The Cattleman's Daughter Read online

  In the darkness as they drove, Emily looked at the glow from the dash. It reminded her of the first time she’d ridden in the truck with Clancy. She remembered the rush of excitement when he’d pulled up at the Tranquillity drive and she’d climbed up the steps to open the truck door. It had been five-thirty in the morning and still dark. The moon in the dawn sky was gently illuminating frosted paddocks. The first thing Clancy had shown her on the complicated computerised dashboard of dials and buttons was his sleeper light.

  ‘I call it the sexy light.’ In the dimness, he had cast her an inviting look. ‘Do you want my sexy light on?’ With a teasing smile, his finger jabbed the tiny cherry-red square with a half moon on it. The light above their heads gave the cab a seductive red glow. On that first trip, they’d barely travelled five kilometres down the road before Clancy pulled over and was kissing her. Emily had shuddered as he kissed her softly above the lace of her bra. The sensuality of that first time in the truck with Clancy was intoxicating.

  As he undressed her in the cab, she had seen the cattle prodder propped behind his seat, the prongs of it looking as if they belonged to Satan himself. She’d never met a boy as bad as him. It thrilled her. All her life she’d been so good. So responsible. The glue holding her family together. Now here he was, this wicked man, who made her laugh and cry and lose herself in the sexual sway of lust. ‘Want to get lucky with the truckie?’ he had said, helping her up into the sleeper and drawing the curtains shut.

  On that first dawn trip, with her body zinging from Clancy’s lovemaking, Emily had loved seeing the other trucks coming towards them, all lit up like Christmas trees. She was falling in love, lost in the gentle sway of the cab, the modern interior snug and clean. For the entire trip she had longed for Clancy to reach over and touch her again. She watched his sexy hands draped over the big round steering wheel and the way his middle finger teased the split-shift button on the gearstick. As he double-clutched round bends, the sigh of the air-clutch reminded her of her own desires. Everything within that truck was plush and phallic. From the purple polish the men used to shine their silver stacks to the way the truck let out a sound like a whoosh of steam when Clancy pulled up at the truckstop. She was addicted to him. And back then, he had treated her as if she was the only one in the world for him.

  Slowly, though, the truck had begun to take him away from her. More and more he left her alone with the babies. On the rare occasion she rode in the truck in the later years of their marriage, she found herself staring into the giant side-mirror, watching the white line fall away behind her. It felt like her life was going backwards, their love slowly turning into something toxic. Now, on her way to the plains, Emily realised she was free from Clancy. But with that freedom also came a great sadness, for what their marriage might have been.

  PART TWO

  Twelve

  On the Dargo High Plains the snowgums glowed white in the light of a full moon. The gumleaves glistened liquid-silver, like a million tiny fairy lights in the treetops. Long grasses shone in the stillness of the night. As Sam hit another rut in the meandering gravel road and scudded over corrugations in the bend, Emily reached out for the door handle to steady herself, wincing with pain.

  ‘Oi!’ she said, casting a glance at Sam, who was happily swinging on the wheel.

  ‘Sorry, mate.’ He braked and swerved suddenly to miss a Hereford cow and calf that were dozing on the road. ‘Oops!’

  Emily glanced in the side-vision mirror to see Rousie dig his claws into the tarp of the ute, as if surfing the crest of a wave. She smiled at how happy he looked to be off that suburban chain and in the scrub again, nose to the wind, where a kelpie should be.

  After they had sped through Dargo, and began the journey past the Cherry Tree yards and up the Long Cutting, Emily began to feel better. She felt lighter, stronger, happier as the mountain air grew thinner and the vegetation, caught in the headlights, changed from straight-trunked woolly butts and Brown Sallees to twisted snowgums on rocky basalt.

