The White Girl

by Birch, Tony;

  ‘You seen my missus?’ he asked Odette.

  ‘She went walking.’

  ‘Walking?’ Kane puzzled. ‘What do you mean, walking? There’s no place she needs to walk.’

  ‘She headed across the paddock towards town.’

  ‘What did she say to you?’

  Odette had never heard Mrs Kane speak a word, not to her own children or anyone else. ‘She said nothing. She just went walking.’

  Mrs Kane’s body was found three days later, face down in a dam that held no more than a foot of water. Odette had been feeding the boys when Joe Kane coldly announced to the children that their mother was dead. George jumped down from his chair, threw himself at Odette and burst into tears. Aaron didn’t react at all. He sat motionless in his chair, as if he hadn’t understood a word his father said.

  The week after Mrs Kane’s funeral, Joe Kane asked Odette if she’d consider moving to the farm and looking after the boys on a more permanent basis. Odette declined the offer without hesitation. Kane would not accept her rejection, and a few days later drove to Quarrytown and knocked at Odette’s door. Lila answered it.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  Joe smiled at the sight of the teenage girl. ‘Does Odette Brown live here?’

  Lila left him at the door and went searching for Odette in the yard. ‘There’s a man here for you. A strange white man.’

  Odette was surprised to find Joe Kane on her doorstep. It was obvious he’d been drinking. ‘Who was that, here just now?’ he slurred.

  Odette ignored his question. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want you to come out to the farm and look after my boys. They’re running wild.’ He rubbed his ample belly. ‘You can bring that lovely girl with you.’

  ‘I’m not interested, Mr Kane. I have other work now. You can’t be here in Quarrytown,’ she said, shutting the door in the man’s face.

  Over the following months Odette would occasionally see Joe Kane’s truck parked along the river track. The sight of him not far from her home caused Odette great unease. One morning she walked past and saw him sitting in the truck, both hands clutching the steering wheel. He appeared to be talking to himself. Returning from town later in the day she was relieved to find the truck had gone. She’d been planning on baking a cake with Lila that afternoon but when she opened the front door and called out to her daughter, to Odette’s surprise the house was empty.

  Aaron lifted his chin towards the junkyard gate. ‘I’m after some parts for the truck. Spare tyres and a new gearbox.’

  ‘I have no gearboxes,’ Henry snapped.

  Aaron ignored Henry’s attempt to brush him off. ‘We’re racing at the track outside of Gatlin in a month. Course you’d have a gearbox in there, I reckon you’d have dozens of ’em. I’ll pay,’ he added. ‘You can earn yourself some spare change, buy yourself a drink and a feed. Maybe even a bar of soap,’ he chuckled, turning to his younger brother for support.

  ‘I have no parts in this yard for you,’ Henry said. ‘I don’t have any parts for any sort of a truck. And I don’t need no money for drink. I never take a drink.’

  ‘Henry,’ Aaron said, ‘I can see from out here all the shit you have piled up back there. You wouldn’t know what you have in the yard.’

  Aaron walked to the gate and tried forcing it open.

  Henry moved between Aaron and the gate.

  The boy pushed him away. ‘Fuck off, Henry.’

  Henry looked anxiously at Odette.

  ‘How have you been, Aaron?’ Odette asked. ‘Do you remember me?’

  The boy looked her up and down. ‘I don’t know you from any place.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Odette said. ‘You and your brother, I looked after you for a time when you were young. When your Mamma was still with us.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Aaron said. ‘Nobody has taken care of us but our father.’

  ‘She did,’ George interrupted. ‘I remember her.’ George smiled at Odette in a manner that appeared familiar to her. ‘You used to make cakes for us. And at the end of the day you would walk all the way home.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Odette said. ‘I’ve always enjoyed walking. And they were scones I baked, not cakes. You loved them, George.’

