Eight — Frogmen and Killers

Very early the next morning I found myself studying a patch of ground containing the homestead’s septic tank.

“We’ll need to pop the lid off this septic and pump it clean, Dave,” Charlie instructed. “It may have a bit of concrete over the handle. There’s a pick in the shed if you need it. Peter will be along with the pump to clear it out. Do what he says.”

As the big man strode away, I used a shovel to expose the tank lid under about three inches of dirt. Sure enough, a seal of concrete had been troweled over the tank lid. “Damn,” I thought, “I’ve gotta walk all the way down to get the damn pick.” Any avoidable exertion in my standard predawn funk was guaranteed to elicit a grump from me.

I walked several minutes to the large open building where Dick was moving stiffly about, mumbling inchoate oaths. I sensed he may be the same cast of curmudgeon as I regarding mornings. Several picks stood in a corner with other worn and dulled implements. I hoisted the sharpest one onto my shoulder and was trudging back to the homestead when Peter appeared in the pickup.

“Dave! Cheer up, mate. I need your help with this pump, as long as you’re here!” Then, more quietly, “I’d have asked Dick if need be, but I’m glad I don’t have to. He’s a bugger in the morning. Always looking for a blue.”

Peter and I wrestled a bulky hunk of machinery from underneath a shelf in the shed and swung it into the truck. Peter climbed onto a loft covering half the workspace and presently handed down a large diameter hose, loosely coiled. It fell through me to the floor when Peter released his hold. Dick glanced sourly my way.

“Sorry, Dave,” Peter said with a grin as he bounced off a workbench back onto the floor. “I thought you were awake, since I seen you walking about and all.”

We loaded a few more tools and hoses into the truck, then started back towards the house. We carried the pump to the small patch of dirt covering the main septic tank. As Peter set up the hoses I retrieved the pick and, spreading my feet wide, raised the tool and directed all my morning animus at the concrete. The hollow impact made Peter stand straight up.

“David! Bloody hell, mate. You looking to take a swim?!”

“What do you mean?” I asked, more annoyed by the interruption than curious as to his meaning.

“That’s the septic lid you’re banging at. And that’s the septic lid you’re standing on, matey. One more knock and you’d have been taking a very rude early morning dip, old boy!”

I blanched as the situation became clear. His consternation turned into hilarity. “And I don’t think you could have counted on me to jump in and save you!” He howled. “That’d be a bloody rough piece of business, Dave, even for a mate!”

“But…” I fumbled, “Charlie said there’d be concrete over the lid.”

“Aye, there is. Between the sections. But the lid’s concrete, too. And that’s what you’re hitting at.” He stooped down to examine the chip I’d drawn.

“A bit of a belly on you, Dave, and you would have been treading some evil water, matey!” He leaned back and hooted until tears came to his eyes. Watching his mirth broke my own bad mood. I began chuckling as I imagined walking down to the workshop covered in filth, haplessly holding up the broken piece of the septic lid to Uncle Dick, asking him to cast another. Hard to imagine that request would have offered the old fella any of the cheer Peter and I were feeling in the moment.

After we’d recovered our composure, I took a shovel and began gingerly scraping the rest of the dirt off the septic lid. Sure enough, where the three large slabs joined a thin skin of cement had been spread. This I chipped away with the pickax, and before long the cesspool was exposed and our noxious duty discharged.

My next assignment regarded two faucets in the bathroom near the kitchen.

“The hot water leaks in the shower,” Charlie informed me. “It’s probably just a bad seal in the stopper pen, so pull off the hot water faucet and check the seal. Dick will have the tools you need. Replace it if it’s worn. If it seems okay, get Peter or me.  And one more thing. The water pipes are concreted into the foundation, so if you stuff up we’ll have to tear out the whole shower to get at it. Keep that in mind.”

Charlie need not have worried. Though I’d never worked on plumbing before, having nearly sent myself to a watery hell an hour earlier had sharpened my senses. It was absolutely guaranteed I would be a ninja all the way through this job.

