The Reed Warbler

by Ian Wedde

  ‘I took his stuff to the forge,’ said Wolf without taking his eyes off his mother, ‘but if he wants any of it he’d better be quick, because if he’s not away from here by morning Mister Hastings will see to it that he’s charged on account of Will.’ Then he turned his head slowly to look at her. ‘You stay here, Catha, because Ettie and me are going home. We left Ma Francis there with the kiddies.’

  Then they left without another word, with Ettie going first and Wolf’s hand on her shoulder steering from behind, and Catharina sat down in the chair Wolf had vacated and reached for Mutti’s hand across the table. But Mutti would not relinquish the teacup. It was as if the world was whirling around her grip and she was holding on tight to time and its chaos of comings and goings.

  Did Mutti know that even Wolfgang von Goethe was given to buggery or at least was not particular in his pleasures? – and no, just in case Mutti wondered, she had not included this information in her lessons at the High School!

  She meant the reference to her lessons as a little joke but did not risk an encouraging chuckle.

  Mutti’s birthday party was over and they were walking off their lunch.

  The day was overcast with clouds that seemed to sag with the weight of rain needing to fall. They were pushed ponderously along by the wind. That chilly wind was gusting over from the south-west, it had the tang of the sea in it, and from time to time Mutti had been sniffing it with a look of enjoyment on her face, wrinkling up her nose and top lip and closing her eyes. She was well wrapped in her old Danish shawl. The Botanic Garden in winter was somewhat dreary and the salty breeze was an enhancement, given the comfort of the shawl. She was in the middle of a sniff when Catharina said what she did about ‘even’ Wolfgang von Goethe, whereupon her mutti’s eyes sprang open. The rims of her nostrils, somewhat reddened by the chill, turned white. Greta had run on to meet her school friends by the rotunda, and so Mutti was able to pause and stand face to face with her daughter.

  Which of them would speak first? Mutti filled her meagre chest with a great intake of the cold air and then let it out again in a sigh through lips that almost smiled. The sigh was not words but it was eloquent. ‘Oh, Catha, why do you try me?’ was what it seemed to say clearly enough, but the hint of a smile was more difficult – was it just how the sigh had shaped her lips? Then her thin hand gripped Catharina’s quite hard and she led her briskly to a park bench within sight of the rotunda and the girls who were running around it being squawking seagulls with outstretched arms in the gusts of wind. They sat down with Mutti still gripping her hand.

  ‘They believe they are really flying,’ said Mutti. ‘That is the wonder of being a child.’

  What was the hint almost but not quite concealed in that remark – that then perhaps sadly we know we must have our feet firmly on the ground? Must know what is meant by ne-ces-si-ty? By what is ne-ces-sary? What is notfalls? Or was Mutti just avoiding the issue of Freddy, as usual?

  ‘Mutti, it’s been nearly three years since Freddy went. Why can we not talk about him?’

  The girls ran squawking to the ornamental pond with water lilies and then back to the rotunda. Greta had been promised cake at the kiosk and she was allowed to invite a friend. She and Catharina had discussed how she would choose the one friend, a problem so complex the child had wept with the agony of it and the fear of discounting even one of her classmates. She and Mutti had laughed about it on the way to the Gardens.

  For once, Mutti was talking without looking at her, without immobilising her with that direkt in die Augen schauen – she was looking at the seagull-girls and smiling about their game, or at least it was likely that was what was making her smile, rather than her daughter’s insistence.

