Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

  “Climb the fence,” I tell her, sidle the mare’s haunches over. “Grab my arm.” I help her straddle up in front of me, holding mane, and feel her heart beat against my chest.

  “Thank you,” she says. Finally her frailty, weary and scared in my arms, as we jig through the darkness, up to the Lagoon Paddock hill in a wide black windy silence.

  “We’re being watched,” she whispers, her hair in my face. And I can feel it too. The other horses just behind us now, falling in line and all I see is the quivering grass and the dog up ahead, as if I’m riding into a kind of vanishing time. Shadows seem to fling above us and Sharen clings to me as the ibis, like slow-flying planes, flap off their perches in the trees beyond the house and the missing black horse gallops in from nowhere. Both the big geldings now flanking in triangle formation. The mare’s head is high, her mouth hard as iron, as Ruthie with the gun. I raise my hands above the level of her jaw and check her, calm her, and then I smell smoke. It could be a campfire, some illegal New Year’s party over the road.

  I click the mare forward, up to the fence line. One gelding rears and the other one spooks from behind. “We’d have heard if a fire was headed this way,” says Sharen. It’s true; we’d have smelt it, there’d have been smoke coming down through Tynong North, across the flats at Nar Nar Goon, this region dry as straw. “It’s got to be him,” she says.

  “Jesus fuck me,” I say, slide us both down from the horse.

  As I round the servants’ quarters, the horses set loose, I see flames rising high from the cypress trees, streaks of them purple and red, the row of old papery trunks that climb straight to the sky then plume. The fire whips up them just lengths from the house. Then I see my eighty-three-year-old mother in a nightgown and gumboots on the lawn, brandishing the hose. “Call the fire brigade. You can’t fight this on your own, are you crazy?”

  “Well, you weren’t bloody here.” She doesn’t want to give up the hose.

  “Where’s Reggie?”

  “Told him to stay inside.”

  I find the rickety extension ladder from the veranda, lean it up against the spouting, and climb, yelling at Ruthie: “Pass me the hose.” My mother looks up at me almost as if this is thrilling, fighting a fire together. As if she doesn’t care if she’s incinerated. “Then fill the buckets from the tap,” I yell, but as I climb the ladder it pitches, shifting in the wind, the rungs seem too narrow. A limb cracks loud as it falls, the trees exploding. I look down and it’s Sharen steadying the ladder’s base.

  “I got you,” she yells. I hook my elbow through the ladder frame as my mother lifts the hose toward me. The water bubbles in spasms, dry air smarting in my eyes. The high limbs are catching, the flames lick the bark. If the wrong branches break, they’ll fall and be blown on the house like matches. Maybe Walker wants to flush Reggie out of the house. I irrigate the roof as best I can, hoping my mother’s gone inside to make the call or someone smells smoke soon. Water blowing back, spitting in my face, the ladder not well enough moored in the dirt. It feels shaky but Sharen holds it down with all her might, the flames curl up the trunks like snakes. She can’t look up.

  “Go check on Reggie,” I yell as I climb even higher, crawl over the gutter and onto the uneven bullnose of the roof. “I’m okay now.” The hollow of the tin veranda beneath me, where I teetered as a kid. The taste of burning on my breath and mushrooming smoke stings my eyes. These trees my father’s wanted to fell for twenty years, my father who’s not here, the upper branches crackling, embers fanned by a quick vicious wind. The sudden snap of a limb sounds like another shot and I scream down at my mother but she can’t hear. “Call the fucking fire brigade.” With a sack, she slaps at a branch burning on the lawn, the roof so slick with water I have to kneel on the slant to get to the ladder, wanting to climb down and help her, but a high flame from the trees has me standing again. Dousing all I can to save the roof. Sharen is still out there, pointing up past me. “Find Reggie,” I shout but the wind has subsided all of a sudden and an ember floats past me as a silent guided moth. I moor myself and spray at the eaves where the ember nestles, and then I glimpse another phosphorous hint of orange.

  “Come down,” shouts Sharen.

  “Call Bobby,” I yell back, my lungs stinging, pull my shirt up over my nose and mouth. I make out shapes through the smoke—cattle? The old dome tank left full of stagnant water waiting for a night like this, but where is my father and where’s the pump? Just like him to forget the essentials. My mother down there in just her nightie, smudging the ground with her sack, losing her balance and then going back at it. Now Reggie appears from out in the night and the smoke like a wraith. His hands slack by his sides. He wasn’t inside at all.

