Dust Off the Bones

by Paul Howarth

  On his way out of the cemetery, he spat on Sullivan’s grave.

  A boy was waiting for him when he reached the backyard gate. Tommy could guess who he was. Tall, dark-haired, his father’s image, but there were parts of himself, or maybe his own father, in there too. Freckles on the kid’s nose and cheekbones. A seriousness in his stare. He stood with his arms rigid at his sides, his fingers picking his trouser legs and itching his palms. Tommy came through the gate and the boy stepped determinedly forward with an outstretched hand.

  “Glad to meet you, Uncle Tommy. My name’s Thomas McBride.”

  It took him a moment to recover. Uncle Tommy—he’d never heard anything so strange. But he shook the boy’s sweaty hand, an exaggerated flapping up and down, then swallowed and managed to reply, “Glad to meet you too, son.”

  “That’s your sister buried up there,” the boy told him, like this might be news.

  “Aye, it is.”

  “Aunt Mary.”

  “Aunt Mary?” Tommy echoed, laughing.

  He nodded. “She was the same age as me when she died.”

  “Which would make you eleven, I take it?”

  “Yessir. I’ll be twelve soon. Daddy says he’ll take me mustering then.”

  Tommy winced. The laughter faded from his eyes. “I heard you liked cattle work. Skilled on a horse too, eh?”

  “Daddy says I’m about as good as you were when you were a boy.”

  “Is that right now?”

  “Yessir. Better than him even, and he’s the best I’ve seen.”

  “Billy said that? That I was better than him?”

  “Only with the horses. Not with nothing else.”

  Tommy smiled tightly. A short quick laugh through his nose. He looked at the boy standing earnestly before him and could feel the lump rising, a thickness in his throat. He reached out and scuffed his matted hair, warm and wiry in his hand, and at that moment the back door opened and Katherine was standing there, a girl peering past her, clinging to her waist. “Thomas,” she scolded, her voice catching, her breathing ragged. She’d been crying. Tears stained her cheeks. “What did I tell you? I’m so sorry, Tommy—I warned him to leave you in peace.”

  “I’m glad to have met him at last. No wonder Billy’s so proud.”

  He glanced again at Thomas, beaming at the praise, cupped his shoulder then turned to the girl hiding at Katherine’s side. He stepped forward, crouching slightly, attempted a reassuring smile. “And you must be Suzanna?” he asked her. She gave a shy nod. Tommy knelt on the steps and touched her arm ever so gently with his left hand, the little girl watching his missing fingers like there might be magic there. “I read about you in a newspaper once,” he told her. “Now look how big you’ve grown.”

  * * *

  Katherine dismissed the kitchen staff early that evening, and she and Tommy sat around one end of the long rough-wood table, drinking wine and picking at cuts of bread, meat, and cheese, in the light of a single candle flame. Neither could stomach a formal supper. And Tommy held dark memories of that dining room. Dark memories of the whole house, in fact, but maybe these were the kind of memories he could manage to let go. Leave them all up here, where they belonged, find a way not to take them back home. Beginning, perhaps, in this kitchen, a room like any other, four walls, a table and chairs. There was no evil in here. Just him and Katherine, his sister-in-law, eating and drinking, sometimes laughing, swapping stories about Billy, remembering him, beginning to mourn.

  “There was this one time,” Katherine said, her hand whirling, loosened by the wine, “Billy got it in his head there was money to be made in camel breeding—did you ever come across a camel, Tommy?”

  “Once or twice. Thought they were the strangest-looking horses I ever seen.”

