Ash Road (4 page)

It hadn't always been called Ash Road. At the start—no one was sure when—it had been a track to a settler's hut. No one knew the name of the settler any more or where his hut had been. Later it had been used as a road to the gold diggings. Not many people knew of the diggings any more, either. The shafts had caved in or grown over. Old-timers, in their youth, had dropped dead horses down the shafts to spare themselves the effort of digging pits; but now, apart from a pony or two, there wasn't a horse to be found from one end of Ash Road to the other and only one genuine old-timer, Grandpa Tanner. Most of the giant mountain ashes had gone, too. A few were left along the roadside, standing here and there among lesser trees, but their days seemed to be numbered. They were a constant danger to power lines and telephone lines, and, had it not been for the unyielding stubbornness and vigilance of the residents of Ash Road, one authority or another would have felled them years ago.

There were several look-outs on the surrounding hills from which one could see down most of the gravelled length of Ash Road. It was predominantly red in colour, with four distinct bends and two steep dips, flanked on either side by a maze of creeks and springs. Oddly enough, the road was at its lowest at the farthermost point from the dam. There it ran out into the unspoiled bush, and there the Pinkards grazed a few cattle on eighty rough acres. (The Pinkards lived in the city and came up sometimes at weekends.) Back towards the dam, where the land improved, a second generation of Hobsons tended the apple orchard and the Georges grew carrots for the city market and berries for the local jam factory. Farther up the long hill, just short of the crossroad that provided the quickest route into Prescott, were the Fairhalls, the Buckinghams, and Grandpa Tanner, in a group. Adjoining Grandpa Tanner's was a thirty-acre potato paddock, curiously contoured, lying fallow. There the brow of the hill subsided sharply into the source of a spring. On flatter land, still closer to the dam, were about two hundred acres of scrub and timber out of which the nurserymen, James Collins and Sons, cut new ground year by year as their business grew. They owned land on both sides of the road. The Robertsons had a ten-acre corner opposite the dam with their main frontage to the highway. The highway skirted the dam for about eight miles. Bill Robertson was a fuel merchant. He had an agency for petroleum products and a contract for the supply of firewood to a number of suburban depots.

That was all there was to Ash Road; except that at daybreak on the morning of Saturday, 13th January, it lay only six and a half miles across country from Tinley, a fact of which its residents were strangely unaware. The roads through the hills wound so much, changed direction so often, that Tinley seemed to belong to another world. The Ash Road people never thought of its lying more or less just over the hill, separated from them by an almost unbroken expanse of forest. They thought of it—if they thought of it at all—as an oddly inaccessible and uninteresting place at the end of a long road that they might travel over once or twice in a lifetime. In fact there were children on Ash Road who knew nothing of Tinley, had never heard mention of its name.

Julie Buckingham, who was five years of age, opened to the sun like a flower. When the morning sun came strongly through her curtains she stirred; her limbs uncoiled like petals to the light of day.

It was terribly hot in her room and though she was too young to worry much about weather—was indeed to a great extent oblivious of its extremes—she knew that she was very uncomfortable and very thirsty. She padded to the bathroom because it was easier to reach the taps over the bath than the taps over the kitchen sink. She turned the tap on, but couldn't turn it off again. Even Stevie, who was nine, had trouble with it sometimes.

Julie was a bright girl, and usually made the best of things, even things that grown-ups sometimes got excited about: things like wet hair or pyjama coats all dripping with bath water. She was wet, so what did it matter if she put the plug in the bath and sailed her plastic boat up and down?

When the water came over the top of the bath, she ran to her parents' bedroom at the front of the house and told her father. He didn't seem to hear. He made a sound like a grunt or a groan, but didn't wake up. Then she told her mother, but her mother merely moaned and didn't wake up either. Then Julie went to Pippa's bedroom, and from the depths of restless and perspiring sleep Pippa said: ‘Go away, nuisance.' By this time water was flowing out of the bathroom doorway and down the passage.