  Over a cattle grid and they were there at last: the Flanaghan High Plains Station. They veered off the main gravel road and parked at the station’s front gate. Few people, save the locals in Dargo, knew this was the gate into the homestead. It was just a regular farm gate set among the snowgums, except it was far from straight. Its pipe frame carried a bow, where a panicked young horse had once hit it at a bolt in Emily’s grandfather’s day. No one had ever thought to straighten or replace it. Sam looked at Emily.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ he said, jumping out. Emily wound down the window and breathed in, savouring the smells of summer grasses, cooling after a day in the late-summer sun, fat-leafed clovers, eucalypts and clean mountain air. At last, joy rose within her. For now, her pain was forgotten, the memory of Clancy’s anger buried, the stagnant sadness banished. She was home. All she needed now was her girls and her horse and her life could begin again.

  The old track to the homestead was like a tunnel, lined with silver snowgums. The moon filtered through the canopy of gum leaves and illuminated the yellow everlastings and billy buttons and white paper daisies. The scene was so beautiful, Sam and Emily sat in contemplative silence as they rumbled slowly over the hillocky track towards the handsplit weatherboard homestead.

  Sam left the ute idling and got out.

  ‘You sit in the warm while I get a fire going.’

  ‘No, bugger that. I’m tough. I’ll help.’ Emily did her best to ignore the stab of pain as she clambered out of the ute. The dressings on her wounds tugged and itched and she felt faint. She focused on feeling the solid core of ancient basalt soil and rocks beneath her feet. She found herself asking the place to ground her there, so that she would never leave again. The earth seemed to pulse through the soles of her feet and as she shut her eyes, it felt for a moment like time had stopped altogether.

  Then a gust of wind raced through the trees and pressed its breath against Emily’s face. With the moon above and the dark earth below, she felt both giddy and purposeful. She was meant to be here. But she didn’t completely understand why. What was the old Flanaghan woman asking of her? Emily stared up at the icing-sugar dusting of stars in the velvety black sky. Suddenly her trance was broken when Sam threw a swag onto the deep old boards of the verandah and Rousie leapt joyfully from the ute.

  As they opened the front door and walked inside, a rush of memories came to Emily of summer droving days. Just the creak and bang of the old wooden flyscreen triggered images of all the comings and goings from the place. Used only in the summer and autumn months as a base for tending their cattle on the mountains, the homestead was like a living museum of Flanaghan family history.

  In the hallway, under a rustic bench seat, there was a line of old boots shaped by the feet of several generations of Flanaghans. Old coats, still worn when unexpected snow came in at Easter time, made Emily remember her grandfather. She thought of him wearing one of those coats as he slid down a rain-soaked embankment to help a calf up out of the scrub, and how her five-year-old self had stood watching, rain running off her cowgirl hat, her fingers red and cold as ice. As she walked on the old lino, Emily felt the house stir itself awake to their presence.

  In the kitchen, Sam reached up to the mantel for matches. The crack and fizz and smell of the match gave Emily a feeling of comfort as Sam lit a row of candles that had been stuck in Auntie Flo’s whisky bottles. Sam heaved open the door of the old woodstove and tilted a candle inside so the flame caught the corner of newspaper.

  ‘Sit tight,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll go turn on the gas and get a load of wood for the night.’

  Emily nodded. Gingerly, she pulled out a chrome and red vinyl chair that had been all the rage in the sixties, sat down at the kitchen table, and stared through the crack of the stove door, watching the bright flames dance. She listened to the roar of air in the flue and stretched her fingertips towards the growing heat. She ran her hands over the heavy wooden table. Etched on its surface were all the stories from the p
ast. The dull light from the candles tipped tiny dark shadows onto the table’s pockmarked landscape. Her great-great-grandmother had had the table brought up from the original hut in the Mayford gully, and here it had remained ever since. Emily felt a flash of energy run through her, the tiny hairs on her arms lifted and a tingle ran over her skin as she saw an image of olden-day Emily, her sturdy boots treading a dirt floor as she stuffed a rabbit at the table and turned to place it in a camp oven for baking. Emily blinked and the image was gone, just as Sam came through the door.

  ‘Bit quieter than Nashville out there,’ he said.

  ‘Do you good,’ Emily said.

  ‘Do you good too.’

  ‘I just want my girls with me and then I’ll be set.’

  ‘We’ll ring Dad first thing.’ Sam raised the old kettle in the air. ‘Cuppa?’

  Emily shook her head.

  ‘No, thanks. I’m going to crash.’