  He nodded his head approvingly. ‘Scones. Yeah, I remember now. We piled them with butter. You remember Aaron?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, George,’ Aaron sneered. ‘Go sit in the truck. I don’t have time to waste here. You going to let us in the yard or not Henry?’

  Henry rarely let anyone enter the yard. ‘Today is Sunday. I don’t open on Sundays.’

  ‘Make an exception,’ Aaron said.

  Henry again turned to Odette for support.

  Aaron looked from her muddied boots up to her dark face. ‘I thought there was none of your lot left around here.’

  Many years had gone by since Odette had last seen Joe Kane but the man’s anger, evident in his older son, was unmistakable. ‘Oh, my people are still here, son. A few of us are above the ground, the rest are below it. We’ve always been here and we’re going no place.’

  Aaron spat in the dirt, close to Odette’s muddied boot. He walked slowly back to the truck and climbed into the driver’s seat. ‘We’ll be back, Henry,’ he called. ‘I don’t care if you’re open for business or not. Or what day it is.’

  The truck roared away, leaving a spray of mud in its wake.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Odette asked Henry, who looked upset.

  Henry was just as concerned with Odette’s wellbeing as his own. ‘You need to be careful with yourself, Odette. Being cheeky with that boy. He’s a bad one.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about me, Henry, I can take care of myself.’

  ‘Hey, I remember something,’ Henry said, changing the subject. ‘The bike. I remembered you want one bike.’

  ‘That’s right. For Sissy. For her birthday.’

  ‘How much time do I have to make the bike?’

  ‘Three weeks coming. But it doesn’t matter if it can’t be done before then. Sissy will understand.’

  Henry counted to three under his breath. ‘I can do that for you, Odette. Three weeks. I’ll write myself a note and I’ll build the bike for you.’

  ‘Good for you, Henry. And I’ll have the money waiting.’

  ‘There won’t be any money,’ Henry said. ‘I will build you the bike for free. For your Sissy.’

  ‘I can’t have you doing that, Henry. I don’t take charity from anyone. I never have.’

  Henry scratched the side of his head, mulling over Odette’s comment. ‘You don’t have to take the charity, Odette. You can take a gift. From me.’

  Thanking Henry, Odette said goodbye and walked on. She felt terrible for Henry and the way the Kane boy had spoken to him. Henry had spent his life being bullied and had locked himself away in the junkyard to protect himself.

  Odette understood that the young folk around town didn’t have much to do and relieved their boredom with occasional acts of mindlessness. But there was something more worrying about the older Kane boy. The summer she’d cared for the children Odette had been struck by the emptiness in his eyes. When she bathed him, Aaron’s body often carried bruises and cuts. She was certain the child had been beaten by his father, but being an Aboriginal woman she had no right to interfere in the business of a white family.

  She remembered the younger brother, George, also. He was a quiet boy, at odds with his brother. Seeing him again now she realised there was something more about George but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  Chapter Two

  Odette paused at the iron gates guarding the mission entrance. A stone column stood on either side of an earthen pathway leading to the church. The wooden outbuildings in the yard behind the church lay in ruin, the termite-infested timbers
of the old dormitories had rotted and the iron roofing was warped and rusted. Born on the mission, Odette had been separated from family and placed in one of the outbuildings, where she’d spent many nights listening to the sobs of younger girls. Whenever she felt a need to cry, Odette had slipped outside and sat on the back step of the laundry rooms, yearning for her father, Ruben. Although the men’s dormitory was no more than fifty yards away Odette was not permitted to speak to her father, except on Sunday mornings after Mass.

  Odette had some fond memories of the old church, where families would come together to chorus. After Mass, her relations were allowed to sit together on the ground out front and catch up on their time apart. While Odette had no faith in the Christian God she was told would one day save her, she was prepared to raise her voice and praise Him if it meant she could be reunited with family, however briefly. She would sing from the hymn book, along with her cousins, aunties and uncles, to please the missionaries looking on.

