But The Sweet Bird Was Dead

By Michael Winkler
A version of the short story published in Penguin’s anthology ‘Sunset’, 2004

Morning tea arrives about half-past-ten. Which is good, but that’s five hours after breakfast and I’m ready to eat the crotch out of a low-flying duck, as they choose to say around here. I see Jason coming from miles away and stop the tractor. Get down and stretch my legs while I wait for him. Take a pee on the back wheel, wipe my face with my sleeve and wipe my hands on my jeans. Stand in the sun and watch the dust come closer and closer.

He’s in the paddock-basher, an ancient Ford. Brian has nailed chocks on the pedals so the little bloke’s feet can reach. He’s eight years old. The synchro’s gone between first and second but he double-declutches like he was born doing it.

He parks next to the tractor and climbs out the window, because the door doesn’t open. Morning tea is a thermos of coffee, a hefty wedge of chocolate cake and an apple. It all comes packed in a pail, like we’re in some Faulkner story. I hook straight into the cake. The coffee doesn’t have sugar, but I drink some anyway.

“What are you up to today,” I ask him.

“Not much.” His legs are thin, brown, dirty, and covered in scratch-marks.

“Did you get some of the chocolate cake?”

“Yeah. Me and Mum et plenty. Dad didn’t get some, just you.”

He doesn’t wave or anything; just peers over the busted dash as he turns a big U-ey and heads back home. I shake my arms hard, trying to lose the buzzing feeling in my hands and wrists, then sigh and restart the tractor. I’m wondering if Brian is allergic to chocolate cake. And wondering if Gerald is still with me here today.

This is where my brother came every summer, to Brian and Bev’s farm. Loved the place, loved the people. Don’t think he minded the haycarting work, either. Me, I can think of a thousand things I’d rather be doing.

The paddocks are huge. Brian and I have each got tractors attached to big mowers. Mine is the one Gerald drove. Brian’s tractor has an enclosed canopy and air-con. Mine just has a roof. We start before sun-up, and one or both of us keeps going until 10 or 11 at night. You sit on the tractor and guide it around the paddock in concentric circles. I have to make sure I keep the right front tractor wheel just on the cut surface, and that I turn ninety-degrees to the left every time I reach a corner. And that’s about it.

Gerald? He seemed to find something out here. But I’m not Gerald. I’m some effete little green boy who doesn’t fit the picture.

Brian’s hands are like ham hocks. Very first day, I saw him grab some scraggly ewe by the roll at the back of its neck and throw it clear across the pen. And I started twitching because I thought the sheep might have broken a leg or something, and I’m trying to keep my boots clean while I’m walking through animal dung, and my white plump hands look like they belong to a fine arts student, as they do. Even though they tried to be nice about it, when I turned up I felt Brian and Bev both looking at me and thinking, Shit, this kid is no Gerald Brockton. They looked as sad about that as I felt.

Around and around. The sun has clambered into the roof of the sky, but you know the worst is yet to come. The day’s only going to get hotter. First you mow in endless circles. Then you go back and rake it into winnows: same procedure, same circles. Then you go around yet again, lining up the winnows of hay with the mouth of the baler, and around and around.

Bev gets up when we’re having breakfast. I don’t know why. She seems to think I can’t load a bowl with Weeties on my own. (The milk they’ve got comes direct from a dairy down the river. It sits in the fridge in a great glass jug with a white buttery crust around the lip. The milk tastes of cow fat. I put just the tiniest splash on my flakes, and drown it in white sugar, but I can still taste it.) Bev was an occupational therapist before she met Brian. She’s the smart one of the family, but she has to keep proving it. All the time. If he’s at the table, she asks me questions about things she knows he’ll know nothing about. She belongs to a book club that meets once a month. She tries to talk to me about Arundhati Roy and E. Annie Proulx and Margaret Drabble, and I can’t tell her that she may as well be talking about her favourite Swahili authors. Books aren’t books. You like one writer, it doesn’t mean you like another.

