In the Winter Dark Read online

  Outside, the dog whined. It wasn’t a farm dog, but a silky terrier, that useless kind of dog with a yap that sets a man on edge.

  ‘What’s that dog chained up for, woman?’

  Ida sniffed. ‘He’s done business here on the lino and I’m punishing him.’

  ‘I warned you about buying that dog.’

  ‘Gawd, that was ten years ago, Maurice. He’s old, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, there’s three hundred acres out there he can crap all over.’

  ‘I’m aware of the problem, Maurice. It’s all in hand.’

  I shifted in my seat, smoothed a page, and the dog found a keener note to whine upon. It was dark outside, and cold, and if it hadn’t been for the dog and the chops and the stove and our crotcheting, you might have heard the water-snore of the valley, that strange sound of the river moving and the damp air settling on it in the hollows.

  Ida sighed and served up the pork chops with a splash of peas and a hillock of mashed potato, and we ate in the silence we were used to. The food was good. I could feel the irritation and the weariness back off. Neither of us had really got going before the scream began. It wasn’t a long scream; it stopped before I got to the door. Ida bellowed the dog’s name, and the cold backhanded me as I stumbled outside.

  I turned the light on. Saw the chain trailing down off the edge of the verandah.

  ‘Maurice, what was it?’ she said, sounding like she’d made the effort of being calm.

  I heard her coming from behind me, and I kept my back to her. I held the bloody dog-collar in my hand.

  ‘Get the shovel, love,’ I said. I heard the awful quietness in my voice. ‘Keep away. Go and get the shovel.’

  I heard a thick noise in her throat, and as she moved away I looked out into the darkness. There was a light on up at Jaccob’s, but no lights from across the way. My palm was hot with blood. In my hand was the severed head of Ida’s silky terrier, still with nerves enough to flex its jaws foully in my grip. That was how I found it, the head left in the collar, the chained snapped, blood pushing out hot. And nothing else.

  I heard Ida coming back and it struck me of a sudden that maybe we should never have stayed on here, maybe I should have taken Ida out of this valley thirty years ago and never come back. To spare her the hardships, the hidden things, this night.

  We’d spent some time together, me and Ida. The children had grown and gone, and over the years Ida had fattened up. She sort of spread, like a garden gone wild. I think she was richer, better for the years. She’d developed a big, wide laugh and her memory was gentle. She wanted the best for people, to think the best of them. She gave me the benefit of any doubt, and she’d had a few, because, looking back on it, I see I’d grown in, gotten smaller, meaner with age. But she stayed, even so, though sometimes I wonder why. We loved each other, but I gather sometimes it’s less than enough. Things had been cool between us sometimes, even stony quiet, but never in thirty-six years had there been an evening of such sick silence as this turned out to be.

  We went to bed early, in the end. We lay beside each other, straight as coffins. Moonlight forked in through the curtains. We were there like that about an hour, maybe two, before Ida spoke.

  ‘Was it a fox, you think?’

  I listened to our breathing.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But she heard me open the bedside drawer, and she heard in the dark the heavy, metallic sound as I placed the rifle bolt on the table. It was the only way I could tell her what I thought and not lie.

  I dreamt I ran downhill full of holes in the creeping blindness of night, aflame and screaming. I lit up the valley like a torch and everything saw, everything knew I was being punished. I found the river, dived in, but it was just fuel to the flames. My mouth was a hole. There was nowhere to go.

  We all dreamt that night – the four of us – as though our insides were all tight and grinding with rent chunks of secrecy shivering up to the surface.

  I remember every dream from that night: Ronnie’s floating nightmare, Jaccob’s terrible memory, I even know what Ida dreamt. Like that old Bible story about the wildman chained up in the tombs, ranting and foaming in all those voices. Call me Legion, he says, because we are many. And the pigs screaming down into the water, remember that? What was he having, delusions? Or was he having everyone’s recollections, was it history that tormented him? What had the demoniac done in order to be mercilessly visited by everybody’s dreams? Well, I can’t speak for him, but I think about that poor bastard when I sit out here talking to the dark, or when I wake in the night from a dream that belongs to someone else. The wildman had someone come to cast out his demons. But here tonight, like every night, I sit here, and no one comes.

