Content Warnings (click to reveal)
Discussed: divorce
Lib(er)ation
The creek rose up with a great roar in the year the boy was born. That winter, she lay in bed beside her husband and surrounded by the three children, listening to the clocking of the big boulders that were being moved by the rush of rising water. She knew they would have to check the pump in the morning, that it would probably have been washed downstream and lodged somewhere under the crack willows.
The edges of the road, too, would be washed away, the roaring creek visible from the house, its brown waters encroaching on paddocks of sedge and native grasses. The hollows of the old orchard furrows would remain sodden for weeks to come.
If, indeed, the pump had stopped or washed away, then the family would have to be careful with the water. The tanks would be checked daily, and the rungs counted. –We’re down five rungs! her husband, Dryden, would say, coming in from the milking in his ribbed grey jumper. It was always the water, the pump, the rungs- they dominated her life.
And there were leeches: the children checked themselves for the squirming bloodsuckers when they came inside from playing in the paddocks or the bush. Attached at the head via sucking maws, their tails would sway like the mesmerized cobras in old Hollywood movies. The children would sprinkle them with salt and wait for them to shrivel and drop off. A day or two later, the site where the leech had attached would itch unbearably, especially if it had lodged itself between their toes.
In spite of the nuisance of it, Lupe enjoyed milking the goat morning and evening. She would lead Isobel into the shed, where the goat would step up onto a hay bale. Lupe would briefly pummel and massage the warm bag and then strip the teats into a galvanized billy. She loved pressing her face against the goat’s flank, listening to the rumble of Isobel’s stomach as she milked. Sometimes, the goat would turn her head to nuzzle Lupe’s hair. There were other goats: Gloria, Heather and Gretel (Hansel had been eaten), but it was Isobel that Lupe loved best.
The milk was strained and weighed (they had weighed the fourth baby by the same device) and stored in big glass jars. Some of it was set on the back of the slow combustion stove – the children called it the Smoke and Bustion – to be fermented and strained into a thick yoghurt, creamy and mild. Sometimes, a large quantity would be mixed with rennet and hung to drain through an old pillowcase until it had the consistency of soft cheese. It would be salted and pressed for two weeks, with an old brick weighing down a plate that covered the disk, then rinsed, salted and turned every day. In the end, it would have formed a delicious, crumbly cheese that could be sliced as thin as thin and served with homemade bread. One day, the whole two gallons of curd had fallen from where it hung above the stove, and Lupe had defied the maxim that demanded no crying in such a circumstance.
That week, when the normally mild-mannered creek had risen as an angry maelstrom that reached the timbers of the bridge, the family was cut off, kept hostage in the far side of the gully. Lupe had walked down to the bridge with the children and the dog to watch the unfamiliar wildness of the rivulet in spate. In places, the creek had changed its course, crashing through the willow paddock and lodging logs and other debris in the platypus dam. Beyond the dam and the willow paddock, there was a perfect paddock that was owned by a neighbour, a taciturn farmer. The children had discovered it one day in their explorations, and had returned excitedly, having already named this secret country of ancient treefern and rivulet The Land Before Time.
Two weeks before the fourth baby was due, the mountain at the head of the gully disappeared, and snow began to fall. Once again, the family would be cut off in its small world. The children spent the day in and out of the house, and the nails hammered into the beam behind the wood-heater held just about every item of clothing they owned. A tray of snow was brought inside, to be kept in the freezer (for who knew what reason? But it must be done!). Round cheeks were chafed and red that day, and small fingers aching with cold. At bedtime, there would be the usual hope that the snow would remain until the morning, but the middle of the night would bring the heavy drip drip of melt from the roof.
It did not rain on the day that the boy was born. The sun came out and Lupe walked the sodden paddocks in Dryden’s big gumboots. Dryden walked with her, while the children went about their thumps and other unidentifiable sounds inside the house. For a time, Lupe lay on a mattress on the decking. The baby was born in the afternoon. The midwife then sent Lupe downstairs, telling her to see if she could pee in the shower. She had never done such a thing before, but standing under the warm water, with the relief of the hot liquid emptying out of her, she smiled to herself at the perfection of that day. Awake during much of the night, the baby in her arms and her husband and children snoring nearby, the damp birthing mat she had made still underneath her, she did not think there would ever, in all her life, be a time that was more perfect.
