Sugar Town

By Robert Nicholls

THE MOST CHALLENGING VALUE PEOPLE CAN COMMIT TO IS THE TRUTH...

On the tropical coast of Queensland, Sugar Town's annual harvest festival is a time for restraint to be set aside; for the fanciful and the mischievous to be indulged. But when innocent questions elicit shocking and unexpected answers, the mischief turns, once

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawline Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781922993342

Robert Nicholls

Robert is a Canadian born Aussie, having emigrated with his wife from the cold shores of British Columbia to the warm tropical coast of North Queensland in 1975. With a degree in Education from Canada's University of Victoria, he took up the teaching of English, History and Legal Studies in a Whitsunday high school until, forty-two years later, with retirement and an expanding family in Victoria, he and his wife relocated to windy Ballarat. He has written three novels set in rural Queensland, a YA novel set in 15th Century England and a book of short stories.

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Sugar Town © 2023 Robert Nicholls.

All Rights Reserved.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For Tim, whose stories ended all too soon.

They were not boys. They were men, all three of them, each approaching his fourth decade of life. And she was not a woman. She was thirteen, in a long-legged body that, despite her inattention, grew fuller every week. Her father should not have let her walk alone in the dark. She was awkward, though – had knocked over a chalice and insisted on moving about the church while he practised his sermon.

‘Go home,’ he had said. ‘Tell your mother I’ll be along soon.’

‘Can’t I stay and listen, Daddy? I’ll be still. I’ll sit down the back and not move. Promise!’

She stood in the aisle of the church, hands behind her back, looking up at him in his pulpit. He looked at her there, on her long legs, saw the curve of her hips and the high, small swell of her breasts. Lately, he’d begun to fend her off when she wanted to sit on his knee or throw her arms around him.

‘You’re getting too big for that,’ he’d say. She was his first child.

She stood in the aisle of his church and he looked away from her, down at his Bible. The Song of Songs was there. ‘My love,’ it said, ‘you are as beautiful as Jerusalem, as lovely as the city of Tirzah. Turn your eyes away from me; they are holding me captive.’ He became unaccountably angry.

‘Do as I tell you, Bridie!’

And so she’d gone into the night. She’d left him to his resounding communion with God and walked into the sight of men whose interest in communing was much less inspired. This is how things sometimes end and also how things sometimes begin.

She didn’t see them, but she heard them. She tried to run but her sandals tripped her up. She turned then to face them, to show them her courage, but a blow came out of the dark. She fell, she hit her head and she woke, alone, in the deepest, loneliest darkness she’d ever known. Her father was nowhere in sight. The church was nowhere in sight. Her shoes were gone, her panties were gone and she burned inside. She vomited for a while and, when she could, she got up and edged her way toward a distant street light. That was the night of Harvest Festival, 1997.

I was two years old in 1997 so nothing meant anything to me. Even the disappearance over the next few months of half my family meant nothing to me. When you’re little, you don’t question how the world is. But I grew. I grew past surprise, at how odd my family was, and I grew well into resentment; right up to the door of resignation. Then, one week in 2008, when I was thirteen, the past came hurtling forward, like a rock out of a slingshot, knocking me arse over teakettle, fair into the middle of ‘Now, I need to know!’

I can be very precise with the starting time. Make it October 18, 2008, at four o’clock in the a.m. Things were happening then, not so far away in space, as the other things had happened not so far away in time. October 18, at four o’clock in the a.m. That’s when the space thing (or ‘Queenie’ as we came to know her) was stalling out over the south-western Pacific, slanting in out of the void, a peppering of stars above and the black ocean below. Maybe a shaft of sunlight tried to catch her, high over New Zealand. But she glided away into the western darkness and came to us – to Sugar Town.

We, of course, had no awareness of her approach. Juiced-up fruit bats were taking their usual bearings for home and bossy roosters were clearing their throats over the usual lie-abed hens. In roof spaces all over town, possums were hunkering down, shoulder to shoulder, snouting their tales of tall trees.

By the time anyone saw her (and a surprising number did) she was already past the long grace of her flight, tumbling and turning and flaring, reduced to a howling streak of light.

Asael thinks something in our dreams called her to us. Asael takes medication and his contact with the world is sometimes iffy but, nonetheless, it was a dream that had us McFarlanes up and alert at that hour. So who am I to say he’s wrong?

The dream was the recurring property of my sister, Bridie, who is twenty-four years old and, maybe to her detriment, not a jot less than beautiful. A little before four, she was lying alone, as always, in her bed, across the hall from my room, in our parents’ house. Her long legs telescoped up to her chest, her eyes behind her lids darting from side to side. It was a dream that skirted the edges of nightmare and one I’d crossed the hall to wake her from many times before. In the midst of it, she twitched and moaned and the hammering of her heart was so loud, it would vibrate the air in the middle of the room. And it was always about our town – Sugar Town.

You can find Sugar Town, under lots of different names, on any map of North Queensland. From the highway, in daylight, it looks like a colony of fibro and metal barnacles attached to fields of irrigated emerald green. At night, from high above, (the first view Queenie would have had) it’s little more than a sprinkling of lights around the volcanic glow of a sugar mill.

In Bridie’s dream, a girl walks the streets of Sugar Town, past the familiar mouldering houses and droop-palinged fences. She could be me, this dream girl – tall, thin, angular. Thirteen. She approaches a great door above which looms a massive cross, trembling on an invisible plane of air. The cross and the door, both luminous with grace, speak somehow to the dream girl’s soul – a promise of meaning, of insight into her place in the world. She reaches for the door.

Before she can touch it though, something, some irresistible weight crushes her to the ground. She is instantly suffused with pain. Agonised! Confused! Wiped clean, in a heartbeat, of all hope. Only a single, irreducible spark of resolve endures, prompting her to fold her hands over the agony and, with all the strength of her being, to press it down, a full arm’s length down, into the soil of memory where it’s too dark and cold for anything to survive. And like a creeping tide, numbness edges in.

