I noticed how their bodies were pressed together and I saw Kevin’s wrinkled face, dark and peaceful under the orange caress of her hair. They rocked one another gently. A Category Three hug, I thought in surprise. In my reckoning, Category One is the bend-and-reach hug, where nothing but arms and a square inch of cheek make contact. In Category Two hugs, bodies meet. Category Three adds the rocking motion. There’s only one more category – one I’ve never been involved in – and that’s a pretty intimate one that includes a bum-clutch. So Category Three is well up there on the familiarity scale. I was surprised and undoubtedly a bit jealous. I’d somehow come to believe that I was Kevin’s only Cat’ Three hugger!
When they stepped back from one another, Kevin turned to Asael.
“Nice job in the parade, mate! Got a bit crazy out there, but you did great! Listen, when you’re ready, you and me should hit the back roads one day! I’ll teach you another gear!”
Then he looked at me and gave me a casual rub on the shoulder.
“Hey, Ru’,” he said. “We still on for the display sheds? You’re not standing me up, are you?”
“No way! I’m counting on you to answer deep and meaningful questions for me! Mullberry jam kind of questions!”
It’s silly, but I didn’t want him to rub my shoulder just then. What I wanted was for him to hug me the way he’d hugged Amalthea – Category Three. I wanted to press myself against him and feel his bones and smell the cinnamon and have him rock me, so she could see that I wasn’t Bridie and that I wasn’t just one of the ones who yearned for a vision and that Kevin and I were important to each other. That was the kind of magic I needed.
He must have seen the something in my eyes and he gave me a long steady look which I gave right back to him. Not too long. Just long enough to let each other know . . . to remind ourselves that we were friends . . . that we shared things.
“You okay?” he asked and I kind of wound my head around in a circle, trying to say yes but unable to shake off the torn edges of a ‘no’. He looked a question at Amalthea who became suddenly animated.
“Well,” she said gaily, indicating herself, Rosemary and Garlic, “we are off to the lolly drop! Gonna get us a share. Why don’t you come with us, Asa’? We can talk some more – about magic and The Grand Gourd and the Gathering Force and whatever! What do you say? Is that okay with you, Ruthie?”
I knew I should take charge of him, especially considering the strangeness of his behaviour that morning and the near certainty of him having had a seizure. But I nodded. And she, in a surprisingly protective manner, took his elbow and steered him, the goats following in their wake, out of the human current and out of our sight.
When I looked back at Kevin, he was smiling like a lottery winner.
“Ha!” he laughed. “Aseal McFarlane, walking Sideshow Alley with Amalthea Byerson! What do you think’ll be going through his mind right now?”
I had to laugh then too. “He’ll be checking his pulse as he walks.” I used the laugh as cover to wipe away the tears. I think they were tears of gratitude.
Kevin just drew a deep breath, looked around, grabbed my hand and started walking. “Fairy floss!” he said. “I can smell the need for fairy floss!”
* * *
So, one thing about Kevin was that you could have a heart-to-heart with him while eating fairy floss, while looking at jam in the show pavilion or while leaning on the counter in the bakery. You could do it while you were laughing or crying or listening or seeming to talk about something altogether unrelated.
We started with things that fall out of the sky in the night and what and where they could be. We started there and that got us onto why we were both up at that ungodly time. By which point we were sitting on a log under a huge rain tree and my floodgates were holding nothing back. I babbled out the story of Bridie’s nightmare and Asael’s peeping through the keyhole and coming into my bed and his dream about Rita and our fight and Bridie’s crying and the letter mentioning the ‘terrible deed’ and me stealing more letters and the Agnes letter getting eaten by Garlic while Bridie stood by and did nothing to stop it. The works!
* * *
And when I’d gotten that off my chest, I asked him straight out about the terrible deed. I even got the letter out of my pack and made him read it.
“Ru’, you’re asking the wrong person, really. I hadn’t been in Sugar Town very long at all back then and . . . I just haven’t got any insights! You know?”
“But you knew Rita and the Reverend; and Grandma Gracie! I know you did!”
