‘You’ve been practising that.’
‘Yep. My standard reply to everyone who asks. The sheep are a bit woolly and the cows udderly hopeless. The Macks have all the stock under control too. The refuge pens are more crowded than I’d like, but they’re okay for another day or two. It should all be over by then. Could have been far worse.’
Flinty nodded. Ten thousand acres burned and all because there wasn’t the staff to check the so-called controlled burns. Happened every single year. Or at least every two or three . . .
The door opened again. Sam leaned on the doorjamb, his face pale under its smoky grime.
‘Sam! Good job out there. Felicity’s been telling me. Want a sandwich —?’ Flinty stopped at the expression on his face. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Nicholas?’ whispered Felicity, just as Flinty said, ‘Jed?’
Sam blinked, as if trying to focus through weariness and shock. ‘What? No, Nicholas is still over at the fire shed, doing a double shift. I just rang Jed from your office. She’s fine.’
‘What is it?’ asked Flinty softly.
‘Jeratgully,’ he said. ‘It’s gone.’
‘What do you mean, gone?’ asked Flinty cautiously.
‘Nothing left. Burned. Everything except the hall. Just gone. The wind’s gusting all over the place. They just told me at the fire shed that the fire crew there was working at the east, but fire came in from the north-west too. By the time anyone realised, it was too late.’ His face twisted. ‘And you know the stupid thing? They were a crew from up on the Southern Tablelands. They didn’t know this country at all. And the Jeratgully crews are up at Gosford. The poor bastards will probably hear about this on the news. They didn’t even get a chance to fight for their own homes. Blokes who knew the way the wind would go, which ridge the fire would leap to . . .’ His voice broke.
He dropped to a crouch, still leaning his head and shoulders against the jamb. ‘You can fight a fire,’ he said wearily. ‘But you can’t fight stupidity. They just don’t understand . . .’
Flinty thought of Jeratgully. Or rather, what it had been. Because one thing she had learned in a long life was that once a village vanished — from fire, or flooded under Lake Eucumbene — it did not return.
Jeratgully had been a nothing-in-particular place. Even though it was only an hour or so away, she’d been there maybe six times in her life, to a Centenary Show, a wedding, a few CWA meetings. Twenty houses maybe, a pub and hall and tennis court, another dozen homes scattered nearby but still ‘Jeratgully’ on their addresses. A hundred people, perhaps not quite big enough for a polling station, but big enough to be a community that feuded about where the rubbish dump should be, married each other’s sisters and brothers, spent weeks making every Christmas party the best ever.
Gone. Just gone.
‘How many hurt?’ asked Flinty, hoping desperately that he was not going to give the number dead.
‘Nicholas says there are only two unaccounted for, but they’re teenagers and they’ve got a car. They might be miles away.’
And might be smouldering bones, thought Flinty, young lives unlived.
‘Most people headed for the hall. Women and kids mostly — the blokes were out with the fire trucks. They kept throwing buckets of water when any ember managed to get under the roof. One family survived by sitting under their covered tank stand and making holes in the rainwater tank.’ He shook his head. ‘The whole town could have died this morning. It’s a miracle they survived.’
No, thought Flinty. It was desperation and experience.
‘There’s a few burn cases, a couple of them pretty bad. Some smoke inhalations, a suspected heart attack. The serious cases have all been airlifted to Canberra, the rest taken to Gibber’s Creek.’
Sam’s eyelids drooped. He forced them open again. ‘Nicholas says they’ve evacuated everyone else over to our town hall too.’ He stood, took a sandwich, then looked at it as if he had forgotten what it was for. ‘The others are sleeping in their swags over at the Macks’. Okay if I have a kip here, where it’s quieter? Jed can ring here too.’
Flinty put the tragedy of Jeratgully in the small corner of her mind she kept for large things that must be locked away while you dealt with the now.
‘Of course,’ said Felicity. ‘I’ll get my swag from the cupboard.’
‘I’ll get it,’ said Sam tiredly.
‘You just sit there. You look too bushed to move.’
‘But . . .’ Sam looked at the sandwich again, then put it down. ‘You’re right,’ he admitted.
