A short story by Anna Swan
The blistering, sun-filled day is nearly over but Al reckons he’ll finish the fence by dusk. Has to. The cattle are due to arrive at dawn next day – much to Maggie’s disgust. Didn’t she explode when she heard that.
‘Ten men? And I’ve got to cook for them?’ The wrinkles above her top lip deepened as she stirred the porridge. ‘Jesus, Al.’
‘You’ll manage, love. You always do.’
‘You don’t half expect a lot.’
He’d left her that morning cutting mutton into pieces for their evening meal and chopping onions as if to kill them, her grey pony tail swinging back and forth, fast.
He strains the last wire on the new fence. After wiping the sweat off his face with his handkerchief, he looks back along the posts, all in line, as they should be. Phew. Leans his elbow on the strainer post. A butterfly lands on his sweaty hand. Brown and blue, glistening, with tiny windows in its wings. He stills, softens. The gentleness of the creature holds him, the weightlessness of it, not even a tickle on his skin as it opens and closes its wings. An image drops into his mind. Maggie as a butterfly in the school dress-up concert one time, all flighty wings and glowing face.
His heart aches, and he grimaces. Life has done for her. For them both.
…
Hunger rumbles like a storm in his stomach as Cobby carries him home, hoofs slow on the ground, head hanging. He rubs the animal’s hot neck, glances down at Mate walking alongside, tail drooping. Al’s body and mind are numb with heat and weariness, his face and hands are caked with dirt, and his waterbag is empty. There’d be no relief at home, what with Maggie’s whingeing and flies in the kitchen. Times past, flies stayed outside. He slumps deeper into the saddle. Truth is, the flyscreen on the door needs mending. He screws up his nose. Another job not done.
Knowing he’s nearly home, Cobby breaks into a trot at the row of cypress pines along the homestead fence. Strange trees, cypress, but Maggie’s favourite. She’d insisted on planting them at the homestead. Al has to admit their shade is as cool as creek water at dawn, but he doesn’t like cypress, all the little needle-like leaves crammed together, same as the wrinkles above her top lip.
No light on in the kitchen. No creaks from the old cottage. Instead, a hush, the house holding its breath.
She’s gone.
A pain squeezes his heart, even before he sees the note. ‘Gone to my sister’s. Don’t burn the stew when you heat it up.’
He ladles a heap of the steaming, meaty mixture onto a plate for himself and dumps another lot into Mate’s dish. Eats with a spoon, gravy dripping from his beard, ignoring the circling flies. Mate slops the stew up into his mouth, dripping drips all around. ‘Never tasted stew before, eh?’ Al chuckles. ‘Don’t tell Maggie.’
He lights a hurricane lamp on the verandah, sits back in his canvas chair, thinks about the crowd arriving in the morning.
Stops thinking.
The soft light of the lamp is soothing after the glare of the sun all day. Fireflies are alight in the night, and the stars way above tease him with their mysteries. The smell of Cobby and the other horses in the home paddock drifts on the air.
There’s dirt and sweat on his body, splinters in his fingers. Wishes he’d sluiced water over himself, before he’d eaten. Maggie would’ve insisted. He shrugs, wrinkles his nose. The canvas stretches as he shifts his body in the chair. Climbs to his feet, fetches a needle for the splinters.
‘Mate, we did good, eh?’ The dog lifts his head, eyes bright in the light. ‘It’s a good fence.’
His words are loud and they bump into the silence, drop into the empty air, vanish into the night.
Mates lumbers to his feet, pads over to the empty chair, sniffs, whines.
Al blinks. There’s a spider’s web on Maggie’s chair, glistening in the lamplight. The chair’s the same as his, it’s a wooden frame with canvas forming the seat and the back, and the web is suspended between the wooden arm and the seat. The tiny creature is spinning from the centre, round and round, and the filaments of the web flash and sparkle in the light. The circular pattern puts him in mind of Maggie’s circular, woven rug in the living room. Her globe-trotting aunt had sent it from Persia one Christmas.
He should get up and brush away the web, but he won’t. Maggie’ll want to see it when she comes home. Instead he climbs to his feet, his joints and the chair both creaking, and fetches her insect book from the kitchen bench. Most days she goes out into the bush, straw hat perched above her pony tail, and explores the paddocks or disappears into the scrubland on the property and brings back a dead beetle, a skink skin, an empty chrysalis. The book is so well used its cover is coming loose from the spine and the pages are grubby with finger marks.
Al thumbs through the book but he can’t find the butterfly with windows in its wings. Maggie’ll find it. Most evenings she forgets to whinge because she’s got something interesting to show him or tell him. One night she’d read out an item from the newspaper about the bloke who’d cut the ribbon opening the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
‘Not the premier. A ring-in. De Groot, his name was. He galloped up on his horse and sliced the ribbon with a sword. Galloped away.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘Notoriety. Wanted his name to go down in history.’ She’d grinned, her eyes alight with knowing. ‘And it will. Francis De Groot.’
