Daughter of the Regiment (7 page)

‘He went fencing with Dad.’ She shrugged. ‘He says to tell him if anything interesting happens. Hey, I thought you’d be looking at the hole!’

‘I was earlier. There’s no one there. I just came in here to get some chicken wire. I told Dad I was extending the chook run. It’s a good excuse to be down there all the time.’

Angie nodded. ‘Mind if I go and look?’

‘No, sure. I’ll be over there in a minute.’

Harry hauled out the old netting from the back of the shed and considered it. Dad had rolled it up properly so it wasn’t tangled, and it still looked in fairly good shape. Good enough for another chook run at least.

Harry dragged it over to the chookhouse, narrowly avoiding Magic Mary, who was hopping from one foot to another in front of the shed.

‘You want to go in and lay your egg under the truck again do you?’ asked Harry. ‘Okay, off you go. I’m finished in there now. But I’m still going to collect it this afternoon, no matter where you lay it.’

Magic Mary ignored him. She disappeared under the truck.

Harry left the roll of wire outside the chookhouse and peered in.

‘See anything?’ he asked.

Angie shook her head. ‘Just a kookaburra. It’s sitting right up on top of the big red gum across the creek. And another bird flew right past the hole—it was too close to see what it was.’

Angie looked back through the hole again. ‘The creek looked nice back then, didn’t it? Sort of peaceful.’

Harry nodded. ‘Call me if you see anything,’ he said. ‘I’m going to start digging a couple of post holes so it looks like I’ve done something.’

Angie nodded. ‘Need a hand?’

‘No, I’m right.’

It was hot digging holes. Harry finished the fourth one and stuck his head back in the chookhouse.

‘I’m going down for a swim,’ he said. ‘Want to come?’

‘Didn’t bring my bathers.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Wear your T-shirt. It’ll dry soon enough.’

Angie hesitated. ‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t suppose anything’ll happen while we’re gone.’

‘We can’t watch it all the time,’ said Harry. ‘Not when we’re at school or at night. It’s just luck really that I’ve seen all I have.’

Angie nodded. She blinked as she came out into the sunlight. ‘Wow. You don’t realise how dark it is in there. Don’t the chooks mind?’

‘Nah, they like it that way. They like to lay someplace dim. Like Magic Mary. She always lays under the truck. And Moonlight’s got a nest in the lavender.’

‘That’s a pretty name,’ said Angie.

‘Mum chose it,’ said Harry. ‘When Moonlight was a chick she was sort of pale yellow—a real moonlight colour. She’s pure white now though. She’s the only Leghorn we’ve got—I got her egg up at the Show. It was laid by the Champion Hardfeather Fowl. There she was sitting with an egg at the side of the cage, so I asked if I could have it. The bloke said yes, so I put it under a bantam when I got home.’

‘The same one who’s sitting now?’

‘Nah. That’s Sunset. She’s a really good mother. I’ve got her on a dozen eggs, even though she’s so small. She hatched ten last time. They were all bigger than she was after a couple of months—she looked really silly, as if she’d adopted a mob of baby emus and was trying to teach them how to scratch.’

The rocks around the creek were splashed with sunlight and lichen. The water looked cold. Harry supposed it was cold in Cissie’s day, too.

He dived in quickly to get his body used to the chill, then surfaced and floated through the ripples where the creek fell in a smooth cascade into the swimming hole. You could slide down the cascade for hours when the water was a bit deeper, till your legs were red and your bum ached with the cold.

Harry breathed in the scent of water and rotting casuarina needles, of ribwort and watercress and stonewort. One of his earliest memories was of the creek. Mum brought him down here when he was still toddling to splash in the shallows and try to chase the dragonflies at the edges of the water. It hurt to imagine the creek still flowing here, the ripples of water and sunlight, while he was away at school …

‘Harry?’

‘Mmmm?’

‘What were Cissie’s parents like?’

Harry hesitated. ‘Nice, I think. I only saw them all together once. And I didn’t really see them then—just Cissie. But they sounded nice.’

Angie sighed. ‘I hope the soldiers let her stay. It’ll be horrible if they don’t.’

‘It’s all already happened,’ Harry pointed out.

‘I know. But it doesn’t seem like it.’ Angie hauled herself up onto a rock. ‘I’m going back. You coming?’

