Sing Fox to Me (19 page)

Murray was like his dad. After organising routes, he sent the townspeople off in their groups of two. ‘Everyone has their walking partner?' Lots of nodding. ‘And everyone knows what direction they're heading in?' More nodding. ‘Good, let's get going.' The herd dispersed.

‘Who am I going with?' asked Samson. He was still wearing his pyjamas.

‘We've got enough people looking,' said Clancy.

‘He likes small spaces,' said Samson quietly, then he turned and walked back inside the house.

Before he left, Murray promised Clancy that only he would walk the track past the caves and towards the top, just like George had twenty years before. Clancy wondered what George would think of his son following so closely in his footsteps. He'd probably say it was fruitless. The mountain had opened and gulped another child down. No power he knew could bring a kid back when the mountain took them.

‘What way do you want me going?' asked Clancy.

‘Reckon it's best if you stay here today,' said Murray. ‘In case the boy comes back. Tilda's gonna stay again as well.'

Clancy nodded. No point arguing. He'd wait until Murray was gone and make his own way up the mountain.

‘Be careful up there,' said Tilda.

Murray hugged her and said something softly in her ear.

Tilda nodded.

Clancy knew what Murray had said. He didn't need a babysitter. Certainly not some pregnant girl who was likely to burst at any moment. His kitchen floor had seen one birth already, and one was enough. He didn't need to be mollycoddled. River was gone. He knew that. Lost, taken, eaten, run away. Dead. He'd always known. It wasn't like he was cracked, no matter what they said in town, or in the papers, or in books of fucking poetry. He'd always known she wasn't coming back, but he needed the search. So much had already been lost. So many voices had been silenced, but not his daughter's. River had always been able to sing herself back out of the bush.

‘Clancy?' said Tilda. She was in front of him, at the bottom of the back steps, her stomach bulging beneath her long winter coat. ‘You alright?'

‘No,' he said. ‘How could I be? What if it was your kid who was missing?'

Tilda shook her head. ‘I'd look as worried as you.'

Clancy wished he were in bed with Essie beside him. ‘My dog's missing too.'

‘Murray told me,' said Tilda.

‘I don't give a rat's what this lot think. I'm not just staying here today,' said Clancy. ‘No one knows this mountain better than me.'

Tilda nodded. ‘You ever thought about leaving this place? Letting all this go.'

For a second, Clancy felt as though maybe he
could
walk away down his mountain and follow the road to the ocean. Maybe he could even swim to the mainland, and just step out of the water, newly made. Maybe he could leave everything behind and have a different life.

‘She liked to sing,' he said.

‘Who?'

Clancy shook his head, and the image of another life, a life without even the wisp of River, melted away. Good riddance. ‘I better give David another try,' he said. ‘Then I'll keep searching.' He let the door swing shut behind him and wished Queenie was lying lazily across the welcome mat, next to his boots.

That night, Samson waited on the verandah, staring into the darkness of the bush and sky. The gently waving trees and scrubby bushes seemed blacker than the sky, maybe because there were no stars and nothing to light the darkness. Samson sighed. If he didn't have Down's Syndrome, he would have been allowed to search for Jonah. Without the anchor of his Down's, Samson would be out there, hunting his brother in the darkness. But his extra chromosome was heavy, and everyone knew it.

The next day, townspeople came again to help with the search. Everyone except Murray and Tilda acted as if he wasn't there, couldn't hear them or didn't understand English, so he overheard almost everything. ‘Pity George isn't still alive.' ‘Didn't help them much the last time.' ‘You'd think after she went missing he'd have moved into town.' ‘Not Clancy Fox. He'll die up here for sure.'

Samson sat alone on the back step and thought about the Other Samson
.
There were lots of stories to retell in his mind, but Samson chose the tale of the three hundred burning foxes. His second-favourite, mostly because he was both Samson and Fox. ‘Please,' he'd ask his mum, ‘
please
tell it.'

‘Oh, alright,' his mum would say. She always agreed eventually. ‘The Other Samson was angry at the Philistines because of what was happening to the people of God, so he decided to teach them a lesson.'