  THE SIREN BAWLS along Langdon’s Road toward us. Sharen dragging Reggie back inside; doubled over, that slashed leg not holding weight. Wish I hadn’t left his stick at the cottage. The red light whirs up the drive. Men jump from the wagon—Lonnie Ridges and the Saddler boy. They scurry across the fire-lit lawn with extinguishers on their backs, lights from their helmets, self-important, when the night is bright with fire.

  Bobby Genoni appears, suited up and meaty, along with another, their hoses unspooling. Great cascades of water blast the flame-ridden trees. Bobby doing what we couldn’t. We did need him, dammit. I just wonder who called—not Ruthie, that’s for sure. She sits on the top veranda steps, her nightdress sooty and her hair all out at angles and watches. First one tree doused black and then another; the force of the hose shoots a wet branch to the ground. I climb down and sit aching and breathless on the brick arms of the steps, useless, my throat a furnace from the smoke, my head and hand throbbing. We should have just let it burn, opened the gates and let the place go to the devil. Not let the town rescue us like this. Two old codgers and an absent son with lawyers’ hands and product in his hair.

  A patch of my mother’s sparrow face is lit by a last surge of flame. Alive in her eyes. “Look,” she says as Pip appears, skulking along the wall. He sidles to her, crouches low as she pats him, the dull shapes of firemen moving through the smoke, their yellow jackets grayed by ash as they drench branches, soak the charcoaled trunks.

  My hand and head pulse in unison. I rub my watering eyes. “What was Reggie doing out here?”

  My mother picks at dry grass that’s grown through cracks by her feet. I imagine the house a blackened ruin, smoking for days. Relief mixed with horror, the thought of it gone. These mosaic veranda tiles in the rubble. Ornaments igniting on the dried-out Christmas tree, the dining room portraits in flames. Aunt Emma Charlotte melting down the wall. I picture seven chimneys remaining, a charred labyrinth. Ashes sprouting weeds and ants returning with the rain. But the opposite is happening, there will be no relief. Bobby Genoni, his fist still alive in the swelling under my hair, irrigates the last of the fleshy orange branches. Saving us from ourselves. “Did you really not call them?” I ask my mother.

  She looks over at me as if she had more important things to do. “They came, didn’t they?” she says. Where would she go if we were burned out of here? I can’t imagine her anywhere but here. Then I notice the kerosene canister from the laundry, by the side door. My mother sees it too.

  “That’s mine,” she says, she pushes herself up and wanders over, holds the wall for a second, leans to grab the can. She doesn’t look back as she tucks it under her arm, takes the dog inside. Did she light the trees, or is she covering for Reggie? It doesn’t make sense, unless she’s gone loopy. She once told me that when she was a girl at Carbrook she lit a grass fire as an experiment, to see if she could put it out with a sack. How the wind came up and the flames nearly got away. The look of fervor in her eyes as she sat on the step tonight. I don’t know how to read her anymore.

  THE HOLLOW SOUND of high-pressure water on the roof right above me, Bobby posturing on the dark night lawn in triumph, almost wetting me from the gutters. I get up and nod my appreciation at him, wish I could give him the finger. “I’ll get you guys some bee
r,” I shout to the ghosts of them in the thinning smoke.

  Sharen kneels over Reggie, now lying on the couch. She sings softly in his ear. One hand cups his tight sunken belly; the other rests on his narrow chest where there’s some illegible tattoo. The gamey smell of him mingles with smoke and the resinous Christmas tree drying out in the corner. She’s wrapped his thigh in a towel packed with iced peas. Choku Ray, Honshu Say, she sings, or something like it. Her shorter-cut hair as it falls about her ears, the way she concentrates. I’ve never seen her with Reggie, as attentive and worried, as mother, her boy unnervingly frail.

  The boot room fridge is empty so I take two jugs of lime cordial out as the guys take off their hats and sit down on the wagon’s running board, sooty-faced, exhausted. The fire engine running. “Sorry, fellas, we’re out of beer.”

