She was simply going to have to do it herself. Really, though, the wind was a menace. She’d made the decision about the western lawn before it started up; she’d forgotten this was the less sheltered side of the garden. But Isabel had a stubborn streak; she’d been like it all her life. A sage friend once told her that people didn’t change as they aged, they merely became older and sadder. The first, she’d figured, she couldn’t do much about, but Isabel had been determined not to permit the latter. Thankfully, she was, by nature, a very positive person.
It was only that the windy days brought with them agitation. They did lately, anyway. She was sure she hadn’t always felt this turbulence within her belly. Once, in a different lifetime, she’d been known for having nerves of steel. Now, she was as likely to be overtaken with a sudden surge of alarm from nowhere. A sense that she was standing alone on the surface of life and it felt as fragile as glass. Breathing helped. She wondered whether she needed a tincture or tea. Something to settle her thoughts so she could at least sleep. She’d even considered a doctor, but not Maud McKendry’s husband in the main street. God forbid.
However she did it, Isabel was going to put things right. That was the other New Year’s resolution she’d made, although she’d kept it to herself. She was giving herself one more year to regain her equilibrium. People were depending on her, and it was time.
She would turn thirty-eight at her next birthday. Practically forty! A greater age than either her father or mother ever reached. Perhaps that was why she had been overcome lately with memories from her childhood. It was as if sufficient time had passed that she could turn around and see it with clarity across the vast ocean of time. She could barely remember crossing that ocean.
It was ridiculous to feel lonely. She had lived in this house for fourteen years. She was surrounded by more family than she’d ever had—God knew, she couldn’t escape the children if she tried. And yet, there were times when she felt terror at her own desolation, the gnawing sensation of having lost something she could not name and therefore could not hope to find.
Down on the curve of the driveway, something moved. She strained to see. Yes, someone was coming, it wasn’t her imagination. A stranger? A bushranger sweeping up the driveway on his horse, straight out of a Banjo Paterson poem?
It was the postman, she realized, as the brown paper–wrappedparcel he was carrying came into focus. On New Year’s Day! One of the virtues of living in a small country town where everyone knew each other’s business was service outside usual hours, but this was exceptional. A flame of excitement flared inside her and her fingers turned to thumbs as she tried to tie the bunting so she could get down to intercept the delivery. She hoped it was the order she’d written away for some weeks ago. Her liberation! She hadn’t expected it to arrive so soon.
But it was maddening. The string was tangled, and the wind was teasing it around the flags. Isabel struggled and cursed beneath her breath, glancing over her shoulder to observe the postman’s progress.
She didn’t want her package delivered to the house.
As he reached the nearest bend of the driveway, Isabel knew she would have to let go of the string if she were to scramble down the ladder in time. She vacillated for a moment and then called out, “Hello!” and waved. “I’m over here.”
He looked up, surprised, and as another gust of wind made her grip the ladder tight, Isabel saw she’d been mistaken. For although he carried a parcel, the stranger on the driveway was not the postman at all.
Adelaide Hills, South Australia
1959
Christmas Eve
Later, when he was asked about it, as he would be many times over the course of his long, long life, Percy Summers would say truthfully that he’d thought they were asleep. The weather had been hot enough for it. Throughout December, the heat had pushed in from the west, crossing the desert center before driving south; there it had gathered, hanging unseen above them and refusing to budge. Each night they listened to the weather report on the wireless, waiting to hear that it was due to break, but relief never came. In the long afternoons they leaned over one another’s fences, squinting in the golden light as the shimmering sun melted into the horizon beyond the edge of town, shaking their heads and lamenting the heat, the blasted heat, asking one another, without expectation of an answer, when it would finally end.
Meanwhile, tall and slender on the upsweep of hills that surrounded their river-run valley, the blue gums stood silent, streaky skins glinting metallic. They were old and had seen it all before. Long before the houses of stone and timber and iron, before the roads and cars and fences, before the rows of grapevines and apple trees and the cattle in the paddocks. The gums had been there first, weathering the blistering heat and, in turn, the cold wet of winter. This was an ancient place, a land of vast extremes.
Even by usual standards, though, the summer of 1959 was hot. Records were falling in the place where scores were kept, and the people of Tambilla were feeling every bit of it. Percy’s wife, Meg, had taken to rising with the dawn to get the day’s milk delivery inside the shop before it had a chance to spoil; Jimmy Riley said that even his aunties and uncles couldn’t remember it so dry; and in everyone’s mind, especially with the memories of 1955 so fresh, was the risk of fire.
“Black Sunday,” the papers had taken to calling it. The worstfires seen since the colony had been formed. Second of January had dawned four years ago, heavy with a sense of disaster brewing. A dust storm had rolled in overnight, gathered from the dry plains to the north, scorching wind gusts of a hundred kilometers per hour. Trees bowed and leaves hurtled along the ravines; sheets of corrugated iron were wrenched from the tops of farm buildings. Electric power lines broke free, sparking multiple blazes that raged and grew and finally met to form a great hungry wall of fire.
Hour by hour, the locals had fought it hard with wet sacks and shovels and whatever else they could find until at last, miraculously, in the evening, the rain had started to fall and the wind had changed direction—but not before forty or so properties had been lost, along with the lives of two poor souls. They’d been calling for a proper emergency fire service ever since, but the decision makers down in the city had been too slow to act; this year, in the face of eerily similar conditions, the local branch had taken matters into their own hands.
