A Waltz for Matilda (47 page)

There was no reason to deliver the meat to the house up in the gorge. Mr Sampson could easily drop it in. But she liked to go up there once a fortnight, to the gentler security between the cliffs.

Peter Sampson lived there now with his quiet wife, an ex-housemaid from the property where he’d worked before. She dressed and spoke like a white woman, and her skin was paler than her husband’s too. Matilda assumed her father had been white, and her grandfather, perhaps. She and Peter Sampson had three children now, and had added a new room onto the house.

She hadn’t minded — much. Thelma kept the house well. The vegetable garden provided for all of Drinkwater now — carrots and cabbages grew better here, sheltered from the winds.

Peter could have brought the vegetables down to Mrs Murphy too. But she wanted to be up here, remembering, as she pulled up beetroot, stripped the stalks of Brussels sprouts. Remembering Mr Doo, in the days when they shared almost no language, showing her how to dig the first small patch; Tommy, balancing the steel piping somehow on his bicycle, and his clever hands
fitting it together; Auntie Love, showing her goanna tracks and so much else.

Auntie Love, saying it would rain.

Should I have believed you, Auntie? she thought. You seemed to know so much. But I was just a child when I met you. When you are a child you think the ones you love are always right.

And Auntie had been dying when she had made her prophecy. Perhaps this time even Auntie had been wrong.

The sack was full, enough vegetables for the next days’ stews and roasts. She left it lying on the cold soil, and climbed up to the spring. There was no need to keep it swept clear of animal dung now. Peter kept the fence around it well repaired. But it seemed the right thing to check it every fortnight, a promise kept to Auntie.

The stock trough below the spring was full, the float valves automatically letting water flow when it was needed. Tommy’s system still works, she thought. She wished she could let him know, could thank him for this gift, still giving so many years after he had left. The spring …

She stared. For the first time in all the years she’d been here, the spring was overflowing, seeping down a few yards into the bed of tumbled rocks below.

Why? How? The spring was fed by the river underground. But there had been no rain to make that river rise for thousands of miles. The spring hadn’t ever risen before, not even when the river flooded after the fire.

She gazed at the spring, as though it might suddenly go back to the barely visible seep it should be. But the trickle continued, clear and steady till it vanished in the rocks.

She looked up at the cliffs, suddenly eager. Were there other changes she hadn’t seen? There was a new white streak down the
rock face — a wedgetail eagle’s nest? They hadn’t nested last year — or she hadn’t seen any young, only the two giant parent birds circling above the gorge. Had they decided that this summer would be rich enough in rabbits and baby wallabies to feed their young?

She began to scramble up the rocks, then stopped, and looked at the ground instead. Yes, there were wallaby tracks, heading away from water. She followed them, soon finding the faint path, the hairs under the rock that showed which way the wallabies had come. She stopped as soon as she saw them. They saw her too: heads up, bounding away swiftly up the cliffs, as though their feet could grip onto rock.

But she’d had enough time to see their bulging pouches. The wallabies too knew that it would rain.

She took a breath, and then another. She could almost smell it now: moisture, flying this way from the sea.

Or maybe it was her imagination. It didn’t matter. For now she knew the rain would come.

The termites flew in a black cloud above the homestead, swept up in the wind then fluttering down, losing their wings and crawling into every crevice, into her hair, her eyes, down the neck of her dress, till she finally retreated to bed and the mosquito net.

The wind blew even stronger the next day, the sky a hard tight blue. It was still blue when thunder rumbled, so deep, so far away it was as though the earth had spoken, not the sky. Lightning ripped the sky even before the clouds arrived — green clouds, edged with purple. And then the hail.

Hail so loud it shook the roof, thunder that made it impossible to speak. The earth was white in minutes. Mrs Murphy held a saucepan out of the door and drew it back after a moment. Inside were balls of hail bigger than walnuts, rippled a bluish white.

The hail piled up against the house, against the trunks of trees. And then it stopped.

The rain began with the dusk, so light at first it was almost mist, a thin moisture on her face. By the time they had eaten dinner it was washing at the windows. The wind blew again, suddenly now, splashing drops against the house, the gusts strong enough to blow the candles out. They went to bed by lantern light, having left saucepans around the house to catch the drips.

It rained.

The storm was over the next morning. This was simply rain; there was no wind, nor even a breeze. The leaves hung limply in the downpour as though too sodden to move. The grey streaks merged into one so the whole air was grey, the earth turning silver below it.

The ridges vanished behind a haze of white. Even the cliffs were hidden. The world was simply water. Frogs yelled in an ecstasy of fluid.

The dry stones down from the Moura spring became a creek rushing toward the river, and then a river and finally a flood, clear and purposeful, as if the water needed to find its way from the earth down to the river proper.

The river roared below the homestead, not the shout of a flash flood but a steady vibration you felt through your feet and skin, a noise that filled the air at first, then you grew used to it. This was how the world was now, with the song of the water.

It rained, and then it rained some more.