  “No worries,” says the Saddler boy, guzzles straight from a jug then toasts. “Tooradin, Tooradin, oi, oi, oi.”

  I raise the other jug and hand it to Bobby. “Thanks for getting out here.”

  “That’s what we do,” he says and chugs.

  “Deliberately lit, it looks like,” says Lonnie gazing out at the remains with a quiet authority.

  “Walker Dumbalk, most likely,” says Bobby Genoni, wiping dirty water from his mouth. “Settling his dues.”

  “It’s a miracle none of us is dead,” I say. This place of old feuds. Reggie inside being cradled back to life.

  “Not yet,” says Bobby and laughs, pours the rest of the cordial over his face. That same thick-set hand that met my skull just hours ago.

  “This place makes LA seem peaceful,” I say and they laugh as if that’s praise.

  Bobby offers back the empty jugs. “See you in the soup,” he says.

  “Happy fucked-up New Year,” I say in a glib kind of truce, the way we country people pave over the fury and yet it still hovers in our eyes. Minimized, in waiting. I hate who I am when I’m here.

  I wash my own face in the kitchen, listen to the fire-truck leaving and wonder where Walker is now. In the living room, Reggie doesn’t look good. Rivulets of sweat on his brow, down the side of his small flat nose, the tendons taut on his neck. Sharen’s hand where it was on his chest, on this very couch where I lay as a boy, with mumps and measles. The same moth-eaten red and purple blanket that was supposed to protect the sofa from the dog now over Reggie’s unshod feet.

  “The stone could have ruptured his liver,” I say. Firemen are not trained as paramedics here or else I’d have granted them entry. “He needs to be in hospital.”

  Sharen doesn’t show she heard me, doesn’t open her eyes, keeps on with her humming, gripping Reggie’s arm as if to hold him conscious. “His body is processing things,” she says. His breathing is labored, pushing up shallow against his bony sternum. The amount of his sweat seems unnatural.

  “We need a doctor.” I say it too loud, lift the frozen peas and examine his thigh. A shallow knife wound where the skin has broken, a livid pink strip against brown skin. A new river of sweat runs down his cheek and I think of that rock appearing from the moonlessness.

  “This isn’t doctor stuff,” she says. “This is bad magic. Doctor can’t do nothing about this.”

  “But—he’s got a fever. Let’s at least get him a tetanus shot.” In America we’d all be in hospital by now. But Sharen’s here tracing symbols in the air, jagged boxes and zigzags, my mother shakily emerging with a new saucepan of water and a facecloth, places them down on the magazine table.

  I know I should call the ambulance but there’d only be a struggle, Sharen fighting for the boy. “Why would his own father do this?” I ask, think of the time my father threw a hammer at me but that was just blind fury, he wasn’t hunting me down.

  “Walker,” says my mother. “Doesn’t like him here with us.” She leans with an elbow on the mantel, among the figures of the drab wood-carved nativity, rubbing her index finger against her thumb the way she does.

  I think of Walker out there. “So who actually lit the fire?”

  “What difference does that make now?” she says.

  I wonder if all fathers secretly hate their sons just a little. “Where’s the Winchester?” I ask.

  Sharen shushes me. “You’re safe,” she whispers to her son. “All’s over.” She scoops air from the top of his head and his throat, as if clearing him of something, and there are tears in the corners of his bloodshot eyes. I want to comfort him too, he looks so scared, but I know it’s more important to get him to Emergency than let him die here bathed in prayer and hoodoo.

  “Tell him he’s all right,” says Sharen, smoothing his matted hair. He opens his eyes for a second, groans slightly, and Sharen searches my face. “Tell him he can have the land.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I ask. When he’s already tried to finagle a chunk of it. The self-witnessed codicil.

  “Look at him,” she says. “You can give him this.”

  His skin so dull, a slatey gray, and he’s squinting up at me from under the cloth on his forehead. I don’t know what’s real, if I’m being set up. To what lengths would these people go? Am I supposed to offer something then take it back, the way my father did to Walker twenty years ago, that started this whole thing?

  “I won’t do that,” I say, feel myself close up into a fist. Yet I remember the relief that flooded me as I pictured the place burnt down to the chimneys.