  “Well, Billy bought a pair off this trader—I don’t know where he met him, Billy met lots of men—and came back one day with the two of them plodding along behind, that funny walk they have, the bend in their knees. Anyway, I remember it, I was in the backyard, and I saw him lead these things into the old corral. Like Hannibal with his elephants, he was. Not sure I’d ever seen him so proud. ‘What the hell are they for?’ I asked him, and of course he says we’re going to breed them, sell them, or even make use of them ourselves. Well, you can imagine my reaction, but there was no telling him sometimes, not when he’d got an idea in his head, and I thought if it made us a bit of money . . . this was during the drought, mind you, anything was worth a try. So, he starts up with these camels. Honestly, Tommy, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard. I’d stand out the back and watch him trying to train them, even better trying to get them to mate. You’ve heard of mules being stubborn, a camel wouldn’t run if it didn’t want to even if you set the thing on fire. Every day he’d be out there, getting bitten or stomped on or kicked. They destroyed the corral fences. Had to have a whole new one built. Billy would be trying to shove one onto the other, climbing up on the railings, dangling out food as bait. They just weren’t interested. Didn’t matter what he did. And the noise those creatures made! Have you heard them? Sometimes at night we’d hear them from the house, honking away like car horns! After about a week of this carry-on, Billy arranged for some vet to examine them, tell him what was going wrong. We all stood around the corral watching, me and Billy, a few of the men. The vet walked in, took one look at the camels, walked right out again. Didn’t even inspect them. ‘Well?’ Billy asked him—you could see he wasn’t pleased, he’d paid to have this bloke brought out here, he was some sort of expert, I think. And the vet looks him square in the eye, deadly serious, big beard and whiskers on him, asks, ‘And you are hoping to breed these two camels, are you, Mr. McBride?’ Billy looks about, confused, like this must be some sort of trick. ‘I already told you that—what’s wrong with them?’ ‘Nothing,’ the old man answers. ‘They’re two perfectly healthy, if a little unhappy, examples of the species. Your problem is, they are both males.’”

  Tommy burst out laughing. Katherine cupped her mouth with her hand, her eyes watering, she couldn’t stop. She clutched her chest and fell back in the chair and dabbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “So what happened?” Tommy asked her finally. “What did he do with them?”

  It took her a while to steady herself. She sniffed and sipped her wine. “He was furious! Didn’t believe the vet at first. Asked him, ‘You sure about that?’ and the bloke offered to get both camels all excited just to prove it, though there’d be a hefty surcharge. Billy sent him packing. I don’t know if he ever caught up with the trader in the end. The camels, I think he sold them. Knowing Billy he probably even made a profit, claimed they were thoroughbreds or something. The men joked about it for months afterward. I didn’t dare. As you can imagine, Billy did not see the funny side, but it still tickles me to this day.”

  “Two males,” Tommy said, shaking his head. “Didn’t he notice?”

  “You can’t exactly see it on a camel. None of us thought to even check. This trader must have known, surely, but poor Billy just took him at his word.”

  They drifted into silence, lingering laughter at the tale. She sipped her wine and looked at him fondly. “I’m so glad you came, Tommy.”

  “I’m not staying.”

  “I know. But just having you here . . . Billy felt your absence, I’m sure he did, not that he ever told me how he felt about anything. He was a man of silence, mostly. Maybe you all are. But he missed you. There’s no doubt about that.”

  “Aye, well.”

  “It’s unfair, what happened to you both. You were so young.”

  “You weren’t much older.”

  She shook her head. “No. And that wasn’t fair either.”

  “I’ll get off in the morning, I was thinking. It ain’t good for me, being here. Head down to Glendale, then into town, see if I can pick up a coach.”

  “I can arrange one for you? A private carriage?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Shall I come with you th
en? To the house?”

  “What for?”

  “Billy always struggled. Took him years before he went back. Probably you could count up all his visits on the fingers of just one hand.”

  “Yours or mine?” Tommy joked, weakly, but Katherine didn’t laugh. He was ducking the question, doing his best to avoid her gaze.

  “I mean it. Let me come with you. I’ve my own goodbyes to say down there.”

  He thought for a moment then shook his head. “I think I’d best do this alone.”

  That night he lay awake in one of the guest bedrooms, tracing tendrils of flowers on a section of wallpaper lit by a shaft of moonlight. Dog-tired from the journey but he couldn’t sleep. He knew that wallpaper, this bedroom. The furniture was different—one big bed now, not two—but from the moment Katherine had stopped in the hallway, wished him good night outside the door, he had known.

  This was the same room he and Billy had slept in, the night their parents were killed.

