Sing Fox to Me (7 page)

Most nights, it stayed together until morning.

Clancy pulled the covers over his naked legs. He heard a Tyto shriek and wondered how long owls lived. It hooted again. Some days, it seemed as though there was only an hour of the day when a bird wasn't declaring ownership over his mountain. At night it was the owls, howling like ghosts in the bush, and in the morning the kookas took over, cackling together over some private joke.

Clancy often wondered if he was the only living thing left on his mountain without a voice. Even though he'd not heard them since he was a very little boy, Clancy knew the tigers had the loudest voices of all.

He had found proof of them once. A footprint, clear as anything. Not long after River first disappeared. Clancy remembered rushing home. George and Clancy's new pup, Queenie, were waiting for him. ‘Show us where,' said George, and together they climbed his mountain as fast as either of them ever had.

But by the time they got to the footprint, it was gone. Melted into mud or walked over by wallabies. ‘It was
there
,' said Clancy. ‘Three long toes and a middle pad …'

George touched his shoulder. ‘We'll set bait and check again in the morning.'

That afternoon they laid a trap using the head, legs and liver of a newly slaughtered sheep from town. George tied up the pieces and hung them over a shallow hole near where Clancy had seen the footprint. They dug the ground. Neither of them mentioned the last hole they'd dug together or what they'd filled it with. Once it was deep enough, Clancy covered the tiger trap with king fronds.

Next morning, the sheep was gone but the trap was empty.

It was the only trap they ever set, and even though Clancy kept searching, he never saw another print.

Plenty of blokes still searched for tigers Clancy's way. His da, Abraham Fox, had first told him about these hunts when Clancy was only a boy. And years later, Clancy had told Abraham's stories to River. She asked him to show her, but Clancy hadn't known how back then. Or maybe it was more that he didn't have reason. Either way, he didn't show her, but River was stubborn and resourceful in the months before her mother's death. She made up her own rules for how tiger hunting was done.

There's a Fox den stink to his tiger tale.

Clancy switched off the wireless and his room fell silent.

two

S
amson Fox smelt the sandalwood of his dad's shaving soap before David's hands wrapped around his shoulders. The hands dragged his body up and rattled him.

Samson yawned.

His dad shook him again. ‘Wake up,' he whispered.

Sleepy, Dad
, signed Samson, and the sign for
sleepy
was two pinched fingers on either hand swirling in front of his eyes.

A louder whisper. ‘I said, wake up!'

This time Samson opened his eyes.

His dad was beside him. David's face and eyes glowed in the half dark like white sand underwater. He held his finger to his lips and stood up. The bed didn't creak. Then he gestured for Samson to follow as he crept through the door and out into the hallway. Slowly Samson pulled back his covers and, bit by bit, he bent his legs over the side of the bedframe and lowered his feet to the ground. The floorboards felt damp. The bed creaked when he tried to lift his bum off the mattress.

David was waiting for him in the hallway, wearing his daytime clothes.

Sleepy, Dad
, said Samson's hands again, but this time his voice followed, ‘I was sleeping.'

David patted him on the shoulder, one, two, three. It was a sign only he used, and meant he was about to sign. Sometimes Samson wondered if his dad actually knew the difference between having Down's Syndrome and being deaf. If he were deaf, he might need his dad to pat his shoulder, but David could just say, ‘I'm going to sign.' Only, Samson wouldn't have needed that either. He was always watching for words. In every flex of every finger, in each open hand, every point and gesture. He hunted for language in every silence.

When he'd first started Special School, Samson would run home past the lawns and garden edging and mailboxes to show his family what he had learnt.
Cat. Boat. Perspective. Indifferent
. But his mum didn't listen to things she couldn't hear, and his dad only learnt enough sign to tell him to speak instead.

Until now.

Standing in the dark hallway of Clancy's house, David started,
please
, or maybe it was
beautiful
. Next, he signed
don't
, so Samson knew the first sign meant
please
.
Please
, and the sign for
don't
was two hands facing down, then flipped over as though his dad was trying to show him that his hands weren't dirty.
Hate
was next, and
hate
looked like a closed fist pressed up against the chin, then flung away from the face as if he was throwing something away.
Me
.

Please don't hate me
.

Samson shrugged, which was a sign everyone used and meant he didn't understand.

David grabbed his shoulders again and pulled him in against his chest and throat. Samson could smell sandalwood again, only this time he could also smell the familiar tang of pine air fresheners.

‘Are you okay, Dad?'

His dad never hugged him. ‘You'll understand soon, Samson. You both will.' David stepped back and rattled him like a baby toy.

‘Okay.' Samson tried to use his quiet voice, but his words still filled the hallway.

David held his finger to his lips again.

