The Party Line (6 page)

‘Another couple of weeks, we’ll have our first calves,’ said Jack. Ian pretended not to have heard him. He felt sick, thinking about it. About what he knew about calving. Nothing.

One of the cows was bellowing. It stood away to the left. Its spine was buckled and its back legs splayed. Ian looked again. Two slimy thin black legs protruded from the beast’s back end.

‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’

Ian looked at Jack. Jack threw his cigarette on the ground.

They ran through the mud to the cow. Its eyes were white and rolling back in its head. Ian didn’t know what to do. He stopped short of the beast, his arms hanging at his sides.

‘Turn it around,’ Jack yelled at him. He’d grabbed the heifer around the neck and was holding it tight. The cow put up no resistance but kept up a low keen.

Ian couldn’t see the point of turning the cow around, but followed instructions and moved towards the rear of her. Then he saw what it was he had to do. Not turn the cow around. Turn the calf. Turn the calf inside the heifer, so it came out head first.

He rolled up his sleeve and grabbed the spindly, hairy legs. He clutched them together like a handful of kindling. Then, pushing, he eased the legs slowly back inside the cow.

The calf was alive. Its legs slipped out of his grip. They slid apart. He thought about the time he’d tried to eat with chopsticks, the time Bridie and he had gone to the city and, drunk, visited a Chinese place for dinner. They had a life of their own, those chopsticks, flicking themselves and the salty sauce from the dish all over the table.

‘Fucking get on with it,’ Jack yelled at him.

The calf was alive, that was the main thing. He regained his grip on the legs and kept pushing. His arm was almost entirely inside the cow. He felt the legs buckle and bend away from his hand. He’d managed to force it back into the uterus.

‘It’s alright,’ he called out. ‘I’m turning it. It’s turning now.’

He let go of the legs as he felt another part of the calf brush up against the back of his hand. Repositioning himself behind the cow, he turned his arm and grabbed. An ear, he was pretty sure it was an ear in his hand. His hand felt its way down the back of the calf’s head to the neck.

Slowly, he pulled. There was a tiny pulse under his hand. The head moved, inch by inch, towards him.

He grinned over the back of the heifer at Jack. ‘I’ve got it. It’s coming now.’

Jack didn’t smile back. ‘Hurry the fuck up,’ he said.

He saw then that the cow was shaking. Convulsing. It was ready to collapse.

One last tug and the calf slid out of its mother. It lay on the ground in the mud, twitching. ‘We’ve saved it,’ Ian said.

‘Saved
what
?’ asked Jack. ‘Saved a half-baked fucking calf? Fuck it.’

The mother lay next to the calf. Her breathing became shallow. Her eyes were all white, no pupils to be seen.

‘What have you got?’ shouted Jack. ‘What have you got with you?’

‘Nothing. I only came out for the fences …’

‘Grab your gun then. We’re not going to save her. Grab the gun.’

Ian had no gun. Not on the tractor. Not anywhere.

‘It’s not here either,’ he said.

‘
Jesus
.’

Jack marched over to the tractor and picked up a fencing post. He strode back. Then he stopped. In those few seconds between walking away and returning, the cow had stopped shaking. Its eyes were wide open, glassy. It was dead.

‘
Jesus
,’ Jack said again, shaking his head.

The calf was barely moving. Ian bent down beside it, pulled away the placenta, clearing its nostrils and mouth. Its eyes were closed.

‘Get out of the way.’ Jack was standing behind Ian.

Ian stood up and stepped backwards.

‘Further. Get out of the fucking way.’

Ian thought Jack was going to put the calf on the tray. It was still
alive. He thought they’d take it to the vet. Gabrielle could rear it by hand. She’d love that.

Jack lifted the fencing post high above his head, then brought it down onto the calf’s head. The calf didn’t move. Again, he lifted the post. Ian felt bile rise in his throat. He turned away.

The wall of black cloud had moved across the acres of land. The rain was only two or three paddocks away now. Ian imagined being caught in a vice — the vertical plane of the coming deluge forcing him backwards, jamming him up against the mountains behind him.

Ian heard the wooden post come down hard again. How many times had it been? The calf had been dead after the first blow, he was sure about that.

When Ian finally turned around, Jack was walking away from the mash of bone, blood and black hair.

