4338.211 · July 30, 2018 AD
Sawdust and Radar
The morning at the Owens' place is still sitting in Jim's chest when he pulls back into the yard. The blue gum needs splitting. The truck needs loading. The sky needs watching. Between the rhythm of the work and the drive south to Glenfern, something should settle — the way it always settles, the way physical labour has always been enough to bury whatever's underneath. Today, it isn't.
The morning at the Owens' place is still sitting in Jim's chest when he pulls back into the yard. The blue gum cracks on the splitter. The truck gets loaded, billet by billet, in the rhythm his body has been running since he was fourteen. The sky turns the colour of a bruise. And a billet hits the headboard hard enough to make a point Jim isn't ready to hear from himself.
Then south toward Glenfern with a full load and the weather closing in. The storm catches him before he can outrun it — or maybe he wasn't trying that hard. A tonne of stringybark dumped in horizontal rain. Boots filling. Clothes plastered to skin. Keith Proctor under the verandah with a thermos and the kind of quiet decency that doesn't need to explain itself. The road back is dissolving. The heater's screaming. And Jim's soaked through to something deeper than skin, driving into hills that are disappearing behind the rain, carrying a morning that won't sit where he put it.