I squatted in the shower and examined the faulty faucet. And ornamental cylinder covered the connection onto the pipe. I would need a pipe wrench. I walked to the workshop and got one, then used it to remove the cylinder. An array of bolts confronted me. I retrieved tools as needed, investigated carefully the disassembled mechanism, found a replacement for a worn rubber washer, and reassembled the unit. When I ran the water I was half surprised and fully delighted to see that the tap no longer leaked.

I attacked the tub faucet with the same dedication. The hard Bullo water had eaten a groove in the metal stopper facing. I fixed the facing. I fixed the faucet. I’d pumped the septic. I’d fixed two faucets. I’d put tools in my hands then used my mind to direct them. By any reasonable measure, the day was already a success. It had been lived. Nay, the day had been conquered.

At lunch, I let everyone know how fruitful my day had been.

“Both of them,” I crowed, “fixed. Immutably, irrevocably, and forever.” Perhaps I was overstating things a bit but making myself useful felt good.

“Right,” said Sara. “Now you’ll know how to fix the jacuzzi in case you ever want to take the plunge,” she said referring to a neglected hot tub sitting beside the house.

“I don’t know mummy; from the sound of it, Dave came bloody close to taking the plunge this morning!” snickered Danielle. At that, the whole crowd broke up at my expense. I was discovering how quickly word travels in a community of eight.

Just as the laughter died down, Stumpie walked in.

“What’s the laugh about? Maybe Dave’s swimming hole?” His question reignited the howls. The world was feeling very small.

 

“Danielle,” Charlie was speaking. “After lunch you take Peter and the Frog Man,” Charlie gestured my direction, “and go get a killer.”

“A killer? What’s a killer?” I inquired.

“Food, Dave,” explained Danielle. “Those steaks you’ve been wolfing down; we don’t buy them at the supermarket.”

“It’s what you use to generate the rubber ducks floating around in your private bubble bath, mate,” chortled Peter.

This time I joined the entire ensemble in another round of laughter.

 

An hour later I stood with Peter in the back of a ute, rolling slowly through a sparsely treed meadow of pale green knee-high grass. Grasshoppers scattered in our path like hailstones off a tin roof. Danielle was speaking softly to us out the window, keeping a running commentary on the cattle as they wandered in the distance. We were looking for a husky steer—a castrated male—to turn into a month of steaks.

“Mob of cows, there. Maybe over there? Nope, look a little young. There’s a bullock over there—let’s have a look… Nope… Too run-out. Okay old fella, we’ll leave you be. Maybe those in the trees…” She chewed the inside of her bottom lip as she scanned.

“Naw, cows…wait, look! There’s a big fellow. Peter do you see him?” My companion nodded.

I could tell the babies from the adults but sorting the girls from the boys was opaque to me. How these two could spy a wang-dang-doodle or the lack thereof at a quarter mile was more than I could comprehend.

“Let’s go have a look at him,” she said, accelerating slightly towards a group of cattle off to our right. The cattle raised their heads to watch our approach.

“He’ll do. Can you get a shot?” Danielle asked from the front seat.

“Not yet. Bloody cows in the way. Circle clockwise.”

As Dan did so the half-dozen animals broke towards a group of scrubby trees.

“Oh, he’s a good one!” Danielle gushed as she accelerated sharply.

Peter, holding onto his rifle with one hand, swung solidly into me as the girl spun the wheel. I’d learned the hard way to hang onto the rail with both hands, so Peter bounced off me and back onto both feet. Danielle drove alongside the fleeing bovines. They loped with all they had, as though aware of our murderous intentions.

Suddenly the head animal—a large buckskin cow—pulled short and stared at us from about fifteen yards. When the rest of the mob followed suit our quarry stood unobscured. Danielle slammed on the brakes. We skidded slightly sideways in the soft grass.

“Get him!” Danielle whispered urgently.

