Snake (7 page)

37

They Say All Things Are for the Best

A
S HE MADE
his rounds, on land that he would never own, Rex droned the chorus of a song he had learned in the army:

Jim crack corn, I don't care.
Jim crack corn, I don't care.
Jim crack corn, I don't care.
Ol' master's gone away
.

That was the extent of his repertoire. His dogs, soft-eyed and wet-nosed, attentive to his every gesture, were always by his side. If he went anywhere in his utility, they piled into the back, panting and slobbering. When the vehicle was in motion, they faced into the wind, eyes half-closed, pink tongues flapping like flags. At night, he chained them to kennels in the tractor shed, where they waited patiently for his return in the morning. ‘Faithful as the night is long,' said Rex of his dogs.

One of the dogs was called Flash, after Flash Gordon, and the other was Emma, after a television character played by Diana Rigg, whom Rex rather fancied. Television had recently come to the district, and Rex had taken to the medium, planting his armchair in front of the set, applying himself to it with the same seriousness with which he read the local newspaper.

The dogs' attentiveness did not extend to obedience. Keeping the sheep bunched in tight, manageable groups was beyond them. Nor did they run agilely across the backs of penned sheep, as one sometimes saw in newsreels proclaiming Australia's might as a wool-producing country. Because of this, a session in the sheepyards was a cacophony of yaps, yelps, yells: ‘Goddamn it, Flash, get over here!' ‘Jesus Christ, Emma!'

Then came the terrible day when the utility was at the garage being fitted with new tires, and Rex used the family sedan to check on some sheep at the far end of the farm. He took Emma with him, and her paws got muddy; on the return journey he put her in the boot so she wouldn't dirty the seats. When he reached the house, he was distracted by a minor crisis, and when he remembered Emma half an hour later – it was a hot day – she was dead.

38

In Accents Most Forlorn

I
N THE WINTER
of 1964, the mice came in never-ending grey waves. They were everywhere, in shoes and boots, the stove, the toaster, even the electric jug. Move something, pick it up – a bag of wheat, a bale of hay – and mice exploded into furious action, darting in a hundred different directions, like living shrapnel. The air was fusty with their smell.

The dogs grew dizzy chasing bolting mice and soon adopted poses of indifference. The cats – pet and feral – had only to open half an eye to see their next meal. Goannas gorged until they could barely haul their swaying bodies up trees. Snakes satiated themselves, becoming lethargic, slow as slugs.

At night, before going to bed, Rex stretched a tarpaulin on the ground and in the morning poked a hose under it. The hose was attached to the exhaust of the utility, whose engine he duly started. Thousands of mice expired each time. He shoveled them into a trench, added dirt as if layering a cake. Months after the plague ended, Rex could still see mice out of the corners of his eyes: blurred, teeming.

39

Dust Shalt Thou Eat

C
LOUDS OF DUST
boiling in from the west.

The trees in the near distance were obliterated first, then the sheds, the water tank, the windmill, the cypress pine, the fence to the yard. The sun was also obscured; the light became yellow, gloomy. The family watched at the kitchen window as sheets of corrugated iron and roly-polies whipped by.

Dust filtered into the house, clogging their nostrils; they champed on the stuff. Soon the house was veiled with dust; it lay an inch thick on horizontal surfaces, but it also clung to the walls, the ceiling, the sides of the refrigerator.

40

The Brief Lives of Insects

A
VENGING CLOUDS AGAIN,
this time of locusts. From a distance, the clouds emitted a steady thrumming sound; up close, in their midst, the noise broke into its component parts: clickings and scrapings as well as the whirring of a hundred million wings. Rex's barley crop was a victim, as was Irene's garden. The locusts smashed blindly into windows, daubing them with their viscous entrails, which dried to a gluelike hardness. Rex sprayed insecticide, and the bodies of those felled crunched underfoot.

41

Mercy Mercy Mercy

S
TONES ON THE
roof. Someone was showering stones on the roof. Dimly awake, Rex thought it was his brother, playing a trick, and then he knew what it was: hail heavy enough to flatten the wheat crop. The children came without being summoned. The four of them stood in the living room in their pajamas staring up at the ceiling, as if that could provide answers. Rex drew back a curtain and shone a torch outside: the ground was white with hail. And still it came: pelting, pinging, skidding.

