by Garry Disher
Thank you for your last. It sounds pretty clear to me that the Government doesn’t have a clue concerning the man on the land. The Pastoral Industry has always delivered the goods and will do so very much better if not mucked about by all the form-filling that has to go on in wartime.
Anna could hear her uncle’s voice in her head as she read the letter; he spoke then as he did now. Her father liked to say: Your mother’s brother had a good war. Did her father have a bad one? His heart beat hot and cool in his diary:
28 April 1944. I await Eleanor’s letters with the deepest longing. They sustain me, and as one mailcall after another fails to bring me the scrappiest communication from her I want to slink away like a dog and howl my homesickness at the jungle. 2 May 1944. We are surrounded here by Nips, as far as can be gathered thirty thousand, so why the delay, why no attempt to break through our lines? The odd one will slip through the lines to steal our boots or tucker, which are far superior, or set a shell to explode inside a tent of sleeping men. Two flushed out yesterday, a sabotage patrol. One emerged from behind a latrine, hands in the air, and got a rifle butt to the head for his pains. The other ran into a drain and would not come out again, so our chaps poured aviation fuel into the drain and tossed in a match or two.
Anna repacked the diary, replaced the shoeboxes. At the end of the decade, with a slump in prices, a credit squeeze, a couple of dry seasons, Grandfather Ison said: What we need is another war. He meant a war like the Korean War, when wool fetched a guinea a pound and even a sibling-divided family property like Isonville earned money to burn. Anna was disposed to hate a war that threatened to take Lockie from her, but the ballot was years off, months off yet, so she stored her anxiety somewhere at the edges of her mind. Besides, there was no one to shake it loose—certainly not the women in Women’s College, wearing their pleated skirts and white ankle-socks. What finally did shake her was a studied act of loathing on the homebound train after her exams. A smiling boy no older than her was making his way through the carriages, talking to those who returned his smile, leaving broadsheets on the empty seats: ‘Stop the Country to Stop the War’. Anna smiled back and called him by name. His father had shorn the sheep at Isonville and was still her father’s shearer on the six-forty acres, a man who stood for Labor against the sitting Member in election after pointless election. They talked briefly, and the boy moved on. Almost at once he was there again, backing up past her seat, one supplicating hand raised to protect his chest from the men who were advancing on him, spitting hate and mad anger. Freedom of speech, he said, but they ground his leaflets and bumper stickers into the floor and finger-jabbed his ribs. Leave him alone, Anna said, and one man, beer-fed and knotted with hate, leaned his face into hers: What’s it to you, slag? Pure, useless, helpless indignation rose in Anna and she pursued the pack, which shrugged her off and trampled over the boy, tossing him aside. She helped him to stand, then sit, peering at his damp eyes and dust-smudged face. Animals, she said, but he shrugged and smiled lopsidedly: Oh well. It was as if he knew too much about the world. Anna knew too little, and what she was beginning to know she couldn’t put a name to, but she did know that it was fierce in her heart—fiercer, when the boys from home began to die. When her son was born she made it a rule: no guns, no uniforms, no war toys. But what was the point? She saw the crazy light in his eyes, the gun in his fist and his lust for blood whenever he played with other little boys. Only three boys from Anna’s class had been spared by the ballot from fighting in Vietnam. One of them was Chester Flood. When Anna met up with Chester again, a part of her hoped that his good luck might rub off on her. The other part sank into his arms, forgetting everything. Chester was a relief from the Jaegers. He was a beautiful, bold, unnerving, quicksilver lover, a reminder of the love she had lost. She has never forgotten those distorted faces on the Pandowie train. She sees them from time to time, most recently on the evening news, chin-jutting, spitting in the faces of women attempting to lay wreaths commemorating the rape of women in wartime. Anna telephoned the little house in North Adelaide: Is Becky all right? Was she hurt? A little shaken, Meg replied, spitting chips, but basically okay. More and more women will rise to the position of prime minister or president in the years to come, and some of them will propose or wage war. Anna will listen to the arguments—a woman like that is a traitor to her kind; a warlike disposition isn’t the exclusive province of men—and find little satisfaction or relevance in either position. The point is, she will say, war makes us all hateful.
