CW: References to death, murder, mentions of fire and burning, allusions to miscarriage.
The shimmering haze plays tricks on the horizon as you reach for the white shirt billowing from the clothesline. You pull it taut, inspecting it against sunlight, the world bending in and out of shape in your periphery. All that remains of the past few days is the stain. A hint of rust. Easily overlooked. But you know. Your fingers keep finding it, tracing the outline of the same faded spot, as though testing whether memory is a smudge that will come off.
Above, there is a flapping rush of cockatoos, a chorus of screaming panic. You shield your eyes and watch them disappear into distant sky. Earth-bound, you place your trust in animal instincts. Moving quickly, you snatch at the garments on the line, letting wooden pegs scatter across the ground.
Retreating to the house, you begin packing and stacking belongings by the door. The danger is vague: a feeling. Not fact. But you prepare. All you can do is prepare. You will not warn Henry until it arrives, not until you can be certain it is proof, not paranoia.
When it finally comes you smell the smoke first. Henry is a distant smudge in the paddocks. There is nothing left for you to do but pick up your skirts and run, breathing hard against your corset in the sweltering heat. When you reach him with that same mewling to pack up and go, the cold steel of his voice slices past protest. He will stay and fight. You will stay and fight. He thrusts a bucket at your chest. You do as you are bid, scurrying back and forth, up and down the slope, hauling water out of the shallow creek. The more you hurry, the more it sloshes and spills, soaking your dress, leaving little left to save your tinder-box home. Henry splashes at the walls uselessly, as the sun slips behind an encroaching orange glow.
Henry wipes tears from his stinging eyes, holding the house for support. You press your sweat-slicked forehead against his, begging him to change his mind—while there is still time. But he is already pulling away, shaking his head, telling you to put your faith in him, as he puts his faith in God. That’s when you know. Everything he built, the wood he chopped, the furniture he carved, the fine things he bought, will become nothing but kindling for your shared pyre.
At the gate, his horse is thrashing like a creature possessed. Protesting a death sentence from where he has been fastened to the post. As you approach, your own animal fear is reflected in the whites of his eyes. You know he will bolt. Still, you tug frantically at the leather. Henry has seen you now. There is a hollow clatter as the bucket drops, and he is rushing towards you, bellowing at you to stop. But he is too far away—too late. The ash drifts in on the hot wind, settling in your hair like flakes of snow. For a moment, you are a child again back home in Ireland. Turning your pale face up to the sky to catch snowflakes on your tongue. Your father taught you this game, when melting ice was all he could offer his starving children. When you buried him beneath a blanket of snow, the tears ran hot against your face. But you had to let go—watch the dirt fall from each mourner’s outstretched hand. Now, you let the reins slip through your fingers. Watch the stallion charge away, still capable of escape. Leaving the condemned behind in a cloud of dust.
When the summer began, Henry was away for weeks, peddling fleece. You were left behind to hold the fort on the farm alone. The days stretched between your fingers like dough, kneaded into shape by routines: tending to the house, tending to the crops, tending to the animals, and tending to the absence inside yourself you refused to name. The town was a day’s walk, and Henry never taught you to ride a horse. Every time you itched for conversation, you pictured what happened to people who risked the road, who were robbed and raped and left for dead.
The afternoons were yours to occupy as you pleased. You passed the haze of hot days by arranging your paints on the verandah. Standing in the exact right spot, at the exact right time, you could imagine your life as a pastoral paradise. Few women could call themselves so lucky. When your mind was coming loose like the hem of a ragged dress, Henry buried each bundle of failure in the backyard and never said a word of reproach. Instead, he brought you brushes and paint in a collapsible tin tube, an unimaginable luxury, a reminder there is always more than one way to give birth. So, you worked carefully, taming the twisted tangle of the surrounding bush through delicate brushstrokes, until it resembled the orderly columns and pillow cloud canopies of your childhood. Yet, whenever you stood back from the canvas, squinting, the trees refused to conform, jutting out from the earth at odd angles—like spears. The bush seemed intent on warding off intruders, concealing the inner workings of the engine inside this strange machine.
