The Hands (3 page)

‘Murray!' Fay called, from somewhere deep inside the house, although she was used to this sort of talk.

‘Look at him,' he called back. ‘He's like a bloody lobster.'

‘Chris!' Fay tried to shout. ‘Listen to your uncle. Come inside, please.'

‘I'm not finished.'

‘Now!'

Chris kept picking. Murray lit another cigarette. ‘Listen to your mother,' he said.

Nothing. The sound of Fay shelling boiled eggs.

‘Hey, Fay, you gonna come out here and deal with this? He doesn't listen to me.'

‘Well, he doesn't listen to me.'

‘He'll end up in hospital. He's not all there.'

‘Do you mind?'

Carelyn was at the door, glaring at her father-in-law, holding a dessert bowl half-full of his old cigarette stubs. ‘What's this?'

‘What?'

‘This is for eating food, Murray.'

He looked at the bowl and shrugged. ‘Looked like an old one to me.'

‘It's not.'

‘You told me you were sick of seeing my butts in the—'

‘Not in a bloody bowl, Murray. It's a filthy habit.'

No response.

‘And in the toilet. I told you not to smoke in the house.'

‘It's my bloody house.'

She glared at him.

‘The toilet's not inside, is it?'

‘Of course it is.'

He took the bowl and emptied the butts in front of the house. ‘There,' he said, returning it, ‘just gotta soak it for a bit … good as new.'

She sniffed it. ‘You'd eat from this?'

‘When it's clean.'

He inhaled, but she took the cigarette from him, put it out in the bowl and said, ‘Keep it.'

He shrugged again. ‘It looked chipped to me.'

Then she looked over at Chris. ‘Chris, get in here now. You should know better.'

This time Chris seemed to understand. He stood, gathered his bag and walked towards them.

Carelyn looked at Murray. ‘What were you thinking, leaving him out there?'

3

Trevor drove along the edge of the road. Grass and bullock bush scratching the ute. ‘We need to talk about the loan,' he said to his father.

‘You needn't worry about that … it's manageable.'

‘It's not.'

Again, a silence of rattling panels and exhausted shock-absorbers as he prepared for the same, almost daily, argument. ‘It's not what we owe today … it's the future.'

Murray couldn't see the problem. ‘My old man went fifteen years without a drop of rain. As long as you keep the pumps running. There's enough water …' He trailed off, his words diluting like a tea-bag he'd been using for years.

Your old man, Trevor thought, studying a forest of sheoak bending in the wind: the one who got us into this mess in the first place. And his old man's old man, buying a dud property while so much green, productive land went begging across the rest of the state. ‘As long as the repayments are heading south.'

‘They're not gonna do that, are they?'

‘Then we're gonna have to ask for more.'

‘Bullshit.'

‘Well, this afternoon, you ring Mercy, you ask 'em if they'll take another term of half fees; ring Elders, ask 'em—'

‘Don't be so bloody dramatic.'

Trevor listened to the land breathe. Eremophila, in clumps, and growing over the track, spreading sacrificial limbs; attempting to reclaim the land,
his
land, although Murray (for now) held the deed. ‘It was somewhere near here, wasn't it?'

‘Eh?'

‘God-man?'

Murray almost smiled. ‘Bit further back, I think.'

They both remembered a hot day in 1992, coming across an abandoned bike saddled with two pouches of clothes, a Bible and empty water bottles. They'd got out and examined it and Trevor had said, ‘Do you know anything about this?'

They'd tried to remember if they'd received a letter from a bike club, a lone trekker, a survivalist, anything.

‘Buggered if I know,' Murray had replied, and they'd thrown the bike into the back of the ute and continued.

Then, another three or four kilometres on, they'd found the rider: a Canadian fireman cycling around Australia. He'd been attempting to cross the Nullarbor, but when he'd ridden past the turn-off to Bundeena, God had said to him:
Here, the Wilderness, enter this place
(or words that that effect).

‘You would've killed yourself,' Murray had said to him, but he'd just replied, ‘No risk of that, sir. Jesus was lookin' out for me.'

No, he was fuckin' not, he'd wanted to say. Instead, explaining, ‘Do you know where this track goes?'

‘I've lost a lot of weight,' the Canadian had explained, ‘but I only ran out of water yesterday.'

‘Another two hundred clicks and you're in the desert.'

God-man had just smiled, taken off his cap and wiped his matted hair, forehead and raw face.

