The Sunken Road Page 6

  Soil

  The shepherd boy’s headstone squatted on the bank of Ison’s Creek as if it were a natural stony eruption, not something planted there by a grieving father. Wind and rain had stripped the nearby soil away, leaving an impression of pebbles and coarse sand held together by a poor glue of red dirt and fibrous star thistle roots, so that Anna fully expected to see the boy’s ribcage laid bare one day, or at least the box or the cloth he was buried in. Farther back from the creek a mat of grasses held the topsoil together, broken here and there by busy sheep tracks, meandering like the veins that map a drunkard’s cheeks. A risky business, Mr Wheelwright said. He tapped the wall map with his cane. The map recoiled. The children went very still, watching the cane tip trace a winding course through the mid-north, past placenames they used in conversation every day: As you can see, Goyder’s Line passes very close to Pandowie. Goyder advised that anyone who farmed east of the line did so at his peril. And he was right. You’ve all seen the stone ruins out there. It might look a picture in the spring, carpeted by wildflowers, it might look green after a fluke wet year, but it’s not sheep country, it’s not wheat country. It’s a place where dust storms rise and minerals lie buried. Anna wanted to tell him about the gold diggings in a remote corner of Showalter Park, alluvial gold washed down the creek system over the centuries, but Mr Wheelwright was writing on the board again. Did you find any, Mum? Nuggets and things? The children’s mother went faintly pink with pleasure: I remember Rex Showalter gave me a tiny glass vial of gold dust. I wish I still had it. That was the only gold I ever saw. It was a miserable place. Very little gold to begin with. The day Rex Showalter took me out there in the horse and buggy, only about a dozen men were left, trying their luck. They were living in dugouts in Noltenius Creek. Yes, holes in the creek. They’d dig a horizontal drive into the bank, leaving about four feet of soil over their heads for a roof. The more enterprising had fireplaces, with a small hole through to the surface to let the smoke out. Cool in summer, warm in winter, one man told us. He had no teeth, as I recall. They lived in faint hope, those men, but this was the Depression, no jobs around. She smiled: Your Uncle Kitch and I tried panning in Ison’s Creek once, when we were kids. No luck. But one of the original Ison brothers joined the rush to the Victorian goldfields. Apparently he found gold there but was killed on the way home, poor fellow. Grandfather Tolley had twin storerooms at the rear of the shop, groceries for the housewife, agricultural supplies for the farmer. He was an agent for superphosphate, malathion, fencing wire, sheep dip, sprays and ploughshares. It’s putting goodness back into the ground, Anna’s father said, his hands and trousers white, the air acrid, with superphosphate. The soil around here is low in nitrogen. It’s been punished pretty hard over the years. Farmed to the bone, so to speak. Sixty-seven was a dry year. What little grass was left by Christmas was stripped away by hungry teeth or chopped about by frantic hooves. The price of hay quadrupled. It was a tired-red landscape they lived in. If you were a Kelly, there were no buyers for your wretched, starveling sheep, and you had nothing to fall back on. The council provided the grader and the bullets. Lockie did the rest, penning their two hundred ewes, then shooting them in the back of the head, while his father and the grader driver stood back and smoked and waited. First I felt squeamish and sorry, then I went on automatic pilot, now I just feel awful, a monster, a slaughterer with blood on my hands. Hush, Anna said, wrapping her arms around him. All you can see now is this mound of dirt, but to me it’s a mass-grave. Lockie, Hush. One of Anna’s tutors had a low, goading voice and a face that expressed weary contempt, the face of a man who wanted you to know that he hurt inside. Poor Anna, out of her depth. The more he expressed his loathing, the more she wanted to make him feel better. The more he made Lockie seem like a raw youth, the more she wanted his misanthropy—which could so quickly soften into need. She saw him in his study above North Terrace and let him pinpoint her guilt. He put her on a horse and in a private school and from an exclusive set. No, she protested, my family is poor, but he brushed her denials aside. He talked about superphosphate bounties, and the myth of the soil, and graziers in parliament. If someone like you is against the war, then it’s playacting, not heartfelt, he said. One