The Power of Bones by Keelen Mailman
Author:Keelen Mailman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: BIO026000, book
ISBN: 9781743431924
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2014-04-03T16:00:00+00:00
6
FIGHT FOR THE CHILDREN
Going around the property now, I’m still finding things that were burned or damaged by the big fire this year. That fire wiped out everything in its path. When it finally settled, I went out checking for spot fires and to see what the fire had taken. I went with Janna, who was the cook for the musterers down at the other house. She and I drove and walked around, but I especially wanted to check out what had happened at Black Springs where the old grandparents’ campfire was. The grass had been real high there.
We walked in and at first I had tears. It looked like the whole place had been all burned out. But then we got close. And there they were: the two wooden pegs with a fork in them, either side of the fire stones. The old people would put a rail between these posts for the pots and billies to hang from. I thought they’d be gone. But there they were. That fire had burned all around the sticks but it hadn’t got the sticks. Those sticks were well and truly older than me, and the fireplace more than a hundred years old. They’d raised my mum’s mother there.
Janna said it looked eerie, like someone had put out the fire around them. That they stopped it, right there.
And I said, it’s the spirits, Janna. They look after me and the things that I gotta look after.
I knew that’s how those two pegs didn’t get burned. It had to be the spirits.
Janna said, if someone had told me they’d found these pegs here like this, with black ground all around and them untouched, I would have said, bullshit. Wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it myself.
And that’s exactly how it was, all around the pegs everything was burned, it was just as black as. And then these two pegs. The fire should have caught on those pegs. They were ironbark, I think, or budjeroo, that budjeroo bark we make coffins out of. That budjeroo and ironbark are what we use in strainer posts, and they last for donkeys and a day. But they can still burn, like any wood.
I’d like to know what my old Uncle Rusty might have said about that fire. The old bushie; Uncle Rusty had a big heart. One day, the year after I came to live out here, Sugar rang up with a favour: could Uncle Rusty come out there to Mount Tabor for a while? He wanted to be on country. So Uncle started coming out here, comin and goin but makin a permanent little home here, with me and the kids. That was 1998, and he’d come out for days or weeks at a time.
He was a real character. He would chew these lollies all day, chomp chomp. And that car of mine wouldn’t move without him in the front seat, when I went to work, morning or night. Uncle Rusty taught me lots.
Then old Dave came along and, well, they knew each other: he and Rusty had worked together out here once.
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