Like that same winter’s night, after I’d gone to bed, I woke up and I looked out the window, and the snow had started. I went to the back door, put my gumboots on, so I could go rushing out into it, like I used to do when I was a little kid. And then I looked at the snow that was starting to cover the ground in perfect newness, and I thought: it’ll be even deeper if I leave it till the morning.
Now I say to Mum, ‘Let’s catch the train down to Sydney this arvo. We can go to Rozelle, hear Dad play . . .’
‘OK,’ she says, ‘but what about all your stuff?’
‘I’m staying,’ I tell her.
Mum isn’t very good at showing what she’s feeling so she just starts shifting the junk from the floor back into the shelves and cupboard. We work together in silence until my mother starts stacking the CDs next to the CD player.
‘What’re you doing?’ I ask as the air suddenly reverberates with the opening bars of ‘Are You Experienced?’
‘Welcome home, Seamus Murphy,’ Mum shouts.
Uncle Clem was a man in blue football shorts and a blue singlet. The soles of his feet were made of calluses and he seemed to walk on little springs. Every morning just before dawn he ricocheted across the paddocks to get the cows up. Sometimes from her bed on the verandah Denzil could hear him yelling at Kylie, the blue cattle dog.
‘Gerron, gitoutathat, gitback, Kylie! One fine day, girl,
you’ll push a man too flaming far!’
One of the cows was red and temperamental. She was called Billy and she gave thin milk. The other forty-eight were all calm, well-brought-up Jerseys. Their hides were the colour of Auntie Mim’s coffee, and their milk was almost pure cream. As a city child used to bottled stuff, Denzil was only able to swallow Billy’s produce.
No matter how cold the morning, Uncle Clem wouldn’t wear a coat. Even in winter he strode out on his bare feet through the wet grass wearing only his singlet and shorts. The singlets had originally been white but they had been pulped around in the copper with the shorts for so many years that both were now the same shade of faded iodine. Denzil liked to stand over the steaming copper in the foggy wash-shed and watch the dye seep out of the shorts and into the singlets. She would sometimes drop a handkerchief on top of the boiling blue water, watch it puff up into a big white bubble, and then go flat like a sigh. The blue would creep in from the edges till all the white was gone, then Denzil would fish the hanky out with the long smooth copper stick and run it under the tap, or else Auntie Mim would rouse on her for spoiling it. Denzil believed that hankies were meant to be spoiled; and anyway, she had about a thousand of them. Since her mother had died, all the aunts ever gave Denzil were hankies – or pink embroidered bags to put hankies in. Once a handkerchief had been in the copper with the shorts, it always remained faintly tinged with blue.
Sometimes when Denzil was in the wash-shed Kylie would come in and push her head against the back of Denzil’s knee, and Denzil would crouch down and stroke her ears and whisper,
‘Good dog, Kylie, good girl, good girl.’
Denzil was on Kylie’s side and liked to believe that Kylie was on hers. Everyone else had it in for Kylie because of the way she hurried the cows.
When you herd cows (Uncle Clem told Denzil) you have to do it slowly; if they run, their milk dries up. But Kylie hated the way a cow would move one foot and another; and a third foot. Then there’d be the wait while the cow rolled down her head to the grass. Finally, bite; look up; down to conclude the bite; up again; swing the head. The cow would chew like one of the aunts selecting curtain material. And then the last leg would move. It could take an hour to shift the cows from the river up to the bails.
And so Kylie would crouch belly-flat in a clump of grass, her long nose a fraction above the earth and swivelling back and forth like a snake. Once her choice was made, she would take a flying leap at a particular set of hooves, and yapyap her victim into life.
‘Gerron, gitoutathat, gitback, Kylie! One day, girl, you’ll
push a man too far!’
But at least one Jersey would be jogging up the slope, those fat udders swinging slap and slap against the back legs, her face a little less like Auntie Gwen’s. Naturally, Kylie never went for Billy.
When Kylie overdid it and got all the cows on the run, Uncle Clem would lash out at her with a loop of fencing wire or a bit of wood or anything handy. Sometimes he even collected her hard in the side with his foot. Still, it was worth it, Kylie thought. Or Denzil thought Kylie thought, which was the same thing.
