Wedding Bush Road Read online

  I pull the Camry onto the rise beneath the draping evergreens and for a moment we sit with the view. The town divided by the South Gippsland Highway, more a road than a highway by American standards, but branded impassable by my mother nonetheless. Semitrailers hurtle through on their way to Inverloch or other Gippsland towns, Korumburra, Leongatha, Sale. The narrow bridge over Slocombe’s Inlet with sluice gates below, and the rock pool, where local boys still swim in the salty water. Grumpy Unthank walks his bulldog, maybe not the same dog but similar. The wall of the foreshore and a narrow gray beach akin to some coastal town in an oven-baked England, the sand leading out to the channel, the mangrove islands toward Bass Strait. Tourist buses burn through full tilt but sometimes stop for fish ’n’ chips from Cova Cottage or a ploughman’s wheel from the bakery.

  My mother tries to turn to the backseat. “Sorry about Hilma’s furniture,” she says as if he’s just appeared, then she gets from the car abruptly, her movement jerky, pursing her lips in the shade of her cap as she manages the leash and her blue dilly bag. “C’mon, Pip,” she says and the dog jumps down, prick-eared and ready to be led. Despite the heat, my mother pulls on the cream nylon parka I bought for ten dollars in Manila twenty years ago. Over her jumper. She says her bones never thaw from the chill of the night.

  My father is still in the back, left like a shopping bag.

  This is their ritual. She’ll walk in from here and he’ll drive on ahead and sit at his table at The Pelican, hold court, wait for unsuspecting tourists returning from a weekend of fairy penguins waddling up through the dusk in their black-and-white thousands. A windswept beach down near the Nobbies, sixty miles farther on. Since Elsie, my father’s been relegated to this side of the road, the tired side. The row of bright, multicolored shops on the far side of the highway is my mother’s side.

  And I am shepherding my mother who wanders off ahead with a grim, unsteady determination, her new crook and her dog, trying to keep her stroke-canted limbs in measure. She shields herself from the back of Genoni’s agricultural machinery yard, a red Massey Ferguson tractor, a John Deere combine, tractors with cabs much taller than ours on the farm. A lot that was once full of weeds and unsold slashers is now awash with gleaming mulchers and balers for silage, mowers for hay. My mother admires the feat of farm production but she isn’t keen on trade, or those who work in it, or Italians. I think of the crumbling walls and plumbing those Genonis have traveled to this end of the world to avoid, to this town where my family has old money, such as it is, stashed deep in hatboxes in the house with its own crumbling plaster and echoing pipes.

  My father passes by in the Camry, hunched low against the driver’s-side door. He gives a halfhearted wave, as we venture the rest of the way on foot, as is the custom. The only difference is I’m here now.

  The roar of a truck on the highway, the inlet at low tide and the warm salt wind off the briny water, the mire. The dog’s head up in the wind as it lifts its leg and irrigates a shine on the raised black letters of a new bronze plaque near the bridge: Tooradin. Aboriginal for bunyip. A mithical animal of the dreamtime. Donated by Royal Genoni.

  My mother scoffs, endlessly buoyed by the misspelling, hauls the dog onward, forges the pointed end of her crook in the dirt. My father parking outside The Pelican, getting himself inside to settle in his usual chair among the Ken Doane plastic tablecloths. From the street, I see him smile up at a straggle-haired waitress who pours him tea, his deerstalker’s cap held down in his lap, still in his favorite green sweater with its minor stains and holes. And still lord of the manor in there. I observe him through the sun-glinted window as my mother waits a few doors up at Tooradin Collectibles, pretending to examine the curios.

  But I can’t take my eyes off my father. The way relatives seem different when they don’t know you’re watching, more themselves but strangers somehow. He appears even more shrunken, struggling to settle his hips in the chair, to turn and greet an elderly couple eating scones at another table. He grins up at the waitress as if she might get snared inside the creases of his smile.

  “Heard a rumor you were back.” Mikey Duggan, stout and aproned in the plastic fly-strip doorway.

  “So it seems,” I say, not meaning to sound snooty. I summon a wink of collusion, pass by him through the veil of plastic, head over and kneel by my father. “Dad, I spoke to Sharen. I think she’s a bit unstable. Why do you have these people on the farm?”

