IAN HAD BEEN IN THE HOSPITAL FOR THREE WEEKS WHEN the doctor finally released him. He’d spent most of that time staring out the window, looking at Jacy as seldom as possible and speaking to her even less.
“Go home,” he told her bluntly on the last morning.
“That’s just what I intend to do,” Jacy answered. She’d bought a few clothes for him, along with shaving gear and toiletries. Now she tossed the items into a satchel; they were all a-jumble, like her emotions. “Since the homestead at Corroboree Springs is gone, I’ll have to see about getting a trailer—a caravan—for the McAllisters to live in until the place can be rebuilt. And then there’s the school—all those books and things I ordered have probably arrived, and they’ll need sorting—”
Ian was standing beside the bed, looking stiff and a little gaunt in his brand-new jeans and a cotton shirt that still had creases in it from being folded into a package. His knuckles went white where he gripped the steel railing with one hand. “Damn it, Jacy, that isn’t what I meant by telling you to go home.”
Jacy set her jaw. She’d been extraordinarily patient with Ian, but his sullen attitude was beginning to get on her nerves. “I know that perfectly well,” she said. “You want me to fly back to the States, just like I did ten years ago, so you can really feel sorry for poor old Ian. No doubt you’d tell yourself, and a few trusted mates, that you were right about me all along—that I was a quitter and you were better rid of me.” She paused, took a breath, met Ian’s glare, and held it. “Well, I’m not going to make it that easy for you, Yarbro. I’m going back home, all right—to Yolanda. To our house, if it’s still standing. I’m going to look around and see what needs to be done and then push up my sleeves and get started.”
Ian was silent for a long time, just staring at her. His expression was unreadable. “You’re a fool,” he finally said, in a low tone laced with wonder as well as irritation.
Collie Kilbride chose exactly then to make his entrance. “Here, now,” he said with nervous good cheer, “that’s no way to talk to a lady, now, is it?” He looked around and then shuddered. “This place gives me the quivery-crawlies,” he said, grabbing up Jacy’s suitcases, packed earlier at the hotel, as well as Ian’s satchel. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Go ahead, Collie,” Jacy said quietly. “We’ll meet you downstairs.”
The pilot glanced anxiously from Jacy to Ian, then went out. No words passed between husband and wife, just a silent battle that neither won.
A nurse whisked in with a wheelchair, and Ian settled into it, his face grim, knowing a protest would only delay his escape from a place he plainly hated. Jacy walked alongside, chin high, shoulders straight, heart tremulous and fragile, ever-so-ready to break.
Collie had hired a minibus, and Ian insisted on riding in the front with his mate. Jacy climbed into the back and snapped on her seat belt without comment. She didn’t give a damn where she sat as long as she could go home to the property she loved and all the dreams waiting there. Ian, on the other hand, would probably have made an issue of it, in the die-hard hope that he could still drive her off.
Collie whistled through his teeth while they drove out of the city and made their way over a bumpy road to a small private airfield. Collie’s plane was there waiting, and while he was loading the baggage and making his routine engine check, Ian and Jacy waited in the minibus.
The air was thick with silence, with things that needed to be said and things better left unspoken. Finally Ian turned in the seat and looked back at her with bleak annoyance in his eyes.
“You don’t have any idea what it’s like to start over from nothing in the bush,” he warned. “It’ll be ten times worse than the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”
Jacy was well aware of the challenges that faced her, faced all of them, and she was nervous and scared, but she wasn’t about to reveal that. She’d write about it someday, she thought whimsically, in her memoirs.
“You’re right,” she agreed tautly. “I don’t know what it’s like to start over from nothing in the bush. And neither do you, if you’ll excuse me for pointing it out. But we’re sure as hell going to find out, aren’t we?”
Ian muttered a swear word, wrenched open the door, and climbed shakily out of the vehicle.
Within fifteen minutes the ancient bomber was airborne. Nobody tried to talk—Ian was sulking, and Collie was caught up in the pure joy of flying, as always. Jacy sat rigidly in her seat, praying she wasn’t making the mistake of a lifetime by going back to Yolanda, willing her stomach back down out of her throat every time the plane banked steeply to one side or the other.
After a little more than an hour they put down on the familiar, rutted landing strip outside of Yolanda. Jake’s truck, now Jacy’s property, was parked nearby, where Collie had probably left it when he departed for Adelaide.
