Joe was with the Uncles, carrying branches of black cypress pine and gum to the fire pit. August noticed Eddie there with the men who were carrying dried lengths of geebung too. In his suit he seemed to have the confidence of a soldier off to battle, not unlike the town’s statue. August thought about Poppy, trying to imagine him so young, thinking how she never knew him completely, only for some of his life, and wondered what it was like for him here in Massacre as a young man. Elsie was waiting at the fire. She was wearing a crepe navy-blue dress, her hair looped into a low bun.
August stood with the women and girls who were bound together and heaving; sorrowful noises came from all the Aunties, even Aunt Mary was crying. The sun seemed to ease and August suddenly didn’t feel sweltering hot anymore. A breeze felt as though it came off the water of the Murrumby, where it couldn’t. She’d once heard Aunt Missy talking about the grief coming from upriver – or had it been from underground? She couldn’t remember. Aunt Missy squeezed August’s wrist. Missy was thinking about when her dad had taken her fishing, about when she was little he let her push her thumb into the soft soil and how he walked past her, dropping seeds into the earth, with the other hand she would cover them up. Aunt Mary was swaying by the fire. She was thinking about the first time she met her brother again at the Aboriginal Medical Centre Christmas lunch, how relatives had walked them to each other across the lawn, how they didn’t know whether to hug or dance in the joy. She was thinking about when she buried her own son, how much she’d loved him, more than she knew she could, more than she was ever taught. And Aunt Nicki, who had let go of August’s other hand, with eyes closed, asked the Lord, whom she never asked for anything, to end this chapter of their lives. Amen.
Nana took the black cypress-pine branches, the gum and geebung from the cousins and uncles and placed the ends into the fire. The men and boys stood back and waited. When the branches were smoking but not yet alight, everyone moved forward and Nana handed them out until she was empty-handed. August stood back from everything, just watching.
Once Nana took the jewellery box of ashes everyone went quiet, but music came from their feet when Nana spread the ashes into the fire. The flames rose and sank. She walked into the wheatfield, letting the grey gravel dust trail from the box alongside her. Nana dropped the box on the ground, threw her arms wide and moved to those private songs of their marriage with her eyes closed shut. Elsie was thinking about Albert, thinking about his free spirit flying, whooshing into the air as he’d always said he could. Like an arrow through a heavy heart the long elegant body of the bird glided into a chorus of sobbing and landed out by the dam. Elsie opened her mouth and a deep noise came out, words she didn’t remember that she’d gathered like years. August stared further out towards the dam as the ceremony continued and smoke rose, sweeping across the plains.
The whole world seemed to stop then: the cicadas went quiet, leaves stopped rustling, chairs didn’t creak.
August couldn’t taste or smell a thing. She spied the lone bird at the edge of the dam, dancing, as did her nana, who stopped moving when she noticed. It was as if the bird were coming towards the fire. Everyone else was looking too.
It was a brolga.
A few family members pointed in the direction of the dam where the red bonnet of the brolga rose and fell, and its white and blue-grey feathers opened and collapsed. At the edge of the water, with its stick-thin, sinewy legs and dipping knees, it danced. It flapped its wings, showing its black underside. When it bowed its head August thought she could see its yellow eye. It had a trumpet call, its caw rising, rising. Then its beak dipped right down to the ground – and up, up its wings went, the long body of the bird rose, its legs cycling in the air before it fell again. As the brolga hit the ground, a wing, then the other, whooshed into the smoke blowing in the field. One leg up, and then the other leg joined so that the brolga was airborne for a moment, and then as its body, atoms, molecules joined the ground its head rose up with the billow of dust, rising. Over and over, the brolga repeated the dance. There was music. Everyone was still, watching – seeing suddenly not the freedom of the bird, but its belonging. She dropped to her knees and sobbed and wailed like she’d never done before. August saw something else in the bird, too. Her legs felt heavy and she fell where she stood, kept her eyes on the bird. Jedda, she thought, Jedda.