“It’s so good to get some intellectual stimulation out here, you wouldn’t believe,” she says. Brian has just left the kitchen and is outside clearing his nasal passages and fighting with the laces in his boots. I want to be on my tractor, then – much better than sitting here prickling with discomfort. “Of course we’ve got the ABC – where would we be without Aunty, TV and radio, both? – but you still can’t help but feel really disconnected. It’s hard to find like minds in these parts. Except for Gerald, of course. And you, now.”

There’s a shiver of black-brown chintz just forward of the outside tyre. A momentary glint of snake; I see it straightening to get out of harm’s way, and then the tractor is on it, and I spin my head around to see if the mower has chopped it up, but there’s nothing, just hay and a plume of dust, and then I jerk my head to the front again, wondering if it’s still alive, somehow – maybe twisted around the wheel and advancing on me by the second? The share farmer told me last week about a chap he knew who had a big hole in the floor of his four-wheel drive. He ran over a snake, the wheel flung it up through the hole and inside the cabin where it landed on his shoulder. I asked if the bloke was bitten. The share farmer frowned and shook his head and said he couldn’t remember.

Gerald would have remembered. I loved it when he came home. I never begrudged him anything. He was my shining sun. The weeks he’d spend off doing his bush macho stint would always drag. Then he’d be home, and he’d have stories that stretched for hours, and he’d be this great bronzed monolith, body hardened, at ease with himself and the world. And then do you know what the bloody farmer said…? And the worst thing about repairing it was… And then I realised the noise was coming from a heifer which had… And all these townie dingbats who think they’re ringers start…

The first time he came back from working at the farm he insisted on sleeping in his swag on the back lawn. Said it was the only way he could nod off, these days. He would affect a moleskin-and-akubra look, talk about out-drinking B & S veterans in Bundy and Coke skolling comps, say that we city-dwellers didn’t know if we were Arthur or Martha. I just lapped it up.

But the laps, now, are all mine. I think I’m going out of my mind, Ger. Have you noticed the way the paddock seems to get bigger the further you go? And the bloody furnace heat. Where have all the clouds gone? Tell me that. I’m hurting all over. But maybe that’s the point. Eh? Is that the point? Well, is it?

I sing ‘One hundred green bottles’ almost to completion. There are six green bottles still to accidentally fall when I see the car approaching. It’s lunchtime. Ten days gone, and I don’t know how many more I’ve got left in me. I got them to agree to take me for a month. Brian hadn’t wanted to sign me up at all. Said he didn’t need an extra worker, and anyway, he didn’t see why I’d want to do it – sleep in the same bed, drive the same tractor, labour over the same tasks. But I said they didn’t have to pay me. That I’d do it just to do it. Brian wasn’t happy, frowning into his black bushranger beard, bloodshot eyes scanning the horizon in case there might be a get-out clause lingering out there, somewhere – but he said, alright then. For Gerald. I nodded and went to shake his hand but he’d turned away.

The paddock-basher pulls up. It’s not Jason this time. At all. It’s Bev. I creak across and offer a hand as she clambers, ungainly and red-faced, through the car window. Then she brings out a little esky, and opens it to show me the wares. There’s three rounds of egg sandwiches. An apple, still cold from the fridge. Another slice of chocolate cake. (Was this the same cake, in which case I got two pieces to Brian’s none, or had she baked another?) A packet of sultanas. Plastic-covered cheese, and some Saladas.

I thank her, and put it aside to eat once she’s left. She is leaning against the car. She’s changed her clothes from this morning; wearing a print dress now. Perfect if you were sitting for Andrew Wyeth, but not so practical out here. There are little incursions of sweat around the neckline and under her arms.

“Hot enough for you?” she says.

“It’s a shocker today.”

“It’s even hot at home. Usually it’s okay inside the house, but I’ve been feeling it all day. Can’t cool down.”

“Thanks for lunch. That cake’s great.”

