Mateship With Birds Read online

  Betty cuffed him across the shoulder and stood up to leave. She smiled. He smiled back.

  Even after that Harry was hesitant about coming inside Betty’s house. He’d hold the fly-wire door open and stand stiffly in the doorframe – a portrait of a man unsure of his welcome. Or he’d stay out on the verandah.

  Michael reads to Betty as she peels potatoes in the sink. The white flesh turns around and around under the knife in her hand. Michael rocks on his chair at the kitchen table, shadowing the lines in Science for Young Australians with his finger. Harry listens from the verandah.

  ‘The Laughing Kookaburra, or Laughing Jack, or Alarmbird, or Breakfastbird, or Shepherd’s Clock, or Woop Woop Pigeon is a boisterous bird of the Australian bush known for its raucous laugh.’ Michael stumbles on ‘raucous’. Betty corrects him.

  ‘Raw-cous,’ he says. ‘Laughing Jack spends his days hunting throughout this territory and comes home of an evening to lead the family chor-us. These birds, from the kingfisher family, have an unusual family structure. Groups of adult males and females live in celibacy with one central couple and assist them in hunting and raising their young.’ Michael’s finger has halted under ‘celibacy’ – he looks up at his mother.

  ‘Go on, Michael, love,’ Betty says, her voice high and formal. She turns back to the sink, her curls joggle against her neck as she reaches for another potato.

  Harry knows all this, of course; he knows everything about birds.

  After a few years they have the impression that Harry is always there, but in fact he is only ever there in small snatches – a meal, the delivery of a particular item, collecting Michael to help with the cows. The operations of the family are attractive to him, but also unsettling. When he’s invited to tea he leaves immediately the meal is finished, as if unsure of what happens next.

  The year that Little Hazel turns eight Harry helps her make a present for her mother – a pokerwork sign for the house. They work in the dairy. The girl’s hands wrapped in rags to protect them from the hot poker; Harry taking over when she loses interest and finishing it off with a chisel to give it a decorative edge. Harry says it is all her work, although she knows it isn’t.

  On Christmas Day Little Hazel goes to collect Harry. She wears a green skating dress with ten large white buttons down the front. It looks odd; like a uniform. She saw the pattern in Woman’s Day and wouldn’t let up until Betty made it for her. She has her scuffed leather school shoes on and no socks. Harry wears a cream shirt, braces and his good trousers. His beard is freshly trimmed. Harry notices that the girl is walking strangely. At each step she kicks her knees up and watches as the green skirt flicks around her legs. It’s a worrying age for a girl child, Harry thinks. An age when they can start to impersonate themselves.

  After the Christmas dinner shared with Sip and the Christmas pudding with a saucer of cream for Louie, Harry mounts the sign on the weatherboards next to the front door. It’s twilight, the air is full of summer insects. They stand back to admire the sign. Little Hazel gives it a once-over with the hem of her dress. REYNOLDS it says, not quite centred on a slab of red gum. The sound of the cicadas is amplified as the light fades. Betty turns around. Harry has gone. She can see a dark shape moving behind the sugar gums and just in front of it the orange glow of his pipe that looks to be leading him away.

  The pull between the boy and the man is much like that between the man and the dog. Soon Michael is at Harry’s most afternoons after school, and on the weekends they go fishing together or rabbiting. Betty walks out of the kitchen, a basin on her hip, to see them sitting on the step together with one of Harry’s bird books and the binoculars. She overhears Harry’s directions to Michael; gentle, low-voiced, almost swallowed in his beard. ‘Fantail at four o’clock.’ There’s a way they have of half turning their faces towards each other. Betty is tipping the sink water on the tomatoes when Michael calls out to her for assistance. He’s trying to tie a handkerchief over Harry’s eyes so he can record how many birds Harry can identify in five minutes by call alone.

  Betty kneels down and pulls the material taut across Harry’s thinning hair. Then she holds his head in her hands and turns it from side to side to check his ears aren’t impeded.

  ‘Can I start now?’ Harry asks Michael.