As the children grew older, the family spent most of the summer at Drip Beach or Randall’s Bay. Sometimes, they tried other beaches, but they mostly returned to The Drip, where a permanent spring oozed out of the clay ledge that shaded the sand. There, the children played, swam and dived, and returned home ravenous. Later, Lupe would sip on a glass of red wine and play Telemann or Boccherini while she chopped the vegetables for tea.
Summer was a worrying time. There were weeks when the creek was so low and so sluggish that Dryden had to stop the pump every morning before leaving for work and then start it again every night. Every day, he and Lupe would knock on the tanks, testing for the depth of the water. Sometimes, Dryden would come into the house before breakfast and say: –We are twelve rungs down.
Dryden had always said that the pump was the heart of the gully, the way it thunked throughout the stillness of the night, its echo sometimes indistinguishable from the loc-toc of a boobook owl that lived nearby. The family slept with the throbbing of the pump at the back of its sleep. On the stillest of nights, it was the only sound that drummed on the membrane of the silence.
Lupe hated the worry of the water. As the children grew, and Dryden’s job often took him away, her life was increasingly dominated by the pump and the tanks. During one such week, when Dryden was away in one country or another, she and her youngest daughter had built a shrine to the water goddess, down beside the creek. They built it from creek-stones, mosses and ferns. They had brought from the house a tin shaving mug with which to pour over the shrine offerings of pure, icy-cold creek water. There were summers when the creek almost disappeared and became a silent ooze from between blue-grey rocks. That summer, Lupe and her eldest daughter painted the kitchen red, while sipping on cans of beer and singing along to kd Lang: What more can it be? Sex-u-al-it-y…
Amongst the cottonwoods that whispered paper leaves further up the gully, lived a neighbour who would occasionally stop by to tell Lupe that her hot water tank was full and that she would be away for a few days, inviting Lupe to make use of her outdoor bath, which was sunk into the ground behind her tiny cottage. After the children had gone to bed, Lupe would venture out in her dressing gown and gumboots, 9 Volt torch in hand, to take a bath amongst the fuchsia and ferns and slabs of rock. The bath was long and deep- one of those old-fashioned metal ones- and Lupe would fill it to the brim and lie back in the deliciousness of hot water, candles flickering and spitting, a fine mist cooling her face, the possums rustling and squealing in the branches above. Later, heading back toward her own house, she would be drawn on by the orange glow from the windows, and she would feel lonely and left out. The dog would bark, briefly, as she approached, with the torch showing the way down already-frosted grass.
There was a spring that rose from under the ground up behind her neighbour’s house. When it rained and rained, Lupe would go out with the boys to race boats made from corks and paper. On the hottest of days, they would turn on the petrol-driven fire pump, and the thrum and sputter of the thing would fill the gully. The fire pump was in a small dam below the house, formed in the creek by a low wall of smooth river-stones. When the pump was on, it could fill the tanks with cold brown creek water, at the same time dousing the timbers that formed the front of the house. Lupe and the children would run out into the welcome spray, laughing and skylarking.
There were those dry, dry summers when the sky above the clothesline would become strange- like the world looked at through a square of yellow cellophane. Lupe would turn on the radio to listen for news of nearby fires. There would be no news, but the sky would continue to become heavy with smoke, the sun a slice of blood orange. Lupe would drive out of the gully to look for the source of the smoke. There were was afternoon, and one whole night, that she spent sitting on the rabbit-hutch on the veranda, while the farmer next-door bull-dozed the burning blackwoods on the ridge above the house. Lupe’s eldest daughter stayed awake with her until the morning finally came, and the dew… and the dozing ceased, and they finally slept.
Dryden told her he had walked the track beside the creek for three weeks before coming to tell her that he had decided to leave her. She had seen him becoming dry and desiccated before her eyes. Life had sucked the juice out of him, and now he was paper thin. Lupe wondered that he didn’t fly away in a breeze. And it seemed that the more he dried out, the more she bled, as though she was some kind of channel for all the lost wetness from his soul. She had dreams of blood pooling from her body, and in her waking life, she became pale and grey. There were no pathology tests able to pinpoint the cause of her anaemia. It seemed that it was merely a leeching – a blood-letting.