“What do you think about out here all day? Going miles and miles around in a circle. You must have time for lots of thoughts.”

“Too many of them, Bev. Think I’m losing my mind.”

“That’s how it is for intellectuals, isn’t it. Too many thoughts all at once.”

“I dunno about intellectuals. That’s how it is for psychiatric patients, though.”

She laughs, far too loud.

“You’re not going at it too hard out here?”

“No, I’m doing okay.”

“You looked a bit ragged this morning. You don’t have to keep up with Brian, you know. He flogs himself. It’s ridiculous. You’ve just got to find your own rhythm and stick with that.”

“Okay, thanks Bev. I’ll keep it in mind.”

“If you need a bit of time out or some TLC, just make sure you make that happen.”

I look at her. The dress is sticking to her strong legs. She’s probably not 40 yet. She wouldn’t be quite double my age. The sun is blistering hot. She catches my eye, just for a moment, but I look away.

“I’d better get back to it.”

“You’re not going to eat your lunch? After I packed it for you?”

“I’ll save it for later. Delay the pleasure a bit. Got to have something to look forward to out here.” I’m back up on the tractor by then. I have to switch it on, feel the thud of the motor again. Drive away.

“Well, just before you push off, one more thing. I brought you these. Might help you through the long arvo.”

It’s another mini esky. This one holds four stubbies of cold beer. As I thank her I sense she’s trying to hold my gaze again, so I give a little wave without looking at her face, and let the tractor lurch forward along the endless line between the cut and uncut stalks. By the time I make the corner and have turned the requisite ninety degrees left, she is driving away. After a bit I cut the engine, squat in the shade of the mammoth back wheels, and chow quickly through lunch. When I swing back onto the uncompromising tractor seat, I crack a stubbie and keep it jammed between my thighs as I drive. The beer tastes fantastic, and I demolish a second and a third. The alcohol evaporates off my skin. I don’t feel inebriated in the slightest.

I don’t feel the pains in my body so much now. Rounding another corner, I look at the rocks that have been piled inside the fence-line. Is it just my imagination, or have they been set up like that for a reason? It looks like a face – two little grey mounds for eyes, then a long twisted satyr smile. I’ll bet it was Gerald did that.

By the time the tractor has completed another lap and I can get a clearer look at the rocks I’m convinced that it was Gerald’s handy-work. The leering mouth almost seems to want to say something to me. I snap the lid off the last stubbie and drain it. When another lap has been completed, I let fly with the empty, and watch the broken leap of the brown glass as it smashes on the silent stones.

The sun sinks. I’m overdue for dinner at the farmhouse, but I don’t feel like food. I keep working, dragging my way around another paddock, and then another. When the night is almost inky I drive the tractor back to the compound and get into my little car. It feels as light as a whisper, and I’ve got to be cautious not to oversteer. I can’t do dinner with them tonight. I can’t watch Jason push his pumpkin and peas around the plate. I can’t parade my ignorance of rural issues in front of Brian again, and I can’t pretend interest in Bev’s comments on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

The town shambles into sight after 30 minutes fast driving. I knew I’d end up here. Knew I’d be drawn, a dumb ignorant moth to a blue-hot flame, to have my wings singed off me. This is where the road was always going, wasn’t it Ger?

The pub has mirrored windows. I push through the heavy doorway, feel the hotel coolness. Cigarette smoke. Low hubbub. One end of the bar is vacant; I plonk on a stool and order two beers. The first gets rid of my thirst. The second is for sipping on. For comfort.

After a bit, I look around the dim room. Knots of convivial drinkers, sharing yarns and swapping troubles. A couple of lone wolves eyeing off the women in the corner; ‘stalking their lusts’, as Larry Brown would have it. There’s a rowdy group playing pool. And then, there, in the gloom over the other side of the baize, I see him.

He’s bigger than I remembered, and wearing spectacles. His clothes are greasy. He looks like he’s been repairing machinery. His face and forearms are thick and fleshy. There’s something unpleasant about his eyes. He hasn’t got the swagger that I remembered from the inquest. But, yes, it’s him alright.