  As she carried the candle along the narrow hallway, cupping her hand about the flame, Emily felt the comfort of the house wrap around her. She was aching all over now, and part of her was scared, but she knew leaving the hospital had been the right thing to do. This was the place to heal. Wanting to shed her pyjamas that reeked of the hospital, she opened the old wardrobe and held out the candle. Whenever the Flanaghans came up to the homestead, they lived out of their bags, never staying more than a week at a time. It had been different in her grandparents’ day. The clothes in the wardrobe had been there since they had lived up here full-time in the summer months to salt and muster cattle, fix fences and combat summertime weeds. It was easier than making the winding eighty-kilometre journey back into Dargo in their little old spring-suspension utility, or on horseback as they preferred. Pa always chose horses over cars. Part of his routine had been riding out and dropping a match here and there along the tracks to trickle fire through the landscape when the weather was just right, in the way the Aborigines had done. But over the years this ritual of burning had been reduced and eventually banned by the government, and the landscape had gradually changed. The beautiful open-treed country of Victoria’s Alps had become a mass of bone-like fallen limbs from trees weighted down with snow. On the lower slopes dogwood and wattles, once kept in check by the cattlemen burning patches of bush in a mosaic pattern across the mountains, now choked the landscape. Places that were once gently cool-burned and periodically grazed were now inaccessible.

  Life gradually changed for the Flanaghans too. The once isolated family living on the plains had become a thorn in the side of the government men, who did not believe the Flanaghans should profit from pristine wilderness. As the roads improved, the interference from the city increased. The more bushwalkers, skiers and rubberneckers arrived, the more rules the cattlemen faced. Emily’s grandfather had died a sad man. Sad for his mountains. Sad for the loss of a simple life and for the loss of his privacy and freedom. Emily ran her fingertips over the coarse woollen dressing gowns – her grandfather’s brown check, and her grandmother’s soft blue one. An image came to her of her grandpa and grandma sizzling chops in a pan in the pre-dawn light, while a pot of strong tea sat on the kitchen table wearing a woollen brown-and-yellow tea-cosy – the one they still used. At the very back of the cupboard, Emily found a nightie she didn’t remember at all. It was long and white, with intricately stitched blue flowers and tiny buttons at the scooped neckline. The sleeves were long, ending in a thin ruffle. Emily giggled. The nightie was so old-fashioned compared to the gauzy negligee Clancy always wanted her to wear. The angrier he had got over her cosy flannelette pyjamas, the more she’d dug her heels in. She’d only ever slipped between the sheets blissfully naked on nights Clancy was away, enjoying then the sensual feel of her skin.

  She pulled the nightie off its hanger, which was stitched with the same tiny flowers, and decided to put it on. She did so slowly and painfully, then stared at her ghostly reflection in the mirror. The candle’s light did not reach far, the lower half of her body, her legs and her feet disappearing into blackness.

  ‘Bloody Joan of Arc!’ Emily said, taking in her cropped dark hair, the shadowy sockets where her eyes were and the nightie’s creamy glow. She sniffed at the sleeves but smelled only mothballs – not a trace of her grandmother’s scent was left. She looked again at her reflection and carefully took a twirl, fancying herself as an old-fashioned heroine. Ignoring the crunch of pain, she tried to make a flourishing move towards the bed.

  Emily clambered between the icy sheets, feeling so relieved to be out of hospital and strangely happy to be ‘on the run’. She lay for a time twirling the hospital wristband around and around on her arm, looking at the ornate cast-iron work of the old double bed and thinking again about her grandparents. They had lived so self-sufficiently, with God and Mother Nature and the spirits of the land as their guides. She thought of the simplicity of their lives, and the core of happiness they carried within themselves. She’d felt it as a child, and she was sure she could see that same trait in her girls. Particularly her youngest, Meg. She would lay her hands on her mother’s skin and Emily could feel something special in her touch. An odd child, Meg had never seemed to fit with others, preferring to play alone and talk to imaginary friends, making no sense to anyone but herself. Tilly, on the other hand, was less dreamy, and got on with the practicalities of life. In the hospital, it had been Tilly who got water for her mother and plumped her pillows and straightened sheets, while Meg had sat with her warm little hands on Emily as if trying to heal her. In the darkness Emily longed for her girls.

