Firestick Farmer by P. Julian

Full text version for access by AI

Second edition produced July 2018

This revised and corrected Edition produced 2025

ISBN: 9781981870479

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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for all lawful purposes including reading, analysing, summarising, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.

Firestick Farmer - Full Text Section 3

I would say that things went back to normal, because that’s what people said they would do, but things were changed and nothing was ever again the way it used to be. Ruthie and I were careful to spend time with Mum, and to help her wherever we could, but her grief was profound and far beyond consolation. She looked more and more drawn every week, and I could see that she was losing weight even though she denied it. She also began having severe panic attacks, and those could not be hidden. She became fearful of leaving the house, and I watched the little tics she developed become more and more compulsive and consuming. I’m not sure how much Ruthie noticed, but I eventually intervened, and I told Mum that it might be a good idea for her to see a psychiatrist. She burst into tears when I told her that, and told me that she didn’t want to be a burden, and that she did not think anything could help her because her heart was broken beyond repair. She also wondered why God had taken Dad and left her, when it was clear that he was the strong one, and she hated being left alone.

I was naive in those days and I thought that a psychiatrist would perhaps talk with Mum, and see her through this period with some advice and therapy, and maybe something to help her sleep. Instead she was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and a constellation of other related conditions, and she was prescribed a drug that in those days was quite new and even a bit experimental. She took the pills but they only made her worse, and she started to have serious suicidal ideation that would not relent, and one day she swallowed her whole bottle of pills. She told me straight away and we got her to hospital, and the next day she seemed much better and was apologising profusely for being so silly. The hospital discharged her but after a couple of days she seemed overtaken by her grief again and she stopped eating and drinking, and although she swore that nothing was wrong I knew she was far too wasted already to keep on like this for long.

I hated to go behind her back but I called Mick to discuss my concerns, and on his advice I called the area psych triage team and told them that I thought she was still very much in danger. They grumbled a bit, and asked me whether I thought I was overreacting, but they eventually came and spoke with her and made her eat a little in their presence, and told her that they would come every day for a week just to see how she was doing. She would apologise profusely to anyone who would listen, and eventually they stopped coming and told me that it was just grief and that we would just have to wait for it to pass.

***

I did my best to look after Mum but she began to fail in alarming ways, and she became more and more skeletal. When university started again I spoke to a counsellor there who was very understanding, and she arranged it so that I could defer for a semester. Mum was in and out of hospital with worsening symptoms, owing to stress and malnutrition, until her doctor told me that she needed constant care for the indefinite future, and that she would be confined to a special hospice or hospital unit or whatever it was. She went to this creepy white place on a hill that had once been run by nuns, and when I visited her she began crying and said that she just wanted to be at home, so that she could go peacefully, and she said she knew I was a good boy and that I would get her out of this place and bring her home.

I told her that she needed to be there, so that she could get better, but she did not stop crying and begging me to let her come home. It was heartbreaking to hear her, and I was mostly heartbroken at the fact that I was causing my mother such pain. I tried to imagine what Dad would do, and I saw him striding off home with her frail in his arms, looking back and saying to me: this is your mother, Nate, who took you in and loved you and nourished you. You should protect her, and be obedient to her, no matter what you think of the rights and wrongs of her wishes.

That night I did not sleep much, and the next day I went straight to her bedside, and despite the protestations of the nurses I carried her gently out to the car and brought her home. As I carried her she smiled softly at me and said you’re such a good boy, and over the next few days when I asked her what she needed she would say: just an ice block, for my dry mouth. I looked after her for a week or so, with Ruthie helping me where she could, until Mum frowned and said that both of us were looking peaky, and she told me to take Ruthie down to the junction for a coffee and a look around the shops. So we went and poked around half-heartedly, and Ruthie bought a silk-look scarf for Mum, and when we returned our mother was quiet, with no expression on her face but with a great sense of presence and peace within the room, as if she was lingering there to enjoy the fact of her release, and perhaps to reassure us and say goodbye, before she moved on to a better place altogether. I had thought of this moment and worried about Ruth, but she just went very quiet, and she draped the scarf gently about mum’s neck, and then the two of us stood there hand in hand until the room became empty of that lovely presence and our mother was gone.

I called Mick and he told me he was sorry, and he also told me that he would take care of the arrangements. He was very good and soon there was another funeral, much more sombre this time, and soon the house was left with just me and Ruthie in it, turned to the sad task of burying our last remaining parent, with me just gone nineteen, and the sole guardian and provider for us both.

At the funeral people hugged us and said that it was better this way, better for your mother this way. I was numb and accepted their kind words, over tea and sandwiches, but I wondered what could be better about our lives this way, with both parents lost and we two still so young to bear it.