Fire
Drought, pestilence, fire. There was a summer heralded by unwanted December storms, which chased one another in from the west, flipping the Showalter Park Cessna onto its back, stimulating the wild grasses, pinching the wheat crops where they stood. When the sun reappeared in January, bringing a long run of summer heat, it was too late—the government silos brimmed with worthless grain and Isonville lay tinder dry, wide open to the first spark. What were you doing out there? Anna demanded. Hugo stood sullen and mute. She shook him. His pocket rattled. You’ve been playing with matches again. Hugo threw his forearm over his eyes and shrank back: Don’t tell. But why should Anna tell? She wanted what he wanted. Show me, she said, and he dropped his arm, and relaxed, and gradually the lineaments of his mania reappeared and he turned and led her through the grass, away from the house with its knowing eyes behind the candy-stripe noonday blinds. They had been taught to strike away from the body. It’s gone out, Anna said, staring at the match on the ground—but it hadn’t, the sun had robbed the tiny flames of colour, that’s all. Then, before their eyes, the flames had shape and colour, eating swiftly through the grass, leaving ashen shapes like black and grey after-images in the dirt. Hugo danced at the edges, panicky, elated: Don’t let it get away! She felt it, too, a fire-lick in her belly. That was on Isonville. No playing with fire on their six-forty acres, where everything was precarious. When the little Austin truck had had its day, her father didn’t dump it in the creek or sell it to a wrecker but stood a two-stroke pump, hoses and a couple of 44-gallon drums of dam water on the tray and called it his fire plant. One late February evening, when the superheated air had been gusting for forty-eight hours without a break, Anna saw her father stop in his tracks, tip back his head, and sniff the wind. I don’t like it, he muttered. She was halfway across the yard with him, Kip dancing around their feet, tormented by the flap of mutton in his hands. It’s a bad one, he said, moving on to the kennel and the chain. Anna paused for a moment in the darkness, spooked now, the night assuming lost cries and flickers around her. She followed the jerking torch into the shed. She wanted to know what it was her father had seen or heard or smelt on the wind, but then she came upon him in one of his old, comforting postures, down on one knee, crooning as he clipped the chain to Kippy’s collar, and the world righted itself again. They returned to the house, arm in arm, discussing her coming year in the city. The call to save the town came at one o’clock in the morning. Pandowie, nineteen miles away, with a fireglow in the black hills behind it like a war, or hell, or a city of brawling nightclubs. They had scarcely reached Dead Man’s Corner in the little Austin when Channel 7 waved them down. Lose any stock or property, anyone hurt, anyone killed? reporters wanted to know, swarming around the truck. Anna’s father stared at them, a terrible stare. Finally he snarled: We’re here, the fire’s way the hell over there, you work it out. Ghouls. Morons. A little village of headlights and trestle tables had been set up in a dry creek bed in a forgotten gully deep in the hills, and for the next twelve hours Anna and her mother helped to make sandwiches and mugs of tea. The men were called the menfolk. They drove in, dog-tired, stopped for a while, drove out again. Anna stared after them, dreaming that she stood on a tilting deck, hosing down the flames, but she liked it with the women, too, a place where she heard things she realised she was hungry to hear. One day in August, Lockie drove down to the city to show her his call-up notice. Burn it, she said, stung into taunting him by the expression in his eyes, his queer,
dreamy pride and hunger, his bitten, angular, country fingers. Burn the fucking thing. She made to snatch it from him: Here, give us it. You’re sick, he said, jerking away from her, they’ve twisted your mind, and suddenly ugliness and struggle were there in the room with them. When Wesley Showalter paid Sam to cut up and burn a massive pine tree that had split and collapsed in heavy winds, Anna took the children to see the bonfire. Suddenly she remembered Hugo, his matches, and anxiously searched the faces of her children as they watched the flames. Nothing abnormal; they hadn’t inherited that mania. The flames reduced the old tree to a bed of coals and a wall of heat. Anna stood watching with her children. Behind them the stud cattle watched. Still smoking, Michael said, two days later as they made the school run on the sunken road. And the cows and heifers were a few metres closer. On the third morning they saw the cattle standing around the ashy remains like spokes in a wheel, facing out, tails up, squirting long, hard and steamily upon the coals. It must be nature, Anna said, and it became something to giggle about over the years. Anna had assumed that she was done with fiery love. That part of her life was over and it had been fiery enough to last her forever, all that passion and pain. Someone solid and dependable, that’s what she’d needed after Lockie died, and that’s what she’d got in Sam Jaeger. But the body mends, or some states are temporary, for she woke up one day wanting to burn again. It was a disappointment she hadn’t counted upon, Sam’s muted needs. Companionship was all very well, but it was hard to let go of her need for passion. And where was the companionship now, anyway? Along with his emotional and sexual thrift, Sam was obsessive, he couldn’t sleep, he was eaten up inside with hatred for his father. Anna is writing about fire for the town’s Jubilee history: The Ngadjuri used fire to regenerate the scrubland. George Catford, founder of the Pandowie Lode, died when he fell, intoxicated, into an open fire. Fires burned in the mine shafts before the waters came. Fires lay waste to our livelihoods. We are forged in fire. As she writes, she wonders if anyone is interested. When Anna stays with Meg and Rebecca in the city, they might return from a draughty concert hall on a wintry night and stand before the gas heater like the three monkeys. Rebecca says that this is the only time she can see the benefit of wearing a dress, for she is able to bunch the skirt around her waist and roast the backs of her thighs. Anna will have central heating in her house beside the sea. A thermostat will cut in and out and warmed air will whisper in all the rooms. Bushfires on the evening news, that’s the closest she will get to naked flames when she is old, and she will never be quite warm enough.
