Yesterday's Dust (34 page)

The flutter of his fingers on her
arm woke Ann. She sprang upright in her chair.

‘She's awake,' he said. ‘Look who's here, May. Ann is with me.'

‘There's still time,' May said.

Perhaps he misunderstood. Perhaps he didn't. ‘It's not too late, May.'

‘Never. You're . . . you're hurt, Jack?'

‘Not me. Poor bloody old Satan is shit-scared I'll do him out of a job when I get down there.' His finger touched her face.

Love there.
Love in that finger, in that gentle touch. Ann had known that gentle touch, his hand on her chin, turning her face to the light, studying her face. A cleaner hand back then, a soap and cigarette perfumed hand.

She leaned over the bed, her eyes blurring, but she was smiling as she kissed her aunt's cheek, knowing now that May was going to be fine.

‘My dear little girl. So far away. The babies?'

‘All home in bed.'

‘Love you,' May said. ‘Love you . . . both. Love each other. For me.'

Then May Burton died.

Tuesday 4 November

Jack couldn't take the empty house. Couldn't take the daily sympathy, couldn't handle the manager when he came to call, or the cleaning ladies when they came to clean. Couldn't eat the food the manager's wife brought over. Couldn't live like this. Didn't want to live. Wouldn't bloody live any more either. Nothing now to live for.
Nothing left.

Fake bastard, that's all he was, and this was real. May was dead, cremated, her ashes spread on her beloved Narrawee.

Life had been coming together for them, old craving, old memories fading, but his moods were all one and the same now.

Black.

He woke up black and went to bed black and he cursed his life, a life wasted. He cursed every mistake he'd ever made and he thought of
how it might have been had he married May when he was twenty, had he given her the kids she'd wanted. He would have grown with this place, learned, as she had learned to run the place. He didn't have a bloody clue about running a property. How the hell could he ever run the property?

Just a useless bastard. That's all he was and ever would be.

May had known this property. She'd given the orders.
But May was gone.

Lonely. Soul-crushing loneliness. The never-ending days and the longer nights of his own cursed company. No one to sit with him. No one at his side to watch television. No one to look at the
bloody paper and see what was on the television. No bloody milk in the fridge. No bloody food on the stove.

Nothing.

No one.

Almost three weeks had passed, and he'd spent each day of
each week on his own. No ears in which to pour his pain. No one to see his tears. But when had there ever been anyone for Jack bloody Burton? Only May and that crazy little black-headed bitch who had refused to run from him.

Bastard. A cursed bastard. What had he ever done for her? But she'd come when he'd called. She'd bloody well come when he'd called. Dad, she'd said. Dad. She'd called him
Dad.

Dirty filthy murdering bastard. That's what she should have called him. Dirty filthy bloody spoiling murdering bastard mongrel of a man.

If he'd been behind the wheel that day, he might have done something. Pulled the car off the road. Headed up the embankment. Hit a bloody tree. Something. He could have done something.

Dead. Fiery little May dead. It wasn't right. It wasn't real. But
it was bloody true.

Everything he touched, he killed. Everything turned to shit in his hands, and always had and always would, because he was shit and that's all he'd ever be.

Ann had left for home after May had gone. He'd told her to get some sleep, but she'd taken no notice. Never had slept much – always wandering around in the dark, always sitting somewhere with her dog. Always watching him.

She'd driven down again for the funeral and stayed at the motel. He hadn't asked her to stay at the house. She would have refused if he'd asked her, and he knew it, and he hadn't wanted her to refuse, so he hadn't bloody asked her, had he?

‘Love each other,' May had said.

Samuel Burton and his niece had sat side by side in the church, and at the crematorium, then they'd driven away in separate
cars.
She'd gone back home to her husband and her babies. His grandchildren. A nest of bloody little Burtons called Taylor.

May had taken photographs of them on that last day in Warran. She'd filled a roll of film with their small faces, and her camera had survived the crash. He'd dropped it into the chemist, got him to get the film out, develop it. Something unfinished he could finish for her;
there was little enough he'd ever done for May, or for anyone.