The day after he told her he was leaving, Lupe and Dryden still had a dinner date at the home of another couple. They sat at a tiny kitchen table, and Lupe felt that the sadness and shock would overwhelm her- that she would open her mouth wide and scream and wail and bellow, with bubbles and strings of saliva stretching between her lips. She held the scream in, and it lodged somewhere in her sternum. It would be thirteen years before it would escape. (It was one Saturday when she was at the garden centre, looking for violet seedlings.) She would feel a pain in her chest and wonder if it was a heart attack. But, no, the next day, writing it all down at last, she realised it was that old scream dislodging from her ribs.
In the following months, after he left, Lupe’s lungs filled with fluid, and she developed bronchopneumonia. While she could still manage to get there, she went to the creek to rebuild the fire dam. Even throughout the worst weeks of her illness, she trudged up the hill and climbed onto the tank stand once every day, to check the water level.
By the time Dryden had left, the house was in such disrepair, Lupe wondered if he had really left to get away from the overwhelming idea of fixing it. An enormous wattle had almost fallen onto Lupe’s bedroom. The bathroom wall was dissolving into mush, and the bedroom and veranda rooves were perished and blowing away. The boards of the decking had rotted, and that part of the house was out-of-bounds. Several tarpaulins had been unskilfully thrown over the roof, and were the only means of keeping some of the rain out of the house. Lupe moved upstairs with her youngest daughter, afraid that she might have to let the bedroom and bathroom fall off that side of the house.
*
Thirteen years later, Lupe returned to the gully. Over the previous six months, she had spent a small inheritance from her mother on repairing the house, after so many years of neglect. She had paid for the complete re-stumping of the timber footings, where they had rotted away in the valley damp. The driveway had been gravelled and the water seeping from the hillside drained away from the house. The broken glass in idiosyncratic windows had been replaced. The renovated fibre-glass skylight, having become rotted and opaque, once again allowed for a view of the treetops. The floors had been sanded and oiled. The tiny bedroom that once threatened to fall off the house was painted and carpeted. All that was left, now, was for a local handyman to replace the two tanks.
Lupe visited the gully with a good friend, Wolfie. He and she marvelled at the new house, solid, stable, and come together at last.
-Do you want to go upstairs? he asked.
There was no furniture. Lupe locked the back door, and they went upstairs. The floor, of course, was cold. What sort of sacrilege was this? Lupe’s and Dryden’s double bed had once stood in that very spot.
Later, while Wolfie fiddled with the plumbing, Lupe went back outside to bag up the last of the rubbish: semi-perished grey bags of used cat litter, dolls’ heads, broken ceramics, sherds of glass, rusted cans, and other detritus. She started a fire onto which she threw timber boards, slabs of chipboard, branches of the pussy-willow that had been felled. – It is so much harder to clean up after a life than to live it! she had remarked to her old neighbour, who had stopped, briefly, to see what was going on at the abandoned house. Stooping over in the shed that was, even yet, half full of dead blackberry whips, tangled cable, chicken wire and glass jars, she realized that she was cleaning up after nine lives, not merely her own. Besides her own family of seven, there had been the two tenants who had left more than six years’ worth of garbage behind.
Exhausted, and with a head throbbing with sadness, she dragged some of the last garbage into one of the big orange bags. She picked up an empty cassette case and read her own writing: OM KALTHOUM. That was almost too much for her: seeing her own handwriting, and that name, Om Kalthoum, a relic of a three-year immersion in middle-eastern music.
She could not do any more. She packed her things together, taking her water bottle to the tap to fill it. The water ran brown and icy. Nonetheless, she filled the bottle, deciding she would take the water home with her. She took a sip. There was something metallic about it, but, at least there was no dead taste, unlike the time when a possum had drowned in the tank.
Later, as Wolfie backed the car out to leave, she suddenly noticed:
-Oh! He has replaced the tanks, after all!
Wolfie drove the car up the hill for a closer look, but, no, they were the same old water tanks, rusted through, in places, the bracken and herringbone fern flattened around the stand.
Soon, they would be replaced. Lupe had paid for them. She had paid for them a thousand times over. She slid down in her seat and almost smiled to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of the libation that Wolfie had, not so long ago, left on the floorboards, newly sanded and varnished. Yes, a libation to the water goddess. They drove out of the valley, and thought about where they might get a drink.
Philomena van Rijswijk is a poet, novelist, and short story writer living in Southern Tasmania. Her stories and poems have been published in Australia, Ireland, and India. Her most recent novels were “The World as a Clockface” (Penguin, 2001) and “House of the Flight-helpers” (Tartarus, UK 2019). She is currently focusing on writing songs.
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