by Garry Disher
Blood
Grandfather Tolley bone-creaked down to the level of her head and tut-tutted with a vast khaki handkerchief at the welling blood on her kneecap: You’re just like your father. He was always into everything, couldn’t take my eyes off him for a second. Anna let herself go slack. Her head lolled on her neck and her trunk loosened as her grandfather’s kindly, panicky, cuffing great hands comforted and supported her and staunched the blood. She felt blood in her sock, thick and wet. She had been watching it tick out of her knee just a moment ago, before her grandfather’s bulk broke in upon her dreams. Hugo watched nearby, appalled and elated. I warned you two not to go near the barbed wire. Wicked, wicked girl. Both of you, wicked. It’s dangerous—very sharp, full of germs, God knows what else. What if you’d bled to death while my back was turned? Life is a very fragile thing. Anna let him pat her leg dry and heard him spit onto his handkerchief and rub it around the cut. She looked out over the floor of his shop and saw the shelves and goods suddenly gleam and quiver as vividly as knives and glass. What will your mother say when she comes to pick you up? She’ll think I haven’t been taking proper care of you. When the Floods came to live in the town, the oldest boy would do anything for a dare. He’d dive out through the strands of wire in the schoolyard fence and dive back in again, flushed and elastic and untiring, a new boy unloved and in need of an audience. But the grin that split Chester’s narrow face and his throaty man’s laugh took on a desperate, unrewarded edge as the children began to lose interest and drift away. He rallied: Look, I’m bleeding. Anna drifted back. She put her hands on her knees and peered at the gash on his thigh. It looks deep, she said. Does it hurt? Doesn’t hurt. He was beautifully brown from the sun and a dusting of dirt, and Anna felt an appalling need to reach out and touch his dark rich blood before it dried, envying him, for she was pale, a little freckled, an unlovely bleeder. Bad luck that bit of wire hooked me, Chester Flood said. Anna stiffened. She didn’t say where the bad luck had come from. There was no telling when her bad luck might jump from her on to someone else. It would happen without warning, a disaster out of nowhere, a shift in the alignment of time, place and people, over which she had no control. Her bad luck seized her father, shoving his poor hand into the whirring auger of the harvester and slicing off the top of his finger. What if her bad luck had been very bad that day? He would have lost his arm, lost his head. Think of the blood then, missy, he said, winking at her from his pillow. Hush, Peter, stop teasing the poor child. Anna held his hand and kneaded the grainy dry palm. Ahh, that’s better, he said. The middle finger, swaddled in gauze and smelling of the hospital, stuck out fat and long, as if the doctor had enlarged it while her back was turned. The boys from home began to die. By November Anna had attended three funerals. On Remembrance Day she bought a red poppy, then thought irrelevantly: Do poppies grow in Vietnam? Would poppies grow where the blood of those boys has stained the soil, now that the Americans are dowsing the jungles with defoliants? Finally Lockie was killed, just when she thought they might get over the bad blood between them. The first thing Anna’s future father-in-law said was: Fine family, the Isons. I had a bit to do with your grandfather over the years. Fine man. He means fine blood, Anna thought. He’s pleased as punch that Sam’s marrying someone with Ison blood in her veins. She supposed it was inevitable, given that farming people saw everything in terms of bloodline. There was good and bad blood, weak blood, healthy blood, and tendencies in the blood that might appear without warning in future generations. Sure, Anna had suffered a breakdown when Lockie was killed, but she was also predisposed to it, like her grandfather before her. Mr Jaeger warned her about the blood of the Jew, the Negro and the Chinaman. Weaken our bloodstock? she inquired, raising her eyebrow, and he clapped his hands in delight: Exactly! There was very little blood in the car or on the ground. Anna forced herself to lift her son’s head from the cradling rock—very little blood. His eyes were closed, his fingers curled in a loose fist near his cheek, miming sleep. Well, of course, she realised, as she gazed at him later in the casket, how could there have been blood if his heart were still? Her own blood stopped then. It was fifteen months before she needed a tampon again, time enough for the long-forgotten spare one in her bag to have broken through the cellophane—promising, she told her mother, all kinds of toxic shock. What did you do? I was only spotting a bit, Anna replied. Nothing too alarming. I got home before it got too bad. Her mother looked away, down through the years: The body will do that. When we had to leave Isonville and find somewhere else to live, I stopped bleeding for a while. Rebecca, so slight and obsessive, started late, and bled sporadically and inconclusively, but the moment she found someone to love her, the blood flowed strongly, richly and on time. Sam will grow increasingly obsessed with names and bloodlines—old names dying out, bloodlines coming to an end. Until he actually sees Meg and Rebecca with their baby, and melts under all of their smiles, he will explain hotly to Anna why it is that he can’t feel a family connection to them: One, it’s not our daughter who’s giving birth, so there’s no blood connection; two, it wasn’t a natural act of conception; three, there’s no father, just two mothers. Anna will give up telling her brother to quit smoking. Toward the end he will cough up blood. Anna will call him from time to time and urge him to sell the farm and move in with her: Where I can keep an eye on you. No thanks, he’ll say. I’m staying right here where the air is clean. It will seem to Anna when she is old that her blood is slower, darker, heavier, winding down as she winds down, ceasing altogether in certain parts of her legs and in the backs of her hands.