day Anna saw how restless her father had become. He was fifty-five years old, a man who loved to yarn and have people around him. He sighed: I must be the only cocky in Australia who knocks off in the middle of the day to pay social calls. Anna nudged the plate of scones toward him. She laughed: I saw you less often when I was a kid! His soil-engrained hands curling around her Liberty mug; his black nails; the black fissures where he’d torn the skin on fencing wire; the horny nail stub, all that was left of his shortened ring finger. Anna realised that her father craved company, not solitude on a tractor on a hillside. He stared morosely through the dusty window at the lucerne flats on Showalter Park, his attention caught by the sprinklers, shooting jewelled arcs of water over the green. Ahhh, farming’s a mug’s game. What do you think, love? Should I take over the shop when my dad dies? He leaned forward suddenly: Ah, the schoolbus. And there’s my little Becky. Chester Flood has been convicted of misuse of clients’ funds and incarcerated in a low-security prison on the Adelaide plain. I asked for the library, he tells Anna, so they put me in the garden. I wonder where they’d have put me if I asked for the garden? The laundry, probably. He stares at his hands: Lovely soil, black, rich—not like up home. He looks at her sadly: Think of me next time you buy flowers in the Rundle Mall. More than likely I grew them. Rebecca and Meg will drop their daughter at Anna’s house for four hours every Friday afternoon. Come along, little one, Grandma’s taking you to the beach. They will sit side by side and look out upon the water, the one cramming sand into her mouth, the other running it through her fingers, thinking, thinking.

  Washing

  The laundry on Isonville abutted a wall at the rear of the big house, probing into a corner of the shrubbery that was rarely ever warmed by the sun. Low-roofed, cramped, chilly all year round. No one thought to move or modernise it, or even to clear the shrubbery—it was the laundry. A dented copper, massive cement troughs, iron taps poised like complicated birds, a washing machine that yew-yawed through the hours. In a heatwave, that’s where you found Dad, home from crisscrossing the countryside in the Stock & Station car, flat on his back on the glassy floor, Kippy in the crook of his arm, hat tipped over his face, maybe half a bottle of beer nearby. Anna and Hugo stretched out with him. All right for some, Aunt Lorna said, arriving to fetch her washing, to wheel it back through the dust to her house on the other side of the creek, sheets and trousers piled in a cane basket half the size of a bathtub, perched on a spindly, waggle-wheeled trolley. Silly cow, why doesn’t she bring the car around? Because she wants to rub it in, that’s why. She’d love to be living where we’re living. When Mrs Mac had a puncture on the sunken road, Anna watched the Kelly children watching them stranded there. All those children, Mrs Mac said. All that washing. They watched Mrs Kelly advance massively upon a line of flapping sheets and then, in a quick, curious, delicate swoon, press the fabric to her nose and overheated cheek. Poor woman, dust always blowing in from the road. Anna finished primary school and went away to her mother’s old school in the city, knowing how to rinse out her things by hand. But she saw at once that it would not do to be seen rinsing your things out by hand where everyone could see you—it admitted too much, it marked you out as somehow lower class, an unloved, furtive figure bent over a porcelain sink in a bathroom where rich girls thronged by the hundred. Anna lasted exactly one week and then she ran home. There was no washing machine in the Hammersmith house. Everyone in London uses the local laundromat, Anna wrote, in her first letter home. She was there to put Lockie’s death, put time itself, behind her, but the present intruded: It’s as if I’ve had to learn a set of new skills, a whole new routine, revolving around a tiny roomful of washers and dryers crammed between a corner pub and a fish and chip shop. There are seven of us living here and when a few loads have
