Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  ‘A pair of lungs that sound healthier than they ought to. Keep that finger out of water,’ he said, then smiled and dismissed her.

  Georgie was waiting to drive her around to the funeral parlour.

  A big business, death. Those requiring funerals had to form a queue – or to take what they could get. Jenny and Georgie took ten-thirty on Monday morning, then had to find words for the death notices the undertaker would place in the Willama Gazette and the Herald Sun.

  ‘Loved husband of Jennifer, father of Trudy –’ Georgie said.

  ‘And Jimmy,’ Jenny said.

  ‘James?’ the undertaker asked.

  ‘Jimmy,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Deceased?’

  ‘No.’

  Georgie’s eyes wanted to say ‘yes’. He’d never come back to find them. If he’d been alive, he would have come back.

  ‘Adored Grandpa of Katie, Jamey and Ricky,’ Jenny said. And that was it; written down it didn’t look enough, though. Jim wouldn’t want to be remembered as the father-in-law of Nick, and who else was there?

  ‘You can add, “Only son of Vern and Johanna Hooper, deceased. Brother of Lorna and Margaret, also deceased”,’ Jenny said, then she got out of that place and left it to Georgie to finish up.

  They had an appointment with Jim’s solicitor at midday, and with half an hour to kill, they had a coffee. Watched their watches, watched the wind lift an elderly woman’s skirt high. It didn’t lift her clinging petticoat.

  ‘Can you still buy petticoats?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘In specialist shops maybe,’ Georgie said.

  ‘I’ve never thrown mine away. I’ve never thrown anything away.’

  ‘Waste not, want not,’ Georgie said.

  The solicitor offered further proof of suicide, proof too that Jim had started planning his escape well before Trudy moved out. Last November he’d transferred ownership of the old Hooper house into joint names and done the same with his investments and shares. Jenny had to sit though that fifteen-minute appointment and keep her mouth closed about what she thought she knew. Georgie had told her to.

  She talked when they were back in the car, talked about that cold-hearted house. ‘I’ll burn that bloody place to the ground,’ she said, then remembered that burning was the wrong thing to say to Georgie, so changed the subject to milk, to bread and ham for sandwiches.

  Entering the supermarket was like walking into an oasis of normality. They separated there so they could grab what they needed fast. Easter not far away, there were displays of colourful eggs, of gold-wrapped chocolate bunnies. They slowed Jenny’s feet. Every year she’d bought chocolate eggs or bunnies for everyone. Jim had only ever bought one egg, the biggest he could find. They’d spent weeks eating chocolate egg while sitting side by side on the couch, watching their favourite television shows. She bought no chocolate bunnies or eggs but picked up a dozen Easter buns. The living still needed something to eat with their cups of tea. She bought more butter, because what was an Easter bun without plenty of butter?

  Half of her hand still numb, she sat in the passenger seat on the drive home, nursing Georgie’s handbag. They were crossing the Mission Bridge when her bag vibrated.

  ‘It’ll be Katie,’ Georgie said. ‘Tell her we won’t be long.’

  Georgie’s phone was modern, but Jenny picked out a brief reply and sent it.

  We’re twenty minutes away.

  At Christmas time, Katie had been a young woman. She’d been a weeping child last night. Fourteen is neither one thing nor the other. Jenny remembered being fourteen. She’d been a young woman the night she’d competed with city singers in a radio talent quest and walked away with the third prize. At fourteen, she’d been an innocent child who hadn’t understood the possible repercussions of rape. Fifteen when Margot was born, by sixteen she’d been the town pariah, but far more knowledgeable. Despised that town and had to go back there, had to do and say the right things.

  And couldn’t. Not yet.

  They were approaching Hooper Street when she asked Georgie to drop her off on Teddy Hall’s corner. Harry lived in a bungalow behind his middle son’s house, and whether Lila took a piece out of Nick’s leg or not, she was coming home. Katie had been one of Lila’s pack since puppyhood, the twins her first litter, and today, Jenny needed her.

  A mind reader that dog, she’d known her lady was coming. She was waiting at the gate. A mood reader too, she didn’t greet her lady with her usual wriggles and licks, her ‘Where have you been?’ yips. One sniff of her bandaged finger and Lila knew where she’d been.

