Texas (2 page)

She spread the camping mattresses out on the timber floor of the sleep-out, away from the bad smells of the kitchen and the dark musty bedrooms where each doorway was barred by the thin invisible lines of a spider's web. She turned off the light, hoping the twins would settle quickly. After she tucked them into each side of her, their bodies gradually softened in sleep. The man had said the generator would go off in the early morning. He'd told them his name was Gerry and that he was the bore mechanic.

Later her husband lay against the wall in his swag. He may have been asleep but there was too much between them for her to be sure. She had no idea of the time now but she knew the trip from town was supposed to take about three hours. They'd stopped to eat at a roadhouse at around six. She'd wanted to stay at the motel, to come out in the morning so that she could see where she was. There was a time when she would have argued with him, when her mother was still alive, before the boys were born.

Through the flywire she could see the shapes of trees against a lighter shade of darkness that was the sky. Something scrambled in the branches close by. In the early years of their marriage she'd wanted to be involved in what he was doing. She'd wanted to talk about them, their relationship, their future, anything. He always said he was too busy, that there were jobs to be done. Eventually she stopped trying and now the voice in her head kept quiet most of the time. But she was only here because he wanted to be. She pulled the flaps of the swag closer and folded them up so they became more of an obstacle for anything that might crawl across the floor. The canvas was stiff and new. They'd bought it from an army surplus shop in the city. At the time she hadn't thought she'd need it because she wasn't going to be working in a stock camp, but John had wanted to sleep under the stars on their way north to show the boys what it was like and he wasn't interested in why she didn't want to. She wasn't scared of animals, only the men who might be on the road at night. John accused her of imagining the worst, but even though she hadn't mentioned the accident, she'd been right. She knew what the country was like.

II

After breakfast John left to find the other men. She had served tea and toast on the lino table once the sticky dirt had been

Texas wiped off, now she stepped around the cardboard boxes and the esky left beside the cupboard and walked back to the house where the children still slept on the floor. The house was separate from the kitchen. To reach it, she followed a path of concrete slabs with grass growing between the cracks to another flyscreen door. She opened it slowly but it still creaked. Her children hadn't moved. Ned, always the hotter one, his hair stuck wetly to his forehead, lay on his back, covers off, arms raised above his head. Ollie lay bunched on his side. A gentle breeze filtered through the walls. She could see that this area of the house had once been an open veranda but now it was built in with flywire, shady and cool. Beyond the flywire walls were trees and lawn and then, on the other side of the fence, were long blond spears of grass and bare dirt. The lawn needed watering; it had yellowed in patches of neglect.

The pale green interior wall was marked with brownish stains and discarded spiders' webs that looked like white spots from a distance. Louvre windows opened into the sleep-out, some missing and broken, sills covered by a band of thick dust. Beneath the ledges huddled little brown frogs. Last night Susannah had pushed a cane couch and two chairs with stained and flattened covers into the corner of the room so she could put their bedding on the floor in there. She entered the dim, musty interior where cream-coloured walls had darkened into a sickly yellow, leading to high ceilings and light fittings covered by a rope of dusty cobwebs. Through the hallway into the middle of the house, her thongs slapped the timber floor. Open doorways revealed rooms with camp beds, one with yellow foam leaking from a floral mattress cover; another had a double bed with a white headboard plastered with peeling stickers and a dark-wooded dressing table with the mirror scratched and wardrobes with open doors, the little ornate keys long since lost. The windows were all slatted louvres jammed at different angles—some opened fully, others almost closed—looking out onto the veranda or the sleep-out, and beneath the louvres were beetle shells, legs dried brittle, crossed neatly.

