Sawdust (4 page)

I don’t remember what happened afterwards, except despising little Sam like hell for many moons to come after betraying his word and dobbing us in.

After that, Sam earned the nickname “Ford Pill”, much to his chagrin. Ford Pills were something Mum would take a handful of before going to bed each night so that her bowels would move in the morning. In my view, Sam had the same effect on all of us... he bloody well gave us the shits too.

Those were the good times, the good memories for all their harshness. There were others, many others to come.

When we moved to the other side of the highway
I used to wonder if people, the cars passing by, knew that sometimes families moved from one side of the highway to the other. As much as they looked at one house and thought about that particular family, a year or so later they could be looking at the other side of the highway and instead of wondering about another family, they would actually be wondering about the same family.

Maybe they should have known. We always took all of our mess with us. Not that we had a great deal in those early days. The days before Dad started his junk collection, that is. That was yet to come – when we moved to the big property, not that far away either. But what I remember more than anything was Cousin Glad’s chunky black shoe landing on my naked foot as I tried to get my first peeks at little Sam.

I remember that because I recall distinctly that it was just a few months after that we moved to our next rented house on the other side of the highway. More precisely, from our local point of view, the move could be thought of as shifting to the other side of the Nebo River, which ran like a big snake through Anondale. Down at its mouth, the river separated Nebo Island from the seaside town of Burrum Sound, a place where I would one day end up too.

Although the new house still had just two main bedrooms, one for us kids and one for their royal highnesses, Mum and Dad, the new house was slightly bigger. Like the old one, it was raised but this one had a whole steep flight of stairs we had to walk down to get to the backyard. The stairs had a view to the paddock where Dad ploughed the dry ground to grow his crops.

I also remember Cousin Glad stepping on my toe at the time Sam was born because it was not long after, just after we moved to the other side of the highway, that I began to notice the way Dad would gaze at me. He had a way of plucking or flicking with his thumbnail at the gap in his two front teeth when he was distracted or seriously concentrating on something.

Only now it wasn’t quite that look I was noticing, it was another, stranger look, like one sometimes sees in a bird gaping down at you from a tree – its head almost but not quite tilting, very inquisitive.

In the event, Dad’s gaze lasted even longer than a bird’s curious stare and had the feeling of excavating, as though scratching. As though digging at skin with a pick. Unlike a bird, too, his eyes remained absolutely steady, never a blink or even a twitch of alarm. It was like he had become oblivious of everyone and everything around him, and there was absolutely no inclination to fly away. I noticed the look for the first time one day when Dad and I were out in his shed together.

As usual Dad was sharpening his blades, and I had toddled down there with my unbendable curiosity to see what he was up to. The shed at that time, with its open sides, looked more like a gazebo than it did a normal iron shed, and it was big and filled with mysterious things that were like a pile of giant mysterious toys.

They were Dad’s toys, of course, but the good thing was he didn’t mind Jim and me hanging around him in the shed. In that way he was much better than Mum who used to always shoo us away from all her cooking and baking. As long as his day’s work in the paddock was done, he enjoyed our company.

He especially liked mine, and would natter endlessly to me as I sat and crawled at his feet. I enjoyed being among the muck; I enjoyed the smell of grease and petrol and metal, and I enjoyed the proximity to the solid, giant frame that was his.

On this particular occasion I needed to do a pee, and old enough to let adults know when I needed to do so, I told Dad.

‘Just do it there,’ he flicked with his eyes pointing to the thin grassy scrub outside the shed. So off I went, just outside the shed, and pulled down my knickers under my dress.

All around me, in my immediate vicinity, I saw a heap of old metal timber saws with their huge round cutting wheels that were as tall as me, I saw axes standing against steel frames and heavy metal implements that were used for ploughing. There were also tons of spare and rusted tractor parts that were strewn all over the place like massive brown ants.

