Quick heard the old man go out then. The door closed, and it was like the room was roaring. He’d never heard his father say words like that.
In the dark that night, Quick tried to pray, but nothing came. He knew it wouldn’t come for any of them anymore. He felt the hunger raving in him.
He woke and saw it. The people in all the pictures on the wall — they were dancing and there was Wogga McBride jitterbugging along the tracks. They were laughing, all of them. He’d never known such terror as coiled in him right then. He got out of bed, ran into Fish and Lon’s room and climbed into bed with Fish. He lay awake there with his brother’s sleeping body beside him until dawn. When the sun came up he began to weep. Fish woke.
What you laughin for, Quick?
The Kybosh
It was strange that Lester should get up before her on a nonmarket day. Oriel Lamb found a bowl and a teacup on the kitchen table, and that’s all. She sat down with a sigh and rested her head on the wood. It could only be bad. To be up early, to have gone somewhere without a word, to have taken the truck. The fresh summer sun tilted at the window. She saw the pale blue promise of heat out there. An engine whistle blew. Oriel looked at her hands. They were farmer’s hands. Women told her they were men’s hands. She watched the way they squared up to make fists. She rested them on the table. Her knuckles were like dirty blocks of ice.
There was something wrong with men. They lacked some basic thing and she didn’t know what it was. She loved Lester, but a lot of loving him was making up for him, compensating. He was never quite up to anything. She knew he was a fool, but it wasn’t the same thing. Her father had been the same. He was a kindly man, big and thin and softlooking, but without enough flint in him to make his kindliness into kindness. As a child she could tell that he thought well of people, but he never had the resolve to make his feelings substantial. He never did anything for anybody but himself. Like when he remarried. Oriel’s mother and sisters died in a bushfire that razed the farm and the house. Her father was so broken by the event, that after she was dragged alive from the half-collapsed cellar almost mad with fear and shock and guilt, and after he’d killed his last pig to fix her burns, it was she who nursed him. She always had the feeling he would have just faded away, had she not mothered him as they moved from property to property on neighbours’ charity until she’d earned enough from kitchen work and dairymucking to buy them a moth-eaten old tent to take back to their place and start again. She made it a home for them until the darkness stemmed in him long enough for him to think of going on with his life. And when he remarried he told Oriel it was to give her another mother, though she knew perfectly well it was to give himself another wife. Her stepmother was a strong girl, and though she hated her, Oriel knew she couldn’t help being strong when she had such a weak man to live with. Oriel continued to love her father, but she knew that loving a man was a very silly activity; it was giving to the weak and greedy and making trouble for yourself.
Even Bluey dying in Palestine. Killed because he was careless, the swaggering underage horseman from the colonies showing how young and fearless he was, and in her bitterest moments Oriel thought of it as a betrayal, that for Bluey there was loveliness but not love. If he’d loved her he would’ve come back made sure of it.
Lester came back alright. She danced with him at the Woodanilling victory dance, another strange boy gaunt with malaria. He laughed a lot, seemed bemused by the way Oriel fastened herself to him. That’s what men had, those bemused grins. She’d seen it in him all along, from courtship to the farms, the police force, the oddjobs, oh, the endless trail of oddjobs … she’d known it right along. But what could you do? Be like that poor wretch of a woman next door?
These days she wished she could take it to the Lord in prayer, but there was nothing there anymore and there was no choice but to grit and go on. She didn’t mind the army. The army was the nation and the nation gave her something to believe in. Him, too, that’s why he joined up again so suddenly when there wasn’t even a war on. But on a Saturday morning before anyone was up, he wouldn’t be at band practice, he’d be somewhere he shouldn’t be.
Elaine came downstairs with a headache already.
Where’s Dad?
He’s out on business.
To be sure, Elaine smirked.
Don’t wrangle with me this morning, my girl, or I’m liable to put the kybosh on your Saturday.
I’ve got a headache!
These days you are a headache. Put the kettle on.
Oriel Lamb tromped out the back to the privacy of the dunny and latched the door with great care. Whatever was going on with that husband of hers would need the kybosh put on, too. But today she wasn’t sure she was up to men.
Like a Light Shinin
The night before.
It’s dusk when Sam Pickles sees his tenant and neighbour come down from the back step into the yard. He’s been standing here a few minutes smoking and easing up. His clothes and his skin smell of metals and kerosene. These days after work his mouth tastes of copper. Out the back here by the splintery fence near the mulberry tree that towers on the Lamb side, it’s pleasant and cool and except for the muffled shouts of children in the house and the faraway carping of a dog, it’s quiet. Sam sees the other man stand still a moment with his hands in his pockets to look up at the pumpkin-coloured sky, then to spit and regard the ground at his feet with what looks like a great sobriety. He’s tall and thin; he’s beginning to stoop a little already, even though Sam guesses him to be about his own age. Maybe older, he thinks, maybe he’s forty — yes, come to think of it he’d be at least that. He looks like that cowboy cove, Randolph Scott. Since the night they arrived Sam has hardly spoken to his neighbours. They’re always working too damn hard to talk, and they’re not the sort of people to waste much time having fun.
Sam leans his elbows on the fence.
Gday, he calls.
Lester Lamb looks up from the ground, straight into the crown of the mulberry tree and then along the fence. His face changes when he recognizes who it is.
Oh. Gday there. Thought I was going daft. Sounded like you were in the tree.
Too tired to get up there.
Lester is coming down to stand beside him on the other side of the fence.
A man aches all over, Sam goes on.
Ah. Know how you feel.
Cepting I get all the ache down one side, you know, cause of this. He holds up his pruned hand. Lamb squints at it and murmurs a sympathetic sort of noise. See, Sam continues, I favour the other arm all the time. Makes it ache like buggery. Used to using both arms.
Lamb gives the stump a careful look.