‘I'm sorry, but if you'd kept going, Jesus wouldn't have helped you,' Trevor had explained.

‘You just keep driving, we'll see.'

Murray had shaken his head. ‘That would be the same as us allowing you to die.'

No response.

‘I'm not gonna have that on my conscience.'

‘You've just gotta trust, sir. He's watching us at this very moment.'

Murray had been tempted to leave him there. ‘Go on, get in the ute.'

The man had just stared at him. ‘I think I might walk.'

‘I think you might get in the ute, before we put you in.'

Trevor had stood with his arms crossed, for once, agreeing with his father. ‘This is private property. Ours.'

Their visitor had yielded, climbing into the back of the ute. ‘I appreciate you picking up my bike. Can you take me back to the road?'

Father and son had climbed in; Trevor had said, ‘Eventually, after we shoot a few roos.'

Trevor pulled into a clearing beside the road. A marker showed the location of buried water containers. This is where they'd stop for the night if they were out working on the edge of their blue-bush galaxy. Where they'd open their swags and slide the esky off the back of the ute, wash blood from their hands and light the primus.

They got out and made their way over to a long, concrete trough.

‘As I suspected,' Murray said, noticing it, and the bore's storage dam, was dry.

The bore itself was capped by a metal ring bolted onto a square of concrete. There was a pump. PVC pipes led into the trough and down to the dam.

‘Righto,' Trevor said. He fetched his tool box from the ute and started fixing the pump. Murray moved to the trough, sat down, produced another rollie and lit it. ‘Old God-boy. I wonder what happened to him?'

‘You really care?'

‘Might still be out here somewhere.'

Trevor started wiping fine sand from the lubricated parts. ‘It was his choice. There's only so much you can do to help some people.'

Murray studied the distant hummocks. ‘He mighta made it to Mount George, perhaps … with a bit of help from Jesus.'

As they both remembered the night, in 1992, cutting up a roo, looking up to see the stranger dancing in the bush before disappearing into the mid-distance. ‘Where the hell are you going?' Murray had called, but all they could see was scrub, and all they could hear were branches snapping. ‘Christ … a complete bloody idiot.'

‘You're gonna die,' Trevor had shouted.

He tried to start the pump. Nothing. Murray finished his cigarette, walked over and squeezed the fuel line. Milked it as if it were some type of mechanical cow. ‘Go on.'

Trevor tried to start the pump, two, three times, and eventually it spluttered to life. He looked at his father and tried to smile. ‘Well … very good.'

As they waited for water, Murray said, ‘See, I'm not completely bloody useless.'

They drove to outstation ‘Number one' (although, except for a pair of wooden rooms built by Murray's grandfather, Bill, in the 1890s, it was their only outstation). The old shack measured thirty by twenty feet, four bunks, what passed for a kitchen and a spot in the middle to sit and eat and talk about the day. It still had its original floorboards, part-iron, part-wood walls, a pressed-tin ceiling and iron roof.

Number one was used until the late 1960s. Murray could still remember staying with his dad and the older men during the horseback musters. He could remember beef and damper and sweet black tea, and nothing else, for days on end. Playing cards and drinking beer that was kept cold in a rainwater tank that was kept full from a bore. He could still see and hear the men farting their way through an unsleepable night. And remember how they smelt after the fourth or fifth day.

Trevor stopped the ute in front of the old shack and looked at his dad.

‘Go on,' Murray said.

‘You won't come in?'

‘No.'

‘That's stupid.'

Murray glared at him. ‘Hurry up.'

Trevor got out and fetched a jerry can full of fuel from the back of the ute. He carried it towards the shack. His feet sank and he put it down, lifted it, walked a few more paces and stopped again. He went in, sliding it along the floorboards. Then he left it beside a table covered with a dozen or so rabbit traps. Looked up at the ceiling. It was held in place (mostly) by two lengths of right-angled redwood, cut to fit into each other. Someone had wrapped an electric wire around one of the beams.

He wondered where. Studied the beams but there were no clues.

Outside, Murray sounded the horn. ‘Come on, what yer doin'?'

‘Hold on.'

No rope marks, no notches, from where his great-grandfather, Bill Wilkie, had passed a rope around the beam, tied it off, managed a rabbit-trapper's knot as a noose, climbed onto the table and mumbled a few words. From where he'd jumped, unsuccessfully attempting to break his neck. There was no sign of where the rope had rubbed on the beam, no indication of the smell (after hanging undiscovered for six days), no signs of where his son, Morris, and two stockmen had taken him down.

