by Ian Wedde
He’d come out of Ma’s room on the morning he found her dead and there were Ettie and Adam and Grace all looking at him as if they expected him to say that she was dead when they already knew she was. There was some tea ready on the table and it was as though they were waiting for him to just straight away sit down as if nothing had happened and have a nice cup of tea! Then Ettie put her arms around him and said sit down for a bit and we’ll work out what to do next, but he already knew what he had to do next. Just leave her, leave Ma! he told them, he’d be back soon. Then he got his coat and hat on and went out and started the truck. Ettie was at the back door with her hand to her mouth. He remembered that sight of her for a long time afterwards and felt bad about it, but he knew what he had to do despite the memory of Ettie with her hand at her mouth. He was driving as though his body had taken over from his mind that was full of thoughts and images about Ma and not of how the road’s twists and turns went, although he knew them all well. He swerved to miss a silly stray sheep that was panicking and running bleating in the road but it was just his body that did it, not his attention to the road.
When he got to the Badem house Asian came out and greeted him with a nice handshake and asked how was he? It was clear from his expression that he saw something was wrong and of course it was, but what could he say at that point apart from? – And so would he mind calling his dad, he told the serious young man whose eyebrows had almost closed his eyes with their weight of worry.
But of course, please come in. Please, Mister Wenczel! Please, Wolf!
No he preferred to wait because he was in a hurry.
And then when Omer soon came out with a worried look he just asked straight away did they still have any of that orange blossom water because his mother had died early that morning and one of her last wishes had been to have some of the special water to bathe her skin with, not that she had spoken about it in such a direct way. Then Omer shook his hand very firmly and held it tight while he shouted to Asian in Turk. Then Nehir was there with her hand to her mouth just like Ettie. Yes of course they had some of that orange flower water but now they made it themselves because they had those sweet orange trees growing out the back, she Nehir made it, her mother had taught her, it was the truthful water.
The orange blossom water Nehir brought out with trembling hands was in an old lemonade bottle with a sprung-wire porcelain stopper – Nehir put it in his hands and then held them for a moment with the cool bottle there between them. They were all trying to find the right words and shake his hand that wasn’t holding the bottle against his chest but he didn’t wait, he took the lemonade bottle of orange blossom water and drove back past the stray sheep making it run hopelessly bleating into a fence, and then he drove on to where Ettie and the two others were waiting and told them that now they should wash Ma and make her tidy, they should of course bathe her skin with this orange blossom water since that was what she had always wanted but perhaps had been too shy to ask Denis Badem for, but now that hardly mattered. And now he would rather just sit outside on the porch for a while if they didn’t mind. So Ettie and Grace went in to the room where Ma was, and Adam came and sat with him on the porch.
After quite a while sitting there looking ahead in the direction of the river Adam said he remembered when Grandma first came to live with them, he’d have been about five or six, she used to sit out here and sew.
But how could he remember that, he’d have been too young.
But he did remember, because she had that old thing with pictures sewn on it, a little house and stuff like that. She told him stories, he used to like those stories.
Ah yes of course! – so then he got up and hurried back inside leaving Adam clambering to his feet in a what’s-the-matter kind of way. Nothing was the matter, but he didn’t have time to tell Adam it was just as well he’d reminded him about the old sampler because when he went into Ma’s room where Ettie and Grace had drawn the covers away and were starting to take Ma’s nightdress off he turned his face away and blurted where was the old sewing sampler thing of Ma’s? – because they had to put that on top of the bed when they had finished making her tidy, and were they wiping her down with the orange blossom water?
Of course they were, they said even a little impatiently.
And so then he went hastily back out again to the porch where Ma had liked to sit and this time Adam put his big warm heavy arm across his shoulders so that he could feel the comforting warmth and substance in it and told him to take it easy, just sit still out here for a while, Dad, there was nothing more he could do. He Adam would telephone Henry, he could easy come down from Taumarunui with his wife and the kids, and the others too from wherever, it was simple. Aunty Cath was already on her way on the ferry from down there in Blenheim because he’d phoned her last week when Grandma stayed in bed. Henry could be here tomorrow and so could Greta on the train, probably with Aunty Cath. Josie and her husband would probably drive down from Auckland with their kids, they had that flash car now, a bloody Rover 14, they could give Peter a lift from St John’s, they could be here day after tomorrow at the latest in time for the funeral.
Yes it was a pretty flash car all right that Rover, he said to Adam but as if the words coming out of his mouth were being said by someone else and he was hearing them not saying them. He was remembering that Ma went pretty quiet last year after hearing about Freddy. A few weeks later Josie and her lot visited in their flash new car and that was when out of the blue Ma said she wanted a couple of things buried with her when the time came, they were in the little top left-hand drawer of her tallboy in the bedroom. She said what she did about the things in the tallboy as though she’d been thinking about them for a while and had decided in her own Ma way that then was the best time to say something about it even though Josie was talking about her kids and their achievements. No one knew what to say at the time except Oh Ma! But back then and over the months after hearing about Freddy she was often quiet as though taking time to think about her life, though she never once talked about it.