This time, Samson copied.

His dad reached over and roughly pulled his hand from in front of his mouth. ‘I just can't,' he whispered. ‘You understand? It's too much for one person. You wouldn't begrudge me this … Would you?'

Samson nodded.

David rubbed his eyes as if he was very tired. ‘Jonah won't understand,' he said, ‘but you'll explain it to him, won't you? You'll tell him what I said?'

Samson nodded again.

‘Okay, back to bed,' said David, his voice all of a sudden louder and no-nonsense. ‘It's past bedtime.'

Goodnight, Dad
.

‘Goodbye.'

After he was back in bed with the blankets wrapped up around him like woollen bat wings, Samson saw his dad's hands again. They floated above him, weaving through the darkness and leaving streaks of warm vanilla light behind them.
Please don't hate me
, the hands signed again and again.

Jonah stood in the living room, staring at the pile of folded blankets and neatly stacked pillows on his granddad's couch. It was morning, but outside the sky was still dark. The last embers in the fireplace were almost out, and Clancy's dog watched him closely from the hearth.

Jonah checked all around the living room first, then the bathroom, and then he looked outside. Deep grooves ran through the dirt, as though his dad hadn't been able to get away fast enough. His dad was gone. His bags were gone, clothes, toothbrush, keys – all gone.

Back inside, Jonah checked the coat rack at the back door. His dad's shoes, coat and beanie were gone, but his leather satchel was still there. It was his teaching bag – Jonah and Samson weren't ever allowed to go through it. Jonah looked around. Maybe his dad would come back for it? He lifted it over his shoulder, but the strap was sized for his dad, so the bag hung at Jonah's ankles. He set it down on the table and looked through the house for a note explaining where his dad was and when he would be coming back.

No note. His dad had just left.

The dog, Queen Elizabeth, stirred in front of the hearth. She pulled her tail out of the way of the tumbling coals.

‘Hello, girl,' he said, reaching out.

The dog growled, and Jonah pulled back his hand as if she'd already bitten him. He wanted to move further away from her, but his legs didn't know what direction to carry him in. This wasn't his house. The dog growled again, as though she knew what Jonah was thinking.

Gently, he backed out of the room and kept going all the way to the kitchen. He held his hand tight to his chest in case the dog decided to come after him and pounce. Then he hit the kitchen bench. ‘Ow!' He held his breath, but Queen Elizabeth didn't follow.

The dinner dishes were still in the drying rack next to the sink, and the curtains were pulled back. Jonah doubted that Clancy ever closed them. He ran his hand over the benchtops. They weren't smooth and plastic-coated like the ones in his mum's kitchen. These felt like raw wood, mostly smooth but with rough patches. Something jabbed into the end of his finger. He looked down, but nothing was there. He turned his hand over and looked closely at his skin. There was a splinter at the base of his index finger. Jonah held the tiny bead of blood to his lips and pressed his tongue against the wound. The cut was too small to cause him any pain.

What if Clancy didn't want them to stay? Their dad often complained about the day Clancy threw him and their mum off the mountain when she was pregnant. If Clancy could do that to his own son, what was going to stop him from throwing Jonah and Samson out too?

Jonah knew one thing for certain. If they did have to leave the mountain, Samson was on his own. Jonah wasn't going to get stuck looking after his brother. No way.

He poured himself a glass of water and drank it standing up, looking at the orange stain on the wall. The tail imprint, sticking straight out, was lighter than the rest of the shadow. Maybe it had been made by a huge wild dog? Nah, Jonah doubted his granddad would've had a dog skin on his wall with Queenie sleeping on his floor. A kangaroo skin, maybe.

After finishing his water, Jonah replaced the glass on the drying rack without rinsing. He turned around and stared at his dad's satchel on the table. Had David left the bag on purpose? He might even have left it for Jonah.

There wasn't much inside the satchel, just some loose papers, notebooks, a few novels and collections, an open packet of Fisherman's Friends. Jonah combed through them all before he understood – his dad had been so desperate to get away, he'd left the bag by accident.

Jonah tried to close it, but a bunch of papers got in the way. He pulled some of them out.

Poems, in his dad's handwriting. Usually Jonah didn't care about his dad's poetry, but today he found himself turning the pages over and taking a look. One seemed older than the others. He read it first. Pretty soon he had read them all. Most he didn't understand. Some were about Tasmania or animals in the bush, and in many it was snowing or about to snow. Those were the parts Jonah really didn't understand.

After he'd finished reading, he sat twirling the papers mindlessly between his fingers. What did his dad's words mean? Jonah had never liked poetry, even when David had tried to explain it to him. He liked novels where everything was laid out in front of him. He didn't like puzzles – they were confusing. He stuffed the pages back inside the satchel and shut the flap. This time it stayed closed.

