Neverending
The days are long and hot and sick and drawn out now. The days are long and dull and hot and sunny so that you have to squint in glasses or take your glasses off and close your eyes for a while and feel that heat, that dry heat on your face, on your eyelids so that when you open your eyes you can feel the heat wrapped up above your eyes in the compressed skin of your eyelids. The days are longer and hotter and your sweat is hot and salty and as annoying as flies so that when the flies do come and hit at your face not wanting to land just hit and tap at your cheek and forehead you wish that all you had were those little drops of sweat. The days are so hot you sit there waiting for that one drop of sweat to roll down and feel all the nerve endings cheer as that drop passes over them and carry that drop down to your chin where you wipe it off. When you wipe it off you look at your hand and then out over the plains, over the fields, over into the next lot where a small family sits, still, as still as you, wiping sweat and swatting flies. Nothing is moving these days; the heat; the death; the three dead cows out in the next field. Sitting under your carport, sitting in the shade while the sun heats up the ground, sitting watching the rest of the earth’s surface baking and dying, sitting watching the three dead cows you own that are dead and the other family watching you watching your cows watching their dog come out from the shade and go back in to the shade. The days are longer than ever, they days now are so long because there is nothing you can do, there is noting anyone can do but sit and watch their cows die or wait until a fly comes or a drop of sweat forms and travels down, tickling your face and neck and being absorbed into the neck of your shirt. There is nothing in this heat but a small family, a husband and wife and two children and their dog, the little boy still alive enough to run around, pick things up and put them down and try to get the dog to move around but they are just like flies moving around. There is nothing but the flies and the heat and sitting there looking at the sun keeping coming and staying and the dust bowls and the dust storms and the yellow grass and the dead livestock and the other livestock not dead yet and something like a heart or a soul urging those claves, silently urging them to get under a tree, go down to the creek and drink. The heat in your joints, under your arms, under your nails, in your hair, as you run the sweat through your hair with your hot nails it’s as if it thins your hair and you look at your fingers to see if any hair is caught in there. The long hot days of death and loose hair and nothing else to help this, this…coming after three months or six months or so a year. The sickness in the throat in the community in the day every day; another dead cow or calf or sheep or whatever animal it is this time. Just the cool night to keep the foxes coming to eat the free flesh of these newly dead meat bags, these unsaleable thin cattle, these leather bags with air and bone, these things that stand there like troopers in the sun, not moving, shallow breathing, eating weeds, prickly weeds that poison them, sickly small white flower buds that the bees don’t touch. The hot days with no pollen and no water and no livestock and no respite, no shade, just under a house, under a half leaved tree roots exposed through the drying dirt, under ground. My youngest boy, now a teenager, has the long drawn face of an old cattle man although he has never drawn cattle or mustered a single beast or killed a calf for food because instead he has dragged a newly dead mutton sheep up from the bottom field and we have skinned it and cooked it. My youngest boy has stopped being a boy because his father told him he must go down and drag that dead sheep up from the paddock and so he went and as he dragged that heavy sixty kilo dead body through the dust, the sound of the dead thing dragging in the dirt, that’s what did it, that’s what did that to this face. My youngest boy dragging a dead body up for us to eat because we couldn’t eat anything else and he knew he had to do it because his father asked him to do it son so he just went and did it and that is how it happens, when you do it like that, when you do it because your father tells you and in your heart it is that you have to do it so you do it and that is how it happens, that type of face. The heart aches to get up and go down and take those young cattle by the nose and lead them down to the creek, the heart doesn’t want to see them, when you are here and they have trodden like that, hard step after hard step, half fumbling like you never want big beasts to do, their stumbling hurts you in the most human way, so that when you get them there you want to see them drink it in, drink something but to have them meander around wondering why you bothered to lead them down this steep incline that used to be a river to nothing, then you can see that they are dead and you put them in a grave they can’t easily walk back out of. What we did was take that old trailer full of half a shed down to the quarry and tip that out into the pit and go back and get the other half but there was more and go and dump that in the quarry and go back and get the rest, fill the rest up into the trailer and have a beer and drive back down to the quarry twenty minutes drive and dump all that there into the pit too and in the end you couldn’t really see what we’d dumped and the birds came anyway, optimistic birds to go through the shed looking for something but there was nothing other than wood and rusted corrugated iron and nails. We drove back and Mike handed me a lit cigarette and I took one puff and let the rest just burn down.