  Michael checks Harry’s wristwatch.

  ‘Ten seconds.’ Michael counts the seconds down by tapping his finger on his leg. Betty notices the length of Michael’s thighs; how quickly he is growing. She stands up and smooths down her skirt.

  ‘Directly behind us, Michael,’ Harry says. ‘Number one: a Mother Bird.’

  One evening, Harry edges carefully up the track and parks at the edge of the channel. He rubs his palms on the steering wheel. ‘We can walk along here a bit. I need to check the water, see how she’s flowing.’

  Betty looks across at him and smiles. She likes to sit in Harry’s Dodge. The seat is low and sleek like an upholstered banquette at a fancy restaurant and it smells of hay and boot polish. She looks out of the windscreen at the scene framed in front of her. The channel has an oasis quality. Water seeps through the channel banks to the weeds and wildflowers, marking out a strip of bright green from the grey of the paddocks. At either side of the car large river red gums are anchored to the bank just as a painter would place them at the outer edges of a canvas for balance and perspective. Harry takes his foot off the brake and the car settles under them.

  ‘Alright then?’

  Betty nods. ‘Alright then.’

  They walk for a while along the edge of the bank, Harry stopping now and then to measure the channel depth and test the flow of water around his outstretched fingers. The hot edge has gone off the afternoon. There doesn’t seem much need for talk. The bank is narrow so they walk slowly, in single file. Betty is in the lead; Harry hangs far enough back so he can watch the way she moves. He likes her plump forearms, the cardigan pushed up around them; the gilt band of her watch digging into her wrist. He likes the sound of her clothes moving around her middle. When she turns to speak to him he notices her softening jaw and her mouth – the lipstick on her front teeth. He’s been watching all of this, over the years, watching her body age and temper.

  They reach the fence and turn back again towards the car. Harry scans the bank for a flat section with decent grass. He points it out to her. ‘Sit down there a bit and take your shoes off.’

  ‘Give my bunions a breather?’

  ‘I didn’t know you had bunions. That’s a bonus.’ He takes his coat off and lays it down for her. They sit for a while, murmuring the odd comment into the afternoon; watching the birds flit between the trees and the water.

  Betty needs to get tea on, and there’s work tomorrow. The day is closing in. He follows her back to the car. The grass has made an intricate scribbled pattern on the backs of her legs. It reminds Harry of ancient Egyptian writing he’s seen in books; hieroglyphics. He wonders if the scholars are mistaken, if hieroglyphics is not a written language after all, but the marks early crops made on the skin of women when they lay down in the fields to rest.

  Harry makes the grass brand from a stirrup iron. He solders the plate of patterned tin over the opening where the ball of the foot sits. Two harness traces form a handle. It has taken many hours of work with the tin cutters to match the whorls and intersections in the tin with his memory of the grass pattern on Betty’s legs. Countless times, in the making, he has wiped the tin on a rag and tried it on his own leg.

  Sunday evening, Harry wraps the brand in a clean tea towel and walks over to Betty’s. He’s always expected for tea on a Sunday. He has his good jacket on, but his shirt cuffs are still rolled thickly at the elbow so it isn’t sitting right. He’s not sure what he’s going to say to Betty about the brand. He’s hoping explanations won’t be necessary – that she’ll just take it, that she’ll understand.