It was an environment that excited me. Otherwise it was pretty bare; thin tufts of browning grass here and there and the odd eucalypt tree peeling like snakeskin.

This was my land, the land at my feet – dry and hard like a khaki desert and flat with no place to hide. Whatever we did out there, like my peeing now, was done well and truly in the open. I wonder if anyone saw me from the highway? Too late now.

My wondering head, as I peed, spun out into this endless hot scrub, and after a while I heard a scraping noise. I looked up and saw Dad stepping out of the shed. When he was quite close to me he stopped in his tracks and just stood there, watching me.

He was very quiet and appeared to me like a tall, silent swamp bird. I was not afraid. I had no reason to be. But the look was strange, as I had described, like a probing bird, his head ever so slightly tilted, but unlike a bird his eyes did not blink or look about or flinch.

After a while I could not help but think, ‘Why is he looking at me like that? Is he trying to say something?’

Even as my little girl thoughts flew up to his eyes and my urine watered the dry weeds beneath me, he continued to watch me.
After a while, he started to pluck with his thumb at his front teeth. He did it until I was well and truly finished peeing.
Then he lumbered up to me, leant down, which was a long way for his tall, lanky body to bend, and placed his hand on my crotch.

‘What is he doing?’ I thought, convinced he was checking to see if I was finished, if I had indeed done my business. But he did not say anything, and just stayed like that for a while. It passed through my mind again, why are you touching me, but it did not feel wrong or misplaced or scary in the least.

The only thing I do remember being certain of was that his hand rested there, lingered, like one uncertain of a route, like one looking for direction. All the while his eyes looked into mine with that digging feeling, that scratching and picking, as if to say I shouldn’t move until he was finished.

Then he jumped up and told me also to get up. He strode away from me, back into his gazebo-shed.

At that time I also used to enjoy being around his mates who would come over now and then to play a whole bunch of musical instruments and sing and drink. Happy, like any little girl, I would run around, feeling warm, feeling affection, feeling like I was being loved. It was the most important time in my life, this fun-making adult world that belonged to Dad.

By comparison, on normal weeknights, sitting near the stove at our dark wooden dining room table, everything at home would be the same.

From the first day outside that shed and in the long nights after that, our family would sit at the dinner table, listening to Dad, listening to him constantly telling us to salt our food – ‘You kids must put salt on your food. Eat lots of it. It’s good for you.’ – And yelling at us to eat all of it, every scrap of our dinner, as we tried to hide our boiled, mushy pumpkin and sometimes other squishy vegetables from sight.

‘Eat your goddamned bloody vegies, too,’ his wide throat would yowl. ‘You’re not leaving the table till you’ve finished every speck. Unless of course you want to get your backsides tanned!’

I suppose I should have been alerted that day
when Dad touched me after I’d urinated outside the shed? But he did it again and then again as though it were completely normal, eventually telling me with his steely bird-eyes that this was something between us, a father and his daughter. A king and his princess. It wasn’t that other people shouldn’t know, it was just they would never understand.

What they would never understand, according to Dad, was the way other cultures brought up their children and kings and queens continued their long historical lines. Our own modern royal family not exempt. He said that for some obfuscating reason these days no one wanted to face that part of their history. I was a little girl, and in a strange sort of way glad to be a princess. It gave me a sense of belonging.

There we were stuck out in the middle of nowhere, and there was Dad, a mercurially tall man with strong – in all the ladies’ opinions – handsome, square-jawed features, gregarious and funny and helpful to everyone – and there was I, a hopeful little girl, suddenly accessible to him.

Even though I could not always follow the reasoning of his need for my company, I was happy to see the spark in his eye fall on me. A bizarre understanding developed between us that was like clouds melding and becoming one, and I was at times extremely close to him. It felt extra special.

