Mullumbimby (3 page)

Ellen made a loud fart with her lips at this, and Comet startled sideways against Jo, his eyes wide in alarm. They laughed.

‘He's never heard a human fart before,' said Jo.

‘I find that
very
hard to believe,' answered Ellen, grasping a handful of Athena's black mane and cantering away.

‘Smart-arse!' her mother yelled. ‘Be careful!' And don't come running to me when you break your neck.

She picked up the lunge. Coiled the long flat cotton rope in her left hand and swung the other end in a circle from her right fist. Comet's left ear tilted inward, conceding to her authority.

Walk on.

The colt stepped forward instantly, his packed brown rump forcing the clean-boned legs forward, and his back hoofs overreaching the marks left by his front ones.

Baugul yarraman...

Can you jump? Jo wondered. And if you can, does that mean you'll buck under saddle? Her right hand swung the end of the lead a little faster.

Trot on.

If I had the money, my friend, Jo told him silently, you'd win royal sashes, but who's got a horse float? Not me, boyo, not me. So we'll just ride these hills and, once Ellen leaves home, we'll hit the National Trail and really have us a time ... She frowned and increased the tension on Comet's halter.

Git up there! None of that...

The colt was snaking his neck towards the ground, testing to see how serious Jo was about this trotting in circles nonsense. She gave
the lunge a sharp snap. His head dipped low again and his back heels flicked up in irritation at having to follow orders. I know that feeling, bunji, Jo told him, but you're outta luck. The whole point of lunging the horse was not to exercise him, but to teach him to yield to her authority, her voice, her rope, and her fingers. If she worked well enough, the colt would eventually obey directions made with a mere flick of her eyes. She had seen Oliver do it. Whether she had his skill and patience was another matter altogether, but it was something to aim for. A second sharp tug saw Comet return obediently to the circle, blowing loudly out of flared nostrils and steadily trotting with his neck arched, inside ear pricked to the Boss, patient now with this rounded business that the human creature found so important.

Goooood booooy ... baugul yarraman ... Woah.

She halted the colt, worked him in the other direction, threw a few tarps around to get him used to the noise, and then left him tied to the railing to teach him about the waiting game.

Oliver was still spinning his magic with the now foam-flecked chestnut. She wandered over to watch.

‘I'll chuck a saddle on that colt next week if you want.' Oliver spoke out of the side of his mouth.

‘Does the pope shit in the woods?'

‘What?'

‘Nothing, bad joke. That'd be great.'

‘Will he draft, do ya reckon?' she asked.

‘He's been watching my cattle, so I'd say so. Could probably do just about anything, that colt.' Oliver halted the chestnut merely by shifting his weight backwards in the saddle, leaving his reins untouched. Jo beamed. He thinks Comet is good enough to draft. I done good. I bred him – yeah that's right, me, Jo Breen. Ah am the Greatest–

‘But he's too good for you,' Oliver added.

Jo stopped beaming onetime. Rude old redneck fucker.

‘You wanna sell him on to a pro like Annie Beaumont,' he advised, dismounting.

‘That horse is not for sale!' Jo said. ‘Even to Annie. I'm doing the National Trail on him.'

‘Well, I better ride him next week then.' Oliver led the chestnut away and left Jo steaming in his wake.

‘How'd the old girl go?' Jo asked when Ellen rode in the gate twenty minutes later.

‘Good.'

‘Holly home?'

‘Yeah. She had homework, so I didn't stay.'

Ellen was an oddball in many ways, but a typical Goorie in at least one: she spoke around half as much as a white child her age. Learn by watching and listening, using your mil and binung, was the centuries-old habit, and not by asking bloody silly questions all the time.

Jo couldn't help it. Oliver was going to ride Comet
next week.
Her face and her heart opened, she grinned fit to beat the band, and for once her freckled, green-eyed daughter softened and smiled back.

Baugul jahjam.

The sun was creeping above the slash pines, and its early slanting rays bathed the twenty acres with a brilliant golden sheen. To her left, Bottlebrush Hill gazed benignly down over the old farmhouse and paddocks. To her right, the heavily forested ridgeline made a thick green barrier between her and the rest of the world. Few trees stood out distinctly on that high ground, but in one thinly wooded eastern section, Jo saw, a large eucalypt – a mountain ash perhaps – raised its curiously heart-shaped canopy in outline against the lightening sky. She slowly breathed out a stream of cold white breath and contemplated an astonishing fact: from where she stood in the middle of the big paddock, she could take off running in any direction and be winded before she'd left her own land.

