Myths, Sins, And Cosmic Machinery

The story my grandfather told me

A newspaper article appears in a state daily, concerning a skeleton that has been washed downstream during local floods. This sets off events that become the closing chapter to a story that began twenty-five years earlier, when Robbie Sutch was nineteen and on the run from responsibilities he couldn’t handle.

Exhausted, Robbie strays into Pritchard’s Glen, an enclosed valley with only one road in, and peopled by descendants of Welsh agricultural workers brought in during colonial times by Owen Pritchard ‘the elder’.

When Robbie arrives, the third Owen Pritchard, and his attractive young wife, head a successful fruit cannery business that is the only employer, but with a feudal ‘Squire’ and tied-cottage social structure. Owen owns the best of the valley, but his aged aunt holds an isolated section at the base of the ranges, run by her and her great-grandaughter Bronwyn, but a property Owen wants.

Robbie takes up casual work on her farm as a temporary sanctuary, but when Bronwyn falls for him, the old lady sees an opportunity to set up Bronwyn’s future, and put her affairs in order before it’s too late, as the old lady harbours a secret, concerning the empty graves of her two sons and a large and enigmatic building that is sealed and mostly hidden at the back of the property.

But Robbie’s selfish and callow nature soon rises to the surface and becomes not only his own undoing, but triggers a chain reaction that is catastrophic for Pritchards Glen and its people. It will be twenty-five years before Rob, still not yet a man in his own eyes, returns in an attempt to put his ghosts to rest.