Fire in Summer

by JH Fletcher

  People began to talk, not only about Byron, but other blokes, too. Eventually, someone said something in Steve’s hearing. Steve never had a word for a soul, but this unlocked his tongue. ‘My wife needs friends,’ he said. ‘She likes conversation, a bit of a laugh. I’m no good for that. But she’s all right. I won’t have you lot saying anything different.’

  Blokes looked at each other and shrugged. If it was laughs she wanted it was funny that none of her mates seemed to be women but, if Steve wanted to believe everything was jake, who were they to call him a liar? They watched, all the same. One or two even took bets on who would be the next conversationalist to be honoured with Jo Warren’s attention.

  Two years down the track and Michael Warren’s name was added to the list. It was winter and in no time jokes were flying around about keeping things in the family, and people having to cozy up to keep warm. Michael’s reputation was as ripe as a polecat, and people waited with the pleased expectation of spectators at a prize fight, wondering when they’d see the first blood.

  Winter turned to spring and then to summer, and now Jo and Mike were rocking up at the pub together, cool as you please, holding hands and laughing secretly, for all the world like the lovers that Steve persisted in believing they were not.

  Christmas, with the headers flat out across the valley and everywhere eyes watching the sky for the first smudge of smoke. Fire in summer: the nightmare of every country dweller.

  January. Still nothing. The crops were in the silo. That, at least. Not the best of seasons, but better than many, and prices were up on last year. No-one was going to make a million, but no-one was going broke, either.

  It was an uneasy time. The wind came and went, gusty and unsettled, slinging dust across the landscape in uneasy twisters that scurried, and died, and returned to haunt the paddocks like ghosts. Temperatures hovered in the low forties during the day, sagged no lower than thirty degrees at night. Houses that had been built for coolness became ovens as they heated through. Tempers grew as thin as paper. No-one committed suicide, no-one was murdered, but it was the weather for it, and no-one was taking anything for granted. Even the cops, who some claimed existed only to raise taxes from motorists, struggled, if not to their toes, at least to keep their eyes open.

  Mike and Jo continued to flirt in public; unlike the cops, Steve’s eyes remained resolutely shut.

  And still the wind blew, the temperatures stuck around forty degrees, and nothing happened.

  46

  THE WARREN FAMILY

  2000

  In the second week of February temperatures took off like a V8 saloon. Forty-two, forty-four, forty-six. All over the state hospitals were crammed with heat exhaustion cases. People called it the week from hell. In the mid-north the wind settled into the north and took root. The temperature was enough to fry eggs, and at dawn and dusk the skies were the colour of blood. Red dust blowing down from the Centre powdered man and beast, trees, paddocks and houses, the very air itself. Dams dried; grass wilted; each breath became agony. Even at night, the thermometer barely dipped below thirty; sleep, for most, became a thing of the past. Those with air-conditioning had it going full bore, to hell with the cost, until a succession of sub-station failures left them to swelter with the rest.

  Hedley had always loved the heat, but this year was different. ‘Must be getting old,’ he said, but only when no-one could hear him. Work was out of the question, but to stay in a house that radiated heat like an oven was almost as bad. He climbed into the ute and took off on a circular tour of the three farms that together made up the five thousand acres of the Warrens’ land and that represented the sum total of his life’s work.

  He remembered boasting once about being the next Sidney Kidman. Four thousand nine hundred and eighty-six acres, he thought. Pathetic, if you thought how much land Sidney Kidman had owned. People had said that Kidman owned more land than anyone in the Empire except the king. Alongside that, a tad under five thousand acres sounded like nothing at all.

  I did the best I could, he thought. No point fretting about it. It was the biggest holding in the district; that was something.

  Edgemont Forest was the most remote of the three farms, located on the eastern flank of the valley at the end of a dipping, lurching track that even nowadays was often impassable in the wet. Hedley had been onto the authorities a hundred times, but the Council had Brian Welke as its chairman, and Brian and Hedley had fallen out years before over the very property that Hedley was now visiting. Hedley Warren could go hang, as far as the Council was concerned. Never mind; Edgemont was a good property, for all that it was perilously near the top of the range, and the state of the track had never prevented him getting in equipment when it was needed.

