92 / COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH
4 The head stockman's house stood on piles some thirty feet above a narrow gulch fringed with tall, straggling gum trees and many weeping willows. After the splendor of Drogheda homestead it was rather bare and utilitarian, but in its appurtenances it was not unlike the house they had left behind in New Zealand. Solid Victorian furniture filled the rooms to overflowing, smothered in fine red dust. "You're lucky here, you have a bathroom," Father Ralph said as he brought them up the plank steps to the front veranda; it was quite a climb, for the piles upon which the house was poised were fifteen feet high. "In case the creek runs a banker," Father Ralph explained. "You're right on it here and I've heard it can rise sixty feet in a night." They did indeed have a bathroom; an old tin bath and a chipped water heater stood in a walled-off alcove at the end of the back veranda. But, as the women found to their disgust, the lavatory was nothing more than a hole in the ground some two hundred yards away from the house, and it stank. After New Zealand, primitive. "Whoever lived here wasn't very clean," Fee said as she ran her finger through the dust on the sideboard. Father Ralph laughed. "You'll fight a losing battle 93
trying to get rid of that," he said. "This is the Outback, and there are three things you'll never defeat—the heat, the dust and the flies. No matter what you do, they'll aways be with you." Fee looked at the priest. "You're very good to us, Father." "And why not? You're the only relatives of my very good friend, Mary Carson." She shrugged, unimpressed. "I'm not used to being on friendly terms with a priest. In New Zealand they kept themselves very much to themselves." "You're not a Catholic, are you?" "No, Paddy's the Catholic. Naturally the children have been reared as Catholics, every last one of them, if that's what's worrying you." "It never occurred to me. Do you resent it?" "I really don't care one way or the other." "You didn't convert?" "I'm not a hypocrite, Father de Bricassart. I had lost faith in my own church, and I had no wish to espouse a different, equally meaningless creed." "I see." He watched Meggie as she stood on the front veranda, peering up the track toward Drogheda big house. "She's so pretty, your daughter. I have a fondness for titian hair, you know. Hers would have sent the artist running for his brushes. I've never seen exactly that color before. Is she your only daughter?" "Yes. Boys run in both Paddy's family and my own; girls are unusual." "Poor little thing," he said obscurely. After the crates arrived from Sydney and the house took on a more familiar look with its books, china, ornaments and the parlor filled with Fee's furniture, things began to settle down. Paddy and the boys older than Stu were away most of the time with the two station hands Mary Carson had retained to teach them the many differences between sheep in northwest New South