Harry nodded.

The chookshed smelt even more strongly of chook as the day became hotter. At least half a dozen hens had laid in their absence, Harry noted. They must have been crossing their legs till they left.

‘I’ll watch for a while if you like,’ offered Harry.

‘It’d be better if I watch,’ said Angie. ‘Then you can be working on the chook run if your parents come down and check. I promise I’ll call you as soon as anything happens.’

If
anything happens, thought Harry. Maybe Cissie has already gone.

But he didn’t say it aloud.

The shadows lengthened.

White Ice, the Light Sussex, peered into the chookhouse and saw Angie. She considered for a moment, her small pale head on one side, her black neck twisted, then hopped into the far right nesting box.

Twenty minutes later Harry heard her call. Pruck pruck opruck pruck opruck pruck pruck …

‘Dopey birds,’ sighed Angie. ‘No, there’s nothing happening. I just wanted to stretch for a moment and get out of the chook dust. Why do they call like that anyway? Everyone knows they’ve laid an egg and can come and take it.’

‘It’s to signal to the rooster,’ said Harry. ‘When he hears them cluck he knows to look round and make sure it is safe for them to get back to him and the other chooks.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘What time do you have to be back?’

‘Soon,’ said Angie. ‘I haven’t finished my homework. I’ve still got all those maths problems. Surely something must have happened by now.’

‘Maybe we’ve missed it. While we were down at the creek … or before breakfast.’

‘Or they’ve sent her home. They
can’t
have sent her home. We’d never see her again. We’d never know …’ She stopped, as though embarrassed by her own vehemence. ‘I’d better get home myself. What about tomorrow?’

‘I’ll look before I go to school,’ said Harry. ‘Damn. I can’t after school though—I’ve got basketball practice and Mum’s picking me up. It’ll be five at the earliest before we get home.’

‘Would you like me to come down and check?’ asked Angie hesitantly.

‘Would you? That’d be great. I’ll tell Mum we’re doing a project together or something.’

‘Okay. Just so I know what I’m supposed to be doing here. When are Sunset’s eggs going to hatch?’

‘About a week,’ said Harry. ‘It’s been fourteen, no fifteen days so far.’

‘If anyone asks what I’m doing in the chookhouse I’ll say I’m checking the eggs,’ said Angie. ‘And waiting for you of course.’ She hesitated. ‘Maybe I’ll look just one more time,’ she said. She slipped inside the chookhouse and pressed her eyes to the hole.

‘Harry!’

‘What? What is it?’

‘She’s there! She’s back again!’ Angie’s face was glowing. ‘Oh Harry, they did let her stay!’

Cissie was older. But not much taller, thought Harry, as he crouched under the perches with Angie.

If they sort of sat opposite each other with their eyes at an angle, they could both get their eyes close enough to the hole to see inside at the same time.

Cissie was still dressed much the same as before. But her face looked … different somehow, he decided. It was almost the face of the woman she would become.

She was sitting on her rock. The same rock she had sat on the first time Harry saw her, and the last. She was reading aloud from a book in her lap, a solid sort of book, with a leather cover stained at one side.

Sergeant Wilkes leant against a flat-trunked gum on the bank opposite. He held a fishing line. Or at least that’s what Harry supposed it was. It was just a stick and a piece of thread dropping into the water.

‘That was a nice one,’ said Sergeant Wilkes in his croaking voice.

He looked older too, thought Harry, much older than Grandad now. The hair had shrunk from his head like grass in a drought. ‘A very nice one indeed. Not that I understood it, mind you. But it was nice the way you read it.’

Cissie’s face was laughing, so different from the girl Harry had seen just a few days before.

‘You didn’t even listen,’ she accused. ‘Your eyes were shut.’

‘I can listen with me eyes shut,’ said Sergeant Wilkes amiably. ‘Read me another then.’

Cissie looked down at her book again. ‘To Daffodils,’ she read. ‘It’s by Robert Herrick. Captain Piper says Herrick was a very famous poet.’

‘He’s dead then?’

Cissie hesitated. ‘I think all poets are dead,’ she said. ‘All the good ones. All the ones in Captain Piper’s book are dead anyway.’ She cleared her throat.

            
‘Fair daffodils,
we weep to see

            
You haste away so soon:

            
As yet the early rising Sun

            
Has not attain’d his noon
.

