Hope's Road Read Free

she was still there at his side.
    Even back then, it had been: ‘Joey, you really should make it up with that poor girl. She’s done nothing wrong by you and she’s the only family we’ve got left. You’re nothing but a stubborn old fool! For goodness sake, Joey, go see her. She’s so sad with her family all gone!’
    But he wouldn’t listen. Did nothin’. And Nellie would sigh, ruffle what remained of his hair and walk away shaking her head. She’d never go against his decision though, and had gone to her grave not knowing Tammy either.
    Regardless, he knew what she would have said about last night’s action down on the flats.
    Shon Murphy, the prick, had the girl on the ground. And he’d swung a fist. Joe had quickly shifted the rifle to the north, not wanting to see or think about what was taking place on Montmorency Downs. The place that, by rights, should have been half his. Not this rock-laden, bush-encrusted hill.
    There’d never been any good outcome from tangling with the Murphys, of whom Shon was one of the worst. Shades of his father, but with a meaner streak, hidden under all that palaver. A charmer who gave with one hand while seeing what he could flog from behind your back with the other. That bloody Tammy had got tangled up with him years back.
    There was a time when he’d pondered that maybe Nellie was right. That the sins of the parents – or in this case the grandparents – shouldn’t be foisted onto a child, and that he should acknowledge he did have family in the Narree Valley. But the installation of a fucking Murphy at Montmorency had sorted that one out. Be buggered if he was going down that drive, the fifth-generation homestead of the McCauley family, and have a Murphy greet him as host.
    Things might have been different if he and Nellie had been able to have kids. If their children had needed cousins to play with. If he’d been able to meet his brother’s eye and say, well I’ve got what you’ve got, regardless – a wife, kids, a farm. But his farm wasn’t a good one and they hadn’t been able to have children, much to the eternal grief of his wife. She would have made a beautiful mother. The best. Always picking up stray or injured animals in the bush, bringing them home and lavishing her nurturing side on them. It was with regret and no small amount of tears that she let them go back into the wild once they were well enough. A bit like the flood of tears that came with her two miscarriages and thereafter each month when, yet again, she would bleed.
    Joe sighed. Yes, his Nellie was a good ’un. One of the best. She didn’t deserve the hand God had dealt her. No kids, little money and a grumpy old bastard of a husband. But she had endured it all with the good grace and nature of a bloody saint. And now she was gone, leaving him rocking up here on his hill all alone. It had taken him a long while to get used to not having her around.
    â€˜Ahhh . . . Joey, my love, you do go on.’And she’d have that soft look in her eyes which meant he might get lucky later on when the lights were turned down and the lavender-scented bed sheets were whispering softly around them.
    So now it was just down to him. Besides that do-gooding chit of a girl who married a fucking Murphy and thus reneged her right to call herself a real McCauley!
    He didn’t need no one. He rang in his shopping list to the Narree supermarket and that hippy nurse Lucy Granger picked it up for him and dropped it at the drum down at the gate in return for some firewood. A wary stock agent appeared every once in a while to organise the sale of his animals. Travis Hunter had taken to silently dropping a fresh hindquarter of deer off to him whenever he made a kill. It gave him a bit of variation from the odd sheep he slaughtered. And then there were the rainbow trout he sometimes caught, fresh from the Grace River, a half-day