Grassdogs Page 4

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  There were some forms for him to sign, the matter of a fee. Edgar saw all the paperwork in that office. He walked straight past her, out into the sunshine. The door. The steps. If she spoke to him he might burst. She pursued him to the doormat, excusing herself! excusing herself! She called out to him from the top of the wooden verandah, her voice strident, ‘Sir, sir.’ Had she forgotten his name?

  Edgar kept walking, the little dog in his arms. Perhaps it wasn’t her, perhaps it was her friend—

  ‘Come back here.’

  —who had been kind to him. What was her name? Sophie, yes.

  ‘Come back, you—’

  He did not turn. Did not hear. His mouth throbbing with every step, down the gravel pathway to the road.

  They walked. He had no idea where the ute had been taken. When the silky grew tired he carried her. Beyond the last fibro houses of town where no sprinklers flung their feathers of spray. Maybe Ivy lived in one of them? There were no lawns. The paddocks, stained purple, began to spread towards the horizon. Without the domesticity of fences getting in the way the earth seemed to sigh and stretch, finding its level, luxuriating in its own sweet dust. Their footsteps found a rhythm. Cars occasionally honked, irritated at having to drift around them. They passed the dry, brown fairways of the golf course. Open spaces. Sheep crowded together in the shade of solitary trees, so still they might have been photographs of sheep. Rounding the Kapooka bends, over the rise, the blue silhouette of the Rock again came into view. He lifted the dog over the fence and climbed between the strands of wire, deciding to travel cross-country. Bugger the road. He walked through a rustling stubble of canola—rape, as his father called it—in the general direction of the Rock. It wasn’t just a barren paddock. Edgar understood, even if he wasn’t good at it, the plain hard work that went into persuading it through its seasons.

  It should only have taken a few hours to walk the distance by road, but he was forced to detour around several farmhouses and farmers out in their paddocks, who appeared between him and the distant landmark. Sometimes the dogs in these houses set up their warning chorus. He had to stop to dig grass seeds out of the silky’s ears when they arrowed their way through her fur. Once the silky rolled in a cow turd, dislodging worms, grinding its muzzle into the golden dung. Edgar did not try to stop it, rather he felt it was a reward after the torment of the pound. It looked like freedom. They walked on, the dog a little prouder in its stink.

  The paddocks hummed with insects. Black rags of crows passed overhead. Edgar’s feet swished through grass, crunching over stalks of wheat. Cows eyed them warily. Sheep fled. The silky kept by Edgar’s side. His anger at Ivy Cornish abated. Mile after mile they walked, clambering through fences. Horses snorted and whinnied at them. The silky yapped, then scampered after Edgar who wasn’t afraid of any old horse. Edgar trusted that eventually he would come to a plot of familiar ground. Soon enough he would recognise the hills and dams and dead trees.

  At first he identified more general qualities of the landscape other than the distant Rock. The slant of horizon, or a whole copse of trees that had survived the father’s manic clearing. A ringbarked redgum with upright branches like a witch’s fists clutching at the sky. He walked. Even if he had to traipse the known world, out to the flatlands and back. The slope of a particular incline (they couldn’t be called hills); the lean of a particular tree trunk; a creek bed and the contours of its erosions; all began to concur and look familiar. When he knew everything, even the birds in the sky, as the sun was starting to descend, turning the clouds green and purple, he knew he was at this empty place called home.

  The house was dark. A few loose weatherboards lay on the ground as if someone had dropped them and run away. No smoke from the chimney. The steps. The door still wide open. Was it only yesterday he had carried the feathery sack of the mother through it? Her chair on the porch. Her box of flour on the kitchen bench. His footsteps echoed. He tapped the water tank by the back door. It gave a hollow clang down to the lowest corrugations. He lit the fire and warmed some food from a tin over the stove and fed half to the dog, adjusting his own chewing in accordance with the changes demanded by his mouth. There had been no electricity since before the father had shot himself that calm afternoon, so he lit a fire in the lounge room too, the owl-eyes of a couple of plough disks deflecting heat out into the room. He patted out several sparks that leapt from the grille. He wondered where was the gun now? He went into the mother’s bedroom and stared at the unmade bed. There was hair in her brush on the dressing table. Her wardrobe. It was painful to look at, so he closed the door on those raw frailties, fixing them in his mind. He dragged the blankets off his own bed, the cushions off the couch and slowly fell asleep in front of the dancing characters of the flames. (‘Now now, Eddy, I hope yer not dirtyin’ them blankets?’) It was his place now. No mother to tell him when to go to bed, wash his ears, change his underpants. He could do as he wished.

