In the Winter Dark

  Ronnie wished she’d known about Ida a long time ago. She couldn’t help thinking she wouldn’t be in such a bloody mess if they’d been able to talk last year when she first moved in. She looked out into the bitter cold night.

  She wondered if you could be held responsible for something you saw but didn’t take part in. Why had Nick taken her to that place? God, she hadn’t even thought about it for six months and now she couldn’t get it out of her mind.

  Ronnie swayed in the dark.

  Out there, something moved. She heard it step across leaf litter. The trees beside the shed; it had to be there. She looked around for something stout. Beside the back door was a furled umbrella, one of those yellow ones people give out at agricultural shows. She focused on it well for a moment, but it tended to reproduce itself a little. Ronnie, she thought, you’re pisseder than you think. But bugger it. Some prick was out there scaring people and she was going out to give him a spanking.

  As she felt her way down the steps in the reeling night she was barely able to suppress a giggle. Commonsense and sensible shoes, that’s what you need, Ronnie Melwater.

  Ida felt the bed churning through space. She held the edge of the mattress and kept her eyes closed. The headache was coming back and she knew it’d be worse by morning, compounded by the worst hangover a body could anticipate, but all she could concentrate on now was the way the bed, the room, the house spun crazy through the dark. With her lids squeezed shut until moons burst into view behind her eyes, Ida Stubbs prayed that this spinning would take her away, out of this place forever.

  The thump was clear enough to wake him in a moment. Jaccob lay still and listened. There was another sound, a muffled rattle from out in the yard. He pulled on some jeans and went to the window. He could see nothing. The moon was cloud-smothered. Opening the wardrobe he pulled out the .22. He turned no lights on as he went downstairs, and he slipped a bullet into the breach. The metal was cold against his hands.

  At the back door he paused a moment to even out his breathing. As he pulled it open, he felt the jarring cold and slid the barrel out before him. Straight away he heard the sound. It was a kind of hissing-scraping noise, quiet but distinct. Jaccob was suddenly full of breath again and for a few seconds he couldn’t move. When he could make himself work, he cocked the gun and stepped out.

  Hiss. Scrape. There it was.

  Hiss. Scrape.

  And panting. There was the faintest hint of something panting and it made his skin rise.

  Jaccob eased himself onto the wide verandah, and it took him some time to be able to distinguish the orchards and paddocks, the shadowy lines of fences and sheds in the dark. He heard the river and the swamp. He heard the blood in him. He heard the tiny click of the screendoor as he let it come to.

  He saw something light, but he’d barely registered it. He stepped out to the verandah rail. The wood was rough with cold.

  Hiss. Scrape.

  He looked down along the limestone foundations where the grass grew long against the house, and saw that light-coloured blob reeling across in an arc with the panting close now, and he brought the rifle to bear as it came.

  He fired. The umbrella shook. The dull crack sounded up and down the valley and Ronnie cried out like a wounded rabbit.

  He lowered the rifle as a poisonous rush of fear billowed up in him.

  Ronnie continued her shuffling dance with the yellow umbrella until she came to the wooden steps.

  ‘There’s nothing out there.’

  Jaccob made a weak little noise and went inside.

  I stumbled in the dark to the window. There were no lights on up at Jaccob’s. It was his .22, I guessed. That typical flat smack they made. Ida snored mercilessly. I waited. A light came on. I shivered in my pyjamas. The light up there went out. I figured a kill or a disaster would cause more ruckus than that, so I went back to bed and spent the rest of the night failing to sleep.

  ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ Ida mumbled sometime before dawn.

  I shoved her in the ribs.

  ‘You won’t be soundin’ so bloody smug in the morning, my love.’

  ‘And milk,’ she said.

  You can’t argue with a sleeping drunk.

  This is Ronnie’s dream, though it might as well be mine nowadays, I have it so often. It’s quite short, and like the others, always the same.

