The straps were low and tight around my mother’s long body, buckled to the wood-slatted base of the special bed. Her forearms, purpled with bruises, were bound in too. I knelt on the veranda bench and watched her through the fly-wired window, my chin in my fists, my elbows spread wide across the cool stone sill. I was twelve years old, small for my age. We lived in New South Wales.
She couldn’t see me; the bed was angled wrong for it. My father had added a high latch and lock on the door, its brass knob luminous in the room’s decay. The window was bolted so I couldn’t get in. The moth-eaten drape was too short for the frame. It was two in the morning.
I knocked on the pane, softly so my father wouldn’t hear. She strained her face and rolled her eyes to see. She knew it was me. A spoon-shaped palette was in her mouth, tied around the nape of her neck with a twisted tea towel. My father said it stopped her from swallowing her tongue.
I made random sentences to fit the number of bars on the bed to the letter, knowing there were seventeen. emily neydhardt. I counted the letters on my fingers, added mrs to make them fit. Neydhardt was her name before she married and followed him there. The way she rolled her accent around the name. Her curious, deliberate English. When she was young, she was an opera singer in Vienna, but I’d never heard her sing.
The rods of the high-sided bed formed shadows that crisscrossed her. They dappled a pattern on the cream of the eiderdown. The moment when she’d usually struggle passed. No muffled cries, her body didn’t jolt against the straps, just the murmur of the crickets. She was still. I squinted to see her in the faint light, my face against the glass. Her head lolled left towards me, her cheeks slack. She scared me the way she was. I clutched the small shining stone she’d given me, its rounded triangle in the shape of Tasmania felt smooth in my palm. A chill set in my toes.
Her blue cambric dress with the red flowers on it hung on a line, strung between the veranda posts beside me in the dark. I pulled the dress free of the pegs and wrapped myself in it for warmth on the hardwood bench. The fabric was frayed and thin from her days in the garden in the flourish of japonicas and jonquils she’d planted herself. She’d work the soil with her fingers, crusting her knees if she drew the dress up or wearing it threadbare if she didn’t. The dress without ruffles or bustle, not navy or black like those of mothers with gardeners. Endlessly washed and wound through the wringer. The sun was so hot it faded a frock like that in a day. The roses had lightened from puce to pale pink, some fallen off on the way. Then she started to wash it overnight and hang it under the veranda; she’d put it on damp and unpressed in the morning. She got so she didn’t press clothes. She didn’t seem to care that her dress was the one she wore yesterday and the day before that. Or that it was wrinkled, uncollared, and unlike those of the women we’d pass in the street when we went in the buggy to town. She’d given up corseting, no longer wore stockings. She sometimes put on my father’s shoes if she couldn’t find her own, scuffing them unlaced in the dirt so she wouldn’t step out of them.
Wound up in the dress, I slept on the bench. The latch of the door and my father through the window woke me. The bright-lit morning struck a fine sheet of dust across the room through the space between the sill and the bottom of the drape. I watched him unbuckle the leathers that strapped her quieted body. He undid the restraints on her arms and eased the tea towel coiled around her neck. He slid the palette slowly from her mouth. The pale grey of her open eyes.
He fluffed the eiderdown free of the depressions left by the tethers and pulled it up to cover her waxen face so there was none of her left to see. He walked over and drew the curtain closed, looked through me as though I wasn’t there.
I moved deep into the agapanthus. He must have known I watched from somewhere. He had my mother wrapped in a hessian feed sack, propped up in the big wooden wheelbarrow, a shovel beside her. He bumped her down the steps. I kept low and tracked him, under the cypress hedge, out through the woven wire gate. He pushed her across the paddocks like a load of wood.
On the rise by the billabong he dug her grave deep and easy in the red sand. A few scrub cattle looked on. Done shovelling, he tipped her in from the side of the barrow. I felt the dull thump of her body as it met the earth, felt it in my hips as I lay flat as a lizard in the grass.
I watched her silent funeral through a failing windbreak of scant lucerne trees. On a rough-rutted stone he chiselled her first name and the year. He buried her in the middle of the mulga, a chicken-wire fence around the mound of earth.
My mother died with her eyes wide open in 1947, near Maude in the Riverina. No doctor was called, her body was not prepared. I still wonder what he was thinking as he dropped her in the dirt without a word or a coffin or the whole of her name, as he knelt and scooped red dirt to cover her with the chub of his pale Scottish hands.
I stayed in the trees all day, knotted on a branch, wearing her dress, and stared at the white, white sun. My father didn’t find me. When it was dark I climbed down like something nocturnal. I went to Leonie’s, I went there barefoot.
Leonie lived in the dust with a dog that didn’t bark, in a mud brick hut where the river was unbanked and the floodplain spread. I watched her unsaddle a thin roan colt in the cool of midnight. She left it haltered, its saddle mark steaming, and came towards me through the shadows of the anthills. Her blood-red hair and snug-fit moleskin trousers, an old army bridle hanging from her elbow; its bit jingled as she walked.
“I like you in the dress,” she said.
“My mother is dead.” I said it offhand, like I might mention a horse looked lame. I thought she’d be surprised but she just hugged me hard, pressed her face in my matted hair and took me inside. I was too tired to tell her more. She didn’t ask.
As she poured me leafy tea, I leant over the split-log trestle, my head held up in my hands. Her rangy dog licked dried sweat from my ankles and calves, blood from a scratch below my knee. I picked around weevils from a half of wheat cake as it crumbled in my fingers. It tasted like gravel, too dry to eat.