***

After Dad passed away Mary had spent a lot of time at our place, and we made up a room that she could call hers. After Mum passed she moved in to my bedroom, and from that point on she more or less lived with Ruthie and me. Ruthie loved her without any reservation, and I loved her too, although things were often complicated between us, and there were frequent harsh words and cold spells. She was surprisingly domesticated, for someone with her politics, and between the three of us we managed to cook and clean and generally look after ourselves tolerably well.

I got by OK but I worried about Ruthie, who was very distressed about losing Mum and Dad in such a short time. I didn’t quite know how to explain it to her, but Mary had no such hesitation. She told Ruthie that Dad was needed for a job up in heaven, and that Mum had gone there too because she was missing him so badly. Ruthie said that she wanted to go too, but Mary said that she was needed on earth to look after me, and also that there might be some other job that needed doing that would keep her down here. God will call you when it’s time, she said. Ruthie asked me whether I was going to go to heaven too, and I said: no, not if I could help it. You’re stuck with me I guess. Ruthie smiled gravely and said she didn’t mind, as long as we were together, and she said that she was quite glad that Mum and Dad were now together as well.

One thing we didn’t have to worry about was money. Dad had owned the house outright, and had invested fairly well in stocks, and he also had a substantial life insurance policy that paid out in full. Mick helped me sort those money matters, and we were left with a place to live and a decent income to see us through for as long as we needed it. The older I get the more I appreciate that, because life can get lean and hard when you are constantly grubbing around to find a few dollars.

I toyed with the idea of quitting uni and buying a farm somewhere, which I thought would be especially good for Ruthie. I eventually asked her about it, and she said that she liked living in the city better than the country because of the clothes shops, and the nice places to have coffee and cake. I reminded her about Spirit and she said: Spirit is happy where she is. Mick was very keen for me to keep studying, and I knew that Dad would have been too, so I decided to have the rest of the year off and then go back to it. I ended up really enjoying the time that I had that year: hanging out with Mary and Ruthie, out in the garden or around town somewhere, or doing some fixing up of the house. We decided to paint it, inside and out, which turned out to be fun, although Ruthie and I had some disagreements over the colour scheme. Mary had a better eye than both of us, and we ended up following her suggestions: green and cream outside, yellow for the kitchen, and Ruthie’s room whatever colour she wanted, which turned out to be aquamarine. She also put up some decals of mermaids and starfish, which went perfectly in the blue-green depths of the room, and also some unicorns that she told me were special ones that could live underwater.

The next year I went back to university, a bit rusty from my break, and I struggled a bit to adapt to it. I had fitted well with criminal law in my first year, but the civil law subjects that I was studying in second year left me very cold. I already knew that I wanted to practice criminal law, and all of those other subjects seemed just like wasted time. Mary helped me, and I had the benefit of her notes and summaries, but I eventually got pretty lean marks in my end of year exams.

For Christmas both Ruth and I were invited to Mary’s place, and while her Dad was strained and strangely formal, especially with me, her mother was very hospitable to us. Ruth had a reasonable time, but on the way home she told me that she was sadder on Christmas Day than any other day, and I told her that Mum and Dad would also be sad, thinking of us and missing us during Christmas in heaven.

Over New Year the three of us went down to Mick’s beach house and his family were very welcoming, helping us to forget our own loneliness for a while. Every night after dinner we would throw a blanket over the table for a game of Texas Holdem, and with ten dollars to buy in you ended up winning pretty big, if you ever got that far. Ruthie dropped out quickly in her first game, and she sulked a bit, but I enticed her back to the table by saying that we would play as a team. We ended up winning the next night, and I have never seen her so happy, counting her fortune over and over again while everyone else lamented their losses.

It was always fun down there. Mornings we slept late, and in the afternoons we would rig up Mick’s catamaran and go tearing up and down the blue water just off the beach, fast in the fresh southerlies that would blow all afternoon. Ruthie was petrified to begin with but Mick was a very good skipper, and by the end of our stay she was out near horizontal in the trapeze, her free hand touching the waves, yelling for the boat to go faster and especially up on one hull.

We eventually left for the city some time in the middle of January. We arrived home in the middle of the afternoon, and while I was unpacking the car I heard a scream from the front of the house that froze my blood. I sprinted around the side of the house to find Ruth staring and pointing at a motley jumble of bags on the veranda, as well as a sleeping bag that was stretched out there on the hard boards. She was sure that they belonged to a robber, but I told her that it was probably just some poor person who didn’t have a home, sleeping there under cover and out of the wind and the rain. Ruthie thought about that for a while, as she calmed down, and she said that we should let the poor person stay there if they had nowhere else to go, and I said that we would see what help we could give them once we found out what they needed.

I had a sneaking suspicion about the identity of that poor person, and sure enough, less than an hour later, I was standing in that exact spot talking to Jimmy Farmer.

