Absolution Creek (17 page)

James sighed. ‘Because I’m like you, Cora: I love Campbell Station. I don’t want to see the property broken up in any shape or form.’ He looked at her. ‘Think about it. You and me living and working together.’

‘And arguing,’ Cora added. James’s image of their potential life was so picture-perfect at times even she believed it were possible. How then did she go about explaining to him that what he wanted and what she longed for – a joining of hearts and businesses – was impossible? All relationships were impossible. There had been other men in her life: the occasional drover passing through, a stock inspector, even an encyclopaedia salesman. The ‘book man’, as she fondly remembered him, had lasted three years. A length of time made enjoyable by the fact that he travelled through Stringybark Point every six months and on arrival at Absolution Creek stayed for an average of ten days. Yet despite these romantic interludes no one had touched her deeply. As soon as Cora felt the stirrings of something more than mutual companionship, she backed off, haunted by a past that scared her away from any form of commitment, and by memories of a man whom no one, to date, could compare with. ‘For a smart man you really know how to capture a woman’s heart; a marriage and a business transaction all in one.’

James made a show of noisily scraping his chair back across the linoleum floor. Cora waited for the final retort. They’d always been like this: the bantering, the playfulness, and then the moment would turn and Cora would come face to face with her feelings and find escape through a single throw-away line. She followed James outside and watched as he pulled on his boots, his old collie, Tag, lolling patiently in the dirt with Tripod and Curly.

‘Gidday, Tag,’ she called. The dog sat up, looked from her to his owner and moved to James’s side. ‘It’s a conspiracy,’ she commented. Her attempt at levity didn’t work. James walked down the back path and soon after she could hear his utility start up. Was it her imagination or had she really murmured the words
Don’t go?

Cora scuffed her feet against the worn burgundy runner as she walked along the enclosed walkway dividing the living areas from the bedrooms. She turned onto the veranda ringing the outward facing bedrooms. Only Cora’s bedroom was big enough for a fireplace. A wall had been knocked down in the forties and a fireplace put in at her instruction. The twins’ bedroom faced the east, their single casement windows offering a view of the edge of the ridge with its pine trees. Cora hoped they would be cosy enough. She banked on the warmth of her fire to keep this part of the homestead liveable. The girls’ bedroom, dusted and polished by Ellen, was so clean not even the most canny daddy-long-legs spider could hide from view. It was true that the creamy paintwork had seen better days, and the single beds creaked when you sat upon them, but the dusty pink bed covers and curtains looked rather pretty next to the timber wardrobe Ellen had managed to freshen up with white paint. There was even a navy rug on the floor, retrieved from a camphor box, the thick pile now quite passable thanks to warm water and soap.

Cora wondered about the family due to descend on Absolution Creek. She could only imagine the discussions that would have gone on between Meg and her husband. Uprooting their family was no small matter, especially when the transition involved heading northwards from a city life into a new environment. The Australian bush. She wondered which of them had made the final decision or whether the knowledge of Cora’s childless state and the asset involved had been enough to warrant their speedy agreement. In Cora’s view it was a win-win situation. Her niece had been enticed by the offer of a paying job in the country and would by now have visions of inheriting the land one day. And Cora wanted to inflict some form of pain on Jane Hamilton. She wanted Jane to feel as lonely, angry and betrayed as she had once felt.

Cora hoped Jane would miss the girl so deeply it hurt. She hoped Jane would lament the loss of her grandchildren, and wake every morning feeling helpless and alone. She hoped Jane would be furious at Cora and that the fury would make her pick up the telephone, or travel northwards to have it out with her. It was a confrontation long overdue, and Cora was already basking in Jane’s annoyance and frustration. Meg didn’t know anything about Cora and Jane’s past, and Cora was sure Jane had every intention of keeping it that way. Either way, Meg and Sam Bell’s arrival would bring changes for everyone. Especially Cora. She would have family around her again for the first time in more than forty years. She tried to imagine what it would be like – how she would react, how they would. And children: Cora never expected to have children living at Absolution Creek. She was suddenly wary and excited.

Before her father married Jane’s mother, Abigail, following the death of Cora’s mother, her family had been a wonderfully close-knit unit. Then Abigail arrived with her
holier than
attitude and a spiteful daughter. Jane hated Cora and Ben from the very beginning. She sneered at them and complained to Abigail, who in turn whined to their father. However, if Jane was embarrassed by her stepbrother and stepsister, she was also jealous of the love they received from their birth father. Looking back it seemed to Cora that Jane was intent on getting rid of them in order to have her stepfather’s undivided attention. How a kid could have so much hatred within her at such an early age baffled Cora. Maybe Jane suffered from some type of mental deficiency that served to emphasise the worst parts of her personality. Either way, in the end Jane won, although Abigail had played a significant role in Jane’s eventual short-lived victory. What a pair for her father to become tangled up with: a thief for a wife and a conniving stepdaughter.

