Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

  I cast my eyes on Sharen but she avoids them, gazes off to the fish shop on the foreshore, the circling seagulls. A hand covers her crow’s feet from the sun, her bruise still covered with makeup below the line of her white sunglasses, her bare legs where the welts have faded into her tan, the fine blond hair on her thighs.

  “She needs furniture,” says Bobby sitting back down to his coffee.

  On Sharen’s middle finger, a cracked turquoise ring the color of her eyes.

  “She needs more than that,” I say. I watch her turn, a shadow creeping around the edges of her mouth. “She needs security.”

  “I’m getting her a weapon,” says Bobby as though he’s ahead of the game, ready to play the Italian. Put a gun in his pyro girlfriend’s hands.

  “Is that you want?” I ask her but her sunglasses reflect so I can’t see her eyes. She carefully pastes Chapstick on her pink splitting lips, neither nods nor answers.

  “Don’t all Americans carry guns?” asks Bobby.

  I suddenly realize how I feel safer back there, where my accent can somehow diffuse things, where strangers don’t maraud about inside at night. “Walker took a shower up in the big house at two a.m.,” I tell them. “I think I should report him to the Cranbourne police.”

  Sharen shades her glasses with her open palm. Her head does a small sad shake. “I’ve already talked to them,” she says. “They call it ‘a domestic.’”

  “He doesn’t live with us,” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Bobby. “Maybe you can tell ’em someone you’ve known since you were a tyke just used your bathroom.”

  Sharen watches out over the mangroves. “I just need to keep him from Reggie,” she says.

  BACK AT THE house, my mother doesn’t hear or see me leave her fresh ploughman’s wheel on the kitchen table. She’s on her knees in the dining room, crunching wads of tinfoil to stuff holes in the baseboard, trap the rats that leave tooth marks in the grapefruit, their dirt in the muesli pack.

  Alone in the sitting room with the tree that needs to be taken down, I search for locksmiths in the yellow pages, call one in Hallam who’s mobile and try to explain the seven outside doors and twenty windows but he tells me you can’t replace those skeleton keys and he doesn’t travel this far. Another says he can get to it next month for twenty-five hundred dollars. The third one, in Tooradin, is called Bound Safe and Smart and the owner seems to know this house. “Let’s be real,” he says. “If anyone wants to get in that place, they will. Regardless. But I can come out again if you like.”

  I’m not sure how oblivious my mother is of Walker, if she knows what happened to the rifle, but in her state of determined flimsiness I decide to leave her alone.

  I slide the laundry door closed behind me, the smell of Joseph Lyddy saddle soap and the sweat of saddle cloths. Silence, save the flies already hitting at the window, trying to escape. Cool in this enormous brick room with bluestone slab floor, two sinks, a row of old machines, the ancient wringer. A bag of ropes and halters that looks as if it’s been cut open with a knife. The New Guinea axe with the woven grass handle. No obvious sign of the gun bag with my grandfather’s Winchester.

  I reach past a cardboard box of wooden boot trees to slide the window open, let the flies out, but the frame won’t budge. I hate the sound of them bombing the glass, struggling in the cobwebs. I’m staring at farm clothes soaking in the big cement tub. Earley’s boiler suits. My mother who still takes in his washing. Probably does Reggie’s too, if he ever changes clothes.

  Touching the dusty suitcases shelved along the wall, I spot Granny Rawson’s portable turntable, her wicker picnic basket, and a brown leather case I don’t recognize. Dark frayed stitching and bronze reinforced corners, the kind Isabel buys at collectible shops and plies with orange oil, piles them up like a stack of giant books in the corner of the studio. I could smuggle this home for her, as an offering.

  As I pull the case down, I think of packing up and heading off somewhere, the lavender farms in Western Tasmania. I place the suitcase on the ironing table, rub dust from the flaking gold initials. E.W.R. Ernest Wilkes Rawson. Earley’s father. I called him “Bop.”

  Inside lies a silver flask and an old canvas wallet with a memorial war coin from 1914, and a clothing rations card with sections torn off. Director of Rations, Sydney. Everything but the gun he tried to teach me to shoot, back when there were wallabies and roos here and I missed them on purpose. Nothing more depressing than a wounded kangaroo.

