The Hands by Stephen Orr

Author:Stephen Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, FA, FIC019000
ISBN: 9781743051597
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2015-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

15

A few days before Aiden was due to return to school, father and son sat (with barely a word passing between them) in the front of the ute. Trevor was listening to an old tape he’d found under his seat. He was surprised it still played. Years of heat and dust had failed to dull Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The music appealed to him: notes as footsteps trailing across the landscape. It was no-nonsense music. Farmers’ music. Winding itself around his ears and brain like a too-tight fence snapping and unravelling.

‘Hungry?’ he asked his son.

‘Not yet,’ Aiden replied, searching the hummocks for cattle.

They’d driven an hour from home. Stopped in the middle of the track to watch a large herd approach from the west. Then Trevor had pulled in behind shrubs, killed the engine, and waited. The cattle had come close but stopped short, lifting their heads and watching them.

Trevor studied the tape turning inside the player. Never surging or slowing as fingers worked like tappets in a cylinder, a motorhead of motion that somehow pleased him. The little door to the slot had fallen off and Harry had spent years shoving chip packets and pencils inside the mechanism.

‘That one there’s about to drop,’ Aiden said, pointing.

Trevor studied the cow. ‘Yeah …’ He looked at the sky, full of low, rolling cloud. ‘She’d better get on with it.’

It was cold. Winter had arrived. The morning chill persisted all day. Murray would lead Chris to the shed to fetch wood; return, drop bark and dirt everywhere; make his boy-scout construction and light it; move his chair closer and cover his legs with a rug; complain that he could feel his gout coming on. As Trevor said, ‘It’s not the cold brings it on.’

‘How would you know?’

‘Red wine, tomatoes.’

‘When do I drink red wine?’

Trevor knew his father won every argument by default. There was nothing he didn’t know. Once, he’d asked him, ‘Where do you get all this information?’

‘Books, and common sense.’

‘What books?’

But he’d just tapped his head.

Back in the ute, Aiden had covered his legs with his coat to keep warm. ‘Should we move on?’ he asked.

Trevor was watching the cow. ‘She’s started.’

‘How many are pregnant?’

‘Seven, eight … that one on the edge perhaps.’

Although the desert was gale-swept, Trevor had rolled his window down. He could feel the chill on his face and neck. The clouds had taken the light. It was a grey-sludge day. But he liked this; it kept things neater, simpler, easier to comprehend. The trees and the cow piss in the cab with him. The oestrus and the damp bark, the smell of approaching rain.

‘That’s a good sign,’ Aiden said.

‘Yeah, perhaps.’

If this many cows were pregnant then it might be a good year: yards full of calves waiting for a tag; to grow old, gain weight and make money for them.

‘There’s not enough feed,’ Trevor said.

‘It’s gonna rain all winter.’

‘Perhaps.’

They waited. Aiden wanted to survey the other herds but Trevor needed to see this animal born. It would be a sign: life had interruptions but kept going, moving across the baked earth.

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