He went to get up and go to the tallboy to see what was in the top left-hand drawer but Adam’s big arm just stayed where it was across his shoulders.
Elke was mooching about down at the Smiths’, said Adam, he could give her a ring in a bit. Just take it easy. They could all between them sort out what had to be done. Just sit tight for a while, Dad, there’s no need to agitate yourself.
Agi-tate!
The word sounded so unlike anything Adam would ever say that he began to laugh. What did he mean, agitate?
You know – jump up and down all the time.
What, like a bloody spring lamb or something?
You know what I mean, Dad.
But of course come to think of it they would have to organise some food for everybody. Would Adam mind butchering one of the new-season hoggets?
The big arm lifting off his shoulders.
Come off it, Dad. Goodness sake.
Then Ettie came out on to the porch. He heard the sound of her, those quick movements, he knew them with his eyes shut, no one else moved quite like that, but there was a difference, it was the faint smell of orange flowers that he’d sniffed from the neck of Nehir’s lemonade bottle before driving home from their place earlier.
He could come in and see his mum now, Ettie said. She put her hands against his cheeks from behind. They were warm and had that orange flower smell. And so he got up and went inside with her. The door to Ma’s room was open, there was the faint smell of the orange flower water, and what he noticed at once was how dim it was in there and so the first thing he did was cross the room and open the curtains because that was what she had always liked to do in the mornings while the sun was still on her side of the house. And then there she was, very neat and tidy, with the broad stripe of sunshine across her on the sewing sampler thing. Ettie and Grace had closed her mouth with a nice blue scarf tied over her hair and fastened under her chin, she looked as though she was getting ready for an outing may
be a picnic down the river past Smithy’s where there was that shingly shallow at the bend. Back in the day she’d even hopped in there herself sometimes, his little ma, she’d sit up to her waist in the water and wave her hands around in it because she thought that otherwise the eels might like to give her a nip. Not a lot of you for them to nip at Ma, he used to tease her, and it was true, the band of sunshine was lifted only slightly by the outline of her under the coverlet and the old sampler – the sunshine was flickering a little from the shaking leaves outside her window, it was like flickering water down there where they had their picnics.
‘Not a lot of you for them to nibble on, Ma,’ he said, and then saw the horror on Ettie’s and Grace’s faces on the other side of the bed and the shock of that shoved aside something in his mind that had been getting in the way and there he was in the time of it, in the time of Ma there so neat and tidy just the way she always liked to be and with her hands folded on the sampler.
They’d had a good laugh about it finally after he explained that what he’d meant by the nibbling was the way Ma used to flap her hands in the water down at the bend, to keep the eels away, not . . . The laughter went on for a while with Ettie wiping her eyes and saying stop it! – but by the time the laughing did stop it had cleared a space around what had to be done so they could all just get on with the job. He could stop being so agitated like Adam reckoned he was and just move around his share of the work with time to think about it, in the time of what was happening there.
The poplar planks he and Adam had stacked to dry out in the shed six months ago were still a bit green but some could be mortised quickly enough, it would be good to put his mind to that work and make a proper job of it. Adam could help him when he had time but otherwise if Adam didn’t mind he would prefer to be working by himself in the sunlight that came through the open doors of the shed, that was a good place to be at this time. He liked the way the pale straight-grained shavings curled down to the floor from his plane and the dust that floated in the sunshine inside the door. The warblers were down there in the bush by the river, he thought he could just hear them from time to time, and voices from the house.
He could tell that they were leaving him alone and he didn’t mind that. Grace brought him a cup of tea and a couple of cold-mutton sandwiches later on, so it had to be dinner time back over at the house with that leg of cold mutton left over from yesterday. She gave him a hug and said it looked lovely, Dad, what he was doing.
There was a spider that had stitched her web across the windowpane in the western wall, she was sitting off to one side of her web and was still there when the sun got round that way in the afternoon. ‘Ah, so you’re keeping an eye on me are you?’ he said to her, glad that no one was there to hear him talking aloud to himself as if he thought that Ma was watching his work with that sharp look she had, but perhaps she was!
He heard the truck drive away a bit later but didn’t bother to think about why, it would be Adam or Ettie on an errand. The three planed base-boards he’d fastened simply with short finishing nails from the forge, fastening batons across them for the inside and the side-boards likewise, they could be covered inside with some cloth later when the thing was finished, but now he could fasten the base-boards and the sides and the ends together with the mortises. They would make the thing neat and tidy the way Ma liked and people would see that care had been taken.