  Beneath is a sepia photo. A fine-featured man in military garb on a cavalry horse. Probably the one that dragged him by the stirrup over the ploughed fields of the Somme, before he was shipped back to England with multiple fractures and nursed by his young cousin Hilma. The one he hauled out here and married.

  “Saved his life, that horse.” My mother standing in the faint light startles me. Armed with a rusty Mortein insect sprayer, she sallies over and launches a great plume of poison at the window. I reel from the haze of toxins. The brand name—mort, French for “dead,” and ein, German for “one.” An army of blowflies fighting for their lives.

  “Do you know where Bop’s old trench gun is?” I ask.

  “Haven’t seen it for years,” she says.

  From the suitcase I pick out a small color shot of my grandmother. Hilma, petite and fair. My mother steadies herself on the washing machine and peers at it. “Didn’t even need to change her last name,” she says. The old story. I place the two photos together. The likeness is strange, my grandmother and grandfather could be brother and sister.

  “Poor things,” she says with a kind of weary relish. “They lost the other son. He was taller. Earley was all they had left.”

  I feel the Mortein settle on my eyelids, irritating. “Remind me why you married him?”

  She tucks her insect sprayer under her arm. “Without him there wouldn’t be you,” she smiles but that’s no answer. I look away from her coffee-stained teeth. A pair of faded board shorts draped on the wooden clotheshorse. I drag out my old mountain bike by the handlebars. “That’s Reggie’s,” she says.

  I look at her sharply.

  “Well, he’s been using it,” she says, pulls out a stained envelope from the suitcase. Photos of the old brown Vauxhall. My father is young, standing in front of it on some mountain road. “That was our honeymoon,” my mother says. “We went to Gelantipy!” I can feel her wan smile. “It wasn’t exactly Paris.” Up near where my father found that brumby foal. A town in the High Country where that big family ran brumbies and where those Snowy River films were shot. I shuffle through photos of horses and polo, my father the day Prince Philip played at Coldstream riding Minta or Bandy, the best day of my father’s life. Then a picture of a bare-chested Walker out in the bush block, chopping down a tree. He must have been seventeen. Like Reggie but taller and thick-limbed, not wiry.

  “Why wasn’t he allowed up in the house?” I ask.

  “Gracious wouldn’t let him,” she says. “She was afraid for you. Walker was ten years older, rough as pineapples even back then.” She touches my hand and reaches for the doorjamb for balance, as if we’re aboard a ship.

  “Did you know he’s back around here?”

  My mother presses her lips as if to keep her face from falling. “I guessed,” she says. “I saw Sharen’s face.”

  Closing the suitcase, I hear photos sliding all over each other, the mixing of trips, honeymoon in the mountain shuffled with black-and-white snaps of old Gracious with me as a baby in her arms.

  “He wants Reggie,” I tell her.

  A duffel bag falls and a thick horse bandage rolls out across the floor. “He can’t have him,” she says.

  “It’s the only way to get rid of Walker, unless we go to the police,” I say.

  “We can handle it,” she says, taking her leave. I’m not sure if we means us or her and Reggie.

  “We can’t even find the Winchester,” I say but she’s already gone.

  OUT ON THE pathway I stra
ddle the red vinyl bike seat, ride down the dark gravel drive and into the crisp gray hints of light. The pedals whine beneath me as the rim of the sky turns puce ahead, a chill in the air and the face of the moon still high. Not the dull-featured one of a hazy Los Angeles sky or off the beach in Malibu, but wide-faced with wide-set eyes and a tight mouth.

  The bike scrapes along Langdon’s Road toward the lane where I used to ride away from her, the lane now regaled with a sign not yet buried in trees. Genoni’s Road. An unmade track with no traffic that runs alongside the farm. Nothing to do with the town or any Genoni, just local bootlicking. I spit out an insect that lands in my teeth, and wend on, the back tire low so I have to work hard, wobbling a bit in the dust. I haven’t been near a gym since I left LA, haven’t even done my sit-ups. Exercise for its own sake feels self-indulgent here.

  Looking back to the house, I see the blood-orange sunrise glistening on the windows of the shearer’s quarters, reflecting, and I make out shapes under the rotary line. My mother and Reggie, motionless, watching. Some dull Australian version of Wyeth or Wood. But straining my eyes, I realize it’s not Reggie at all. She’s standing beside Earley’s boiler suit, which she’s now hung on the line, a slack ghost beside her.