How long had it been since he’d slept? Flinty wondered. Sometimes fire crews went for so long they had to be talked back, fighting the flames on automatic for forty-eight hours, or sixty, unaware of time or their own exhaustion. You had to give them orders quietly, firmly, until at last they heard and obeyed.
She helped Felicity spread out the padded swag on the floor.
‘We’ll leave you to it,’ she said, hoping that once he shut his eyes he’d be out for the night, and Fire Control wouldn’t need to send them out again till they’d had a decent rest. She’d drive him back to Gibber’s Creek herself, if Jed called to say she was in labour.
‘The animals from Jeratgully,’ said Felicity suddenly. ‘What’s happening with them?’
Most would be dead, thought Flinty. And many more would need to be mercifully shot. But some families would have taken their dogs and cats to the hall with them.
‘Any that can be saved can come here,’ said Felicity. ‘Now the Bald Hill fire front is under control, most of the Rocky Valley animals will be leaving soon. You? Sleep. Now!’ she said to Sam.
He had hit the swag before they closed the door. Flinty and Felicity began to walk down the corridor.
‘I’ll go over to the fire shed,’ said Felicity. ‘Nicholas needs to put out a call for volunteers to look for injured animals. They can build Jeratgully again,’ she added.
Yes, they could. But wouldn’t, thought Flinty. To see your house burn was one thing. To see your entire community disappear was unimaginable. Or rather, too imaginable. She shut her eyes and saw Rocky Valley black and empty. If the village burned, and Rock House, would she come back?
Yes, she thought. Because she loved the bones of the land, was part of it, lush, burned or blizzard. But she had an income that did not depend on the local country or community. Her children had long ago left school. She could afford to come back to a burned-out land. Few had that luxury.
In years to come, Jeratgully would be just one more collection of foundations among the bush, a lone pear or quince tree managing to grow from its rootstock, deep in the ground. Bushwalkers would see a crumpled chimney, or trip over a foundation post, never knowing that around them there had once been a community of love and sorrow and small shared joys . . .
‘Go and get some apple cake,’ said Felicity as they passed through the office. The animals watched suspiciously from their cages, wombats, wallabies, a cattle dog, wondering if this time the humans brought food or the indignity of needles or bandages or medicine; and were both relieved and indignant to be ignored.
Flinty nodded. She needed to share this shock with friends, the Greens, the Whites, the Macks. She needed to drink tea and eat apple cake, then plan what they could do to help the evacuees, what empty stockmen’s huts could be made liveable for those who didn’t want to move as far away as Gibber’s Creek, who could take a family in for a while . . .
Later. Apple cake first. And the company of women. She’d ring Jed from the Macks’. Felicity would be under the eye of her husband at the fire shed. There was no need to watch her now.
Flinty opened the surgery door. She stopped and stared in shock. Beside her, Felicity stood in horrified silence. This was day, and yet it had become night.
The sun had vanished. Light had vanished too. Ash blew in its place, so thick she almost felt she should do breaststroke to get through it. She could see three metres away, four at most, hear little but the roar of the wind.<
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‘What’s happened?’ whispered Felicity. Flinty felt rather than heard her words.
‘Ash. The wind’s changed again. The smoke from the fire front must be heading right towards us.’
A bushfire could be twenty kilometres away, or two hundred metres, and we’d never know in smoke this dense, she thought. Except, thankfully, the fire crews would have a good idea of where the fire was headed, and the Bald Hill burn had now made a vast firebreak that would surely keep fire from the valley.
Would Jeratgully have burned if Gibber’s Creek’s and Rocky Valley’s and their own big tankers had been there, not up at Gosford? No point even wondering, Flinty thought.
She stepped out into the dimness as Felicity headed to the fire shed.
An hour later, full of apple cake, comforted by cups of tea and the conversation of old friends, Flinty slowly made her way back towards the surgery. Felicity might need a hand, if Nicholas was still at the fire shed. The air was still dense with smoke, so dark that she could only see a few metres away. But she knew by the smell of sausages and onions that the Lions Club had set up a sausage sizzle outside the hall.
