The earth at Knolly Downs was as barren and parched as it was at Kharko, and the same dispiriting round of labour continued. They fed truckloads of molasses to the breeders – all that were left on the place, the rest of the herd having gone off for sale or agistment in Queensland. Jim grew to hate wrestling the dead weight of 44-gallon drums in the loose sand, and the stink of the molasses glugging into the feed troughs. They ran Herefords on Knolly, and nothing, Jim decided as another winter advanced, looked as bad as those particular cattle when they were in poor condition.
Knolly’s manager was Chris Landers, a heavy big-bellied man; a one-time fighter run to seed. He did most of his managing from the seat of a land rover. He had a voice that could make itself heard across a cattle camp, and a short way with lazy men and slipshod workmanship. In the kitchen he was known as Grease, for the manner in which he sacked the incompetent. ‘You better grease your swag straps’ was an invitation for a man to call round at the office for his cheque. Jim liked him well enough, but as Mason Andrews, the other jackeroo, pointed out, he knew what he was doing so there was no reason not to.
Mason was from the city and had only six months’ experience in bush living when Jim met him. He had a mop of curly brown hair above guileless eyes and a snubbed and peeling nose, and his face retained some of the chubbiness of childhood. He was perennially cheerful and proved to be a quick learner – and just as well, Jim thought, as he had a great deal to learn. They shared a room, for at Knolly the jackeroos lived separately, taking their meals with the manager’s family. Mason would have been content with the men’s quarters and the kitchen, and was agog to learn he needed an invitation to both.
‘For God’s sake, why?’
‘It’s customary.’ Jim frowned. ‘Where’ve you been all your life, anyway?’
‘Adelaide. I learned to ride on a farm my mate’s dad owned. Then I got my dad to pull a few strings and he came up with this job. Mind, he reckons I’ll be back in twelve months. Fact he’s counting on it, but I’ve got news for him.’ Mason gazed contentedly around the spartan room, which contained only their beds, a chest of drawers, and two towel rails screwed to the wall. ‘This’ll do me.’
‘What’s his job then, your father?’
‘He’s a lawyer. Thinks I’m gunna be one too. What about yours?’
‘Dunno. Haven’t seen him in years.’ Jim shrugged. ‘Mason – what sort of name’s that?’
‘Hah! That was my grandfather’s occupation. That’s why I’m supposed to be a lawyer. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, we Andrews, with our eye constantly on the goal – no diversions or side trips permitted. We signpost our successes as we go. I expect I could call a son of mine Jack Aroo Andrews. Anyway, I generally answer to Mace.’
‘Right.’ Jim thought he would like his new companion. A brassy clanging broke upon their ears and he stood up. ‘There’s the lunch bell. We’d better get up to the house and meet the missus and the bookkeeper. And I see the padre’s here as well. I recognised his vehicle coming in.’
‘You’re kidding?’ Mason’s face was a study. ‘God, I thought the one thing I’d be safe from out here was soul-savers.’
‘Oh, Padre Don’s not like that. In fact I’ve never met a bush preacher that was. Forget your churchy blokes. That side of him’s there if you want it. He’ll baptise you or marry you – even bury you,’ he added with sudden soberness, remembering Barney. ‘But if he didn’t wear the crosses you probably wouldn’t twig he was a padre. He’s just like the rest of us, except he’s ready to help when he’s needed.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. For a moment there I could just see him handing out tracts and reporting back to my dad.’
After lunch they met Pete Patterson, the head stockman. Thin and lugubrious, he suffered from piles and carried a swagful of medicines about with him, but he ran an efficient camp. The station cook, whose right arm was missing below the elbow, was called Lefty. What remained of the limb had shrunk to the size of the bone, but he managed his work and wasn’t a bad cook.
‘Mad bugger,’ Pete warned the two young men, ‘but at least he ain’t gabby. Gawd, I can’t abide a gabby cook.’
The rest of the men changed as regularly as the months. Only Pete and Lefty and the two jackeroos stayed on through the grind of that first winter and into the start of another summer of flies and heat and dust-stained skies. Jim, standing on a mill platform to grease the head, thought the country looked as if it had never been rained upon, nor ever would be. As far as the eye could see, the land stretched barren as the moon. Only the willy-winds moved upon it, in red spirals of heated air, and all he could hear above the buzz of flies was the maddeningly repetitive cawing of crows.
