All for a strip of
rocky ground

I

Susannah could see that something was not quite right on the road ahead. The way the lights were tilted seemed wrong. To begin with they were tiny, winking in the far flat expanse of the night, beyond the thin band of bitumen road that was lit up by their own vehicle’s headlights. And it was impossible to tell whether the lights were on the earth or above it. She glanced at her husband’s profile. It appeared in the greenish glow of the dashboard as an outline and not a real face, but the angle suggested determination and fearlessness.

‘Can you see that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What do you think it is?’

His eyes didn’t leave the screen. ‘Maybe a smash.’

She stared hard through the dark, and the lights disappeared.

But before they did she saw that there were two of them, one on top of the other, and they were on her husband’s side of the road. A set of reflector posts flashed past. And then they reached it, captured by the high beam of their vehicle: a truck lying sideways and cattle on the road. It had come from the opposite direction. Her husband stepped hard on the brake and she was thrust into her seatbelt, seeing through the windscreen the bull bar touching the rump of a bullock. She put her hand out as though to prevent her children from falling, but they were strapped to their seats. He slowly eased the vehicle onto the gravel, the headlights finding the stunned eyes of cattle, several on the edge of the bush. They must have escaped from the truck. The one they hit was seemingly unhurt, its flank disappearing into the darkness. John turned off the vehicle’s engine.

‘Barely touched it,’ he said.

He opened the door.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going to have a look.’

‘Mummy, I’m thirsty.’

‘Shush. Be careful.’

He stepped out, slamming the door too hard so that the impact of metal on metal jarred, and crossed the road, the darkness folding him away. She hoped no one was injured.

A child moaned irritably. There was a short hard sound and at first it didn’t register. But when it sounded again, she knew that noise: it was a gun being fired, like when the roo shooters were out at night on the boundary of her parents’ farm. She sat forward in her seat, feeling her skin shrink.

‘Mummy.’

She wanted to be sick and her stomach hurt. There was a figure in front of the overturned cattle truck.

‘Be quiet, be quiet,’ she said urgently.

Her husband opened the door and climbed in. He stared straight ahead and turned the key in the ignition.

‘What is it?’

He drove slowly back onto the road.

‘Some cattle were injured. In the truck,’ he added.

‘So who was it, were they all right?’

‘Some things you’re better off not knowing about.’

‘Were they thieves?’

But her husband concentrated on the road in front of him and she wondered what he was thinking.

About two hours later their headlights picked out the white painted posts of a fence. A generator throbbed through the night air and a dog barked. The dark and its density engulfed her. The car engine clicked as the metal cooled. He gripped the wheel and turned towards her. She looked over her shoulder to avoid the hesitation in his eyes. The children’s limbs were loose with sleep, fat and smooth, revealed by the triangle of light that shone from the roof. One of them seemed to sense the change in motion and stirred a little, muttering. He opened the car door and she watched him disappear around the side of the house. She climbed out, almost falling. Barefoot in the soft warm dirt, she stretched and the blood flowed to the rest of her body; silent, conscious of her breathing, in and out, feeling crowded by what lay beyond the artificial light.

John returned with a shorter, square-shaped man who wore a shirt with sleeves ripped from the shoulders. His forearms were thickly veined. He told them they weren’t expected until next week. John walked behind their vehicle and began unloading the bags and the other man stepped forward to help him. Ned started to cry, waking his brother. She reached into the car to get the boys out of their seats, lifting them, one at a time, and placing them on the ground beside her, holding their hands in the darkness. They were irritable from being woken again. The men gathered their odd assortment of suitcases and bags and headed towards the veranda. She followed, coaxing the children to walk with her. They reached a doorway and the man turned on a switch and held open the flywire door. The twin fluorescent tubes flickered and hesitated before they became a strong white light. Something scuttled out of sight and the door scraped the concrete floor as it closed behind them. They were in the kitchen. It smelt of old blood and burnt animal fat. The surfaces looked greasy and were dotted with dead insects. A thickset timber table, its top covered with faded green, red and yellow linoleum, was in the centre of the room.

Mismatched chairs surrounded it. A small gas oven and cook top stood dwarfed in the recess where once there would have been a wood-fired stove. The render behind it was splattered brown. Obviously no one had ever bothered to clean it. She turned to the small man who remained in the doorway.

‘Are there any women here?’ she asked.

Texas He shook his head. ‘No, only blokes. Camped out at number eight bore.’

Her husband avoided her eye. She let go of the boys, and the men returned to the car to finish unpacking. She heard them talking on the veranda.

‘They would’ve been cattle duffers, maybe contractors, you know, with their own truck,’ the other man said.

She sat with the children at the table, tracing the patterns on the lino. Clouds of green overlaid by dashes of red and yellow stripes. She told them a story. The stripes became birds in a tree talking to each other about how they had flown a long way north and how they would need to build a new nest. They were like the green and black parrots from home, she said, but the boys couldn’t remember them.

She spread the camping mattresses out on the timber floor of the sleep-out, away from the bad smells of the kitchen and the dark musty bedrooms where each doorway was barred by the thin invisible lines of a spider’s web. She turned off the light, hoping the twins would settle quickly. After she tucked them into each side of her, their bodies gradually softened in sleep. The man had said the generator would go off in the early morning. He’d told them his name was Gerry and that he was the bore mechanic.

Later her husband lay against the wall in his swag. He may have been asleep but there was too much between them for her to be sure. She had no idea of the time now but she knew the trip from town was supposed to take about three hours. They’d stopped to eat at a roadhouse at around six. She’d wanted to stay at the motel, to come out in the morning so that she could see where she was. There was a time when she would have argued with him, when her mother was still alive, before the boys were born.

Through the flywire she could see the shapes of trees against a lighter shade of darkness that was the sky. Something scrambled in the branches close by. In the early years of their marriage she’d wanted to be involved in what he was doing. She’d wanted to talk about them, their relationship, their future, anything. He always said he was too busy, that there were jobs to be done. Eventually she stopped trying and now the voice in her head kept quiet most of the time. But she was only here because he wanted to be. She pulled the flaps of the swag closer and folded them up so they became more of an obstacle for anything that might crawl across the floor. The canvas was stiff and new. They’d bought it from an army surplus shop in the city. At the time she hadn’t thought she’d need it because she wasn’t going to be working in a stock camp, but John had wanted to sleep under the stars on their way north to show the boys what it was like and he wasn’t interested in why she didn’t want to. She wasn’t scared of animals, only the men who might be on the road at night. John accused her of imagining the worst, but even though she hadn’t mentioned the accident, she’d been right. She knew what the country was like.

II

After breakfast John left to find the other men. She had served tea and toast on the lino table once the sticky dirt had been

Texas wiped off, now she stepped around the cardboard boxes and the esky left beside the cupboard and walked back to the house where the children still slept on the floor. The house was separate from the kitchen. To reach it, she followed a path of concrete slabs with grass growing between the cracks to another flyscreen door. She opened it slowly but it still creaked. Her children hadn’t moved. Ned, always the hotter one, his hair stuck wetly to his forehead, lay on his back, covers off, arms raised above his head. Ollie lay bunched on his side. A gentle breeze filtered through the walls. She could see that this area of the house had once been an open veranda but now it was built in with flywire, shady and cool. Beyond the flywire walls were trees and lawn and then, on the other side of the fence, were long blond spears of grass and bare dirt. The lawn needed watering; it had yellowed in patches of neglect.

