He heard the thud and clip of the cricket ball as he turned back to the girls. Sophie was still fiddling with her chords and Lo had her head down over her latest artwork.
‘Do you want to have a go on the guitar, Lo?’ he asked.
‘I’m doing this.’
Nathan moved over to look at her pictures. They had been laid out across the porch, weighed down with rocks. She had been painting the same scene over and over again, he saw now. Every one was a variation of her dad’s painting.
‘You’re trying to paint the grave?’ he said.
‘I can’t get it right.’
‘They look pretty good to me.’
Lo threw him a look that implied his artistic opinion was of questionable value, but Nathan could tell she was pleased. He wasn’t making it up, either. The images were all imitations of Cameron’s theme and were unavoidably childish, but they were strangely expressive. Where Cameron had been heavy-handed with the shadow, she had managed to capture corners of light.
‘Are you missing your dad?’ he said, and Lo exchanged a glance with her sister.
‘Do you think Daddy was scared out there at the grave by himself?’ Lo said, finally.
‘No,’ Nathan lied. He thought for a minute. ‘He liked being out on the property.’ More truthful. ‘But I think he found some things in his life very hard.’
The girls mulled that over.
‘I don’t like the stockman’s grave,’ Sophie said, eventually. ‘It’s scary.’
Nathan shook his head. ‘It doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of stupid stories about the stockman. None of them are true.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I went to the State Library once and looked it up.’
He’d spent a few hours there, years ago, in Brisbane, when Xander was still young and Nathan had found it particularly hard to pass him back into Jacqui’s arms. It had been a difficult handover and Nathan had missed the flight home. Adrift, he’d found himself walking the city streets until he’d ended up outside the library, with the sudden urge to find out more about the only person he could think of who was more alone than him. A librarian had helped him search, and as he’d read the old newspaper article in the cool air conditioning surrounded by the discreet hum of company, he had felt more at peace than he had in a long time.
‘So what happened to the man?’ Sophie said.
‘It was this bloke called William Carlisle and he actually lived on this property with his wife and kids. Two boys about seven and ten, I think.’
‘Did they live in this house?’ Lo said.
‘No, it wasn’t built then. They were somewhere closer to where the grave is now. Anyway, they’d gone out riding together one day and had got off their horses to have lunch or whatever, and suddenly they realised a dust storm was coming.’
‘Oh no,’ Sophie said. ‘I really hate them.’
‘Me too,’ Nathan said. The sight of the sky turning red as a towering wall of dust bore down. The storms engulfed everything in their path, sucking away the oxygen and filling the air with missiles. They sent the cattle stampeding and reduced visibility to nothing.
‘You know how fast they come in,’ he said. ‘So the stockman put his wife and the littlest kid back on their horses and told them to ride home. But the older boy had gone exploring. Over the crest or somewhere. Out of sight, anyway. The stockman went looking for him, yelling out I guess, while the storm would have been coming closer.’
Nathan thought for a minute. He remembered himself driving in desperate circles as he searched for eight-year-old Xander, and the way his heart had pounded in his ears and the fear had run pure and cold.Please let him be okay.It would have been worse for the stockman, alone on horseback, on the brink of a natural nightmare.
‘Did he find his little boy?’ Sophie asked.
‘Yeah, he did, eventually.’ Nathan hesitated. ‘But the kid’s horse had panicked and thrown him off. The kid was okay but the horse was gone.’
‘So what did the man do?’
‘He must have decided one horse wouldn’t be able to outrun the storm carrying both of them, because he gave his own horse to his little boy.’
Nathan imagined the man telling,ordering, his son to go on without him. Promising him he would find the other horse and be right behind. Saying it, and knowing that wasn’t true.
