Blueback

XIV

The night Abel returned, there was a little party on the verandah at Longboat Bay. The sea murmured against the shore and humpbacks sang somewhere out in the dark beyond Robbers Head. It was a hot, still night and the salt air hung upon them. Dora Jackson told them stories of waterspouts and lightning balls and manta rays and schools of salmon so thick you could climb out of your boat and walk across them. All the wonders of the ocean, the things she’d seen. She held the papers from the government that protected the bay as a sanctuary. The pages flashed yellow in the light of the lantern. Her face glowed with pride and relief. The three of them laughed and sang until it was late, celebrating the news, happy to be together again.

They were all going to bed when Abel’s mother fell. She stumbled against the rail and toppled down the verandah steps to the hard dirt below. She cried out, her voice small as a girl’s.

Abel rushed to her and saw that her hip was broken. Stella called an ambulance and they wrapped her in blankets for the long wait.

‘I’m old, Abel,’ she sobbed. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m old.’

He held her and cried with her under the warm, starry sky. She was too old to stay on here alone. Sooner or later she would have to leave and that was why she was crying. It hurt her more than the pain itself and Abel understood why.

During the long weeks his mother was in hospital, Abel began to clean the old Jackson place up. He was appalled and ashamed at how run-down the house and gardens had become. The jetty timbers were rotting. Fences and sheds were falling over and the orchard had begun to go wild.

The telephone rang day and night with calls from cities and beaches all over the world. A crisis here, some emergency there, but Abel kept at the job of fixing his family place.

One afternoon he walked up past the orchard to the peppermint tree and stood there a long time. He thought about his father and felt close to his memory there. He put his cheek against the rough bark the way he had as a boy and hugged the thick trunk.

At sunset he stood on the jetty and watched a big blue shadow circle beneath him and peel off into the golden light. The wind luffed at his hair. Cicadas in the dry grass clicked their tongues. Crabs bubbled and clattered across the rocks. Whalebones made a chain all the way along the beach, yellow in the sunset. Abel felt the place was calling him; it made him dizzy.

His wife joined him on the jetty.

‘How will she live somewhere else?’ he asked her. ‘My mother’ll die in a town.’

‘I know,’ said Stella. ‘She should stay here.’

‘She can’t do it alone.’

‘That’s why we’re staying,’ said Stella.

Abel laughed. ‘Really?’

‘Abel, do you want to talk about the sea or be in it?’

He shuffled his feet.

‘Do you want to be homesick or be home?’

He looked out at the water, purpling towards night. ‘It’s a hard life here, Stella.’

‘So why do you lie awake every night wishing you were here?’

‘Because it’s what I want,’ he said. ‘It’s what I always wanted.’

‘I rang the Foundation a few minutes ago and told them we quit.’

Abel brought his mother home to a freshly painted house. She was surprised at the yards and the fixed sheds and newly planted gardens. They made a special bed on the shady verandah and nursed her back to health. Dora stood with the aid of a walking frame the day the officials came to declare the bay a marine reserve. She pointed out the politicians who used to be businessmen, the same ones who wanted to build hotels here. With great satisfaction she watched them set the marker buoys that showed the boundaries of the sanctuary. It stretched all the way out to Robbers Head, a safe place at last. She wanted more of them, other havens along the coast, but for now she was content.

In time Abel’s mother was walking again, but she never went far without help. Some days she took a chair down to the jetty. When she was strong she made the climb up to the peppermint tree to be alone with her memories.

The three of them mended nets and bottled fruit and smoked fish and told long, ludicrous stories as they worked. Abel and Stella supervised the bay and kept an eye on the summer visitors. They wrote papers on the breeding habits of abalone. They walked in the forest and sat up high on the ridge to watch the migrating whales pass. Some days they took divers to see Blueback gobble crabs and swim grumpily round his reef.

One cold winter night a baby was born at Longboat Bay. They called her Dora after her grandmother. Her fists were like pink sea shells and she cried like a bird.