The Fire

Shakespeare wrote of the morning’s red sky in Venus and Adonis: “Like a red morn that ever yet betokened, Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field, Sorrow to the shepherds, woe unto the birds, Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds.”
 
I could have said the same about the ominous beginning to my life on the farm at Mannibadar, in Victoria’s Western District, exactly thirty years ago. Only weeks after my husband, John, and I arrived to join his parents on the farm, an out-of-control bushfire came threateningly close to burning us out. Betty was fifty-eight – exactly the age I am now. She had just retired from teaching high school English and Geography in Bendigo to live on Eric’s new farm.

“Dig deeper,” I tell my students when the first flush of creativity fades. “You are swimming on the surface and cannot see or reach into the ocean’s depths. What a magical world there is to explore when you don a mask and scuba gear and sink beneath the waves to discover what lies hidden amongst the kelp and coral and sand.”
 
And so I dig deeper.
 
The warning signs that Shakespeare wrote about were there. I missed them all. The day of the fire caught me unprepared for what was to come when Mother Nature, like an artist boldly sweeping a brush across the canvas with controlled, deliberate strokes, created startling and surreal images that would remain as permanent exhibits within the gallery of my mind.

Under the sun’s searing rays, the hard-baked earth crazed into ever-deepening crevices, creating homes for thousands of deafening crickets. Spiky dry grass crackled beneath our feet. The receding water in dams exposed huge banks of black, oozing mud that trapped weak or unwary sheep trying to get a drink, where they remained until we rescued them, or died of thirst in the heat. Blowflies swarmed noisily on manure...or anything dead. Maggots thrived in damp or daggy wool, where they ate into their host’s flesh to cause a slow and painful death. We chased each mob of sheep around in the car until the fly blown ones fell to the ground, kicking their legs frantically in panic to get on their feet before John could dowse them with a milky solution to kill the maggots. Once he grabbed a sheep and the entire fleece along its back lifted off in his hands to expose hundreds of fat, wriggling maggots and raw flesh where they had eaten into it.

North winds fanned Australia’s desert heat across the land for days on end, turning the house into a baking oven despite closed windows and drawn curtains to keep it out. It brought with it a nervous watchfulness, for it could coax flames from smouldering grass where a carelessly tossed cigarette lay, then fan the flames like giant bellows until they licked and crackled over the spiky yellow grass, or exploded up gum tree trunks to set alight the shredded strips of outgrown bark dangling from silver branches. Billowing clouds of smoke and ash could mushroom into the air, spitting out glowing cinders and turning the vivid blues and golds of summer into a sepia snapshot.

Bush fires were an inevitable fact of life in Victoria. Sometimes they burnt out of control for days before armies of men with water-laden trucks halted their destruction. But they also revitalized the bush, making it grow back lush and green; the ashes bringing new life to the land. And the wattles, which brought the landscape alive with masses of bright yellow puff-ball flowers near winter’s end, couldn’t grow without fire to help germinate seeds lying dormant for years waiting for its lick of life.
 
On the day smoke descended upon us in a swirling, ash and cinder-laden haze, radio announcers appealed for volunteers to fight the fire. Eric tested out the water pump in the carport of his house and as water gushed high into the air, he fumbled to adjust the speed of the engine to control its flow. John arrived at the back gate with the truck, a large rectangular water tank mounted on the tray. The men exchanged a grim and silent glance when they lifted the pump onto the truck to position it next to the tank. Fear had carved haggard lines on the old man’s face, making him look every bit his eighty-one years. Would fire obliterate this chance to redeem the self-respect lost after fire razed his property at Kyneton? After once belonging to an old class of well-to-do graziers, I noticed with some misgiving that arrogance had crept into his manner soon after taking over the Mannibadar farm.

After John drove down the gravel road in a cloud of dust to join the farmers who had gathered at the community hall to keep watch for the approaching fire, I went to sit with Betty, hoping I could distract her fears of another fire destroying everything she had. Betty stood at the glass double doors in the dining room, sucking heavily on a cigarette and looking anxiously out at the haze of smoke that had settled over the paddocks below the house. She walked the few steps to her blanket-covered armchair and slumped down into it. “Make yourself a cup of tea...” she said, peering vacantly at me over the top of her round rimmed glasses, blurred with fingerprints and dust. “There’s a freshly baked date and walnut loaf on the wire rack. Help yourself.”

