Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,20
the ladder. When the horrible deed is done – the anxious crouched-walk across the beams, the scraping of the mother corpse and her dead newborn, the scraping up of maggots (he won’t tell that to Hazel) – he’s reaching out of the darkness with his boot, feeling for the top rung of the ladder, and he sees their three faces shining up at him like just-washed plates. He’s embarrassed by their gratitude, the cups of tea; a whisky, even, that they are offering him. He hands the stinking chaff bag down to Michael and looks away from them around the room. He wouldn’t normally stare at Betty’s bed, but the mound of clothes draws his eye. It is Betty’s life in fabric. He recognises the work dresses, the good dresses he has seen at Christmas and birthdays, the winter coat. There’s something in peach silk that must be an undergarment and then something white. At the very bottom of the pile – closest to the bed so he can’t get a good look at it – is a white dress with a thick expensive lustre, like icing on a fancy cake. Harry gets a sharp ache in his gut before he even fully understands that it is probably a wedding dress; it is more than likely a wedding dress.
Harry has two baths and scrubs his hands and arms with carbolic. He is unable to eat any tea. He goes to bed early – even for a dairy farmer. He dreams of Sip with a rotting pup half out of her vagina, of his father taking a shit in a paddock of barley and squirting out a huge bubbly spray of crimson blood. In the dream, Harry and his father stand next to the circle of blood-splattered barley looking at the shit at the centre of it – a little chocolatey crescent, nothing to write home about.
The air is fresh when he goes out to milk at dawn and he takes in big gulps of it. He doesn’t look into the cans before he seals them. There’s a cursory glance to check for foreign matter, but this morning he’s not keen to look into the milk. He can’t stop seeing it in his mind though – the silky white gloss of it is fixed behind his eyes.
Four days now over a hundred. The smell of the dairy turns Harry’s stomach. He wets his sheets in the bath before sleeping and wakes steamy and exhausted in the morning. He’d stay in bed, but for the cows and the sound of the tin pinging bleakly on the roof as the day heats up. Mues has asked for help with a killer so after milking Harry and Sip cross the road and meet him under the peppercorn tree where he is preparing the ropes. Mues’s knives are set out neatly on the top of a forty-four-gallon drum – that’s his profession showing, Harry thinks. Mues has been retired for six years now, but he still talks about his work as if it is current. Mues says a slaughterman is as skilled as a surgeon. He tells Harry about a slaughterman who conducted a successful operation on one of his children (saved himself a few bob) and another who went to the southern states of America for a lucrative career executing blacks. Harry doesn’t doubt it.
Mues drags a dirty-coated ewe from the house paddock and pushes her under the tree. She’s severely wool-bound so there’s not much protest. They tie a rope around each of her back legs and hoist her up over a branch. Mues ties the ropes off, avoiding her stiff front legs. The change of angle confuses the old ewe. She stabs her front legs forwards as if she is expecting the ground to tilt back up again and meet her hooves. Mues grasps a handful of wool on the back of her head to stretch out her neck and slices through the jugular. Harry jumps back. The first spill rushes out in a jet; then it falls in with the beat of her heart, spurting in a regular pulse. Harry and Mues watch the blood run away from the tree. It seeks out the low ground in between the roots, flowing in fat streams.
The streams of blood stop at the exact point where the circle of shade from the crown of the tree runs out. Harry walks over and watches the place where the blood runs into the sun. The instant