In reality, I was a shy and timid but mostly friendly little bird who liked to see the good in everyone. I would do pretty much anything for others to be friendly back to me. I was the girl with the big fuzz of hair who wanted to be loved. The girl who, with her older brother, Jim, had tried to make glue in the old wooden caravan that was so blemished and dilapidated it had become the accommodations for small animals and reptiles.

But I was also the girl who would go with Dad to the same caravan and do much more than Jim would ever know.

‘Come, let’s go and see what we can find at the back paddock,’ Dad would say to me, and my young five-year-old legs would happily follow him.

There was a mouldy old mattress in the caravan and he would lie me down and take my knickers off. Lying or kneeling next to me he would fiddle with me and touch my privates, then he would take his erect penis and rub himself against me. I never thought there was anything wrong with it, just as on that first day, no more than a three year-old, I had not thought there was anything wrong when he touched me outside his work shed.

With only the slightest sense of trepidation, in all honesty, it felt pleasant.

Strangely, I don’t ever remember him ejaculating either. But after a while, after a few minutes – the whole thing would take no more than about ten minutes – he would stand up and tell me to put my knickers back on and then say something as simple and matter of fact as: ‘Go and see if the chooks have left any eggs.’

That part was confusing. The cold that came afterwards. The not knowing what had really happened. The only thing I did know for certain as I gazed into Dad’s straight worker eyes, which stared back like a wild bird into me, was I should not ever, under any circumstances, discuss it with anyone.

The caravan was “our place”, and it wasn’t the fact that I was happy to have it between us. More so it was that it was “our secret”. A clandestine touching of affections between a father and his naively loving daughter. A place for a king and his princess. It had a feel of more than normal. Of special.

On my fifth birthday I was given a dog, Widget
. It was one of the greatest days of my life.

‘Go over to that box,’ Mum and Dad said to me that afternoon, pointing to the big old tea chest in the living room.

Unsure, I toddled over to the box and heard tiny little yelps. I thought the box was trying to talk to me. I was told to open it, and inside found this minute ball of black and tan fur. My whole heart lifted like the sun had infiltrated every pore in the house. I touched the puppy and felt its fur breathe. I could have cried from joy.

‘That’s Widget,’ Dad said. ‘She’s yours.’

But like all things in our house, Widget, an Australian terrier, turned out to be mine and not mine. She was in reality all of ours –
the family dog
– even though she was given to me for my birthday.

People were more practical in those days. If there was a need, especially if it was a more nonessential pleasure-giving need, it was saved for an occasion like this, a birthday, and everyone benefited. Although we did not comprehend it then, I guess that’s why Dad and Mum called the dog Widget. In the end Widget, like all things in country regions, was expendable: by definition, a mere small gadget, a mechanical contrivance that kept us kids occupied.

Still, for a while I felt a little unique. I was loved and had something smaller than me to love back.

That night there were lots of people in the house, I can’t recall exactly who, but typically, as would happen to me, the day would be remembered with some associated pain.

‘Deb, it’s time for the candles,’ Mum called out to me. ‘Go on over and get the knife. We’ll need it to cut the cake. And then we can all sing happy birthday.’

I walked over to the sink and grabbed a tea towel only to have the butcher’s knife – which Dad had sharpened enough to kill a cow – kind of spring out of it and fall directly into my foot. Yes,
into
my foot. The point pierced straight through my flesh and blood spurted everywhere.

At least this time Mum heard me when my cries reached into the heavens. Suddenly a cloud of bodies was swirling around me, and Mum, taking charge, was washing my foot and applying bandages.

Mum... Yes, I remember Mum that night; it was one of the few times when she held me, when I felt the warmth coming from her that was usually reserved for my younger sister, Marge and little brother, Sam. I felt small and wonderful in her arms and wondered why it couldn’t always be like this. Why she always had to be so frosty. Why she never heard me.

Come to think of it, Jim, my older brother, was pretty much in the same boat as I was. I don’t recall him getting much praise or attention from her either. Maybe us two just didn’t fit into the category of cute since the advent of the two younger ones? Now we were looked on in a more earthy, practical way – older and therefore more “workable”. It always took something more than just being you to get love in our house. It didn’t come of its own accord. You had to have some use.

