The Grass Castle (13 page)

‘What are you talking about, Mum?’ Pam says quietly.

‘I’m a burden.’ Daphne’s voice wobbles. ‘I should be gone like Doug. Dead and buried.’

Pam smiles kindly. She stands up and puts an arm around Daphne’s shoulders. ‘Mum, we love having you here. The kids love having a great-grandmother. How lucky are they?’

Daphne sniffles and blows her nose on a handkerchief that she tugs from the sleeve of her blouse. She waves Pam away, saying, ‘Don’t fuss.’

Embarrassed, Abby squats on the floor with the boy and asks to see his Lego, giving Daphne and Pam time to sort themselves. Ben is focused on his task—he’s been amazingly quiet for a small boy. ‘What are you making?’ she asks.

‘A spaceship,’ he says without looking up. ‘It’s from
Star Wars
. See, here are the guns.’ He points out several features and Abby makes appropriate grunts of approval. Then he swings the construction and aims for her head, making shooting noises. ‘Peeow, peeow.’

Pam moves quickly and grasps his elbow, pulling him up. ‘We don’t shoot people,’ she says, frowning. ‘Come and have some morning tea, Ben.’ She guides him to the kitchen bench and directs him onto a stool where he sits obligingly, banging his feet against the legs.

Abby smiles at the grandmotherly discipline. Her Gran was the boss of the house too, given that Abby’s mother wasn’t much of a correctional officer. She moves to join Daphne again while the boy scoffs a piece of Pam’s fine cake and prattles about
didn’t mean to
and
that’s what guns are for
and
sorry Grandma
. But as Abby starts to sit, Daphne pushes up onto her feet and slowly unfolds the stoop in her back.

‘Come with me,’ the old lady says. ‘I have something to show you.’

12

It was only the other day that Daphne had retrieved the boxes from the garage. It had been a quiet afternoon: Ray was working in his office and Pam had taken Ben out shopping, so Daphne had the place almost to herself. Usually she likes it when the house is peaceful, and sometimes she naps in her chair. But that day she’d been restless and didn’t know what to do—she’d already been through the newspaper and done the crossword. It was then she’d thought of the boxes in the shed: boxes of memorabilia that had been sitting under a dustcover since she’d moved in with Pam and Ray.

This is what she wants to show Abby now: the contents of one of those boxes.

She leads Abby down the hallway and into her room, which is tidy and minimalist, the pink bedspread tucked without a wrinkle, all her clothes folded away in the drawers, her books stacked neatly on the bedside table beneath the white lamp, not an object out of place—because she knew she might bring Abby here today and she didn’t want to make a poor impression.

She is strangely and girlishly nervous as she unhooks the lid of the first box, and as she peers inside, she feels an unexpected shiver of nostalgia and regret. It surprises her—she hadn’t anticipated such a revival of youthful emotions today. Perhaps it is the presence of Abby that has done it—the girl has such an interested look on her face.

Daphne pulls out a folded length of coarse black hair, cut from the tail of the old mare when she died, and she hands it to Abby who takes it carefully. The wiry hair is crimped in a crazy zigzag, not free and floaty in the way it used to hang from the mare, but altered now into the imposed creases of many years’ storage.

‘Horses were my childhood out in the valley,’ Daphne says, her voice scraping a little, like sandpaper over glass. ‘We used them for everything: work, pleasure, mustering, hauling, brumby-running, racing, transport.’ She ticks her list off, hoping she hasn’t forgotten anything. ‘The yards were my second home. Whenever I could escape my chores, I’d be down there, watching the men working the stock. I used to climb the fence and sit on the rails while the animals milled below like a pack of swarming beetles.’

Abby is running her hand along the length of tail hair, stretching the kinks and releasing them again.

‘I was only four when I learned to ride,’ Daphne goes on. ‘That hair is from my horse’s tail—Bessie, my old black mare.’

She remembers how her father had lifted her in his strong wiry arms browned by the sun, and swung her up into the saddle, how tall she felt, how large the world seemed, how important she was sitting on top of a horse. Bessie was ancient, slow and safe, happy to shuffle along at a walk, and Daphne had devoured the freedom. On a horse she was a different person, older and more responsible.

