I woke to the sound of my mother grunting. It was morning. I sat up and watched her through the window. She never came to bed.
She turned shovels of soil in the wet half of the garden, transferred a dying bush to where the ground was muddy, moved a barrowload of clay to where the flood water hadn’t come.
My father walked in alone on a hot and tired horse. Dickie Del Mar wasn’t with him. He wanted tea and hot water and didn’t want to talk to her. My mother kept on digging while I got out of bed and dressed.
I stayed out of his way, went outside and hoed the garden with Mother; we worked the wet soil. The flood came no further, it had been soaked up. The sand we turned was a bright, wet orange.
The fly-wire door squealed and banged shut. I looked up at my father. “Get the pony,” he told me. “I want Day to see the river,” he said to my mother. He didn’t usually call me by name.
“Where’s Alphonse?” she asked.
“He was too afraid to cross.”
I didn’t look at her. I went out with my father, bareback so I didn’t need shoes. I could keep up with him without a saddle, I used a sack instead.
The desert had bloomed overnight with meadows of tiny purple flowers like furry carpets; their seeds must have waited for years in the sand. A flock of dark swans flew so low overhead their shadows quivered over us, spooking my father’s horse. He called his horse Boss Hog, said he was unreliable.
The Murrumbidgee had overshot its banks, it was half a mile wide, fat as a lake. It had taken out the bridge. From the edge he pointed to a shadow up a tree out in the middle. It looked like a rangy cow stuck high in a branch, something dragging in the water out ahead of it. It was strange to see a dead thing so high up.
“What is it?” I asked.
He kicked the horse into the water where the current wasn’t strong and I followed so we could get closer. It was Dickie Del Mar.
“Never swim on a horse across a flooding river,” my father said, waving flies from his face with a stick. “You have to send your horse ahead of you and grab on to its tail, get dragged across behind.” He pointed at Dickie’s body. “I told him but he didn’t listen.”
The horse was wedged in a fork of a river gum, and he was strung up in front of it. The reins were caught around his neck, his legs were out ahead of him in the drag of the water. Ravens hovered over him. One settled on his shoulder, another on his hat.
My pony stamped in the water, ready to head for home. I didn’t want to look but I couldn’t stop.
It was Dickie who carried me on his shoulders, let me steer him around the stockyards by the handlebars of his moustache, my thighs around his neck. He taught me to tango in the garden, my bare feet on the zip up the middle of his boots, clinging around his waist. Dipping and bowing through the sheets and pillowcases, my face in the sweat on his chest where the buttons of his shirt stayed open, my mother laughing, hanging his clothes on the line.
At lunch he would sit beside her when my father had already eaten and gone. Lying on the ground underneath the table I looked at the hairs on his legs as they talked. Once I almost held my face against his ankle. He pretended I wasn’t there. Sometimes my mother’s leg would brush against his and stay there. After he arrived, she stopped wearing socks, put a ribbon in her hair.
But he was out on the water, hanging from his horse, his hat still strapped to his head. I felt dizzy like I did when I had a concussion.
My father turned his horse, rough with his hands, and rode for home. In the Backblock Paddock I jumped off the pony beside a patch of kangaroo paw that had blossomed among the paddymelons in the flood. I picked a cluster of the fire-orange flowers. I would give them to my mother.
When I caught up with my father, he took the flowers from me. As we reached the house, he leant down and gave the flowers to my mother in the yard.
“These are from Dickie,” he said. She looked at the ground. She must have thought that Dickie had left her. I didn’t tell her he was dead. He was supposed to take us away.