Summer at Mount Hope Read Online Free

Grove, to a life tightening the strings on her frail, fierce mother’s corsets, to endless days of tedious housework and, of course, to Hadley and his sheep. The weeks during lambing were always tense but she liked it when the hungry orphans rushed at her, bunting her skirt and bleating. She loved to feed them warm cow’s milk and see them grow. And she was very handy in the pens, renowned for her knack of cornering the sprightly rascals then dragging them to Hadley for wigging and crutching. She knew Hadley would be lost without her when it came to docking and castrating too. He appreciated her bravery, how she held them unflinchingly while he performed bloody tasks.
    â€˜I have a home where I am needed,’ she reminded herself, unlike the swaggies tramping the lonely lanes. And things would improve. Hadley would get a job. He would sink a well deep enough to reach good water. He would fertilise the land, breed up the stud line and build the new house their mother boasted of. There might even be money to hire help and that would give her time to grow proper, prize-winning vegetables. At last they would be able to buy a cow, build a proper dairy and even fox-proof the old chook house. It would mean she would miss her rides to Overton for the hamper and her visits to Phoeba. But there would be time for friendship, not just hasty visits and brief conversations after church.
    â€˜I have a good friend in the world,’ she muttered.
    â€˜Henrietta!’
    â€˜I am indeed fortunate,’ she said, turning to go to her mother.
    As he rode down the driveway Hadley looked at his land. It was a ghostly landscape of grey, dead gums. The majestic trunks were bare and bleached, jutting from the ground like stalagmites with angular branches that had twisted to a slow starved death and now pointed accusingly at him. His father had ring-barked them to make way for his sheep and now, years later, Hadley was battling salt-bog pastures clogged with rotting trees and supporting his mother and sister with money scratched from sparse, stunted grain crops and a few bales of wool each year. Not even rabbits, which plagued every other farm, bothered to eat his meagre patches of grass. But he still dreamed his father’s dream – a flock of prize stud merino ewes and rams. True, he had sold some of their dwindling stock to pay for his wool classing studies, but now he was about to embark on a career. He would plough his earnings back into Elm Grove and the stud flock, and when the drought was over, ‘white gold’ – that fine merino wool – would make them rich. He would make something of himself, improve life for his mother and sister, and marry and have a family. He had prayed hard in church that morning, and was certain God would help him.
    Spurring his brown mare through the intersection, he glanced up to Mount Hope. Phoeba didn’t believe in God. ‘You just live and die and turn to dust,’ she said. Sometimes he could spot her, a distant figure in a white blouse and dull skirt reading the paper on the front veranda. But none of the Crupps were visible now, just a group of swaggies making their way up the outcrop track – last year’s shearers returning to Overton, hoping for work.
    The lane led him through the outcrop pass to the Overton homestead, which sat on the plain like a wedding cake on a vast table. Scattered around it were stables and sheds, sheep yards and the shearers’ store, workers’ quarters, tank-stands and haystacks. The mare cantered through the gateposts, and Hadley, nervous but hopeful, tethered her to the yard gate at the back of the house. At the kitchen door he handed the cook an empty string basket. The cook was Chinese, so Hadley spoke carefully and loudly: ‘Today for hamper I will have butter’ – he mimed spreading butter on bread – ‘and one leg of lamb. And six eggs.’ He held up six fingers.