Tide (24 page)

The Queen thought, Well,
she'll
get the house – and I got to carry all the babies.

And then the funeral celebrant struggled to give a potted history of the deceased's life; said he was going to a better place, and that one had in mind those he'd left behind. He then requested any last words. The widow sobbed and looked around. One of the dead man's sons recounted a story of his own childhood that was about a great time out he'd had with his parents, then corrected himself by saying, Actually it was only with his mum because his dad was away travelling as usual. He finished by saying: He was a flawed man.

The celebrant begged for anyone to say a word. Silence. J was too distressed, and tried to comfort the widow. The Queen sent burning hot eyebeams in her errant daughter's direction, but J could only think how the rising and falling of her tears and those of the widow blended with the waves crashing against the beach, dissolving into memories of her father.

The tall man stood up and went to the lectern. I have something to say … I knew Bill pretty well in recent years and he and I got on fine. He was a witty bloke who loved his footy team, the Sharks. He told a good yarn.

As he spoke, the family sent a tempest his way. They willed flames and death. They invented monstrosities and perversities they were sure he had committed. They burned to be outside so they could share their epiphanies. It struck all of them, as one body, young and old, how much the tall man looked like their father when he was young, when he was theirs, when they didn't want him and knew he was a bad man. He's a bad man a bad man a bad man! And then as the tall man babbled on and on, droning like the waves, the body-of-family felt suddenly relaxed, like pissing in a cold sea and feeling briefly blissfully warm inside one's bathers. The Kraken had been awoken. The Leviathan had emerged again. Their father had been reborn and this time he wouldn't escape their punishment. They were happy, and had the ocean to thank for it. Whose idea was it to bury him by the sea anyway? They all glanced over at the Queen, who loomed large as a thunderhead rising up over the ocean. They felt glad that her thunder and lightning were no threat to them, that it would always be directed towards mariners coming from strange lands carrying their cargos of unpredictability.

And they only half heard the tall man say: And though he thought of himself as an inland man, loving the great wheat crops and even the blank pitiless areas of salinity, he always talked of the sea, of raising his children within earshot of the waves. He used to say to visitors, See that shell over there on the mantelpiece, lift it up and you'll hear all my kids and their mother laughing and playing on the sand, the water bluer than blue, the waves gentle but interesting. And what's more, if you hesitated, Hilda, his second wife and dedicated partner of thirty years, would generously say, Go on, go on … take a listen … it makes him so happy when you hear who he is!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Agni, Westerly, The Literary Review, Meanjin, Story Quarterly, The Reader, The Kenyon Review
(online), and
The Kenyon Review.

John Kinsella's most recent volume of poetry
is Jam Tree Gully
(WW Norton, 2012). His collection,
Armour,
won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Award for Poetry. His most recent volume of stories is
In the Shade of the Shady Tree
(Ohio University Press, 2012) which was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is poetry editor of
Island.