Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy Page A

getting up. I saw she had a special little cushion for kneeling on and I was looking at that cushion when she said something else.
    Where did you get that box, Billy?
    I said out of the shed. She laughed and looked up at the sky. I looked down at the box with the picture of the apple on it.
    Out of your shed? That’s a finger-joint colonial box, Billy. Do you know how much some of them are worth?
    Her voice was all excited, like that lady at the school who pretended boring things were interesting on that test.
    What about selling it to me , she said .
    I said it was my rabbit box and she said did I have any others in the shed. I said I would have a look. She was a loony. My dad sometimes split up old boxes for the chip heater. He kept nails and bolts in them.
    I know where there’ll be a lot , I said. At the Franklin’s garage sale .
    Her eyes looked a little bit like Mr Bailey’s dogs’ eyes inside the netting.
    When is it? she asked.
    On Sunday. They got lots of stuff .
    Like what? she said, and then said a whole list of things like fire pokers? ironwork? cupboards? and I just kept nodding.
    Lots of that kind of thing , I said. Lots of these little boxes with writing and maps of Australia and animals like emus .
    She folded her arms and looked at me harder. Boxes with emus and kangaroos on them? With joints like this one?
    Yep , I said, but you got to get there real early in the morning. Like 6.30 or something. ’Cos other people come up from the city .
    She asked me where Franklin’s was, and I told her.
    I can get there earlier than the dealers , she said, looking down the hill at the row of trees, all secretly dying.
    On Saturday I set a snare just inside a little tunnel of grass by the lake. Dad says it’s bad to kill something without a good reason but I knew the rabbit wouldn’t mind. The trees were very quiet now. It was going to be a black frost. When the moon came up there was a yellow ring around it like around a Tilley lamp when you take it out on a frosty night.
    I couldn’t hardly get to sleep with thinking. I thought of her going out there with her new saw from the hardware shop and cutting open their skin. In the night, while the rabbits nosed around with their soft whiskery mouths and Mr Bailey’s dogs cried and choked on their chains over and over.
    When I got up it was still dark, as dark as the steel on the monkey bars, cold metal that hurts your chest. I felt a still, cold rabbit’s body in the trap and I felt sorry for it. I knew she would, too. Because in the lady’s head you can feel sorry and worried for rabbits but not for trees.
    It looked like it was sitting up there by itself on the track, alive. All the crystals had grown in the night and now the black ice was smooth as glass all round that turn.
    I got back into bed when I was finished. I felt my mum’s gloves.
    My dad knew I’d got up early when he came to wake me up again. I don’t know how.
    You’d better go out and check your traps , he said as he split the kindling.
    Up the road Farrelly’s tractor was pulling her car out of the ditch. It had crumpled into one of the big gums, and leaves and sticks had been shaken all over it. Mr Farrelly said the ambulance blokes had nearly skidded over themselves on the bloody ice, trying to get in to help. What’s a sheila like her doing getting up in the bloody dark on a Sunday morning anyway , Mr Farrelly said as he put the hooks on. Bloody loonies .
    Under the front wheel I saw white fur, turned inside out like a glove, like my hat. I went down through the trees, touching the sick ones. On the way I stepped in a big patch of nettles. No use crying if you weren’t looking out for yourself, my dad says. I looked around and found some dock and rubbed it on and it stopped hurting like magic. That’s what nature’s like, for everything poisonous there’s something nearby to cure it if you just look around.