Settlers' Creek, page 11
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.
But he could never imagine that life for himself. He shook his head and set off back down the hill.
The furnace’s tall brick chimney rose fifteen metres above Box. When Pop still grew tomatoes the glasshouses had been heated by hot water pushed through pipes. The old bloke used to have a pile of coal delivered weekly from June to September. Box still remembered the noise as the deck of the delivery truck would slowly lever up and the coal began to avalanche onto the ground. A black cloud of coal dust like a billion small dark flies would rise up. But the old furnace hadn’t been lit in years. Deregulation in the mid-eighties and the wave of cheap imports from Australia had ripped the guts out of local tomato growing. Pop had staggered on for longer than most, doing the best he could, but even in the best years he’d managed to do little more than break even.
When Box was ten he’d been deemed old enough to help shovel the coal. He remembered standing close to the open door of the furnace, feeling the sweat dripping down his back, his arms aching from the lift and heft of the shovel. It wasn’t as Victorian as it sounded, though. Box had liked using his body to help with the running of the place. It had been good for him. It let Box forge a sense of himself. This is what men did. They used their hands and the strength in their backs and legs to keep things functioning.
There were other benefits of hard work. He remembered standing stark naked in front of the mirror in his room looking at his newly defined muscles. That summer at the community pool he’d been sure that he’d seen Katherine Tyler looking at him in a new way. Not that he’d been brave enough to do anything about it.
A noise dragged him back to his surroundings. There was someone in the first glasshouse. Box went over to the door and stood looking into the vast hangar of steel and glass. It was a woman. She was bending over in the corner to his left, old corduroy pants stretched over an arse like two fat boys under a sheet. She must have heard him because she straightened up and turned. Her hair was a pale blonde.
‘Yes? Hello.’
She scratched at the tip of her nose with the back of her gardening glove as she spoke. At her feet was a tight carpet of containers, hundreds Box guessed, each one holding a cacti — cactus? He could never remember. Succulents, anyway, all spines and swollen leaves.
‘Sorry, I didn’t know you were here. I’m Dee’s grandson.’
‘Box?’
‘Yeah.’
The woman smiled. ‘I’m Ali Jackson. You went to school with my older brothers, James and Aaron.’
He walked towards her and felt the air turn humid. ‘Sure, I remember them.’
Freckled redheads, both of them, close enough in age to be referred to by people in the bay as ‘Irish twins’. Box could’ve told you that James and Aaron Jackson had a younger sister but he had no real memory of her. Apparently she’d grown up into a pear-shaped woman with a warm smile. She probably had kids of her own; she certainly looked like she should.
Ali Jackson picked her way through the plants to where Box was standing. ‘I was sorry to hear about your son.’
Box looked away to the glass walls. He wondered exactly what she’d heard. ‘Thank you.’
‘Sorry. Word travels fast in the bay.’
‘Sure.’
‘Would you mind if I came to the funeral? A lot of the locals want to be there to support the family.’
You mean to support Dee, thought Box. ‘Of course. Sure.’ He looked over at the containers. ‘You’re growing succulents.’
‘Cacti.’
‘Right.’
‘I’m just leasing this space from Dee. I feel guilty, though. She’s hardly charging me anything. This is something my husband and I are trying.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘So-so. We sell to big garden centres mostly. Even with the recession, cacti are quite popular for landscaping right now.’
Perhaps it was the heat, but Box felt suddenly light-headed. He reached out and put his hand on one of the glasshouse’s steel supports. It seemed to move under his weight, rolling away. The ground tilted and swelled up to meet him. He heard himself cry out.
Ali Jackson was staring at him, eyes wide. ‘Box? What’s the matter? Are you all right?’
Again, the ground surged and rolled, back the other way this time. Box had to bend his knees and shift his weight to stop himself from falling. There was a creaking sound like wood shifting and settling back. He felt himself go down on his knees.
And then the feeling passed and everything was still and quiet except for the sound of Ali asking him what was wrong.
Box stared around, bug eyed, breathing raggedly. The ground beneath his feet had gone back to being as level and solid as — as, well, as the ground. Ali Jackson hadn’t moved. She was standing where he had left her, staring down at him with a look of worry stamped on her face.
Sweat was leaking down into his eyes. He tried to get up off his knees and almost fell again.
‘Here, let me help you.’ Box felt Ali take his arm. She helped him walk slowly over to the door and out into the cool air. The brick chimney stretched up above him. The only movement came from the poplars down by the road as the tops bent and snapped back in the onshore breeze.
‘Box? Are you okay?’
‘Didn’t you feel that?’
‘No, what?’
‘I thought it was an earthquake’
‘No.’
He didn’t mention the voices. Now that he was outside he had time to wonder about those. In among the adrenaline rush of panic he’d heard voices, as though there had been other people right there in the glasshouse, people all around him.
‘I’ll get Dee,’ Ali said.
‘No.’
‘But …’
‘I’m fine now. I guess it’s just the stress.’
‘You should see a doctor.’
‘I will,’ he lied. ‘Look, I’m really feeling much better now. I’m going to go. I’ll see you later, okay.’
‘Take care.’
Box walked away in the direction of the ute, forcing himself to breathe deeply. Pop used to have what he called his ‘turns’. Doctor Foster had called it high blood pressure. Almost as high as Pop’s cholesterol, apparently; the result of a lifetime’s worth of butter smeared thickly onto bread, full-cream milk, and mutton with the fat laid through it in broad white seams. Box could remember seeing Pop sway when he got up from the couch too quickly. Twice, when Box was in his late teens, his grandfather had fallen. They’d been alone, once in the tractor shed, the other time in the bottom field. That had scared Box. Both times, Pop had staggered back to his feet and muttered out embarrassed dismissals as he brushed the earth from his trousers.
‘Don’t tell your grandmother, Box. It’s nothing. Just one of my turns.’
‘Okay.’
Nothing was wrong. Everything was fine. There was work to do.
But apparently, now it was Box’s turn — his turn to have a turn — to experience the shifting, tilting dislocation; worse than he’d imagined. He was probably right when he’d told Ali that it was caused by stress and grief. Who knows, his blood pressure was probably through the roof.
Box parked the ute with its grille almost kissing the white picket fence, then walked up towards the church along the shingle path between the old graves. The churchyard was in heavy shadow. With no regard for the future, big fir trees had been planted years ago along the northern side. The trees had grown taller even than the cross on the top of the church roof. He’d arranged to meet the minister at one o’clock, but there was no sign of the other man. Box stood and looked around. The walls of the church were hewn out of blocks of volcanic stone. The roof was finished with slate tiles and was pitched steeply with wide eaves that sheltered the agapanthus growing beneath.
As a boy he’d played here with kids from school. Back then, there had been only the Marshalls’ horse paddock between the church and his grandparents’ north boundary — easier to cross than a city street. And a bloody sight safer. During breaks from whatever game was flavour of the month Box would read the names on the graves. He’d always marvelled at the magic when those mossy, chiselled letters — ‘Saxton’ — were the same as the letters he spelled out in pencil on the front of his school exercise books.