  Jenny had to explain her finger to Harry. She blamed Lorna Hooper’s ghost for the splinter. Told him that Lorna’s targeting of her wedding finger had been a statement on Jim’s marriage to the town trollop. Then told him that Jim wanted to be buried with his family.

  ‘In the Hooper plot?’

  ‘Fenced in with them,’ Jenny said. She would have said more if Vonnie, Harry’s daughter-in-law, hadn’t joined them at the gate.

  ‘We were so shocked,’ Vonnie said, then in the same breath asked when the funeral was likely to be.

  ‘Monday. Ten-thirty,’ Jenny said, as she might offer the date of a dental appointment. She turned away, walked away then, Lila at her heels.

  ‘She seems to be taking it all right,’ Vonnie said.

  Harry didn’t comment. He watched Jenny and Lila walk to the Hooper Street corner where they didn’t turn and disappear but turned back. He thought she had forgotten to tell him something, so waited at the gate. She didn’t look his way but walked on towards the railway crossing.

  ‘She never puts that dog on a lead,’ Vonnie said.

  ‘Smart dogs don’t need leads,’ Harry said. ‘I wouldn’t mind getting a pup. Paddy Watson’s bitch whelped seven they say.’

  ‘He charges a fortune for them, and they dig and poop everywhere,’ Vonnie said. ‘Where’s she going now?’

  ‘Walking her dog, Von,’ he said. The walkers now gone from his view, he returned to what he’d been doing, pulling weeds from his vegie plot.

  CHINA LADIES

  It had started, the visitors with their cakes and condolences and flowers. She’d seen a bouquet making its way in through her small gate, and in no mood yet to play the widow, Jenny had turned back and walked towards the town centre, or what used to be a thriving town centre, dissected by railway lines.

  There were two crossings, Blunt’s, so named for Blunt’s Drapery on the corner, and Charlie’s crossing to the west of town, named for old Charlie White’s grocery store. Both buildings had lived a few lives since their owners died. Blunt’s, was now a residence, Charlie’s an opportunity shop. Jenny and Lila used Blunt’s crossing that morning then continued to South Street where they turned right.

  She’d spent her childhood in South Street, in a railway house built next door to the station; her playground had been the park, directly opposite the station yard. It used to have swings, a merry-go-round, a bandstand. The old swings and merry-go-round, decreed dangerous by some do-gooder, had been replaced by a slippery slide and monkey-bars, very dangerous when preschoolers played unsupervised there. She waved her fingers at two climbing Macdonalds – or Macdonald offspring, thickset, short-necked, snowy blond heads. They looked like Margot. Lila eyed them but she remained at her lady’s heels as they walked through the park that led to Park Street. The football oval was on its far side.

  No footballs being kicked there today, no cricket balls being hit for six, a school day today. A pack of Duffys were looking for spoil up the far end. They raised Lila’s hackles, and Jenny’s, so they took the diagonal track across dead grass and dust, giving the Duffy pack a wide berth.

  They lived nearby, on their great-grandfather’s acre, out Cemetery Road, a junkyard of rusting vehicles and crumbling caravans, lean-to sheds and the remains of a house. The cemetery was between their acre and the oval, and Jenny went no further than its small gate.

  She knew that field of the dead well, an
d not looking to her left or her right, she made a beeline for the Hoopers’ wrought-iron fenced plot, needing to curse it and every Hooper in it before Jim joined them on Monday.

  Couldn’t believe he’d want to join them. In life he’d had nothing to do with his family. It may have cost less. There’d been a vacant space beside his mother’s stone forever.

  Only six when he’d lost her. He’d never forgotten her. The day he’d gone with Trudy to search Lorna’s house for the old Hooper documents, he’d returned home with his mother’s collection of fine china ladies. Lorna had left her all to Trudy, house, furniture and twenty-odd thousand dollars. Jim claimed his mother’s china ladies and these past weeks he’d sat handling one of them.

  Jimmy was six when the Hoopers stole him. Did he sit remembering his mother? Jenny hadn’t owned any fine china ladies. In 1947 she’d owned little more than the clothes on her back.

  Mourners would be lined up around that fence on Monday. It was rusting. A decent kick might have done it some damage. She considered that kick, but the anaesthetic beginning to wear off, her throbbing finger suggested she shouldn’t. She didn’t need a throbbing toe.