He told me that he had found out where I lived from our old neighbours down in Lindenow, and that he had come to see me to say hello and maybe to escape his life for a while. He had been on the porch for three nights, popping up to the milk bar every so often for a sandwich or a chocolate bar. He told me that he was glad we came home when we did, as his money had run out yesterday, and it was going to be a hungry wait for us from that point on. I brought him inside and introduced him to Mary, and he shook her hand gravely and said it was a pleasure. Ruthie gave him a hug and asked him whether he had been cold out there, or frightened of the dark. He said no, but told her that he had been pretty hungry. She disappeared and soon came back with a jam sandwich, just as she liked it, with the crusts cut off and plenty of butter to make it taste good. He thanked her and gulped the sandwich down, and she giggled and went to make him another.

I was a bit less kind. I told him that he reeked, and he smiled and agreed with me and I handed him a towel. I told him where the shower was, and I also told him that he could borrow some of my clothes if he needed to. I was still relatively slim back then, but he was an absolute scarecrow, and when he was gone Mary asked me if he had always been so slight. I said no, and that I had an idea why he was so skinny, and her eyes widened and she said: drugs? I told her that I could not be sure, but that I would find out after he had finished in the shower. She looked concerned and I told her: if he’s using we can’t have him here. Let’s just find out what the story is, before we do anything else.

I went to put his bag of clothes in the laundry but Ruth had beaten me to it, and I found her stuffing his clothes into the washing machine. Jim eventually came downstairs looking much more human, even if my things were a couple of sizes too big. I got us the last two beers in the fridge and we sat down on the front steps, and he spoke lean sentences to my full ones, staring out over the unmown buffalo grass to the leafy street beyond. I told him what had happened to Dad, and then to Mum, and he told me he was very sorry and that my folks were good people, and that I was lucky to have had them.

He sipped at the beer and eventually got up and poured it out on the lawn, saying that he had no stomach for it anymore. He sat down again and was silent for a while and then he told me the real reason that he had come to see me. He said the life he was living had become untenable, although he may not have used that exact word. His boss Aaron was a hard man, and he had been getting more and more tired of Jim. When you use and you deal you eventually fuck up, and Jim told me that he had finally fucked up in a really big way. Aaron was done with him, and very angry besides, and Jim knew that things would soon get very ugly for him. Some guys had come to see him see him last week and they were seriously bad guys, and they had said: you need to disappear, Jim, or we will make that happen. Jim had himself delivered such messages himself in the past, and he knew what they meant and that they were not messing around. Even though it was late he parcelled up what drugs and money he could, along with his gear, and he walked to the train station and caught a train into the city. He shot up in the railway toilets, and so missed the last tram to our place, and in soaking cold rain he walked down the tramlines for two or three hours until he found the stop he wanted, and then took a left and then a right and found our house in complete darkness. And he found it empty, unfortunately, until right now.

Jim finished the story, and he was silent.

I asked him how much he was using. He shrugged and told me that he was using enough, enough to make it a problem. I asked him some more questions about it and he was evasive and he eventually told me that the details did not matter. I asked about rehab and he shook his head and said: haven’t you heard that joke? Rehab is for quitters. He smiled weakly and then leaned forward with his hands shoved between his knees, and I saw again how wasted he was and how little of him there was left.

I was about to tell him that we couldn’t have him if he was using, but he then told me why he had come. He had seen a documentary about Miles Davis, of all people, and it told the story of how he had kicked heroin. Miles was using and he had seen too many people die from it, so he went back to his parent’s place and locked himself into a room above their barn. He sweated and cramped and was terribly dope-sick, alone in that room, but after seven days he emerged and embraced his parents and told them it was over.

Jim told me all of this, and then he told me that he was also ready to give it up, and that he wanted to do it cold turkey, and that there was nowhere else for him to go. He asked me to lock him in a room, and to bring him water and aspirin, and not to let him out until it was over. Until he was through this fucking shit, so he said, and he had his life back again.

And he was silent again.

I told Jim that I would have to speak with Mary and Ruth before I said anything else, and he said that he understood, and he told me he was going to have a lie down if that was OK. I showed him to the attic room, and he fell face-forward on to the bed, grabbing and folding the pillow up under the side of his face. He didn’t say anything else, and I shut the door and went downstairs as quietly as I could.

I told Mary about what Jim wanted to do, and although she was supportive she thought that we should have a doctor visit, just to keep an eye on him. We don’t need any more death in this house, so she said. She also told me that her cousin was a detox nurse, and that withdrawal can get very dangerous if you’re not careful. I was anxious about what to tell Ruthie, but Mary sat her down and told her that Jim had been taking a lot of bad medicine that was not good for him, and that it made him sick, and that we were going to help him to stop taking it. Ruth took the news very calmly, and even when I told her that Jim might get angry or noisy she just said that if Jim was sick we should help him to get better.