‘What was it?'

‘You know what it was.'

‘Mum,' scolded Samson. ‘Pretend.'

‘Oh, okay,' she said. ‘Well, the Other Samson caught three hundred foxes. Then he took two foxes at a time, tied their tails together and lit them on fire. He released the foxes into the grain fields and vineyards and olive groves that the Philistines owned. Afterwards the Philistines had nothing to eat.'

‘Why did he do that?' Samson asked, because the Other Samson was a hero and turning the foxes into fire wasn't like a hero.

‘He was fighting a war,' said his mum.

‘It's mean.'

‘The Other Samson was only trying to save his people.'

Samson imagined the Other Samson calling the foxes to him, catching them, tying them together and lighting the fur between them like a slow-burning match. He thought of Jonah and the bats, and wondered if the Other Samson was like him, and freedom was just an excuse for killing.

‘Who am I in the story?' asked Samson.

His mum shook her head. ‘You're too old for that, Sammy. Not every story is about you, or for you.'

Sitting on his granddad's back step, Samson decided he didn't agree with his mum's words and wondered if he and Jonah were like two of the three hundred foxes, burning at the tie where his mum and dad had knotted them together.

On the following day Clancy waited for Murray to send everyone in different directions again before he headed out to search the mountain on his own. Occasionally he bumped into one of the other search parties and exchanged updates – no one had seen or found anything – but mostly Clancy found himself alone. Sometimes he called for Jonah, other times for Queenie or River. No one answered. He wandered without knowing where he was going or how he'd find his way back, and his mountain seemed to understand. The birds were quiet, and the tree branches sagged, prematurely ready for the dark to roll in over the mountain and cover everything in sleep.

He held his hand out. One drop of water and then another. Spitting, his da called this kind of rain. Not enough to fill the creeks, but enough to make the ferns droop and the ground smell like wet dog. He thought of River. She loved the rain. Murray too.

Clancy remembered watching the two of them in the rain not long before Murray was asked to leave. They were just beyond the fence, jumpers abandoned and hats, River's white shirt almost transparent from the rain. Murray's hair, not dreaded then but still long, clung to his skin. His strong arms lifted her into the air. Her legs looped around his waist. She leant back, closed her eyes and opened her lips to catch the droplets on her tongue.

If only River hadn't caught Murray's eye. Maybe none of it would have happened at all.

It was complicated, too right it was. Clancy had always known, but for some reason that just made River more special and his connection to George more real. All three of them living up the mountain together, lines were bound to be crossed. Somehow, though, River had never felt like a crossed boundary, not once. She was all three of them combined. Never any question of Clancy being angry or resentful. Essie was his wife, nothing had changed that, and he owed George more than his own life. He owed him River's as well, and more than once.

Clancy remembered the day George had saved their daughter clear as anything. It had been the school holidays and bloody cold for June. Essie was newly buried. Clancy had just finished splitting firewood for the night when he heard a banging on the inside of the kitchen window – David, who'd been sitting inside all day, studying for the next semester. The boy was still wearing his pyjamas, even though it was almost ten o'clock and there was enough work on the property to keep three grown men busy until dusk. His fist was raised, frozen in the reverberation of the bang.

‘Dad,' he shouted through the glass. He pointed. ‘Look.'

Clancy followed the direction of his son's hand.

River was at the edge of the bush on the far side of the lawn. Her jeans were dirty at the knees, and her hands were muddy. Clancy called to her. The girl took two steps and looked towards him as though everything would be alright. She lifted her arm like a much smaller child showing her mother a recent wound, then crumpled to the ground. Clancy dropped the firewood and ran. David banged on the window again, but this time it sounded as if he was trying to get out.

The earth was damp, and Clancy almost slid twice. ‘I'm here, girl,' he said when he reached her.

‘Daddy?'

‘Yes, River, yes. It's Dad.' He lifted her into his arms, and River made a sound somewhere between a yelp and a sigh. Clancy understood. He'd been trapped inside his body once too. He lifted her head into his lap and checked her entire body. She was wheezing. Two puncture wounds on the side of her left foot.