  ‘You won,’ she told Vern Hooper’s polished stone. ‘I hope you’re rotting in hell.’

  You won’t raise my grandson a bastard in this town, girlie –

  Could still hear his voice. Could still see his sagging mouth spitting those words across Granny’s kitchen table.

  Jimmy’s hands, his double-jointed thumbs had marked him a Hooper at birth. She’d kept him and his hands hidden for months. Had to take him into town to start his injections and Margaret Hooper saw him. That’s when the war over Jimmy began.

  They’d come on a Sunday morning, Vern and his daughters.

  I’ll take him off your hands and raise him decent, he’d said.

  Not that day. Jenny had snatched her beautiful boy up from his pram and run with him, across the goat paddock to Harry and Elsie’s house. The Hoopers hadn’t followed her there.

  He’d been eight months old the day Vern took out his chequebook and offered five hundred pounds for her signature on his piece of paper. Five hundred was a fortune back when the basic wage had been thirty bob a week. She’d shredded his paper and told him where he could shove it and his chequebook.

  It’s your prerogative, girlie. Take my money now or let the courts decide that you’re not fit to raise dogs.

  She’d had to run further than Harry and Elsie’s house that time. She’d taken a ten-month-old baby by train to Sydney. Jim had a week’s leave from the army. He’d wanted them to marry. She’d been eighteen, and in 1942, eighteen-year-old girls had required their parents’ permission to marry. She’d worn his ring. For two years she’d waited in Sydney for the army to be done with him. She’d called herself Mrs Hooper, had worked as Jenny Hooper.

  She’d sung with a band of elderly gentlemen, sung at parties, weddings, dances, and on Friday nights she’d sung at a servicemen’s club for tips.

  Should have put her age up and married him before he’d been sent overseas. She would have been the one informed by the war department. Vern Hooper had been informed when Jim was reported missing in action. He’d informed Granny, who’d informed Jenny, but missing hadn’t meant dead, not when she’d been nineteen.

  Jimmy was three years old before she brought him home. She was twenty, plenty old enough by then to believe the Hoopers’ lies. An hour after she’d stepped inside Granny’s door, Vern and his daughters had been knocking on it. She’d asked them if there’d been any news of Jim.

  Dead, that old bastard had said. You need to do the right thing now by his boy. He’ll inherit everything I’ve got when I’m gone. He’ll get every penny Jim’s mother left to him.

  As if she’d give Jim’s son away. He was all she’d had left of a love affair that might have begun when she was four years old.

  When the war ended, for a time she’d dreamed that Jim had been found somewhere, then Norman, her father, died. The night of his funeral, Granny told her that Norman hadn’t been her father, not by blood, that she’d been born to a Juliana Conti, an Italian woman. Too much to swallow. It wouldn’t go down. Then Ray King wanting to marry her – and who else would marry a girl who’d given birth to three illegitimate children?

  She hadn’t loved Ray. She’d pitied him. She’d been honest with him too. She’d told him that she’d never have another baby. He’d said he wanted her, not babies. He’d had a house in Armadale. He’d had a job. She’d married him to give her kids a name, to get them out of Woody Creek, and to put distance between Jimmy and Vern Hooper.

  For six months being Mrs King had seemed possible, then Maisy Macdonald told her that Jim had been carried alive from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Thereafter, sleeping with Ray had seemed like adultery. Twice he’d got her pregnant. Vroni Andrews, a neighbour, had aborted Ray’s babies.

  That was how Vern Hooper won. The second abortion landed Jenny in hospital and the police became involved. Somehow Vern Hooper had got his hands on the details of that abortion and threatened to plaster those details on the front page of every newspaper in Australia.

  Murder of the innocent, Granny used to say of abortion. She hadn’t known what Jenny had done, twice, and could never be allowed to know. The Hoopers had blackmailed Jenny into signing Jimmy over to Jim and had she known of his condition at the time, she wouldn’t have done it. He’d signed his own papers. Margaret Hooper and her husband had adopted Jimmy.

  And Lila knew. She commented on that rusting fence with pee.

  *

  Trudy was discussing a Margaret Morrison when Jenny walked into the kitchen. The power was on, Nick was sprawled on Jenny’s easy chair, taking care of his back. The others sat around the table.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Trudy asked.

