Snake Read Free Page A

hundred irrigated acres, five hundred miles from the nearest city, nine miles from the nearest town. Rex went as a share farmer, a status he had been brought up to view as ignominious – better to own one acre than manage ten thousand – but he was thankful for the opportunity of a new start.
    The fact that it was an irrigation farm helped his decision. No anxious scanning of the skies, no tightening of the gut as the days without rain became months and then years; instead, he would order water from the water bailiff in the same way he bought seed and fertilizer from the stock and station agent.
    He felt, too, a connection to the area: his grandfather, forced off his land near the Victorian border by drought, had found work there, hauling sand on a bullock wagon. It seemed to Rex that Irene’s family could easily have been his, scraping to make a living, if misfortune had chosen to dog them. Whenever he was told stories to do with success or failure, Rex always intoned with the regularity of a clock striking the hour, ‘It’s the luck of the game.’
    Because of the war, the farm had been neglected. Channels needed to be cleared of weed, banks recontoured, paddocks graded. Rex thought of his years in the service as a long, tedious round of setting up camp only to pull it down again; in contrast, this work was deeply satisfying. Soon he was flushing the paddocks with water; ibis came, and spoonbill. Rex grew wheat with full, firm ears and grazed wethers with rounded sides.
    He took childish pleasure in watching water flow down a freshly delved furrow, filling the depressions, turning clods into islands, enveloping them. Once, he pulled off his thick-soled work boots and scratchy woolen socks, rolled up the pant legs of his overalls, and waded into a half-filled channel. Mud squeezed between his toes; it was not an unpleasant sensation.
    His feet were magnified by the rippling water; they were as white as wall plaster and traced with prominent ink-blue veins, in contrast to his face and forearms, which were weathered to a uniform reddish-brown. The world burned, but he was up to his ankles in cold water. If he had been an expressive man, he would have shaken his fist at the sun.

3
    Who Would Live in a Country Town?
    I RENE LOOKED DOWN at the baby girl clamped to her nipple, the screwed-up purplish-red face, balled fists, jerking legs, and remembered the cat in the woodpile. She had pulled away a log to reveal a cranny in which a cat was at that moment giving birth to a kitten. The cat was a fine specimen, black and white, with a queenly set of whiskers. Irene crouched down, and before her very eyes, the cat, seemingly without effort, expelled a kitten from her vagina, a tiny thing wrapped in white membrane, the umbilical cord securing it to its mother like a ship to a dock.
    What the cat should then have done, after an initial moment of puzzlement at finding an alien object attached to her, was free the kitten from its caul, lick its nose and mouth clean, bite through the cord. But something was wrong with the cat’s instincts. Instead of turning maternal, she had become angry. She swatted at the kitten as if it were a mouse, swatted again, and realizing it wasn’t about to run away, devoured it. After, she cleaned her whiskers.
    â€˜Your baby, ma’am. Pay attention.’ The baby had come unattached from Irene’s nipple and was butting blindly at her chest. It was the ward sister, a small woman with large shoulders. ‘You must try harder. After all, you can’t return your baby to the baby shop.’ The sister chuckled at her own joke.
    â€˜What happens now?’ asked Irene of no one in particular. She was on the edge of hysteria.
    The sister ignored her. Instead, she came over and peered at the baby. ‘I think she’s had enough,’ she said, and took the bundle from Irene. ‘I’ll get the nurse to bring you some Ovaltine. That’ll settle