  ‘It was the fear of shame and disgrace and gossip that killed my mother,’ she said, making each word clear. ‘I did not allow that to happen when you became pregnant to the professor. I did not allow it to happen to me at that time, but nor did I allow it to happen to you. That boy had his fun with the gossip about you and the professor and Wolf, and so did his friend, they were foolish and thoughtless and thought they were clever. You saw that I was angry then, but that passed in due course. I saw how they were together those two and that no good would come of it, but what could I do? Now after three years he is just as gone as he was on that morning. Do you expect that to change, Catha? If I talk about it? He cannot come back and talking will not make him. Now we should go and have some cake, and there is a way to help Greta choose her special friend, it’s called Ene mene miste, es rappelt in der Kiste, ene mene Meck, und du bist weg! Do you remember that one?’ Now Mutti was looking straight at her and the smile was for her – a little closed-lips smile, not exactly humorous. ‘Und du bist weg, and you are gone! Friedrich is gone.’ A glint of teeth in the smile now. ‘And so is Wolfgang von Goethe, for the love of God, Catha, what do you or more likely the Professor take me for? Now come!’

  Friedrich. She had never called him that, only Freddy. So she had not really called him by name and so had not really brought him back into their world. But a phantom of Freddy had been acknowledged, an insubstantial and abstract kind of being that did not quite merit attention, but perhaps he was present in a way sufficient for Mutti, at least for now, he was present in her secret or private heart where after all much else was hidden and kept safe.

  Beth and Frank

  The attempt to Skype with Frank hadn’t gone all that well. His uneasiness with the process made him turn this way and that away from the camera, as if avoiding its and her gaze, or as if looking around for her in the room where he was sitting awkwardly at a table with the laptop on it. The room was large and bare, with strong light coming in through wide folding doors from what looked like a veranda behind him, so that his backlit face was darkened. At one point he bent to pat a dog but kept talking more or less inaudibly as he did so – the pooch, an ageing kelpie, wandered out of sight on to the veranda. A young woman with a small child on her hip, perhaps his granddaughter Lizzie and ‘Frank Junior’, appeared briefly in the doorway the dog had gone out through. She seemed to be checking that the call was going okay, and waved, but didn’t come into the room.

  He’d begun to feel a bit queasy reading bits and pieces of the stuff he’d fished out of the trunk, was what he’d been saying as he bent to pat the dog, and so Beth missed the part that came before he said the names Ruth and Greta as he reappeared.

  ‘Missed a bit there, Frank, while you were smooching your pup.’

  His face, already in shadow and hard to read, was still for a while, as if he was trying to remember what he’d just said. His uncertain manner was un-Frank-like – vague and anxious.

  ‘I was saying that they’ve begun to get on my nerves, those bloody ghosts, Granny Cath and my mum Greta, and my sis Ruth. Not to mention that Frederick chappie’s stuff I sent you last time. Seems it was Granny Cath who kept everything, then Greta inherited it and was planning a book after she came over here with us but never got round to it, and then poor Ruth got the ghosty bug and started organising the relics but of course she never finished the job either.’ Then, at last, a loud Frank laugh or bark – the kelpie appeared briefly in the doorway, ears pricked. ‘Oh fuck,’ Frank said, ‘bloody King Tut’s curse or something Germanic!’ Another Frank bark, but this time the dog couldn’t be bothered responding. ‘And don’t forget the Krauts got poor old Albert Parks’ bloody leg as well!’

  He’d had enough of it, too many dead people, was all he was trying to say, so would she mind if he just sent the rest over? Better still, she could come and collect it. He’d send one more lot, the last batch he’d had a peek at, but that was it for him. He needed to go and listen to some birds for a while.

  ‘Get those voices out of my head, know what I mean, Beth?’

  She guessed he also meant they were drowning out Helen.

  And then, some weeks later, the email with an attachment. It was an image of Frank with the head of a galah photoshopped over his. It had its crest up a
nd was looking at her from a sideways tilt of its head. Of Frank’s head. His feathers were pinkish-red up as far as his beak, and the rest of his head was grey-white. His single visible black iris regarded her intently.

  Dearest Kiwi bird cuzzie, Greetings from the Happy Country. Lizzie is writing this down for me because I’ve had a wee stroke and can’t work my claws. In addition my beak is a bit numb so we can’t really chat very well at least for now because I mumble. The vet says I’ll get better but it may take a while. Meanwhile I have to take it easy and rest the crest as we galahs say which means not too much excitement. Lizzie has sent you another batch of the haunted Germanics so I hope you don’t get struck down by the Curse when you open it. Do come over, would love to crack a few nuts with you. With love from Frank.