The woman behind the bar is about my age, plump and pretty. While she pulls me another beer I ask, “That bloke over the other side of the table – that’s Eric Vandenberg, isn’t it?”

“You know him?” she says.

“Yeah. Never spoken to him, but I recognise him. I’m Gerald Brockton’s brother.”

Her face changes. She looks up, as if she’s frightened people might catch her talking to me. No-one’s looking our way.

“Did you know him?,” I ask. “Gerald?”

“Gerald? Oh yes. Yes, he was a great guy. Gerald.”

“Yeah. He was.”

“Excuse me,” she says, then, and disappears through the narrow doorway into the back bar. There’s a sick feeling in my guts. I feel bloated and acid and wrong.

After a while she returns, looking like she would rather serve beer in the front bar of the bottom ring of Dante’s hell than be back here near me. She trudges over to where I’m sitting: a vulture on a bar-stool, hungry for a feed.

“So were you here that night?”

She seems to consider her options. Decides on the truth. “It was just a stupid night,” she says. “A stupid drunken night. No-one meant the wrong thing but it all got out of hand and what happened, happened. And it was awful, and it must be awful for you.”

“Spose so.”

She purses her lips. She looks – sad. “It was one of those things that starts off with everyone best mates and having fun and ends – and ends – well, you know how it ends. Gerald was fantastic. Everyone loved him up here.”

“Yeah. We did down there, too.”

She looks down the bar. “It wasn’t Vander’s fault,” she says. Sulky, almost defiant. She hugs her arms across herself, and her cleavage wrinkles.

“No. Hell, how could it have been?”

She looks exonerated and runs away.

I know the story backwards. I sat there and heard the eyewitness accounts hour after hour. I can recite sections of transcript in my sleep – and, I suspect, often do. But it’s still strange to be here, right here. Here hunting ghosts, and it doesn’t feel like I thought it would. I thought I was going to get something, but no-one looks interested in giving.

Gerald had a stockwhip, who knows why, and he told Vandenberg he could flick a box of matches off his head. And apparently Vandenberg wasn’t too keen, but Gerald was all over him – so enthusiastic; he could get anyone to do anything – and they were both half gone anyway. They went outside and Gerald whirred his whip around his head a few times, and then cracked it and flicked the matchbox halfway across the road. Didn’t even ruffle his hair.

And then Vandenberg said, alright buddy, my turn, and he went over to his ute and pulled out a shotgun, and everyone was laughing. But Gerald upped the ante, said rightio, I’m not chicken, and went and fetched the matchbox and balanced it on his head. Gerald was yelling out ‘I’m not yella; I’m not a yella fella,’ making chicken noises at Vandenberg and making everyone laugh – but even then some people could see what was going to happen and they were saying, don’t be bloody idiots, come inside and get a drink. Later, they tried to make it sound like it was Gerald’s fault.

He had the whole top section of his skull blown away. It actually came clean off his head and was lying in the street.

And now I look across and see Vandenberg, he’s looking towards me, and I wonder if he recognises me from the inquest. I keep looking at him. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got no idea in the world. I’m just looking at him, seeing his ugly face, amazed that someone so inconsequential could have erased Gerald Brockton from my life.

I stand up. Think I’ll go and talk to him. Ask him how he feels. If he’s proud of himself. But then he turns away, exchanges words with one of the pool players, and disappears out the door. I feel conspicuous and stupid. Standing there, like a marionette with its strings cut. There’s a fridge behind the bar. I lean over, yank out a six-pack, leave a twenty on the hops-stinking bar towel.

It’s dark and hot. Streetlights are dotted in either direction, but there is no sign of movement. Vandenberg has gone. I think, for a moment, that I might cry. Then I see him, sloping away down the shadowed footpath. I yell out and he hesitates, stops, scratches his head as he watches me hurry towards him.