  He got in now, the ute crashing and banging through the ruts, the wheels chucking up dust so thick that he could barely breathe, never mind see. It didn’t matter; there would be no other traffic on the track and he could have driven it with his eyes shut. He stopped the ute outside the homestead. The house was empty. Walter had lived there once. After he died Hedley had put in tenants, but they’d been more trouble than they were worth. After that he’d left it empty. It wasn’t good for the house, but Hedley had never been interested in stone and mortar. Now, climbing stiffly out of the ute, he did not even look at it, but at the land flowing like a tawny sea across the upper slopes of the range. It was steep but not too steep for equipment, provided you were careful, and he’d built revetments, which had taken care of the erosion. This year had been one of Edgemont’s best, cropping twenty bags from most of the property.

  ‘And that Welke bastard told me it wouldn’t go ten,’ Hedley announced to the flame-hot air as he stood and looked out at what was his.

  It had also killed his son, but he had trained himself not to think about that.

  It was a while since he had walked the paddocks. Today was hardly one for unnecessary exercise, but he decided to give it a go, all the same. He anchored his hat firmly on his head and set off, working his way diagonally downwards towards the furthest limit of the property.

  It took a while; the stubble was as brittle as glass and the heat coming off the ground would have toasted bread. There was no shade. You’re crazy, he told himself; there was satisfaction in the thought.

  All the same, he thought he’d catch his breath before heading back. He took off his hat and wiped his face with his handkerchief. He looked across the valley, twenty kilometres wide at this point, and on the far side, trailing its grey plume across the baking air, he saw smoke.

  Early that morning, before it was properly light, Steve Warren’s wife Jo — the one who had come up to the mid-north from Adelaide on a husband-hunting expedition and caught herself a farmer — had got up from the sweaty bed where she had spent the night trying vainly to sleep. The red pre-dawn light reflected from the ceiling; beyond the window, the world looked as though it were stained in blood. For the moment, all was still. Every tree and blade of grass might have been carved in stone, but the wind would come with the sun.

  The previous night Jo had watched the forecast, praying for a break in the weather, but the announcer had spoken of another day of torment, with no relief in sight. Winds would continue from the north, with the possibility of veering to the west later.

  Huge fires were reported on the Eyre Peninsula; there had been a hundred smaller outbreaks across the State, the CFS was warning that their crews were stretched to the limit. Planes had been grounded because of the Avgas crisis; if a big fire came, there would be no aircraft to dump water on the flames.

  Great, Jo had thought. Absolutely bloody great. Now, in the pre-dawn light, she walked out onto the veranda of the house. It was already hot and would soon be much worse. The north wind was beginning to blow; by eight, the mercury would once again be nudging forty degrees.

  Early as it was, Steve had already left the house to do whatever kept him amused all day. Jo wasn’t interested, but was thankful to see the back of him; the weath
er was too hot for husbands.

  There was a ton of ironing and housework, but she wasn’t interested in that, either. Let it wait, she thought. For the cooler weather, or for anything. It could wait all year, for all she cared. Who’d be a farmer’s wife? she thought. A husband who didn’t speak, no shops worth a damn, no entertainment, a million miles from anywhere with none of the comforts of home.

  Well, perhaps one. Thank God for Michael, she told herself. Without him I’d have been climbing the trees by now. She knew that tongues were wagging all over the district, but didn’t give a damn. What I shall do, she told herself, is have a cup of coffee, take a bath in water that may not be cold but is at least no worse than tepid, and give Michael a ring. See if he can suggest ways of passing the time.

  Running the bath, she thought how funny it was. Too hot for housework, yet the other, which could be guaranteed to raise the temperature, was a different matter altogether.

  At the McCreedy Homestead it was the babies who were suffering most from the heat. Little Paul, with his asthma, had an especially hard time, and the dust-laden wind didn’t help, but there was little anyone could do.