They all hated the crows, and the dingoes grown sleek and bold on the stock’s misfortune. The first time Jim had to shoot an old mare that had had the living eyes pecked from her head by crows after going down in the paddock, he’d been sickened to his soul. But he discovered as the months went by that you got used to even that. Death was their daily companion. You shot the dying and towed them away to make room at the troughs and in the shade for the tottering living, and you gritted your teeth and knocked on the head those few foals and calves that were born. The paddocks reeked of death, part of the grim economics of survival. In the war against drought only the strategists survived, and not always then.
Mason, muscles harder and face leaner, endured grimly beside him. He had never killed so much as a fish, he confided the day Pete shot a brumby mare and her newborn foal and left the jackeroos to burn the carcases.
‘What are we doing this for, anyway?’ He dumped an armful of wood over the emaciated hide. ‘There’s gotta be thirty or more dead cattle unburnt back there.’ He jerked his head at the country north of the bore. ‘Come to that, why shoot her? She’s only a brumby.’
‘And good for about another week, by the look of her.’ Jim sleeved his forehead dry and splashed diesel over the pyre. ‘Then she goes down and dies over a coupla days and the foal starves. You ever see a horse die like that, eyes pecked out, digging at the ground trying to get up? That’s why he shot her. Brumby or not, she’s a horse, and Pete’s a horseman.’ Gazing at the skinny neck and staring ribs, he said softly, ‘I knew another bloke like him once. He would’ve shot her too.’ He struck a wax match against his boot, dropped it onto a little scraping of mulga leaves and watched the oily black smoke billow into the dust-hazed sky. ‘God, I wish it’d end.’
His voice was suddenly wistful and Mason eyed him in surprise. He had thought Jim too pragmatic for sentiment.
‘You should see this country after rain, Mace, you’ve got no idea. It’s the most beautiful… The feed, and the flowers…’ He waved a hand to express what he could not find words for, finishing lamely, ‘Well, I was born here. I suppose I’m biased.’
‘I’ll have to take that on trust, won’t I?’ Mason swung himself into the saddle. ‘Right now I’d swap the lot for half a mile of beach. If I thought he could control the weather I’d reckon my old man had planned it this way to turn me off the whole thing. Lawyers don’t have to worry about droughts.’
Jim squinted ahead at a wavy line shimmering above the mirage on the claypan: cattle coming in to drink. ‘On the other hand, you’re seeing the worst it can be nice and early in the piece. I had a mate who worked on that theory. Tackle the touchiest horse first, he used to say. It saves on your nerves in the long run.’
Mason, who had been thrown off every horse he’d saddled, looked sceptical. ‘Oh, great – and if they’re all touchy? Where’s your friend? Maybe he’d like to try my string?’
‘Dead,’ Jim said curtly, and Mason, surprised by the sudden change of tone, let the conversation drop.
The drought lasted four years, and that fourth year was the longest Jim had ever lived through. It was late November 1967 before it finally broke. Three weeks beforehand the four of them, Pete, Lefty, Mason and Jim, had been sitting around the kitchen table listening to a static-filled broadcast of the Melbourne Cup, won that year by a five-year-old chestnut called Red Handed.
‘Christ,’ said Pete at the end of the broadcast, an irritating roar of fragmented speech, ‘I only heard every fourth word of that.’
‘It’s called static,’ Mason offered. ‘Caused by weather or sunspots or the hand of God.’
‘Funny bugger, ain’t you? Weather? When’s the last time we seen any of that?’ Pete rose stiffly from the bench and walked with his peculiar spraddled gait to the door.
Jim crowded his shoulder. ‘That’s not cloud, is it?’
‘Yep.’ Pete scratched at his ear. ‘But it don’t mean nothing yet.’
He was right. The few wisps of white were high and far off to the east, and could have little effect on the radio reception, Jim thought. The day felt no different around him, the air was still furnace-dry, but the cloud’s very existence planted a seed of hope in his heart.
‘Won’t come to anything,’ he scoffed, not yet daring to admit that it might.
‘Give it a month,’ Pete grunted. ‘You young blokes, think yer seen it all. But the end of every drought’s gotta have a beginning, and I reckon this might be it.’
He was right, although his timing was out by a week. For three glorious days rain pounded down upon the stricken country, filling dams and creeks, turning claypans into lakes, and washing the dust and smell of death from the land all the way from Alice to the border. For the first time in four years a cerulean sky, washed clean of haze and dust, arched above the mulga, and almost as they watched, the nine-day grass came pushing through the steaming earth. Within days there were fresh shoots on the trees and ducks planing down onto waterholes. The country burst and chirruped and sang with life, from the little brown frogs that dug themselves out of their desert cocoons to the strident row of the cicadas in the big gum outside the jackeroos’ quarters.
