Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
just begun, but I have a system: we carry rubbish and debris in buckets to the skip and then we sift through the remaining ash and charcoal with our sifting trays, and we will work our way thoroughly through one section at a time.
“My trophies,” Hank says now, holding up a scorched and melted golden trophy he received as a child in some science fair. The fact that he had these items shipped from his childhood home in New York, over half the world and several oceans, goes a fair way to explain how much they mean to him. And yet Hank has been reacting this way, with vivid despair, at every recognizable item he has come across, from old CDs to beard trimmers.
I suppose, woodenly, that my lack of sentimentality has turned out to be a good thing, that it was right, in the end, not to keep anything of my mother’s, and to tell myself it was because I wanted nothing from her or of her.
“Put your mask back on,” I say to Hank.
He slumps onto his overturned bucket, holding the trophy to his chest and gazing around at the house. I pick my way over to him and gently move his mask into position. I stroke his hair, once. Then I return to my work, knowing that it will be me who clears and sorts through this house, room by room, while my husband grieves his losses.
“I’m going to take the job on Shearwater,” he tells me without warning.
I straighten and look at him over the wreckage. I am so hot under this protective gear.
“I’ve been saying no because I needed to be here if we were going to have kids,” he adds. “But you’re never going to give me those, are you?”
My mouth opens but no sound comes. That he is doing this now, in this moment, is astounding to me.
“There’s nothing here for me anymore,” Hank says.
I turn and walk out of the ruins. I walk past where the eucalypts stood tall and proud and so very old. Then into the forest of alpine ash. They are dead now. Everything seems to be. It is an eerie place of white and black. There is no birdsong. No rustle of tiny feet under
brush. I sink onto an overturned piece of roofing tin that has flown a long way to land here. I don’t cry for my husband, who wishes to leave me. I cry for the forest. For the trees and the shrubs and for all who lived within it. So many species. So many creatures I’d come down here to look for each day, and delight in the glimpses I caught. I cry for my life here, in this little patch of paradise. For the safety I felt. For the woman I was while living here. I fed the magpies each evening in this spot. I waited for the passage of mother wombat and her baby, ambling slowly by. Her burrow was here somewhere.
I stop crying and stand to look, unsure why I would do this to myself. Any remains I might find will only make it worse. But I lift the sheet of tin and rest it against the burned husk of a tree. I can see the opening of the burrow in the earth. I get down on my knees, then onto my stomach, pressing my whole body flat into the ash. And I look.
I think my husband loved me as a vessel. Not consciously, I don’t think so little of him that I believe he could be conscious of this. But somewhere deep within. A buried truth in the darkness. He never took the time to discover my body, he never explored it for what it could offer aside from the obvious, he never found in me, in my essence, a purpose other than to carry children, and when I admitted I couldn’t do this for him he turned away from me. He had no more use for my limbs or my skin, my muscles or tongue or fingertips. He couldn’t even
see me anymore, my flesh. I’m not sure that such a turning away could exist in the same body as love. I’m not sure it’s possible to make so small a thing of love. I think love expands when it needs to, it adapts, it embraces.
But then, mine didn’t do that either, did it?
Hank and I carried on, pretending it was alright. He video called me from the island once a week. There was comfort in the familiarity of him. Still married, after all. Maybe I would follow him to Shearwater
one day. Maybe we could salvage a life together. But every day I did not come.
And now there is this day. Here on a windswept, starlit hill, and I think I have found something, and the broken years fall away. I think only of him as he was in the beginning, when he taught me how things could grow, how they could entangle. I think of how I loved him when that love was simple. Because I am quite certain I have found his grave.
Dominic
She disappears. She doesn’t tell us where she’s going, and she doesn’t let the kids go with her. I spend every minute waiting for her to come back, forcing myself not to go out in search of her. She is not mine. Still, I wait for her.
I thought she would ask me about the blood in the hut, but she didn’t. It’s disorienting. All I have is Raff’s explanation for their trip south, how she presented as worried about the concrete, but he suspects she was using it as an excuse to get back to the hut, where she used her chemicals to prove blood was spilled. He swears to me they spoke no more about it, that he told her nothing except to talk to me.
She did not talk to me.
She must suspect violence. She must think I’m lying to her.
Why did she come here.
I lie awake, obsessing over these questions. Thinking of her. I have an urgent need to fix this, but I don’t know how. I feel lost at the thought that she will not come back to us. To me.
