The Crossing
The old woman and her dog were folded into the shelter of the veranda, she gently oscillating back and forth in her rocking chair, he lying on the floor beside her, curled up, his eyes closed, his nose tucked against his tail. Both ignored the desert wind which, charged with the heat and yellow dust it had stripped from the distant Mayondere salt pans, raged around their house. It came out of the east and, after striking the back of the building, either surged over the roof to clatter the loose sheets of corrugated iron or swept round the gable ends, moaning at the gaps where the weatherboards had shrunk. In the lee of the building it eddied and slowed, probing into the gloomy veranda to bump against the back of her chair, worry the woman’s flimsy cotton dress, and tug at her hair. Then, as if irritated by her indifference, it laid a film of dirt across clothing, floor and furnishings before spinning away into the limitless barrens beyond the road.
A white Mercedes van, braking sharply as it hurtled out of the storm, slithered to a halt twenty yards in front of the bungalow. It stood, rocking slightly under the buffeting of the wind. The dog had woken upon its arrival, lifting his head to watch. He turned to look up at the woman, knowing she would not go out to meet it, and turned back to observe the van. After a minute he heard, over the whine of the wind, the gears engage with a savage crunch, and watched as it accelerated away. The old woman, her lips pursed, continued to stare out at the point where its single tail light had disappeared into the murk.
Slowly, painfully, the dog rose. For a moment he contemplated the spiralling dust scoured from the patch of bare earth in front of the bungalow and the sheets of pale wind-sand that seethed like a flood across the tarmac beyond. Then, cautiously, he shook himself in an attempt to dislodge the dust that saturated his coat. His age showed in the white-rimed whiskers around his muzzle and, as he moved towards the veranda steps, in the arthritic distress of each movement. He negotiated the steps tentatively, pausing between each movement to look around. The wind was fiercer when he reached the bottom, causing his hair to bristle in waves, as if the gusts were stroking it the wrong way. For a few moments he contemplated the maelstrom that raged around him, then he wandered away to his right, sniffed the ground, slowed, circled, hesitated, sniffed some more, turned, arched his back and defecated. When he had finished, with his back still partially arched, he moved forward two steps, stretched his back legs, and set about kicking dirt at the small, sticky pile, dirt that did not reach it but was snatched away by the wind. Then he returned to the veranda.
This dry, desert wind was a frequent if unpredictable visitor. Over the years it had sucked so much moisture from the old woman’s skin that she had joked to the man who drove the Mercedes van that she would be mummified long before she was dead. Recently it had become no more than a nuisance. Its visitations had been far more serious when there had been the gates to close at her level crossing, when she and the dog had had to venture out in all weathers for the four trains that passed on a regular basis each day, two during daylight and the two night sleepers. When the wind was at its worst the trains were delayed and the gates difficult to move. But she no longer had to go out: the gates had been replaced with automatic lights and the old woman had been pensioned off.
But habits and adherence to timetables die hard in anyone, like the old woman, who has worked a whole life with the railways. So, after the gates had gone, she and her dog had continued to go out to watch the daytime trains come through, the zero nine thirty-two and the sixteen twenty-five, standing by the new, if rather unreliable warning lights as the rollingstock rattled across the level crossing: ‘clackety-clack, dumpity-dump, clackety clack’. Although they no longer went out at night, the old woman found that sleep would not come until she had heard the twenty-two seventeen pass through and, however soundly she slept, she always woke to listen for the zero three forty-four.
There were other rituals that remained. When the two of them had seen the afternoon train through, they took their daily constitutional along the road, walking in alternate directions on alternate days. After two miles following the highway’s pencil straightness they turned and walked back again. Rarely was there anything to see. Sometimes there might be an ostrich, its extremities disarticulating in the horizontal mirages which, even in the late afternoon, distorted the flat desert surface; or a distant gazelle, its steady stare interrupted by the flick of its ears; or a small group of disdainful giraffe. They never seemed to be feeding, these animals. Usually they simply stood and contemplated the human and her dog as they wandered along the road.
Three years previously, in the face of approaching redundancy, these walks had taken on a more serious purpose. The meagre pension the railway company paid the old woman was barely enough to live on. So, whereas previously the dog’s picking at the pathetic remains of the small animals and birds whose lives had been extinguished by the speeding vehicles had earned him the reprimand, “Dirty, boy, dirty,” she now began actively to encourage his scavenging. On the rare occasions they found something large, however mangled, she would pick it up and carry it home to share between them, eking out the precious meat over several days.
The walks took on another purpose. The woman began to collect car and lorry parts that had fallen off, with the intention of selling them to passers by. But the removal of the old crossing gates which she used to close some time before the train came through had destroyed the main reason for motorists to stop, so no-one bought the hub caps arrayed along the front of the veranda, and the piles of other debris - sections of exhaust, nuts, bolts, a chrome bumper, wheels, shredded tyres, a wheel arch - steadily accumulated in the back yard. Indoors she secreted the more valuable of the oddments that had escaped during their owners’ passage, amongst them a woman’s silk scarf, a pair of Calvin Klein sunglasses, a silver cigarette lighter engraved, “D.J.”, and a set of unused dentures.
