Muck (24 page)

The Duke reaches for my hand. The bottoms of his eyes are puddling. “And what about you?” he asks me. “What have you got to say for yourself?” Said not as true inquiry but as men speak heartily to men, and a father to his son.

“What have
you
got to say for yourself?” I play along. I want to sing out the relief in me. A me who is not to be duke but freed. I take a breath to let out a deep stomach note for all the hospital to hear, but abort it—if I start singing, Feet will clap her hands together and say, “That’s all very nice and good, but what about a bit of Dean Martin? Something special and swoony I can hum.”

There is no such thing as prayer transmission or else for what I prayed out to him, the threat of leaving, and cock and calf sin, The Duke would not have his satisfied grin. Nor is there an animal justice—he would not be sitting there if there was. He is hardly a fighter, a warrior to look at, unless you’re meant to face down nature with tears welling. Do it with your teeth just put in and talking toughly of owning the world.

“How are those calves of yours?” He squeezes my hand.

“I’m late feeding them today because of you there. I’ll have to do it before it gets dark.”

The Duke rests his head against Feet’s arm and sighs to me, “What a good sense of responsibility you have. I couldn’t be happier with the way you’re turning out. What a credit you are to yourself, to me and to my lovely lady here.”

He urges us to get on our way in a cab so his boy can do his chores, feed his starving calves.

Feet kisses his cheek. He and I shake hands. He compliments my handshake for its controlled power. “Hard work is making a man of you,” he says, waving us to get going out into the corridor and back to Tudor Park.

Feet clip-clops along the shiny floor so fast I have to skip into a jogging stride to keep up. She hums as she passes people as if to let them know she is not one of them—poor unfortunates with faces longer than a mile.

She holds out her arm for me to do the right thing and come in under her wing. I let her hold me for a few strides.

“We’re back to normal,” she says. “That’s the main thing. I’m going to have a victory champers the very second that I’m home.”

I
MIX MILK INTO
the vat on wheels, drive the tractor down the cow race to where the moaning huddlers are paddocked. Miss Beautiful, the loudest of them all as usual. I answer her with singing. I don’t care if Norman catches my voice upon the air and performs an off-with-the-fairies eye roll. I let out lungfuls of notes from down in me, so joyfully released that I could bawl in ecstasy. Is this what bliss is? Is this the happiest I have ever been?

I wade through the nuzzling moaners. I knee their mouths from my fly. They seize my fingers and suckle. I have no penis-cock sensation. Is bliss so pure that it washes our imagination clean?

I finger-steer mouths to the vat’s boom and tell Miss Beautiful—singing the telling instead of plain talk—that she is as greedy as always; there won’t be enough left for others.

But let her be greedy today. Today in my bliss state I can’t refuse my darlings their gorging. Today I will mix another batch so they can share my bliss as well. A celebration with milk as their very own champagne toast. I drive back to the milk shed. Re-fill the vat. Return.

The toast for some mouths only lasts a minute before they slide from the rubbers, white saliva suspended to the ground. Others stay a minute more. Miss Beautiful and three larger calves are left to drain the dregs dry.

I stretch out my arms and sing, “Toast that I am free, Miss Beautiful. Free and so you must toast my life,” walking towards a ridge where wind pushes me, tries to shove itself inside my body past my voice. The current from inside me is stronger than any wind’s power. I win the combat: my voice versus the wind which is reduced to having to grab at my coat and hair. It can’t gather enough strength to buffet me backwards.

I walk over the ridge and down the other side as if advancing on the wind to capture it. I stomp dirt-clumps down, leaves, twigs, as if these are the crude weapons of the wind discarded in its hurry. The sun has slipped away at the sight of me. It has ducked behind a tree top slowly as if any sudden movement breaks its cover. But I already saw it and sing so— “There you are, a sun behind a tree.” I will leave it to sulk there. I salute it goodbye and sing my way back to the calves.

They are gathered a small distance away from the vat. Gathered in a circle as grown-up cows might ring a water trough and sniff and snort at the surface. They are competing, heads low, to be included in the circle, butting for a place in the crowd. I walk closer. There at the bottom of the circle, a calf on its side, belly globed. A bloated calf. Not any calf. Miss Beautiful.

I slap and screech to be let through into the ring. Miss Beautiful. Her mouth wide open. Milky tongue dangling dead in the grass. Her eyes turned up into bloodshot whites. Legs stuck out like a rubber glove inflated.

I hit her to get a breath back. I twist my fist into her throat to clear a passageway. “Get up. Get up,” I hit. “Miss Beautiful. Not you. Not you.”

I vomit brine. I chant her name, a howling chant that burns my throat with the strain. I chant that I have killed Miss Beautiful. I punch my head to pass the death down to me. My temples, my jaw, my nose. I punch till blood-snot slimes my lips. I tear my shirt open at the buttons to ram my knuckles into my bare ribs, where the heart is so as to stop it. I fail. I sit. Calves come closer to smell me once I am silent. I am heaving. I have the extra breath again. The scales are even. The Duke survives but the death is passed to Miss Beautiful.

I must drag her with a chain now for the dead cow lorry. “Just a calf. Put it out of your mind,” Norman will say. But my mind has no door that goes outwards.

To have one moment with no thought in it. Two moments when I haven’t thought a word. A day. A week. A year. No-one could fail at something so easy. Not if they had a brain, could they?

C
RAIG
S
HERBORNE
’s books include
The Amateur Science of
Love
,
Bullion
and
Necessary Evil
. His memoir
Hoi Polloi
was shortlisted for two literary awards, and its sequel,
Muck
, won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Sherborne’s journalism and poetry have appeared in most of Australia’s leading literary journals and anthologies.