Leonie walked me to the canvas army bed, her long freckled arm to guide me. “Skin a rabbit,” she said, trying to be cheerful. I raised my hands in the air as she slid the dress up over my head. It smelt stale and sweet. I lay down but I couldn’t sleep. She didn’t ask about my father.
She took the slush lamp, hooked it carelessly on a snapped-off sandalwood branch outside as she passed. The light wafted back and forth through the open door before it settled. It shed on her thighs as she slid from her trousers to bathe. The night air sagged around her. Her body was thin, but not as thin as my mother’s had become. Leonie stood in the bucket to wash and an unlikely breeze quivered the flame of the lamp, dabbled the light on her breasts so they wobbled like flummery puddings. Her freckle-dotted stockman’s tan left rings around her neck and forearms, the way granite meets sand, her sun-scorched arms like long gloves pulled up to her white shoulders. My mother’s arms became pale, she was kept from the sun.
The day Leonie arrived, her face was already sunburnt from Far North Queensland. She came on foot, her hand through the reins of a footsore horse. She was handsome as boys from town, her red hair scooped up in a droop-brimmed hat. She had narrow brown eyes. I was ten.
My father hired her. She was supposed to be my governess, my mother couldn’t seem to teach me any more. But Leonie couldn’t read. She knew only horses, so she worked outdoors with my father. They rode out together like brothers, working cattle all day in the plains, walking in as night drew down around them, bearded in dust and talking in earnest. She lifted him from my mother like a rabbit from a cage.
The strangeness that came upon my mother was more gradual, a fungus up a tree trunk. When my father and Leonie headed into the desert, riding the boundaries, Mother set off after them. Walking with unstockinged feet, she tracked them through the thistles and sand.
From the veranda steps I watched as he realised she’d followed. He herded her home, bumping her forward with his horse’s shoulder. He confined her to the house. With her silver pincers I pulled the splintered thorns of the bindi-eye from her purpled soles.
My mother lost her level and demanded that Leonie leave, so he shunted Leonie three miles up the river to the dusty, low-pitched hut, left her breaking brumby horses. He plotted his visits, announced he was going to town for bullets and barley when we didn’t need a thing. When Mother walked to the cart to go with him in her white-ribboned hat for travelling, he shooed her back to the house like a following dog.
The night I was inventing eucalyptus tea in the shadow of the flowering gum, I saw Leonie and my father disappear through the chicken coop door. They didn’t seem to care that Mother was up in the house. I put my eye to a nail hole. Her red gingham shirt was half undone and askew. He stayed clothed. Their bodies like jigsaw pieces, shadowed together, over and over, hay in her hair from the floor. The jerry-built shed pitched against me slightly as he buffeted her to the boards. My eye to the hole, my mouth against the tin. In the quickening movement a loose-nailed plank clattered free, its clenches risen. A hiss ran through his teeth as he slumped down on her, finished.
The rusty taste of the tin from the chicken coop wall came up in my throat as I lay in Leonie’s bed and watched her through the doorway. She stood in the tub and dried herself. The lamplight played on her skin like gentle fingers.
I closed my eyes and saw my mother buried with her eyes still open. Did she land face down in the dirt or on her back, or did she fall in on her side? Artesian water seeps in that soil at night, brackish. Was the sack that wrapped her growing mould, soft-bodied worms disappearing inside the cerement, nudging at her skin already sodden from the dirt and night, searching for nooks to nestle in and breed? Her eyes were the lightest blue, dappled like shillings.
*
I woke at the bawling of a far-off calf. This was not my mother beside me. There was a dull whistle with each of Leonie’s sleeping breaths. I traced the freckles on her milk-white back with my forefinger; a plump New Zealand and a funny-shaped butterfly. She smelt of damp grass. My mother’s smell was different, softer. I would be without it.
The four-beat canter of my father’s horse drummed up the track outside. I caught a hint of him through the open door at the tie-up as I skiffled out and slid beneath the bed among Leonie’s scattered clothes. The dog lay on my mother’s dress in the corner, snapping at flies and scratching its flank.
My father closed the wood-plank door behind him. “She died,” he told Leonie without particulars. Leonie said nothing; she already knew. I hadn’t heard my father speak since he had locked my mother in the room. He sounded different with Leonie, less Scotch.
“I had to bury her,” he said, undressing, his pants on the floor. “Have you seen the boy?” He didn’t call me by my name. Leonie didn’t say, but she often didn’t answer. “I need to keep him to the house,” he said.
I lay as still as a stone. The dog on my mother’s dress was on my father’s blind side. I prayed he wouldn’t see it. Leonie had him occupied; we all conspired in pairs.
Their bodies shadowed on the canvas above me, but I couldn’t see them. I’d never seen my father naked, he’d never let me. I wondered why she fancied him. His movements against her pressed me to the floorboards, the dusty underbelly of the bed smudged against my chest. They seemed more coupled from their hips than at their mouths. As his body stopped and slumped, an arm fell loosely over the edge of the bed like the limb of a dead thing, his hand so near my face I had to move and risk a sound.
My father’s name is Darwin. He has one lazy-lidded, hooded eye. An eye that belongs to another man’s face. A mickey bull kicked up at him, the branding iron was in my hand. When the swollen purple subsided, it uncovered the colour of a bloodshot potato. He couldn’t see out of it.