Peter didn’t need to be prodded. He rested his gun barrel on the rooftop and focused along the scope. Just as the leader again broke into a trot the shot rang out, loud and sharp. The big brown bullock collapsed in an inanimate heap, as if a robot, unplugged. I was dazed, by the reverberation of the shot and by the complete way in which the shot severed the beast’s life systems. All four legs buckled simultaneously, pillars in a controlled demolition, the animal’s bulk dropping with the solidity of an anvil. Bam. Blackout. Dead.

Peter turned my way with victory in his eyes as Danielle pumped her fist outside the window. “Good shot, Peter! Dropped ‘im. A big fellow, too! Okay, let’s get at him.”

She drove up alongside the rotund castrati and hopped out. On the seat next to her lay a leather roll containing butchering knives. She selected a long narrow blade and bent over the beast. She stuck her knife up to the hilt into the bullock’s throat, then slit it open from side to side. I joined Peter in pumping the animal’s flanks with our feet. This caused it to bleed profusely from the cut, the blood pooling in the grass and staining Danielle’s sneakers purply brown.

“Okay,” she said after a moment, “let’s get him on his back.”

Peter seized the front left leg, and I got hold of the rear. We pulled as Danielle twisted the head around to its shoulder, which braced the animal upside down. Peter grabbed two knives and handed one to me. We moved to the rear legs, which stuck straight up in the air, undignified and cartoonish.

“Watch me,” he said, “and watch out, the bugger can still kick you. Reflexes.”

I remembered how as a child with more curiosity than scruples I had once pulled a spider’s leg off and watched its disembodied twitch. That child could never have imagined that same phenomena someday threatening his dental work.

Peter bent the beefy leg forward at its lowest joint. Starting from the outside he sliced through the animal’s thick hide into its milky white joint. I followed suit. I easily parted the hide but hit bone just below.

“Too high,” said Peter. I sliced again and found a knot of tendon and ligaments. As I cut these they made a fleshy swoosh. Clear fluid—the bursa around the joint—flowed over my fingers. It was warm. Peter demonstrated how to cut all around the joint, and after several moments of probing and cutting I held a hock in my right hand. The mud in the hoof was still moist.

“Now Dave, you need to do the front alone. I need Peter’s help.” I moved to the animal’s front limbs and hacked and sawed as I watched my two friends quarter the beast.

Danielle began by cutting the animal open from head to stern. She sliced through the thick muscle over the rib cage and through the belly. Then they each reached deep within the animal’s body cavity and counted four ribs up from the stomach. Along this rib they cut from the spine up to the initial lengthwise incision. Peter took an axe—one used only for this purpose—and with a dozen precise blows parted the rib cage and pelvic bone.

By this point I’d finish cutting off the hocks and stood watching. I was appalled and fascinated. Violent death in the city—the only death I’d known—seems so dramatic. Lights and sirens dance, spectators lend mystery, preachers eulogize, newscasters sensationalize. Here, I was the sole spectator, and the animal’s only death knell was tomorrow’s dinner bell.

“Dave, give us a hand,” Danielle called. She sat crouched over the animal, her arm to the shoulder inside the beast and her clothing covered in blood. “Hold the guts out of the way while I get the liver.” I squatted down and got a grip on the squishy yellow membrane containing the digestive organs.

The animal’s stomach was vast; a duffel seemingly large enough to hold the equipment for an entire league of bowlers. The labyrinthine intestines slopped about, gray and turgid. Peristaltic action continued, pointlessly pushing the load of grass through the expired animal’s system.

Danielle rolled the gut out of the carcass after cutting it loose from the ribs. She removed the heart, liver, kidneys, sweetbreads, and most of the body fat. These she slid into a plastic garbage bag. Peter, with some delicate knife work, removed the head. Sitting it upright, he split the skull with the axe. Shelling it like a coconut he scooped out the brains and dropped them in the bag.

“Danielle makes great crumbed brains,” he said enthusiastically.