  ‘Just walking. Who is Margaret Morrison?’

  ‘A neighbour,’ Trudy said, with a barely perceptible wink in Georgie’s direction. ‘I thought she might have been one of your father’s family?’

  Something was bubbling hard in a saucepan. Wood stoves have no knobs to adjust. Jenny knew where to place that saucepan so its contents would simmer.

  ‘Trude thinks she’s her birth mother,’ Nick said.

  Jenny glanced at her son-in-law. ‘Lila’s home,’ she warned him, then turned to Paul, who asked if she had any pasta. It was excuse enough to step into the pantry where she hid her face a moment from Trudy’s eyes. She’d have to be told about Margot, but not today.

  There was little method to her pantry. Most feared to enter it, but she could quickly put her hand on what was required. She picked up an unopened packet of spaghetti and one that was half full. Paul would be feeding eight tonight.

  They were over the shock of Jim’s death. The boys were on the floor renewing their acquaintance with their bucket of colouring pencils and Nanny’s never-ending supply of scribble paper.

  ‘Where’s Katie?’

  ‘She went looking for you,’ Georgie said. ‘Sit down, Jen.’

  Two easy chairs, side by side near the door to the hallway, a matching pair. She looked at Jim’s. He’d never sat on her chair. She’d never sat on his – and had no intention of sitting beside Nick anyway.

  ‘Something I have to do,’ she said, then left them to discuss birth mothers and pasta while she collected Jim’s china ladies. On the walk home from the cemetery she’d decided to bury them with him, but remembered that Katie had always loved them.

  Two by two, she took them down to the library, only a library in name because of its two walls of built-in bookshelves. They stored more than books, and she stood scanning them for a carton large enough to hold Jim’s ladies. There were boxes aplenty but none large enough. She turned to a tower of cartons, stacked like bricks beside the window wall. One of them would do the job. They were full of free copies of Juliana Conti novels; a few of the cartons had never been opened. The reprints. She’d ripped her way into the others, needing to see the finished item,
to hold it – then to sit down and read it.

  She found what she was looking for on the floor, pushed beneath her sewing-machine bench. It was full of fabric, off-cuts, dress lengths she’d never got around to making up, fabrics she could barely recall buying. She upended it on the floor, then began wrapping Jim’s ladies in off-cuts before burying them carefully in the carton, and cushioning each layer with a dress length. A mass grave, she thought.

  There was a roll of duct tape on one of the bookshelves, and memory in the sealing of that carton. If you live too long, everything is memory.

  Her finger was throbbing, and the young doctor’s bandage dusty before she was done. The ceilings of this house rained dust. She stood tall a moment, stretching her back, looking at the bandage and thinking Panadol until she heard Trudy and Nick outside the window and moved quickly out of their view. Her chair was where she’d last sat on it, a new office chair and comfortable. Her legs wanted to sit down, so she sat.

  ‘I said I’d drive you up here. I didn’t say I’d stay until Monday.’

  ‘I need my car – and your support, Nick,’ Trudy said.

  It was her car, registered in her name three years ago. Teddy Hall found it for her, a six-year-old Commodore with only fifty-seven thousand kilometres on the clock. Jim paid for it. It had done a lot of kilometres since, most of them on the road to and from Willama.

  ‘I’ll be back in time for the funeral,’ he said.

  ‘I need the car tomorrow. I want to take the boys down to say goodbye to Dad.’

  ‘Use your mother’s.’

  ‘Their car seats are in mine, Nick!’

  ‘Then take them out of yours!’

  ‘You’re not taking it, and if you’re in agony now, you’ll be in worse agony before you get there.’

  The trip to Croydon would take three and a half hours or more. A man with a bad back didn’t put himself through that for no good reason. What was his reason? Lila? Maybe. His in-laws, who had little to say to him? His boys’ demands?

  Some men are born to be fathers. Jimmy was ten months old before Jim met him, but for the week they’d been together in Sydney, he’d never been far from his father’s arms. Jenny had believed it was a blood thing, one Hooper recognising another. It had nothing to do with blood. By birth Trudy was Jenny’s granddaughter. She had no blood link to Jim, but from day one, he’d been her adoring Daddy.