‘Say goodbye to the wheat,' said Rex.

‘The insurance will pay,' said Irene, the same words she had used about the locusts. The children nodded in agreement, their teenage faces fatuously solemn. Rex looked at his wife, baffled anew by her insensitivity. Of course the insurance will pay. That wasn't the point; his work was shredded.

42

Life-writing

G
IRLIE HARDLY NOTICED
the scourges visited upon the farm. She was captive to her mother's every mood, quivering to them like a tuning fork. At the smallest provocation, Irene cut her daughter off, and it drove Girlie half-mad. When communication resumed, Girlie could never quite get it right; out of uncertainty, she was apt to be fulsome and giddy.

Boy was no more observant of his natural environment than his sister. His energies went into practicing neutrality; he kept his head low, cloaked himself in ordinariness. His interests were typical of a teenage boy: movies, music, sports, sex. If he had aspirations, apart from a desire not to be a farmer, no one knew.

Irene, however, was busy noticing everything. Freddie had given her an old Remington portable, and she had discovered that she had a way with words. Using as her model the American humorist Betty MacDonald, whose book
The Egg and I
was enjoying a vogue, she wrote vignettes about the farming life that were upbeat and rueful. First she read them on the radio, and then the local newspaper gave her a column.

Using understatement typical of farmers, Rex admitted to neighbors that he thought Irene's columns were ‘a bit rich'; he read them shaking his head.

43

Close Your Eyes

‘
S
CHINUS MOLLE.
A
NACARDIACEAE
family,' said Irene. She was in the bath, soapy water lapping at her shoulders, legs bent so that her knees made islands, a flannel floating in the vicinity of her bosom for modesty's sake, and she was instructing her son, who was sitting on top of a cupboard that held towels, in the taxonomy of the pepper tree they could both see framed in the open bathroom door.

‘It's not a native, you know, although it looks like it has been here forever, under our beastly sun. Its common name is the California pepper tree, but it doesn't come from California, either. Comes from Peru. We gave them eucalypts, they gave us pepper trees.' She inclined her head, admiring the tree's twisted trunk and clusters of tiny bright pink berries.

Boy, who had been enduring his mother's botanical lessons for years, said nothing. It was dim in the bathroom, cavelike, cool. Outside: the tired late-afternoon light of a summer's day.

The bathroom was the one room in the house that remained unchanged. The tin walls were rippled and painted an institutional green, the floor was cement. The tub, large and clawed, was also green. The ceiling was high, beyond the reach of a broom; daddy-long-legs wove dense webs in the corners.

The two of them had fallen into the habit of having chats while Irene took baths when Boy was five or six and had never given it up, even after Boy's voice broke and his body grew lanky. In these sessions, Irene sometimes interrogated Boy about school, books he was reading, friends, girls, but what they liked best to do was recite snatches of banter they had picked up from here and there and polished into routines. ‘The Goon Show' was a popular source of material, as was
Mad
magazine.

Irene moved, and water sloshed over the edge.

‘More kindling, Boy'

The water was warmed by means of a chip heater, a primitive Australian invention consisting of a cylinder, where the fire was set, and a flue exiting through the roof. Boy took a jemmy and cautiously levered the lid off the heater, then dropped slivers of pine into the heater's belly. The fire flared almost immediately, and the contraption huffed like a train on a straight stretch.

Irene and Boy paid no attention to the lunatic noise issuing from the heater. When it was quiet again, Irene, in a nasal voice quite unlike her own, said, ‘Books are for the birds.' She was pretending to be Paul McCartney's grandfather in
A Hard Day's Night
, which had been showing in Progress that last week. Paul's nasty old git of a grandfather tickled the two of them, and they had been twice.

Boy took the cue and became Ringo. ‘Books are good,' he replied in his best Liverpudlian accent, dropping consonants and swallowing vowels as if born to it.

‘Parading's better,' said Paul's grandfather.

‘Parading?' queried Ringo.

‘Parading the streets, trailing your coat, bowling along. Living!' explained Paul's grandfather.