  Chapter 44

  Tommy McBride

  Around the workers’ compound, past the derelict watchman’s hut, following the bridle path through sparse woodland and over lush grazing fields in the west, until he turned uphill onto a southern slope where the terrain was more barren, riddled with rock and scree, stubbled with spinifex and towering termite mounds, cathedrals of another world, and in the distance glimpsed the slender blue gum forest that had once marked the boundary between Broken Ridge station and his family’s little cattle run.

  Tommy could have ridden blindfolded, he’d done the journey so often in his dreams.

  He dismounted in the trees and walked the horse through, the brush thicker than he remembered it, overgrown. On the other side he stood gazing over the sloping plains, ablaze in the morning sunshine, the land scrubby and perished, not a blade of decent feed. He took off the hat Katherine had given him—one of Billy’s, she had said—and forlornly wafted the flies with his hand. The place was a wasteland. And to think it had once been his whole world.

  He settled the hat back on his head; good fit, nice feel, pure rabbit felt. Something to remember us by, Katherine had said, as if he was likely to forget. The two of them standing on the verandah, a drawn-out goodbye, Katherine again offering to come with him, Tommy refusing, a shake of the head. She’d hugged him long and hard, made him promise to write, mumbling about arranging another visit sometime. The children would appreciate it, she had added, so he’d agreed. But he doubted he would ever see any of them again.

  The horse trotted reluctantly over that hard, rubbled ground, hooves slipping, her gait wary, and still a long way to go. Tommy patted her neck sympathetically. He knew exactly how she felt. The sooner they got there, and got this over with, the sooner they’d both be gone.

  They crested the final hillside and at last the little homestead peeled into view, ringed by its moldering outbuildings, ghostly and abandoned in that dust-blown scrubland. Tommy pulled the horse up short and sat staring. The place looked condemned. Holes in the walls, holes in the sagging roof; one side of the scullery had collapsed. The storage shed had been flattened, the stables looked burned-out, a carpet of weeds covered the yard. He walked the horse slowly down the hillside, struggling to understand the disrepair. Hadn’t Billy said he’d lived here? Hadn’t he visited? Wasn’t this all part of the Broken Ridge estate?

  Tommy tied off the horse at the cattle yards, the railings dangling, the posts chewed by rot, and walked carefully toward the house and main yard. Total silence out here save the crunch of his footsteps. Deathly still. No cattle, no insects, no birds. Ahead the house was lit up in the sunshine and all the more decrepit for it, the front door standing open, dark shadows inside . . . Tommy looked away, to the bunkhouse, the remnants of a firepit outside the entrance, the rusted frame of a cot bed visible through the doors. He reached the verandah and wavered. Breathing in staccato jags. He could almost hear Mother sweeping, the swish of her broom on the boards; he snatched free of the memory and hurried around the back of the house.

  Headstones, he’d expected. Marble, like Mary’s, something with their names. Instead he saw only thick scrub and bald soil patches, no grave markers of any kind, no sign that his parents, or anyone, had ever been buried here.

  Bewildered, Tommy trudged through the weeds and clump grass, glancing back at the house to get a fix on where they’d dug the holes. He found them eventually. A pair of plain white wooden crosses lying discarded in the dirt, the surrounding scrub a little thinner, two rectangles, the vague outline of each plot.

  Tommy knelt and snatched up the nearest cross and tried shoving it back in, but the earth was baked solid, no give beneath the dust. He heaved and heaved, jabbing at the ground, until the join between the arms splintered and the cross fell apart in his hands. He looked at the two halves despairingly, then screamed and launched them into the scrub, falling onto all fours and snatching up weeds with both fists. This was his mother’s grave he was tending. He’d dug it out himself. Worrying he’d made it too big for her, lowering her in; now she lay here like she was nothing, had meant nothing, like she wasn’t a mother at all. “Fuck, Billy!” Tommy yelled, panting, rearing back on his heels. His hat fell off. Hands cut and filthy, but his scrabbling had made no difference at all.

