The Salt Of Broken Tears by Michael Meehan

Author:Michael Meehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61608-606-6
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The boy came upon the water in the late part of the afternoon, as the bagsewer had said he would, when the shadows were longer and the worst of the heat had gone from the sun. The insects teemed about him as he made his way through the thin green grass and over the broken bark and down to the water’s edge. He saw for the first time an expanse of water that was not bounded by low rims of mud and hard dry banks. He saw vast fields of water flowing from a place that lay beyond his sight to the east and rolled past him and on to pass a bend that lay miles to the north and to the west.

He saw for the first time the vast white gums with their deep floodbands and stretching limbs that lined the steep and dusty shores and stepped out into the waters of the river, and he saw their shrieking burden of hundreds of white sulphurcrested cockatoos. He saw for the first time the flow and ripple of a rolling current and the eddies and the whirlpools that moved around the snags that jutted from the waters and reached out from the shore, the milling waterbirds and the turning logs and branches that moved with the toiling muddy green of the waters, and the patches of thin grass and the damp mudpans that ran off here and there from the water’s edge, the swamps and billabongs that stood off from the flow.

For hours there had been no relief in the low flaking scrub and loose red sandy soil beneath their feet. There was no sign as they moved along the tracks of a change in the greygreen bushland that lined the route, no smell in the hot afternoon air of water and no sign of restlessness on the part of the horse. The bagsewer had told him that the horse would know when the water was near, and that the dog would surely find it first. But they came upon the water unexpectedly as they moved over a bank of loose soil. They saw it spread out in front of them, winding off for miles into the far distance and through the stands of tall drinking gums and smaller waterlogged eucalypts that stood thin but straight from the water’s edge. Here and there along the banks they saw the green and stooping forms of willows, the dense leaves drinking and wafting in the currents that ran and eddied about the water’s edge.

The horse stepped down to the edge to drink and the dog quickly plunged in and swam around and around in expanding circles from the bank. The boy began to throw sticks out to the dog, as he had done in the tanks that they had passed in the wastelands, but here the dog was now struggling with something that was new, the movement of the water which drew him off to the north, with the dog swimming hard

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