Read Online The Hands by Stephen Orr - Free Book Online

house.’
    Silence. The two girls and the farmers’ sons watched him. Shakina managed to keep her mouth closed. What is he, she was wondering, a retard? Around the house? What about the farm, the animals?
    â€˜I help Harry with the chooks and the veggies.’ He indicated in case they were unsure who Harry was.
    Silence, again. And then Shakina, unable to hold it in any longer. ‘What do you do during the muster?’
    Chris stopped to think. ‘Sometimes I do the counter, so they know how many they’ve loaded onto the trucks.’
    But Shakina wasn’t happy with that. That was something you got a kid to do, not a man. ‘So you don’t do the rounding up?’ she asked.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Why not?’
    Everybody felt the awkwardness: Mrs Lawrence and Harry, the other kids and their mums; Murray and Fay, sitting on the lounge, and Carelyn, sewing a button on a shirt.
    â€˜It’s sorta hard for him,’ Harry told Shakina.
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜He got a … injury, when he was a kid.’
    Shakina still wanted to know. ‘What, kicked by a cow or something?’
    â€˜Everyone does what they can on a farm, don’t they?’ Mrs Lawrence said.
    But Shakina just stared at the oldish-looking man, unsure.
    Chris bowed his head. He could feel them staring at him, thinking, deciding. This, he remembered, is why he’d given up on the School of the Air after only six months. In those days it hadn’t been so bad. Just the radio, and the school books he couldn’t make any sense of. But his fellow students (and back then there’d been twenty in a class) had somehow been able to tell. Although he was hundreds of kilometres away from them, they somehow managed to tease him. Not with actions, or words, but pauses, and questions they knew he wouldn’t be able to answer.
    Chris, what sort of tractor’s your dad got?
    Eventually, he’d retreated from the radio they’d set up for him and Trevor. Murray and Morris had said to Fay, ‘Go on, make him do it,’ but no matter what she said, Chris had refused to go anywhere near the black box. ‘I don’t understand what she’s talking about,’ he’d tell them.
    â€˜You just gotta sit and listen and answer a few questions,’ Murray had said, but it didn’t make any difference.
    Miss, Chris reckons he’s got a dozen girlfriends .
    I didn’t say that .
    And he’s kissed them .
    No .
    Chris looked at the small black eye. ‘I have 187 videos,’ he said. ‘I’ve watched them all at least ten times.’
    Harry gently bit his lip.
    â€˜What sort?’ Aleisha asked.
    Chris’s face lit up. ‘War movies … and thrillers, like Mission Impossible .’
    Silence.
    Fay took a deep breath. She stood and walked over to her son. Mrs Lawrence and the other students watched her growing bigger in the background. She put her hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Well, kids, Chris is gonna come and help me now.’
    As they all thought the same thing. As they watched, as Fay led Chris out, towards the laundry.
    And Shakina said, ‘Is that his wife?’
    Trevor returned to the shed. He went inside and studied his newly repaired roof. ‘Right.’ Turned to a pile of old timber, took out his tape and started measuring. Most of them were too short, but there was a piece of pine that looked long enough to replace the rotten eaves that supported the busted gutter. He secured it in his vice and started sawing. Moments later he stopped and sat down, looking at the pictures of Harry’s hand. Looked at his own hands: liver-spotted, freckled, wrinkled; the pink, splotchy undersides marked with impossibly short lifelines. ‘I’m so tired,’ he said, leaning forward so his head almost touched his knees.
    â€˜Right!’ Realising action was the only solution, he jumped up. Grasping the saw, he started working but