  He stiffens, his beefy hands about his mug, staring into it. The old couple seems riveted in our direction. Mikey is listening, his waitress too, so I whisper to my father again. “I guess Mum ended up out there fighting the fire.”

  My father’s attention draws down to the hat in his lap, the mug being choked in his fingers. He clearly didn’t know this. “We should go to the police,” I say. I dredge up allegations from long-ago studies of torts and crimes, malicious mischief, arson, growing dope, if that’s still illegal here, countered by my father accused of harassment, unwarranted entry, all of it aggravated. Sweat in my shirt and under my collar; getting embroiled brings blood to my muscles.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” my father says looking at me in the eye, his lids sagging and red with disappointment, his slightly dank coffee breath. “We might need your help this time,” he says, and I’m nodding, touching his shoulder as I rise.

  “First we need to get Mum to the doctor for tests.”

  He’s nodding, as if with me here that might be possible.

  As I leave, I allow a half-apologetic smile for the waitress.

  Outside in the sun, I breathe in the sea air and run to catch up. My mother’s well ahead, waiting at the new pedestrian crossing, impatient to get to her side of the highway. To the Tooradin bakery, the post office, Cova Cottage, and the newsagency, to secure her crossword magazine. As I glance back, my father, hunched in the café doorway, starts limping this way.

  “Blast you,” says my mother. “What did you say to him now?” Then, unannounced, she launches out to cross the highway, her jagged step and no light in her favor, just the dog as it eagerly pulls her across, her crook half in the air. A truck whines to a stop. At the shriek of its air brakes, I wave in apology to the driver. Oblivious, my mother’s fishing in her jacket for the post office key on the pink nylon string, the material my grandmother crocheted into bath mats. She swats me away as I attempt to help her onto the curb.

  “I told him you were out fighting Sharen’s fire on your own,” I say, and she stops as if unsure and I wonder if she’s already forgotten. Then she notices Earley again, knotting along the other side, beneath the flowering gums, and she hands me the mail key. “And where the hell was he?” she asks as she loops the dog to the bench. “I don’t want him over this side of the highway.”

  In an effort to avoid a scene, I head to unlock Box 90. A bundle of Christmas cards, some addressed to “RB & EW Rawson,” as if my parents are still happily married, a few just to her, from those who’ve taken a moral stand. Again I’ve forgotten it’s almost Christmas. There are no windows dressed; it’s the middle of summer. Last Christmas in Manhattan when I met up with Isabel, it was snowing. Those elaborate New York traditions—Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor, the tree dressed up at Rockefeller Center. I bought her a cashmere scarf for seven hundred dollars because it was Loro Piana, whoever that is, when I only met her the night before. She said it was a red flag, but lovely nonetheless.

  Here, the only thing Italian is old Royal Genoni gliding by on the footpath in a fancy four-wheel motor chair, the Lincoln-jawed face of a patronage statue.

  “I hear you had a fire,” he says, his accent more subtle than his satisfaction. “Not to worry, Bobby Genoni took her in. Poor thing had nowhere to go.” As he passes my mother she smiles at him falsely, holds her dilly bag close as if fearing it might get snatched. She calls him a dreadful old fossil as we step inside the store, the jingling bell on the door the only obvious nod to the season, along with a big red stocking taped to the wall. My m
other ransacks her change purse for coins to buy the Herald-Sun and New Idea, preferring not to break a note. She stamps a great fistful of coins on the counter, silver embossed with emus and echidnas, and waits for someone to count.

  The locals monitor us from behind the shelves—the Savigo girl whose parents used to run the railway station when there was still a train. I remember how she was sweet back then, all glasses and spotty face. Now she’s a sad-looking woman. I’d say hi but the way she stares is disconcerting, makes me want to say: Yes, I’m the one who moved away. Then she averts her eyes as she always did and, for some reason, I have a desire to apologize for leaving her here.

  My mother nudges me, ready to go, but outside Earley is sitting awkwardly on the bench, petting the reluctant Pip. “It’s Tagalong Shenandoah,” my mother says, the name of some pony from her childhood or a private joke she still shares with my father who raises his head with an uncomfortable grin.

  “Sorry about the other night, Ruthie,” he says, his hat back in his boxy hands, and then he turns to me. “Can I have another word with your son?”