With one last blow Peter severed the spinal column. Danielle sliced through the last bit of skin and the animal lay in four quarters. The two then moved about these pieces cutting slits in the hide to serve as handholds.

“Grab a hold,” Peter said, indicating a front quarter. I slid my hand through the incision in the cowhide and put my other through a slit cut between two ribs. Peter did likewise. With a heave we hoisted the 250 pound quarter of beef into the pickup’s bed.

“Christ, that’s not light!” I exclaimed. I was surprised by the density and substance of the animal flesh, and equally by the durability of the materials. The handhold Peter had cut was only a quarter inch wide, but managed to not rip under the great weight of the forequarter. I had noticed while cutting through the leg joints how well-made and resilient the tissues were. It seemed absurd it’s ever possible humans, composed of similar tissue, could do anything so banal as slip in a bathtub, say, and die.

But this beast had most surely left this life. Twenty minutes after it stood eying us suspiciously it lay in pieces, filling the bed of the pickup, jiggling grotesquely as we drove home. Bone splinters from the axe blows were scattered across the meat. Flies flitted with a lurid zeal along the tracks of dripping blood.

The by now familiar wary looks cast our direction by the cattle along our route home struck me for the first time as entirely appropriate, as if they knew something I hadn’t realized before that morning.

“That’s right; you’d better keep your heads on a swivel,” I whispered to them as we passed.

We drove our corporeal cargo back home, stopping at the dilapidated abattoir. I was happy to see that the former home of Bullo’s commercial meatworks remained in a more functional condition inside than its outside promised. A shiny meat grinder and bandsaw stood in the uncluttered concrete space. A large metal dressing table sat in one corner. A network of iron rails snaked along the ceiling, lined with dozens of S-shaped meat hooks.

Danielle stood on her toes to unhook four of the hooks. We returned to the truck and sunk a hook into each quarter of beef. With a heave we hoisted the bone-in steaks-to-be out of the bed and hung each from the overhead railway. The rear quarters must have weighed three hundred pounds.

“We’ll leave them here overnight to drain, then dress them in the morning,” said Danielle.

“What about all the flies? Won’t they get at it?” I wondered.

“Sure they will. That’s why we have to get here early in the morning.”

“Not to worry, Dave. This Bullo beef’s too tough for ‘em. Can’t sink their teeth in,” Peter said, gauging Danielle’s reaction with a sidelong glance.

She’d begun hosing down the carcasses, and appeared to ignore the comment, until with a sudden squeal she aimed a jet of cold water at the lithe joker. He caught the full brunt as he jumped for the hose. My laughter was rewarded with a frigid bath of my own. Peter and I wrestled the hose from the spirited lass and returned the favor in full measure.

The boisterous water fight washed much of the late beast’s blood off all of us, along with any lingering compunctions I may have been feeling over the afternoon’s fatal duty. We’d done our jobs; dinner would be served. There was no call for anguished moralizing. The gory spectacle was appalling to the senses, to be certain, and to my suburban sensibility, but the cold facts were that the animal hadn’t suffered, and we’d secured sustenance for a month.

The day’s chores completed, and I now wringing wet, my attention turned to the prospect of dry clothing and a wet whistle. The long hot day of labor had wrung my gizzard dry; I was sure a cold beer would be the perfect re-hydration.

“That brings up a good point,” said Charlie, who’d finished his own labors and was sitting at the kitchen counter with Marlee. “Beers are two dollars apiece. It’s best if you tell us how many you want each week and we’ll take it off your pay.”

“Ummm… How about two per night?” Two tinnies after a hard day seemed a modest ask.

“So fourteen each week then?” confirmed Charlie.

“Right.”

“Okay; so that’s $28 per week,” he paused as he calculated, “$112 per month.”

Christ, I thought, two beers per night would drain the better part of a week’s pay.

“Better make it one per night,” I offered as amendment, then immediately reconsidered. Only one solo beer on a Friday night? No indulgence in honor of the past week’s labors?

“And two on Friday.”

But we work Saturday as well, so Saturday is really the end of the week.