His eyes are stones. I stand so close I smell his sweet stupid aftershave. He seems almost glad, mouth twitching towards a smile as his body sinks backwards to lean against a shop window.

‘What?’

I don’t know how to answer. I’m just staring at him, smelling his fear, watching his hopeless granite eyes dull behind the glasses.

‘He was my brother.’

He looks back, waiting. A while. Looks away to trace the path of a Ford sedan turning down a side street. They’re all side streets out here.

‘What do you want?’

‘I dunno. What are you offering?’

‘Look, this is it. I only met him once before that night. It was forty k out of town, pissing rain, and I had a flattie. Wheel nuts were rusted on. Bloke I never seen before stops and jumps out, got this big grin on his face, and we went to work on it together. He rigged something up with the wheel brace and a steel pick handle and the two of us got enough force on it to move the bastards. He was mud up to his knees, all over his face, soaked to the bone. Said I could buy him a beer some time.’

‘Said you could buy him a beer some time,’ I echo.

‘That was the only time I ever met him before that night. That’s what I knew about the bloke. But I wasn’t allowed to talk about that at the trial.’ Bitterness, like it was his loss.

Not enough oxygen in the air. Everything is contracting. I feel like I’ve been hit in the guts with the back of an axe. Then, a surge. Of something. I vomit onto the shop window, a hot stream, my head banging the plate-glass as I overbalance. By the time I straighten up, Vandenberg has walked away.

‘Hey!’ I yell after him.

He doesn’t even turn around.

‘Hey!’ I roar. When I stop, the street is silent.

I wrench a stubbie open and drive back to the farmhouse. Drive the first couple of k’s without the headlights on, then remember, and muse on how much easier it is once I can see where I’m going. Drive fast fast fast through the velvet night.

Stumbling across the verandah. I’m weaving-drunk, staggering-drunk, damn-fool-drunk. In my bedroom there’s a huntsman spider big as a fist nestled on my pillow. I pick up the pillow and slam it into the wall; a couple of legs fall off but it still tries to crawl away. I track it as it skitters down the wall, then leap in the air and land, boots together, on its back. It makes a satisfying crack as I crush it to death.

In the bathroom I splash cool water on my burning face. There’s a glow down the hallway. I don’t even bother trying to walk softly. I clatter down the creaking floorboards, bump around the corner of their bedroom, and see Bev propped in bed reading a book.

‘Where’s Brian?’

‘Still out there. Went back after dinner. Said he’ll keep going until one or two.’

‘I see.’

I’m looking at her. There’s a roaring anger inside, and I’m worried what might happen if it’s not released. I want to have her; right there, on the bed they share. I want to spear myself into her, through her, mash her into the bedclothes. I want her to bite my neck, and tear my skin. Right here. This moment. There’s something in her face. It might even be fear. I’m swaying on my feet. I need her right now. Because, suddenly, it’s me. Here. I’m seeing it all through my eyes, now. The feelings I’m feeling are my own. Nobody else’s.

A whimper. I reel around. It’s Jason, eyes bleared with sleep. ‘Want a drink of milk Mum,’ he says. His face is Brian’s face, and his voice is Eric Vandenberg’s voice, and his eyes are my eyes, and he is breathing and alive like Gerald was, the ever-alive Gerald; absolutely, utterly alive.

Before she can get out of bed I’ve left the house. I’m swimming through the star-laden night, back to the dumb clanking tractor. Back to the tractor Gerald used to pilot. I grope around and find the switch for the huge overhead floodlight. I drive to the bottom paddock, set the mower blade, and slowly, methodically, start cutting. Around, and around, and around. All alone. Gerald’s gone, now. I’m all alone, under the great jeering crowd of stars. I’m going to mow this paddock. Just me. And when I’ve completed it, I’m going to mow the next one along. And then the next one. And when daylight comes, tomorrow, I’m still going to be mowing. Around and around. I’m going to keep going, as long as it takes. I’m going to do it until it’s finished, and I can go.