At first, it was on the gravel shoulder of the highway, right next to the road edge, but then it was moved.

Bill guessed the sidewinds from the passing semi-trailer trucks had been blowing it over.

Next, the cross had been hammered in about three metres inland, down in the ditch more or less, where the ground was damp.

It didn't stay long - Bill suspected the cross was failing over in the soft earth.

Then the cross was moved even further away from the road, uphill slightly, closer to Bill Evan's fence.

Bill thought the reason must have been that the soil was firmer there.

While understanding the likely causes for the mysterious movements of the cross, he wasn't happy about it.

To him, the ever-nearing presence of the cross was an intrusion of his personal space, his perfect world.

He didn't have any legal status over the strip of land that ran between his fence and the highway, but he nonetheless regarded the narrow corridor as a buffer zone between his place and the rest of the world, and so he tried to control it as much as he could.

In the spring, when the rains came and the wild grass on the verge grew like topsy, Bill was always the first farmer in the shire to phone the council to get the slasher out.

Which was exactly what he did now.

After making the phone call, Bill got into his car and headed into town. It was a luxury he permitted himself once a week, to have a quiet drink at the local pub. It was usually three beers, sometimes two, never four.

As he drove into town, he saw the council tractor coming out of the depot with its slasher on the rear.

And when he drove home from the pub a couple of hours later, he could see the progress of the slasher in the newly mown strip stretching outwards from the town.

The council tractor had gone past Bill's place, and as he passed the spot where the cross usually was, he stopped for a closer look. To his relief, he saw now the problem had gone, the cross had disappeared somewhere in the wake of fresh-cut grass.

But his reassurance that things had gone back to normal was short-lived.

A day later, the cross was back, not only closer to his fence but actually tied to a fence post.

His fence post.

He looked at it, on and off, all during that day - the white cross, its plastic flowers scarred from contact with the slasher blades.

Over the next week, the cross occupied Bill Evan's thoughts - this sense of a graveyard marker encroaching on his property.

Although he had sometimes seen a small white car stopped occasionally at the cross, no-one had come to see him about it, no-one had asked his permission, and yet here was this thing tied to his place, touching his property.

Every time he drove past the fence, checking the wheat or counting his cattle, Bill's eyes would be drawn to it, the plain white cross clearly visible on the outer side of his post, the tattered plastic flowers fluttering in the breeze.

Finally he did something.

He went down on the inside of his fence-line to the cross, cut the plastic baling twine that held it to the star picket.

He put his boot between the horizontal wires of the fence and toed the cross away, so that it didn't make contact with the post any more.

The first push with his boot left the cross leaning outwards at a sharp angle.

It was enough at that point, he had intended to leave it at that, but as he straightened up it was clear he had pushed too far.

The cross gradually kept falling over until it was face-down in the grass.

Bill paused for a moment, unsure, then he began walking back to his house. As he walked along his fence-line, he would randomly pluck the line with his work-hardened fingers. Each time, he would feel the tautness in the wire, his wire. It was a comfort.

Bill was totally unprepared for what happened next. The next morning, he was out front of his house, working in his open-sided machinery shed, when a car came towards him. He had been occupied with greasing the tractor, so he hadn't noticed the vehicle turning in from the highway, and thus he was startled when it skidded to a stop on the gravel of the driveway.

It was the small white car he had seen before, from a distance.

A woman came out of it, in a rush.

She was of a similar age to Bill but seemed much older.

Her face was a mask of grief and she railed at him instantly.

"Why did you do it? Why would you knock it down?" she pleaded.

Bill was motionless, his legs paralysed, his feet set in stone. The woman kept talking at him, kept asking why but he had no answer. She started crying then, which made it all worse. He had no idea what to do. They stood apart, her worn face wet with tears. Eventually, the hysterical woman clumsily got back into her car. As she started it up, Bill realised he was standing directly in front of it and for a wild moment he thought she might run him down.

But instead, she quietly reversed, turned and went slowly out the driveway.

Bill watched as the little white car turned right at the gate, heading in the direction of town. As the car went down the road, he expected to see it stop again near the prostrate cross.

But the car just kept on going.

