August and Elsie couldn’t bring themselves to eat in the end, and Elsie, avoiding her marriage bed another night, had fallen asleep on the couch. August walked into the field and could see that the windows of the workers’ annexe were darkened. She thought about Saturday when they’d gather together, imagined the lights on again. After Jedda disappeared no workers came and stayed and the annexe doors had been closed since, lights dimmed. Elsie and Albert had also let the preaching and karate room in the front of the house turn quiet. All the photos of Jedda were taken down and wrapped in muslin and put away. And just like that the home became just a house, they never really talked about Jedda Gondiwindi again. In the beginning people had shaken their heads in the street, and mothers wept, and at afternoon tea the few people that came by wondered aloud how something so bad could happen. How puzzling it was – that she could disappear without a trace. There were murmurs and tears, but no-one had answers. After that, childhood wasn’t so carefree, it was risky. Kids got picked up from school, parent volunteers crossed names off lists and manned the bus stops, few were allowed to walk home alone, and playing on the street was mostly forbidden. In spring no-one sold purple bunches of Paterson’s curse to tourists by the side of the road. Though, the thing about a small town in a place like Massacre Plains is that they love their own. Or if they don’t love them, they at best stick by them; defend them against the outside world of troublemaking out-of-towners, tourists, big money. But the Gondiwindi weren’t their own. They never double-checked if they saw a Gondiwindi walking home alone. The newsreader said Jedda’s name and flashed the school portrait on the screen only twice over a pressure-cooked week, and Jedda, like the kids who went missing, the brown-skinned children like her, became a mystery manufactured to forget about.
But the Gondiwindi (and the Coes, Gibsons, Grants and every other family like them) couldn’t forget. Almost every woman’s hair in the family then took a journey into silver and, by the next year, all August’s aunts looked old and grey on the tops of their heads. All the religion and the festivity of a full house became mute rooms, faded to white noise. That noise of the mind where all the questions restaged and all suspicion rehearsed. Over the once-comatose valley of town, their minds rattled with every combination. August, just nine years old – her heart stretched like bubblegum string until it snapped. And it stayed snapped.
Once August had run away from Massacre Plains and made something resembling a life, when someone would ask her if she had siblings she’d tell them she had a sister but never said she was missing. August would furnish a space in the universe where she imagined she could have been; at twenty Jedda was at a faraway university, at thirty she was expecting her first child in the city. Or sometimes she’d just say she was dead. Life or death have finality, limbo doesn’t; no-one wants to hear about someone lost. Someone that just went and disappeared altogether.
In the field now her skin prickled, that big organ remembering everything that happened before. She thought about what her nana mentioned – of losing the house, of all the Gondiwindi leaving here forever, and even though the bad memories were beginning to seep back into her skin, it still didn’t seem right to her to be forced off that place. Not, she thought, if they go all the way back to the banks of the river and further, like her poppy had always said. The air changed, a breeze pulled at the trees and August looked up from that dark field where stars were hidden. The possibility of rain was a simple smell, a good taste. She slipped off her shoes and within seconds the dirt that stretched out around her was covered in fresh scars from the sudden, heavy rain. It was a single burst. A thermal updraft but not enough to break the hard topsoil. August thought about what her poppy used to say, that rainfall after a dry spell is the perfect condition for good wheat yields and also, the perfect condition for locust outbreaks. Simply put, he’d say, sometimes there isn’t a silver lining at all.
In the walls of her former bedroom she smoked out the louvre window, fingering the packet of cigarettes. Her mouth ached for something more, wanted some unknown balm, not a kiss, or a meal, or a drink, but something long denied. Since she was a girl the ache had scratched further inside her, for something complete to rest at her tongue, her throat. The feeling that nothing was ever properly said, that she’d existed in a foreign land of herself. How she saw home through the eyes of everyone else but her. The feeling had begun before Jedda vanished.
She stubbed the cigarette out, looked at the block of telly rehomed in the corner of the room. On the same telly, that was once downstairs, the newsreader had initially encouraged people to search their properties, dams, silos and abandoned wells. Some people searched with dogs. August had wandered down to the flats of the Poisoned Waterhole Creek and ate roots and tubers for the first weeks without a sister. She’d taken slices of stringybark gum and let the paper melt on her tongue. Sucked at the bulrush reeds. She’d been compelled to eat the earth, become immune to it so it didn’t hurt, eat up the whole place where Jedda was lost. Forever? If she could eat the entire earth, be of the earth, she thought she too wouldn’t disappear that way. A month later when Jedda was still missing Albert baptised August himself in the field under the hot cracked sun while she cried. Everyone was gathered and talking about the sanctity of childhood, the kids they kept saying, and then her poppy poured water over her head and recited the absolution of the dead:
‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. For unto Thee are due all glory, honour and worship, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.’
He told August that it was to protect her, and she, feeling all the weight of blood rushing to her head in his hands, saw the world as she always felt it was – turned, upside-down.