And nothing, in this room at least, of the story behind it all.

‘What are you doing?' Murray called, again.

This time Trevor didn't respond.

No newspapers (September 1916) with a Cowards' List—and the names of local men who had ‘shirked their duty'. No indication of what his wife, Mary, had said or thought when they brought his body back to the house. No explanation of how John Wilkie, their eldest son, born as a fat-cheeked baby in 1895, had gone missing on the Western Front (although his parents knew their son was no deserter).

Still, this is where Bill, father of Morris, grandfather of Murray, great-grandfather of Trevor, had come to kill himself. To keep everything neat, and private, to bury his shame in a thousand square miles of sand. To leave his body, as it left the world (seeing how the list had been made public, and had become a sort of unofficial gospel) in the little dog-box of a house he'd built.

‘Christ,' Murray shouted, holding down the horn. ‘It's getting warm out here.'

Trevor returned to the ute. ‘How long since you've been in there?'

‘A long time.'

They drove towards Bundeena.

‘Not since I … found out,' Murray said.

‘Maybe it's time.'

‘It doesn't need discussing.'

They drove silently.

‘It was just too much for him,' Trevor dared.

‘That doesn't excuse anyone. He was a coward.'

4

Harry stood on the edge of the compound holding his stock-whip. He lifted his arm, flicked the tongue, moved his wrist back and forward in a fraction of a second and listened to the crack. It echoed and settled around the sheds and garden, on the house and down the hill towards the lavender. He smiled. ‘Dad,' he called, but he didn't know where he was.

He searched the horizon. Noticed a rusty gidgee tree in the distance. He often wondered why there weren't others: perhaps there'd only been a single seed, a drop of water. Why it was there, what purpose it served, how it could survive apart from other gidgee trees. It couldn't be shaded, or give shade, make other trees, even provide wood—because who, really, would have the heart to chop it down?

There were more trees at the back of the compound where their little world opened up to the road. One dead sheoak had become a bottle tree. An actual bottle tree, with old cans and bottles and jars placed over the dead tip of each branch. Some of the newer bottles and cans were still recognisable—spaghetti, creamed corn, Sno-Top—but most had lost their labels, rusted, clouded up and sand-blasted over the forty years Trevor had been decorating his desert Christmas tree. Since, aged six or seven, he'd found an old beer bottle on the ground. Every few days he'd come out with bottles and cans (and at Christmas, tinsel and other decorations).

Until, later, his sons had taken over. Until each of the branches were full, at which time Harry went to the kitchen drawer, found a roll of twine and started hanging the bottles, like baubles, along the length of each of the branches.

Now it was a giant wind-chime. No one really minded. Most evenings it made music. A few branches had fallen off and Harry had used more twine to reattach them. To him, the bottle tree was more than just decoration.

He turned to face it, lifted his hand and cracked his stock-whip. A beer bottle dropped and shattered. ‘Yes,' he sang, running towards the tree, looking at the broken glass sitting in ankle-high compost.

‘Harry,' he heard his father calling, from inside his shed.

He gathered his whip and ran across the compound. Felt the temperature rise as he went into his father's shed. Smelt a hot globe burning fine sawdust from the pine.

‘Is that you smashing bottles?' his father asked, looking up from the hand in his lap, clutching a piece of folded sandpaper.

‘Yes,' he replied, closing the door.

‘I need your help.'

Harry sat on a stool beside his father, placed his hand on the bench and spread it out. Trevor looked at it, and back at the piece of wood sitting in a singlet in his lap. ‘Right,' he said, studying the two hands, using the edge of his sandpaper to help sculpt the knuckles.

It wasn't a hand yet, he thought. Whatever made a hand a hand, it still wasn't there. There were fingers, with the right amount of curve; each fattened by blood vessels, and wrinkles, and nails he'd polish so finely they'd shine. There was the meat of the hand, with its tendons and more arteries and veins, and there was a thumb, of course, coming up past the bottom of the first finger. But it still wasn't there.

He'd followed the usual steps—chiselling, refining, sanding—but he hadn't got the usual result. Like his wife's and dad's hand, sitting on the shelf above the unused fireplace. Seven hands, in all, and these were only the successful ones.

He had five photos pinned above his bench: side views, finger-tip, wrist and palm. These were what he'd use for his sculpture. Mostly, apart from calling Harry in every few days to lay his small hand (sauce-smeared, his ring finger calloused from his pen) on the bench, to sit for an hour as he studied his fingers, felt them, moved them closer together, further apart.