The pale green interior wall was marked with brownish stains and discarded spiders’ webs that looked like white spots from a distance. Louvre windows opened into the sleep-out, some missing and broken, sills covered by a band of thick dust. Beneath the ledges huddled little brown frogs. Last night Susannah had pushed a cane couch and two chairs with stained and flattened covers into the corner of the room so she could put their bedding on the floor in there. She entered the dim, musty interior where cream-coloured walls had darkened into a sickly yellow, leading to high ceilings and light fittings covered by a rope of dusty cobwebs. Through the hallway into the middle of the house, her thongs slapped the timber floor. Open doorways revealed rooms with camp beds, one with yellow foam leaking from a floral mattress cover; another had a double bed with a white headboard plastered with peeling stickers and a dark-wooded dressing table with the mirror scratched and wardrobes with open doors, the little ornate keys long since lost. The windows were all slatted louvres jammed at different angles—some opened fully, others almost closed—looking out onto the veranda or the sleep-out, and beneath the louvres were beetle shells, legs dried brittle, crossed neatly.

In the bathroom a petrified frog lay in the bottom of the shower recess, its droppings spotting the surface. There were more live frogs huddled in the corners beneath the ceiling, like little mounds of wet dirt. The washbasin was a dusty bowl, and soap was caked hard in the dish by the taps. She wondered briefly whose hands had been washed by it. They hadn’t brought much with them; they didn’t have much to bring. They were told the house would be fully furnished. She wondered at the people who lived there before them, their rubbish like the clues to a game. She’d grown up on a sheep farm and when the shearers left she remembered that they too had left behind hints of themselves. Sometimes the smell of the sweat of their bodies lingered on months after they’d gone.

At the end of the hall was a small room with a yellowed floral curtain. The window behind it was open and the fabric moved slightly. There were grey blankets and a foam mattress torn in half with bits shredded on the floor like large crumbs and books with cowboys on the covers. She picked one up and turned it over. She thought at first they were comics but in fact they were small soft-cover books with pictures of the

Texas Wild West on the front. The book in her hand flicked open to the first page. Texas was never beautiful in the sense that the rich green and red lands of Montana or Colorado were beautiful, but fairness and splendour were there if a man cared to take the trouble to look.

Susannah scrubbed the walls of the kitchen while the boys were asleep. When they woke they wanted to help her but they soon became bored and then they asked again and again where their father was. She brought out their tricycles and let them ride around the kitchen floor, watching them move in aimless circles. Her eyes were drawn to the pattern in the lino. The cloudy green blurred into a lawn, which her father was mowing. Brightly coloured beach towels lay on the grass. She and a friend were on their backs, home from boarding school, darkening their skin and watching fat white clouds and the stream of a jet passing from east to west. They’d go riding in the afternoon, saddling up the little grey mare and the chunky bay to amble along the fire break. When they reached the granite rock they tied the horses to a shrub at the base and climbed to the top. The granite smelt of squashed ants because there were always so many nests, marked by coarse pink sand surrounding the holes, that it was impossible not to tread on them. Once she stood on a nest while trying to undo the knot that tethered her horse to a tree. It felt as though hundreds had crawled up her boots and along her legs and almost to her crotch before she could get her jeans off. They were meat ants with a stinging, burning bite. A small truck drove across the table and through her thoughts. Ollie had found the bucket of Matchbox toys.

In the afternoon she sat on the grass beside the children as they paddled in their plastic wading pool beneath the yellow fingers of a rain tree. Her eyes traced the papery flowers of a bougainvillea climbing over the roof of the washhouse. It was a small shed separate from the house and the kitchen and it opened out towards the clothes line. She’d discovered earlier that it contained a twin-tub washing machine and a hand-operated wringer beside two concrete troughs. The vine above it was in full flower, its soft bright petals hiding the long thorns that grew along its branches. The grass was short and spiky beneath her bare legs.

The boys were splashing in the pool. She hadn’t noticed Ollie climbing out but when she looked back towards them he stood with his bucket, pouring water over what seemed to be a long brown stick on the grass. Then it moved. She watched the diamond shape of its head, poised. Ollie was flinging his bucket and the snake struck the blue plastic and she was running to his side. She had Ollie then, scooped up in her arms, grabbing the other one too. Ned squealed, squashed against her body as she ran into the house with them. She could have left them in the kitchen and gone back to kill it, she’d killed a snake before. When she was much younger, on her parents’ farm, she’d taken the saddle out of the shed and was walking towards her horse as a dugite slipped through the grass by her feet. She’d dropped a rock on its head and thought no more of it. This time, she shook by the louvres, peering through the slotted glass. The worst of it was she couldn’t imagine where there might be other people; the workmen, John, or another

Texas woman in a homestead beyond the hills. The snake had gone. But as she glanced through the window she saw in her mind what might have happened. She didn’t even know how to contact the Flying Doctor.

They wanted to go outside again. Their demands brought her back and she was reminded that she was their mother. Ollie’s face was striped with dirt. Ned, the smaller of the two, was dark-haired like his father. She felt a surge of warm responsibility. It didn’t happen often. Sometimes she wondered if there was something wrong with her. Ollie turned to his brother and moved his fat hand across his brow in a way that an adult might. Ned watched his mother too. When she brought out the blocks, he stood at the window while Ollie sat down amongst them. He looked back over his shoulder. Just as she thought he would sit down, he turned back to the window and asked: ‘Who planted the trees?’ She didn’t answer for a minute. She didn’t believe in God, not after what had happened to her mother. Her mother would know what to do with this place. It would be clean. She might even have baked some bread by now and the smell would have leaked into the corners and softened the sight of paint peeling from the walls. She began to answer but realised she was talking to herself since Ned was sitting down and playing with Ollie. Long shadows striped the dirt and the colour of the trunks of the bloodwood trees had deepened. John would be home soon.

That morning she’d unpacked the food from the esky and the boxes bought from a dirty supermarket in a small town they’d passed through, and stored it in the cold room, which was a large refrigerator with shelves and hooks that hung meat.

When she opened it now it smelt of stale blood and she took out a wooden crate and leant it up against the door so it wouldn’t close behind her. Rather than hang a whole beast, someone had cut it into chunks. She wasn’t sure whether the piece she picked out for dinner was rump or something tough like blade. She closed the cold-room door and walked back into the kitchen, slapping the heavy slab of meat down on the benchtop. She looked under the bench to the shelving below where pots and pans and crockery were stacked. Beside them was a plastic tray separating the cutlery, which normally would have been kept in a drawer, except there weren’t any. She couldn’t find any sharp knives. She went back to the cold room, wishing she’d started dinner earlier. She looked along the shelf.

She couldn’t even find the stone that would be used to sharpen the knives. Boots scuffed the concrete. She jumped and turned.

It was Gerry, the bore mechanic. His eyes sidled sideways, shyly.

He touched his hat.

‘I can’t find any knives,’ she said.

He took off his hat. He was smaller without it. His dark hair was plastered flat in a sweat crown. When he spoke, he looked at the ground: ‘There’s a killing knife on the back of the ute.’

Ned was crying because Ollie had taken the block that he wanted. It didn’t matter that there were more of the same shape and colour in the box. He wanted that one. Then Ned hit Ollie with a blue block. Ollie screamed and then more loudly when he saw his mother. She stood and rubbed her arms, clasping her elbows tightly. Shit! Her face was tense with a

Texas frown. Sometimes she could stand outside it, the tight feeling that would cause her to erupt noisily or physically. But when that happened it was more dangerous than if she reacted, for she knew it meant she didn’t care. She turned her back on them.

