Mum stayed quiet while Nan recovered. Nan wasn’t one to loosen her grip on her emotions.
After a few minutes, she resumed chopping and fetched the soup pot and put the gas on.
‘At least he’s been found,’ said Mum. ‘At least we know what happened.’
Nan turned around. She was blotchy and red and very stern. She said, ‘What do we know? That he’s been in the lake this whole time? Celia, we have no idea what happened.’
•
Mack went back to the station after he’d visited with Mrs Bart and Pearl.
‘I’m so sorry, Flora. Pearl,’ he had said. ‘This is not how we wanted to find him.’
Mrs Bart just stared. While once she had paced, now she stared. She stared holes in the walls, in the carpets, in the bed linen, in the back of the bathroom door. She’d taken to sitting on the toilet, with the lid down, just like it was a good old regular chair. ‘Just in case’, she said blankly, as if sickness may escape her instantly without her even sensing its approach.
Of course it was too soon for a formal identification. That would probably require dental records at this point. But Mack could be fairly certain—he could be sure—given what he saw, given Bart’s windcheater, given Bart’s boot. He was sure it was Bart, and the family needed to brace itself for a formal identification stating that fact.
Back behind his pinewood desk, Mack felt helpless. He had Paulie Roberts come in and give a formal statement. Mack took it down longhand and typed it up later on the station’s handsome new computer. He noted many details: Paul thought Bart was a log; Paul didn’t disturb the log/ body in any way; no one else was present at the time of the discovery; the smell lingered.
Paulie proved nauseous throughout his delivery. He stopped now and again to breathe out like the old bellows that Lang Mackenzie had used to stoke the fire when Mack was small. Paulie swallowed air in big gulps and saliva flooded his mouth. He turned his head to the side, searching for relief.
Mack emptied his metal rubbish bin and set it down next to Paulie’s chair. ‘Just in case,’ he said.
Paulie thanked him greenly and seemed happy when the whole thing was over.
‘Why me? I don’t know. Just bad luck I guess,’ he said, on the other side of the counter now, heading for the door.
‘Worse luck for Bart,’ said Mack.
•
At school, George and I sat on the grassy hill in the sun and pondered the universe in the gravest tones we had ever used. We spoke as deep as the lake, and as wide as our seventeen-year-old horizons could fathom. I’d never seen George so serious.
Death.
It was our first experience of it as almost-adults. George and I were five when Grace Mackenzie shed her translucent skin and escaped her sadness. We were eight when George’s elderly dog, Digger, dug his last hole and lay down inside it. We hadn’t had a death since. And Goodwood had not lost a man of such note—a man so revered—ever.
The news was filtering in to school slowly. Some parents had heard it early on Cedar Street and spoken it to their children. Some teachers had gleaned it from classroom chatter, or had stopped by Nance’s on the way to school and been given an unexpected lesson in forensics. By that stage it was conjecture and rumour for some, and dire certainty for others. Who else could it be? said the believers. Paulie Roberts saw him good and proper. Was sick down the side of his boat. It was no log, June told us.
The doubters were less vocal. Maybe it was someone else? We heard Jackson Harrington say that as he passed us. And Mr Berg was always quick to dissent. What if it was Rosie? If he or she—if the body—if it was so sick-making, then it can’t have looked like Bart. Bart had such a kind face. It was too soon to jump to conclusions.
But it wasn’t too soon, because the majority of the town had already bent its legs, readied itself and confidently jumped there, and in this instance the majority was right.
‘Pearl would be glad at least that he was in The Horse,’ I said to George, just before the bell rang.
‘How could she be glad of anything?’ asked George.
I shifted uncomfortably. ‘I just mean, it’s nice that it’s called after a horseshoe. Nan told me Pearl collects horseshoes.’
‘I guess,’ said George. ‘Didn’t turn out to be a lucky one though.’ George frowned. She was not her usual self. She didn’t talk as fast and incessant. She made few jokes. She’d become so serious, much like the rest of the town. It was almost holidays. Ordinarily the whole school would be abuzz with excitement. But instead there was a heavy feeling to everything—a communal gloom—and no one knew how to shake it.