  A rat ran across him in the night. He woke with a start. He slept. He woke, comforted by the certainty that the mother was asleep in the next room. Darkness lasted a long time.

  The next day a copper arrived to give him some instructions for the funeral. The swelling in his bottom lip had gone down, and the raw vacancy in his mouth felt less tender, although his tongue was still drawn to it. Was it the same policeman, or another? Edgar could not tell. He was trying to remember how the father had taught him to deal with coppers. Where was the spanner? The silky bared its little pointy teeth. The man read from a letter in his hands: the mother had died of coronary occlusion compounded by cirrhosis of the liver. It was all neatly typed on the sheet of paper he handed over. Edgar crushed it into his pocket. He asked if he would be able to dig the grave himself. The policeman told him if he did that then the Miscellaneous Workers Union, who represented the gravediggers, would blackban his mother’s plot and not maintain it. Edgar shrugged—was that a reason why he couldn’t dig the hole? The cop shrugged.

  ‘I see you got your dog back.’

  ‘She a good dorg,’ said Edgar.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘A good dorg.’

  ‘Right.’

  Edgar stared at his injuries in the mirror. His swellings would heal. In a way they distracted attention from the anomalous sneer of his top lip, covered with a sparse brown fuzz. His gum was pink and soft, but if he was anything like the father then he’d soon be able to chew on it. If he stuck his jaw out, the canine teeth on either side gave him a look he rather liked, a proper good set of fangs.

  A woman approached him at the graveside.

  There were a few other people there. A couple of pallbearers, the backhoe operator. Father Fletcher with the whiskers carefully excised from his dimpled chin, his soothing voice struggling against the wind. God may have been invoked. Spits of rain. Edgar made no sense of it. Dungay, the neighbour, was there, in a too-tight suit. The coffin bumped against the clay sides of the hole as the assistants lowered it down. It was a good-looking hole. A neat pile of dirt covered in a tarpaulin. He could have done as good a job. Edgar held the silky in his arms. It kept licking his hand and licking his hand. He wondered did gravediggers ever find any gold? One of the assistants offered Edgar a sprig of wattle, then, when Edgar did nothing with it, motioned for him to throw it into the grave. Dungay and the strange woman did the same.

  Dungay shook Edgar by the licked hand. Soothing words. It seemed he was not permitted to watch the backhoe refill the hole. He would have been interested in that. The woman removed her dark glasses and came over to him. She was a fair bit older than Edgar. With wavy hair. She smelled faintly of musk and sweat. Her coat was wet.

  ‘Hello, Edgar,’ she said, holding out her hand. It was cold and thin. ‘Paul Cornish wrote to me. My name is Lynne. I’m your sister.’

  This was the first time I had ever laid eyes on my uncle. I was nearly ten and horrified to think I could be related to this mutant.
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  ‘And this is Tony, your nephew.’

  He could have been a big-boned teenager, or he could have been fifty, it was impossible for me to tell. Broad across the shoulders, a bush of wiry brown hair alive on his head. I did not want to shake his hand, but she made me do it. Imagine what my friends would have said if they could see me.

  Mum had told me about her brother only days before. Why did we have to sit in a car for six hours and drive to this desolate hole in the middle of nowhere for the funeral of some old bag I had never met? Because Mum was going to bury her ghosts. Why couldn’t Dad come? Because he refused. If they weren’t important enough to visit in life, then it was too late now. Mum hadn’t seen her brother since he was a baby.

  Her brother! He belonged in a circus. When he spoke his face was a hatchet job of gums and yellow teeth. He spoke like a spaz. And when he shook my hand his fingers were wet. Did he have a clue who we were? I don’t think so. A musky woman and a kid who looked like most other kids he had seen, not wanting to meet his eye.

