Use-By Date

Written by Mick Donaldson

(Twitter: @donaldson_mick)

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible.”

― Erich Maria Remarque

The lights began to flicker, then went out. In the darkness, Frank put a weathered hand on Amy’s thin arm. He been expecting this moment, glancing at the unpaid bills on the sideboard.

It was hot, outside and inside. Always hot these days, it seemed.

“I’ll kickstart the generator, we’ll be right,” he reassured her.

Whilever the old Gardner was running, saved all those years ago from Uncle Rick’s farm, things could be preserved, at least until the diesel ran out.

Amy sat, silent, and he touched her greying hair gently as he arose from the wooden table, which creaked its usual protest.

He came back and cleared the plates. Amy didn’t have an appetite.

***

Frank and Amy’s only child, Sam, left home for the army with his onion ring, that permanently sunburned strip of skin between his work trousers and T-shirt that was exposed when bending over furrows.

“We gotta let him breathe a bit, spread his wings, let him get this out of his system,” Frank said, to himself as much as to Amy. “He’s gonna learn a lot of stuff that’s gonna be useful when he comes back, when he’s ready to take over the place.”

Amy looked up at Frank from a pile of manilla folders containing the farm accounts, her brows knitted.

She found mothballs and put them in her son’s drawers.

***

In Frank’s childhood summers, his family would live at Uncle Rick and Auntie Lola’s place, Frank’s dad taking a break from woodcutting to work on the harvests. Frank learned to drive tractors, then headers, just about anything with wheels and a motor, all night long when necessary.

Coming in from the machinery shed, he saw Uncle Rick alone, leaning against the corrugated iron water tank, his chin tilted to the stars, the moon shining only wan midnight light on his bearded profile, as if out of respect. It was the first time Frank had seen a grown person crying. A long way away, a politician had said it was the recession the country had to have.

Frank crept through the shadows to the lean-to bedroom he shared with his cousin, who was lying on his back on the iron-framed bed, looking at the bare rafters. They didn’t talk until the night subsided, and they were called to break their fast.

***

He read the local paper to Amy, their daily ritual since her incident. She had always liked to know what was happening.

He sat next to her, a sinewy arm around her slight shoulders, his other hand turning the pages in front of her on the table and pointing to pictures as he read the captions. When the sweat formed on her brow and began dripping on the paper, he knew it was time for her to rest. He took her up gently, wrapping his heart around hers.

***

After two tours of Afghanistan, Sam left the army. He started to come home less frequently.

“Terrible things were done over there,” he said during a visit, running his finger through a line of dead drought flies along the windowsill. “Some of it by us.

It was the only time he’d spoken about it. They weren’t sure whether he was talking to them, or to the powdery paddocks.

Amy stood against Sam’s broad shoulder and peered out the window, hoping to see with his eyes. He twitched involuntarily at her touch. A dust devil, an apparition from a parched land, made its macabre twirling dance across the paddock.

“Gathering up souls, that’s what grandma used to say,” Sam said.

“I wonder where they go?”

***

The next time they saw Sam, he was lying on a mortuary table and people in white coats and blue caps asked them to identify him.

“He’s my son, always has been, always will be,” Amy said, tidying the fringe from his forehead, startled at the coldness of his skin. She put her own woollen shawl across his shoulders, tucking it in gently under his body, so that when they left him to the commonsense of that place, she would not be completely gone from him.

“He’d survived all those shit kickers over there,” Frank whispered fiercely through a crack, his arm a little too tight around Amy.

“They got him in the end,” she said, not returning his hug.

***

Amy had desperately wanted to see the touring art exhibition in the city, only a four-hour drive, and he promised he’d take her, half-listening, preoccupied with the daily market report on the radio.

Come that day, she was up earlier than usual, vegetables to pack before they left. Amy always pulled a working shift on the farm, as well as looking after the bookkeeping and the house.

She’d laid out the white midi dress, the one he’d said made her look like that girl out of Dirty Dancing.

He came back in for breakfast, saw the dress, and groaned. “Sorry love, I’d forgotten about the exhibition. Look, gotta get this stuff in the ground. If there’s a rainy day, I’ll take you, how’s that?”

She nodded quickly without saying anything and packed the dress away.

When he got back in the evening from the paddocks he saw a note on the table: “I’m not a rainy day option.”

***

Frank spent three days looking for her. Phoning, messaging, texting. Visiting the local haunts, the friends, his desperation making him immune to the humiliation of asking people had they seen his wife.

At last, there was a response, from her sister’s place, and when Amy agreed to return he was in the truck within five minutes with nothing but a water bottle and a full tank for the thousand-kilometre round trip.

“I’m tired, Frank,” she said to him on the journey home.

“I’ll make it better. I swear,” he said. his voice crackling like a radio signal competing with errant interference. “I’ll get some casual help in.”

She leaned her head against the truck window, allowing the vibrations from the beaten-up asphalt to massage her temple, as they drove through unrelenting vistas of low, lurking mallee scrub. She wondered whether this was all there was, now that Sam was dead. That’s what made her so tired.

