62

Within weeks of his death, dreams of Emmett move into their nights. Louisa dreams Emmett picks up her hand and turns it over as if it were an oyster prised off a rock. In the room, square windows hold the sky at bay.

He begins to tell her the dream and she says, ‘I know, I know.’ Behind her, someone walks though the windows and blood springs up like red umbrellas. Louisa will always wish she had not interrupted her father in that dream.

That same night, Peter dreamed about him too. ‘There was a boat and the sky and there were others and I was trying to get people to sit down so they wouldn’t fall. The sky was green and Dad said he was going.’

It’s another hot day, a month after the funeral. Peter and Louisa are driving up to the bush for the scattering of the ashes. Rob, Jessie and Anne are following them. Louisa hears Peter’s dream and stares through the smeared window. So much does she want to hear more, she can’t speak.

Peter doesn’t say anything for a long stretch of road. He looks into the rear-vision mirror at Rob in his ute and wonders if he’s had a dream. How he will be today? Will he be able to handle it?

When they have a break and a cup of coffee at a roadside stop, Rob and Anne, it seems, have also dreamed about Emmett. In Anne’s dream, he came into the room and sat down and put a bunch of flowers and her little dog on the bed. ‘Goodbye my darling, Annie,’ he said. She woke up gasping at the vision of Emmett.

In Rob’s dream he spoke to him on the phone, told him he was a bastard, a hard man, but that he wouldn’t have had it any other way and Emmett said goodbye. Jessie missed out on a visit that night but the dreaming has its own rhythm and goes on for months.

The windscreen is coated with the fine mesh of the day the car collects and the sun blurs through it. The kombi trails over the shimmery road and the black wing of a dead crow flaps up as they pass.

Back in the car, Louisa and Peter peer through the windscreen at the long road that takes them to Emmett’s uncles’ place up in the river country. Talk of the dreams preoccupies them for a hundred kilometres. No one believes in ghosts or in God but they believe in him. ‘It’s him, he’s come back to tell us he’s goin’, to tell us he’s all right,’ Peter says. ‘Definitely.’

Louisa wonders. Doesn’t seem in character for the old man to be so caring. ‘Maybe it’s not intentional, just the leftover spirit of him like the tail of a comet fizzing out, finishing. What d’ya reckon?’ Pete holds the wheel and the car hums. ‘Dunno, but the coincidence gets me, it seems intentional. Honestly, I can’t even think about it yet.’

Louisa grabs the bottle of water between them and knocks back half of it, hands it to Peter. She says, ‘I mean, shit, what if there is a bloody God after all this certainty that there isn’t? What d’you think? Angels, you reckon there’ll be angels Pete?’

He grunts and laughs at that idea. She keeps at it. ‘What if there’s heaven and hell? Where d’you reckon he’ll go? Poor old bastard. What if he’s in heaven? And that’s why he’s being nice.’ Peter drinks the bottle dry and crushes the plastic with a crack and tosses it into the back and starts talking about anything else.

Then after a while it goes quiet and they drive on, spearing through the day towards the river, a place Emmett held sacred. This was one of the many places he’d wanted to wind up in. The others were the backyard under the beer bottles, Newport Power Station because it was beautiful, or in the Mallee because he was born there.

They have his ashes in the urn. Peter has made a lid for the urn out of something hard and Emmett is duly contained. When they get close to the river there’s a floodplain spreading out before it and the earth is brown, a cracking dry place with scraggly leaves barely hanging onto the trees. Everything is taupe and it doesn’t look like much at all.

Peter steers the van up the embankment and fears with a sinking heart that they might not make it. He doesn’t say anything out loud but he’s thinking, oh shit. But as the kombi has never failed him before, he hopes it’s not going to start now, and finally after a long, high-pitched straining in the engine, it gets them there.

It feels like Emmett is offering advice from the back seat and they both recall times when their father had bogged the car and then thrown mighty tantrums and stalked away, leaving them all waiting in the baking sun for him. Once in a country town when the car broke down they played cricket in the middle of the road and the local kids joined in. By the time Emmett emerged from the pub, it was night and the other kids had gone home.

Around the soft edges of the inlet in the river, bulrushes stand straight and weed cast on the water like a blanket is moved by the breeze. A nearly submerged beer bottle lingers close by and they all get the joke, at least Emmett will have something to drink.