  My mother’s eyes draw down to the pavement, waiting, giving me the choice, and I feel tossed up between them, knowing my father can’t really catch, my mother who might drop me for sport. “Of course you can,” I say.

  My mother folds her New Idea into her bag and I can feel her pull, her silent disapproval. Accusing me with her eyes as she points to the magazine cover: a Hereford bull with a bridle and saddle, a woman on board midair over a jump. My mother pretends to seem tickled, a jumping bull. “I rode the farm bulls when I was a kid,” she says, “but we never thought to jump them.”

  As if running interference, sweet Margaret Boatwell parks her truck and gets out with her shopping bags and her face like a twisted sandwich, all brow and chin, keen to say hello to me but not daring. She can see we’re in the midst of things. Old Cloudy Gray, on his way to the pub, is trying to listen in. Some woman watches out of the newsagent’s window.

  My mother walks on with her dog and her purse and her stick.

  “It’s strange she still loves you,” I say to my father, but he shakes his head—he can’t fathom how love could manifest as so much fury. We watch her recede in silence, wafting along in the hot sea air. The stick as her rudder, she heads away over the highway, a flimsy, meandering figure daring the trucks.

  A couple of city people pull over in their new Range Rover, eclipsing her. They get out in their moleskins and polo shirts. Hobby farmers and their fifteen acres, moving down here to breed alpacas or Welsh mountain ponies, getting their tractors stuck in the winter mud. My father acknowledges them with a hopeful smile, touches the brim of his cattleman’s hat, but they don’t know him from a can of paint. Ruthie in the distance, already on the footbridge over the channel. She stands there, staring down into the swill rushing through the sluice gates as if daring herself, then she shields her face and looks out across the foreshore, to the rickety jetty where the few local boats are moored, over the mud and mangroves toward Westernport Bay.

  I STAND BESIDE my mother on the bridge, both of us staring down into the mouth of the inlet. The walking stick is floating by the sluice gates.

  “I don’t need it,” she says.

  “But didn’t Sharen’s boy make it for you?”

  “Oh,” she says, remembering. “Can you get it back?”

  “No.”

  I slide into the passenger seat, onto the ratty sheepskin beside my father as he keeps tabs on my mother who’s climbing in the back with the dog. He starts the car but it’s already running; the ignition screeches. “Want me to drive?” my mother asks. She’s not been behind the wheel since she had dental work done without anesthesia, then, on the way home, drove right through the florist’s front window in Mornington. After that my father got the car.

  He bumps it forward and my mother starts to make that tap-drip sound and the dog seems unsettled, shifting about on the seat, whining out at the trees as they pass. “What’s going on, Mister Pip?” I ask. My mother strokes the dog’s ears.

  “The gifts your father brings into our lives,” she says. “Marvelous.” But my father says nothing, turns left at the school and drives through the new subdivision, accelerates up a newly paved street doing his sick-of-bloody-everyone driving, past a cluster of ugly brick houses. The land we sold to the Genonis too early and they made all the development money.

  “Here we go,” says my mother as he swerves off the end and we bump up the track, the back way to the cottage, as if it’s old times, dust roiling out behind us, a smoke train, the dog poking its face out the window, eyes shut in the wind. And I wish I was on that Pacific Coast Highway with the cliffs jutting out like huge rocky sails and the rain sweeping in off the water. The weekend we drove up to San Francisco to see art at the Legion of Honor. The Cult of Beauty—The Victorian Avant-Garde. A museum and a movement I pretended I’d heard of and it was amazing—galleries of Whistler and Stanhope, and Isabel holding my hand.

  Near Big Sur, Isabel spied a tree in the distance, a giant ancient cypress full of color. As we walked down the path toward it, we realized it was ornamented with bright vintage dresses, blues and pinks and yellows, hanging from branches and rippling in the wind. They were pinned with prayers and dreams, hundreds of them, written on old-fashioned cardboard luggage tags. She wrote and pinned some of her own and I envied her, attaching a prayer to a tree and believing it might be answered. “You never know,” she said. As though it might be that simple.