In the bathroom a petrified frog lay in the bottom of the shower recess, its droppings spotting the surface. There were more live frogs huddled in the corners beneath the ceiling, like little mounds of wet dirt. The washbasin was a dusty bowl, and soap was caked hard in the dish by the taps. She wondered briefly whose hands had been washed by it. They hadn't brought much with them; they didn't have much to bring. They were told the house would be fully furnished. She wondered at the people who lived there before them, their rubbish like the clues to a game. She'd grown up on a sheep farm and when the shearers left she remembered that they too had left behind hints of themselves. Sometimes the smell of the sweat of their bodies lingered on months after they'd gone.

At the end of the hall was a small room with a yellowed floral curtain. The window behind it was open and the fabric moved slightly. There were grey blankets and a foam mattress torn in half with bits shredded on the floor like large crumbs and books with cowboys on the covers. She picked one up and turned it over. She thought at first they were comics but in fact they were small soft-cover books with pictures of the

Texas Wild West on the front. The book in her hand flicked open to the first page.
Texas was never beautiful in the sense that the
rich green and red lands of Montana or Colorado were beautiful,
but fairness and splendour were there if a man cared to take the
trouble to look.

Susannah scrubbed the walls of the kitchen while the boys were asleep. When they woke they wanted to help her but they soon became bored and then they asked again and again where their father was. She brought out their tricycles and let them ride around the kitchen floor, watching them move in aimless circles. Her eyes were drawn to the pattern in the lino. The cloudy green blurred into a lawn, which her father was mowing. Brightly coloured beach towels lay on the grass. She and a friend were on their backs, home from boarding school, darkening their skin and watching fat white clouds and the stream of a jet passing from east to west. They'd go riding in the afternoon, saddling up the little grey mare and the chunky bay to amble along the fire break. When they reached the granite rock they tied the horses to a shrub at the base and climbed to the top. The granite smelt of squashed ants because there were always so many nests, marked by coarse pink sand surrounding the holes, that it was impossible not to tread on them. Once she stood on a nest while trying to undo the knot that tethered her horse to a tree. It felt as though hundreds had crawled up her boots and along her legs and almost to her crotch before she could get her jeans off. They were meat ants with a stinging, burning bite. A small truck drove across the table and through her thoughts. Ollie had found the bucket of Matchbox toys.

In the afternoon she sat on the grass beside the children as they paddled in their plastic wading pool beneath the yellow fingers of a rain tree. Her eyes traced the papery flowers of a bougainvillea climbing over the roof of the washhouse. It was a small shed separate from the house and the kitchen and it opened out towards the clothes line. She'd discovered earlier that it contained a twin-tub washing machine and a hand-operated wringer beside two concrete troughs. The vine above it was in full flower, its soft bright petals hiding the long thorns that grew along its branches. The grass was short and spiky beneath her bare legs.

The boys were splashing in the pool. She hadn't noticed Ollie climbing out but when she looked back towards them he stood with his bucket, pouring water over what seemed to be a long brown stick on the grass. Then it moved. She watched the diamond shape of its head, poised. Ollie was flinging his bucket and the snake struck the blue plastic and she was running to his side. She had Ollie then, scooped up in her arms, grabbing the other one too. Ned squealed, squashed against her body as she ran into the house with them. She could have left them in the kitchen and gone back to kill it, she'd killed a snake before. When she was much younger, on her parents' farm, she'd taken the saddle out of the shed and was walking towards her horse as a dugite slipped through the grass by her feet. She'd dropped a rock on its head and thought no more of it. This time, she shook by the louvres, peering through the slotted glass. The worst of it was she couldn't imagine where there might be other people; the workmen, John, or another

Texas woman in a homestead beyond the hills. The snake had gone. But as she glanced through the window she saw in her mind what might have happened. She didn't even know how to contact the Flying Doctor.