  When we drove away I sat sullen in the passenger seat staring out the window at the stupid paddocks. They were still as barren and oppressive as my mum remembered. Made for leaving. I did not want to listen when she explained that his appearance, the cleft palate and the harelip, was how I had also been born. There was an hereditary link. I should feel lucky I was so good looking. If that was the case, then I was never going to have kids. She ruffled my hair. I refused to believe that I had once looked like that monkey man. I wished she’d keep her secrets to herself. But if I could not believe it, what must Edgar, left alone at the graveside, have thought of us?

  It took me many years to conjure this question, and when the time came, I forgot to ask it.

  It was too much to think about. His brain could not think beyond the landscape. After the funeral Edgar left for the hills, and spent several days in the scrub on and around the Rock. The silky went with him. He found the spot where the fox had torn his arm. Not even the bones remained, out here in the open. Sometimes, in the air around them, coming even from the earth, seemed the music of crows. He thought that these were the sounds of desolation, as well as the sounds of home. From other homesteads on the western side of the Rock neighbouring dogs caught wind of them and set up a nightly wail. Edgar and the silky responded as a duet, howling together in the absence of a moon.

  They camped at night on top of the Rock, near the severed throat of the headless lion, with a fire to warm them and random sparks to contribute to the heavens. The faint glow of lights from Henty and Culcairn to the south. At dawn they woke among the stones with frost on their blankets. During the day they never tired of wandering over the gradual waves of hills. The way they rippled towards the eastern horizon or the flatlands to the west. It was an ocean swell that had set like a pudding. They were part of the landscape, like a myth. At the base of the lion’s foot they discovered the carcass of a wallaby. It had been pecked clean by ants and crows, leaving the stiffened parchment of its hide. Edgar picked a few wizened gobbets off it, kicked clear the ribs, scoured the skin on a rock. He draped it around his shoulders. It would do for sitting around the fire at night, to keep the wind off, or else for the dog to sleep on. At night the stars prickled the sky and Edgar did not feel alone.

  In the cold ashes of the fire Edgar discovered what he thought was a human tooth. He thought this had something to do with the blackfeller business, and left it there.

  On the third night, as he gazed into the familiar faces of his fire, the silky commenced a low growl at the darkness all about them. Edgar fed twigs into the flames and watched them burn and contort into coal and ash. He turned potatoes wrapped in tin foil with a stick. In the flickering shadows a pair of red eyes reflected coins of light tossed there by the flames. Edgar studied the eyes, shielding his vision from the fire, until he picked out the shape of a dog sitting, watching them. It might have been a stone in the shape of a dog. He whistled softly. The dog’s ears moved. He tossed a few steaming clods of rabbit guts. Rabbit was one of Edgar’s favourite foods, especially if he had caught them himself, but not the guts. Ready to flee at any moment, the new dog sniffed apprehensively towards them, one eye on the fire all the time. Its incisor hooked the guts up delicately as a crochet needle. A hot gulp of tongue and they were gone.

  By morning he had befriended the new dog. It was a blue heeler bitch, crossed with other bits and pieces. A farm dog, and judging by the dugs on it, fairly due to whelp. It followed them back on the morning’s journey to the house along Bullenbrung Road. The hide he had found had cracked and softened already to the contours of his shoulders. He felt like a caveman, insulated against the elements. The bitch would not walk with them, but lagged behind in the gravel. Stopped when they stopped, moved forward when they did. Sniffed at their ablutions.

  No smoke from the chimney.

  The bitch moved into the laundry. Edgar made a nest for it out of the mother’s old rags. There was a blackened scorch mark reaching from floor to ceiling behind a cupboard. The mother had often looked sadly at it. It gave him an idea to burn everything he didn’t need in the fireplace or the old combustion stove with the leaky flue. He found a pair of the father’s boots in the bottom of the wardrobe and they were a good fit. He practised kicking them off into the corner of the kitchen.

  ‘Pass the salt. Fetch my tea,’ he would call out.

  ‘Fetch it yerself,’ the mother’s ghost replied.

  ‘Do a digger a favour.’

  ‘Bag yer head, yer drongo.’

  He amused himself in this dialogue.

