Three Summers (27 page)

‘The heart of Dancey,' Ruth said softly, ‘Exactly
you
,' and her voice held that same tenderness Dancey had heard in Laura's mother's voice as she sat with her little boy, the tenderness that shone from the faces of the Indian student's family, or sounded in the dark-haired man's song – the tenderness that was the real true thing.

Dancey sprang to her feet and rushed towards the fire. She kicked at the banksia bush. She kicked and kicked, she stamped, she scooped up handfuls of sandy soil and threw it over the burning twigs and leaves. ‘Out! Out! Out!' she cried. ‘I'm crossing you out, see! You're gone!'

And little by little the fire
was
gone, flaring and glaring, sulking and smoking and dying, till it was no more than an occasional red glint among the ashes, which Dancey covered with stones and armfuls of the hard dry soil. She put the fire out. She buried it. Then she waited; she stood there for half an hour to make sure it couldn't begin again. The wind dropped. A new little breeze came, whispering and cool. The trees sighed with pleasure. The sky was all grey now, and a big drop of water fell suddenly on the top of her head. Other drops fell in the dust. They fell on the warm earth above the ashes, and the warm earth hissed and went black and wet and held no danger anymore.

The garden floated round Dancey, its lawns and paths and big kind trees. She turned and the peacock was there, spreading its glorious tail, and the dark-haired man came and looked into her eyes and said gently, ‘Go home now, little one.'

‘Home?' asked Dancey, and he smiled the most beautiful smile she'd ever seen and said, ‘Go home to Ruthie.'

The rain was falling. She ran up the hill and turned in the direction of Hayfield Lane. The air was cold and the trees dripped; it was as if the whole world was changing. A flock of white cockatoos flew over, so soundless they might have been cut out of cloth.

seven

There was a new fire over in the Hartshorn Valley; Ruth heard the news on the radio. The Hartshorn Valley was thirty kilometres to the west, but thirty kilometres was nothing on a day like today. She went to check that the gutters were still free of rubbish; when she opened the door, the heat came at her like a blow. It had a thickness about it now, clammy and solid against her skin, and when she looked up she saw that the sky was grey, a soft foamy grey the colour of cobwebs. The wind had dropped. ‘Please rain,' she whispered as she hurried down the side path. ‘Oh please, please rain.'

She had no real hope, all spring and summer there'd been such afternoons: the sky would cloud and the wind die down and it would seem that at any moment the rain would begin to fall. But the dry minutes stretched into hours and then in the evening the wind would rise again and the cloud thin into wisps and the moon and stars shine through, and at the end of the ten o'clock news the jovial announcer, safe down in the city, would say happily, ‘Tomorrow's going to be another hot one.'

The leaves of the young peach tree she'd planted hopefully last year hung like sad little rags from the branches; all the greenness had been sucked out of them, they'd lost their light, like her dad had done after the accident in which her mother died. In the old people's home he'd had a special chair beside the big window in the dayroom where he'd sit from breakfast till bedtime gazing out into the garden. ‘He seems quite happy in himself,' the matron used to say when Ruth came to visit. ‘Never a cross word.'

He'd died two years ago.

The gutters at the back of the house were clear; Ruth walked round to the shady side beneath the firs. Here too the gutters were still free of debris, but as she turned to go inside again her glance fell on something small and white lying beneath one of the trees. A piece of paper? An old envelope blown there by the wind?

It was a letter, still sealed. A small pebble sat in the centre of the envelope, weighting it down. Ruth picked them up. For a moment she studied the pebble, then dropped it onto the ground. The letter was addressed to her and was from Fee, postmarked Barinjii, two days ago.

So it would have arrived in the post this morning. How had it got round here? Sometimes the postman left letters hanging from the box and they fell out onto the ground. That might have happened. And today, the wind could have swept it across the grass, even tweaked it round the corner of the house, till it fetched up here beneath the firs. That
could
have happened.