Samson lay in bed staring at the ceiling, trying not to think about his dad. He turned over. The bedsprings groaned. Jonah's bed was empty. The sun pushed through Jonah's window and across the floor towards Samson, like legs on a giant octopus.

Please don't hate me
.

Samson closed his eyes. He wanted to get out of bed. He wanted to walk down the hall and into the kitchen. He wanted to make toast with vegemite for breakfast and eat it with his mum while they watched Saturday morning cartoons, but she was gone and his dad was gone, and Samson didn't know where his granddad kept the toaster.

Samson rolled over and faced the wall. His blankets rolled with him, exposing his back. He knew it was cold, but his extra chromosome was heavy, and it always took his skin time to understand things that his mind already knew.

‘Your skin is just a bit slow,' his mum always said. ‘You're a bit different, is all.'

She often said he was different, so Samson had catalogued how. His fingers were stubby, he knew that, but he also had strong wrists from making words with his hands. He had deep creases like empty riverbeds through the middle of each hand, and almond-shaped eyes. His skin looked older than it was supposed to, but his mum said that was ‘normal for you, Sammy'.

Normal for him, Samson figured out, was not normal at all.

He knew what Down's Syndrome was. He knew he wasn't like everyone else – he had an extra 21 chromosome. He had often tried to explain to his parents that the extra chromosome was heavy and sometimes slowed him down, but no one seemed to understand.

Please don't hate me
, his dad had signed hours before, but because of his extra chromosome, Samson hadn't understood until now.

His dad was gone.

Gone
, he signed to himself.

Soon after that, Samson felt the cold shiver across his exposed back. He didn't move or try to cover himself. It was normal to be cold. This was what normal felt like. Slowly, Samson's breathing changed. It grew jagged and shallow, pushed up when it should have pushed down, and rattled inside his throat like a seedpod.

His extra chromosome was panicking.

Only one person was strong enough to help him.

The Other Samson, Other Samson, Samson, Samson … ‘My name is Samson too,' he whispered, and his lungs expanded, his breathing widened and his body filled up with more air than he could ever use. His breathing slowly returned to normal. ‘Other Samson …' he whispered.

The Other Samson was a hero from the Bible. Even though his dad said no one from the Bible had ever actually existed, Samson knew that the Other Samson was real. He had lived a long time before Samson and Jonah, or their dad or even Clancy. He was tall and fast and strong, with super strength stored in his long, long hair.

The Other Samson never cut his hair, so Samson Fox didn't either. Just in case.

Samson knew all the stories of the Other Samson. There was the story of the roaring lion and the belly full of bees, the story of finding a wife and the burning foxes. The story of Delilah cutting his hair and pushing down the columns of Nineveh, the story of his tricky riddle, his birth, and plucking a mountain from the ground like a carrot so he could hurl it into the sea.

Samson rolled onto his back and imagined that the hands wrapped around the mountain were his. His fingers squeezed. Dirt fell from between them like brown rain. Some dissolved like water evaporating, and some blew away or stayed under his fingernails. Trees came loose from the sides of the mountain and tumbled down. Creeks drained and vanished, boulders were unearthed. Mountain houses were crushed into nothing, and roads leading all the way up disappeared from any map.

Then Samson imagined growing huge, like Optimus Prime, and hurling handfuls of Clancy's mountain all the way out to sea. ‘Watch out!' he shouted, but Jonah never listened. He toppled over the side. Samson shrugged, and his shoulders cut clouds in two. He hurled a chunk of the mountain. A long way away, his dad looked up, just in time to see hundreds of tangled trees blacken the sky. Then his car sank beneath a shower of boulders.

The bedroom door opened, but Samson kept his eyes closed. ‘Are you awake?' whispered his brother. Samson didn't answer. ‘Good.' Jonah shuffled around the bedroom, and in a few minutes it was silent again.

After Jonah had hidden his dad's satchel under his bed, he made himself a bowl of cornflakes and ate it beneath the amber stain. When he was finished, he showered and dressed, ready to search the house for the animal that once hung on the kitchen wall.

Down one end of the house, on the far side of the living room, past the fireplace, was his granddad's bedroom. When Jonah pressed his ear to the wooden door, he heard snoring. He'd only search Clancy's room if absolutely necessary – it probably smelt terrible in there, like old man soup.

There was nothing much to see in the living room, except dozens of unmarked videotapes. Jonah liked movies and wanted to watch one, but the sound might wake his granddad. He reminded himself to come back if Clancy went out.

The fireplace still smouldered. Jonah held out his hands but couldn't feel any heat. He wondered how cold it was outside.