‘I feel sick,’ she said. ‘Do you want my sandwich?’
‘I feel sick too,’ I said, and we left our lunches sitting on the hill between us.
30
The authorities were having a difficult time with Bart.
The fish had nibbled him, and the water had wrested the skin from his limbs, and bloated his trunk, and sunk his organs like tiny ships. In fact, the log-body of Bart McDonald had been through so much since anyone last saw him, that any messages it now tried to transmit—even to the most skilled medical examiner—were very hard to decipher.
Bart travelled all the way to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Sydney, where he lay on a silver slab while a forensic pathologist did the best he could. But, as far as Mack could understand, the answers Goodwood longed for were to be confusing at best.
The merciful thing, which happened by Wednesday, was the relief of a formal identification. No matter how big a lake fish gets, lake fish don’t eat teeth, and as much as Bart was diminished, his teeth were still intact. The forensic pathologist in Sydney declared the teeth to be, without a doubt, the teeth of Bart McDonald.
Mack knocked on Mrs Bart’s door and found it opened by Jan. Mrs Bart was busy, staring at the bathroom door from her seat on the toilet. Jan went to tell her sister while Mack waited in the hallway. There came no answer.
Jan said blankly, through the wooden door: ‘Flor. Mack’s here. He’s spoken to the doctors. It’s him, Flor. It’s Bart. They know for sure.’
All Mack heard was the sound of staring.
The rest of Goodwood, though, breathed a sigh of relief. The town could not take much more uncertainty. People were desperate. They were hopeless for some answers. No one could tolerate the question marks left by the missing.
‘God bless,’ said Val Sparks to an impromptu gathering at the Vinnies counter, gently illuminated by her votive candles. ‘A conclusion.’
And yet there was still very little to conclude. As Nance had cleverly foretold from behind her all-seeing counter, the state of Bart’s body meant that there was certain to be a problem. And, as Nance had suspected all along, that problem was cause of death.
•
Mack received the preliminary autopsy report on Thursday afternoon. It spilled out of the station’s fax machine and landed in a mess on the carpet. Mack spread it over his pinewood desk and read with his head propped up on one arm.
The medical terminology caused him a slight pain to the temples. First, the autopsy disclosed ‘minor degrees of pulmonary congestion and oedema’. Mack leaned back in his chair and puffed out some air. ‘Water on the lungs’ was how it was explained to him later. Mack read the report from beginning to end and then called the forensic pathologist himself for an explanation.
Water on the lungs.
The lake was in Bart’s chest.
A drowning.
That much Mack could gather.
But, as the pathologist explained, it was slightly more complicated than that. The lake shared Bart’s chest with Bart’s heart. And Bart’s heart had not been a healthy organ.
Mack read on. ‘Severe coronary artery atherosclerosis with posterior wall myocardial fibrosis.’ That sounded bad. It was bad. Bart was a heart attack waiting to happen, and it seemed that a heart attack had waited until just that moment—when Bart was on his boat, blissfully fishing.
Mack felt his own heart t
humping. The voice of the pathologist was slow and muffled. Mack saw Bart in a quick vision, grabbing at his burning chest like he was patting out a fire. Old Lang Mackenzie was there too, stoking with his bellows, his beetroot head and a lonesome raven. Mack closed his eyes and waited for it all to pass.
The pathologist had three theories.
The first one sounded simple enough: Bart had a heart attack on his boat. He’d felt the thrust inside him, assailing him from within, and must’ve been in a precarious position—like near the edge, sitting or standing—and he’d been so overcome by the pain and the shock of it that he went over into the water, where he swallowed a chest full of brown liquid, until he spasmed, and frothed, and wilted, and drowned.
Death by drowning. That’s what everyone had thought.