You dipped your brush in water, then dragged it back and forth across the newspaper. Henry brought them back in bundles whenever he returned from Melbourne. You could not help but soak up the screaming black ink headlines, just as paper absorbs pigment. You scanned the list of fortunes and failures. The struck luck of men who staked their futures on gold, carving up the continent until it offered a return on investment. In the small print, between the stories of success, you noted the names of the dead and missing deemed worthy enough to be written about. You cast your eyes past the predictable, the attacks of snakes and dingoes, the droughts and disease, the children and explorers who never returned. Turning the page, you sought the sensationalised, reading rumours of raids, the invasions of respectable homes. When you came here on assisted passage, fleeing famine, you knew you had rolled the dice. Now it seemed a risky bet.
Heat had mustered for days, hanging heavily over the farm, until it tired of aimlessness, and turned on you with blustery force. You chased after your brushes as they rolled away, only to discover a speckling of dust clinging to the freshly painted canvas. Frowning, you tried to scrape it away. Each attempt left a mutilating mark, exposing the undercoat like a scar. Stepping back from the canvas, the painting seemed to glower at your gaze. Each sloping stroke inched itself forward in violent slashes. Between each line, shifting smudges winked, alive with chaos that could not be contained. You staggered backwards, clinging to the rough-bark reality of the house.
In the following days, you stood transfixed on the verandah—watching and waiting. Your feeble eyes strained to catch the shifting light, as you glimpsed a silhouette in every shadow. But the trees refused to give way, obscuring what you saw clearly, taunting you with a bold display of shaking limbs.
You shut out the outside world, sitting for hours with your back against the door. Henry had laughed at your foolishness when you had demanded a lock and key for the property. There’s no-one around, he said, and if there were, I doubt a lock would offer much protection. Patting your head affectionately, he mused that his gun was a much better deterrent. But now he was gone, and you had no way to defend yourself. At night you woke from sweat-soaked dreams to the banshee howl of an iron roof resisting the wind.
The day Henry returned, you rehearsed every stitch of your argument as you scrubbed and swept. At dinner, ladling stew into his bowl, you waited patiently as he complained about the crooks who tried to fleece him with contracts he could not read. Pinching your palm, a list of pin-prick anxieties came to your lips unbidden. You could not find the right words to explain it, but you had the urge to bolt. Sell the land to anyone who would take it and leave on the next ship. Henry listened, tolerantly tilting his head, but you knew the sick pit of your stomach could never be admitted as evidence in the court of Henry’s mind.
He reached across the table, holding your hand firmly in his. There was nothing to fear, he said, trying to reassure you. Still, you pulled away, with an abrupt scrape of your chair. It was the land itself, and the people, the ones who had been here first. Even magpies swoop to defend their territory. Neither of you, with your sunburnt skin, belonged here.
Your taut throat slackened as you asked whether he was prepared to die this far from home. Henry refused to follow the thread, snipped it off cleanly, insisting he was born here, and destined to die here.
He flung the door open to gaze upon the fences he had built, the animals and crops he had raised, the investment he had made. How could you look upon it, he asked, and deny that he had made this country his own. Staring out across fields soaked in the sunset swirl of fading light, you could almost believe it. If we returned to England, or Ireland, Henry added pointedly, we would have less than nothing, but here, here, we have our chance. He was still the same man you married, years ago, eyes gleaming by dying candlelight, promising to remove the stain of his father’s convict name by rising above his station. Standing together on the verandah, Henry brought your hand to his lips and swore he would take any action necessary to protect his home from harm.
You did not want to know, weeks later, why he came home early, spattered in blood and mud. He shed his shirt and passed it to you without a word. You felt faintly sick, pushing it down into the bucket with a firm hand, crimson tendrils swimming as it soaked. Breathing deeply, you scrubbed vigorously against the washboard to erase every trace. Grunting the effort, you could not seem to lather it out of existence entirely.
