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In the morning, the flax bowed with snow. The firs across the road with their branches almost supplicating. Outside the air has a muted, hazed feeling, as if it is still snowing but invisibly. The seven sheep sitting on the white, chewing, or staring off into the willows. The cows under the far pines – I surmise.
And at the table with Brian, snow encircling the horizon, we talk about “that bastard Alzheimer’s”.
He’d written:
I’m one such
who’s brain’s scrambled,
tangled and unwilling to ‘sort
itself’ and ‘get a
grip’. I’m well
on the way to
where I’d never
wanted to be.
But, I’m still
determined to whistle,
and sing for as long
as I dam well can,
to chatter chatter,
chuckle chuckle,
sing songs
of love and gratitude,
try to keep that
bastard Alzheimer’s
at bay.
“My condition?– I never dwell on it,” he says. “There’s no point. I’ve had operations, accidents, I’ve worked my way back. As for now, this is the way it is. I’m not going to sniffle or grizzle about it.”
…I am entranced by life
and friendship and affected
by ignorance and despair.
‘Illness, memory and regret’
preoccupied Clive James’s
last 15 years.
For Clive James poetry
‘means freedom’.
(Brian Turner Feb 2022)
*
I ask him how he finds contentment.
“I like the formation of the clouds.
“And collecting wood. It’s not being wasted, and its being cleaned up. I don’t appreciate things thrown away or wastefulness. The life of a tree is over but it can still be useful.
“I love being out in the natural world, the cheeky birds in the trees, niggling each other.
“I like watching the ducks coming into land, at the right angle if there’s a breeze.
“And looking at the distant skyline, and where the sun is.
“The wondrous clouds, golden on the edge.
“And I enjoy listening to what other people are saying. Not blabberers who don’t listen back, but you never know what’s going to be introduced.”
“How are the guys you talk to at the pub?”
“They’re fairly forthright.” And Brian chuckles, that hee-hee-hee of his that’s close to the surface.
*
I used to picture that he would marry me. We’d walk down the road together, past where the cows graze now, to the church behind the macrocarpas. A country church for weddings, funerals and Christmas carols. There would be a song from Phantom of the Opera.
Sometimes, the wedding song comes on the CD when I’m driving, and I sing loudly, as if I am remembering that day. Or I shake my head at myself, and my ideas. But affectionately. He was not the marrying type.
He tells me instead, “We have a good future ahead of us.”
And maybe we have. Maybe there’ll be a cure. Maybe we won’t go raging into the dying light but dancing, like we do, in the kitchen, when a song comes on. Or maybe we will go raging.
When I walk to Brian’s he has written a note on his pad: “When I’m confused and sombre…there’s music, sunshine…”.
We’re always sad inside, “but we don’t want to be sad anymore” as the poet Blaise Cendras once wrote. “The whole world is always there. It is necessary to know how to be stupid and happy.”
*
There are many things that can’t be said about a situation like this. Instead, I sometimes lie on the couch at night, the fire an orange haze, clicking on the next episode and the next. Late, late to bed. A wilful desecration of time.
One morning: sunshine, coffee at the table, Nick Cave’s Ghosteen playing, and code cracker. Maybe it’s not bliss, the yellow tablecloth, the glass bowl in the sun, but a cessation of sadness. It’s a recipe that works today.
The next four mornings on repeat: code cracker, coffee, Ghosteen. ..“Peace will come and peace will come and peace will come in time” …Yet nothing stays the same. And on the fourth day, fog.
*
On the day of snow, Brooke, one of the three rescue cows, licks her towering son. She circles her tongue along Sundae’s neck, under his stomach, between his legs, under his tail. He stands there and watches the two paradise ducks come up out of the stream and waddle across the snow. His mother reaches up to lick his face.
Next door, Lorna, who’s 95, also watches the cows. She said that once Brooke (Mammy, Lorna calls her) licked Sundae (the Delinquent) all over and then he lifted each foot for her to lick as well.
I watch for the foot licking, but Brooke turns to stare in at me from the snowy field. I put on two jackets, gloves and gumboots and go out to feed them hay. The grass so long, the snow falls into my boots.
I tried twice to wean Brooke’s hulking son. The first time he simply busted the gate to get to her, even though he weighs possibly 350kg and is quite capable of surviving without milk. The second time he cried and bellowed, day and night, for ten days, until a neighbouring farmer said I may as well put him back, it was just the comfort sucking he was after. For a few weeks I thought he was weaned, then one morning there he is, legs splayed and head down to her udder again. He couldn’t quite get his mouth on her teats, only nudge her. Brooke let her milk down foaming into the grass.
In an agricultural world, Brooke and Emily wouldn’t have known the days of adoration they have for Sundae.
They would have trudged up a lane and back twice a day to have their udders emptied, and be slaughtered by the age of six.
