Eucalyptus by Murray Bail

barbed wire, which tore off most of his nose.
    As owner of the fence Holland was an early visitor.
    â€˜He sure was feeling pretty sorry for himself,’ Holland told Ellen. ‘Both parents were there, no hard feelings about our fence. They are just pleased to still have him. It’s all they could talk about. I suppose he’s still alive, but it’s not going to be much of a life. Milking cows is all he’ll be good for.’
    He lost the sight of one eye, quickly followed by the other.
    Ellen had been told about his healthy good looks. It was said in town he had a wild streak.
    â€˜I don’t want to see you ever getting on the back of a motorbike,’ Holland was saying.

    One morning outside the Commercial Hotel, Ellen laughed—a sound no one in town had heard before. A tall waterfall from Africa or the Andes could have been transposed onto their dusty old street.
    Apparently her father had said something dry. Looking across at him as he trudged Ellen laughed, and when he gave his two-stage smile, known elsewhere as a muddy smile , she tilted her throat and laughed all the more.
    A daughter openly mocking a father: other women saw the power of her adult beauty overflowing as gaiety.
    Everybody was proud of her; to think that such a beauty in all its rarity was living in their parts.
    Conventionally strong men lost their tongues. At the sight of her, some were inflicted with a sort of paralysis. All they could do when Ellen came into town was stand about grinning and gaping. To get around this the lads speeding past the property made it a practice to sound their horns, and filtered by the river and the trunks of hundreds of eucalypts it reached the house like the faint bellowing of sexually mournful steers.
    Of course there were some who boldly marched up and spoke to her. First they had to get past her father. And he was more like a tennis coach than a father, never letting his girl out of his sight. If a gangly young man appeared to bump into them and opened his mouth to say something, or if Holland came out onto the street to find his daughter in the sunlight half-listening to a man, or several of them, he stood beside her with an expression of concentrated shrewdness. Among them he was the expert. After all, she was his daughter; he knew her better than anyone.
    The trouble was he was not impressed with any of them. There was something wrong with each and every one, if not in the way they spoke, in the way they looked; one of them held his smile too wide, with another it was the size of thumbs. By far the worst were those who exhibited a certain truculent ease. They literally bulged with familiarity, their hair combed like paddocks for sowing.
    They were just beginning, like the country itself; Holland didn’t know what to say to them.
    His daughter, she had no idea what men took and discarded, how they went about it. Without thinking, Holland had hired a man from town to help grub out some trees, a contentedly married man, known to be reliable—until Holland caught him leaning on his shovel, doing nothing but watching Ellen. Later, he saw him offering her a cigarette. Holland felt as if he himself was being violated. She had always been at his side, had grown alongside him—an extension of himself.
    Cars and trucks slowed down approaching the gate; for you never know your luck. Suitors came from all directions. If one knocked on the front door asking for his daughter, Holland was factually polite. One of them galloped up no hands on a horse! Noticing her curious smile Holland pointed out the idiot had been drinking.
    In winter she liked to spend entire mornings in the tower where it was warm and she could feed the birds. From there the scale of her father’s achievement could be seen; though when she took off her clothes and felt like an orchid, the all-over warmth opening the petals of her body, she became conscious of her nakedness mocking the laborious placement into all