Waking, Bridie knew and I knew and all of Sugar Town knew that there was a wall in her mind, with at least a pair of years utterly concealed behind it. She was resigned to it. More than that, she’d convinced herself that she knew the reason for it. It was part of a penance that she was being charged for some terrible, unremembered sin. Part of a penance that included being abandoned, in one way or another, by almost everyone she’d ever loved. Except for Asael, who is our brother, and me. Two kids, dumped on her when she was barely more than a child herself.

Funny how people can imagine something and then accept that imagining as truth. Asael’s imaginings about Queenie; Bridie’s imaginings about her lost years; my own, about the history of my family. Some people say that the truth can set you free, but I think it’s a tricky and dangerous thing that can just as easily push you into a prison you can never escape from. Bridie’s dream girl, of course, knew that right from the start.

Ordinarily, Bridie’s dream ran in a continuous, unchanging loop. But on the night of Queenie’s arrival, the night before Harvest Festival weekend, there was one new thing. A voice. The dream girl, while wrestling her pain into stillness, heard – little more than a fleeting, fading hiss – a command. A command containing our mother’s name.

‘Reconcile yourself to it, Rita!’

That voice brought the dream to an end, but the voice that woke Bridie was her own. At the edge of my own awakening, I heard her.

She lunged from the bed, as you do when nightmare struggles to be reality. You know what it’s like. Your body is awake but the wet, woollen feel of monsters remains. You stumble to the window, panting for breath, sweat prickling on your belly and thighs. You mop your throat, insisting to yourself that, whatever it was, it wasn’t real. But unreal things have just as much power as real ones to pluck at your skin, pull up the hairs on your neck and whisper terrible, incomprehensible things in your ears.

‘Reconcile yourself to it, Rita!’

Bridie fled into the hallway, flicking on lights, whimpering like a small, terrified animal. She went to the shower where she scrubbed at herself with punishing ferocity – scrubbed until her skin burned and the nightmare, at last, began to fade.

In the mirror, as she slid back into her nightie, she saw herself, still close to tears and she shook a menacing finger at the reflection. ‘You stop that!’ she demanded. ‘Right now!’

In the hallway outside the bathroom, Asael jerked upright. For the past several minutes he’d been crouched at the door, his eye pressed to the keyhole. He’d heard her cry out in her sleep. He’d seen lights and heard the shower running. He’d had to go to the toilet anyway, which meant passing by the door to the bathroom. So, as he always did, he’d stopped for a peek. He was eleven.

‘I only wondered why you’re up!’ Even from my room, half snagged in sleep, I could hear the sniffle in his voice. ‘It’s not even four o’clock yet! Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine, Asael! I just… had a bad dream. I’m washing it away with a shower, that’s all. Go back to bed!’

You have to picture Asael. He’s not built like Bridie and me, tall and rangy. He’s pale and small. Also, he wears glasses, which not many kids his age do. And lots of people believe he isn’t entirely all there. Or maybe, in some infernal way, there’s too much of him there! At the start, it was because he was so introverted – so turned in on himself. Then, right around his eleventh birthday, he started seeing things – lights, mostly; sometimes faces and figures. And once or twice he went completely blind, though only for a couple of minutes at a time. Late Onset Childhood Occipital Epilepsy, Doctor Dabney said, which still left all of us, including Asael, poorly prepared for what was to follow.

In some ways, I think his sense of that particular illness got swamped by his overly morbid (understandable, considering what had happened to our family) and depressing obsession with death and dying.

Once, long ago, Bridie put him off a burst of persistent questioning about Rita’s death by saying: ‘People just die, Asa! Every day! We can’t know why! It’s just God’s will!’

People die every day? And we don’t know why? No way! And from that moment, he’d developed a sort of paralysis of watchfulness. Any cough, hiccup or sneeze from any one of us could launch him into a state of high anxiety. He even started studying illnesses, memorising their faces so as to properly recognise them if they showed up at our door.

‘You know what ‘fatal arrhythmia’ is, Ruthie? You know why polyps grow in our sewer pipes, Ruthie? What if you had a weak blood vessel in your head, Ruthie, and you fell down? Know what would happen to your brains?’

The year before, at Christmas, we’d given him books just to get him off our backs – a copy of The Visual Dictionary of the Human Body and an edition of Barcsay’s Anatomy for the Artist, (142 full-page plates). So he was well up on the osseous and muscular systems and on a first-name basis with ‘flexors’, ‘extensors’, ‘iliums’ and ‘ischiums’. It’s important to know, he said, because disaster is sneaky. Which, interestingly, is pretty similar to what I feel about truth!

So anyhow, morbid obsession was one reason he was watching Bridie through the keyhole, snivelling out excuses and dragging me the rest of the way out of my beauty sleep. And the other, much more obvious reason, of course, was that he was a hormonally rabid eleven-year-old boy.

‘What’s going on? Why’s everybody up? It’s four in the morning, for God’s sake!’ Not happy, shielding my eyes from the light, hair in my face. Itchy bum. Not happy.

‘She had a bad dream,’ he whined. ‘She’s having a shower to wash it away. I had to pee. Can I come in with you?’

‘What? Don’t be stupid! Go back to bed!’

He nodded agreeably then followed me into my room and climbed under the sheet beside me. I didn’t really care. It was too late, or too early, to fight. Overhead, the fan ticked slowly.

‘God!’ I said. ‘This family!’ And I turned my back on him.

When I say ‘family’, of course, there were, as I’ve said, just the three of us. Rita (or ‘Mum’, as the other two insisted on calling her, but I wouldn’t because I’d hardly known the woman) had been gone so long that only Bridie truly remembered her. It seemed she’d barely had time to give poor little Asael his life and his odd name and get him home to Sugar Town, to this house, before she was gone, dead.

And there’d been Gramma Grace, but she’d got herself murdered the year before Rita died. For a couple of years after that, we’d still had a father, the Reverend Jacob McFarlane, who’d lasted with us until the start of the new millennium. And then he’d gone off, missionary-ing in New Guinea.

