Fire in Summer

by JH Fletcher

  ‘That was kind,’ the young woman said. ‘Won’t you step inside, out of the heat?’

  Kath walked through the doorway like someone who spent her life dropping in on communes. She was careful not to let her eyes roam; no-one was going to accuse her of sticking her beak where it wasn’t wanted. Harvested a few impressions, even so: rooms empty or nearly so, bare walls, plain boarded floors. There was a faint, sharp smell she could not identify, but, apart from that, nothing. There was nobody about.

  In what would have been the living room, a couple of chairs that had seen better days, but something to sit on, at least.

  ‘We got them for visitors,’ the woman said. ‘Mostly we sit on the floor.’

  It seemed expected, so Kath sat in one of the chairs, feeling her age and weight, the uncertainty of not knowing what to say next.

  ‘I can offer you a glass of water,’ said the young woman.

  ‘That would be nice.’

  The woman wafted away, leaving Kath with the chance to have a squizz. There was little to see: the room neither clean nor dirty, looking as rooms do before the furniture arrives. Except that in this case no more furniture was expected.

  The woman brought two glasses of water. ‘Welcome to our house,’ she said.

  They drank, Kath feeling that she had been trapped into a kind of ritual. But could, of course, be mistaken.

  There was nowhere to put the glass. Stick it on the floor, for heaven’s sake. And did so, feeling an absurd flicker of triumph at having passed that barrier, at least.

  With new confidence she asked, ‘Are you here alone?’

  ‘The rest are around, somewhere.’ As though mislaying a person or two were quite normal. The woman told Kath her name was Asta. ‘It’s Norwegian. After the wife of the first Matlock who settled on the Yorke Peninsula in the eighteen-forties. They were my ancestors. There’s a family legend that her husband was killed in a brawl in a Hunter pub. Probably nonsense.’

  It was true that Matlock was a famous name in the district. None of them left now, the Matlock mines closed for a hundred years, but Matlock Beach, on Spencer Gulf, was where Ruth Ballard had lived after she’d made it big as a writer, although Kath seemed to remember that she had died, too, a year or two back.

  ‘There are six of us,’ Asta said. ‘Plus two children. Paul, who belongs to Dave and Lucy, and Asta. Who is mine, of course.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ Kath remembered what she was doing here. ‘I wanted to warn you not to light fires.’

  ‘We know better than that.’

  ‘Is that what brought you here?’ Kath asked. ‘Because your family’s from these parts?’

  ‘It was Dave’s idea. His mother used to live here. Susie. Maybe you knew her?’

  ‘Susie Warren?’ Kath stared. ‘She’s my niece.’ Who had done a runner at age sixteen, with that bikie bloke Bugs Hancock. Who, it seemed, had now returned, at least by proxy, in the body of her son.

  ‘Do you know what happened to her?’

  ‘Living with someone in Ipswich, last I heard. Dave doesn’t see her any more.’

  Lost all her life, Susie was lost still. Perhaps it was as well, Kath thought. She would be fifty, now. With both Wilf and Dulcie gone, there would have been nothing for her here.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ Kath wondered. ‘If there are eight of you?’

  ‘Lucy’s taken Paul to Gawler on the bus. The rest of them are working.’

  ‘Working?’ Kath was lost; around the McCreedy Homestead there was no land to work.

  ‘We’re artists,’ Asta said. ‘Apart from me. I’m a poet.’

  It was difficult to know what to say about that. ‘Artists? You mean paintings?’

  Paint. Of course. That was what she had smelt, when she had first come in.

  ‘Would you like to see some of them? I’m not sure they’ll let you, mind. Privacy’s a big thing with us.’

  Take that how you like, Kath thought. She remembered Miss Blyth, who had introduced her to the idea of art and the trip she had made with her to the Gallery in Adelaide. It was years since she had looked at a painting; the thought made her sad, that life could slide away unnoticed.

  ‘I would like that,’ she said.

  Asta told Kath that they had converted one of the sheds, which explained the emptiness of the house.

  ‘I thought I could smell turps?’ ventured Kath.