  JACCOB WENT through his orchard in the light of morning. He looked about, but he most definitely did not search. His neck was sore and his bones ached from sleeping in the rocker. From over the Stubbses’ place he heard the low gearing of a motor. Kookaburras whipped up a brassy chorus back in the trees, and he saw fresh roo scat between the fruit trees which he ground moist into the earth with a smile. He smelt grass. He remembered the day he retired, the day he was a little mad with sun, when he mowed that rich bastard’s lawn and then his herb garden, and his azaleas, made his garden gnomes into amputees, until the place looked like a UFO had landed on it in a careless manner. Yes, it was good to have at least one memory where you took destiny into your own hands.

  He went down to the roadside boundary from where he could see birds engraving the platinum surface of the river. The little bridge shimmered in the sun, and he could smell the muddy sweetness of the swamp. He knew this place was good. Even if he died here alone, it would be good. It was morning, light had come and he had nothing to do but live his life.

  He stopped, though, when something caught his eye. Something red. The wet-stiff grass seemed to shiver. Jaccob reached for a stick. As he climbed through the fence, the stick snagged in the wire and he fumbled a second and left it there. From across the road, in the tall grass, he heard panting. Well, it might have been panting. He stood there in the road, wishing he could just walk away, but he was afraid to turn his back. Whatever it was, it was moving again. He could see its slow passage through the grass. As he crossed the road he listened to the stones mashing underfoot, then the quietness of the macadam. A duck bawled in the distance. Jaccob hardened up. He saw everything quite clearly: gravel at the edge of the road, wild oats, the black gloss of beetles. And, knowing it was a stupid thing to do, he waded into the grass. He felt weirdly calm, or perhaps calmly weird. It was morning and there was light and sound and it was his land.

  It hit him behind the knees so hard he went down like a sack of wheat, steeling himself, even as he fell, for the pain to come. It had hold of his legs, but his nerves hadn’t caught up yet. His nose ploughed the ground, his mouth was full of grass stalks, and he tasted whisky at the back of his throat, waiting in that awful timeless calm before the pain.

  ‘Dad?’

  Jaccob lifted his face from the dirt.

  ‘Daddy, is that you?’

  ‘What the bloody —’

  He twisted over and saw behind him, grafted to his calves like a rugby player, the girl from over the valley. Her hair was wet across her blue-pink face, snarled in drifting snot. Her red parka was torn and twisted. She was a mess.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘Don’t go.’

  He felt laughter and relief gushing up in his throat and he hit her.

  Ronnie didn’t dare breathe. Sometimes the man carrying her looked like her father and sometimes he didn’t at all. His face seemed to grow and shrink. The ground raced below her, like a runway. Yes, he hit her, he was her father alright. Yeah, now he’d take her up to her room and beat her and that hopeless twat of a mother’d shout at him but not stop it and he’d leave her in the room and she’d tear her clothes and smack her face against the wall while they ate their dinner downstairs.

  There was a big place c
oming up, all elephantine and distorted. White. A white place. Oh, God, not a hospital! No, not this trick. Oh, they had it all organized. So this was the doctor. With his knife, his fish scraper, his pig-sticker or what-the-hell-ever.

  She was inside, like it swallowed her. White walls, dirty white walls. So why did he put her on the floor? On a rug? Sometimes the rug was all crawly and sometimes just a rug. She lay there. No she couldn’t let them, but she couldn’t move anymore, no she couldn’t. Here came those great shudders again, and then she was hot and prickling and there was orange light and the doctor was pulling at her parka. Oh, God in Heaven must know she didn’t deserve this; she didn’t deserve much, but this . . . this! This all went purple and grey and this became that. Or something.

  On hands and knees I went over the wet grass, combing the ground beyond the verandah. I smelt woodsmoke and eggs, heard birds, felt the angry drive of blood in my ears. I was looking for tracks and getting madder. Everywhere I found my own stockinged footprints where last night I’d trampled the place like a fool in a fit. There was a rut where grass and dirt had been uprooted: something stopping fast. I laboured on for an hour. I cursed myself, I felt the old back and knees complain, but in the end I did find a single, clear print. Fifteen feet away from the verandah. I sat there on my haunches and set my teeth to just look at it.