It was as if the world had held its breath until it was soaked with water. White tree bark turned grey, then green and orange, peeling off in giant sheets, and new leaves shone red. The sheep looked stunned, as though they had never dreamed of wet like this; it took them a week to learn to stand under the trees, their backs to the wind. Even then they looked offended, and not sure quite how to walk or lie with wet and heavy wool.

Grass grew overnight, and then the flowers. Mosquitoes bred in small black clouds. Suddenly the land was white again instead of green, but this time it was the heads of daisies, so pale yellow the colour vanished when you saw them massed. Tiny pink flowers on thin stems, lichen springing from the rocks. Orange fungi sprang from dead tree trunks. Other tree trunks turned from skeletons to bushes of growth by morning.

Matilda helped Mr Drinkwater out onto the verandah. They sat together on the chairs her father had made, which she had brought up from Moura when she moved here, looking out at the green acres and the sheep with lush feed they hardly knew how to eat.

There was no need to speak. The river said it all, and the seed heads on the grass. This was a gift from the land, the sky and Auntie Love.

DECEMBER 1906

Mr Drinkwater still read the newspapers before the rest of the household, when they arrived with each week’s mail. He liked the crispness of an unread paper. It was almost dusk when Matilda bathed and changed for dinner, then went down for the evening drink on the verandah with Mr Drinkwater: his usual whisky for him, Mrs Murphy’s lemonade for her.

Mr Drinkwater wasn’t down yet, but the papers lay on the table, with the whisky decanter, the jug of lemonade under a doily to keep out the flies, the glasses.

‘Scratch cocky,’ ordered the cockatoo. She obeyed, scratching his crest, making sure he didn’t bite her fingers, checking he had plenty of the sunflower seeds he loved. She longed to let him out, but he was Mr Drinkwater’s bird, not hers.

She sat and leafed through the newspapers — the damage from the October floods was being repaired (it was still strange to be in a world where floods happened at least each year); a record wool clip had been exported this year, and a new record for wheat export too; the story of the infamous Kelly gang was to be told in
moving pictures. How strange it would be to see pictures that moved …

She was about to pass over the social pages when a photo caught her eye.

Tommy.
Tommy in a dark suit, with a waistcoat and gold chain. Tommy in a tall top hat. She pulled her eyes to the caption.

Mrs Thompson. Not Tommy’s mother, but a young woman, in a straw hat with daisies around the brim, and ribbons. She held Tommy’s arm, as though she didn’t want them to be separated in the crowd, that so formally dressed crowd standing on the sand in their silks and their stiff collars and their boaters and top hats.

Matilda put down the paper and stared out at the Drinkwater paddocks. So Tommy was married. Her Tommy.

Not
hers. It hurt, as though someone had attacked her with a pair of shears, severing the two of them like fleece from a sheep. But it was stupid to feel that way. He had been gone for so long now. And part of her felt a strange gladness that he was happy. The man in the paper looked fulfilled.

And his wife … She looked at the paper again. She was looking at Tommy, not the lifesavers, with a smile that said that Tommy was more important than anything else could be. A good wife, a suitable wife, a wife for a businessman and inventor, not a woman who wore trousers and yelled at her stockmen.

Maybe in a week or a month, she thought, the pain will go. James’s death no longer hurt, except when she thought of the
loss, his laughing brightness gone from the world. Tommy was happy. That was what mattered now.

Mr Drinkwater’s stick tapped on the floor behind her. He lowered himself carefully onto a chair.

‘So you saw it,’ he said.

She nodded.

‘Pity. I liked him. You’d have been good together, one day.’

‘One day?’

‘You were both very young, my dear,’ he said gently. ‘Yes, you were both enormously capable too. But both of you still needed to find the confidence to cope with each other’s strength.’

‘Well, I know who I am now.’ She touched the photo gently, as though she was almost touching Tommy himself. ‘I think he’s found what he needs too.’

She folded the paper away, hoping he wouldn’t ask for it again. She would cut the picture out, put it in Aunt Ann’s Bible. It was the only picture she had of Tommy. It would hurt to look at for a while, but in ten years, twenty, when she was an old woman maybe, she could take it out and say, ‘That was my friend.’

They sat watching the paddocks together.

‘I still think I will wake up and see it brown,’ he said at last.

She was glad to talk about something else. ‘It was drought most of my life, though I didn’t know it till I came here.’ She forced herself to smile. ‘I suppose if the drought had come any earlier I wouldn’t have been born. Dad would never have got married.’

‘If there had been no drought you’d never have come here. You’re a gift to me from the drought. Like many things. The drought gave us much more than it took.’

She looked at him enquiringly.

‘If there had been no drought there’d have been no shearers’ strike, no union. If times had been better no one would have worried about tariffs between the states or kanakas coming in to take white men’s jobs. Without all of that we’d still be a collection of states, bumbling along side by side. The drought gave us Australia.’

He reached for her hand, and squeezed it briefly. His hand felt papery, but warm and comforting. ‘Maybe as you get older you see your gifts for what they are. You and Love and Drinkwater. The land gave me them all.’