Where There's Smoke (26 page)

‘If it's not our lambs, it'll be the neighbours'.'

‘I'll keep him in the house then. Or we can put up a higher fence.'

‘I can't even afford to fence the back paddock.'

He didn't tell his father about the latest attack. Hedley's trick knee needed replacement, he had enough on his plate. But when the older man next rode around the farm with Ben he saw immediately that the lamb numbers were down.

‘That cold snap,' Ben lied, and Hedley seemed satisfied enough, or too preoccupied with his own health to care.

Meg kept Nigger inside for the rest of the week, and when Ben found the fourth batch of savaged lambs it seemed at first that the dog might be in the clear. But a day later Meg found a leg bone in the dog's basket. She told Ben as soon as he came in that afternoon.

‘You let him out last night?'

‘He might be able to get out. But I can't see how he could get back in.'

‘He must have,' Ben said, and walked to the kitchen door. The flyscreen door was open an inch; he pushed it open, watched it fail to close completely.

‘The spring's gone. He could shove his nose in there.'

‘No wonder the mozzies were biting,' Meg said, but mosquitos were the last thing on Ben's mind as he stalked outside and chained the dog to the tank-stand.

‘Why is Nigger chained up?' Edna wanted to know over the roast that Sunday.

‘Just a precaution, Mum.'

‘You missing a few more lambs?' Hedley put in.

Ben said nothing; his eyes sought refuge in Meg's, avoiding his father's. But he couldn't turn his ears away.

‘You've only yourselves to blame, Bennyboy. Both of you. You can't get close to a dog.'

‘A few pats can hardly make a difference,' Meg said.

‘A few pats? He has the run of the house. You feed him scraps from the table …'

‘Sometimes.'

‘He thinks he's human, girlie. He thinks he's a member of the family.'

‘He
is
a member of the family. And he feels things – just like us.'

Hedley spluttered, amused. ‘Like you maybe.'

‘Like
all
of us. He feels anger. Jealousy. Love …'

‘Maybe you'd better get one of these social workers from the city out to talk to him.'

‘Hedley,' his wife warned.

‘Just trying to help, Edna. The kids have made a rod for their own backs. All I'm doing is offering advice. You have to put the dog down, son. Before you lose any more lambs.'

‘We'll think about it, Dad.'

‘Well don't think too long. It might be your farm now, but I can't sit by and watch it go down the gurgler.'

Ben, through gritted teeth, ‘I
said
, we'll think about it, Dad.'

‘And I said, you're running out of time.'

Ben dropped his knife and fork with a clatter. ‘Maybe I don't want the fucking farm, Dad. Maybe I never wanted it …'

‘There must be someone who would take him as a pet,' Meg interrupted before anything more damaging could be said.

‘You could put an ad in the paper,' Edna suggested.

Her son picked up his cutlery again. ‘We'll think about that too, Mum.'

The young couple lay awake half the night thinking – and talking. Meg's sleep, when it came, was eased by a sense that nothing had yet been decided. Ben left the house before she woke the next morning, needing an early start. Restringing wires in the top paddock, he waited until he saw her drive away to school before climbing into the ute and heading back to the house. He dragged a stool into the bedroom next to the wardrobe, and climbed up. Three guns had once been stored on top, out of his child's reach, until the Anzac Day when Hedley arrived back early from the Club, pulled down his old army .303, carried it out to the woodpile, set it on the block, and took to it with a sledgehammer. He had offered no reasons, then or later, and Ben had never seen him in such a state, before or since. Edna deflected her troubled son's questions by talking vaguely of ‘a disagreement at the Club', of someone calling him ‘a name that he didn't like'.

Two guns remained. The single-shot .22 Ben had used himself as a boy, spotlighting rabbits and kangaroos and even shooting the odd fox under supervision. The shotgun – a Winchester Type 12 – he had never been allowed to touch. He had been too small the winter his father had bought it. A pair of ducks had settled on the dam, but after breaking a tooth on a pellet while biting into a drumstick, Hedley had gone off duck meat forever. The Winchester had not been used since, except secretly, in play. In his teens, Ben would often take the gun down when his parents were out, and familiarise himself with its workings. He was standing on the stool now, checking the pump action, when his father appeared in the doorway below him.

Startled, he nearly unbalanced. The old man might have been a genie conjured up by rubbing the blue gun metal.