Well, baby, Jacy thought, laying one hand on her lower abdomen in a gesture of communion with her unborn child, we’re home.
Ian opened the plane’s door and climbed down over the wing. Although he was waiting to help Jacy to the ground, he didn’t meet her eyes. Everything seemed hopeless just then, and Jacy’s throat tightened painfully.
Maybe Ian meant it. Maybe he truly didn’t want her around, didn’t want their baby either.
She sniffled and silently reminded herself that this was the man who had gone to Adelaide at the age of nineteen to claim his infant son. This was the man who had raised that child with love and patience in the face of almost insurmountable difficulties. He’d wanted Chris, Ian had, and he wanted the new baby, too, though he was probably telling himself that the little one would be better off without him.
Not so, Jacy’s heart insisted.
They got into the waiting truck, Collie driving, and set off toward the land Ian’s grandfather had settled. Neither Jacy nor Ian knew exactly what they would find, and Collie wasn’t volunteering anything. He just drove, whistling through his teeth again, and occasionally pounding out a beat on the steering wheel with one palm.
They bypassed Yolanda—Jacy intended to drive in on her own later, after Ian had had a chance to absorb whatever awaited him, to reclaim Chris, stop by Jake’s grave, and view the remains of the schoolhouse.
At first everything seemed the same. The grass was dry and brown, the dirt red, the trees few and far between, straggly and twisted from lack of water. Then, abruptly, the landscape changed to a black and barren expanse where it seemed nothing could possibly live.
Sitting in the backseat, Jacy reached forward and laid a hand on Ian’s shoulder when they turned onto his property. He didn’t shrug away, to her great relief, but instead covered her fingers with his own.
The sheds were gone, just as Nancy had said, and so were the fences. Jacy felt Ian’s muscles convulse under her palm, and she squeezed his shoulder, trying to offer some reassurance.
Nothing could have prepared either of them, Jacy thought, for the reality of seeing those blackened ruins.
Jacy squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then swung her gaze to the homestead. Alice had said she’d saved it, but that didn’t mean there was no damage.
Relief swept through Jacy. The once-white walls were charred and stained with soot, and part of the roof had burned through, but the structure itself stood strong and valiant under the blazing sun.
Ian pushed open the door of the truck and got out without saying a word. Collie turned to look questioningly at Jacy, and she managed a smile.
“It’ll be okay,” she said hoarsely, hoping God would back her up and make her brave words true.
She could insist on staying on the property, living in the house, but what if Ian barred her from his innermost self? What if he never let her in?
Ian didn’t seem to notice the homestead. He wandered like a sleepwalker, slow-moving and dazed, between the twisted ebony skeletons of his beloved sheds.
Jacy got out, meaning to go to her husband and lead him away, but Collie stopped her, taking a light grip on her arm.
“Let him have a minute, love,” he said.
Jacy swallowed hard, then nodded. Collie was right; Ian needed a little time to face the brunt of his grief. She got some of her baggage out of the back of the truck and went into the scarred but triumphant house. Collie followed, bringing in the rest of the baggage.
Moving slowly, tears slipping down her cheeks, Jacy walked along the hallway to Chris’s room. After taking a moment to gather her courage, she opened the door and looked in.
Everything was the same except for a faint odor of smoke, and the whole house smelled of that.
She moved along, finally, to the bedroom she and Ian had shared. She stood in the doorway, her heart full of love and fear and memories. This room, too, had been spared—this precious room where she and Ian had joined themselves together in passion and conceived the child nestled inside her now.
Jacy hadn’t heard Ian approaching, and she was startled when she turned to leave and found him standing directly behind her. He didn’t speak, but his eyes said everything as they searched Jacy’s face.
She gave a soft cry and put her arms around him, laying her cheek to his chest, careful not to press against the healing wound. It was hard and warm, Ian’s chest, and she felt his heart beating.
“Oh, Ian,” she whispered raggedly, clinging to him. “Let me love you. Please, please—don’t turn your back on everything we could have and do and be together—”
He stood stiffly for the longest time, but then she felt him relent a little, and she gave a strangled sob of pure, joyous relief. Ian’s arms tightened around her, drawing her close, and she felt his breath in her hair.
