The Girl from Snowy River Page 22

  But Sister Burrows had done great deeds in her own right. Even the war had been made up of women too. Not just the women and babies bayoneted by the Huns, their homes destroyed, but women who had done things.

  Mrs Clancy rode with her man, even if she had to be disguised as a drover’s boy to do it. And there was Miss Matilda down at Drinkwater, running the biggest property in the district, and all the wives and daughters during the war who had also run farms with their men gone. Maybe the world is full of women who do things, she thought, but they’re women men don’t see, don’t write about.

  I did something once, she thought. I rounded up a mob of brumbies. She glanced at Kirsty, snuffling across the room. Even if she hadn’t longed to get up from her bathchair for her own sake, she owed it to her sister. If she could stand then Andy would have no excuse not to send Kirsty back to school.

  And what of Flinty herself? What would she really want, if she had the choice? To be a nurse, like Sister Burrows? Women could be teachers too, at least until they married, and telegraphists. But all she really wanted was to live here on the mountain, just as Mum had.

  No, she acknowledged. Not like Mum. She wanted to train Snow King, to ride out after brumbies again and this time do it right, to be the farmer, not the farmer’s wife.

  And neither might be possible. Even if she could walk, she might never be able to do the sustained work in the saddle needed to train horses or face the rigours of a hill ride after brumbies. And Sandy, gentle Sandy, was the fourth son of a small farmer. Even when he had his own land, it could never be Rock Farm. Rock Farm belonged to Andy. One day Andy would live here with his wife. He would always give his sisters a home, but when they married they would be expected to live in houses of their own.

  Yet Sister Burrows hadn’t waited for a husband or brother to support her. She had even spoken as if a woman was capable of earning enough to keep a family.

  Dawn glowed from the chink in the shutters. Flinty pulled herself as quietly — and gently — as she could into her chair. Kirsty muttered as the wheels passed her bed.

  Flinty peered out the back door. The world was white, the snow-gum branches heavy with their load of snow. Something moved, up on the hill, white on white. Snow King, prancing in the snow.

  She smiled, grabbed a lapful of wood before her hands and nose froze, shut the door against the chill and put wood on the fire, then slipped her old pillowcase of bran into the oven, to warm up for a poultice.

  She slipped it in against her back as she sipped a cup of tea. The warmth helped almost immediately, dulling the ever-present pain. Experimentally she slid forwards, put her feet on the floor, and tried to push herself upright.

  Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened, thought Flinty. Sister Burrows had promised hope, not miracles.

  And yet something nibbled in a dark shell of her brain. Something she knew, something that mattered. Something she could possibly do…

  She grabbed a blanket from the cupboard, tucked it about herself and rolled herself out the front door. The sky shone sharp and blue against the white. Even the Rock was cloudless this morning. And it was as though the clarity of the day cleared her mind too, so she could see the thought that had been bubbling up inside her brain all night.

  Nicholas was writing a book. Now she had written a book as well, admittedly a little blobbed and blotted in one and a half exercise books. But that shouldn’t matter, should it? Books were printed, so it didn’t matter how messy they were at first.

  Could you really make a living writing books? Nicholas must think so. He’d have an army pension too, of course, but she was pretty sure he expected his book to make money.

  She wheeled herself inside and reached up for a copy of The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses by Banjo Paterson. Mum had given it to Dad the last Christmas before the war. She had rubbed out the price on the title page, but you could still see the pencil mark — three and sixpence.

  If a man could write a book, maybe a girl could too. After all, Miss Brontë had written Jane Eyre. Miss Austen had written lots of books.

  If a book sold say, a hundred copies, that was a hundred times three and sixpence. But it would cost money to print them, maybe a shilling a copy. Two shillings a copy would mean a book might earn two hundred shillings, or nine pounds two shillings and tuppence.

  It wasn’t enough to buy a farm. But if she wrote two books a year and Andy bred horses, like Dad, it might be enough to help support them without Dad’s pension, so that Andy didn’t have to work down at the Mullinses’, could afford to support a wife, might even — possibly — let Joey at least go to high school.