You left the shirt in a sodden, crumpled heap. You refused to glance at the livestock, refused to count, letting your mind circle around a confirmation. As you chopped vegetables, you counted your blessings. You had food in your belly. You had a roof over your head. You had a loving husband. You could not risk it now. Biting the inside of your cheek, you tried not to think about the sensation when you sliced your blade through animal flesh.
Henry had warned you not to wander into the bush for risk of becoming lost. But the spectral wailing drew you out, luring you from the safety of the house. It drifted in, on the heave and sigh of the wind. A haunting, hiccupping cry. Your own babies brought back to life. You could not ignore it. To do otherwise meant letting your mind be slowly unpicked, stitch by stitch.
By the time the sound died, you were lost. Twisted trees huddled together conspiratorially, refusing to reveal a way out. That’s where you found them, within sight of the road, scarcely inside the boundary of your property.
A black buzz of flies had already descended to claim the smell, clinging to the oppressive heat. You drew a sleeve over your nose, rationing your breath, to avoid inhaling the stench of rotting meat. The edge of a skirt, so like your own, beckoned. Your heart clenched like a fist inside your chest.
An outflung arm covered her eyes. You hastily whirled around, away from the blood matted in her curls, pooling beneath her head like a pillow. But a short distance away, the man, presumably her husband, was face-down in the dirt—shot in the back. You shivered at the sight of their skin. Even after their murder, you still saw them as a threat.
Then you saw him, the baby, swaddled in a pelt. Long eyelashes. Fat cheeks. Tiny fingers. No blood. No injury. The killer could not bring himself to do it. Not to the baby. And yet he left him. The baby. Behind. To die. How could he? How could anyone? But the wailing—with a sickening lurch, you dropped to your knees. Your fingers fluttered frantically, searching for a sign of life. Please, God. He was still, but not yet cold. A baby, a changeling child, someone you could take in, make your own. But, hovering your ear above his lips, you could hear that there was nothing left. No breath. He had exhausted it, screaming for his sleeping parents to save him from a slow, starving end.
As you placed him down, gently, the ice-water in your veins hardened. Rising to your feet, you flicked the dirt from your skirt. There was no need to weep for them, with swollen eyes and streaming snot. Already you began to think of them as bodies, only. Your sole obligation was to bury them. That would be the proper thing, the Christian thing, to do. After all, what good would it do, to have a husband hang? The men who massacred at Myall Creek must’ve had wives, even children, perhaps? Who would provide for them now? And, even if you reported it, even if you were believed, even if the matter progressed to a court of law—what woman would act against her own interest?
Yes, you would see to it that they were buried. Then you would leave them, deep in the earth, where they could not disturb. And life with your husband would go on, until your house on the hill became a home, lit from within, smoke rising from the chimney.
That night, Henry wanted to know where you had been. Instead of asking for admissions, you led him to the bed and let him comfort you with calloused hands. In the coming days, you would mention the bodies, without ever articulating a crime. You would do so in your tea-time voice as another chore to be added to the list, between mending fences and slaughtering chickens.
But the fire is coming, and you will be held to it. It is starting now, as a faraway man of your colour makes the mistake of building a bonfire on a hot day. He does not know this land, how quickly it ignites. A single spark strikes dry grass. Now it’s racing. The blanket he beats against the ground will burn, as the flames are unable to be contained.
When you run out of time, you will tremble together inside, sweat soaked and scared. Even as Henry mutters that the house will hold, he prays for divine protection. Henry will waste his last words failing to atone. Not that you will hear him above the crackling roar of the bush scorched by fire. In the billowing black smoke, you will choke out a confession about sins in the soil, and know it is too late. The blaze will burst in like hell itself, until you are moved to tears by the heat of the light, blinding and brilliant. With your husband’s hand in yours, you will burn together, eternally in this moment, until the roof above your head caves in.