That was something for a Goorie woman to think about; something to hold onto and savour.

The bottom dam was hazy with mist. White wisps lingered among the dark knotty pines beside it. The morning felt miraculous, as though this was the First Day after some tremendous upheaval which had somehow left Jo standing unscathed. It seemed to her, facing the dawn, that anything might be possible now, and as if the day –
this
morning,
this
sun upon
these
hills – called for a kind of reverence that she could barely express. She kicked off her dirty runners and let her bare feet meet the earth. The grass she stood on was moist with autumn dew. The cold of night still lingered in the soil beneath,
especially here in the shadow of the enormous tallowwood tree. Jo stepped away, out into open pasture where the sun could fall directly on her skin, and, as its warmth reached her face and chest, she lifted her arms high in supplication.
Black Old Sun.
Oh I musta done something right, someday, somewhere, to be still standing up alive here on Bundjalung land. She turned in a slow circle, arms still high, watching the ridgeline. Here I am, my budgeree jagan. Here I am. Know me for who I am, a Goorie jalgani, jinungalehla here, poor and ignorant though I might be, I'm here at last. Jo closed her eyes and saw Aunty Barb perched on the rotting veranda at South Golden in a canvas deck chair, fishing line in the canal and a durrie in the ashtray wisping smoke around her creased brown face.

Sit ning and listen, JoJo. Gotta hear the world around you, bub. You just sit ning and you'll soon work things out.

Jo's face suddenly felt cold as something came unexpectedly between her and the heat of the sun. When she opened her eyes she laughed aloud in astonishment. No more than twenty metres overhead, level with the top of the tallowwood, a wedgetail was circling with its enormous dark eye cocked to observe her movements. Jo could clearly see the precise curve of the bird's killing talons, and the blackness of its diamond-shaped tail. The eagle's motion was silent, other than the occasional slow flap of its giant wings. Transfixed, she let her arms drop and watched the bird watching her. The sun had made it right over the top of the pines now, and as the dew on the grass dried and her feet lost their chill, Jo realised that she was being ringed by two distinct but joined circles: that of the bird in the air, and the one its shadow was making on the earth below. An unfamiliar sense of great peace descended upon her as she remembered:

Circles protect you if you let them, girl. But you gotta let em. Gotta not get in their way.

‘That you, Aunty Barb?' Jo asked the eagle, hearing the waver in her own voice.

The eagle gave one harsh cry – of dissent, Jo thought – and rose swiftly in the air, soon becoming a tiny black dot above the ridgeline. Couldn't be, anyway. Aunty Barb's meat was that slowpoke
tree-dweller, boribi – koala. Couldn't get much further from boribi than a wedgetail. It was just one of those things, one of those odd and striking visitations of nature, Jo decided, as she dragged her runners back on. Still, the feeling of having been seen by the eagle stayed with her. Her arrival on the farm had been witnessed, Jo felt. She had asked for a sign, and a messenger had welcomed her. She was Home.

As the mourners turned to leave the mound of red earth covering the late Mrs Lacosta, Jo found herself face to face with Cheery Dan, Fat Tony's offsider at the rural co-op. His permanent grin had been muted to a half-smile in deference to the occasion and, Jo now realised, he was standing alongside the same bloke who had driven past her farm in a yellow ute that morning.

Yellow Ute Man was fit from outdoor work and he had a hard face, Jo thought, a hard face with intelligent grey eyes that wouldn't easily look away from a fight. A bit of a dangerous character, perhaps. Then, as Dan introduced her, she amended this: it's not so much a hard face, maybe just tough. Tough I can live with, she thought. Tough I like, in men and women both ... Even if he hadn't stopped when she tried to wave him down.

‘G'day,' she greeted him. ‘You drove past me an hour ago when I was looking at that cow on Tin Wagon Road.'

‘Oh. Yeah. Rob Starr,' the man said, putting out a rough square hand for her to shake. His skin was freckled, and the hair on his muscled arm shone copper in the hot sun. ‘Yeah, I knew that heifer was already dead, otherwise I would have come down and shot it meself.'

