Cutting the Power

"Nothing has to be urgent to be getting worse. A wall, a wound, a graft union — they all go the same way, quietly, while you're deciding it can wait."

The light went early behind the shed. It always did once the sun dropped below the ridge, and by the middle of the afternoon the fruit trees were laying their shadows the full length of the grass — long flattened things at an angle that put the back fence further off than it had any right to be. Not dark yet. Just going, and going with intent. There was frost in the air ahead of the frost on the ground, that dry needling edge at the back of the nose that meant the temperature had been falling since about three and had no intention of levelling out. I'd written 2.4 in the gauge column that morning, from Tuesday, and clearing underneath it, and for once I'd been right.

I'd been out since after lunch working down the list. The stone fruit needed pruning and had needed it for a fortnight — one of those jobs that keeps getting shifted to the bottom because nothing has gone wrong yet, and nothing having gone wrong yet is the weakest argument there is for leaving a thing alone. The older plum was the worst of it. Two crossing branches I'd been looking at since September, one of them carrying a decent fruiting spur that had been quietly arguing for itself every time I came past with the saw. Up the ladder I ran it through again. The crossing branch was bearing on the union. Left another season it would open a wound the tree would spend five years walling off, and it would do that instead of doing anything else. The spur was worth about a kilo of fruit. I made the cut, came down the ladder, and went on to the apples.

One of the young graft unions had shifted. Something had been working at the stake — wallaby, going by the scuff on the bark, blunt and incidental, damage done in passing by an animal with no opinion about it either way. I stripped the old tie and re-wrapped it with fresh budding tape, firm but not choking, and then stood back and looked at it for considerably longer than looking at it could achieve. It would take or it wouldn't. I'd know in October. That didn't stop me standing there.

The compost went before the light did. Not glamorous, turning a heap in July, but the outer layer had crusted over and a crust is the heap telling you it's been left too long. It sealed the air out, the pile stalled, the middle went cold, and instead of the dark crumbly stuff you were after you got a bin of half-rotted nothing that took another season to talk round. I broke through with the fork and the centre was still steaming when it hit the cold air, which was more than I deserved. Sixty degrees at a guess, and a guess was all it was. Karen would have had the probe in it before she'd got her coat off, and a figure written down, and the figure would have been within two of what the pile actually wanted. I turned the crust in, ran the hose over it until the outer material was damp through rather than wet, and left it to sort itself out.

My phone was on the porch railing where I'd left it after lunch and I didn't go back for it. Nothing principled in that. I'd just never got comfortable with it out here. The garden was better without it — quieter inside my own head, and I noticed things I'd otherwise have walked straight past.

The drainage at the shed had been sitting on me all week. Longer than that. The first note about it was the eleventh of June — SE cnr shed, standing water 36hrs post rain, check fall — and there were four more entries under it since, each one saying much the same thing in slightly worse handwriting. Water pooling at the back corner. Not a lot. Enough. That flat glassy surface that sits too long and doesn't move the way water moves when it has anywhere else to be. The ground there was saturated and had nothing to drain into, and every time it rained the footer took the runoff off the slope above. Overnight the freeze drove a little more of it into the mortar. The next afternoon let it go again, and the joint came back looser than it had been. I'd watched that happen to a retaining wall at the Collective's Sassafras site for three winters running, all of us agreeing it wasn't urgent, and then spent a week of a very cold August rebuilding forty metres of it by hand with my knuckles splitting. There is only so long a thing can be called not urgent before the words stop doing any work.

By four I had a torch on it and a clearer picture than I'd been hoping for. The seep ran the whole length of the footer. The corner was only where it showed. I got down on my heels with the beam low and flat and followed the fall — northeast, toward the rain garden, so slight you could argue about it, but there. That was this block all over. There was always a slope if you got your eye down to it. The water always had somewhere it was going. All that was ever required was to give it a better option than the one it was using, which at present was a hundred-year-old stone footer in the middle of winter.

I could start now. Get the hard section broken while the ground would still take a tool.