Lefty baked a cake to celebrate, although only Jim, Mason, Pete and the mechanic were there to eat it. The pumpers, cut off at their lonely posts by the mud, could not leave until the roads opened. The windmill expert was bogged halfway between Trident bore and the homestead, and the station blacks had gone walkabout the moment the rain stopped.
They drank a toast to the cake and the cook and the ending of the drought with black tea, Pete shifting uncomfortably on his piles on the wooden bench.
‘Well, I reckon this means we can get the steers home again next year,’ he said.
‘And a man might get a bit of decent beef in the meat house for a change,’ Lefty said. ‘You couldn’t feed a bloody dog on what’s been coming in.’
‘We know,’ Mason said. ‘We’ve been eating it.’
The cook pointed his stump threateningly at him. ‘Cheeky young bugger. Watch yer lip.’ But he spoke without heat; everyone got along with Mason.
Afterwards, luxuriating in enforced idleness on his bed, boots off and hands crossed behind his head, Jim said, ‘There won’t be anything much doing here for a while, Mace. Where are you going for Christmas – back to the city?’
‘For a couple of days, anyway. To see the family. Then I don’t know.’ He raised his knee to cock it over his other bent leg, and watched a fly circle lazily above his head. ‘Cripes, this is the life. Nothing to do and all afternoon to do it in. Makes a change for a hard-working ringer, don’t it?’
‘When you are one,’ Jim suggested derisively. ‘Anyway, if there’s no hurry, stop off with me for a day or two at Kharko. Have a look at the place and meet my uncle. There’s a good chance you’ll do at least a year of your time with him. Besides, there’s bound to be a dance, and I’ve got a very good-looking cousin. She’ll be home.’
‘A dance? Music, you mean? And girls?’ Mason rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll be in that, mate. Tell you the truth, I was starting to wonder if there were any girls out in this country. I’ve seen nothing female – in a dress, that is – since I got here. Apart from the missus of course.’
Jim grinned. Mrs Landers, gossipy and friendly and matching her husband in girth, was no oil painting.
Riding back home in the mail truck, Jim marvelled afresh at the changes the rain had wrought. Green feed carpeted the red earth, a scattering of white clouds softened the glare, and the cattle, stringing along the pads to water, were visibly improved from a fortnight before, their coats cleaning up, their apathy lifting. When a bony young heifer standing in the road put up her tail and bucked over the verge, he felt like cheering. He wondered how Bill Maddison was doing, and Sam Colson and the rest of them around Goola.
Dropping down out of the truck at Kharko’s loading dock, Jim was vaguely surprised to observe that nothing had changed. It was two years since he’d left, the drought having prevented him returning the previous Christmas, but there was old Baker’s head popping out like a tortoise from its shell at the sound of the motor, just as it always had, and the pepper trees still guarded the gate, and the smoko bell was a clanging racket.
He tossed his swag onto the platform and threw Mason’s beside it. ‘They’ll be right there,’ he said, slapping dust from his clothes. ‘C’mon, let’s go find my aunt.’
Mary, writing at the dining-room table, looked up with a glad smile at her nephew. ‘Jim. Welcome back, dear. And this must be Mason?’ She rose to shake his hand. ‘I’m pleased you could come.’
Jim hugged her. ‘Aunty, you look great.’
She folded her reading glasses and said, ‘Shopping list. We’re going into the Alice next week. Your uncle will be back soon. He’s gone out to the Ten Mile. How long can you stay?’
Just then Rosemary came in and her discontented expression changed at the sight of them. ‘So it’s you – how are you, Jim? Nice to meet you, Mason. Wasn’t the rain marvellous?’ Then, before he could answer, ‘I’ve got another job. The new Riverside Hotel in the Alice. They don’t open their doors until mid-January, so I’m here till then.’
She had worked that year as a governess for the Tillets, after spending her obligatory twelve months at home on Kharko. Experience as a governess, she had reasoned, would widen her chances of finding work abroad.
‘Good for you,’ Jim said. ‘What’s the job?’
‘Oh, general dogsbody – running messages, taking bookings. Not,’ she mimed horror, ‘working in the bar. That’s the first thing Dad thought, of course. Anyway, it’s a start. I’ll find something better later on.’
‘I’ll make tea,’ Mary said. ‘Take Mason through to wash, Jim.’
But Mason, head tilted, was looking curiously at Rosemary. ‘Won’t you miss the life out here?’
‘Probably. But I don’t have a choice. You should try being a girl sometime, it’s pretty restricting.’ She shook her head. ‘Bathroom’s through there. Jim’ll show you. I’d better help Mum.’
