Then the farmer’s wife (who knew, after all, something of such things) brought the axe down hard, right behind the megarrity’s head. She let the farmer in, and he slung the snake’s body out on the rubbish pile and built a fire over it. Neither of them ever said anything more of it. If there was no sign of a snake’s charred skeleton in the morning, why, any number of things might have carried it off in the night, leaving faint prints in the dust. And if often in the trees that farmer heard whispers, he always found he was speaking only to himself.

I remember—now, years ago—Mitch and Chris perched on the veranda railing, saying the megarrity ought to have eaten up the whole family.

“Then who’d have told the story?” Gary asked, lying back against the steps, his stiff red-brown hair almost touching my knee.

“The megarrity, idiot,” said Chris. “Or the baby, if it lived. If I had been a megarrity, I’d have snuck in in the night and…”

Mitch grinned, face beaked and hungry in the shadows. “Left its bones in a tidy white pile and its skin folded neatly on top?”

“No, you’d have to hide it,” Chris said. “Pretend to be it. I mean, you could get taken care of for the rest of your life.”

“The rest of their lives, at least,” said Mitch.

“Well,” said Gary, loyal to his grandmother’s telling of the story and to his family’s trade, “I’d have taken bloody good care to keep it out to start with. Better locks and a really good fence.”

I remember, too, Dad didn’t like the story. “Make-believe,” he said. “McGarrity’s a good Scottish name. There’s no beast called that.”

That never stopped us echoing each other in the trees, though, just to get a rise.

Chapter 5: The Witch of Carter’s Crossing

CHAPTER FIVE

THE WITCH OF CARTER’S CROSSING

The truck bounced up from the creek’s cool shadows and over a grid in a tidy fence—the only thing tidy about Gwenda Sage’s place.

White tyre-swans spilled nasturtiums and geraniums; giant concrete toadstools squatted garish crimson in the mid-afternoon sun. Tasteless. Ornamental toads crouched, elbows out, leaching verdigris onto the cement rim of a pond green with weed and sharp with reflected dragonflies.

“This is nice,” said Trish. I couldn’t tell if she meant it.

The house sprawled at its ease, propped by pillows of banksia roses and yellow jasmine. The corrugated roof draped over the veranda like a cat in the sun.