Gerry handed her the knife through the partly open door, clearly not wanting to step any further into a place that was foreign to him. She found a big stewing pot under the bench and set it beside the meat. She cut through the black outer crust, chopping it into pieces for the pot and slicing off the thick yellow fat. It was a smell she had grown up with: the fresh smell of raw meat. She liked it and it took her back to when she stood at the table with her parents while they were cutting up a killer, bagging diced meat and chops and labelling them for the freezer. The sheepdogs lolled panting outside the flywire door, saliva dripping from their lips, leaping onto all fours as soon as they heard the rusty spring of the door. She found tins of vegetables in the pantry, some musty-smelling onions and a few sprouting potatoes and Vegemite for stock, and placed them in the pot and covered it all with water.

Ollie was wrapping his arms around her legs. He was hungry. What to feed them? She looked around for Ned. He was playing quietly in the corner of the room with what looked like an old drinking straw he’d found on the floor; he’d need something to eat too, but first they needed to be bathed. She pushed her hair back with her shoulder. Her hands were smothered in onion juice. There was only a shower in the bathroom and she hadn’t cleaned in there yet. It would have to be the concrete tubs in the outdoor laundry. That was where their father found them. His children shrieked when they saw him stride across the lawn, his stockman’s hat covered in dust. She was almost relieved to see him.

‘Sit down, Ollie. You’ll fall out,’ she said, tugging the soft round skin of his arm.

‘Where can I wash?’ asked John.

‘In the bathroom,’ she said, as though that were obvious.

‘I need to wash my hands outside.’

‘God I don’t know, wherever.’

‘It was just a simple question.’

‘Can you hand me Ollie’s towel?’

The flywire door of the house banged shut behind him. She could have said they were his children too but she didn’t.

She returned to the kitchen with the boys, fresh and pink, smelling of Velvet soap. He was at the table, looking at paperwork.

‘You haven’t cleaned the bathroom,’ he said without looking up.

‘No.’

She sat the children on chairs at the table. Ollie immediately stood on his and lunged towards his father’s papers, tearing a corner from one of them. He gathered up his reading material and walked out of the room, leaving her to deal with the children.

He returned to the kitchen when the room was empty, sitting at the end of the table without speaking. She moved in the same way she always did: from the bench to the table to the stove to the sink to the table, then sat down. He’d already started.

‘Is there any salt?’

Texas She pushed her chair backwards, got up and walked to the pantry. She placed the big red and white plastic salt container in front of him and sat down again. She ate without noticing the taste. A moth flew into the light and the smell of its burnt body filled the room.

‘Not too bad here. What do you reckon?’ He placed his knife and fork carefully together on his plate and looked at her.

‘Mmm.’ She stared into her stew.

When he turned away, she watched him. She had married a bland-looking man but she supposed some would say he was nice-looking. His dark hair was freshly washed and combed. He wore a flannelette shirt, with a creased collar, and he must have found his old tracksuit pants. The clothes were familiar. He leant back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

‘It’s going to be a big muster this year,’ he said with some satisfaction.

She stood up and began clearing the table. He stood up too.

‘Here, love, let me help.’

He took his plate to the sink and returned to his seat. Her back was to him as she filled the sink with hot water and began washing the dishes.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s three years today since Mum died.’

Her mother had died on the tenth of May, 1982. She looked over her shoulder at him. He frowned and slammed the tobacco tin on the table.

‘Jesus!’ he said crossly. ‘I can’t believe you’re still carrying on about the past. What’s happened’s happened. Got to get on with it.’

She stared into the soap suds, her world narrowing to the width of the sink, feeling the bits of food swirl around her hands in the warm water. She heard the door slam as he left the room and it rattled the louvres.

The edges of the window blurred and suddenly she could see the cluster of thin-limbed trees on the farm. They were like a forest even though you could see through them to the paddock on the other side. She and her brother thought there might have been a faraway tree. But once you were in the middle of that lonely stand of mallees it was clear there was no other tree of substance. They found sticks which they rode like ponies, whipping them faster with long strips of bark, leaping over the long grass and the lumpy mounds that were rabbit burrows or which perhaps hid a snake. The wind whispered the leaves and shook the tops and rolled them about. But it was always quiet below and when they were tired of galloping they lay down, panting and watching ants trickle over the leaves and along winding narrow paths. She remembered a beetle with black and yellow stripes being carried by an ant. Gradually the flies would whine more loudly and they would escape behind the flywire door of the small fibro cottage built by her grandfather and father.

Not long after she met John she’d taken him to meet her mother’s parents. They’d retired to a leafy riverside suburb in the city after selling the farm that had been one of the oldest in the State. Her grandparents were pleased to discover they knew of the station in the Kimberley that John’s family had once owned but somehow lost. She couldn’t remember the

Texas story or understand why she even thought of it now. John had found her father much harder to please. Her father’s family had been running Collinsville-blood sheep on the edge of the Wheatbelt for about thirty years. They were hardy, robust animals with a good wool yield. It was her father’s idea to run fewer sheep and still fill the wool bales. No one could ever persuade him to increase his stocking rates. He wanted to be prepared in case of a drought. Her father never said anything critical about John but she remembered there was sometimes a look that came over his face when John was talking about cattle. When that happened she’d try to change the subject. She didn’t want John to notice that her father didn’t support his ideas. How stupid she’d been, worrying about John. She placed the dishes on the bench to drain, watching the suds slide off into the sink. He never wanted to know what she was thinking. Despair settled thickly across her shoulders.

III

The nights had suddenly gone from being mild to cold. A brittle wind blew every morning across the flat, making her eyes water and nose run when she stood at the edge of the lawn. She would look out towards the hills, watching the bleached grass ripple as though it were solid like water. A stray cow might bellow and a dingo might howl from somewhere out there. By mid-morning the wind would have dropped, the sun would be strong and the light would have washed out the colour of the earth. By then she would have been up for six hours. She always started before dawn because that was when John wanted breakfast. Sometimes he’d drive out to where the men were mustering, but most of the time he went with the bore mechanic to learn where there was water. Half a million acres, much of it stony country where rangy cattle clustered in small mobs. They were wily beasts, difficult to muster, and the terrain was hard on the horses. That’s what he told her when he came home at night.

Susannah looked down at the diary left behind by the previous manager. John had been studying it over breakfast. It told him where cattle had been found last year, how many head had been sold and where they’d gone. The men’s wages were listed at the back. She hadn’t seen any of the stockmen yet, only Gerry now and then. They were still out at the camp. Before John left this morning he told her there was a cattle truck coming. The driver would drop off some fruit and vegetables from the co-op in town. Then the truck was to continue out to the yards to pick up some bullocks for the meatworks. At least there would be a change in the routine.

John had used the Flying Doctor radio, a thin metal box with black knobs which sat at the end of the bench in the kitchen. Static crackled and then there was a sound like a sigh breathed into the microphone. But other than that it was silent.

She hadn’t told John she didn’t know how it worked. She turned the knob marked channel. It clicked heavily into the next slot.

A woman’s voice spoke loudly through a whining, celestial noise.

Texas ‘She said she’d manage. There was nothing more I could do for her. Over.’

More static before the woman replied.

‘Yeah. He took her to the races. What more could you ask? Over.’

