Sugar Town

by Robert Nicholls

  “Well, you know that that’s what your name means. Asael . . . God strengthens. So I guess she was just telling you, you know, that strength is important. It’s something she would’ve wanted for you. Probably for all of us. And that it’s not just physical. Not just muscles and stuff. Some of it’s in your head and you have to try not to be frightened.”

  “Like frightened of dying?”

  “More like frightened of living, I expect.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “No, well! I’m not surprised.”

  He went quiet then for a bit and I thought he was probably okay so I rolled back over. Bridie was back in her bedroom. I could hear her rummaging and I could just tell she had the memory box out. We called it the memory box but it was a dilapidated shoebox, really. It had been there forever. Brooks Brothers sandals, it once held, according to the covering advertisement. Singapore Pink, plastic, size eight: a kid’s size. Just shows how badly in need that house was . . . of a good clean-out!

  In times past, opening that memory box had been a weekly ritual for us. Bridie’d drag out old letters and clippings and read them to us, then cry, then read them again and cry again. For a long time, we used to cry with her but, for me, it was mostly just to keep her company. Eventually I realised she didn’t need me, so I stopped and took to just waiting quietly.

  It had been a long time. Her getting it out was what made me realise she’d had ‘the dream’. We should burn that memory box, I thought – and everything in it! Ironic, considering what was to happen only three days on. I was drifting on those thoughts when Asa’ suddenly started in again.

  “Genuflecta?”

  “What?”

  “Why are you wearing a bra?”

  “It’s a trainer, nerd-boy. I’m getting used to the idea, that’s all.”

  “So you got boobs then?”

  “Course I got boobs, you idiot. Huge juicy ones just like Bridie. Which is why I’m wearing a TRAY-NER and disappear when I turn sideways. Now shut up and go to sleep!”

  “Can I touch one?”

  That was enough. I pulled my knees up between us and kicked him out. In fact, I wound up having to push him all the way out of the room. I fully expected Bridie to jump up and order him back to his own bed but, instead, her light went out. Which was strange because usually she got between us straight away when we fought, being all about peace and reconciliation, as she was. When she didn’t come out, Asael went instantly back on sickness alert.

  “Something’s wrong!” he whispered. “I knew it!” And confirmation came straight away – a gasp of breath and the muffled sound of crying.

  Oh crap, I thought. And though I was inclined to pretend I hadn’t heard, nothing else would suit Asael but that we go in. Which we did and we crawled in either side of her and just about got her to the point of talking when a light flashed through the window from outside. We all looked at the same time and we all saw it, streaking across the sky. As though that was the very moment Queenie, the space thing, had been waiting for – for us all to be together and quiet. So we could see her long fall come at last to an end. In a spot, as it turned out, that Asa’ and I were to become far too familiar with for comfort.

  “Holy Crap!” I heard myself say. “What was that?”

  * * *

  As I said earlier, it was crazy how many people, like us, were awake at four on that particular morning. These are the ones you need to know about.

  * * *

  First there was Kevin Truck. Kevin isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool local Sugar Town guy. But when he came to town and opened The Harmony Bakery, Rita and Gramma Gracie were still alive and the Reverend was still here and neither Asael nor I were born yet. So that’s a long time.

  Kevin’s fifty-ish, short and wrinkled and he always smells like new bread or cinnamon; like a man you could inhale. He’s the only black guy who lives in Sugar Town which, it turns out, matters to some people. And he’s gentle and clever and funny but his most important quality – the one that got him completely tangled up in my family’s woes, in ways that not everyone appreciated – is that he’s just a very lovable guy. Even Bridie, in her shy-of-men kind of way, can’t help but love Kevin. You might be surprised to learn (I know I was!) that being loveable is a quality that can get a person into heaps of strife! Not a problem I’ll ever have to deal with, happily!

  Anyhow, Kevin saw the space thing come down because he was, at that moment, just opening the back doors at the bakery, starting his day’s work.

