During the course of each long summer, Anna and Hugo pushed at the boundaries on their bicycles, drawn farther and farther away from Isonville by unanticipated bush tracks, gates, mine shafts and washaways, yet always they returned to the old school ruin on the sunken road, where the spirit of their mother still moved within the crumbling classroom walls. Nettles and licheny stones covered the rotting floorboards. A tilting chimney, a door frame, two window frames, three half walls and rudimentary roofbeams suggested the shape and dimensions of the old school, while the mind’s eye, and their mother’s kitchen-table stories, supplied the rest. Faded blackboard paint remained on one of the walls, and whoever those final pupils had been they had left a perfectly proportioned yellow alphabet across the top and the twelve-times table down one side. The desks were long gone. Only the schoolmaster’s residence remained intact. Showalter Park sprawled a few hundred metres away across the lucerne flats, the homestead screened by lawns and a box-hedge from a chapel, a woolshed, a dairy and a scatter of stone workers’ cottages, shearers’ quarters, barns and workshops, set among red gums, pines and weeping willows. A sufficient number of cooks, servants, stablehands, stockmen, blacksmiths, well-sinkers and gardeners and their families had lived on the property before the First World War to warrant the school. Showalter Park had been a self-supporting feudal enclave, and the Showalters and their practices were considered, by Government House aides-decamp, to be a suitable diversion for circulating earls and minor princesses. By the early thirties, when the Showalter boys were riding to the school in a horse and sulky driven by the children from Isonville, the school belonged to the Education Department. Anna’s mother tapped her finger on an old photograph: It was the Depression. There were only ten pupils left. Me, your Uncle Kitch, Wes and Rex Showalter, the overseer’s kids, a couple of sharefarmers’ kids. Kitch and I would collect the Showalter boys and park the sulky in that little stonewalled paddock at the back of the school and let the horse go. Rain or shine, five days a week. By jingo, those frosty mornings could bite. I get chilblains just thinking about it. Habits of contempt and cruelty at the high school enabled Anna and the others to ignore Chester Flood. He had no parents; he lived at the convent; he had the skinny, raw-boned cast of someone born to poverty, dirt and cunning. Five out of ten; nought out of ten; two out of ten. Twice he was put back a year. Ink stained his fingers and sleeves; his trousers were holed and shiny, revealing his hard, brown, possibly grimy flanks. Mr Wheelwright bent Chester Flood over a desk and cut him with a whistling cane. Anna stopped breathing: Chester held out until the fourth cut, then lifted his bony, martyred skull and cried out, a long, throaty cry of protest and deep, deep pain. Anna was impressed by his close and very human flesh and odour, his snuffling tears and nose-wiping misery. Yet he remained invisible, and Anna and the others saw him beaten so often that finally they failed to register that it was happening. A tutor at the university left his desk one day and crossed the room in front of Anna, saying: Let’s give ourselves some privacy here. She heard a faint snip: he’d locked his office door. She looked up and saw the heat and gleam of powerful feelings on his face. He hovered a moment, then pulled an office chair close to hers. Their knees touched, precipitating in Anna a breathless, anticipatory paralysis. He leaned close to her, vinyl squeaking under his rump. The man was notorious, and Anna waited. When his warm, dry hands picked up her wrist and kneaded the tendons in her forearm, she closed her eyes briefly and swallowed. She heard his low, goading voice through the veil of her emotions: I read your article in the student rag. What could you possibly know? You are an empty page waiting for experience to write itself across you, and the sooner the better. Have you ever had an idea of your own? That pretty head of yours is full of refectory talk, correct me if I’m wrong. Anna heard his loathing even as his warm hands crept along her compliant upper arms. When he had reduced her to tears he began to kiss her, a hundred highly charged bites and lip-pulls on her neck and earlobes. She was dependent, submissive, emotionally captive. Then the phone rang and he exhaled involuntarily and Anna smelt an old, old corruption working inside him. But still, he took her to his house in Unley and she went willingly. When Anna married and had children, one of the burdens of her existence was the interest her parents-in-law showed in the spiritual growth of their grandchildren. They were appalled to learn that the primary school did not offer religious instruction of any kind, let alone instruction in the many faiths of which they disapproved. They undertook to guide Anna’s children in spiritual matters, and soon Rebecca and Michael were clapping hands for Jesus and reading comic-strip moral tales printed on blurry cheap paper. Anna’s husband is on the Parents and Friends Committee for the high school these days, a body that quivers with responsibility now that the government has given local bodies the right to determine who will teach their young. Sam’s eyes burn: We don’t want any ratbags on the staff. What have you heard about So-and-so? he’ll ask—which Anna takes to mean: Is So-and-so left-leaning, ambiguously single or tinged with foreignness? Among the illustrations she has collected for her history of the town is a photograph of pupils outside the Showalter Park school in 1879. There are a couple of gawky eighteen-year-olds towering above the little kids. Maybe one of them is Elijah Ison, son of one of the original Ison brothers. Elijah later joined the Pandowie Social Improvement Association:
It is a grand opportunity for a young fellow from the Bush to improve himself in moral and intellectual matters. I recited Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard by Thomas Gray, a capital piece, and got taken to task for standing incorrectly.
Anna will regret that she didn’t finish her degree. She will enrol in the University of the Third Age and start again. It will be unkindly put to her that women undertake further study in order to leave their husbands, but Anna will need no such artificial means. Died when he was fifty-three. Heart attack.