Robert reminds Minna of a picture she used to love of Faust and his poor Gretchen. Robert is Gretchen: not because he’s slim or girlish, but because he has the same red hair and paper-coloured skin. The printing of the picture was a little heavy-handed, so that pale Gretchen was hatched with pinkish red in all her shadowy places, and so is Robert. He flares up in the sun, as if he’s in some never-ending fever. His good humour, the size of his hands, the way he settles down into a chair and stretches his legs out, his uniform, and the fact that he’s a man of the law: all this made Minna feel from the first that nothing she did with him could be wrong. She was the one who convinced Robert, out in the garden one afternoon, to put his hand beneath her skirt. It wasn’t far from there to everything. She loves to hear the whimpers she can tear loose from him.

  And now he’s sleeping, right there, in his bed, and she has every right to be in this room and to see the way he’s spread himself out, naked. The room is hers, the house, the bed, the sleeping man. All of him: his dark armpit, his softened cock. His uniforms are hers now, and she’s allowed to lift the trousers and pull them on just to see the way they feel, to roll the cuffs and wrap the belt twice around her waist, to pull his boots on and stuff the bottom of the trousers into them, and to swim through the wide sleeves of the shirt. She buttons the jacket of itchy wool and shuffles to the long mirror in the hall to look at herself in what light there is—the sky is brightening, the first birds are calling out. Her reflection is ridiculous. She’s reduced by the uniform—by its size—and at the same time has played her own trick by turning it into something silly. She wonders if Robert, seeing her, would be angry and accuse her of being disrespectful. But would he mean it?

  Then there’s someone beating at the front door and a man’s voice shouting, ‘Manning! Manning!’

  Robert told her to expect urgent calls at any hour, but surely not on their wedding night? She steps into the kitchen and, after Robert hurries down the hallway on his way to the door, she runs to the bedroom. Her heart is very loud.

  It’s Mathew Wallace at the door—she hears Robert call him Wallace. He’s saying that his son is missing. And this seems unjust, since Mathew Wallace has so many daughters and his oldest son is off somewhere, no one knows exactly where; or perhaps Minna’s mother hasn’t told her everything. You can’t trust Mama to have told you everything. And the Wallace girls were at the wedding; apparently they even came to the breakfast and stayed three minutes and left as soon as the vicar had his fainting spell. Now their brother is missing in the desert—he might as well be on the moon. Minna listens, but Mr Wallace has lowered his voice.

  ‘Only one thing for it,’ Robert says and, a few seconds later, ‘I’ll raise the lads.’

  Minna feels that in any catastrophe Robert will always know the ‘one thing for it’. How helpful that would be: to know the one thing, always, and to do it. Now Robert comes back into the bedroom, already holding his constable’s cap. He’s shirtless, but has pulled on his crumpled wedding trousers.

  ‘What in God’s name?’ he says when he sees her in his uniform, but he isn’t angry, he’s laughing and says, ‘Name and rank, constable?’

  ‘Constable Manning, Eighteenth Class,’ Minna says, also laughing, trying to remove a boot and failing. Robert kneels on the floor in front of her and pulls the boot away. Minna begins to laugh harder, then covers her mouth and whispers, ‘Is he outside?’

  Robert shakes his head. He’s removed the other boot. He’s still kneeling and he rocks back to rest on his heels. His hands drum at his thighs.

  ‘How awful,’ she says, but can’t help smiling. ‘His poor little boy.’

  ‘You’re my little boy,’ says Robert. He pulls at the trousers Minna’s wearing until she slides down to the floor with him and climbs into his lap.

  PRAYER OF THE GERMAN WIDOW

  I thank you, Heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ, your dear Son, that you have blessed me so graciously on this day of gifts and marriage. This day I sent my Minna out, strong and wise, to meet her bridegroom. Minna, my trimmed wick. For into your hands I commend myself, my body and soul, and all things, as Luther said each evening while he prepared for bed. By all things he meant the mountains and hills and rivers not only of Eisleben, but also South Australia, and all that’s in between, all that’s above and below, the angels and devils, the hearts of men—all things. I commend them to you, I commend my married daughter, I commend my humble self.

