The Sunken Road

by Garry Disher

  Water

  Clean water, bore water, rainwater, fresh water, water supply, out of water, wrigglies in the water, don’t waste water, tank water, water under the bridge. The four figures circled the house—the man on the verandah roof, keeping to the capped nails where the beams ran beneath the corrugated iron, the children and the dog below him, metres out from the walls so that they could see him clearly. When he stopped, they stopped. He carried a zinc bucket and a painter’s trowel. Metal scraped against metal and Anna’s flesh crawled with it. Her father finished scooping up the rubbish in the rainwater gutter and tipped it into the bucket. Dirt, straw, petals of old paint, leaves, mud-encrusted feathers. He moved on a short distance, scraped again. The iron sheets of the main roof overlapped unevenly where they hung over the guttering, leaving points like hidden razors to snag the skin on the backs of his hands. From time to time he wiped the blood on his trousers, and Anna imagined the blood falling into the gutter, the rain washing it into the underground tank. Beside her, Kip yelped and circled in the dirt, wanting the man to come down from out of the sky where he did not belong. Hush, she said. Another, smaller, ground-level roof concealed the underground tank, an echoing chamber the size of Anna’s bedroom. Padlocked doors kept the children out but there was an open porthole in the low wall just above the ground, breathing cool, damp, ancient exhalations at them and frequently sounding a piping note deep down in the blackness. Anna knew all about water. She owned a plastic stencil of the country. You placed your pencil hard against the outside edge, starting at Cape York Peninsula, and traced around the coastline crinkles to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Scored inside the stencil was a short, hooked channel, the river system, but not long or broad enough to be considered one of the major rivers of the world, according to Mr Wheelwright. She lived in the driest state in the driest continent in the world, a fact she was not allowed to forget. Mr Wheelwright ran the tip of his cane down the wall map: Goyder’s Line. To farm outside it meant risk and heartache. Old-timers joked: I’ve been watching that cloud on the horizon there for the past ten years. Often the rains came too little or too late. Once a severe frost gripped the mid-north. Forgotten washing hung as stiff as washboards on back yard clotheslines and pipes burst, freezing the water-spray into diamond-winking ice necklaces under the early sun. An underground tank was not enough. Isonville had two above-ground tanks sitting on mossy railway sleeper stands for backup in the dry seasons. One tank was minutely holed and the seepage had calcified over the decades into a lumpish formation that invited the tongue on hot days. The children were warned not to climb into old refrigerators but they were never warned not to explore Ison’s Creek. They sent boats into the current. In winter they measured the high-water mark in the pasted grasses high on the bank, and in the drought years they trudged over the tocking dry roundstones in the creek bed. To Anna’s knowledge, flash floods had never reached as high as the headstone of the drowned shepherd boy. When the family moved to the six-forty acres they ran into water trouble. There had only been an old bachelor on the place before: A man, Anna’s father said, who was a stranger to bathwater. One narrow galvanised iron tank, scarcely big enough for an old cracked-brain bachelor let alone a family. The children went with their father to a clearing sale and came back with a second-hand rainwater tank roped to the tray of the little Austin. There was a dam in the paddock behind the house, fed by a poor suggestion of a creek. All the history seemed to vanish from Anna’s life in that salt-damp house, which had no decent creek, no grave from the last century, no line stretching from 1850 to the present. She started to go out with boys. They took her to the old mine above the town. Eyeless sheds, rusting hoppers and pulleys, nude stone chimneys, heat-buckled railway tracks, hillsides sliced open across the grain, and no trees, only wiregrass tussocks and red dirt anthills. But there were the bottomless shafts, flooded for over a century, the water as blue as sapphires. You sat in his seat and dreamed your way into the blueness, wore the blueness maybe as a dress or a ring, or plunged unheedingly into it, in a shimmering dive from the rocks, seeking the rapture of the deep, while all the time his thick fingers probed and he gave off ignitable, eye-prickling fumes of cheap aftershave. They were beefy, loose-lipped redheads and towheads, those first few boys, and they put Anna off big men for good. Anna’s end-of-year exams marked the start of the bushfire season. She always came home to swot, counting upon the familiar beat of the farm to see her through the temporary madness—feed hay to the sheep, check the bores, help mend a fence, fill the 44 gallon drums of the firefighting plant with water pumped from the dam. She lost concentration one day, framing an answer to daydreamed attacks on her stance against the war, and allowed the mouth of the inlet hose to sink into the mud. Her father jerked it out of her hands, looking at her curiously: Wake up, missy. At first, when Anna married into the Jaegers, she liked their orderliness—tidy sheds, well-oiled machinery, no weeds, a clean canvas spout on the fire water tank at the gate on the main road, clean bulk containers of diesel and petrol for the farm vehicles. That’s why she didn’t expect the car to have fuel-line trouble. Rainwater, old man Jaeger explained, pointing to the cap on the massive tank above their heads, and he proceeded to show her how to remove the fuel filter and the float bowl in the engine compartment and blow the water out. Anna was appalled: You mean each time the car stalls, or chokes when I try to accelerate out of trouble, I’m to get under here with a handful of spanners and fix it? Wouldn’t it be easier all round if you were to fix the seal on the overhead tank? Dollars and cents, girlie, the old man said. A bit of grease won’t do you any harm. Now that Showalter Park is in the hands of receivers, Shame File reporters have been snooping around, splashing the excesses over the front page of the Adelaide dailies—two 300 SEL Mercedes saloon cars, marble quarried in Italy, a spa with gold-plated taps, a ballroom with a white grand piano, not to mention the artificial lake. A swimming pool, fine, but an actual lake? Meg will have an ultrasound at eighteen weeks. The foetus, swimming in its amniotic sea, will resemble nothing so much as a cartoon figure reclining in a hammock, according to Anna. She will move to a house by the sea and Maxine will write from the Gold Coast: Why not get a place near us? But the Gold Coast isn’t Anna’s idea of the sea. She will walk shoeless on the sand where her grandmother was lost and let the water paint her feet.

