‘Sad is the man who
would fall, with none to mourn him’
It had not stopped raining for
twenty days. Big fat drops pelted from the sky and carved through the soft
earth, carrying away the topsoil until swollen rivers had run yellow and brown.
Others swelled their banks, washing away entire villages in the night, taking
houses, people and livestock indiscriminately. Adam had watched helplessly as a
herd of sheep were pressed ever tighter on a shrinking island surrounded by the
muddy currents, until one by one they had been picked off, swept away and
drowned. If he ventured from the inn now, he would no doubt share the same
fate. Even as he stood well sheltered under the eaves, he could feel the cold
damp spray on his face with each breath of wind. He was late.
At
first he had even welcomed the damned weather, thinking it would be a brief
relief from the sweltering summer. But then the hard dirt beneath his feet had
begun to ooze and stick, leaving sharp imprints of his every step. The
incessant pattering of droplets on the leaf litter had sounded to him like the
pitter-patter of a thousand following feet. Every shadow in the hazy distance
hid an enemy. At night he shivered in the cold. In the day he trudged unseeing
through the damp. A typhoon is no friend to a traveler, just his luck.
Adam
knew he couldn’t stay long in this inn, a tempting prospect as it was. In the short
week that he rain had started, even straw mattresses, wooden crate tables and
musty sawdust floors had become a small luxury. Plus, there was fire, and hot
food. Any traveller who left now would draw the surprise, and the remembrance,
of the entire inn. Best to lay low. But he could not help but dream of walking
through the door of his own house, to the warmth of his wife’s arms, his
children’s laughter and the huge fireplace crackling away. It was only a day’s
walk to the border, and then only a night’s travel back to all that he held
dear. He could make it, he’s walked the same paths a thousand times. Each step
replayed in his mind, each turn, each fording, he knew them all. And yet, every
day, he still stood on the same spot on the veranda, looking out into the
sheeting rain. Soon. Soon.
***
Mia watched the rain fall outside
of her window and pressed her nose to the rivulets running down the glass. If
she squinted, the warped windows transformed into landscapes of mountains and
the streams running through them into the familiar rivers of their delta home.
She could picture her father slowly picking his way through the distant Alps at
the top of the window, before being swept up by the rain, down, down and back
to her. She rubbed the mist of her breath off the panes. She did not want to
miss that first glimpse of him through the trees.
Leanne
watched her eldest daughter tuck her slender legs underneath her skirts and
rest her head back against the frame in the alcove. She had always been the one
who watched with the most vigilance, while the rest of the family had accepted
it for a fact that her husband would walk through that door when he is well and
ready, and not a second before. But it was Mia who watched day after day
staring off into the encroaching trees when the letters came telling them he
was heading home. Leanne feared the encroaching trees would simply swallow her
slender little daughter up someday, just as it did her father. Still, the
latest letter had only come a week before, and it would be moons until they set
his place at the table for supper. Until then, lamps still need to be lit,
children washed and supper still needs to be served.
While
her husband had managed to command silence and order at the table, meals had
always been a pandemonium without him. Leanne, red faced and puffing was trying
to feed baby Zach in one hand whilst untangling the twins with the other. Mia
was trying to sneak tid bits to Teddy the puppy, while he whined and licked her
fingers with a coarse tongue, before nuzzling his snout between her feet. So
much for no animals at the table, but at this moment the twins had started
flinging broiled cabbage between them. Their laughter punctuated with squeals
of disgust as the green globs settled in two mops of golden hair and stained their
satin smocks. Her eldest boy, Junius, sat straight backed in the great oak
chair between them and ate with a solemn dignity unbefitting his thirteen
years. Even as she wrestled the twins apart and back into their chairs, Leanne
found herself wishing her husband would reappear in her arms so that she might
watch his eyes bulge as she strangled him. Just as quickly, the wave of anger
passed into longing. She gathered up her skirts and stepped over the dog,
taking her place at the head of the table. Quietly, she began to eat amidst the
din.
***
‘You know that your father is a criminal right?’
‘What do you know?’
‘My mum said she saw your dad sneaking around in the middle
of the night, and had a great big rucksack over his shoulder bulging with bad
things! He’s going to get a-arr-arrested’
‘Well your mum’s a liar, my dad is a trader! He goes to
other countries and brings back food for us’
‘Ha, a smuggler more like. You’re a thief too!... Ah!’
Mia looked at the thin boy
splattered in the mud, his plain cotton overalls stained gravy brown. Bits of
twigs stuck in his hair, and a leaf was caught between his lips. He blew it
out, and proceeded to smudge much over his eyes as he cried. Mia felt oddly
ashamed of herself, standing over the boy like that. Though he was a year
older, she felt like it was her baby brother she had pushed into the puddle.
She watched him sob for a while, but his shrill cries and hiccoughing began to
grow tedious very quickly. She turned from the half muttered insults and headed
up her veranda. Mia could never understand why her mother wanted her to play
with the neighbour’s son so much, she much rather enjoyed her books and the
company of her siblings. At least she didn’t have to put up with the insults of
her father, whom she adored.
It was
the same at school. When the schoolmaster would deliver his daily speech about
the evils of excess, the devils within all humans that make us all greedy,
wanting more, more, more by taking from those who do not have, those who drink
the blood of their peers and line their pockets with the skin of others, there
would be the odd snigger and nudge directed her way. Her teacher didn’t like
her much either. She’d always be picked as an example, paraded in front of her
school if her hair ties were too colourful, her faux leather shoes too real,
her jacket too new or her bag too big. She’ll grow up to be a consumerist, they
had said, a vane, shallow and selfish person who gives in to their own
hedonistic desires at the sacrifice of all else. It was such a waste in a girl
so young they said, it wasn’t wholesome. Finding no fault in Mia herself, a
cloud of speculation and rumour had surrounded her family ever since. But Mia
had never quite enjoyed talking to the people around her anyway, so it was no
great loss for her that they kept their distance from then on.
***
Junius,
or Jun, as everyone called him, believed himself to be a sensible child. From
his earliest youth, his father had been absent, often for months at a time, and
had only spent short weeks before leaving again. While he loved his father very
much, and he truly did, he grew up knowing that he would have to fill the chink
where his father should have been. His place was in the home, with his mother
and his siblings. His duty was to help his mother tend the field; adhere to his
studies, and to join a guild when he became of age in order to pursue a life
skill. And yet, deep down, he was a romantic too. A question that had plagued
him since he knew how to question that never left his mind. What kind of
occupation had so enraptured his father that overwhelmed even the desire for
the warmth of home? Though he was told that his father was a merchant he was
too old to be fooled by that. The big families that had come discreetly through
their doors in coaches, clinking with gold and left with heavy trunks and a
lighter purse had informed him otherwise. His father was no ordinary trader.
His home was different too. While
on the surface, it was modelled after the bare hovel standard of sawdust
floors, rough wooden furniture and stuffed straw, little forbidden luxuries
were tucked away in spring cupboards built into the warm brick walls. Pop-up
mirrors and small glass trinkets were released from the top of drawers through
a simple crank lever. They had down quilts for freezing winter nights. There
was even a miniature crystal vase tucked inside a small wooden box for
snowdrops in spring. Seven feet under the floor, there was even supposed to be
a secret buried cellar. Of course, no one had ever bothered to dig it up. While
Jun appreciated these creature comforts and how happy they had made the
womenfolk, he could not help but wondering if this was corrupting the
principles that had been drummed into their brains since birth. Excess is evil.
Squander is sin. Repeat…
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