“God help me,” he murmured, “I’ve tried not to need you, Jacy, not to love you. But I can’t stop the feelings—they’re as elemental as the bushfire that ravaged this place.”
She pulled back, stared up into his face, afraid to believe she’d heard him correctly. “You love me? You did say that—in a roundabout way—didn’t you?”
Ian smiled, that slow, slanted smile that always made her heart do a little leaping pirouette, but in the next instant his expression turned solemn again. “Yes,” he said gravely. “I love you. But such fine sentiments aren’t always enough out here. This is hard country, Jacy—”
Jacy stood on tiptoes and kissed his chin. He needed a shave, and his skin felt rough against her lips. “We’ll nurture our love, Ian,” she said, “and it will grow and grow until it’s bigger than anything this land can do to us.”
He touched her nose, his mouth still tilted at one side, but there were shadows in his blue eyes. “It’s going to be hard work rebuilding this place, love.”
She stepped back and pushed up her sleeves. “Let’s get started,” she said with a toss of her head and a watery smile.
Ian laughed and caught her face in his hands. “Crazy little Yank,” he murmured, and then he bent his head and kissed her with such thoroughness that she sagged against the doorjamb when it was over, dazed.
“I’d better go to town and get Chris,” she said when she caught her breath.
Ian took her hand and pulled her over the threshold, into the cool, spacious room with its simple furniture and its silent echoes of passion and promises.
“Not just yet,” he said, pushing the door closed behind them.
Jacy leaned back against it, closing her eyes, surrendering as Ian opened her blouse button by button. They hadn’t made love in weeks, and their need was desperate. Within a few minutes they were on the bed, both of them naked, flinging themselves at each other in the lush violence of their love.
Jacy came first, crying out and arching high off the bedcovers. While her body bucked and strained beneath him Ian groaned and stiffened, the muscles in his neck cording as he plunged deep into her warmth and spilled himself there.
Afterward they lay entwined in each other’s arms. Ian soon tumbled into an exhausted sleep, and Jacy held him, smiling and crying, promising herself and all the angels in heaven that she would make this marriage work no matter what she had to do.
Perhaps an hour had passed when Jacy slipped from Ian’s embrace and put her clothes back on. He stirred but didn’t awaken, and she bent to kiss his forehead, and the scar where Redley’s bullet had entered his chest, before covering him with a lightweight blanket.
Ian opened his eyes, looked at her without recognition, and sank into sleep again.
Jacy loved him so much in that moment that she ached with the emotion, wondered if she could endure the depth and purity and sharpness of it.
She went into the kitchen and found Collie at the table, drinking beer and working a crossword puzzle in an old newspaper. She hoped he hadn’t been inside long enough to hear her and Ian making love—it hadn’t occurred to either of them, in the wildness of their wanting, to try to be quiet—and then put the idea out of her mind.
She invited her father’s old friend to stay for tea, picked up the truck keys from the counter, and left the house before he could accept or decline.
During the drive to Yolanda she kept the window rolled down, despite the dust and the smell of burned grass, and tried to prepare herself for the trauma she still had to face—the burned-out school building.
It was a quietly horrible sight, and Jacy stood at the burned and crumbling gate ten minutes later, weeping. Then she proceeded to the Yolanda Cafe.
Chris ran to her when she stepped into the restaurant and flung himself into her arms, and just holding him tightly was a consolation.
After a long time he drew back and looked up at her. “Is my dad all right?”
Jacy smiled and ruffled his silky hair. “Sleeping like a baby,” she said as Nancy came out of the back to join them. Her smile, while welcoming, was rather tentative, too.
“The police came out from Willoughby yesterday,” Chris burst out before Jacy could question her friend’s subdued manner. “They took Darlis away.”
Jacy stiffened. “Darlis?” she asked, looking from the child to Nancy and back again. “Why?”
“She killed Redley,” Chris replied.
Jacy’s knees threatened to give way. She groped for a chair and sagged into it. “She—”
“Killed Redley,” Nancy confirmed, bringing two diet colas to the table and sitting down across from Jacy. “He came home from dogging, full of rum and hate, and proceeded to beat her. She picked up his rifle and shot him between the eyes.”
Jacy felt sick. She’d despised Redley Shifflet, but even at his most dangerous she’d never wished him dead. “Poor Darlis,” she whispered, reaching for her bottle of cola with a shaky hand. “What will happen to her?”
