The Burning Bush

Just something I wrote today. This is version 1, no real editing yet :)

This kid Callum sat across my desk, looking down and scratching his fingernails mainly, answering my questions with a shrug and down-turned mouth. He looked up occasionally and I tried to work out if he was being honest or just trying to appear honest. Mostly he looked bored.

Even covered by a baggy grey hoody I could see he was slim. Lucky b*****d. I looked down at my white shirt, the buttons straining over a belly which cascaded over a too-tight belt. I don’t like this part of the job. Actually, I hate it. When I got a teaching job at a college, I thought I would be teaching. Okay, I wasn’t expecting a cap and gown, or respectful students, not at this place anyway. But at least I thought I might be able to get through to a couple of students, you know?  These days I spend more time sorting out this kind of crapola. I don’t know if someone recognised a talent for administration or if I was just dumb enough to accept the jobs handed to me.

I gave Callum my standard warning on bringing contraband items to college, my “I don’t know what you were thinking” speech. It’s a long speech. He nodded. I went over it again, I had to prompt him to get an agreement. “Yeah, sure” �" that’s it. For all that talking that’s all I got. He stood to go and reached across the desk to pick up his shopping bag. “No way, Callum. You’ve lost them”.

He gives me this look. I can see him weighing up in his mind if he should argue, threaten a formal complaint for stealing his property, threaten me. I’ve heard it before. He just turned and went; the highlight of my day.

It’s a waste of time, all this talk. I don’t want to say it and the Callums don’t want to hear it. I’m required to say it, they are required to hear it; that’s that. I picked up the bag and pulled out the box. Sparklers. Some numbnuts in policy has classified these as “incendiary devices” and put them on the contraband list. Probably did a risk assessment. Maybe applied the Precautionary Principle. Whatever, I’m left with the job of confiscating toys from twenty-year-olds.

I stood up and looked out the window facing across the staff carpark, nearly empty as it was getting towards five and most classes, and teachers, have finished. There’s just one tree in the middle of the carpark, a stunted gum that gives little shade. Callum slunk out of the building and started walking across. He took off his hoodie as he walked and waved to someone. I could see a car parked on the entrance road near the boom gate, arms out of the windows on both sides, flapping like a bird. Callum broke into a trot, whipping his hoodie above his head as he passed the tree.

 

I remember the summer of 1980 was hot and dry. I was in high-school then in Sydney; Year 9. My grandmother lived on a tiny farm about two hours drive away, four hours by train. We would escape up there (it was in the mountains, so to us it was “up”) whenever we could. Ma was always happy to see us and our friends. That summer holiday I’d taken my best friend Matt up to visit for a few days, catching the train up to the little country station. My uncle, John, met us at the station to give us a lift to the farm. He lived up the road from Ma.

John drove a 1950 Chevrolet with a ute body built by Holden. What the Americans would call a truck. Matt and I thought it was the coolest thing on four wheels. John, on the other hand, was what you might call a difficult man. He had a hard life working on the land and spoke in short, blunt sentences. He had a temper and was known to discipline his kids by spraying them with the high-pressure hose he used to clean the truck. There wasn’t a lot of chatter on the trip to Ma’s farmhouse.

The farmhouse had not changed a lot since the 1930’s. Just a few years before the electricity had been put on, which was like a miracle. There was still no running water or telephone. Heating and cooking still relied on a wood-fired range in the kitchen. Ma had a shiny new electric range which she rarely used; I never knew why.

You might think being “up” in the mountains it would be cool, but we are talking about Australia. The mountains are glorified hills, really. It can get cold and wet in winter, but summer was usually hot. Hot and tinder dry. There’s lots of things to be worried about in the bush: deadly snakes, lethal spiders, crushing isolation. But the thing that worries people more than most are bush fires. When the bush gets dry, really dry, it can go up in a flash and spread for miles. My grandfather, long gone by then, had done his best to protect the house by clearing a wide space around it where cattle would wander aimlessly keeping the grass down. Inside that space were ornamentals and gardens only.

Matt and I had a great time. We would walk in the bush, take turns riding the horse, or just collapse on the back porch to recover from the heat and wave away flies. Ma was a great cook. I was able to eat everything to the point of bursting and not put on any weight. Times have changed.

