Fiction

Winter and Pippy

If this land was made by anyone, it would be you. You always had a crucial role. Woodend is the beauty of your making. Our mountain is grey like the freshwater pearls you wore just in case he came home. The wet mud looks like one of your letters to Dad, dropped in tea by accident. The clouds are whipped and ready for him to come running down the track. But it won’t lead the walker and rider through the valley and past our mountain, to you, sitting on the porch and reading.

I heard about the events of the 25th of April, 1915, when Mr Moonee gave me a telegram with shaky hands. He had ridden along the track for hours before he found me riding Pippy. That telegram. It whispered to me a hundred times while you were sleeping and before the morning frost had bitten. I thought you were sleeping. I will never forget your face when I told you. Then I heard your accent through the walls, a murmur and a mumble, stripped of perseverance. Thick with love and Australia. Then you cried. It was as if you left frost over our land. The frost didn’t break until you stood at the threshold wiping your eyes. Then the sun went low and golden. Like it was leaving. Like he was leaving us. Across the sky into the night. I prayed. I went to bed that night with carpet branded on my knees.

I rode to check the gates on my horse Pippy, like you asked. I liked to feel her warmth. It felt like I could breathe. The garden gate, open; the paddock gates, open; the front gate, open. Just like you always asked it to be. The grass was green for your eyes and for me to be reminded of you as I touched each blade. Dad had eyes like the sky. I had felt before that you gazed upon him like the grass gazed on the sky.

I knew about your grief, or the cusp of it. The ride was long and when I came back I tracked mud on the porch. There you were hanging out the washing. There you were clutching your stomach as you heard the radio. There you were as you waited for him. You clawed in anticipation.

In the morning, Pippy pushed into me like she too felt the prickle of some kind of disease. I told you I thought I saw Dad in the smoke bush. I thought the memory of planting the smoke bush would bring you back to a happy memory. But grief is chronic. I remember the darkness of you that day. I remember the dust that swept you out of the house. I remember your nightgown in the wind; it was afraid of you. I remember the deep warmth of smoke bush fire as you tore through the garden burning the memory, every last whisper of red and purple.

By the summer of 1917 your hair had completely turned grey. Our mountain grew dark. The earth was sick and tired. You weren’t strong. The trees grew dark and creaked in conversation. The land was bare and sparse. I remember helping you through each day. I fed you and I bathed you. I felt myself fade.

There was something about you that was still like my god. I saw it in you. The way you surrendered yourself. Your paleness and your thinness. The way you refused the soup and took the tea. You refused to be whole without him. When Dad died he took half of you. The good half. The one that took care of me.

Pippy was old. You could tell because she had a blue layer in her eyes and she walked like she was winding down. I had to get away from your sickness. Your search to be closer to him. I made her run when she couldn’t. I wanted to feel her auburn warmth and the salt on my face. Keep the company of the stars over you.

You didn’t come and find me. So sick in your grief that you forgot about me. I pulled myself out from under her. Her breath shook until it stopped. Sick and stuck in my grief I went to feed her in the paddock until she began to sink into the ground. It was like she was still alive, but then she wouldn’t eat the food. Surrounded by a straw halo, caved in, she went with the land. No mouth, just teeth and white sticks in memory of a body. But for me it was still there, like a white-knuckle grip.

I left Pippy and I walked back to the house. The walk was short, but it was hard to catch my breath. I stumbled through the threshold, my hands aching, I opened up the scars. I wanted to talk to you. It was then I saw your hand on the floor. How the blood snaked on the floorboards. I knew.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 1, 2025 as "Winter and Pippy".

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