Further out fish push their mouths up to slice through the surface and when they move on, they trail furrows through the dark water. Dragonflies busy themselves and their silver wings shiver an inch above the water.

On the big island in the river, shots blast. Duck-shooters, says Rob. This news causes a comradely argument about duck-shooting because Jessie takes it personally when bad things happen to animals. The others don’t like it much either but don’t claim to be missionaries on the subject, but because it’s ashes day they let the disagreement fall away.

No one knows in what order they should do things, never having scattered ashes before, and they long for a bit of leadership on the subject but there’s none. Everything will be done by consensus. Finally, they settle on a strategy.

They get the six deckchairs out of the car, one for each of them (Daniel included), and set them around a circle in the sand and then they collect firewood. They’re after dry stuff which isn’t a problem because most of the wood is practically explosive due to the drought.

It’s late afternoon. There’s a bit of summer moon out thinking about the night and the bush is readying itself for that too. Alone in the bush, Louisa starts talking quietly to Emmett.

She stands on a dead sapling and pushes it down, waiting, concentrating on the moment of the snap. It comes and she’s ready to go back to the campfire when she comes upon another tree with a red trickle of sap: tree blood. ‘Dad,’ she says, ‘look what I found,’ and imagines he’d have patted her head and treated her like a scientist if he was in the mood.

Again, like a ship coming to grief on a reef, she is holed by the loss of her father. By the absence of her father he could be. So she hangs onto the tree as if it’s someone’s arm and, in time, recalls the many realities of Emmett.

Then she hears the others dragging wood and getting the billy on then looking over cups and saying, ‘Where’s the milk?’ and ‘Did you bring sugar?’ and ‘Why don’t we use the mugs from before, save us washing them?’ Little questions hanging there in the evening like clean washing on the line.

She listens to her brothers and sister for a while then joins them sitting with their legs stretched out and their feet pointing towards the fire like spokes in a wheel.

It’s decided that the tree should be planted first. Emmett liked the idea of having a ficifolia planted for him, he liked to think of their scarlet coats in the summer, and so Anne had ventured into the vast acre of the local Bunnings and picked one out.

Concerns are mounted: that this is a State Forest, that the tree will die because there is no water, that it will be rabbit food. They decide to look upon it as a gesture to Emmett. Possibly to his fathering, Jessie jokes.

Rob does an impersonation of a full flight Emmett: ‘It will live or die like the rest of us and will probably have a hard go of it. But THAT is LIFE.’ He gets out the shovel and digs a big hole for the small tree. Jessie fills a bucket of water from the river and waters it. They stand back. The tree is small beside the bush, just a little bloke.

It’s decided that the child believed to be the most loved by Emmett will be the one to disperse him. So Peter kneels at the foot of an ancient river red gum with the urn. The tree must be two hundred years old and with the lower limb removed it makes a rough altar.

Rob wants to smash the urn but really he just wants to break something, anything. Make a big show of it. Smash the bloody thing to smithereens. ‘Go on,’ he says, ‘act like Greeks, they smash urns. They do,’ he says, looking around for agreement. The family looks doubtful.

Then Peter and Louisa say, ‘No, it’s not happening.’ The word ‘dignity’ is used and Rob gets mad. Says, ‘He wasn’t being very dignified when we were kids, was he? Don’t get all sentimental about him just because he’s dead. Anyone can be dead. We’ll all be dead, nothing mystical in that. He was poison. Pure and simple.’

Rob steps back, vanquished in his attempt to smash the urn and so finally to smash Emmett all at once and gloriously in front of everyone. His anger is understood but no one else feels like being destructive today. It’s just time to let the old man go. Scores, they reckon, don’t get settled at ashes-scattering ceremonies.

Rob seems to shoulder his hurt as he always has by taking it into himself and looking out at them, daring them to disagree with him. The others look back, there are times when Louisa and Peter see that Rob has borne more than anyone, other times they wish he’d just give it up, even for his own sake.

Jessie watches them in their endless banter. The three-parter they play again and again, as if she’s part of the audience. God, she thinks, let this be over. Anne says nothing.

