Grandfather Ison died in comfort in Adelaide but the family had him carried home for burial in his beloved mid-north, in the cemetery behind the open-cut mine, where his wife Antonia and the generations of Isons before him had been buried—where the season seemed always to be high summer, the red dirt unforgiving to picks and shovels, the bull ants quick to rise up and bite, the mourners stunned by the heat. Anna looked down at her feet. Ants. Fast, hardy, segmented black scratches swarming over the caps of her shoes and on to her socks. She kicked, stamped her feet, raising a dust cloud. Keep still, Aunt Lorna hissed, her face unreadable. Anna shook off the last of the ants and kept one wary eye upon the ground and another on the rear doors of the Pandowie hearse. Uncle Kitch, her father, Mr Showalter and three men she didn’t know were shouldering into position under the coffin. Now they had begun a slow march with it to the grave’s edge. Anna glanced at the faces around her, to see who was crying, or should have been crying, or was faking it. Then, in October, Beulah died and there was another funeral. Anna’s mother said: Poor old girl. When her father had died she had said: Poor old boy. Four years later, a school project took Anna back to the cemetery to find the headstone of George Catford. She searched, but he wasn’t there, and wind, rain and the erupting roots of the pine trees had long ago toppled all of the old headstones into the nettles, so she went to the tourist information office next to the tractor dealership in the main street. The man there dug up a facsimile of the November 1851 edition of the Chronicle:
Coroner’s Inquest—Death of the Discoverer of the Pandowie Mine. An inquest was held on Friday, 21st inst., on view of the body of George Catford, who met his death under the following distressing circumstances:— The deceased, who was the discoverer of the Pandowie Mine, was engaged in cutting wood in the Pandowie Scrub for the Copperworks, and had come into Pandowie for the purpose of obtaining a settlement for his work. He was last seen alive on Tuesday, the 18th inst. about 2 o’clock p.m. by a man of the name of Albert Woolley who was also employed in woodcutting. Catford was then standing at the door of an old vacant hut in the creek at the Pandowie Scrub. Woolley spoke to him and found that he was drunk. Nothing further was heard or known of poor Catford until about 3 o’clock p.m. on Thursday, 20th inst., when a little boy about ten years of age casually entered the hut to seek a piece of twine for some childish purpose and saw the deceased lying dead on the floor of the hut, nearly naked and severely burnt. The child communicated the fact to his mother, who lives in a hut on the opposite side of the creek, who in turn alerted the Constable in Pandowie. From the position in which the body was found and from the medical testimony of Dr. Reid, it was clear that the deceased had met his death by falling into the fire while in a state of intoxication and the Jury returned a verdict to that effect.
When the boys who’d been in her final year began to die, Anna came home for the funerals, standing head bowed at the graveside—often alone, as if the other kids felt that she’d relinquished all claims to the district and its emotions when she left to live in the city. She came home for those funerals and soon a sense of dread, a paralysis, set in when she was not at home. One day she simply walked out on her textbooks and lectures and came back for good. She was waiting, waiting. If only Lockie would write. If only she had not precipitated the break that kept them miles and emotions apart. His two years in the army were almost up; with any luck he’d make it. Anna and Sam buried Michael in a tiny coffin in a tiny hole in the ground. Once or twice at the graveside, Anna had to shake herself covertly, to wake herself up, to fix her drift-dreaming mind on the funeral, but again and again her attention was caught by her father’s hands, the way they angled under the casket, the way his fingers were splayed against the varnished black flank, the lopped-off middle finger apparently stuck in a hole. She could see from Sam’s face that he wanted to say: You’re a controlled one, but he held his tongue. Anna wanted to say: You don’t understand. When Sam’s father died, Rebecca came up for the funeral, dressed in tailored black trousers. She hooked her arm in Sam’s and stayed close to him, at the church, at the graveside, at the house. Anna felt pity for him. The Ascension Church had stepped in and rendered him powerless, an onlooker. His surging grief beat futilely against their implacable busy calm. They made themselves at home in his father’s house. He found them in his father’s study. They helped themselves to his father’s petrol. And to cap it all off, he said, slamming down the phone that evening when he was alone with his wife, daughter and mother again, their chief Bible-basher has the nerve to ring and say his car’s just conked out somewhere the other side of Adelaide. I mean, what’s he expect me to do about it? Lousy so and so. Rebecca snorted, giggled, tried to hold it in. Then Anna, Mrs Jaeger, and finally Sam, all of them laughing, the repressive weight of the dead man evaporating around them. The Committee intends to update the Statue of Remembrance in Redruth Square by carving the names of the war dead of Korea (one) and Vietnam (five) in the marble column. Fine, Anna types, watching her words creep across the monitor, but let’s also remember George Catford, who stumbled unrewarded upon the ore body that later returned dividends of eight hundred per cent to investors. Sam says: Why do you always have to twist things, make progress sound as if it’s greedy, the old-timers out for all they could get? One year short of the year 2000, Sam will gulp and die. Only fifty-three. One minute he’s arguing with the boss, the next minute he’s dead. Hard to believe. Arousing outrage in Rebecca’s face: Believe it, Mother. Dad’s been depressed for years. Couldn’t sleep, obsessive, you said so yourself. Ashamed because he was reduced to being a paid manager of his own place. He was a candidate for a heart attack. Couldn’t you see that? The cold kitchen will fill with silence around them. Three cups on the sink, tea dregs, the ticking clock. They will walk to the car, three women in black, the baby in her best pin-tucked white. The silence stretching all the way to the little church, scores of dusty cars angled up and down the nearby streets, people shuffling, looking away, a silence broken by Anna’s sudden grief, her helpless, racking tears. Rebecca will touch her arm: Mum, come and stay with us for a while. Gasping: Thanks, I think I will, just till I find a place of my own. In her place by the sea, the phone will ring, another funeral, an old friend, a stroke, a heart attack, cancer. Life entails loss. Toward the end, Anna will find that Lockie is often in her head, and wonder if the lost six weeks had in fact been a lost sixty years. Every month or so she will hear of another death. She will attend some of the funerals—her mother’s in Pandowie, Chester Flood’s in Victor Harbor—but all of the others will occur in far-off places, places where it’s intended that the sun should warm your old bones and keep you young.