Learning to ride was her very first rite of passage, and soon she was allowed to roam the valley on Bessie’s back. When her jobs were done, her mother would saddle up the horse and help Daphne to mount. Then Daphne would kick the old mare into action (her legs barely reached below the saddle-flaps), and Bessie would plod away from the homestead. It was the opening of a whole new world. Daphne would visit the men out working as they fixed fences, dug up rabbit warrens, grubbed out saplings and stumps. She wasn’t much use, sitting there watching them, but they didn’t seem to mind her company. And they told her stories, showed her things.

‘My favourite worker on the farm was Johnny Button,’ she says, ‘the Aborigine who came to work with us sometimes.’

Abby lays the horse hair over her arm and looks at Daphne with bright attentive eyes. It seems the mention of Johnny has pricked her interest.

‘My father used to call him in after the muster to find our missing cattle,’ Daphne continues. ‘He had a way with animals, and somehow he knew where to find them. He would go out alone and there they would be, hidden in pockets of bush, waiting to be gathered like butterflies in a net. But he never stayed very long. He would work with us for a while and then he would be gone, up into the High Country somewhere. I’m afraid my father didn’t like him very much. He was happy to use Johnny’s bush skills, but he wasn’t comfortable when Johnny was around. I didn’t understand about racism when I was young. I liked Johnny because he knew the bush differently from the others. He knew secrets about food and animals and he didn’t mind sharing his knowledge with me.’

She remembers how she used to seek him out on her old black horse.

Hey girlie
, he would say, smiling at her, his white teeth gleaming in his shiny face.
What you doing in these parts?
She would tell him she’d come to see him, to learn things. He would show her echidna-diggings around the dirt castles built by termites, and he would point out nesting-hollows in trees where black cockatoos laid their eggs. While she sat on Bessie’s back, watching, he would shimmy up the tree and steal eggs that were shiny white like pearls. Once, he’d lit a small campfire and cooked the eggs, shelled one and given it to her. She’d closed her mouth around the firm white flesh, savouring it, while Johnny grinned up at her.
Special, eh?
he said.
Better than chicken eggs.

One time she had found him digging up yams at the edge of the forest.
Lots of things to eat in the bush
, he’d said.
Yams are good
.
You throw him on the campfire and cook him up. Then eat him. Or you grind him up and make flour. Make patties. They’re good, but not so good as moth patties. Those are the best. Come from big fat moths up in the mountains. Full of nice sweet fat
.

She remembers Johnny’s smile as he told her things, his dark lips spreading over his teeth. She liked his friendly face, the way he spoke to her like she was important, as if she knew something. He had a bushy smell about him, a tangy aroma of smoke mixed with eucalypt and a tinge of sweat. It was his own particular scent: strong, but not offensive. His way of moving was unique too. Limbs long and loose, he had a fluid gait over uneven ground. His eyes were black marbles and his nose was wide, lips dark-brown and full. Daphne liked his manner of speaking. When he was explaining something he cocked his head to the side like a sheepdog and stood on one leg, the other foot crooked against his knee. She respected him, and he always had time for her.

Daphne gently takes the horse hair from Abby and places it back in the box. ‘As I grew up, I longed for a horse with more energy than Bessie,’ she says. ‘But my father wouldn’t let me move on. My mother said I had to be patient. There was a reason he was being cautious, you see. It was because of what happened to my brother. A terrible accident. My father didn’t want anything like that happening again.

‘My brother died before I was born. He was thrown from a brumby that had been brought down from the hills. My father thought it was tamed, but it hurled itself against the rails in the yards one day and crushed my brother into one of the posts. My father never forgave himself for it.’

She reaches into the box again and picks up a neatly folded child’s jumper, her son Gordon’s favourite when he was six. She had knitted it from coarse homespun wool that Doug had clipped from the sheep. Gordon had loved it, despite its scratchiness. It was warm and grey, the colour of the rocks on the ridge. And it was a rarity—Doug had got rid of the sheep soon after.

Daphne rubs the wool with her fingers, feeling its rough texture, and her eyes become misty. The never-ending well of tears for Gordon still hasn’t run dry. She swallows and lays the jumper on the bed. Today she’s too fragile to enter the shady corner of her mind where Gordon lives. It’s not something she can share with Abby.