‘Jesus, Dad – where did you come from?'

‘You can't use a twelve-gauge, son. You'd take his whole head off.'

Hedley turned and limped out of sight as abruptly as he had appeared. Ben placed the Winchester back on the wardrobe and took down the .22, an ancient single-shot Browning, plus a box of shells, and the squeeze can of gun oil. He spread newspaper over the kitchen table, and carefully wiped down the open sights, broke open the breech, and blew out the cobwebs. He oiled the hammer, checked its action, then opened the box of ammo and dropped a single shell into his breast pocket.

He was about to replace the box on the wardrobe when he stopped, and took out a second shell. Just in case.

Outside, Hedley was back on his throne. ‘Nigger,' he called, and as always the dog ran instantly to him. ‘Sit, boy,' he ordered, and as he leaned forward Ben thought he might be about to pat the dog for the first time ever. ‘You've been a good worker, boy,' he said. A pause. ‘Well done,' he added, then leaned back again, and turned to his son and nodded. To Ben, unsettled, it felt weirdly like a prison warden's nod to an executioner.

‘You coming, Dad?'

‘You got to do these things by yourself, son.'

Bullshit, Ben thought. You just don't want to see it. But a lump clogged his throat; his father's terse farewell to the dog had touched him somehow. He averted his face, and whistled Nigger up into the back of the ute. Blue tried to follow; twice Ben had to order the usually obedient dog to stay. The younger dog whimpered, and paced around the yard, agitated. When Ben tossed a spade into the tray, Blue barked frantically up at his sire, as if in warning.

Ben knelt and held the young dog's head for a moment, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘It can't be helped, Blue. It's got to be done.'

The condemned dog, its own mind-reading powers apparently diminished by age, showed no qualms at accepting a ride in a ute with a man with a rifle and a spade. The south paddock was three gates away. Each time Ben stopped and climbed out he avoided eye contact with the dog, but Nigger seemed oblivious to this body language, running eagerly from side to side of the tray, tongue lolling, happy just to be out and about. When they reached the stand of uncleared mulga that bordered the south fence, the dog jumped joyfully down, and headed straight into the bleached summer grass. He had killed a brown snake here years before; the patch of scrub was clearly a technicolour mix of nose memories and fresh scents, which was why Ben had chosen it.

Ben took the spade and rifle out of the tray and stood for a time with one implement in each hand, as if balancing them, or weighing something. Should he dig the grave first? Or afterwards? Nosing about in the dry grass the dog still seemed impervious to his fate. Dig first, and work a little agitation out of the system? And if it delayed the inevitable a little longer, so be it.

The work was hard; the stony ground had never been tilled, and no rain had fallen since August. He should have brought a pick, or mattock. He dug slowly and methodically, wanting to take his time, needing to take his time, all the time in the world. He took an unnecessary break, and sat with his legs dangling from the back of the ute, sipping tea from the cap of his thermos. The dog ran to him, expecting a treat, but he was saving the one treat in his pocket till later, and the dog immediately turned and ran back to his explorations, able to read the man's intentions in this respect at least. Ben savoured a second capful of the tea, black and sugary, then returned to his digging. The hole was Nigger-sized in length and breadth, but no more than two feet deep when he decided that enough was enough. The phrase ‘a shallow bush grave' came to him, poignantly, from somewhere, another murder story in that morning paper perhaps. He rolled himself a cigarette from a long-abandoned pack in the glove box. Having smoked it to the last few millimetres, stale tobacco or not, he could delay no longer. How small the .22 shell he fossicked from his breast pocket seemed, not much more lethal than an air-gun slug. He broke open the old rifle, loaded the chamber, snapped the breech shut. He took the scrap of dried liver from his pocket, a treat his father had never approved of for working dogs, and dropped it into the hole.

‘Here, boy.'

The dog came to him, looked down into the hole, looked up into his eyes, looked down again, then once more up, quizzically.

‘It's OK, boy,' he said, and as the dog stepped down into the hole for its last, small meal, he lifted the rifle to his shoulder in one quick movement, aimed it into the black crown of the dog's head, and fired, and the dog collapsed on its own legs without a sound.

As fast as the shooting had been, the tears that sprang to Ben's eyes were even faster.

‘Sorry, boy,' he said, and knelt and examined the dog through the film of those tears. ‘Sorry, old feller.'