mounted up we scrounge for coins, head down the street, fill two or three machines to the brim and go next door for a pint, except I have halves. An Adelaide QC restored the old schoolmaster’s residence on the sunken road, used it as a weekender for many years, then offered it for rent. It was a small, stone, coldish house, but better than anything else on offer in the district, and the rent was cheap. Anna, Sam and the children had only been there for a year when Michael was killed. He was gone from them, yet for a long time he seemed to linger nearby, always slipping away at the edge of sight. Everything Anna did reminded her that he’d been a part of her life. She might walk across the laundry floor with Rebecca’s little bundle and think: There’s not enough here for a load. Sam might plunge-snort his face and hands into a sink of water before coming to the table and she’d almost, almost, hear Michael’s glee: Do it again, Daddy. Isonville and Showalter Park were both visible from the kitchen window. Anna’s mother liked to visit, always choosing the chair that allowed her to look out upon those distant chimneys and treetops. It was an unfocussed gaze, all the focus in her mind, not her eyes: I never told you this, dear, but Kitch and Lorna had the gall to offer us the overseer’s house when your grandpa died. They couldn’t wait for us to move out. It was indecent. A clink of china, Anna pushing away her cup and saucer: You, too? Mum, when Sam fell out with his father they also offered it to us. Mother and daughter sipped their tea, elbows on the table, staring along the years. Mum, why didn’t you challenge the will? Oh no, I couldn’t do that, lawyers, a court hearing, couldn’t air our dirty washing in public. Rebecca came in from the bus, dropped her homework on the table and walked on heavy legs to the bathroom. Anna read misery and discomfort in her daughter’s stiff back: Has your period come, sweetheart? Give me your pants to wash. No, Mum, I want to do it, and Anna heard a tiny note of elation: At last. Anna whispered to her mother: Her first one. Rebecca is still small and reed-thin, a wisp in the orchestra’s string section, a speck on the stage. Her lover, Meg, intends to get pregnant sometime in the next few years. Apparently Meg has a friend who will donate his sperm. Meg and Rebecca have announced this defiantly, expecting opposition, but really, they should know better. Besides, Anna is too distracted by the image of that man knocking on their door with a syringe in his hand to object: the Brunswick Green door closing swiftly in his face, Meg assuming the missionary position on the hallway carpet, Rebecca depressing the plunger, the claggy swiftness of the whole deal. The image grows large in Anna’s imagination, and, just for a moment, until reason takes over, her skin crawls and she wants to wash her hands. She will visit the house in North Adelaide, edge past the Nappie Wash bin next to the change-table, bend to kiss her granddaughter’s damp cheek: Lovely to see you, my poppet. Especially lovely given that the locals back home think Anna is washing her hands of them, those things she’s been saying in the Chronicle.

  Dogs

  The first Kip was a border collie blessed with a sweet, alert face, a glossy black coat patched with white, and a huge boredom. He was underemployed, and he hated it. He wanted to live. His yawns were vast, prostrate, heavy with reproach. He cocked an eye from the verandah whenever Anna left the house, ready to bound in if this were an adventure that she had embarked upon, not simply another egg or firewood run. But, once a month, Grandfather Ison would visit from the city and deliver him from boredom. Wishty, wishty, wishty, Grandfather Ison whispered, a kind of sibilant secret language that Kip strained to interpret, yipping a little, eyes intent in his cocked head, just like the man talking to him. Grandfather Ison worked Kippy to the bone on useless sheep musterings that made both of them feel useful, and they returned from the paddock lathered and panting and ate huge meals at bedtime. Kip liked to patrol the stock ramp at the front gate, where letters, bread and the daily paper were lodged in a milk can marked Isonville. The family knew that he was a chaser, but they couldn’t catch him at it. One day Anna heard a horn, a thump, Kip’s infernal howl, and ran from the house with streaming hair and eyes. She found the mail contractor’s station wagon idling beside the ramp. The driver’s door was open and the contractor, stricken by Anna’s face, began a ceaseless dry-washing of his hands: No warning, love. He just ran right under the front wheels. Anna knew that her luck was running bad that day. The second Kip was a red kelpie. Rarely in his short and cranky life did he ask more of the family than food and shelter. He had a favourite spot in the slanting sun on their verandah, another on Great Aunt Beulah’s, and even when Beulah was dead and gone and Uncle Kitch and family had claimed her rooms, he continued to pad around to her part of the house every afternoon, following the sunlight. Anna didn’t know what that Ison mob had done to hurt him, but one afternoon after school she found Kippy