Salt Rain

by Sarah Armstrong

  The smell of wet earth rose through Allie’s open window, carrying the faint sounds of animals burrowing and tree roots inching through the soil. The air held residue of everything that had happened at the farm, including the moment of Allie’s conception, her mother spreadeagled, pinned down, that moment.

  She sat up, and in the faint moonlight coming in the window, looked down at the white rectangle of bed around her. She swung her feet to the floor and hurried across the hall to the door of her aunt’s dark bedroom. ‘Julia?’ Allie heard her sit up and fumble for the lamp.

  Her aunt’s face was pale and her eyes squinted against the bright light. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Where did it happen? Tell me what you saw.’

  ‘Oh, Allie.’ Julia lifted a hand to her face, ‘No. No.’

  Allie stepped into the room. ‘Was it in my bed?’

  ‘No!’ Julia shook her head vehemently. ‘No. Do you think I’d let you sleep there?’

  ‘So, where?’

  Julia took a breath, ‘The dairy. It was in the dairy.’

  Allie walked through the house and looked down to the dark outline of the old dairy building. Such a simple shape, a simple harmless shape. She opened the back door and started down the steps. The moonlight threw shadows of trees onto the paddock, and the tree trunks glowed silver, like night had become day. As she crossed the yard, her limbs moved slowly through the air as if through water.

  At the dairy she pulled hard on the metal doorhandle and dragged the wooden door across the dirt. She felt around the doorframe for the light switch and three bulbs lit up the long room, with its empty stalls and feeding troughs. There was the sound of Julia coming down the steps and across the yard.

  The cement floor was rough under her bare feet and she stirred the fine hay dust as she walked slowly around the room.

  Julia stepped inside and pointed to the far wall, at a small door that had been boarded up with a piece of wood.

  ‘In there?’ Allie asked.

  Julia nodded and took a jemmy from the wall of tools and levered the plank off the doorframe. The wood splintered and she wrenched it free with her hands.

  The second room was small and windowless, stacked with wooden tea chests and old cream churns, one wall lined with shelves of paint tins and dusty bottles. Allie made herself go and stand in the middle of the room. It was so quiet in there that she could hear every quaver of her breath. The air tasted stale, like it had been trapped inside for years. She turned in a slow circle, letting her eyes run over the shapes, the corners, the angles of the room where her mother had been. Where her mother had prayed not to be.

  Julia was in the doorway, the jemmy still in her hand, watching Allie. The pale girl with plaits, standing in the door, watching it happen.

  And her father. Allie imagined him buckling his belt, dusting his pants down and going back to the milking.

  She pushed past her aunt to get outside into the fresh air, where she stood on the muddy earth, facing the dark house, the dairy looming behind her. The air from the small room was still in her body. She bent forward and leaned her hands on her knees and drew in the cool dawn air.

  Julia came to stand beside her and spoke softly, ‘I’m sorry.’

  She looked up at her aunt in the light spilling from the dairy door. ‘Did she know that you saw it?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘But she never spoke to you about it?’

  Julia shook her head.

  ‘Who did you tell?’

  Julia looked down at her hands before replying. ‘I don’t know how to make you understand what it was like, why I didn’t tell. I was just so afraid of him. And I was young…’ She turned to Allie, ‘and I was weak and I regret it.’

  Allie whispered, ‘Do I look like him?’ She touched her face, the shapes under her fingertips suddenly unfamiliar. ‘Can you recognise anything of him in me?’

  ‘Allie. Allie.’ Julia’s hands were around hers, bringing them down from her face. ‘Stop it.’ She led Allie across the yard and up the steps to the house where she took a photo album from a shelf in the kitchen. She flicked through the yellowing pages to a photo of a broad-shouldered man standing in front of a tractor.

  He was wearing overalls and looking straight at the camera, squinting his eyes into the sun, one hand lifted to brush the floppy fair hair from his forehead, a slight smile on his face. Allie bent down to try to see into his eyes. Her father’s eyes. But they were just tiny dark marks on the skin of the photo. She touched the image and his half-smiling face was small next to her finger.

  ‘You’re not like him. There’s nothing of him in you.’ Julia closed the album. ‘I’m like him. You and Mae take after Mum.’ She traced a finger over the album cover. ‘He wouldn’t let me talk about Mae. But I wouldn’t let him forget. I was the one person who knew and every time I looked at him, every time I brought him a meal, I made sure he knew I was thinking of it. That’s why I stayed. I didn’t stop it, I failed her, and staying was my way to pay.’

  ‘So Saul didn’t know?’