She clicked onto the next channel. It was a male voice.

‘To be picked up Monday. Over.’

Back to the woman.

‘Knew when she didn’t come on that she was gone. Wouldn’t go to hospital. Had the men to look after, she said. They sent out the plane to pick her up. But it was too late. Over.’

Crackle.

‘Yeah. Don’t know how he’ll cope. Or the kids. Over.’

She switched it back to the other channel and moved across to the other side of the kitchen. She gathered up the papers and the diary and returned them to the old table that was pushed against the wall in the sleep-out. John was using it as a desk.

A truck rumbled over the cattle grid into the station paddock. She stood at the edge of the veranda as the boys tore across the yard. Dust caught up with the vehicle as it stopped. A hand swung the door closed and a man in a blue shearer’s singlet and stubbies emerged from behind it. He pushed his hat further back on his head. She was at the fence with the children.

‘I have the map. My husband said the cattle are at number eight yards. He said to follow this race.’ She pointed to the stony track that led away from the homestead. It wound around the work sheds and the homestead yards and down towards a creek.

On the other side of the creek was a wire gate. The track continued over the hill. ‘You need to go through that gate and then follow the map after that.’

‘I know it,’ he said.

He was looking at her instead of where she was pointing.

Ollie was trying to escape through the fence. She let him go, gritting her teeth. Ned pulled to go after him. She gave up on both of them, conscious of the man watching her. The children crawled through the fence.

‘Come back. Not outside the yard,’ she said weakly.

‘Where do you want this stuff?’ asked the driver.

‘I’ll show you.’ She spoke over her shoulder.

They reached the step up to the veranda.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Her face reddened. It would be rude not to offer.

‘The cattle won’t be ready,’ he said, following her into the kitchen.

She moved awkwardly, aware of him behind her. He set the stores down by the cupboard. The kettle had boiled a little while ago. He pulled out a chair. Through the louvres she could see the boys playing in the dirt beside the truck. The fan creaked above her head. Red brown hair coiled moistly above the neckline of his faded singlet. He seemed vaguely amused about something.

‘How’s your old man doing?’

She looked blankly then realised he was referring to John.

‘Fine. I think.’

Texas ‘He was up here before, wasn’t he?’ He paused, watching. ‘That’s what he said.’

‘Oh, did he? Yes I think so. Before we were married.’

She wondered why she lied. There was something about his manner which irritated her. She straightened her shoulders. He leant back in his chair, smiling.

‘He thinks he knows this country. He’s just had a taste of it. That’s all.’

She brought the mug of tea up to her mouth and swallowed noisily.

‘Have you always been a truck driver?’

He moved in his chair, leaning forward as though to get up, but settled back in it again.

‘Done all sorts. Carting cattle, ringing, horsebreaking.’ He looked into his mug. ‘It isn’t the same now. Too many cowboys.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘They were ringers back then.’ He seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Now you wouldn’t pass the time of day with any of them.’

He looked out the window. There was a long pause. A cricket started up in the corner. She would look for it when he was gone.

‘You know things have happened up here. Things you lot know nothing about.’

He folded his arms and crossed his ankles. She couldn’t contain herself.

‘What?’

He looked at her and shook his head slightly.

‘Nah,’ he muttered. Not telling.

‘I don’t know anything about this country.’

She was pleading. His eyes narrowed. She was stripped bare.

‘You see them old yards by the turnoff from the main road?’

She nodded.

‘There are yards like that about every ten mile or so through this country. You don’t know how they got there, do you?’ He was waiting for her to react but when she didn’t he continued.

‘Blackfellas,’ he said. ‘They cut em, eh? Big solid trees you get down by the creeks. They dragged them one by one behind donkeys. They’d dig a big hole, same height as you. And if they got it wrong they’d have to sit there for twelve hours, no dinner, nothing. And if they moved they got shot.’

The fan whirled lazily above them, clunking when it caught momentarily at the same point on its rotation. His chair scraped the floor as he pushed it backwards. Suddenly she noticed one of her children had disappeared. She stood up quickly, knocking her hip against the table. She pushed open the flyscreen door, banging it loudly against the wall as it swung wide. She reached the truck to find Ollie hanging off the back of it.

‘Naughty, naughty boy!’ she shrieked, pulling him down.

Ollie screamed and tried to kick her stomach. When she turned around to carry him back to the house the driver was at the door of his truck. Corellas screeched overhead, flying as a white cloud against a deep sky. They dispersed and settled in the trees down by the creek.

Texas ‘Hey young fella, you want a ride in the truck?’

Ollie stopped struggling and looked at him, angry and distrustful. She shifted him around onto her hip. Ned was hanging on to one of her legs.

‘Oh no, I couldn’t . . .’ Her voiced trailed off, panic-stricken and embarrassed.

‘Your old man’s out there? He’ll bring them back.’

No. Why couldn’t she say it? She seemed to have lost the ability to stand up for herself, for her children.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she muttered without looking at him.

He shrugged and swung up into the cab. Ollie was snuffling into her neck. She handed him to the driver and then went around the other side. She opened the door and lifted Ned onto the seat and hauled herself up. Ollie clung to the truck driver’s shoulder while Ned shuffled his bottom towards the edge of the seat, little legs dangling near the gearstick and hands holding on to the two-way radio that was attached below the windscreen in front of him. Both were solemn. She slid onto the vinyl seat, scratching her legs where there was a tear in the upholstery. He turned the key and the engine vibrated thickly. They lurched down a small slope and over dusty potholes that marked the track, chains rattling in the back. Beside the work sheds were disused vehicles with wheels missing and bonnets raised. A blackened exhaust poked out the side of the generator shed. Between the sheds was a lean-to of timber and corrugated iron attached to an old caravan. A skinny old man in a sleeveless dark shirt stood in front of it, watching them as they drove past.

‘Met the old fella yet?’

‘No,’ she said.

She waited for him to continue but he didn’t and the man in the rearview mirror slid out of sight. They reached the homestead yards, some of it old timber railings, the rest red iron bars. Frayed hessian shaded the round yard. The truck stopped at the gate beside them and she slid down on the ground to open it. The brakes hissed and she remembered as a child opening the gate for her father. Sometimes he’d let her steer, and when she was older, when her feet could touch the pedals, he allowed her to drive. He’d get the ute going in first gear and then leap out while it was moving so she could drive behind the mob of sheep while he ushered them on foot. All she had to do was keep the accelerator steady and clutch the wheel closely so she could see over the top. She remembered the throaty sound of the ewes and the bleats of their young and the smell of damp, crushed clover. Sometimes her feet would slip off the pedal and the ute would stall and then she’d swap places with her father and walk behind the sheep as they shifted like a white stain across the deep green paddock, the cold air tightening the skin on her face.

The truck moved haltingly through its gear changes. It drove down and through the creek, where water reached halfway up the tyres. They left the taller trees behind and the country opened out. Rounded mounds of hills, spotted pale green and yellow, seemingly soft and accessible. It was only when they came closer that she saw the hills were steep and between the spinifex were slabs of sharp flinty rock. On the other side of

Texas the road, bunches of grasses grew on the plain amongst sparsely leafed trees that seemed denser as they receded into the distance. She looked down on a lizard and caught the inside of its mouth, framed by the frill around its neck, as it stood briefly on splayed legs before disappearing into the grass as the wheels rolled past it. She held Ned on her lap and Ollie tucked closely into her side. She pressed her legs together to stop the skin on her thighs from jiggling with the corrugations in the road.