Jimmy Riley, who worked as a tracker for some of the Hills farmers, had been talking about land clearing for ages. For thousands of years, he said, his ancestors had conducted regular slow burns, reducing the fuel load when the weather was still cool, so there wasn’t enough left to start a fire when the earth was baking and the northwesters howling, and the merest spark was all it took. It seemed to Percy that men like Jimmy Riley, who knew this country from the inside out, weren’t listened to anywhere near as often as they should be.
The most recent call had come through from Angus McNamara down near Meadows the week before. The mild, wet years since ’55 had resulted in rich growth, and the forest of Kuitpo was thick with foliage. One stray lightning bolt, one dropped match, and the whole lot would go up. They’d been at it all week and had finished slashing in time for Christmas. Just as well—storms were forecast over the weekend, but there was every chance the rain would pass them by and they’d be left with dry strikes instead. Meg had been less than thrilled when Percy told her he’d be gone during the busiest timeof year, but she knew it had to be done and that Percy wasn’t one to shirk. Their boys had been drafted in as proxies at the shop and Meg had grudgingly agreed that it was no bad thing for the lads to have some real responsibilities. Percy had left them the Ford utility and taken Blaze on the run down to Meadows.
Truth be told, Percy preferred to go on horseback. He’d hated putting the utility vehicle up on blocks during the war, but you couldn’t get petrol for love nor money—what little there was had been requisitioned by the army and other essential services—and by the time they were able to pull the ute down again, he’d got out of the habit of driving. They’d kept the ute for bigger deliveries, but whenever he could, Percy saddled up Blaze for the ride. She was an old girl now, not the fearsome young filly who’d come to them back in ’41, but she still loved a run.
The McNamara place was a big cattle property this side of Meadows that most people referred to simply as “the Station.” The house was large and flat with a wide verandah running all the way around and a deep iron awning keeping the heat at bay. Percy had been offered a spot in the shed to sleep, but he’d been happy to take his swag out under the stars. He didn’t get much chance to camp these days, what with the shop keeping them so busy and the boys growing up. Sixteen and fourteen they were now, both taller than him and with boots as big, each preferring to spend time with friends rather than camp with the old man. Percy didn’t begrudge his boys their independence, but he missed them. Some of his best memories were of sitting around the campfire telling stories and making each other laugh, counting the stars in the night sky, and teaching them real skills, like how to find fresh water and catch their own food.
He was giving them each a new fishing rod for Christmas. Meg had accused him of extravagance when he brought the presents home from town, but she’d said it with a smile. She knew he’d been looking for something to soften the terrible blow of losing old Buddy-dog in the spring. Percy had justified the cost by remindingher that Marcus, in particular, was becoming a fine angler; he could do worse than to take it up full-time. Kurt, the elder of the two, would be heading to the university when he finished school. He’d be the first in their family to go, and although Percy tried not to make too much of a fuss over his glowing school reports, especially not in front of Marcus, he was proud as punch—Meg was, too. Even with the recent distraction of Matilda Turner, Kurt had managed to keep his grades from slipping. Percy just wished his own mother were still alive to read the things Kurt’s teachers wrote.
Heat ticked in the underbrush and bone-dry twigs snapped beneath Blaze’s hooves. They had left the Station first thing and been traveling all day. Percy steered the old girl along the track, slow and steady, sticking to the dappled shade where he could. Ahead was the edge of Hahndorf; not much longer and they’d be home.
With the day’s warmth on his back and the monotonous drone of hidden insects buzzing in his ears, a somnolence had come over Percy. The dry summer air brought back memories of being a boy. Of lying in his bed in the small back room of the house he’d shared with his mother and father, training his ears on the noises outside, closing his eyes so that he could better imagine himself into life beyond the window.
Percy had spent most of his twelfth year in that bed. It hadn’t been easy for a lad who was used to roaming free to be struck down. He could hear his friends out in the street, calling to one another, laughing and jeering as they kicked a ball, and he’d longed to join them, to feel the blood pumping in his legs, his heart punchingone-twoat his rib cage. He’d felt himself shrinking, fading away to nothing.
But his mother came from strong Anglican stock and wasn’t the sort to stand by while her son’s self-pity threatened to swallow him up. “Doesn’t matter if your body’s grounded,” she’d said, in that firm, no-nonsense way of hers. “There’s other ways to travel.”
She’d started with a children’s book about a koala with a walking stick, and a sailor and a penguin, and a pudding that miraculously re-formed each time it was eaten. The experience was a revelation: even as a small child, Percy had never been read to. He’d seen books on his teacher’s desk at school, but—influenced by his father, perhaps—had assumed them objects of punishment and toil. He hadn’t realized that inside their covers were whole wide worlds, filled with people and places and hijinks and humor, just waiting for him to join them.
When Percy had heard the children’s stories enough times that he could recite each one under his breath, he dared to ask his mother whether maybe there were others. She’d paused, and at first he thought he’d crossed an unseen line, that the stories were going to evaporate, and he’d be left alone again with only his broken body for company. But then his mother had murmured, “I wonder?” and disappeared deep into the coach house in the back corner of the garden, the place where his father didn’t go.
