Forty Mils

"Wet wood doesn't burn and wet men don't complain. Both just sit there steaming until someone does something about it."

The wipers were losing before I'd hit the bottom of the hill. Fat drops at first — the kind that splatter against the glass like thrown eggs, each one distinct, each one its own small event — and then the gaps between them closed and the windscreen became a thing that water happened to rather than something you could see through. I flicked the wipers from intermittent to full and they dragged across the glass with a rubber shriek, smearing the water into arcs that cleared for half a second before flooding again.

The road between Collinsvale and Glenfern followed the ridge for the first few kilometres, running along the spine of the hill where the eucalypts thinned out and you could normally see across the valley to the ranges beyond. Not today. Today the ranges were gone. The valley was gone. The world beyond fifty metres had been replaced by a grey wall that moved and shifted but never opened, and the road itself had become a dark smear between the verges, its edges dissolving into grass and gravel that all looked the same colour in the flat, brownish light.

I dropped speed. Then dropped it again. The truck was heavy with a full load and the weight kept the rear end planted, but the surface was slick and getting worse — water running across the bitumen in braided channels, pooling in the dips, the road's camber doing its job in some places and failing in others where leaves and gravel had blocked the drainage. The tyres hissed on the wet surface with a sound like tearing fabric. Through the floor of the cab I could feel the steering tighten and loosen as grip came and went.

A gust hit the truck broadside and the whole cab shifted. Not much — a nudge, the kind of lateral movement you feel in your hips before your hands register it on the wheel — but enough to make my knuckles whiten. The wind was coming from the northwest now, driving the rain at an angle that turned the passenger side window opaque and made the wipers essentially decorative.

I knew this road the way I knew the grain of blue gum — every rise, every dip, every section where the council had patched the surface with a different aggregate that changed the feel under the tyres. The Proctors' turnoff was two kilometres ahead, down a gravel drive that would already be turning to slush. The trick would be getting in, dumping the load, and getting back out before the drive became a creek bed. Gravel drives in the Derwent Valley hills had a talent for this — fine for nine months of the year, then transforming into something biblical at the first serious rain, every rut becoming a watercourse, every low spot becoming a pond.

The turnoff appeared through the grey — a weathered post with a reflector that caught my headlights, and beyond it the drive curving down between a row of old apple trees that hadn't been pruned in a decade and a paddock where three horses stood with their backsides to the wind and their heads lowered, looking as miserable as horses can look, which is considerably more miserable than most animals manage.

I turned in. The truck's rear wheels slipped on the transition from bitumen to gravel, caught, slipped again. The load shifted behind me — I heard the billets knock against each other, that deep wooden percussion muffled by the rain's noise on the roof. The drive was already running with water, shallow rivulets cutting between the tyre tracks from previous visits, the gravel dark and shining.

The Proctors' place sat at the bottom of the slope — a weatherboard house from the fifties with a tin roof that had been painted green at some point and was now the colour of patience. A wide verandah ran along the front, cluttered with pot plants, a wicker chair, and a firewood rack that Mrs Proctor kept stacked with geometric precision — every billet aligned, every row level, the woman treated her woodpile the way other people treated flower arrangements. The shed where I dumped the bulk loads was off to the right, a corrugated lean-to with one open side and a concrete slab that drained well enough to keep the wood off the wet ground.

I backed the truck in toward the lean-to, squinting through the rear window at a world that had been reduced to rain and the vague shapes of buildings. The hydraulics whined as I raised the bed. The load held for a second — that suspended pause — then the whole lot went. A tonne of stringybark crashing out of the tray and onto the slab in a cascade of bark and dust and water, the noise of it swallowed almost immediately by the storm. The truck shuddered. I dropped the bed.

And then I had to get out.

I sat in the cab for a three-count, watching the rain hammer the bonnet. It wasn't going to ease. It wasn't going to pause. It was the kind of downpour that had committed to itself fully and didn't care about your plans. I pulled the collar of my jacket up, which would achieve absolutely nothing, and opened the door.

The rain hit me like something thrown. Not falling — driven. It came in sideways, needling into my face and neck, instantly finding the gap between my collar and my skin and running down my spine in a cold stream that made me suck air through my teeth. My jacket was soaked through in the time it took to walk from the cab to the back of the truck. My jeans went heavy and dark from the thighs down. My boots, which had been keeping the morning's cold out perfectly well, now filled with water that had found its way down my shins and pooled around my socks with the intimate, disgusting warmth of someone else's bathwater.

I checked the dump. The wood had landed mostly on the slab, with a few billets that had rolled wide onto the grass. I kicked them back toward the pile. The rain ran down my face and into my eyes and I blinked it away and kicked another billet and the water in my boots sloshed with each step. My shirt had plastered itself to my chest and stomach, the cotton clinging to skin that was prickling with cold, every nerve suddenly awake and complaining.

The verandah light came on. I looked up through the rain and saw Mr Proctor standing in the doorway — a thin man in his seventies in a flannel shirt and reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead, holding the door frame with one hand and peering out at the weather the way you'd watch a footy match between two teams you didn't support — mildly interested, completely unthreatened.

He disappeared inside. I went back to the truck, pulled the tailgate up, latched it, checked it. The rain had not eased. The rain had, if anything, intensified, as if personally offended by my continued presence outside. My hands were numb. My hair was stuck flat to my skull. I could feel water running along my jawline and dripping off my chin in a steady stream.

I was halfway to the cab when I heard him over the wind.