She peers in the box to see what’s left and pulls out a stirrup iron, rusty and corroded, which she hands to Abby. ‘This came from my husband’s saddle,’ she says. ‘His name was Doug, and he was a fine horseman.’ That’s all she can say for now: Doug is another story she can’t contemplate today. She lost him to the mountains too.

Abby takes the stirrup and inspects it, then she gives it back to Daphne.

Daphne sets it aside on the bed.

Now only two items remain in the bottom of the box: a coiled stockwhip and a stone. Daphne reaches in and touches the stone, runs a fingertip around its sharp edges. Without removing it from the box, she wraps her hand around its ovoid shape and measures its weight in her palm. She remembers a warm summer’s day. Riding down the valley in the shimmering heat. Having lunch in the shade of a rock shelter. Finding the stone. Taking it home. Her father’s irrational anger when she showed it to him. So many stories and secrets. So many things she can’t possibly know. When her father died he took his secrets with him. She picks up the stone and slips it into her pocket without showing it to Abby.

Then she lifts out the old stockwhip. The handle has small cracks in it and the lash is stiff and dry, bent permanently now into twists and loops. She turns the whip over, admiring the handiwork, the neat close criss-crossing pattern. ‘My father used to make his own whips,’ she tells Abby. ‘I used to watch him plaiting the thin strips of hide around the core. At night, he would sit by the fire, huddled beneath the yellow light of the hurricane lamp. His big rough hands were so deft with the fine strands of leather.’

He knew how to wield his stockwhips with skill, and he used them liberally—on cattle and men alike. Daphne pictures him now, down at the yards, breaking a young brumby. The horse is tied by a thick hemp rope to a large solid post in the middle of the yard. Daphne, young and skinny, nut-brown from the sun, sits on the top rail to watch as her father carefully passes a scarf across the horse’s eyes with slow and gentle hands, and blindfolds it. By nature, her father is strident and impatient, fearsome and quick. But something softens in him when he’s with a horse, and he changes, becomes patient, calm and alert. It seems to Daphne he understands horses better than people, that he speaks the language of their shivery skin and inherent flightiness.

On light feet he moves cautiously around the horse, his body relaxed and soft. The brumby strains on the end of the rope, muscles bunched, then it twists into a desperate fight, hooves flailing. Her father steps aside and waits quietly. When the horse is done struggling, its sides heaving and dark with sweat, head dropped low, the rope still taut, her father moves close again and restores contact with his palm on the horse’s hot skin. He lifts a hessian sack and touches it to the horse’s shoulder, slides it gently up and down. The horse tenses and raises its head, nostrils flared. It feels the rope on its head, holds itself tight and quivery, braced for flight. Slowly Daphne’s father shifts closer, rubbing the sack along the horse’s neck. The horse breathes loudly, lifts its nose, sniffs the air, tugs at the rope. Then it releases a juddering breath that vibrates through its nostrils and shudders along its flanks.

Daphne knows the unpredictable strength of a wild horse and she’s afraid for her father. It’s frightening to watch, but it is also beautiful. Her father is an artist of sorts: lithe, and in tune with the horse.

Other workers leave their tasks and gather to watch. Johnny Button is there too, the best horseman in the district. He hooks his long dark arms over the railing and flashes a white smile at Daphne, gives her a nod.

At first Daphne’s father doesn’t notice his audience. He is focused on the horse, feeling its mood, shifting carefully with its nervous movements. As the horse circles the post, sidling away from him, he follows its evasive shimmy. Then he sees the gathered crowd, and for a fraction of a second he loses concentration, but it is already enough. The young horse swings and Daphne’s father is caught out. Leaping out of the way, he ejects a shout of alarm, and the horse lurches wildly. It leans back and yanks at the post, then hurls itself impossibly in the air and tumbles. One of its legs hitches over the rope and hooks around the post. The horse twists and struggles, thrashes like a demon. There is a loud crack like a fired bullet and the horse lies suddenly still, breathing raggedly. Its leg and body are skewed, its head still tied to the post.

Daphne’s father stands in the swirling dust and stares down at the horse, his face blank. It’s clear the leg is broken, and the horse’s stillness reflects its agony. He looks up at the crowd, hell burning in his eyes, then he strides to the fence and vaults over it, landing lightly and continuing past them all and on up to the homestead. They hear the thud of his boots on the veranda, the door banging open, silence as he passes inside.