Three Summers

by Judith Clarke

  Everything would turn to ash.

  ‘I can’t bear to think about it, Dancey,’ she heard Ruth’s voice saying. ‘All the old people who won’t be able to get away in time, and the animals . . . running, trying to escape, and the birds, falling from the sky—’

  ‘I fell out of the sky when I was little,’ whispered Dancey, ‘and no one even saw.’

  ‘The heart of Dancey,’ Ruth said softly, ‘Exactly you,’ and her voice held that same tenderness Dancey had heard in Laura’s mother’s voice as she sat with her little boy, the tenderness that shone from the faces of the Indian student’s family, or sounded in the dark-haired man’s song – the tenderness that was the real true thing.

  Dancey sprang to her feet and rushed towards the fire. She kicked at the banksia bush. She kicked and kicked, she stamped, she scooped up handfuls of sandy soil and threw it over the burning twigs and leaves. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ she cried. ‘I’m crossing you out, see! You’re gone!’

  And little by little the fire was gone, flaring and glaring, sulking and smoking and dying, till it was no more than an occasional red glint among the ashes, which Dancey covered with stones and armfuls of the hard dry soil. She put the fire out. She buried it. Then she waited; she stood there for half an hour to make sure it couldn’t begin again. The wind dropped. A new little breeze came, whispering and cool. The trees sighed with pleasure. The sky was all grey now, and a big drop of water fell suddenly on the top of her head. Other drops fell in the dust. They fell on the warm earth above the ashes, and the warm earth hissed and went black and wet and held no danger anymore.

  The garden floated round Dancey, its lawns and paths and big kind trees. She turned and the peacock was there, spreading its glorious tail, and the dark-haired man came and looked into her eyes and said gently, ‘Go home now, little one.’

  ‘Home?’ asked Dancey, and he smiled the most beautiful smile she’d ever seen and said, ‘Go home to Ruthie.’

  The rain was falling. She ran up the hill and turned in the direction of Hayfield Lane. The air was cold and the trees dripped; it was as if the whole world was changing. A flock of white cockatoos flew over, so soundless they might have been cut out of cloth.

  seven

  There was a new fire over in the Hartshorn Valley; Ruth heard the news on the radio. The Hartshorn Valley was thirty kilometres to the west, but thirty kilometres was nothing on a day like today. She went to check that the gutters were still free of rubbish; when she opened the door, the heat came at her like a blow. It had a thickness about it now, clammy and solid against her skin, and when she looked up she saw that the sky was grey, a soft foamy grey the colour of cobwebs. The wind had dropped. ‘Please rain,’ she whispered as she hurried down the side path. ‘Oh please, please rain.’

  She had no real hope, all spring and summer there’d been such afternoons: the sky would cloud and the wind die down and it would seem that at any moment the rain would begin to fall. But the dry minutes stretched into hours and then in the evening the wind would rise again and the cloud thin into wisps and the moon and stars shine through, and at the end of the ten o’clock news the jovial announcer, safe down in the city, would say happily, ‘Tomorrow’s going to be another hot one.’

  The leaves of the young peach tree she’d planted hopefully last year hung like sad little rags from the branches; all the greenness had been sucked out of them, they’d lost their light, like her dad had done after the accident in which her mother died. In the old people’s home he’d had a special chair beside the big window in the dayroom where he’d sit from breakfast till bedtime gazing out into the garden. ‘He seems quite happy in himself,’ the matron used to say when Ruth came to visit. ‘Never a cross word.’

  He’d died two years ago.

  The gutters at the back of the house were clear; Ruth walked round to the shady side beneath the firs. Here too the gutters were still free of debris, but as she turned to go inside again her glance fell on something small and white lying beneath one of the trees. A piece of paper? An old envelope blown there by the wind?

  It was a letter, still sealed. A small pebble sat in the centre of the envelope, weighting it down. Ruth picked them up. For a moment she studied the pebble, then dropped it onto the ground. The letter was addressed to her and was from Fee, postmarked Barinjii, two days ago.

  So it would have arrived in the post this morning. How had it got round here? Sometimes the postman left letters hanging from the box and they fell out onto the ground. That might have happened. And today, the wind could have swept it across the grass, even tweaked it round the corner of the house, till it fetched up here beneath the firs. That could have happened.

  Only there was the pebble. The pebble couldn’t have got there by itself. Someone had placed it on the envelope, to it down against the wind. And then that person had forgotten, because she’d heard her name being called. She pictured Dancey out in the front yard this morning, remembered the distant putter of a motor-scooter from further down the lane, remembered how, when she’d called her to breakfast, Dancey’s running footsteps had come from round the side.

  She could have dropped it. Dancey could have collected the post, intending to bring it inside, and then come here – it was one of her favourite places – and the letter had drifted from her pocket and she hadn’t noticed it fall. Ruth shook her head impatiently: why was she fooling herself like this? Dancey had taken the letter. Ruth had known for a long time that when she was out of the house, Dancey spied. She had found little traces: a slight rearrangement of the contents of her drawers, the laptop shifted slightly closer to the edge of the desk, nearer the chair, so that someone small could operate it comfortably.