  There is firelight. There are voices raised. They are hammering in the nails and the tree is soft and the cat is mad with pain as they dance. Blood is like tar in the flickering light and suddenly the cat tears itself down and comes at Ronnie, pawing her belly until her shirt is open and there is only laughter.

  When I dream this, I get up and find Ida’s old Bible and the stuff about demons and spirits and miracles will make sense to me for minutes on end until the fear wears off.

  JACCOB HEARD her scream and he was awake again, sweaty and awry in his bed. She was sobbing now; he could hear her in the room down the hall. He sighed and pulled on his trousers. He listened to the sound of her retching as he dragged on a shirt and blundered his way downstairs, bruising his shins on furniture until he thought to turn a light on to help find her a bowl. But when he got to her, Ronnie was back on the pillow, finished, and the sour-sweet stink of her puke was in the blankets. She groaned at the sudden light.

  ‘I’m crook,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t say.’ He wiped her face with the edge of a sheet.

  ‘No one’s takin’ this baby . . .’

  Then she was asleep again.

  She looked so pitiful. He turned the light out and sat by her. She was just a kid. He didn’t know anything much about her. She was as silly as a wheel, though you could tell she knew more than she let on, maybe more than she herself realized. Plenty wasn’t being said. Shit, she didn’t have a chance, this one.

  He put a hand on her. A curve of her calf muscle had exposed itself, and he ran his hand down the smooth warmth of her skin. It was a woman’s flesh, alright. She might be eighteen, twenty maybe. He knew he should take his hands off her, but he ran a palm up her thigh and across her cotton panties. Her little belly was round and hard as fruit, and Jaccob sat there aching with his hand on her till the first cautious bird broke into song, and the light showed the mist rising on the slopes and the sorry lump in his jeans. He saw the hopeful, childlike outline of her face, and he felt the kind of pity he’d always reserved for himself. Little by little, the sun came up on him.

  Ida Stubbs held her head and closed her eyes against the light. Even her teeth ached. She could hear Maurice moving about in the kitchen, but there was no way she’d be getting up before noon. Oh, Lord, maybe she’d never move again. She thought about last night. She thought carefully and was ashamed. That poor girl Ronnie. I let her drink so much – and her with a baby coming, what was I thinking? Where was my brain? Right now her brain felt as though it’d been cooked and eaten, and Ida pulled the blankets to her chin and felt old and stupid and sad and pathetic and irresponsible, and, and everything.

  She wondered about the men. For all she knew they might’ve killed whatever’d been causing the trouble. But she remembered how angry Maurice had been and how quiet Jaccob was, and she knew it couldn’t be. She lay still and let her mind roll with the morning. The grip on her head was terrible. Sometimes she slept light and dreamless, but when she woke again it would still be the morning and Maurice could still be heard putting wood in the stove, and she’d continue thinking about the last few days.

  She couldn’t recall a time like this. There’d been bushfires and cockeyed-bobs, some floods and droughts and grasshoppers here before, but they were the kinds of things which announced themselves; terrifying because you knew what they could do – but this, this was worse. There was no knowing what might happen, what it was all about, and it seemed to Ida as though everything in the valley had stopped and nothing could go on until they knew what was out there.

  There had to be something out there. Unless they were all imagining it, un
less they’d dreamed up all those ducks dead, and the goat. But she’d never seen those herself. Unless. Maybe Maurice was right – they’d been relying on the word of people they didn’t know, people who weren’t farmers. Though there was the dog. Poor Coco. God, how it hurt to have him gone. Ida turned on the pillow. No, they weren’t imagining it, but . . . but it could be a trick. Come to think of it, she hadn’t actually seen poor Coco’s . . . remains. Maurice had hid it from her. Out of kindness. Or. No, she’d heard the scream. But still, she couldn’t say she’d seen it with her own eyes.

  The sherry taste in her mouth became sickly and unbearable. Ida reached across to the water jug by the bed. Beside the jug was the honey-smelling cast of the print. She picked it up and sniffed it. It made her shudder, it was so puke-sweet. She turned it over in her hand. Now this was something definite. This was no imagination. Nor was it a wild pig or goat – nothing hoofed. Some memory, the edge of something in the past, floated at the back of her mind. Rain. A rainy day. On the road. A dream? Something. It was hard to keep a thought alive with a head like this.

