The Cowgirl Page 5

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ she said. ‘I didn’t know I was keeping you here so late – you must want to go to bed.’

  ‘I’m having too much fun talking to you,’ he told her. ‘But you’re right, it’s late.’ He paused for a moment and for some reason she held her breath. ‘I’d stay longer if I could – but you’ll probably want to get rid of me.’

  Wrong.

  He picked up their plates and glasses from the table and took them to the sink, while Teddy fussed about with the remains of the tart, wondering how she could ask him to stay longer, then dashing the impulse from her mind. He wouldn’t want to, he was being polite. She was quizzing him like a crazy person, it was turning into a hostage situation and she needed to give him his freedom. She cast about the room as she walked him to the door. ‘Uh, anyway, thanks for a very pleasant evening – I bet you spend time with a lot of different people.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you must have a great social life.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. We archaeologists like to say we have a different woman in every city,’ he said. ‘Of course we prefer them to be over five hundred years old and buried in lava.’

  ‘Now I can see why you’re into Deirdre,’ she said. He didn’t laugh, but turned to face her in the doorway.

  He was tall and his body was relaxed, but there was something about him, perhaps an energy or a focus, that made her want to step back. He startled her. He gazed into her eyes, assessing her.

  ‘I like your hair,’ he whispered, and she reached up self-consciously to touch her tangled red hair.

  Teddy held her breath again without knowing why and waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He took her hand in his, held it warmly there for a long moment, and headed out into the night. She slipped back into the safety of her home, leaned against the door and as she listened to his footsteps crossing the yard, the wind that had been bustling about the verandah puffed gently under the front door.

  The woolpack was hanging from the rafters of the shearing shed, attached to a thick coathanger-shaped hook and a pulley attached to a rope. Teddy was lowering it down to the wool-classing table when Will found her.

  ‘What are you up to?’ he asked. She swung the pack onto the plastic-covered table and released the weight.

  ‘Just cutting a roast for Grandma,’ she said and pulled the woolpack off, revealing a large lamb carcass.

  ‘Woah,’ Will said. ‘I’m assuming that wasn’t natural causes?’

  She smiled. ‘I killed it yesterday and hung it overnight.’

  ‘What happened to, you know, all the stuff?’

  ‘Buried. I skinned it and gutted it yesterday too. We do it in the late arvo when the flies are going to sleep. The meat hangs overnight to make it easier to cut.’ Dog made his way back to the small puddle of congealed blood and recommenced licking delicately.

  ‘And you know how to slaughter sheep?’

  ‘It’s not that hard,’ she assured him. ‘The killing is the hardest – I have to get it into the wheelbarrow and tie up its legs. The rest is just butchery.’

  Will approached the carcass and lay his hand on its cool, solid form. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Of course,’ she told him. ‘Roll the chopping block over and we’ll get going.’

  ‘I assumed you’d have a bandsaw.’

  ‘Hamish does. I don’t bother for one sheep; it’s a lot of cleaning.’ She pulled out a cleaver. ‘I find it easier to just chop it up a bit.’

  ‘You just chop it up a bit. Geez.’ Will rolled the wooden stump across to the table, where the carcass was lying. He glanced down at the damage done to its surface, as the cleaver had struck it across the years.

  Teddy picked up a sharpening steel and began sharpening her favourite knife, then she reached for a thin steel rod. She hugged the carcass to her body briefly, and plonked it onto the block.

  ‘Hold it upright,’ she told him, and inserted the rod down the spinal column, hammering it in. He watched, fascinated, as she chopped down the length of the rod – the spine peeling down heavily until it was almost in half – and finished it off with her knife. Before long she had carried it to the table and picked up her cleaver again.

  ‘Now,’ she said, with a large smile. ‘Who likes chops?’

  It was an hour before they had finished bagging and labelling the cuts of lamb. Half of them ended up in an industrial-sized freezer in the shed, and the rest was assigned to Deirdre’s kitchen and to Teddy’s fridge. As Will found a space to fit the meat, she put the kettle on without thinking, and made them both a cup of tea. The conversation had flowed easily. Will had asked about the cuts she was making and what she would do with them.

  ‘Who taught you to butcher?’