That evening when Jim emerged I told him that we were going to help him, and he was grateful like I had never seen him before. He was adamant that he should not be allowed to leave the room, and at his insistence I fitted a little latch to the outside of his door, and I gave him a big school bell that Dad had picked up at a trash and treasure somewhere, so that he could get our attention if he needed it. He asked me to write out the rules of his confinement, which he then copied out in his own handwriting and signed, before sticking it the wall next to his bed. His commitment was to stay in the house for ten full days, regardless of how well he might think he was, and Mary and I agreed that one of us would be present at all times to make sure that he did not leave. Jim then built a fire in the lounge room fireplace, and with his hands already a bit shaky he threw all of his fits and foils and bags into the fire, and the four of us sat in there late into the evening, drinking tea. Eventually Jim said he was beginning to feel a bit average and I followed him upstairs, deadlocked the windows in his room, and he lay down on the bed with his bottles of Lucozade and water and he told me he was ready. I told him that I admired what he was doing, and he told me not to be too hasty about that because he was likely to become very unpleasant to deal with. I told him that I could handle it and he just said: don’t be too sure about that.

I closed and locked the door and went downstairs. The three of us went back to drinking tea in the lounge room, staring into the fire, and we spoke only a handful of words for the rest of the evening. Mary wanted to know whether the latch was really necessary, and I told her that Jim wanted it that way and that I actually hadn’t latched it, just fumbled with it to make it sound locked. She smiled at me and I also told her that the latch would break anyway if he battered the door, and that it was a psychological barrier rather than a real one. Ruthie said that locking Jim up made her feel sad, and I told her that it was only for a little while, and that we were only pretending anyway and that he always could get out if he wanted to.

For the next week and a half the three of us did little more than wait around the house. Jim looked pretty awful for the first couple of days, with chills and stomach cramps and what he called kicky legs, but it was less intense than I had imagined. We gave him chicken soup and aspirin and Lucozade and white toast with Vegemite and he picked up pretty quickly. After four days he told me that the door probably didn’t need to be locked anymore, and I just nodded and left it unlatched as usual, and the day after that we saw him downstairs looking for a bit of dinner. He was still a bit pale and sweaty but he felt much better, he said, and he made a small speech telling us all how much he appreciated our help and how much he owed us for getting him clean again and coming back to life. Ruthie walked over and gave him a hug and told him that he had to stay alive because God needed him here, and all he had to do was find out what job he was here for and everything would be fine. He smiled a weak smile and said he looked forward to finding that out.

Mary had been making some enquiries with her cousin, the AOD nurse and counsellor, and she said that a proper residential rehabilitation program would be a good idea for Jim, especially for the first few months of being clean. Jim was initially hesitant about the idea, but at our insistence he let us drive him down to a therapeutic community on a small farm about an hour or so from town. It was a pretty setting, and the counsellors were all very friendly, and Jim was especially impressed that a few of them had been addicts themselves. He decided that he would give it a go, at least for a couple of months. Mary told him that the program would help make it stick, and Jim said that he wanted it to stick. He did not intend to experience withdrawal again, he said, and in any event he was going to need a place to stay.

A few days later we drove down to the farm again, this time with what stuff Jim had packed up in the boot of the car. We arrived in bright sunshine after a heavy shower of rain, and we all gasped at the brilliant double rainbow to the East and Jim said that he supposed that must be a sign. We all hugged him goodbye, one by one, and I told him there was always a room for him at our place if he needed it, and Ruthie told him to call us if he got lonely or sad. Jim asked me to get in touch with his mum, and to let her know that he was OK, and I told him it was as good as done. And then it was time for dinner prep, and we left him waving goodbye.

When I did eventually speak to Maisie she was very grateful for the call. She asked whether she could visit Jim and I said she definitely should. I told her to contact the Community to arrange it, and I offered to drive her up there, and she said that the train would be fine, and that I was such a sweet boy to offer.

I asked her how she was keeping, and she said fine, more or less, and that she was pretty much the same as usual. I suppose I knew what that meant, but I just hummed and then told her to take care, even though it was such a stupid thing to say. She told me that she would see me soon, and then she hung up the phone. I said goodbye and I did nothing else, and with my cowardice and the cowardice of everyone else it was just a short time afterwards that poor Maisie’s brutal life was brought to an end.

***

I got a call late one evening from one of the counsellors down at the community, telling me what had happened. My guts sank at the news, and there was guilt in me also, and I jumped in the car and drove down to see Jim, waking Mary to tell her what had happened. She wanted to come too but I asked her to stay and look after Ruthie, and she was reluctant but she agreed and kissed me a hurried goodbye.

I drove way too fast but I got there safely enough, and I found Jim sitting in the dining room, staring straight ahead and blowing on a mug of tea. I began to speak but he spoke over me without looking at me, and he said the same thing three or four times.

