The Cattleman's Daughter Read online

  Not far from the hut Emily noticed a planting of tall, floppy-leafed corn, and next to it a stone enclosure holding a lazy sow dozing prostrate in the sun. Somewhere in the bush high above the hut she heard the tinny jangle of a bell and the bleat of a goat. With her hands on her hips, the woman watched Emily.

  ‘What are you doing here, Emily?’ the older woman asked. ‘It’s not your time.’

  ‘It’s not?’ Emily said, searching the woman’s face.

  ‘Are you looking for your mother?’

  ‘Should I be?’

  ‘Go back,’ the woman said gently. ‘You have work to do.’

  ‘Work?’ said Emily. ‘What work?’

  ‘Mother Nature’s work, maybe.’

  Emily frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  The woman laughed softly.

  ‘Go back, Emily, and perhaps you will find out.’

  ‘But I want to stay here. That’s a beautiful horse. This is a beautiful place. It’s our place, isn’t it?’

  ‘Go back to your children.’

  Emily frowned and the woman gently urged her again, ‘Go back to your children, Emily. I’ll be there for you.’

  The woman stooped and threw a few sticks on the lazy fire, gathered her skirts and turned away. She walked over to the man and together they went inside the hut, letting the heavy curtain of canvas fall shut. Emily somehow knew the woman was her great-great-grandmother, Emily Flanaghan. And the man her great-great-grandfather, Jeremiah. They were the ones who had carved out a life in the rugged mountain terrain and had remained after all the goldminers left. They were the ones who had begun her family’s journey. She wanted to follow them inside the hut but she suddenly felt a shock of pain, as if someone had clasped her ribcage with steely claws. Pain ripped through the red string of her muscles and gripped her bones so hard they snapped into shards of white. She felt herself being dragged backwards through the sharpness of the fallen branches of snowgum limbs that had speared the ground around her. Then a pain so strong it blinded her.

  Emily could hear voices shouting over a rhythmic whumping noise.

  ‘She’s gone again!’

  ‘Clear!’ someone shouted.

  A pulse of electricity spasmed through Emily’s body, her legs jerking straight, her spine pressing hard onto the stretcher where she lay. Gone were the smells of eucalypt and horse sweat and fear. Now there was only the scent of engine fumes and a roaring in her head. She tried to fight to see where she was but the pain was too much. There was no way known she wanted to come back. Not to her life. Not to Clancy, anyway. All she wanted was to find her valley in the mountains and to find her family again.

  Emily blacked out.

  Five

  In a dark old cottage in Fitzroy, Luke Bradshaw stepped from the shower and slung a towel around his hips. His shoulder-length black hair curled in loose ringlets, dripping water onto his broad brown shoulders. He swiped away the mist on the mirror with the palm of his hand. The reflection of his dark, almost black, eyes met his own gaze. He opted not to shave. All he was doing today was going to the uni gym. Without lectures, tutorials and exams, this city life was stupefyingly boring, he thought miserably. But until he got a job, he was spending a lot of his time pumping weights or swimming laps of the pool.

  It wasn’t out of vanity, more a frustration of not knowing what to do with the energy zinging through him. His was a farm boy’s body, used to doing, used to moving, used to being stretched with hard physical work. For the past three years, while studying his environmental management degree, all Luke had used was his head. Not his hands, nor his brawn. Sometimes, when the lectures drifted into esoteric intellectual drivel, he even doubted whether he was using his brain.

  Now Luke itched to get out of the city. But to where? He swiped more mist from the mirror, turned side on and tried to push out his belly. Nothing. It was sculpted to perfection, his skin dark caramel, his body carrying no fat, a throwback to a dash of indigenous ancestry. His colouring was not a good look for the son of a western wheatbelt boy. At the tiny local primary school where he’d grown up, his peers, other farmer’s sons, repeatedly called him ‘coon’ or ‘boong’. At least here in the city no one seemed to give a damn about skin colour, Luke thought. Melbourne was made up of all types.

  Opening the bathroom door, he emerged from a waft of steam and sauntered down the cluttered hallway, squeezing past road bikes, kayaks, backpacks and camping gear. In the kitchen, his girlfriend Cassy was eating organic nine-grain toast smeared with tahini. She was reading The Age and didn’t look up when he came in.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said.

