Mullumbimby Page 5

  ‘–and the first chance grandad Tommy had – after about a week – he shot that booliman over him. He took off running and didn’t stop till he got past Rocky.’

  Ah.

  ‘He didn’t have any interest in murdering Goories for the benefit of white men and their bullang. He didn’t like that idea one bit, so he grabbed a station girl from the north, and they travelled all over the Top End together. Laying low his whole life with a false name cos of that dead sergeant. But he knew where he really belonged, made sure all our family knew it too. I got his name, and I got his meat. And now we’re back to collect what’s ours. Humble Pies n all.’

  The silence returned as Jo and the others digested this.

  ‘Black Power Pies,’ joked Laz, raising a semi-ironic fist.

  ‘Bloody oath,’ agreed Therese amiably, holding her stubby to the light to assess its state, which was nearly empty. ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  In the next three seconds, Jo came speedily to certain conclusions. These were that (a) native title over the Billinudgel valley generally, and the Jackson family genealogy in particular, was really none of her business; (b) that getting involved in the looming shitfight between Jacksons and Bullockheads and Watts was asking for way, waaay more trouble than she had stomach for; and (c) above all else, her daughter and her farm with its title deed sitting in her kitchen drawer were the only things that really mattered. She had her twenty acres and her version of culture safely tucked in her back pocket. There’s no chokecherry tree on my back, she reminded herself. I’m a free enterprise, freehold blackfella, beholden to nobody except my own family and my own conscience. She’d circled right around the hideous politics of colonial fallout, and bought back the ancestral land herself.

  Cash on the stump, you fuckers. Game over.

  ‘Well, just don’t go claiming my farm,’ she told Twoboy, ‘or it’ll be pistols at dawn, brother.’

  The tension broke with this tacit consent to the Jackson’s wider claim, and everybody breathed out, grinning broadly.

  ‘I don’t fight women,’ Twoboy answered. ‘Only Mr Pitiful does that.’

  ‘You’re a lover, not a fighter, is that it?’ Therese flirted as though she wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool dyke from the year dot. Jo and Amanda rolled their eyes and groaned. Oh, puh-lease. No, insisted Twoboy, ignoring the flirting and groaning, he was a lover and a fighter. Only these days we fight with lawyers, not with guns. So long as the Native Title Tribunal came to the party anyway. If they didn’t, then he’d be on the phone to Al Qaeda mob, onetime.

  ‘Eh, knock off!’ Lazarus chimed in with a frown. ‘Start talking like that some dickhead’ll have us in the paddy wagon before ya know it. CIA’ll turn up in Wilfred Street.’

  Jo shouted with laughter, and talked into where her wristwatch would be if she owned one.

  ‘Radical blackfellas at two o’clock. Book em Danno.’

  ‘That might be just what it takes, eh,’ Twoboy twinkled at the three women sitting opposite. Jo hoped the brother was joking. There had to be a middle path didn’t there? Something between the white man’s table crumbs and the Taliban? Else we’re all fucked.

  ‘Uh, there’s no twin towers round here, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ she suggested, gesturing at the one-horse town that was Billinudgel.

  ‘No twin towers!’ Twoboy said in mock-horror, half-rising from his seat and looking about him at the weed-infested railway line and the tennis court with its torn and rusted wire mesh hanging lazily from the poles, testament to a thousand bored pub brats using it as a bouncy castle. ‘You mean we aren’t in downtown Manhattan?’ He turned to Laz.

  ‘This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Pocahontas!’

  Jo found herself warming to Twoboy.

  ‘Not to tell you your business or anything,’ she said drily, ‘but you might wanna get your continents straight before claiming them land rights, bala. This is Australia, y’know? Dead Heart. Meat Pies. Holden Cars. Racists.’

  Twoboy put an index finger to his pursed lips, thinking hard.

  ‘And – waaait – it’s America with the Statue of Liberty, and the Lincoln Memorial?’

  ‘I believe so, yes,’ Jo answered, grinning.

  He winced and smacked his forehead, making the yellow feathers on the end of his dreadlocks do a little dance. Then he beamed at Jo, who was laughing in disbelief. Spunky. Educated. Smart as a whip. And funny.

  The workmen in the front bar roared as someone in another city scored a try.