“I knew Rita, of course – from the bakery. I didn’t have much to do with your father. And your grandmother – she was an elemental force. I don’t know if anyone actually got to know her!”
“Okay, but this letter was for Rita! Didn’t she ever give hints? You know, like, ‘The Reverend’s a closet maniac!’ or ‘Snowdroppers have been stealing my underwear’? Something?”
He just looked at me, patiently, like, ‘Be serious, Ru’!’
“Okay! Look at this bit! We will take it as a sign of blessing that God has blocked out both the memory of the deed and the understanding of what’s happening now. You and I will raise this new child – your child and mine – to be strong, to hold his faith high above the swirling waters. ‘Blocked out the memory’ is obviously Bridie, isn’t it? And ‘this child’ has to be Asa’. So Bridie saw something, knew something, witnessed something that related to mum’s pregnancy! And something was ‘happening’! ‘Now’! What could it have been, Kevin? C’mon, help me out with this!”
That’s when he got peculiar with me.
“Ru. It’s Harvest Festival weekend! One of the points of Harvest Festival is to be a marker . . . a line that marks off the past. You know? The old year – all the dear old years – they’ve fled away, behind us! They are where they belong!”
I gave him an intentionally blank look and he just sighed.
“Right! Okay! You know I love you like you were my own, don’t you Ru’. I’m thinking of naming a scone after you, did I tell you that? But here’s the thing! I’ve known Bridie . . . since she was younger than you. A long, long time. And your mother . . . I admired her a great deal. A great deal. I know that they . . . both of them . . . went through some hard things. And I have to say that, if Bridie doesn’t remember them, then maybe that’s for the best. Really! But I didn’t know details then and I’m not sure I want to know details now! That’s a bit of how I get through life, Ru’, and it’s not a bad way to go. Because knowing things about people gets you involved in their hurt. And for the most part, there’s not much you can do about other people’s hurt! That’s all I can say.”
I tried one last tactic. “Yeah, yeah, whatever! Look! It says here that Johnathon Cranna said the town was trying to ‘atone’ for whatever happened. Do you think they did?”
But it was hopeless. I couldn’t budge him further. So I was left no wiser at all and a whole lot more frustrated.
We sat under the rain tree and watched people, each in our own world of thoughts, until eventually Mayor Hoggitt’s rant over the loudspeaker broke through to us. The lolly drop was coming up. People passing in front of us were already craning their necks for a first glimpse of Johnathon Cranna’s Tiger Moth. Naturally we headed off toward the open footy field where it was all to happen. But Kevin had one last thought to leave with me.
“You know, Ru’, from here . . . from this very point in time . . . from every moment in time . . . everything’s as new as we allow it to be! You know what I mean?”
This time my blank look was unintentional.
“It’s just that . . . ugly things happen in everyone’s lives. And everyone makes their own choices about how much air-time to give those things. And no one much says ‘Thank you’ to people who make them look back. That’s all I’m saying.”
It occurred to me only later that Kevin might have been advising me to back off.
Chapter 3 – Garlic and the Gourd
Isak knows how close the thing is, firstly, because he’s picked up the mewling sound once again, ahead in the cane, and secondly because it’s suddenly stopped. As though some creature in mid-bawl has suddenly realised it isn’t alone. Isak lowers his lead foot gently and stands, rigid as an ear, bristling with listening. Eventually he understands that whatever it is isn’t about to charge out of the cane at him. Even so, he stalks it for fully half an hour longer before succumbing to a kind of sleepy sense of acceptance
It lies in a wide furrow of earth at the end of what appears to be half a dozen bounces and several very destructive (to the cane) tumbles. Isak thinks that, if it weren’t for the sound, it might be a seat, fallen from a passenger jet – a gently S-shaped thing – like an open recliner. Except that it’s kind of blown up, like a balloon. From a distance, the copper coloured surface looks smooth and possibly metallic, but it’s oddly indistinct, as though the interface between it and the air is none too solid. He estimates it to be shoulder height – a huge weight if it actually is metal! At this stage, it’s as still as the frozen wave of soil that it’s ploughed up around itself. And it's quiet. But it glows ever so slightly, as though a tiny, dim bulb might burn somewhere within.
