Rosemary Jones: SHADOW WATER • Cleaver Magazine

Rosemary Jones
SHADOW WATER

This is how I heard the story. The this. The that. The this and that.

I was at the hospital with my daughters to visit their grandpa, Geoff, who had fallen playing indoor bowls. One small, ambitious move and he was a hip disaster. Maybe they could operate. Maybe they couldn’t. He had a lung condition. I don’t know the medical details. Just two nights before when we’d had dinner together, he announced that it looked like he’d make it to ninety. Sheepish grin. For the past two, three, no, four generations, the fathers and grandfathers and greats had died aged eighty-nine. At his desk some years before, he’d unfolded a family tree, his gnarly finger confirming the facts of the matter. But he was going to break the record.

From his hospital bed by the window, he stared longingly at his granddaughters as I’d never seen him stare before. Inhaling the sight of their dark, glossy heads of hair into his bad lungs. He never talked about the war except to say he’d had a good one. But while the girls were playing, he started a story. A chink opened. He was in the RAAF, his troop ship leaving from Sydney headed to Newport News. From there he’d make his way by train to Prince Edward Island for further flight training, then to Calgary, where he got his wings.

On the ship, a group of airmen shared a bathroom, the bath already filled with water. An airman from a wealthy suburb of Sydney presumed it was for him. Stepped in, soaped, and soaked himself. What he didn’t know: this was their freshwater ration for washing and shaving, expected to last the three-week journey.

My father-in-law crinkled his eyes and gave a wheezy laugh. “We were furious,” he said. His balding head on white cotton, handsome face cracked and lined, still glancing over, drinking in his granddaughters. What happened next? I had to know. The men made him replace the water. Beg for a bit here, a bit there from other men’s baths. Ladle by ladle, cup by cup. After that, they didn’t have much time for this fellow. Maybe he never properly filled that bath up.

This and then that. Consequences. Filling, not filling.

Unthinking privilege, yes, we can say that. I imagine that young man, erect in his smart new uniform. Short back and sides. How he must have carted that body of wasted water around in his head, sloshing in his dreams, for the rest of his life. Guilt and dread. Did he die thinking of bathwater? Couldn’t someone have forgiven him?

Geoff sucked on a fruit pastille. Smiled. I kissed him on the forehead. And gave him another on behalf of my husband who wasn’t there, in case they didn’t see each other again. That two-day journey across the skies. Well, he did make it, winging in to drink a last whisky with his father, who died—aged eighty-nine.

Yet always that water in the shadows, dark water, ladle by ladle, filling our lungs—how to bring life to land.

Rosemary Jones is an Australian whose nonfiction has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Cimarron Review, and Sweet, and was awarded first prize in Alligator Juniper’s nonfiction competition. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, Gargoyle, Corium Magazine, and Brilliant Flash. Rosemary Jones lives in New Haven, Connecticut and currently teaches and tutors writing at Yale.