I offered my thanks and walked behind the kitchen counter, where the bench was a permanent clutter of packets, spices, cake pans and wooden spoons. I took a mug from the dish rack and rewashed it, and a plate, and cut and buttered a piece of the loaf while I waited for the kettle to boil. Betty’s knitting needles clicked: three plain, three pearl. The two poodles lay curled up together in a lounge chair, the foxy stretched out on the polished wooden floor nearby. The ceiling fan whirred slowly, clicking out of rhythm with the knitting needles. It was hot and sticky inside with the windows closed to keep out the smoke. Betty put down her knitting and stared vacantly at me. Her short brown hair sat flat on her head and she wore no make-up. The cheap, loose-fitting cotton dress she had bought at K-Mart further accentuated the image of a downtrodden and unappreciated wife. During her days teaching she always had salon-styled hair, wore perfume and red lipstick and looked smart in tailored clothes.

“Now you see why I don’t like to celebrate Christmas,” she said. “The kids had only opened their Christmas presents a few days before the fire.” She let out a sigh. “Lost all me treasures: photographs, books... Nothing was saved. Our beautiful blue stone home Eric worked so hard to fix up... Only memories left...and the clothes we were wearing. Had to flee the house with the kids… Just made it to a dam before the flames swept over us.

“Hay sheds just filled with freshly baled hay exploded into flames… Saw them from the dam… Watched everything explode into flames…like being in a war… Still haunts me…the sight of burnt sheep jammed up against fences they couldn’t get through, tangled up with wire and charred wooden posts. Horrible death. Will never forget the smell of burnt land...and the rotting stench of death.”

Betty lifted herself awkwardly out of the chair and walked to the glass doors again. She stood with her hands on her hips, her barrel-shaped stomach pushed forward. Looking over the paddocks she belched and didn’t excuse herself. But it wasn’t offensive. It was more like the sound of a sudden rush of air escaping from between pursed and angry lips.

“Neighbours gave us a house to live in... Eric was humiliated...forced to accept charity...and all because of his own stupidity. The very year he let the insurance policy lapse! We all paid for it so dearly...so bloody dearly!” Bitterness had crept into her voice and she turned to look at me. “I used my own money to buy furniture at second-hand stores. Got some really nice old pieces. Eric never showed any appreciation… Proud bastard. Couldn’t thank anyone for anything. He was losing it then...now this place. Thinks he can make a go of it again. He’s too old...should have retired... Might be sorry yet that he didn’t...” Betty walked slowly over to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of wine from a cask, then lit up another cigarette before returning to her chair.

“I was just getting over losing Carole...so bright...dux of her school... Eric stopped her ballet lessons...said he didn’t want her wasting her life as a dancer. But she danced so gracefully… After she died I hit the gin bottle. It worried my brothers. They tried to scare me with horrible stories about what it would do to my liver. I had stopped drinking just before the fire came…” Her eyes became vacant again, glazed over as if she was drunk. She sipped her wine and took a long, thoughtful puff on her cigarette.

I stared at her without saying a word, as if the hurt and pain and anguish she had locked inside and nurtured for over twelve years had cut out my tongue. The pain of losing a beloved daughter, a home, a property, a way of life was beyond my mind’s ability to grasp. No feelings came. It was as if everything Betty shared with me had turned to ice and left me numb inside. Neither could I imagine the anguish of a proud and arrogant man having to surrender his pride to accept charity from neighbours, to feel the humiliation of his own folly, and to finally accept defeat by selling the farm after struggling in vain to find the finances to rebuild it.

“Bastard!” Betty often hissed from between clenched teeth when I visited.  And then she’d add something like, “He started at me again this morning...complaining about the money I spend on ingredients for baking. The other day it was the phone bill! After all the years I supported him!” One day I asked why she stayed with him and she replied, “My mother always said, ‘It’s better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.’”

I wondered what had caused the bitter disillusionment with her marriage after what seemed to be the beginning of a fairytale romance and living “happily ever after.” When Eric told me how they met and that he’d taught her to ride one of his racehorses to get to school, it intrigued me to see the change of expression on his face and the sparkle that crept into his eyes as if it had happened yesterday, and there was no bitterness that caused his wife to retreat to living in a separate room within their home and lock him firmly out of her affections. The proud look on the old man’s face and the sparkle in his eyes were seductive. Momentarily they lured me into a feeling that I was the most important person in the world to him. I understood then how Betty was seduced into marrying a man twenty-three years her senior.