Flinty glanced inside. Mothers fussed at kids being fed early, in the vain hope that a four pm dinner might mean they’d be asleep by eight. More likely there’d be a pillow fight till four am.
She took a sausage in a tomato-splodged square of white bread — she was full of apple cake, but it would be churlish to refuse — and began to calculate how much stock she could agist up on Rock Farm as she trudged along the grass verge towards the clinic. They left most of the land wild now, but in an emergency they could probably take forty head, or even more if they hand-fed. But of course Felicity would need to move some of her menagerie back up to Rock Farm if she was to take any more injured animals there in the village, the wombats recovering from mange, the roo with the broken tail, all the wildlife that needed minimal care until they could be released again . . .
She stopped, smelling the smoky air like a horse. Smoke as not one smell but ten thousand. And this smell was wrong. For there were not just the scents of extinguished fire, of faraway flames.
This smoke was nearer. She ran back past the hall to the fire shed, ignoring aching knees.
‘Nicholas?’
He was speaking and had the headset on and motioned her to be quiet. ‘Copy that,’ he said finally. ‘Rocky Valley Fire Control. Roger. Over and out.’ He turned and looked at Flinty. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I can smell smoke.’ She realised how stupid that sounded. ‘Nearby smoke.’
‘Flinty,’ he spoke with the tolerance of a young man for an old woman, ‘the smoke is going to linger for ages.’
‘Not in this wind! It’s a different kind of smoke smell. There’s fire nearby.’
He shook his head. ‘None of the look-outs have reported anything new.’
‘How could they see on a day like today?’
‘They’re experienced men, Flinty.’ He sounded tired. Preoccupied.
And she knew her mountain.
She ran for her car and drove.
Chapter 30
JOSEPH
Dr Joseph McAlpine (officially retired) stood readying his makeshift first-aid post at the Gibber’s Creek Town Hall: walls of corrugated iron painted so many times over the past century that the paint was as thick as the iron; red gum posts that would last another six centuries, at least; assorted chairs; trestles that were hauled out for sausage sizzles or raffle days.
A town hall could be many things: a movie theatre, electioneering platform, the centre of a union strike back in the 1890s, a place for wedding breakfasts and funeral feasts.
Today it was a refuge.
Blue moved efficiently along the trestles by the far wall, checking that the vast aluminium teapots were ready to be filled with hot water, the platters ready for the sandwiches the other CWA women were making in the adjoining kitchen — cheese and tomato, Vegemite and lettuce . . . too risky to chance finding maggots in a lamb and chutney sandwich without a fridge.
His brother Andy was out in the kitchen too, hauling in buckets of water from the rainwater tank — Gibber’s Creek town water was drinkable, but only because it was so heavily chlorinated that any woman who peroxided her hair risked it turning green. Long-time residents knew a decent cup of tea could only be made using tank water.
Joseph’s heart ached a little at Andy’s determinedly cheerful gallantry. Andy should be in the Fire Control shed, pulling the threads of this new world of fire into a coherent whole; checking maps to see who needed to be notified of the fire’s path, where each blaze or tanker was — and why in hell weren’t those bureaucrats in Sydney letting the Gibber’s Creek big tanker come back from Gosford when the town and district were so clearly under threat?
‘Joseph!’ Blue beckoned him to the front door. ‘The first lot are arriving.’ The Jeratgully families.
Town was deserted except for the two cars coming down the street, their headlights on even though it was still early afternoon. Gibber’s Creek was either here, or firefighting, or clearing their gutters and filling them with water and making the other necessary preparations in case fire came, though a few would be steadfastly ignoring reality and watching the cricket on the telly.
The air was a strange metallic brown, neither shadow nor twilight nor smoke, though the grey-white of the sky was smoke, not cloud. Let it rain, he prayed as the two cars slowed down, packed with kids, quilts, suitcases, garbage bags filled with clothes or photos, a dog leaning out the window, gasping in the heat.
Joseph stepped forwards in professional doctor mode, making sure no one in the cars was hurt, in shock or had chest pains. Blue directed people inside, and the small boy with the dog round to the alley by the hall, where there was shade and water. ‘Yes. I’ll make sure he gets some dog biscuits too, I promise. Her name is Milly? Sorry, she will get some dog biscuits. Now off you go. Leave your things in the car, they might get mixed up inside . . .’