  She grunted and went on reading. Luke wondered for the umpteenth time why he put up with her. He shut his eyes, lashes long and dark resting on his high cheekbones. He knew. What else was there to do? Now that his dad had sold the farm, what else was there? Cassy Jacobson made the time fly. She was one out of the box and she had pushed him out of his comfort zone.

  ‘Suck shit,’ she at last said after finishing the article.

  ‘I’d prefer Weet-Bix, thanks,’ Luke said, eyes glinting cheekily at her.

  ‘Huh?’ she said, glancing up.

  ‘You asked me to suck shit,’ Luke said smiling, the dimple showing on his cheek.

  Cassy gave him a dirty look. ‘No, not you. This.’

  She tapped her skinny index finger on the paper. Luke propelled himself away from the bench and leant over her to see the article better.

  ‘A mountain cattleman’s daughter was involved in an horrific race accident at the Victorian Mountain Cattlemen’s Cup on Jumble Plains yesterday,’ he read in his best anchorman newsreader voice. ‘Emily Flanaghan, 26, of Brigalow, hit a tree whilst riding in the Cup. Ambulance officers revived her at the scene and she was flown to Melbourne with suspected internal injuries. She remains in a critical condition. Race officials were unable to comment on the outcome of her horse.’

  Luke looked at Cassandra’s intense blue eyes. ‘You’re saying suck shit to this?’

  ‘Yeah. Stuff ’em. Bloody cattlemen. Serves them right. That tree was trying to tell her something. Get off the mountains!’

  Luke nodded. ‘Maybe, but you can’t help feeling sorry for the girl. Pretty rough to hit a tree.’

  ‘She’s not getting my sympathy. I’m more worried about the horse. Poor thing didn’t have a choice, did it?’

  ‘Oooh, Cassy, you’re so harsh! You are so mean, especially to me.’

  ‘Am I?’ she said, spinning round and running her fingernails down his bare torso.

  ‘Ow!’ He pulled away from her but she had hold of his towel.

  ‘C’mon, pretty boy. Let me bite you.’

  He felt her pointy teeth on his neck and he turned to bite her back, nibbling at her long thin neck that was now starting to bristle in the weeks since her Demi-Moore style buzz cut. She smelt of lavender and sandalwood oil. The scent had remained on her skin from their slippery lovemaking by candlelight the night before, when she’d emptied a whole bottle of massage oil over him in the bath. She’d still only halfway cleaned the bath, giggling as she bent over naked before him wiping the towel over the oil-smeared enamel surface.

  ‘What’s Karla going to say when she gets back from her bushwalk? She’ll go ape.’

  Luke had shrugged. He didn’t really give a toss what Karla thought. He watched Cassy, nude. Her small, pointed breasts swinging down like a bitch in pup and the waggle of her tiny white backside. She was so uninhibited about her body. Luke had seen more of a female form in the past two years than he’d ever thought he’d see. There were still times when Luke was confronted by her aggression and selfish ways. It left him wondering if she was a really gutsy and intelligent girl – or just fucked in the head. Still, she made life exciting and she’d turned his farm-boy ways inside out since he’d met her two years earlier.

  When Luke had first come to Cassy’s house, after they’d skipped a tutorial at uni, he’d been confronted by a bookshelf filled wi
th feminist theory. As Cassy whipped up a vegetarian risotto for him, the boy who’d been raised on chops and three veg on a wheat and sheep farm in the west ran his fingers over the spines of her books: Stone Butch Blues, Cunt, Lesbian Ethics and Herland were just some of the titles.

  ‘Whoa,’ he said to himself, as if steadying a nervous green-broke horse.

  After their ‘first-date risotto’, washed down with cask wine, Cassy became like a predatory lioness. Her eyes focused intensely on Luke, as she pounced, and he felt her nails dig excitingly into his skin. She made him go down on her that first time they made love. Her body had patches of thick, dark hair in places most Australian women waxed, shaved or hid, and Cassy seemed culturally exotic at first. None of the girls from Luke’s hometown in the wheatbelt had been this uninhibited. They all had long hair and shaved legs and played sex by the rules. Country girls, although fun, liked a little bit of romance.

  Unlike Cassy, who, in the first five minutes after they met at the uni library, said, ‘Fancy being my flatmate, and fuck buddy? We can save on a room and rent.’ It turned him on and turned him off and challenged and excited him all at once. So for the past two years, uni life with Cassandra had been interesting in the extreme. She was the antithesis of the type of girl his mother wanted him to bring home. And at the time, that suited Luke perfectly.