            
Stay, Stay
,

            
Until the hasting day

            
has run

            
But to the evensong

            
and, having pray’d together, we

            
Will go along with you

            
We have as short a time to stay as you;

            
We have as short a spring;

            
As quick a growth to meet decay

            
as you, or anything
.

            
We die
,

            
as your hours do, and dry

            
Away

            
Like to the summer’s rain
,

            
Or as the pearls of morning dew
.

            
Ne’er to be found again.’

Her voice grew silent.

‘Ah, that’s a sad one,’ said Sergeant Wilkes at last. ‘Things growing, changing, passing. But flowers come again. Maybe that poet of the Captain’s forgot about that!’

Sergeant Wilkes drew up the string, examined it, then reached beside him for a gobbet of meat. He tied it back onto the string and threw it in.

‘He must be trying to catch an eel,’ whispered Angie. ‘There’s no hook on his line for fish.’

Harry nodded. There was no need to whisper, of course. Neither Cissie nor Sergeant Wilkes could hear them. But it seemed wrong to speak aloud just the same.

‘Sergeant Wilkes?’

‘Yes, lass?’

‘What are daffodils like?’

Sergeant Wilkes looked nonplussed. ‘Well, they’re flowers, lass. Yellow flowers. Like any flowers I suppose.’

‘Like wattle?’

‘Well no. Not like that. They stick out of the ground on a straight stem, one at a time.’

‘They’d look silly!’

‘Well they don’t, lass, and that’s a fact. They look right beautiful. You ask Captain Piper about them. He’ll tell you right enough. He’s the one with all the learning.’

Cissie nodded. She looked down at her book, then looked back at Sergeant Wilkes. ‘Has anyone ever written a poem about wattle?’

Sergeant Wilkes looked startled. ‘Not that I know of, lass. You’d best ask Captain Piper about that as well. But I don’t suppose they have. Wattle doesn’t grow back home where the poets were. Too cold.’

‘I bet wattle’s prettier than any daffodils,’ said Cissie stubbornly.

Wilkes chuckled. ‘Well, you might be right at that. But don’t let Captain Piper or Lieutenant Carstairs hear you say it. Lieutenant Carstairs has a whole wood of daffodils right by his home in Surrey. He talks about them every spring. You’ll see daffodils for yourself one day, lass. Then you’ll see why they write poems about them.’

‘I’ll still like wattle best,’ said Cissie obstinately. ‘Maybe I’ll write a poem about wattle, if no one else has. “Fair wattle branch that waves about the sky …” What rhymes with sky, Sergeant Wilkes?’

‘Ah, no, that’s not a question you should be asking me neither,’ said Sergeant Wilkes. He stretched. ‘I’ve been sitting in one place long enough. Me bones are aching. Come on. They’re not biting today, or maybe the meat’s too fresh for them to fancy.’

Cissie nodded. ‘Fly,’ she said.

‘What’s that lass?’

‘Fly. It rhymes with sky. And high, and lie … “Fair wattle branch that waves about the sky, There against the blue you lie, Showing the … bees, maybe … the bees … or laughing jackasses… no, bees sounds better… Showing the bees then how to fly …”’

‘Then you’d better run back and write it down before you go forgetting it,’ said Sergeant Wilkes. ‘I bet it’ll be a grand poem. Don’t you go waiting for me, lass. I’ll come as fast as my bones can carry me and no faster.’

Cissie clasped her book and leapt across the rock. Suddenly she was gone. Her voice floated back, too indistinct to hear what she was saying, then Sergeant Wilkes was gone as well.

There was silence in the chookhouse. Outside, Arnie Shwarzenfeather yodelled to his flock. Showing them a patch of grass seed, thought Harry, or just keeping them together. The dust wove and quivered in the sun streaks that came through the door.

‘It wasn’t very good,’ said Harry at last. He felt disloyal, but he had to say something.

‘What wasn’t?’

‘Cissie’s poem. It wasn’t very good.’

‘It was her first poem,’ said Angie defensively. ‘I bet she gets better at it later on.’

Harry nodded. He didn’t want to argue. ‘You’ll check tomorrow after school?’

‘I said I would,’ said Angie. She seemed uncertain too, thought Harry, as though neither knew quite what to say. Nothing really seemed adequate.