Salt Rain (9 page)

Even as Julia loaded the rifle and stepped forward, the wallaby’s body relaxed and the life passed from its eyes. A rush of urine diluted the blood spreading on the road.

Petal lit a cigarette. ‘At least it had company as it died.’

Julia turned to her, surprised at the vehemence in her voice. ‘You think we were a comfort to it, Petal? It’s a wild animal. It died absolutely terrified. It would have been better off if we left it to die on its own.’

Petal shrugged and started up the driveway.

‘Feel it,’ said Allie, her hand on its bloated belly. ‘It’s still warm. It’s dead but still warm.’

Julia squatted beside her niece and touched the soft pale fur of its belly. She wished she had come by herself and killed it straight away. It would be all over by now, the body already tossed into the bushes beside the road. She ran her fingers through the fur and found the fleshy pouch opening.

‘What are you doing?’ Allie sounded shocked, but leaned closer.

‘Checking for babies. There are none. Let’s get it off the road.’

Allie wouldn’t move. Her eyes glistened with tears as she looked down at the dead animal. Julia wanted to sit on the muddy road beside the wallaby and take her niece into her arms but she knew if she did, her own tears would come. She rested her hand on Allie’s shoulder, then reached down and gripped the wallaby’s tail. She felt its vertebrae separating as she dragged it over the gravel and swung it into the tangled undergrowth.

Saul sat at his father’s kitchen table and watched Iris wrap the lump of corned beef in a tea towel.

She nodded at him. ‘Call your father again will you, Saul?’

His father was down at the dairy and from a distance, looked especially shrunken and frail. Saul leaned on the verandah railing and called, ‘Dad! Dinner.’ While he waited for his father to shut the heavy wooden gate and walk up to the house, he wondered again why Mae hadn’t told Allie about his trip to Sydney and their argument in the milk bar. She had marched off down the road, her hair wild, the wriggling child in her arms. Allie in her arms. And he had gone back to his hotel and got drunk before catching the train south. When he had first got to Tasmania he would think of her every night, while he lay in his cold stone room at the back of the jeweller’s workshop, the weight of the woollen blankets squeezing sensation from his limbs and the distance stretching achingly between him and Mae. On the weekends he spent hours chopping wood for the stove in the jeweller’s workshop and for the fireplace in his room. Stripped to his damp steaming singlet in the stone courtyard, he swung the axe high like his father had taught him and let its weight drop and cleave the wood. He fed the fire in his room until it roared, then stripped to wash himself from a bucket. In the firelight he had looked down at his body, at the dark hair growing thicker on his chest and running down his stomach, around his pale penis. He had thought of Mae lying on the blanket by the creek, hands crossed over her breasts, smiling at him to come closer. The warm soapy water brought release but there was no joy in it, just an aching wave that broke into familiar emptiness.

‘The bloody dairy pump has gone out again, Saul,’ his father called as he walked across the yard. ‘Will you have a look at it later?’

‘Yep.’

His father reached the bottom of the steps and Saul turned to go inside. After a few minutes, his father came to the table as he always did, smelling of soap, his hair freshly combed back with water. When it was just the two of them, before Saul left for Tasmania, mealtimes were quiet, all their talking done out in the paddock while they worked. Now Iris kept them chatting through the whole meal, as if she were running a class on conversation skills.

She passed Saul the plate of buttered bread. ‘I hear they’ve decided to put the highway right through the golf course. What about us! Where will we play?’

‘Ah, it’ll take them years to do anything.’ His father unfolded his serviette onto his lap.

‘I’m just so mad that they can simply decide to do it. Oh, I feel all out of kilter after yesterday. I just hate burying young folk.’

‘Don’t talk to him about her. You’ll end up in his bad books too.’ His father looked over at Saul, smiling as he chewed.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad.’ Saul didn’t smile back.

‘Oh come on, you never wanted to hear the truth about her.’

Saul ignored his father. ‘What do you know about how Mae died, Iris?’

She frowned. ‘Just what you know, dear. That she drowned in the sea.’

‘In the harbour,’ he said.

His father reached for the mustard. ‘Sydney Harbour. Sea. Same thing.’