  Up Tommy labored. He retrieved his hat and stood over those two outlines and paid his respects with silence, the only way he knew. He wasn’t one for praying, or talking to the dead, and anyway if they could hear him, he figured they already knew. He missed them, was the crux of it. And he was sorry as hell for how they’d gone. That day had punched a hole through Tommy that nothing had been able to fill. You never get over becoming an orphan. Not for all the Arthurs and Jack Kerrigans in this world. He hoped they would be proud of what he’d made of his life, what little he’d achieved, but deep down didn’t see how they could.

  He left the other cross lying in the long grass, left the graves unmarked. Fuck it—this land had defined his parents, sustained them, ruined them, it might as well swallow them now. It felt fitting, almost. They belonged here totally, in a way that for the first time Tommy was realizing he did not. This endless red flatland he’d always thought of as home . . . but it wasn’t anymore, was it, all it ever brought him was pain. He felt no sense of belonging being back here. No, home for Tommy was Gippsland, with his cattle, his gully, his pastures, and with Emily, and Arthur, and Rosie; they were his family now.

  But he had to go inside the house again. Had to lay that ghost to rest. He walked around the front, beneath the rusted windmill, past the crumbling log pile and dried-up well, the little clearing where they’d found the dogs stabbed, and forced himself face-to-face with the old slab hut, planting his boots in the weed-strewn dirt directly in front of the steps, the open door yawning beyond. Dark in there, but not fully, the gloom leavened by shards of sunlight through the patchwork roof. He glimpsed the curtain to his old bedroom, swallowed and steeled himself. All he had to do was go inside. Then he could go home.

  Slow boot tread on the steps then the verandah. A dark stain between the bench and the door. Tommy pictured Father slumped there, three holes in him, his rifle across his lap, and had to grab the doorframe for support. He took Billy’s hat off. Dropped it on the cobwebbed bench. He exhaled shakily. Get in, get out, and he was done here. He’d never be back again.

  Tommy stepped into the room and the gunshot flung him backward, a searing pain in his midriff, total incomprehension in his eyes. He slammed against the wall and slid to the floor, clutching his side; the hand came away soaked in blood. Desperately searching the shadows, broken by those dusty columns of light, until his gaze settled on the far corner of the room and the outline of a tall man, sitting at the head of the table, in Father’s old chair.

  A match flared in the darkness. Noone’s hollow face in the flame.

  “You took your time, Tommy,” he said, drawing on his pipe stem, shaking the match dead. “I was expecting you yesterday.”

  Tommy groaned in a
nguish. Blood gushed through his fingers from the wound. His eyes closed then he opened them, fixed them again on Noone.

  “You know, I did warn Percy that he should shoot you first, that you were the more dangerous of the pair. I suspect he just couldn’t help himself, he and Billy had never got along. I am assuming you killed him for his troubles, the poor lad. I’ve not heard from him, so . . .”

  Noone shrugged, like it was all the same to him. Tommy’s legs were tingling. He shivered, suddenly cold. His gaze sliding aimlessly around this room that had once been the very center of his life, the safest place in the world. He could almost feel them with him, his family, gathered around the table, shuffling between the rooms. Noone like a specter in the shadows, the slender outline of his body, his crossed legs, his crooked arm, holding the pipe to his lips. The silver revolver was on the table beside him, among a small scattering of victuals and supplies.

  “That could have been you, Tommy. I always said you’d have made a fine officer one day. And truly, I planned on leaving you alone, out there, living your life. You will notice that not once over the years have I attempted to track you down, when really it would have been no trouble at all. Even after you killed that headman, down in St. George. And remember, I was a serving police inspector at the time.”

  A draw on the pipe, a thick plume through the sunlight; Tommy’s head rolled.

  “Now, your brother on the other hand . . . the man always was a buffoon, though I thought we had an understanding, I must say. The problem is, you people just can’t seem to forget me, it’s like we are sweethearts, old flames.” He chuckled, shook his head. “Whereas, truthfully, I have not given either you or Billy or the events that connect us even the slightest thought in all this time. It was nothing to me, what happened here. Nothing—do you understand? But then Billy goes running to some lawyer and I learn you brought a gun to my house. To my house, Tommy. I was very disappointed. I expected a great deal more from you.”