CHAPTER SIX

Through the kitchen window Marnie and I watched the axemen setting up. They lugged lengths of pine into place, lying them down in metal cradles or clamping them upright, chalking marks on their sides so they’d know where to cut. Then they took out their axes, the silver heads flashing like mirrors. Marnie said, ‘That guy on the left almost beat Rob to the trophy last month. Rob wins every year – nobody expects any different – and then this new guy turns up at the carnival, more than a decade younger, and just about takes it. Ethan bloody McKay, Rob calls him. Can you imagine? If Rob had come home without the Golden Axe? Without the prize money? Actually let’s not. Let’s not imagine. He’s playing so nice now. Giving his rival some tips so they can win the team relay at the South Island champs, but what he really wants is to make the South Island team. He reckons there’s big money in it if he gets to the States – oh, that was fast. He’s broken his own record, I’d say. And the guy doing the Standing Chop – the one with the big scar on his chin? Rob doesn’t like me talking to him because he’s single. As if I’d ever do anything. Look at them, scrutinising the wood for clues. It’s serious business, Tama. Serious men’s business. Still, it’s an outlet, isn’t it. As long as he’s pouring himself into that …’ She broke off, smiled at Rob through the glass. Held up the kettle.

I could hardly believe how quickly the axemen demolished the pine. They’d had a gutsful. They stood next to the logs and chopped sideways; they climbed on top and chopped between their feet. They attacked with saws, too – sharp-toothed lengths of steel that turned the wood to dust.

‘Strange,’ said Marnie, ‘how you can see the blows a split second before you hear them. You know they’re coming but you don’t quite believe it.’

When they stopped cutting I fluttered outside: chips of trunk littered the back yard, the hacked-off stumps still sprawled where they had fallen. I couldn’t look, though it smelled like home.

‘I reckon we’re in with a chance,’ said Rob, and the other axemen agreed – a smooth operation, a tight unit. Rob was in the best form of his life, too, anyone could see that. Why not Australia? Why not America?

After they’d gone, he asked Marnie to look at his practice axe and tell him if she noticed anything wrong with it. No, she said, it looked fine to her – it looked perfect. Ah, he said, but run the honing stone over the edge – now did she feel it? The bump? Yes, she said, now she felt it. He’d hit a knot, he told her, and the blade wasn’t true. He took to it with a file first, then a stone to get rid of the feather edge, and little bits of steel drifted free, tiny specks of feather edge that lodged in the weave of his clothes, the grain of his skin. That night, in front of his crime show about attractive dead women with evidence under their nails and leaves in their throats, he stropped the blade back and forth over the palm of his hand to pull away the last feathery burrs: hush, hush, hush, until it was true. Then, to test the sharpness, he ran it down his forearm, slicing away the fine blond hair.

*

Marnie waved him off when he left in his beetle-black car for the South Island champs. ‘A whole weekend to ourselves, Tama!’ she said. ‘Just you and me.’

I slept in the master bedroom while he was away, as if we were married, but I wasn’t to let on. I wasn’t to say a word. Marnie made a shadow bird on the wall as I snuggled down on Rob’s side of the bed. She fluttered her fingers and the shadow bird fluttered his wings; she bent her thumbs and the shadow bird bent his neck. Then she sang me a lullaby about the wind in the treetops, and I went to sleep.

As soon as I heard him inside Marnie’s phone, I could tell he wasn’t happy.

‘You look disappointed,’ she said, staring into the screen as if it were a mirror.

‘We lost.’

‘I’m sorry, Rob. Where did you come?’

‘Second.’

‘That’s not losing.’

‘Yeah it is, and it was my fault. And the rest was an abortion too. I won’t make the South Island team, that’s for sure.’

‘I’m listening for the rain,’ I said. I couldn’t help myself.

‘Someone there with you?’ said Rob.

Marnie glanced over at me so I kept my trap shut.

‘Just Tama.’

‘Show me.’

‘Rob.’

‘Show me.’

Marnie turned the phone to me – I was tugging at the braid on the living-room couch at the time – and there was Rob’s face, as small as the palm of her hand. My size. I looked at him with my left eye, looked at him with my right eye. I said, ‘As if I’d ever do anything.’

‘Fucking poplar,’ said Rob. ‘It sucks the silt into its heart. Blunts the blade. Would’ve been a different story with pine.’

‘So that’s America off the table, then?’

‘It was never on the table. Not really.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah, the money would’ve come in handy.’

‘You’re still king of the local chop, though,’ said Marnie. ‘Nobody can take that away.’

‘Too bloody right,’ he said.

The next day I made the sound of Marnie’s phone ringing, and she ran to pick it up, then frowned at the screen.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Hello,’ she said, smiling.

Rob and the dogs brought the ewes down from the hills to the covered yards for the night in preparation for the next day. They spiralled and swirled across the ground like clouds, and later in my bed I heard them bleating for the open space they knew, their voices carrying through the cool quiet air. I heard a possum, too, creeping around on the roof, and until I recognised its raspy breaths I thought Rob was somewhere nearby, dragging a file across the edge of his axe. In the morning he herded the ewes into the woolshed that sat musty and musky and half falling down the hard hillside. Up the ramp they went, and then into the cramped catching pen, and from there they could only go forwards. Chin Scar the axeman was back to help him, and one by one they hauled the ewes out to crutch their backsides so they would be ready for the rams. I watched Rob hold each one still between his knees, squeezing on her neck, pushing his fist into her hip. The handpieces buzzed and bit, and Marnie swept up the dirty wool, deft with her broom, careful not to get in the way.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ said Chin Scar. ‘Where do I find one like that?’

‘Not here, mate, that’s for fucking sure,’ said Rob.

