Free Somewhere around the Corner by Jackie French Page B

was still gold in the creek either, except Gully Jack, thought Dulcie. She sighed a little, thinking of Gully Jack.
    Thursday mornings began early at Dulcie’s. The kindling had to be brought in to light the fire so the bread could be cooked for breakfast, the cows had to be milked at first light, half-asleep bodies warm and furry where you leant your head against them, flicking manure-sodden tails at you so you had to wash as soon as you came in, the smell of them lingering in your hair all day. The pigs would run squealing through the mud to feed on the small potatoes Dulcie had cooked in milk. The cream had to be left to rise in the stone dairy where the floor was wet with cold and moss grew in the corners when she didn’t have the time to scrub it out.
    Sometimes Dulcie thought her whole life had been cows. The low moan of cows waiting for milking was behind her every memory—every time she thought of her mother she heard the song of the cows, or smelt their warm teats and warmer milk on her fingers.
    All her childhood had been cows, except for the years when she boarded during the week up in town to ‘get her learning’. Cows to milk on hot summer afternoons, while the flies bumped at the bucket and tried to sip the cream. Cows to milk on frosty mornings when the white grass bit your toes and the only relief from chilblains was to find a fresh hot cow pat, still steaming on the grass, and warm your toes in it.
    It had been easier when her father was alive, thought Dulcie, and not just because the butter prices were better then. Four hands to do the work, not just hers, getting harder and redder around the knuckles and more cracked each year. But Johnny Bill was working for his board and keep now there was no money to pay him—not with butter prices the way they were, not with floods and drought and cows that kept on getting sick so you never knew what lay around the next corner. If her brothers had come back from the war it might have been different, but they hadn’t, and there it was; what couldn’t be cured must be endured. At times she thought her bones would break, they ached so much. But you had to keep on going. There was so much to do, so many people who needed so much.
    After the milking there was breakfast to be eaten on the hop, a slice of bread with a soft-boiled egg spread on it, eaten from one hand as she picked vegies, still sweet from the dew, out of the garden, and then the bacon to be chopped and thrown in the copper to make soup for the susso families later in the day. Potatoes from last autumn, soft and just on sprouting in the big sacks in the pantry, carrots, turnips, parsnips, cabbage, tomatoes in the summer, or peas in winter, and onions that made her cry.Johnny Bill would light the fire underneath the copper to cook the soup, the same as he lit it on Mondays so she could do the washing.
    Soup didn’t cost you anything if you grew it all yourself; the vegies fed with cow manure, the bacon from the pigs that Johnny Bill slaughtered for her every autumn which they smoked over the meat-house fire, half for her and half for Johnny Bill as payment for the extra work.
    You could feed an army with soup, the copper keeping it hot and bubbling, like the creek below the falls, and by lunch it was ready to hand over the gate to anyone who passed. For kids there was the buttermilk, left over after the milk had been churned to butter, as much as they could drink, kept in big iron buckets, while the women rested on the verandah.
    It was a good life, thought Dulcie, if only she weren’t so tired; if only her hands didn’t ache with cold sometimes; if only the kitchen wasn’t so empty-feeling at night, so that you were glad you were so tired, and didn’t have the energy to think about how lonely you felt. You didn’t even have the energy to dream at night of what things might be like.
    Dulcie glanced at the sketch that hung on the wall, roughly framed with sanded wood. Johnny Bill haddone the framing.