Now Jane’s daughter, Meg, was coming to live at Absolution Creek. Closing the casement window, Cora looked out at the wind-blown day. The grass was brittle and yellowing from successive frosts, and a draft crept in from beneath the sill. She recalled that chilly whisper of air sneaking into her own room long ago. Of course back then she’d been prepared to freeze at night. As a young girl she spent hours watching the tips of a branch of the leopardwood sway out the window, as if cautiously testing the landscape beyond. The pale leaves billowed in blustery winds.

On a timber dresser on the veranda stood the last of the boxes previously lining the bedroom. During the fifties Cora had given thought to packing the lot up and railing it south to Sydney. They were not her keepsakes after all; they were Jack’s. And with sentimentality not high on the list of her preferred characteristics, Cora speculated that an antique shop would no doubt have a customer interested in such collectibles. Yet somehow the items remained in the house, until now. Cora lifted the folded cardboard and was immediately assailed by the pungent aroma of a bull mouse. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ she exclaimed, taking a step back. This
was
fire material.

Over the previous weeks Cora had burnt whole piles of New York’s
Saturday Evening Post,
water-stained and stuck together, ten years of the
Australian Agricultural Gazette
with its outmoded agricultural implements and a carton of sale brochures.

Cora leant delicately over the box and lifted a wad of old
Sydney Morning Heralds
from their smelly resting place. Most were dated around the early twenties, with one from 1931 commemorating the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. She blew at the dusty type, careful the mouse droppings remained in the box and didn’t escape onto Ellen’s polished floor. Despite having never been to Sydney, the arch amazed her. Its whole construction seemed a modern miracle even if Jack always lampooned it. She remembered this particular copy of the paper, for she’d saved it herself. It was a window into Jack’s world. She gave a brief thought to salvaging the best of the papers and then changed her mind. The past was the past, and had she not spent half her life trying to forget it? With a heave she lifted the box and carried it outside.

There was an old 44-gallon drum sitting on bricks behind the meat house. Tripod and Curly kept a respectful distance as she removed a stack of the newspapers and dropped them into the drum. There were small holes in the base and sides of the drum to draw air. When Cora threw a match in, the aged papers caught light quickly. Smoke streamed from the top and as the flames rose she added more papers by hand before upending the box’s contents into the drum. A shower of sparks rose up to assault her nostrils as papers, magazines and a book curled beneath the heat.

‘A book?’ Cora said loudly. She peered through the gathering smoke as the flames took hold. The blaze leaped across a skinny volume. It was pale green, with a faded red binding. Cora lifted her bad leg and kicked at the drum. A tongue of flame reared up angrily. She kicked at the drum again and it toppled, falling on its side with a great whoosh of ash. Cora too fell with the force of her movement, and by the time she scrambled to her knees the book was already smouldering.

At that moment Harold arrived, struggling with a dead wether over his shoulder. He dropped his load when he spied Cora and rushed to help her up.

‘I’m okay, really,’ she said shakily. ‘I was burning off and, well, I slipped.’

Harold righted the drum and did his best to tidy the mess blowing about the garden. He gave a nod at the blackened remains she clutched. ‘You’re all right?’ His hands were bloody and the air about him carried a curious mix of fresh meat, lanolin-rich wool and manure. Cora hated the stench of a fresh kill.

‘Yes, sorry to startle you.’ She clutched at the book. There were streaks of black ash on her moleskins, shirt and hands. ‘An old book,’ she explained. ‘Hadn’t seen this one. Guess my curiosity got the better of me.’

The growling of dogs had Harold running to the freshly slaughtered wether. Curly and Tripod were pulling on a leg apiece. ‘Get out of it, yah mongrels,’ Harold yelled, doing his best to kick at Curly and missing by a foot. Curly growled in response, but the dogs reluctantly backed off as Harold heaved the carcass over his shoulder. ‘You okay, then?’

‘Sure.’

Harold carried the carcass into the meat house to hang by its shanks, and the door slammed shut. Cora tried to open the book, pulling at the hardcover until it ripped away to reveal a mass of blackened pages. For a second, just a second, Cora could have laughed. What she thought had been destroyed long ago had remained intact beneath her roof for nearly forty years. She’d found Jack Manning’s diary and lost it; once again destroyed by her own hands.

Chapter 13

T
hey arrived near dusk at a boundary gate just as the twins began to cry in unison. Unwrapping the last Vegemite sandwich, Meg passed a slice each to her girls, before clambering from the vehicle. Stretching the small of her back she opened the wooden gate to let the car through. There was a jam tin nailed to an iron post and a peeling painted sign that said
Absolution Creek
. This was it. They had arrived.

The wind made Meg’s skin prickle with cold, yet it was unlike the chill of built-up Sydney. This air was bracing, fresh, new, and despite the long journey and the hours of mulling over Sam’s idea of selling Absolution Creek, Meg felt renewed. The trip had ended up taking two days. Penny had become car sick and then the radiator overheated. Still, they were here now. A sense of pride swept through her as her gaze encompassed the dirt beneath her feet and the grass swaying across the paddock. A flock of white birds flew overhead. Low on the horizon the sky turned from a dusty pink to a wavering line of red. They had crossed mountains and hills, watched as the countryside flattened and stretched itself into unknown horizons, all the while Meg smiling inwardly as they grew closer to this great adventure: their new life, their new home.