They wanted to go outside again. Their demands brought her back and she was reminded that she was their mother. Ollie's face was striped with dirt. Ned, the smaller of the two, was dark-haired like his father. She felt a surge of warm responsibility. It didn't happen often. Sometimes she wondered if there was something wrong with her. Ollie turned to his brother and moved his fat hand across his brow in a way that an adult might. Ned watched his mother too. When she brought out the blocks, he stood at the window while Ollie sat down amongst them. He looked back over his shoulder. Just as she thought he would sit down, he turned back to the window and asked: ‘Who planted the trees?' She didn't answer for a minute. She didn't believe in God, not after what had happened to her mother. Her mother would know what to do with this place. It would be clean. She might even have baked some bread by now and the smell would have leaked into the corners and softened the sight of paint peeling from the walls. She began to answer but realised she was talking to herself since Ned was sitting down and playing with Ollie. Long shadows striped the dirt and the colour of the trunks of the bloodwood trees had deepened. John would be home soon.

That morning she'd unpacked the food from the esky and the boxes bought from a dirty supermarket in a small town they'd passed through, and stored it in the cold room, which was a large refrigerator with shelves and hooks that hung meat.

When she opened it now it smelt of stale blood and she took out a wooden crate and leant it up against the door so it wouldn't close behind her. Rather than hang a whole beast, someone had cut it into chunks. She wasn't sure whether the piece she picked out for dinner was rump or something tough like blade. She closed the cold-room door and walked back into the kitchen, slapping the heavy slab of meat down on the benchtop. She looked under the bench to the shelving below where pots and pans and crockery were stacked. Beside them was a plastic tray separating the cutlery, which normally would have been kept in a drawer, except there weren't any. She couldn't find any sharp knives. She went back to the cold room, wishing she'd started dinner earlier. She looked along the shelf.

She couldn't even find the stone that would be used to sharpen the knives. Boots scuffed the concrete. She jumped and turned.

It was Gerry, the bore mechanic. His eyes sidled sideways, shyly.

He touched his hat.

‘I can't find any knives,' she said.

He took off his hat. He was smaller without it. His dark hair was plastered flat in a sweat crown. When he spoke, he looked at the ground: ‘There's a killing knife on the back of the ute.'

Ned was crying because Ollie had taken the block that he wanted. It didn't matter that there were more of the same shape and colour in the box. He wanted that one. Then Ned hit Ollie with a blue block. Ollie screamed and then more loudly when he saw his mother. She stood and rubbed her arms, clasping her elbows tightly. Shit! Her face was tense with a

Texas frown. Sometimes she could stand outside it, the tight feeling that would cause her to erupt noisily or physically. But when that happened it was more dangerous than if she reacted, for she knew it meant she didn't care. She turned her back on them.

Gerry handed her the knife through the partly open door, clearly not wanting to step any further into a place that was foreign to him. She found a big stewing pot under the bench and set it beside the meat. She cut through the black outer crust, chopping it into pieces for the pot and slicing off the thick yellow fat. It was a smell she had grown up with: the fresh smell of raw meat. She liked it and it took her back to when she stood at the table with her parents while they were cutting up a killer, bagging diced meat and chops and labelling them for the freezer. The sheepdogs lolled panting outside the flywire door, saliva dripping from their lips, leaping onto all fours as soon as they heard the rusty spring of the door. She found tins of vegetables in the pantry, some musty-smelling onions and a few sprouting potatoes and Vegemite for stock, and placed them in the pot and covered it all with water.

Ollie was wrapping his arms around her legs. He was hungry. What to feed them? She looked around for Ned. He was playing quietly in the corner of the room with what looked like an old drinking straw he'd found on the floor; he'd need something to eat too, but first they needed to be bathed. She pushed her hair back with her shoulder. Her hands were smothered in onion juice. There was only a shower in the bathroom and she hadn't cleaned in there yet. It would have to be the concrete tubs in the outdoor laundry. That was where their father found them. His children shrieked when they saw him stride across the lawn, his stockman's hat covered in dust. She was almost relieved to see him.

‘Sit down, Ollie. You'll fall out,' she said, tugging the soft round skin of his arm.

‘Where can I wash?' asked John.

‘In the bathroom,' she said, as though that were obvious.

‘I need to wash my hands outside.'

‘God I don't know, wherever.'