“So I’ll be heading out to Lawton soon, I reckon. Start up with a new mob.”
There had been that one other time, he remembered, not long after Tommy had left, when Billy had grown tired of Katherine’s pity and ridden down, intending to simply carry on with his life. Sixteen years old, newly orphaned, sitting alone at the table, lying awake in his bed, the ghosts of all he had witnessed here swirling through the night. He made it to dawn but only barely. Returned to Broken Ridge the very next day. Told Katherine to stop mothering him, there was only a couple of years between them, they were almost the same damn age. He didn’t need protecting, by her or anyone—he would work for fair pay and lodgings, the same as any man, and for the last five years had done just that, waiting for Glendale’s paddocks to recover, for the drought to properly break, for the drip drip drip of his courage to finally reach the brim.
“Well, thought I’d let you know anyhow. Plenty more work still to do.”
He turned and walked beneath the windmill, past the well and the rotten log pile, around to where Buck was tethered to thefront verandah rail. Billy untied him and glanced up at the house. A run-down wooden slab hut with a patchwork shingle roof;behind him a smattering of ruined outbuildings around the dust-blown yard. Mother had swept that verandah every day of herlife, now dead leaves littered the deck and tumbleweed caught in the rails. The front door had blown open. It knocked againstthe inside wall. Billy exhaled shakily and mounted the front steps. There were so many memories. Darkness yawned within. Betweenthe bench and doorframe was a bloodstain on the decking, and there were two others just like it inside. Billy wouldn’t lookat them. Wouldn’t set foot inside the house. Boots nudging the threshold, he leaned in and pulled the door closed and hurriedback to his horse.
Over the following weeks he withdrew from the life he’d made at Broken Ridge and began building a new one alone at Glendale.He took all Katherine had offered, ferrying feed sacks and hay bales and other supplies in the dray, and on the last day packedup his hut and said his farewells to the men, glancing at the distant homestead, imagining her up there, watching from a windowor standing at the verandah rail. He’d not seen her since their argument, wasn’t sure where the two of them stood. That fiancéwas still sniffing around, apparently, and if she’d wanted to, Katherine could always have sent for Billy, or come down. Itwas all too complicated. Their fucking had once been enough for both of them, now she talked about him breaking her heart.He didn’t know what else she expected. He’d always been clear about his intention of turning Glendale around.
In the empty bunkhouse he ripped down the curtain that had once separated black stockmen from white, and found Arthur’s old belongings still littered around his bed. His ornaments and trinkets, a Bible, of all things—Billy took them out back and skimmed them like stones into the scrub. With his mother’s old broom he swept the floor and caught the cobwebs, dust pluming in the window light and roiling in waves through the open double doors. He made up a bed at the white end of the barn and hammered nails into the coping to hang his clothes, dragged over Arthur’s bookcase and filled it with trinkets of his own.
Meals he cooked outside the bunkhouse, in a firepit someone else had dug. Drifters, wandering swaggies, you got them out heresometimes. At night he’d sit in the warmth of the flames, smoking against the wall, looking at the shadow of the house inthe moonlight and trying to remember happier times. The old days of his childhood, when a dozen stockmen had lived and workedhere, every day a rabble of activity and, for him and Tommy, excitement and fun. Falling asleep in the bed they shared theywould hear the laughter and swearing and singing under the stars, and all Billy ever wanted was to be a part of it, a manjust like them.
He still sang their songs sometimes, sitting out here on his own.
With the wages he’d been putting aside over the years, Billy rode out to the saleyards at Lawton and bought himself half asmall mob. The other half he’d be loaning from Broken Ridge: their cattle would graze his pastures, when they were sold he’dtake a cut, and if he managed to get a calf out of any of them, that calf would be Billy’s to keep. He’d agreed the deal withJoe, the headman, and had got the feeling he could have named almost any terms.
But he wouldn’t accept loaned labor, not without paying a wage, and since he couldn’t afford to do so had no choice but todrove the Lawton cattle back to Glendale by himself, seventy miles over rugged flatland that took him the best part of a week.Two dozen head of cows and heifers, plus a scrawny-looking bull calf. He’d not had his pick of the market, had been outbidon all but the dregs. And these were Lawton dregs, remember—most breeders only sold there when they couldn’t sell anywhereelse.
Under a beating sun Billy had walked the dusty pathways between the stinking pens, studying the cattle in their stalls. None was much to look at. Sunken rib cages, sagging bellies, a pained and mournful bellow. Still, some were better than others: Billy shouldered between the buyers crowding the wooden rails and tried