  Ida slipped her fingers into the depressions in the cast. Each was big enough to rest a full knuckle in, and if she bent her hand into a loose fist, the curves fitted snugly. For a moment it made her smile. If she had a bigger hand, like a man’s hand . . . She pulled her knuckles out and then slipped them back in. My God. A man could do that. A big hand could make this footprint!

  She sat up and winced at the pain.

  Someone was trying to frighten them. She thought as clearly as she could. Now where was that music-playing boyfriend of Ronnie’s? Where was he? He’d never been what you’d call well-disposed. Sometimes when he deigned to wave as they passed in their cars, Ida had the feeling he was laughing at them, sending them up. Funny how he’d been gone only a few days and this business had begun to happen the same time. Or. Or that talk about witches at Bakers Bridge. What was Ronnie up to? Should she trust her? What kind of a baby was she having?

  Ida’s mind galloped and swayed on and her blood packed her flesh until it almost hurt and it became hard to get her breath.

  The men. Could it be the men frightening the women? No, that was stupid. Maurice hated practical jokes as much as he hated impractical people. Now. Now. Now, was it something or someone?

  She drank some water. Her head constricted and it cramped up the muscles in her eyes. Everything tightened. She looked at the penny-spots on the backs of her hands and began to weep. Back on the pillow she felt the tears running back into her hair, across skin that almost hummed. She heard the rain coming across the valley and it sounded ominous and unpleasant though a long way outside of her. She listened to the rumble of tears across her drum-flesh and tried to breathe.

  I sat there all morning on the sofa where I’d slept. The bloody house was full of beer bottles and lipstick-smeared glasses, and I was damned to hell if I was about to clean everything up. My eyes were sore and my back ached, and I didn’t have the willpower to do much more than sit and look down the slope to the black bend of the river as drizzle turned to rain and swallowed up the light so the valley blurred like the grey end of a dream.

  Toward noon I saw Jaccob walking down in the rain to the road. He trudged in the softening pasture and when he got to the road he headed for the girl’s place. He looked dark and small with all that land and sky and rain around him, and before long he disappeared into it, and there was just the valley and the distance to look at.

  I wondered what he’d shot last night. If it was the girl, he was certainly in no hurry to confess. Maybe, I laughed to myself, he’s looking for a shovel. I shocked myself, thinking that way.

  There were some scones left going stale on a tray near me and by noon I was hungry enough and lazy enough to eat them. Then I cleaned and oiled the .243 to keep my hands busy. Mostly I didn’t think. I waited. Looking back, I suppose I’d been waiting for this half of my life. Something was going to happen.

  The cat burns. The boy stops to watch a moment, and then he’s running with a great and sudden light erupting behind him. Something has happened, and it can’t be undone. He’ll remember. It’ll always be done. When he’s an old man it’ll still be happening: over and over and over and over.

  Jaccob didn’t know much about milking a cow, but he’d watched Ronnie do it yesterday and he remembered the general idea. He made a fair job of it, and the cow seemed pleased to be out of the rain and she left no doubt about what hurt and what didn’t. She smelt like a farmhouse, that cow, and the milking soothed him.

  Coming back he realized he should have covered the bucket. Rain dimpled the milk’s surface as he sloshed along with it steaming in the grey noon light. The valley was quiet but for the sound of the rain and occasional disgruntled cry of a bird he wouldn’t know the name of.

  Jaccob saw no movement from the Stubbses’ place and he figured that, like his own, it contained one snoring, sick woman in it, and that things would likely be that way all day. She was a good woman, Ida Stubbs. He thought perhaps she might be of help to Ronnie in the next few months. The girl was going to need a lot of it.

  Jaccob walked and the ground squelched beneath him as the rain found its way into his eyes and down his collar.

  Babies.