  Stone

  The creek water ceased to flow, stilled into pools, and finally, in mid-summer, winked into nothing, leaving tumble-smoothed stones clustered pink, dry and testicular on the sandy bed. The stones clocked satisfyingly under your feet. When the water was high, the children sought hand-sized flakes of the serried rock that skeletoned the country around Isonville. Crouch close to the lapping water, draw back the hand, and throw, encouraging a final spin with your forefinger, and see it skip-slap across the water, finishing in a juddery display like a kind of emergency braking on the surface. The headstone of the shepherd’s son was in fact one massive flake of the same dark rock. Lichen crawled across the chiselled face, filling the grooves and channels that spelled out the boy’s name, and his fate, and the father’s appeal to God. Anna once noticed a hint of fretting where the stone leaned out of the grass. Her fingernails itched. She dug them in, pulled, and dislodged a segment of the shepherd’s prayer. Hastily she pushed it back but it failed to hold and slipped into the grass. Anna’s bad luck, bringing bad luck to others. She never touched the headstone again. Trucks came to the Isonville homestead with gravel every few years and her father helped the men shovel and smooth it along the front drive from the roadside gate to the house. Until the pastelly blue chips of stone were packed down, they seemed to choke and bind the tyres of the children’s bicycles like a river of molasses. On the six-forty acres there was no flash long driveway, just a rutted, potholed track. And, in all of the paddocks, unforgiving ranks of white quartz had been pushed to the surface by ancient movements of the earth’s plates, treacherous reefs of it concealed in the grass. Heartbreaking country. To farm it efficiently, Anna’s f
ather was forced to terrace the steep hillsides, winding his tractor and plough around the stone islands in nervy concentration, full of fear that he might topple the heavy machines, desperate not to waste an inch of the undernourished soil. Their house sat squat and solid at the base of a windy hill on which one last bent-over tree seemed to crawl for shelter behind a fringe of licheny quartz. The masons who had quarried the blocks must have been beefy, sweat-flipping, careless characters, Anna decided. The stones were all sizes and bore unmistakeable chisel and crowbar gouges. To prettify the walls the builder had cemented the gaps and scored the wet cement with orderly horizontal and vertical lines. One of the first things Lockie did was take Anna up onto the Razorback. He brought her to a cave, no more than an eye socket in the hillside. She saw lizard shapes, spearheads, stick humans, stick kangaroos bounding ahead of them. I was going around my traps, Lockie said, saw this eagle disappear, and hey presto. Anna peered deeper into the cave and saw the twigs of a nest. It won’t attack us? Wrong time of the year, Lockie said. There had been a local tribe, the Ngadjuri, according to Mr Wheelwright, but no guesses as to what had happened to them. Seven years later Anna feared that the rock paintings would be discovered by some heavy-footed actor or producer or clapper-boy or director. She sat in the car with the children and watched the cameras track Sam and the other locals as they staged a Boer charge along a down slope of the Razorback, and willed them not to roam, not to get curious. Mummy, why are you crying? Michael wanted to know. Nothing, she replied, knuckling her eyes. A memory, that’s all. When Grandfather Tolley died, Anna’s father inherited the Four Square Store and called a family conference. Anna’s mother whispered in the kitchen: Do you know what finally decided him? He was working the top paddock and first blew a tyre on the tractor, hundreds of dollars for a new one, then broke an axle of the header on the same blarmy rock. The last straw as far as he was concerned. On the afternoon of the Showalter Park field day Anna encountered dust. It lay thickly in the deepest channels of the sunken road and swirled about her windscreen. Behind her, in the back seat, Michael cried out, alarmed by a moth. Ahead of her there was nothing, only dust eddies, until the black Bentley appeared, its raised snout and arrogant headlamps bearing down on her from out of the laden air. Anna had been taught not to brake sharply on loose surfaces. She would steer her way out of trouble. She turned the wheel, planted her foot on the accelerator. But the engine faltered. Watery fuel entered the carburettor and the car kangaroo-hopped for a short distance and then they were being sideswiped by the Bentley. They rolled, the car uttering a long, protesting moan, and when it stopped and the wheels were spinning and the strained welds had relaxed again, Anna heard one of her children crying. Rebecca, afraid but unhurt, was crouched confusedly on the side pillar, wondering why the seats and doors and ceiling had rearranged themselves. Near her feet, Michael’s window glass had folded inwards over one of the fallen rocks at the edge of the sunken road, like a web-patterned final pillow for his head. The Jubilee Committee intends to restore several sections of the old stonewall fences in the district, using mud and lime to bind the stone in the traditional manner. The most intact section meanders over paddocks and gullies from Isonville to Showalter Park and one wag has painted ‘The Great Wall of China’ on it in acrylic white, knowing how much that will irritate Kitchener Ison. On one of her visits back to Pandowie, Anna will load a few stones from Ison’s Creek into the boot of her car. Small, interesting, colourful ones for the mantelpiece, large ones for a rockery in her tiny garden. One stone in particular will fascinate her granddaughter. No more than a thumbnail-sized, dull-looking pebble, it will darken dramatically when the child places it in her mouth.