  ‘Dad. I used to help him as a kid. I loved getting the hide off, seeing the guts, all that stuff. Then when I came home after Dad fell sick, he wanted me to learn so I could do it for Grandma. We must have killed a sheep a week until he was satisfied I could do it myself – the freezers were full of some pretty dodgy cuts for a while!’

  Will laughed. ‘You seem pretty capable now,’ he said. ‘But why didn’t he just get Hamish to do it?’

  ‘I think he wanted me to be independent. He made me change the tyres on the cars and the ute, swap the gas tanks over for the kitchen stove, use the .22. Maybe he wanted to prove to me that I could.’

  Will sipped his mug of tea. ‘He sounds like a great guy.’

  ‘Yeah. It was hard to lose him. I really felt for Mum – and for Grandma. I think she’d pinned a lot of hopes on him, a lot of love. But he had to leave her and Mum here, and their relationship didn’t survive. Mum moved to Perth not long after he died.’

  ‘So,’ Will said, ‘you back with me for the day now?’

  Teddy was washing her mug in the sink. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But I’m helping Grandma with something later.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not digging,’ she told him and pulled out a tea towel. It was a mistake, really, not to just lie, because he looked pretty interested. It was if he already suspected something about Deirdre she didn’t.

  ‘I’d better get my pound of flesh out of you now, then,’ he said, and gestured towards the door.

  It felt like they worked for hours, finding small pieces of Deirdre’s unremarkable history. They unearthed a bedhead, a baking dish, a towel hook and were excavating a laundry wringer when Teddy checked her watch and saw that it was mid-afternoon.

  ‘Gotta go!’ she said, leaving him to it and dashing back to her house.

  She threw herself through the shower, got to Deirdre’s at the same time as Audrey, and together they settled in the lounge room like time travellers arriving, unsurprised, in 1965. The couch had been well respected and had even been re-covered in the eighties. It was now a loud bright-blue floral pattern, Deirdre’s favourite colour.

  ‘I’m making tea,’ Deirdre announced and marched off to the kitchen to warm the pot.

  It was knitting day. On the second Wednesday of every month they got together with whoever was around Windstorm and knitted squares to turn into blankets for the homeless. Sometimes there were as many as seven knitters of varying skill levels, but often it was just the three of them – particularly if the season had broken and the rains had come, or if harvest was on and everyone was busy with sporting wind-ups and Christmas concerts.

  Teddy pulled out her knitting bag, glad Will was most definitely not invited. She didn’t mind listening to the old girls chatting but she wasn’t about to be caught sitting with a cup of tea in one hand and a set of knitting needles in the other.

  ‘How’s the excavation getting along, Deirdre?’ Audrey was asking. ‘That boy of mine making himself useful?’

  Deirdre put down her teacup and picked up an eight ply. ‘Seems to be, Audrey. He’s a good boy, a bit wild.’

  Teddy surreptitiously rolled her eyes. By ‘a bit wild’ Deirdre usually meant she hadn’t personally observed him attending church or cutting some pensioner’s toen
ails. The bar was pretty low. She must have made a noise, perhaps she had started the huffing thing like her grandma, because both the older women turned to her with interest.

  ‘And you?’ Audrey asked. ‘Do you like my Will?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Teddy said politely. She looked at her bright pink square. She’d dropped a stitch a few rows ago but she wasn’t going back. ‘He’s been very careful with Grandma’s old stuff.’

  ‘Too careful, probably,’ Deirdre said. ‘He’ll be off soon and I don’t think he’ll have the job done by then. Not at this rate.’

  Teddy fiddled with her wool, wondering if Deirdre had cottoned on to the fact that Will was planning to skip out on the job earlier than he’d indicated. Deirdre often had a feeling in her waters about such things. Teddy didn’t like to think about Deirdre’s waters too much, but they seemed to hold an uncanny ability to predict the future.

  Teddy started massaging the dropped stitch to make it disappear. It didn’t, so she picked up a darning needle and carefully stitched it into place, hoping Deirdre wasn’t watching; she’d make her unravel it and start again.

  ‘Hello?’ There was a woman’s voice at the door. The car engine must have been drowned out by the digger Will was manning over at the sheds. Deirdre struggled to her feet.

