Every so often, there’s a chance for reversal.
For a thread pulled to drag things backwards.
For the drowned places to rise. For the dead to walk again. To breathe air rather than water.
Sometimes, there’s a chance.
Adie Kane came home last week—just as she has done once a year for a decade of searching—to visit Nessa’s View. She took a room in the tidy little bed-and-breakfast at Ganymede, unpacked her suitcase, then got back in her rental and drove up to the lake (dam). She parked, and went to sit by the shore, careful to ignore the spillway and great curving concrete wall to her left. She sat on a rock (the same one, each and every time), and stared into the same black, unmoving waters—surely, it’s the same liquid, nothing flows, nothing shifts, not since that first flood settled—and thinks about the end.
Michael had been on the road for hours. Everything in Tasmania, he’d discovered, took precisely forty-five minutes longer to get to than Google said it would. It was his first trip, though his grandparents had both been bred here. And the roads… shit, the roads were an eclectic mix of blacktop, washed-out gravel, and fuck-you potholes that turned into gullies, abysses, or crevasses, depending on the personal inclination of each and every bloody hole. Barely wide enough for two cars, he’d had to back up five times this morning to let someone else by, someone with a much bigger vehicle.
There was an etiquette to it, he realized, a hierarchy on which he was the bottom rung due to his shitty little hire. He might as well have painted a red mark on his forehead. He kept seeing lips move in the shape of “fucking tourists” every time someone drove past him, the gale produced by massive 4WDs with mud on their bull bars and back windows shaking his flimsy Hyundai. The really serious ones had winches and steel cables for pulling idiots like him out of ditches and lakes.
He was already regretting that he’d agreed to meet Adie here. That he’d agreed to meet her family. But the sex was good and he wasn’t quite prepared to give that up yet. Not quite. Michael smiled, thought about Adie. Felt things move lower down, thought about it too much and was almost run off the road by one of the too-big mining trucks that carried ore to the ports and took the ridiculous curves and corners as if they were auditioning for a Mad Max chase. Michael pulled over, half-on, half-off the bitumen; the engine coughed itself out. Kept his hands tight on the wheel because if he let go, he’d see how hard they shook, and he wasn’t sure he wanted that knowledge. He inhaled a deep breath, started the car again, took a good look around then drove gingerly back onto the road.
The first proper house had been the sandstone one built in the 1800s by Adie’s great-great-great-great grandmother, Nessa Kane. A structure built, rather, by convict labor, all the rough men assigned to the property that would eventually grow into a town. Adie’s aunt would tell tales of Nessa, though she’d never met the woman, and those stories were third-hand from her own mother. It was said Mistress Kane was far more feared than her husband or even the overseer. She would take the whip from that man’s hand and use it herself on any member of the work detail not pulling his weight. She’d make sure they bled, that she could hear the patter of their blood on the ground, on the stones. Like so many from the Old Country—wherever that might happen to be—Nessa Kane knew the value of red.
She also knew that nothing stable or worthwhile came for free, and she was smart enough to make sure someone else paid the price on her behalf. Others might have called her a witch, though not to her face—her husband included—but she simply saw herself as a careful builder and protector of the family that was to come. And her husband let her have her way. He saw how she brought him a prosperity he’d not have had the will to wring from the earth. He didn’t question her, in the cold hours of a moonlit night, when she left their bed in the little ironbark hut they shared while the big house was being built. He did not follow.
Nessa Kane led one of the convict men to the newly dug foundations. Younger and stronger than the others, he’d kept his shape better, not starved to string and sinew. He had good teeth, and was clean enough for her purposes.
She took him to the required place, and though he hated and feared her in full knowledge of what he’d seen her do—felt her do, for he’d been no more proof against the bite of her whip than any other—she was beautiful, though older. She was alluring and demanding, and he’d not had a woman in months. So, when she came to him warm and wet, half-naked with breasts dark tipped in the moonlight, smooth thighed and greedy, he did not seek a deeper reason, for most men are fools.
He did not think as he came inside her, did not think as a sharp, hot pain tore across his throat in the wake of the blade. He remained nameless, this father of Nessa Kane’s first child, voiceless but for his final moan, last act, last coming. He was what she needed: a man no one would look for, who might truly have run away into the wilderness and been lost just as she would claim. Yet he stayed; not by his will but he stayed. Buried in the foundations, he formed the family’s first connection to the land, paid the required tithe, gave them an anchor to the earth.
A sacrifice to the past and the future.
His blood, it was, kept Adie Kane coming back, year after year, like a leash that let her wander only so far. Kept her searching for what was needed, following a trail of relocations and feints, dying outs and changed names, as if someone was trying to hide it.
It kept her seeking until she found it.
Adie’s hungry but she doesn’t let the rumbling of her stomach distract her. She’ll get something when Michael arrives. If there’s time. Instead, she sits on the rock, shivers a little in her coat; no matter how thick it is, there’s always that tiny piece of heart-ice to keep her chilly on the warmest of days—and this is not a warm day. The sun’s watery, too often behind the gray clouds that scud across the sky. The wind is like a slap in the face that she’s grown used to, can barely feel on her cheeks now.
She doesn’t look down and far to her left, to where the new town sits. Instead, she stares out at the strangely still surface of the lake (dam). No waves are kicked up. It’s like glass. If she concentrates long enough, Adie’s convinced she might see the houses beneath, where Nessa’s View used to be.
Ganymede.
Ganymede was on a lot of maps because its mine produced a lot of copper ore. It was on a lot of other maps because the process released arsenic into the soil, turned the water red as blood, poisoned the surrounding areas for years and years and years. Almost as if it could only protest its own birthing in the most toxic way possible. Adie hates the place, though she’d lived there much of her life. She hates how ugly it is, how it scarred the land. She hates that something so ugly had been allowed to live—encouraged to thrive—when Nessa’s View had been condemned. Flooded one town, built another further downstream.
Economics.
Filthy word.
Poor excuse.
Not everyone stayed in Nessa’s View. Some moved away, to Hobart or the mainland. Some moved sooner, some later. Some even moved to the nascent Ganymede, got jobs in the mine. They found new houses, though not true homes; kept dying out until there was just Adie, almost alone in her generation. Aunt Miriam and Uncle Toby brought Adie up; however, they didn’t thrive. They put everything into raising her, yet she couldn’t help but feel they continued living only out of duty, until she could stand on her own two feet. Toby died a few years after Adie left high school, but Miriam went on until the girl finished university, then promptly succumbed to breast cancer she’d not bothered to have treated.