, but with the unseasonably warm weather it was time for it to be eaten. The minister hadn’t passed through Stringybark Point on account of a fever hitting a family of eight. They’d drunk water from a river where a dead cow had been found. Olive and Jack were still not married.
‘Why don’t you go home with Thomas?’ Jack’s brother had determined to leave in July. It was the time of the year when the rainfall was at its lowest, making travel much easier, at least that was what Squib heard. She put the meat and a good portion of the brine into the cooking pot.
‘How do you know how to cook that?’ Olive was intent on changing the subject.
Squib wiped her hands on her blue serge dress. It was one of two sewn by the village dressmaker. A third in poo brown was a cast-off from Olive. ‘I’ve got eyes. Besides, most of it is common sense. You don’t always need a recipe book.’
Olive decided on a more companionable approach. ‘Living out here,’ she said, pouring a glass of lukewarm water, ‘well, it’s hard on a couple. I never see Jack. At least Thomas comes home for meals, but not Jack, he’s out from dawn to dusk. Why, the man only needs a water bag for sustenance.’
‘He’s making a living. We’re meant to be making a home.’
Olive took a sip of water to settle her stomach. ‘Making a home? Apart from making pastry and scones, the only thing I’ve learnt is how to chop wood and sprinkle water on dirt floors and get my arms burnt red by the sun.’
Squib washed the paring knife in the ceramic basin, drying it on a towel tucked through a belt at her waist. ‘This is our home and we have a responsibility to care for it – both the buildings and the land.’
Olive wanted to tell the girl that Absolution Creek wasn’t her home, and that she should only speak when spoken to or else she’d be on the next packhorse to Stringybark Point. Instead she piled the washing to one side. The girl knew Olive’s condition. Maybe there was some benefit in keeping her on. She was adept at cooking and cleaning and was probably born into service. Only yesterday, the girl mentioned an interest in purchasing some cheap spoilt fruit during the winter. Olive was dying for a little variety. ‘Are you still planning on making jam?’
‘Why?’
‘I thought we could make some preserves as well.’
‘Perhaps,’ Squib answered tightly.
Olive ran a finger along the washed boards in the hallway. She had approached Jack for an entrance parlour yesterday complaining it was quite wrong to walk directly into a hallway. To her delight he agreed, although he quickly changed the structure to an open veranda, promising to build it during the winter.
A slight breeze stirred the swept path as Olive walked along the side of the house. They’d finished the roof last month and it was a comforting sight even if it did look like a patchwork quilt with its high-shingled roof interspersed with sheets of shiny new corrugated iron. Once the woolshed was completed, Jack promised to replace the kitchen fireplace with a built-in stove and stone chimney. The stove was already purchased, courtesy of Anthony Horden’s mail-order catalogue.
The rear of the house block was where the chook run, clothesline, vegetable plot, outhouse, wood shed and pile were located, the copper taking centre stage. Beyond was a tangle of low brush and wind-twisted pine trees. More than once Olive considered walking through the shadowy grove and not reappearing. At nearly five months gone, she was aware that one day she would wake up and no longer be able to conceal her ruination. To date
, loose clothing and a general increase in her own weight had assisted, however time no longer favoured her. Olive stared into the ridge. She envisioned a cool glade of sun-stippled grass and it was quite an enticing thought to simply lie down as the characters did in a fairy tale, to be awoken to a fresh new world abundant with hope and love. It was a pity that she was such a coward.
Olive chose instead to rely on Jack’s Christian charity. It was a decision long in the making, one compounded by the shock of the attack, which she now recognised had slightly unhinged her faculties. Looking back she saw a stretch of days filled with complaints, and she knew it was her attitude that caused Jack rarely to return home. When he did it was to campfire quietness and a child-woman who knew his every mood. Well, Jack Manning was her fiancé and, while their love had been eroded, Olive determined to salvage something from it. She had given up everything for him and it dawned on her that her pride refused to see her left with nothing. She thought of her father. He’d aspired to a better life and through hard work and perseverance achieved his goal. If he were here he’d be telling her to do the same thing.
‘You wanted him, Olive,’ he would tell her. ‘It is your duty to help him achieve his dream. As your own mother supported me.’
Only one lifetime stretched out before them both and it was with the future in mind that Olive determined her hateful secret must be revealed.
Her confidence grew daily. It was like a bird in a nest, testing its wings before that first life-affirming flight. Soon Olive would sit Jack down and explain the ordeal she had suffered. In her heart she knew he cared and she believed she could be a good wife. She simply needed to forget her shame and share the misfortune that plagued her body. Once Jack understood, once he accepted Olive was the wounded party, she knew everything would be all right. Honesty and loyalty were now the virtues Olive aspired to.
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