‘We’re going to see Daddy.’

Ollie jumped up.

‘Where?’ he said, taking his thumb out of his mouth.

‘At the base of them hills,’ said the driver. And then he looked towards her. ‘There’s an esky behind you, grab us a can, would you?’

She reached behind the seat. There were only cans of Four X, Queensland beer. His mouth covered the opening of the can as they lurched over the uneven ground.

‘Have you always lived here?’ she asked.

One hand gripped the wheel while the other hand leant against it, fingers clutching the can. He didn’t answer.

‘You don’t say much,’ she said, smiling, wanting to be liked.

He glanced at her, sideways. The track turned sharply and he held out his drink for her to hold. The truck followed the thin strip of road as they bounced over rocks and holes. The grassy plain gave way to more trees: white trunks and startling green leaves and trees with bark like the skin of a crocodile. The dirt changed from red to a softer, loamier soil and they reached a dry riverbed. The driver changed down a gear and the truck chugged through the sandy ground. She thought for a minute they would get bogged but they ploughed on. She looked upriver where water during the wet would rush densely towards the sea.

An enormous paperbark leant over the sand like an old man, and a little trench on the bend held a silver slice of water. The sun was low in the sky and as they came onto the flat where the trees were thin, the soft light turned the flattened grass into the colour of gold and the red hills brightened. Dust hung in the air before the yards like a veil screening the action behind it.

Horses and riders were holding a mob that moved as a solid mass through the gate. Against the dust-filtered light were silhouettes of horns and heads, hats and horses, men in the shape of cowboys. Beasts bellowed. Long whips unfurled and snapped back, cracking like gunshot, and the dust flew in between. She was conscious of the feel of her back stuck to the vinyl seat and the way she moved with the vehicle as though it was an extension of her body. The jolts beneath her relaxed the invisible binds that prevented her from breathing freely.

‘Look,’ she said to the boys, ‘we’re almost here.’

Ollie stood up, grasping her shoulder, and Ned tried to stand on her lap. They followed the two-wheel track around the side of the yard and pulled up alongside the ramp. The driver got down from the truck and disappeared from sight. She helped the children out and as she did so she heard John’s voice. He was talking to the driver around the other side. She carried Ned on her hip and held Ollie’s hand as she walked to the front of the truck. She smiled as she made her way towards him. The children were squirming and wriggling like excited puppies.

Texas ‘Daddy!’

She let them go and as she looked up into his face that was partly obscured by the rim of his hat she saw from the straight line of his mouth that they weren’t welcome. He strode towards her, leaving the boys to trail after him. He grabbed her arm, pinching the bone above her elbow with his thumb and forefinger, and spoke into the side of her face.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

Her teeth ground hard together with the effort of not making a sound. Her head suddenly felt full and dense as though a thick cloud of heat was expanding. Outwardly she was impassive.

‘Hey boss!’ someone called over the yards. ‘They’ve lost some.’

‘Useless bastards.’

He let go of her and turned away, climbing easily over the yards. Skinny and long-limbed, his body moved as though it was capable of anything. In that movement she saw briefly what she’d seen when they first met. The children rushed to follow him but were stopped by the yards, peering instead through the gaps in the railings. The cattle lowered their heads and snorted, wide-eyed, tightly bunched and moving in a circle, uselessly, their red and white flanks rubbing together, tails lifting for a steady stream of shit that splattered those nearby, horns twisting and getting stuck, long threads of saliva hanging from foaming mouths, linking one to the other. She pulled Ollie down as he started to climb the rails. The driver was beside her. He took out a tin of tobacco. A light film of dust covered her face and she blinked to clear it from her eyes. Ollie was rubbing his and whining that his eyes were stinging. Ned began to too. It was getting late. It was their bath time and soon they would be hungry. She hadn’t brought anything with her. God, what was she thinking? She was suddenly so tired. So tired she could have settled into the grass and stayed there. But the boys grabbed at her. She had created them and they wanted her, wanted her to make everything all right for them. But how could she when she couldn’t even make it all right for herself?

Dust grew denser and the shouting more intense. Horses galloped while their riders tried to wheel the runaways back into the yard. The driver said something again. She couldn’t remember his name or perhaps she never knew it.

‘Sorry, I didn’t hear what you said.’

‘They won’t be loading tonight. Give you a ride back if you want. I’ll camp up at the station.’

His voice penetrated her fog and it irritated her. She was embarrassed, too, by her husband’s lack of kindness. She looked at her feet and the grass around her that had been squashed.

‘Thank you.’

She gathered the children to her. When they reached the truck, she got in first and the driver lifted her boys up to her.

‘Don’t cry, Mummy,’ said Ned as he shifted on her lap.

The driver settled into his seat.

Ollie turned to her and said: ‘We’re hungry.’

She thought about that as they left the yards, following the track as it looped around through bush and then back the way they’d come. Heading towards the pale rosy glow that softened the sharp edges of a land seemingly hacked into being with

Texas a giant chisel and hammer. We’re hungry. Ollie, who spoke for himself and his twin, condemned always to being part of another instead of the singular I. She knew what that was like.

After the truck driver showered he returned to her kitchen with two cans of beer. She glanced up quickly while stirring the pot of savoury mince. He had taken his swag out the back and across the small dry creek bed that separated the stockmen’s quarters from the homestead. The children were settled but John hadn’t returned. The driver, she remembered his name was Steve, sat at the table, ripping the top off his can with a familiarity she found disconcerting. She turned back to the pot, stirring, watching the peas and the small pieces of carrot tumble through the grey meat. He spoke and she jumped.

‘I brought you a beer.’

She suddenly panicked. What did he want? Her husband would be home soon.

‘Not for me thanks,’ she muttered into the pot.

The generator seemed to miss a beat and the light above her flickered as though it was going to go out. He started to whistle between his teeth. The light was strong again. She heard Ollie calling out to her.

‘Excuse me.’

She walked outside. Ollie was waiting at the door.

‘What’s the matter?’

The light coming from the sleep-out lit half his face. An eye was wide and dark like a pool.

‘I’m scared, Mummy.’

She looked at him, feeling the fluttering of the vessel in her throat as her heart trembled. God, what to say? To tell him that she was scared too, of the fog that seemed to have wrapped around her. The hands that held his were wet with fear. She lifted him into bed and tucked the covers tightly around him.

She whispered a little rhyme that her mother had taught her:

‘Diddle, diddle, dumpling . . .’ Those silly words connected her to another time, and they calmed her.

When she returned to the kitchen John was standing under the light. It was the charming John. The one who stood with his feet slightly apart, hips thrust forward, moving his hands as though he was exercising his fingers while he talked. He offered Steve a Bundy and Coke and winked at her as she took her place at the stove. His hair was plastered flat at the sides and it made his face seem narrower and his eyes closer together.

Dirt ringed his mouth and highlighted his teeth.

IV

John had taken the boys with him on a bore run. As she carried the heavy basket from the laundry to the clothes line she wondered if he was feeling guilty about the way he reacted when she turned up at the yards. A light breeze moved the threadbare sheets already on the line and the shadows beneath formed and re-formed. She had no idea what he was thinking but he’d been in a better mood since the truck left with a load

Texas of steers for the meatworks. Over breakfast he’d explained how a helicopter muster worked. Cattle were ushered into yards through long wings of hessian that spanned out into the country like a funnel, channelling them into captivity. They were brought there by fear, the flapping hessian and the throb of the machine above.