I was five when he left, so I know I’d’ve had memories of him. But I’ve worked actively at forgetting them. People who abandon you cancel all rights to space in your head, as far as I’m concerned. Ironically, the one memory I wish I’d kept is a memory of how he left. Whether he took a suitcase or called a taxi or waved from the gate or promised to come back. What does someone look like as they walk out on their family? There were times I could have used a memory like that.

Still, try though I might, I couldn’t get rid of all of him, because of the letters. Most years we got two or three; just enough for us to understand, I guess, that he wasn’t dead like the others. And I suppose I could give him this much credit, that the letters were pretty interesting in some ways; full of stuff about ‘God’s great work’ and sinners and pagans and strange practices! Whenever one came, the three of us would troop into his study, which Bridie insisted on keeping like a shrine, and she’d read the thing to us. Interesting, but surreal. Like having a ghost sending us drafts of exotic stories.

I should mention too, though, that they weren’t solely for us. Parts of them were always clearly marked for passing to Brian Johansen, for publication in the ‘Sugar Town Weekly’. It was important, Bridie told Asael and me, to remind ‘the congregation’ of the Reverend’s ‘selfless work’ and his ‘continued prayers’. Etcetera, etcetera, yada, yada. The real story was that we and the Reverend lived pretty much on donations and hand-outs and the goodwill of the town. So the true purpose of the letters, I always knew, was to fortify the illusion of his and our usefulness.

In the long, slack periods between letters, Bridie did her best to compensate. ‘We’re so blessed!’ she’d tell anyone who’d listen. ‘Show me another town with a minister doing such important work! So important that he can’t come home! Not ever!’

His letters and her delusions were enough to keep Asa and maybe a few other fanatics on his side. But not me. Never me. If I wasn’t so flat-out busy not caring about him, I’d have written him a note saying, ‘Get over yourself! Bridie needs you here more than they need you there; so come home!’

Not that I felt sorry for myself. I didn’t. Seriously! I felt sorry for Bridie! Landed with Asael and me, and too precarious about everything to claim a life for herself. But being sorry for people – even for people you care about – wears thin. Like I said, she was twenty-four. Sure, she had an amnesiac block and ‘nervous problems’ but I figured hey! Do those things break your legs? Or can you still stand up for yourself? Which takes me back again to those comments on truth. It’s way complicated.

So anyhow, when I turned my back on Asael in bed and said, ‘God! This family!’ I was thinking of all those people, just a little bit.

‘You shouldn’t,’ he whispered, ‘take God’s name in vain!’

‘No? Is that worse than peeking through keyholes?’

‘I wasn’t peeking to see her, Ruthie. I was peeking to see if she was okay.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Thousands wouldn’t, but I do… believe you. And don’t call me Ruthie. Call me… Genuflecta.’

‘Genuflecta?’

‘Yeah. I’m thinking of having a holy week this week.’

‘Okay.’ He rolled on his side and touched my back. ‘Genuflecta?’

‘What, Asael? Can you see I’m trying to sleep?’

‘I had a dream too.’

‘Mm. That’s nice.’

Asael had a regular Xbox thing happening in his head. Sleeping and waking. Seating for only one. Hence the medication.

‘Mum. It was the Mum dream.’

‘Uh-huh. And how was she?’

‘Like always. Beautiful. Like Bridie. And sad. Like Bridie.’

‘Uh-huh. Well! I guess that’s being dead for you. Same feet as always?’

In Asael’s ‘Mum dream’, she always had skeleton feet. Creepy, I know, but it had to do with the way she died.

‘Yeah.’ I could feel him pulling one of his own feet up to touch. ‘Twenty-six bones,’ he muttered. ‘Tarsus, metatarsus, phalanges.’ Then he lost interest and started on at me again. ‘She talked to me. She said my name. Asael. Then she said, God strengthens. But you have to help. What do you think that means?’

I rolled over to face him. He was weird, but he was my brother. And I knew he had a guilt thing about Rita. Post-natal depression was the only explanation we’d ever been given for what she did and, of course, he was the ‘natal’ that the depression came ‘post’ of… if you take my meaning. So I gave him a bit of a hug.

‘Well, you know that that’s what your name means. Asael… God strengthens. So I guess she was just telling you, you know, that strength is important. It’s something she would’ve wanted for you. Probably for all of us. And that it’s not just physical. Not just muscles and stuff. Some of it’s in your head and you have to try not to be frightened.’

‘Like frightened of dying?’

‘More like frightened of living, I expect.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘No, well! I’m not surprised.’

He went quiet then for a bit and I thought he was probably okay so I rolled back over. Bridie was back in her bedroom. I could hear her rummaging and I could just tell she had the memory box out. We called it the memory box but it was a dilapidated shoebox, really. It had been there forever. Brooks Brothers sandals, it once held, according to the covering advertisement. Singapore Pink, plastic, size eight: a kid’s size. Just shows how badly in need that house was… of a good clean-out!

In times past, opening that memory box had been a weekly ritual for us. Bridie’d drag out old letters and clippings and read them to us, then cry, then read them again and cry again. For a long time, we used to cry with her but, for me, it was mostly just to keep her company. Eventually, I realised she didn’t need me, so I stopped and took to just waiting quietly.

It had been a long time. Her getting it out was what made me realise she’d had ‘the dream’. We should burn that memory box, I thought – and everything in it! Ironic, considering what was to happen only three days on. I was drifting on those thoughts when Asa suddenly started in again.

‘Genuflecta?’

‘What?’

‘Why are you wearing a bra?’

‘It’s a trainer, nerd-boy. I’m getting used to the idea, that’s all.’

‘So you got boobs then?’

‘Course I got boobs, you idiot. Huge juicy ones just like Bridie. Which is why I’m wearing a TRAY-NER and disappear when I turn sideways. Now shut up and go to sleep!’

‘Can I touch one?’

