by Sally Piper
She picked two more.
‘You haven’t sprayed them with any bug killers have you?’ Jorja eyed the red orb suspiciously.
Grace looked askance at her granddaughter. ‘This is your composting, green granny you’re talking to, not Mrs Yates.’
Jorja flicked her fringe back and put the fruit in her mouth. Grace enjoyed seeing both her granddaughter’s questioning eyes for a change.
‘Mum reckons you’ve never lost your country roots.’
Grace laughed. ‘She’s right. You can tell by my hands.’
She held her hands out for Jorja to see. They weren’t as stained and worn as Mother’s had been, but they still showed a line of soil under the nails and in some of the deeper seams of her palms as well.
‘These are my roots.’ She waggled her fingers at Jorja. ‘But they wash up all right, just like carrots.’
Jorja laughed, held her smaller hands out and turned them up then down to compare.
Grace gripped each of the pale, slender hands in hers and ran her rough thumbs over the backs of each. ‘Pah,’ she joked, casting them free. ‘City girl’s hands. Pretty, but soft.’
Yet they were the exact hands Grace had wanted once. Soft, pretty hands that proved she’d taken a different path from her mother’s. Harvest had offered few options to a 1950s girl that didn’t lead to hands like Mother’s.
Her most likely, and expected, occupation had been housewife, but at seventeen that had no appeal to Grace at all. She could have tried for work in the local shops. There was the haberdasher, whose proprietor was a woman with a nose long and thin like a pencil pleat. But she only took on girls whose mothers she was sweet with, and Grace’s mother wasn’t one of them – she couldn’t afford pretty lace trims or expensive lengths of gabardine. And Grace believed she was owed something more, for having made it all the way through high school, than to end up like those girls who hadn’t. They weighed beans or quartered cabbages at the greengrocer or made spiders for children yet to learn their pleases and thankyous at the milk bar. Or they cleared away the greasy counter-meal plates from tables at the pub. There was the occasional office job – at the accountant, council chambers, the doctor – but Grace was sure she didn’t want to miss even what sleepy Harvest had to offer by being stuck in some stuffy back room as a typist, a fluorescent light as the only sun.
Grace had looked for alternatives, ways to escape, even as she feared she wouldn’t find the courage to take the opportunity, should it present itself. Mother had never supported her in this, so Pa wouldn’t either. At the time Grace thought her mother was reluctant to lose a useful worker from the farm. But later, after Grace had gone, and letters from her mother arrived asking her to describe the intricate details of her city life – the decorative stair inside a department store, whether a tram swayed like a train, the exotic plants found in the Botanical Gardens – she came to wonder if the real reason was that her moving away proved there were other, possibly better, options than Harvest.
Up until then, Grace supposed her mother’s vision of the future had been built on lush good seasons, the drought-ridden ones hidden by the forgiving undulations of her mother’s memory. But the young Grace couldn’t help seeing her own future from decades down the track: and she saw a wizened Grace looking back on pastures bristling with lost opportunities.
So at seventeen, just three years older than Jorja, Grace had wanted a different vision, and certainly no more country dirt under her nails. And it was Filip, his differences, that became the catalyst to change her life.
‘What will your hands eventually do, d’you think?’ Grace asked Jorja, who was picking her own tomatoes now.
‘Maybe nursing, like you.’
‘Really?’ Grace was surprised, and a little proud.
‘Uh-huh.’ Jorja put two cherry tomatoes in her mouth, filled each cheek. She smiled a swollen smile at Grace then pushed a finger into either side of her face. Grace heard them pop inside her mouth.
‘Why nursing?’
Jorja shrugged. ‘I don’t reckon it’d be boring.’
