Limberlost by Robbie Arnott

Author:Robbie Arnott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2022-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

~

It took him a single long day to remove the paint. With an old shirt tied around his nose and mouth he attacked the hull, the stern, the bow, the decking, the centreboard, the oars, the space where a rudder would sit. He tore through his first length of sandpaper within an hour and was lucky to find another roll of it in his father’s toolbox. By the end of the day more than half of it had been eaten up by the work. His shoulders hurt, his back hurt, his arms hurt. His fingers were clawed up with ache. The floor and walls of the boatshed were smothered in the clinging dust of dead paint. His skin was a mess of green marks, his hair was matted with green drippings, his clothes were a scene of green ruination. Even the light was stained green by the particles in the air.

But beneath that verdant cloud, the boat was free. Ned circled it, appraised it. When he was sure that every smear of paint had been stripped from every plank, he stepped back into the doorway to view the vessel in its naked entirety.

As he felt a huge, red-sparking emotion flow through him, as he felt a tremble and a jitter, he told himself: maybe it was just exhaustion from the day’s labour. Or it was the plan he’d obsessed over for so long finally coming together. Or the romantic slant of the low sun’s light.

Or maybe, he cautiously let himself realise, it was none of these things—maybe he was just experiencing the truth: that this boat was glorious in ways he could not fully comprehend. That its golden hue was overbearing in its richness. That the way its neat design caused it to slice through the air, even as it lay stationary, was somehow savagely beautiful. The boat seemed to lunge towards the river, as if running home.

Compounding all this was something else he had not expected: the stripped wood’s aroma. Now that the stale, petrollike scent of the paint was gone, Ned was hit by a spicy, sappy pine smell, somehow both cleansing and intoxicating, subtle and strong. It was entirely new to him, and it was unavoidable. At first he thought a lubricant had leaked onto his tools, or that Maggie had spilled perfume on his clothes. It was only when he lowered his face to the boat that he realised it was coming from the timber, rising from the grains to settle in his nose and throat.

He had never worked closely with wood before. If he’d thought of it as having a smell at all, it had been as the broad scent of the forest: the pungency of rotting vegetation, the clearing menthol of eucalypt, the off-sweet tang of wild blossoms, the dankness of mud, the freshness of rain, the rot of a dead wallaby, the chalky minerality of broken rock. The odours of trees belonged to their leaves and flowers; he’d assumed timber would be mute. He wondered at his wrongness, as the wood spice filled his lungs, sank into his blood.

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