‘I've got a better idea,' Harry said.

‘What's that?'

‘Make 'em in clay?'

Trevor didn't reply. He used a pencil to lift his son's fingertips, leaving the fingers curled like a claw. Then he said, ‘No,' and pushed them down.

Harry studied his father's face. ‘You should measure the fingers and thumb.'

‘Perhaps.'

They sat together thinking separate thoughts. Trevor: how the little bits of fat in each finger bulged; Harry: how his father was slow and careful, content to wrestle with small things.

‘You wanna be careful with that whip,' Trevor said, without looking up.

Harry just looked at him.

‘When I was your age it came back at me.' He showed him the scar, just below his left eye.

‘You keep telling me,' Harry said, moving his hand.

‘Still!' Trevor growled, returning to his pine hand. ‘Look, half-an-inch from my eye. Cos I was showing off.'

‘I'm not showing off … I'm careful.'

‘Good.'

‘I could do this at the Show.'

‘Why don't you?'

‘I might.'

Trevor smiled. ‘You'll make a good stockman one day.'

Harry waited for more, his hand lifting and dropping.

‘One day?'

‘You're still young. Patience.'

Harry wasn't happy. ‘Old enough to help with the muster.'

‘Yes, but … school … that's what's most important now, eh?'

‘But you reckon it's a waste of time.'

‘When did I say that?'

‘Every time you walk past, you say to Mum, what's he need to do that for?'

‘That's not because I don't think education's important … it's just because … it doesn't seem relevant.'

‘To us?'

‘No, to ….' He stopped to think. ‘Education allows you to do whatever you want with your life.'

‘Like being a good farmer?'

‘Not necessarily.'

‘But that's what you want me to do?'

Trevor placed the hand on the bench. He wiped his own hands on the singlet. ‘That'd be nice. It's not the sort of job I can put an ad in the paper for. But …' and he turned his face to him, ‘if you or Aiden wanted to do something else.'

Harry wasn't sure about this. ‘You wouldn't mind?'

‘For instance, if you wanted to be an airline pilot …'

‘But I don't want to be an airline pilot.'

‘
You're only young
.' He ruffled his son's hair, and indicated his hand. ‘You can have that back now.'

‘Harry!' Fay called from the house.

‘Go on,' Trevor said.

Harry left the shed and met his aunt halfway across the compound. The sun was above their heads and there was almost no shadow. He could see her threadbare dressing gown; her slippers, open around the sides and on the toes; her legs, covered with fine hair and scabbed patches of what he assumed was old age.

‘Here you go,' she said, handing him a small basket.

He went into the chook yard, with its nine Rhode Island hens, and into the laying shed. As he collected eggs from each of the straw-lined boxes, Fay said, ‘You shouldn't need reminding.'

‘I was just about to do 'em,' he replied, but she said it again, like she always did: ‘You shouldn't need reminding.'

After he'd collected the eggs she made him weed the vegetables while she picked tomatoes. Then, he filled a watering can and wet the straw he'd spread around the base of the cucumbers, peas and beans. Kept studying his aunt, butterflied on her knees, her dressing gown open past the white fleshy meat of her thighs. If he looked he could see more. He wanted to say, Could you adjust yourself, please, but knew he couldn't. So he just studied her bony fingers as she picked spent leaves. ‘Aunty Fay?'

She kept working, her face set hard.

‘Can I ask something … about Uncle Chris?'

Meanwhile, Trevor closed the door of his shed and called, ‘How many eggs?'

Fay slowly lifted her head and replied, ‘Eleven, although they're a lot smaller now.' She waited. ‘Why do you think that is?'

Trevor walked past them. ‘They're getting lazy.' He looked at his son. ‘Give 'em a good drink.' Turning and walking towards the house.

‘About Uncle Chris?' Harry repeated.

Fay looked at him.

‘Will he always live here with us?'

She shifted onto her knees, picking peas and throwing them into the bucket.

‘Me and Aiden, we'll always look after him.'

‘I can look after him.'

He returned to the tank, refilled and came back to the garden.

‘Just cos it's done one way, doesn't mean it always was,' she told him, as he started watering.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Like washing your clothes.'

He waited.

‘Once, what we'd do,' she explained, searching for pods, ‘was put all the clothes in a drum, like that one.' She pointed to the drum of chicken feed. ‘We'd fill it with soap and water, and rocks, and drive around with it on the back of the ute for a few days.'

