Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong Page B

finish it off. Where would I have ever seen her swim?’
    Saul turned to Iris. ‘I just thought you might have heard something. People are saying…’
    His father licked the serving spoon. ‘She always had a dozen stories circulating about her, that girl. She kept the valley gossips going.’
    ‘What would people up here know, Saul?’ said Iris. ‘Huh? Remember when Sally Benson’s girl went to Sydney and everyone was saying she’d become a prostitute? It wasn’t true. Most of it’s not true.’
    ‘Ah, you couldn’t be sure of anything with that girl, son. Nice enough lass, but she didn’t tell it straight, eh?’
    Saul put down his fork. ‘What makes you such an expert on her?’
    ‘Ah, this is all ancient history Saul.’
    ‘You don’t like to talk of those that are gone, do you Dad? You never mentioned Mum’s name once after she died. It was as if she had never existed. I began to wonder if I was crazy, if I’d invented her.’
    His father wiped his plate with a piece of bread and smiled at Iris. ‘Lovely meal thanks, dear. That was Mac Wilson’s beast. Very tasty.’
    Iris glanced from one man to the other, her face worried.
    Saul stood up and scraped his plate into the bin.
    ‘Oh, you can’t have had enough yet, Saul.’ Iris pointed to the platter of sliced meat.
    ‘No. I’m fine, thank you.’
    His father got up and left his plate on the table.
    Saul rinsed his plate and thought of how his father had never taken to Mae. He was friendly to her but it seemed to Saul that he was always watching her out of the corner of his eye, as if he could tell that she would never settle for life as a farmer’s wife and she was simply biding her time in the valley. Saul suddenly remembered overhearing his father up at the meat co-op one evening soon after Mae’s pregnancy became common knowledge around the valley. The men used to meet at the small timber cottage to do maintenance on the place. Once, Saul was out the back, smoking a stolen cigarette, and he could hear Mae’s father inside, talking, as he had for days, of driving out west to track down the balloon man, at whichever small-town Show was on. Saul had put an eye to a crack in the door just as his dad interrupted Mae’s father, ‘Forget it Jim. It’d do no good. You couldn’t prove anything and the scoundrel wouldn’t do the right thing by the little tart anyway.’ Only one of Mae’s uncles had looked shocked, glancing around the room as if waiting for a reaction. None of the other men seemed to notice what his father had called her. They kept talking, complaining about the rubbish left behind after the Show every year. Saul had thrown his cigarette onto the cement path and walked home along the road feeling sick, the gravel releasing the day’s heat and the crickets pumping their noise into the evening air. He had climbed into bed fully clothed, his father’s words replaying in his head, the most alone he had felt since his mother died.
    He put his plate in Iris’s fancy wooden dish rack and walked out onto the verandah. She called after him, ‘Don’t you want a cuppa Saul?’
    ‘No thanks, Iris, I’ll head off now.’ He started down the steps. ‘Thanks for dinner.’
    He walked along his forest path and had the crazy idea that Allie would be waiting for him again. He had felt a mixture of delight and dread seeing her on his doorstep that morning and had wanted to ask her exactly how Mae died, wanted to demand specifics, quiz her about the whispers around the valley. All he had was an image of Mae gliding through the water, her arms tiring, moving slower and slower until she simply stopped swimming and let herself drift lazily to the bottom of the harbour. Julia was the one to ask but she had avoided him at the funeral. Of course he would never ask Allie. That morning at his place, she’d had the same slightly stunned expression as the day before at the graveside. He had been standing across from her and his shadow had fallen down