Settlers' Creek (12 page)

‘I’ll see you at the funeral on Wednesday. I’ll come and get you, drive you up to the church.’

‘When you were a boy and you’d hurt yourself you’d never cry. Do you remember?’

‘I must’ve cried sometimes.’

She shook her head and her ponytail flopped to and fro across her shoulders. ‘No matter how bad the scrape or the cut, you didn’t cry. Never. It was a matter of pride with you.’

Box turned the key in the ignition and the engine stuttered into life. ‘I don’t remember. I’ve really gotta get going now, Dee.’

‘Okay, Box.’ And then she added, ‘Poor boy.’

She reached in through the open window and touched his cheek with her hand. Her skin was as dry and warm as a page from a book that had been carelessly left in the sunlight. ‘Poor boy,’ she repeated.

As Box drove away he still wasn’t sure who she was talking about, Mark or him.

Box drove to the end of the long driveway and pulled over just outside the gate on the main road. He turned off the engine and simply sat, alone and silent in the cab, both hands still on the wheel. A couple of cars passed. And then there was nothing except the sound of the wind in the poplars along the roadside boundary of the bottom field, and the fussy twitter of unseen birds.

The truth was, he didn’t have to meet the minister for almost an hour. He didn’t feel good about lying to Dee but right now he needed to be away from his grandmother. He hated her attempts to tease out his feelings, always had, right from when he was a kid. Dee was like that acupuncturist he’d once gone to at Liz’s insistence about a persistent twinge in his neck. Dee knew just the spot to probe into him with her little needles. And now she wanted him to move back here. It wasn’t going to happen.

Without bothering to lock up the ute, Box walked back past the red letterbox and then cut up through the orchard.
There were late pears still on the trees and he surprised himself by remembering the name of the variety, Taylor’s Gold. They were green and hard as bullets right through until April. There was a surprising number of pears lying on the ground. Apparently harvesting all of them had been beyond even Dee. Maybe her new-found love of online research had taken too much of her time. Or maybe she was just getting old. Box smelt the sweet fructose fug. He could see wasps crawling among the hollowed-out shells of the rotting fruit. They hummed a high warning when he got too near.

The whole orchard needed to be overhauled. Black spot had taken hold in places. And there, leaf curler insects with their gummy spit. A full week’s worth of pruning at least. Whole trees, like that one there, would have to come right out. Dee was right. Despite arguing that she was as robust as a goat, he knew that she was slowing down. She couldn’t keep on top of things any more, and she wouldn’t be alive for ever.

Box had snooped in her medicine cabinet a few months ago. There were prescription medicines there, Warfarin and some heavy-duty painkillers among them. Box knew Dee well enough not to bother asking her about it. She would tell him when she thought he needed to know, which probably meant never. Confronting her would just result in a fight.

He moved on through the orchard and into the vegetable garden. Because of the tall laurel hedge, the old woman couldn’t see him from the house. Pop had built half a dozen large raised beds out of brick and then spent years building up the soil. He used his own patented mixture of horse manure, blood and bone, compost from the three
heaps over by the wall. He pilfered sand from down at the beach and added it in handfuls. Pop used to tell the story that one winter he had lost a garden trowel in one of the vegetable beds. The next spring he’d seen a bush growing up. He’d left it alone and by late summer he had a fine crop of shiny new trowels. That was how good the soil was.

‘And you know, once your grandmother boiled them up, those trowels were quite tasty.’

A punchline to follow the punchline. Box had heard that tale half a dozen times and not once had the old man so much as cracked a smile. In the end that was what made it so funny. Not the joke, but the deadpan way that Pop told it.

But it
was
true that these beds produced some of the best corn that Box had ever tasted. Not to mention lettuce and cauliflower and runner beans and broccoli and beetroot and potatoes, pumpkins the size of beanbags. Okay, maybe that last was a slight exaggeration, but not much. Dee turned the pumpkins into a fantastic soup the colour of the sunset in one of those blurry French paintings.