When Rowan returns, I am expecting a confrontation. But instead she gathers more supplies in her pack and sets out again without a word. This time I follow. Because strapped to her back is a shovel. I think of what’s buried in this island and know I can’t let her dig it up.
I lose her for a while; I’ve been leaving a huge gap between us. I think she has walked all the way down to the southern beach and the seed vault, and my heart lurches, but I can’t find her at either place. I retrace my steps and by following the shoreline back around I eventually
see her in the distance. How did she know to come here? Did one of my children tell her? Or has she been out searching, roaming. Hunting.
She is crouched on a sloping hill, overlooking the ocean. The view is spectacular, it’s why we chose this spot. The shovel is moving. She’s already dug out the raised mound that sits beneath the rudimentary, nameless headstone.
My dread explodes into horror and I run to her. “Don’t,” I say. But when she looks up at me I see a different woman, a creature of certainty, I see that she will never stop digging, not until she’s found him.
With a shaking hand I reach for the shovel. I say, even though it’s the last thing I want to do, “Let me.” Because I can see the pain in her exhausted, hollow face, I have seen the damage done to her body, and this hole will take many hours, it is deceptively difficult to dig a grave, I know it is because I dug this one. I dug it with my son, who wept as he shoveled earth long into the night.
I do the same now. I have spent countless hours digging holes in this hillside. I did not think I’d be spending more.
What will you tell her? my wife asks. I didn’t hear her come but she’s here now. I wish she wasn’t. I don’t speak to her, I dig.
When we reach him, I lower the shovel and we both slide into the hole. Our hands gently pull the last dirt away from him. There’s no coffin; he is simply wrapped in a sheet. I have been very careful with my shovel.
“This will be bad,” I tell her. “It’s been a few weeks.”
She nods. I can see the muscles of her jaw clench. She is readying herself. Folds back the covering from his face, and looks.
I didn’t know if we would be able to tell, but we can.
Rowan starts crying. She covers her face and weeps, and then she reaches for his face, which still looks like his face, and she smooths her fingers tenderly over his cheeks, brushing the hair back off his forehead, and through her tears she asks, “Who is he?”
Alex
Alex came eight years after Tom did, and that’s how his life has been since. Trailing behind his older brother, who is everything to him. He never probes too deeply into why Tom means everything to him, for fear of uncovering hidden pain about their father having left. He prefers to just let it be fact: all Alex really wants is to be close to his brother. Tom did swimming in school, so Alex had to do swimming too. Tom learned the guitar, so Alex learned the guitar. Tom developed a passion for mathematics and science, so Alex decided he would be passionate about the same. When Tom left university in Chicago and went chasing the worst storms to hit the country, Alex had all his fears realized: he was being left behind. It was this damn eight years between them: What had possessed his parents to leave it so long? Why couldn’t they be two years apart like every other pair of siblings he knew? Tom didn’t stay put anywhere, he followed weather events, studying the extremes endured around the world-at one point he found himself in Siberia, of all places-while Alex was still trying to get through high school. When Tom moved for a time to Svalbard, Alex was limping through his biology degree. Alex only caught up to him, at long last, on his most recent venture into the wilds of the world: a stint at the research base on Shearwater Island, which was dealing with extreme weather shifts, enough to garner Tom’s interest. So much farther away than Tom had ever gone before. All the way down near Antarctica. By this stage Tom was very good at remote, at cold and exposed, at quiet. Alex had never been away from the bustle of the city. But he was determined. He had chosen to study, in a somewhat calculated way, pinnipeds and cetaceans, creatures that traversed the world, that could be found in many pockets of many seas, and thus hedged his bets. A bizarre choice, for
someone who had never seen either a whale or a seal. The closest he’d come to an ocean was Lake Michigan. But he knew Tom would choose a rough-edged coastline somewhere. And this time Alex was going with his brother.
The research base on Shearwater is full of interesting people from all over the world. Many of the scientists are from Australia or New Zealand, because of the proximity, but there are quite a few Americans to make Alex and Tom feel more at home, including Hank, their team leader. None of the researchers can make much sense of Alex, who has extremely limited field experience, almost no publications, and who chose to study sea creatures without knowing the sea. It’s quite clear that he has attached himself to his older brother and been pulled along to this outcrop of the world. As a result, Alex never feels very comfortable among the inhabitants of the base. But then he meets Raff.
“Do you know someone hanged themselves off those?”
There is sun, and they are lying in it, letting it warm their faces.