‘Reckon you can afford it, with all you and Rose got in the bank?’ asked McKenzie. Clancy had forgotten McKenzie guarded Rose’s wages too — had even kept paying her when she married. Paying a married woman working with her husband was almost as unthinkable as paying money to a native in the first place. ‘Place like that, me and the wife could use it as a base for buying cattle. Could do with a proper bed now and then too,’ he added. ‘How about we go shares?’

It cost fifty pounds, less than a quarter of their accumulated funds. They needed the rest, for the hut was just that, bark walls and a bark roof, held together with spiderwebs. McKenzie and Tiger were bush carpenters, but McKenzie found a proper builder — Clancy himself did not care to advertise his presence in the district by going to Gibber’s Creek, though the way gossip spread Ezekiel surely knew his son was back in the district as soon as he’d signed the contract for the land.

The new house was long and low: a living room, dining room, a corridor that led to four bedrooms, a kitchen designed to Mrs McKenzie’s specifications separated from the house in case it caught fire, as kitchens were wont to do — especially, Clancy thought, when Rose was tending the new stove. The house even had corrugated iron for the roof, a major improvement on shingles, even if the rain sounded like thunder.

But then it didn’t rain much. It hardly rained at all.

McKenzie bought more cattle, but fewer than before. Clancy wasn’t sure when the old man stopped speaking of taking the mob to Queensland. The two men ran the property, not that there was much work to do, except extend the fences and cut the she-oaks and the kurrajongs for feed. The farm did not make much, but the pools stayed deep and with cutting fodder from the trees — and not just from their own farm either — there was sufficient to feed enough cattle to make a living for them all, and even slowly build up a small reserve in the bank.

Tiger, to his shock, found himself married to a local widow after a week-long bender. She was younger than him: a barmaid who wanted a home of her own. She was happy with her new cottage on Dirty Butter, and seemed not to notice the colour of Rose’s or Mrs McKenzie’s skin, though Clancy observed she never suggested either of them join her on her visits to town.

Clancy had come home. Even if Dirty Butter was not Overflow, this was his country. And from the peace he saw on his Rose’s face, he knew she was at home too.

Chapter 52

Chapter 52

From the Notebooks of Maria Fitzharris

Wattle Fritters