A Dutiful Daughter by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The elder Glover could feel through his hoofs the electric contact of truck on road. A tribute to the manufacturer, he thought. To whom he immediately penned a mental letter of commendation. Dear Sir, We have used your vehicle extensively for the transport of livestock, and my wife has never complained of her milk being turned by it—a tribute, of course, to your excellent suspension…

The excellent suspension was shuddering over corduroy road towards the beach, and Mr Glover took the shocks in his four robust legs with gusto: all that veranda life, a chain of boredom on which were strung the spasms, flurries, medications of the day, had come close to convincing him that he should settle down to his decline. He had developed symptoms such as balled handkerchiefs, exhaustively read newspapers, catalogues of discomforts. His wife’s mastitis had been obtrusive enough to distract him from his own animal potency.

My daughter does most of our driving, over roads frequently cut by floodwater…He could see Barbara’s beige elbow poking out from the window of the truck. A fallow arm, very firm, her long beige hand laid out along the dirty paintwork. Her hand in marriage…What a life she could have had. Mr Glover felt exhilarated that that limb was set aside for serving the irony which was known in the house as Our Accident.

He shook the vile joy off, and was then at his ease again, leaning back on the supposition that she had somehow willed the accident and could not now un-will it. She had gained in power and lost in freedom; they had gained in peace of mind and lost in status. All parties could be well advised to call it quits. Not lacking in insight, Mr Glover knew that he would be a fool to pretend he could have coped as brilliantly as his exceptional daughter.

It was the peace of animals that Mr Glover was most grateful for not having missed in his lifetime. Of course he had suffered exquisite despair at some notable stages of family history. But there were other times when his consciousness sank into veins, the fabric of his nerves, the organs of filtration, transmission, transformation and cell-manufacture. He became nothing more than a walking delight in the flow of his own blood, the grandeur of its passage, the exhilaration of its oxygen. So that he came to understand why animals could stand visionary all day, drunk on the magnificence of their own livers, the splendour of their kidneys.

Into his human faculties he had no entree. Man was cursed with mind-your-own-business vitals; his organs took revenge for his bright-boy cleverness. But even pain was different in that four-square, shock-absorbing trunk. Pain surfaced in man with the suddenness of flotsam. But in the true animal, there was a sense of non-performance, ill-performance or over-performance in one or another function of the body. Pain came closer to being what the priests said of it: God’s plan for letting us know we are ill. Still it crushed,

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