The horse trotted reluctantly over that hard, rubbled ground, hooves slipping, her gait wary, and still a long way to go.Tommy patted her neck sympathetically. He knew exactly how she felt. The sooner they got there, and got this over with, thesooner they’d both be gone.
They crested the final hillside and at last the little homestead peeled into view, ringed by its moldering outbuildings, ghostlyand abandoned in that dust-blown scrubland. Tommy pulled the horse up short and sat staring. The place looked condemned. Holesin the walls, holes in the sagging roof; one side of the scullery had collapsed. The storage shed had been flattened, thestables looked burned-out, a carpet of weeds covered the yard. He walked the horse slowly down the hillside, struggling tounderstand the disrepair. Hadn’t Billy said he’d lived here? Hadn’t he visited? Wasn’t this all part of the Broken Ridge estate?
Tommy tied off the horse at the cattle yards, the railings dangling, the posts chewed by rot, and walked carefully towardthe house and main yard. Total silence out here save the crunch of his footsteps. Deathly still. No cattle, no insects, nobirds. Ahead the house was lit up in the sunshine and all the more decrepit for it, the front door standing open, dark shadowsinside . . . Tommy looked away, to the bunkhouse, the remnants of a firepit outside the entrance, the rusted frame of a cotbed visible through the doors. He reached the verandah and wavered. Breathing in staccato jags. He could almost hear Mothersweeping, the swish of her broom on the boards; he snatched free of the memory and hurried around the back of the house.
Headstones, he’d expected. Marble, like Mary’s, something with their names. Instead he saw only thick scrub and bald soilpatches, no grave markers of any kind, no sign that his parents, or anyone, had ever been buried here.
Bewildered, Tommy trudged through the weeds and clump grass, glancing back at the house to get a fix on where they’d dug the holes. He found them eventually. A pair of plain white wooden crosses lying discarded in the dirt, the surrounding scrub a little thinner, two rectangles, the vague outline of each plot.
Tommy knelt and snatched up the nearest cross and tried shoving it back in, but the earth was baked solid, no give beneaththe dust. He heaved and heaved, jabbing at the ground, until the join between the arms splintered and the cross fell apartin his hands. He looked at the two halves despairingly, then screamed and launched them into the scrub, falling onto all foursand snatching up weeds with both fists. This was his mother’s grave he was tending. He’d dug it out himself. Worrying he’dmade it too big for her, lowering her in; now she lay here like she was nothing, had meant nothing, like she wasn’t a motherat all. “Fuck, Billy!” Tommy yelled, panting, rearing back on his heels. His hat fell off. Hands cut and filthy, but his scrabblinghad made no difference at all.
Up Tommy labored. He retrieved his hat and stood over those two outlines and paid his respects with silence, the only wayhe knew. He wasn’t one for praying, or talking to the dead, and anyway if they could hear him, he figured they already knew.He missed them, was the crux of it. And he was sorry as hell for how they’d gone. That day had punched a hole through Tommythat nothing had been able to fill. You never get over becoming an orphan. Not for all the Arthurs and Jack Kerrigans in thisworld. He hoped they would be proud of what he’d made of his life, what little he’d achieved, but deep down didn’t see howthey could.
He left the other cross lying in the long grass, left the graves unmarked. Fuck it—this land had defined his parents, sustainedthem, ruined them, it might as well swallow them now. It felt fitting, almost. They belonged here totally, in a way that forthe first time Tommy was realizing he did not. This endless red flatland he’d always thought of as home . . . but it wasn’tanymore, was it, all it ever brought him was pain. He felt no sense of belonging being back here. No, home for Tommy was Gippsland,with his cattle, his gully, his pastures, and with Emily, and Arthur, and Rosie; they were his family now.
But he had to go inside the house again. Had to lay that ghost to rest. He walked around the front, beneath the rusted windmill, past the crumbling log pile and dried-up well, the little clearing where they’d found the dogs stabbed, and forced himself face-to-face with the old slab hut, planting his boots in the weed-strewn dirt directly in front of the steps, the open door yawning beyond. Dark in there, but not fully, the gloom leavened by shards of sunlight through the patchwork roof. He glimpsed the curtain to his old bedroom, swallowed and steeled himself. All he had to do was go inside. Then he could go home.
Slow boot tread on the steps then the verandah. A dark stain between the bench and the door. Tommy pictured Father slumpedthere, three holes in him, his rifle across his lap, and had to grab the doorframe for support. He took Billy’s hat off. Droppedit on the cobwebbed bench. He exhaled shakily. Get in, get out, and he was done here. He’d never be back again.
Tommy stepped into the room and the gunshot flung him backward, a searing pain in his midriff, total incomprehension in hiseyes. He slammed against the wall