After Gabrielle and Ian finished their tea that night, Ian started the washing. Two sets of clothes lay in the corner of the bathroom — his thick woollen singlets and pants and shirts, smelling of shit and silage, and Gabrielle’s smaller pile.

He thought back to the first few days after Bridie’s death. He couldn’t remember how the ordinary household jobs had been achieved. The washing, food, cleaning — had there been cleaning?

It must have been the women, Bridie’s friends. The ones who had slipped in and out of the shadows, quiet figures who touched his shoulder as they brushed passed him, set to heating meals and folding clothes.

He gathered the clothes and took them to the wooden shed near the back door. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, its cord hanging next to it, cobwebs draping to the corners of the room.

There was a short red hose attached to the single tap over the concrete tub. He flicked the end of it into the white agitator drum and turned the water on.

As he threw his clothes into the washer, the death of the animals came back to him. The sleeve of his shirt was covered in rusty, clotted blood and shit. The stench of it turned his stomach. The water clouded immediately to a rose pink.

He was about to put Gabrielle’s clothes in too, but stopped just in time. Unthinkable, her pretty, frilly things soaking in the residue of two violent, ugly deaths. She would never know what had happened in the back paddock.

He finished the washing of his clothes and put them through the wringer before starting over with Gabrielle’s. Except they weren’t her clothes. They were Bridie’s.

He was less shocked by his daughter wearing her dead mother’s clothes than by the fact that he hadn’t noticed it. He strained to remember the familiar fabrics against Gabrielle’s small body but couldn’t. And now, now that they were just garments laying lifeless on the floor, they were so painfully Bridie’s that they may as well have been lifted off her warm, living body just seconds earlier.

He bent down and lifted the top item from the pile. It was a blouse made of seersucker, white and blue: the blue of a policeman’s uniform. He held the blouse to his face, breathed in as deeply as he could.

It was still there. Through the sweet, fresh scent of Gabrielle’s shampoo, he could smell the duskiness of Bridie.

He waited for sadness; he wanted it badly. Instead a hunger grabbed him. He reached up and pulled the cord to the light. In the darkness, he again held the blouse to his face and breathed in deeply, frantically. He draped the blouse over the concrete lip of the sink, careful not to let it get wet, and groped again at his feet, at the pile of clothes. Working by touch, he found a silky fabric. Bridie’s scent was there, too — the cream she had rubbed onto her face at night before going to bed. He calmed himself, made his breathing shallow. Rubbing the silk nightdress against his cheek, he closed his eyes and gently breathed in and out. He was sleeping next to Bridie.

He switched the light back on. The blouse and the nightdress he would not wash, not ever. He folded them carefully and put them to one side.

The rest of Gabrielle’s clothes went into the tub. He needed to talk to her about why she was wearing Bridie’s things. Did she not have enough of her own clothes? Did she need new ones? He would never notice. Would she ask him?

Not tonight, though. He was not ready for the conversation yet.

Car lights shone in through the window of the little shed. The vehicle pulled to a stop near the end of the gravel. The headlights went out. It was Jack.

Ian put the blouse and the nightdress carefully on a shelf and came to the doorway.

‘Ian,’ said Jack, as he walked towards the door. His head was down and his hands were in his trouser pockets.

‘Hello, Jack.’

‘Got a minute? I would have phoned first but your line was engaged …’

‘Sorry … that’d be Gabrielle. She’s got a new friend at school.’

‘You’ll have to remind her you’re on a party line. It’s all party lines around here. She’ll piss everyone off if she sits on the phone all night.’

‘I will tell her, thanks Jack. I’ve left her to it, it’s just good to see her making friends. But you’re right.’

‘Ha,’ said Jack. ‘Tell her other people listen in. The mothers. Tell her that. That should sort her out. Anyway. Just wanted a word about this morning.’

Ian had been waiting for this. Right until he started the washing, he’d thought of nothing else. It was all over. They’d be on the road.

Jack pulled his cap off his head and scratched at the back of his scalp. Then he flicked the hat back on his head.

‘Have you got a rifle, Ian?’

‘Ah … to be honest with you, Jack, no. I had a gun, a while back. But something happened, a bit of a near miss to an accident, and I got rid of it. Brid … my wife, she didn’t want it in the house. Not with a kid around.’

