It Smelled of Rain

"A hard layer is never nothing. It means something happened there that you weren't around for, and then it stopped."

My suspicions turned out to be correct. Putting up a ten-man ridge-framed tent was a very long way from putting up a two-man dome, and we were nowhere near as far along as Karen had promised anybody we'd be. I did not mind in the least. There was canvas to be spread and poles to be sorted into their lengths and laid out in order, and every one of those jobs behaved itself, and while my hands were doing them the rest of me was left more or less alone.

Which was where the trouble was, because the rest of me kept going home.

The vegetable plots would want water inside the week. The ducks had been let out and not shut in. There were four chickens who had never in their lives had to think about a door, and a plum with two fresh cuts on it that ought to be looked at in a fortnight, and a trench lying open behind a shed with the gravel only halfway down it. Some part of me had gone on quietly arranging all of that in order of urgency, the way it had every morning of my life at the kitchen bench, and had not yet been told there was no point to it. I kept catching it at the job and putting it down and then finding it again a few minutes later.

This is your home now, Chris Owen.

I did not answer that. I picked up the pegs instead.

They were the wrong pegs. I'd known that from the moment I got the box open, and it was of a piece with everything else in that camp. Ordinary hardened steel, three hundred long, the same ones that came in a bag with every tent sold anywhere, and they relied entirely on friction down the length of the shaft to hold on to anything. Loose sand gave them no friction worth the name. I could drive one in with my thumb and pull it out with two fingers and it would come up bringing a spoonful of the country with it and nothing else.

What that ground wanted was a wide ribbed sand peg, or failing that a deadman — anything flat buried horizontally at depth with the guy tied round the middle of it, so that the whole weight of the sand sitting on top of it became the anchor. A stick would have done. A folded bag would have done. A bit of scrap timber would have done very nicely indeed, and there was not a bit of scrap timber within a world.

Somebody had spent a fortune on those tents. Somebody had chosen a ridge frame and ten-man canvas and paid whatever that came to, and then packed the bag of pegs that came in the box.

Still. There were pegs, and there was ground, and I'd been given a job. So I got down on my knees at the first guy point and started one in by hand.

It went in beautifully. Straight down, no resistance worth mentioning, the whole way to my knuckles.

And then it stopped. Not softened and not slowed — stopped dead, against something that had no interest whatever in the conversation.

I sat back on my heels.

I'd met that already. On the way in from the wall, halfway up one of the faces, I'd put my heel down out of habit and found something at about a hand's depth that would not give, and I'd worked at it for a moment and then pulled the boot out and caught the others up, because I'd had a great deal else in front of me at the time.

Now I had a peg in my hand and nowhere in particular to be.

I pulled it out and had a look down the length of it. Clean steel for the top two-thirds and a bright scuff across the point where it had come up against whatever it was. I put it back down the same hole and leaned my weight on it and it did not move a millimetre.

So I got the surface off. Side of the hand first, sweeping the loose stuff away in long strokes and throwing it out behind me, and then when I got close I used the flat of the peg and took the last of it back in careful passes, the way I'd have cleaned a face in a pit.

And there it was. A hard grey-buff surface, paler than everything sitting on top of it, coming up under my hand as smooth and continuous as a laid floor.

I laughed out loud, on my knees, on my own, which was becoming a habit I was going to have to keep an eye on.

Because this was a thing. Not a wonder and not a horror and not a voice inside my own head — a thing, sitting in the ground, doing something, with a reason for being there. I'd been handed nothing but wonders and horrors since I came through that door, and my head was very badly in need of a thing.

So I played with it, and there is no better word for what I did.

I ran the peg point across it and it left a pale scratch and took nothing off. I got a fingernail into the edge of the scratch and the nail lost. I rapped it with the peg and it came back with a short dry knock, no ring to it and no give under it, closer to a fired tile than to packed dirt. I tried to lever a piece up at the edge of my cleared patch and the peg skidded off and I nearly put it through my own hand.

