This will all be yours
by Jake Dean
I was staying at a farmhouse owned by my wife’s grandmother. We spent the first day doing farm stuff. Me, my wife, her dad, uncle and grandmother, collecting firewood, feeding the chooks, picking oranges. Then we sat in her kitchen drinking instant coffee and, later, cheap beer in the yellow light, and eating stuff cobbled together from what was in season. Potato and carrot fritters maybe, or maybe that was another visit.
The only sign we hadn’t been transported back in time about fifty years: the calendar on the wall—a huge rectangular thing featuring the correct year and month, a picture of a black-and-white cow, and the garish logo and contact details of a farm machinery shop, which I think I spotted on the way into town.
Most of the conversation was small-town gossip about family friends and acquaintances from neighbouring farms and the row of shops and institutions on Main Street. Whose farm had gone bust, who’d had a mental breakdown, who’d divorced who. I knew none of the people they were talking about, but I became invested in the characters, who felt like real people to me, and it was nonetheless a pleasant way to spend the evening.
I had a cigarette outside on the porch before bed and marvelled at the smell of nothing but clean air and the dazzling array of stars, unencumbered by the toxic lights of the city.
The second day we took it easy. I’m not sure whether we had a plan. I do remember lots of kangaroos. Whole swarms of them, boxing and lounging in the red dirt, while we watched from the porch on old chairs in our Ugg boots.
Talkback radio and ABC news bulletins murmured faintly from the kitchen, occasionally replaced by the sound of infomercials and the inane banter of a studio panel show when my wife’s grandmother turned on the TV.
We drove to the bakery—a thirty-minute round trip with nothing but dust in between—but found it closed at midday on a Saturday.
I masturbated in the shower while the rest of the family finished their lunch and I wondered what they’d all think if they knew.
We heard my wife’s grandmother’s scream from the porch just before dusk. My father-in-law reached her first, lying still and clutching her chest, a weird grimace disfiguring the left side of her face like a mask a haunted train carnival character might wear. I’ll never forget the sounds he made when I reached them in the chook pen. A wailing child in a supermarket. The rest of the night was one long soundtrack of pain. Animal howls in the night.
It was too late for us to head back to the city, some seven hours away via roo-filled roads, half of them dead alongside the highway. Plus, my wife didn’t want to leave my father-in-law’s side in the state he was in. I tried to make myself useful while the others took turns to break down and console each other.
I overheard my father-in-law saying the only right thing to do was to bury her on the farm— where his mother had lived her entire adult life—right then and there. But my wife told him there were processes that had to be followed. I can’t remember what they might have been, but I assume the ambulance had to arrive. Reports had to be filed.
I washed and dried the dishes—my back turned to the grief—and put stuff away, probably in all the wrong cupboards, while we waited.
At some point, my wife’s uncle placed a hand softly on my back.
“We’re all glad that you’re here,” he soothed, and I was startled by how much of the kitchen light reflected off his bald head.
“She loved you, you know.”
I knew he was lying. I’d only met my wife’s grandmother maybe six times. But I couldn’t blame him for saying it. What are you supposed to say? Sometimes you’ve just got to talk to fill the air.
We drove in silence for the first hour the following morning. There were things my wife could do back in the city to help with arrangements, and we planned to drive back to the farm in the coming days to help with the funeral.
She kept her head turned to the window and I imagined she was locating memories of her grandmother, as if turning over rocks to find the bugs underneath.
“You know you could’ve been a bit more compassionate,” she said suddenly.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You barely said a thing back there, it was fucking weird.”
“I didn’t want to get in the way. I wanted to let you all grieve.”
“Well, sometimes you have to have some kind of input. Otherwise what’s the point? I’m your wife, for fucksake. You’re like an emotional mute.”
I sat silent, eyes ahead, gripping the steering wheel with the heater blasting the backs of my fingers.
At the petrol station, my wife went inside to buy a cup of coffee while I filled up the car. I imagined leaving her there and wondered whether she’d eventually find her way back to me.
Jake Dean is a writer and waverider living on Kaurna land in South Australia. His fiction has appeared in Sweaty City, The Fiction Pool, White Horses, the fourW anthology and elsewhere.