  ‘Deirdre – stay where you are. It’s only me!’ Cate Christie came around the corner, smiling broadly and holding a bag full of wool. ‘Hi, Audrey. Don’t be afraid but I’m getting back on the knitting horse.’ She plonked herself down at one end of the lounge.

  ‘Hello, dear!’ Audrey greeted her. ‘You’ve been keeping up with your knitting, then?’

  ‘Not at all, you’ll be pleased to know.’ She pulled out a ball of wool and held it before her for a moment.

  Deirdre started to get up again, this time making for the kitchen.

  ‘Stay put, for goodness sakes, Deirdre. I’ll have my tea when I’ve knitted something decent and not before!’

  Deirdre fell back with a grumble. ‘If you don’t want tea at all, you just have to say so!’ she snapped.

  ‘Deirdre – are you making a joke?’ Cate asked mildly. She started a slightly jumbled process of casting on. ‘Because, you know, well done.’

  ‘Harrumph.’

  Cate turned to Teddy. ‘Hey, Teddy. Long time, no see.’ She smiled.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, Cate. We’ve been a bit busy here.’ Teddy said.

  ‘I can see that,’ Cate said, with a glance out of the window to the dusty mess by the yards. ‘But I was sorry you didn’t come to my chocolate appreciation afternoon last month – I had you pegged for a milk-chocolate person, myself.’

  Teddy blushed. ‘We were kind of busy last month, too.’

  ‘I’d just shoot that bloody cow,’ Cate said. ‘It takes way more effort than it’s worth. Cow’s milk is out of vogue now anyway, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to be milking coconuts now?’

  ‘We don’t worry about silly things like fashion here, Cate,’ Deirdre said.

  Cate cast a wide-eyed stare about the room. ‘Really?’

  ‘Harrumph.’

  Teddy laughed and Cate winked at her.

  Cate was one of Deirdre’s favourite people, only it was so far down it was almost undetectable to the human eye. She was the great-niece of Deirdre’s best friend Ida, and she showed a measure of cheek and grit that Deirdre seemed to find appealing. She was a stylish woman, too, and today was no exception. Cate was clad in denim and midnight blue cashmere, brought to life by a bright orange cotton scarf that had been handpainted by her young daughter. It was a rebellious slap of colour in a classic ensemble. Teddy observed her over the top of her knitting. She liked Cate; she was outgoing and upbeat and Teddy admired her easy confidence.

  Teddy hadn’t been too busy to go to Cate and Henry’s the month before, but she’d reached the end of their drive and realised she’d forgotten to feed Dog, and she knew that Deirdre would think she had. And then she’d arrived home and walked in the front door to find a wave of relief had swept over her, and she’d noticed she hadn’t done the washing up, so she set to – Deirdre would be appalled if she were to drop by and find the house in a mess. And then, well, there had been some vacuuming, because Teddy had walked half the paddock into the lounge room, and then it was only half an hour to milking and Deirdre had been looking so tired lately that she thought she’d better get that done for her . . . and then the day was gone, and it would have seemed rude for her to ring Cate and say, Sorry, I’m not coming. I just had a few last-minute chores to do . . . No one would understand.

  She stretched her square into a more-square and less-trapezium shape. Cate was chatting to Audrey and Deirdre about her husband, Henry. The old girls loved to listen to her tell tales and she usually had an entertaining story about Henry when they saw her.

  After an hour Cate leapt from her chair. ‘Crap!’

  Deirdre frowned.

  ‘Got to go! I told Henry I’d help him move some sheep at three.’ She started gathering her knitting.

  Audrey looked amused. ‘Would you like me to finish off that square for you?’ she asked.

  ‘Would you?’ Cate said, and placed the wool in her hands and a kiss upon her cheek. ‘You are the best!’ She gave Teddy a quick hug and dashed from the room. ‘And, Deirdre, you are also the best!’ she yelled as she flew across the verandah and into her car.

  ‘Always in a hurry, that one,’ Deirdre grumbled comfortably.

  ‘And frankly, not a great knitter!’ Audrey laughed, tugging at the square Cate had left behind. ‘Now, Teddy – have you thought any more about the vintage dress fundraiser?’