There were no tears in the dog's motionless eyes, or even any kind of death shiver in its legs. He rose and took up the spade and began to fill the grave, working rapidly this time. When he had finished, he found the sight of the small mound – exactly the length and width and volume of the dog – too disturbing, and he began to remove dirt from it, and spread it around. He couldn't bring himself to tread down the remaining heap, not wanting to further damage the dog, or in any way to squash it.

He drove off immediately to his fencing chores, and buried himself all day in the physicality of star-dropping, and stringing and tightening wires. Hard enough work for two, near impossible for one – but he had no distractions. He had drunk most of his tea while stalling for time at the shooting, and had left home early without packing lunch. His father's car had gone when he returned to the house late in the afternoon; he washed down a meat and pickle sandwich with a bottle of beer then slumped into the cane throne on the veranda, exhausted.

‘Ben?'

‘Hmmm.'

A kiss on his forehead. ‘You're sleeping in the sun, darling. Come inside.'

Meg made no mention of Nigger, then or later, over dinner, but she brought Blue into the house, and fed him a choice scrap of meat from the table, whether for her comfort or the dog's or to make some kind of obscure point to Ben he couldn't tell.

He had dreaded facing her, but she seemed especially kind to him also.

His mother rang after dinner. ‘You OK, Benny?'

‘Fine, Mum.'

‘And Meg?'

‘She's managing.'

‘I know she was fond of old Nigger. But your father was right. It had to be done.'

‘I know, Mum. Thanks for the call.'

‘Give my love to Meg.'

‘Of course. She's right here. You want to talk to her?'

‘I'm sure she has more important things to do. Just give a hug.'

Blue nosed his way in through the flyscreen door the next night as they were eating. It was clearly lonely out in the yard, and after the three of them had cleaned the two dinner plates between them, Ben brought the dog's basket inside.

It was Blue tugging at the quilt that woke him in the small hours the following night. He had seen the dog agitated before – the morning of Nigger's execution for one – but he had never seen such a silent, purposeful agitation. Something was afoot. An intruder? The hairs were bristling along the dog's back, but still it made no noise, insisting only with its body language that Ben follow, immediately. Meg, exhausted, slept on as he slipped from the bed. It wasn't until he reached the hall that he heard the scratching at the kitchen door. Blue was already waiting at that door, staring at it, ears pricked, hairs erect, one forefoot raised. Ben pulled his old cricket bat from the hall stand, turned on the porch light, and jerked open the door.

A dog was lying with its head on the doormat, scratching at the flyscreen; it took a moment for Ben to realise, shocked, that it was Nigger. His heart was thumping as he knelt and examined the dog. The entry wound on its crown had congealed into a dark, hard scab. There was no sign of an exit; the slug must still be in there somewhere. Blue was whimpering now, finding his voice, and after some sniffing, and licking of the older dog's nose, began to lick methodically at its wound.

‘Nigger,' Ben whispered. ‘It's OK, boy.'

The dog had lost the power of dog speech, apparently; it made no noise at all, not even a whimper. It dragged itself an inch or so closer, but skewing sideways, crabwise. Ben saw that it –
he
, he reminded himself – was able to move his right-side legs only, as if cut down by a stroke rather than a bullet. His coat was encrusted with dust and clay; he had clearly been unable to shake off the grave dirt. Ben looked out, across the dust of home yard; within the fall of the porch light he could make out the trail of the dog, a dragging, snake-like spoor. A black joke from childhood came back to him, made poignant now; what do you do with a dog with no legs? Take it for a drag.

But what
do
you do? His immediate reaction, through the fog of disbelief, was to take the dog straight back out into the bush and shoot it again, before Meg woke. To put Nigger out of his misery, certainly – but even more, to spare her. Except the rifle was in the bedroom; he couldn't get his hands on it without waking her. The cricket bat was still tucked under his arm; he became aware of its weight again. Could he club the dog to death? He baulked at the thought, but the bat seemed to be getting heavier all the time, as if by a sudden surge in gravity. Did he have the heart for it? No – he had the heart
not
to do it. Did he have the stomach for it? He was saved, for the moment, by the padding of bare footsteps along the hall floorboards behind him. He shifted on his haunches to hide the maimed dog, but Meg was already leaning over him, her ‘What's the matter, darling?' swallowed by a horrified gasp, ‘Oh, my God!'