‘Did you ever see her swim, Dad?’

His father shook his head. ‘Pass the white sauce, will you please, love. I’ll finish it off. Where would I have ever seen her swim?’

Saul turned to Iris. ‘I just thought you might have heard something. People are saying…’

His father licked the serving spoon. ‘She always had a dozen stories circulating about her, that girl. She kept the valley gossips going.’

‘What would people up here know, Saul?’ said Iris. ‘Huh? Remember when Sally Benson’s girl went to Sydney and everyone was saying she’d become a prostitute? It wasn’t true. Most of it’s not true.’

‘Ah, you couldn’t be sure of anything with that girl, son. Nice enough lass, but she didn’t tell it straight, eh?’

Saul put down his fork. ‘What makes you such an expert on her?’

‘Ah, this is all ancient history Saul.’

‘You don’t like to talk of those that are gone, do you Dad? You never mentioned Mum’s name once after she died. It was as if she had never existed. I began to wonder if I was crazy, if I’d invented her.’

His father wiped his plate with a piece of bread and smiled at Iris. ‘Lovely meal thanks, dear. That was Mac Wilson’s beast. Very tasty.’

Iris glanced from one man to the other, her face worried.

Saul stood up and scraped his plate into the bin.

‘Oh, you can’t have had enough yet, Saul.’ Iris pointed to the platter of sliced meat.

‘No. I’m fine, thank you.’

His father got up and left his plate on the table.

Saul rinsed his plate and thought of how his father had never taken to Mae. He was friendly to her but it seemed to Saul that he was always watching her out of the corner of his eye, as if he could tell that she would never settle for life as a farmer’s wife and she was simply biding her time in the valley. Saul suddenly remembered overhearing his father up at the meat co-op one evening soon after Mae’s pregnancy became common knowledge around the valley. The men used to meet at the small timber cottage to do maintenance on the place. Once, Saul was out the back, smoking a stolen cigarette, and he could hear Mae’s father inside, talking, as he had for days, of driving out west to track down the balloon man, at whichever small-town Show was on. Saul had put an eye to a crack in the door just as his dad interrupted Mae’s father, ‘Forget it Jim. It’d do no good. You couldn’t prove anything and the scoundrel wouldn’t do the right thing by the little tart anyway.’ Only one of Mae’s uncles had looked shocked, glancing around the room as if waiting for a reaction. None of the other men seemed to notice what his father had called her. They kept talking, complaining about the rubbish left behind after the Show every year. Saul had thrown his cigarette onto the cement path and walked home along the road feeling sick, the gravel releasing the day’s heat and the crickets pumping their noise into the evening air. He had climbed into bed fully clothed, his father’s words replaying in his head, the most alone he had felt since his mother died.

He put his plate in Iris’s fancy wooden dish rack and walked out onto the verandah. She called after him, ‘Don’t you want a cuppa Saul?’

‘No thanks, Iris, I’ll head off now.’ He started down the steps. ‘Thanks for dinner.’

He walked along his forest path and had the crazy idea that Allie would be waiting for him again. He had felt a mixture of delight and dread seeing her on his doorstep that morning and had wanted to ask her exactly how Mae died, wanted to demand specifics, quiz her about the whispers around the valley. All he had was an image of Mae gliding through the water, her arms tiring, moving slower and slower until she simply stopped swimming and let herself drift lazily to the bottom of the harbour. Julia was the one to ask but she had avoided him at the funeral. Of course he would never ask Allie. That morning at his place, she’d had the same slightly stunned expression as the day before at the graveside. He had been standing across from her and his shadow had fallen down into Mae’s grave but stopped short of the girl where she stood on the other side. It surprised him how deep the grave was. He had never imagined his mother buried that far down.

He remembered his father kneeling by his bed the morning of his mother’s funeral, asking him if he wanted to go and somehow he knew that his dad didn’t want him there. So he stayed with Mrs Jenkins down the road and waited the day through, in the slow heat and buzzing of cicadas. In the afternoon he had walked down towards the creek and heard the other kids yelling and hooting as they got off the school bus, then the splashes as they jumped into the waterhole. He had never forgotten the blank look on his father’s face when he came to pick Saul up. It was as if he wasn’t sure which house he was in, or what he was there for. Saul had been afraid that his father had already forgotten her, his face seemed so vacant.