When she told me how she loved to sketch by the river on their Kyneton farm, I suggested that she could do this again. “It’s too late…” she said, “wouldn’t know where to start.” Instead she knitted children’s jumpers in colourful stripes. And she loved knitting baby’s outfits, which she wrapped in clear cellophane to sell at a local craft shop, along with the jumpers and cakes she baked on Fridays. And it became our social outing to deliver them to the shop each Saturday morning.

“Sold all your cakes last week,” said the woman who owned the craft shop when Betty walked in. “People keep coming back to buy the date and walnut loaves...and tell me how delicious they are.” “Good,” Betty would say, beaming with pleasure from ear to ear, “I’ll make some extra ones next week.” Sometimes Betty talked with customers about politics, and her cynicism made them laugh. “Malcolm Fraser came out with the understatement of the year yesterday,” I remember hearing her say. “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.” She repeated it slowly, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy... What hope does he give us? He’s always ready with some clever answer to disguise his bungling attempt to run the country…”

Betty was always centre stage in that shop; the larger the audience, the more biting and sarcastic her humour and wit became. She drew people to her and held their attention with a friendly animation that replaced her usual scowl of bitterness, making it difficult to reconcile the Betty married to Eric and the Betty who shone in the limelight of her agile ability to shoot from the hip as if she was in fact, a politician herself.
 
How I wished then that I had the power within me to separate the fibres of Betty’s bitterness like I teased wool for spinning, and make it into something beautiful and warm and comfortable to wear. Instead the bitterness silenced my tongue while I ate cake and sipped tea at the round laminated table Eric had recently bought, and Betty hated, watching the painful memories flicker across her face like the shadows cast by gathering storm clouds. As smoke continued to hang over the house with a disquieting air of foreboding, I felt like an observer witnessing a disaster that had no bearing on my own life. Fleeting moments of compassion flowed through me, but without the pain of really knowing, feeling, or understanding.

I thought about the strange coincidence that she shared my mother’s name. I even wondered if she was trying to tell me something about the mother I had not seen since I was thirteen. Had my own mother’s life come to this? Instead of finding happiness in the arms of another man, had she too become disillusioned each time romance turned into silent indifference? Despite the vivid image I had of my mother taking off her bathers to run naked amidst sand dunes, my father shouting angrily after her to put her clothes back on, she reminded me of a butterfly who had not yet dried its sticky wings after emerging from the cocoon of adolescence. She hadn’t had her maiden flight before being caught, then anaesthetized in a collector’s bottle and left to die to become a prized specimen in a collection, her wings stretched out as if in flight.

A voice from the radio intruded to prod Betty’s pain like a poker. “Fifteen homes have been lost in the Streatham area and the town is now threatened. Four people have lost their lives. One man, who refused to leave his home, was overcome by heat and smoke when he tried to save it. Another man has been found dead in a bath filled with water in his gutted home. The fire is still burning out of control…”

We remained silent as classical music began to play again in morbid tones like a funeral march. “I’ll drive around the boundary to check on the fire’s position,” I offered, suddenly feeling the need to escape the death-like trap of bitterness Betty was knitting. A faint look of gratitude flickered across her face as I stood to leave. I felt no fear of the fire as I walked out into the haze of whirling smoke. A wave of relief washed over me like a cool and soothing sea breeze as soon as I climbed behind the steering wheel. I rested my head against it for a few moments to savour being on my own again before backing the car out of the shed. Driving along the rough dirt track bordering the farm, it seemed to me that Betty’s bitterness and grief, rather than the fire, were the falling cinders of destruction that had caused so much loss in her life.

That day I didn’t see the flames that swept down mercilessly from the north to turn homes, livestock, sheds, and fences into charred ruins, snuffing out people’s lives at random and leaving others numb with shock in a whirlwind of suffocating smoke and ash. Towards evening the wind suddenly dropped and a cool south-westerly blew the fire back upon itself. Then for days, as the earth lay smouldering and a blue haze hung in the air, farmers banded together to shoot the sheep lying in agony with their feet and bellies burnt on blackened earth that stretched for miles.