The red wheelbarrow - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Maria Takolander
The journey took hours. The asphalt roads became narrower and rougher, and there were endless flat green fields and forests of dark trees. The sky remained grey. I started to feel as if I had a hangover, and I had to close my eyes. When the driver woke me up, we were parked on the side of a dirt road by a grassy clearing in a forest of mottled birch and dark-green fir trees. I couldn't see any houses or other cars. It was still raining. The colour of the day had changed, and I could hear the engine ticking. I started to panic.
I looked at the taxi driver, who sat with Mum's piece of paper in his lap. He was small, wizened and brown. He smiled. His teeth were bad. He pointed to Mum's handwriting, tapping his finger on the page at ‘Dad's home', and then to the clearing surrounded by forest.
Mum once told me that Dad had spent his childhood summers in the woods. I imagined him in these forests, ravenous as a wolf. Perhaps he had shot game or caught fish in hidden lakes or streams. I had wondered what Dad's parents had thought of his escapades, but Mum didn't know. She had never met them. They died long before she came on the scene. Mum had been to the house, though. Dad had brought her here after the wedding in a work truck so that he could collect some old furniture for their flat in Tallinn. There was the timber frame of his mother's bed, grey with age but still strong, and a dining table that was the same. The barn, Mum said, had already collapsed, and the house had looked as if it was ready to fall down. It seemed as if there was nothing here now.
I looked out of the passenger window, which was still blurred by rain. The grass of the clearing was wet and lush. The weather and undergrowth made the forest look impenetrably dark.
WHEN I GOT home from Raphael's tutorial, Dad was in the backyard setting bait-less mousetraps on the ground under the netting cloaking his apple trees. There were four trees. While they had been there for years, they weren't yet more than two metres high. Nevertheless, they bore fruit every year. The netting and the traps were for birds.
I drank a glass of water at the kitchen sink, watching Dad from the kitchen window. It was the middle of the day, and the sky was perfectly blue. It was hot, but Dad was wearing a woollen jumper. His hair was almost white, and unbrushed. Crouching on one knee, he sprung the wire on a wooden trap and gingerly placed it on the bare earth under the gnarled and laden branches of an apple tree.
The house was quiet. I found Mum in the bathroom, showered and in her dressing gown, putting on mascara in front of the old mirror. Her hair was still damp, and she had it combed back and held in place by an Alice band. She smiled at me as I stood at the bathroom door, then kept going with the mascara.
‘Do you need me to change the bandage?' I asked.
She dipped the brush into the black bottle that she was holding in the bandaged hand. ‘I'm fine now, my son.' She smiled at me again, one of her eyes framed by thickened lashes. I wanted to touch her, but instead I smiled back. She turned away from me and started work on the other eye.
I went to my room and ransacked my pine desk for the essay questions for Raphael's subject. The essay wasn't due for a week, but I knew what I wanted to write and, even though English was her second language, Mum liked to proofread my essays before I submitted them. ‘In poems such as "The Red Wheelbarrow",' I read, ‘William Carlos Williams strips the world bare of meaning. Discuss.'
I looked out of my bedroom window and into the backyard. The sky was cloudless, and the air was still. Dad, his face set in a grimace, was down on all fours on the dust beneath the leafy branches of an apple tree, setting another empty trap. ♦