Funerals
Grandfather Ison died in comfort in Adelaide but the family had him carried home for burial in his beloved mid-north, in the cemetery behind the open-cut mine, where his wife Antonia and the generations of Isons before him had been buried—where the season seemed always to be high summer, the red dirt unforgiving to picks and shovels, the bull ants quick to rise up and bite, the mourners stunned by the heat. Anna looked down at her feet. Ants. Fast, hardy, segmented black scratches swarming over the caps of her shoes and on to her socks. She kicked, stamped her feet, raising a dust cloud. Keep still, Aunt Lorna hissed, her face unreadable. Anna shook off the last of the ants and kept one wary eye upon the ground and another on the rear doors of the Pandowie hearse. Uncle Kitch, her father, Mr Showalter and three men she didn’t know were shouldering into position under the coffin. Now they had begun a slow march with it to the grave’s edge. Anna glanced at the faces around her, to see who was crying, or should have been crying, or was faking it. Then, in October, Beulah died and there was another funeral. Anna’s mother said: Poor old girl. When her father had died she had said: Poor old boy. Four years later, a school project took Anna back to the cemetery to find the headstone of George Catford. She searched, but he wasn’t there, and wind, rain and the erupting roots of the pine trees had long ago toppled all of the old headstones into the nettles, so she went to the tourist information office next to the tractor dealership in the main street. The man there dug up a facsimile of the November 1851 edition of the Chronicle:
Coroner’s Inquest—Death of the Discoverer of the Pandowie Mine. An inquest was held on Friday, 21st inst., on view of the body of George Catford, who met his death under the following distressing circumstances:— The deceased, who was the discoverer of the Pandowie Mine, was engaged in cutting wood in the Pandowie Scrub for the Copperworks, and had come into Pandowie for the purpose of obtaining a settlement for his work. He was last seen alive on Tuesday, the 18th inst. about 2 o’clock p.m. by a man of the name of Albert Woolley who was also employed in woodcutting. Catford was then standing at the door of an old vacant hut in the creek at the Pandowie Scrub. Woolley spoke to him and found that he was drunk. Nothing further was heard or known of poor Catford until about 3 o’clock p.m. on Thursday, 20th inst., when a little boy about ten years of age casually entered the hut to seek a piece of twine for some childish purpose and saw the deceased lying dead on the floor of the h
ut, nearly naked and severely burnt. The child communicated the fact to his mother, who lives in a hut on the opposite side of the creek, who in turn alerted the Constable in Pandowie. From the position in which the body was found and from the medical testimony of Dr. Reid, it was clear that the deceased had met his death by falling into the fire while in a state of intoxication and the Jury returned a verdict to that effect.