But the pathologist had a second line of thinking: that Bart did not ‘drown’ at all. He had a heart attack on his boat. He felt it take him from within, in an instant. And it took him, just like that—so sudden. Bart died standing; or he died sitting. And then he went over, from his precarious position—graveyard dead—and hit the lake as cold as the water was. The forensic pathologist assured Mack that even then, in the instance of Bart not inhaling, the lake would still find his lungs. From all the time he’d spent sunken, aimlessly caressing the silty floor, the water would’ve seeped in and kept on seeping. The pathologist assured Mack of that. ‘That’s what water does,’ he said down the line. That’s what water does, thought Mack for a long time after.
None of this was a shock to Mack. Everyone knew about the heart attack Bart had had on the riding trail with Pearl.
But then there was option number three: that somehow, at some time, Bart fell into the lake. That before the heart attack had even considered its move, Bart suffered some form of misadventure. Did he trip? Was he pushed? How could anyone be sure? But whatever it was, it caused Bart to take leave from his own boat and wind up in the water. Then, overcome with the stress of it, or the cold, and coupled with his already developed condition, then Bart had a heart attack and drowned. And the water seeped in, regardless of the order. The water seeped and seeped, because that’s what water does.
Mack leant back in his chair and stretched his arms back over his head like he used to before a game of football.
He got to the end of the report. The blessed conclusion. The forensic pathologist had hedged his bets and sat on the fence. His preliminary findings—which would be passed on to the coroner—posited death by ‘atherosclerotic coronary artery disease with a contributory effect of drowning’—in which the drowning part either happened before, or after, or not at all.
Mack felt deflated. He chewed the inside of his mouth.
A coronial inquest had been ordered. The question marks were bound to hover. It could take months for the authorities to determine how Bart had died—and when.
And, in any case, where had Bart been this whole time?
The first thing Mack had been quick to note was that Bart was not wearing his life jacket. They’d found two on his ghost boat when they searched it, and Mack had asked Mrs Bart if Bart had owned another. ‘I have no idea,’ said Mrs Bart, who had no taste for fishing. So he asked Irene Oakman and Roy Murray the same question, but they didn’t know either. For certain he had two, because they’d both worn a second one. But they couldn’t be sure if he had more. And whether he did or didn’t, Bart had not been wearing a life jacket when Paulie Roberts made his terrible discovery.
The authorities had their opinions. The lake was cold that winter. Cold water stops a body from coming up again once it goes down. Mack had asked a lot of questions. Does a body always go down? The answer was yes, it does. A body always goes down. But then Mack heard words like ‘bacteria’ and ‘gas’ and ‘distension’ and he shut his mind to the black thoughts the whole thing gave him. He thought of Belanglo and the inevitable ravens. He was verging on hallucinations. Mack closed his eyes again and waited for the dark clouds to pass and pass.
The undisputed facts were that Bart had died and sunk to the bottom. Then perhaps he’d floated along it, but no one knew for how long or for how far. Currents at the bottom were different to currents at the top, and no one had been down there taking notes. Bart bore no concrete signs of pre-death injury, like a person hitting him over the head or engaging him in a scuffle; but then again it was very hard to tell. Water does all kinds of things that make ‘postmortem’ and ‘ante-mortem’ just approximate phrases. Water smudges and mystifies. It seeps in and destroys. It dampens a for-certain diagnosis. Mack hadn’t known this about water, but now he did: that’s what water does. So Bart had injuries, yes, the pathologist had said. He had gouges as big as valleys. He had cuts and abrasions and lacerations. But they were just as likely acquired by him making acquaintance with ‘obstructions’ at the bottom of the lake. Sunken branches, the hulls of old boats, the wings of missing planes.
So Bart had sunk. Then the bacteria and gas and distention had caused him to rise, like the Second Coming, and that’s when Paulie found him in the marshes of the Horse.
There was some question as to whether water levels may also have contributed. Bart was, after all, quite wedged. And with the lack of rain the lake was lower. So he may have risen earlier, got stuck just below the surface in the quagmire, only to be revealed as the water level in the lake slowly waned.
Really, though, what did it matter? Bart McDonald was dead and would soon be buried. He had a heart attack and drowned. Or he had a heart attack and didn’t. Or he kind of did both at the same time.