She’s dead.

I told him I was sorry, but he snarled at me and said that it was way too fucking late for that. I stood there for a moment trying to think of something worth saying, but everything I thought of sounded pathetic and I just gave up and sat down facing him as the silence in the room grew.

Eventually he spoke again, saying simply: drive me there. I tried to tell him that it was too late, and he laughed bitterly and told me that he was fully aware that it was way too fucking late. He said that he would walk down there through the night if I refused to drive him, and so I nodded and told him that I would drive. I asked whether he needed to check out, but the look he gave me was enough, so I grabbed his bag and followed him out of the dining room and into the cold night air.

We walked out to the car park and we got in to the car without a word to each other, with one the counsellors calling out for us to stop. We barrelled down the driveway, and soon we were out on the highway, speeding South and East through emerald-green dairy country that was now shrouded in darkness. At one stage Jim said: faster, Nate, and I told him that the car handled like a boat, and that I was going way too fast as it was. He said nothing else for the next two hours, and I kept milling through things that I might say, finding every one of them to be hopelessly inadequate.

When we arrived in town I threaded through the streets towards Jim’s old place. When we got there we found police tape across the front yard, with a police car sat out the front containing two very bored-looking officers. Jim swore and thumped the dashboard, and I sat there looking at the house until I eventually asked him what he wanted to do. I want to kill Colin, he said. Go talk to the Jacks. Find out where he is.

I got out of the car and into the brisk night, and I walked over to the patrol car. The driver wound down his window as I approached, looking over at me with a hostile expression. Good evening, I said. They were quiet enough, but they kept looking over at Jim, and it was obvious that they did not like the look of him.

Evening, I said again.

They did not greet me back.

It’s late to be out, said the cop in the passenger seat.

I’m looking for Colin, I said.

Col? They both snorted. He’s in the cells. He turned himself in before she was cold.

Can we visit him? I said.

The fat cop laughed at that, and told me not to be so fucking stupid. It’s too late, he said. Besides, he fears reprisal from the son. I was stupid and blurted out: so he should. They both leaned forward and asked me what I had said, and I said it was nothing, and the fat one pointed at me and said: you better go before you say anything else, boy.

I wanted to say more but I had no words in me, nothing adequate anyway, and I wandered back to the car. I got in and looked over at Jim, but he just stared forward intently, his hands curled up in fists on his thighs.

So? He said.

I shook my head. He gave himself up, I said. He is down in the cells. Jim swore and told me to drive down there, but I shook my head and told him that there was no way they would let him in. He swore directly at me this time, calling me a weak cunt, and told me again to drive him down there. So I did what he wanted and drove him down to the lockup, and when we got there I killed the engine and sat there for a while and eventually I asked him: so what do you want to do?

You know what I want to do, he said. He told me that he was going to confess to something, something bad, and get put in there with Colin so that he could kill him at the first opportunity that he got. I told him to be serious, but he was silent after that, and I just sat there and tried not to look at him or say anything to upset him. After a long while I cranked the engine back to life and drove slowly out of town towards the city, and as he said nothing I just continued to drive back home. As we neared the community I told him that I would drive him back there, and he said that he did not want to go back, and also that he never should have been there in the first place. I asked him where he wanted to go, and he said: back in time. He said that he wanted to stop being a fucking deadbeat, and go back and kill that fucking cunt years and years ago when he had the chance to do it.

I drove on in silence, and as we passed the turnoff for the community I asked: are you sure? He didn’t make a sound so I drove straight on. By the time we got back to our place the light was coming back into the sky, and I left the car out in the street to avoid waking the girls. I told Jim that the bed was made up in the attic room, and I gave him a new toothbrush and a fresh towel, both of which he took without a sound, and he lurched up the stairs and into his bedroom, and as I watched him go I knew he would not sleep. I crawled into bed next to Mary and I lay there thinking of poor Maisie now cold and dead on a slab somewhere, and I thought of the suffering she had endured at the hands of that man. I wondered again at my own cowardice and blindness and also the neglect of everyone who knew what she endured and could have done something to save her.

***

The next morning I rose to find Jim at the kitchen table, staring at the timber surface with an intensity that was new and intimidating. He softened a little whenever either of the girls spoke to him, but he was in the grip of a bitter fury that made him shake slightly, leaning forward with unblinking eyes, jiggling his knees against the table. For the next few days he did not relent from that intensity: not when he identified the body and claimed it for preparation, not when he spoke at the funeral, not even when he and I shouldered the casket, with two of his distant uncles, and took it down the aisle of the church and out towards the waiting hearse.

