Now there’s a sign that says maude before you get into town. A few dusty cars and dogs, the weatherboard store, the Maude Hotel with its bull-nosed veranda, and the square sandstone post office that used to seem so big.
The mail van driver turns from the bitumen road and pulls to a stop in the dirt outside the post office door. I take my suitcase from among the mail bags in the back. A truck rattles through on the road to Broken Hill.
I sit on the one dusty bench and close my eyes. It’s hot and I’m tired. I’m not sure what I’ll do if he doesn’t come. I don’t want to talk to the locals. I could hitchhike out there and see what’s left, but nobody drives in that direction. The flies are loud as an echo in a pipe, and the heat is thick, the air just hangs in slabs. I wish Callie was here to dilute it somehow, as a decoy. She loves the heat, Hoofers used to call her Lizard.
A new sign above the general store says Cova Cottage in red. The blacksmith’s shop is gone from over the road. There’s a garage with a petrol pump in its place, and a feed store with a phone box outside. There is no one in the street.
I wind my watch nineteen hours ahead of Los Angeles time. It’s ten to eleven on Thursday morning, 16 January 1958.
He gets out of a brown and white Vauxhall sedan in front of the general store, goes around to the boot of the car, opens it, and stands there. He looks shorter than I imagined. I pick up my case and walk towards him. He has on a fawn-coloured, long-sleeved shirt, buttoned at his wrists despite the heat, and a brown-checked hat with a peak. He wears dark glasses that don’t suit him, but they hide his bunged-up eye.
I say “Hello” as I put my case in the trunk. Hands are not shaken. He is smaller, the way older people’s necks recede into their shoulders. I left when I was twelve, he was taller than me then. I haven’t seen him since.
I get in the passenger side and look over at him as he leans forward to start the car. “I guess you got my telegram,” I say. He nods as the car crunches forward on the gravel. It smells vaguely of banana, as though there might be a peel blackening under the seat.
At the pub he takes a right onto the Burrabogie road out of town. As he turns the steering wheel, I watch the backs of his hands, freckled brown with sun and ingrained with dirt. It’s hard to imagine them once young and pink and touching my mother.
It’s hotter than I remember. Sweat pools on my shirt as it clings to the ribbed seat behind me. My legs itch in my trousers. I pull a knob that says “fan” in the hope that some air might circulate, but he reaches over and turns it off.
“Runs through petrol,” he says. He’s still not a generous man.
I wind down the window and rest my elbow, let in the furnace from outside. “Bushfire weather,” I say, a bleak attempt at conversation.
The Murrumbidgee is low. The bridge is still unfenced but it’s now been cemented for cars. On the other side, Muddy Gates Lane is the same dusty track of a road, an unpuddled path through the mulga, named in a wet year; I’ve never seen it muddy. Once we’re on it, the body of the car shakes hard, dust comes up through the floor.
On the bench seat between us a stack of empty egg cartons, cupped one inside another, edges forward each time we hit a rut. He pulls out the armrest from its hole in the seat and lays it on top of them to keep them still. I take hold of the vinyl strap above the door.
“These windscreens shatter,” he says, slowing the Vauxhall down. The speed indicator changes from orange to yellow as the coloured line recedes across the dashboard. The windshield is shaped like a big, bent fish. The lane is nothing but bumps and ruts, there is no choice but to hit them. He slows enough so the tyres don’t skim the corrugations, they enter each of them deliberately.
My father starts parting and closing his lips; the spittle between them makes a sound like a drip from a tap. I want to put my fingers in my ears to avoid it and hum like I did as a child. Instead, I try and remember why I’m here. There are things I want. The photo of my mother by the fountain in the snow, the dress wound up in an Arnott’s biscuit tin. I left it under the boards where the milk separator stood on the meat safe floor. I want to visit her grave, plant something there.
The sign on the cypress tree at the gate still says Palparara. The house is the same but the garden is gone. My father takes a hand off the wheel and wipes his palm on his pants. The hand that didn’t shake mine. I wonder if bits of truth will fall from him?
“Do you know I’ve been living in Los Angeles?” I ask. I don’t mention Maryland. “It was a furnished apartment.” I don’t mention how, half asleep and sweating in the echo of the street, I saw images of my mother forming in the shapes and car-lit shadows in the ceiling above my bed, and in the breeze that shifted the light in the chintz of the curtains as they swelled along the wall. I look over at the squeezed-up man beside me as he stops the car in the shade outside the house and makes the tap-drip sound with his nervous live-alone lips.
“It must be noisy in America,” he says.