It wasn’t real this morning of bright sunshine, when the kookaburras in a nearby gully were chuckling, and a butcherbird on a near branch was looking at him with his head to one side. What tricks the booze will play on a man, lifting him up and then dumping him like a sack in the bush to have a bout of the horrors. Karl stood, stretched, relaxed. He didn’t feel good and he didn’t feel bad. This day he would be home again.
The remainder of the water in his canvas-bag he poured into the quart pot and boiled it for a brew of tea. Into the tea he emptied the remainder of the rum, and whilst sipping the concoction and chewing hard biscuits with a sliver of hard cheese, he felt again the doubt that the passing of Marvin Rhudder had been hallucination. Still worrying, he rolled his swag and sat on it while filling his pipe and smoking for fifteen minutes, the while arguing aloud the pros and cons as though the butcher-bird could understand what he was saying.
“Look! The last we heard about this Marvin Rhudder swine is that he’s doing time for bashing and raping a woman on a vacant allotment in a Sydney suburb. If it was him last night, then he’s out of gaol. If he was heading for home, and he wouldn’t be here in the West without going home, he wouldn’t of been coming this way from Albany. He’d of been coming down from Timbertown on the milk truck, having come over to the West by train or ship. I can’t see him coming home, anyway, not after old Jeff Rhudder swearing a thousand times to shoot him on sight. Naw! Musta been mistook. Musta been a fit of the horrors. I expected ’em, but they didn’t come till last night.
“All right! Then let’s say it was him. We won’t argue how he got here. I got twelve miles to do today to get me home. He’s got fourteen or fifteen miles to get him back to the Inlet. He won’t be doing that right off, or will he? Could of camped for a spell at the old mill where there’s water, and he had none with him, and then branch off south to hit the Inlet right on the coast. Oh, blast it, I musta been mistook.”
Karl stood and knocked the dottle from his pipe, stamping it out on the hard ground. He poured the residue of the tea leaves on the now cold fire ashes, just to make sure there lingered not one spark, slung the swag behind a shoulder and strapped the gunny-sack to fall suspended against his chest. Although the contents of the gunny-sack weighed twice as much as the swag, the arrangement gave balance and left both hands and arms free.
Five miles on he could see the site of the old timber mill, nothing of it left save a few uprights once supporting the iron roof, and the battered useless debris littering the banks of a stream which now carried but a narrow flow of water. Karl spent almost an hour reconnoitring before he was assured no one was camped hereabout, and when again on his way he was convinced that the experience of the previous night was a dream.
Even if it hadn’t been a nightmare, Marvin Rhudder would have followed the little stream down from the old mill, followed it southward to the Inlet and then along the shore of the imprisoned water to reach his people’s homestead. Karl’s way was no longer on a track. He trudged up the slopes and down them, and presently he gained the top of a hill from which he could see Rhudder’s Inlet all blue and shimmering right to the narrow entrance from the distant Southern Ocean beyond the white dunes. He could see the Rhudder homestead seemingly protected by the coast dunes, a rambling house surrounded by work-sheds, the milking-shed, the stockyards. His home at the Matthew Jukes farm was five miles inland.
Emma Jukes was mixing a cake batter when the dogs began to bark, and the barking became frenzied when she heard Karl Mueller shouting at them. His was a joyful shouting, the joy of a man happy to be home again. Then he was standing just inside the open door of the large kitchen-living-room, smiling broadly at her, and lowering to the floor his swag and gunny-sack.
“Good dayee, Missus! Got home, you see.”
Poor Karl! His suit purchased in Albany had been slept in during the journey. His boots were caked with mud and dust. His whiskers were two inches long. His eyes were still bloodshot although now wide and bright.
“And glad to see you, Karl,” Emma said. “Have a nice break in Albany?”
“Too true, Missus. Same old joint. Same pubs, same sister and brother-in-law. I got something for you. Hope you like it.”
“You have!” Emma Jukes turned to spoon tea into the pot and pour boiling water from the heavy iron kettle. She was small and compact. Her greying brown hair was coiled neatly in a bun at the back of her head. Her brown eyes were alive and excited. Karl untied the mouth of the sack, gazed inside for several tantalizing moments, and brought out a package wrapped in gilt paper. Then, when Emma was looking and waiting, he said bashfully:
“Sort of proving I didn’t forget the old farm when I was away.”
Emma Jukes removed the wrapping to disclose a small brooch fashioned after a butterfly. For a moment or two she stood looking at the brooch, and Karl waited as though anxious for her verdict. It wasn’t the thrill of receiving this present which sent her hastening to a wall mirror, to pin it to her dress. Dear, simple, honest, affectionate Karl. For twenty years he had worked with them and for them, and when their boy was taken by the sea, he had slipped into their hearts. Her eyes were very bright when again she faced him across the table.
“Why, it’s just lovely, Karl. How nice of you to think of me.”
It always had been like this on the return from his annual bender. No gush. Just plain appreciation in her eyes, and simple happiness in his broad smile at the pleasure he gave. She poured tea and produced small cakes from a tin, and urged him to sit and eat whilst she continued with her mixture. He told her about the sister and the children, and the brother-in-law who was doing fine. He spoke of the various publicans in Albany in a manner as though they were close relations, and afterwards he picked up the heavy gunny-sack and emptied the contents on the floor, displaying together with new boots and new shirts a mass of paperbacks.
“Look at ’em, Missus,” he urged Emma. “All good blood-and-gutzers. Look! Wuthering Heights! Kidnapped! Peyton Place! Blood on the Sand! The woman at the shop picked ’em out for us. We’ll have some sessions now, won’t we?”
“They look fine, Karl,” agreed Emma. “Now pack them on the sideboard, and go make yourself ready for dinner. Matt has Jack helping him with the milking and things, and Jack’ll be wanting to go home tonight.”
“Still courtin’ Eve?” asked Karl.
“We think so. Now, run along and make yourself tidy.”
“By golly, yes,” he responded, having glanced at the clock on the mantel. He scooped up the boots and oddments into the sack, picked up the swag, and again at the doorway, turned to say: “See you later, Missus.”
When Emma did see him again, he was shaved and showered and dressed as always for the evening in white open-necked shirt and drill trousers. He came in with her husband and a youth of nineteen. Matt Jukes was nearing sixty, and the years had whitened his hair but had not touched his black beard nor dimmed the dark and brilliant eyes. He was stocky and powerful of build, and now he was chuckling at something Karl had told them.
After dinner Karl took the utensils to the wash-bench, and Emma expostulated, saying, “This is still your holiday time.” But he came back swiftly with the objection that as she had cooked the dinner it was his job to clean up as he had done for years. And afterwards, as had also been the custom for years, he would be rewarded by Emma reading to him one of his ‘blood-and-gutzers’.
The temporary help roared away on his motor-bike back to Timbertown, and Emma tidied up and lit the power lamp suspended from the ceiling. Matt went off to lock up the fowls from the foxes, and when he returned he heard Emma say:
“Something on your mind, Karl? You’re very quiet all of a sudden.”
Matt sat with them at the table on which Emma had laid out the new books, and without speaking he began to load his pipe. Karl, he thought, looked tired, looked old