A Short Story...

FOOTPRINTS IN THE DUST

Talcum powder; that’s what it was like.  Fine, soft, silky smooth, and all the shades of a Mallee sunset.  The dust of her childhood was still there, thirty years later, flying out behind her car in billowing clouds despite the fact she was crawling along at less than twenty kilometres per hour.  The corrugation beneath the dust made her teeth rattle, even at that pace.

Anna slowed even more, hesitated, then turned the vehicle into the driveway; past the old milk can on a tree stump that held all manner of deliveries.  No name, no number, no need out here to tell the postie or anyone else who lived where.  Everybody knew everybody else. She knew though, that nobody would know her now.  She doubted they would even remember the girl she was.  She struggled to remember that little girl too.  Nobody would recognize her dark blue Impreza with its air conditioner working overtime and the dust coating it a strange reddish brown. Enya soothed her via the CD player, tinted windows dulled the impact of the summer sun and all of it protected her from the world outside.  The real world.  For Anna, right now, reality stunk. 

The last time she had been here she had been a passenger in a two tone green 1965 Holden station wagon, sitting in the back with her cousins, choking on the dust as it poured in through the open windows, preferring that to the oven the car became with the windows closed.  It was a good hour’s drive to the farm from the railway station in Mildura, and by the time they turned at the milk can the excitement of visiting the farm and the impending summer holiday had worn a little thin.  Relief was the primary emotion she felt as a kid.  Today it was replaced with trepidation.

The driveway was long and straight and divided a sea of gold, which rippled and danced at the mere hint of a breeze.  You couldn’t see the house until you were nearly upon it, despite the unending flatness of the landscape.  Gnarled and ancient peppercorn trees stood as sentinels and provided a rare piece of greenery as they shielded the occupants of the homestead from the harsh reality of summer.

 She parked beneath one of the trees and sat for a few minutes, trying to marry her memories with what surrounded her.  The sheds were new, but the bougainvillea still clambered over the fence and above the gate, tangled through the wooden arbour her grandad had built. It was difficult to tell the supporter from the supported.  The climber had been old when she was a kid.  Anna couldn’t believe it was still there.  Her grandma had planted it, along with the peppercorns, as a young bride more than fifty years previous.  The cerise bracts glowed against the clear blue of the sky as the vine scrambled upward in profusion, seeking the sun, a brilliant reminder of survival against the odds.  Unlike herself, the bougainvillea had known how to protect itself.  Anna had been a victim of its thorns more than once. 

Her grandmother had spent much of her precious time and water first starting her garden, then keeping it alive.  She carted water in buckets by hand from the water tank each day and poured it carefully, gently in the little dams she made around each plant.  The dust turned blood red. Many cuttings and saplings perished but some clung to life, then flourished over the years, defying the odds, daring the elements until finally here they were, a permanent legacy of another time.

However in the years since she was last here, the house had changed considerably.  It had been in her family for three generations, but had been sold several times since Anna’s uncle had severed the family’s connection when she was in her early twenties, self absorbed, and not that interested in such things.  She vaguely remembered he had claimed ill health was the reason. Everyone knew it was more likely that the unending struggle to make some sort of decent living, but instead finding oneself merely existing had finally worn him down.  Disillusionment.  It was as all-pervading as the dust round here these days.  The optimism of those early settlers had been eroded along with the topsoil.  Uncle Jack lasted longer than most, outlasted many of his neighbours, struck with the same malady of rural heartbreak.  Nobody blamed him, but there was overwhelming sadness among the family that such a tangible link with the past was broken.  Despite the animated discussions around kitchen tables across the country, nobody could or indeed would come up with a plan to keep the property in the family.  Sometimes it is just time to let go. 

It didn’t cause so much as a ripple on Anna’s pond at the time, but now…now she wished the family had made more of an effort.  Now, as she gazed at the so called improvements, she wished those who had followed had shown a bit of respect towards those who had gone before.   A slick polyester-suited salesman had convinced one of the owners to ‘modernise’ in the sixties; another had needed extra space.  Now, instead of the weatherboards so meticulously maintained by her grandfather, Anna was confronted with chipped and faded pale green stucco under a tired red iron roof.  The ample shady verandahs had, for the most part, been built in with flyscreens and aluminium windows.

The house wasn’t alone  in it’s sad little evolution.  Anna was not the same girl either.  She too had been modernised, convinced somewhere along the line she needed improvements.  The thin veneer she and others had applied to herself was beginning to show signs of wear.  She sighed and opened her car door.  Someone had once told her you could never go back, and yet here she was.  A chance business trip had brought her to the general vicinity.  The allure of childhood and summer holidays had beckoned as she struggled to face the crisis confronting her in her present. Anna had been drawn back; had fled to the farm.  She wasn’t really sure why. 

She leant on the open car door in her suit and sensible shoes, staring ahead but looking back.  Anna remembered always being barefoot.  This had not been allowed in the neat, ordered and altogether proper suburban backyard of an only child.  Out here though, no one seemed to care.  There were too many kids and not enough time.  She may have been an only child but Anna had no shortage of cousins.  There seemed to be no end to the children she would meet on her holidays who were introduced as cousins.  There was a cousin for every occasion, every mood, every game.  There were enough of them to have their own footy and cricket matches, with a couple of ring-ins from the adjoining farms.  Hell, some of them were cousins too.  Anna smiled at the recollection.  She remembered being happy, adventurous, full of fun.  Where had that gone?  They would sit in the dark under the peppercorn trees when it was too hot to sleep and tell ghosts stories and share secrets, share dreams.  Her impending divorce had not been one of those dreams. 

