Then she saw an eagle as big as a man perched on the edge of a cliff and she was sure it looked over its shoulder and into her eyes before lifting its great expanse of wings and tipping off into a great expanse of sky. She gasped at the sight of it
.
That night they did not stop at all and she did not know what Fitz's horses could possibly be made of that they could travel ceaselessly, and by the time the road dipped into a stony track and then dipped into a valley it was midday again and the air was dry and the sun was so bright that she could no longer see anything but fields of yellow, as if the whole place was washed with just one colour. Fitz pushed on and on and the fields turned over to the edge of a forest and then everything changed. It was green and dark and damp and when she breathed in the air it felt different in her lungs.
We are close
, he said.
Can I walk then?
she asked, as she wanted to reclaim something of herself, beginning with the muscles in her legs.
There's no time to waste
, he said and she asked
Why?
but he did not answer.
When they arrived at his homestead she knew by the way he said,
Here it is
that he was proud of it and he had built it himself but she was not sure what to make of it or what to say so she said nothing. She just tried to take it all in.
It was a wide house with a wide veranda and there were two chimneys sticking out each end of it. All trees within a hundred yards of it had been cleared and she could see neat fences and holding yards and a shed and a stable.
Come inside, Jessie
, Fitz said.
Inside, he poured himself a drink of whiskey and her a mug of water and he said,
Whiskey is not a woman's drink
. But she disagreed.
Then he pointed to the other side of the room, gestured awkwardly and said,
Be my guest.
And there it was, the armchair, the trap, and although she saw it that way from the very first sighting, she sat in it anyway. She was thin from a diet of gruel but still the walled-in sides of the chair did not seem wide enough for her arms, unless she kept her hands in her lap or rested them on the huge panels either side of her, which she did.
Her eyes flicked between her hands and her arms and they had never looked paler. Suddenly, sitting there, she felt ill and her hands did not look like her hands and her arms did not look like her arms and the sight of them haunted her.
Fitz began speaking and she heard him say
rustling
, and
wife
, and
gaol
and still she was trying to take it all in.
Do you understand me?
he said.
She shook her head.
It's our agreement
, he continued.
She looked up from her arms and straight into his eyes and she said:
No.
And that was all she said.
The effect of the word on Fitz was immediate. He swelled up like some sideshow spectacle she had seen in the circus. She sat back in the chair and watched a rash spread from his neck to his chin and blossom around his nose so his face became two distinct colours, and then his arms swept down to the floor and wrapped around his chair and he wrestled it towards her.
You will understand
, he said.
And then, after the longest ride through the city and over flat fields, around a mountain range and down into a valley, he raised his arm and hit her.
Out of all of the hopes that the women in prison had for my mother, carved out in the round faces of angels and birds that flew and some that perched, was one my mother had for herself. Her hope was that her employer was a good man.
But he was not.
Fitz was my father. He was mean and violent and he blackmailed my mother and over time he bruised every inch of her. He had the power of the law over her as her legal guardian and she knew that on the slightest provocation he could cart her back to gaol. And if she tried to escape him, he warned her, he would send his men out after her, although she never knew who his men were. Many times she thought gaol would be better than life with him, and yet somehow she found freedom in the ways she defied him. Ways he did not know and ways he could never imagine.
Four years on, as she looked over the dusty room and the chairs she hated in the corner, she knew that time was running out. I was on the way and this was no life to be brought into. She would have a child to protect.
She could not have guessed how soon.
It is hard to know what tipped my mother on this particular night to a place so sharp and vengeful. The scrape of moon, the moths, the rain, the memory, all of it fertilised something inside her.
Shifting back and forth on her feet in front of the fire did not ease the discomfort that was growing. As the rain pelted down hard on the roof she thought of Fitz falling from his horse and stumbling up the steps and then entering the house as if he owned everything in it, including her, and pressing himself upon her smelling of whiskey and mud and other women. And as she thought it, anger pulsed within her.
Other nights when she knew he would be drunk she would lock herself in her room, though that would only postpone his rage until the morning.
She scanned the room. Next to the door was a cabinet where he kept his rifles and next to the cabinet was an axe. Fitz kept the key to the cabinet in his pocket so she took the axe instead.
She pressed her back against the side of the cabinet and pushed with all the strength of her legs. Then she set a chair in its place and sat and listened and waited. She was used to that.
She knew every sound of him. The crashing as he rode through the forest, the thud as he struck through the paddock. All of it: the slapping, groaning, dragging, lurching sounds of him as he approached the house.
And she knew, too, what she had never heard and longed to hear: the sucking sound of the earth as it clung to him and swallowed him up.
HALF NAKED, ENCRUSTED in sand, Jessie did not get back on her horse or roll herself into the river. She reached up, pulled a blanket from her saddlebag and wrapped herself in it. She writhed and cursed as pain seized her womb and she bit down on the edges of the blanket to contain it. Then, as three figures moved across the paddock directly towards her, she blacked out.
Had she the strength or consciousness to mount her horse, she would have seen the figures first as shadows thrown across the yellow grass. And eventually she would have made them out: a woman, a man, a dog.
As they approached, she would have seen the man was old, his mouth cragged like barbed wire across his face, his eyes deep sockets, like dents in the earth when you kick away a stone. Bits of him were missing. His teeth, a piece of his ear.
The old woman was better put together, though she was surely as old as the old man. Her white hair streamed behind her like spider webs and she was towing a cart. In the cart was a dead lamb.
The old woman and the old man were following the dog.
The dog was a yellow stripe with yellow eyes, and he zigzagged out in front of them. He vanished in the long grass of the paddock and the old woman and the old man kept track of him by the splitting and crackling of the grass where he went. They were both eager and charged by the find of the lamb and they were confident the dog would sniff out any warm-blooded creature within a mile of them.
