The Burning Bush v2

This kid Callum sat across my desk, looking down, scratching and picking 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, like he couldn’t care less about explaining himself.

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 last-notch belt and pushed up against the peeling laminated desktop. I found myself scratching at the underside of the laminate, peeling a little more off as Callum gave a half-explanation. I don’t like this part of the job. Really, 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 in me or if I was just dumb enough to accept the jobs nobody else wanted.

I gave Callum my standard warning on bringing contraband items onto college premises, followed up by my “I don’t know what you were thinking” speech. It’s a long speech. He barely looked up and gave me a half-nod, half-shrug gesture when I’d finished. I went over it again, then 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, like a gunslinger at high noon facing down his opponent. I can see him weighing up in his mind if he should argue, threaten a formal complaint for stealing his property, threaten me. Go ahead, punk, I’ve heard it all 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; nobody wins. 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 after five and most classes, and teachers, had finished. There’s just one tree in the middle of the carpark, a stunted gum that gives little shade from the summer heat. I watched as 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, one arm out of the windows on both sides, flapping in unison like a bird. Callum broke into a trot towards the car, 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 was waiting for us, sitting with one elbow out of the window of his 1950 Chevrolet ute, built by Holden. What the Americans would call a truck. It bulged in all the right places and had a front end that looked like a huge chrome grin, with braces. We slid across the giant leather bench seat beside John. Matt and I thought that car 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. His arms were wiry and browned by the sun, his face had never known moisturiser. 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. It was home-built, of course, and had grown as the needs of the family had grown, with a room added here or a verhadah filled in there. They used whatever material was available; the kitchen was rammed earth, the back rooms were weatherboard, and the newer front rooms were cement sheet. 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 relied mainly on a wood-fired range in the kitchen. Ma had a shiny new electric range which she rarely used; I never knew why. We always had a job to do, splitting logs in the wood heap to feed the fire.

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 the bush fires. When the bush gets dry, really dry, it can go up in a flash and spread for miles. It only takes one spark, one cigarette butt, one lightning strike. My grandfather, long gone by then, had done his best to protect the house by clearing a wide space around the house paddock. Beef cattle would congregate in this cleared space, patiently keeping the grass down and producing enough cow pats to nurture the next generation of flies. Inside the house paddock were ornamentals and gardens only, a little oasis in a sea of grass.

Matt and I had a great time. We would walk in the bush on our own for miles, take turns riding the horse, or just collapse on the back porch to recover from the heat and wave away flies. Ma spent most of the time in the kitchen looking like a poster for the Country Women’s Association: pretty apron over a floral cotton dress, floury hands, patient smile. She was a great cook. Back then 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 it 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 safety 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, so yeah, like a bazooka. You popped off the base plug and pulled a pin to fire it, holding it out and pointing it up. The rocket was supposed to launch and shoot up to 1 000 feet before it would explode, releasing a parachute with a burning-bright phosphorous payload.

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 just about deaf anyway. No one else was around.

I talked Matt into holding the flare while I pulled the pin; he seemed okay with that. He stood with his arm stretched out doing a sort-of countdown as I fiddled with the firing pin. It was stiff and hard to pull out, Matt had to slow down the countdown: “three and a half, three…”, but finally the pin 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, bouncing once or twice 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 patiently chew the grass down as if nothing had happened, or perhaps as if this sort of thing happened every day: “huh, another rocket”.

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, bigger than a sapling but only by a year or so. It was one of a line of straggly gums that stretched along the fence line beside the road and lead all the way into the bush, where gums and dry grass kept going to the horizon and beyond. The rocket slammed into the trunk near the base and the gum burst into bright red phosphorous flames.

Matt and I came to life then; we knew enough to act straight away when there was a fire in the bush. We ran as fast as we could up to the fence and climbed though it to get 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 long dry grass at the base of the tree. 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 couldn’t 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, resting his elbow on the door. He let the engine run and didn’t get out.