  Within a fortnight the bitch had given birth to a litter of half a dozen mongrel pups. Edgar watched the labour with interest and let the dog gnaw at his wrist to ease its pain. He was curious to see her eat the afterbirth and lick the clear shit sprayed over the nest by her blind rodents. He watched as they found their way to the teats and latched on. From her position on the floor the bitch stared up at him, helplessly, her eye imparting some message that he could not figure, lying in her rags.

  In another week the pups had grown a peach fuzz of fur and were crawling clumsily over each other in the laundry. The silky too observed their progress with interest. Its tail wagged like a metronome. Edgar congratulated the bitch when the pups opened their eyes; gave their first yap; did all the first things that dogs do in their unstoppable urges.

  ‘Good girl, good old girl.’

  Survive and grow. Suffer and thrive. Shit and prosper. He began to see the force in this equation.

  Edgar ate eggs. He filched them from the secret places chickens hid themselves during the day. He had to watch where they went once he’d released them from their coop. He found one of their favourite hiding places in the tin cathedral of the old shed. The bright invasion of sunlight when he hauled open the door. Its echoing emptiness. The father’s old tools were still in there, hung up on old coat hangers, rusting. There were still footprints in the dust on the floor. Bird prints. Mice prints. The dustsquirm of a snake. The peppercorn tree grew over the door, keeping it in perpetual, lacy shade, hot smell of spice in the air. The chickens laid their eggs in boxes of nuts and bolts and nails. When there were no more eggs he began to eat the chickens, plucking then cooking them whole in the firebox. Eating the limbs before feeding the bones, baked gizzards and offal to the dogs.

  ‘Good tucker, eh dorgs?’

  The remaining chickens began to look worried.

  The pups grew quickly, in direct proportion to the shrinking population of the chickens. Other dogs came to join their pack, including Rex and Bex who made a break from Dungay’s chain gang. Edgar welcomed them home and saw they had grown older, greyer. Bex immediately lay down and wanted her stomach scratched. Edgar was pleased they both remembered him. When he had finished his attentions, she lay there, limbs awry in the dust. The leathery studs of her nipples.

  Over time he adopted a wayward golden retriever. Also a bull mastiff, a Springer Spaniel, a Staffordshire terrier with half its
tail missing, a Great Dane as big as a pony. He admired the way the purebreds could lie flat on their stomachs, hind legs splayed out behind them. Edgar welcomed them all. More the merrier. He enjoyed a sense of freedom he had not imagined when the mother was alive. Mrs Hamilton. When he thought of her, a sense of pale sadness formed in him like a milky ball of dough. It sat in his gut, disrupting his ability to consider anything else. Where was honour and dignity now? During such moments the silky would come and lick his hands. Edgar stroked the soft flesh of its ears, like new leaves. It was the same gesture the father had made with money, but Edgar could not see the similarity. Disliking stillness, the pups would pounce on him, and they would resume their perpetual game of racing up and down the hallway, in and out of rooms, round and round the house. The yard. The surrounding paddocks. Edgar saw great purpose in fostering them. Each week they grew perceptibly bigger and he knew that one of these days he would have to think hard about the implications of this. Or something to that effect.

  TWO

  Endless exercise.

  Dungay watched Edgar and his troop cavort through the lupins and shook his head. From a distance it did not look like he was canine, more that the canines all resembled him. A big strong lad without a father carrying on like a ten-bob watch. Dungay was glad his daughters were safely locked up at nursing school or teachers’ college, or wherever they were. That lass who’d gone missing all these years past: too many mysteries there. There were so many dogs he could not tell from a distance whether his own were among them. He suspected they were, but he wasn’t about to march over to find out.

  Edgar roamed the countryside in every direction, investigating derelict homesteads, not unlike his own, where even the farmers had gone. Houses without roof or wall. Homes for bats and owls. He loved to yank up old sheets of corrugated iron lying about in the grass and chase snakes. They even made their way as far south as the river, defined in the distance by its shadow of trees. Which river was it? He supposed it had a name. Most things did. They drank from it; they swam in it. For Edgar, names were not important. If they followed it far enough to the west they would meet the Murray. If they followed the Murray they would meet the sea. The father had said so.