  At breakfast, a beeswax cast of the print stood between Ida and me on the table. We ate in silence. The early cold blue of the sky was giving way to grey and it felt as though a westerly was due. The footprint tilted, catching a bit of light. I could smell honey from it. I caught Ida looking at it. She sipped her tea. She brewed the stuff strong enough to shrivel your tongue.

  ‘It’ll rain d’rectly,’ she said. ‘Better get to it.’

  I watched her get up and push into her gumboots by the door. I saw the blue veins of her legs and felt grateful and sad and as old as hell.

  That morning we drove around the property, moving from one minor task to the next, putting some feed about when it wasn’t really needed, shifting steers from paddock to paddock. Ida drove the ute and I got out for the gates. The pastured hills were the colour of the sea, and the sheep and steers like islands on it. Crows hoyed from the trees. We saw Jaccob on the edge of his orchard. He was stiff and small in the distance. We rode the boundaries, as they say, and we didn’t know quite what else to do.

  On the northern boundary closest to the forest we came upon the carcass of a roo caught in the fence. It was a doe, fresh-dead with its neck broken in the wire. I motioned Ida to stop and I pulled the skinning knife from its sheath beneath the dash, thinking of meat for the dog, but Ida just looked at me and drove on and it caught me stunned a moment before I sank back like a fool, too ashamed even to say sorry.

  Jaccob got the fire going and felt it hot on his face as he began to undress the girl who lay rigid with cold. Her eyes were wide, pupils like bullet holes. All she seemed able to do was shake her head. She was blue as a bruise. He peeled two shirts from her and her small breasts moved like . . . like things. Her jeans and boots were slicked with mud and his fingers had become fat and clumsy, but he got everything off and threw it on the hearth. He felt her eyes on him as he shucked down her panties, the way he might have done if she was his child, and the thought hurt. From upstairs he brought the feather quilt to wrap her up. The fire cracked and spat.

  Jaccob sat down and thought. No, he wouldn’t call a doctor, not yet.

  The girl began to cry.

  All morning Jaccob tended the fire while the girl slept. He was agitated like he hadn’t been for a long time. He tried not to prowl and pace lest he wake her, so he confined himself to the rocker. Hell, this was his neighbour, naked on his living room floor. He didn’t know her, and he sure as eggs didn’t want trouble. He rocked by the fire. This was not good, but it was no reason to panic. It was just something silly and unexpected. Nothing.

  Late in the morning when the girl still hadn’t woken, he hid his whisky bottle and his novels before going out into the chill to clear his head. He felt like he had a decision to make. Like maybe something was happening and he should identify it in order to square it away and get on with being happy and alone.

  At noon, he bundled the girl’s clothes up and took them out to the wash-house. They stank of sweat and stale deodorant. Cleaning the small, silly-looking boots, he caught himself smiling; it reminded him of his own father. He remembered his father used to clean all the children’s boots. It was like a devotion, and the thought made him unaccountably happy. He knew he’d wanted it for himself. There’d be no little shoes to polish now. The sudden warmth went and there was bitterness in him. He scraped swamp mud from the little green pointed toes.

  By the fire, the girl slept white-lipped and muddy in the quilt. He knew he should take her up to a bed, but it seemed somehow just too much.

  Now and then she moved a limb. Once, a white foot slipped out from under the cover to reveal ragged toe-nails and a crusty heel. He wondered if maybe he could get her in the car and take her home. Surely she’d wake up soon.

  After lunch I went up to the northernmost reaches and into the forest. The smell of a good stand of jarrah is enough to make a man sing. Sink people over the years came to call the scrofulous bald patch on our side of the valley Dick’s Hill, after my father. Dad was a tearer and burner, cleared damn-near everything he could find, but he had to stop at the northern boundary because it’s state forest, crown land. He was frightened of trees, my old man. Never sleep in the forest, he would say; everything is above you. And I know what he means. I’ve seen twelve foot boughs fall and spear so deep into the earth that they looked like small trees in their own right. Being under that in your plastic tent – imagine. The old man had his practical side, but there was more to his feeling about the forest than that. Well, there’s all those fairy tales for a start, all those stories we brought with us from another continent, other centuries. Whatever it was, the old man did what he could to bash and burn it into submission.

