It is the women’s turn to rest, and the men’s responsibility to take the children for a swim in the stock dam. David and Meredith carry bottles of beer and orange, to put in the water there. Michael is amazed by all the droppings, and Rhys, though younger, laughs at his ignorance of the country. ‘But there’s poop everywhere,’ says Michael.
‘A farm’s mostly poop,’ says Uncle Llewelyn. ‘Poop and grass. Two forms of the same thing.’
‘I don’t like it,’ says Jane.
Uncle Llewelyn is very gallant. ‘Quite right. Ladies never do,’ he says.
The ground of the gateways is worn bare by the passing of sheep, but, more than that, the earth itself is worn away, so that there is a dip which becomes a puddle in the winter. The gates drag even so, and are held by a collar of thick wire. The ends of the wire have been turned to a latch by the power of their father’s hands.
The stock dam is large enough to keep the water clean. No one considers trusting the sea, for its undertow is a local legend. There remains a sense of irony, however, if only visual. For the group of them gather at the stock dam while the ocean stretches to the horizon. The three children squeal, and stir up the mud to make the water yellow. They smack with their hands, and splash the men on the bank.
‘I stood on something.’
‘Eels, eels,’ they shout, enjoying the terror of their imagination.
‘When do you leave for Australia?’ David asks.
‘I must be in Sydney in three weeks.’ Alun lies on his side, propped on an elbow. He draws grass stems from their sheaths, and lances them into the pond. A flock of yellow heads sweeps by, bobbing like corks.
‘Sometimes I feel I’d like a change myself. Living and dying where you were born isn’t so wonderful a prospect.’
‘It makes self-deception that much harder.’ Alun plucks the grass, thinking of the way to continue. The wind blows his lank hair from one side of his face to the other. ‘Change can sometimes seem a personal progress, when the essential journey bears no relation to distance at all.’ Alun was able to talk of things that would make his family uneasy from any other source.
‘Get your head right under, Michael,’ calls Uncle Llewelyn. As he watches the children he shares their joy. He laughs when they do, his calls match theirs. He sits with his brother, a little apart from his nephews.
‘I’d quite like to farm in Australia,’ says David. ‘I saw parts of Victoria that I could be happy in.’
‘Imagine Mum and Dad if you went.’ Wearing Joseph’s coat has never been easy. The skuas gobble like turkeys, or give their keening cry, which hints at an essential hollowness of things.
Meredith, David and Alun watch their father. He has worn glasses for years, yet they are still an oddity. He puts them on awkwardly. The thin stems puzzle his fingers. The glasses are incongruous across his seamed, moon face. Glasses and hats don’t suit their father. He has greater idiosyncrasies, with half a life of another way, and not even a letter since his parents died. Only Uncle Llewelyn can join in tacit reminiscence. Nothing is regretted it seems, but something sacrificed nevertheless for the new life. Alun points out to his brothers that their father never faces the sea when he rests. As a test they stand and talk to him, drawing him around to them. But soon he unthinkingly turns again, not right away from them, but so he can regard the downland, and the gully running up towards the road. He lifts his glasses, and rubs where they have rested. The Welsh are not great lovers of the sea in spite of all their coastline. Welsh men are miners, preachers, farmers and soldiers. Beneath the extravagance of song and poetry, an inward-looking people. Their father wasn’t poet or singer, but he had a Celtic heart. His absurd glasses catch the sun, so that for an instant as his sons watch, the lenses silver over and his calm eyes are lost. His best blue shirt is open,, and the hair of his chest begins abruptly at the razor’s edge, grey and so dense it hides the skin. Meredith moves to get more beer, and Uncle Llewelyn brings his brother’s glass and his own. David tells the children to keep away from the top end of the dam where there might be snags. They have had enough. Rhys and Michael begin to quarrel over the one stick they have between them. Jane is thin, and as she comes from the deeper water her knee caps flick up and down as she shivers. ‘Throw that stick away now, boys,’ says Alun. ‘We’re going back to the house.’