  Odette pushed the heavy church door open, announcing her arrival with a heaving creak. Above the altar was an open space where a stained-glass window – the image of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross – had once dominated the far end of the room. When the missionaries abandoned the church they had taken the glass window with them. The oak pews had long since been broken up and used as building material. Odette ran a hand across the back of an imaginary pew. She could see her father sitting alongside a woman, holding her hand in his own. While Odette had no memories of her mother, who’d died on a wooden table after giving birth to her, she had no doubt who the woman was. She’d sensed the presence of her parents in the church many times and was not surprised by, or fearful of, the apparition.

  She exited the church, collected a broom and rake from a shed in the graveyard and walked along the narrow paths, each row bordered with blocks of sandstone. The first children of the mission had been buried in nameless unmarked graves, struck down by previously unknown illnesses – whooping cough, measles and fever. The only indicator of the presence of the children beneath the earth were the wildflowers that revealed themselves each year. The seeds had been sown by mothers. In mid-winter the plants lay dormant but by early spring green shoots would appear, followed by yellow and deep red flowers.

  Beyond the common burial ground were the marked plots of the children who were born on the mission in later years, some whom Odette had known. Her cousin-sister, Bonita, Now with the Lord, had slept in a bed next to Odette. Bonita desperately missed her mother and often sought comfort from Odette. Less than a month after her tenth birthday, Bonita and several other girls contracted measles. They were quickly isolated in a shed away from the main dormitory. Fretting for the children, a group of women approached the head of the mission, Reverend Holman, and asked that they be permitted to take the girls to an important place along the river, to fix them better. The Reverend refused, explaining that the girls were too ill to be moved. He ordered the mothers to join a gathering in the church to pray for the girls.

  The morning after, desperate to visit Bonita, Odette had placed an empty tea chest below a window at the back of the shed. She stood on it and called Bonita’s name. One of the other girls, Ada, her face covered in a mass of red welts, came to the window. She said that Bonita was too ill to leave her bed.

  ‘Can you give her a message from me, please?’ Odette asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Ada coughed.

  ‘Tell Bonita I love her, and—’

  ‘Go away from here before you get the sickness,’ Ada interrupted. ‘We’re going to be dead soon. All of us. Do you want to die with us?’

  ‘You’re not going to die,’ Odette said.

  ‘We’ll be dying. We know that.’ Ada coughed again. ‘Will you pray for us and sing to God for our souls when we have gone? I don’t want to go to Hell, Odette.’

  Odette slipped her hand through the window and took Ada’s hand. ‘I won’t have to say any prayers for you girls, because I know that you won’t die.’

  ‘But will you anyway? Say the prayers?’

  ‘I will,’ Odette promised. ‘I will.’

  Odette was wrong in her belief that the girls would not die. Over the following weeks, as each girl passed away she was wrapped in a white bedsheet and quickly buried. Family members were not permitted to attend the graveside, Least you become infected, the Reverend explained to the wailing mothers. When all of the sick children were gone, the mission community was ushered into the church to pray yet again for the souls of the departed. The following day the shed was doused in oil and burned to the ground.

  Odette cleared the fallen leaves from the earthen pathways. Her body warmed up as she worked, although she could still feel the pain in her side. When she was finished, she sat near the graves of her parents and her own deceased husband, Daniel, who’d also been born on the mission. Daniel had worked alongside her father at the mine. The inscription below the names of both men recorded: Perished in a mining accident. The opening of the sandstone quarry had provided work for Aboriginal men from the mission. Many of them, including Ruben, became highly skilled. With the permission of the Aborigines Welfare Board, the men moved into new quarters in Quarrytown, close to the mine site and within the boundaries of reserve land.