***

They were coming for the farm. Amy did the numbers, forwards, backwards, sideways, but the answers resolutely refused to budge. They were financially counselled to within an inch of their lives.

The government said the new trade deals it had signed would reward the most efficient producers while keeping food prices down for families. It was a win-win. And there was government money for farmers struggling against the flood of cheap imports.

“There’re two reasons we can’t get that money, Frank,” Amy complained. “One begins with red and the other ends with tape. They never really meant to help people like us.”

Everyone around was selling out to BigAg.

As he’d always done when he felt men crying and boys staring, Frank ironed his King Gees and polished his boots, finding refuge in steely neatness.

***

After Sam’s death, Amy found her easel and took up painting again. As a child, a sharp grandmother had recognised her talent at depicting raw emotion; a baby alone crying in a cot, it’s face streaked with greys and reds and purples; in the next panel, in the arms of its mother, its face and its mother’s sharing the one, huge yellow-starred smile, which had also become the sun.

Grandma paid for art lessons but Amy was always in trouble for breaking out of the paint-by-numbers techniques.

She eventually confined herself to hurried snatches of drawing in her room, hoarding her pictures under the bed, where they could lay without criticism.

Now, in her different world, her paintings were depictions of labouring people whose edges bled into the space around them so that they became indistinguishable from the grinding machine of work.

Some were hung in regional galleries, where hungry souls, looking for sustenance, dragged dusty, shuffling boots across pockmarked, creaking pine floors, and were shocked to find their lives could be the subject of art.

***

As the colours re-entered her life, her relationship with Frank regressed. They shed the layers of complacency that had suffocated them as Frank wondered anew at the way light from the breaking sun bounced off her jawline or the curve of her nose when he set a cup of coffee down in front of her.

And Amy once again could take joy in Frank’s smile. Sam’s smile.

***

Frank pushed Amy in the wheelchair, looking dispassionately at the liverish sun scars, the bulging knuckles and the meandering veins on the back of his hands, badges that, once affixed, he had believed would protect his family forever.

For months now, he’d been retracing this journey every day, ever since he’d found Amy lifeless on the floor of the old sunroom that was her rustic studio.

The expression on her face was bewildered, like a child who’d been berated for drawing a picture in crayons on a wall for her parents. The brush remained clasped in her hand, the conductor’s baton stilled as the silence settled around them.

***

In his steely neatness, Frank had tried to phone to begin the formalities that would make Amy a statistic, a name on a form, a job to be attended to by someone who had never known her; the white coats, the blue caps, the cold metal table.

He’d gotten through to the police station but hung up as soon as the efficient voice answered, for he knew he had no further words, yielding instead to the moonlight, his back kneaded by the corrugations of an old water tank.

His wedding ring, scratched and dented, clicked against the screen as he put the phone down. Kneeling on the studio floor, holding Amy against his chest, he gazed up at the portrait.

***

Amy had created a series of paintings of Sam over the years since his death, at first redolent of La Pieta—a mother cradling her tortured son.

As the series progressed, the mother receded until the son emerged as the central figure, his back turned at first with each subsequent painting showing him shifting, gradually, to face outwards.

Sunlight caught glimpses of his face, until the final portrait in which he stood front on, hands on hips in his characteristic pose, his lopsided grin, the furrow in his brow a defence against naïve joy.

His mother’s presence was now only hinted at in the background, a swirl of lines, a glance at a passing stranger, a person she’d thought she’d known, her mouth agape at the inexplicable.

***

Frank carefully positioned the wheelchair and sat with Amy at the kitchen table a final time.

He placed the newspaper before her and read it.

He spoke to her, retracing conversations from their peaks, intimate music from a stereo record now played only on an old mono machine.

The drips from her brow onto the paper began too soon but he could not move, until the noise resounded like cannon fire and the newspaper was rent by damp corrugations.

The diesel was gone now, the faithful Gardner silenced. The big walk-in freezer out back, their grotto, could no longer shelter his deity.

Amy’s form began to slump over the table. Frank patted her face tenderly with his handkerchief before kissing her on the brow and squeezing her hand gently, cleaving to a softness he had not felt since her death.

He got out of his chair and walked stiffly to Amy’s studio and stood for a long time in front of Sam’s final portrait.

It was not yet finished. He took up a brush, dipped it in a pearlescent hue and signed Amy’s name on the picture.

His face was almost pressed against the canvas, looking closely at her brushstrokes, at how they were rough ridges and uncertain valleys and trailing. unfinished lines, making no sense on their own.

Frank fumbled about in his pocket for his phone, to make the call, for Amy. For Amy to be anchored in the soil. Then the soil would be all he needed, to start again.

About the Author:

Mick Donaldson is an Australian writer pre-occupied with socio-economic justice, climate change, the kaleidoscope of personal relationships and why toast always lands butter-side down on the floor.

Donaldson has been published in Aesthetica Magazine’s anthology of short stories, CERASUS literary magazine, Half and One online magazine and publication pending in AutoEthnographer literary and arts journal.