  Second there was Johnathon Cranna. If every town’s got a favourite son, Johnathon Cranna, at whatever age he was – maybe forty – was Sugar Town’s. He had money. He had property. He had this way about him that just wafted importance. And he was way handsome; gorgeous, in fact. Not that I particularly knew him beyond the ‘hello-nod’ that small town people are inclined to exchange with everybody. I don’t think we’d ever actually talked before the week in question. And I never expected anything more because, after all, he was him and I was me. We shared a corner of the planet but that didn’t mean we moved in the same universe.

  I don’t know why Johnathon was awake in his fine bachelor’s pad in his own Grand Central Hotel. Maybe he hadn’t been to bed yet, free-wheeling man-about-town that he was. I like to picture him waking up and blinking at the clock, which blinks right back at him. 4:00, it says. Can’t sleep, eh? Well check this out! And bam! Just like that, Queenie winks by outside the window.

  “What the . . . ?

  As I say, I don’t know why he was up, but I know he saw it.

  The third and fourth to see it were Garlic and Rosemary. Well, Garlic was blind, so he couldn’t have actually ‘seen’ it, but I’m counting him because I’m betting that he didn’t actually ‘miss’ it either. And you have to know that Rosemary saw it! First because their place was the closest building to the spot where it landed, them living right on the edge of Alf Caletti’s cane paddock. And second because they’re goats and Amalthea says goats can see the wind.

  I just know they’d have raised their heads and pricked up their ears. ‘Hear that?’ one of them would have goat-talked to the other. Louder and louder, then WHOOSH! Probably there was a bump. Maybe the house shook a bit. Rosemary gets to her feet to see if Amalthea’s okay. Amalthea’s breathing is shallow and regular. Rosemary sees her by starlight that’s filtering through the window. Her hair, showing those chemical-red tints, trembles in the breath of the fan. She’s asleep. Amalthea sleeps the sleep of the fearless!

  Garlic’s clouded, blind eyes turn toward Rosemary and she touches her nose to his. ‘She’s okay. Nothing for us goats to worry about. Go back to sleep.’ Never suspecting that events had been set in motion; that they would both die in the next few days, (though only one of them would stay dead).

  The fifth one to see the space thing, one who, incredibly, was Johnny-on-the-spot where it came down, was Isak Nucifora. Isak was one of those men who stay around so long their lives become kind of mythological. Once he was this and once he did that! What he was now was a bitter, unrepentant alcoholic and what he did now was snarl amongst people with all the charm of a Tasmanian Devil.

  Since we’re talking about dreams, though, here’s a curious thing about Isak. After I got to know him he told me that, right up to and including that night, October 18, 2008, the night before Harvest Festival Weekend, he hadn’t dreamed a dream in over a decade of nights! Which I found strangely sad! Though, when I found out the truth behind some of the things people reckoned he’d done, I also found it pretty amazing!

  “Just goes to show you, girlie! The feckin’ booze . . . she can kill ye from the inside out or the topside down. Both ways work.” That’s how he talked.

  Another thing he told me was that, at whatever age he was (somewhere in his seventies, I’d guess) he’d arrived at a place where he owed no one, feared no one, believed no one and had mostly forgotten that he ever loved someone. I remember that clearly because, at the age of thirteen, before Ha
rvest Festival Weekend, it was a stance I was working on for myself! Parts of it, it turned out, were alarmingly true for Isak. Realistically, I guess none of it was true for me. The last part definitely wasn’t true for either of us. Especially not after Queenie arrived on the scene.

  As he told it, at four A.M., he was rolled in his swag, beneath a tall poplar gum, only half a kilometre beyond the last house of the town. He’d spent the early part of the evening shooting ‘roos on a contract for Alf Caletti. Pest control – that’s how he made his living and still does! One shot per ‘roo. He reckons it’s like someone switching off a light. “It’s the world, then fuckin’ nuthin’. That’s all.” It’s a way, he reckons, he wouldn’t mind going himself, when his time comes.

