Chapter Three

He was nine the first time he watched a man make money out of nothing, and he never entirely came down.

Neville took him to the saleyards at Glen Innes on a Thursday in autumn. Cold enough that the steam came off the cattle in sheets. The men stood along the rails in oilskins with their hands in their pockets, and above the pens, on the catwalk, walked the auctioneer.

His name was Reg Tolley. A small man in a big coat with a voice that came out of him like a chainsaw starting. He walked above the pens, above the men, above the cattle, and he talked.

Jamie stood at the rail and watched a pen of fourteen mixed-breed weaners come in. They were not good cattle. Even at nine he could see they were not good cattle — narrow through the hip, badly weaned, and one of them had a weeping eye.

Reg Tolley looked down at them and said:

"Now. Here's a line I like."

And the extraordinary thing — the thing that permanently reorganised the architecture of Jamie McIntyre's brain — was that the men at the rail leaned forward.

Grown men. Men who had been buying cattle for forty years. Men who could see the weeping eye as plainly as he could. Reg Tolley said here's a line I like, and the whole rail moved half an inch toward the pen, and the price went up eleven cents.

Jamie watched the rest of the sale without moving.

He watched Tolley take a pen of genuinely good Herefords and spend less time on them than on the weaners, because the good ones sold themselves and the attention was better spent elsewhere. He watched him drop his voice to bring the room in, and lift it to close. He watched him look at one particular buyer at one particular moment and say nothing at all, and the buyer nodded.

On the drive home Jamie said, "Dad. Those weaners weren't any good."

"No."

"But they went for more than ours did."

"That's Reg for you."

"How much does Reg make?"

Neville thought about it. "He'd be on commission. Two, two and a half per cent."

And Jamie sat in the ute with his boots not reaching the floor and did the arithmetic that would define his life.

Reg Tolley had not raised a single one of those animals. Reg Tolley had not put out a bale of hay, or pulled a calf at three in the morning, or lost a season to frost, or stood in a yard in August with his hands cracked open from the cold.

Reg Tolley had climbed onto a catwalk and described the cattle.

And for describing them he took two and a half per cent of everything.

"Dad. Why aren't you the auctioneer?"

Neville drove about a kilometre in silence.

"Because someone's got to grow the bloody cattle."

Jamie looked out the window at the country going past and thought, with total and permanent clarity:

No they don't.