Nursing had beckoned Grace from a photograph in a magazine. The picture of the nurse was a good one for catching a restless girl’s eye – it conveyed seriousness and possibilities. The uniform was serious, with its creaseless fall, the collar demurely high, the starched cap like a crown on the girl’s head. A fob watch rested above her right breast like a medal and her hands, one resting on top of the other in front of her tightly belted skirt, looked soft, and pretty. The girl’s face captured the possibilities. She looked out at Grace not with the empathy that the job would demand, but with a Come and join the fun dare, and the corners of her mouth, turned ever so slightly up, implied the girl was happy. That photograph was all the job description Grace needed.
She’d gone to the city with the hope of becoming that girl, but she never did, not really. Adult life proved more complex than that one-dimensional snapshot. Sometimes the work was too serious; the possibilities too few.
She found other things though. Anonymity for a start, a freedom she’d only dreamt of in Harvest. She could walk the streets of the city late at night with friends, coming home from a dance or the pictures, and not have to worry about who might see her. There were no phone calls to Mother the next day by a neighbour or a relative, calling on the pretext of a chat, only to let slip that Grace had been spotted, out late, shoes swinging in her hand. She loves a good time, that Gracie, they might say with a small laugh, which had the power to fold Mother’s brow and leave it folded for days. In the city the magnifying glass was removed.
But she never did achieve those soft, pretty hands. As a nurse she found a different kind of dirt. She found it in infected wounds and soiled beds or on the dead when she washed and laid out their bodies. Her palms and fingers discovered blood – thick, sticky – when she lifted half-limbs, bandaged broken heads. Vomit, piss, pus; they all left their mark. Some days she struggled to touch her own food. And her hands became chapped and reddened too, just like Mother’s, abraded by scrubbing brushes, harsh soaps and disinfectants.
But they remained gentle, she was told.
*
‘You’ve a gentle touch,’ a woman, diminutive both in stature and confidence, said to Grace. ‘He’d be grateful for that. I’m sure he’d tell you himself if he could.’
Her husband hadn’t been able to say much at all for several days, though when he’d first been admitted to hospital the things he did say as he fought his delirium tremens didn’t suggest to Grace that he cared too much for gentleness. But she smiled at the wife, complicit with her attempts to recall only the good.
Grace remembered the day as hot and humid with no breeze for the ward’s open windows to catch. The woman fanned her husband with a folded newspaper, giving herself purpose, Grace suspected, rather than him relief, as he was oblivious to the heat. He was mostly unconscious, and when he did stir he muttered incoherently or plucked at some invisible lint or bug on his starched sheet. Grace supposed liver failure could be a kind death in this way, though she knew enough about its causes by then to suspect that his family had probably known lesser kindnesses. He could, of course, have been the type of drunk who simply went to sleep after two or six too many. But the confused looks of pity, contempt and disinterest on his sons’ faces told a different truth. As did the way the mother jumped when her husband shouted some curse from his semi-comatose state.
Grace was still struggling to lose her country girl’s gait, her country girl’s drawl, her country girl’s startled look at the helter-skelter of city life, despite living there more than a year. She was never sure if it was her long legs or her cow-eyed country innocence that attracted Des.
He was the youngest of the five siblings around that bed, all of them men. Grace supposed if a woman was to be widowed in mid-life, as Des’s mother was soon to be, then five able sons were her ticket to some comfort in her
old age. Years later, she realised the stupidity of the thought.
When Grace was attending to his father, she could feel Des’s eyes following her, as she worked her way round his bed, straightening covers, checking a chart, taking a temperature, a pulse. With a country girl’s trust – that took many more years to lose than the drawl – she’d look up, fingers still pressed to his father’s thin wrist, having lost count of the thready beats, and stare right back at him. Sometimes he’d look away first. Mostly she was the coward.
When she was at another patient’s bed, and out of Des’s line of sight, she had the opportunity to watch him instead. She decided there were contradictions at play in this man, contradictions that only revealed themselves when he thought he was alone and unobserved. Grace would watch as he carefully adjusted the sleeves of his father’s pyjamas, pulled them out straight where they’d been rumpled or twisted up to his elbow in a way that would be uncomfortable for the conscious. At other times, when his father was flushed and sweating, he’d gently lift his head and turn his pillow over to the cooler, dry side. Grace had seen wives and mothers perform these small caring acts without a second thought, but rarely men. And yet there were other times when he’d sit in a chair beside his father’s bed and spin his hat round and round in his hands between his knees and not even raise an eye in his father’s direction. Or he might only stay a short while, study the form guide, then leave without so much as laying a hand on his father or saying a single word to him.