  Anyhow, he’d drunk his over-proof dinner and lay down to watch the stars. He was thinking, he claims, about all the ways that death finds people. And the ways that, sometimes, people find death. And he was taking stock of what things he might’ve left undone in his life. It’d been on his mind for days, he says – a premonition of something about to end. Which explains why he’d brought his swag out when home was near enough to walk to.

  So he was lying there, awake, with his arm over his eyes and these weird old thoughts duck-diving through the alcoholic fug in his mind, when suddenly, there was this tremendous buzz and yoick and howl somewhere up in the sky! He lifted his arm an inch and saw a trail of phosphorescence flickering on the air straight above him, followed immediately by a bumping and banging and squawking in the near distance, like a ghost cane bin falling off a set of ghost tracks. Having no idea what to make of it, he put his arm back over his eyes and stayed where he was, studying on that yammer which, he says, didn’t fully die out until just before dawn.

  Only then did he rise, rolling his swag and testing the wind with a long stop-start pee in a vaguely northerly direction. He sucked the last ounce of whisky from his bottle, gathered up his gear and loaded his rifle. And, ready at last, he began to walk. Two hundred metres away, he found small branches newly skinned from the tops of the trees. At four hundred metres, he saw a large branch hanging from the mid-way point of a big old paperbark. At six hundred metres, he entered a paddock of mature cane – Alf Caletti’s cane – following a swath of bent and smoking stalks.

  Chapter 1 – The Parade (Friday)

  I was still in Bridie’s bed when I woke up. So was Asa’, spread out like a starfish, but Bridie was up, clicking around in the kitchen. It was a great room, Bridie’s room; big and airy. It used to be Rita’s and the Reverend’s long ago; a room where secrets were whispered and, I suppose, we kids conceived. Now, with them gone, it was still the cosiest corner of the house.

  I rolled out, bumped my feet on something and looked down to see the memory box. And dropped beside it was a letter, much folded and faded. ‘Hello!’ I thought. ‘You must be the one that made her cry in the night!’ And I popped it open for a read. Why not? As far as I knew, we’d been through all the letters together heaps of times before, so it wasn’t like I was snooping. This, however, turned out to be one I’d never seen.

  It was dated June 12, 1994 – just a month before Asa’ was born – from the Reverend to Rita. Rita and Bridie and little two-year-old me were all in Brisbane that June, and had been since Christmas, staying with someone who I obviously couldn’t remember because I was too young and Bridie couldn’t remember because it was lost in her ‘blank spot’. Neither of us even knew why we were in Brisbane, beyond the obvious possibility that Rita might have had trouble with the pregnancy. Typical Asael – uncomfortable, even in the womb!

  Anyhow, I read the letter through twice, getting more puzzled and more annoyed each time. Because apart from the expected ‘mum-and-dad-newsy’ stuff – (sermons he was writing, neighbours he was visiting, a commendation of Bessie Crampton, who was just starting her long period of caring for the McFarlane family) – beyond those things, I had no clue what it was about!

  ‘As for our “problem”, (the most confusing bit said) no one understands your bitterness more than I. I can only give you the same answer I’ve given your mother (Rita’s mother – that’s Gramma Grace, who got murdered) who, I might add, continues to storm about the town like a wild thing. (Amazing to think we once had someone in our family who could ‘storm about like a wild thing’!) Of course, there’s no denying the terrible nature of this deed! And our longing for retribution cannot be questioned. But you are not here and don’t see Sugar Town as I do.

  I’ve battered the congregation for months now, as you’ve asked, and you of all people, Rita, know the power of my pulpit. No one mistakes my message. I preached from Romans this week: ‘They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh, but they that are after the Spirit do mind the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death.’ And I do believe that, in response, the people strive with their individual souls. But the striving yields nothing. As a community, they’ve closed ranks on the matter!

  Johnathon Cranna (of all people) has been to see me! I know he’s never been part of the congregation. I’m not even certain that he’s a believer! But he’s a young man with an undeniable understanding of the town. He confides in me that the people are at their wits’ ends with my demands. They are, he assures me, doing everything in their power to atone, and he warns that that effort must be enough for now. (As an example, he has organised a commission for a beautiful new blue gum cross to be erected over the church’s entryway!)