That was enough. I pulled my knees up between us and kicked him out. In fact, I wound up having to push him all the way out of the room. I fully expected Bridie to jump up and order him back to his own bed but, instead, her light went out. Which was strange because usually she got between us straight away when we fought, being all about peace and reconciliation, as she was. When she didn’t come out, Asael went instantly back on sickness alert.

‘Something’s wrong!’ he whispered. ‘I knew it!’ And confirmation came straight away – a gasp of breath and the muffled sound of crying.

Oh crap, I thought. And though I was inclined to pretend I hadn’t heard, nothing else would suit Asael but that we go in. Which we did and we crawled in either side of her and just about got her to the point of talking when a light flashed through the window from outside. We all looked at the same time and we all saw it, streaking across the sky. As though that was the very moment Queenie, the space thing, had been waiting for – for us all to be together and quiet. So we could see her long fall come at last to an end. In a spot, as it turned out, that Asa and I were to become far too familiar with for comfort.

‘Holy Crap!’ I heard myself say. ‘What was that?’

As I said earlier, it was crazy how many people, like us, were awake at four on that particular morning. These are the ones you need to know about.

First, there was Kevin Truck. Kevin isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool local Sugar Town guy. But when he came to town and opened The Harmony Bakery, Rita and Gramma Gracie were still alive and the Reverend was still here and neither Asael nor I were born yet. So that’s a long time.

Kevin’s fifty-ish, short and wrinkled and he always smells like new bread or cinnamon; like a man you could inhale. He’s the only black guy who lives in Sugar Town which, it turns out, matters to some people. And he’s gentle and clever and funny but his most important quality – the one that got him completely tangled up in my family’s woes, in ways that not everyone appreciated – is that he’s just a very lovable guy. Even Bridie, in her shy-of-men kind of way, can’t help but love Kevin. You might be surprised to learn (I know I was!) that being loveable is a quality that can get a person into heaps of strife! Not a problem I’ll ever have to deal with, happily!

Anyhow, Kevin saw the space thing come down because he was, at that moment, just opening the back doors at the bakery, starting his day’s work.

Second, there was Johnathon Cranna. If every town’s got a favourite son, Johnathon Cranna, at whatever age he was – maybe forty – was Sugar Town’s. He had money. He had property. He had this way about him that just wafted importance. And he was way handsome; gorgeous, in fact. Not that I particularly knew him beyond the ‘hello-nod’ that small-town people are inclined to exchange with everybody. I don’t think we’d ever actually talked before the week in question. And I never expected anything more because, after all, he was him and I was me. We shared a corner of the planet but that didn’t mean we moved in the same universe.

I don’t know why Johnathon was awake in his fine bachelor’s pad in his own Grand Central Hotel. Maybe he hadn’t been to bed yet, free-wheeling man-about-town that he was. I like to picture him waking up and blinking at the clock, which blinks right back at him. 4:00, it says. Can’t sleep, eh? Well, check this out! And bam! Just like that, Queenie winks by outside the window.

‘What the… ?’

As I say, I don’t know why he was up, but I know he saw it.

The third and fourth to see it were Garlic and Rosemary. Well, Garlic was blind, so he couldn’t have actually ‘seen’ it, but I’m counting him because I’m betting that he didn’t actually ‘miss’ it either. And you have to know that Rosemary saw it! First, because their place was the closest building to the spot where it landed, them living right on the edge of Alf Caletti’s cane paddock. And second, because they’re goats and Amalthea says goats can see the wind.

I just know they’d have raised their heads and pricked up their ears. ‘Hear that?’ one of them would have goat-talked to the other. Louder and louder, then WHOOSH! Probably there was a bump. Maybe the house shook a bit. Rosemary gets to her feet to see if Amalthea’s okay. Amalthea’s breathing is shallow and regular. Rosemary sees her by starlight that’s filtering through the window. Her hair, showing those chemical-red tints, trembles in the breath of the fan. She’s asleep. Amalthea sleeps the sleep of the fearless!

Garlic’s clouded, blind eyes turn toward Rosemary and she touches her nose to his. ‘She’s okay. Nothing for us goats to worry about. Go back to sleep.’ Never suspecting that events had been set in motion; that they would both die in the next few days (though only one of them would stay dead).

The fifth one to see the space thing, one who, incredibly, was Johnny-on-the-spot where it came down, was Isak Nucifora. Isak was one of those men who stay around so long their lives become kind of mythological. Once he was this and once he did that! What he was now was a bitter, unrepentant alcoholic and what he did now was snarl amongst people with all the charm of a Tasmanian Devil.

Since we’re talking about dreams, though, here’s a curious thing about Isak. After I got to know him, he told me that – right up to and including that night, October 18, 2008, the night before Harvest Festival weekend – he hadn’t dreamed a dream in over a decade of nights! Which I found strangely sad! Though, when I found out the truth behind some of the things people reckoned he’d done, I also found it pretty amazing!

‘Just goes to show you, girlie! The feckin’ booze… she can kill ye from the inside out or the topside down. Both ways work.’ That’s how he talked.

Another thing he told me was that, at whatever age he was (somewhere in his seventies, I’d guess) he’d arrived at a place where he owed no one, feared no one, believed no one and had mostly forgotten that he ever loved someone. I remember that clearly because, at the age of thirteen, before Harvest Festival weekend, it was a stance I was working on for myself! Parts of it, it turned out, were alarmingly true for Isak. Realistically, I guess none of it was true for me. The last part definitely wasn’t true for either of us. Especially not after Queenie arrived on the scene.

As he told it, at four a.m., he was rolled in his swag, beneath a tall poplar gum, only half a kilometre beyond the last house of the town. He’d spent the early part of the evening shooting roos on a contract for Alf Caletti. Pest control – that’s how he made his living and still does! One shot per roo. He reckons it’s like someone switching off a light. ‘It’s the world, then fuckin’ nuthin’. That’s all.’ It’s a way, he reckons, he wouldn’t mind going himself, when his time comes.