‘Weird name.’
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘Foreign. Exotic. Like an unexplored Egyptian pyramid.’ The newspaper rustled as she let it drop onto her lap. ‘I wish – ’
‘What do you wish, love?’
‘Forget it.’ After folding up the paper, she put it on the floor and pulled off the band holding her pony tail in place. ‘It’s bed for me,’ her hair tumbling around her shoulders.
…
Dawn brings salmon skies with touches of mauve in the east. A fresh breeze, cool. The cattle’ll banish that, Al thinks, as he saddles Cobby and throws the reins over the fence for later. A deep rumble vibrates the earth as the great mob approaches, the beasts bellowing and tossing their heads. The men on horseback appear and then vanish back into the thickening clouds of dust churned up by the cattle.
‘Al.’ Jim swings his leg over the saddle and jumps down. ‘G’day.’ His brother shakes his hand. ‘We lost two.’
‘Christ, Jim. That’s eighty quid down the drain. How?’
‘Got bogged in a creek. Had to shoot ’em.’
‘You’re too handy with a rifle.’ Al shakes his head. ‘Eighty quid. I should take it out of your share.’
Jim stiffens. ‘Bastard. Yeah, you’d do that. You weren’t there. The whole country’s been like that. Hardly any water. What there is, in dams and creeks, it’s boggy.’
‘You should’ve pulled them out. You’ve got enough men, enough horses.’ Al throws the words into the hot, dusty air, but his shoulders slump. He kicks a stone with the toe of his boot.
Jim strides towards the house. ‘Hey, where’s Maggie?’
‘Gone to her sister’s. Didn’t want to cook for you lot.’
‘Huh. Lazy bitch.’
‘None o’ that.’ Al’s neck tightens. ‘Maggie’s all right, Jim.’
‘Doesn’t matter, anyway. There’s a cook in my crew.’
‘What? You should’ve told me.’
Jim says, ‘I’m parched for a cup of tea. The others’ll set up camp. C’mon. Maggie left a cake?’
‘Not for you.’
‘When’s she coming back?’ Jim smirks, winks. ‘Maybe she won’t come back, eh?’
Al scowls. If she ever left him for good – Christ. His heart flinches. She wouldn’t, would she? He trips on a stick, gulps. He already misses her comfy body in bed, her sharp mind, even her bossiness, like telling him to wash before dinner. He wants to smooth her wrinkles with his fingertips, remind her of that school dress-up concert, tell her about the butterfly with windows in its wings.
All day the drafting goes on in a haze of sweat and heat and heavy, gritty dust. They’re separating out the cleanskins. Al is galloping around the edges of the noisy, milling mob when Mate appears. The dog is hopping along on three legs, swaying back and forth like a seesaw.
‘Christ, Mate,’ Al says as he dismounts. ‘What’ve you done?’
Jim rides up. ‘Got in the way of a hoof, did he?’
‘Yeah. Leg’s broken. Christ.’ Mate whimpers as Al examines one of his back legs. ‘I’ll have to take him into town in the ute.’
‘The old dog’s past it, Al.’ Jim raises his eyebrows and grins. ‘Like his owner?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Get on with the drafting, Jim. Leave the smartarse comments for the campfire.’
He hoists Mate up onto the saddle, crossways, and rides back to the homestead. An hour later, a young female vet whispers and coos to Mate. Her name is Summer and she looks about fifteen. ‘She’s probably at least thirty, Al.’ Maggie’s voice in his head. You’re right, Maggs, he thinks, grinning to himself.
‘I’ll put a splint on your leg, Mate,’ Summer says into the dog’s ears. ‘You’re gonna be okay, you are. I reckon you’ll be a good dog and rest a lot, too. Won’t you?’ She’s got him to lie down on the bench – how’d she manage that? – and her busy hands are wrapping a bandage around the splint and the leg. ‘And I’ll give you a wide collar, so you can’t go tearing off the bandage.’
Al stands beside the bench, watching the girl’s long, silky hair sliding over the fur on Mate’s back, feeling he’s not needed in the surgery. Except to pay the bill.
That evening, after the meal, he leaves the noisy drovers’ camp and heads back to the house. Mate is lying on the verandah. He pushes his wet nose up into Al’s hand. Al rustles around in the kitchen drawer for pen and ink and paper, scrawls a letter to Maggie. He’ll drive into town in the morning and post it.
‘Love, come back. Mate needs you and so do I. Al. PS Jim brought a cook.’
…//…
