Page 5 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘Campdraft,’ she announced.
Marigold stopped talking. ‘Excuse me?’
‘That’s the resolution I’m making. I, Hannah Cody, will be taking up the sport of campdrafting in the New Year.’ She was committed now.
Marigold gave her a hug. ‘Oh, I am pleased, pet. Kevvy’s going to be over the moon. What with me flat strap on my committees, he needs a little something more in his week, and helping you learn the ropes will tickle him pink.’
Wow. That was a lot of cliches. Maybe she wasn’t the only one who needed to soak up some prosecco with paella. But—
‘Wait. I thought you wanted me to join your Wednesday evening craft group?’
Marigold winked. ‘And have my merry crew contaminated with your double triple trebles? Oh, please, Hannah. What kind of a fool do you think I am?’
CHAPTER
2
The dumbest thing Tom Krauss had ever done was lie about why he’d returned to his boyhood home after his career in the Navy imploded. Five long months later he was still wallowing in the consequences.
He could have waffled on about his house in Kiama having a long-term tenant who wouldn’t shift (sort of true), or about secrecy (very true) or Royal Australian Navy ethics and the repercussions of breaching the Crimes Act of 1914 (punishably true), but that was the sort of boastful bullshit that made people more curious, not less.
‘My dad’s crook and needs me,’ he’d told the woman at the butcher on Henry Street the first week he was back in town, ‘and I was between jobs, and Dad’s got some commercial property that needs sorting, like the pub and so on, so … yeah.’
Still bullshit, but the bitter kind rather than the boastful kind. Bruno Krauss would rather crawl over broken glass than admit he needed anyone. Especially his long-lost son. The only reason Tom knew his dad was crook was because Mrs LaBrooy, the Ironbark Station housekeeper and his unofficial second mother, had told him. He only knew about the Hanrahan Pub needing ‘sorting’ because he’d tried to book himself a room there and found himself listening to a disconnected phone message.
So he’d taken the road out of town that brought him to Ironbark Station.
Father–son relations in the Krauss household made the Cold War look like a teddy bears’ picnic; he’d half expected to be given the boot the moment he crossed the cattle grid. But he hadn’t been booted off, and the days and weeks and months had gone by, and he’d repeated the whole crook/between jobs shebang to old Kev Jones, and to Mrs Grundy, and to the new policewoman in town who’d pulled him over on the Alpine Way and given him a serve about the bald tyre on his four-wheel drive.
Nobody had questioned him; Bruno had multiple sclerosis, and agewaswearying him faster than most, and the pubwasempty of beer, so he’d stuck with it.
His lie was so much easier to go with than the truth.
He’d been halfway to believing it himself until the time he’d darn-near collapsed in the park between Paterson and Dandaloo Streets one lunchtime. He’d had to sit for an hour on a bench seat in the sunshine beside the Great War cenotaph until he had the strength to make it back to his car. He’d passed the time reading the names of fathers and sons and brothers who’d never got the chance to return to Hanrahan and deal with whatever they’d left behind them when they’d enlisted.
If he was a better person, maybe he’d feel grateful to get his chance. Too bad he wasn’t.
The bloke from the council emptying the park’s bins at the time, Johnno Somebody-or-other, who’d been the groundsman at Hanrahan High back when Tom had been a student what seemed like a thousand years ago, was the one that spelled it out for him: what the lie meant; how he looked to the townsfolk of Hanrahan that he hadn’t seen in seventeen years; what his current worth was as a man.
‘You’re old Bruno’s son, aren’t you? Heard you was back home with yer tail between yer legs.’
That had stung.
Johnno the bin bloke had got it in one. A fistful of commendations, a Conspicuous Service Medal and a lieutenant commander’s dress uniform hanging in a garment bag at the back of his closet didn’t mean diddly-squat when you were as near useless as he currently was. As he might always be.
He’d lied to the cadet in Wollongong who’d typed up his official discharge papers from the Navy, too, but that had been a different lie.
‘I’m heading home to the Snowy Mountains,’ he’d said. ‘Stockhorses and cattle, air so clean it’s like the industrial revolution never happened, and no more bridge duty on some rustbucket in the Arafura Sea.’
‘But this says it’s a medical discharge,’ the cadet had said. ‘Unfit for duty.’
Tom had stared him down. If he wasn’t telling the truth to himself, he sure as sheep dung wasn’t telling it to some newbie recruit who looked like his mother still buttered his toast for breakfast.
When he’d finally quit procrastinating and driven in through the old iron gates of the property where he’d grown up, he’d found his father—who he’d barely said three words to in the long years since he’d left—in a wheelchair. Mrs L hadn’t mentionedthatwhen she’d convinced him he was needed back at Ironbark Station … but of course, she wasn’t to know it would be a trigger.
‘I was made redundant,’ he said to Bruno. ‘Thought I could make myself useful.’ By that stage he was making up lies about himself left, right and centre, so what was one more?
Big effing mistake.