I shifted half a metre along and cleared another patch and found it again, a knuckle deeper. Two metres out toward the ute I cleared a third and it was down past my wrist before I reached it. So it was not level, and it was not a floor, and it had not been built. It was following something.

Cemented, then. Something had come down through that dust in solution, stopped at a horizon, dropped its load and set. Carbonate country did that. So did silica, and so did iron, and I had no way on this earth of telling which of the three I was kneeling on — carbonate would have fizzed for me inside ten seconds with a splash of vinegar, and iron I could have called off the colour of a fresh break, and for silica I'd have wanted a hand lens and a hammer and somebody's bench.

What I had was a tent peg.

I made the list anyway, kneeling there. Hand lens. Geological hammer. Dilute acid. A square-mouth spade. A tape. Something to write in, and something to write with — and that last one went through me worse than the rest of them together, because I had never in my adult life been anywhere a whole day without writing down what I found there.

The tent went on going up behind me. I heard Paul say something and Glenda laugh at it. I did not turn round.

"Hey, Karen," I said, once I had a piece cleared big enough to be worth showing anybody.

"What's up?" She came over and got down next to me, and her knees went in the way mine had.

"Take a look at this." I pulled the peg out of the hole and put it into her hand.

She turned it over. Looked down the shaft of it. Looked at me.

"What am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Try pushing it into the ground."

"You could have told me that to start with." She gave me the smirk with no approval anywhere in it, and put the point down into the loose stuff a foot clear of my cleared patch, and pushed.

It went in like a knife into a cake. And then it stopped.

"You have to push it harder," I said, and I could hear the enjoyment sitting in my own voice and did nothing whatever about it.

She put some weight behind it. Nothing. She put a good deal more behind it. Still nothing.

"Hold on a sec."

I got in beside her hand and cleared the surface off in front of her, digging and sweeping and flicking the loose stuff up and out behind us, and it went into the air and hung there and came down over the both of us, and neither of us paid it any attention.

"Right. Go."

Karen got herself up over the top of the peg with both hands on the head of it and put her whole body down the line of it, shoulders locked, arms straight, and the veins came up at her temple.

There was a crack.

Not a snap. A dull heavy crack, the noise ice makes over a puddle, and it came up through the ground into my knees, and the peg went, and my wife went after it.

"Holy shit!"

"Chris!" She got herself back onto her knees, brushing her hands off, doing the face.

"Did you see that?"

I was already in the hole. There was a piece of the crust tipped down on its edge like a dropped roof slate and a crack running away from it in both directions, and I got my fingers under an edge and lifted a lump clear and put it aside and went back in for another. It came up in plates about as thick as a good slate. A metre away I would not have shifted it with a crowbar. Right there, for whatever reason of its own, it was thin enough for a fifty-seven-year-old entomologist to break with her own body weight, and there was no earthly reason we should have had that piece of luck, and we had it.

"No. I was too busy falling on my face, wasn't I?"

I did not answer her, on account of what was underneath the plates.

It was dark.

I got two fingers into it and it was cool, and it took the print of them and held it. I brought a handful up and closed my hand round it and opened my hand again, and it did not run out. It sat there in my palm in a lump, and when I pressed the lump with my thumb it did not smear — it broke, into crumbs, into peds, along lines of its own choosing, which is what ground does when there is something alive down in it gluing it together and prising it apart again by turns. There were voids running all through the piece. Channels. Fine ones, going off into the body of it.

I turned my hand over. My fingers were stained. Nothing out in that place had stained anything all day.

And then I put my nose down into it.

I'd done that in a trench in my own paddock at first light with a black band under my thumb, and known what it was before I'd finished breathing in. I'd done it in front of that wall with a double handful of dust and had nothing at all come back, and understood I was standing in a place with no record in it.

I breathed in.

Rain. Rain on dry ground — which never did come off the rain and never had. It came up out of the earth, out of whatever was alive down inside it, and the first drops landing were only what knocked it loose. Wet clay in under that. And something faintly sweet and faintly foul at the same moment, which was how the middle of a good heap smelled when I broke one open in July.