School
During the course of each long summer, Anna and Hugo pushed at the boundaries on their bicycles, drawn farther and farther away from Isonville by unanticipated bush tracks, gates, mine shafts and washaways, yet always they returned to the old school ruin on the sunken road, where the spirit of their mother still moved within the crumbling classroom walls. Nettles and licheny stones covered the rotting floorboards. A tilting chimney, a door frame, two window frames, three half walls and rudimentary roofbeams suggested the shape and dimensions of the old school, while the mind’s eye, and their mother’s kitchen-table stories, supplied the rest. Faded blackboard paint remained on one of the walls, and whoever those final pupils had been they had left a perfectly proportioned yellow alphabet across the top and the twelve-times table down one side. The desks were long gone. Only the schoolmaster’s residence remained intact. Showalter Park sprawled a few hundred metres away across the lucerne flats, the homestead screened by lawns and a box-hedge from a chapel, a woolshed, a dairy and a scatter of stone workers’ cottages, shearers’ quarters, barns and workshops, set among red gums, pines and weeping willows. A sufficient number of cooks, servants, stablehands, stockmen, blacksmiths, well-sinkers and gardeners and their families had lived on the property before the First World War to warrant the school. Showalter Park had been a self-supporting feudal enclave, and the Showalters and their practices were considered, by Government House aides-decamp, to be a suitable diversion for circulating earls and minor princesses. By the early thirties, when the Showalter boys were riding to the school in a horse and sulky driven by the children from Isonville, the school belonged to the Education Department. Anna’s mother tapped her finger on an old photograph: It was the Depression. There were only ten pupils left. Me, your Uncle Kitch, Wes and Rex Showalter, the overseer’s kids, a couple of sharefarmers’ kids. Kitch and I would collect the Showalter boys and park the sulky in that little stonewalled paddock at the back of the school and let the horse go. Rain or shine, five days a week. By jingo, those frosty mornings could bite. I get chilblains just thinking about it. Habits of contempt and cruelty at the high school enabled Anna and the others to ignore Chester Flood. He had no parents; he lived at the convent; he had the skinny, raw-boned cast of someone born to poverty, dirt and cunning. Five out of ten; nought out of ten; two out of ten. Twice he was put back a year. Ink stained his fingers and sleeves; his trousers were holed and shiny, revealing his hard, brown, possibly grimy flanks. Mr Wheelwright bent Chester Flood over a desk and cut him with a whistling cane. Anna stopped breathing: Chester held out until the fourth cut, then lifted his bony, martyred skull and cried out, a long, throaty cry of protest and deep, deep pain. Anna was impressed by his close and very human flesh and odour, his snuffling tears and nose-wiping misery. Yet he remained invisible, and Anna and the others saw him beaten so often that finally they failed to register that it was happening. A tutor at the university left his desk one day and crossed the room in front of Anna, saying: Let’s give ourselves some privacy here. She heard a faint snip: he’d locked his office door. She looked up and saw the heat and gleam of powerful feelings on his face. He hovered a moment, then pulled an office chair close to hers. Their knees touched, precipitating in Anna a breathless, anticipatory paralysis. He leaned close to her, vinyl squeaking under his rump. The man was notorious, and Anna waited. When his warm, dry hands picked up her wrist and kneaded the tendons in her forearm, she closed her eyes briefly and swallowed. She heard his low, goading voice through the veil of her emotions: I read your article in the student rag. What could you possibly know? You are an empty page waiting for experience to write itself across you, and the sooner the better. Have you ever had an idea of your own? That pretty head of yours is full of refectory talk, correct me if I’m wrong. Anna heard his loathing even as his warm hands crept along her compliant upper arms. When he had reduced her to tears he began to kiss her, a hundred highly charged bites and lip-pulls on her neck and earlobes. She was dependent, submissive, emotionally captive. Then the phone rang and he exhaled involuntarily and Anna smelt an old, old corruption working inside him. But still, he took her to his house in Unley and she went willingly. When Anna married and had children, one of the burdens of her existence was the interest her parents-in-law showed in the spiritual growth of their grandchildren. They were appalled to learn that the primary school did not offer religious instruction of any kind, let alone instruction in the many faiths of which they disapproved. They undertook to guide Anna’s children in spiritual matters, and soon Rebecca and Michael were clapping hands for Jesus and reading comic-strip moral tales printed on blurry cheap paper. Anna’s husband is on the Parents and Friends Committee for the high school these days, a body that quivers with responsibility now that the government has given local bodies the right to determine who will teach their young. Sam’s eyes burn: We don’t want any ratbags on the staff. What have you heard about So-and-so? he’ll ask—which Anna takes to mean: Is So-and-so left-leaning, ambiguously single or tinged with foreignness? Among the illustrations she has collected for her history of the town is a photograph of pupils outside the Showalter Park school in 1879. There are a couple of gawky eighteen-year-olds towering above the little kids. Maybe one of them is Elijah Ison, son of one of the original Ison brothers. Elijah later joined the Pandowie Social Improvement Association:
It is a grand opportunity for a young fellow from the Bush to improve himself in m
oral and intellectual matters. I recited Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard by Thomas Gray, a capital piece, and got taken to task for standing incorrectly.
Anna will regret that she didn’t finish her degree. She will enrol in the University of the Third Age and start again. It will be unkindly put to her that women undertake further study in order to leave their husbands, but Anna will need no such artificial means. Died when he was fifty-three. Heart attack.
