Salt Creek (21 page)

‘Hugh' – Papa's voice, normally reedy, was low now – ‘I think not. Gold is for fools and speculators.'

‘What are we doing here if not speculating? I could go.'

‘Not on your own. It's not safe. Remember the Ballarat uprising.'

‘With Stanton then.' He was ablaze now.

Stanton leapt to his feet. ‘Yes.'

‘No.'

But two days later when we woke in the morning they were gone, leaving a letter for Papa.

‘What does it say?' Albert asked.

Papa looked at us sitting about the breakfast table, with dislike I would say, as if it was just a matter of time before we too betrayed him. ‘They have gone to try their luck in the goldfields,' he said with frightening quiet. ‘At the worst possible time.' Cheese-making was upon us. For more than a week he gave up directing any of us. He stayed away, leaving the house early and returning late, if at all, so I had the running of things. It wasn't so bad. Tull took charge of the yard work and the stock, working with Fred and Albert, and I managed the cheese. Without Stanton and Hugh we could not do all the milking. We divided the herd, milking one half, and leaving the calves with the cows in the other half. It was the best we could do until Papa was himself again.

I wondered what it would be like to be a man, to be Papa. I thought lonely; they are solitary creatures for all they work in each other's company. ‘Hole in the fence there, wire's out back, rain later', they say, like the smoke signals that are used by the natives in some parts of the country. For all I knew it would not be so different for the blacks: ‘Cold today, cockles for dinner, fix the fish traps, rain later'. They are all of them, as much as I can make out, free as gulls wheeling across water and earth and space alike around the belly of the world.

In some way it was the sight of Tull so busy and so able that seemed to settle Papa again. He looked up from his newspaper to watch him reading one evening.

‘See, Hester, what we have created? But for his skin he is as white as any one of you. Others will follow.'

It seemed to me that Tull had made himself as much as anything, but Papa would not want to hear that. ‘He is a remarkable person,' I said. ‘But what will happen to him? Will he stay here working for you or get his own run? Who will he marry do you think?'

Papa rustled his paper and turned a page. ‘He has connections with his own kind. Something will be arranged for him. He can teach them what he has learned. See?' The plan was so neat, so certain to him. Perhaps it would come right, but watching the game of draughts that Tull and Addie struck up, and the two of them talking and laughing, I was not sure.

A letter arrived from Hugh to let us know that they were at Ballarat having walked to the inland route and hitched rides on passing drays. Papa said, ‘Well, happen they will strike it rich after all. We shall see.'

I imagined lighting out to seek my own fortune, leaving without a thought as if family had nothing to do with me, as if they had no corner in my mind or any part of me. My life occupied a small space; it was time that moved: days and weeks and months and seasons and years rolling across me as inevitable as night. Moving any great distance would be like a cut against the grain of time. How had Hugh and Stanton done it with such ease? Any one of the things that held me at Salt Creek – Mary or Albert or Addie or Fred – was enough to stop me running. I hated Hugh and Stanton for their selfishness; I envied it too. Sometimes I took Birdie and galloped her up and down the track until we both were panting. It gave me the illusion of flight.

In November, when Papa judged that the cheeses were ripe enough, he sent them up the lagoon to Goolwa and from there by paddle steamer around the coast to Port Adelaide. But the large cheeses, when cut into in the grocers' shops, were found to be spoiled. Even the small ones were poor quality. It was as if our misery had poured into them. A number of grocers demanded refunds but Papa could not repay them, having spent the money already. The grocers were not pleased and declined further risk, which I could not blame them for since they had been left out of pocket. We were left with the cheese moulds and our mouldering cheese and Papa's hopes, dashed again.

After we had the news of the cancelled orders I found Papa resting his arms against the paddock fence, looking at the cows. ‘We'll have to let them go, Hester,' he said. ‘I'm finished with them.'

‘Could we go back to the small cheeses?' I said.

‘There's no money in it, my dear, or not enough and never will be. If we don't know that by now, we have learned nothing.'

He kept only a few cows in the home pasture for our own use. The rest he and the boys drove out onto the run's expanses, planning to sell them when the calves were old enough to be moved.

When I look back at that year I see that we were all right until Mama died. I think we were. Every wrong and every setback that ever befell us began to concentrate then, like seawater drying until just a salt patch remained on which nothing would grow. Even when her spirits were low she'd had a softening effect on Papa.