  We trundle over the cattle grid, across the hummocky paddock. Bracken and shiggy scrape the underbelly of the car, the tires jolt in the ruts. “Jesus, Earley,” my mother says. “Must we?” But he ignores her this time, parks by the fence that’s supposed to keep animals out of Sharen’s nonexistent garden. A scrawny roan calf scuttles out into the field through the garden gate.

  “Wait here.” My father’s out quicker than you’d think, a slam of the door behind him and we watch him limp across the sandy lawn, banging on Sharen’s brown door, then letting himself right in.

  I move to get out as well.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” my mother says wearily, but the house door’s left open and I can’t resist.

  In the pokey kitchen, the stack of filthy plates and pizza boxes remains. From the sitting room, the smell of sage and paint, eucalyptus. Sharen crouched on one of the small wooden crates, my father stands beside her, staring at the wall above the fireplace. The plaster painted black as onyx, white letters on it where the Munnings hung. SHAREN LIVES HERE. Branches inside, eucalyptus, bridal bush, three old tires piled up as a seat.

  “All I need’s a decent piece of quiet to take care of myself and Reggie.”

  “You said you’d get that little bastard out of here.” My father grits his jaw and hisses in a way that reminds me of childhood. But Sharen ignores him, watches me as though I’m her witness.

  The words seem to pierce the dullness of the room. “Who wrote that?” I ask.

  “Bloody kid’s everywhere,” my father says.

  Sharen cups her cleavage as if she’s doing Reiki on herself. “I’m so sorry, Daniel,” she says. “Coming home to all this.”

  I try to summon the landlord and tenant’s laws here. The Landlord and Tenant Act. But all I remember is the “rule of rentals is that renters rule.” Sharen looking at me with those parrot-green eyes. I decide to check the rest of the house, head out through the frosted French doors past the place where my grandmother’s desk and prize-winning chair sat until recently. The front door is open, the late morning sun lancing through. Outside, the rocker recliner is splayed in parts on the path as if there’s been some incident. Beyond it my mother has the dog off its leash, and it’s running a bunny down into a burrow under the green corrugated shed. A second poddy calf skitters from sight.

  The other room is empty. Another discarded Women’s Weekly, this one with a cover titled “The End of Dame Edna,” a tangled mess of sheets and laundry. Hearin
g boards creak down the hall, I move toward them, wary, but I want to see this kid close up. Apples of dark green manure, neat and piled on the floor. I turn from the murky light of the hall into the bright-lit bedroom. No bed, just a small white pony, stock still, regarding me standoffishly, its forelock long between its eyes. Its head extends to check the air and its eyes reflect darkly. “Bloody hell,” I say, then hear a noise from outside.

  As the pony cocks its head, one eye goes pale, opaque in the light and out the window, my mother peers in, shading her face through the bird dirt. The flinty sound of her laugh makes the pony restless, shifting its feet and turning, its reflection in the wardrobe mirror, twinned with the white of its eyes and its dusty angular rump.

  Retreating into the hall, past the loamy manure, I glimpse Sharen and my father through the sitting room door. Awkward, together, looking around to see what’s going on.

  “Should there be a horse in the bedroom?” I ask. I know if that pony explodes and comes rushing out, my father’s one good fall away from a wheelchair, but I just leave them to it. She’s not allowed to keep a horse in the field so she put it in the second bedroom.

  My mother stands by the gate, staring at the distant road the way a captain might watch out to sea, and I feel a kind of debilitation unfelt since I was young. What Doctor Orry called “the ready tiredness,” but I suspect it was a bewildered depression. My mother right here as if nothing has changed, ready to be driven home, putting the dog back in.

  One of the three big horses approaches and sniffs the car. “He’s a character, this black horse,” she says. Has she forgotten the pony in the house, or is she no longer fazed by strangeness? I open the door for her, playing the consort, sidekick, as she thinks it should be. “What’s his name?” I ask.

  “This one? Trombone,” she says. “Out of that great big Lady Lime.” She points to the other two in the distance. “Satchmo and Goolagong,” she says. “Remember the twin foals?” The pair that stands on either side of the burnt Mitsubishi eating grass. My mother calls out to them and they raise their heads like sentinels. She scoots into the passenger seat and I remember when they were a pair of darkening foals, one named after an aboriginal tennis player and the other a jazz musician; how political correctness bypassed us here.