Julie knew that that was very naughty. The last time it had happened she had been given a smack on her hand that had stung, even though she had said it hadn't. Water was a sort of mystery in her house. At times it didn't seem to matter how much was used or wasted; at others Mummy and Daddy were very stern about it and Daddy often tapped the tanks outside and listened to the sound they made. Sometimes he pulled a funny face and said: ‘If it doesn't rain soon we'll be in trouble.'

Julie didn't want another smack on her hand, so she crept out the back door and hid behind the woodshed. After a while, because nothing had happened, she went back to the house, but when she saw water dripping down the steps she started crying just as if she had already been smacked. Then she ran down the hill and hid in the bush behind the raspberry patch. From there she could see Grandpa Tanner's house. She loved Grandpa Tanner. He gave her silver pennies to buy ice-creams with, and sometimes when he came over for dinner he brought a bag of sweeties. She could see Grandpa standing outside in his pyjamas.

It was early for Grandpa Tanner to be out of bed. There had been a time when he had been up around dawn almost every day, but there was no need for that now. His family had long since grown up and gone away; his wife Marjorie had been dead for so many years; the relentless bush had reclaimed his once splendid farm; dogwood scrub and blackberries had choked his fruit trees; sorrel and couch grass had overrun his garden; there was no cow to milk or hens to feed. The milkman called these days and Grandpa Tanner bought his eggs at the grocer's shop. There was not much left for Grandpa, really, except the routine of getting up and of going to bed, and remembering. Without the Buckinghams life would have been pretty drab. The Buckingham children meant much more to him than he would have cared to tell anyone, even the Buckinghams.

He was up early because the heat was stifling, and the sun was already glaring, and the north-west wind that had blown all night was still searing the leaves off the trees as it had seared them the day before. Grandpa hated the north wind. He had hated it all his life. It was an evil wind, a wind that angered men and dismayed women and frightened small children. The long grass growing up to the house was as dry as straw, and dust was in the air, and the smell of smoke. It was the smell of smoke more than anything that had got Grandpa out of bed and out of doors in his pyjamas.

He could see no smoke in the sky, but it was in his nostrils, teasing them, and in his mind, in a way, prompting his memory back down the years to that one desperate hour when he had faced an inferno on his own and fought it on his own and beaten it on his own. He had prayed hard at the time, prayed for a wind-change, for rain, for an army of men with beaters; but none of these had come, and he had done it on his own, and had stood blackened and burnt and bare-headed in the paddock, in the prime of his strength, shaking his fist at the heavens.

An old bushman like Grandpa could smell eucalyptus smoke on the wind from a fire burning fifteen or twenty miles away; he could smell it and feel it and see it with his eyes shut, with tingling senses, with an awareness that was electric. He stood almost motionless, every part of him tuned to that faint signal of smoke.

There
was
a fire; it was burning somewhere, and the world around him was set to ignite. It always happened on a day like this; when the north wind raged, the temperature soared, and the hills were so dry that they crackled. Fire at most seasons of the year was nothing but a flame that water could extinguish; in this season, on a day like this, a little flame could in an instant become a monster.

Not in years had Grandpa seen real smoke—the savage, boiling, black-red smoke of the forest fire on the rampage. He had seen the smoke of scrub fires that had got a little out of hand for an hour or two; the smoke when farmers burnt off new ground, or when shire-workers burnt off the roadsides; and the smoke when fire brigades were cleaning up hazardous pockets of bush before the full heat of summer (the boys of the fire brigades enjoyed a good blaze now and then). But he hadn't seen real smoke close to home since 1913. He had read of bad fires and seen far-off glows in the sky by night, particularly in 1939, but those days seemed to have gone; there were too many people now.

Though the presence of fire always tightened him up, Grandpa had never been unduly afraid of it. He knew that fires, unlike earthquakes or avalanches or erupting volcanoes, could be stopped or turned. Men who knew what they were doing could even fight fire with fire. That was what Grandpa had done in 1913, and he had saved his farm though others not so far away had been wiped out. Even the township of Prescott had gone on that day, 13th January. It had been there in the morning, and in the afternoon it was a heap of charred rubbish and the Gibson family had been burnt to death.