Anyhow, he’d drunk his over-proof dinner and lay down to watch the stars. He was thinking, he claims, about all the ways that death finds people. And the ways that, sometimes, people find death. And he was taking stock of what things he might’ve left undone in his life. It’d been on his mind for days, he says – a premonition of something about to end. Which explains why he’d brought his swag out when home was near enough to walk to.

So he was lying there, awake, with his arm over his eyes and these weird old thoughts duck-diving through the alcoholic fug in his mind, when suddenly, there was this tremendous buzz and yoick and howl somewhere up in the sky! He lifted his arm an inch and saw a trail of phosphorescence flickering on the air straight above him, followed immediately by a bumping and banging and squawking in the near distance, like a ghost cane bin falling off a set of ghost tracks. Having no idea what to make of it, he put his arm back over his eyes and stayed where he was, studying on that yammer which, he says, didn’t fully die out until just before dawn.

Only then did he rise, rolling his swag and testing the wind with a long stop-start pee in a vaguely northerly direction. He sucked the last ounce of whisky from his bottle, gathered up his gear and loaded his rifle. And, ready at last, he began to walk. 200 metres away, he found small branches newly skinned from the tops of the trees. At 400 metres, he saw a large branch hanging from the mid-way point of a big old paperbark. At 600 metres, he entered a paddock of mature cane – Alf Caletti’s cane – following a swath of bent and smoking stalks.

Chapter 1 – The Parade (Friday)

I was still in Bridie’s bed when I woke up. So was Asa, spread out like a starfish, but Bridie was up, clicking around in the kitchen. It was a great room, Bridie’s room; big and airy. It used to be Rita’s and the Reverend’s long ago; a room where secrets were whispered and, I suppose, we kids were conceived. Now, with them gone, it was still the cosiest corner of the house.

I rolled out, bumped my feet on something and looked down to see the memory box. And dropped beside it was a letter, much folded and faded. ‘Hello!’ I thought. ‘You must be the one that made her cry in the night!’ And I popped it open for a read. Why not? As far as I knew, we’d been through all the letters together heaps of times before, so it wasn’t like I was snooping. This, however, turned out to be one I’d never seen.

It was dated June 12, 1994 – just a month before Asa was born – from the Reverend to Rita. Rita and Bridie and little two-year-old me were all in Brisbane that June, and had been since Christmas, staying with someone who I obviously couldn’t remember because I was too young and Bridie couldn’t remember because it was lost in her ‘blank spot’. Neither of us even knew why we were in Brisbane, beyond the obvious possibility that Rita might have had trouble with the pregnancy. Typical Asael – uncomfortable, even in the womb!

Anyhow, I read the letter through twice, getting more puzzled and more annoyed each time. Because apart from the expected ‘mum-and-dad-newsy’ stuff (sermons he was writing, neighbours he was visiting, a commendation of Bessie Crampton, who was just starting her long period of caring for the McFarlane family) beyond those things, I had no clue what it was about!

‘As for our problem, (the most confusing bit said) no one understands your bitterness more than I. I can only give you the same answer I’ve given your mother (Rita’s mother – that’s Gramma Grace, who got murdered) who, I might add, continues to storm about the town like a wild thing. (Amazing to think we once had someone in our family who could ‘storm about like a wild thing’!) Of course, there’s no denying the terrible nature of this deed! And our longing for retribution cannot be questioned. But you are not here and don’t see Sugar Town as I do.

I’ve battered the congregation for months now, as you’ve asked, and you of all people, Rita, know the power of my pulpit. No one mistakes my message. I preached from Romans this week: ‘They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh, but they that are after the Spirit do mind the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death.’ And I do believe that, in response, the people strive with their individual souls. But the striving yields nothing. As a community, they’ve closed ranks on the matter!

Johnathon Cranna (of all people) has been to see me! I know he’s never been part of the congregation. I’m not even certain that he’s a believer! But he’s a young man with an undeniable understanding of the town. He confides in me that the people are at their wits’ ends with my demands. They are, he assures me, doing everything in their power to atone, and he warns that that effort must be enough for now. (As an example, he has organised a commission for a beautiful new blue gum cross to be erected over the church’s entryway!)

I think I must believe him, Rita! In no small part because I know that God tests and tries his vessels in many ways. Surely this test is as much for the people of Sugar Town as it is for us! Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour? So we must pray for our neighbours, Rita, and also for ourselves, that we all may achieve His mystery.

And my decision is this. We will take it as a sign of blessing that God has blocked out both the memory of the past and the understanding of the present. We will raise this new child – yours and mine – to be strong; to hold his faith high above the swirling waters. And the rest, we will leave to God, who makes all things happen. I tell you this plainly, Rita, as I have told your mother. I will not further alienate this congregation by continued recriminations. You are to stop asking it of me. This is our cross to bear and bear it we shall. Reconcile yourself to it, Rita.’

The letter finished with another Biblical quote: ‘If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for battle? Corinthians 14, 8,’ and ended with, ‘Yours in the strength of God, Jacob.’

Okay, well, bits of it I could guess at. The ‘new child’, obviously, must be Asael – Asael, yet to be born, yet to be named. The ‘blocking out the memory’ thing had to refer to Bridie and the cross that Johnathon Cranna organised is still there, over the church. And the snotty, arrogant tone was, in my mind, authentically the Reverend. So yes, some of it did make a kind of sense. But the stuff about the ‘terrible deed’ and the need for ‘atonement’ meant nothing.

It had become increasingly strange to me, how Bridie nurtured her delusions about the Reverend; like he was the biblical Jacob – wise, righteous, noble and beyond questioning. Not the one who stole his brother’s blessing but the one who fought a fight with God. It was a fight she seemed to think he’d not yet abandoned, even though he’d clearly abandoned us. Us and the whole town! How could he be beyond questioning for my sister when, for me, questions were all he was worth?

I took the letter to the kitchen and dropped it on the table.

‘What’s this?’