‘Let’s all play cricket,’ says Michael. ‘We always play cricket on Christmas Day.’
Uncle Llewelyn is asleep on the verandah. His hands are as broad as they are long, and the folded skin of his brows almost hides his eyes. The dogs are not usually allowed within the house enclosure, but nothing is denied the children on Christmas Day. So sheepdogs play awkwardly at being pets. Jane has gathered Uncle Llewelyn’s presents on his lap while he sleeps: tobacco pouch, patterned socks, petrol vouchers, handkerchiefs, cigars, parka, a box of twelve-gauge cartridges number five shot. There must be a good deal more to Uncle Llewelyn than such things represent, but it’s not subject to easy scrutiny. If he is ever disappointed at being a supernumerary at his brother’s Christmas, there is no sign of it. No outward show of affection either, yet they are rarely far apart. Every task on both farms which could not be done by one man, was accomplished by the two of them through the years.
Meredith stands for a time beside his mother, and they watch Alun and David play cricket with the children. Physical work hasn’t yet stiffened David, and he is lithe and admirable. Alun has tapering, office legs. ‘Soft as butter,’ says his mother. ‘The boy’s as soft as butter.’ There is an element of real contempt. ‘And what does he want to go to Australia for, I’d like to know. We kept hearing how well he was doing in his job here.’
‘It’s a big job he’s got over there. I don’t think you realise just how much responsibility Alun has in his work. You’d be surprised, I think.’
‘I blame Margaret as well. All these ideas. A car for herself, she said, and talk of a sauna bath in the house.’
‘You know it’s not Margaret. Things have always been different in the city; different tempo, other goals.’
‘What Alun had wasn’t good enough. He was always the discontented one.’ She wouldn’t relent. Any threat to old values and established patterns was received with bitterness. David must endure being favourite, Meredith being taken for granted, and Alun the guilt of finding his parents’ life insufficient.
Tea is an attack again upon the food of midday, with the addition of ham, Christmas cake and strawberries. Daylight saving makes it only afternoon, and there are hours and hours for travelling, Mother says. She is reluctant to think of any member of the family leaving. For this one day in the year she can protect herself from the bare hills.
The bacon on the last goose has shaped itself to the breast, and Uncle Llewelyn makes a sandwich of it and thyme stuffing. ‘Costs are beating us,’ says Uncle Llewelyn. ‘No matter what we do about production, the costs beat us every time. Most of the expenses we have no control over.’ Uncle Llewelyn turns to his food again, and the pause is more than their mother can allow.
‘Every union hanger-on in the country, every unnecessary middle-man and bureaucrat taking a fat living.’ Her bitterness is unashamed. The family, each with an individual expression of wry restraint, carry on eating as she talks. Mother hasn’t been educated to expect two sides to every situation, and the lifetime here hasn’t suggested it.
‘Workers in the city. . .’ begins Margaret, but then she catches Alun’s eye and falters. His mother carries on ready to start on the freezing workers, and her voice quickens in anticipation.
Michael puts strawberries into his mouth one after another. The sequence goes on and on. Uncle Llewelyn watches in admiration. David argues some point with his mother. ‘Have you got the tree hut ready?’ Meredith asks his mother. When he was ten David stole a fruit cake, and hid in the tree hut all night. No one had disturbed him, and the next morning he had returned for his breakfast, bringing the remains of the fruit cake as a token of submission. The children enjoy
the story. David only grins and says he can’t remember it. Each of the boys is the subject of some childhood anecdote, and the wives have learnt to join the laughter and the provocation.
Alun helps his mother sort the dishes to be washed. For a while they are alone by the window, and approach each other with a concern that always has the guise of exasperation. ‘This job.’ The manner in which she says it has a message in itself. ‘This job of yours in Australia. Your father and I hoped that you’d be happy in Auckland.’
‘The firm has its central office in Sydney. It’s the opportunity, you see. It won’t come again.’
‘I thought at least you might have considered your father. I thought your own country would satisfy you.’