All of that was true. Ian watched Jack shuffle his feet, looking at the ground. Every time Ian mentioned Bridie to another male, the reaction was the same.

‘Well, look, you need one. For situations like today.’

Ian felt the tension seep out of his neck. ‘Yes, I know. You’re right. I should have one. I should have gone and bought a new one, after …’

‘Never mind all that now,’ said Jack quietly. ‘I’ve got a spare at home. You can use that until you get yourself sorted out. You’re supposed to have a licence but. Have you still got your licence from the other one?’

‘No.’ Ian had never had a licence. Again, not a lie, as such.

‘Well, you’ll need to sort that out. I’ll drop the rifle off tomorrow.’

Jack stepped back into the darkness. Ian listened to the crunch of his boots on the gravel. He’d spent all afternoon imagining how the conversation would go. Not once did he anticipate it turning out like that.

‘Oh, Ian?’

Ian looked out the doorway. Jack had stopped at his car door.

‘Yes?’

‘That calf. It could never have lived, you know. So early, half its bloody organs wouldn’t have even developed. I had no choice …’

Ian looked at Jack’s silhouette. It was quite still. Behind Jack, at the bright bare window of the kitchen, Gabrielle was watching. She waved to Ian, he waved back at her. The window was shut. She couldn’t hear what was being said.

‘I know, Jack. It was a bloody shame, wasn’t it?’

‘But you know, sometimes with those calves, even though they’re going to die, there’s something in them.’

Ian wasn’t sure what Jack meant.

‘There’s some kind of will. What I’m saying is that they don’t give in so easily, when the moment comes. Like today, for example. It taking more than one blow.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s why you need a gun.’

‘Like I said, Jack. It was a bloody shame.’

Ian hesitated in the doorway of the wash house. Jack lingered by his car. The menace of the day’s events — the violent death of the calf, the stifling threat of Jack’s constant sniffing around Ian’s past — it all seemed to be closing in on Ian.

The window above Jack’s head swung open.

‘Dad, do you want a cup of tea?’ Gabrielle’s head popped out, she looked down. ‘Hi, Mr Gilbert … tea?’

Ian carried two chairs from the kitchen and sat them in the front porch. It was too dark for them to see each other’s faces clearly. Ian steadied his breathing as Jack fished in his pocket for tobacco and papers.

For a moment they sat silently.

The teacups chinked together as Gabrielle pushed the door open with her free hand. As she brushed past Ian, he caught the drift of perfume, the same one he’d smelled on Bridie’s clothes minutes earlier. He glanced at Jack, who was licking his cigarette paper into a tight tube. The fading light silhouetted Gabrielle; her nose, lips, forehead. She turned into Bridie a little more, every day.

She asked whether Jack wanted milk or sugar, he mumbled
No thanks,
the cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth. Jack stared straight out into the darkness, as though willing himself not to see Gabrielle.

‘How many kids do you have, Jack?’ If Ian initiated the conversation, he might keep it on a navigable track.

‘No kids.’

‘Oh …’

‘Audrey. Women’s problems.’

Ian recalled Eugene mentioning Audrey, the day they talked about the rotten hay, but he couldn’t remember how her name had come up. Hadn’t he said something about problems? Ian felt rueful of the conversation he’d started. He followed the glow of Jack’s cigarette.

‘Have you got anything stronger than tea?’ Jack asked suddenly.

‘No … sorry.’ The truth of it was Ian didn’t dare allow himself near alcohol. Keeping a lid on his grief was a full-time job sober.

The silence returned. It was becoming awkward now for Ian. He wanted to be inside, with Gabrielle.

‘Too bad.’ Jack shifted in his seat. Ian watched the red dot flicker as Jack tapped ash onto the wooden boards under him. Then the dot burned bright, wide, as Jack took another drag off it. ‘Don’t you drink?’

‘Oh, I do. Just haven’t picked anything up yet … How long have you had the farm, Jack?’

‘All my life. Born here, it belonged to my old man.’

‘That’s something, eh? Land, the way it’s passed on …’

Jack slurped his tea. ‘It’s something alright. Fucking something.’

An incredible fatigue washed over Ian. The physical tiredness he didn’t mind, but the mental stress of steering the conversation away from himself, from the lies he had told, was overwhelming. If he continued talking, the night might never end. If he stopped, Jack would start asking questions of his own.