He kept the photographs on the kitchen table, with everything else. He looked at them when there was nothing else to look at. The eldest boy had the height of the Burton strain, and the dark hair, something of his mother, and the youngest too, but it was the girl, that little black-headed bugger with black beetle eyes that got to
him. She was of the old strain, God help her. The Burtons' mad bloody head was a hard load to carry.

They were all mad, the whole bloody bunch of them. Always looking for more. Always wanting something they couldn't have.

He couldn't take any more of his bloody mad head. And he didn't have to now. The cheques were his to sign. The shares, the investments, the bank accounts were his. The stock;
each bloody bull in that paddock was his now. All his. He could sell the bastards to the butcher if he wanted to. No one here now to tell him nay.

‘Blind paralytic drunk, that's what I need. Close it all out. Blind, blotto drunk.' He stood and limped out to the hire car the insurance company was paying for him to use. His back had been bruised in the smash, it was still bruised, his hand was
still giving him hell; he'd lost a lot of flesh, and the sinew to his thumb had been slashed; they'd had to dig for it. He had a new red horseshoe-shaped scar dissecting his eyebrow and curving down the temple. His eye was still blood red, but they'd saved the sight in it.

Samuel Burton was marked for life. Might as well have the bastard's name tattooed on my brow, he thought. No one could duplicate
these scars, nor identify him by the old scar on his wrist – he had a five-inch skin graft running from the thumb, up the side of
his hand, over his wrist.

May had fixed it. Her final action had wiped out Jack Burton.

But not his bloody cravings. He'd buy a bottle. Buy a bloody crate and shit on his liver. So poor, perverted bastard Sam had been driven to the bottle by his loss. So bloody what?
Good enough for old Malcolm Fletcher, good enough for Sam bloody Burton.

It wasn't easy driving with one hand and the tips of three fingers, his thumb, taped in a splint, jutting out one side, but he took it slow, he made it to the licensed supermarket, and he dragged his bruised bones from the car and went window-shopping. Couldn't bring himself to walk in there and buy a bottle of whisky. He
couldn't do that to May. Not here. Not in this town.

Nothing to stop him driving to the outskirts of Melbourne, though, and buying his crate. And that's what he did, but he settled for a bottle of Jack Daniel's. It returned to Narrawee on the passenger seat.

‘I'm a bastard, and a drunk, May, and you always knew it.' He scratched his head, and pushed the long hair behind his ears. One hand couldn't
gather the hair and bind it with a rubber band. May had been due to trim an inch off it. She hadn't trimmed it. She'd died instead. She'd promised to give him a short back and sides and a bottle of louse shampoo for Christmas. Bloody Christmas.

He hadn't washed his hair since the accident. How could he wash it with one hand? His other was refusing to heal; the slice of his bum they'd grafted
to it didn't want to be there.

Back in the kitchen he stuck his head under the sink tap, used a palm full of louse shampoo on it and he stood there, head down, letting the water rinse clean before drying his hair on a tea towel. Using his damaged hand hurt like buggery, but he used it and managed to get most of his wet hair into a rubber band.

He had a collection of them on a doorknob now.

That's what Ellie had done with rubber bands. Stuck them on a doorknob. May hadn't liked it. She'd pitched his rubber bands to buggery, but he had a mess of them on the doorknobs now. The bills
and his newspapers, delivered to his mailbox at the gate, were all held together with rubber bands.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror as he walked by. ‘Bloody old scarred, pigtailed, bloodshot-eyed
poofter bastard,' he snarled, then proceeded on with his bottle and his glass to the dining room.

Unused, this room, except when they'd opened up the house and property for that one day in June, for his mother's birthday. He fought the top from the bottle, poured a good shot, then sat on one of the dining chairs. Too long away from the whisky, perhaps he was afraid, had to creep up on it slowly.
He sniffed at it, placed the glass down. And the noise was too loud.

There was an echo in this room. Always had been. Hollow.

‘Why bloody not?' he said. The words had no impact. They floated around him. Ghost words. ‘Why bloody not?' he screamed.

Give me a push, Jacky
.

Little May, on the table, on her stomach. He'd grasped her feet and pushed, and she'd slid all the way down the end, fallen
onto the floor, then picked herself up and run back for more.