He was chiselling one of them out a bit too quickly but still carefully with his best narrow blade when he heard the truck return and then Catha calling out, ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ – and then Adam’s voice rumbling quite loud but he couldn’t hear what – but then there was his sis Catha in the doorway, the late sun made her fair, now nearly white hair glow around her face that he couldn’t see clearly because of the light behind her, but he could see the dark shape of her open mouth that he then held against his chest feeling the warmth of her gasps, he held her there as if to capture the sounds that she was making and put them inside himself. Then she quickly stepped aside and put her hand lightly on the work he had done throughout the day and they went over to the house with that hand in his and Adam coming along behind with Catha’s old carpetbag that had been their Ma’s once. He remembered Catha wanting to keep it when Ma first came down the Kaitieke all those years ago, goodness knows why, ‘that old thing’ Ma used to call it and wanted to get rid of it. But it was the one she had brought all the way from Germany when Catha was just a little girl and perhaps that was what Catha wanted to keep, the journey, not just the old thing itself. Because she’d been there for the whole journey and used to say she remembered some of it, though no one believed her, especially Ma – but she always insisted that she did remember, with that stubborn shape to her mouth and her head held up, she remembered a lot, including when her little brother got born on the way, yes that was right, the same brother that had his papa’s first name Wolf, yes this one!
That memory of hers reminded him.
There was something he wanted her to do.
Wanted? – Catha’s eyebrow going up just like their Ma’s used to.
There was something he would like her to do, something Ma had wanted. He would like her to do it.
But what?
Ma had asked for two things to be placed in her coffin when she died, they were in a drawer in her tallboy. He would rather Catha did that because she was the eldest and had been with Ma the longest. She might know what the things were and why they mattered, whereas he might not.
*
And so on the day there were a couple of dozen of them, family and friends, gathered at Ma’s graveside up in the Raurimu cemetery, and when Omer lifted his hat and made it flap in a circle around his head a good six or eight of those at the graveside began to more or less whistle the little trill they had practised at his and Ettie’s place that had also been Ma’s for going on thirty years, and at the Badems’ where Omer and Nehir and their oldest boy Asian and one of his kids knew the little trill because Ma’s friend Denis had told them all about it when he was alive.
Then the neighbours and friends who didn’t know what to make of the whistling heard Catha who was both laughing and crying say Auf wiedersehen und sichere Reise unsere liebe kleine Rohrsänger, that he could just catch the meaning of but that the neighbours and friends couldn’t understand and most of the young family ones neither. So then Peter who was at St John’s College in Auckland and a clever one with languages made a hemm in his throat and said, ahemm, Goodbye and safe travels our dear little, but then stopped, and Catha said, reed warbler, our dear little reed warbler, and then everybody including the neighbours and friends and even the pastor from Taumarunui all clapped.
And then for the rest of the day including at the afternoon tea back at the house people were talking about the twitter and the story of the brave little bird, and trying the twitter out with funny shapes to their lips. The sewing sampler was displayed in the front room and people were admiring it and touching the pictures on it with careful fingertips, but the things from the tallboy had been sealed in the coffin before it went up to the cemetery on the truck. Catha had not told him what the things were that Ma had wanted buried with her and he would not be asking. Ma had wanted them gone with her and that was how it should be as far as he was concerned.
Beth
A really good red wine seemed like the best idea, assuming Frank could still drink the stuff, so she got him a bottle of Te Mata Coleraine at the international Duty Free. A familiar crowd, at once avaricious and wistful, was wandering through the aisles past the luxury wristwatches and face creams. On the strength of its absurd label she bought herself an elegant container of very expensive Snowberry Intensive Renewal Face Serum. The label on its box promised that it contained a special ingredient, eProlex™, ‘developed over several years of intensive skin science research by Snowberry at the University of Auckland’. The special ingredient was ‘specifically designed to re-densify ageing skin as well as to help reduce lines and wrinkles’. She might apply som
e of it to her face after exposing herself to the fierce heat of the sun Frank had promised her at Dingo Beach along with the grilled prawns she might resemble after the sun, but she could also dab some on his leathery cheeks and provoke him with the word ‘re-densify’, assuming he could still be provoked. And after she got back she’d be able to ask her pals at the Staff Club what they knew about their alma mater’s intensive research into re-densification.
The rest of the international departure lounge was filled with a different but more familiar crowd, one she knew but was seeing afresh, as if her perceptions had themselves just then been re-densified. It was the crowd that didn’t use the VIP lounges, all sorts and ages, some weary and others excited, keeping fractious children amused, huddled with the cabin baggage or eating cheap snacks, speaking many different languages – they were going somewhere new to find new lives for themselves, they were going somewhere that was warmer, or with more opportunity to better themselves – that word! – or they were returning to their homelands to visit their families, to a wedding, or a funeral, to see a new baby, or they were just heading off hoping something would happen to change their lives that had become too hard or too boring.
There was a large Indian family agitating around their aged matriarch as if she were a kind of magnetic force. The old woman had a fresh vermilion bindi dot above the long bridge of her nose and she looked piercingly at Beth past the dot and gave her a secretive smile as if to say, They all expect me to be paying attention but why should I? She gave the old woman a courteous smile back and got a knowing nod in return. The nod seemed to be saying, I know you. She had already seen the family at the check-in where a farewelling cadre had been clustered around those departing – there had been much mopping of tears and thrusting-forward of new babies for farewell kisses, and the elderly woman seemed to be the centre of attention.