  ‘Sometimes one of us needs to work in private, but mostly we share the same space. It helps the vibes,’ Asta said. ‘Togetherness is what lies at the bottom of our basic philosophy. Togetherness and unity.’ And smiled, as though Kath had the slightest idea what she was on about.

  Asta led the way into the yard, where the door of a shed had been painted: a golden circle on a light blue background.

  ‘Blue and gold,’ Asta said. ‘The colours of unity.’

  They went inside. A half-hearted effort had been made to sort things out. A lot of the rubbish that one associated with sheds had been cleared away, although grime and probably redbacks still lingered in corners.

  A group of young people stood around an easel. They were all talking, most vociferously, with no-one listening to anyone else; unity obviously had its limitations.

  The talking stopped as Asta and Kath came in. The silence watched, cautiously. Kath had the feeling that she was somewhere she had no right to be — but it was Asta’s idea, she protested silently. Then the tall young man in the centre of the group smiled, which cracked the ice.

  Asta said, ‘This lady’s Mrs Warren. She reckons she may be some relly of yours, Dave.’

  ‘I’m your great-aunt. Your mother is my brother-in-law’s daughter,’ Kath explained.

  The thought of the relationship struck no sparks. ‘She never said much about her time here.’

  Small wonder, Kath thought. ‘She was only sixteen when she left.’

  ‘I don’t see a lot of her,’ Dave said.

  They looked at each other, out of conversation before they’d started. ‘You paint?’ Kath said foolishly, determined to make an effort.

  ‘Yes.’

  She had hoped he would show her his work. He did not, but stood, as did the rest.

  ‘I won’t disturb you any longer, then.’

  Asta said, ‘Mrs Warren stopped by to warn us not to light fires.’

  ‘Not only for that,’ she lied boldly.

  ‘We won’t be having any fires,’ Dave said.

  And watched, silently. Feathers slightly ruffled, Kath went home.

  ‘I warned that hippy bunch about fires,’ she told Hedley when he came in. ‘One of them is Susie’s kid. Wilf’s daughter?’

  Hedley was in no mood for long-lost rellies, particularly on Wilf’s side. ‘There’s grain trucks backed up half a mile at Hunter. How we going to cart grain without trucks, eh?’

  I shall not visit them again, Kath thought. They did not want me there. Besides, we had nothing to say to each other. Yet the knowledge of their presence, so offensive to the Madge Staceys of the district, gave Kath pleasure, and for the same reason. Because, undeniably, they were different. By being there, they stirred the stagnant waters of the district. For that reason Kath would have welcomed more contact, but there was none. Hippies and town kept themselves apart. Only Dave proved the exception.

  Kath met him in town with a pretty woman in a flowery robe, a baby slung like washing on her hip.

  ‘Lucy,’ Dave introduced. ‘And Paul.’

  After that they were always knocking into each other, although mostly they just smiled, or exchanged the occasional word. The rest of them Kath never saw at all.

  One day Dave came around to the homestead. Reaping was over, but Hedley was out, which might have been as well.

  ‘I wondered if you could give me the name of a doctor?’

  ‘Is anyone ill?’ Not that it was any of Kath’s business, but common humanity demanded that she at least ask.

  ‘The kid. We think he may be asthmatic. The heat knocks him abo
ut a bit. We thought we’d get a doctor to have a look at him.’

  ‘There’s Doctor Carlyle over at Kapunda. Or the new one who’s just joined him. Doctor Anderson. She’s a cousin of yours.’

  ‘I might give her a call.’

  A week later he was back, with a flat packet about two feet square.

  ‘How’s the baby?’

  ‘Good. We were right, though: he is asthmatic, poor little bugger. She said we had to be careful of dust. How do you get away from dust in this part of the world?’

  Many would have said by leaving it, but Kath did not.

  Dave unpeeled the newspaper covering from the package. ‘This is for you.’ It was a painting, but unlike any painting that Kath had ever seen. It was formless, a spiral of colours, whirling madly in an explosion of reds and golds and blues. With, at the centre, a tiny black circle.

  She held it tentatively; its lack of form made her nervous. I understand so little in the world, she thought.