She thought of her marriage and remembered how her mother had called John good husband material when she met him for the first time. He wore an open-neck shirt and moleskins and he told her that he’d just sold his V8 ute and bought a four-wheel drive since he was planning to settle down. Susannah was working as a cadet journalist, filing stories from the Perth Royal Show about the animals that had won their competitions. John had been showing his stud’s prize bull. They met one evening at the stockman’s bar. Together they went outside to watch the entertainment in the arena before the fireworks. They were called the chuting stars, parachutists spilling from a plane that was like a large insect letting loose its young. They fell quickly until their parachutes ballooned above them. Then they drifted steadily downwards. Susannah discovered that she and John had friends in common. Over the next year, in between travelling around the countryside interviewing breeders and carefully reporting the way they described the attributes of their animals, she met John every now and then at the pub where all the country people congregated. It had large windows facing the broad expanse of the Indian Ocean but no one went there for the view. She’d always liked the way he looked in those early days of their relationship. And she liked the casual weight of his arm around her shoulders, the way he claimed her in front of the others at the pub. She thought he was someone she could rely on.

She placed the second basket of dripping washing on the ground and stretched out a wet work shirt, squinting at the bright light that was filtered by the leaves of the gum tree on the other side of the fence. Drops of water fell loudly on the hard slivers of dried leaf scattered beneath the line. The spin-dry on the twin-tub didn’t work and she’d struggled to put everything through the hand-wringer. She’d asked John if she could take it into town to get it fixed or perhaps get a new one, but he’d said there wasn’t any money for it in the station budget.

She remembered the first time she doubted him. After they were married they went to live on the stud where John had been appointed the overseer. She was excited to have her own home and, being from the country, it didn’t matter that the nearest town was about thirty kilometres away. The housework didn’t take up the whole day then, when it was just the two of them, and she suggested that she should get a horse.

‘Why?’ he’d asked over the scones she’d proudly baked from her mother’s recipe.

She was surprised by his tone.

‘I told you, I always used to ride. It’d be fun.’

‘You won’t have time for that.’ He put the last piece of scone in his mouth.

‘What do you mean?’

He stood up. Smoko was finished and she could see that he was about to leave through the back flywire door and down

Texas the concrete path to the ute parked by the gate. He would get in that vehicle and drive off like he always did.

‘What do you mean?’ she repeated. ‘Are you saying I can’t have a horse?’

‘I’m just saying, I don’t think you’ve thought it through.’ He spoke carefully as though he was concerned she might misunderstand him.

But he needn’t have worried. She knew what was meant.

When the hours between meal breaks seemed to swell and change shape she took to phoning a few of her friends from school, girls with whom she’d shared five years of living in a boarding house, where the partitions between each room didn’t quite reach the ceiling. She was careful to ring only the unmarried ones. And when John became concerned about the phone bill, after all they were only on an overseer’s wage, she took to inviting one or two down from the city for the occasional weekend. John was happy with that. He liked being the host, showing off his wife and his house, and he would invite the unmarried son of their next-door neighbour for dinner. It wasn’t long before her friend Liz was engaged to the neighbour.

They were the happy married couples, meeting for a barbecue on a Sunday; their husbands talking about the weather and cattle prices and whatever else it was that they had in common. It was important to support John. He needed to feel confident that he was like any other man who had grown up on the land.

Then she became pregnant and, not long afterwards, she realised her mother was very ill, and it was like a wave that caught up with the next one so that when it broke, its impact was so much heavier. She started to see less of Liz. To tell her anything, when their husbands were friends, would have been disloyal to John. And although Liz was at their going-away party, Susannah knew the distance between them was too great now for the friendship to continue.

The Hills hoist was covered in clothes. Nothing had changed since those first few months on the stud. Perhaps it might have been different if she’d fought harder in the beginning. But each event on its own didn’t seem that important at the time.

If she tried now to explain it to John, he wouldn’t know what she was talking about. She left the basket to soften in the sun and walked towards the kitchen. She lit the gas for the kettle and put away the breakfast dishes that were draining on the sink.

She made a cup of tea and sat down beside it, feeling the dust dry on her legs.

There was a light tap at the flyscreen door and the oily smell of unrubbed tobacco. It was a smell she was used to after cleaning the homestead of all the empty tins of Log Cabin. The people before them had been smokers and readers of cowboy stories. And sometimes, when the boys were having a nap, she read the stories too, for company. Behind the door was an old man, his face flushed with a network of veins. Two large sacks of skin hung beneath his eyes. They were eyes without eyelashes and they looked at her and watered. His hat was held at his

Texas side and with his other hand he smoothed wisps of hair across the top of his head. He nodded.

‘Yes,’ she said, realising he was the man she saw standing by the shed when she had passed in the truck. She had forgotten about him.

He cleared his throat and gave a small hoarse cough. She thought he was going to spit on her veranda.

‘It’s Irish,’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘Me name,’ he replied.

‘I’m the manager’s wife. How can I help you?’

‘The other fella, he bank me pension and I buy stores from here.’ He nodded towards the stores shed. ‘I’m outa tobacca.’

He seemed out of breath too. She noticed his lips were slightly blue. He probably had emphysema.

‘I’ll have to speak to my husband,’ she said.

He reached into his shirt pocket and took out what she thought was a tin of tobacco but when he opened it they were sweets like the ones her grandfather used to have buried in his deep trouser pockets. Lemon-flavoured lollies covered in white powder. She suddenly had a strong memory of the way the smell of his cigars used to cling to his clothes.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said. ‘Kettle’s just boiled.’

He didn’t answer but he reached for the door she was holding open. She stepped back to let him shuffle through. She noticed one of his legs dragged a bit as though it were stiff. He pulled a chair out and placed his hat on the table. With the other hand he tucked the tin back into his shirt pocket.

‘My grandfather used to love those. My mum always complained it was the only thing he ever ate.’ She looked up from where she was standing at the bench. ‘How do you have your tea?’

‘Black.’

She placed it before him and moved the jar of sugar and a spoon in the same direction then sat down at her own cup.

‘He was a drover somewhere up here. I don’t know where.

Or maybe it was over in the Northern Territory.’

She watched him spoon five teaspoons of sugar into the liquid and stir it. Her grandfather had lived with them on the farm until about a year before he died. She was eight when that happened. She hadn’t thought of him in a long time. It hadn’t occurred to her this might have been the country he worked before he went south, before he met her grandmother and worked as a fencing contractor and then bought his bit of land, the land her father now worked. Both of them, she realised, had lost their women before they should have. She wondered about this old man who called himself Irish, whether he’d had a wife.

‘You live on the station?’ she asked.

‘I worked for the fella before the fella just gone, and the fella before him, and maybe even the fella before him. My memory’s not what it used to be.’

‘Things are a bit different since then?’

He looked into his mug and did something strange with his mouth, pursing his thin lips and then sucking them in.

Texas ‘This place here used to have good cattle and good horses. That station paddock there,’ he nodded towards the window, ‘had a stud herd with good bulls and good cows but it all changed in the sixties. Big mob of horses too, beautiful horses, there were too many for one fella to handle, started to shoot em for pet food. Got rid of all the good working horses, he did.’

He swallowed his tea.