In response, she told me that she’d had her old repeated nightmare: the whole ‘little girl and big doors and terrible weight and pushing the pain away’ thing that we’d already talked about ad nauseum heaps of times in the past. And the new bit – the voice: ‘Reconcile yourself to it, Rita.’

‘I don’t know! It’s not like I recognised the voice! But the words reminded me of the ending of this letter. So I dug around in the memory box and found it. That’s all. Just a coincidence, I expect.’

I was totally good with it being a coincidence. Frankly, I was over her dreams and couldn’t wait for the day when she was too. But the fact that she’d hidden a letter from me was something else! I mean I knew that her memory was full of holes but that didn’t give her the right to create holes in mine!

‘Okay well, I’ve never seen this letter before! Why’s that? And what’s all this stuff about a terrible deed and atonement? What’s all that about?’

‘I don’t know, Ruthie! Some old argument going on in the town back then.’

‘A family argument? Is that why we were in Brisbane? Were they splitting up or something?’

I kept picturing Rita being pregnant up to her ears, away from home and getting these heart-breaking, self-important messages from her husband.

‘Of course they weren’t splitting up! They were in love – deeply in love – having another baby! He’s a strong man, Ruthie, and those words… they’re just the language of his calling, that’s all! For goodness sake, where do you get these ideas?’

‘Gee, I don’t know, Bridie! I guess I get them out of my over-active imagination! And now and again from family letters that’ve been hidden from me!’

I suppose I went overboard a bit. I accused her of being sneaky and untrustworthy and not giving me credit for having any brains at all. I insisted that I had a right to know what quarrel had occurred between our parents and the citizens of Sugar Town and she insisted that, if such a thing once existed, it no longer did, so it no longer mattered. Dredging up the past, she said, was no way to complement the present.

‘And anyhow, as you well know, Ruthie, I don’t remember those times! I don’t know what those references were about! Which is probably why I didn’t bother showing you the letter! Okay? Because I knew you’d blow it out of proportion! Anyhow, I thought none of this mattered to you!’ She stomped. ‘Little Miss Who Cares!’

‘Well you thought wrong… Missus Why Ask Me? And I’ll thank you, in case you get the urge again, not to make any more choices for me! I’m thirteen! I’ll blow whatever I like out of proportion! And you’re not my mother!’

Long story short, we got side-tracked and plopped into the pit of our own ongoing quarrel; me wanting to be treated more like an adult and her adamant that I needed to ‘enjoy my innocence’.

‘Innocence isn’t enjoyable, Bridie! It’s humiliating!’

‘Oh, don’t be so dramatic! If old letters and old quarrels are all you have to worry about in life, Ruth, you should be counting your blessings!!’

And of course, her telling me that it wasn’t important only convinced me that it was extremely important!

‘Put it back in the box,’ she demanded, ‘and forget it! Like I have!’

I didn’t bother pointing out that forgetting it like she had apparently meant having it thoroughly lodged in your dream-memory. I stomped off but halfway down the hall I thought of a last word and went back. She was still sitting at the table but had her hands folded in prayer. (She’s the Reverend’s daughter, through and through.)

‘Dear Lord,’ I heard her say. ‘I’m still here! Still in the same place.’

She scrunched her eyes and ground the heels of her hands into them. That wrung at my heart a bit, I must say, and I decided to keep my last word to myself. Or, more properly, I guess I just re-directed it, adding my own little conclusion to her prayer: ‘Still without expectations.’ Just in case the Big Guy was open to sarcasm.

I headed back to her room, intending to do as she’d asked, but somehow I found myself detouring into my own. There were, after all, other people I could talk to. Kevin Truck, for example. I knew I’d see him later at the festival and I knew that, if I mentioned the quarrel and he knew anything about it, he’d share. This ‘terrible deed’ that had split my parents and that the town had had to atone for was not going to stay a secret! Not if I had anything to do with it!

Harvest Festival weekend! Kev says you have to beat your conscience with a stick if you’re going to do Harvest Festival properly. Flog it into submission. It’s the only way, he says, a person can celebrate the area’s blessings while staying quiet about all the things they’ve personally gotten away with. So that makes it less surprising that everything came to a head that weekend. Right from Bridie’s dream re-discovery of the Reverend’s letter, to who showed up in the travelling carnival, to the town’s reactions to Queenie! Consciences were already sore and bloodied.

Sugar Town’s Harvest Festival weekend starts off shortly after dawn, in the park behind the hospital, with the marshalling of the parade; just about the most deadly serious ‘fun’ thing you could imagine. The years that the parade comes off well are positive years for Sugar Tonians. The years it doesn’t quite, are like the dog has peed in the soup.

The thing is, of course, that you can push east as hard as you like, and some things’ll still find a way of going west. The 2008 parade, for example, looked exactly like every other parade since Ned Methusala’s 900th birthday. It had a stack of cattle trucks; each with at least one crapping big Brahman on board, because everybody loves a cow. It had tractors covered in fresh-cut sugar cane, because cane is our bread and butter. It had a fleet of semi-trailers, loaded down with four-metre long papier-maché wrenches and giant thrones made of paper daisies that the oldies in the nursing home folded by using their dentures or whatever. Because everyone loves colourful, fun things and also old people. It had bands and Brownies and Boy Scouts, Lions and Rotarians and kung fu fighters, volunteer firemen and guys with baggy britches and red balloon noses.

It had everything it was supposed to have, including, most importantly for my family, the most beautiful girls in North Queensland. It’s a celebration of fertility, right? What would be the point without beautiful girls? Which is why Bridie, who filled that bill so well, every year since she was sixteen, had dug out her little homemade signs, dolled herself up and put herself forward for Harvest Festival Queen. Not that she ever expected to win! It was just that even her public shilling for money for the Reverend’s ministry was part of what was expected in our annual parade. She had to be there. And even when we were fighting, Asael and I had to be there with her.

‘Wake up, Rosebud. It’s after eight.’

