The Mary Smokes Boys

by Patrick Holland

  Grey had only this day felt strong, felt the human desire to leave his handprint upon the world. Now he no longer wished to convince the world of his presence or its error or of anything else. In the day it had been far away and from far away he could entertain it. Tonight it eyed him over its kill. Now she was in his arms and further away than the stars. His only desire was to turn back one hour and take what was his away somewhere in the darkness. He would find Eccleston and they three who loved would walk up into the hills, to a place where secrets could be kept, and he would hold her in the storm that was coming and never let her go.

  Against the stars crept the pretty orange glow of the highway: those lights that admitted no secrets but tonight, the secret identity of a killer. They droned away into the night like permanence. Then it began to sprinkle rain and he could not see the stars anywhere in heaven. The wind blew the rain around a long time before it fell to earth. Winter rain in the town of Mary Smokes or in any of the towns in that country was a rare thing. Grey North sat up with his sister’s body in his lap and looked at the water falling quietly out of the dark and thought that this would be a true storm. In time he shut his eyes and all he knew was the cold in the air and the absence of breath in her small body and the sound of the water beginning to rush in Mary Smokes Creek.

  X

  BILL NORTH UNLOCKED THE ROOM HE RENTED ABOVE the bar and picked up the letter that was slid under the door. Angela Teal’s name was on the back of the envelope. He flipped it over and saw the postmark from a fortnight ago. He took it to the window. He sat down in the chair where he had spent these last three afternoons with a bottle, watching the sun descend behind spindly black desert trees and a faded cemetery.

  The letter said his pension had come through. Angela wrote with genuine happiness. The money was more than they had hoped. It seemed she would be able to take that holiday overseas with her sister this year after all. She wrote that, though she had not been home for awhile, she planned to redecorate the house before she left–to make it more like a home. She said she meant to carpet the floors, and put a proper rack for coats instead of “those bolts in the wall,” and that if he did not mind she would take down his former wife’s Black Madonna “and that terrible lamp that stains the walls. I know your daughter is nostalgic about those, but you’ll agree children must grow up sometime. I hope this is all right with you.”

  He put the letter on his lap and looked onto the darkening plain. Yes, that is all right, he thought. He had been haunted too long by ghosts.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said aloud, his blood-shot eyes taking in the dying rays of the sun. “Maybe now there can be happiness.” The happiness there could never be in the days of his wife, when love had complicated everything and finally turned it all sour. He thought this as the first spits of a rare winter rain pockmarked the dust in the cemetery across the way. Then the western horizon was black. Fear stirred in him and he stood and let the letter blow out of his hands.

  Acknowledgements

  SPECIAL THANKS TO POP, BUSH, LEE, TRIN, GRANDAD, Nan, Peter and John Sims, and Barry Scott. And with prayers for Stacey.

  Copyright ©2013

  Patrick Holland

  All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Holland, Patrick, 1976–The Mary smokes boys / by Patrick Holland. pages cm

  eISBN : 978-0-989-36043-2

  1. Australian fiction.

  2. Families–Fiction.

  3. Grief–Fiction.

  4. Brothers and sisters–Fiction.

  5. Domestic fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR9619.4.H65M37 2013

  823′.92–dc23

  Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

  9 2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue

  8 3rd Floor

  7 Portland, Oregon 97212

  6 hawthornebooks.com

  5 Form:

  4 Sibley House, Bklyn, NY

  3

  2

  1 Set in Paperback