  ‘Titans,’ said Laz to Therese, ignoring Twoboy’s performance. ‘Titans and Rabbitohs.’

  ‘What’s the score?’ asked Amanda, but nobody knew.

  ‘I’ve been missing those land rights, you know,’ Twoboy said softly to Jo. ‘They really tied the room together.’

  And just like that, Jo felt the hard carapace of her resistance begin to flake and crumble away. Years worth of armour fell from her tender heart. Great slabs of steel and granite hit the wooden floorboards and shattered into fragments there. Jo sat, wondering, among the shards. This isn’t happening. A black prince rocking up at the Billi on a Friday night, quoting the Coens at her.

  ‘Well, The Dude abides,’ she murmured in disbelief.

  ‘He certainly fucking does.’ Twoboy grinned, untying his dreads and shaking them loose. ‘But maybe not in Billinudgel,’ they chorused together, laughing.

  Lazarus noticed this sudden softening of Jo toward his older brother. He wondered in an abstract way whether Twoboy would fuck things up for them again. There were more important things at stake in Billinudgel than whether Twoboy got his dick wet tonight, Laz worried. Much more important things.

  Twoboy drained his last long mouthful of beer and stood up to replace it.

  ‘Well, anyways, if you’re Bundjalung tidda, yorright by me. We’ll let ya stay on ya farm.’

  He leaned across the table and gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze as he winked. She could feel the steel of his strength even in that brief touch.

  ‘That’s bloody big of ya,’ Jo retorted, tingling from his fingers on her skin and wanting more, more, more of the same. He was Goorie, and gorgeous, and her desires were endless.

  If many hands make light work, Jo silently asked the paddock in front of her, then why is it that many hands always arrive just as the light is failing. Why is it that many hands sit around the fire drinking your piss and talking up a storm about how much work they’re going to do at some pleasantly nonspecific time in the future?

  Pondering this perennial question, Jo let her gaze drop from the rolling hills to the firepit. There stood Stevo warming his arse in front of the latest stack of burning fenceposts. A six-foot eucalyptus fencepost is a mighty heavy thing, even when the termites have got to it and the barbed wire that gave it a purpose has rusted into earth a dozen summers ago. Each blazing post had left a tightly knotted signature in Jo’s neck. She flung her head sharply to the right, hoping to hear the bonecrack that would signal relief, but there was none. Jo nil; fenceposts too many to count.

  Stevo, whose supple neck muscles held no tight memories at all, was grinning at his girlfriend Caroline.

  ‘–old Bingo would’ve loved them bones!’ He rocked with laughter on the heels of his near-immaculate Blundstones. The workman’s boots had gotten very slightly muddy on the way from the car to the fire, Jo noted sourly. First time for fucken everything.

  ‘That’s the oldest joke in the book, my love.’ said Caroline, draining a squat glass that reflected the yellow blaze of the fire. Stevo’s newest conquest pushed a hank of gleaming blonde hair back, revealing the garnet earrings that Stevo had just given her for their six-month anniversary.

  ‘Yeah, don’t give up your day job.’ Jo shifted the timbers further into the fire with a blackened tomato stake that she had discovered gave her a fresh sense of purpose and meaning in the world. ‘Anyway, I need a shower,’ she announced, stripping off her dirty suede gloves.

  ‘What’s for dinner, Horse?
’ asked Stevo. The setting sun was making his face glow the colour of bush honey. Jo gazed at him, speechless at his effrontery.

  ‘Horse?’ Caroline squawked in horror. The siblings laughed.

  ‘We call her Horse sometimes,’ Stevo explained. ‘When she was five she really thought she was a horse, and it stuck.’

  Caroline lifted one smooth eyebrow and said nothing.

  ‘Here’s an idea, Stevo – what if I stagger to the shower with my last shred of remaining energy, and you cook?’ Jo proposed.

  ‘Fuck off. Since when dya invite people down and then expect them to cook?’ Stevo’s outrage was palpable.

  ‘Since when dya offer to help ya poor sister do some fencing and show up at five o’fuckenclock in the afternoon?’ Jo asked, knowing in her mitochondrial DNA that the answer was forever.

  ‘She’s got ya there,’ Ellen chipped in.

  ‘Oh ... it’s gang up on Uncle Stevo time, is it?’ But he wilted under the hard look from three women.