  He felt that stony feeling in him again. The memory of that little box slipping into the hidden fire as the wailing relatives hugged one another and looked at him with pity and wonder. Strange, but it was only after the funeral that he felt anger. Marjorie was soggy with tranquillizers and dozing in the bedroom when he went out and gassed the cat. He could still feel it bucketing around in the bag. Jesus, it felt good making something pay. The yowl reached a pitch of fury as the monoxide and the motor and the heat filled the garage. Cot death, they reckoned. Kids die. It’s a mystery syndrome. But he’d seen the cat leaving the nursery that night before Marjorie got up to check. Oh, it sauntered out casual as you please, and he thought nothing of it until he saw the fur on the pillow where the face of his daughter had been, warm as blood, not long before. But it was years now. Five? Six? Sometimes he wondered if he’d simply needed to think it was the cat that smothered his daughter, but a mystery, a syndrome just wasn’t enough.

  He stepped up onto his verandah and shook off some of the water. He looked at the milk and thought it must be rather diluted by now. He kicked his boots off and went in. The moment he was inside he felt he was back in a maze. That old feeling he’d come down here to escape.

  The girl was up.

  Ronnie got out of his rocker as soon as he came in. He had water in the wool of his sweater and the milk rolled in the bucket.

  ‘Did the cow,’ he said. ‘How you feeling?’

  ‘Shithouse.’

  ‘You look it.’

  Well bugger you, she thought.

  The deep marks in his face stood out hard in the afternoon light. He looked old and sad as hell. He went into the kitchen and she heard him pouring the milk down the sink.

  ‘Thanks a heap!’

  ‘It’s full of water,’ he called back.

  He came in again and stood by the window.

  ‘Anyway, I did it for the cow, not for the milk.’

  ‘Not to be neighbourly then?’

  He looked at her a moment. ‘You’re a silly little bitch.’

  ‘Well, fuck you too.’

  ‘Tell me, why do you have a she-goat and a cow when you’re never in a fit state to milk the poor bastards?’

  ‘You seem to forget that I don’t have a goat anymore. Anyway, who are you to tell me how to run a farm. You don’t know the first thing about it.’

  ‘Run a farm? You couldn’t run a bloody tap, girl.’

  ‘You’re a prick.’

  ‘And you’re a spoilt twat. You’ll kill that baby, you know.’

  Ronnie tried to rub the dried spew off her sleeve. She set her teeth hard as a rabbit trap, but it was no use. She was going to cry, shit on it, she was gonna melt in front of this old creep.

  ‘
You’ll never know, mate. You’ll never have to carry one. You’re a fucking male and you wouldn’t know what a baby was if it crept up and bit your balls off! You’re a fucking bastard!’

  She got down the stairs to the back door with him yelling behind.

  ‘I nearly shot you last night, you little idiot!’ she heard him call as she got into a run and felt the jarring in her spine. She didn’t remember. She didn’t know. She didn’t know what she’d done. He’d probably raped her and abused her and everything and she didn’t give a shit. She ran out in the rain and the weight in her jugged around and the ground spread and slimed and skidded beneath her and the rain was in her face.

  The weather set in. The riverbed fattened. A cold southerly burrowed through the lupins on the slope. I emptied a box of shells into my lap and felt the smooth, brassy jackets with my fingertips. The valley soaked up rain and light and all sense.

  When a man dreams things from the past, you’d think he’d be able to rearrange them in new sequences to please himself. You’d think your unconscious mind would want to do it for you, to spare you the grief and shame. But no. In my dreams, it all happens as it happened, and I see it and be it again and again and the confusion never wears off.

  After a shower and a fistful of aspirin, Ronnie lay in her bed as dusk came on and she scrutinized the cracks and crazes time had left in the plaster of the ceiling. They’d never gotten around to fixing it up – that or anything else – and to look at it was to remind herself of what a joke the whole business had been. She could see now how Nick’d just been marking time, letting her have her fantasies until it was time to shoot through. It was like some lousy film. He’d left her high and dry.