On an average walk they might see two or three cars. When they heard them they made a point of moving to the upwind side of the road to avoid the dust they would throw up, before turning to watch. The occupants rarely acknowledged their existence from the dark, remote interior of their machine. A few might raise a hand as they sped by. A child might wind down a window and wave or shout or, occasionally, throw something - chewing gum or a compacted ball of the silver paper from chocolate bars. The only people who stopped were those in need: water for their radiator, air for a tyre, or the telephone the old woman no longer possessed. But, every fortnight, on a Tuesday, Hendrick stopped.
Hendrick owned the general store twenty-three miles down the road. On his regular dash into town to collect his stock he stopped his Mercedes van briefly in front of the old woman’s house. He required that she be at the roadside waiting. Without opening his door he handed her the meagre items she had ordered upon his previous visit and, once a month, her pension, taking most of her money away again as payment for goods received. He was a man of few words and short temper who had made it clear that she was privileged: he did not deliver to other customers and she only received this service because she happened to be upon his road. Despite his hostility, and despite her efforts at self-control, she prattled away to him. When he left, as often as not in the middle of her sentence and without a word of farewell, she wept dry tears, more in self-disgust than from any sense of renewed loneliness. She returned to her veranda clutching the cardboard box and, in her misery, sat with it on her lap, rocking herself back and forth in her chair while the dog stretched out at her feet, his muzzle along the floor, his dark eyes rolled up to watch her.
*
As the day drew on the wind’s assault became fiercer. Shortly after four in the afternoon it finally succeeded in lifting a sheet of corrugated iron from a section of roof at the back of the house. For a few moments the rusty metal clattered and fought and tore, then it broke away, distorting as easily as a piece of paper as it was catapulted over the ridge before falling sharply beyond the veranda, continuing to cartwheel towards the road. The dog raised his head to follow its brief cavorts of freedom before it folded itself around a telegraph pole.
The afternoon train was due. It was time for his walk. He was deterred neither by the gale nor by the fact that his mistress had not accompanied him for some days, nor would accompany him that day. She had no need to worry that he would get lost: he knew the geography even better than she, having been here when she’d arrived, a long dog’s life ago.
After negotiating the steps the wind harried him across the open ground to the road, ruffling his fur and throwing grit in his eyes. Reaching the tarmac, by now almost lost beneath a sheet of hissing, moving sand, without hesitation he turned right. His normal route kept to the near side of the road but each swirling gust pushed him out into it. Despite this, he had almost reached the level crossing when Hendrik’s Mercedes van, approaching fast from behind, struck him. The sharp edge of the front bumper decapitated him, propelling his head some thirty yards across the road, while his body was thrown forward, hit the tarmac surface, bounced, rolled, and passed under the right front wheel where the skin and rib cage were crushed and split open, strewing a tangle of flesh, shattered bones and entrails along the road.
Hendrick braked, heard and felt the front, off-side tyre explode, fought the manic wheel as it spun and jerked, and brought the van to a slithering halt. For a moment he sat, gripping the steering wheel, his mouth working as he cursed. He knew he had hit the old woman’s dog and he was certain it was dead. These did not matter. But the burst tyre did. It was his spare, for he had suffered a puncture a few days earlier which he had not found time to repair. When he finally controlled his fury, directed at the old woman rather than himself, he knew he would need to patch one of the inner tubes and, to do that, he required water.
Hendrick reached across the seat and pulled the old woman’s box of groceries towards him. With some difficulty he pushed open the door and jumped down. Holding the door open with his back, he reached across the seat and lifted the box, moving aside smartly as the wind slammed the door shut. He then set off back down the road, passing the scattered remains of the dog, each fragment already obscured by the small slope of sand building against it. He walked until the outline of the bungalow loomed through the haze. There was no need to tell the woman about her dog. He would give her the groceries and ask her if he could have a bucket of water. In these conditions, even she was unlikely to want to help him mend the puncture. He did not intend to return her bucket: he would leave it by the roadside. So he would, with a bit of luck, be quickly upon his way.
As he struggled towards the house the wind rose in renewed frenzy, snatching at the box he carried and urging him back to his vehicle. But he fought it, finding progress easier as he approached the veranda. He did not see the mess left by the dog, perfectly camouflaged by the sand grains that had stuck to it, but he felt the slip as he trod in it. Cursing again, clutching the box, dragging his heel across the sand, he finally succeeded in wiping the last of it off against the bottom step of the veranda.
From there he discerned the old lady sitting in her rocking chair deep in the obscurity at the back of the veranda. She was watching him, rocking gently back and forth. He raised his hand and shouted, a curt greeting, frowning at her lack of reaction. Holding her groceries in front of him and watching his footing, he mounted the veranda steps.
He stopped when he saw her shoe. It lay on its side at the top of the steps, a heavily worn leather shoe with a low, square heel that might, once, have been black. What stopped him was not the shoe itself but what it contained, a dark, tarry mess. He glanced up at the woman and, when he saw her legs, he dropped the box.
They were no more than bone, sharp, splintered bone surrounded by flapping material. Her feet, presumably still in the shoes, had been removed, the one he had already seen lying near him, the other slightly to the left of her chair. He knew immediately that she had been dead for several days and that the dog, in his hunger, had begun to eat her.
Hendrick set about retrieving the scattered groceries which she would no longer need. While he was on his knees, groping under her chair for a tin of corned beef, he decided to enter the house and carry out a rapid search for anything of value. No-one would know he had been there. He had stood to move past the woman when, above the banshee screams of the wind, he heard the sixteen twenty-five hit his van.
~