August could see her dancing, her narrow childish hips, her long limbs weaving in the air. She could see Jedda as she took his arm when he went to run his hand through August’s hair. Where was Jedda going with him? Who was he? She tried to remember but couldn’t. In this wakeful dream, this vivid echo, August peered over the bed, somehow controlling what she could see, and looked at the floor of their bedroom. Below the bunks their cassette tapes were strewn across the rug, she saw the texta marker: Spice Girls, Hanson, TLC. She could see all their books and figurines and one cassette on the pillow of Jedda’s bunk, it read Letter to the Princess. That wasn’t a song, it was their secret recorded messages to Princess Diana of England. They used to record stories for her. True stories? August and Jedda were watching ballet dancers on the television when the news came on that Princess Diana had died. Why, she thought was she seeing this, now? Had she not gone to England for Jedda? she wondered, looking about their bedroom in her mind. Hadn’t she flown to Buckingham Palace for her? Hadn’t she done nothing all those years? Hadn’t she just washed dishes, like when they were kids doing the chores at home? Hadn’t she not eaten properly forever? Hadn’t she wasted herself to stay a girl forever, little girls forever? The cement block of her memory, that smooth slab in her mind cracked, the grey wall crumbled then, and all she saw was Jedda dancing. The music to Jedda’s dance. Chanting girls’ voices: Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, they sang that, Balang gaanha bungang burra-mi, bungang burra-mi, bungang burra-mi … she could see the little girls. August wanted to fall from the bunk bed and hug them, but as her head moved towards them, her neck dropped heavily like a body on drugs, a mind in the sea and she was awake, in the field again. The brolga folded itself through the motions, heads, shoulders, knees, toes … poking into air … pecking into the earth. Again and again the body surged from the dust field, like future and past colliding.
Then the brolga’s mates arrived from the west, a hundred sails flung into the sea of yellow-green. They followed the same motions, bicycling their own sinewy legs, but the first brolga danced the most: it stood forward in the pack, its wings spread out the widest. August could feel her face turn wet. A benediction blanketed the yard in all the words that weren’t needed to be said. It was simply, painfully, the finality of a time. All along they’d wanted peace, or to be happy, and they are good things to want, especially for children, but they’d been drawn again and again into the past, where all pain lives. She wondered if everyone was haunted by being a kid. Haunted by the feeling of being unshielded. They weren’t protected from everything, August remembered, not the words hurled by the other locals in town, not the slurred looks, not the school history books and those lies, not everyone around her whose spirits were shattered in a thousand pieces, and she remembered clearly now – how they weren’t protected from everything at all, not even Uncle Jimmy Corvette who liked to climb into their beds when nobody seemed to notice.
She could hear Gospel music playing around her when it wasn’t. Under the eaves, down the verandah steps and out into that old field ran the music, rustling dormant seeds from pods and pods from branches, and stuck-branches from trees. She looked back at the verandah of Prosperous and could see Nana and Poppy that night, dressed up for the fundraiser and waving goodbye to the girls. That was the year the Gospel came to Prosperous and hadn’t Jedda and August been over the moon? Nana and Poppy had bought a brand-new CD player to add music to the beginnings and ends of Bible study on Fridays. Poppy said it was God’s Will and then he pressed the play button. Younger Nana always agreed with God but smiled and winked at the girls about God’s wishes all the time. They let the music run through every part of that house. They even opened up the windows and August had seen Gospel leaking out of Prosperous like the smoke of something burnt off the stove. Those wailing singing voices pitching camp on that farm.
No-one knew what Jimmy Corvette was then – he was just babysitting that night, wasn’t he? He said he’d brought a movie for them and did they want to watch it? It was on VHS. August didn’t remember what the movie was called but she remembered it wasn’t rated G or PG. The girls didn’t like it, it was confusing, and Jedda and August squeezed each other’s hand under the blanket when Uncle Jimmy kept running his fingers through their hair. August could feel popcorn shells caught between her teeth when he put his mouth on hers. Jedda looked away and then August looked away.
The next day at breakfast, around the cornflakes and coffee pot, Poppy held the newspaper aloft and announced to anyone listening that a statue of the Virgin Mary was crying blood in a country called the Philippines. August had thought that the Virgin Mary must have known what they were feeling then. August had wondered if she’d ever be able to cry again. She’d imagined when she did it would be of blood, too, but she didn’t think she could squeeze a drop in any case. She’d been changed forever, she felt she were buried that day and all the days after, under a hundred babushka-doll casings, way beneath the wood and varnish. And she didn’t ever want to listen to Gospel music again.
Weeks later was the second time it happened, wasn’t it? But Jedda led Uncle Jimmy Corvette away from August. Jedda saved her.
Her head seemed as if it could feel the rest of her body then, as if things were sinking in and her feeling was seeping out, like a sieve fallen into a bowl of cake batter. She sat on the sandy dirt, crying. All feeling crept over her body, everywhere, like waking up comatose nerves of the skin, the undead stirring. Her mouth, her throat, her nose – even her ears felt as if they were wet with tears. A word came into her mind, fully-formed, she knew what it meant – burral-gang – the brolga. She didn’t know how she knew the word but she knew it. Burral-gang. The brolgas finished their dance. It was her, dancing. Jedda and her friends began to flee the paddock, spindly legs galloping south, away from all of them before taking full flight. August ran her fingers through the dirt, just scratching the surface. Poppy, she said out loud; Jedda, she said on the inside.
She closed her eyes, a dam had broken, broken their little hearts, hearts born as fragile as clay. With her hands flat on the dry dirt and her eyes blinded with tears, she felt as if she were back home, back on the land she belonged to. At the same time, she thought that this was the saddest place on earth.