Cassandra

3 - The Hunt

~ 3 ~

The HuntThe worm struggles in Cassie’s hand. It wants to burrow into her skin, hide from the sun. Are baby snakes a bit like worms? Would her snake have babies? Maybe it was a boy. It wasn’t easy to tell with snakes … or worms really. Did the snake go back under the house? There has been no chance to sneak under and look.

Maybe he is still in her room, hiding somewhere where she can’t find him.

‘Leave the worms alone, Cass.’

‘Yes Mum.’

The worm doesn’t know it is free. It sits on top of the dirt wiggling like stupid. Cassie drops a clod of dirt on it. ‘There you go, wormie. Go back to your family and tell them to watch out for the hoe.’

Her mother hoes, then stops and wipes her face, leaving a smear of dirt. Her mother doesn’t care about dirt when she gardens. Aunty Ida weeds around the sweet peas. Tiny buds peek from between their leaves.

Gardening days last all day. She will help Poppy at lunch time, and they will make corned beef sandwiches and hot tea. At the end of the day, her mum will be too tired to cook. Cassie will pick fresh parsley and they will have hot toast and scrambled eggs freckled with green leaves. Dad will drop Aunty Ida home and go to the pub for a beer. Then her mum will be too tired and they will sit together and watch TV. Gardening days are always the same. It is like knowing the future.

She picks up the clod of dirt. The worm is gone. ‘Good wormie.’ The clod is still firm. Cassie splits it apart and it breaks perfectly, like the cake her mum bakes. She calls it mud cake, but it has chocolate in it, not mud.

‘Save some cake for me,’ her dad says, crouching beside her in his dusty blue overalls. She giggles. How could he know what she was thinking? He picks up some of the dirt and breaks it apart with his fingers. It could be gold the way he looks at it. ‘It’s pretty good cake.’ He nods thoughtfully and stands, facing Cassie’s mum. ‘You sure you should be doing that?’ he asks.

‘What?’ She stops hoeing and looks at him.

He nods at the baby bump of her stomach and she shrugs and looks at Aunty Ida.

Aunty steps forward and throws weeds in the wheelbarrow. ‘Your mother carried milk pails to the front gate up until the morning you were born.’ She wheels the barrow to the next section of garden and disappears into the weeds again.

Her mum leans on the hoe. ‘You’ve decided to look for the snake then?’

Cassie pretends she is not interested, searching for worms and cake, but really her heart is jumping all around her chest.

‘Yeah, well I still say it’s a bit of imagination. A snake’ll move on with the warm weather anyhow.’

Her dad heads towards the house and her mum follows him. He puts on long thick gloves. Cassie follows them at a distance. She knows how to be quiet. If she walks slowly and remembers not to speak any of her thoughts, her parents seem to forget she is there. Maybe she really does disappear. It doesn’t matter. The best place to hide would be the side of the house under the lily. She will be able to see her father from there.

Aunt Ida won’t let the big lily flowers into the house. She says they are bad luck and should only be seen at funerals. Poppy’s wife (which means she is Cassie’s grandma) planted the lily. Her name was Lily and she is dead. So perhaps they are bad luck. Cassie hides among the long leaves and watches her father crawling under the house.

He looks uncomfortable and squashed and keeps scraping his back on the floorboards above him. Is the lily really bad luck? Perhaps she should hide somewhere else. She crosses all her fingers to cancel out the lily. Dad disappears into the gloom under the house. She closes her eyes and remembers her snake. With her fingers tucked into her hair and her head bent she breathes deeply and lets her breath out slowly, for every breath making her wish. Breathe in deeply, don’t let him find it, breath out slowly, don’t let him find it. Her head fills with white air. The world rotates around her. In her mind the snake dances, flying through the sky, weaving like a kite, and then suddenly it stops dancing, falls to the ground and slides alongside the water tank.

‘I can’t find anything.’ Her father’s voice startles her. Her feet have so much energy she wants to run and run.

