ATDTDA (18) 505-510: Exploding childhood skies

[John Bailey]

Another voyage by boat – Katie McDivott says bye bye to Dally and her newfound family and mentions there’s hope of an acting role from R. Wilshire Vibe. Dally (I presume) responds with mock horror.
 
Once the boat moves out into the “complications of the harbour,” though, Katie wonders about the journey east. A nod to M&D’s westering impulse here: if heading west is a journey into the future and possibility, Katie contemplates heading back east to the Old World as a kind of return to childhood. And what else?
 
Out in the ocean, which has just been cast as a kind of timeless non-space. Those back on the pier waving goodbye have turned their faces “inland once again, landward to the day they had taken this brief hour from,” which suggests that both or either a goodbye or a sea trip is somehow against the day…
 
And on the ocean, then, Erlys and Dally can find a safer space to talk about their relationship and how they got to where they are.
Erlys embarks on memories of her first meeting with Merle. Wandering back from the cemetery, presumably just after Bert’s funeral. It’s twilight; Merle offers her a ride on his wagon (not a metaphor). “You’re partial to women in mourning?” she says, but he’s just being polite, is all. Luckily the world is in the mood for a cute meet, so it’s a beautiful sunset that brings to mind the eruption of Krakatoa (“like the end of the world”), which occasions a more mournful reflection on how growing up seems to result in everything fading down to a less brilliant lustre. Growing up and disappointment are themes in this chapter – if heading east is returning to childhood, maybe it’s also finding ways to see the world in all its radiance, too.
 
And Bert’s own departure has left Erlys got with child, as the old-timey folk used to say. Not to mention a history of “small-town miseries” including gambling debts, a laudanum and whiskey problem, bad credit and, perhaps, reputation.
 
In a roundabout way, they’re soon in a kind of unspoken relationship, and they know Merle is going to stick around and help raise the kid. As the blazing sun sets behind her, she catches in his gaze what he sees – an angel outlined by the “exploding childhood sky”. 
 
He’s seeing her contre-jour, of course. Against the (dying) day, literally; in the photographic sense, too; and in the sense of love going against all those miseries that should make this pairing unreasonable.
 
But it works, and there’s no sense of a romantic or erotic aspect to their love here, early on, just a kind of compassion. Erlys finds in Merle a stability – ironic, since they’re always on the move and he’s always switching jobs – but a stability nonetheless, that affords her the ability to really pay attention to the growing baby inside, so much so that she begins to dream Dally and when the little girl arrives it’s more of a reacquaintance than an introduction.
 
But of course after Dally was born, Erlys met the first “real passion” of her life, Luca Zombini, and left Dally and Merle to be with him. We’re now treated to her attempts to explain the situation, Dally’s mostly guarded resentment, and Erlys’ regret. They talk it through. Dally expected Luca to be a svengali, but she’s been shocked to realise how much like her pa he is. She lets go of some of her bitterness, and Erlys unburdens herself too.
 
The sunset they watch is pretty spectacular. “Maybe another volcano went off somewhere.”
 
Kit is on the same boat, and Erlys notices him eyeing Dally, as well as Dally’s uncomfortable avoidance of him (she’s just shy, you know).
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