  ‘And I shall be Queen of the Fire,’ offered Caroline, easing herself down onto her elegant saronged haunches and picking up the blackened Tomato Stake of Authority.

  Jo and Stevo walked inside to a kitchen reincarnated from their childhood. Mum’s familiar array: IXL jam in fat steel tins. Gold Coast Bakery bread. Bulk rice, and Keen’s Curry Powder, even now when better, fancier curry pastes filled whole supermarket shelves.

  ‘You can find everything, eh?’

  A clatter of pots and pans behind her was the answer. But Jo was already in the bathroom, can of Coke and all, ripping off her filthy paddock rags and stepping into the bliss of hot water on her screaming muscles. In the past month, she had lost several kilos, grown visible triceps, and learned the hard way about always wearing gloves when she walked out the door. She ran soapy hands down past her breasts and stomach, scratching halfheartedly at the splashes of dried mud on the back of her brown calves. Some days it felt like the only way she’d ever be really clean again was to drive to South Golden, flop in the surf all day, and then take a two-hour sauna. It hardly seemed worth scrubbing it all off when the next day would see more grime, and the next, and the next. But thinking that way lies ruin, she told herself, and walking ocelots on a rhinestone leash. Or else rolling around in the mud at Nimbin with the ferals, god bless em and their dirty little dreads.

  She briskly shampooed her hair and watched the bubbles around her feet – rising in an alarming puddle. Now the flaming shower wasn’t draining properly. Beautiful. So tomorrow she’d crawl under the house and see what she could see among the white poly pipes and dog dust and fleas. Just add it to the list, she told herself, trying for calm, think of the Glorious Ten Year Plan. You mow and spray and weed all week in Mullum for Basho so you can come home and mow, and weed, and clear away the Mooneys’ shit, and plant and fence here. It’ll be worth it, one day, when the place looks like somebody loves it. When the land knows somebody loves it, she corrected herself. Ya caring for your jagan, girl, it’s gotta be more than just words.

  And though her neck still had a machete stuck in it, and her back felt like it belonged to her great-great-grandmother’s billygoat, it was already time to turn off the precious tankwater, no matter how good the gushing torrent was. Jo gave herself another five seconds of scorching heat on the back of her neck. Another ten. At fifteen seconds she heard her mother’s voice from childhood: I had to drink water with dead frogs floating in it. Jo turned the taps off and reached for a worn, stripy towel as she heard Chris’s dying Econovan clatter into the drive.

  Early the next morning, Jo and Caro pulled on gumboots and walked across the small paddock to check on Jo’s young jali jali billa. How she’d made the time to plant the small grove in her first week on the farm, Jo couldn’t remember rightly, but these thirty knee-high seedlings were her special project. The effort spent digging holes in the moonlight would be well worth it.

  ‘You wouldn’t have heard of the Tree of Knowledge, I suppose–’ Caro said, with only half a question mark at the end of the sentence. This was exactly half a question mark too little for Jo’s liking, and she felt her face stiffen.

  ‘Ah, Tree of Knowledge, umm, no...’ she answered. Caroline was about to speak again, when Jo interrupted.

  ‘Unless, oh, hang on – do you mean the Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine, where the modern Labor Party grew out of the iconic shearers’ strike of 1897?’ Don’t patronise me, luv.

  ‘Oh, you’ve been there?’ Caroline asked in surprise.

  ‘Just a lucky guess,’ Jo said, shortly.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Degree in Australian history and comparative literature, actually.’

  ‘Ah. Woops.’

  Caroline went bright pink, and balled her fists inside her trouser pockets. Fucken hell, dugais are hard work, thought Jo.

  ‘It’s okay. We’ve got special trees here too, you know,’ she said, pointing around the paddock.

  ‘Oh, which ones?’

  Caroline grasped at this new thread in transparent relief. Jo pointed her lips at the neighbouring cattle property.

  ‘Well ... see that big wattle starting to flower there over the road, no the big one further to the right, that one without so much blossom on it. Well, round here we call that the Tree of Children’s Learning.’

  ‘Get outta here.’ Caroline looked as though if she had a notebook she’d be scribbling in it.

  ‘Yeah, true. And that young spindly sandpaper fig closer to the fence, well that’s the Sapling of Self-Importance–’

  Caroline glanced sideways.