  For a time, I thought that I was born for missionary work. I had in mind the trials, the dangers, the lines of black children outside a small white school, the husband raising his voice up in the church, the happy holy heathen, the grace of God. Then I thought that I was born for Otho, who chose me and then chose South Australia. We worked and worked, we were workers in the vineyard, the great trees fell, the sun mellowed, the sun bit, the grape grew on the vine. One year of blight and we lost everything. I thought then that I was born to suffer. I suffered coming north; I suffered at Thalassa among the animals and the men; I lost one baby, then another and another, and thought I’d grown too old for children. All while Otho spent his days consoling Joanna Axam for the death of her husband, and working to keep her rich. Then, when her sons grew up, she cast us out.

  But that was all right, it could be endured. Otho was clever—he’d bought into the Blinman mine and had started to earn money, and I had my healthy baby twins. Then I thought that I was born for children, for Peter and for Minna: the sweet milk of their mouths, the endless need when they were sick, the calling of my name into the dark. There is selfishness in children, it can’t be helped. They all insist on growing. Peter grew self-important, a true German, full of restless longing, and Minna too obliging with the men. I saw her kiss that painter in the garden, just days before her wedding. And now she’s married to a policeman because she’s carrying his child. I did have hopes for her. Ah, but she has a pretty waist, at least for now. I had one once myself. And her father did indulge her.

  Poor Otho, who was born for work—he dreamed in silver, he dreamed in copper; he grew thicker, darker, hardly there, windy and long-winded, a funny old machine with money in him, that he made and gave and lent and lost and made and lost. And here was missionary work at last: Otho’s sickbed. The boiling of the sheets, the bowls of blood, the doctors like hopeful suitors, the reading in the morning from the prettiest parts of Scripture, the wading late at night through his darkest fears and shames. The parade of children, friends and debtors; the clutched hands; the forgiveness; and the death. Thanks be to God.

  Peter already busy in the world, fussing at the mine, away from me—he wouldn’t even stay tonight. And Minna married, so that’s the last of it. The flawless nights ahead, the house intact, and everything decided. Nobody to need me. I’ll be left to shrink. But that’s not so—there’s Minna’s baby on the way. It will need and need. Ach, the warm scent of its heavy head!

  But that’s to come. Tonight, if I could stand, I’d walk across the room and open every door and shout until they ran to me: Otho, Peter, Minna. I would tuck and peck them, I would look and look. If you offered me one hour, just one minute, I would spend it young, and Otho young, with my face in his neck. Hide not thy face far from me. Oh Lord have, Christ have, Lord have mercy, and Lord now lay me down to rest.

  SECOND DAY

  Billy, riding to Thalassa, meets George Axam on the road. George is driving his wife north towards Fairly in a smart dogcart. The wife is dressed for train travel. Billy slows his horse; George slows the dogcart. The plain rolls out on either side of them, studded with occasional trees.

  ‘Morning, Billy,’ George calls.

  His wife lays one gloved hand on his arm.

  Billy stops beside the cart. ‘Morning, Mister George,’ he says. ‘Morning, missus.’

  George’s dislike of Billy is palpable, as always, but they’re involved in each other’s lives in ways that won’t allow them to pass on a road without speaking. Billy’s sister Nancy used to be George’s nursemaid; what a fat, pink baby George was. Nancy would carry him about wherever she went, and Billy would use a single piece of string to tell him dozens of stories. He’d play out Thumbkin on George’s fingers: virdnaapanha, ringwaitanha, wawarriwartanha, nuininha, thumbkiniha. But this former tenderness is forgivable. What’s unforgivable to George is that, when he was five, his father died, and Billy saw it happen. George says, ‘On your way to our place, I hope? And planning to stop? There’s a deal of work to do.’

  ‘It’s a madhouse,’ says George’s wife, then laughs, as if surprised at having spoken.

  Billy’s horse moves under him. ‘I can’t stop,’ he says.

  George raises his eyebrows. ‘Wallace keeping you busy, is he?’ He shifts forwards in his seat. When people refuse him—which rarely happens—George becomes alert and aggrieved. It’s bad enough that Billy chooses not to live and work at Thalassa, although the native camp is full of his relatives and his sister runs the kitchen. Really, what Billy chooses to do or not to do is immaterial to George; what affronts him is the fact that Billy is free to make choices.