Finally, he barked “What happened?”. 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 and our lungs were full of smoke. Our sneakers were singed from stomping out the flames, but the fire was out. On the way back to the house we waded through a dam to give us a story: we got dirty swimming and now we needed a bath. 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’s crystal clear. I shake my head and wonder how John had more impact with two words than all of my lengthy speeches put together.

Author's Note

Version 2...I added some more descriptive passages. I'm never sure how much to put in our leave out! Still needs more work

Reviews

[JayG]

• This kid Callum sat across my desk, looking down, scratching and picking 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, like he couldn’t care less about explaining himself.
- - - -
Apparently I arrived late to this show and missed the first act. Whose skin do I wear? What questions are being asked, and why? Where are we? What’s going on? You know. The person the speaker is calling a kid, plus everyone else in the story, knows. But who did you write this for? Shouldn’t they know? Lacking context, I have words, but not your intent. And the voice of the narrator contains only the emotion suggested by punctuation. Have your computer read it to you to hear how different what the reader gets is from your intent.

The word meaning is only what the words suggest to the reader, not your intent for their meaning, so one paragraph in they're lost—as would be an acquiring editor or a reader looking at this in a bookseller's, to see if they wanted to commit to reading.And since you cannot retroactively remove confusion or provide a second first-impression…

• I don’t like this part of the job.

"This part?" This part of what? And "job?" What job? You've hinted at none. The speaker could be of any age, any gender, any profession, and live in any country, and era.

Think about it. Why does the reader care that someone they know absolutely nothing about, who is doing something unknowable, doesn’t like an unknown job? Obviously, we're not in the viewpoint of the protagonist. Instead, the aurthor, pretending to have lived the event, is talking about them in overview. That's a report.

My point? A great deal of the story never made it to the page because you didn't know it had to—but must.

One problem you face is that you know the situation, the characters, and the plot intimately. And because you know it so well you don’t mention the things you find obvious—bit which the reader needs. Then, when you read your own story you automatically fill in the blanks and the writing sings to you. You never see the problems.

Added to that, the voice of the narrator is your voice, all filled with the emotion that the reader cannot know belongs there. So it works perfectly…for you.

Bottom line: In our schooldays all those reports and essays we write made us good at writing reports and essays, which have informing the reader as their goal. In other words, we learned to be nonfiction writers, and have only a skill-set that’s useless for fiction.

It’s not a matter of talent, the story, or even how well you write. It’s that you can’t use the skills of verbal storytelling on the page because they don’t work in our medium. And you cannot practice a profession without professional skills. After all, since you learned to read you’ve been selecting only fiction created with the professional skills of Fiction-Writing. You can’t see them, or know the various decisions and choices those skills guided the author into. But you do see and expect the result of those techniques being used, just as your reader expects to see that in your writing. And I can’t think of a better argument in favor of spending a bit of time, and perhaps a few coins, on your writer’s education.

So…is this what you were hoping to hear? Hell no. Who would? But it is what you need to know, and I thought you might want to know.

So how do you fix the problems you never saw as being problems? Simple. Add the tricks the pros take for granted to your writing tool kit. Of course the words simple and easy aren’t interchangeable, and we are talking about the specialized knowledge and techniques of a profession. So there is a significant amount of work involved. But that’s true of any field, so it’s not happy news, but no big deal. More a rite-of-passage that every successful author faces and passes. So why not you?

The local library system’s fiction-writing section is a great resource. But my suggestion is to pick up the best book on the subject I’ve found to date at the link below (it’s free). Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer won’t make a pro of you. That’s your job. But it will give you the tools, and knowledge of why they’re needed and what they can do for you. And when mastered, the act of writing becomes a LOT more fun, as the protagonist becomes your co-writer. The leftmost of the three buttons on the page (the one in Russian) will select the format your reader requires.
https://ru.b-ok2.org/book/2640776/e749ea

So dig in. Like chicken soup for a cold, it might not help, but is sure couldn’t hurt. And to sample some on the issues that are very different in writing fiction the articles in my WordPress writing blog are mostly based on Swain’s teaching.

But whatever you decide, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/