SHORT story 2

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The Postie

The sky was as grey as his hair when the postman arrived. 

I was waiting, at exactly the time he usually stops at my mailbox, number 7.

Becoming a mother was like getting an early retirement ticket for me, I stopped working and looked after my son at home. My husband was happy to carry our financial burden alone, and I simply did not want to miss out on my firstborn's early years.

I had ordered a biodegradable toy over the internet. I conscientiously tracked the little package as it journeyed from Japan to Singapore, then to Queensland, and finally, after three weeks, it is arriving at our home in Canberra.

The postman, Dave, last name unknown, balanced his motorbike onto itself, and dismounted. He rummaged in his backpacks and took out a pink box. He glanced up at me standing on the front steps and smiled that increasingly familiar crooked smile of his through his salt and pepper beard. 

I shyly smiled back and tilted my head up to the sky, frowning.

Dave did the same, and shook his head slowly, before returning his gaze to me.

'Looks like it's just about to start pouring, Mrs Maples. Maybe some thunder.'

I nodded, and looked at the pink box, wanting to delay him no more than was necessary.

He gently pressed the box into my hands and handed me a stylus.

'Please sign here, Mrs Maples.'

I scrawled my initials across the touchscreen.

'Thank you, Dave, you have a nice day.'

He gave me a thumbs-up and got back on his motorbike.

I waited for the sound of his motorbike to rumble away before I closed the door. 

'Mummy, postaman come!'

'Yes honey,' I murmured, glancing down at my son and ruffling his curly hair, 'the postman came.'

My five-year-old loved toy cars, and he was equally enthralled by the daily appearance of Dave's red motorbike. Once, just before last Christmas Eve, Dave graciously allowed Sam to have his photo taken with the motorbike. We ended up getting a baker to print the photo on Sam's fifth birthday cake.

As I used a utility knife to slice through the sticky tape bordering the edges of the cardboard box, a loud crack of thunder struck my ears painfully and an instant later a flash of lightning blazed through the window curtains.

I quickly gathered Sam into an embrace and covered his ears. He was just beginning to whimper. I comforted him with a kiss.

Half a minute later, as I led Sam around the house to turn off the television and computer, I heard a knock on the front door.

The rainfall was heavy by then, a deluge hammering down on the roof like a thousand miniature drummers marching to a gloomy tune. It was barely four o'clock but already dark outside. 

I lifted Sam to my hip and carried him to the door, puffing slightly as he was getting heavy.

I peered through the peephole.

It was Dave, and before his knuckles could strike the door again, I had unlocked the door and stood aside for him to enter.

Dave was drenched. He glanced apologetically at the motorbike parked under our carport.

'Sorry to bother you Mrs Maples, I need to shelter until this thunderstorm has passed. I can wait in the carport if you like.'

'Jane,' I replied, 'call me Jane. And Dave, please come out of the rain. You're welcome to wait in the lounge room.'

Sam reached out and played with Dave's beard.

'Sam!' I muttered.

'Oh, it's quite alright, er, Jane.'

'Would you like a cup of tea, and biscuits?'

'Nah, I'll be fine thank you very much.'

Dave carefully cleaned his boots on the doormat and walked into my lounge room. As he eyed the sofa, and then back at the raindrops rolling off his waterproof Fluro overcoat, I understood his concern and gestured at a wooden chair by the far side of the coffee table. He sat on it. 

'Normally, I keep going, but when it's anything this loud and close, I'd rather be safe than sorry. Awnings, carports, any overhead projection would have been enough. But I forgot to give you this before.'

Dave took out a very big, slightly moist yellow envelope from inside his overcoat and handed it to me.

The label said it was from The Institute of Sciences, New York. 

For a moment I was puzzled, then my eyes widened and I covered my mouth in amazement. 

'Oh my,' I gasped, 'I got in!'

Dave raised an eyebrow at me.

'Good news, eh?'

I nodded excited. I sat down on the sofa, my eyes not leaving the label. Sam had taken it into his own hands to finish unpacking the new delivery and had crawled to a corner with his new toy. 

With trembling hands, I took the letter opener from the coffee table and cut through one side of the envelope, which was thin and heavy.

'I was a research assistant for the local university,' I explained, 'mostly in preliminary experiments on emerging drought-tolerant landscaping techniques. I completed one paper before I took maternity leave. But it's been four years,' here I giggled sheepishly, 'and I still haven't gone back to work.' 

I took from inside the envelop a set of bound papers.

'A few months ago, I decided to submit my paper to The Institute of Sciences. They were publishing studies on climate change mitigation. Looks like I got published.'

'Well done!' Dave said and clapped his hands in congratulation. 

A cheque fell out from between the bound pages and onto the floor. I quickly picked it up. It was for four hundred US dollars. Just enough to pay for some urgent plumbing.

'You know, my father was a farmer,' Dave said and looked out a window blurred by rain.

The sound of the storm was relentless, and I had to shift closer to hear him.

'He was a fourth-generation farmer. In fact, I would have been the fifth generation in the family to live solely off the ground.' Dave paused and looked at Sam.