  ‘Goodnight, Tilly and Meg,’ she said to the empty room, conjuring the image of them peacefully asleep in her old bedroom at Rod’s house. As she drifted off to sleep, Emily thought again of her vision of bringing her girls up and living here full-time, even when the snow came. Was it possible? Even the Flanaghans from three generations ago had retreated to their winter homestead on the lower valley of Mayford when snow draped itself over the mountains in thick blinding drifts of white. Was she strong enough to endure a winter here?

  ‘Emily,’ came the whisper.

  In her sleep Emily frowned and stirred a little.

  ‘Emily.’

  The voice again. Suddenly Emily’s eyes flashed open. She sat up in the pitch-dark room. The candle stub was extinguished. The moon had slunk away behind the tree tops and gone was the glow it created behind the old lace curtains.

  A faint, eerie light came from the hallway, and she could hear music, gently playing. It couldn’t be Sam. There was no radio here. No power to run anything. Before she had time to find fear she got up, her feet pressed cold against the lino. She struck a match and the skerrick of candle that was left offered up a pathetic, wax-drowned flame. She tiptoed along the hall and gently pushed open the door to Sam’s room. Just as the candle petered out, she saw him sleeping soundly beneath old grey woollen blankets. Emily caught the sound of music again. Fingertips pressed to the wonky horsehair walls of the old house, she blindly felt her way along the hall to the kitchen, where the fire still glowed. The music was clearer now. Emily could hear an old piano accordion, and voices, too, being carried along with the tune. The voices were both male and female, and they were singing a hymn. As she walked through the kitchen to the old dining room, she saw a cluster of rough working men in their well-worn Sunday best. Emily stood in the doorway, holding her breath.

  They didn’t look up from their leatherbound hymn books as they stood in front of makeshift pews of flat slab-cut timber propped on bricks. At the front of the congregation stood a handsome young minister, his dark hair slicked back with a straight side part. He was wearing a three-piece suit, his brilliant white priest’s collar catching the light from the oil lamps. Could this be the Flanaghan son, Archie, who had eventually left his preaching and returned to the plains to work with his young bride Joan, Emily wondered? She looked around. Next to them sat a cluster of children of various ages – Flanaghans, Emily somehow knew instinctively, for at their side were the same
two people she had seen in her vision of the Mayford hut: Emily and Jeremiah. Together with a group of wayward goldminers, they were singing songs of thanks to God.

  Without fear, Emily stepped into the room, wanting to join the gathering. As she did, the woman with the greying hair looked up. She tilted her head to one side and smiled gently at her. Emily smiled back. Then she, too, began to sing the hymn, the words foreign to her, yet somehow known …

  ‘Emily. Emily,’ came a voice in the darkness as she felt the press of hands on her arm.

  She woke suddenly to see Sam above her, his face caught in the shine from a small kerosene lamp.

  ‘What?’ she said, sitting up.

  ‘You woke me up.’

  ‘But I was in the dining room.’

  ‘What? No, you weren’t! You were here, talking in your sleep. Well, not actually talking. You were singing. Trust me, I’m the singer in this family. Sounded like two cats in a bag.’

  He held the lamp up to her. ‘Geez, what are you wearing? You look like flamin’ Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music!’

  ‘A nightie. One of Nan’s.’

  ‘A passion-killer more like. It’s a wonder she had any descendants!’

  ‘Get over yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m not that bad a singer. And what would I want with passion anyway!’

  ‘So, you’re okay? You don’t need more painkillers?’

  ‘Why do you keep asking me that? I’m fine, really I am. I reckon it’s you who needs the pills. Are you hooked on them or something?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Sam, but Emily felt a stab of concern for her brother, who’d clearly been pushing things too far in his life.

  ‘Don’t you go and do a Heath Ledger on me, mate,’ she said. Sam looked off into the darkness of the room, his big, blue-green eyes reflecting the glow of the lamp. He said nothing. Instead he turned back to Emily.