Only there was the pebble. The pebble couldn't have got there by itself. Someone had placed it on the envelope, to it down against the wind. And then that person had forgotten, because she'd heard her name being called. She pictured Dancey out in the front yard this morning, remembered the distant putter of a motor-scooter from further down the lane, remembered how, when she'd called her to breakfast, Dancey's running footsteps had come from round the side.

She could have dropped it. Dancey could have collected the post, intending to bring it inside, and then come here – it was one of her favourite places – and the letter had drifted from her pocket and she hadn't noticed it fall. Ruth shook her head impatiently: why was she fooling herself like this? Dancey had taken the letter. Ruth had known for a long time that when she was out of the house, Dancey spied. She had found little traces: a slight rearrangement of the contents of her drawers, the laptop shifted slightly closer to the edge of the desk, nearer the chair, so that someone small could operate it comfortably.

Nothing had ever been taken, and Ruth had let the matter go. Dancey was only checking, she told herself; the spying in Ruth's things was simply part of the girl's effort to feel a little bit secure. Dancey wanted to know about Ruth so that she could begin to feel she might be safe. Ruth thought of Dancey's warm hand in hers last night and the way she'd drawn it back, quickly, as if she'd been terrified. ‘They don't
do
affection,' she heard Sandy Jimpson's thin voice saying. ‘They can't.'

‘They're afraid to,' said Ruth.

She went back into the house and sat down at the kitchen table to read Fee's letter.

‘They've drained Skelly's dam,'
wrote Fee.
‘They're going
to build houses there. Remember how I used to say that if
they ever did that, there'd be bones at the bottom of the
dam, the bones of Tam Finn's girls?

Well, I was right and I was wrong, Ruth. There were
bones down there all right, a whole skeleton of bones. But
it wasn't one of Tam Finn's girls – it wasn't Kathy Ryan or
Ellen Lester or even Helen Hogan: they all went to Sydney
after all, eh? Sydney's a big place; girls can vanish down
there as well as at the bottom of Skelly's dam. (Though I'm
glad you never did.)

It was him, Ruth. Tam Finn.

Old Mrs Finn identified the bones. Sergeant Mercer went
out to
Fortuna
and brought her back to the hospital where
they'd taken what was left of poor Tam Finn. Old Mrs Finn,
I called her, but ancient would be a better word. She's ninety-seven,
people say. I mean, think of it, Ruth: she's not Tam
Finn's mum, she's his gran! And he was the same age we
were, just about; so, work it out: old Mrs Finn must have
had his dad when she was about fourteen! You should see
her, Ruth! I did – not stickybeaking, honest, just happened
to be passing the hospital on my way to get the milk – she's
very tiny now, very tiny and thin, like some kind of bird, but
she'd not hunched over like so many people that age, she
stands straight and she walks straight and she looks people
straight in the eye. And what eyes she has, Ruth! Sharp and
bright as needles; you get the feeling that if she looked at you
hard, it would hurt. Poor Tam Finn.

Anyway, she identified him. There was a watch with his
name on the back, and some shreds of a blue shirt, and that
old ring he always wore, remember? The snake with red eyes
that was swallowing its tail? I always thought that ring was
sort of scary. I know you liked him when we were girls, but
I thought Tam Finn was scary, too.

All the same, he was a human being. And no one cares
what happened to him, Ruth. No one knows if he fell in the
dam, or if he jumped, or if someone pushed him, and no
one wants to know. The Finns thought he was living somewhere
down in Sydney – he went down there not long after
you left – and when they never heard from him again they
simply thought he couldn't be bothered with them. And they
couldn't be bothered with him; they'd written him off long
ago.

Now I know he was weird, but honestly, Ruth, imagine
just forgetting about someone like that, someone who's your
own son, your own grandson! What's wrong with people?
Sergeant Mercer told Mattie that old Mrs Finn looked at
the watch, and the ring, and the shreds of blue shirt and
then down at the bones and all she said was, ‘Yes, that's my
grandson. That's Tam Finn. He was always headed for the
bottom of something.'

