Tommy wondered what his father would have made of it, or Billy, or even his boyhood self, if any could have seen him now.
It was exhilarating work, but exhausting; he had never been so tired. Eighteen, nineteen hours in the saddle, dust gritting his eyeballs, so thick in his throat it hurt to breathe, droving anything up to a few thousand head over towering sandhills and barren gibber plains, through the abundance of the Cooper floodplains and the treachery of Goyder Lagoon. Nothing was predictable out here. Jack might have been familiar with all the waterholes, and the soaks and wells and bogs, but water they’d drunk and even bathed in on one trip would be gone next time they came through, and feed could disappear in a matter of days. The land followed its own rhythms. Secrets that over the years became lore. In hushed whispers drovers exchanged news with a grimace or shake of the head. Nobody really knew anything. You took your chances every time. Ah, she’ll be right, they all told themselves, since what else could they say, but many times it turned out she was not. Grave markers lined the trackside. Sometimes even bodies, a party strung out one by one across the desert like dropped beads, part-covered by the drifting sand—over the years Tommy helped bury more than a few. Their follies became memorialized in the stories of how they’d died, and by the names given to each place: Misfortune Creek; Dead Man’s Sandhill. It wasn’t always cattlemen either. Mostly cattlemen were better prepared. The teacher who’d decided to walk all the way to Birdsville but was later found eaten by dogs. The group on their way to a race meet so desperate they slit the throats of their horses then perished having drunk too much blood. You felt their ghosts coming at you. In the great silence of the desert, on a warm breath of wind. There were times it sounded like the land itself was howling—this was a place of coochies and debil-debils, and of sandflies gnawing away at your skin. Bites that if you scratched them could get infected and blow up like boils that would later need popping, the puss leeching, a heated knife-tip in the evening campfire. It got freezing cold after sundown, during the main winter season anyway. The night watchmen shivered on their horses, the others shivered in their swags. They slept regardless: some days Tommy could have slept on his feet. He was used to riding, grew up with cattle work, but nothing quite like this. At least the heat wasn’t scorching. Mild, even, in the wintertime; if you found yourself baking, you’d probably left it too late in the year. That’s what did for most men. Bravado, greed, stupidity—these things got them killed. Jack had a rule that come October he wouldn’t set out north again, not for any price, and so it was that Tommy found himself, at the end of that first droving season, back in Marree and at something of a loose end. Every day he called into the post office, popping his head through the door, asking “Anything?” and growing used to the postmaster replying in the negative, until one day he looked up and grinned.
“There is, actually. Your lucky day. Here you are, young man.”
It was Arthur’s handwriting on the envelope. Tommy tore open the flap. The postmaster noticed and said, “A sweetheart, I’massuming?” then, laughing, “They all say that,” when Tommy replied it was just a letter from a friend.
Tommy—
Hope you got the last note. I’m a bit more settled these days. I’ve put the address up top there, so you can write back if you want. I don’t know how long they’ll keep me on for but I’m not in a hurry to leave. Work’s been hard to come by—it’s mostly sheep down here, and you know what I think of them. Hope you’re getting along with the cattle and Flash Jack’s treating you all right. Don’t take shit from anyone. Be good to hear your news. Take care now.
Arthur
Tommy wrote back immediately. It tumbled out of him in a rush. The cattle droves he had been on, the places he had seen: Boulia,Bedourie, over the Territory border and out toward Alice Springs. Jack was treating him well, he told him, and despite theusual gripes and grumbles, he and the other men got along fine. He was sorry for how things had ended between them, for howhe’d behaved back then, unburdening himself after months of carrying that guilt around. He missed him, and was grateful, morethan he could quite bring himself to say.
Apart from the cameleers still making supply runs to the stations, Marree largely emptied during summertime, as the drovingseason wound up and the men returned to their families or looked for work nearer the coast. When Jack asked his plans Tommyadmitted he’d never thought about it, and didn’t have anywhere else to be. He might just stay in Marree, he said, shrugging;Jack told him he’d go out of his mind. “Why don’t you come with me to Adelaide,” he offered, then when Tommy asked what wasin Adelaide he’d laughed and said, “You’ll see.”
They boarded the train in Marree and within a few days were on the south coast, the same journey undertaken by all that cattle they had droved, albeit with a happier end. Sitting in the carriage watching the country slip by, Tommy wearing a clean shirt and trousers, the best of all he owned. He didn’t have any town clothes. Certainly none as smart as Jack: clean-shaven, his hair freshly trimmed,