His speech at the funeral was heartbreaking. He spoke of the gentleness and kindness and devotion of his mother, how devout she was and how much she taught him of scripture. He described the violence she would suffer as she protected him from the rages of his own violent father, and then from the violence of another savage man. He told how he had finally fought back at fifteen, and then run away like a coward just when he might have been able to match Colin blow for blow, running instead of stepping up to protect his mother and beating that brutal man down. He told of his years of addiction that were nothing but self-obsession, and how he was thus estranged from his mother through no fault of hers. He told of the comfortable environment of rehab, and how he had been indulging in the selfish pleasures of therapy at the very same time as his mother was being beaten to death with no one to stand for her and protect her. He even described his own selfish mission when he heard of her death, meaning to avenge himself upon that man when it was clear to anyone with discernment that it was far too late to be a hero, far too late to stand up in protection of his mother. He finished by saying that he hoped his ancestors might one day forgive him, and that they might clear a path for him to redeem himself, through what suffering and loss, and enable him to become the man that he should have been for his mother.

When I looked over at Mary I saw that she was sobbing, and Ruthie was holding her tenderly and looking at me as if to say: why so much sorrow? I smiled weakly back, but if she was asking that question it was a good one, without any hope of an answer. I suppose I presumed that some universal balance would eventually prevail, and that some joy would eventually come to alleviate the sorrow, but what I have found out is that unrelenting sorrow can break people, and wear them down, and cause them to flee rather than to face more sorrow. The kind of sorrow that drives all the refugees of the world.

***

Mary came to me the next week and told me that she was going to defer her studies for a year in order to take a trip overseas. I was quite shocked, and things got worse when I asked her how long of a trip and she said: I don’t know that yet Nate. As long as my money holds out. I composed myself and asked her what that meant for us, and she said that she did not know, but that the best thing might be for us to break up for a while and to see what happened when she got back. I agreed that this was probably for the best but I had a horrible sinking feeling in the opposite direction, and I knew even then that I was going to lose her. She told me that her Dad had stumped up the money for the ticket and I felt a jolt of real anger at that, because he was a dirty old racist and quite unapologetic about it, and he didn’t like the idea of Mary being with a blackfella like me. I knew that his largesse was motivated by a desire to separate us and I burned at that, but as always I did nothing and said nothing about it. I suppose there’s no point getting between a father and a daughter, no matter what sort of an asshole that father might be.

I saw Mary to the airport less than two weeks later. She had a round-the-world ticket, and she was going to start in Bangkok and see what happened from there. This was in the era before email and cheap phone cards, and I knew that our communication would be stilted at best. Ruthie was there too, and while she was happy for Mary to travel she did not understand why we could not go with her, and she was very sulky about it. Mary tried to tell Ruth that she had to stay and look after me but Ruth went off in a huff, demanding to know when I was going to be able to look after myself.

At the airport Mary said goodbye to her family, her father smiling broadly and pretending I was not there. She kissed Ruthie goodbye and then she stood before me and I could not look at her. She told me again that she needed to do this, the same broken record, and I told her that I knew that but that I still wished that things were not that way. I asked her to stay but she smiled and kissed me and went, she went through those doors and she did not re-appear, and as I stood there blinking back tears I knew that she was gone, and that no matter what she said she would never come back to me.

***

Looking back now I know it was for the best, but I was pretty fucked up about it at the time. I was lucky to have Jim and Ruth to keep me company, and to distract me from my self-pity, but even though I got up in the mornings and went on with life it was a while before I got much enjoyment from it again.

There were distractions, though. I began to worry again about Ruthie being bored, and I eventually made some calls and found her some volunteer work down at the local op-shop, sorting and hanging clothes. She was a good worker, and the manager soon recommended her for a paid position at the main sorting centre down on the edge of the city. I took her down there for the first couple of days, and she really took to the work once the basics were explained. One day she would be on shoes, the next on dresses, and then on toys and so forth. I had a meeting with the supervisor and I told her what I could about Ruthie, and she smiled and said she would be very happy here. The other staff were mostly older ladies, more or less the same age as mum, and they realised very quickly that Ruthie would need a bit of extra looking after and they were all very kind to her. I asked Ruthie whether she liked the work and she said that she loved it, especially sorting the shoes and the dresses, although she was worried about the toys because a lot of them had parts missing and did not work properly. I told her that’s why they needed sorting, so that poor children would have proper toys, and she nodded quietly and said that was true.

The only problem with the new arrangements was what to do about Ruthie’s salary. She knew that she was earning money, and she kept at me about how much she had earned and when she would have enough to go overseas to visit Mary. I took a risk and asked her who she would like to look after her money, and she thought Uncle Mick would be a good person, because he was rich lawyer and he might be able to make her rich too. Mick was happy to oblige, and he chuckled when I told him about her conflicting desires for wealth and travel. A common problem, he said. From that point whenever the travel issue came up Mick would ask Ruthie whether she wanted to be rich or to travel, and she always (a bit reluctantly) elected the former.

