Jackbird’s father again ran his eyes over the boat, laid his hands on its body. Inhaled its spice. Turned to Ned’s father, and when he saw that his neighbour had looked away to the river, that William West wasn’t really there anymore, switched his attention to Ned. An urgent question pulsed from his expression: Did you know? Did you?

Ned wanted to shrug, shake his head, to communicate that it was all a fluke. But in the knocking of his blood he knew that wasn’t true. He’d seen the flash of colour beneath the peeling paint. He’d chased it through layers of off-green muck. He hadn’t known what he would find, but he had known, somehow, that it would be worth revealing. The boat had told him. He had just followed its directions.

~

The rudder would need to come from a single piece of timber. Ned hadn’t read this in a book or heard it from a salt-skinned shipwright; his own ineptitude demanded it. Nails couldn’t weaken or ruin the rudder if there were no nails involved.

Eucalypts were plentiful, eucalypts of many kinds, but they were too hard and would tear the teeth from his saw. He began to hunt for softer timber. The valley was filled with blue-green gums and knobbly coastal natives, but after two days of wood-watching he found an old oak stump down the road from Limberlost, near the convent. It had not been dug up or burnt out. It was wide and not too old; the tree had only been removed the previous spring, when the nuns had been worried it would come down in a storm and crush their tomatoes. Ned looked around, searching for wimpled sisters. When he didn’t see any he took a saw to the stump, cut a thin round off the top, then another, wider round from the fresher wood beneath. He heaved the latter onto its side and began rolling it down the road, down the driveway, all the way down the property and through the bush to the boatshed, where he lifted it onto a hobby horse.

He got to work with care, with hesitation, with pencil and saw and chisel. At first he worried he was butchering it, that he didn’t have the skill to cut it correctly, that the result would be the same as with the planks. But after a while it seemed to be coming together. Shavings and offcuts crowded around his feet, and something like a rudder began to emerge from the oak.

He stepped back, viewing the slab of timber. Took in the neatness of it, imagined it wave-licked, river-wet. Then he returned to his work, snagged his chisel in a knot, and in his impatience to remove the tool managed to split the wood down the grain.