“Nothing, I hope,” Nancy answered. “We’re all set to testify, Sara and me and a lot of others, that Darlis was off her head when she did it. Besides, she was only defending herself, now, wasn’t she?” She paused, looking at Jacy with affection and concern. “How’s Ian?”
Jacy answered only after Chris had lost interest and gone off to play with one of the portable video games Regina had bought for him. “Almost his old self,” she said with a small grin.
Nancy laughed. “Lucky girl,” she said. She sat back in her chair and studied Jacy for an interval before speaking again. “I guess you’ve seen the schoolhouse—or what remains of it.”
Jacy nodded, feeling choked up all over again. She wondered what she was going to do with all the books, supplies, and equipment she’d ordered in Adelaide before Ian’s shooting. The stuff would begin arriving any day.
Nancy grinned somewhat mischievously. “No worries, love—we’ve taken over the old institute—the women of Yolanda, I mean—and cleaned it from top to bottom. It’ll do just fine until the government helps us get another school built, won’t it?”
Jacy gave a burst of laughter, then a sob, and covered her mouth with one hand. “Yes—oh, yes!”
Nancy leaned forward and whispered in a confidential tone, “The men are still a little unsure about you, Mrs. Yarbro, but the fire and what happened to Ian got them all to thinking about what’s really important. They’ve troubles enough of their own, God bless them, but they’re that set on helping Ian get a new hay shed put up. With Tom McAllister’s help they’ve been gathering up those dratted brumbies of Ian’s, too.”
Jacy was overcome. She folded her arms on the table, laid her head down on them, and wailed.
“What’s wrong with her?” she heard Chris ask.
“She’s happy,” Nancy replied, sounding surprised at the question.
The next few weeks were busy ones.
The supplies Jacy had ordered in Adelaide began arriving by mail, and the satellite dish and television set came by truck. She called a man in Willoughby—Bram gave her the name—and bought a caravan, sight unseen, for the McAllisters to live in over at Corroboree Springs. The men of Yolanda repaired the hole in the roof of the Yarbros’ house and, with the help of crews called in from all over the bush, erected new outbuildings.
Darlis Shifflet was released from jail, after a hearing, on the grounds that she’d acted in self-defense. She didn’t return to Yolanda but instead went to Darwin to be with Gladys.
There was a long letter from Margaret Wynne, Jake’s lady friend in Queensland, full of love and grief and funny stories about the times she and Jake had shared. Jacy liked the woman even without meeting her.
One by one those brumbies that hadn’t already been brought home by neighbors wandered back to the property and stood watching while the new sheds and fences went up. Jacy and Ellie McAllister spent most of their time cooking for the workmen who swarmed over both the Yarbro place and Corroboree Springs, but when they could they sneaked into the living room and watched soap operas on the television set.
A full month had passed before Jacy could bring herself to drive over to Corroboree and face the destruction there. She cried when she saw the rubble that had once been her father’s home, and hers as well, and went down to the spring to crouch beside the water.
The grass that had thrived there before had been burned away, but when Jacy took a closer look at the ground she saw tiny specks of green poking up through the soot. She smiled at the reminder that life is born of catastrophe, that joy comes from trouble and hope from despair.
Only then did Jacy truly believe her own prophecies. Everything really was going to be all right.
She lingered there for a time beside the bubbling spring until it restored her. Then she walked back to the truck, parked where Jake’s front yard had been, started the engine, and headed for home.
The workmen and neighbors were gone by the time she arrived, and she found Ian leaning against the new rawwood rails of the fence, watching his beloved brumbies. He turned and watched Jacy walk toward him, stuffing the truck keys into the pocket of her worn jeans as she moved.
“You again?” he asked, but he was grinning under the brim of his hat. It was a new one, since the other had been lost the day Redley Shifflet shot him, but it had already been thrown down and stomped on enough to look properly disreputable.
Jacy linked her arm through his. “Me again,” she said. “And always.”
He turned her to face him and, hooking his index fingers in the belt loops of her jeans, tugged her against him. He was just bending his head to kiss her when they heard an engine in the distance and broke apart.
The fancy Land Rover from Merimbula swung into the yard and came to a stop a few yards away.
Ian cursed under his breath and prepared himself for another bout with Andrew Carruthers. Wilson Tate was driving, but the man who got out on the passenger side was nobody Jacy recognized.