‘Are you sure?’ her mother asks. They are close by, on the stairs around the corner. She must not move.

‘It’s like I said, there’s nothing underneath there except old matchbox cars and rusting milk pails. No snake. Now, I’ve got work to do.’

Her mother sighs, turns and walks down the stairs. ‘Cassie,’ she calls.

Cassie keeps her body tucked up close and holds her breath. The snake is safe and she knows where he is. It felt like a dream, but sometimes dreams are real. Maybe even Aunty Ida’s dream with lollies falling out of the sky.

‘Cass,’ her mother calls again as she walks away across the lawn. ‘You had better not be ignoring me, Cassandra Shultz.’

Cassie ignores her. She sneaks around the corner and runs from fence post to fence post so her dad, walking across the paddock to the tractor, won’t spy her.

Puffing from her run, she kneels on the dry grass by the tank stand. The grass prickles her knees. The sunlight spreads across the top of her head, like a crown of heat. Above her a group of birds argue. She searches the nearby branches. They are grey birds with yellow circles around their eyes. Noisy miners. It is an easy name to remember. Poppy told her they are called miner birds because the circles around their eyes make them look like coal miners. She can tell where the noisy part of their name comes from.

She hunches low and peers under the tank stand. Underneath it is dark and damp. Could he be under there? She can’t see deep enough. She can’t fit underneath. She sits up again and runs her hand over the spongy moss growing across the rippled wood. This is the only place she knows where moss grows. She has tried taking the soft, cool carpet to other places in the garden, but it always dries up and becomes stiff and grey. It likes to grow where it is cool and damp. She thinks about the snake hibernating over the winter. If he had not long woken up, he will be tired of the cold. He will want to be warm. She always wants the warm sun after she has been cold.

From the corner of the house, almost to the fence, stands a trellis where Aunty Ida’s climbing geraniums grow. Large flat grey rocks line the garden’s edge. Sometimes it is Cassie’s job to pull the weeds from between the rocks. She sits on a rock and picks a geranium, one of her favourites, white with red edges. One day, when she can count to a thousand, she will count all the different geranium colours in the garden, and maybe write them all up in a book like Poppy does with his weather. She searches along the line of rocks, wondering where the snake might go to get warm. Some clover grows between the rocks. Aunty Ida doesn’t like clover. It is a weed, she says. There is no good luck in a four-leaf clover. The only good luck is used up in the finding. Cassie still counts the leaves before she pulls it and throws it onto the grass. The noisy miners argue above her. Silly birds. She finds more weeds further along. She leans across the rocks. Aunty Ida will be happy she has done this job without even being asked. She grabs the weed nice and tight and pulls.

The snake rises from the ground and twists into an S shape. Orange spots. Cassie didn’t know it would have orange spots on its belly. It hisses, its mouth open, and she knows she should move but less than a second has passed although it feels like a day and the snake’s bite stings like a hot needle. Why is he angry with her? He is fast. He bites her so fast and disappears so fast if it were not for the pain she wouldn’t believe it has happened. Two drops of blood glisten on the back of her hand. She clutches her hand to her chest. Her head fills with sound: the noisy miners screaming, the cicadas, and the air swishing past her ears as she runs up the back stairs. Her head aches, each sound an explosion.

At the top of the stairs she starts to wobble. She stumbles across the veranda. There is a wall of haze between her and the screen door. She has to reach through it to open the door, but the door handles multiply and she doesn’t know which one to reach for. She reaches for one, any one, and then another until she finds one solid and turns it. She stumbles into the kitchen. Her mother stands at the sink looking like many shimmering ghosts. She is going to be so mad. It would be better if Poppy was standing there.

‘Cassie.’ Her mother’s voice booms like a drum.

Cassie holds out her hand. ‘The snake bit me.’ She thinks she says the words. But she can’t be sure. She tries to say them again, just in case, but her tongue swells fat and wet in her mouth and she can’t move it.