As his father’s stranglehold on life slipped further, Des would sometimes look across his gasping, jaundiced body and wink at Grace. The first time he did it she was confounded, and looked to check nobody had seen, especially his mother. But she stared blankly and didn’t notice.
It became a game then. He might let a single finger caress her back or arm as she leaned in to his father to freshen up the stale acid smell of his breath with a mouth swab, or to reposition a limb.
Are you always so gentle? he’d whisper, genuine in his enquiry. At others, he’d be more playful: You’re enough to make a bloke wish he was dyin’.
She couldn’t deny she was flattered by his attention and figured it was the kind of thing that had lifted the corners of the girl’s mouth in the recruiting photograph. But she also sensed confusedly that he was both a man who cared, and one who didn’t.
‘I kind of hope the ol’ man lingers on as long as possible,’ he said to her on one occasion when he was at his father’s bedside alone.
‘I can’t see him lasting much longer,’ Grace said, her voice gentle, like her hands. ‘I’m sorry.’
Des laughed. Grace looked at him, mystified.
‘We’ve pretty much accepted the ol’ bugger isn’t going to dodge this bullet,’ he said. ‘What I meant was when he goes I’ll have run out of excuses to visit the hospital. I could always slip one of my brothers something, I suppose. That’d give me reason enough to come back to visit.’
Nineteen by then, Des’s pluck appealed to Grace.
‘Mind you, I wouldn’t trust any of them getting tucked in at night by a pretty girl like you. So unless you wanted to make it easier for me …’
Grace felt a fresh plume of warmth creep up from her neck.
His father did take more days to die, more than Grace would like to have seen anybody have to fight for each breath.
Des remained, caring, then not.
‘So do I have to poison one of my brothers or not?’ he whispered urgently on the last afternoon, behind the closed screen of his father’s bed.
His father had taken on the type of breathing that left a family poised at every exhalation, waiting and wondering if there’d be another breath in. Grace could smell the defeated sweetness that fermented in the air above his bed. She knew it as the smell of death.
Des’s persistence made her want to resist him, to show him she was choosy and not won over by such jokes and winks.
But city girls took risks, Grace reasoned. Only country girls accepted boy-next-door mediocrity. She’d felt taller, and prettier, since she’d left Harvest. And this taller, prettier Grace felt confident that day.
‘Here.’ She passed Des a folded slip of paper.
‘It’s fair to say you won’t be bored nursing,’ Grace said to Jorja. ‘But your hands will get dirtier than you know.’
Grace started to work at a troublesome run of couch grass that had threaded its way between two beetroot plants. She dug deep with her fingers to loosen the weed’s roots. ‘Gardening – it’s tough love,’ she said, holding the extracted weed up triumphantly to Jorja.
‘Like nursing?’
‘Yes, I suppose like nursing.’ She looked at her hands, the fresh dirt under her nails. ‘Who’d have thought they’d happily dig in soil again.’
‘I’m glad they do. These taste much better than any Mum buys.’ Jorja held another cherry tomato out to Grace.
Grace put the fruit in her mouth, enjoyed the sweet acid burst as she crushed it between her teeth. ‘I’ll have to teach you how to grow your own.’
‘Why, when I can come round here and eat as many as I like?’
Grace gave her granddaughter a wry smile. She’d been as ignorant as Jorja at her age, assumed the patterns in her life – people, places – were fixed and unchanging.