  Nothing had ever been taken, and Ruth had let the matter go. Dancey was only checking, she told herself; the spying in Ruth’s things was simply part of the girl’s effort to feel a little bit secure. Dancey wanted to know about Ruth so that she could begin to feel she might be safe. Ruth thought of Dancey’s warm hand in hers last night and the way she’d drawn it back, quickly, as if she’d been terrified. ‘They don’t do affection,’ she heard Sandy Jimpson’s thin voice saying. ‘They can’t.’

  ‘They’re afraid to,’ said Ruth.

  She went back into the house and sat down at the kitchen table to read Fee’s letter.

  ‘They’ve drained Skelly’s dam,’ wrote Fee. ‘They’re going to build houses there. Remember how I used to say that if they ever did that, there’d be bones at the bottom of the dam, the bones of Tam Finn’s girls?

  Well, I was right and I was wrong, Ruth. There were bones down there all right, a whole skeleton of bones. But it wasn’t one of Tam Finn’s girls – it wasn’t Kathy Ryan or Ellen Lester or even Helen Hogan: they all went to Sydney after all, eh? Sydney’s a big place; girls can vanish down there as well as at the bottom of Skelly’s dam. (Though I’m glad you never did.)

  It was him, Ruth. Tam Finn.

  Old Mrs Finn identified the bones. Sergeant Mercer went out to Fortuna and brought her back to the hospital where they’d taken what was left of poor Tam Finn. Old Mrs Finn, I called her, but ancient would be a better word. She’s ninety-seven, people say. I mean, think of it, Ruth: she’s not Tam Finn’s mum, she’s his gran! And he was the same age we were, just about; so, work it out: old Mrs Finn must have had his dad when she was about fourteen! You should see her, Ruth! I did – not stickybeaking, honest, just happened to be passing the hospital on my way to get the milk – she’s very tiny now, very tiny and thin, like some kind of bird, but she’d not hunched over like so many people that age, she stands straight and she walks straight and she looks people straight in the eye. And what eyes she has, Ruth! Sharp and bright as needles; you get the feeling that if she looked at you hard, it would hurt. Poor Tam Finn.

  Anyway, she identified him. There was a watch with his

  name on the back, and some shreds of a blue shirt, and that old ring he always wore, remember? The snake with red eyes that was swallowing its tai
l? I always thought that ring was sort of scary. I know you liked him when we were girls, but I thought Tam Finn was scary, too.

  All the same, he was a human being. And no one cares what happened to him, Ruth. No one knows if he fell in the dam, or if he jumped, or if someone pushed him, and no one wants to know. The Finns thought he was living somewhere down in Sydney – he went down there not long after you left – and when they never heard from him again they simply thought he couldn’t be bothered with them. And they couldn’t be bothered with him; they’d written him off long ago.

  Now I know he was weird, but honestly, Ruth, imagine just forgetting about someone like that, someone who’s your own son, your own grandson! What’s wrong with people? Sergeant Mercer told Mattie that old Mrs Finn looked at the watch, and the ring, and the shreds of blue shirt and then down at the bones and all she said was, ‘Yes, that’s my grandson. That’s Tam Finn. He was always headed for the bottom of something.’

  There’s not going to be a memorial service or anything like that. But I suppose, when you think about it, who is there to remember? None of us knew him, not really, not even Tam Finn’s girls. I don’t know if there’s going to be any kind of enquiry or if anything would come from it – Sergeant Mercer says it was all a long time ago.

  A long time ago!

  But that’s our time he’s talking about, Ruthie! The time when we’d just left school and I was getting married and you were off to university – and it makes me feel funny when Sergeant Mercer thinks our time is ancient history. Despite the kids and grandkids, to me it seems like last summer, and sometimes, when I’m walking across the paddocks or down along the creek, I’ll play this game: I’ll close my eyes and concentrate, and almost believe, Ruthie, that when I open them I’ll be back in that time again. I’ll be seventeen, and Mum and Dad and Gran will still be alive, and any moment when I look up, I’ll see you running along the track towards me – in that blue skirt you used to wear, remember? The blue skirt with the pockets? How lovely you were!

  And still are, of course.

  Come visit soon, and bring your Dancey – we’re longing to meet her.

  All love and kisses, xxx

  Fee

  So Tam Finn was gone. All these years Ruth had had a sense of him, far away yet always in this world, travelling in exotic places: in India and Africa, the high plateaus of Ladakh, the romantic cities along the old Silk Road. She’d had this daydream that when he was old and she was old, too, they’d come back to Barinjii, and she’d be walking down Main Street and see him across the road and she’d go up to him and say at last, ‘Look, here I am.’

  He’d never got to be old. ‘Not long after you left,’ Fee had written, so he’d still been a boy. She read the letter through again, and found herself crying. It was the blue shirt that did it: she could remember the way it had hung from his narrow shoulders, and how the breeze had blown the cloth against his body, revealing his thinness, the shape of his bones.