  He recalled the day he led Cassy into the Bradshaw family kitchen – it was as if he’d brought a footrotty sheep onto the place. Luke had been delighted by his old man’s reaction. His father was in the process of gradually selling off the farm to a tree plantation company and Luke felt his old man was literally selling the farm out from under him. As each title was sold Luke felt more bereft, as if he was in limbo, with nowhere to go in life. Luke figured his parents deserved a dose of Cassandra.

  It had been so funny to see Cassy drying the dishes for his mother while lecturing her on feminist theory and how most men were ‘terrified of being swallowed up by the vagina’. His mother nearly dropped her china teapot. It was Cassy’s refusal to stifle her screams during sex, on the basis that she was entitled to ‘self-expression’ no matter where she was, that had undone his mum and dad. His parents had suggested they not stay the second night, and would be better off going straight back to their share house in Melbourne. And a haircut would be good too, his mother had suggested. For Luke, that was, not Cassy.

  Cassandra pulled away from him now and glanced up at the kitchen clock.

  ‘Shit,’ she said suddenly. ‘My batik course. It’s on in fifteen. Can I borrow the Datto? You can get the tram later, can’t you? Please!’ She slipped a cool small hand inside Luke’s towel and twirled her fingertips in the hair there. ‘Pretty, please?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Great! But make sure you’re in the city by one. The rally’s on.’

  ‘Rally?’

  ‘Yes, I told you about it. Remember?’

  Luke looked guiltily blank.

  ‘The wind turbines. They want to put them on the Prom. Right where the parrots fly. It’s just plain wrong.’

  ‘Parrots? Yeah, that’s right! Parrots.’

  ‘You’ll be there?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  She grabbed her satchel made from recycled tyres and turned to go.

  ‘But just one thing,’ Luke said. ‘Couldn’t the birds just learn to fly around the wind towers?’

  Cassy looked at him as if he had just vomited green slime.

  ‘Shit, Luke. Shit!’ she said, as she exited the kitchen with the irritated stomp of her Doc Marten boots. ‘You are taking the piss. Geez, I hate that.’ She slammed the door and Luke smiled and looked again to the newspaper. Next he heard the door open again and Cassandra pelted an orange at his head.

  ‘Ow!’ he said. ‘That really hurt!’

  ‘Well, imagine how the parrots feel, running into those bloody great spinning blades!’ And then she was gone.

  The house fell silent, apart from the constant drone of traffic on the freeway behind the back fence. Luke rubbed his head as he listened to the stream of trucks, sedans, utes and vans making their way to work or the shops or somewhere. City life, pulsing on in its own constant, ever-hungry energy system. Luke sighed. He missed the country. Here he was, a graduate in Environmental Management. But what environment could he manage? Where? He didn’t know. Back out where his home had once been, the farm that was now managed-investment-scheme trees as far as the eye could see? He thought not. It broke his heart knowing all that land that had once produced food was now being taken over by blue gums demanding nutrients and water in great hungry monocultures. Land that no one loved any more.

  He glanced again at the newspaper article and silently wished the cattleman’s daughter and her horse well, then turned the page gloomily, wondering what other horrific stories the media was dishing up for breakfast this morning. Then an advertisement caught his eye.

  Department of Land Sustainment, Conservation and Environmental Longevity (DLSC&EL) requires a Victorian People’s Parklands (VPP) Ranger for the Heyfield–Dargo Plains region. University qualifications essential.

  He’d often heard about this region from his grandmother. Gran’s genes were responsible for Luke’s dark colouring. She and her people had come from that place. Luke felt a tingling sensation on his skin.

  The mountains, he thought. Yes, he loved mountains. Perhaps the excitement now coursing through his veins was a sign he was being called back to a home-place. After loving then losing the flat landscapes of the family wheat farm, and then being absorbed in the buzzing energies of a big city, the idea of living quietly in the mountains was like a tonic. Luke had never been to the high country, despite Cassandra’s plans for a bushwalking trip that had never eventuated. But the Victorian Alps sounded so rugged and beautiful. Luke looked up at the clock. The government office phone lines would be open by now. He would ring right away.