  Julia shook her head. ‘No. He found out last night.’

  Allie walked to the front door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To his place.’

  ‘Let me drive you.’

  ‘No. I want to go through the forest.’

  Julia paused. ‘All right. I’ll be here.’

  In the faint light she stepped from boulder to boulder, then stopped in the middle of the creek to look around at the mist sitting low on the water and drifting through the trees. Her father had been in the valley all along. She looked back the way she had come, towards the paddocks he had cleared and the fences he had dug into the land. He had left his mark all over the valley.

  She stepped from the boulder into the creek and started wading towards the bank, the strong water rushing up her legs, soaking her clothes. She knew Mae must have longed for the moment that she would slip into the harbour. She must have rowed as fast as she could, each stroke of the oars taking her away from Allie and closer to the place where she would shed her clothes and at last, drop into the black water.

  Saul was sitting on the verandah as if he were waiting for her. His dog’s head was in his lap and he was lighting a cigarette. As she crossed the misty clearing, he moved his dog and stood up to lean against the railing in his pyjama bottoms and an old T-shirt. He offered a tentative smile. ‘Allie.’

  She climbed the steps and sat on the old couch facing him. ‘So, Julia told you.’

  He nodded and stubbed his cigarette into the full ashtray beside him. He came to sit beside her on the couch, his legs stretched out in the soft cotton pants, his tanned feet crossed on the verandah boards. ‘Now I look back, I can see it, but I didn’t know what to look for.’ He turned to her. ‘I just feel…sad for her that she was so alone with it.’

  Allie was suddenly exhausted, her body aching and tired, her clothes wet from the creek. Mae would never have told him. She had even left it to Julia to tell Allie.

  She looked out to the forest, where the sea of green was shifting in the early morning breeze and the pale sky was turning blue. ‘Shouldn’t you be milking?’

  ‘He’ll manage.’

  She brought her knees up close to her body. ‘You know, when she went rowing that night, she knew she wasn’t coming back. She rang Julia and told her to go down to Sydney and bring me here. So she knew what she was going to do out on the harbour… She planned to leave me behind.’ She saw Mae standing in the rocking dinghy, her feet wide for balance as she slipped her dress over her head. And she would have paused for a moment, as the breeze lifted off the water and the waves slapped the side of the dinghy, before she stepped off into the harbour.

  There was just the heat of Saul’s bare arm next to hers and the trees rippling and soughing around them. ‘She planned for me to be the one to come back to the valley.’

  He put his arm around her, warm across her shoulders. After a moment she reached up to
take his arm off and lay his hand back on his thigh. And they sat looking out at the tangle of green, at the serene trees that had been there all along. Beyond the tallest trees, further down the valley, was Julia’s farm. One day soon they would be able to see the tops of her trees from Saul’s verandah.

  chapter twenty-six

  They floated in the big waterhole, two pale bodies held by the green water, arms outstretched, turning with the gentle flow of the creek. Allie let some of the water into her mouth. Every day it was less bitter. Every time she and Julia swam, there was less grief leaking from them into the water. Julia’s long hair was silky on Allie’s arm, and the cool flesh of her aunt’s leg brushed hers. The trees rose high either side of the creek, the big green leaves silhouetted against the sky.

  From above, from up near the treetops, there would be the shapes of the two women floating down the creek through waterhole after waterhole, past boulders, under bridges, travelling the spine of the valley. And floating ahead of them, the grey cladding boards from the dairy building. Ten of them every day, levered off, carried to the creek and launched. The weathered strips of old hardwood, twisting and turning in the eddies, slipping over rapids, sometimes wedging between boulders to wait for the next flood to lift them and carry them away. They would float all the way to the sea, to the wide salty sea.

  acknowledgments

  For support and critique, thanks to Laura Jan Shore, Jesse Blackadder, Millie Connolly, Emma Hardman, Hayley Katzen, Dan Phillips, and Matt Ottley. For early encouragement, thanks to the Northern Rivers Writers’ Centre, Jill Eddington, the Beach Hotel, the Byron Shire Echo, and Inez Baranay. Thanks to Annette Barlow, Collette Vella, Catherine Milne, Briony Cameron, and everyone at Allen & Unwin. For the G4 and the Santa Cruz writing space, thanks to Joel Olinger. Big thanks to Pippa Masson and Fiona Inglis from Curtis Brown. And my gratitude and appreciation to all at MacAdam/Cage—Khristina Wenzinger, Melanie Mitchell, and Julie Burton, with particular thanks to David Poindexter.