Free Highways to a War by Christopher J. Koch

even inside fear, that he was angry not merely at Mike and me, but at something else: something in the storeroom.
    What in particular were we looking for? he wanted to know. What had been important enough to make Michael steal his keys?
    Getting no satisfactory answers, he stared at us both in silence again, his thin mouth growing thinner. Then he said: What you’ve both been doing is prying.
    He looked at me. You will go back to Launceston as soon as possible, Raymond. I’ll ring your father tonight. Now you can get out, while I deal with Michael.
    Slowly, hot with confusion, I moved to the door, leaving Michael and his father staring at each other. I feared for him, and not without reason.
    When he was younger, he’d been beaten with a leather strap for any misdemeanors John Langford regarded as serious: a bad school report; tasks around the farm neglected. These beatings were administered on the bare legs, and were savage: he’d once shown me the welts. Since the age of thirteen, the beatings had stopped; but for entering the storeroom, his punishment was to do heavy farm work ten hours a day until school went back, with half-hour meal breaks and no break at the weekends.
    It seemed excessive, and I said so when he told me. He looked at me for a moment without comment. Then he said something I’ve always remembered, his pale face expressionless.
    Sometimes I don’t think I’m his son, he said. I think I’m the son of someone better.
     
     
     
     
    Only those who have not been tied to the land can romanticize it. I loved Clare because I could escape it. Mike could only dream of escape; meanwhile, he’d found a way of escaping reality by transforming it.
    The device that made this possible would eventually be his passport to the world. Ken had once given him a box Brownie camera, and Mike became more and more interested in photography. He photographed everything, and I still have the prints he gave me: his brothers working at the plow, or supervising the picking; Duke and Prince; the old blacksmith’s shop in New Norfolk where they still shoed horses, and where big old Percy Maynard, hammer in hand, grins at Mike’s camera from the forge: an afterimage from the nineteenth century.
    The small, crude black-and-white pictures are surprisingly good; it was as though he saw these ordinary things as strange, and made the camera show it. And the light in the pictures, despite the box Brownie’s limitations, was different from the flat light in the snapshots I took: he seemed to have chosen moments when it defined things.
    I thought his interest merely a passing craze, at the time. I still see him focusing on something, peering into the tiny viewfinder, earnestly bent; the tip of his tongue would creep out of the corner of his mouth. He had no conscious idea then of where this would lead, I’m sure; but from his absolute seriousness, I can see now that he knew it unconsciously. We always do.
    At the end of the visit that John Langford had cut short, on the night when I was leaving the farm, Mike gave me a present: a leather-covered album of his snapshots. We were standing on the front verandah, watching for the lights of my father’s car.
    Here, he said. Something to remember the place.
    I looked through the book, and found that he’d mounted a set of his photographs. The pickers; Percy at his forge; Ken plowing in his Digger hat. Strangely, there was also a picture of Luke Goddard, striding through tussock grass at evening in his dark bluey: head down, outraged eyes fixed, white stubble on his chin, his long shadow behind him. Mike must have snapped him from hiding; and I suspected now that he didn’t just fear the old man: he was unaccountably fascinated by him.
    In the front of the album, he’d written: From your friend Mike.
     
     
    The next summer, when he and I were sixteen, I was invited again. But this would be the last time. I didn’t know it then, but there’d be no more holidays at Clare: Mike and I