There's not going to be a memorial service or anything
like that. But I suppose, when you think about it, who is
there to remember? None of us knew him, not really, not
even Tam Finn's girls. I don't know if there's going to be any
kind of enquiry or if anything would come from it – Sergeant
Mercer says it was all a long time ago.

A long time ago!

But that's our time he's talking about, Ruthie! The time
when we'd just left school and I was getting married and you
were off to university – and it makes me feel funny when
Sergeant Mercer thinks our time is ancient history. Despite
the kids and grandkids, to me it seems like last summer, and
sometimes, when I'm walking across the paddocks or down
along the creek, I'll play this game: I'll close my eyes and
concentrate, and almost believe, Ruthie, that when I open
them I'll be back in that time again. I'll be seventeen, and
Mum and Dad and Gran will still be alive, and any moment
when I look up, I'll see you running along the track towards
me – in that blue skirt you used to wear, remember? The blue
skirt with the pockets? How lovely you were!

And still are, of course.

Come visit soon, and bring your Dancey – we're longing
to meet her.

All love and kisses, xxx

Fee

So Tam Finn was gone. All these years Ruth had had a sense of him, far away yet always in this world, travelling in exotic places: in India and Africa, the high plateaus of Ladakh, the romantic cities along the old Silk Road. She'd had this daydream that when he was old and she was old, too, they'd come back to Barinjii, and she'd be walking down Main Street and see him across the road and she'd go up to him and say at last, ‘Look, here I am.'

He'd never got to be old. ‘Not long after you left,' Fee had written, so he'd still been a boy. She read the letter through again, and found herself crying. It was the blue shirt that did it: she could remember the way it had hung from his narrow shoulders, and how the breeze had blown the cloth against his body, revealing his thinness, the shape of his bones.

‘Let me,' he'd pleaded the last time she'd seen him. ‘Let me, oh, let me!' and she'd wondered later if he'd been saying, ‘Help me.'

Perhaps he had been – for that unhappy boy, roaming the paddocks of a small country town, it would have been the same; sex would have helped him, but only for a little while. ‘Oh Tam,' she whispered. His shadow had been at the back of her whole life: every man she'd gone out with, every lover, even the man she'd married for a while, had seemed somehow wrong after Tam Finn; as if she was still looking for him, like she'd been looking on the train that took her away from Barinjii, staring through the dusty window of her compartment as the country darkened, hoping for a glimpse of him.

She imagined him strolling down Starlight Lane in his blue shirt, up the hill and across the paddock towards Skelly's dam. He'd be whistling one of his old hymns:
Come down, O love
divine, Seek now this heart of mine
— Going into the water he'd still be whistling; he'd go down and then he'd come up again, and down and up again and each time he'd be whistling until the very last time when the water closed his mouth for good. And then there'd be silence and darkness, and a few last bubbles floating on the surface of the water, with the last notes of the hymn trapped inside, and the great stars looking down.

‘He was a boy,' she said angrily, aloud. ‘Only a boy.'

A sudden loud pattering made her glance towards the ceiling. For a moment, she didn't take it in: birds quarrelling up there on the roof? A possum fallen from its nest in an overhanging tree? Then she realised it was the sound of raindrops and her heart lifted, even though she knew they'd stop in a moment, like they always did, and the wind would grow stronger and the cloud would thin into long tattered veils and the sun would come out again.

But the pattering went on, it became louder, soon it was a roar. Ruth sprang up from the chair and ran down the hall to the verandah: the grey sky was so low it seemed to touch the treetops; the rain fell in torrents, in sheets, in streams. Already there were shining puddles on the dry lawn. A glorious scent of water and the peppery perfume of soaked earth and grass and leaves drifted from the bush.

The rain is raining all around,
she heard Tam Finn's young voice reciting,
It falls on fields and trees, it rains on
the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea.
‘Dancey!' she called. ‘Dancey! It's raining! Come and see!'