When the boys who’d been in her final year began to die, Anna came home for the funerals, standing head bowed at the graveside—often alone, as if the other kids felt that she’d relinquished all claims to the district and its emotions when she left to live in the city. She came home for those funerals and soon a sense of dread, a paralysis, set in when she was not at home. One day she simply walked out on her textbooks and lectures and came back for good. She was waiting, waiting. If only Lockie would write. If only she had not precipitated the break that kept them miles and emotions apart. His two years in the army were almost up; with any luck he’d make it. Anna and Sam buried Michael in a tiny coffin in a tiny hole in the ground. Once or twice at the graveside, Anna had to shake herself covertly, to wake herself up, to fix her drift-dreaming mind on the funeral, but again and again her attention was caught by her father’s hands, the way they angled under the casket, the way his fingers were splayed against the varnished black flank, the lopped-off middle finger apparently stuck in a hole. She could see from Sam’s face that he wanted to say: You’re a controlled one, but he held his tongue. Anna wanted to say: You don’t understand. When Sam’s father died, Rebecca came up for the funeral, dressed in tailored black trousers. She hooked her arm in Sam’s and stayed close to him, at the church, at the graveside, at the house. Anna felt pity for him. The Ascension Church had stepped in and rendered him powerless, an onlooker. His surging grief beat futilely against their implacable busy calm. They made themselves at home in his father’s house. He found them in his father’s study. They helped themselves to his father’s petrol. And to cap it all off, he said, slamming down the phone that evening when he was alone with his wife, daughter and mother again, their chief Bible-basher has the nerve to ring and say his car’s just conked out somewhere the other side of Adelaide. I mean, what’s he expect me to do about it? Lousy so and so. Rebecca snorted, giggled, tried to hold it in. Then Anna, Mrs Jaeger, and finally Sam, all of them laughing, the repressive weight of the dead man evaporating around them. The Committee intends to update the Statue of Remembrance in Redruth Square by carving the names of the war dead of Korea (one) and Vietnam (five) in the marble column. Fine, Anna types, watching her words creep across the monitor, but let’s also remember George Catford, who stumbled unrewarded upon the ore body that later returned dividends of eight hundred per cent to investors. Sam says: Why do you always have to twist things, make progress sound as if it’s greedy, the old-timers out for all they could get? One year short of the year 2000, Sam will gulp and die. Only fifty-three. One minute he’s arguing with the boss, the next minute he’s dead. Hard to believe. Arousing outrage in Rebecca’s face: Believe it, Mother. Dad’s been depressed for years. Couldn’t sleep, obsessive, you said so yourself. Ashamed because he was reduced to being a paid manager of his own place. He was a candidate for a heart attack. Couldn’t you see that? The cold kitchen will fill with silence around them. Three cups on the sink, tea dregs, the ticking clock. They will walk to the car, three women in black, the baby in her best pin-tucked white. The silence stretching all the way to the little church, scores of dusty cars angled up and down the nearby streets, people shuffling, looking away, a silence broken by Anna’s sudden grief, her helpless, racking tears. Rebecca will touch her arm: Mum, come and stay with us for a while. Gasping: Thanks, I think I will, just till I find a place of my own. In her place by the sea, the phone will ring, another funeral, an old friend, a stroke, a heart attack, cancer. Life entails loss. Toward the end, Anna will find that Lockie is often in her head, and wonder if the lost six weeks had in fact been a lost sixty years. Every month or so she will hear of another death. She will attend some of the funerals—her mother’s in Pandowie, Chester Flood’s in Victor Harbor—but all of the others will occur in far-off places, places where it’s intended that the sun should warm your old bones and keep you young.