Willowglen ran from the road up half a mile or so of track to the house, and then down again the same distance to the river flats. On the eastern side, past the bails, it dropped through the bull paddock to the darkness of the billabong where eels lurked beneath a thick skin of algae; the fourth side of the property just sort of dwindled away into a scrubby gully that acted as the boundary with O’Reillys. (As their name proved, they were tykes, so the natural barrier was just as well. Uncle Clem of course was Methodist. Not that he ever went to church; but when he played euchre, it was only for matches.)
With its soft pastures, its fat cows, and the long pastel green skirts of the willows that danced along the meandering river bed, the place could almost be mistaken for a farm in one of Denzil’s English picture books. If she dug her fingers into the soil, however, she found warm red earth, and if she looked up, she saw the tropical green of the banana trees clinging perilously to the steep hills that enclosed the whole valley.
Like all the farms along this road, Willowglen was too small to make a living from, so Uncle Clem rented one of these banana plantations. He called it his second hat. That year when the picking started, Denzil stuffed herself with the sappy unripe fruit until her belly swelled right up and she rolled on the shed floor screaming.
‘Yous kids never learn!’ Uncle Clem told her.
It wasn’t possible to wait till the bananas ripened and eat them without agony, because all the fruit was packed green (after being dipped in a bath of sticky black stuff) and shipped away to the city. You couldn’t, after all, eat the profits. (Or even, in Uncle Clem’s case, the losses.)
If you could stop yourself from getting a bellyache, picking season was exciting, because it meant that a whole lot of new people came to the valley. The men walked along the rows with machetes, slashing down the bunches, and the women packed like fury, layering the bananas into the boxes in a herringbone pattern. That was the first time Denzil met Italians, and Yugoslavs, and Chinese, and Aborigines. There were babies and kids and dogs and old cars and the radio played all day and everyone sang along to it. The inside of the packing shed was dark, with an occasional sunspot like a gold coin where the light pierced through a nail hole in the corrugated iron roof.
One day the wall of the shed got a hole in it, as well. Denzil saw it happen.
She was sitting in the shade outside, and there were some of the packers’ kids there as well. Once the children were five or six, they worked alongside their mothers, but the littlies used to sit outside playing marbles, or maybe using bits of old crate as vehicles in the roads they would build in the dust.
On this occasion, it was the boss’s turn to stand at the bottom of the flying fox that whizzed the heavy bunches from the top of the plantation down to the shed door. The trick was to throw a hessian sack over the singing wire with one hand, and hold it still for a moment, while with your other hand you grabbed off the steel hook with its catch of bananas and slung it onto the floor. Denzil’s uncle had been working for half an hour or so, was well into the rhythm of it, when one of the littlies flicked his marble too hard, and up it flew – Denzil afterwards felt as if she had seen the whole thing in slow motion – and struck Uncle Clem on the knee. It couldn’t have hurt him, of course, but it was enough to distract him, and as the bunch arrived, he was a split second too slow with the sack. As he grabbed the fruit, he took the full momentum of the flying fox with it, and was cannoned straight through the fibro shed wall.
A couple of the women screamed, and then everyone was silent. The perpetrator of the crime – it was a boy from one of the big Italian families; he can’t have been more than three or four – looked about to burst into tears, then wisely thought to stick his fist in his mouth. Denzil clamped her gob shut too. Meanwhile the bunches kept arriving at the turning pole of the flying fox, so after a few moments Uncle Clem picked up his body and put it back to work. You couldn’t afford to let the fruit spoil.
The next morning, the number of shed-hands was down by ten, but Uncle Clem was unrepentant. (‘Bloody dagoes,’ was all he said. ‘You can’t even trust the bambinis.’) Ever after that, the shed wall had an Uncle-Clem-shaped hole in it, like a shadow puppet.
The greyhounds were the other gamble against disaster. They lived with Neil and Sue across the road. Every couple of weeks they were loaded into the station wagon and taken to the Grafton races, where usually they would win just enough to fuel both the car and the belief that one day they’d really come good. Denzil loved them too, although she couldn’t identify with them as she could with Kylie.