  Dora from the poultry farm is sitting in Harry’s place at the kitchen table. She’s sipping lemon cordial and leaving her orange l
ipstick on the rim of the glass. A chair is brought in for Harry and he sits at the corner of the table straddling one of its legs. Little Hazel passes Harry the gravy, but she can’t take her eyes off Dora. Betty explains that Dora and Michael are working on a project together for school. Michael mumbles in agreement, a crop of pimples reddening around his nose. Betty returns to her dinner, forking her peas with care. Harry feels uneasy listening to Dora and Michael talk – as if he’s eavesdropping on something encoded and private. Four is comfortable, everyone has their place; five feels lopsided, unbalanced somehow. After dinner Michael and Dora go into the front room to listen to the wireless. Dora is interested in next year’s royal tour. She’s brought her scrapbook in case anything new is mentioned. Betty washes the dishes, Little Hazel dries. Harry sits at the table behind them with his cup of tea cooling in front of him. Little Hazel places the clean plates, the baking dishes, the egg-beater and the slotted spoon on the table. This is the time, after dinner, that Michael would usually get his bird books out and they’d chat about the week’s sightings. The brand is still on Harry’s lap. He considers unwrapping it and putting it on the table with the kitchen utensils, it wouldn’t look out of place – or not immediately so. He says goodnight to Betty and Little Hazel and scratches Louie under the chin. He calls out to Michael in the sitting room, there is no reply. On the way home Harry stops at the dairy. He hangs the brand from a rusty nail on the wall. As time goes by it looks more and more like an implement that every dairy farmer would have.

  On the shelf in the dairy: Provet Vaginitis Powder; Ammolene Dairy Cleanser; Hamilton Mammitis Vaccine; Provet Teat Salve; Provet Blighty; Killaweed; Sykes’s Bag Balm – keeps teats as soft as silk; Immunol Organic Lime Compound; various discarded medicated licks – they didn’t work, but he can’t quite bring himself to throw them out; Calcijec for milk fever and grass tetany; Fumoflake calcium cyanide for gassing rabbit burrows; a copy of The Right Way! by John Roy Stewart, a veterinary book on how to treat the disease and how to perform the operation; numerous unread reports of milk, butter and cream equalisation and stabilisation schemes; and a flyer promoting a screening of Egg Petersen’s colour film, No Hand Stripping, held at the Cohuna Mechanics Institute four years ago.

  The forecast says some stratocumulus moving over at times from the north, but it should fine up nicely later on, it should give Harry a clear run at fixing the fence in the channel paddock. He starts the vacuum pump on the milking machine, rinses the glass observation bowl and tensions the inflations. The first cows trot forwards into the bails. Licker and Big Joyce are jostling for their place in line. Harry hears their hooves skittering on the bricks. He looks up from taking the cups off Stumbles to see Licker with her head down shoving Big Joyce out of the way. Licker often has a large mood on her. The top cows and the bottom cows are not the problem – it’s the middle classes that are always jockeying for position, trying to better themselves and knocking each other about in the process. Harry is careful not to pet a middle cow – even the smallest attention and she’ll be high-hatting her sisters and become even more unmanageable. Joyce takes the shove at the worst place – just below the hips where she’s not very stable, where the weight of her udder is already pulling her off-balance. Her knees splay out from under her; she teeters pathetically on the edges of her hooves. Licker trots smartly through the gap and shoves her head into the trough to feed.

  ‘Really, girls,’ Harry says. ‘Is that really necessary?’

  He moves smoothly between each cow, going backwards and forwards into the engine room, checking the separator. When the rhythm of the milking is well underway he lets his mind wander. Harry entertains himself with the idea that the girls are a troupe – perhaps dancers or singers – and that he is their manager, responsible for their myriad complex travel arrangements and costumes and meals. They are on some sort of vague world tour where they are much acclaimed for their talent and beauty. Harry is a dedicated but exasperated manager, worn down by attending to all of their feminine needs and foibles. He’s responsible too for their reputations. When Babs leaves the stalls at unexplained speed, her empty udder slapping slackly between her legs, he watches after her and feels ashamed on her behalf, hoping nobody has seen his good girl with her bloomers showing. Harry shakes his head and finishes rinsing the udder in his hands – the tight bag of a milker in her first lactation. Four cows to go now. The pump is chugging along warmly. Harry wonders what grand city they are in today. He sees bold headlines in foreign newspapers, imagines them being met in the foyers of expensive hotels. The sound of their breathing falls into line with the pulse of the cups inflating. Harry is their conductor – he’s at the centre of an orchestra of pistons, lungs and udders. The cows provide the wheezy melody, the milking machine bashes along underneath with its regular motorised beat. It’s Harry’s music-de-milk and the dawn is only just breaking.