And for me there was something else, beyond the loss of her and her gentleness, which it shamed me to think on, and that was that with her gone so also was my hope of escape. I had had no clear idea of when the future might arrive or what it might hold, but that I would leave Salt Creek had been certain. There would come a time when the children were old enough to be left to Mama and I was of an age when Papa could no longer make me stay. Now the failure of the dairy meant there was no prospect of a return to town. All that, a life of my own choosing, must be forgotten now and if I fell into despair sometimes when I was alone, on the sand hills or over a wash trough, I'm sure that would be no wonder to anyone.

Tull came into the kitchen one day when my face was wet. A magpie that I fed meat scraps approached the door and tipped its head and made a sound in its throat. Tull watched it with the same grave interest that he watched me. I wiped my face on my sleeve and threw some meat at the magpie and it plucked it from the ground and flew onto the veranda railing.

Tull said, ‘What is it telling you?'

‘That it's hungry.'

He shook his head. ‘No, something else.'

‘I don't think so,' I said.

‘You need to pay attention,' Tull said. ‘Listen. Watch.'

But I did not hear or see anything.

Life is so much absence and emptiness and vivid stretches and disconnected fragments when everything happens; things that light up in memory while all around is darkness. Some of the people I have known are no more than fragments themselves, because I knew only a part of them or because their lives were short. Mary is one. There are so few now who knew her, but for the time that we had her she was someone and I mention her even though she had no part to play really, except that she was sweet and loving and missed in her absence, and that the loss of her made us all grow harder. It would have been difficult for us to grow sadder.

She glances into my mind best when I am not thinking of her or of anything: at a movement of Joss's shoulder, the sight of a basket of eggs, a fistful of daisies. We took her out with us onto the sea beach sometimes. She clutched our clothes – a collar, a gathering of lace – and faced the wind, her eyes squeezed all but shut, sand in her lashes and her clothes billowing. The sound of them: a high snap like a small sail. She ground her fists into her eyes. I sank down in the shelter of a sand hill and pulled her onto my lap and bade her shut her eyes, holding her head against my shoulder and putting a hand over her eyes to hold them closed.

‘Can't see.' She shook her head.

‘Move your eyes, Mary, pretend you can see. It will feel better soon.'

Her lidded eyes rolled beneath my hand.

‘Good girl,' I said, and presently, ‘better?'

She nodded and I released her and her eyes flew open and she blinked at the sudden brightness and her pupils shrank.

She was curious about everything, leaning out of our arms to gaze at the ground and pointing imperiously – ‘This way, there' – to set our direction. She liked shells and at first she put them to her mouth as if she were a puppy at a bone. When we put her upon the sand she ambled about until a slope or softness or a gust of wind or her petticoats caught beneath her feet made her collapse. She was old enough for pick-a-backs, and would ride us, droning in our ears, her fingers laced at our throats. Afterwards I felt her fingers still, a phantom touch upon my neck.

‘Don't watch the sun, Mary. Don't look at it now.'

She screwed up her eyes and held her fingers above them in a veranda, looking up at Fred and Tull to make sure she had the stance correct and they stood, Fred holding her hand, all of them shielding their eyes and staring across the sea at the skeins of light. I wish I had let her look and look until she would look no more.

‘Fast, Hettie,' she shrieked, bouncing up and down on my back. ‘More fast!' and she set me galloping along the pathway from the sea beach through the valleys. She lived fast, like one of the summer insects that Fred liked to draw. And when she died of a snake bite it was the worst of that year, worse than Mama. I could not get past the length of her life and the place of it and hated Papa for it, more than for all else combined. Mama might have died even in Adelaide but the snake was in the Coorong. She suffered a great deal before she fell asleep in my arms and later died. I try not to think of her hot body and panting breath and how her death was a labour.

I missed her sticky hand in mine. I would have done anything to have her back, even though part of me knew that the loss of her brought freedom and escape closer. I was not the worst person yet, then. I took some comfort in that.

Afterwards, it was uncomfortable to be near Papa. In the evenings, Fred and Tull and Addie and Albert went walking along the lagoon and sat close to the moored boat, not so far away. If it was cool they lit a fire and the crack and smell of burning driftwood and the sparks from it and the sound of their talk and laughter came up the rise to the house. I went with them once or twice and felt what it was to be part of them – family again, but a different family than our own, nothing to do with Papa or the memories of people who had died or the things we had lost. I could not like him then. The shame of my disloyalty and inconstancy stopped me going with them more often.