My father had gone to help an old ewe that had trapped its head in the fence line. Peter left his farm bike and managed to roll himself down the slope to where the ewe was trapped in the wire. He freed the sheep and lying on his side watched it wander away. He managed to raise himself to his elbows and drag himself a few metres before he became stuck. His legs were a dead weight. He couldn’t move another inch. He tried and tried; and at some point it must have been easier to just lie there and wait.
Around dusk my mother had begun to worry. With the last light about to disappear over the hilltops she went out to look for him. She didn’t get far. Soon it was dark, and she hurried back to call up the Wheelers. They came over immediately. Well into the night they fanned out over the tracks with their torches. Chrissie found him around 5 am. My father had suffered a heart attack. He was already dead.
35
The hills and sky were waiting for me. Look what you’ve done. Look what you did. It’s all your fault, you realise that, don’t you? That’s what they seemed to be saying, and as I wound down the hill road to the farmhouse I felt like I was descending a hole with no way out, no way back.
My mother, the one person entitled to lay blame at my feet, wrapped her arms around me and held her frail body against me. Harry Wheeler was next in line. My father’s oldest friend and neighbour laid his hand on my shoulder and with a few chosen words I felt my guilt lift and forgiveness settle in its place. Last in line, so to speak, was the doctor. He caught up with me on the phone. ‘That you, Lionel? Listen, it’s not a bad way to go,’ he told me. ‘Once you pass fifty a finger can reach out and touch your shoulder and over you go. That’s the thing about heart attacks. There doesn’t have to be any prior symptoms. It’s not like a sniffle leading up to a cold.There’s no warning. It picks its moment. I’ve arrived on the scene to a man crumbled on the floor still holding his shaver, slumped at the wheel of his truck, in the bath, halfway through a slice of toast, holding his fishing rod…’
I walked outside and breathed the farm air and stared up at the hills and sky. The sky kept moving overhead as it had always done. I looked up the hill and saw a motorcycle sketch a shadow against the hillside above the road. Chrissie was one more element waiting to fit around me.
It was Chrissie’s hand I felt at my shoulder during Peter’s funeral. And it was her shadow that slipped alongside mine almost unnoticed at first in the weeks and months after.
I don’t recall a more brutal winter. Condensation on the farmhouse windows turned to ice in the night. Ice covered the old wheel tracks of my father’s farm bike and cracked underfoot as slowly and inexorably I found myself walking into his life. Snow blanketed the tops. The air had only to make a slight shift to cut through to the bone. June, July, August, and for a week in late September, I dug tracks through the snow for the marooned merino flock to follow me down to the lower slopes. I had help, and I’d hear Chrissie whistling and shouting at her eye dog. She wasn’t so shy on the tops. We’d meet back at the farmhouse; circling back by different routes to Jean’s soup tureen bubbling on the stove top. When we saw only two places set at the table Jean would give an apologetic smile. She wasn’t hungry. Or she had already eaten.There was never time to argue the point. She was already half out the door.
One hot December day I watched Chrissie track back to the ute from the post office. We’d been on a week-long muster and we were both feeling as fit as buck rabbits. Chrissie’s face was tanned, healthy looking, healthier than anyone else’s in town.Through her denim jeans I could sense her strong lean thighs. The word ‘coltish’ comes to mind. I may have read that somewhere. But whoever came up with that word must have caught a glimpse of Chrissie that day. I saw the way she turned heads; and one old face from school went out of his way to stop her in the street. He was delighted to see her.When I saw how pleased she looked in return I made a snap decision.
By the time she got back in the ute I was ready to ask her to marry me. I didn’t at that precise moment. The actual asking bit followed later.
It was a two-hour drive back to the farm. Once she looked across to ask if anything was the matter. I must have been feeling pleased with myself because I couldn’t stop grinning.
Back at the farmhouse she picked up her motorcycle helmet to ride back to the Wheelers. She kept turning the helmet in her hands. She was reluctant to leave. And without splurting something major I couldn’t think what to say that would delay her; some small talk, farm matters which we gave too grave a consideration until, at last—fortunately—Jean came to the rescue.
‘I’ve got a lasagne coming out of the oven in forty minutes. I’ve made far too much.’
She looked at Chrissie when she said that; Chrissie briefly looked at me.
And because my mother rightly divined that something else was required, she said, ‘There’s some cold beer in the fridge.Why don’t you two go out to the porch and I’ll bring a tray out to you.’
Chrissie smiled down at the helmet in her hands. She didn’t know what to do with it until I took it from her.
After dinner Jean slipped away to her bedroom. I put on ‘Danzarin’.
Chrissie was halfway through picking up her beer glass when she put it down again. I held out my arms to her.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘I’m going to teach you to dance.’
Lloyd Jones, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance
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