There was a shed my Dad and I had built the year before to take the surplus items from our garage at home. Dad had bought an old boat that he kept on a mooring in the harbour. When we cleaned out the bilge there was a pile of stuff that we didn’t know what to do with, so we dumped it in the shed. There was an old car in the shed, too. Dad planned to restore one day (he never did). When we got bored Matt and I would go through the shed, maybe fiddle with the car. It had a hand-crank at the front, if you put it in gear and turned the crank it would lurch forward a little.

We found the box of expired flares in the boot of the old car. Marine flares back then looked more like military rockets: a solid aluminium body about 40 cm long and maybe 7 cm diameter. It looked like it would penetrate a tank. It sat in a thick cardboard cylinder for launching. You popped off the base plug and pulled a pin, holding it out and pointing it up. The rocket would launch and shoot up to 1 000 feet before it would explode, releasing a parachute with a burning-bright phosphorous flare.

I don’t know who hatched the plan, I guess it was mutual. We decided to give the flare a try and took one out into the empty space around the side of the house. The cows were in the top paddock near the front gate, so we figured we wouldn’t spook them if we fired it there. Ma was in the house cooking, and she was deaf anyway.

I talked Matt into holding the flare while I pulled the pin; he seemed Okay with that. He stood with his arm stretched out as I fiddled with the firing pin. It was stiff and hard to pull out, but finally it came off and I stood back as the flare started to hiss. Then it hissed really loudly. I don’t know if it was the hissing or me standing back that made Matt re-think his “I’ll hold it” decision, but I could see by his wide-mouth wide-eye look that he wished he could trade places. Then Matt did the unthinkable: he dropped the flare and stood back, too.

For a second I was frozen as I tried to think of what to do: pick it up, run, scream. Fate intervened as the flare fully ignited, shooting a flame out one end of the cardboard tube and an angry rocket out the other. Having been launched horizontally, not vertically, the rocket shot along the ground before gaining a little height. White smoke spewed behind it and hung in the air so we could clearly see its path. It corkscrewed across the paddocks, heading towards the herd of cattle in the front paddock.

Even to this day I have this jolt when I think what would happen if an angry marine flare with a phosphorous tip hit a cow at full speed. It wouldn’t be pretty. The best scenario in my mind is instant bar-be-que, laid out neat and nicely cooked. The worst is an animal ablaze, screaming and running into the bush like some sort of devil-cow from hell spreading flames over the entire district. Amazingly, the flare just cork-screwed through the herd without hitting one of them. The herd continued to chew as if nothing had happened, oblivious to the stream of white smoke that magically appeared around them.

The rocket continued on to the fence line next to the road, probably 300 m from the launch site, where it finally found its mark: a small gum tree, just bigger than a sapling. The rocket slapped into the trunk near the base and the tree burst into bright red flames.

Matt and I came to life then; we knew enough to act straight away when there was a fire. We ran as fast as we could up to the fence and climbed though it to get close to the burning tree. There was no running water and no phone, so we stripped off our T-shirts and began beating the tree with them as hard as we could. The fire had spread to the dry grass at the base of the tree, which was out of reach of the cattle and quite long. We stomped at that furiously, ignoring the heat and the smoke. We were running on adrenalin.

As we were getting the fire under control, we saw the old Chevy ute coming down the road. I knew we could not hide the signs of fire and that we were in big trouble, but I also knew John would know the best thing to do; we were saved. I yelled to Matt and we whipped the fire as hard as we could in a futile attempt to make it look like a minor accident. The Chevy slowed down and pulled in beside us. John looked at us through the open driver’s window, watching us beat the flames. He didn’t get out.

Finally, he called out in a hard voice “What happened here?”. He gave me a hard look. “We dunno” said my younger self “it just caught fire”. I kept beating back the still smouldering grass and tree, I knew it could flare up quickly as long as it was still smoking.

John watched us for a few more long moments before he pulled the car back to the other side of the street and drove away. He drove down to the farm gate, did a leisurely U-turn, then slowly cruised back past us. He didn’t look at us once, he just kept driving back towards his house. I suppose I thought he might call the fire service; his house had a phone. But no one came, and he never said a word about what he saw to anybody.

Matt and I spent a long time putting out every little ember we could find. By the time we were done our clothes and bodies were filthy. Our sneakers were singed from stomping out the flames, but the fire was out. On the way back to the house we waded through the dam to give us a story: we got dirty swimming and now we needed a shower. Ma sent us off to get cleaned up while she worked on cooking our dinner.

 

The lesson I learned that day has stayed with me over the years. It took me a long time to work it out, but now it is crystal clear. I shake my head and wonder how John had more impact with no words than all of my lengthy speeches put together.