I park the Vauxhall under the fig tree. I don’t have the energy to get out of the car. I touch the letter in my pocket, watch my father as he walks towards me. His pants are ragged at the knees, like the trousers of a child. I have to tell him. I don’t know why I thought it would be easy.
“Where have you been?” I ask him, as though he’s the one who’s up to something.
“Checking the cattle in Hindenburg,” he says, leaning a hand against the roof of the car. Hindenburg isn’t a paddock I remember.
“I started to call them after things that happened in the year they were fenced,” he says. “Like Belafonte.”
“Belafonte?”
“I heard this song called ‘Island in the Sun’; they played it at the pub.”
“Harry Belafonte’s black,” I tell him.
“I never saw a picture of him,” he says. “Any mail?”
I get out of the car and pull the letter from my pocket, lean against the panel beside him. “I’ve been invited to ride at a thing in Puebla,” I say as though it’s a well-known place.
“Where’s that?”
“Mexico.”
He squints through the stunted cypress and into the lowering sun. “How will you get there from here?”
“Through Los Angeles. They said they’ll pay my way. I haven’t ridden for ages.”
We go over and sit on the cemented arms of the veranda steps. He never pulls up on his trousers when he bends his legs to sit. His pale knees push through where his pants are worn. He looks deflated, like the wind’s been taken from him.
“You can practise on old Nifty Dan,” he says.
“I’ll be all right.”
The sun sets red around us like the desert’s caught on fire. We watch it and listen to the evening birds.
“Is it the girl?” he asks.
I nod. “I’m meeting her there.”
“It doesn’t always work away from where it started,” he says and scuffs a heel quite deep into the sand. The dog comes by and lays its head in the hole he’s made.
“It’s worth a shot,” I say.
“I was getting used to you,” he says as though he’s talking to the dog.
I look down the drive to the sheds; an empty leather halter drapes from the fence. My mother could be walking back up to her roses with a trowel and a bucket of manure from the stockyards. But the garden is gone.
“Why did you put her in that bed?” I ask him.
For a moment he looks at the dog and doesn’t answer.
“She’d gone peculiar,” he says. “She still wanted to go to Europe but the War wasn’t over. She’d wanted to go with Dickie Del Mar. Even he wouldn’t take her.”
I think of the body stuck up in the tree, it’s almost as if I imagined it. “Why did you make me think he was dead?”
“Because he was your father.” It catches me midbreath, to hear the words from him out loud, even though I already know them. Sitting on the steps in the late afternoon, all these years later. I look at him across from me, the furrows deep in his forehead, the sagging skin on his neck, the eye. I’ve carried him with me like a stone in my shoe.