Peter walks over to the ficifolia and touches the top of it lightly. Louisa is looking at the sky as usual, a bit of rose is smeared on the clouds stretched out up there in the acres of blue. Louisa hears her Nan saying, ‘Pink clouds in the evenin’, sailor’s warnin’ ’, and regardless of what’s going on, as always, misses her savagely.

And then, in a moment’s flash, she sees how isolated the Browns are. Always alone when it comes down to it because no one else shares the legacy of Emmett. Alone there and missing no one really but Daniel.

And had he lived, how would he have turned out with a father like Emmett and a mother who worked so hard you feared she didn’t have time to breathe? How had they all turned out? How was it possible that they were not all basket cases? Ah, maybe they were. No point getting all high and mighty when you’re talking about the original latchkey children.

Peter pushes the urn under the water because the bugs and yabbies might make a home there and that would be a good thing. Tears make lines down his face as he kneels.

Leaving Emmett behind is harder than Louisa thought it would be. She takes a stick and stirs him into the water; one of the others tells her to leave things alone and yells, ‘Come on Louie,’ so she chucks the stick down.

Then they stand in a circle and put their arms around each other’s shoulders like footballers after a big victory and weep for the old man. For what he was, for what he wasn’t, for what he might have been. Rob and Peter shake with the sorrow of it.

And then to break the solemnity, Jessie laughs and says, pulling her hands across her face to wipe the tears, ‘It’s time Emmett got a move on, hanging around here, wasting all our bloody time.’

They laugh remembering his performances on the subject of time-wasting when they were kids. ‘NEVER be late; it is a discourtesy to those waiting. Politeness is free and everyone can give it and receive it; you don’t have to be rich to have manners.’

They move from tears to laughter so fast, their faces are still wet.

Anne declares she has nothing to say, except that the kids are better at such things. She’s quiet in the bush because it reminds her of Emmett. He said this place was as holy as any cathedral and it feels like he’s come back to somewhere beloved.

Louisa reads a bit of a poem by a German poet who thinks that we’re all nobody really, except maybe fragments of stars. Or some such typically dilatory stuff, thinks Rob. In the bush standing on leaf litter smelling eucalyptus like a memory, the poem is read in her usual halting, stumbling, croaky way and makes little sense. She should have read from ‘Clancy’, she knows this as soon as she opens her mouth. But there you are, stuffed it up again.

After a silence, Rob tells them that when Emmett was up here as a young man his uncles would leave a tin of jam hidden within these giant old trees for him in case he didn’t catch a fish. Then he says, ‘Now here we are, the kids, those endlessly bloody annoying kids, not the beloved long dead uncles, just us wretched kids, we are the ones releasing him, the ones letting go.’

Peter shuffles about on the spot, clearly ready to disagree but not wanting to. He reads out something he’s written about Emmett taking him to this river when he was a small boy. How he taught him to look hard at everything he picked up on the riverbank. How, because of Emmett, Peter would always be ‘investi-gate-ing’. He smiles as he remembers Emmett telling him that there’s a gate in the word and gates take you to many places.

Is this what love looks like? A campsite with six seats, the sky full of rose clouds. Insects touching them lightly. All of it connected to Emmett, who in his leaving becomes human again, becomes himself?

And then Rob stands up and sings, ‘I Know Where I’m Going’, the song Emmett taught them on those couple of nights when he decided they might make a reasonable choir. His mother’s song.

They take the cars out an easier way and in time the road hauls them home.

Louisa drives with Peter again and they listen to the Cat Stevens’ songs she played when he was a boy. It’s his idea this time. Then they sing Joni Mitchell and Dylan songs, the words engraved on them. Eventually, they put some Floyd on to ease themselves.

Then the hypnotic road consumes them. The headlights fan out and touch the sides of the road lightly. There’s a rhythm in the driving and then, out of nowhere, a bat hits the windscreen at speed and they leap forward absolutely together, shocked by the randomness of life and by the death of the bat.

Outside, they see a stripe of red fire burning in the long grass in a faraway paddock and soon they pass the luminescent orange of a haystack on fire, the heat drawing in all within its orbit. Behind them the lights of Rob’s ute are steady eyes in the hungry night. And then they press on and the dark folds itself around them and the light retreats like a fallen army.