Summer at Mount Hope

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Book: Summer at Mount Hope by Rosalie Ham Read Free Book Online
Authors: Rosalie Ham
dry fruit to make a plum cake.
    â€˜Why are you making such a rich cake in the middle of summer, Mother?’
    â€˜It’s good for the digestion, everyone knows that.’
    â€˜There’s no point making wedding cake for me.’
    â€˜The vicar may call,’ said Maude, her voice rising. ‘We need something to feed him.’
    â€˜The vicar doesn’t need feeding,’ said Phoeba and she dumped the milk bucket on the table.
    Robert wandered through from the vineyard where he had been blotting dew from the berries with cotton rags. He picked up his newspaper, said, ‘It’s going to be 103 degrees by midday,’ and went to the front veranda. Spot stood against the fence, his ears forward, watching small groups of surly, straggling people – more itinerants from Geelong, Robert supposed – move up the lane. They paused at the signpost then wandered towards Mount Hope and through the yard, a grubby lot, grimy and tattered, with their blackened camp gear slung over their backs. Robert watched the parade: the kids with boils and their mothers with green teeth; the men with beards stiff with matted knots.
    â€˜Campin’ at the outcrop,’ said the leader flatly. He was a small bearded man with ruptured blemishes all over his face. ‘
    After harvest work, are you?’ said Robert in his most friendly tone. He couldn’t say that he didn’t want them to camp there – because he knew if he did, they’d burn his house or crop.
    The leader glanced back at the grapevines and spat on the ground near Maude’s stressed petunias.
    â€˜You’re not interested in grapes?’ Robert asked.
    â€˜Fruit?’ He shook his head. ‘Grain is what we know.’
    â€˜Good luck to you,’ said Robert. Here was a group that wouldn’t like Marius’s new Sunshine harvester.
    The itinerants moved on leaving Robert with a sense of repulsion. Swaggies were the dispossessed, he knew, the downon-their-luck and the unemployed. Itinerants were a different kettle of fish. Stray vagrants, sundowners, rogues, gypsies and ratbags – probably, he thought, without irony, from convict stock. He would make sure the door was latched last thing at night, and keep his Collector handy.
    Aunt Margaret saw them straggle through the yard and wondered if they’d sit for her. Then she dismissed the idea – they would ask for money.
    Phoeba dropped the last thick curd into a cloth-lined vat, put its lid on, then placed a small, smooth rock on it to weigh it down. The kitchen reeked of rancid whey. She was putting the last of her cheese under the tank-stand when she saw the group halfway up the outcrop.
    She cleared away her ladles, sieves and squares of muslin, washed down the table and removed her apron. It felt 103 degrees already, and she splashed cold water over her face, neck, arms and wrists in the washhouse before disappearing to the cellar to sit, flapping her skirts up and down, with her feet in a bucket of well-water. What she wanted to do was ride Spot to the foreshore, drape her skirt and blouse over a tea-tree and wade out into the green, salty water. Spot would stand up to his belly, his withers quivering and his tail in the air while Phoeba sank down to the peaceful sea world. But this was one of the sharpest ways the depression had affected them – swaggies now camped on their beach, fished and swam in their bay. So they couldn’t swim there anymore. She thought of Hadley again. Loyal, sincere Hadley, ten years old and sombrely shepherding his mother and big sister to church for his father’s funeral, then crying all through the service, his shoulders leaping about as she stared at them. It was strange not to have seen him for days.
    Henrietta drove up at dusk, one foot resting on the dash and the reins loose in her hands. The dust behind her obliterated any sign of Spot, the rooster or the ducks as she tore through the

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