  An enormous lop-eared hare, almost the size of a wallaby, stands in the grass that divides the track. I anchor my foot in the sand and lean, watch the Old World rabbit bound away as I get off the bike and rest it in the ti tree scrub at the edge of the lane. I think of Isabel’s book about animal totems—she’d say the hare is my guide. Yet it’s as foreign as I am. English as my grandparents, breeding with its cousins, but I follow it anyway, in case I’m somehow supposed to; I climb the fence as the day comes in clearer, patterns weaving in the browns of the grasses. No sign of the hare but a figure appears in the distance. Ascending the rise, it emerges—just the crown of a dead tree with bare arm branches. The farm and the light playing jokes. The sense of being watched from somewhere.

  Along the cattle path into the bush, I walk to the thicket of eucalyptus, high bracken, sword grass. The sheltered clearing with a stand of different trees, bark black and knotted, leaves fine and weepy as willows, maybe Murray pines. Brennie’s Brothel. That’s what I called it as a teenager, when I brought Brenda Ferguson here to lie with her in these lush fans of unlikely grass plastered long and flat and parted like hair where cattle sheltered. I lie myself down in the coolness of the dew, the late-morning light pleating down through the branches like a luminous skirt. Overhead, a sort of Casuarina, a she-oak, maybe, or a wild cherry. A sanctuary greened by a silent seep beneath me.

  I close my eyes to the memories of Brenda, her short tennis skirt and the way it rose up when she served. Mrs. Ferguson in her gatekeeper headscarf who said it wasn’t safe. She’d heard things about my father. “Like what?” I asked but Brenda wouldn’t say as we stood on the cracked asphalt court, wooden rackets held in our hands, old-fashioned as the trees. For the first time I realized the wings of my father’s reputation had spread further than the house.

  A breeze swarms the leaves above me, then a rustle and humming. I sit up, spooked. Sharen on the cattle path, barefoot with rips in her jeans, the sun aglow behind her. It gives her a kind of radiance. She gazes into the clearing as if she knows I’m here, almost a smile but it’s not in her eyes. Her hair twisted up. For a moment I think she hasn’t seen me after all, but she’s making her way in, over a fallen wattle trunk, knotting her shirt at her belly.

  “Saw you riding up the lane,” she says. She crouches, barely six feet from me, picks a stalk of grass and sucks the sweetness from it. “Followed your scent,” she says. I wish I could have gone unseen, but I’m drawn to her knees pressing through the frays, her bare toes arch in the grass, toenails pink and chipped. I want to stand up, to give myself a chance, but I’m clasping my own knees tighter.

  “I used to come here,” I say, “when I was a kid.”

  She nods. “I bet you did.” A rotting branch pokes up behind her like a big horned bird. She moves closer, squatting down, leaning. I strain inside for willingness to recall why this doesn’t serve anyone, but she’s combing my lips with her fingers, my arm reaching to her as if it’s a limb on its own. I pull her fingers right to my mouth, and press them there, biting her fingertips. The taste of soil. Her nipples against me and I don’t say no, I don’t say anything. She smells of things low to the ground, of farm and house and childhood. I close my eyes to the salty sweat taste of her neck, pull her to me. A length of her hair falls down my cheek, gentle as water and I can’t even feel the pain in my hand. “Maybe you need me more than you think,” she says, my fingers diving down under the lip of her jeans, undoing myself and she’s falling around me, down on her back and it all seems too easy, in through the moss to the warmth of the water, finding myself so smoothly inside her. Hoping Reggie doesn’t see this, his mother’s wetness on me, nudging her into grass and twigs, my mouth on her ear and her hair has the smell of apples as she arches up eager, so eager I groan as I flood her already, slumping too soon. My face falling down to the loose strands of her hair and the grass stems, and the feeling of tears that never quite come.