Patriarchy
Let me tell you about men. Great Aunt Beulah drew Anna to her in an exaggerated pantomime of dread secrets being withheld from ordinary ears: We don’t want that old bat listening in. Her outer and inner garments crepitated, the springs moaned in her chair, she drew in a ragged breath: My father was a hard father to us, and a hard husband to our mother. Men were, in those days. It was expected of them. They ruled the roost and watch out if you disagreed with them or disgraced them in any way or disobeyed them. Anna heard a new sound, of ancient bellows huffing into action, and realised that Great Aunt Beulah was laughing: Poor old Father, I did all three. Then she was crying: The one true love of my life and he forbade me to be with him. Anna sought out her mother, who confirmed everything: He was a hard man, all right, your great grandfather. Rarely smiled, apparently. A big, bony fellow, according to the photos we have of him. We always believed he treated my dad badly. Made life a kind of test for him, always setting him obstacles. For example, his will. Enlightened, you might say, leaving it all to his daughters. I’d say pragmatic—he thought my dad wasn’t coming back. And I’d say mean—he wanted my dad to have to struggle, as he’d had to struggle. When Grandfather Ison died, leaving everything to Kitchener, Anna’s mother sat drained of energy at the kitchen table, twisting a handkerchief in her hands: Just goes to show, if someone does you a mean act it can make you behave meanly to someone else. Hardness breeds hardness, Anna, and don’t you forget it. Hardness and the desire to control everything around you. Anna said: Dad’s not like that. Her mother smiled: No, he’s not. Well, maybe a little. A father can’t afford to be too slack when his kids are growing up. So Anna began to look for signs of hardness in her father. She could not see any, but one day Hugo began to go through a peculiar phase. He’d announce: At footy, Dad, at school, and trail off. Yes? And blurt out: I got six kicks. Two more than yesterday. Or he’d say: I haven’t cried once since Saturday, and then he’d wait, watching for an acknowledgement, but what he got was always faintly crushing: Try for seven or eight kicks tomorrow, all right? Let’s hope months and months go by before you cry again, okay? Anna brought Lockie Kelly home to meet everyone. Afterwards, when he was gone, her father said: The Kellys are Catholics, you know. So? Anna demanded. Her father was harsh suddenly: So he’ll put you up the duff and then where will you be? I don’t want you seeing him again, you hear me? You can do better than the bog-Irish Kellys, for Christ’s sake. He pushed the air at her with his palms: Nope, subject’s closed, find yourself someone else. When Lockie received his call-up papers, he drove the length of the Main North Road on a day of hail and sleet to show Anna. She looked Lockie up and down scornfully: It’s like the government’s some kind of autocratic father and you’re a bunch of biddable sons, doing as you’re told. Three years into the marriage, Sam said to Anna: I’ve slaved my guts out for this place, new methods, new equipment, new crop strains, you name it, and the old man still treats me like I’m in short pants. A wage? Christ, pocket money more like it. Having to account for how we spend every penny. Giving you a hard time if you ring your mother, planning our kids’ education, wearing us down with all this conspiracy rubbish, totally controlling our lives. What’s the bet my mother doesn’t even know how to write a cheque? I want to make a go of it on my own. How about it, sweetie, you game? But blood counts for something in the end and patriarchs need sons. Sam and his mother got the lot when the old man died. When Anna thought about it, years later, it occurred to her that Wesley Showalter had breezed on through life after knocking her off the road because for generations the Showalters had been seen as patriarchs of the district, a habit of mind not easily altered. People saw it as a shame that her son had been killed, but not a shame that Wesley Showalter
had been negligent and got away with it. Old attitudes linger. Sam has lost all that he invested in the Park’s sperm-bank scheme, yet he can’t bring himself fully to blame Wesley Showalter. The Showalter name stretches back in time. It means patrician sons and wealth and something solid. Anna has come upon this passage in Mrs Showalter’s 1950 history of the Park:
Young Hugo Ison, of the original Ison brothers, visited the Pandowie head station on Noltenius Creek, where he noted that a neighbour had ‘as ornaments a couple of blackfellows’ skulls pegged through the eye sockets to the wall of his hut’. Hugo also recorded that he went hunting with another man (who will remain nameless, out of deference to his descendants) reputed to have shot more Aborigines than anyone else in the district, and who, while discharging his firearm at a mob of kangaroos with young Hugo, boastfully declared that he ‘never missed a black who wandered into his sights’.
Anna wonders if that man was a Showalter. Maybe Mrs Showalter wanted the fact to be recorded but could not bring herself to name her husband’s forebears. One day Anna will hear Rebecca argue: Patriarchy’s talent is for compartmentation, separating intellect from emotion, emotion from action, vision from reality. It sets up disconnections and institutionalises them. Women, on the other hand, connect. We don’t fix the boundaries of our egos. We find it difficult to distinguish between our own needs and those of others. And Rebecca will hark back to her father’s confusion about the new baby and family notions: Think about it, Mum—when Mikey was killed, Dad was left with me, a daughter, and we all know that daughters don’t carry on the family name. Not only that, I ended up living with another woman. Not only that, I presented him with a granddaughter without being the biological mother. And to top it all off, she was conceived as though his half of the race were irrelevant. Remember that lapel button we pinned to her little jumpsuit?—‘My family is my mother, my mother and me’. It was ages before he could bring himself to introduce the poor little thing as his granddaughter, or his daughter’s child. It was always: This is the child of my daughter’s friend. Poor Dad. Anna will retort: That’s enough, Becky. He grew to love and accept, that’s all that matters.