The event rattled Bill and he couldn't settle down to farm work, not even two days later, so he gave up and made his weekly visit to the pub earlier than usual. He got his favourite seat, a stool at a tinted window that allowed him both the cool shade of the pub interior and a private vantage point to watch the life of the town pass by.

It was while sitting at the pub's footpath window, sipping his beer and taking his time about it as he always did, that he saw the little white car again.

It was parked across the broad country street, outside of the town's craft shop. It was a place for the ladies, all coffee and curtains and knitting wools, and he had never had reason to go in there.

Bill sat in the pub for a further hour, and on his next beer, he saw her again - the woman with the haggard face, clearly visible behind the lettering on the craft shop window glass.

It was a quiet mid-week day and there weren't many people in the street let alone in the craft shop, he noticed.

The season went on and the pattern of life on Bill Evans' farm continued as before.

He traded his wheat and cows, went to town for his weekly fill.

But two things were different.

The first was that the cross didn't move from where it had fallen under the force of Bill's boot.

It lay still among the weeds, collecting an ever-deepening coat of dust.

The second was that when Bill went to the pub, he found he was anxious to get to the footpath window seat, from where he could look across the street to the craft shop on the other side.

Over the weeks, he saw the craft shop was closed more often than not, although the white car was always out the front.

"What’s the go with that place?" he finally asked the publican.

"What place?"

"The shop across the road. Craft and stuff. With that woman."

The publican followed his customer's gaze.

"Oh, that's the lady who lost the kid in the car accident. Nice lady. Bloody shame, the whole business."

Bill thought about this for a moment.

"But why is the shop always closed?"

The publican paused in his ritual of wiping down the bar counter with a wet hand-towel. He was surprised by Bill's sudden interest in the affairs of the town. The farmer was one of his most loyal patrons but he had never been chatty - two questions in one day was a record.

"Not sure, Bill. Not enough business maybe, things are quiet. But really, I don't reckon she's over the accident. Well, you wouldn't, would you?"

Full summer came and the harvest was on. It was a busy time for Bill Evans - and the town, which traditionally saw a lot of extra spending at cropping time.

But on his regular visits to the pub, Bill saw that for three weeks in a row, while the rest of the main street bustled, the craft shop was closed.

For the first two of those weeks, the white car was also gone from the front of the shop. Bundles of dusty junk mail were jammed under the foot of the shop door.

When Bill queried the publican about it, the answer was a shrug.

Bill went home that afternoon with his own harvest done, his priceless wheat grain already safely stored in the town's central silo. It should have been one of the golden days of the year.

But it didn't feel right.

At home, he put the car away then went for a walk down from the house, along the fence-line to the spot where the cross used to be. He had to climb over the wires to find it in the grass now grown high again.

The cross was coated in dust and Bill rubbed it somewhat clean with his hand. For the first time, he looked at the writing on it.

He didn't recognise the name, but he saw that it belonged to someone who had been only eighteen years old.

Bill took the cross back to the house and washed it. Then he took it back to the fence-line, back to the post and tied it on. It was high up but still not out of the wild grass, so he went back to the machinery shed and brought out his father's old scythe. It hadn't been used for years and the dry brittle wood of the handle gave him splinters, but he persevered and some wide sweeps with the rusty tool were enough. When Bill mopped his sweaty brow, he saw that he had created a large level space around the cross.

Nothing happened for a week after that.

On his weekly visit to the pub, the craft shop was still closed, and there was no sign of the little white car.

The next week the same.

And then the third week after harvest, he was driving out of the property, heading to town, when something caught his eye and he immediately had to see what it was.

He stopped the car for a closer look.

There was a fresh bunch of flowers taped to the cross.

Bill stood looking at them for a good while.

Then he drove into town and parked at the back of the pub. He couldn't wait to get to the dark footpath window.

When he looked across the street, the white car was outside and the craft shop was open for business. The woman was there, in the bright sunlight, writing up the daily special on a chalkboard outside the doorway.

She still looked worn, but as Bill watched from the shadows of the pub window, she engaged in a conversation with a passer-by and a brief smile appeared on her face.

Bill looked on for a few seconds more as the woman turned back to her work writing up the chalkboard.

Then, with a feeling of satisfaction he couldn't have explained, he settled himself contentedly on his bar stool and signalled the publican for his usual order.