  ‘We’ll have to sweat it out,’ Dave said.

  Sweat was right.

  ‘Perhaps we should take him down to the river,’ Lucy suggested. There was a river, partially choked by reeds, that ran around the outskirts of the town. Some years before, a dam had been built to create a duck pond. ‘The air might be a bit clearer there.’

  But Dave shook his head. ‘It’ll be just as hot. Just as dusty, too. We’ll have to live with it.’

  The CFS got the first call at nine o’clock; within minutes its siren still fracturing the hot air, it had received a dozen more. There was fire on the northwestern side of the valley, in an inaccessible patch of scrub ground where, years earlier, an aboriginal woman had lived. It had started up the hill from the McCreedy Homestead. By the time the truck got there, the flames had bypassed the house and were driving through the ranges on a half-mile front.

  No way one truck could handle it. Bert Ogle, the team leader, radioed for help but was told he’d have to wait; there were no spare crews to be had.

  ‘We don’t get back-up out here now,’ he shouted into the radio, while the flames roared a hundred feet into the sky not two hundred metres from where he was standing and the heat crisped the hair on his head, ‘this one’s going to get away from us.’

  There was no time for further discussion. He flung himself back into the battle. With every second the fire was spreading. The wind picked up sparks and blazing debris and hurled them over the fire crew’s heads, kindling more blazes wherever they landed. Within the first hour, there were a dozen times when the crew came close to being cut off.

  There were dozens of volunteers and other crews were diverted to help when it became clear how serious a blaze it was, but the wind still blew and the flames, although they never got away altogether, continued to rage.

  All were under threat: houses, sheds, equipment, fences, livestock. And humans. Yet the crews were winning. Cursing, sweating, scorched by flame and drenched by water, they contained the main thrust of the fire. Back burns inhibited its spread. The settled ground was safe, the flames confined to an area of inaccessible bush that encircled the western side of the valley. Beyond was nothing but rough pasture. Its teeth drawn, the fire could burn out safely there.

  As the fire crews relaxed for the first time that day, the wind did what the forecast had warned: it veered to the west and redoubled its strength. Within minutes, it had leapt the breaks and shouldered its way down the hill into an area of dense scrub. Once again flames billowed skywards. Thrusting before it a pall of heat and smoke that brought visibility down to a few metres, the fire raged down the slope. Eucalypts exploded in the heat; faster than the fleetest horse, fire leapt from crown to crown until all that side of the range was ablaze. For a moment it paused — like it was getting its breath back, an onlooker said later — then fell with all its fury on the valley.

  Caught out by the wind change, the crews had to make a huge detour to come to grips with it again. In normal circumstances it was a forty-minute journey; now, through swirling smoke and smuts, they did it in twenty-five.

  In that twenty-five minutes, the fire had begun to kill. Sheep, to begin with: a mob of two hundred, caught in a hilltop paddock and roasted as they tried to break through the fence into the road. Next was the turn of two breeding emus and a horse that had been with the Fannings so long it was almost a member of the family.

  Everywhere farmers were trying to move their sheep away from the fire’s path. It was a hopeless task; the flames, ten times faster than the speediest sheep alive, rolled over them and they were gone. One dog went with them; the men themselves were lucky to get out, flinging themselves into the back of a ute and screaming away on wildly bucking springs from flames that snatched for them, missing them by centimetres.

  On the valley floor Michael and Jo Warren were making love in the bedroom of Michael’s cottage. The shutters were drawn to keep out as much heat and light as possible. Jo gasped and moaned, clinging with frantic hands to her lover as, for the second time that day, he pleasured her. Engulfed in shuddering sensation, she was well beyond any capacity for thought.

  Michael, however, was not. As he fondled her white body, smiled into her contorted face, listened to her frantic cries, he was conscious, too, of the room. Of the air pressing close and hot about them. Of …

  He paused.

  ‘Don’t stop! Oh God, don’t stop!’

  Of smoke.