‘After eight?’ Asael said, popping out of sleep and fumbling for his glasses. ‘Holy cow, why’d’ye let me sleep, Ruthie? Is she gone already?’

‘Don’t get your colon in a twist, Hanky Boy! It’s your turn for the shower so get your bony butt moving!’

And then, because he’s a nervous little character and I like to help him exercise his demons, I added, ‘Better make it a cold one, As! Driving through those crowded streets is gonna take some alertness!’

‘I don’t feel so good, Ruthie! Maybe you should do the driving!’

Wetting himself with anxiety. The fact was that he was slated to be the one new element in the parade; for the first time playing a central part in Bridie’s display.

‘No fear, Buster. You got the training, not me! Anyhow, you gonna die, what better way to do it than on a big old Harley, eh? There’re bikies who’d die for a chance to die like that!’

Character building, I call it. Anyhow, Bridie came into the room before I could take it any further and put a thumb against his chin.

‘Don’t listen to her, she’s in a mood. Show me your tongue.’

He lolled it out, scanning her face all the while, checking her while she checked him. ‘You’ll be fine. A good breakfast is all you need.’

She pushed him away but he reached for her arm and held on. ‘When you were up early, before, in the shower, Bridie – were you sick?’

‘No, As, I wasn’t sick. I told you. I just had a dream that needed to be washed away.’

‘Me too. I had one too. I dreamed of Mum!’

‘Did you? Well, that was nice, I suppose. Was it nice?’

‘Nice’ isn’t a word Asa would ordinarily settle for but about then, I decided to bring the tension in the place down a notch. I gave him a ‘don’t push it’ glance and, knowing what was good for him, he didn’t. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I guess.’

‘Well then. Good.’

She was looking around the room like maybe she’d counted us and realised someone was missing – the Reverend, for example. Maybe he’d any moment pop out of the closet. She’s told me that sometimes, ages ago when there was just her and me and Asa and the Reverend in the house – and Bessie looking after us – sometimes she’d creep into this room in the morning, to wake him.

She liked to remember it as a sweet thing, but I bet she was scared crapless every time – in case he’d gone missing in the night, like Rita and Grandma Grace. Which, of course, is a version of what he did in the end. ‘Reconcile yourself to it,’ he’d said to Rita in the letter. It had taken a little longer to say it to the rest of us but that’s what we’d had to do, nonetheless, to Bridie’s endless bafflement.

‘Well,’ she said again to Asa, as though saying it a second time somehow summed up the situation. ‘That is nice, then.’

I could see she was still upset from our quarrel plus probably anxious about the day’s coming events so I pushed Asa off toward his room and nudged the door shut. I wanted her un-distracted and focused for a minute; not to apologise, but to explain that, even though I didn’t cry with her any more, this ‘memory box’ stuff did actually have some importance for me. Not in the ‘How-sad! I-wish-it-could-be-like-it-was!’ sense, but in the ‘curious about history’ sense. Kind of on a par with learning how Rasputin seduced the empress.

Her special dress was hanging on the closet door and she set about pinching off invisible bits of fluff. How many Festivals had that dress seen by then? Six? Seven? It was the prettiest thing she owned and she kept it just for parade day.

I fiddled at making her bed, giving her a chance to settle before starting my little talk, and she had the nightie half over her head when the door squeaked back open. Asael’s eye appeared around the corner, she dropped the nightie back over her bum and we both turned on him, fists propped on our hips.

‘You’re supposed to knock, Asael!’ I snapped. ‘You know that! You’re too old to be… !’

‘I wasn’t peeping! I just wanted to be sure… that Bri’s all right. That’s all! You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If you were sick? I’m old enough to know, you know! Than be left in the dark!’

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, not you too!’ Bridie snapped. ‘Listen! Both of you! Once and for all! I’m not hiding anything. I’m not keeping anything from you. Either of you! You have to stop… expecting things from me. Stop… suffocating me! I can’t be your…’ I thought she was going to say ‘mother’, but she didn’t. ‘I can’t be your everything. Okay?’

‘Why’re you mad? I told you I wasn’t peeping! Are you an’ Ruthie fighting?’

As I said, a clingy, obsessed little dude. I felt for him though; really. I mean, except for his obsessions and his phobias and his illness – and a pair of mismatched sisters – all he had was the knowledge that, if family history was anything to go by, he’d turn around one day and find himself utterly alone in the world. Same fear Bridie grew up with and look how she turned out!

She sighed, with a kind of weary finality. Then she relented. He was still such a boy – narrow and bony, and for his age, short. The top of his head was at Bridie’s mouth level. She held him at arm’s length, straightened his glasses on his face and pushed his hair from his forehead.

‘No, no. I’m not mad. In fact, just the opposite! I know you do it because you care. But you don’t have to fret, As. Honestly. I’m fine’ Ruthie’s fine. We’re all fine. Nobody’s fighting. Why would we be, after all? We’re family!’

‘We heard you in the night, me ‘n’ Ruthie. You got the memory box out after your shower. That’s why we came in. We weren’t s’posed to look there anymore, I thought! Because of the cryin’ ‘n’ all!’

‘Yes, well. There wasn’t any crying. Did you hear any crying? You did? Well, maybe there was just a little then. I just… sometimes I get a little sad, you know?’ She glanced at me and I gave her my best ‘time to get over it’ look. ‘But you’re right, Asael. You’re absolutely right. There’s been too much crying in this house!’

She drew him to her and he tucked his head under her chin. She beckoned me to join them, which I did because you have to make an effort, don’t you?

‘Let’s make a pact, shall we?’ she said trying to sound upbeat. ‘All three of us. Let’s promise each other – no more crying over the past.’ I knew that was meant mainly for me and I nearly pulled away out of the group hug. But she held onto me and so did Asael. ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,’ she continued. ‘That’s what Proverbs says. And you know what else let’s promise? To tell only the truth between us! What do you say?’

I guessed that that was probably also meant for me; like an apology for not showing me that letter and a promise, on her part, to do better.