I struggled through uni and I socialised a bit, and I wrote long letters to Mary. I filled them with trivialities and a few more profound observations and even some embarrassingly overwrought words of longing. I told her that I missed her, and that I was waiting eagerly for news that she was heading home. I wrote poste restante to Bangkok, and then to Delhi, and then to Kathmandu. In return I found the odd fat envelope in my letterbox, stuffed with a letter spanning various dates, giving me details of places she had seen and people she was meeting. I read them over and over again like an idiot, until the edges got grubby from my touch and I could recite passages by heart. There were occasional mentions of other guys and I tried to interpret her spare prose and work out whether they were more than friends, but there was never anything concrete and I lived in hope that the next letter would tell me that she was coming home.

Jim stayed with us until he got an old caravan moved on to his mum’s place. I was worried about how it might affect him to live down there, but he was adamant that he wanted to go. When we visited a couple of weeks later the house was missing its roof, and there were a couple of rough guys ferrying pieces of the house out to a flatbed truck owned by a demolition company. I found Jim inside the house with a wrecking bar, and I asked him whether it was legal for him to do this, with the will still in dispute. He laughed at me and told me: call the fucking cops, if you want. This house is coming down.

He came out of the dust and wreckage and we went down the street for some lunch. He told me that Colin had pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and he asked me to explain how he could be guilty of anything less than murder. I tried to explain the complexities to him but he was impatient and said that I was as bad as the cops were. As it turned out he didn’t mind too much, because the sooner Colin got out the sooner Jim could, as he said, pay him a bit of a visit.

The demolition was over fairly shortly. Jim called me the Friday fortnight after my visit, and asked whether I could come down, and the next day Ruthie and I drove down to find the demolition crew decamped and the house completely gone. The old caravan now looked tiny, there on the bare block, and there was an enormous stack of split and broken hardwood piled up on what had been the house site. We sat on the ground, and Jim and I drank the cokes I had brought while Ruthie asked questions about where the house had gone.

We eventually grabbed some dinner, and then when night came down Jim doused the woodpile with a jerry can and lit it up with a frightening petrol whoosh. Flames soon lashed the black sky, and the radiant heat mounted and made us all step back and then back again, the embers soaring to such an extent that I began to worry about the houses standing downwind. Jimmy stared into the fire with bitter intensity, and I knew that he wanted that blaze to be overwhelming and violent and purifying. I half imagined that he might leap in to the flames, burning himself up as well, but he just shuddered a couple of times, and I saw some tears on his cheeks in the hot firelight. He wiped them away but they were still tears, sparse but necessary tears, and there may have been some consolation for him that night. The whole thing was quite beautiful and quite terrifying at the same time, and I was both relieved and disappointed when the fire trucks arrived and the blaze was quickly put out.

It could have gotten ugly then but the fire captain had been a mate of Dad’s and he was also a very decent bloke. Like everyone in town he knew what had happened in that house, and when the fire was gone he came up to Jim and said something like: we had to put it out, son. You know why. He also told Jim that he was sorry for his loss, and Jim shook his hand and thanked him, and then the captain told the three of us to disappear before the police arrived. We ran back to the car, and just as the first patrol car entered the street we drove quietly the other way, and we drove right back to the city and heard no more about it.

***

The next week I got a letter from Mary, and at Ruthie’s insistence I read it aloud, after I had read it a couple of times over myself. It was a long letter, and Jim and Ruth made it much longer by interrupting with questions and asking me to re-read bits and then read them yet again.

One section of the letter concerned a place in Turkey where travellers stayed in tree houses and wandered down a valley floor to a stony blue-water beach. There were ancient fortifications on the promontories, and wooden barques moored in the deep water, and the whole valley was thick with pine trees and orange trees in blossom. Mary waxed unusually poetic as she described all of this, swearing on her life that the scent of this place was a better intoxicant than wine. She also wrote of a climb she had done with some other travellers, up to a bare ridge overlooking the valley, and with snow peaks on one side of her and the Mediterranean on the other she had experienced such a feeling of peace and exhilaration that she never wanted to come back down.

I must have had three requests from Jim to read this bit again. Eventually I just handed him the letter and told him to tell me when he was ready to continue. I waited and then made tea and still there was no sign of him stopping. Finally he looked up and he said something emphatic like: I am so fucking there. Ruthie immediately shot up her hand, and said she was also fucking there. I tried to pour some oil on the waters, pointing out that Mary was not even there anymore, and that she was probably in love with some completely new place at that very moment. Jim was not swayed, though. I’m not going for her, he said. Me neither, said Ruthie. I told them both that we should just finish the letter, grabbing it back from Jim.