  Six

  Emily was sure she could see angels. The blue-white light before her seemed to drift and shimmer. She tried to drag something from her face but could barely lift her arm. She could hear a slow hiss, in and out, repeating itself over and over, and feel something tugging her skin, just below her heart. It felt like she wasn’t breathing at all. She wondered whether she had died. From far away she heard a voice.

  ‘Emily?’ Was it her great-great-grandmother again? ‘Emily.’ A cool hand on her arm and a bright light in her eyes. ‘You’re in hospital. You’ve had a fall off a horse. Emily?’

  Horse? Snowgum! Emily thought with a jolt. Then she foggily remembered she had left her girls somewhere. She grappled to recall where.

  ‘Meg, Tilly?’ she mumbled, agitated, her words lost in the mask that covered her nose and mouth. Again the woman soothed her.

  ‘Your girls? Yes, they’ve been here to see you. Look.’ The woman held up bright paintings. Emily recognised Meg’s familiar wild brushstrokes in vivid colours and Tilly’s neat pencil lines in pastel shades. Relief flooded her.

  On a trolley near the bed sat an unruly bunch of everlasting daisies and roadside flowers the girls must have brought from the mountains. Emily watched the nurse move to the end of the bed, the room spinning and coming in and out of focus. It terrified her. She frowned and made a small murmuring noise. The nurse came and laid a cool, comforting hand on Emily’s arm.

  ‘You’ll be fine, sweetie, but very tender for a while, and a bit groggy. You’ve broken ribs and there’s some internal bruising. The doctors had you under sedation to make sure your heart is tracking right. That heart of yours must be pretty smart and strong – it just got right back on track beating for you. You’re a very, very lucky girl. You’ve been given a second chance, darling.’

  Second chance? Emily tried to fit all the pieces together of how she’d come to be here. She thought of Clancy and felt a lurch of despair – the memory of him was a cruel one.

  ‘I’ll go find doctor to tell him you’re back with us. Won’t be long.’ And the nurse was gone.

/>   As Emily lifted her arm gingerly she noticed a needle taped to the back of her hand with clear fluid running through it. Pain ripped through her. She panicked. She just wanted to see her dad and her girls. She just wanted to go home. But where could home be now? There was no way she was going back to the squat brick house in Brigalow she had shared with Clancy. No, she thought, home was one hundred and fifty kilometres away in Dargo. But not just Dargo. The Dargo High Plains.

  As she stared at the back of her hand, Emily thought of her mountains. Her little finger became the Long Spur, her ring finger with the plain gold wedding band became the main Dargo Spur. Her middle finger, the one she raised at Clancy’s back, was the White Timber Spur. Her index finger, which she also pointed at Clancy accusingly, was the Table Spur, and her thumb the Blue Rag Range. The back of her hand was the Dargo High Plains, where the Flanaghan homestead nestled on sub-alpine meadows, surrounded by white-grey snowgums. Her beloved mountain run was mapped out on her hand. Gingerly she lifted her hand further to scratch her scalp that itched and burned. She was shocked when her fingertips met with the short tufts that stuck up at all angles. My hair, she thought! They’ve cut my hair! But then she remembered …

  It was the day before the Cattlemen’s Cup. She had been sitting on the edge of their marital bed, gazing at herself in the mirror, waiting for Clancy to come back from his truck run to take them away for the weekend. Her long, dark hair looked lank and greasy, even after a wash. Her jeans felt too tight and her tummy rolled out over the top of her leather belt.

  She poked at the fat roll with her finger.

  ‘That’s no muffin top,’ she said to herself. ‘It’s more like a bloody double-sponge cake.’

  She looked around the room, bored with it. She’d slept here every night for six years but it had never felt like home. The bedspread fell neatly to the clean carpet, a delicate clock, a wedding present, ticked in a civilised fashion beside the bed. Stacked on her side were Hereford cattle and Australian Stockhorse magazines. On Clancy’s side were truck and girlie mags. A tacky, tempting headline read ‘Boobs Galore!’. Emily glanced down to her own breasts, which had sustained both her children for the first fifteen months of their lives. Breastfeeding had been the most natural thing for Emily, but for Clancy it was not. His brain was wired to think tits were for blokes not children. And he was jealous of the attention Emily gave the girls. Over time, he stopped touching her. He rolled away from her in bed every night and his back became a wall.