to call the ambulance. Betty says it’s best that she examines Harry first. She trots back with Michael in her work clothes, being careful of her shoes among the cow pats. Harry tries to stand still for her, but his body has got away from him and he can’t stop his knees from kicking up and down. He marches on the spot while she lifts his shirt and presses the heel of her hand against his skin. The flies are bad. He can see the dark outlines of flies on his face, like scabs. They tamper with his vision as he looks down at the top of Betty’s head. She’s speaking to him, she wants answers, but Harry can only moan – his voice is going the wrong way, back inside himself. Michael and Betty take an arm each and walk him slowly over to their house. Sip trots along a few yards behind them. The hardest part is sliding him through the fence. Betty tells him he’s an awkward parcel and to puff through his mouth for the pain – she remembers it from childbirth.
Harry spends the day on the couch dosed up on Bex, a hot-water bottle tied to his middle with a tea towel. In the afternoon Little Hazel makes him toast with honey while Michael and Mues do the milking. Then Michael fetches his books and his glasses and he is able to sit up a little and read.
When Betty gets home from work she brings him scrambled eggs on a tray. He doesn’t normally see her at both ends of the day. All her lipstick is gone now and her hair has flattened against her head. She looks old and her breath is stale from drinking tea. He can hear the children in the kitchen talking in exaggerated whispers as if they have been told to be quiet. Betty sits on the edge of the couch and takes his temperature the way mothers do – a hand on the brow. Then she smiles at him and pats his shoulder. ‘I’ll let you get back to your birds.’ When she stands he notices the roundness of her belly, her dinner not yet digested.
Harry looks out of the window at the jasmine curling around the verandah posts. It is his cutting. He brought it over in a kerosene tin when they first arrived. Over the years he’s trained it up the posts, steering it away from the gutters and towards the front door. Sometimes Sip will come back from visiting Little Hazel with a garland of jasmine around her neck and sneezing at the sweet juice of it. Sometimes he’ll notice Betty with a few squashed flowers in her hair. It is worse to be here with them, in the house but separate, than to be alone. He insists on going home. Betty relents and gives him the tea strainer with instructions for its use. The stones will pass in a day or so and it is important that he collect them. She’ll put them in the outgoing pathology at Acacia Court and get them tested for anything sinister.
The pain is duller now. He carries Betty’s tea strainer in his pocket and mainly remembers to piss through it; increasing his proficiency at hitting the mesh rather than the rim and avoiding splatter.
It’s nearly a week later; he’s taking his last piss of the day under the sugar gums, looking up at the kookaburras engaged in a bout of family bickering, when the two stones wash out of his cock. The smaller, oval-shaped one could be a piece of the larger stone that has chipped off on its long trail through his organs. They are not really like stones at all, more lumps of hardened molasses rolled in chaff. He double-boils Betty’s tea strainer and places the stones in a clean Vegemite jar on the kitchen windowsill. In the morning he notices they have exuded a little watery milk and are stuck to the bottom.
As he walks across the paddock with the jar in his hand he thinks of all the things he has walked across the paddock to Betty’s with – milk, binoculars for Michael, tools, guttering, records, brake oil, Christmas presents, an orphan calf, cuttings from the garden, various veterinary ointments, articles from magazines for Little Hazel, lemons, and now an intimate letter for Michael tucked into his sock. He looks at the stones through the glass. This is what I gave birth to, he thinks.