  As he washes the buckets out Harry sees Tiny admiring her reflection in the wing mirror of the Waratah. She sits perched on the handlebars turning her head from side to side in front of the glossy circle. Tiny is the smallest, most dim-witted member of the family of kookaburras that live on Harry’s farm. Nearly all well-run dairy farms with their irrigation channels and fertile pastures, their thick shelterbelts to protect the cows from wind and rain, can attract enough insects, lizards, frogs and small birds to support a kookaburra family. Harry and Michael keep a weather eye on the kookaburras. They are brash and rowdy, more like dogs than birds. Tiny hammers her beak into the mirror. The force of it knocks the bike from its stand and it clatters to the ground. Tiny, startled, flies away so hurriedly one of her wings clips the gatepost and she veers clumsily towards the mud. Harry shakes his head at her in exasperation, but he’s smiling as he rights the bike and checks it for damage. It’s something to be shared with Michael, although Harry is not sure Michael will be interested while young Dora is on the scene. Harry takes an old milk ledger from the bottom shelf in the dairy. The left-hand column is full of pencilled figures, but the right-hand column is blank throughout the book. It’s wide enough for a few notes, and it’s better than leaving the paper unused or buying a new book. Harry writes, ‘Observations of a Kookaburra Family at Cohuna’, and underlines it twice. He’s not sure about the pitch of it, or how to begin. So he imagines he’s talking birds with Michael, licks his pencil and starts to write.

  The day starts in their throats.

  Dad first, then Mum,

  Tiny and Club-Toe.

  The four of them in the red gum

  by the dairy.

  As regular as clockwork

  they make their request for air.

  Most afternoons

  Mum and Dad nap in the old angophora.

  The aunts take off –

  flying the boundaries,

  hunting,

  spying on the neighbours.

  But for several hours Mum and Dad

  share a perch,

  and do nothing at all.

  They sit very still,

  a couple of woody fruits

  budded to the branch.

  Jewel beetles,

  longicorn beetles,

  stag beetles,

  chafers,

  earwigs,

  weevils,

  spider – one leg only,

  lizard – one almost complete,

  bones of three others,

  two mice mandibles,

  six (v. large mouse or rat?) mandibles,

  a long aquatic feeler – catfish, maybe a yabbie?

  Three complete beaks,

  one partial beak.

  All of this in a handful of pellets

  under the roost tree.

  I sliced them open with my knife.

  There’s a high percentage of waste,

  but a beak isn’t like a mouth.

  There’s no tongue for tasting.

  Just some sort of mechanism

  that decides what goes down,

  and what comes up.

&n
bsp; A spot of family boxing after the rain blows over.

  Mum is challenged by Club-Toe.

  She’s all bluster;

  a bit of wing action,

  some bobbing up and down on the branch,

  a few jabs with her beak.

  Mum stands her ground,

  doesn’t move, doesn’t blink,

  just turns her head towards the offensive.

  After a while Club-Toe cracks the sulks

  and flies off to a distant tree.

  She’s back by teatime,

  taking her place in the chorus,

  singing her familiar lines.

  Their primary address

  is a large red gum by the dairy.

  But they also reside

  in your mum’s peppercorn,

  in the bundy box in Mues’s front garden,

  in the old angophora behind the channel,

  in the sugar gums that line the driveway

  and the road.

  Mum and Dad I understand –

  your typical marital pair.

  But why do the ladies stay on?

  Club-Toe and Tiny

  are fully grown,

  are fit enough to feed themselves.

  They slope off during the day,

  stray towards the boundaries,

  do some show-off flying

  where the neighbours can see.

  Yet each dusk and dawn

  they are back in the family chorus,

  right on song.

  When Mues was here the other day

  he threw his cigarette butt away – still lit, of course.

  Mum was watching us

  from the roof of the tractor shed.

  She flew down

  and picked the butt up in her beak.

  I had the cows in so I couldn’t follow her,

  but she took it back to the roost tree, I’m sure of it,

  for what –

  a family smoke bath –

  a delousing of the lot of them?

  A high branch is chosen for hunting.