The mattock was in the shed behind the wheelbarrow. The ground nearest the footer was the worst on the block — years of boots going past, and the shed itself sitting on top of it pressing everything down since before we bought the place. The first three swings skidded off the crust without taking anything, which was the standard punishment for not having started in April. I shortened my grip and leaned into it and got through, then worked back along the line with the blade face and cleared the loose material out with the shovel. The cold had got into the soil and set it right through. It came up in plates rather than crumbs.

I was making ground. Slowly, but I was making it.

Then I thought about the junction box.

I'd been thinking about the junction box since May, when I'd opened the wall cavity to run a new lead out to the garden tap and come face to face with somebody else's idea of acceptable work. Two circuits married up in a box that had stopped serving either of them, in rubber that had been drying out since well before we owned the house. Brittle. Cracked along the top of both runs. Two conductors sitting close enough together that the only thing holding them apart was the way they happened to have settled when whoever it was pushed the lid back on. Settling was not a fixing. Copper against copper was a question of when, and in my experience a fault has never once chosen a convenient evening to introduce itself.

I went inside to have another look at it.

It had got worse, which was saying something, because the last time I'd had the lid off I'd told myself I'd do it properly within the month and that had been eight months ago. Two sections where the rubber had gone altogether — not cracked, gone, dried away to a grey dust that came off on my thumb — and bare wire lying against bare wire underneath.

The sensible thing was to find the circuit at the board, kill it, and leave the whole business until morning, when there'd be daylight and a clear head and nothing already behind me. That was what Karen would have asked. Not told. Asked, in that even, unhurried way she had of putting a question when she already knew what the answer was going to be and wanted to hear me say it out loud. And you thought you'd do it tonight, did you. The box had waited eight months. It could have waited until Friday.

I looked at it a moment longer.

Then I flicked the hallway switch, to be sure which circuit I was dealing with.

The house went. Lights, fridge, the low electrical hum underneath everything that you never hear until it isn't there — all of it, in the same instant. What it left behind was a different quiet from the one outside. The quiet in the garden was full of things. This one was just the absence of a sound I hadn't known I was listening to.

I went out to the board and reset the safety switch and walked back down the hall to check. The moment the current found the fault it dropped again. It did what it had been put there to do, and it did it three times, because I tried twice more on the general principle that a second and third attempt might produce a different outcome. They did not.

Right. The power was off.

I stood in the dark hallway and did the arithmetic. The box had to be dealt with before the power went back on. Dealing with it meant cutting back to sound insulation, capping the ends, and either blocking the cavity off properly or pulling the circuit out at the board — the whole job, not the tape-and-hope version. An hour, with the right bits. The right bits were in the shed.

And the trench was half open. And the ground was workable now and would not be workable at seven in the morning, when it would have had the entire night to set.

I got the head torch off the hook. I got the strippers and the terminal caps and a new junction box cover down off the shelf and set them on the bench inside the back door, where I would deal with them the moment the trench was finished. I got the floodlight out of the corner of the shed — the big battery one, bought back when the place still ran the four sheep and I was forever out in the dark walking one of them off the orchard — and checked the charge. Most of a battery. Plenty. Then I found the trowel and went back out.

The floodlight sat on a brick at the edge of the bed, angled low across the footer so the beam came in flat and threw a shadow behind every rise in the ground, which was the only way I was going to see fall I couldn't otherwise see. I got back to work.

The trowel beat the shovel for the tight sections. You could get it into the gap between the stone and the soil and feel where the water was actually coming through, and that was the thing that mattered — the pipe had to go where the water was going, not where it was convenient to lay it. Somewhere in there I ended up flat on my stomach with my shoulder wedged into a space just wide enough to be no use to anybody, working more by hand than by eye even with the light on it. The soil down there was wet and cold and smelled of clay and iron and old mineral, nothing like a garden bed and nothing like the compost. Just the actual ground, the part of it that had never had much to do with air.