  Sharen fixes on me, a blue-green agitation bright in her eyes. “You don’t understand about healing,” she says. Reggie getting better by getting what he wants? What she wants? When I thought she wanted to come away with me. Reggie’s hair is wet with sweat, his eyes fallen shut, the lids shine: he’s folding into himself.

  “For Christ’s sake let me drive him to the hospital,” I say, lean down to pick him up but Sharen swipes my arm away with a ferocity that matches her eyes.

  “You don’t understand anything,” she says, stabs me with a mean stare.

  I think of the Lancaster girl at the Cranbourne gymkhana whose parents were Christian Scientists, how they refused treatment and the daughter died right there in the tent. I plead with Sharen to let me. “Don’t let him die,” I tell her. Not here.

  “I’m his mother,” she says. “I’m the one who says.”

  “Leave him,” says Ruthie and I turn at the clarity and reason in her voice. A reasoning I don’t understand.

  “I did what I had to,” whispers the boy and there’s a tingling on the roof; this time it’s not the hoses but the unlikely sound of rain. First it sizzles in the trees, then tumbles on the slate. My mother heads to the window. No one mentions it in case it stops. The old superstitions. Even Sharen knows.

  “What were you going to say?” whispers Sharen. “About the land.” She caresses Reggie’s woody hand and maybe she truly wants for her son. I think of the disingenuous promise I made to take her away as I fucked her, that lit up her body and made me come. I look to Ruthie, it’s her house; she’s not dead yet. She nods at me, scratches dry skin on the top of her hand.

  “Reggie, you can have the cottage.” I look over at my mother and think about the will she tried to change. What she wanted. “And the bush block.”

  “The whole place, Daniel,” my mother says. “Unless you’re going to stay.”

  The chimneys, the portraits, the burnt car, the black horses. “It’s too much for him,” I say. “This way he can live in the roof or wherever he wants, paint all the pictures with dots.” Stand outside with a stick, if he has to. “But the farm is too much for him, Walker would take it away.”

  “Don’t worry about Walker,” she says.

  Reggie breathing more easily and I feel my own breath rest in my throat. The fire gone and now there’s rain.

  “We’d make it work,” says Sharen, reaches out to touch my hand, the anger turned to yearning in her blue-green eyes.

  “The cottage, Reggie,” I say. “Ruthie lives here as long as she can. You can rent out the land but not sell and I won’t sell unle
ss you say so. We’ll write a proper codicil. It’s as much as I can do.”

  Sharen grabs Reggie’s wrist, feels it desperately. “Reggie?” Pleading. “Sweetie?” His eyes closed and I feel a sound travel through me, a primitive call that doesn’t find voice. He smiles and takes my hand as he falls into sleep or loses consciousness. Sharen’s head pressed to his chest, listening to her young boy’s heart. A last smell of smoke from outside as if it whispers him away.

  Uncle Worry coming as a darkness at the window, calling me back into his creased-up eyes. Wants to take me with him, out there deep into that dark smoke, with him and those lawmen, drive me back. Pointed the bone and I got fevers and pain in my own bones and my belly is a fire started and the inside throbbing, Worry waiting through that cobweb glass because of what I done to Walker, I see you, he says, tries to have me travel on the snake’s tail. Come away with me. That world where Worry lives, just a spirit comes and goes as some old ghost. But I got a place here, got the bush for real. Make you the ghost boy, he says. Uncle on the chimney roof, in the trees when I needed, showing me how. Saved us all. Reggie Don gone and done it, protecting, end him proper with the gun. Left the gun out there beside the bastard, left the bastard in the dark. Reggie made it back on this old couch with his mumbo-jumbo mother over him, Ruthie watching from out her old bandicoot eyes, she try not to cry, even Danny all chalky and sad as if he’ll miss me in the Dreaming. But I ain’t gonna go so easy, not now. Gonna teach me those black horses on my own.

  THURSDAY

  4:44 a.m., almost morning. The skewbald pony standing in the kitchen, keeping watch out the window. Ruthie snoring gently from her recliner, the dog snuggled up at her side, snoring too. Reggie silent but breathing again, asleep in his mother’s arms. This vigil for his return to life, the way my mother did the other night. I wonder where they go, down a well that’s deep inside them, telling them to stay. That still-small voice I’ve never heard. Perhaps I’ve never listened.