  ‘I have, Audrey, but I’d rather not.’

  Audrey’s face fell. ‘Oh, Teddy, really? But you’re such a pretty girl . . .’

  ‘Sorry, Audrey. I’m busy that day.’

  ‘Are you even sure which day it is, dear?’

  ‘She’s busy,’ Deirdre snapped. ‘Don’t nag, Audrey.’

  Audrey fell silent for a moment. ‘I had thought it would be a nice thing for the young ones to do, that’s all,’ she said quietly. Deirdre stood up and disappeared down the hall.

  ‘Time for tea,’ she announced over her shoulder. ‘Don’t get up. I’ll bring it in.’

  Teddy glanced guiltily at Audrey, who was impassively knitting Cate’s square. It wasn’t hard to tell where she had started. It was kind of like the wool had been horribly disfigured in an industrial accident and she was knitting its face back on. They listened to Deirdre clattering about in the kitchen and Audrey’s mouth twitched in amusement.

  ‘I think I can hear Deirdre humming an old dance tune,’ she remarked. ‘No one will ever know my heart is aching, although a million teardrops start to fall, I’ll cry myself to sleep and wake up smiling, you hurt me, but no one will ever know.’

  Teddy tugged at her square again, and joined in.

  ‘I’ll tell them we grew tired of each other, and realised that our dreams could never be, I’ll even make believe I never loved you, and no one will ever know the truth but me.’

  ‘Well!’ Audrey said, pleased. ‘How do you come to know an old tune like that?’

  Teddy shrugged. ‘She sings it sometimes while she’s milking, I guess I picked it up.’ She studied her knitting very closely. ‘I thought I’d better remember a few of the old tunes for her – you know – just in case.’ She swallowed. ‘You know, just so someone around here knows her stories, and her songs . . .’

  Audrey’s hands stopped moving, and in the silence Deirdre clattered a teacup onto its saucer and grumbled about her arthritis to the kitchen sink. ‘You are a good girl, Teddy Broderick,’ she said.

  ‘Is there a cup of tea in the offing?’ Will had arrived in the kitchen, and the sound of his deep voice made Teddy drop her knitting.

  ‘Oops,’ murmured Audrey, twinkling as old ladies do, given half a chance. Will showed up in the doorway a moment later as Teddy was retrieving her square. She kept her eyes on her knitting.


  ‘Afternoon, Audrey.’ He kissed her cheek and pointed at Cate’s knitting. ‘What’s with the wool – thing?’ he asked. ‘Did you have a stroke?’

  ‘It’s not mine, silly boy!’ she admonished. ‘Now, go and help Deirdre fetch the tea – make yourself useful.’ Will rolled his eyes and headed back to the kitchen so that Deirdre could enjoy ordering him about. Audrey hummed a few more bars of ‘No One Will Ever Know’ and within moments Will was back, balancing three teacups and saucers in his hands. He handed Audrey hers, then held out Teddy’s. He waited until she had to look up at him.

  ‘I’ve missed your help,’ he told her. ‘And here I find you slacking off.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘What have you found this arvo?’

  ‘Parts of the old valve wireless, what looks to be a metal tray, and a really rusty rabbit trap.’

  ‘It sounds like you’re doing okay without me,’ Teddy told him.

  ‘But it’s been hard.’

  ‘Teddy’s been singing one of the old dance tunes with me,’ Audrey said.

  Will looked impressed. ‘So, it’s knitting and singing dance tunes?’ he asked. ‘Sounds like a big afternoon.’

  Her cheeks flamed. This was pretty much exactly what she hadn’t wanted to happen.

  ‘Teddy knows all the old songs,’ Deirdre supplied with begrudging pride, returning from the kitchen, her teacup in hand. ‘What do you think of that?’

  It was something Deirdre said a lot. Teddy’s father had said it too. What do you think of that? It was like a challenge, like you couldn’t help but be impressed. Teddy skolled half her tea. It was scalding hot and her eyes watered.

  ‘Got to go,’ she rasped. ‘I’m helping Hamish with some drafting.’ She made for the door, leaving the knitting where it was – because it would look even sadder if she clutched it to her person as she was attempting to leave with dignity. ‘Bye!’