  When the stone mine first opened the old people despaired, convinced that cutting into the ground and destroying country with explosives would do great harm, to themselves and the earth. Their superstitions were ignored. By the time Ruben moved off the mission, few paid attention to the earlier warnings, including Ruben himself, who had mastered the skill of shifting clean slabs from the quarry wall. On the day of the accident, Ruben had drilled holes at several points along the stone-face, set the charge and ordered his men to safety. At the point of the explosion, the ground beneath Ruben’s feet shook violently. He looked across at his son-in-law, Daniel. Three other workers, one of them a young Aboriginal man from the northern plains, and two white workers from town, died along with Ruben and Daniel, buried under tons of stone.

  Odette had been standing in the kitchen of the family hut in Quarrytown and felt the vibrations in the earth. She knew immediately that something was wrong. She placed the baby on the bed, lay down alongside Lila and closed her eyes. She felt the same sense of loneliness she’d sometimes experienced in childhood. A mining company foreman knocked at the door later that same day. There was no need for him to explain what he was doing there. The company offered the young widow a conditional one-off payment of twenty pounds in recognition of her pain and suffering. Although she was in no position to seek anything more, Odette insisted that the slab of stone that had crushed her father and husband be crafted into decorative memorial stones that would stand at the head of their graves.

  Odette walked back home along Deane’s Line. The morning sun had vanished with the stiff breeze. Approaching the footbridge she noticed an eerie and unfamiliar fog hovering over the riverbed. She saw someone standing on the bridge and hesitated. She recognised a cap and silver badge. Bill Shea. It was rare for the town’s policeman to venture from the main street of Deane, let alone pay a visit to Quarrytown. Odette had known Bill since they were children – they’d played in the dirt together – but she had little respect for him. Shea started his day with a drink to cure himself of the hammering in his head from the night before. He rarely moved from the desk in his office. The only positive to come out of his neglect on the job was that he left the Aboriginal people of Deane to themselves.

  ‘Is that you, Bill?’ Odette called. ‘If you’re looking for any troublemakers, you could start by chasing after that lad Aaron Kane. He was here earlier, tearing along the Line in his truck. The boy was making a nuisance of himself with poor Henry Lamb.’

  The figure emerged from the fog. Odette first noticed a pair of black shoes, spit polished and almost gleaming, a task the dishevelled Shea was hardly capable of. She looked up at the policeman’s face, at a man years younger than Bill. Hi
s skin was opaque. Like death. The policeman removed his cap. His hair was cut brutally close to his skull.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he asked, with a steel voice colder than the morning air.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Odette answered. ‘I thought you were Bill Shea. He runs the police station. In Deane,’ she added.

  ‘Officer Shea? He doesn’t head the station here, not any longer. He is about to retire. I have been sent to replace him.’ The policeman’s tone quickly turned interrogatory. ‘You obviously know Officer Shea. You are familiar with him?’

  Odette was careful about how she spoke to white people. She knew that the wider you opened your mouth, the more likely you’d regret what you said.

  ‘No, I don’t know him, not too well. He’s been in charge of the police station for years.’

  ‘Officer Shea,’ the policeman offered, studying his manicured fingernails, ‘is one of those fortunate men who was too young for the Great War and too old for the last one.’ He pursed his thin lips. ‘But with good fortune comes complacency, a debilitating combination. Officer Shea is finished.’

  Odette found it unnerving that a policeman, and a stranger at that, would speak so poorly about one of his own to an Aboriginal woman.

  ‘And you are?’ he asked, studying Odette.

  ‘Odette Brown,’ she answered, avoiding his gaze.

  ‘Of course,’ he nodded, as if confirming information he was already privy to. ‘You reside in the old mining accommodation.’

  ‘Yes. My home is just across the bridge.’

  ‘Home? Those old huts are in such a state of disrepair, they are worthless.’ He looked down at Odette’s muddy gumboots. ‘You’ve been out and about early, I see?’

  ‘I like getting out,’ Odette said.

  ‘Why so early?’ he persisted.

  ‘I like the birds, they get going early as well. Excuse me,’ she added. ‘I need to get home to my granddaughter.’ Odette shuffled past the policeman and felt his cold breath on her cheek.