From the rafters I saw him flip a ewe on her back, clamp her with his knees and shave her, then shove her through a door and grab the next one. Every few minutes he stopped and wiped his face with a torn blue towel that hung on a nail, and after the ewes were finished he and Chin Scar sat on the broken couch in the breeze by the woolshed door and drank. They talked about keeping on top of parasites; they talked about terminal lambs and sacrifice paddocks and kill value and smothers. They watched for the rain, and the rain never came.

One day a truck turned into our driveway and crunched its way up the gravel to the yards, and a man jumped out and shook hands with Rob. Then he backed up to the loading ramp, and Rob and the huntaways pushed the lambs through the yards, but gently, gently, so as not to bruise them – so as not to bruise the meat. ‘Night, come away,’ shouted Rob. ‘Come away! Speak up! That’ll do! Wayleggo!’

The lambs trotted up the ramp, one after the other, each with a smudge of blue chalk on its head that meant Rob had chosen it.

Then the truck drove away to the works, tufts of white wool bursting through the gaps in its sides.

The sound of the engine faded.

They shouldn’t have climbed in there. They shouldn’t have trusted him.

When the cool weather came Rob lit the fire and fed it with chunks of pine that he split with his axe. They whistled and hissed as they burned, and behind the guard they spat out sparks redder than a father’s eye, and I lay belly to the flames then back to the flames, and Rob said, ‘Look at it cooking both sides. DIY rotisserie.’

Marnie tried to light the fire once, but she did it all wrong, he said: she didn’t take the time to twist the paper and stack the pinecones, didn’t lay the kindling crisscross, crisscross. She didn’t leave gaps for the air to get in.

‘What would you do without me?’ he said.

‘I’d freeze to death,’ she said.

He was allowed to light the fire inside the house, but he wasn’t allowed to light cigarettes because those things would kill him. That was how houses worked. If he wanted a smoke he went outside to the back porch, or to his beetle-black car, or to the chook run with all the coppery chickens that could not sing. Sometimes he went way up past the gut hole – the reeking pit that my father had told me about – where he took all the dead things and threw them away to rot, even his own dogs if they wouldn’t work. I’d peered inside once and once only: a bloated sheep, a chicken head. Mostly, though, if Rob wanted a smoke, he went to the woolshed and sat on the broken couch and looked out to the hills, waiting for the rain to come, and when it failed to come he drank, and when it came only in trickles he drank too, filling himself to the brim.

Marnie’s mother joined him for a smoke on the porch whenever she visited.

‘You’re a dreadful influence, Rob,’ she said. ‘I gave up years ago.’

‘No one’s forcing you, Mum,’ said Marnie.

‘But who can say no to him? I mean, look at the man.’

‘Let me get that for you, Barbara,’ he said, lighting the end of her cigarette as she sucked before they were even out the door.

Afterwards they came inside stinking of it.

‘Something smells good,’ said Barbara.

‘Shepherd’s pie,’ said Marnie.

‘Can we tempt you to stay for a bite?’

‘Anyone would think you’re trying to fatten me up.’

‘A few mouthfuls won’t hurt. Shall I set a place?’

‘If you insist.’

Rob was full of jokes and stories and best behaviour. ‘This’ll make you laugh,’ he said. ‘One time in the school holidays, when we went to stay with my uncle on the West Coast—’

‘I don’t think Mum wants to hear that,’ said Marnie. ‘I know I don’t.’

‘I know I don’t,’ I said, tugging at the braid on the couch, waiting for Marnie to smile at the way I copied her and to call me a good boy, the cleverest boy.

‘Well, now you have to tell me,’ said Barbara.

Rob said, ‘One time in the school holidays, when we went to stay with my uncle on the West Coast, me and my brothers thought we’d go exploring on his farm. It’s different country over there, different from home, and we took his BB gun and aimed at a few rabbits and let out a few war cries. Then when we were deep in the scrub we found this massive sinkhole. It just crept up on us and I nearly fell in, but Adam grabbed me, and Lachie grabbed Adam, and there we were, right on the edge of it. We threw a few stones down inside and we couldn’t hear them hit the bottom, so we got some bigger stones, some rocks, and we couldn’t hear them hit the bottom either. Lachie said it probably went down forever. We looked around and Lachie found this huge log, though Adam thinks he found it and I can’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. We dragged it to the sinkhole – we had to crouch down and grab it from underneath, and I could feel my fingernails digging into the rot, and we could only go a few steps at a time. And we pushed it over the edge bit by bit, and it teetered in mid-air, and then we gave it one final nudge, just a touch was all it took, and it heaved into the hole and disappeared. We listened, and for a moment there was nothing, and then we hear this tink tink tink tink, and then a terrible scream, and something comes rushing and crashing through the undergrowth, straight for us. Lachie tries to lift the BB gun but he’s shaking too hard. And out of the scrub bursts this goat, flying along on the end of a chain, and the chain’s connected to the log, and the goat whips past us, yellow eyes bulging, and straight down the hole and gone.’

Barbara laughed until she cried. ‘Oh! Oh my goodness! I did not see that coming!’

‘Neither did the goat,’ said Rob.

‘Stop it! Stop it!’ choked Barbara. ‘Let me catch my breath.’ She was beside herself, she said – but clearly that was untrue.

‘It’s a horrible story,’ said Marnie, and she shuddered. ‘Imagine the ground swallowing you up.’

‘It was just a goat,’ said Barbara.

‘You have to watch your step round here too,’ said Rob. ‘My father lost a dozen sheep down a mine shaft once. When I was little, I remember, Mum tied me to a rope to explore the gold workings.’

‘Makes you wonder what’s still down there,’ said Barbara. ‘You could be sitting on a fortune.’

‘There’s no gold these days,’ said Marnie.