Starr made it sound as though Jo was a long-time resident who had been lumbered with the shooting of a sick beast.

‘I wasn't – ah, I didn't know how to make sure it was dead,' Jo confessed. Starr raised his eyebrows, as if this was information hardwired into all humans.

‘If you can't see any breathing going on, you just touch the eyeball, see if it jumps at that,' Starr said.

‘And if you're still not sure, give it a kick in the guts and see what happens,' Cheery Dan added.

Yeah right, thought Jo, wincing at the idea of kicking a dying animal anywhere.

‘Well, I haven't got a rifle anyway, so it wouldn't have mattered much.'

‘You might want to get yerself one,' Rob Starr said mildly, looking to Cheery Dan for agreement. ‘There's a fair few wild dogs in them hills up the back of your place.'

‘Oh.'

This was news to Jo.
Wild dogs.
Did he mean dingoes? And how did he already know where she lived?

‘They're getting real bloody cheeky, too. Darren Ferrier lost a good bull calf last month–' Cheery Dan was on the same assassinating wavelength as Starr, it seemed.

‘Well, don't go shooting any dingoes with collars on, will you?' Jo interrupted these dugai histrionics. ‘If it's got a collar on it's our yellow dog.'

‘Any yella dog comes onto my place it takes its chances.' Starr replied, deadpan. He shook a cigarette out of its packet, and felt in his jeans pocket for a light.

They weren't long on diplomacy in Tin Wagon Road, then.

Jo nodded slowly and pursed her lips, jutting them out as though for the life of her she was trying, and failing, to see eye to eye with him. If anyone shot Warrigal, she didn't know what she'd do. Poison their waterholes, probably. Steal their children. It was at moments like this that she understood the old Goories refusing to walk behind the dugais when they travelled together in the forests. Just in case the temptation to sink an axe into their ignorant European skulls became altogether too overwhelming.

Rob Starr angled out a cloud of smoke. It faded into nothingness as the first of the mourners' cars began to drive away to the Middle B to get on the hops.

‘So which is your place then?' Jo asked him. A neutral response.
Don't start anything at a funeral, she told herself. She heard Therese:
Remember to breathe, Josephine.

‘Right at the end of the valley, where the ridge loops back on itself.' He gestured north-east. ‘I back onto the World Heritage. Our places meet up near the old abandoned banana winch – the corners meet, or near enough. Old Jim Mooney's kids used to walk through my place to get to the Pocket school, years ago.'

‘Run cattle, do you?'

‘Brahmins.'

‘Rightio, well, I better get cracking.'

Cradling a bowl of Weetbix the next morning, Jo looked out to where a shiny Land Cruiser troopie had pulled up in her driveway. Daisy and Warrigal were sniffing around the wheels, lifting their legs and issuing a few tentative barks, still unsure of the rules on the new place. A fiftyish blond bloke sporting an akubra and permanent sunburn had his elbow sticking out of the Cruiser window. He was looking down at the dogs.

‘You're right, mate, they won't bite,' Jo called from the yard. The man didn't get out. He cast his gaze around at the ongoing work in the paddocks, the ute full of junk and the smoking rubbish pile, then came back to Jo.

‘G'day. You got a teenage girl here that rides horses?' he asked, pushing his hat up to show more of a face that had drinker written all over it.

‘Yeah, my daughter.' Jo took a sustaining sip of good sweet coffee, and kicked a dry dog turd off the lawn and into the dust under the house. ‘Why?'

‘The name's Darren Ferrier. I live up on the last bend before Nudgel there, place with the stockyards. Anyway, me neighbour reckons he seen a girl riding my horses there, round about dawn the last couple of mornings. You know anything about that?'

‘Riding
your
horses?' Jo said, astonished.

‘Yep. Bareback, he reckoned.' Darren Ferrier looked a lot less than pleased.

‘I dunno ... she can ride, but–' Jo stopped. Wouldn't put it past the little bugger. ‘–we've got our own horses. I dunno why she'd go and do that.'

‘Well, it only started last week, when you moved in and Mooneys moved out.'

‘Are they quiet?' Jo asked abruptly.