  Then there was an added note from Lizzie.

  Dear Beth, grandad’s not too bad but can’t do much, he probably wouldn’t want me to say this, but he’s such a special old guy and I know it would do him the world of good to see you. It would be nice to meet you, he talks about you a lot. Best wishes from Lizzie, John and Frank (junior).

  Yes, there was the time on their road trip when she’d done a kind of faint on the way to pay respects to Helen and Pouakani, and had come to lying on her back between Frank’s skinny shanks with her head propped up on his tummy, but nothing fainty like that had happened to her since, and it was true she’d been agitated at the time, as much about Frank’s bad manners as anything else, so nothing to worry about there, not that she was going to take Frank seriously re the ‘Curse’! She remembered his lozenged argyle socks quite vividly, but perhaps that was just because they were pretty much the first things she’d seen when she unfainted.

  I’m being haunted by Frank’s socks, she told herself, but it didn’t work, because of course reading those ghosty fragments did your head in after a while, and that was what had happened to Frank – he’d had his head done in by the ancestors in that trunk.

  Would Joe please come over on Saturday, she needed to have a chat. And by all means bring Frankie and the boys, maybe they could bring some stuff for a barbie?

  ‘You’ll love this,’ she said, trying to keep her tone light. ‘Frank’s granddaughter who lives with him has a wee boy called Frank. Frank Junior. Invasion of the Franks and Frankies.’

  Frankie and the boys were goofing about while setting up the barbie at the other end of the deck, and Joe was watching them with a sooky look of blind love. Compared to squarish, baldish Joe, Frankie was a tall skinny thing with messy black curls on top. She was vegan; they were going to grill aubergines and courgettes and ‘stuff like that’. The boys weren’t all that keen, said moist-eyed Joe, but they were pretty crazy about Frankie.

  How humans went on making such unlikely choices was one of the great mysteries. What would Joe and Frankie’s kids look like, if they had any? Where would the veering progress of their genes land them? The budding guitarist Tim hurled an aubergine down the garden quarterback-style and Frankie gave a piercing farm-girl whistle – her long arm shot out and the other boy ran to fetch.

  ‘See what I mean? Best of mates.’

  ‘And you two?’

  ‘I got lucky, Ma.’ Then he was looking at her with a so-what’s-up expression. ‘You’ve been in touch with old Frank again?’ He pushed a forefinger against his temple and twisted it around. ‘You two been messing around with that old stuff again?’

  ‘Frank’s had a stroke. He wants me to come over. I don’t think it’s all that bad, but you never know.’ The image of Frank with the pink-and-greyish galah head stuck on top was all at once so vividly present she knew she’d been hiding it away somewhere in the back of her mind – she caught her sob with one hand while grabbing Joe’s arm with the other. ‘I’m afraid, Joe.’

  ‘Well then, you should bloody well go, what are you waiting for, for the old guy to conk out before you get there?’

  His big hand landed emphatically on top of hers.

  The veges were on the grill and Frankie and the boys were dancing about fencing with tongs and spatulas. There was a world just down the other end of the deck that was also hers, that was hers if she wanted it, of course it was hers and of course she wanted it, but now she’d inserted herself into another world as well and the two of them couldn’t quite fit together.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to hear you say that. What else have we got cooking?’

  ‘The aubergines are going to be something called baba ganoush, and there’s hot pita bread and salady stuff.’ Joe patted his stomach. ‘Lost a few kilos, too.’ He took his hand off hers and made a whip-cracking gesture. ‘Real tough task-master, that one.’ His grin. ‘Task-mistress. Oh, the pain.’

  She kept Joe company by not having a glass or two of wine with the baba ganoush – which was truly delicious – but after they’d gone she poured herself one and prepared to open the large box from Lizzie in Cungulla somewhere near a place called Dingo Beach where there were tiger prawns. Frank had promised to take her to Dingo Beach for the prawns.

