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when he’d say things he didn’t mean.” She sighed then and looked as tired as I think I’d ever seen her. “He was a good man, Charlie, up until your mother left. He was never the same after that. Too proud, I think, to admit he wished things were different.”
    It was quiet then, and I turned the next page. It had tear marks where a photo had once been, but was later ripped out. As did the next page, and the one after that.
    I assumed those were of my mother.
    The last entry was a picture of me, probably four years old, holding a fish that was half my size, wearing too-big riding boots. I was grinning like the happiest kid on the planet. A kid that didn’t know his world was about to be forever changed.
    Trav put his hand at the back of my neck and leaned in, not to look at the picture, but to be closer to me. “Do you remember that?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “Nope.” Then I looked at the photo again. “I think I remember those boots, though.”
    Travis laughed. “Yep. You’re gay alright.”
    I nudged him with my elbow but chuckled. Next was the scrapbook. It was the same age, pages yellowed and dusty. Pasted inside were newspaper clippings, some photos of me, some just mentions. “You used to do bull riding?” Travis asked.
    “Yep. Up until I was twelve and broke my wrist in two places.” I’d mentioned to him before that I’d broken my wrist just before my dad was due to go some important meeting. “My dad said no more rodeos after that.”
    Some of the clippings were about Sutton Station, some were directly about me doing something with the School of the Air. “It wasn’t your normal kind of school,” I explained. “There ain’t no team sports, no after-school activities or anything like that when the closest kid was two hundred and fifty kilometres away. Give or take.”
    Travis shook his head. “Such a different childhood than me,” he said.
    “It was pretty great,” I admitted. “Riding bikes, horses, chasing bulls… being chased by bulls.”
    Ma pointed to her hair. “See these greys?” she said, her eyebrows raised. “Every single one of them is from something he did.”
    There were cut-outs ranging from me bein’ little right up to my teen years. The last clipping wasn’t stuck in, just folded and pressed between two pages, and was from only a few years ago.
    From what I could tell, it looked like it had been cut out of the Beef Farmers Association magazine, just like the one we got the other day with my face on the front. Except this was just text, an interview, it seemed, with my father.
    He talked of the last stock prices being a little lower than he’d have liked, but the season had been okay. Then as the conversation turned to family matters, the interviewer noted,
    “Charles Sutton spoke of his son proudly, saying he was studying Agriculture in Sydney. ‘As much as we can learn from living the land, the future is in education,’ he said. ‘Charlie will be a better farmer, better than what I could ever be.’
    The interviewer had joked, wondering if a young man would come back to the outback after tasting city life. Charles Sutton laughed like it was an inside joke. ‘It’s a hard life, no one would argue that. But ask any one of us—we wouldn’t have it any other way. Charlie will be back. Not because he’s obligated, but because he loves it.’
    ‘You must be very proud of your son,’ the interviewer prompted. Charles Sutton answered with one resounding word. ‘Very.’”
    I read it. And then I reread it. And I swallowed back tears while Travis and then Ma read the article. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Was he lying when he said that? Why would he lie to them? Why would he say those things? They weren’t true.”
    “Charlie,” Travis murmured. “They were true.”
    I shook my head. “He said the opposite to me. He told me. Ma was there, so was George. They heard what he said.”
    Ma frowned. “Oh, love.”
    Travis, undeterred, took my