‘Nowadays everyone in a bloomin hurry. They get jackaroos never seen this country before. Last fella he was using a helicopter, otherwise they’d all get lost and perish in the bush. I don’t like that helicopter mustering. Cattle are all knocked up by the time they get em into the yards. Cows leave their calves behind and some of those big old bullocks just lie down and die.’

She was surprised by his volubility. Perhaps he hadn’t spoken to anyone for a while. He gazed mournfully out the window, his eyes watering. She knew John was going to get a chopper pilot in. It was the only way to get stock out of the hilly country where they hid in the gorges. Irish turned to face her again.

‘Used to be a lot of people lived here in this country. A mob here and a mob there and fellas in out-camps and hawkers and drovers wandering through. You can see signs of them if you know where to look. Some of them big white gums down by the creek they’ve got scars where wire ate into the bark. Scars from a long time.’

Was her grandfather one of those men? All she knew of that time was when he’d taken some enormous bullock to the meatworks without it dying from exhaustion. There was another story too, one she was vaguer about since she wasn’t sure how she came to hear of it, about how, along the droving run, her grandfather, whose name was George, was known by everyone as Daddy.

‘There was a truck driver here the other day,’ she said. ‘He was talking about the timber yards around the place, saying the Aboriginals built them and that they were forced to . . . It sounded cruel. I wasn’t sure . . .’ She trailed off, not knowing what she wanted to say.

Irish drained his mug of tea. Thin vertical lines etched the corners of his mouth. His skin was mottled and stained. He seemed to be watching her.

‘I could tell you a few stories,’ he said, and turned away.

She waited. And perhaps because she didn’t say anything, he began.

‘There was this fella called Kelly. His place was just over the river here, a battler’s block, the country in between the big holdings that were too hard for the big fellas to get into. Kelly and the likes of him used to help cleanskins wander into their country. They call it poddy-dodging. With the branded cattle, they’d make a new brand to cover the old one. Kelly was real hard on a young fella he had working for him. They reckon he used to knock him around or throw him in a waterhole early in the morning. Sometimes he put him in a big sack bag and hung him up in a tree. The boy grew bigger and stronger. By and by he got fed up with Kelly so he belted him.’

He paused, coughing, and Susannah thought it was going to be the end of it. But he continued.

Texas ‘One day—’ he croaked and cleared his throat—‘a policeman rode into Kelly’s stock camp. He got off his horse and walked over to Kelly. Kelly’s men were holding a small mob of cattle out on the flat. Kelly gave him some tea. The two men had a bit of a yarn. They call it Moonlight Valley that run of Kelly’s and back then it were wild blackfella country which was why that fella was there yarning to Kelly. He had rounded up six myalls for spearing some cattle. Kelly would normally hunt coppers off his block. That day he was pretty friendly, finding out from the copper what he was doing. They reckon it gave him an idea. To get rid of the boy.

‘“But what’s he done?” asked the copper.

‘He’d heard all the stories, how that boy had saved that fella’s life, how he was a bloody good stockman and a bloody good tracker. He knew he was no outlaw like Kelly said. Well, he took him like he was told to, and wrapped one of them collars around his neck and joined him up with the others. It took ten days to walk to town. The main street was just a track with the crocodiles below waiting for the cattle to slip off the side. There were no meatworks back then. They reckon it was a town full of madmen and fellas from the government. The road ended at a two-storey pub down near the jetty where they loaded the cattle. Now this copper was heading south by boat the next day. They reckon he wasn’t too bad for a copper and his conscience was worrying him about that boy. He walked out onto the veranda of the pub and looked into that bright iron light. The water and the mudflats and the dead-looking scrub shimmers and jumps about in the heat. That bloomin place can be hotter than hell. He wasn’t sorry to be leaving. He knew there were a lot of wrongs done in that town and this one he could put right before the morning.

‘“You’re a pretty good fella,” he told that boy. “Here’s a rifle and half a pack of bullets to protect you on your way back.”

‘In those days there were wild blacks along the river and he’d need to watch out for himself. The policeman sent him off thinking he’d go back to Kelly and that Kelly’d realise what a good fella he was and there’d be no more trouble. Before that boat pulled away on the full tide that young bloke must’ve been thinking, I’m going to shoot that old bugger Kelly. He followed the tidal flats out and then upstream, along one of the five rivers that fed it and into the wide river valley where all that good cattle grass grows.’

‘Sorry,’ interrupted Susannah, ‘I just remembered, one of the sprinklers.’

He cleared his throat again and took a mouthful of tea.

‘Ah you don’t want to hear any more,’ he said into his cup.

‘I do,’ she said, stepping through the doorway.

She hurried back from the far end of the yard, thinking he might have gone. But he was still there, smoking. She made them both another cup of tea.

‘Go on,’ she said.

His eyes became more distant, and he started again.

‘By and by that young fella came to a big old bottle tree and they reckon he watched one of Kelly’s stockmen for a while and then put that rifle up to his shoulder and shot him. That bloke buckled like one of them new cans of grog but he wasn’t dead.

Texas He called out to his gin and she caught his horse and they bolted for the main camp. That fella died from his wounds the day after he reached Kelly’s homestead. All of them at that place were watching the shadows and looking out for the boy. They knew he was coming and Kelly stayed locked inside, the old women bringing him his food. For a few days the boy made tracks around the house and then he left. But that wasn’t the end of it. At another place two men were found dead in their swags. They reckon it was the work of the boy and a couple of wild fellas that joined him. He stole ammunition, guns and tucker and took all the girls from there into the bush. For the next year or so he hung about in a cave on a big hill not far from here. He made a ladder he could pull up so nobody could climb up. From there he had a view of the river snaking its way through the country. All that year and all the next, stock camps were surrounded at night and robbed and travellers held up. Word went from station to station that the bushranger and his gang were going to kill all the whites. The coppers were buggered. They couldn’t find him. No one could. There were stories flying around as to where he was hiding but only the old women at Kelly’s place thought he might be close by. It was one of Kelly’s old girls who spotted signs of him one day. That boy, they called the bushranger, had been terrorising for near two years. She was looking for some stray goats along a dry creek bed when she saw marks of someone trying to cover their tracks in the sand. She went back to the homestead and told Kelly and he sent her and one of his men on to a coppers’ outpost. They flew there, horses’ hooves clattering on the stony ground, riding hard through them rocky creek beds, their horses lathered and footsore. At daybreak that old woman led four coppers and six trackers on the hunt for the bushranger.

Over the next few days more coppers joined them until there was a big mob after him. The bushranger must have got bloomin careless cos they picked up his tracks not far from the river where he crossed it. It’s a place not far from here where the river curves almost at a right angle and then narrows to shallow rapids over grey rock. In the early morning those stones shine like silver, you know, like foil. The riders made their plans on that sandy river bank. Just above them there’s a hill that looks like a bloody big red head which has rolled away from the ranges. They rode up into the river gums and the paperbark and out into the open country of grass and ant beds and trees with no shade. They found him at a little jump-up. First they shot two of the fellas with him. The bushranger was behind an ant bed and he shot a bloody copper through the ears. They reckon he had a forty-four rifle, and a pistol and six-shooters, and that a woman was loading them for him until she was shot. And then one fella sneaked around and got him, shot him in the arm. When that happened he couldn’t hold his gun.

‘“You got me,” he said, throwing his gun away and coming out into the open. They shot him bit by bit. It wasn’t a clean death. They shot his other arm, then through his ribs. They came closer and put the finishing touch on him right in the forehead. They cut off one of his arms and took it back to town to show they got him.’

