The Timing Chain

I have been picking zucchini blossoms at the Warburton station for three years now, and in that time exactly two interesting things have happened. One was a hailstorm that dented the ute. The other was the wildfire, but I will get to that.

Most days the rhythm goes like this. I get up before the sun, walk the rows, pick blossoms into crates until my fingers smell green, and load them into the shed. By noon Brody shows up to check the gum tree in the fenced yard, the one the bears use as a rub post. Yes, bears, in Western Australia, which is its own argument we have had many times, and I am not going to settle it here except to say the paperwork says bears and Brody believes paperwork.

He is thirty-eight, four years older than me, and he treats that gum tree like a patient in a hospital. He carries a notebook and a tape measure and he logs every claw mark, how high off the ground, how fresh, which side of the trunk. He has filled eleven notebooks in five years. When I asked him once what he thought would happen if he skipped a day, he looked genuinely troubled, like I had suggested he skip a heartbeat.

"They don't file themselves, Meera," he said. "A gap in the record is a gap in the record."

"It's a tree," I said. "Bears scratched it. You wrote it down. Congratulations, you are the world's leading expert on one tree."

He did not laugh, which is typical, but he also did not get angry, which is also typical, and I will admit here in the privacy of my own narration that the combination irritates me and does something else to me that I did not plan on. He takes things seriously. Nobody else in my life takes anything that seriously. I moved to Warburton three years ago partly because I wanted to prove I could handle a hard, lonely job without a partner fussing over me, and I handled it, and it turns out the reward for handling it is more handling.

So our days settled into a shape. I picked at dawn. He checked the tree at noon. Evenings we sat in the picking shed with lukewarm tea from the urn and traded barbs, and I looked forward to it more than I wanted to look forward to it.

The trouble started on a Thursday, and like most trouble it began with paperwork.

The station manager, Colleen, came out on the quad bike waving her phone around like it was on fire, which in a sense it was, ten miles out and moving with the wind.

"Fire's up past the ridge," she said. "Rural crew says it could swing our way overnight if the wind holds. I'm pulling everyone off the station. Trucks, all of it."

"Everyone?" I asked. "Including me?"

"Everyone," she said. "Except somebody has to stay and hold the perimeter fence. If embers come over, the fence line is where they'll land, and somebody needs to be here with the pump and the hoses to knock them down."

"Then take me and leave Brody," I said, fast, and Colleen gave me a look.

"You're the only one who knows the pump," she said. "And Brody volunteered before I finished the sentence. He's staying either way, so you can fight about it or you can stay and keep him from doing something stupid."

I wanted to fight about it. I want it noted that I wanted to fight about it. But the ute had died the week before with a sound like a saucepan falling down a stairwell, and Brody, who knows engines the way he knows claw marks, had opened the bonnet and said the word "timing chain" with the calm of a man reading a weather report. The replacement part was somewhere in the mail system between Perth and the middle of nowhere. So there was no driving out anyway. Colleen left us a slab of water bottles, a two-way radio, and instructions to call every hour, and then she was a dot on the horizon heading south.

"Well," said Brody. "Roommates."

"Don't get comfortable," I said.

He had already set his notebook on the bench in the shed, squared it up so its edges matched the bench edge, and put his pen on top of it, parallel. The man squares his notebook. I sat at the other end of the bench and drank my tea and did not look at his forearms, which were forearms, on account of him hauling pump equipment around all afternoon.

By six the sky over the ridge had gone the color of a bruise. Not the pretty sunset kind. The other kind, brown at the edges with a dull orange core, and the wind had picked up enough to walk the grass flat. We did the fence line together, me with the hose, him with the radio, checking the pump intake at the tank.

"Smoke's thicker," he said at the north corner. "But it's holding at the ridge. Crews will cut a line overnight, most likely."

"You sound like you're reading that out of one of your notebooks."

"Prediction is just logs with a future tense," he said, and I laughed before I could stop myself, and he looked pleased, which annoyed me, so I stopped.

We came back to the shed and I made tea, which meant putting the urn on and waiting, and we sat there while the light through the door went orange and then gray. The radio crackled its hourly check-in. Colleen's voice said the fire was holding at the ridge line and the wind was due to drop after midnight. Holding. Everything in my life that week was holding.

"Do you ever get scared?" I asked him, because the silence was doing something to my head.

"About fires?" He considered it honestly, which he does with everything. "Yes. About this fire, a reasonable amount. About most things, not much anymore. Five years ago I would have said no to everything and meant it, and that was the problem."

"That's the most words you've said in one go since I've known you."

"You bring it out of me," he said, and then looked startled at himself, and I looked at my tea, and the tea did not help.

The wind dropped after midnight like Colleen said it would, but the smoke smell came in stronger, thick enough that we shut the shed door and put towels under it. We dragged the pump hose out to the fence and laid it along the line so it would be ready, and then there was nothing left to do but wait, and the waiting was the worst part, because the shed is one room with a bench and two chairs, and one of us was going to have to sleep on the floor.

"I'll take the floor," he said, before I could claim it, and I bristled on principle.

"I'm sturdier than I look."

"You look plenty sturdy," he said, and then went red in the dark, actually red, I could see it even by the lantern, and something about that undid me a little. A thirty-eight-year-old man with eleven notebooks going red over the word sturdy.

We laid out the sleeping rolls with a decorous gap between them, the width of a crate of blossoms, and lay there listening to the wind do its undecided thing. Every so often the radio hissed and neither of us reached for it.

"Meera," he said, after a long stretch.

"Yes."

"If the fire comes over the fence, you take the ute side and go. Don't wait for me. The pump is my job, it's on my log, I know the pressure settings."

"It's not on your log, it's on Colleen's checklist."

"It'll be on my log by morning."

"Brody."

"Yes."

"If the fire comes over the fence we both go, because the fence doesn't care about your log. And if it doesn't come over the fence, then in the morning you'll make tea and I'll insult your notebook and life will go on."

He was quiet for a moment. "That sounds good, actually," he said. "The morning part."

And out past the ridge, the sky glowed, and we lay in the dark two feet apart, and neither of us slept much, and that is where the first night ends and the second one begins.

The second day was mostly smoke. Not close smoke, just a gray lid over everything, and the sun coming through it like a coin behind a napkin. Colleen's radio voice told us at nine that crews had cut a line on the north flank overnight and it was looking decent. Decent. One word, no commas, and I turned the volume down.

By noon Brody did his walk to the gum tree, and for once I followed him out instead of staying in the shed pretending not to watch. He stopped at the fence and looked back at me like I'd broken a rule.

"Guests aren't standard procedure," he said.

"I'm not a guest, I'm the blossom picker. I have a key to the yard."

"You don't have a key."

"I have the universal key of it being my yard too." He let that stand, and we went in together. The gum tree was bigger than I'd ever bothered to notice, a big old red gum with bark worn smooth at the height of a big animal's shoulders. Horses did it, I'd assumed. Horses and whatever else scratched itself on trees.

"So this is the famous notebook tree," I said.

"It's a rub tree. Grizzlies use them to mark territory and shed winter fur. It's a communication system with no words in it." He said it flat, like it was a fact about rain, but his hand went out and touched the bark like it was a horse's neck.