He misjudged the bank of the dam, people said when they heard Frank Slovak had overturned his tractor onto himself. Not dead, they said, but might as well be. Caught him straight across his spine. Turning at the embankment, some loose earth, must have been looking the other way and, bang, look what happens.

His wife found him, they went on, pausing to let their listener visualise this, a nightmare they’d all had: hearing the faint throb of the tractor engine changing as it rolled, either roaring or cutting out; or else you’d be hanging out the washing, maybe, and look up to see it in the distance already on its side, metal glinting, upturned rake tines like fangs.

Everyone had imagined, sometime, making that crazed run across the paddocks, faint with whimpering dread, the air sickeningly still over your head like the eye of a storm.

Pounding through dust and weeds in that unearthly silence, steeling yourself for what you’re going to find.

Yeah, his wife, they said finally, nodding. The quiet one.

Frank’s wife notices the dust floating like a heat mirage as she drives up the track with the weekly shopping. She stares blankly at the silhouette on the horizon for what seems like a long time before she realises it’s the huge rear wheel of the tractor she’s looking at, the vehicle tipped upside down like an abandoned toy. As she runs she kicks off her slippery town shoes and feels dry furrowed earth rising and falling and crumbling under her bare feet all the way to where he’s lying.

‘Frank.’

Eyes rolling back to her. Collar torn off the shirt she’d just ironed the night before, and shattered glass strewn around him like crushed ice.

‘Turn it off.’ His voice like a bad phone connection, a robot, between locked teeth.

Shaking hand into the upside-down cabin, in and around the buckled steering wheel. Then turning the key, sliding out the familiar clinking weight of the set into her hand. Post-office-box key, car, tractor, truck, padlock for fences. They’re hot from hanging in the sun. Stunned and slow, she can smell diesel dripping from the tank cap. What is he saying to her now?

‘Phone.’


She instantly sees the mobile phone where she’s left it on the passenger seat of the car. It’s not till she blurts this, tells him she’s running back to phone the ambulance now, and sees him swallow and close his eyes instead of shouting at her, that she realises just how bad it must be. Sees too, as she pulls his shirt up to shade his eyes, that every emotion he’s withheld from her for the last eighteen years, every flinch and grimace and jerk of the eyebrows and lips, is boiling and writhing across his face now. It’s as if the locked strongbox inside has burst open and everything in there is rippling free and exorcised to the surface, desperately making its escape. By the time she’s run home, phoned for help and returned — seven minutes there and eight-and-a-half minutes back — the spasms have stopped and he’s lying there with his face as emptied as a ransacked, gaping envelope, eyes closed, doggedly sucking air in and panting it out.