His mother used to let him stand on a chair beside her while she cooked, a tea towel wrapped around his waist like an apron, the skirt reaching down his bare legs. One day—it was perfectly clear in his memory—he was carefully measuring three cups of flour into the big mixing bowl and when he finished he looked up and found her watching him, tears running down her cheeks. He stood motionless on his chair, small hands dusty with flour, waiting for her to reassure him but she had just rubbed the butter and flour together, crying still, her tears falling into the scone dough. He never saw her cry again. Even when they took her to hospital for the last time she had just held his hand to her cheek and smiled. He wished he could recall eating those last scones they had made.

Now Mae and his mother were in the town cemetery, the last traces of them turning to the one mass of soil. Mae had come over with her own mother once when his mother was very sick. They appeared on the doorstep with a casserole and a banana cake wrapped in a checked tea towel. It was the first time that Saul had really noticed Mae. They must have been seven and eight years old and were sent outside to play. They had run down to the creek, away from the quiet, serious house. He remembered sprinting, following her flashing legs across the bright grass and he wanted her to keep running, to lead him away from his grey-faced mother and silent father. They squatted on the bank of the creek and watched the eel swimming lazily around the waterhole until Mae stripped to her underpants and climbed the big tree to swing out on the thick rope his dad had tied to a branch. When the creek was muddy green from their jumping, they stretched out on the grass to let their undies dry. As he lay there, in the drowsy heat, flies tickling his skin, he watched her from the corner of his eye, the neat mound under her white cotton underpants and the way the tiny blonde hairs on her arm stirred in the breeze.

‘I helped make the casserole,’ she said as she lay back with her eyes closed. ‘I chopped the carrots, so you can think of me when you eat the carrots.’

He didn’t go to see her until the baby was almost due. From the orchard, he had watched the bleached white bed sheet blowing back against her body, outlining the great curve of her belly. All he could see were her hands slowly pegging the sheet on the line and her calves and feet in leather sandals. Then she pushed the cane basket with her foot and moved along the clothesline and into sight. He had forgotten how well he knew that face and the way her long hair slipped from where she tucked it behind her ear. He wanted to remember every detail of her moving in the sunlight, the white sheets flapping around her.

Then she saw him and dropped a wet sheet to the ground.

He called across to her, ‘Mae. I just want to talk. I want to understand why you went off with him. I thought…’

She turned away and hurried inside, leaving the sheet crumpled on the grass.

He was backing out from under the lemon tree when Julia came out the door, thin and awkward in her school uniform. Her voice was apologetic. ‘She says don’t come again. Don’t dare come again.’

‘I just want to see her. I want to talk to her.’

‘She’s crying. I think you frightened her…’ She pulled at the loose hem of her dress. ‘She’s pretty jumpy these days.’

He walked away, looking back, hoping for a glimpse of her face at the window. There was nothing but Julia stretching up to hang out the last of the washing.

After the baby came, he tried again. Julia was waiting on the verandah as he swung open the wire gate. ‘Bloody hell, Saul. Go away, will you? Dad’s around.’

He nodded and kept walking up the path. ‘Is she here?’ He tried to see past her, through the open door.

‘Wait. I’ll go and find out if she’ll see you.’

He could hear a distant clanging from the dairy and the cows lowing. It was nearly milking time and he couldn’t stay long. Nerves pressed on his bladder and he looked around for somewhere to piss.

Then she was there and the sight of her stilled everything. All his prepared words were gone. He could see her dark nipples through the dress and even as he looked up at her where she stood on the verandah, they leaked milk onto the flimsy fabric. She was the same, still the same smooth tanned arms and slender fingers. Julia was standing in the doorway holding the baby and whispering to it, like Mae used to do to him down by the creek, his head in her lap, her hand stroking the hair back from his forehead.

She spoke first, ‘How are you Saul?’

He opened his eyes wide to stop the tears. ‘Mae.’ Just to say her name was enough, just to stand watching her, then he remembered what he had come to say, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry about what happened down the creek. I didn’t mean…’