  It was a start.

  She looked at The Man from Snowy River again. The publisher’s address was on the next page: Angus and Robertson in Castlereagh Street, Sydney.

  She carefully tore a blank sheet of paper from the back of the exercise book, added water to the ink gunge in the bottom of the pot, took up the pen and began to write as neatly as she could. There was no use wishing for blotting paper, because they didn’t have any. The best she could do was not smear any splodges that dripped from the pen.

  Rock Farm

  The Track

  Rocky Valley via Gibber’s Creek

  4 August 1920

  Dear Mr Angus and Mr Robertson,

  I hope you are both well.

  My name is Felicity McAlpine and I have written the book in this parcel. I am sorry the words are not clear at times. My little sister did most of the writing. She was not very good at forming her words when she started, but as you will see her writing gets much better soon. I am sorry about the blots too. We do not have any blotting paper left. The smudge on the cover of the second exercise book is not blood. It is strawberry jam which was spilled on the kitchen table.

  I hope you like the book. If you like it I can write more. Could you tell me how much it will cost to publish the book? I have forty-nine pounds five shillings and threepence in my savings account.

  Yours sincerely,

  Felicity McAlpine (Miss)

  Flinty looked at the letter. It seemed to lack something. Or maybe there was too much.

  But it was a good story. If Kirsty liked it, it must be good, or even very good. She wondered if she should tell Mr Angus and Mr Robertson that. But she’d either have to write the letter again, or put a PS, and a PS wasn’t good manners when you wrote letters, except to friends.

  Anyway, she thought, it was the book that counted. Even if they just read the first sentence they might want to hear more, as Kirsty had.

  She wrapped the exercise books and letter in brown paper, and tied the parcel carefully with string. She’d ask Andy to give it to Mr Mack to post when he went to the next sheep sale.

  Her bran poultice was cold. Her feet were chilly too. Kirsty would need three pairs of socks and Mum’s old gumboots to feed the hens (Kirsty never soiled her own gumboots with chook poo) and check that Snow King’s water trough hadn’t frozen over, and to give him a few forkfuls of hay.

  The brown-paper parcel stared at her from the sideboard.

  Chapter 35

  14 September 1920

  Dear Diary,

  Kirsty says Harriet is sitting on ten eggs. She is sitting well, so I hope they all hatch. She was a good mother last year. Only three eggs from the others, so I boiled one each for Kirsty and Joey for breakfast; I kept the third for pikelets for afternoon tea.

  Sandy comes up here every Sunday now, just as if we were courting, except he spends more time with Joey and Andy, helping with the ploughing, than with me. He hasn’t brought me flowers again. But at least we talk these days, just like we did before he went to war, about the lambs and dingoes and how the ploughing has gone, and how Mutti Green’s goat ate Vati Green’s best trousers and then a petticoat drying overnight on the verandah, and then Hannah saw something white move and thought it was a ghost, and screamed in terror instead of rescuing the petticoat, just like the story I told about the goat eating the sheet. Maybe
that shows that stories can come true, or maybe it just shows that goats like to eat washing.

  My own ghost hasn’t been back. Andy takes me down to the Rock once a week. I tell him the few hours there are my ‘day out’. But there is no Nicholas.

  Maybe I really did imagine I had met him, after I was hurt. I know I met him long before that, but maybe I only dreamed a ghost from the future told me my life would get better, like I dreamed I ran across the mountains.

  Or perhaps Nicholas has decided not to come back to the valley or he is still getting used to his new legs. Perhaps I will never know what happens to him till I’m an old lady, in fifty years’ time. I’ll have grey hair then, or maybe white, like Snow King.

  Snow King is so beautiful. I keep wanting to ask Andy to put me on his back. But that would be the worst thing for my spine, all the jolting, especially as I couldn’t grip but would have to balance. It wouldn’t really be riding at all. I think I’d almost rather never to ride again, than ride like that.

  Almost.

  Spring arrived with new red shoots on the snow gums, and lime-green ones on the oaks and maples that Mum had planted, and diamond-crusted spider webs between the tussocks.