Isak stands motionless and watches for a long time. It’s that mewling that’s spooked him. It sounded like fear and he knows that fear makes things behave unpredictably. He crouches on his heels for another long while. He drinks shallowly from a bottle of port, finds an apple in his swag, rolls a cigarette and smokes it. Nothing happens! He jinks to his feet and walks noisily back and forth in the path of destruction, thinking about the speed and weight and trajectory of the thing.
“Low an’ fast,” he says aloud. “An’ straight as an arra’! Solid, too, bringin’ down them big branches like that!” He manoeuvres so he can look down the track at the distant thing, squat and still, maybe forty metres away.
“So what are ye, then, I’m askin’ meself?” He lifts his hat and scratches through the thin fuzz. “If yer just a ‘thing’, what was all them noises, about, eh?”
He sits, studies the clouds, nods off for a bit, wakes with a start and realises the morning is gone. And so, finally, figuring he’s given caution its best chance, he walks directly toward the thing, crunching and shuffling through the broken stalks of cane. He walks right up to it, to within an arm’s reach. Nothing. He slides a foot forward and leans, putting his face very near to its surface – or at least to where it seems the surface ought to be. There’s a pearly, chatoyant radiance within. It’s as though a glowing curtain has been drawn just an inch beneath the surface. But no sound, no movement. No smell. Isak chuckles. Just a chunk of glowing metal then!
Pretty much everybody has written Isak off years ago. Addled by alcohol, they say. And maybe he is. Or maybe he’s just a man not given to fuss. A man with a nose and a taste for obvious conclusions.
“Yer an ‘out there’ thing, ain’t ye!” he says to the glowing object.
It’s not that Isak has any interest in ‘out there’ things; he barely has any interest in ‘in here’ things! To him it’s just an obvious fact to be filed away – like the location of a water hole or the elevation needed for a two hundred metre shot.
Nonetheless, a change begins to work through him. Only hours before, he’d lain in his swag, experiencing a sense of disconnect with his life – like somehow it wasn’t his own anymore. Like he’d become an observer, looking down on an old man who lived inside a bottle, cut off from everything he’d ever been. But with his face only inches from an ‘out-there’ thing, it’s sort of like that bottle has been jolted. Like the cork has popped and some fizz has appeared.
“So the question is,” he explains to the object, “what to do wi’ ye!”
The obvious thing would be to walk away and leave it for Alf Caletti, in whose cane paddock it lays. But then, it could be days – maybe weeks – before Alf cuts this paddock! But so what?
“How far you come to get here, eh?” he asks of it, as though the difficulty of the journey might help him decide. “Can’t o’ bin aimin’ for this, surely to Christ!” And then he thinks, Mind you, I come a long way too! Seventy-eight feckin’years an’ here I am – same place as you!”
He talks to the thing as though it might answer. “You even know where ye are?”
It’s an old man’s habit. But as it happens, in a way, it does answer. At the corner of his eye, Isak swears, against that glowing inner curtain, a face appears. He swings his head to catch it and it’s already gone! But it was a face! And a face he knew – or had known, many years ago.
“What the Jesus!” he whispers. “What the Jesus!”
That’s when he decides that he has to get it out of the cane. Come hell or high water.
That’s also the moment when, seemingly out of nowhere, Johnathon Cranna’s Tiger Moth shunts by overhead. Cranna’s taken on his load of lollies for the lolly drop and is teasing the showground crowd with aerobatics. He’s tipped the Moth on its wing, rolled it on its back, barrel rolled and looped the loop – coming out of the last barely a hundred feet above Caletti’s cane paddock.
To Isak, it’s as though a gigantic lawn mower, with howling blades and yammering pistons has suddenly rolled over him. He staggers, falls halfway to the ground and barely manages to regain his balance.