As at Knolly, everyone at Kharko was renewed by the change in the weather. In the kitchen Pommy was tracing the station brand into potato mash on an enormous cottage pie. The wood range behind him gave out a steady blast of heat, making the perspiration gleam on his bald head. Loaves lay cooling on a wire rack and there was a mug of half-cold tea on the table beside him.
‘There y’are, Jim,’ he said, unsurprised. ‘Heard you was back. Get a bit of rain too, did you?’
‘Six inches.’ They shook hands and Jim nodded at the branding on the pie. ‘What’s this?’
‘Tryin’ to take their minds orf the meat. Gawd, you oughta seen some of the killers we’ve ’ad. Mince is all they’re good for. I’ve forgot what fat meat looks like – reckon most of the country has, come to that.’ His eyes went past Jim. ‘Who’s this bloke?’
‘Mate of mine.’ He introduced Mason and they sat down to drink tea and catch up with the news. Pommy, as always, knew everything about everyone’s affairs. The rain had been general. Dams throughout the district had filled, Sam Colson was already talking about buying young store cattle to replace stock lost in the drought, and Kharko’s own steers would be coming home at the start of the new season.
Jim turned his pannikin on the scrubbed wooden tabletop. ‘And old Bill? Things were pretty bad on his place – how’d he get on?’
‘Well, ’e’s still there. And he’s bound to get some of his stock back.’ Pommy pursed his lips, adding wisely, ‘You leave ’em be, it’s marvellous how cattle’ll hang on. Course the boss took care of his nags. They been paddocked in the Ten Mile most of the year – thin pickings, but more than Bill had left. He’s done some fencing for the boss as well, so I seen him off and on. I think he mighta been with the camp for a few days even, when they shifted the cows over onto your dad’s old joint.’
Mason stayed five days, long enough to attend the dance. Finding Rosemary alone in the garden, he asked her to partner him, adding hopefully, ‘I’ve got party manners and a clean shirt. And we Andrews never step on ladies’ feet. It’s quite an article of faith with us, that.’
She looked at him, lifted one shoulder. ‘Well, why not?’
‘Good. That’s settled. Tell you the truth, I thought I’d have to fight the big fella for the privilege.’
‘Clown. Jim’s my cousin but he might as well be my brother. We grew up together. I shoved him out of this tree when I was nine. He knocked a tooth loose and got so wild he came after me with a cricket bat. I shot up the mill tower, because I knew he couldn’t climb while he was hanging onto the bat. He was always very easy to stir up.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Mason promised. ‘The cook said something about his father’s property – whereabouts is it?’
‘Oh, that was years ago, when he was a kid. He came to live with us after his mother died. Uncle Sandy walked off the place. Jim never talks about it – or him.’
‘I noticed. I thought you might.’
‘No.’ Her tone was decisive. ‘It’s his business.’
‘Fair enough.’ Mason gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘I suppose you have to take this job in town? I mean, Jim reckons the company’ll shift us around. Next year, the one after, I could be here – who knows?’
‘Well, I won’t be. I’ll be halfway to Europe by then.’ Sudden irritation edged her tone. ‘We’re going to a dance, Mason, not starting a life-long relationship.’
‘True. But the one sometimes leads to the other, and I’m an optimist. Is there a boyfriend?’
‘Not with me it doesn’t,’ she said, ignoring his question, ‘so don’t be tiresome. If you are I can always dance with Jim.’
The atmosphere at the dance was markedly different to the last one Jim had attended. There were streamers and balloons in the hall, and the conversation ran from satisfaction to outright joy at the miracle of rain. Going around the floor with Mary, Jim heard snatches from the older men gathered obstinately in the corners, ignoring both their wives and the dancefloor.
‘… over the spillway of the dam…’
‘… four inches at the very least, swept the crossing to hell, had to run every cable again…’
‘… wettest it’s been in thirty years…’
‘She’ll be a bewdy season…’
Streaks of grey hair showed in the brown as Mary tilted her head to look up at her nephew. ‘It will be too. I’m just so thankful it’s come. It’s been a big strain on your uncle, Jim, getting through this drought.’
‘I’ll bet it has.’ He glanced across the room to where Rob stood in conversation, his back to the dancefloor. ‘Who’s that he’s with?’
‘Where? Oh,’ Mary stopped craning, ‘you wouldn’t know him. Willy Bell. He manages Basingstoke.’ The name reminded her and she eyed him carefully. ‘Did you…? Have you heard from your father at all, dear?’
‘No.’ It came out more curtly than he had intended. ‘I don’t expect to, either. He’s gone for good.’