'When my daughter was about the age of your son, my father committed suicide.'

I almost dropped the envelope.

'Oh Dave, I'm so sorry!'

Dave took a shaky gulp of air and turned to me.

'The farm had been in the red for nearly a decade. Competition from cheap imports drove down prices, and he couldn't afford to, and didn't want to, upgrade to expensive equipment to speed up the processing. He always told me if it's worth doing, it's worth taking the extra time to do it properly. My mother was bedridden with the side effects of cancer treatment as cancer metastasized. Seasoned farmhands were few and far between. It was just getting impossible to keep your head high when the bank was banging on your gates to recover overdue debts. And to add to that, the drought was an ongoing nightmare threatening to make rearing healthy livestock or making a profitable yield from crops a farce. Carcasses dotted the bare land, and any hint of green sprouting was gone in a split second. No good changing tactics and trying solar farming or hardier varieties.... there just wasn't the infrastructure or funds available.' 

Dave sighed, 'If only we had had this storm on our farm.'

Compelled to do something for him, I stood up quietly.

'I'll make you a cup of tea anyway, Dave.'

I judged the storm would pass in about ten minutes.

The only hint he heard me was a slight shrug of his shoulders.

In the kitchen, as I put on the kettle and set out a cup and saucer, milk and sugar, and a chunky chocolate cookie I had saved up to treat my son later if he behaved well, I heard Dave's deep voice float over.

'So, I really appreciate what you do, Jane. I really do. That research stuff. Put simply, climate change is a crisis we have to deal with. The stuff we've been doing to the planet is just getting worse, it's really changed the weather patterns. Temperature and rainfall records are constantly being broken. If life on Earth survived multiple ice ages and the extinction of the dinosaurs, surely there's hope, and plenty of room for improvement in how we can secure our future using the smart ideas that educated people like you can come up with.'

I placed the tea and cookie onto the coffee table. Dave broke the cookie in half, took a bite, and stirred a lump of sugar into the tea.

Sam trotted over and stared seriously and expectantly at the remaining half of the cookie.

Dave unexpectantly laughed and gave it to my son, who promptly stuffed it into his mouth.

'You see it was Daisy, my oldest daughter, who made me choose to become a postie. I didn't want to have her see me lose my mind over the same problems. I could see that I wasn't coping already, so I left the farm, which was passed around amongst my siblings before it was eventually amalgamated with the property next door. I retrained for a job as a driver. Initially I was just doing truck driving, but I ended up doing deliveries when my youngest child move here to start university.'

The thunder was fading. The frequency of the lightening lessened.

Dave took a big sip of his tea and stood up.

'Sorry about unburdening all this on you. I'm usually tight-lipped with other people.'

'Dave, please consider me your friend.'

Dave nodded gravely, and then straightened up. A weary smile surfaced on his tanned face. He bent down and shook Sam's hand.

'See you later little man.'

Sam burped nosily and waved.

I hastily wiped Sam's sticky mouth with a tissue.

As Dave strode to the door, I grabbed an umbrella and walked out to the carport with him. 

It was only drizzling.

Dave put on his helmet and got on his motorbike.

'Good luck with your research Jane.'

'Oh, I don't do anything like that anymore.'

'Maybe you could take it up again, Jane, like, as a... a citizen scientist. You seem like an awfully nice person, and it would be a pity for the think tanks up there to lose out on contributions from someone like you.'

'Thank you for your encouragement.'

Despite his earlier revelation about his personal grief, or rather because of it, I wanted to cheer him up and told him my secret.

'In my spare time, I have been creating a program to put sensory veggie patches into kindergartens.'

Dave brightened.

'That's brilliant!'

There was a moment of serene silence. 

'Well, I'd better be off. Till next time.'

And he was gone. Up and over the hill he went.

A ray of sunlight shone onto my face as the clouds began to split apart. There was a slight breeze, cool and refreshing from the rain. I brushed aside a tendril in front of my eyes, took a deep breath and went back inside. 

As I sat down, my eyes caught the last paragraph of my report.

'In Australia, the driest continent on Earth, the problem of securing water resources has never held back an ancient culture. For tens of thousands of years, the traditional custodians of the land have used proven practices to survive. But now we have the challenging reality of a larger population and global warming. In our efforts towards sustainability, we must be sensitive to what is truly at stake here...the individual stories of love for a sunburnt country.'

When my husband came home that night, I desperately wanted to tell him about Dave but held back, to protect Dave's privacy. Instead, I discussed doing some work for the university again on a casual basis, once Sam begins kindergarten, which would be soon.

'The kindy around the corner is interested in my veggie patch program,' I told him, 'And I've already got some parents' names down for a possible working bee.'

'Sounds good honey,' he responded with a gentle kiss, 'sign me up.'

Dave moved away ten months later. His daughter had graduated, so there was nothing keeping him in the city, and the outback was calling him again. To this day, it is because of him that I keep on dreaming about the marvellous things that I could still achieve to help people experience better lives.