With my foot bound up, I blew out my five candles and helped Mum cut the cake. Despite the blood and pain, it was a good night, full of happy feelings and caring.

It is the small and simple times like these that abound in my memory. To this day I still have a scar on my foot, a remnant of the event.

And of course there was Widget. She was everybody’s dog, the family dog, but on that night and for the next few days at least, she was mine. She licked my face and her tail wagged and I was a little girl in wonderland.

Another thing that was fun at home, especially when we were in this the second house, on the left side of the Bruce Highway, was walking to meet our older brother Jim as he came home from school. With my little brother Sam wrapped in Mum’s arms, and me and my younger sister Marge springing at her side, we’d walk to the wooden gate that led out onto the Bruce Highway. That’s where Jim would be dropped off by the school bus.

I recall how I would stand on the old wooden gate like a jittery-winged cicada, jumping up and down and waving my hands furiously at whatever traffic came by. As we walked back to the house, Mum would ask Jim about his day at school and Marge and I would be all ears, wanting to know what school was like.

Once home, Jim would take out his slate board and charcoal and show us younger kids what he had learnt to write and draw at school. In those days, rather than normal exercise books, rather than pens and pencils, we in Queensland still used slate boards and charcoal.

The slate boards went back to Dad’s day. And I remember Dad, from time to time, would take out his own old slate board from his time at school. But even better than that, he would show us this perfect wooden pencil case that he had made all by himself at school.

Inside the case were these thin, long pieces of charcoal that Dad used to write with as a child. I was also looking forward to writing on a slate board, eager to learn, but paper and pencil came into our school the year I started and that had its own sense of excitement. Times were changing.

But in those days, fetching Jim at the wooden gate, jumping up and down on it like an agitated cicada, and bouncing next to him until we got back to our house, was warm and exhilarating.

Of course, in the background, also happy and bounding, would be Widget, my, or should I say
our
dog. She would wag her little tail and bark helplessly at the magpies and big black crows that paraded the ground nearby. Like the terrier she was, she would spring with bravado – and the birds, used to it, rather than fly away would merely hop, threaten and glare.

As to Dad, although it is something of a cloudy blur now, or perhaps the truth is I have made it into a cloudy blur, touching me was by this time – at the tender age of five – a part of the daily routine.

Like in the caravan, so on my bed or anywhere else for that matter he found available at the time, he would tell me to lie down or sit at his side and pull down or tell me to pull down my knickers. Always he would rub me first with his fingers and then he would stroke me with his hard, erect penis against my vaginal area.

Was I afraid? Was I afraid of that big adult thing? The truth was it seemed so normal, so run of the mill; I have no memory of it crossing my mind in a bad, immoral or even alarming way. That is the honest truth.

I only ever felt this vague apprehension, a kind of mild anxiety that would increase with time, that I could not really relate to anything.

Now, not even the work shed or even Mum and Dad’s bedroom was sacred – he would do it anywhere and everywhere, even in that sanctified bedroom where the king and queen lay under their majestic white mosquito net. Somehow Dad would always find a way to get me alone, somewhere where no one else was around, and he’d lay me down on the bed, or the ground, or wherever, and do his thing.

On one occasion, as I lay there on my bed in my bedroom and Dad leaned over me, a shadow entered the dimness of the room. Something dark, with eyes and yet no eyes. Was it Mum? I don’t know. It was a premonition. A feeling. A sense. But it was something dark.

And really, really, maybe I shouldn’t have been too worried, because I knew whatever we were doing was
our secret
. Was what kings and queens and exotic tribes did, and the only reason others, including Mum, should not know about it was because they did not know the real story about kings and queens and the way other, happy, far-off tribes lived. They would never quite grasp it. Or even want to grasp it.