Mack folded the fax paper and rested it inside his manila folder. He looked at the framed photo of Tracy and Jasper that he kept next to his stapler. They always cheered him. He was a good husband and father. He wanted a nice time with his family now the warmer months had started. This was barbeque weather, he thought, and almost time for swimming in the river. The fish would be biting and he wished he wanted to catch them. Mack closed the folder and set it aside and longed to stop thinking about it every single waking minute.
31
The news about the discovery of Bart’s body had taken up the entire front page of the Gather Region Advocate. It also warranted a paragraph in the News in Brief section of the Sydney Morning Herald, on account of Bart being notable, and the fact that he’d been missing for so long. It described Bart as a ‘local member of council and a much-admired figure in the community’.
Everyone in Goodwood agreed.
I cut out both articles, one big and one small, and slid them into my blue notebook, next to the articles I’d saved about the bodies in the Belanglo State Forest, and the few local articles on Bart and Rosie’s disappearance. Rosie’s MISSING sign was curled up all along the edges. I couldn’t even bring myself to unfold it. I couldn’t bear to look at her black-and-white inscrutable face.
Big Jim was devastated. When he pulled up his ute of an evening he’d sit for a while after he’d turned off the engine. I’d see him out of my bedroom window, sitting in the dark driveway, the whites of his eyes illuminated by the moon. Tears spilled out sometimes, and he’d stare through them for several minutes before pulling himself out the door and trudging into the trenches of his house.
All week poor old Fitzy forced a smile as she watered the back yard in her bike helmet, fretting about the lack of rain. She’d shed her neck brace but could only turn her head with limited mobility. Even Fitzy, who didn’t like to dwell on sadness, was overcome by the news. Her helmet hung lower, resting on her giant glasses, making her face seem put upon by above. She cowered under the swooping magpies and her giant eyes blinked and welled in the fine dry day.
On the Wednesday after Bart’s log-body had surfaced, Mum began complaining of pains in the chest. She said, ‘I don’t want to alarm you, it’s probably nothing,’ and stood slightly bent over, holding her heart and breathing deeply.
‘Are you having a heart attack?’ I asked.
Irritated breathing noises emanated.
‘No, no. I don
’t think so.’ She winced.
She had finished organising the sunroom. The space she had made was just waiting for us to get a desk, and when we got a desk it would be just waiting for us to get a computer. But there was no point pushing it. Mum had been too busy being busy. She’d weeded. She’d alphabetised her keeping pile of secondary books. She’d troubled herself for hours with difficult knitting. She’d dragged the vacuum into the garden on the end of our longest extension cord and cleaned out Backflip’s kennel, awkwardly holding an umbrella to protect herself from the magpies. Then she O’Cedar-polished the dining table, pruned the houseplants, and took two garbage bags of our old clothes to Val at the Vinnies. Mum had nothing left to rearrange. She just held her chest and appeared afflicted.
Nan said it was psychosomatic. ‘Celia, for God’s sake, your heart’s fine,’ and Mum bent upwards so she was straight again and looked genuinely confused.
‘But I’m not even thinking about Bart!’ Maybe it’s indigestion. I’ll have a Rennie.’
She had a Rennie. She avoided chocolate, citrus and spices for the rest of the week.
Nan told me not to worry. ‘Everyone grieves in their own way,’ said Nan. ‘The body is very much at the will of the mind.’
•
On Wednesday night, Mum said ‘The funeral’s on Friday’ and it was agreed that we would both attend. It was scheduled for the afternoon, on the last day of school before the holidays: four pm, at the Anglican Parish of Goodwood. If Mrs Bart had had her way, it would have been sooner, but the autopsy had to be finished before Bart could be sent back to Goodwood. Given the reports from Paulie Roberts, there was no question around the issue of an open casket.
Meanwhile, to the north, the search continued in Belanglo State Forest. No other bodies were recovered. Nance, like an amateur detective, scoured the newspapers for new information daily. So did George and I, every lunchtime. We spread the grass with newsprint, wondering if they might find some hint or clue of Rosie. They didn’t.
Goodwood Page 18