My gumboots were off somewhere behind me. I worked that out from the cold coming up through my socks, which had clearly been arriving for a while before I gave it any attention. One boot standing, one on its side by the porch step. I could see them without turning round. I didn't go and get them. I was most of the way through the section that mattered, and standing up would have cost me the feel of it — the seat I'd found for the trowel, the angle of the wrist that was finally shifting material instead of scraping at it.

The cold had been thorough about it. Knees first, then hips, then it settled into the base of my spine and stayed there, and each of them had put in its complaint and had it noted and filed. My left shoulder had gone rigid — not the joint, the jacket, the shell of it soaked through with soil water and then frozen where it lay, so that reaching forward with that arm came with a sound like standing on dry bracken. My fingers had stopped reporting properly. I was having to look to see whether I had hold of the trowel.

What I was thinking about was the grade.

The grade at the outlet was the whole job. Too shallow and the water would stand in the pipe and freeze and split it by August. Too steep and it would run hard enough to pull the gravel out from under itself and undercut the bed. One in a hundred was the number, which sounded like precision and was in fact a matter of getting an eye down along the fall of the land and trusting that the ground had been at this a great deal longer than I had and already knew where it was going. The rain garden was northeast. The ground dropped that way. The pipe would follow, and the trench would take most of the geometry out of my hands, which was the best arrangement available.

The morepork started up in the gums past the back fence. Two notes, a pause, two notes, in no hurry about any of it. It had been going all winter and I'd never once found it in the canopy. Karen had it narrowed to the big swamp gum on the boundary and had been out at eleven at night in June in her dressing gown and my head torch to prove it, standing in the wet grass with her neck cricked back, telling me to be quiet in a whisper considerably louder than anything I was doing. She hadn't found it either. She'd come back in with her feet like two stones and put them on my calves under the blankets without a word of warning, which I suppose was the point of the exercise.

The trowel went into the stone hard enough to jar the wrist right up to the elbow — not a glance off, the full blade edge into something that did not move at all — and I swore at it once, properly, with everything the moment was owed. I pulled back, shifted my grip, and went round the edges with my fingers. A big one. Fieldstone. Dolerite, off the tops above the property, walked down here over God knows how many winters of freeze and thaw and then folded into the subsoil until it arrived at this position, which was directly in the way of a trench I was digging in the dark in July.

Dad would have had it out of my hand and turned over twice before I'd finished asking. Straight to the grain, and the weathered face, and the fact that everything above the shed was dolerite and everything down the creek line wasn't — and then he'd have wanted to know why I thought that was, and waited while I got there. Nine years he'd been gone and I still couldn't take a stone out of the ground without stopping to work out where it had come from and what it had crossed to get here.

I got the trowel in alongside it and levered. Nothing. Changed the angle, came at it from the downhill side where the soil had less to hold on with, and tried again, and it gave — that first grudging fraction, the ground around it letting go by degrees, the stone starting to lose confidence in its position.

One more.

It came away with a wet releasing sound, mud giving up something it had been holding since before the shed went up, and I worked it out of the hole with both hands and set it on the lip of the trench. Underneath was different soil. Looser, coarser, granular through the fingers — the thing I'd been after since the middle of the afternoon. The natural drain. The line the water had been finding its own way along, patiently, for longer than anybody who ever owned this block had been alive. I wasn't fixing anything. I was introducing it to a pipe.

I cleared the last of the section with the trowel and ran my fingers along the fall to check the grade, which was not how it ought to be done and was the only method available to me. Good. Better than good.

I stayed where I was a moment. Flat on my stomach in the frozen grass behind the shed, the floodlight throwing its flat white beam along the footer, the trench lying open beside me and waiting on a pipe I hadn't yet laid. My wrist ached in a way that was going to be worse tomorrow. My feet had gone past cold into that numbness that stops being a feeling and becomes a gap where a feeling ought to be. Behind me the house stood dark from the back door to the far gable, every window of it, and the frost went on setting in the grass around my elbows, and up in the swamp gum the morepork called again and took its time about it.

I pulled myself forward on my elbows to check the outlet end one more time.