I sat down in the dirt. I did not decide to sit down.

Dark crumbing stuff going down through a lighter horizon. Structure. Channels. Root hair, if I'd had a lens on it, and I'd have bet the block on there being root hair.

I had been shown this. On a rock beside a river, with my eyes shut and my wife's hand flat between my shoulder blades. And now I was holding it, and it was in under my fingernails, and my wife was kneeling half a metre from me brushing dust off her palms, and there was not one word of it I could say to her.

"Here, look. I think it's a seed."

It had come up in the second handful and I'd had it between finger and thumb a moment before I knew what I was looking at. A tiny brown ball, ridged, about the size of a peppercorn. I put it into her open palm.

Karen gave it about as much attention as she'd have given a shopping receipt.

"It's a coriander seed."

"What the fuck is a coriander seed doing buried under the crust!"

And I meant every syllable of it. I was up on my knees with my heart going. Because if there was seed in that layer then something had grown there, and if something had grown there then there had been a season, and a season meant the whole business — rain, and a growing period, and a set, and a fall. That was not a barren world. That was a world with a history in it, and I would have taken it over every other thing that had happened to me that day.

"It wasn't."

She said it in the voice she used for telling me the shop had shut.

"What do you mean, it wasn't?"

She reached up into the top pocket of her shirt and took out a small zip-lock bag, and as it came out four or five of them came with it and went down past her knee into the hole we'd opened.

"Oh," I said.

"I must have forgotten to give them to Jane."

"I should have known."

Of course. Of course she had a bag of coriander seed in her shirt pocket. She had gone through a doorway in the back of our lounge room carrying seed she'd meant to hand over on a bus, and I had gone through it carrying a beetle, and neither of us had known we were carrying a thing.

I turned my left wrist over where it lay and had a look at the cuff, and then along the front of my shirt, and then down at my knees — without moving my head about and without making anything of it, because she was right there. Nothing. Somewhere between a stranger's tent and a hole in the ground it had got off me and gone, and I had no notion of when, and there was no finding it again out in that.

"But I didn't bring those," Karen said.

She had not moved. She was looking at the ground between us and she had not moved at all.

"Shit!"

"Chris! Language!" She did not look up to say it.

There were three green things standing in that hole.

Not the way seedlings usually turn up, a bent half-centimetre of pale stem still wearing the seed coat over its head. Up. Standing. A stem each and a pair of leaves each, opened right out — the long narrow seed-leaves a coriander puts up first, before it bothers with anything that looks like coriander — sitting in soil that had been under a metre of dead dust and a slate of crust when I woke that morning.

"Are they– ?"

"Coriander plants."

"Did they grow just then?"

I put my cupped hands down into the grainy stuff and lifted a couple of them out with the soil still round them, and there were roots. White ones, fine ones, gone down into it and taken hold and made a thorough job of it.

"I'm pretty sure they weren't there before." She did not take her eyes off my hands. "Honestly Chris, sometimes you ask the most stupid questions."

Something came up at the corner of my mouth and I let it stay there. I'd been irritating that woman with genuine questions for twenty-one years and had never once got tired of it, and she had never once worked out that the questions were real.

She pulled another seed out of the bag and pressed it down into the soil sitting in my two hands.

And then the pair of us stopped, and looked at it, and did nothing whatever.

"It's like watching a kettle boil," I said.

"Shh!"

She had a hand up at me without turning her head.

Which was the opening I'd been waiting on since first light.

"I don't think either talking or silence is going to make a difference."

The words were still in the air when the seed came open.

It split along its seam with a small definite movement, and a white root came down out of it and turned and went into the soil in my hands and kept going, and behind the root the whole thing lifted — the stem coming up bent over on itself in a hook, and then straightening, and pulling the seed coat off and away as it came, and two leaves opening out of the fold of it and going flat and green and finished.

In my hands. On my own two palms, in a world where nothing had ever grown.

I did not say anything. I could not have got a word out and would not have known which one to reach for.