Box noticed that a garden fork was sticking out of the ground where Dee must have been turning over soil looking for potatoes. He went over, pulled it out and with his bare hands wiped the clumps of soil off the tines. Left out in the rain the metal would rust. It was a good fork, with a smooth grainy oak handle. The garden shed was at the bottom of the raised beds. Box walked over, holding the fork, and opened the door. The shed was dim and smelled of linseed oil and bags of dry horse manure, of blood and bone. Box filled his lungs, sucking the smell of the place deep into his body.

Pop’s gardening tools hung on the back wall. A workbench with a vice ran along under the dirt-frosted window. Box propped the fork up against the wall and pulled open a stiff drawer. It was full of packets of seeds, each of them labelled in his grandfather’s careful writing. Box’s memories of Pop often revolved around working with him head to thigh on the rows of tomatoes, or watching him fixing the temperamental John Deere tractor. As a very young boy Box had come to see that a lot of the work was a constant battle to keep machinery running, to prevent the weight of the seasons turning everything to scrap. Entropy. It was a word that Box had stumbled over only recently — actually, when helping Heather with her biology homework — but it had made perfect sense to him. His grandfather had spent his life fighting that natural tendency all things have to fall apart, to revert to chaos. The packing shed conveyor belt was always on the blink, the fences sagged, the weatherboards at the back of the house rotted. Even the tomatoes leaned towards chaos; especially the tomatoes. They resisted being grown in straight rows. They sagged and twisted and seemed to welcome every type of blight and pest there was going. The weeds sprang up among them and had to be pulled out.

Box looked at the tools left hanging on the walls of the shed. A lot of them were missing now. His grandfather used to have a tool for every job. When he was very young Box hadn’t understood that his grandfather had drawn around each tool in here with a heavy marker and then painted in the outline in black on the wall. Back then, Box, the boy, had believed that when his grandfather was using a saw or a hammer or a fork-tongued crowbar that the tool had left behind its shadow. It was an idea he had probably picked up from listening to Dee read him
Peter
Pan and Wendy
. He looked at the black marks now, faded but still visible. Surrounded by the smells of linseed and earth, he stood for a long time and stared at the wall of lost shadows.

The creek ran along the bottom of a gully that sliced through their land like an axe cut. Dangling willows had been planted at some point among the five-finger and the ferns and the other natives. Box moved into the cool air among the trees and scrambled down the bank to the water-rounded rocks. He was standing by a deep pool, water the colour of overbrewed tea, stronger than anything even Dee would serve up, and Box couldn’t see the bottom. There used to be eels here when he was a kid, probably still were. Maybe they were even the same ones; they lived long enough. They’d just be bigger now. He looked carefully at the places near the far bank where the ferns overhung the stream, but there was no dark flick or slide through the water.

Box and Paul had never been allowed to spear the eels that lived in the creek. Other kids at school had boasted about the number of eels they killed in other creeks, but Pop had always made it a rule that Paul and Box could only kill something if they intended to eat it. And there was no way they were going to eat eels: offal eaters, duckling gobblers, slimy night-wrigglers.

Paul always said that Pop was bluffing, until the day they’d been up by the top water trough with a shanghai. They’d made it that morning in the tractor shed. The Y-shaped frame was three pilfered wire coat hangers, which
they had held in the vice and twisted together, and then insulation tape was wrapped into a thick wad around the handle. The rubber was taken from a bike inner tube that had patches on its patches. For ammunition they were using rusted tractor nuts.

As the eldest, Paul had claimed first turn. Box watched as he made several attempts to shoot birds, sparrows mostly. Paul missed each time. After a dozen shots and a dozen misses he’d got bored and irritated.

‘It’s not made right. It doesn’t shoot straight.’ He handed the shanghai to Box.

Box saw a blackbird sitting on a fencepost. He took aim and quickly fired. The bird shuddered, then fell backwards.

‘You got it,’ said Paul, incredulous.

They went over and Box prodded the bird with his foot. It was obvious that it was dead. It looked smaller lying in the grass than it had when it was up on the fencepost. A few black feathers lay next to it. Its beak was open and there was blood leaking from the corner of one half-closed eye.