Sundae would have been slaughtered at four days, or fattened first…
…his mute white patches,
the shine on his hoofs;
the way he scuffed the ground…
… mostly fat, flesh, bone,
the grace and wonder of his structure
dismantled…
(Brian Turner, Beasts)
“But what return do you get?” a farmer asked me.
They needed a home, and here they are: eating, resting, contemplating (if that’s what staring is), loving one another (if that’s what licking is). Keeping the grass down. Giving me shit.
My studio floor is made with earth, sand and cow shit.
The walls are plastered with earth, sand, lime and cow shit.
The winter vegetable garden is bedded down with straw and cow shit.
Holy shit.
*
There was a time I lived by the sea. Black oystercatchers stepped along the tide line. Their orange beaks dipped and lifted, searching and finding, the mud cool and pebbly, the mountains blue on the horizon. I was on my own with children. Nothing constant but the sea birds and the tides lapping in under the moon and the ngaio tree.
Here, the paradise ducks, the bold black, brown and white pair of them, how they call out to each other, skimming over the grass to land.
Here, this hottest, coldest, driest valley in New Zealand, where the earth warming is a blessing, and the rain coming is a blessing.
“If this is climate change, it’s fine by me,” a farmer wrote in a letter to the Otago Daily Times.
Meanwhile, up north, orchardists stand in the mud of their ruined rows and crops; vines, apples, onions, all gone.
This valley of extremes has its edges softened. There are no slips or floods or volcanoes. Drought will come again, but the land here is used to drought. The smallest of alpine grasses, the twiggiest of grey shrubs, know how to survive and will.
How do we make our lives and survive?
How do we go alone into our sudden or longed for or fought against ending, knowing we have been of value? To ourselves. To each other. To the streams and soil.
“I like to see in my heart and head that I am being useful,” Brian said last night.
“Take koha, give koha,” the poet J C Sturm wrote.
The oyster catchers dipping and strutting, the paradise ducks in their paired, loyal togetherness. Yesterday a friend brought me a load of dry wood. This morning, one degree outside and the house still warm from the elm. Such gifts. The flax set free from its load of snow and Mt Ida blue again. Sun.
*
A visitor this week, Jan Kelly, told me of the skinks that live outside her kitchen window. How she keeps binoculars on the bench and everyday writes down what she sees.
“I’m not a scientist,” she says. “I’m a citizen scientist. I don’t explain anything. I write down what they do, not what I think it means.”
And what she sees is the rich, complex lives of lizards, who have worked out how to live in a tribe, how to give each other space.
“They move as if in a dance,” she explains. “They avoid confrontation by stepping around or away from each other in a kind of shifting flow.”
Her cumulative, insightful details, enough to give a keynote speech at the Herpetologists conference. Enough for a book.
“But I’m not a scientist,” she says again.
Meanwhile, here we are. Trying to live at least in the way of ducks, or cows, or skinks.
Loyalty, and constancy, and lightness.
*
On the way to visit family, I lose an hour. I’m not lost but I have the panic of being lost. Pulled over to take a phone call, precarious on the edge of gravel, cars passing each other and my car at the same time. Then the supermarket.
“Grandma’s here!’: 12-year-old Phoenix. Hard squeezy hugs from Sonny and Lucia. One year old Tora bestows her arms around my neck. They find the ciabatta buns. “There’s bread!” The light bright above the table. The urgency of food.
“This soup is good,” I tell my daughter. “Is it carrot with tomato?”
“It’s Mexican spiced tomato soup,” she says. “I make it lots.”
“We have three types of soup,” nine year old Sonny says. “Lava soup, bunny soup and crocodile soup. This is lava soup.”
*
I pull on boots and walk across the paddock to where Brian’s car is parked by the willow trees. He’s in the shade, cutting branches back from the fence line. The air so cold he stops and rubs his hands together, waiting for me. The cows come too, Sundae first, his neck outstretched. They soon wander off when they see we aren’t about to feed them. Brian shows me what he’s doing, and I say, that’s so helpful, but its freezing under here and it’s such a beautiful day, we should be out in the sun.
“What do you want to do then?”
“Go somewhere, walk somewhere,” I say. “We could walk by the stream and look for your saw.”
I just wanted to mooch around in his life, his hidden life in the trees by the stream where he goes nearly every day, calling in sometimes on the way past with car and trailer. There are piles of neatly stacked willow branches on his back lawn, the wood criss-crossed or standing up in long lines like a pole fence. On missions along the creek he favoured a long curved cross saw with worn red handle. After he lost it a few weeks back, he’s carried an orange hand saw and an axe and ladder on his wood trips.