“And two on Saturday, as well.”

Charlie must have sensed my tangled musings, as he paused his calculations to see if this last declaration was to be my final answer.

Okay. Now that’s four plus five. Nine beers. Eighteen dollars per week, seventy some dollars per month. No way—I can’t work multiple twelve-plus hour days just to pay the beer bill.

“Wait! Let’s cut out the weekday beers. Two Saturday. Two Friday. Eight dollars per week. That works.”

Hold the door—that means I can’t have one now!

“And one today!”

Charlie chuckled. “This one’s on the house. It’s worth two dollars just to hear you stop talking.”

“Dave, you haven’t been bush long enough, mate.” Peter looked serious. “You’ve got your priorities upside down. First you take care of your grog, then you worry about your pay. It’s better to be sane than sober.”

For a split second I thought he may have a solid point.

Charlie retrieved a round of brews from the refrigerator inside the locked storeroom and passed to each of us red, gold, and white cans of Emu Export Lager.

“Would you go an Export, mate?!” laughed Peter, echoing the beer’s ad slogan.

We hoisted the beverages in mutual salute and I took a deep draw. My anticipation immediately turned to mortification. The brew tasted as though it’d been brewed for a junior high science fair. Emu Export Lager—now the name made sense. Australians, known worldwide as beer enthusiasts, would certainly have nothing to do with this acrid brew. Send it to the Kiwis, send it to Africa. Hell, send it to merry old England. But don’t put this stuff in front of me.

Unless, of course, I happen to live in a roasted backwater in the middle of nowhere. Folks in the Northern Territory of Australia drink more beer per capita than anyone anywhere else in the world. With that kind of dedication what matters isn’t the clarity or balance or yeastiness in a man’s brew, but how far that 5% alcohol content takes him from the heat and the dust and the sweat. If it can do a good job of that, sure, I’ll go an Export, mate!. Thanks a bunch! Set us up again. My shout. Two bucks per stubbie? No worries! This piss is worth its weight in gold!

In that spirit, I happily drained my first of many cans of the low-grade shellac.

 

That night was the first comfortable one I’d spent at Bullo; a cool breeze blew throughout. Carried upon it were the muted lows of distant cattle, enriched by the occasional whinny of an amorous horse, all aloft upon a magic carpet of rustling, chirps, and ratchets that brought the vastness of the outback to my bedside, small and private.

Nighttime here was the dub version of daytime—similar sounds, different mix. I appreciated for the first time how unobtrusive the house was after the power went off. In my stone cell, where it seemed even an electric light would violate the tranquility, the days labor was over, and tomorrow’s were far off. I had nothing to do but listen, relax, and sleep.

Like all riches, such moments aren’t fully appreciated until the opposite is juxtaposed. I would like to think enriching my appreciation was Danielle’s primary motivation as she stood at my door in the early morning, irritably rousting me out of bed with a curt “Let’s get going!”

I’d heard the power come on but had assumed it was a nightmare and had dismissed it, and rolled over. Now Danielle was talking about cows and fences and missing breakfast and I knew this reality was all too real. I spent several hypnopompic moments pulling on my trousers and wandering about before I woke to find myself seated below a phlegmatic cow, tugging perfunctorily at its recalcitrant udder.

Pumpkin was looking at me with a bovine moonface I read as saying, “why don’t you just go back to bed?” For the first time I credited the beast with a grain of sense.

Danielle’s stony gaze, however, bespoke more of impending peril as she went back into the house, her bucket full, and I decided to listen to my own good sense over that of the cow. I hurried inside with barely one gallon of milk (my personal daily consumption) and stuffed a slice of cold roast beef in my mouth before following Danielle to the truck.

We were to begin a new task. Several of the barbed wire fences partitioning the local real estate into separate paddocks were old and decrepit. The integrity of those paddocks was critical, for they’re used to keep specific animals together, separate from others. One paddock would hold all the horses suitable for riding, for example, another kept the horde of knock-kneed teenage bovine females from the amorous depredations of Henry VIII, the Brahman stud bull, who, like his namesake, was none too choosy about his liaisons.

