The Noon Lady of Towitta by Patricia Sumerling

up animals they killed and taking out their entrails, at first to inspect them but then because it gave them something to do. When they became more confident of what they were doing, they ran around with bloodied entrails to frighten Bertha.
    There were other aspects of death that neither of them could understand. Mother and Father confused them when talking of Heaven, telling the boys that creatures didn’t go to Heaven like Pauline had because they had no soul. This was a puzzle. Then Mother and Father told them of the hideous place where bad people went. A place named Hell. So August and Willy spent a lot of time wondering which members in the family would go to Hell. I told them, ‘You two will go there if you don’t stop killing innocent creatures.’ But then I confused them further by telling them they need not fear going to Hell because they were already living in it with Father.
    August knew he and Willy weren’t like their older brothers Frederick and Heinrich. When they had been around, life wasn’t quite so bad for August and Willy because Father left them alone while he bullied the older boys. And before the two eldest ran away the four boys had enjoyed good times together. They had teased August and Willy all the time, but in fun. How the younger boys missed their brothers! They showed them how to hunt and kill, to fence, chop wood, and most of all how to keep out of the way of bad-tempered people. Our family was made up of bad moods or cold silences. Horrid things happened in our family. When August and Willy were much older and their big brothers were settled at a cattle station in the far north of South Australia, they returned to rescue them, taking them away on a train to some place in the desert. Later, all the brothers changed their names and spent much of their adult lives in the saddle where they were able to forget their unhappy childhoods at Towitta. Who could blame them?
    Bertha seemed to cause trouble just by being around. She was spirited, and oh so boisterous – cheeky too. She simply got on my nerves. Yet whereas August was clobbered for insolence, as Father called it, she escaped punishment for far more serious acts of disobedience. Pauline seemed able to calm Bertha, August and Willy too, but I seemed to seethe all the time. At times when they talked to me I’d be far away lost in my own thoughts. I laughed a lot when Pauline was alive, but that stopped when she died. Pauline and I had been as thick as thieves, as were Willy and August, and Frederick and Heinrich. But Bertha was on her own.
    After Pauline died the house fell into a stony silence except when someone was losing their temper, which seemed to be a daily occurrence. Bertha tried to move into the space near me made empty by Pauline’s death, but I kept the precocious child at a distance. Bertha thought if she followed me around I’d give in to her. She seemed to want to get inside my thoughts all the time.
    I was the most nervous, even more so than Willy. I was prone to nightmares and sleepwalking. It took a lot of noise to wake Willy and August in the barn, but even they were woken at times by my blood-curdling screams and clung to each other for safety. My nightmares were so frightening that in the hour before bed I paced the floor anxiously. At times Mother and Father would try to calm me down, sometimes by shouting at me, ‘Oh for goodness sake, girl, settle down. Read from the good book and take comfort from it.’
    Mother made me sleeping draughts from her herbal brews during the worse times, but they only made my dreams more vivid. When my sleepwalking was at its worst, Father locked me in the shed for my own safety. I told them the shed breathed like it was alive and full of witches. So although I was prevented from wandering off, August and Willy had to put up with my mournful wailing and sobbing in terror. They sympathised with me because they often frightened each other with