Read Online The Hands by Stephen Orr - Free Book Online Page A

stopped before he was half-way through. Placed his body in the darkest corner of his shed, sliding down until he was sitting on the floor, curling into a familiar tight ball. Breathing deeply, once, twice, before repeating: ‘I’m not feeling so good.’
    There, in the darkness, he was nine years old again: ‘Well,’ Murray was saying to him, ‘the first thing is, you gotta learn to drive.’
    â€˜Now?’ he asked.
    â€˜Yes, now. What if we’re on a bore run and I have a heart attack, or slice me leg open?’
    Trevor just looked at him.
    So they climbed into Fay’s EH and he settled in behind the wheel, watching and waiting for his dad. ‘I can’t see.’
    Murray went around to the boot and found a rug for him to sit on. When they were ready, he said, ‘Start her up.’
    He turned the key and the motor crunched and growled.
    â€˜The clutch!’ Murray said.
    â€˜I can’t reach it.’
    Murray shook his head and pulled the rug out from under his son’s arse. ‘There, how’s that?’
    â€˜Now I can’t see out.’
    Trevor, curled in his dark corner, could still see his dad’s face. Angry, of course, but he knew it was all show, and bluff, and even gladness that he was still too small to reach the clutch. He wiped a single tear with his sleeve.
    â€˜We’ll give it six months,’ his father was saying, ‘or maybe we’ll try on the tractor.’
    He remembered wanting to talk to his father, to touch him, to hold him; on the hard, meaty part of his arm, perhaps. He wondered why they only talked about castration, and practical issues like clutches and molasses.
    The hands were young, and always would be, and he would be reaching out for his dad, willing him to lead him across the paddock that stretched to their private horizon. Harry, too, who, he suspected, was thinking much the same thing.
    The crew’s hut had taken a battering over the years. The walls had been made from lengths of pine, but these had dried and peeled in the sixty years since Bill Wilkie had put them up. Tired of the muster team’s complaints (up until then they’d slept on the porch), he’d spent three weeks (with a little help from Morris) building it. It had an iron roof, which had rusted, but stayed in place over the sixty winters and summers it had sat, mostly empty, between musters.
    The box sat at the bottom of the hill at the end of a dolomite path that snaked down, between more native pine trees, from Fay’s garden. It was away from the business of the house, so both the Wilkies and the team could maintain their own routines, keep their own hours and have somewhere to go when the disagreements became arguments.
    Harry was sweeping it out. Someone had left both doors open and sand had blown in and gathered around the walls. The gaps between the floorboards were so big that all he had to do was sweep and the sand would fall through. Chris had joined him, and he’d sent him back to fetch the shed broom. As Murray often explained, the most important thing was to keep Chris busy. He only made problems when he had time to think.
    He used a shovel to scoop the piles of sand and throw them out the front door. ‘Mum said I shoulda kept the doors shut,’ he said to Chris. ‘I can’t see how it’s my fault.’
    â€˜It’s not your fault.’
    â€˜Every time something happens. Harry, why did you leave it there? ’ He studied Chris’s actions, his big arms, his slow strokes, the way he had to think about every movement.
    â€˜Chris?’ he asked.
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜How did it happen, when you got hurt in the muster that time?’
    Chris didn’t walk to talk about it. How he was standing behind a steer, prodding its rump with a length of hose, when it kicked him in the face. How he fell to the ground clutching his broken jaw with its four shattered teeth and a mess of blood