  I think I must believe him, Rita! In no small part because I know that God tests and tries his vessels in many ways. Surely this test is as much for the people of Sugar Town as it is for us! Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour? So we must pray for our neighbours, Rita, and also for ourselves, that we all may achieve His mystery

  And my decision is this. We will take it as a sign of blessing that God has blocked out both the memory of the past and the understanding of the present. We will raise this new child – yours and mine – to be strong; to hold his faith high above the swirling waters. And the rest, we will leave to God, who makes all things happen. I tell you this plainly, Rita, as I have told your mother. I will not further alienate this congregation by continued recriminations. You are to stop asking it of me. This is our cross to bear and bear it we shall. Reconcile yourself to it, Rita.’

  The letter finished with another Biblical quote: ‘If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for battle? Corinthians 14, 8,’ and ended with, ‘Yours in the strength of God, Jacob.’

  Okay, well, bits of it I could guess at. The ‘new child’, obviously, must be Asael – Asael, yet to be born, yet to be named. The ‘blocking out the memory’ thing had to refer to Bridie and the cross that Johnathon Cranna organised is still there, over the church. And the snotty, arrogant tone was, in my mind, authentically the Reverend. So yes, some of it did make a kind of sense. But the stuff about the ‘terrible deed’ and the need for ‘atonement’ meant nothing.

  It had become increasingly strange to me, how Bridie nurtured her delusions about the Reverend; like he was the biblical Jacob – wise, righteous, noble and beyond questioning. Not the one who stole his brother’s blessing but the one who fought a fight with God. It was a fight she seemed to think he’d not yet abandoned, even though he’d clearly abandoned us. Us and the whole town! How could he be beyond questioning for my sister when, for me, questions were all he was worth?

  I took the letter to the kitchen and dropped it on the table.

  “What’s this?”

  In response, she told me that she’d had her old repeated nightmare: the whole ‘little girl and big doors and terrible weight and pushing the pain away’ thing that we’d already talked about ad nauseum heaps of times in the past. And the new bit – the voice: ‘Reconcile yourself to it, Rita.’

  “I don’t know! It’s not like I recognised the voice! But the words reminded me of the ending of this letter. So
I dug around in the memory box and found it. That’s all. Just a coincidence, I expect.”

  I was totally good with it being a coincidence. Frankly, I was over her dreams and couldn’t wait for the day when she was, too. But the fact that she’d hidden a letter from me was something else! I mean I knew that her memory was full of holes but that didn’t give her the right to create holes in mine!

  “Okay well, I’ve never seen this letter before! Why’s that? And what’s all this stuff about a terrible deed and atonement? What’s all that about?”

  “I don’t know, Ruthie! Some old argument going on in the town back then.”

  “A family argument? Is that why we were in Brisbane? Were they splitting up or something?”

  I kept picturing Rita being pregnant up to her ears, away from home and getting these heart-breaking, self-important messages from her husband.

  “Of course they weren’t splitting up! They were in love – deeply in love – having another baby! He’s a strong man, Ruthie, and those words . . . they’re just the language of his calling, that’s all! For goodness sake, where do you get these ideas?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, Bridie! I guess I get them out of my over-active imagination! And now and again from family letters that’ve been hidden from me!”

  I suppose I went overboard a bit. I accused her of being sneaky and untrustworthy and not giving me credit for having any brains at all. I insisted that I had a right to know what quarrel had occurred between our parents and the citizens of Sugar Town and she insisted that, if such a thing once existed, it no longer did, so it no longer mattered. Dredging up the past, she said, was no way to complement the present.

  “And anyhow, as you well know, Ruthie, I don’t remember those times! I don’t know what those references were about! Which is probably why I didn’t bother showing you the letter! Okay? Because I knew you’d blow it out of proportion! Anyhow, I thought none of this mattered to you!” she stomped. “Little Miss ‘Who Cares!”