‘Only the truth?’ I challenged, just to show I knew how easy a target it was to miss. ‘Nothing else?’

‘Only the truth! Always! Now, As! Have you taken your medication?’

He rolled his eyes and nodded.

‘Good then.’ She spun us both about and faced us out the door. ‘Go and get dressed, the pair of you. We’ve got a festival to attend!’

Funny, isn’t it, how a simple little animal like ‘truth’ can be so elusive. And yet create such complacency. Nonetheless, working on the belief that false optimism must be better than none at all, I did as she asked, and we all toddled off into the first day of a week that was going to turn that little animal into a monster that would rival even those in Bridie’s dreams.

Experience had taught us that, unless you were into chaos and confusion, the marshalling area was no place to be before at least ten. Later was better. That day, it was after eleven when we arrived, leaving us just enough time to stroll through the park, enjoying the real optimism that underpins so much of country life.

Hiya McFarlanes! Day’s half gone awready, did yez know?

’Nother showin’ fer the Reverend, eh Bridie! Yer made o’ gold, you are!

An’ still the mos’ beautiful girl this side o’ Lord Howe! ’F you aren’t Queen this year, I’m writin’ a complaint to the Guv’nor!

Hey Ruthie, you up for the excitement? Them Showies got a ride this year… make Tarzan wet hisself, they say!

Talk about wettin’ yerself, you lot see the comet?

Wun’t a comet, y’ignorant farmer! Was a meteor!

Well, excu-u-se me, Professor Astro! An’ my dearth o’ educational sophistication! Whatever it bloody was, it was bloody hair raisin’! Wonder where it landed!

Not too close, hopefully. Could be radio-active, eh young Asael? Could be burnin’ our bung-holes out as we speak! Whaddya reckon?

If you’d asked me then, I wouldn’t have been able to remember a day when I’d felt wary or nervous or even particularly alone in Sugar Town. People seemed to accept us McFarlanes; to trust us and even to like us! Strange, parentless little threesome that we were, we had roots there. And Sugar Tonians, as country people do, had a special feel for roots.

So, despite my embarrassment at Bridie’s annual self-flagellation in the parade, it was very warm and nice, walking through the crowd that morning; even with the new knowledge that, once, a quarrel had divided them from my parents! A division behind which Rita had died and the Reverend had planned his flight. I smiled at every greeting, even as, without my inviting them, a froth of questions bubbled in my mind.

For instance, if, as Johnathon Cranna seemed to have promised, ‘atonement’ had been made, what form had it taken? And were Rita’s death and the Rev’s leaving then completely unrelated events? Or, had Rita and the Reverend maybe gotten the wrong end of a stick and there was no ‘terrible deed’? And had the townsfolk, then, so generously forgiven the false accusations that, eventually, out of guilt, Rita did herself in and the Reverend slunk away in shame? (Too weird for reality?) Or – were all these people hypocritical and two-faced, nursing memories of the quarrel and biding their time, to put Bridie and me and Asael off our guards?

Okay, the last one was a bit over-the-top paranoid. But unlike Bridie, I’ve always prided myself on being open to all possibilities. In her mind there was no more room for the concept of a division between our parents and the town than there was for the possibility of a division between the two of them! Just as there was no possibility that some of us in Sugar Town might not share her deathless admiration for the Reverend’s absenting ‘mission’. And she had the gall to call me innocent!

On that note, though, as we chatted our way through the crowd, another possibility occurred to me – another one that, even on her least self-effacing day, would never have occurred to Bridie. And that was that these people were surely no longer a part of the Reverend’s congregation! They were part of hers! She could work nine days a week, if she wanted, trying to keep him in their minds, but it was her they were committed to loving and supporting! Not him.

The support I was giving that morning at the marshalling area (and giving very willingly, because I didn’t want to get dragooned into taking his place) was making certain Asael didn’t bolt for home. So when he started dragging me toward the line of the trees, I conscientiously put the brakes on.

‘The Gourd! It’s The Grand Gourd, Ruthie! C’mon!’

What to say about Sugar Town’s Grand Gourd! It’s a pumpkin, of course, but it’s a pumpkin in the same way that a palace is a house. The annual selection, the ‘Chosen One’ – and in some years, none are good enough to be chosen – has to be a gob-smacker! Gi-normous! Chopped in half with its guts removed, a true Grand Gourd becomes two kid-sized bathtubs. Knock on one with your fist and the vibration goes straight back up your arm and sets your ribs to thrumming – almost like the pumpkin has knocked on you rather than the other way around.

Kevin says Grand Gourds have to have drawn their nourishment from the dung-heap of the gods – an image that he appreciates more than I do. But if he’s right, back in 2008 the gods were doing their business in a remote corner of Snowy Sutton’s back cane paddock, because that year an awesome vine climbed out of the earth there, all on its own. When Snowy’s boys stumbled across it, they found it curled around a single pumpkin that stood waist high to an eight-year-old and weighed 260 kilos! They rescued it, washed it, polished it and dared the leading citizens to reject it.

‘C’mon Bri, quick! They’re taking the cover off!’

And who could resist that? 2008’s official Grandest Gourd – on the tray of Snow’s new ute, about to be unveiled to the public!

‘No, As! You know I don’t like all that business! All that excitement over a vegetable… just isn’t right!’

‘C’mon, please? We’re gonna see it in the parade anyhow! Let’s see it unveiled! Please! See? Ruthie’s coming! Please?’

She might have had her way if I hadn’t let the crowd catch us up – if she hadn’t been determined to erase the morning’s quarrel. In short order, we were right up against the ute, scant metres from the veiled monster itself.

Above us, Snowy stood, arms crossed, looking as smug as a man who has the world’s last bunyip dozing under his tarp. He gazed benevolently out over our heads, waiting, demanding our stillness. Then (unaccustomed as he was) he coughed out a blather of rubbish about honour and privilege and the amazing perspicacity of his boys who, to my mind, were about at the outer limit of their powers in recognising a pumpkin, they having barely the brains of a gecko between