Thirteen Ways to Know my Grandfather

1

A dream: Driving an old Holden

down a gravel road. The speedo wanders

as I feel for second gear and slow for a bend and river causeway.

I sense something moving behind me—

a pair of disembodied hands are reaching over the bench seat.

I feel no fear.

They’re farmer’s hands, calloused and square in shape like mine.

When I wake I know these spectral hands belong to my grandfather,

and they intend to choke me.

2

He was a lean and wary man, trimmed the fat from his meat

before it was fashion. A soldier settler, his block assigned by lottery, lay

among the locks and canals— the Murrumbidgee pumped for irrigation—

a river running placid in a grid.

He cleared his allotment of black box woodland, planted nectarines and apricots,

rows of riesling grapes, and cling peaches for canning. I remember

the heft of a rock melon lifted from the field,

its scent earthy, sweet,

and firm at its umbilical star. How could I resist?

A fresh melon is still my favourite.

3

A game he’d play indoors:

Take hold of your big toe below the knuckle with a pincer grip

between thumb and forefinger, then bit by bit he’d apply iron pressure.

Where was our threshold?

He’d watch us intently and always hold on

past the first cry of pain. What I saw in his eyes was terrifying,

an absence.

4

In the farm shed there were tools to repair

just about anything. He could grind the valves of the grey Ferguson tractor,

or replace the bearings at its heart.

In the tall-cool, on a packed dirt floor darkened

with diesel and sump oil, he showed me and my brother—two small boys standing

up to the work bench and its well oiled vice,

each on his own upended fruit crate—the difference between a rip saw

and a cross-cut. Now when I work timber, I know

how to make the saw sing, have its teeth work hardest as I pull them back

toward me; just like he showed me.

One December, with his guidance,

my brother and I made pine trinket boxes

with a lid and brass hinges. I can see my edition painted in black and white

lying open on my mother’s dressing table, a younger her

busy before the mirror, and jewellery—beaded necklaces, earrings and bracelets—

spilling from the small casket of which I was proud.

Last Christmas my brother

told me that I told him— “Don’t go in the corner with G’pa.” I believe him, and yet,

I don’t remember anything.

5

When it came time to kiss him goodbye she refused

his arms. How does a child of nine

find the words, and if she tried to explain would she be believed? I see

the family waiting—she takes a breath in, steps out of her body

and crosses no-man’s land.

Child or not, she understood

well enough the treatment given to those who desert.

After twenty years she remembered, but even now I can’t tell you if

she’s found her way back to the full beam of light she was in 1967.

6

My grandfather left the others lounging

on the rail siding, and went in search of a moment’s respite,

and what passed for a cup of coffee behind the front. He heard the scream, a bomb

falling in the distance, falling where he’d come from. He found

no part of his friend among the bodies of the fifty men in his rifle company, who

had set themselves down to rest. Only Darkie’s pocket-book, encased

by steel remained, a hole in its middle where a piece of shrapnel lodged—

this fragment a keepsake.

Decades later, an unwarranted survivor, my grandfather lay dying

in hospital. The last words he uttered were—He must be somewhere...

7

He returned from the war and turned twenty one.

He was exploding, spinning through time

and space.

Few in our family escaped his obsession with the unsullied, a clear-eyed

pursuit of those still in possession of their angelic selves.

8

When he came to stay at our home, me and my brother

and our baby sister, would gather on the end of his bed. He’d tell us

stories of the war; events that never left him.

With each re-telling he seemed to say,

I was there, I survived and can’t work out why. As if drawn by gravity,

we sensed the power of our witness, that somehow the dignity of youth might reverse

a stellar collapse.

9

When he sold the farm and moved to the outer

suburbs north of Sydney,

my mother believed him retired.

Now she understands, even if he happened to be a dead star, his hunger

for the young in his orbit was undiminished.

10

He must have known she knew—the wry smile

when she told him no. A crack shot with a rifle, he rarely

missed his mark.

On a trip to town, he stopped the black Holden

by the dead water of an irrigation canal, and asked her friend to climb over and ride

up front with him. My mother found his eye in the rear-view—

“She will not be sitting beside you.”

No matter how fierce the resistance—always the haunting.

11

The thousand yard stare: unmistakable in the Kodak slides

shot at my parent’s wedding— taken outside a sandstone church, under a sky

so blue it’s violet. His face is the one with a hammered

metal finish.

When you’re a child, it’s not possible to live long beneath

such unsmiling, before anxiety—of a kind that can’t be spoken—occupies the body,

and little by little, disfigures. My mother learned to redact.

This year when I drove her north for Christmas,

we overtook a line of cars with a thrilling burst of speed, and she laughed

long; a full-bellied laugh.

And laughing with her, I better understood

how she fought; how she stayed alive.

12

At sun up, we’d go with him into the paddocks, wood-smoke

from the farmhouse trailing over the fruit trees

and eucalypts down the fence line. In the cool morning air we’d pluck mushrooms

fresh with earth and wet with dew. The scent of red-gum smoke

from the kitchen fire-box;

an indelible line of desire across the furrows of my cortex.

The flavour of mushrooms, like the smell of beer,

and too many other things in this world, offend the young. It takes time,

but you adapt. You learn to accept what once was foul.

13

Bombed and gassed in France,

he was not one to comply with the policies

of those in power. An unconventional farmer with a Calvinist bent, not by faith

but by inclination.

A prophet of doom, he mistrusted excess, insisted

the flood irrigation employed by his neighbours would soon sterilise the riverland soils;

groundwater rising and bringing with it salt. He watered his trees sparingly.

If he knew about power, those of us who were part of his farm kingdom

did not; we failed to grasp what he intended for his subjects.

What brilliant pretenders; he relied on us

to be swift of mind.

We were the morning sun

glancing off the many faces of a still, dark mountain; our percipience

bound by what we could bear.

Winner of the Local Prize Newcastle Poetry Prize 2019, to be published in What’s Left ASM