  You get that big church feeling up there in the forest. We were running out of fuel early this winter, so I took the chainsaw with me to feel like I was working and not just farting about. I dawdled the ute along the muddy tracks in the broken light, looking for windfalls. It didn’t take long to spot a toppled tree. I stopped and got out. The wind sounded like a choir way above. I grabbed the axe from the rear tray, picked my way through the undergrowth with its crush of bracken and creepers and ferns and bright orange fungi and beds of soft wet pungent bark, and when I came to the tree, I scrambled up its great flank and stood panting a moment.

  The axe rang out sweet and clear, and I made a bigger notch than I needed to, just to feel the weight of the axe and hear that thock! a few times more. The timber was good and dead, the colour of honey.

  I went back for the chainsaw. The air was full of the smells of eucalyptus and gravel mud and dew. As I hefted the saw off the ute, I saw something along the track, something red and quickly gone and I felt a thump of excitement in my chest. This was it. I put the chainsaw back on the tray and reached into the cab for the rifle.

  I moved as quick and quiet as I knew, cutting an imaginary line through the timber to where I thought I might get another sighting. Birds shuttered away up into the wind. My feet sweated in the clumsy gumboots. I remembered to cock the .243. I didn’t understand my sudden anger. Things began to happen too quickly; everything was breathless.

  When I saw that red blur ducking away in the bracken only forty metres away, I got off two shots in a hurry. The forest rippled with the noise, and I heard a slug smack home. Strange, but the first thing I did was pick up the shells from the ground and sniff the cordite. As though I was putting off any investigation. Up there in the bracken, there was a scraping sound.

  When I got close I saw blood, a smear on a fan of bracken. Ground litter rustled. I went forward behind the barrel of the gun. Then I all but trod on the quivering body of a fox, and I leapt back with a shout, and then let o
ut a nervy little laugh. The beast had terrible mange, which would make it look bigger and stranger from a distance. I’d hit it twice: in the front paw and in the back hip. It shook with pain and didn’t even look at me. I killed it with another shot and heard the crack tear up into the light. Then I went back to sawing wood.

  Ida Stubbs heard shots and flinched enough to drop the preserve jar and it smashed at her feet. She leant against the sink a moment and looked out the window to the forest up the hill. Another shot; she heard it soar over the valley and it gave her a flittery feeling she didn’t often get anymore, that sense of being small, of not really belonging. She’d had it in her chest the day she’d come here after the wedding. And she got it each time she brought a baby back from the district hospital. She’d stand here at the window and feel new and strange, as though maybe she should get back in the car and take this helpless child to a town, a city, somewhere where the trees didn’t stand over you, where the swamp didn’t sit there brewing at your doorstep, where people might drive past occasionally and wave on their way to somewhere else.

  She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear and sniffed. That gun’s just a bit big for our needs, Maurice, and besides, you couldn’t hit a barn with a handful of gravel.

  Ida didn’t like guns. Her father went out one day five years after we were married and shot himself dead. And there were always accidents, stupid things. She had a cousin (an old man now) who blew his own ear off climbing through a fence.

  She got on her knees and swept up the slurry of chopped apple and splintered glass. That was another thing; she hated waste.

  What was that fool of a hubby doing up there?

  I have an Ida dream all the time. Some nights I have it so bad it has me waking up thinking I am Ida. In the dream she stands at the last rise before those thickets which web the hills just beyond here. The children are there, picking mushrooms. They call out and throw cowpats and are happy. She holds their cardigans and watches them play, but in an instant she imagines them being drawn into the thicket, snagged deep beyond the light, as though the place will not yield and if it will not yield it won’t be still. She stands there shuddering with apprehension. She clutches their sweet-smelling garments and watches her children. I am not there, not anywhere in the picture. She never told me about this fear. Maybe I wouldn’t have listened. You understand yourself late enough to discover you’re the sorriest bastard who ever was.