Harry had heard the story before, but couldn't see what it had to do with Chris.

‘Got 'em beautifully clean,' she said. ‘Then we'd tip all the dirty water on the vegetables.' She held a pea pod, remembering, perhaps, how peas used to be bigger and greener in the days of improvised washing machines.

Harry kept looking at her, waiting for her to explain, to make the connection.

‘Nowadays we just use that thumping big machine.'

Harry thought and thought, making his brain work harder, attempting to solder a solution. ‘So we could look after him?' he asked.

But she just said, ‘I was always interested in Egypt.'

He was out of water, again.

‘They used to have a black pharaoh. You knew that?' She looked at him. ‘From Sudan. There are pyramids all across Sudan … but they never mention that.'

Then there was a waltz—tinny, thundering across the compound. And with it, a voice, crooning:

Once more I hold you to my heart,

As thru' the waltz we sway …

‘Christ,' Fay mumbled, standing, dropping her bucket, peas and beans spilling across the soil. The sound of the sliding door and Chris, done up in Murray's suit, embracing a phantom partner as he waltzed into the compound.

‘Chris!' she called.

Chris turned in graceful circles, tight in, then larger orbits, his arms raised at exactly the right angle. Fay was soon across the compound, pulling on his arm, trying to bring him back to the world of washing machines. He turned and almost slapped her across the face and she staggered back. She looked at him, accusingly. And then the boy-man was singing:

When you and I were seventeen,

And life and love were new …

Harry could see his grandfather standing at the door to his sleep-out, smiling, then retreating a few steps back inside.

The waltz stopped but Chris kept dancing, caught up in the music in his head. Trevor emerged from the house wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. He smiled but stopped when he saw Fay standing alone. ‘Chris!' he called.

Chris stopped moving, closed his eyes, lifted his head and took a deep breath, savouring his last few moments. He opened his eyes and walked towards the house. As he went inside Trevor stopped him. ‘You shouldn't do this.'

Chris was breathing deeply, tasting the air.

‘Do you hear me?'

‘He's alright,' Fay managed.

‘No,' he said. ‘Look how all this business upsets your mum.'

‘
Trevor
.'

‘No,' he called to her. ‘Look.' Turning his cousin around to face his mother.

Chris moved, but closed his eyes.

‘Look!' Trevor shouted.

‘Trevor,' Carelyn warned, from the door.

‘It's all over,' Fay said, walking back towards the garden.

Harry looked from one person to the other, worried that his question, somehow, might have triggered all this. He noticed the sleep-out but Murray had gone inside and shut the door.

‘Go,' Trevor said to Chris, and he went inside.

Harry watched his aunt kneel and gather the vegetables. Heard her mumble, ‘If they'd just let him go,' and noticed she was struggling for breath, as though she was avoiding crying. He picked up the basket of eggs and said, ‘I'll take these in,' and Fay replied, ‘Make sure you put the can away first.'

Trevor returned to his steamy bathroom followed by his wife. He slipped off his towel, turned on the shower and stepped back in. ‘Someone will have to start thinking about him,' he said.

Carelyn leaned on the doorway. ‘I've tried.'

‘We'll need to try again.'

She studied the parts of her husband she could see: his hairless chest with its sagging, pink-nippled tits; his stomach, bulging from his otherwise slender frame. ‘You're getting fat,' she said.

‘Getting?'

‘Fatter.'

‘Every fucking problem,' he muttered, soaping his legs.

She waited for the inevitable.

‘Whatever needs solving; everyone else just stands back.'

‘I do what I can.'

‘Fay can't leave it all to us.' He waited until the thoughts multiplied. ‘If it's not Dad it's …' Put his head back and let the warm water soak his face.

Carelyn could see his legs were sticks, screwed onto the bottom of his body. His arms, too, like a doll's, hanging loose, unremarkable. He didn't look like he could jump a bull, but she knew he could. It was all in the hands, he'd often explain. The will. The bloody mindedness. His little triangle, a full afro, like someone had run a line-trimmer around the fuzz; his little button cock, retreating into a forest of disuse.

He looked out through the steamy glass. As if he wanted to say, So, what is it? As if he was afraid, even now, of her seeing too much. Of the physical man and not the father-fixer-peacemaker he'd become. Even his wife, he guessed, had lost interest in the body-minus-its-clothing: moleskin man, castrating a hundred beasts an hour, welding pipes, controlling children.