stretched, blood-flecked and imploring, in his morning spot. She explored his coat for broomstick injuries, Aunt Lorna’s style. Kippy never ventured around the corner again. When the family moved house he claimed new places in the sun. He wasn’t interested in the six-forty acres, only in sleep, but Anna’s father took him out to the paddock anyway, for his own good. One day he emerged from the stubble, whimpering softly, proffering his paw. There was a star-thistle spine in the pad behind his claws. Anna felt that it was a kind of loving for him to need her so, and she hugged his head, overwhelmed. But Kip had run out of love and warned her off, a snarl starting low and deep in his throat. At the bleakest hour of an all-night party, Anna and two friends took a taxi back to Women’s College, smelling, at 3.00 a.m., of incense, Buddha sticks and beer. They sprawled over the seats of the taxi, dangerously bored, as ready to fall asleep as to bare exultant teeth and buck in heat if the right lover came along. You girls look like you enjoy a good time. It was a question, not a statement, and slowly they turned their heads to look at the taxi driver, a man wearing a twenty-four-hour smile crammed with gold fillings. He continued: I could take you to see something you would not believe. They watched him. There’s this woman, he explained. She does it with a dog on her hands and knees. They shrugged. It was a way of saying, So what? to the man, as if it wouldn’t mean anything for them, either, to shrug off two decades of good breeding and perform contemptuously in front of a nobody like him. The taxi driver went on: Before her husband went to Vietnam he gave her an Alsatian. He was killed over there. It’s sad, like the dog’s a substitute. But you gotta see it. I can arrange it. Ten bucks a head. Anna’s first punch grazed his cheekbone. She landed another on his ear. Five boys dead in a foreign war, her own true love gone over the sea. If Lockie were taken from her, what would she do? How would she live? Hey, Jesus Christ, get her off me, fucking bitch. Get out the cab, go on, the lot of you. Little bitch. Anna could not be consoled in the chill dawn on that dismal street. The others wrapped her in their arms and said to one another above her head: What on earth’s got into her? One day in the second year of Anna’s marriage, an exclamation of pure delight drew her to the kitchen window. Bluff was dragging Michael along the verandah by the strap of his overalls. Dog and baby seemed to regard each other as siblings, so perhaps it was inevitable. Bluff had two black paws, two brown, and her wiry coat was black flecked with fawn lights. She could not walk in a straight line and her hindquarters never kept pace with her front. Mrs Jaeger would say to Sam: I hope you know what’s going on in your house. When Bluff proved to be unmanageable around sheep, the Jaegers called in Anna’s father and the latest Kip, hoping that a trained dog would settle her. As the men watched the two dogs channel a dozen headlong ewes in the sheepyards, Anna watched the men, particularly her father, as if for the first time. She recognised clearly that she loved and admired him, a feeling reinforced later when he took her aside and said: No offence, sweetheart, Sam’s a nice bloke, but his old man’s not too bright, is he? Suddenly Anna wondered what she had done with her life, marrying into the Jaegers. There is a new Kippy in Anna’s life, her daughter Rebecca’s dog, bought as a companion for Meg’s dog. Young women and their dogs. When Anna visits and if the weather is fine they might spread blankets in the park. Rebecca likes to sit and
talk but Meg likes to scoot over the grass with a dozen other women and a dozen dogs, in full cry after a soccer ball. There was another mother there recently. Anna nodded briefly, gravely, and the other woman returned the nod, communicating everything: Your daughter, too? Today Meg’s old flatmate has come along to the park, a young woman with a husband and new baby. The husband concentrates mutely on the baby’s curls, aware that he is of no account here, today, in this company. The wife talks too brightly, too tolerantly, her eyes jumping in her head at every brushing sleeve, every footfall in the grass behind her. Anna thinks: You have a long way to go. Maybe I have a long way to go. But so do these women. Anna will retire to a unit where she may keep a dog, although she will choose to keep a cat. Its self-sufficiency will suit her. She will show her granddaughter the tiny scar, rather like a ragged fishhook on the back of her wrist, where one of the Kips had bitten her. She won’t always be certain which one, or when.