  Mrs Axam presses her husband’s arm. ‘The train,’ she says, then smiles—not at Billy, but at something behind him.

  ‘It’s the Wallace boy,’ Billy says. ‘Six years old. Been missing since the storm yesterday.’

  Mrs Axam takes her hand away from George’s arm and presses it to her mouth in horror. A lost child is the thing white people are most afraid of. It’s the one cost of settling on this country that they consider unreasonable.

  ‘That’s no good,’ George says. ‘Has Wallace looked for him?’

  Billy resists the urge to say, Of course. ‘Been out all night.’

  ‘Has Wallace gone to the constable?’

  Billy tips his head towards the town. ‘There now,’ he says.

  ‘Excellent,’ says George, lifting his hands and the reins in them; he’s preparing to move the cart on. That’s just like George—trust in the authorities and spare yourself the worry.

  ‘Be good to have Tal out looking,’ Billy says.

  Tal, who lives most of the time at the Thalassa camp, is the best tracker in the district. Also the best rider, swimmer and hunter. He refuses to work with sheep but condescends to handle Thalassa cattle. He can get cows and horses safely over creeks in flood without a sound from any animal. He can shoot fifty rabbits in an afternoon and track any dingo. He can brand a half-wild steer before you even notice he’s brought it to the ground.

  George lowers the reins. ‘Now, Billy,’ he says. ‘I can’t spare Tal. Another time of year, you know, I wouldn’t hesitate. But the shearing …’

  ‘Tal’s a cattle man,’ Billy says.

  ‘Yes,’ says George, ‘and he’s butchering the bullock this morning.’

  Mrs Axam returns her hand to her husband’s arm.

  ‘Look’—George raises the reins again—‘the constable will sort out trackers, trained men. If he doesn’t for any reason, I’ll send Tal.’

  ‘Tal knows the country,’ Billy says, but the dogcart is moving.

  ‘You’ll let me know?’ George calls out. ‘And tell Wallace how sorry I am, won’t you, about his boy?’

  As the dogcart moves down the road, Billy turns and sees Mrs Axam’s maid sitting in the back with trunks and parcels. The maid looks at Billy with her mouth set straight in her long, white face. She lives in the house in Adelaide, and is the sort of maid who is referred to by her surname, which he forgets.

  Billy had been planning to head another mile down the creek to the camp by the ration depot, but if a bullock is being killed this morning, Tal will be at the slaughter yard, which is part of the station headquarters. A Thalassa bullock is killed before the shearing every year and Tal always takes charge. He’s strong and neat. He can kill a bullock before it begins to cry out and roll its eyes; he can be that fast with it. He knows a word that puts the bullock in his power. And the hides seem to fly off, whole and even, under Tal’s sharp knife. So Billy rides down into the river valley where the Thalassa homestead sits among its outbuildings and fences and gardens, its pens and yards and sheds and tanks. It’s shaded by gums and palms, and busy as a little town. Yura women, bending over tubs of laundry, call out to him in greeting as he passes.

  Billy rides through all this activity knowing his sister is here somewhere. His mother, too—old Pearl, who has otherwise retired from formal duties—has probably come up from the camp to help. He remembers this valley before the house was built; he remembers camping here at the permanent waterhole in the river. Billy was a child, around Denny’s age, when Henry Axam settled at Thalassa. One day not long after Henry first arrived—before the house and depot were built, before George was born and Joanna came north—Henry sat beneath a tree and watched the children of the camp play a game with bark shields and hunting sticks. Billy in particular excelled at this game: he loved to stand in front of a crowd of boys, holding his shield tight to his chest and using it, as he pivoted on nimble feet, to send each wirri glancing left or right.

