Having Kittens

1

"The river messes things up," he said in a fit of pique. "It makes people moody." He detested overt displays of emotion, unless it was rage come about by being pushed too far. His father had taught him that a violent response was often necessary.

Yes, his father knew about such things; having to take to errant "workers" with an axe handle on more than one occasion during the Depression while logging the ancient jarrah trees and planting pines, replacing the old forest with new quick-growing building timber. And the workers planting every second one to make life easy. His father said, "A fair day's pay for a fair day's work—no man takes advantage of me. I'll sort you out, mate!" And if a fist was raised in challenge, then the axe handle would come out of the saddle pack, and the horse would take a step back knowing something startling was about to happen.

Mostly the sight of the curved and polished wood was enough, and the worker backed down. "That's managing men," his father said to the boy, who was too big and ungainly and worshipful—wide-eyed, the boy took it all in, getting quieter and quieter and more and more determined not to let his father down, not to take shortcuts in life.

"Up here, boy, we have to make our own law and do work not because someone can see and judge us but because they can't. They aren't there. We're on our own and have to judge ourselves. Down there on the plain, and in the city, they do what they've got to do because they feel ashamed if they fail in front of others. It's social pressure. Up here, we live with our consciences." And as his father spoke, the boy watched a flock of red-capped parrots twist and turn in the limbs of a jarrah tree, and he thought about finding the possum in the old Ford truck that morning. The possum and the truck. He had an idea on how to get the truck going, though it wasn't needed anymore. Sometimes words seemed to elude him, but the language of engines, the ratios and pressures, came to him like the flora and fauna of his isolation.

________

The river is difficult to cross, and it floods, and when it's low and the heat is high, it stinks. Even the river dolphins look uncomfortable. And Bullcreek, where the river and the creek and the wetlands brew under cockatoos flashing red against the sandpipers working the living and the dead, disturbs any inner peace the area might offer. He wasn't a real believer in Hell but felt it might be somewhere in between, somewhere murky, not necessarily deep down, beneath. Something swampy.

He was up from the higher part of the catchment, up where creeks and brooks begin, where the rain flows like silver off the granite rock faces and slides down through jarrah and marri and snottygobble and collects and gathers and finds its sluices and channels through the scarp, down over the coastal plain to where it mingles with salt water in the Canning River, then on to the Swan River, down to the sea. His father had said, "If you follow this creek, it will take you to a river that will join another, larger river, and soon it will be the big river which everyone down there takes for granted. They don't think about its source, about what it means where it begins, where it gathers pace. And here is just one beginning—there are many beginnings to their river and some begin far, far away. But they don't think much about that." The boy was careful where he pissed in the bush, thinking it would end up lapping at someone's front door down in the city. It made him feel shameful.

But now he was living on one side of the river and having to cross Canning Bridge over to work each day, work at the trucking company where he was doing...