More cars, one, then another three, all full too. These were the people who had noted the fire’s position, the wind speed, and quickly gathered the things most precious to them — the wedding-present vase, the kids’ school photos, the Under Tens soccer trophy — and packed them in the car along with the pets and kids and clothes, then left before the fire front hit.
The volunteers had just got the first comers settled when the next procession hit. These cars held only people, white faced, red eyed from smoke and crying, rarely speaking but when they did, in a smoke-ripped croak. One girl in bare feet clutched a library book. She had probably been reading it when the emergency evacuation phone call came . . .
Only two officially missing, so far. But how many others weren’t on the phone or had been too far from the house to hear its summons? What was yet to be found among the burned-out ruins or skeleton cars? Joseph shut that away in the ‘too hard’ closet that Flinty had taught him to find. Was Flinty safe up in the mountains? That must go into the closet as well, until he had time to phone tonight, assuming the telephone exchange hadn’t been burned and that he did have time. The hospital still called him in for emergencies.
An anxious figure in floral shorts and the kind of T-shirt you wear to do the Saturday vacuuming brought an elderly woman with chest pains down to the first-aid station. He smiled, automatically reassuring, though he suspected unstable angina, even a small heart attack brought on by shock, heat, loss. ‘Jack over there will run you over to the hospital. No trouble at all. Yes, of course you can go with her. You’re her daughter-in-law?’
Two cases of heat stroke, one bad enough to be sent down to the hospital too, which didn’t have air conditioning, but also didn’t have a crowd heating the hall just with the sweat of so many bodies. A foot in a half-melted rubber thong, the burn unnoticed in the adrenalin surge of saving the hall and escaping. Down to the hospital too. A lad who started wheezing, probably asthma from the smoke, a diabetic who’d left her insulin behind, an ingrown toenail
. . .
‘Been meaning to get it seen to, and now you’re here, Doc . . .’
‘Gangway!’ Mark from the Blue Belle carried a cooler in each hand. Behind him, Leafsong trudged, carrying trays of . . . bless the girl . . . tiny angel cakes, the tops cut into wings, the centres filled with cream and fresh raspberries. Who but Leafsong would bring angel cakes, the perfect comfort food, to an evacuation centre?
‘Home-made fruit-salad ice blocks in the Eskies,’ said Mark. ‘Kids first, then the grown-ups.’ He grinned at Joseph. ‘Might save one for you if you’re lucky, Doc. Okay,’ he called. ‘Who wants an ice block? And I’ve got good news for every kid here!’
Blank young faces stared at him.
‘No school on Monday!’ Mark yelled.
It was the wrong thing to say. Joseph saw the moment Mark knew it; saw his face crumple. Poor lad, he just didn’t understand . . .
‘Ahem!’ One of the women handing out cups of tea clapped for attention. Mrs Castelli, the school principal. ‘I beg your pardon, but Gibber’s Creek Central School will be open on Monday as usual. We expect to see you all there, bright and early. Don’t worry about school uniforms or books. We’ll sort that out when we get there.’
The small faces relaxed: school was normal, and there was no other normal now. And Mrs Castelli and the various committees would use Monday to find supplies for the evacuated kids: underwear and some new clothes from Lee’s Emporium, more gear from St Vinnies second-hand — a make-do until insurance payments came through. If the homes had been insured . . .
There’d be gifts of toys too. Chemist supplies, nappies, shaving gear. Books, he thought. Jed could use that unlimited account she still had at the bookshop, left to her in Tommy’s will and the bill paid by Thompson’s Industries, and let every kid here choose the books they wanted . . . needed. Not library books, but books that were theirs. Jed could be in charge of that tomorrow, assuming she didn’t go into labour.
He looked around, checking Jed wasn’t among the volunteers. Good. Far too hot for her, in her condition. He realised suddenly she probably didn’t even know the evacuees were here, because the Gibber’s Creek telephone tree would only ring those able to volunteer, and no one would call a nine months’ pregnant woman for such a reason.
Facing the Flame Page 15