One night after six Saturdays of losses Uncle Clem kept everyone waiting for hours while he drank in the striped tent. Auntie Mim gave Denzil her cardigan but she still shivered in the back of the station wagon with the sleeping dogs while she heard Uncle Clem’s voice swearing and saying he’d sell the bludgers; and at the end of that week he did. After that, Denzil feared for Kylie.
Despite Uncle Clem, Denzil would find herself drawn each morning from her verandah bed when the level of the light showed that milking was about to start. She’d put on thick socks and gumboots, because although it was too early for snakes the paddocks were cold and wet with dew. Denzil’s footprints would leave an explorer trail from the house down to the bails.
Once there, Denzil sat on the top rail of the yard and watched as Uncle Clem or Neil slipped the four metal tubes of a milking machine onto a cow’s udders and the milk pulsed down a long plastic coil while the cow kept her head in the trough and ate. When a cow was empty she was shoved out of her stall and the next one was stuck in; tubes were once again connected and another mouth chewed. Unless of course the next cow happened to be Billy: in which case Neil or Uncle Clem would shout and Kylie would bark and Billy would butt and kick and bellow and Denzil would thrill with excitement. When at last the metal was gripped on, Billy’s udders would release the milk in arrhythmic sputters and it would be so thin it would look palish-blue, like Denzil’s hankies. Sometimes they had to milk Billy manually; on those occasions they tied one of her back legs. That winter when she went dry they slaughtered her, and after that Denzil had to mix water into milk to make it thin enough to swallow. She felt like a traitor, even touching the smug milk of those Jerseys, but somehow she had to get down the great bowl of thick salty porridge that boiled in the pan like the exploding mud rivers in Walt Disney’s
The Living Desert
. If she didn’t eat her porridge for breakfast, Uncle Clem made Auntie Mim keep it for her lunch. And if she didn’t eat it at lunchtime, it came back again for tea.
At the end of milking, the yard steamed with fresh dung and the floor of the separator room was a creamy delta. The men would sluice out the bails with hoses, and load the big cans onto the ute so they could be taken down to the little shed on the roadside. It was Denzil’s job to get the milk for the house before it all went away to the city.
‘Auntie Mim says only half a billy today, thanks Uncle Clem.’ She always felt as if she was interrupting.
‘Which half do you want – the top half or the bottom half?’
Uncle Clem cracked jokes like that. Denzil never knew how she was meant to respond. She sometimes heard her uncle telling Neil that she was useless.
An hour later the Co-op truck would pick up the milk cans and take them into town. It would also pick up Denzil and take her to school, unless Denzil was game enough to delay on the porridge and miss the truck. Then she was safe for the day, because no one had time to drive her and, unlike the other local kids, she didn’t have a bike. But gagging on the porridge made Uncle Clem think she was useless, so staying home was only slightly better than going to school.
The school had been founded in 1892 by Denzil’s grandmother, and Denzil hated it. There were camphor laurel trees all around it, and tadpoles in the creek, but Denzil was used to asphalt, and no one played with her. When a storm broke, lessons stopped for the day and all the kids put on blue banana bags and pedalled home before the worst struck. When it rained, Denzil had to wait by herself on the verandah until someone was driving her way.
There was a bike down in Sydney but there wasn’t much point sending it up on the train because no one knew how long Denzil would be staying on the farm. It might be only a couple more months, it might be forever, no one was really sure. It all depended on whether Auntie Gwen’s back got better or whether Auntie Pat’s daughter went nursing or whether Auntie Mim found Denzil too much or whether Uncle Clem really believed that blood was thicker than water. Whatever they decided, Denzil would have to do. When Denzil heard them talking about her she used to feel like something in the copper, swirling round and round and every so often lifted up by someone with a long smooth stick; she found herself wondering how long it would be before she would take on the same grey colour as everything around her.
What Denzil herself wanted to do was run fast out of the valley and hide in the hills with Kylie. They’d live on bananas and rain and hunting. But now she couldn’t dream that either, for one fine day Kylie went too far, and Uncle Clem wasn’t a man for idle threats.
It was on a Monday that Mum started.
‘Are you busy Saturday night?’ she asked Callie over the tea-time washing up.