Harry Gone Away

Meg changed when Harry went away. Her head came up and her shoulders straightened and as Harry and his hunting gear disappeared into the pre-dawn gloom, following the creek up the hills and into the bush, she flung aside her shawl of careful stillness and danced back to the house.
It happened every time. She opened the windows, stripped the bed, stuffed sheets and pillowcases into the machine. Stabbed the “Hot” button. Shook the blankets and threw them over the line to air. Put in a tape, winding up the sound until it washed over and through her.
When she’d finished, she set the player on the ground beside the garden and all morning as she worked she went back and forth and changed the tapes. The Judds. Emmylou Harris. Charley Pride, Eddie Low. At times the music wrenched her and tears fell among the rows of vegetables. She didn’t turn it off.
After lunch she re-stocked the stall at the gate. The people from the village, aware of Harry gone, came to buy. A lettuce, tomatoes, carrots. Glad to find her still in one piece.
They knew the situation, everyone did, but what could they do? Harry was big and he was mean, just as likely to slam a man brave enough to chip him about her bruises against the wall. Frightened the women too, with his flat, blue-eyed glare. The collective conscience of the village shuddered and held its tongue.
Each time Harry left, Meg would make improvements. Lugging stones from the creek to make a rockery, clearing the tangled growth at the edge of the gardens, planting things. Working until dark, squeezing every minute from her precious solitude.
This time it was to be a pond. With crowbar and pick she dug a channel from the creek, to lead the water into an old plastic bathtub found buried in the long grass. The bath was sound, just badly stained. She’d seen at once that if she dug a pit for it and sank it in the ground, then bored a series of holes in the lower end, she might let the water run in, then out along another channel and back to the creek.
Overnight, it seemed, “The Pond” lay under the trees, surrounded by pebbles and cuttings and flax roots pulled from the big bushes by the boundary. Meg, thinning onions, glanced at it from time to time, satisfied. The music poured over her, soothing, healing.
It rained the next day, and the next and the next. Around the village the rivers rose and civil defence volunteers left their farms and businesses. They gathered at the Hall, talked about evacuation. Two men dripped their way through the downpour to fetch Meg. She didn’t move, stood instead gazing out the window, the light of Harry-gone-away absent from her eyes.
“Better come with us,” they urged. They thought it was the house, thought it was her things she didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t. She turned back to the window.
They followed her line of sight. The creek broke savagely and roared down her little channel, gouging at the sodden earth. The bathtub floated out of the ground and in its wake, tumbling and rolling in the torrent, the hole in his forehead washed clean by the water, was Harry.
Harry of the quick hands and sarcastic mouth. Harry, who turned up as she finished the trench, just on dark. Furious at the loss of his pack and rifle over a bluff and into the river. Who sneered at the bath sitting on the bank, pushed with his great feet at the side of the trench, caving it in.
Harry, who lurched at her, fist upraised to punish her cry of protest, rage blinding him to the pick she held in her hands. The pick she used, still bloody from his shattered skull, to scratch a shallow grave beneath her pit, to drag him to it, push him in and bury him.
She worked carefully, calm even when she washed the pick in the creek and had to pull a matted chunk of hair from the crack where the shaft met the metal head. She flicked the hair into the water and watched as it drifted downstream.
“Goodbye Harry” she said softly, and saying it, was flooded with sensation, orgasmically intense, of horror, and release.
Now the Civil Defence men stood with her at the window. Jim the butcher and Will from the farm down the road. They saw Harry’s body, saw where it came from, saw Meg. Remembered a black eye, two, three. A split lip. An arm in plaster from a “fall”. Two great thumb prints purple green and yellow on her throat and a voice that rasped for months from the damage done. For months!
Their eyes met in silent agreement. Will took Meg by the shoulders and turned her away from the window. She waited, head down, passive.
“Look at me, Meg”, said Will urgently. He lifted her chin until she met his gaze.
“We’ve got to get out of here, but before we go, Jim and I have some bad news for you.” Jim nodded in agreement.
“Harry’s dead.”
They saw her flinch at the flat statement. Will reached out quickly and put his finger on Meg’s lips to stop her speaking.
“We think he must have slipped, trying to jump the creek. Seems like he hit his head and got swept away. We saw his body in the flood but it could be weeks before they find it.”
He looked at her squarely until he was sure she knew what he was saying, knew exactly what he meant.
“Jim and I will put in a report of accidental death.”
Jim nodded again, patted her reassuringly, sealing it.
“Now,” said Will firmly, “we’d better get out of here before we all get swept away.”
As they left the house, the water roared and surged against the porch, testing the foundations. Somewhere inside Meg’s soul, a knot of pain five years in growing tensed and popped, dissolving into tears that slid seamlessly into the driving rain.
“Harry’s gone away.” The words, unspoken, pealed like bells in her mind, turning, spinning, flying.
“This time, Harry’s really gone away.”

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bruise, flax, pickaxe and relax