Give me another turn, Jacky, but not so hard this time
.

Wild little bugger. Tough little bugger too.

Not tough enough.

‘I should have been driving. She'd been driving for three hours. I should have taken the wheel. I should have been the one who died. She could have had her kids here then. Bloody little black-headed Burtons coming
out of the woodwork. She would have been happy. She deserved to be happy.'

He stared at old Samuel's ultra long oak table, now veiled by a layer of dust. No May, no cleaning ladies to wipe the dust away. He looked at the chairs at the head and end of the table. Samuel's ornate oak carvers that little Jacky, Sammy and May had once believed to be the thrones of kings and queens. They'd sat on them
and played Arthur and Guinevere. Bloody Sam had been Lancelot – the bastard who ruined their Camelot.

Jack walked to the head of the table now and he sat on his throne. Hard as the hobs of hell.

‘King Jack,' he said. ‘Supreme ruler of the ghosts, May. They're a mixed assembly tonight.'

Old Samuel Burton and his Jane's ghosts were sitting down one side. William, their son, and his Jessy beside
them. Those two had died young, but they'd left two infant sons for Samuel to raise. Uncle Matthew, a consumptive two yards of pale bones, and Jack's father, John the bastard, who had married Elisa Hamstead, a tall and stately Melbourne lady. She had been the Burtons' first fine lady. She had bought class into the family, but she'd had no staying power. She gave up, gave in, died young.

They
were all here, partying, and now May had gone to join the ghosts.

Bloody perverted twin brother Sam wasn't here. What the fire had left of that mongrel dog now lay in a nameless grave. Just another John Doe.

‘And all he deserved. Better than he deserved.'

Jack shook his head, shook the memory of Sam and the funeral pyre and the gallon of petrol, and the stench of the burning away, and he forced
his mind to old Samuel.

Big as a river gum, he'd been, and as tough. He'd made old bones, that one. One of the black breed who had wanted more.

He'd wanted more than his half-share of a few small fields in Wales so he'd come out here with his new wife and they'd carved these acres out of a foreign wilderness and named the property Narrawee. Aboriginal or Welsh, Jack didn't know. Nobody knew
now. Nobody had bothered to ask old Samuel while he'd lived.

He hadn't been able to read or write when he'd arrived here. Someone else had done the writing, and the spelling. Old Samuel's tongue used to soften that second syllable, Nar
rar
wee, he used to say.

‘Nar
rar
wee,' Jack whispered. ‘Nar
rar
wee.'

Old music. Sad music. The townspeople had given the music that old country and western nasal
twang, the hard A. Yarra was
Yarra after all.

Whichever way you said it, Narrawee now belonged to Jack. All of his life he'd wanted it. As a four year old he'd wanted it.

And it was his now. A thousand-acre property, and he didn't know what to do with it. May's land, Hargraves Park, was his too, and May's old house where the manager and his wife lived. All his – or bloody Samuel's, with his
horseshoe scar.

To my beloved husband for his lifetime.

He'd been a husband to her, not Sam. He'd been her only husband, her only lover. She had to write Sam's name on her will. Couldn't get out of that.

To my beloved husband for his lifetime
.

She'd made certain that he could never sell her land, and she'd known he wouldn't sell Narrawee, chop it up into ten-hectare lots for hobby farms. But
what the bloody hell was he going to do with it?

When she was alive the manager had come down once a week, had coffee and scones with May. They'd worked it out between them, rotated their crops, sold their stud cattle and their bull juice. Jack didn't know a good bull from a bad bull. May had known. She'd had her books. Knew where every spoonful of bull juice had been sent. Poor bloody bulls.
No jumping fences and swimming rivers for Narrawee bulls. These poor bastards didn't know what a flighty heifer was, but they'd impregnated a few.

He thought of Bessy's bull rampaging through the paddocks at Mallawindy, and he laughed as he walked to retrieve his glass, his eyes straying to the family graveyard, visible from this window. Much thought had been given to its site, chosen by old
Samuel while his Jane lay in an earthen-floored hut, grieving over the loss of a daughter. Only a dream then, this white mansion on the hill.