‘It wasn’t easy. Margaret and I spent a lot of time talking it over.’
‘But you’re going nevertheless.’ Each, with an effort, says no more about it, for it is Christmas Day. They work in silence until Deirdre comes back from collecting the best cutlery.
‘Uncle Llewelyn and Michael are still eating,’ she says.
The view is ever the same from the window above the bench. The blank wall of the garage, old when he was a boy, older now. The wood is swollen and distorted as rotten wood is. Successive coats of paint disguise the worst of it. At the corners the decay is complete, for there the water can get into the joints of the timber. He could put a fist right through it without pain. On the garage wall are the two safes for dog tucker, or game before it’s dressed: gauze sides and simple wooden latches. The brown grass of the lawn ironed to the contours of the ground. The macrocarpa hedge with holes maintained in its denseness by nesting birds. The pipe-frame gate to keep out the hens and dogs, and a clean sack folded on the path before it. A pipe hammered into the garden, with the radio earth attached. And the dry bank beyond the macrocarpa, with the ice-plant like a wave mocking the drought. Behind it the pines, the downs, the persistence of the ocean’s sound.
At the end of the day they are at the front of the house, and Meredith and Alun are wanting to leave. The children are still playing. ‘Don’t let the dog lick you, Michael. Never let a dog lick you,’ says Mother. ‘They’ve got germs you see, dear. In their mouths. Wash your face and hands, and use the hand towel.’ Margaret begins to gather their things into the car. When Michael comes from washing, Alun tells his mother that they must leave. ‘But you can stay the night. Of course you can stay the night. The children would love that.’ She is sweeping them briskly along with her opinions, establishing any opposition to her views as selfish. Alun is surprised at the anger it raises within him. Anger not so much at her doing it, but at her assumption that he would not recognise it, that he and his brothers had not known and suffered it all their lives.
‘We can’t stay, Mother. I told you when we wrote. I’m sorry, but we must be away by eight, with the distance we’ve got before us.’
‘Very well.’ The red patches on her face flame.
Their father is baffled by the need to say goodbye. He shakes his head as he says the words. He puts a large hand on Michael’s head, and then on Jane’s. ‘God bless now,’ he says. The cadence of his youth has never been lost.
David comes with his brothers up to the turn-off. The three of them get out and stand together for the last time that day. ‘I may have had my last Christmas here,’ says Alun.
‘Australia’s not that far away.’
‘It’s not so much that. Mum’s getting worse. All this compulsive manipulation of other people. We seem to have lost patience with each other. It’s difficult for Margaret too.’
‘That’s why I’ve come this far with you, in a way. Not Margaret, but Mum, and what she’s been trying to tell you both all day, and couldn’t. The more difficult it was, the angrier she got.’
‘About what?’
‘Dad’s going blind. One eye’s all but had it now, and the other is just a matter of time. There’s nothing can be done, they say, nothing can be done.’ The brothers look down to avoid the glare of the setting sun. Margaret has no knowledge of what has been said. She leans across the car to the window.
‘We should be starting, Alun.’ He gives an odd gesture of dismissal and agreement.
‘Is that the way of it then,’ he says to David.
‘We should go back down to them,’ says Meredith.
‘Not now. Not on Christmas Day. It’ll only upset them both. Dad won’t talk about it, even to me. Like everything else it’s left to Mum. And this time she can’t do it. For blindness she can’t find a beginning.’ David doesn’t find it easy himself. So little is words, so much is feeling. ‘I’ll write to you,’ he says, ‘and I’ll get Mum to write to you.’
Meredith and Alun watch him go back; his long shadow reaches down the track ahead of him. ‘Poor Dad, poor Mum,’ says Alun. ‘She’s been wanting to tell us all day. That’s what it was. She couldn’t do it.
‘We could still go back.’
‘Dad would know why. He wouldn’t care for himself, but our knowledge of it is what he fears most. Christmas Day, and Dad’s going blind, eh Merdy. There’s a vision for you. Blind, calm Dad, and Mum keeping the world away from him. And there’s nothing to be done, David says. You see that. Nothing can be done.’