‘I am living,' said Ringo.

‘You! Living! When was the last time you gave a girl a pink-edged daisy? When was the last time you embarrassed a sheila with a cool appraising stare,' retorted Paul's grandfather.

Irene couldn't keep it up; she dissolved into laughter. She twisted her torso to throw the soap at Boy; the flannel slipped. While he wasn't so bold as to venture ‘a cool appraising stare,' Boy stole a look at his mother. Irene knew he was looking; she rather enjoyed it. How else was he to learn? The soap missed Boy and banged against the tin wall.

Irene settled back in the water.

It was Ringo's turn. ‘Bit old for that sort of chat, aren't you?'

‘Well at least I've got a backlog of memories. All you've got is a book,' said Paul's grandfather.

But Irene'd had enough. When she spoke again, it was her normal voice. ‘Time you went, Boy. Before you go, put a few more chips in the heater. And find the soap, please.'

Boy did her bidding. The fire blazed, the heater pulsed, hot water sputtered into the bath. Boy paused for a last bit of repartee. Over the noise of the heater, he shouted in Liverpudlian, ‘Clean old man!'

Boy was in the door, silhouetted; Irene couldn't make out the details of his face. ‘Don't press your luck,' she shouted back, souring her features, Paul's grandfather to a T.

44

A Laughing Woman with
Two Bright Eyes

I
RENE HAD A
new friend. Her name was Gwyneth, and she was one of the women scientists at the agricultural research laboratories. Her area of expertise was rust in wheat. She had blonde hair and looked good in jodhpurs, which she wore as an affectation. ‘Where's the horse?' Rex couldn't resist asking, and Gwyneth laughed good-naturedly. It became a joke with them.

Gwyneth came to stay for a weekend, and in the middle of a restless moonlit night – the screeching of a cornered animal had set the dogs barking, waking them all – she slipped into Boy's bed and deftly undid the cord on his pajama pants. Not a word passed between them. Boy couldn't believe his luck. Afterward, he felt much the same as when he had touched the electric fence.

In one of their bathroom sessions, he told his mother what Gwyneth had done.

‘How about that,' said Irene.

45

The Imperative: Snakes May Not Live

B
OY SAW HIM
first. A brown snake. It was sunning itself on the path leading to the house. Had to be seven feet long. At least. A whopper. Boy picked up an axe and went after it, but the snake moved faster than seemed probable for its size. Boy smashed down on the concrete with the axe, missing the brute. And smashed down again. The snake seemed to be making for the gate but at the last moment veered into a bed of rose bushes, traversed a stretch of lawn, and disappeared among the tangle of roots at the base of the passion-fruit vine.

When it was over, Boy found he had gouged holes in the cement at regular intervals the full length of the path. When Rex saw the damage, he took off his hat and scratched the back of his head. ‘Stone the crows, Boy. Was that necessary?'

46

Passenger of My Passage

G
IRLIE WAS WALKING
along the narrow dirt path to the vegetable garden when her father called out, ‘Don't move, Girlie. Keep very still.' A snake. Girlie's wits deserted her, took off for the hills. She was left hollow, staring, like a china doll.

Afterwards, Rex hunted the creature for over an hour, beating the grass, lifting back foliage, without success. He said that the snake – brown, slim, about five feet long – had been right beside her, moving very slowly, unconcerned about her presence, promenading!

Irene watched the goings-on with an air of bemusement. ‘
Poor
Girlie,' she said, shaking her head, ‘such a scaredy-cat!' Irene had read somewhere that snakes were necessary to the balance of nature.

47

Telling Tales Is Telling Lies

I
RENE HATED GOSSIP,
perhaps because she guessed she was the object of it. She could work herself into a lather of righteousness on the subject. Keep your own counsel, she warned the children, and told of dire consequences if they didn't.

Girlie repeated something Irene had said about a neighbor to her friends at school, and the remark made its way to the neighbor with the swiftness of an arrow. Irene was tending her sweet-pea plants, tying loose tendrils to a trellis, when she saw the neighbor's car approaching, trailing a plume of dust of a size that indicated an accelerator pressed to the floor. The neighbor had a high old time acting the injured party; the role, for once, was reversed.