That dreadful day had started like this one, even to the day of the month—the same searing northerly, the same faint smell of smoke, the same sort of temperature that had climbed and climbed to over 112 degrees in the shade. And when the fire had come over the top of the range and thundered into the valley like a thousand locomotives steaming abreast, it had become still hotter and hotter—so hot that birds on the wing fell dead and grass started burning almost of its own accord and locked-up houses exploded and creeks boiled.

But that had been a long time ago. It couldn't happen now. Now there were hundreds of firefighters trained and equipped at immense expense with fast vehicles and water-tankers and high-pressure hoses. Those boys made fast work of the job; they knew what they were about. Now there were firebreaks through the eucalyptus forests and the pine plantations, great barren scars across the hills with every blade of grass ploughed in, bare earth that could not burn. Now there were many farms, many houses, and most of the old forest areas, the firetraps, had vanished (that was what everyone said, anyway). Now there were water-towers on the high peaks and in the west of the valley the Prescott Vale Dam, eight miles long and more than half a mile wide. What fire coming down out of the plantations and the forests could consume millions of tons of water? What fire could leap a dam half a mile wide?

Probably the smoke Grandpa could sense wasn't bushfire smoke at all. He couldn't hear sirens and he was sure none had sounded during the night. Except for the blustering wind the valley seemed still to be sleeping. Or perhaps the Fairhalls, across the road—early risers for the past forty years or so—were burning leafy wood in their kitchen stove.

One of the Fairhalls was up. It was Peter, but he wasn't anywhere near the kitchen stove. He was swimming in the creek where Gramps in his younger days had dammed the gully with rocks and mud and the trunks of tree-ferns. But Gramps had not intended it for swimming in. Swimming in creeks was not wise. There were always snakes near water, and there were often snags under the water.

Peter was the only grandson of the Fairhalls, only child of the only son the Fairhalls had, and no one was more conscious of this than Peter himself. It was hard for Peter, for almost all the thoughts and all the love and all the hopes of the whole family were centred upon him. It was a great weight that bowed him down. Everyone was afraid, almost all the time, that something would happen to Peter, that he would be killed in a road accident, or be drowned, or sicken and die.

‘Do be careful, Peter.' ‘Take care, Peter.' ‘Watch the road, Peter.' ‘Are you well, Peter?' ‘Out of those wet clothes, Peter.' ‘I'll rub your chest, Peter.' ‘The doctor's coming, Peter.'

He knew what it was all about. He knew that only rarely was their love for him a happy thing; usually it plunged him into a misery of fear. It was like that with both his parents and his grandparents. He sometimes wondered whether his father had grown up the same way, in a state of constant anxiety.

For all that, Peter at thirteen years of age was a healthy lad, even if stubbornly thin. For as far back as he could remember, two weeks of every January—the second and third weeks—had been spent with his grandparents, and almost always Gran had greeted him with the words, ‘We'll fatten you up in no time at all.' Gran and Gramps were unchanging. They always looked the same, always said the same things, always stifled him with their love unless by one deception or another he managed to elude them for a few hours. They never guessed that for years he had swum in the creek in the early morning when the weather was hot. It had to be hot, of course, because even in midsummer creek water was very cold. It brought him out in goose pimples all over, but he loved it; he loved the shock of plunging into it. It was like breaking out of prison.

The creek was his own private secret, because if the news got around it would be the end of it. He told no one about it, not even Pippa Buckingham. Sometimes he felt mean about that, because Pippa was different from everybody else; quite different from other girls, and nothing like a boy. Pippa was a very special sort of person. She always had been as far as Peter was concerned and perhaps she always would be. Peter felt sad, when he thought of her. What would he do with himself for a whole week after Pippa had gone on her holidays?

Pippa stirred uneasily. Oddly enough, she knew she was asleep. She could see herself in bed with the bedclothes as usual in complete disorder; with the pillow as usual on the floor; with one arm as usual flopping limply over the edge of the bed. Pippa also knew that it was important that she should wake up, that if she didn't the house would drift out to sea. The house should have been tied up to the pier, but Julie had untied the rope and couldn't tie it up again.