Isak has an aversion to useless things. And noise – noise that’s its own reason for being – is more useless than anything. At the best of times, it confuses him, muddles him, pounds him down. Today it’s even worse. Maybe it’s the sudden sense of protectiveness he feels for the shipwrecked thing. Maybe it’s the briefly glimpsed vision of that sorrowful face. Or maybe it’s just the fact that it’s Johnathon Cranna up there, having his arrogant way. Whatever it is, even Isak isn’t prepared for the size of the rage that jolts into him – like something he hasn’t felt in more years than he cares to remember. It drills up through his feet, hammers nails into his knees, jams a burning rod into his back and hurls his arms into the air. It peels back his lips and drags a ragged curse out of him.
“Mad bloody bastard!” he thunders, snatching up a clod of earth to hurl into the sky. “Get the fuck up in the air where you belong!”
It’s been more than a decade – maybe eleven years – since Isak’s felt such rage. The memory flickers briefly; how right it felt on that day; the day, in this very same paddock, when he killed a man.
The memory flees as the plane has, leaving him frozen with his old arm cocked behind his head. And something has moved. At the edge of his vision. What was that? In the instant just gone by! What was that?
He allows only his eyes to move. Bits of dirt drop from the clod in his hand and lodge in the collar of his shirt. A fat white grub pokes its head out of the clod, squinting into the morning sunlight, sensing, like Isak, that something strange is afoot. It pulls back into its little circumference of earth. Isak has no such option.
Even in the blood-pounding fug of his fury, he senses that there’s a difference in the way the ‘out there’ thing is laying. Perhaps its S-curve is tighter? Maybe the wave of dirt stands higher around it? Does it seem to be cringing?
And for one truly weird second, Isak imagines that it’s himself lying there, at the end of his run, cowering beneath all the commotion of an unforgiving world.
“Sweet Jesus!” he says in wonder, shaking his head minutely to clear the dross. And then, “Don’ go givin’ up, matey! ‘S not over yet. Not while we’re still standin’
Up in the horizonless blue, Cranna is swinging the Moth about. He’s seen the slash in the cane, seen the old man and the faintly glowing object. He’s coming back for a closer look.
Isak can picture Cranna in that cockpit, head thrust forward, eyes blazing, defying the earth to take him. And a dangerous question pops into his mind. A little seed of ‘What if’.
‘What if . . . I give it a little teeny bit o’ help?’
He lays back against the wave of earth, his
shoulder almost touching the ‘out there’ thing. Its surface pulses weakly and, “Always a little more ye can do,” he says to it as he sights along the barrel of his rifle. He has no clearly defined grudge against Johnathon Cranna. Other than a general distaste for what he sees as arrogance and swaggering self-importance. No, this is almost wholly a reminder of the need for good manners.
“The man jus’ couldn’ . . . give . . . a shit!”
The impact of the bullet on the plane’s engine is like the impact of a slap on the face of a laughing woman. It sucks, spits, dribbles and rattles its carburettors in shock. The impact on Cranna is one, firstly, of mild surprise and, secondly, of major annoyance as he leans back on the stick and struggles for altitude.
The impact on Isak is, to say the least, mixed. The rifle is a tool that he’s used for years, with precision and accuracy, and he’s seen every conceivable result of its use. Everything is ritual. The quick sighting, the gentle squeeze, the explosion, the kick. All predictable. Except that this time, at the end of the sequence, the thing beside him bounces straight up into the air, squeals like a wounded pig and plumps back into its hollow of earth.
Isak is instantly half a dozen yards away, into the cane, the hairs on his neck as stiff as nails!
And that, for the time being, is the last he knows. The air turns red before his eyes, his legs melt beneath him and he slams face first into the earth. In the space of heartbeats, he’s back in his dreamless sleep! Except this time, it isn’t totally dreamless. Now and again, out of the black and silent emptiness, that face, the one he glimpsed in the depths of the ‘out there’ thing, comes swimming back to look lovingly down on him.
* * *
None of us in the showground, of course, knew the trouble Johnathon was in. When the heart of that little Tiger Moth hammered to a halt, he’d not only failed to claw back any altitude, but he’d also failed to identify an alternate glide path. The one he was on – the one he was more or less committed to – led straight over the footy ground where the townsfolk were gathering in their hundreds.
Sugar Town Page 10