  The oak and maple shoots died in the next frost, a hard one that left more icicle daggers dangling from the roof. Snow gums knew how to live with the mountain, Dad had said. The newcomers had to struggle.

  But the oaks and maples were big enough to survive now. They put out more shoots when the frost was gone. Even the next snowstorm didn’t hurt them, flakes as big as a baby’s hand whistling and swirling across the valley, melting as they touched the ground.

  Every morning Flinty tried to stand, and every evening before she went to bed. But, although she could move her legs easily from the knee down now and even lift her feet from the floor a little bit one by one, her back ignored the order to support her.

  Nothing more had been said about the motorbike. Flinty hoped Andy had seen they couldn’t afford it, that any money needed to go towards horses, or be kept for an emergency. His wages barely covered expenses. How could they even pay for a motorbike’s fuel?

  They were lambing down in the valley now. Andy spent most nights down at the Mullinses’ farm, helping to check the paddocks by lantern light. Sheep, it seemed, liked to lamb in darkness. Sometimes one needed help to get her lamb out, especially when there were twins. Others got ‘cast’ — the ewe lay on her side and the heavy wet wool stopped her from getting to her feet. A cast sheep could die by morning.

  Dingoes prowled the mountain too, looking for lambs or ewes too weak to resist. But they knew the smell of men, even if they didn’t understand the guns they carried.

  ‘The dingoes bred up in the war,’ said Andy wearily one evening, as he stretched his feet in their thick socks before the kitchen fire after Kirsty and Joey had gone to bed. ‘Like the bunnies. Not enough men to keep the numbers down. Half the fences in the valley need replacing, and it’ll be worse when the thaw comes and the floodgates are washed away.’

  The floodgates were the fences strung across the creek that would swell to a foam-rimmed river, tossing boulders as though they were knucklebones, in the spring floods.

  ‘The floodgates go every year,’ said Flinty, peering down at the hem of Kirsty’s new skirt, made from an old dress with the top half turned into a frill at the hem. Kirsty was all legs like a colt these days. ‘We got them back up all right during the war.’ Even Mrs Mack had put on an old pair of trousers to help in those days, she remembered.

  ‘It’s not just the floodgates, Sis. The land’s been starved of men for too long. The Browns’ hayshed is leaning so far it’ll go in the next big wind. All the best horses have gone. Most that are left are either too old or too young.’

  Andy was silent for a moment, staring at the fire. Flinty wondered if he was remembering when there were horses in every Rock Farm paddock. Andy had enlisted before the stock was sold and led away. She’d cried for three nights after the horses left, almost as much as she’d cried for her brothers. At least Andy and Jeff had enlisted willingly, knowing something of what they were going to. The horses had trusted the men who led them into horror.

  But of course no man had known what the last war would bring. The Boer Wars, the battles on the North-West Frontier — none of them had been like the mud and endless inching back and forth of trench warfare. She tried not to think of the Rock Farm horses, so far from their mountains, amid the noise and death.

  Where were their horses now? Prince Albert and Blossom Queen and the horse Dad called the Duke of Wellington because of his big nose? Were they with the Indian Army? Pulling a plough in Belgium? Or dead, perhaps, killed by shell fire or even their own riders, determined the beasts would not be shipped off to servitude in India or the Middle East.

  ‘Flinty,’ said Andy suddenly. There was a new note in his voice. Hope, she thought. How long had it been since Andy spoke like that?

  She leaned forwards. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been offered a job at Drinkwater.’

  ‘But…but you have a job.’

  ‘A real job.’ His face was lit as though a fire shone on it. ‘I’d be deputy manager. Manager even one day. I got used to command in France, Flinty. I’m good at it. Mr Sampson is getting on, and his sons have places of their own. Miss Matilda’s husband is no farmer. A good bloke, but he’s more interested in machines than stock.’

  She thought of the neat Drinkwater paddocks, the station that stretched to the hills. Andy manage all that? But he could, of course. Would love the challenge of it. Terror nibbled her heart. She forced her voice to sound confident. ‘We manage all right here.’

