The Turkeys – by Saraid Taylor
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
she steps through the mallee eucalypts and thinks of her dad: an incarnate old bush song a banjo paterson verse a shearer clean with his hands; never taught to read, travelling all down the south-west country in long jeans into tin sheds making runs of a hundred covered in wool and sweat and flies and animal heat: his life, her childhood a folklore yarn a cliché the great australian ballad, a shearer dad home by friday night only to leave again sunday afternoon / she steps past the casuarina paupers and she thinks of her mother: the untold verses neglected from bush tales except as faithful wives, a country nurse with five kids and five hundred sheep on dry land, looking out her kitchen window to see her four-year-old daughter screaming for help pursued by a hoard of furious turkeys, her driza-bone so stiff and new on her small body it immobilises her arms fully extended from her sides as she pelts around their enclosure lap after lap after lap to the amusement of her brothers hiding in the hilux / by the shearing shed with its tin roof and creaking greasy walls she thinks of the colours of the land, the colours of her memories, the brown mice brown snakes brown water browned skin the red sky red kangaroos red road her burnt cheeks; and the cream because of the wheat: so much endless crop unravelling into the horizon like fingers, tilting under heavy wind, and because of all those dirty sheep. she thinks how she thought of the land as hers, the sweeping plains and arid skies, how she grew up and left and learnt of oldness and history and spirit, how the gum trees whisper through cracked lips of a truth she understands now as only how little she understands / she stops at the faded water tank and thinks of the way they used to celebrate the disintegration of the sky: the rare cracking of blueness that seeped rain into the swollen dead lungs of the dam where she watched her father dip sheep to kill the lice, and that she swam in with her brothers to avoid baths in the big plastic tub with water heated from the kettle everyone shared because sometimes the rain did not come / she stops near the old turkey pen and thinks of races to tap the tank to check the water level and how the dam bed was often empty because flimsy sky bile soaked straight through the soil if it had been a dry summer and how its dry dust would scratch in her dry panicked throat when her brothers chucked her into the pen with no choice but to run from those sharp turkey claws she knew would rip her apart if she was caught; she thinks of the nurse poised with the latch telling off the boys and waiting for her tiny daughter to circle back around before opening the gate to let her shoot through, dirt-covered tear-streaked, before slamming it shut on those angry gobbling turkeys / by the dam with hair down her spine and eyelashes long enough to keep the flies out she strips to her underwear and slides into the water and she thinks of being reared on heat and grit and running from those turkeys and she thinks of her tough little mallee town: of the open sky, the school, the one bakery, the two general stores, the hotel and football club and recreation hall, of how she ran all the way to an olympics only to come back and find the years had flooded past like the murray, only one store and the football remaining; the hotel, bakery, hall and school gone / she floats on her back and ponders the outback soul in herself in the entire country the tearing of identity told in the wind with words spoken over unspoken words and a brutal pain concealed at the core of the new narrative. the wind carries those secrets and the rainwater holds her as she thinks of essence: of her mother’s hands and her father’s eyes, of a harsh land bruised with harsher stories and people of many peoples carrying together the quiet burden of hope. ▼
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