  SATURDAY

  I wake to the far-off rattle of a phone, the smell of sex all over me. Last I remember, I lay down in this bed paralyzed in a sleep too deep for dreams. Up through the realms came an image of Isabel stepping out of a car on the drive, her Roman sandals touching the dirt as if it was a movie. But here at Tooradin. The dog leapt up on her cream linen skirt as I struggled to comprehend—Esalen to LAX to Tullamarine, now standing by my mother’s dead roses, her hair tied back with her sunglasses high, that tuberose scent in the dry afternoon. Under these cypress trees. My focus sliding down her dress to the paw marks on her skirt, a lotus flower hennaed on her calf, to the dust that crept about her pale sandals. My own legs weak as folding chairs.

  The phone again. What if it’s her?

  Up at the window, the eight o’clock heat through the glass like an accusation. The bike’s on the lawn where I left it. Grass stains on my jeans as I pull them on and the memory of Sharen in the flattened clearing. No candles and music, just rutting against the earth. She had me finish so fast and hard and I’m still lost in the fog of it.

  Heading out the side door and down the path, I pee on the flourishing lemon, the only tree that seems to thrive. The Camry wagon rolls up the drive and slowly edges alongside. My father winds down the dust-caked window. “Let’s go for a drive.”

  I stand right near where I stood in my dream of Isabel. Thank God that wasn’t real. My father propped up by the steering wheel, hugging it as if it might preserve his life. “I need to show you something,” he says. Sharen not even rinsed from my mouth. I don’t bother to fish for a seatbelt, just wind down the window and hope he doesn’t smell her on me. My father jolts the old car forward as I rummage in the glove box for mints or gum but all I find is a pack of crushed Craven As and matches. My mother’s secret stash. I light one up and it’s so stale it almost makes me gag but my exhale provides a smoke screen.

  We sit in a glum silence and I keep thinking of Sharen, how my neck craned to the sky as I slipped inside her and how it felt better than good.

  My father hums “Moon River” for no apparent reason. The three horses by the stockyards, the same hot surrounding their big bodies settles about my face. I breathe out another haze of smoke, don’t care where he’s going, passing Myra Chaundy’s pony stud and then on either side the asparagus fields spread into the distance, the soil pitch dark and peaty with a soft fur weaving above it, a dark green lace.

  My father taking me away like he used to when I was a kid, to visit Gerida or Maeve or one of the others. Arriving unannounced for coffee and scones, as though it held a country kind of charm, their husbands not long buried or far away at work. Using me as a decoy.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask.

  “Dalmore’s closed up,” he says, ignoring me. The peeling one-room school still sits among th
e trees, a set of broken goalposts. The place where I rode my pony to primary school and tied him up in the falling-down yard. A world that’s been here all along. It’s America that feels unreachable now as we wait at the South Gippsland Highway. I pray he sees the cattle trucks bearing down. They rock the car as they whoosh past like we’re just particles of air.

  The Tooradin Airport, once just a windsock in a field and out on the mudflats, the rusted hull of the old shipwreck. I explored it on my pony spooking in the wind. The mast still leans out on an angle, but back then there was the remnant of a flag, flapping like a small ripped hand. “We should charter one of those, fly over to King Island,” my father says. Savagely, I butt the cigarette in the ashtray, wonder if I’ll take it up again. In law school, I smoked Kretek cloves from Indonesia. “I came to visit my mother,” I say. “She’s dying.”

  The disappointment in his eyes reflects in the sun as we trundle along the highway in a new kind of silence. I imagine his heart going phut and me reaching for the wheel and the handbrake at once, careening through the fence on this bridge, landing down with the boats that lie on their sides in the mud of Cardinia Creek.

  “One day Ruthie lay down in the dirt near the stables and curled up in a ball,” he says.

  I look over at his stubble, the stoop of his shoulders and his green woolen sweater in the heat. “What did you do?”

  “The chores,” he says. “Eventually Old Nev came past on the tractor and she got up.”

  My mother lying in the gravelly sand, waiting, while my father tosses biscuits of hay, mixes feeds for horses in the yards. How could cruelty seem so normal? And which of them is the crueler?

  “So where’s this girlfriend of yours?” he asks.

  How does he know about her? Isabel, who heard her father leave one afternoon and hasn’t seen him since, hasn’t tried to track him down. Not because she doesn’t want to but because he’s not looking for her. “None of your business,” I say. If I’d stayed in LA, I wouldn’t be stuck in this dog-smell car.