  ‘Gratitude,’ Dave said. ‘The colours of gratitude.’

  ‘I see.’ But did not. ‘And the black circle?’

  ‘The centre.’

  ‘Ah.’ Could not bring herself to ask, Of what?

  ‘Why are you showing it to me? It’s nice to see it, but—’

  ‘It’s yours. To thank you for helping us.’

  ‘But I did nothing—’

  ‘You came to see us.’ And smiled. ‘Not only about the fires, as you said. You speak to us in the street. When I asked you about a doctor, you gave me two. Bloke up the hill stopped me once, gave me a mouthful about my dog worrying his horses. Said he’d shoot him, I didn’t look out. Had half a mind to shoot me, too, by the look of him. I don’t even have a dog. None of us does.’

  Lyndon Stiles, thought Kath. He’s neurotic about those damned horses of his.

  ‘I wanted you to have the picture,’ Dave said. ‘So did Lucy. You’re welcome, any time you like to drop round.’

  Absurdly, Kath was moved. ‘Very kind …’

  Later, getting Hedley’s tea, Kath thought about Dave and Lucy and baby Paul and the group up at the McCreedy Homestead. They do no harm, she thought, but they don’t fit in, either. Their attitude to life is different from ours. I suppose you could say that the people around here are as down to earth as you can get. Football and the land, that’s what matters. Practical things. Whereas the hippies live in an enchanted forest, where the rest of us never go. I am too old now, but there was a time when I would have liked to find an enchanted forest of my own.

  She thought, I did.

  She went and sat in the living room, something she hardly ever did in daytime. For the first time in months, she talked with Jeth Douglas and the woman she had been then. Had it been love of love, for its own sake? Or love of someone who, in his own way, had also stirred the stagnant waters? Or love of Jeth himself, the man and the spirit of the man?

  Yes to all of it, she thought. And, for a few minutes, dozed. When she woke, she was filled with a tender awareness of the man who had drowned but never gone away, who was with her now, who would be with her until her own last day.

  I have been so lucky, she thought. Because I have known love. It doesn’t matter whether it was love of love, love of what was different or — as I believe — love of Jethrow Douglas himself. What matters is that I have loved, love still, shall always love. So, however I have lived my life, I am complete.

  45

  STEVE

  1996–2000

  Steve was six years younger than Woody, an accident that wasn’t supposed to happen, and his parents had lost interest in kids long before he arrived.

  Having got away from Juniper at last, Wilf spent his time inspecting the bottom of a glass, while Dulcie was sick of the whole process. Never mind having the brat, it was the business of feeding it, clothing it, changing it, of crap and stinks and shrieks, that got her down.

  ‘See to him, Woody, there’s a dear.’ Woody, by no means the brightest light in the forest, did the best he could, while Dulcie puffed a fag and flipped through the latest picture magazine.

  Said something for Steve’s constitution that he survived at all. He nearly drowned in the toilet before he could walk, was scalded half to death by a saucepan he pulled off the stove when he was one. Yet somehow he did, a bit introverted, it was true, a bit strange, but there. And, before he was old enough to know the difference, rich.

  That Juniper Harris … She’d been another strange one, body like a witch’s broomstick and the face and temper to go with it. Everybody knew what she’d been up to with Wilf Warren, but who’d have guessed she’d be daft enough to leave her five hundred acres to Wilf’s son? Some would have liked to claim that Stevie was really Juniper’s child, but with Dulcie as big as a ten-ton truck during the last couple of months before he arrived, that might have been a hard yarn to sell.

  By the time he was ten, everyone knew Steve had a problem. He found it hard to talk. Not incapable; just didn’t. He spent days saying nothing at all. ‘He’s shy,’ said Mrs Otway, who would have seen the good side of Satan himself. It certainly made things difficult for the people who had dealings with him, to say nothing of Steve himself.

  In 1972, dear old Emily died at last. She had never forgiven Hedley for carving up the family the way he had and now, with one variation, did what she’d always threatened. She left her land, not to Wilf, but to the three boys. Garth was tied up with his hardware store in the hills; Woody was only ninety cents in the dollar, at best, so in practice, as soon as he was old enough, Steve would get to run all of it. In the meantime Dulcie and Wilf, later Dulcie and her brother, managed to keep things more or less afloat.