Now when Grace thought of her childhood home, she could see it more as her mother had. She saw the flat and fertile flood plains cupped in the hands of the surrounding mountains, scooping the land towards the southern coastline. She considered it a pretty landscape. Those mountains, she realised now, were more changeable than she’d given them credit for. They could be lost from sight to heavy rain, capped with white or shimmering purple behind a veil of heat. Sometimes they were grey with smoke; at others crisply green or frosty-footed under a clear blue sky. She could see the dams in the paddocks too, sparkling like diamonds on fingers. Except in the years when they were empty with drought and the landscape took on the appearance of an old sepia photograph. But now, even when she thought of those various shades of drought brown, she considered them as colourful as an artist’s paint box.
How did she fail to see the beauty of those mountains when living at their fingertips?
9
Ada’s son dropped her at the door the way a parent delivered a child to a party. He was already turning back down the stairs to leave, calling, ‘Have fun,’ as Grace answered the chime.
‘Oh. Hi, Grace,’ Max said, looking up. ‘Happy birthday. Hey, I’ve got a bit of running round to do today so any idea what time things’ll wrap up?’
‘I don’t know, Max,’ Grace said, annoyed. ‘It’s not your regular two-and-a-quarter-hour party slot. It’d take me that long just to blow out the candles.’
Ada, with her poor bruised face, shuffled uncomfortably on the front doormat.
‘How about you call later – when you get a chance,’ Grace said. ‘I can let you know how things are going then.’ She gave Max a tinkling-fingered wave goodbye then put her arm round her friend’s shoulders and coaxed her inside. ‘Bloody kids,’ Grace said, supporting Ada as she lifted her tender leg over the door stop. ‘Setting curfews – at our age.’
Ada’s purple cheek creased into a smile and closed her already swollen eye even more. ‘Happy birthday.’ She embraced Grace, tentatively. ‘I’m sorry, but I haven’t been able to get to the shops to buy you a gift.’ Ada lifted her hands then dropped them in a helpless gesture.
Grace shooed the apology away. ‘We both know there’s nothing I need.’
‘Still, your seventieth!’
Grace laughed. ‘So now I’ve reached the same decade as you.’
With arms linked, Grace and Ada moved slowly through the house.
There was a time when the two women were on all fours together on the grass in one or the other’s backyard, small children at their knees or riding on their backs. Ada’s so
n had enjoyed a good tickling then, or tying himself in knots over a game of Twister. Max and Peter had all the time and imagination in the world to run amok with costumes and sticks and large cardboard boxes. Now their creativity stretched no further than what was required to complete their tax returns.
Some couples’ closest friends had been decided by their children’s friendships. Ada was exactly one of those child-forged friendships, created by Peter’s schoolboy mateship with Max. The sons were only acquaintances now, but the bond between their mothers was made of stronger stuff.
And Grace had found other friends in a variety of places. Bev she’d met in her new-to-the-city nursing days over a cheap bottle of cider smuggled into the nurses’ quarters. It was the first of many, and over them they’d laughed or moaned at all manner of things from Matron’s unfortunate lazy eye, magnified behind her thick glasses, to night shifts – that scourge to their social life. Kath came later in Grace’s life, on a long train journey back to Harvest. Even on that first day Kath, who’d never had to share her life with a man, could comment on Grace’s need to do so objectively.
Grace remembered a day Ada and Bev had come to help her with a sixth birthday party. Ada knew the skills of getting order from a bunch of littlies. Bev was keen to learn whatever would be needed by the large bulge beneath her floral maternity dress. Bev had maturity on her side. She’d come to marriage later than Grace, and to a man who didn’t think conception necessarily need take place on the honeymoon; he’d let her have her career first. Des reckoned Bev’s husband was a man shy on pride. Grace reckoned Bev was lucky to be given a choice.
It was Claire’s sixth birthday party. She was a popular girl at school and had refused to cut her list of ten guests by a single one. She greeted each six-year-old at the door like the lady of the house, gave them their allocated party hat, before marching them through to the backyard where all the games were set up.
Susan, who’d not long before hit double figures in age, had been put out over Claire’s party. ‘How come she gets to have ten people? She’s s’posed to only have six.’
