Read Online 1915 by Roger McDonald - Free Book Online

October the second ’13
    Dear Wal,
    Thanks for your trouble I smiled to readit. Why worry thats life. Country here-abouts green as can be.
    Until your return.
    Sincerely,
    Wm.
    After Walter’s all night train trip his father handed him the reins of the sulky and asked him to drive his mother home while he set off separately in a wagon loaded with twine, poison, and grease-clotted harvester parts. Down past the racecourse Walter gave the horse its head and ya-hooed until his mother objected, quietening him with news of district “developments”, reddening enthusiastically over the Bindogundra New Year Dance (he was expected), then describing a missionary meeting as she probed uncertainly towards a change of subject: Billy’s mother was in hospital with something serious. Billy — he’d been found drunk in a horse-trough in October — now had himself well in hand for the harvest, and Mr Mackenzie had been at church every week since Elsie’s illness. ( What was wrong with her?). Oh yes you’ll be interested to hear that Mrs Scott at Cookamidgera has married one of her late husband’s brothers.
    When Walter persisted she told him: a cancer.
    They were on a side-track because of the washaway at Cobblestone Creek. From here, half a mile off-centre, the familiar countryside looked strange, like somebody else’s. He missed none of the landmarks he knew — the six white ringbarked trees, the decayed cottage where rabbiters camped, the thirty-foot dip they called “the plate” where the soil changed and theirwheat paddocks began — but farther off the suddenly — revealed distant view was altogether new. Where had the red gash in the hills come from? That lone pine standing above the rest, he’d never before seen it. And whose house was that, lying like a bent nail under the blue-hazed ridges?
    â€œOurs,” said his mother.
    The imminence of death, Billy’s mother’s death, distorted his apprehension of familiar places and things.
    Later, eating lunch without much appetite, Walter heard his mother say, “Elsie doesn’t have long. A month at best.” She performed plain tasks as she spoke: but the bread board, thought Walter, the cold mutton and the tea caddie would be remarkable to Mrs Mackenzie now.
    Â 
    That afternoon Walter wandered for miles around the wheat, skirting the edges then plunging in. The harvest would soon bear it away, this stalk-town of heat and dust and pale light, but for the moment it was endless. On all fours no-one could tell where he was, except the quail that skimmed between glassy stems and disappeared, except the nesting rabbits, the mice, the worms in the dry ground, the sparrowhawk twitching overhead. Emerging under the box tree at the centre of the paddock he rested in its unrelieving iron shade, where in a week or two waterbags would hang dripping from branches. With his hat on his knees Walter was itchy from the straw, messing his hair as he scratched, still unsurprised that at nineteen he should be engrossed in a game that had absorbed him at ten. Someone else might have said that the paddock murmured in the heat, but having crawled under its roof Walter heard each click and hiss and screech separately. The house was out of sight along with fences and outbuildings. Wheat alone dropped away in all directions: and he saw himself at an elevated point at the top of a ripening world. Soon the life of the paddock would go down before the blades of the harvester: then it would rise again. Here at least there was a pattern to hold to. Fear, which in the city was abstract and confusing and could conjure brick walls only, had ground to contend with in the bush, and on the ground life. It was good that Mrs Mackenzie would be able to see all that if she looked out the hospital window.
    The place crackled with work towards Christmas. His mother, he now noticed, was indeed distressed about Mrs Mackenzie. She asked Billy