‘They're broken in,' he replied. ‘Blood horses, too. But that doesn't mean I want them ridden. Specially not by some kid I don't know. Put yerself in my position.'

‘Nah, well, I'll have a word with her,' Jo said slowly. ‘But I can't see it really. No one else around here it could be?'

Darren Ferrier shook his head. His expression said that he was pretty damn sure who had been mucking around with his stock, and he wanted something done about it, pronto.

‘Kids'll be kids,' he said, softening an iota. ‘But I can't cop it, hey? If she fell off and got hurt, or whatever ... Or if my horses got hurt. Plus the whole trespassing thing.'

‘Yeah, well,' Jo told him, ‘I'll get onto her about it, don't worry.' The word
trespassing
out of a dugai mouth didn't sit happily with her. But Ellen hadn't left her in much of a position to begin an argument with Darren Ferrier, horseman, Longbeach smoker, and offended new neighbour. Jo paused, wondering how to get the truth out of Ellen.

‘You've been doing a fair bit of yakka here.' Ferrier complimented. Understatement of the fucken year. Everywhere she looked was hard work done, or hard work still waiting to be finished.

‘There's a bit more to do yet,' Jo said drily. ‘But we'll get there–'

‘It's always the way on a farm, eh, it never ends. What was your name?' Ferrier asked belatedly as he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray of the Toyota. Jo gave him her name and took the hand he proffered through the window, shook it hard, the way whitefellas liked to.

‘Where are ya from, anyway?' Why are you brown of skin and hair and eyes? he meant. Why don't you look like me?

‘Brisbane. I grew up in South Golden as a kid, though.'

Ferrier was nonplussed, but Jo didn't relent in the pause that followed.

‘Oh. Okay. Well, I'll let this horse business slide, if you manage to knock it on the head.' Ferrier advised her. He started up then reversed out past the hibiscus bushes onto the narrow bitumen of the road, he raised a forefinger in farewell, and roared off.

The dogs erupted noisily – and suddenly old Granny Wotsername appeared from nowhere, cycling down Tin Wagon Road at a rate of knots. Her dark legs pumped up and down, peddling hard, nearing the front gate where the Goorie flag hung in dewy folds of red, black and yellow. The old girl would never see seventy again, and she wore the sort of clothes that said she shopped exclusively at St Vinnies and Lifeline. Her hair was a cap of short tight grey curls, and while Granny was solid around the middle she still had the slender limbs and the rounded features of a Bundjalung showing beneath a paisley headscarf. She rode a thirty-year-old sit-up-and-beg bike, and was dressed in a poor woman's clothes, but nothing poor showed in Granny's bearing: her back was straight, and her face took the world square on, saying quite clearly that she was nobody's fool, thank you kindly.

Jo grabbed two dog collars quickly, and brain-scrabbled for her name – Granny what now? Granny Nunn kept coming to mind but that wasn't right.

Granny's eyes met Jo's for a moment as the old woman drew level with the gateway. A pair of blue fairy-wrens that lived there had a lot to say about intruders so close to their bottlebrush tree, flitting up and down in brief alarmed parabolas and giving their high-pitched ratcheting call. Jo let go of Daisy just long enough to give a quick wave, but Granny had a fair pace going and she didn't slow down. Nor did she wave. There was a brief formal nod from her, that was all. Barely even a nod, and then she was past the pine trees, halfway to where the road dipped for the creek crossing.

Jo straightened up and scratched at her cheek, wondering whether to be offended. Had she just been snubbed? Hard to tell with
somebody of that vintage. Jo knew that she'd been introduced to the old girl years ago at a function. Granny hadn't been too friendly then, either, come to think. But to give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe the woman was just shy, or absentminded, or even half-blind, nodding to shadowy indistinguishable figures all day long.

According to Chris there weren't any other Goories living on the road, hadn't been for twenty years or more. Still, Jo couldn't help feeling affronted. Had the old lady failed, despite the flag hanging right there in front of her, to realise that Jo was a blackfella? Or was she just not very friendly, period? Social complications seemed to be multiplying by the minute. The cemetery had been a very simple place to live, Jo reflected. You knew where you stood, with the dead, since for all their failings they had that sterling virtue of consistency that others so frequently lacked.