  Now he was not thinking of Jo at all. He supported himself on his hands, all senses alert. It was hot, far too hot. And the smell of smoke was stronger.

  Her nails clawed frantically, drawing blood as she sought to drag him down upon her. He resisted her effortlessly. ‘What’s wrong?’ Her hysteria battered his ears. ‘Why have you stopped?’

  ‘Fire,’ he said in a conversational tone. ‘We’ve got a fire.’ He withdrew from her, but still waited, seeking confirmation of what his senses already knew.

  She had not heard a word. Now she beat clenched fists against his sweating chest. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  He became aware of her again: skin old, breasts flaccid, lines revealing age so clearly. Suddenly he was shouting back at her. ‘There’s a fire! Don’t you understand?’

  As though he had not really believed it until he had heard it from his own mouth, the words triggered action. He was on his feet, racing naked to the door. He opened it and ran outside. The scrub grew close about the house and prevented a clear view but, beyond the trees, a cloud of smoke was rolling down the hill. Its billowing darkness was shod by myriad red and orange blinks. Sparks exploded skywards amid the machine-gun bursts of burning branches, the ranting roar of flame. All far too close, and drawing closer with every second.

  A blazing leaf settled on him, but he was unaware of it, or of the sharp pain as the flame seared him. On frantic feet he flung himself back inside the cottage.

  ‘Get up! We’ve got to get out! Now! At once!’

  She pouted up at him from the bed. ‘Why?’

  Michael wasted no time arguing. He snatched Jo’s clothes off the chair and threw them at her. ‘Get dressed! We’ve got to get moving!’ Even as he spoke, he was dragging on shirt and pants, hopping frantically as he pulled on his shoes, staccato movements poised upon the knife-edge of panic. ‘Come on!’

  The message had got through at last. Jo was out of bed, snatching this, grabbing that. Her moan of terror climbed rapidly in both pitch and volume until she was shrieking like a steam whistle. But was no longer moving. Frozen by panic, she stood shaking and helpless in the middle of the room.

  No time for patience or sympathy; no time for anything. Michael grabbed her and slapped her face, first one side, then the other. Crack. Crack. The steam-whistle screech stopped. She stared at him, hands to her cheeks, eyes pits of terror.

  ‘Get dressed!’
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  She began, but still far too slowly, hands fumbling with buttons, with straps. Now, in place of screams, she was drooling words, inaudible and probably meaningless; Michael did not bother to listen.

  ‘I’m out of here.’ And yanked open the cottage door. A furnace blast of heat. He staggered back, forearm raised to protect his eyes. Now he, too, felt terror, but to stay here was impossible. He took a deep breath and threw himself out of the door, staring wild-eyed through the roiling smoke at the fire that now raged less than half a kilometre away.

  Flames, orange, yellow, black, formed a swirling curtain that stretched high above the trees. Rivers of fire flowed downhill, threatening to outflank the cottage. The furnace roar, the crackle and explosion of burning timber, combined with heat and terror to eliminate all other sensation. The fire was; in the face of its ferocity, no space for anything else remained.

  Michael spun on his heel, seeking a way out. There was only one chance: head downhill to the creek and pray that the main track on the far bank was still open.

  Emotions pared by heat and terror, Jo forgotten, he flung himself into the ute. The keys, thank God, were in the ignition. The engine roared. The vehicle — wouldn’t you know it? — was facing uphill, in the direction of the fire. He slammed it into gear, yanked viciously at the wheel and backed across the track in a shower of gravel. The tyres skidded on the edge of the roadway. For an agonising moment the ute teetered before sliding back, inexorably, fatally, and stopping with its chassis jammed upon the verge.

  Hunched over the wheel, shaking, cursing, Michael rammed his foot again and again on the accelerator. The engine roared, adding its quota of smoke to an atmosphere that was already more smoke than air. The vehicle lurched as the tyres tried vainly to climb back onto the track, then settled, wearily, and he knew it was going nowhere. His clenched fists hammered the wheel once in futile protest, then he flung open the door and threw himself out.