  ‘Let me,’ he’d pleaded the last time she’d seen him. ‘Let me, oh, let me!’ and she’d wondered later if he’d been saying, ‘Help me.’

  Perhaps he had been – for that unhappy boy, roaming the paddocks of a small country town, it would have been the same; sex would have helped him, but only for a little while. ‘Oh Tam,’ she whispered. His shadow had been at the back of her whole life: every man she’d gone out with, every lover, even the man she’d married for a while, had seemed somehow wrong after Tam Finn; as if she was still looking for him, like she’d been looking on the train that took her away from Barinjii, staring through the dusty window of her compartment as the country darkened, hoping for a glimpse of him.

  She imagined him strolling down Starlight Lane in his blue shirt, up the hill and across the paddock towards Skelly’s dam. He’d be whistling one of his old hymns: Come down, O love divine, Seek now this heart of mine— Going into the water he’d still be whistling; he’d go down and then he’d come up again, and down and up again and each time he’d be whistling until the very last time when the water closed his mouth for good. And then there’d be silence and darkness, and a few last bubbles floating on the surface of the water, with the last notes of the hymn trapped inside, and the great stars looking down.

  ‘He was a boy,’ she said angrily, aloud. ‘Only a boy.’

  A sudden loud pattering made her glance towards the ceiling. For a moment, she didn’t take it in: birds quarrelling up there on the roof? A possum fallen from its nest in an overhanging tree? Then she realised it was the sound of raindrops and her heart lifted, even though she knew they’d stop in a moment, like they always did, and the wind would grow stronger and the cloud would thin into long tattered veils and the sun would come out again.

  But the pattering went on, it became louder, soon it was a roar. Ruth sprang up from the chair and ran down the hall to the verandah: the grey sky was so low it seemed to touch the treetops; the rain fell in torrents, in sheets, in streams. Already there were shining puddles on the dry lawn. A glorious scent of water and the peppery perfume of soaked earth and grass and leaves drifted from the bush.

  The rain is raining all around, she heard Tam Finn’s young voice reciting, It falls on fields and trees, it rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea. ‘Dancey!’ she called. ‘Dancey! It’s raining! Come and see!’

  There was no reply. Of course – Dancey had gone into Woodfall. She’d get soaked. Soaked.

  Behind the roaring of the rain there was a deep quiet, and from this quiet, faintly and far off, she heard her name being called.

  ‘Ruth! Ruth!’

  Somewhere out in the lane.

  She ran down the verandah steps and out to the gate. The grass squelched wonderfully beneath her feet, Hayfield Lane was running with water, out in the bush she could hear the rushing of the waterfall and above it the voice still calling her name – and there down the lane she saw a small figure running towards her, and it seemed to Ruth that everything in her life had led up to this moment: the accident at the crossroads, Barinjii, Tam Finn, the years between, the letter inside on the kitchen table – everything had led to this, the thin dark-haired girl, clothes streaming, running up the lane, calling out her name. ‘Ruth!’

  Ruth held out her arms and Dancey ran into them, sobbing.

  ‘I tore up your photo!’ she gasped. ‘I tore up your photo, Ruth! The one the Indian man sent of his new baby and his family! Bansi! I tore it into tiny little bits and then I burned it up! I’m sorry!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Ruth, pushing the dripping hair from the girl’s cold forehead. It was wet and sticky with dust but it had such a wonderful, living feel.

  ‘It does matter! It was beautiful!’ sobbed Dancey. ‘There was a baby and a little girl—’

  ‘He’ll send us another one,’ said Ruth.

  Us. Dancey’s grey eyes seemed to leap at the word. They glowed.

  ‘Will he?’ she asked, her voice trembling. ‘Will he? Send – us – another one?’

  ‘Of course.’

  They stared at each other. How like him she was: that pale heart-shaped face, the blue-black hair, the rainy grey eyes – every gesture, every expression was that of Tam Finn’s child.

  But it didn’t matter if she wasn’t, thought Ruth. All around them, a new kind of balance was forming in their world – the heat and dust and danger was giving way to rain: the tanks would fill, the grass grow green, people would sleep sound at night. Tam Finn had been lost, but Dancey Trelawny was found – that was the real true thing. She put her arm round the girl’s narrow shoulders and turned towards the house. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  acknowledgements

  HYMNS AND SONGS

  Tam Finn’s hymns are: ‘Cradling Children in His Arm’ –

  Nikolai F G Grundtvig, 1783-1872; tr. Johannes H V Knudsen,

  and ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’ – Bianco de Siena,

  d. 1434, tr. Richard Frederick Little

  Fa
ther Joseph sings: ‘Glory be to God in Heaven’ –

  Michael Perry, Catholic Worship Book, 1985

  Nan sings: ‘Nut-Brown Maiden’, a Traditional Scottish song

  Tam Finn recites: ‘Rain’, from A Child’s Garden of Verses,

  by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1913

  Barinjii Anglican Church sings: ‘All Things Bright

  and Beautiful’, by Cecil Alexander, 1848