The dog was a hunting dog and the old man had found it a year or so before tied up to a tree. He had heard the dog barking in the valley as clearly as if the dog had been barking in an amphitheatre. He followed the sound until he finally saw it in the distance, just a streak of a thing leaping up and down, barking a frenzy. As the old man rode in closer to it, the dog launched itself so far the rope around its neck snapped it back and its feet went skidding out from under it.
The old man dismounted his horse and took a hessian sack out of his saddlebag. He walked slowly towards the dog and as he did the dog shook itself. Its skin flapped around its bony legs like a curtain. He goaded the dog,
Come on, you wretch, smell that!
and pushed the sack out in front of him. It was the same sack he used for rabbits and their scent was all over it. The dog latched on to it as quickly as anything. The old man wrapped the dog's rope around its muzzle and sank the bag right over him.
The dog thrashed in the old man's arms and the feeling of it enlivened him. Walking around the tree, the old man could see the dog had worn a circular track and there were bones and the remains of the dog's past owner scattered around it.
The old man laughed then as he understood the dog to be a prize. Within the dog's thrashing body was all that was fading in the old man. Wretched though the dog appeared, here was a creature whose senses were still primed, a creature so intent on life it ate its owner to survive.
Weaving through the yellow grass the dog sniffed out my mother. It had caught the scent of her as surely as if she had dragged her bloodied trousers with a stick for a mile behind her.
It tore across the sand and plunged its snout into her neck. She was in and out of consciousness still but she woke to it, to see teeth and saliva. The dog barked into her ear and her head rang with voices and the sound of other dogs barking. My mother was not a religious woman. She did not believe in heaven and hell, but at that moment she thought she had been wrong after all and that hell, finally, was the place she had found herself. The dog was in a fit, savaging the blanket to get to the source of her blood, and she thought,
This is what happens in hell. Dogs disembowel you.
But what my mother took as other dogs of hell moving in on her was the old man and the old woman swinging down from their horses and grunting and croaking as they scrambled down the bank, and then the sound of the old man lifting the yellow dog with his boot and the dog's mournful howling.
Soon their pale faces hovered over her. And with their strange eyes and mess of silvery hair my mother took them to be harbingers of death, as surely as she knew a frost was a harbinger of winter.
You're late
, she said. Because in truth she believed that death had already come to her.
But she was not dead and nor were they harbingers of death. They were old and they were human and they began quarrelling about what to do with her.
MY MOTHER HAD been set up. It began years before my birth. She was just five months out of prison. She was still in the land of hope then, and she hoped directly to the leaf and the dirt as much as to the sky and the mountain that things would get better. She buried herself in her work and tried to prove herself to Fitz through her efficiency and her talent for breaking in horses. But the only acknowledgement he had given her was a walloping when he found her petting the horses in the evening when she should have been preparing his dinner.
She hated him already and it was only the beginning of her first autumn there.
There was some reprieve. Mostly, Fitz disappeared during the day and only returned to the house just before sunset. That left her alone to do her work and enjoy the peace and challenge of the horses. Day by working day she could feel her balance and her strength returning. But with the turning of the season, she noticed the nights were coming sooner. And although there was a time she thought she would welcome every change of nature, she knew that soon there would be much less daylight to get things done and much less time to be free of him. She feared what a winter alone with him would bring.
The night of the set-up, it was just on dusk, the time she expected him. The sun was her clock and it had all but sunk and there was no sign of Fitzâor, rather, no ranging sound of him.
She set the table as he had instructed her to do, with the fork lined up beside the knife and the spoon and a napkin folded in a triangle. She wrapped the plates in a tea towel and put them on the stovetop to warm. She sampled the stew. She waited, warding off an uneasy feeling.
It was fully dark when she heard a cavalcade of horses and it was not the sound she expected to hear or the sound she was used to. She pulled at the wooden door of the gun cabinet and was thankful Fitz had forgotten to lock it. He usually always locked it and he usually always kept his guns loaded. She grabbed a rifle, crouched down and peered through the front window.
There were two men approaching the house and neither of them was Fitz. Beyond them she couldn't quite see but she knew she was hearing the muster of at least half a dozen horses, and if they were being mustered there must be more men.
There was a banging on the door.
Fitz?
yelled one of them
.
Jessie crawled beneath the window and stood behind the door. She yelled back,
What?
It was her best impression of Fitz.
We've got the horses
, said the voice on the other side of the door.
Fitz had not told her of any delivery. But he never told her of anything. She concealed the rifle on one side of her and opened the door.
Sorry, ma'am
, said one of them, surprised to see her.
Is Fitz in?
Both men looked like droving types. Tall and lean. They kept their hats on.
He'll be back soon
, said Jessie.
Do you have business with him?
We do, but we won't stick around if he's not in.
Was he expecting you?
Yes, ma'am. Told us to deliver the horses tonight.
They'll need to go into the holding yard
, said Jessie.
And they need rebranding quick smart
, said one of the men.
I'll get to them in the morning
, said Jessie.
You might want to get to 'em sooner.
They stolen?
she asked.
I'm just saying, ma'am. You might want to rebrand 'em tonight, before dawn.
By the time Fitz arrived back at the homestead the next day, Jessie had rebranded the stolen horses and she had chosen one for herself, the dappled grey Waler she named Houdini. She was riding him in the paddock when she heard a gunshot. The horse reared up but she was able to calm him. She turned to see Fitz riding out of the forest. Even from far off she could tell he was drunk by the way he was swaying back and forth in his saddle.