Fiction

Archipelago

She came to see my parents about milking our goats. Have you ever milked goats, my father asked her. No, she said. My mother got down the medium good china for her cup of tea. She looked like she preferred a mug, but she took the little cup and saucer, held them in her outdoor hands.

What’s your book, she asked me. Can I borrow it after you?

Familiar, and also: the presumption of a second meeting. The presumption that I would trust her with my book.

Show her the goats, said my mother to me. I’ll come, said my father. No, said my mother. I slipped out the front door, quick as a skink.

There had been a storm in the night. Lighting struck the great pine and the morning smelt of resin. The top of the pine was blackened, staggered; a trickle of smoke melted upward. I told her how the storm was rare, how usually there were days only of low fog, weeks of it, when we knew the sun was there only because, surely, it must be. I showed her the orchards, the fields, the trees quiet. The wet grass licked our boots. I told her how you wake up early and find the fog has tightened its water into ice. How the apples lose their crispness to the ice, that sometimes you bite one and it collapses. I told her about the membrane of puddles to be cracked and broken, and we found one in the dark under the pine tree, and we stepped on it, splintering it into the muffled air. The smoke from the tree was hot above us, the ice breaking under our boots.

It’s the three of you only? she asked me. You and your parents?

I said yes, just us. I told her how it sometimes snowed. The muffled quiet. The creek bellied. We saw a fairy wren, and she didn’t know what it was. It blinked away. I told her that sometimes at night it’s so cold and the sky so vast and so flooded with stars they sing, really sing. The fairy wrens? she asked. No, the stars.

She asked me: Have you always lived here? I said yes, except for the year when I was married. She asked if I was divorced and I said no, widowed. She said she was sorry to hear it.

Don’t be, I said.

I showed her where the ducks used to nest, told her how they flew away, would not be kept, not even for our sweetest grain. I showed her the pigs nervously fattening themselves on the leavings of our table. I showed her the new chicks rattling and tapping inside their eggs and showed her the stained tree stump where we’d chopped the rooster’s head off, his life’s purpose complete. Mushrooms raised their flat faces, ringed in conversation. I told her how we ate them, taking freely, unafraid. I told her about pork and mushrooms done with onion and garlic and wine, and herbs from the herb garden. She was smiling all the while. She said, and the goats? For the milking? I’d forgotten, and I wasn’t even embarrassed. I showed her the goats. They bleated and nosed shyly. She said, do you want to marry me instead? And I laughed with surprise and said, not really.

She came again the next day. She brought me a flower, one of the roses made of a folded hanky from the woman at the post office. But she didn’t have to. When my mother called me down and I saw her there, tall and dark-haired, with her kind face and calm brown eyes, it was obvious what she was to mean to me. It was all formality. I felt like we should just be old together already, in twin rocking chairs, or maybe dead, buried in the same plot, our decay commingling with the decomposition of our caskets. I gave her my book. It’s about people in Melbourne, I said. It begins with the description of a photo. Tennyson and his wife and two sons in a garden. It describes it very closely, but I can’t picture it, not really.

The next time she called, she brought me a book. I’ve been up to Hobart, she said. This is from the library up there. She’d had to get a new membership. She’d only been here a week or two.

I had to give them an address, she said. I don’t have one yet, so I gave yours. I hope you don’t mind.

She’d used the dust jacket to mark a page, and she opened it up for me. Here it is, she said. It was the photo. Tennyson’s wife was on his left, not his right, as I’d imagined. They all looked terribly burdened, all four of them. The family sort of beseeching Tennyson, and Tennyson deploring the beseeching. Awful, I said. Yes, she said. Awful. But look in the background. You can see a door open, and windows. And a tree, or a creeping vine. It looks like maybe it was a sunny day.

She never once milked a goat. She said, I was serious about getting married. And I said, I was serious about not. Even if we could. She said, you might change your mind. I said, I don’t want to give you false hope.

She said: What is false hope? Hope is hope. How can it be false? Let me have it.

The things in your life that you wish hadn’t happened are not made of stone. They are ice. They can melt into dark water and remap you, give you islands, new terrain. No man is an island, the poet said. True. Personally, I am an archipelago. I can live among the cold seas.

She read me a poem later. Maybe it was another day she read it to me. It ended, When in this valley first I told my love. Her voice with that gentle up-and-down. It was just the loveliest of things, the dearest of jewels. I felt I deserved it, after all.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 28, 2025 as "Archipelago".

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