Anna and her cousins spent most of the daylight hours outside.  Up the trees, with the chooks, riding old Dusty bareback, running and playing, but always, always barefoot.  The dust lay like a thick terracotta blanket over clay baked hard as concrete.  It offered no protection if you fell, dissolving beneath you on impact, allowing knees, hands and elbows to gain yet another scab from the unforgiving surface underneath.  However, it was honest pain, easily identified and easily fixed.  Anna couldn’t wash the dirt out and put a Bandaid on the hurt she was feeling now. Here she was, thirty seven, about to walk out on a fifteen year marriage before she herself was walked out on.  She remembered jumping from the peppercorn tree she was currently underneath and landing awkwardly, in tears.  Someone had picked her up, dusted her off, made it better.  There was no one to pick her up and dust her off from this and yet she knew she had to jump.   An uninvited tear made its way down her cheek.  Anna didn’t even notice.  It happened all too often now.  As it tickled its way down her face she brushed at it absently, instinctively.  Just as she had brushed the flies away all those years ago without conscious thought.

Anna walked through the dust towards the house.  It covered her black court shoes with a fine film; some made its way inside them. It found its way into every nook and cranny of both house and humans.  Anna remembered Grandma fighting a losing battle to keep both clean.  Dry and dusty everywhere.  Oh, but those rare occasions when teasing clouds gathered and summer’s rumblings led to actual rain and the dust turned to glorious mud…!  Still shoeless, racing about and squealing with delight as the downpour washed everything clean, the red-brown goo would ooze between their toes, giving Grandma an entirely different challenge.

Anna smiled again at the memory and tentatively opened the gate.  It squeaked in protest.  That would never have happened in her grandparent’s day.  There in the front yard was the huge palm that predated even the peppercorns. Everywhere else in the yard grew the buffalo grass, just as it always had.  Anna remembered it prickled like hell and gave her a rash after an afternoon’s wrestling on it. Still, its lush greenness did a good job of creating just the right illusion, contradicting the brutality of the land beyond the fence, hiding the red earth.

The concrete path had been all fresh and sharp-edged pale grey symmetry in her youth, another one of Grandad’s little projects.  He would save up such jobs for the rare down times between one harvest and the preparations for planting the next crop.  He couldn’t relax.  “A man’s got to have a reason for getting out of bed each morning.”  When she was six Anna thought breakfast would have been as good a reason as any for getting out of bed.  She at last understood what Grandad had meant.  Some mornings she wanted to pull the covers back over her head and stay there, waiting for a proper reason to get up and go on.  The garden path cut a straight line from the gate to the back door; no one ever went to the front so Grandad had never bothered with a path to it.  The concrete was darker now, worn and weathered.   Other than its unnatural straightness, it could have grown there.  

Anna walked along her grandfather’s handiwork and up some wooden steps which looked old enough to be original. Knocking on the door seemed almost pointless.  She could sense no one was home.  She knocked anyway.  There was silence.  Relief outweighed her disappointment.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to see what other ‘improvements’ had been made; didn’t want the vast rooms and high ceilings of her memory to shrink so until she felt like Alice, stuck in the White Rabbit’s house. Anna stood there, uncertain what to do.  What had made her come back in the first place?  She shrugged her shoulders in response to the unasked question and leaned against the unresponsive door.

Even though she was in the shade, the heat of the late afternoon was making her feel uncomfortable.  Funny how it never bothered her as a child.  Taking off her jacket, she sat down on the steps.  Sweat was starting to trickle from underneath the curls at the nape of her neck and down her back.  She ran her fingers through her damp, dark, hair.  Those annoying little bush flies had survived the generations and she waved them away absently, the Great Australian Salute alive and well.  The air was warm and gritty; it smelled waterless.  Over at the machinery shed, heat shimmered above the shiny new roof.  It looked so odd against everything else; full of new machinery, new beginnings. Obviously an optimist had taken on the latest mortgage.  So much was different, both here and in the life that had seen little Annie grow into the Anna that now sat, pondering.  And yet, some things would never change. She longed for something to remain constant, something to hold on to in the sea of turmoil and uncertainty surrounding her. Anna wanted to find little Annie again and she was here somewhere, she knew she was.  She just had to find her. 

She stood and walked over to the rainwater tank, turning on the little tap and stooped to take a drink in her cupped hands as she had a lifetime ago.  It was sweet, smooth, cool and slightly metallic and it brought more memories flooding back.

Suddenly, she straightened up and kicked off her shoes.  Looking around her furtively, afraid someone should see her, afraid she would somehow see herself and change her mind, she quickly hitched up her skirt and removed her stockings.  Clutching her clothes in one hand, she wandered back out through the gate, under the bougainvillea, and around the yard between the house and the shed.  The ground was hot and hard, her feet soft and unused to it, but somehow, at last, barefoot, she felt at home. 

This was it; this was authentic life.  The life she would eventually return to seemed less troublesome, less important.  With every step she was gaining some strength, remembering who she really was, where she had come from, and discarding some of the fragile person she had become in the red earth that was all around.  She realized at this moment she came from a long line of survivors, and she owed it to them to survive the emotional drought she found herself in.

Anna walked and walked and watched the dust puff up as she did so, saw it sneak between her toes.  Time melted away.  Birds heralded evensong as the blue above them faded, replaced by colours in the west, making it hard to see where land ended and sky began.  Anna looked behind in the lengthening shadows at her footprints in the dust and smiled.  Now, it really was time to move on.