Beads on a String

Anth and Torrin drove the bus down the driveway at Grammy's and brought it to rest where the trail could no longer follow. There is a strange arithmetic to coming off a long walk: the legs keep reckoning in kilometres the body no longer has to give, the shoulders still carry the ghost of a pack, and the mind, set for weeks to the simple grammar of one foot and then the other, finds the suburban stillness almost too soft to stand in. For the two of them it was a quiet adjustment, made quieter by the thing that sat beneath it. They had not walked the whole length of the South Island as they had set out to. Weather and the closing season had taken the last of it from them, and that final unwalked stretch stayed out there in their minds, a line on a map left open. They might have let it ache. Instead they did what this life had taught them to do with the things that do not finish on schedule: they folded it up and put it away, not as a failure but as an invitation, a reason to come back, an adventure held in reserve for a season not yet arrived.

Two days later Sal was home, and the family closed back around its own centre. This time the drive to fetch her fell to Anth, out to the train station at Gympie to wait on the platform he had waited on before, watching for the figure that turned an ordinary arrival into the end of the longest goodbye they had ever set themselves. With everyone gathered once more under the one stretch of sky, the talk turned, as it always did, to the road, and to when the wheels might begin to turn again. A shape emerged, tentative as all their plans were tentative, plans being suggestions the road might or might not honour: they would leave just after Pop's birthday on the fifth of June.

Until then the days had no shortage of work to fill them. Sal was back inside the books, though her study break had come and gone while Anth was away in New Zealand, so the two of them never got to share it; the rest she had earned had been a solitary one, spent against the backdrop of those sparse satellite messages. Anth turned to the bus and to a list that had been growing in the back of his mind for months. Nothing on it was large. It was the slow accumulation of small things, a fitting here, an adjustment there, the hundred minor attentions a home on wheels asks of the hands that keep it, and he worked through them steadily in the mild autumn light, the days warm enough still at twenty-four degrees to make the labour pleasant.

The weeks carried a run of birthdays, one after another like beads on a string. Anth's came first. Then Shea's, who was back among them by then from his stint down in Sydney. And finally Pop's, the one the departure plan was built around. Torrin did what Torrin always does and made the cakes, the ones the whole family looks forward to year on year, and this year was no exception; there is a particular kind of homecoming in a familiar cake, in the proof that some traditions travel with you no matter how scattered the household becomes. Sophie and Shea had set up in Soph's van, tucked into a corner of the property, the vehicle still carrying a few mechanical complaints that wanted sorting before it would be trusted with real distance. Their intention was to leave when we left, though the road would take them sideways from us almost at once, their path and ours not due to braid together again for a couple of months. Torrin, for his part, was already looking past all of it, toward the end of the year and a trip with Shea to Canada for the ski season, busy with the long tail of arrangements such a journey drags behind it and looking into trials to help cover the cost. Mack would stay on in Gympie. And so, as it had so many times before, the family was quietly preparing to scatter to its separate roads. We had done this often enough to know its shape, and knowing the shape did not lighten it. The going of people you love in different directions is a weight you simply learn to carry without complaint.

Pop's birthday arrived and passed gently. All of us gathered at the home to mark it, carrying in cake and small treats, sitting with him through one of those afternoons whose worth lies entirely in its plainness, in being there, in the cake on the plate and the people in the room. And then, almost before it seemed possible, it was the eve of departure. Tomorrow the bus would point itself outward again and the chosen life would pick up its old rhythm, the engine and the open gate and the country unrolling ahead. That last still night held the two feelings it always held, side by side and inseparable: the excitement of the road remembered, and the nervousness of leaving the known behind. We had felt them both many times. We had learned, by now, that they always came together, and that the coming of them meant it was nearly time to go.Read more