Her attention was taken by latecomers at the door. ‘Oh, there’s Jeff Tillet, and Brenda and the girls. He’s being transferred, you know. Well, of course you do, I remember writing you about it. I must speak to her.’
Jim swung her out of the dance and found himself shaking hands with the blocky policeman and congratulating him on his promotion to sergeant. He tipped his head at Mrs Tillet and grinned at the twins. ‘Hello there – which of you is which?’
He danced with them both, and then a little later he noticed Gina Colson. It had to be her, he thought, staring at the slight, ethereal figure seated beside Kathy Colson, although who could have guessed that that timid, pudgy little girl would turn into such a swan? She would be seventeen, he supposed, and was reed-slim and lovely, her hair the colour of ripe wheat and caught into a twist at the back of her head. She used to have untidy, whitish-looking hair that either clung damply to her face or stuck out in pigtails. He started across the room to ask her to dance, finding it hard to believe he’d ever called her fatso and wondering what strange metamorphosis had brought her to this.
Mrs Colson, a big, forthright woman, greeted him unsmilingly. ‘Hello, Jim.’
‘How are you doing, Mrs Colson? I heard you got good rain. We had six inches over at Knolly – the frogs had to learn to swim again. Hello, Gina,’ he smiled. The music swung into a waltz and he tapped his foot. ‘Have this next one with me?’
Kathy Colson’s hand closed over her daughter’s wrist. Gina showed no sign of rising. Her face had crimsoned and she was shaking her head in rapid little movements, her eyes not meeting his.
He stared uncomprehendingly. ‘Why not? Come on, Gina, you can waltz as well as any of them.’
‘But not with you,’ Sam Colson said at his elbow.
Jim swung to face him, feeling a rush of heat to his face, and then a sudden coldness as realisation sank in. And somehow it worsened the insult that Sam’s expression should show regret rather than scorn or anger. That he should in the same breath call into question Jim’s fitness to dance with his daughter while speaking in so kindly a tone.
‘It’s nothing personal, Jim. I’d wish it otherwise myself. Good God, I count your uncle a friend, but I have to protect my daughter’s name. You can see that, can’t you? It’s not your fault that your father’s…’
He didn’t finish his sentence, but he didn’t have to. Jim knew what he meant. And it wasn’t just Sandy’s alcoholism.
By an effort of will he unclenched his fist and turned away. Another second, he thought, and he might have driven the man’s teeth through the back of his skull. Or tried to, anyway. He felt as though he stood naked in the crowded room – only it was worse than that, for the scalding shame was inside him as well. Sam’s appearance had been no accident; he had been waiting to warn Jim off. The knowledge made his humiliation complete. It showed that the Colsons had discussed the matter. How many others present tonight had done the same? Which of the girls in the room would refuse, or were forbidden, to dance with him?
He had almost reached the door when Rosemary seized his arm. ‘Jim! Dance with me.’ She stepped in front of him, put one hand on his shoulder, and gave him a little shove to halt his advance. ‘Come on,’ she hissed, ‘move your feet. You want them all staring?’
‘I don’t give a shit!’ he gritted. But still, he was obeying her, blind instinct turning him and lifting his feet as the music directed, the couples around him appearing through a blur of rage. The colours of the balloons ran together and he felt giddy from the pressure of blood in his head.
‘You never think, Jim,’ Rosemary told him, keeping her voice low. ‘You couldn’t pick anyone else to dance with but Gina Colson, could you? Knowing the way her parents are about her, what did you expect? A crown prince would have to show his pedigree to get past Sam. And you looked like you were going to sock him.’
‘I was,’ he said furiously. ‘If he’d said one more word.’
‘Oh, that would have been wonderful! Hit first and holler after, that’s our Jim. It never occurred to you that Mum and Kathy Colson have been friends for years? Or that Dad’s got a position to keep up?’
‘I’m not stopping him from keeping up anything he wants.’ Jim sounded defensive even to himself.
‘You will be if you drag this out into the open and make a scandal of it. The company doesn’t approve of your father’s actions either, you know. But as long as it’s kept quiet they’ll overlook it. Next time you feel yourself insulted, Jim, just count to ten and think of my father’s job first. You owe him that much, surely.’
Flushing, he nodded dumbly. She was right, of course. He had never once thought of his father’s shame except as it affected himself. The music stopped and she took his hand and squeezed it. ‘It was a rotten thing to do – I’d thought better of Sam Colson. But it’s done now. Let’s get out of here and go for a walk.’
Through his affronted pride he felt a surge of affection for her. That was Ro: kick your head in and then stick a bandaid on the damage. ‘What about Mace?’ he asked.
‘He’s found the twins. He won’t even notice I’ve gone.’