  ‘No, we don’t. Well, maybe, yes, we do. But that’s not the point.’ He took a deep breath. ‘There’s a good house goes with the job, as big as this place. You should see the Drinkwater cottages, Flinty. No bark huts there. It’s like a small town.’

  ‘I know,’ she said dully. ‘I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Then you know how good it is. There’re so many opportunities, Flinty. Joey can go to high school at Gibber’s Creek. He can get an apprenticeship down there too, if he wants one, might even manage university if he can get a scholarship. It would be easier for Kirsty to go to school as well — one of the cars takes the kids every day.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll get to drive one if I’m deputy manager. Might even get a car of my own.’

  She looked at him in horror. ‘You want us all to go down there!’

  ‘It’s the only thing to do, Flinty. Maybe if I’d saved my pay during the war I’d have enough to stock the place again, but even then —’

  ‘When Snow King starts winning races we’ll make more money,’ she said desperately.

  ‘I can train him as well down there as here. Better, probably. It’ll be easier to prove he’s out of Lamentation too if he’s from Drinkwater. Sis, it’s not just that this is the best thing for us. I don’t want to spend my life perched up here with the eagles. I want a real life. Men working under me. Dances every Friday night. They’re even getting an ice-skating rink in Gibber’s Creek this year.’

  She stared at him, as though he had ripped off the familiar Andy face, leaving a stranger in their kitchen. Ice skating, when they had icicle daggers on every tree each winter here? ‘Then you go! I’m not going anywhere!’

  His look was half sympathy, half the shut-off expression she knew so well, which meant he wasn’t going to argue. ‘You don’t have a choice. I’m Kirsty and Joey’s guardian in the eyes of the law. And yours too, till you’re twenty-one. Besides, the farm belongs to me.’ He took another deep breath. ‘I’m going to sell it, Flinty.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No point letting it stay empty for the dingoes. I could do with the money too. Get set up properly down there.’

  No, he was still her brother. And in an anguished crumb of her heart she knew he might even be right, that this was best for him, for Joey and Kirsty, that Andy had never chosen this life as Dad had. Drinkwater would g
ive him a new life — even perhaps a wife.

  She sat, her hands on the arms of her bathchair, her heart as cold as the Rock. Sell Rock Farm? She couldn’t live anywhere else. Rock Farm and the mountains were who she was.

  A Flinty McAlpine might live down on the Drinkwater flats, but she wouldn’t be her. She’d be a shell: talking, even smiling, but never really there. The real Flinty would be flying with the white goshawk, twisting with the trees. Every time she saw the black swans flying in their arrow overhead she would be with them. I’d be a ghost, she thought, away from my real place like Nicholas was away from his own time.

  How could she live in a land where she wouldn’t understand whether the clouds were hinting at thunder or a flurry of snow, where the birds no longer talked to her in a language that she knew?

  ‘Maybe no one will buy it.’ If Rock Farm was too barren for Andy to make a living, why would another farmer want it?

  ‘It’s a good house. Worth more than the land, really. Sometimes city people want a place in the mountains where they can come when it’s too hot in summer, like the visitors who come for the fishing. If someone buys the house Mullins will want to add our paddocks to theirs. If I got some money for the house I could let Mullins pay it off, a bit each year.’

  But not Sandy, she thought. Sandy loved the mountains, but he would know as well as any farmer that you could break your heart on acres like Rock Farm’s. He needed fertile fields for the money he’d saved, somewhere he could feed a growing family, not paddocks covered with snow for months of the year. Rock Farm would cost him far more than a Soldier Settler block.

  This was The End, she thought, like they put at the bottom of the final page of books. Impossible to think of herself living down below. But it was all too possible to imagine The End.

  ‘When do you want to go?’ she asked dully.

  ‘Miss Matilda says there’s no hurry. After Christmas, maybe. That’s when most of the fishermen come up here. I spoke to the land agent at the last sales. He said houses sell best when they look lived in. But if the house hasn’t sold by the new year, we’ll have to move anyway. Maybe one of the Mack families will rent it till it’s sold.’