The letter went on for a few more pages, telling of a few days’ journey on a sailing boat, some time in Istanbul, and then missing a flight to Frankfurt. She messed up the dates, she said. But they were kind to her and let her on the next flight, and apart from a night in an expensive German hostel there was no harm done. I came to the end of the letter, and then I reminded my little audience that this news was now over two weeks old, and that Mary would now be in London, or God knows wherever else that she decided she wanted to be.

I thought Jim would forget the letter pretty quickly, but after the demolition and the fire he had nothing to stay for, and he meant what he said about going. The very next morning he headed into town, and when I got home that afternoon he showed me a return ticket to London, with a side trip to Istanbul. I asked him whether he needed to get a visa, and he said no, so long as he had a passport. He had this idea that you could get one from the chemist, but I told him that was only for the photos, and that getting a passport might take quite some time. We called Immigration and found out that they were prepared to expedite a passport application for a hefty fee, and he either had to pay it or forfeit his plane ticket. Fucking greedy bastards, he called them, but although there were just a couple of days in it he did manage to get his passport in time.

Ruthie threw a fit when she heard that Jim was going overseas without her. She stewed for a couple of days, and I only won her over by buying her a book called The World Travellers Companion, which had lovely colour photos, and I told her that I would take her anywhere she wanted to go over my next summer holidays. From that point on every time we got a letter from Mary or from Jim I would have to read it in tiny pieces, interrupted by the need to consult in detail with the World Travellers Companion, and look at the relevant photos.

In a few days time we drove Jim out to the airport. Ruthie walked up to the check-in desk with him and handed over his documents, because she wanted to get as much experience as she could for when she was travelling herself. I told Jim to call us collect if he got into trouble, and Ruthie told him that she wanted letters from everywhere he went. Jim was obviously nervous and he looked a lot younger than he was, partly because his huge new backpack made him look more slight than usual. But he was resolute, and we hugged him in turn, and I got him to show me his ticket and his boarding pass and passport and travellers cheques, and then he walked straight out through the immigration gate without looking back.

***

Afterwards life became a bit lean, with just Ruth and me left. Thankfully I was kept busy at my new job in the library of a law firm, updating loose-leaf services and accessioning new books and journals. It was brain-dead work in some ways, but I liked chatting with the lawyers and the support staff and there was no brain-burn to divert me from my studies. I began to tire of the commute back to the suburbs, and to be honest the house began to give me the creeps a bit, thinking of the things it had witnessed. I thought about it and looked in the paper, and one night I asked Ruthie what she thought of the idea of moving. She looked surprised for a second, and then she said quite reasonably that it would depend on the house we would move into.

We drove around the inner city the next weekend, and she agreed with me that North Carlton and North Fitzroy had a nice feel. I rang Mick and he told me that buying there would be a reasonable investment, and he told me the worst house best street rule, and he also suggested that I sub-divide our present block before selling it in order to maximise the yield. He set that process in motion, and I looked for places with Ruthie. Her main requirement was that there be room in the house for Jim and Mary, even if Mary wasn’t in love with me any more and wanted her own room. Eventually we settled on a tatty but spacious double-fronted Victorian place, with a passable 70’s renovation in the back and also a bungalow out across a paved and leafy courtyard. I asked Ruthie whether she wanted to live in the bungalow, if we cleaned it up, and we spent a fair whack of cash to smarten it up. Ruthie was worried when the tradies were pulling it apart but once it was finished she thought it was lovely, with its polished wood floor and French doors, and she told everyone she met about it. She moved in as soon as we got it furnished, and she would cook dinner in there for us both every Friday night, and we would watch bad TV and agree that it was easily the nicest space in the house.

Some nights I would read her the latest letter from either Jim or Mary, even if none had come that week. Jim did eventually go to Turkey, and he confirmed what Mary had said about the pine and orange blossom and the blue-water beaches. He liked the scenery but he had found the travellers snooty and unpleasant, and so he decided to go to places that were much more out of the way. He rode trains and buses moving east, and he described seeing Mount Ararat rising from the dusty plains under its eternal snow, and he said that he aimed to climb it and perhaps to find Noah’s ark. Ruthie asked whether that was the same Noah’s ark as the one with the animals, and when I said yes she went quiet, and then said: I think that’s where I want to go.

The letter finished with Jim saying that he had made some friends with a bunch of Kurds he had met in a border town near Ararat. He said these boys were different from the Turks, and that he could relate to them far better than anyone he had ever met. He also said he was safe, and he told me not to worry if I didn’t hear from him for a while. Words which had exactly the opposite effect.

Ruthie listened right to the end of the letter, and then she said quietly: I’m glad Jimmy made some friends. I was worried about the sort of friends they were but I smiled and said that Jim would always have us as friends, no matter where he went in the world. Ruthie nodded gravely, and asked whether Jim would come home one day. I said it was more than likely, and she looked puzzled for a moment and then asked: how much is more than likely? Sometimes she asks the most insanely complicated questions.

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Firestick Farmer by P. Julian

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