*
The community skating pond is white with ice along the borders and in the middle a deeper, translucent colour. We stand on the bridge over the Ida Burn while Brian looks down for trout. On the right side of the bank the walkway leads along the stream, through the paddocks and all the way to Hayes Engineering where, when it’s summer, we can buy coffee and scones at the café.
We walk along looking at the rushing water and the new deep pools from the last flood and the snow melt. I wonder if they will still be there in summer, if the water will stay a swimmable depth when the Ida Burn recedes to a trickling over algaed stones.
The path is recently mown, a tractor width, and curves between two rows of trees. There’s a newly ploughed field resown in lucerne, white rocks furrowed to the surface. Some of the willows are maybe fifty years old with thick, textured trunks, branches arching and cracked and aloft.
We examine Brian’s careful piles of sapling branches, and look through the flattened grass for a discarded, forgotten saw.
“I think someone may have taken it,” Brian says.
“No-one in the village would take anything of yours. They wouldn’t do that to you.”
‘But things go missing, get shifted around at home.”
“People respect you too much. Does it help if you think it’s Alzheimer’s, you misplacing things? Is that easier than thinking someone would steal from you?”
“Yes,” he says. “But it’s such a bugger.”
The dog at the house across the paddock stops barking and now it’s only the sound of the stream.
“Ahh, it’s talking to us,” he says.
The ancient and younger trees, the rapids and glides, the harvest of branches. How industrious he has been. He’s sawn what he can reach, and placed the leafy twigs behind the trunks out of sight of the path, left tidiness and order.
“Come on, saw,” I call out. “Show yourself.”
“It could be someone’s come and taken it.”
“We’ll find it,” I say. We stop to look at a huge jumble of bulldozed trunks. Brian has chopped and gathered there too. I walk down a dip. There’s another stack he’s made, the red of the saw handle beside it.
“I’ve found it!”. I carry the saw over to Brian.
“Oh,” his face lights up. “You are the life of my life!”
And then he must try out the saw.
A white mist spirals up the slope of Rough Ridge, so white on the sunny slope it’s like smoke, and closer in the trees it’s like a grey cloud coming for us.
“Brian its getting colder, there’s fog coming.”
“I want to get this branch,” he says, not wanting to give up though the branch curves and resists his saw. The air is sunny and then it’s as if it is raining, but so fine a rain I can’t tell if I am imagining it, and turn around looking through the air. The greyness has reached us. Even the hills are blocked out. The branch drops and Brian picks up its long length in one arm, the saw in the other, and we set off up the track.
I tell him about the men in the submersible missing on their trip to the Titanic. How they could be three kilometres or more down under the sea, so helpless, while people search for them. We are walking home through the trees and mist, the trees dark shapes, and the air ethereal, Brian holding a branch, and a saw.
*
The snow has gone, and the overnight rain passed over. It takes a while to find my helmet and gloves, wheel my bike to Brian’s. He checks and pumps the tyres. We confer on a ride. I’m thinking of one that will help me start cycling again. How in the early days of Brian training me we’d get home from a ride, and I’d collapse on the lawn beside my bike. Brian would come out of his house now and then to check up on me. Is there anything I can do? he’d ask, and I’d groan and say no, I’ll be all right soon.
I did become fit enough to win the Wakatipu Cycle Club champs for senior women, (the only one in my field, but still). There is a medal hanging on the door frame to add to my children’s medals.
We decide on half an hour up the road and turn back. The Ida Burn is running full throttle, noisy and brown and rolling under the bridge. There’s a short sharp uphill and I’m pushing and breathing hard, Brian gliding along beside me.
“You’re riding so slow with me you could almost fall off your bike,” I say to him.
“Oh no, I’m in complete control,” he says. The road levels and the paddocks open out each side of us, empty of animals or crops, the grass tawny and short. The clouds have rolled back to reveal the peak of Blackstone Hill, the Home Hills where Power of the Dog was filmed, Rough Ridge and its rocky tors. But not the mountains, not Mt Ida or Mt St Bathans, or even further down the valley. We bike in this lit arena of hills and sky.
It’s downhill almost all the way home. Brian speeds past me and further down the road lifts both arms above his head.
When I catch up, he says, “You have to know how to look after yourself on the bike, otherwise you can’t keep up with the bunch.”
Out here it’s as if nothing has changed or will – Brian the fitter, skilled cyclist, me panting and heart thumping behind him, the land spreading out away from us.
We bike up my long driveway.
“You know, I think that’s enough biking if I do that twice a week.”
“No,” Brian says straight back. “That was just a squirt. Come out with me more. Even if its windy you can ride on my tail. A week or two and you’ll be going all the way round the loop.”
The cows are lying down near the haystack, Emily completely stretched out on the grass. Somnolent.
The next morning, I play Nick Cave’s song “Night Raid” from Ghosteen again:
And we all rose up from our wonder.
We would never admit defeat.
That tune, surging in my heart.
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