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‘I don’t want to upset you, lad,’ the older man grumbled. ‘They’ll blame me if you sink into your thoughts again.’

‘I won’t. I want to know.’

‘It isn’t much. Your father was pretty full when he shared it.’

‘Tell me.’

‘He loved your mother to distraction.’

‘I know. I thought he cared about me too, his only son.’

‘I can’t speak to that. He told me your mother came from a well-to-do family.’

Tom nodded. He’d known that.

‘And she fell in love with some bloke,’ Jonesey continued. ‘I can’t remember what he did for a living; some sort of traveller. Not a salesman, but he might have been a musician or something like that. Either way, it didn’t suit her family, according to Vern. She was forbidden from marrying him, and your father said they near locked her up to prevent her trying to run away with him. They started making arrangements for her to become engaged to the right sort, but from what Vern said, your mother was not one to be pushed around.’ Jonesy began to cough. ‘Bastard thing,’ he cursed. ‘My lungs are shot, son.’

All of what Jonesy had said was news to Tom but somehow it was like finding missing jigsaw pieces, watching and feeling them slip into their correct spots to make sense of a bigger picture. He helped his companion to sip some water. Jonesy sighed his thanks.

‘Where did she meet my father, do you know?’

‘That I do. Apparently, they met at the Royal Adelaide Show. He was there performing.’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t know he was a wizard with a whip?’

‘Ah, yes, I did know that. He used to make me hold his burning cigarette and he’d crack it out of my fingers. I wet myself once, I was so frightened.’

Jonesy chuckled and it sounded like a drain emptying.

‘But I didn’t know he performed for others,’ Tom remarked.

‘Maybe before your time, son. He did a circuit of the shows. Adelaide was his final one and that’s where he met your mother. She was in the audience with some friends who were clapping and cheering, he said, and she was like a radiant cheerleader, applauding just for him. All very romantic, I gather, because it was muddy – isn’t it always at that Adelaide show? – and without permission he picked up your mother and carried her over the puddles. He admitted to me that he fell in love with her the moment she started laughing in his arms, and before the next day was out, he had proposed.

‘He was a good-looking man, Vern, and I can imagine your mother was taken by the cowboy showman that he was. We certainly were. He used to entertain us blokes all the time with his singing, harmonica playing and whip-cracking. I once bet him my week’s wages he couldn’t knock the ash off a cigarette in my mouth with his whip.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘He suggested it! And I wanted his money.’ Jonesy laughed and got lost in another wet coughing fit. When he’d recovered he continued. ‘I didn’t get my hands on his money, of course, and he knew I wouldn’t before he took the bet. Your father snapped off that ash from fifteen yards away as neatly as if he’d stepped up and cut it off with a knife.’

Even Tom had to smile. ‘And you didn’t wet yourself?’

‘I might have done worse, actually. Lucky my trousers were brown, eh?’ He had another coughing session before they shared a grin in memory of the man.

‘How do I fit into this story, Jonesy?’

‘Ah, well. As his story went, your mother was in the family way when he married her.’ As Tom opened his mouth, Jonesy cut him off. ‘Pregnant with the other bloke’s baby,’ he qualified. ‘But it made no difference to Vern, apparently. He was obsessed with your mother. Wanted her so bad he agreed to raise another man’s son as his own. When Vern told me the story, he started laughing at the storm in your mother’s snooty family when she said she was going to marry this rough fellow from Crystal Brook in the southern Flinders Ranges. He reckoned none of her family had been further north than Prospect, which was just a few miles from the city. Anything further out to them was desert . . . unchartered land.’

He grinned at the thought. ‘Vern said they were preparing to stop the wedding at all costs until she dropped the bomb that she was with child. He said that was it – they gave up on her after that, believing it was good riddance to all of them and the problem she was posing for the family’s reputation. Her parents, especially her mother, wanted nothing to do with her any more or the potential shame she would bring. Vern married her within the week and brought her to this very town. No one else ever knew you were the other bloke’s boy.’

Tom wanted to deny it all. Wanted to rage at Jonesy, and yet everything the older man had said fit. It explained so much of what he’d not understood while growing up. He took a breath, then spoke.

‘I sensed that my mother found little to enjoy about her life out here, except me and my father, but she never complained. Not about the hardships or the fact she had to work so hard. But from the moment my mother died, Dad changed towards me. I thought it was because he couldn’t get past his grief. I was still so young, but he left me alone in the care of the station. It seemed so ruthless. He accepted jobs that took him as far from home as you can imagine and for such long periods. I was passed from person to person; all the folk around the station looked out for me. I slept in with the station hands, ran odd jobs, learned to cook for them. The family at the homestead took pity on me, made sure I had clothes, shoes, that I was taken to school until I was about fourteen. By fifteen I was a rouseabout. By seventeen I was throwing wool and by eighteen, skirting it alongside the guesser.’ Tom shook his head. ‘And all the while my father was absent. He came home from time to time, but by then we really were strangers. When he took his last long trip I was all grown up and he was an old man – and a sick one at that.’

Jonesy gave a shrug. ‘We all make our choices, lad.’

‘So he never talked about me?’