  ‘–and a bit further back, well that’s the Camphor Laurel of Patronising City Folk, and just along here flourishing like billy-o we have the Groundsel of Rural and Regional Ignorance...’

  ‘Okay, okay, point taken.’ Caroline looked skyward as a crow flapped east. ‘I apologise. I just didn’t think someone who mows grass in a cemetery would have a university degree.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Jo ruefully, twisting her mouth at this hard economic fact.

  ‘Sorry,’ Caro repeated.

  ‘Ah, forget it. Help me with my jali jali billa.’ Jo told her, as she bent to check the soil around the base of the she-oaks. She plucked at and straightened the narrow plastic bags which protected the trees, in theory, from wind and weeds and wildlife. Jo stroked the soft leaves of the seedlings, healthy and brightly thriving in British Racing Green as was proper and correct. She touched their soft scaly trunks, no thicker than pencils.

  Together the women spent a half-hour peering into the protector bags, tutting or not as the situation demanded, weeding around the seedlings, and pouring buckets of dam water onto the mounded earth beneath them. The dogs lay blissfully in the morning sun, watching them work, Warrigal still scratching like it was his mission in life to wear out his skin.

  ‘That bloody dog’s going in the dam if he doesn’t stop scratching,’ Jo threatened. ‘We’ve done him for fleas that many times.’

  ‘Bit cold isn’t it, the poor thing,’ Caro said in his defence.

  ‘Ah, he’s a dingo, he’ll cope.’ Jo replied. Though maybe it was a bit cool. Both Stevo and Caro had worn jumpers the whole time they’d been at the farm, and traces of mist still lingered this morning, ghosting the big camphors in the dip. Fairy-wrens twittered like manic high-pitched machine guns in the neighbouring lantana bushes. The cold wasn’t worrying them; they chittered like they were onto their fifth strong espresso. Jo smiled. She loved those little birds.

  ‘It’s like Narnia,’ Caroline said as she drained her final drops onto the last bag and stood gazing. ‘It’s so lush, and so peaceful.’

  Jo spoke then, about how time warped once you left the highway and entered Byron Shire proper. Even your blood pumped more slowly, leisurely winding its way through arteries and veins, taking its own sweet time. No rush hour here, and still not a traffic light to be found in the shire. And enough shades of green to put Ireland to shame.

  ‘It’s my idea of heave
n,’ Caro said, collapsing to sit cross-legged beneath the slash pines that fringed the dam.

  Jo looked around. She knew that feeling. The resident kingfisher flashed past on its way back to its nest, a blurred blue rocket with something long wriggling in its mouth.

  ‘Yeah, I still can’t believe we own it, eh. I keep waiting for someone in a uniform to turn up and wave a bit of paper at me and tell me to piss off.’

  ‘But isn’t it Bundjalung land?’ Caroline said in suprise. ‘That’s why Stevo jumped at the chance to be in on the deal.’

  Jo winced and turned away to hide it. The deal. As if retrieving your ancestral land was some kind of a game, not the work of generations. The blueprint of your life, and the only thing worth working for.

  ‘Yeah, but Bundjalung covers a lotta country. We know our ancestors come from somewhere around here, but not exactly where. I’ve resigned myself to never knowing. Some things just happened too long ago to find out.’

  Caroline chewed this over.

  ‘But the way Stevo talks sometimes, it’s all that matters, getting back to the land. Mabo and all that.’

  Jo sighed. Land was the lodestone, the foundation of absolutely everything in the culture. On the other hand, she hated rhetoric.

  ‘Well he can talk Mabo all he wants, but they took our grandparents and the rest of em away to assimilate our families and fuck up our connections to land. And it very nearly worked. So there’s a bloody great need to compromise in families like ours. Why do you think Stevo’s run overseas and stayed there?’

  She gazed at Stevo’s girlfriend, conscious of the chasm between them. Cos you have to be a fucked up blackfella to know what it’s like, not being able to prove who you are, or where you belong. The agony of the stolen descendents, hiding in shame as if it was all their fault. Or else getting hypertension trying to fit in; to force history never to have happened simply because it shouldn’t have. Jo rammed her garden fork into the ground beneath the pines. Who elected me spokesperson, she thought, as she picked up the watering buckets. End of lesson.