A tall man with glossy brown hair and friendly amber-gold eyes came toward them, smiling. Even before he opened his mouth Jacy knew by the visitor’s cowboy-style clothes that he was an American. Maybe, she reflected, Alice had left Australia too soon.
“Jack’s the name,” he said. “Jack Keegan.”
Ian frowned at the Land Rover and then at the cowboy. “We don’t want to sell, if that’s what you’ve come round for,” he said.
Jacy gave her husband a nudge for being so rude and opened her mouth to offer Mr. Keegan a cold drink, but he cut her off before she could say a word.
“Didn’t come about that,” he told them cheerfully. “No, sir, I figure I’m going to have my hands full straightening out Merimbula. This is no time to think about expanding.”
A silence fell. Jacy figured Ian was probably as stunned as she was.
It was Wilson Tate who explained. Getting out of the Land Rover, he came to stand beside Mr. Keegan, smiling around the matchstick he was chewing. “Mr. Keegan here just bought Merimbula from the corporation. Sent old Andy Carruthers packing straightaway.”
Ian was confounded—Jacy heard it in the sigh he gave, saw it in the way he fiddled with his hat brim. “Well, then,” he said at last, a grin breaking over his face as he extended a hand to Jack Keegan, “welcome to the back end of nowhere.”
Keegan laughed, and the two men shook hands. It was another beginning, Jacy thought. She wondered if Jack had a wife, then remembered Nancy and hoped he didn’t.
Maybe she’d try her hand at matchmaking.
She invited the American to stay for dinner, along with Wilson Tate, of course, and he accepted, as Collie had earlier. Throughout the meal Ian kept glancing at her, and she pretended not to notice.
Late that night, though, after she and Ian had made love, he asked her, none to subtly, what she thought of Jack Keegan.
Jacy smiled and snuggled close to her husband. “I think he’d be perfect for Nancy,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I plan to introduce them first chance I get.”
Ian laughed, and Jacy heard relief in the sound, and she loved her husband that much more for being a little jealous and insecure. “I thought you’d learned your lesson about meddling in other people’s business,” he said, pinning her gently beneath him, entwining his fingers with hers and pressing her hands into the pillow on either side of her head.
She knew her eyes were sparkling. “Whatever made you think that?” she asked.
He kissed her, and that was another new beginning.
With June came the winter, and Jacy’s belly was round as a basketball. She’d had tests in Willoughby that day, and her doctor had told her the baby was a little girl, but she hadn’t relayed the news to Ian yet. She was lying in their bed savoring the news, letting it shine warmly in her heart.
Ian came in, fresh from the shower, naked except for the towel around his waist, and walked over to stand next, to the bed, looking down at her.
“Still there, then?” he teased with a half grin. He said the same thing every night; it was a game they played, one of those silly rituals that mean so little and yet so much in a marriage.
Jacy grinned back, spreading her hands over her protruding belly. “Still here,” she confirmed, as she always did. “And I’m not alone, either.”
Ian bent to kiss her bare, mountainous stomach, and she blushed because the gesture aroused her immediately. Fiercely.
He lifted his head, saw the flush under her skin and the blaze of passion in her eyes, and gave a great, heaving sigh full of drama. “Nothing for it,” he said, with airy resignation. “You’ll be wanting my lovemaking now, won’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, trembling as he drew down the sheet to admire her. To possess her with his eyes. “Yes,” she said again, with just the faintest note of urgency in her voice.
Ian took her gently by the hips and turned her so that she lay crosswise on the bed. Then he knelt between her legs, stroking her inner thighs lightly with the tips of his fingers.
“Ian.”
“Shhh,” he said, caressing her stomach now, lifting her right leg over his shoulder, then her left. Then he bent to her, and took her into his mouth. She arched her back and cried out, but the winter wind absorbed the sound—or was it the other way around?
Jacy heaved under Ian’s mouth, her fingers tangled in his hair, moaning as he pleasured her. He was invariably gentle, especially now that she was big with their child, and yet he insisted on her satisfaction every time they made love and drove her mercilessly until she achieved at least one shattering climax. That night was no exception.
She was still gasping when he mounted her and slid into her receiving warmth. As she welcomed him a light, rhythmic rain began to fall, the kind that nurtures the earth and prepares it for spring.