Free The Tying of Threads by Joy Dettman Page B

Bernie hadn’t noticed them. He’d never known hunger, not back then he hadn’t.
    With a length of masonite he scraped what ash he could from the ute’s loading area then got out of the place and drove home, or was driving towards home until he passed the fish and chip shop where his rumbling belly ordered a spring roll and a bag of chips. The door was closed and a sign on it told him it would be closed until midday.
    The service station out on Stock Route Road would be open. They sold a bit of take-away tucker – though not at this time of morning. He bought two chocolate-coated ice-creams then, needing privacy in which to eat them, drove again to Gertrude Foote’s land.
    *
    His second and third loads to the tip that morning consisted of corrugated iron and blackened stumps. He’d found a cache of tools in a corner of the old shed, an axe or two, a selection of rakes, picks and umpteen shovels. He’d found no wheelbarrow, and when he returned with his fourth load, Maisy’s wood barrow rode back out Forest Road with him. He’d filled it with bits of blackened shoes and books, bits of smashed crockery and twisted cutlery before realising he should have thought to pick up a plank while in town. He’d need something to use as a ramp to run that barrow up to the ute’s loading area.
    Back in the shade of the shed, he was searching for a plank when he found an old straw hat. Summer may have been over according to the calendar but wasn’t according to today’s weather, and his scab-covered dome didn’t need a dose of sunburn. He shook off the dust and when the hat didn’t fall apart, checked it, internally and externally, for red-backs before trying it on for size. It got a grip on his head and had a strap of elastic to keep it on – perished elastic, but he tied a knot in it then continued his search for something strong enough, long enough, to use as a ramp.
    And some bugger crept up on him. ‘What’s lost?’
    Bernie turned around faster than he’d turned in a good while and found Harry Hall standing in the doorway, lighting a smoke.
    ‘I need a ramp,’ Bernie said, feeling his blood pressure rising up to his face.
    ‘You’ll find something under my house,’ Harry said as he walked by his boss to a half-full wheat bag where he started scooping chook food into a basin.
    ‘I thought you’d moved into town.’
    ‘The chooks haven’t,’ Harry said.
    He’d been driving logging trucks for Macdonald’s since the thirties, and Bernie, feeling like a comic figure in a woman’s straw hat with elastic under his chin, headed off through bum-high dry grass towards the house recently vacated by that lanky, redheaded, pug-nosed bugger and his part darkie wife.
    He found what he needed, found a solid old door which might make a more stable ramp then a plank. Hoisting it onto his shoulder, he returned to his ute and to cackling, squabbling chooks pecking at those lower down the chook hierarchy. They tried out their wings when he dropped the door in their yard, but returned to watch, heads to the side while he scooped out a trench with the heel of his boot, then rammed the end of the door into it. It felt stable enough. He was testing it with his weight when Harry came from behind a clump of saplings, his chook food basin now full of eggs.
    ‘It might last longer if you fill ’em up and I run ’em up,’ he said.
    There was length in that coot, string and bone length, and not much else. ‘Sounds logical to me,’ Bernie said.
    They worked together then, one raking, one shovelling, two shadows moving across the ash, the long and the lean, the short and fat in the hat, until the load threatened to spill over the sides of the ute, at which point Bernie tossed shovel and barrow on top, then opened his door.
    ‘Hang on for a tick,’ Harry said. ‘I’ll bring my ute around.’
    Bernie lit a smoke and leaned in the shade of the walnut tree until the second ute, older, with more rattles, backed over the fallen