The yabby was close to the bank. He could see the sheen of its back, a shadow wrinkling beneath the light brown water. Stifled, he choked. His mouth opened, he wrenched air from space and as it exploded into his lungs he sprang to his feet, flipped the string and flicked the yabby on its back onto the bank. It scrabbled, twisted, waved claws and antennae, righted itself and slithered backwards toward the water.
Matthew snatched at it, fingers pincer tight behind its head, and dropped it in the bucket of muddy water at his side. It struggled for a moment, hoisting itself on the backs of those already caught, and then, with a last feeble wave of its antennae, sank from view. Matthew peered into the bucket with pride but the last glimpse of the yabby, its futile protest, saddened him.
It was a shiny day. The light shimmered hotly in the sky and the water in the flooded estuary reflected the tawny ragged gums. A mirror image of blueness stretched as far as he could see, as if trees and reeds and fallen logs grew upside down in a space lost in the deep recesses of the water. Very little stirred. Frogs and tadpoles sheltered silently under grass protruding from the bank. Birds hid in the flickering silver foliage of the trees. Only the occasional insect skittered across the water, trailing a skirt of ripples on the surface.
He looked again into the bucket of yabbies; an eye surfaced and sank. The water was as still now as the river. But with evening the river would start again, and life would emerge from trees, banks and reeds to feed, sing and sport. He thought of cooking the yabbies, their twitching in the hot water. He remembered ‘Clicketty’ Tonkin bringing a crayfish for supper. When Clicketty dropped it into boiling water it had screamed—a sound of high, thin agony. Matthew had covered his ears and run, and when he saw it on the table, eyes dead, claws perched over the rim of the plate, he had been sick.
He tilted the bucket so water dribbled out. With a stick he separated and counted his conquests, categorising their sizes and ages—the heavy girthed yabby with one claw had escaped many times before. He was proud of catching that one. He tilted the bucket a little more and a couple of the yabbies slithered onto the muddy bank, confused, uncertain. They hesitated, hunched and doubtful, antennae immobilised. Then, the instinct for freedom asserted, they scrabbled backwards into the water and with a few deft strokes disappeared into the mud.
Matthew let them go regretfully. The self-sacrifice warmed him.
Mother would not be pleased. She would have served them for supper at her card evening, a cut-glass dish holding white flesh, each piece curled and plump like witchetty grubs, vinegar in a matching glass jug, salt for dipping, the sweet taste of fresh flesh.
He tipped the bucket further. More yabbies disengaging themselves from each other fell onto the bank. Finally the old fat one lumbered awkwardly into his watery home.
But Gran would be tickled, not that he had let them go but that he knew why he had let them go. She would put her arm around him and say, ‘Go on, tell me, so I understand.’ He sometimes thought she already knew but she said she didn’t. If he told her about the warmth and the trees with trunks climbing into the sky and then downwards into the river she would listen and smile and then ask again: ‘And the yabbies? Tell me why you let them go.’
All the way home he thought about it. He didn’t think in sentences but in images: of eyes, waving antennae, shiny purple backs sinking into water, stillness, the breathing stillness of the river in which everything lived coolly, comfortably. He thought of the saucepan of boiling water, the thick steam that wet the walls near the stove, the creatures sinking into hot water, leaping and twitching, the high thin scream and the damp silence afterward.
He reached the small sandstone house with the Cloth of Gold roses swarming up the walls and burst through the kitchen door.
‘Gran!’ he shouted, ‘I let them go, all of them! I let them go! They cried in the hot water!’ And he burst into tears.
Sarah was not an old grandmother. She had been a small neat child with a plump face, her blue eyes well-spaced, a small straight nose and firm prim mouth. Her fair hair parted in the middle had been tied in two neat plaits. Now the plaits were rolled into buns over her ears and the round blue eyes wore a pair of rimless spectacles. But the general impression remained, of a compact and self-contained woman. There was no sense of frailty in her slightness, only of a lack of waste, as if by design she took up just the space in the universe she required and no more.
By contrast, her daughter Margaret was a blaze of petulant glory from her wildfire hair to loose indulgent stride—a woman who knew her own beauty and bargained with it as often as possible. She was one of life’s ironies, the beautiful wilful frippery daughter of intelligent, temperate and loving parents.
Both women paused in their tasks as he stopped, sobbing, at the kitchen door. Sarah was bread-making, her long black skirt and plain white high-necked blouse tented in a white cotton apron. Below sleeves rolled to the elbow her forearms were white with flour. Flour dusted the scrubbed wooden table and flitted in motes of sunlight from the window across the green linoleum floor.
The bottle of yeast, a living presence usually crouched behind the kitchen door, bubbling and burping a layer of thick yellow froth, now rested beside the table. It continued to
