Auto

Chapter 1 The Cut Snake Picking wildflowers, which even during my childhood was illegal, my grandmother woke a small tiger snake which coiled itself about her hand but was still too sleepy to bite her. Later someone would joke that this was her punishment and she'd reply sternly that it was on family property and she only ever took one or two. I don't think anyone ever referred to the occasion in the twenty-five years that passed until her death. But I had been there, along with my brother, my cousins, my mother, auntie and uncle. A whole family had witnessed her moment of terror, bewilderment, and relief. The snake was beheaded, its whip of a body thrown in the boot and carted back to the farm where it writhed on the ground until sunset-the headless stub clotted with dirt. Just like the old wives' tale? The farm, or Wheatlands as it was called, was our escape. We went there every second weekend, spent whole holidays there. When my mother was working her way through university and making a living by teaching piano it was the farm that provided us with hand-me-down clothing. When things were emotionally hard it was the farm that offered refuge. The things that kids dreamed about doing in our suburban school could be done on the farm. So, from as far back as I can remember, the farm was an alternative reality. Even if things were bad in the country-drought, the Meckering Quake, poor seasons, it still remained a place that wasn't constrained by the laws of the city. I helped my uncle and cousins plant trees to reclaim land lost to salinity. We planted thousands, ringing the salt like the circles of Inferno, working our way through the hot snow, the frozen centre that would burn a hole straight through you. This desolation became mythological for me. It replaced the language of place that had been seemingly stripped away with the scrub. The salt was the poison. The salt was the truth behind it all and the rich green and the yellow and then burnt stubble of the crops were only an illusion. I remember the first hay baler coming onto the place. We'd seen it the year before at the York Show. There might have been balers around for years but it was the first time one came onto Wheatlands. Before that it was stooks-and I remember the Nyoongah families out in the blazing sun. And I remember someone telling me that the local Nyoongahs had been deceived into accepting a bent shotgun and a sack of flour for the district. And this was told to me by someone who'd prospered from their loss. There was guilt there: there was guilt all around. Some of the young blokes in town expressed their guilt by getting pissed and getting stuck into any Nyoongah they could find. The Nyoongahs don't want their guilt. That's what guilt does. They want land back. We can keep our guilt. My cousins ride their bikes up to the house-dam paddock and park them in an old rainwater tank that lies on its side. The school bus come past and picks them up. I've got a few days off school. I can't remember why now. I take a twenty-two rifle and wander off up to Uncle Jack's bush. Uncle Jack is fanatical about gates-like most farmers-so I climb fences instead of taking the risk of not doing them up properly. I've always been paranoid. And a little obsessive-compulsive. I'd have to go back and check it after walking ten steps away. And then again, maybe. I rest the gun against a post. I climb over, catching my jeans on the barbed wire. The fence twitches and the gun slides to the ground. It's a single shot bolt action and there's nothing in the chamber. I heard once of a guy resting his gun and then climbing and the fence twitching and the gun falling. It was loaded and shot him dead. I shoot twenty-eight parrots. I put them in a sack I've tucked into my belt. I take them back for the pigs. The pigs eat colour. I shoot so many I run out of bullets. There's no one around to say that's enough. The barrel is about as hoKinsella, John is the author of 'Auto' with ISBN 9781876857370 and ISBN 1876857374.