  A few days later, Henry came with a cricket ball and a roughly carved cricket bat suitable for Billy’s size, and he taught Billy how to bowl one and hold the other. After that, Billy spent time with Henry Axam almost every day, learning how to bowl and bat and field. Henry included the other children at first, but Billy was singled out for his uncommon talent; as a result, a new world suggested itself to him, in which one person was distinct from another. Billy came to understand that there were more divisions than those between his father’s people and his mother’s people, the hot and cold winds, the orange tree and the bullock bush. There was also the division of brother from brother, gelding from stallion, wheat from chaff. The world, with its endless distinctions, wasn’t a place you lived inside of, as he’d thought; instead, you walked and ran and bowled upon it, individually, as Henry did. The most important division, Billy came to feel, was that between talent and mediocrity: a boy was either good at cricket, or he wasn’t.

  Later, once the house was built, Henry provided trousers, a shirt and a jumper, all in cream, along with a striped blazer, tailored in Adelaide to Billy’s exact dimensions, and a thick wool cap that absorbed perspiration. Whenever guests arrived at Thalassa, Billy would dress in this uniform and wait to be summoned. He would demonstrate his skills on the bare ground behind the house, or on the cricket pitch by the woolshed, while Henry explained his plans to take Billy to Adelaide, to Sydney, and finally to London, where the boy would be recognised at Lord’s as the world’s finest player. Then, Henry would say, try telling me the Aboriginal is a natural sportsman but lacks stamina! Look at his footwork: it’s perfection! After this speech, Henry would take his visitors away to see Thalassa’s other wonders—the Greek temple or the biblical garden—and Billy would stay on the pitch, swinging the bat and running between the wickets until one aunty or another called him to be useful.

  Henry also taught Billy how to ride a horse, how to muster cattle and how to sing a number of filthy songs in European languages. These, said Henry, were the kinds of skills Billy would need in his life at Henry’s side. When Billy was taken by his elders—‘kidnapped’, according to Henry—for his first initiation into sacred law, Henry was furious. On Billy’s return from the ceremonial ground, weeks later, as a Vardnapa man—no longer a child, but not yet an elder—he learned that all further initiation ceremonies had been forbidden, as had the use of language. When, a few years later, Henry drowned, there were no longer enough qualified men left to perform Billy’s second initiation, the one that would have made Billy an elder himself; the older men had been killed, imprisoned, or had died of disease. It was then that Otho Baumann came to manage Thalassa and the ration depot; he came with his whips and rules, and Billy learned how dangerous it was for a man like him to be extraordinary in any way, to be singled out. So Billy left the ranges for the first time; he spent the Baumann years droving up and down the Queensland stock routes. Riding into Thalassa now, decades later, means, for Billy, remembering a proud boy in cricket whites, swinging the bat while Henry promises him glory and Lord’s.

  Billy skirts the homestead and heads straight for the slaughter yard. When he arrives, Tal has already killed this year’s bullock and is lifting the caul fat out in white nets. A boy holds a dish beside him, waiting to rush the fat to the kitchen. The animal, half skinned, lies steaming on the stone. Tal moves surely above the bullock with his knife, finished with the caul now and working on the windpipe, and soon the carcass is ready to hang. Men heave it up while Tal directs. He struts in the yard, sometimes nodding and sometimes shaking his head. Billy is struck, as always, by the commanding heft of Tal’s body. His handsome face is open, smiling; he takes pleasure in his work and in his pleasure. Billy felt the same way when he played cricket. Skill gives you power: you can see the future because your skill will make it happen. To watch Tal strip the last of the hide and lay it out is to see the way a thing should work. Then, when he’s finished, Tal turns and swaggers, arrogant and ordinary in a way that Billy recognises, because he used to do the same whenever he proved his superiority at cricket.

  Tal is washing his hands at the pump when Billy approaches and says, ‘Hard at it.’

  ‘Big one this year,’ Tal says, shaking the water from his forearms. ‘Biggest yet.’

  ‘Good hide,’ Billy says.

  Tal looks across the yard towards the hide as if it poses a delicate problem, invisible to anyone but himself. He always performs his modesties with a flourish.

  ‘Good eating in that one,’ says Billy, and Tal nods, solemn; he’s serious when it comes to food. But having washed and been complimented, Tal is now finished with the bullock. He’s looking for something else with which to prove himself: he straightens up, lifts his chin, surveys the yard. He rolls his head to stretch the muscles of his neck.