They watch David almost at the house. The wind blows in from the sea as ever, and the seagulls cry our lives away on those long New Zealand beaches.
‘Effigies of Family Christmas’ was most recently published in The Best of Owen Marshall’s short stories (Vintage Book, 1997).
Owen Marshall has written, or edited, over 35 books. Awards include the CNZ Writers’ Fellowship, residencies at the universities of Canterbury, Otago and Massey, and the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, France. His novel Harlequin Rex won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction in 2000. In that year he became an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit and in 2012 was made a Companion of the Order. He has received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and an honorary Litt D from Canterbury University, which in 2005 appointed him an adjunct professor.
Free as a Bird
David Hill
Except for a few sawing and nail-banging noises three or four fences away, the rest of the baches were empty. The boy Darrin liked the emptiness. At least today his mother wouldn’t be at him to go and make friends with the other boys. On this glittering winter morning, the other boys were back in their home towns, at school.
He went down to the bank of springy kikuyu at the end of the bach’s lawn in four jumps. Another two took him across the frontier of thinning grass where bank curved into beach. Three more, and he was over the creaking belt of driftwood and seaweed, bleached plastic bottles and orange twine that lay along the high-tide mark. He stopped to tug at one long stick where it poked out from a tangle of old fishing net, pushed it away when it refused to come, and went on across the grinding pebbles towards the rock pools.
Something was happening between his mother and his father. That was why they had all come to spend these four days at the McIntyres’ bach; why he’d got nearly a week off school.
He’d heard his Auntie Diane talking to his mother about it. “At least see if a different environment makes you feel different. Try and get Lance to look at it from a different perspective.” He didn’t understand all she said; he knew he wasn’t meant to, but it knocked displeasingly in his mind.
He’d gone down to the rock pools yesterday, on his first day at the bach. He didn’t think much of them at first – the scoops and sink-sized hollows with their pitted rims seemed ordinary and unpromising. But they made him bend to look into them, then crouch to see past the surface glitter of sunlight. There were stones and glossy seaweed underwater; winkings of tiny claws beside the stones. A flicker of transparent tail as a cockabully betrayed itself above the matching bottom of sand. Only when he stood up and felt the cramp in his knees and the fronts of his thighs did he realise how much time had passed.
So, he came down eagerly to the pools this morning. More
eagerly because he could feel the drag and crackle starting to build up, back inside the kitchen of the bach.
It was cold in the bach, too. He’d heard Mr McIntyre talking to his father. “Now there’s no excuse for not being warm. You’ve got extra blankets in the wardrobe, and that little heater throws out a real glow.” But his parents hadn’t used the heater. They knew the McIntyres wouldn’t accept any payment for the electricity, and they didn’t believe in being in people’s debt. He knew that before they went, his mother would make his father take the hand-mower out of the shed and do the lawns. She would sweep out both rooms, and wash the floors and windows. Even though nobody would be using the bach for another four months – he’d heard Mr McIntyre say so – they would leave it tidier than they’d found it.
Down at the pools, Darrin stood and blinked in the blue-and-yellow day. The winter sun was on his back. The sea breathed beyond the rocks. Gulls lifted up as he approached, and circled with their long cries above him.
He began making his picture come back, the picture he’d started on while he was down at the rock pools yesterday. In the picture, he was standing before his mother in some unspecified place and speaking to her. The words he was speaking weren’t specified either, but his mother had her head lowered. Sentences were stepping from him which somehow raised his father to the status of wronged victim. Sometimes in the picture, his father came and stood beside him while he spoke and put a hand on his shoulder. But he didn’t feel comfortable with that part.
Now he was looking at a seagull. The bits of his other picture went thin and slid away. One seagull, floating silent and tidy in a pool quite close to him. It hadn’t flown up with the others. It just sat in the water; its head was still while its body trembled a little on the surface of the pool.
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