‘David!' Clancy screamed. ‘Get George.'

David shook his head.

‘Can you hear me?'

His son stepped back from the window and shook his head again.

River moaned.

‘Come on, girl,' said Clancy, and he pushed his arms beneath her body. There were dark circles under her eyes. She was sweating. He carried her to George's shack, and she wept the whole way.

George heard them coming, so he was waiting. ‘Snake?'

‘I reckon.' Clancy was out of breath.

‘Bring her in,' said George. He opened the door to the shack. ‘Put her on my bed.'

Clancy laid River down as carefully as he could, but she yelped when he took his arms away. He pulled a wooden chair to the edge of the bed and sat down. George picked up a knife. Clancy asked, ‘What're you doing?'

‘Have to.' George's face and voice were calm. ‘We've got to get the poison out.'

River looked up at him, her eyes weepy and grey.

‘Hold her down,' he said.

With one hand Clancy restrained her arms, and with the other he clamped her legs. ‘Sorry, girl,' he said quietly.

George cut from one puncture wound to the other like a game of connect-the-dots. River howled and tried to kick, but Clancy held her. George lowered his face into the cut and sucked. He spat a mouthful of blood and poison onto the floor beside them and pushed his lips back in. In a minute or two, there was almost as much blood and mucus on the floor as there could be inside her.

River stopped kicking. Her eyes closed.

George came up from the wound. His lips were covered in blood, and his teeth looked rusty. ‘Get that jar.'

Dark red honey sat in a jar on the kitchen table. Clancy's hands were shaking, but he managed to pick it up and give it to his friend. George unscrewed the lid and took a swig. A huge syrupy dollop fell into his mouth. He poured the rest into River's wound. ‘Come here,' he said, and he poured the remaining honey into Clancy's hand. It dripped between his fingers. ‘Hold it under her mouth. Get some on her tongue.'

Clancy knelt in the blood and lifted River's auburn head. She was limp. He rubbed his finger into the honey. Thicker than any he'd ever eaten, almost like sap. He poked his index finger into her mouth and smoothed it on her tongue. Nothing happened. He did it again.

George opened another jar of dark red honey and ate it with a spoon. There would be poison inside him too now.

‘It's not working,' said Clancy.

‘Keep going.'

‘Is she breathing?'

‘Just keep at it,' said George. His voice sounded burnt.

River's tongue glided over Clancy's finger like that of a newborn pup. ‘She's moving,' he said. She opened eyes that seemed groggy, drunk. She stared at them both as if they were the same somehow, both her fathers and neither of them as strong as she was. She lapped all the honey from Clancy's hand, sneezed and fell asleep.

After a few minutes, Clancy felt George's hand on his shoulder. They stayed that way for a long time, watching their girl sleep.

It had been bad with George after Essie died. They'd carried her up the mountain and buried her, both grieving like husbands, and hardly spoken since.

River jumped once and scared the shit out of them. Her legs started moving, as though she was chasing something in her dream. The hole inside Clancy opened like the freshwater mussels his ma used to steam when he was little.

‘Is it over?' he asked.

‘She'll live,' said George.

‘What bit her?'

‘Tiger snake, I reckon.'

Standing up, Clancy turned and held his hand out.

George smiled. ‘You need a wash, mate.'

Clancy had looked down at his hands. They were covered in blood and honey and spit. Even though it was years in his past, he wiped his hands on his trackies to make sure they were clean. As he kept walking, Clancy wished he had the tiger with him. The ground was soft, but he could feel it hardening. He looked up. The rain had stopped again. The cobbled-together muscles inside his leg pounded against the skin and bone behind his missing kneecap. Though he took deep breaths, and the pain slowly subsided. He looked up, it was getting late. Clancy turned and headed for home.

After Tilda had made dinner and all the people from town had gone home, Samson joined his granddad in the living room. The curtains were closed, and the telly screen flickered silently through a toilet paper ad that Samson hated. Clancy's leg was stretched out, and he had rolled up his trackies. The flesh was covered in bulbous grey-blue veins, surrounded by burnt-looking red skin. Clancy's foot was swollen like a giant red-black leech.