Irish wheezed a little. His eyes flicked over her and then focused on something she couldn’t see from where she was sitting.

Texas ‘Fellas come up here, they don’t know anything,’ he said as he took out the tin of sweets from his top pocket.

‘The policeman must have felt terrible letting him go in the first place,’ she said.

Irish didn’t answer and then he was pulling himself up out of his chair. The flyscreen door scraped closed behind him. She didn’t know whether he was just tired of talking or if it was something she said. She sat back in her chair and drank the last of the tea. She knew the world where she came from was small, a world where similar ideas and opinions found and fed one another. There was little difference from the talk at home on the farm, to the conversations in the boarding school common room and among the people she met as a journalist for a rural newspaper. Some of her friends had travelled to Europe. When they returned they married boys from brother schools who had either waited at home or travelled in packs of their own. She was told she needed to travel to appreciate where she came from. Irish’s story was from a long time ago but it made her think of other stories, stories she didn’t know that were connected to the place where she grew up. She thought of her family’s farm and imagined for the first time how the country might have looked before the chain was dragged through it. Before it was shaped and sowed. She remembered the Aboriginal people on the outskirts of town, their camps conveniently cornered into areas of little value to the town’s municipal leaders. It made her uneasy to think that while she was growing up they had lived in the swamp lands, the sinkholes of the country. Her eyes focused again on the view through the louvre windows. The heat mirage on the flat turned the dirt into liquid. But she couldn’t afford to think like that, to doubt her family’s right to belong in that place, otherwise there was nothing to hold on to.

V

They were fighting. Rational thoughts seemed to compress, one on top of the other, to become something else, something blinding and fierce. It felt like she was capable of anything but it never lasted and then she was left with nothing. John had his back to her. But he wasn’t finished.

‘You always, you and your parents, try to make me feel as though I’m not good enough.’

She wasn’t going to remind him that her mother had been dead for three years and she hadn’t spoken to her father since they left. He turned around to face her. ‘I’m sick of it. I’m not having it any more.’

She’d been telling him about Irish. How he’d come back after lunch for his supplies and told her that he was going to go like the old blackfellas; when he knew it was time, he was going to walk into the bush. She’d added to John that hopefully they wouldn’t still be around to see that. She didn’t realise her husband would be so easy to provoke.

‘I’m making a go of it here. For us, for the boys. Plenty of space for them. What more could you want?’

Texas ‘What more could I want?’ she repeated slowly and quietly. ‘Someone to talk to, that would be a start.’

She was trying to find in her that place where once there was fearlessness. So that she could continue. To tell him that she wasn’t putting up with this any longer. But she’d lost the ability to hold on to the fight, to pluck words and hurl them back without any thought of damage.

‘What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you happy?’

Their eyes met. She looked away. He had no idea how she felt and it made her think there was nowhere to go. How could she even start to tell him what was wrong when he hadn’t even noticed? Blinking away the tears that made everything seem like a mirage. He turned and walked out the door. There was so much space, she thought, so much space for them all to get lost in. She let the air out of her lungs slowly, it could be worse, perhaps. And she thought of her mother.

The cool air between the house and the kitchen was fragrant with frangipani. She stepped from one concrete paver to the next, the thought crossing her mind that a long-legged man must have laid them. Inside the kitchen she opened the windows, letting in the industrious sounds of the birds, and tore down the net curtains from above the louvres. Broken webs drifted with dust motes, sliding across the light. Falling, spiralling. She thought of Irish’s desire to walk into the bush and die; the moment at which he might decide to do it, and the walk, his last walk, the birds fluttering overhead, flickering beyond his vision, unthinkingly noisy; one step after another. Free of a past that might constrain his right to die as he wished. Unlike the way her mother had died, forced to sip water, fed with a drip in the twilight glow of a hospital room. Her mother hated to be any trouble. Perhaps it was why she stopped eating and drinking.

Because someone had to do it for her. Susannah knew that would never happen to John. Looking after him and the children was her reason for existing. Why did she think it could be any different?

John didn’t seem to know much about Irish other than the fact he was written in as a clause of the station’s purchase agreement. No one was apparently allowed to get rid of him.

Although John reckoned he could kick him off if he wanted to. ‘What’s he going to do, sue?’ John added, laughing. Susannah looked forward to seeing the old man again. He didn’t expect anything from her.

She wiped the lino tabletop, watching her hand move in a circular motion, leaving behind little droplets of water, satisfied by the way the dirty marks were being obliterated. The thought of being here indefinitely left her with a vague pain in the head.

It was as though her mind was overflowing with things that had to be folded away. There was plenty of medication she could take for it in the Flying Doctor medical chest. The heavy grey enamelled chest was kept under the bottom shelf in the pantry. Its key was on the top shelf among all the other keys she was responsible for, keys that opened the stores cupboard and the cool room where the beer was kept. Reading the literature, the chest open, she discovered five closely packed trays, apparently containing eighty-five items. She checked them off against a list and read the manual and worked out how to

Texas reach the Flying Doctor in an emergency. The possibilities for injury and death out on a station three hours from town seemed almost endless. She settled for a packet of paracetamol, taking two tablets with a glass of water. Rinsing her glass at the sink, she gazed out through the louvres and remembered that John had just asked whether she was happy. Why had it taken him so long?

In the afternoon she left the boys lining up Matchbox cars like a miniature traffic jam across the floorboards in the sleep-out while she connected the hoses to rusty sprinklers and moved them around the lawn between the trees. Overhead birds darted and dived from one branch to the next, one after another, screeching. She thought of what Ollie had just said. After they had woken from their nap, she had taken them across to the kitchen for a drink and something to eat. He had stopped on the path and looked up at the sky.

‘How high is the sky, Mummy?’ he asked. ‘Like how many metres long is it?’

It reminded her of how she and a group of girls from boarding school had camped out in the paddock of a farm owned by the parents of one of her friends. They slept in sleeping bags around a mallee-root fire and imagined their lives. Looking up at the stars, the possibilities had seemed endless.

‘When I grow up,’ Ollie said, ‘I’m going to be an astronaut. Mummy, what are you going to be when you grow up?’

It was too hard to keep up with the news of all her friends’ activities, especially when she had nothing to tell. The spray from the sprinkler arced over the leaves and everything glittered.

Little birds with black-banded eyes dipped and trilled. She walked across the lawn to the storeroom after collecting the list of stores from the desk in the house. John had produced it last night. She would need to place another order for the second half of the year: all the groceries except perishables for the next six months. They’d come up by truck from Perth. She checked off what they already had. There were cans of food stacked on shelves that bent under their weight. Beans and corn and beetroot arranged at random, and then more cans in unopened boxes on the floor, along with drums of flour and large containers of tea and coffee and sugar and oil. A line of light shone where the walls met the floor, and the gap made her think of snakes. She looked up again and noticed the layer of dust and what may have been mouse droppings that covered everything: the tins of unrubbed tobacco, Rizzo papers and then, to her right, folded dusty jeans and hats and belt buckles that had lost their shine. There were more books like the ones she’d found in the house: cowboy stories for one dollar. The covers reminded her of the posters that advertised what was on at the drive-in in the town where she grew up. A shadow crossed the doorway. It was John. Perhaps she should talk to him, answer his question.

‘What are you doing?’ she called as she stepped back into the light.

‘I’ve got jobs to do,’ he said over his shoulder.

The children were running through the sprinkler.