  Steve might not have been much of a talker, but he was nobody’s fool. He had eleven hundred and seventy-three acres of good arable land. He took it over on his sixteenth birthday and, within a few years, had a good thing going.

  He had never been out with a girl in his life. He was lonely and no oil painting, which didn’t help. For a long time he put up with it, then, when he was in his mid-thirties, decided it was time he did something about it. He had never spent a cent in his life except on the farm but, on his thirty-fifth birthday, he bought himself a present: he stuck a boy-meets-girl ad in one of the papers.

  First thing anyone knew about it was when Jo Daniels rocked up with her blonde head, red sports car and a skirt up to here. Well. Tongues worked overtime that weekend. Who was she? Where had she come from? What was she doing?

  They soon found out; Jo Daniels was headhunting. She was a city girl who’d decided she’d had enough of life in the fast track, fancied a bit of peace and quiet for a change. There weren’t many slower tracks than the mid-north, so maybe she’d come to the right place.

  ‘Won’t stick it ten minutes,’ Madge Stacey said. ‘She’ll be bored out of her mind.’

  For a time it seemed Madge was wrong. Jo had been nearer forty than thirty when she answered Steve’s advert, and the peace and quiet of the country had seemed exactly what she was looking for, to say nothing of a husband with all his teeth and twelve hundred acres. She didn’t care if he wasn’t a talker. As for looks … Well, like people say, looks weren’t everything.

  They got married in the city, some place Jo had been living before she’d moved north, and the next day turned up at the farm to get on with their lives. It wasn’t long before Jo found she had a problem on her hands. Living in the country was one thing, being a farmer’s wife something else again, and she wasn’t cut out for it. No-one was about to show her, either. Not one woman had looked at Steve in all these years but, when this outsider rocked up in her fancy gear and pinched the man who had suddenly become the town’s most eligible bachelor, there was hell to pay.

  You got a problem? Sort it out for yourself. Jo did the best she could. The cutie skirts and blouses went into the cupboard; the first time she went into town in jeans and check shirt, no-one recognised her. Of course there was more to being a farmer’s wife than dressing the par
t but, little by little, she began to make a go of it.

  It didn’t last. They’d been married two years when she started going for long hikes through the scrub, a woman who before she left the city had never walked a kilometre in her life. She quickly discovered that exploring didn’t suit her. The bush was nothing but miles of dust and flies and heat. She didn’t know one bird from another and, when you’d seen one roo, you’d seen the lot.

  She sat on the veranda and looked across the valley at the distant hills. She picked a couple of books at random in the library; half a dozen pages and she gave up on both of them. I am bored, she thought. Bored, bored, bored.

  Because she didn’t have enough to do, the work she had took forever. The house was a mess, but it was too much trouble to put it right. More times than not, Steve’s tea was late; she didn’t make the bed until midday, mooched around the house in a dressing gown with her hair like a bird’s nest.

  One weekend there was a tennis tournament. Jo wasn’t into tennis, but anything was better than nothing, so she tarted herself up and went anyway, dragging Steve along with her.

  There were a couple of national class players, but it wasn’t the matches she enjoyed so much as the company. She’d always been a people person and now found herself back with people who knew how to laugh and have a good time. Some of them in particular.

  Byron Brown was there, a bloke whose eye for a good time was the sharpest in town. At the end of the day the three of them went to the pub, where Steve shouted his round and stood still and silent while the other two jabbered fit to burst.

  A week later Jo put on her glad rags and went off to pay a social call on Byron Brown. Steve stayed home.

  ‘He’s invited the pair of us. I wouldn’t feel right by myself. Please come.’

  Steve wouldn’t. ‘I never got anything to say. You go ahead, have a good time. You needn’t worry,’ he told her, speaking as painfully as always. ‘I trust you.’ More than some would have said.

  She went; in a week’s time went again. After that it was every Tuesday; never again did she suggest that Steve go with her.