Coming Rain Read Online Free Page B

but her…and her legs around
me and what she said with her dress up around her waist. Jesus.’
    ‘Don’t say Jesus like that so much.’ Painter touched a swollen lump on his head where
a lifesaver had hit him. Thumb pressing above his eyebrow. ‘You ever see a woman
having a baby? Giving birth?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Fucking mess. All over the bloody bed and floor, shit everywhere. Like an animal
they are.’ Painter stood up and poured tea into two enamel mugs. Put one next to
Lew’s foot and concentrated on flouring the next few pieces of rabbit. Laid them
in the shimmering fat of the pan.
    ‘There was a baby crying,’ Lew said. ‘Couldn’t be her dead husband’s anyway. Too
young.’
    Painter nodded and began to roll another smoke. He put the unlit cigarette in his
mouth and prodded the browning rabbit with the fork. Spooned in more mutton fat,
turned the pieces and lit his smoke.

CHAPTER 5
    He was about nine feet in the air, leaning over the top of a black conical charcoal
kiln and smoothing wet clay on the widening cracks. It had been burning for five
days and the charcoal would be ready to uncover, cool and stack tomorrow.
    Painter had positioned upright jarrah poles, a yard long and about six inches in
diameter, two feet apart, around the base, secured smaller cross branches on top
of the poles and was standing on these branches as he worked. Thin white smoke easing
out above him. His hands, arms and chest splattered with red clay. A beaten-up Traveller
hat on his head and now he was wearing sandshoes on his feet. Balancing on the cross
branches, he looked down at Lew. ‘This burn’s finished pretty much, take a day to
cool no worries son. Sixteen hundredweight I reckon.’
    Lew held a tall Henry Dilston and Sons crosscut log saw and was sitting on one of
two cross-pole sawhorses. Four cords of jarrah and marri stacked behind him.
    They had laid out corrugated-iron sheets to deter termites. This would be ready for
the next burning. More sheets of corrugated iron roofed the cords. They had weighed
down the iron with logs and stones. Behind Lew, a makeshift workbench with two attached
vices. Three Kelly axes lying flat on the benchtop alongside a stand of wooden-handled
flat, fine and half-round files.
    The bush surrounding them was olive green, grey and black. Straight, brilliant white
trees and blackened bloodwoods. Smoke bush and granite heather. Prickly Moses. Painter
had rigged a sharpening stone with a foot treadle and an upturned kerosene tin as
a seat. Two canvas tents and an open fireplace with the iron tripod holding a black
billy tin. Smoke was drifting from the campfire. Another axe driven into a tree stump.
An American.
    The truck was parked at the edge of the clearing. Clothes, trousers and shirts laid
out on the bonnet and roof to dry. A track through umbrella wattle bushes led away
from the clearing towards a wider, two-wheel dirt road running parallel to a rail
line. Painter climbed down from the charcoal kiln and slapped his hands together.
    ‘Abdul and Wahid be here to pick up the charcoal day after tomorrow.’ He took out
a round blue tin of Capstan tobacco, opened it, removed a cigarette paper, stuck
it to his bottom lip and began to roll the tobacco in his palm.
    ‘Abdul. Wahid? They got camels?’
    Painter shrugged. ‘Afghans. Probably got camels.’
    They sat on a log, drank black tea and ate damper spread with golden syrup. Lew watched
one of his bare feet as it made a furrow in the sand.
    ‘Still like your bare feet in the ground son,’ Painter said.
    ‘Never had shoes in my life till I started work in the sheds. You teased me, remember?’
    Painter took the white paper off his lip, placed the tobacco into the paper. His
fingers and thumbs working on the smoke. Nodded. ‘Barefoot kid turned up for work
in the shearing gang. That contractor dropped you off. You were what?…Seven? Twelve?’
Painter cleared his throat.
    ‘Eleven. I was eleven.’
    The next day, two Afghans