Which was when Pop had appeared. They hadn’t seen him coming up the hill. There he was suddenly standing next to them. He didn’t swear or shout, but looked grim. In his quiet voice he outlined what was going to happen. And the alternatives.

Pop stood over them while Box and Paul took turns at plucking the blackbird. When they were finished Pop handed Box his good hunting knife.

‘Why do I have to do it?’

‘You were the one who killed it, Box.’

As Box held the bird’s body down against the top of the fencepost and worked the knife in below the swollen crop,
he could feel the brittleness of the bones and the slide of the thin flesh across the muscles. The guts were still warm. They resisted coming free and Box had to get his finger inside the cavity. He scooped them out and dropped them onto the grass. He had to cut off the feet and the head.

Later that afternoon, Dee made a stew out of the bony little carcass and served it up on mashed potato. ‘Just enough for you boys,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t want to deprive you of any of your tasty dinner. Not when you’ve hunted it down and killed it yourselves.’ The two oldies would do fine with just mutton, they said. Box and Paul weren’t allowed to leave the table until they’d finished all of the stew. Jesus, but that had been a long meal.

Now Box grinned ruefully. After that dinner, this creek’s community of eels was as safe as any protected species.

He jumped the narrow white tumble of water and algae-slick rocks and scrambled up the far bank. Back into the sunlight he climbed the sagging wire fence into the paddock and carried on up the steep hill. The grass was longer than he’d ever seen it. Dee didn’t keep sheep up here anymore. There wasn’t even a lone goat to keep the grass and the weeds down, and any sheep track that he might once have been able to follow up to the top had been overgrown years before.

The hill became steeper and after ten minutes of steady climbing Box was breathing in short audible gasps. He stopped and turned. This wasn’t the highest point on the farm — the caldera rim still loomed up well behind him — but from here he had an unobstructed view. He could see the house and beyond it the three huge glasshouses where Pop had grown tomatoes, but which had been empty since the old guy died. The fattest and most aristocratic of Dee’s three cats was walking slowly, tail up, across the lawn by the
house. He could see everything from up here: the orchard and the vegetable garden; the fields where generations of Saxtons had grown tomatoes and lettuces and, at one time, carrots for the market in the city; the creek, which cut through everything like a dark scar.

Box thought of the photograph of Randall, Augustus’s eldest son. The photo hung in Dee’s hallway. It was one of those things that Box had lived with all his life, so long that it had become as invisible to him as the pattern of moles on his arm or the slanting shape of his own toes. But standing up here on the brim of the land he thought about the photograph.

In it, Randall is still a young man, broad shouldered and strong as he walks behind two draught horses, the reins slack in his hands. You can see the clouds of dust rising up around him. All day with the dust of the land in every breath he took, soil permanently imbedded in the cracks of his brown hands. That was the life he lived until he died. The field where Randall is standing is empty — fifty years later the red-roofed packing shed would be built there — cleared by hand out of the bush that used to cover the bay. The field slopes down gently, tilted towards the harbour as though the rows of ripening tomatoes that will soon be growing there are to be shown off to the blue water. As he worked Randall would have been able to look right up the harbour, past Bird Island, all the way to the heads. The tallest point on the peninsula, Mount Parker, was always visible to him on clear days. There were flounder and cod to be caught in the harbour, eels in the streams. The family grew their own fruit and vegetables. They ran sheep and goats on the higher land and kept a cow for milk, butter, cheese. A fowl-run for eggs and meat.

All Box really knew was that Randall had been famous for his hard work and his shyness. He was a confirmed bachelor until he caused something close to a scandal by marrying his sister-in-law’s maid. At the time he was in his fifties and she was still in her teens. They had three children in quick succession.

The sun had shifted slightly and was now catching the top of the second glasshouse, and Box had to turn his head away to avoid the dazzling glare. Paul was the one who’d always talked about taking over this place. Even as a kid he had plans, things he would change, grand designs. But Box had never seen the attraction. He’d assumed that his life would really start when he moved away from Regent’s Bay. Now as he stood in the sunshine looking out over Whitecliffs, with the hills like cupped hands around the harbour, it occurred to him that there must be a satisfaction, a simple magnificence that comes from working your own land.