  Wolf

  The lads had cleared out to higher ground on a little ridge to the east of the drive while he and Dick did the honours and finished the final two-man cross-cut. Then Dick scampered away up the slope with the saw while he bashed the wedges in the way he had learned to and followed Dick with the sledgehammer over his shoulder as the cut began to split with a twang. Behind him the first of the big trees let out a long loud creaking groan, and he turned to watch. It was as though he was watching the loudest noise he had heard since coming down the valley. The tree, twice his arm span wide, began to fall slowly at first, and then fast. And then an almighty crash as it landed against the two below and down they went, and two more big fellows below them – that was all of them except two of the seven they had got ready over the two days leading up. There was a great outcry of birds that had flown up from the falling trees and from all around, as well as whooping and shouting from the lads. The cold overcast air was full of sawdust and windblown rubbish and the smell of smashed branches, but there was also now broad grey daylight where before there had been dim shapes of light and shadow. The drive swathe was a mess of broken and splintered stuff, with the five big trunks lying this way and that down the slope, and a great many smaller ones snapped and broken.

  Then it was quiet except for the lads calling out after Tom as they came jumping down the slope. Who had seen him? Their faces wore that look he had seen back at the railhead when one of the navvies got his legs run over on the track by a buggy. Tom must have gone back across the river. But why would the fool do that and miss all the fun?

  It was Curly who found the boy and began to bark and bark down the bottom of the drive slope just as it was getting dark. He ran back to the hut for a spade and a lamp and dug under the boy’s body enough to get him out. He was not even a hundred yards from the river – perhaps he had planned to cross it and watch the drive from the other side. It was a big elbowy branch on the last tree that had knocked him down and fallen across him. His chest and jaw and shoulders were crushed, God only knows if he had seen the branch coming or what had happened, God only knows why he had decided to go down there in the path of the drive and not up the hill with the rest of them.

  God only knows was all he could find to say to Ettie after he got back from the settlement where they had taken Tom’s body to his house. Four of them carried him there in a canvas sling. The good canvas that had been their roof at first was all bloody, so he left it, he told Dick to burn it. God only knows, the poor boy was boarding at the settlement and getting piecework, he was a good worker, he had done plenty of cutting, he knew what to do, he had helped to cut the scarfs on some of the trees that went down, he knew the trade, he would be owed a share of the timber, he would have been owed a share.

  ‘God only knows, it was me, Ettie, it was me that drove the wedges on the first one that went down. I should have looked out for the poor lad.’ He was trembling in the bed, and she put her arms a
round him and held him from behind, saying it could not have been foreseen, but the trembling would not stop. He could feel the beginning roundness of her belly against him and that would usually have been a joy and a comfort after losing the last one but now it was not. It was wrong to have the thought that Tom had been the price to pay for their new child, but that was the thought he had at the moment he fell steeply into sleep, hearing what sounded like the tree’s loud groan as it began to go.

  In the morning it was the birds that woke him as usual, it was as though nothing had happened to them, that was how noisy and songful they were. He walked along beside the river in a chilly shower of rain to where the drive’s swathe was filling up with weak early light. Oh lord the place did look cursed now.

  But later when he rode over to Dick’s place to have a talk about what had to be done, Dick said that poor young Tom was not the first and would not be the last to lose his life down here or over at the railway, the graveyard already had a few killed in the timber, as well there had been a leg off at the knee that he knew of from a cut foot that went rotten and a hand with no fingers from the sawmill, not to mention an arm gone from the elbow, that was a bloke called Horne, and the fires had done some harm, one man’s life taken at the end of the summer just passed when the wind shifted and another he knew of who had lost the sight in one eye from a spark. A few kiddies that got sick and died from the chill. There was a girl that drowned, most people thought she had meant to do it. The rest of them were lucky, Dick thought, and were only getting luckier as the country opened up. Wolf would get plenty of good timber out of that drive, enough to build a decent house, he should get on with the job of clearing some more and start burning off.