"Jim! Here."

Mr Proctor was standing under the verandah, one hand on the post, the other holding something. He'd put a waxed canvas coat on over the flannel shirt — one of those heavy jobs farmers bought once in the eighties that would apparently outlast the sun — though he hadn't stepped off the boards. Seventy-odd years of Tasmanian weather had taught him exactly where the line was between solidarity and stupidity.

I jogged over, boots squelching, rain hammering the back of my neck. The verandah roof cut the downpour off like a tap and the sudden absence of water hitting my skull was so dramatic it felt like silence, even though the storm was roaring three feet away in every direction.

He held out a thermos. Steel, battered, the kind with a screw cap that doubled as a cup.

"Tea," he said. Not a question. Not an offer. A statement of fact.

"Cheers, Keith." I took it. The metal was warm against my frozen fingers and I held it for a second, just feeling the heat before tucking it inside my jacket against my ribs, where it spread through the wet fabric and into my skin like a small, private mercy.

"Bloody day for it," he said, glancing past me at the pile of wood on the slab.

"Yeah."

"Dorothy'll sort the stacking when it clears."

"No rush."

He nodded. We stood there for a moment — him dry on the boards, me dripping onto them — with nothing more to say and no reason to drag the conversation into places it didn't need to go. His reading glasses had fogged. My teeth were starting to chatter. The horses in the paddock hadn't moved.

"Right," he said. "Get home safe."

He turned and went inside. The thermos was the sentence. Everything else was punctuation.

I hauled myself into the cab and pulled the door shut. The sound of the rain changed — from open and everywhere to contained and percussive, hammering the roof and the bonnet and the windows with a density that made the inside of the truck feel like the inside of a drum. Water ran off me onto the vinyl seat, pooling in the creases, darkening the fabric. My jeans were a second skin. My shirt clung to my chest, my stomach, the hollow of my lower back. Every movement peeled wet cotton away from wet skin and the cold bit into the exposed patches before the fabric settled back again.

I was soaked. Properly, comprehensively, irrecoverably soaked. The kind of wet that doesn't dry — that just slowly transitions from cold and dripping to cold and damp and then, eventually, to the particular clammy warmth of fabric that's been sitting against a body long enough to reach some unhappy equilibrium.

I pulled the thermos out of my jacket and unscrewed the cap. The steam rose off the tea in a thin column and the smell of it — strong, milky, the particular tannic hit of a teabag that's been left in too long by someone who doesn't believe in timing — filled the cab and cut through the smell of wet wool and wet earth. I poured, drank, and felt the heat trace a line from my throat to my chest. Mr Proctor's tea. Two sugars, from memory. Maybe three. The man had a sweet tooth he denied and a wife who knew better.

The rain showed no sign of relenting. Through the windscreen, the world was water — the drive had become a shallow creek, the gravel invisible beneath a moving sheet of runoff, the paddock beyond it a smear of brown and green. The horses had finally moved, drifting toward a stand of trees along the fence line with the resigned patience of animals who understood weather better than people did and didn't waste energy resenting it.

I turned the key. Second try. The engine settled into its idle and the heater kicked in with a reluctant wheeze, pushing warm air at my shins. The fan belt squealed — another thing for the list — and then caught, and the warmth began to build inside the cab in layers, meeting the cold rising off my clothes and creating a climate that was neither comfortable nor unbearable but somewhere in the grey territory between.

I put the truck in gear and started up the drive. The rear wheels spun on the wet gravel, caught, pulled. The truck climbed the slope in low gear, the engine working harder than it needed to because the surface was half-mud now and every metre forward was a negotiation between traction and weight. At the top of the drive I turned onto the road and the bitumen felt solid and reliable beneath the tyres after the gravel's treachery.

The road back to Collinsvale ran north along the ridge. Visibility was thirty metres at best — the headlights carving two pale tunnels into the grey, the wipers fighting a war they couldn't win. I had the heater on full and the fan belt was screaming and the warm air was wrapping around my legs while the rest of me dripped steadily onto the seat. Mr Proctor's thermos sat wedged between my thigh and the handbrake, still warm, and I reached for it at the straights and drank between the bends.

The envelope from Gladys was wet. I noticed it on the passenger seat — the corner of it dark where water had run off my jacket when I'd climbed in. The cash inside would be fine. Cash survived worse than rain. But the paper of the envelope was soft now, warped, and it sat there looking like something that had been through something, which I suppose it had.

The storm pressed down on the ridge like a hand on a skull. The eucalypts along the road were bent almost double in the gusts, their branches whipping, their leaves stripped and spinning in the wind. A branch came down somewhere ahead of me — I heard the crack before I saw it, a limb the thickness of my forearm hitting the road surface and bouncing into the verge. I swerved around it without braking. Instinct. The truck stayed planted and the moment passed and the branch disappeared in the mirror, already being swallowed by the water running across the road behind me.

The lay-by appeared on my left — that widened patch of gravel past the Glenfern turnoff, bordered by the old stringybarks and the collapsed fence. I'd parked there a hundred times. In better weather. In worse moods. Once, for forty minutes, after a phone call from the hospital about Dad. Just sat. Not ready to go anywhere yet.

I indicated. Force of habit — there was nobody behind me, nobody in front, nobody on this stretch of road at all, just me and the rain and the trees. But you indicate. Because that's what you do. Because thirty years of driving the same roads builds patterns that survive any weather.

I pulled in, killed the engine, and sat.