Much of this fence network was slack and broken from years of assaults and repairs. In places, the metal pickets spaced out between wooden strainer posts were too far apart to be effective. Many of the strainer posts themselves were rotten. The decision had been made to use the necessary time and manpower needed to tune up the fences as a critical step in preparing for the first muster.

That first round-up was supposed to take place in mid to late May, and much needed to be done to prepare the yard sites and necessary machinery. For the near future, fencing was to be the focus for Danielle and me. As Charlie set off to butcher yesterday’s killer, Danielle and I drove to the fencing dump sprawled alongside Stumpie’s place, where deliberately placed coils and stacks and pallets included all the material needed for fencing.

The bulk barbed wire resembled oversized spools of thread, tightly wound and compact. A few paces away was the plain wire, stacked like coins in two-foot diameter rolls. Next to them lay a great pile of six-foot-long metal star pickets. These green posts were shaped like the inside of the Mercedes-Benz symbol when viewed on end. Holes were punched at intervals along one flanged edge. With an industrial clatter we loaded fifty of these onto the pickup.

Danielle then heaved one large roll of plain wire into the truck while I wrestled with another. It must have weighed eighty pounds. I rolled it over the edge of the truck bed and released it with a crash. Danielle looked at me askance.

“Too much for you?” she asked sourly.

“No. Just putting it in the truck…”

“Well, take it easy on the gear,” she barked.

I paused for a moment. Was this the same person gleefully dousing Peter and me the evening before? “Lighten up,” I said. “You know, like last night in the abattoir.”

“There’s a time for work, and a time for play,” she said with a glare, “and there’s never any reason to mistreat the tools.”

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. This girl was nineteen, and she was talking to me like my parent. I was in no mood to swallow it at that hour.

“What’s eating you? You sound like a preacher.”

“Well, I’m glad you asked.” She looked squarely at me, “You wake up on time, and do your work, I’ll get off my pulpit. This is no country club you’ve come to. We’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do. We hired you on to do it. If you can’t or won’t, we’ll find somebody else.”

She turned away. “Look. I think you’re a nice guy. But you can’t be sleeping in. And you can’t throw things around like that. For some reason I’ve come out responsible for you, and Charlie will expect me to make you useful around here.”

“But that’s bullshit. If Charlie has a problem with me, I want him to come to me about it.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, “Charlie tells you what to do. He expects you’ll do it. If you don’t, he’ll come to you to send you packing. Until then he expects me, and Marlee and Peter when you work with them, to help you out. That’s more than he gives most blokes. You’re a special case. But he’ll not keep you here if you act like you’re here on a bloody school trip.”

“Look, I’m sorry. Does he know I slept late this morning?”

“Of course he does. There’s not much goes on around here that he doesn’t know.”

Coming as it did amid my usual morning gloom the exchange dented my pride, and I spent a few moments fuming. But as my head cleared the unpleasant conversation began to have a transformative effect on me.

I couldn’t stand the thought I’d antagonized any of these good people. I realized with some embarrassment that Danielle was right, that I was absorbed by the personal nature of my quest, without opening myself to the needs or expectations of the community of which I was now a vital part.

No, this adventure could no longer be a lark, an exotic indulgence; I had stumbled into playing an important role in the lives of the Hendersons. Though I couldn’t threaten their existence in any real way, I could surely inconvenience it. What a lousy way to repay them for the risk they took in hiring me on, despite whatever suspicions they likely had as to my ability to play that role in a meaningful way.

“Danielle, you tell me whatever you need to, whenever you need to. I’m probably way over my head here—I’d be crazy to throw away my only life preserver. Just give me a little slack in the mornings, okay?”

The country beauty paused, nodded slightly in recognition of my contrite tone, then squared her jaw.

“Morning,” she said in a level tone, “is half the day, Dave.”