Thank You, Jean Harley
‘Truth is, Stompy, she was always tryin to leave. She came too quickly out of the womb. Near tore me to pieces and put me in such a state I didn’t know if anything were real or not. Nothin like childbirth. Pain you can’t even imagine, but it’s a good pain. A right beautiful one. Otherwise we wouldn’t keep doin it.’ Pearl strained her eyes, trying hard to see into the past. ‘I swear when Jean was born she weren’t even cryin. And when they brought her over to me that first time, she still hadn’t a cried. Just looked up at me with those big blue eyes of hers and stared into my own. I know they say babies don’t see nothin but fuzz when they’re born but I’m no dummy, Stompy. A mother knows. She was lookin straight into my eyes. She saw me. Just wished I coulda looked into her eyes and seen her when she was dyin.’
The old woman smoothed out the pink and cream woollen blanket, all of its history told in the many holes and stains. The fabric was more scratchy than soft but she liked the feel of it under her hands. It was as much home as the house they’d built in the Ozarks with their own hands, as much as the rich soil on which the picnic blanket lay, surrounding her husband’s grave. She looked up to the clouds, which seemed to spin the earth faster this afternoon. ‘Guess there ain’t a thing I can do about it now. I just hope she forgives me for not bein there.’
The woman was sixty-one years old, with a birthday coming up later in the month. She looked and felt ten years older because her life of raising two children with very little money had been a hard one. Worrying about food and clothing can put deep furrows on a woman’s face. That and smoking more than the chimney of the pot belly stove in the kitchen ever did. And though she wasn’t quite sure how she would manage getting up from the blanket she was sitting on, what with her knees so riddled with an arthritis she’d gotten at only forty-three, she liked being nearer the earth where her husband rested. The picnic had been Jean’s idea. It’s how she’d met Stan’s grandparents when he first took her to his childhood home. It’s how Pearl knew the boy was the right one for her daughter, even if he did live on the other side of the world.
‘What about that time she went missin? Only seven years old. Wanted to get to the state line. She been studyin that geography in school and thought the line between Missoura and Kentucky was a real line. Like someone took one a them permanent markers and drew one right there next to Hickman.’ The clouds had now completely covered the sun and the woman shivered, feeling the chill bore into her shoulders, her fingers and especially her knees. ‘I always did blame myself for that. Member how I told her if she could get there she could stand with one foot in Missoura and the other in Kentucky? She liked that. You liked that too, Stompy. I member you sayin you’d like to go one more. You’d like to stand with one foot in America and the other in Mexico. You member that? Good thing she didn’t take up your idea that night.’ The woman looked up, as if the continental border lay in the clouds. ‘I also member the moon was big and low that night. We was settin out on the front porch, sharin a bottle a beer, wonderin if we’d ever get to Mexico one day, or any other country. Didn’t even know she done snuck out. Course we didn’t ever get to Mexico, did we, Stompy? Even when our girl went and found herself in Australia, got herself that scholarship – she always was smart, both her and the boy – but we never left to visit her. Missed the wedding too. I don’t think she was mad at us, though. She knew we was simple folk. But her leavin us like that, livin so far away … didn’t think I’d ever forgive her for that. Too painful watchin her get on that plane, but wasn’t she a sight? So much spunk, and she was little too. Short, like you. She was a beauty, wasn’t she?’
Pearl clasped her hands together, sniffing the water the clouds contained. It wasn’t much different from the morning after Jean had slipped out of the house to find that black line between Missouri and Kentucky. The thick chill had not been ideal for a missing little girl in a flannelette nightgown and wearing no slippers. Pearl and Stompy and a neighbourhood of worried souls wore jackets and strong boots while they joined the police in their search for Jean. Now Pearl wore an old green cardigan and her shoes were white and orthopaedic and her daughter was dead.
She sniffed the air some more, sure she could smell Jean if she only focused hard enough. ‘I thought she was gone then. I never did think anyone had stolen her – I knew better than that in my heart and I knew that Curtis fellow was a fine man, even if his skin was as black as the inside of a broom closet. Didn’t ever bother me none. Did you, though. But I thought she was gone for sure in a different way. She was old then. Even at seven she was old. Curious too. A wild seed likes to blow in the wind and that’s what that girl was. But we got her back. Dolly Fife’s son found her sleepin in that hollow tree, member? She musta been so cold, Stompy. Such a cold ground in those early hours that time a year.’ She looked off in the direction of the forested patch of land where her daughter had lost her way long ago. ‘But we got her back, didn’t we? And she wasn’t even scared.’ Pearl remembered the love-making that night too. The shared desperation so strong that it was both physically and emotionally painful, and that the pain was a thing of great beauty.
From a basket with a woven rose near the latch, Pearl retrieved a thermos and a plastic container of three peanut butter cookies. A Ziploc bag of a ham and cheese sandwich cut in two escaped un-smooshed. She felt relieved, old enough to know it was sometimes the tiny things that could ruin a day. Big things, like finding out your only daughter had died in a hospital bed while you slept soundly in your own thousands of miles away, too afraid to fly over the ocean to be with her in the end, did not ruin a day. They shaped it. This was the saddest day of Pearl’s life and in some strange way she felt it a perfect day in its tragic proportions. There was something beautiful to be had in an encompassing sorrow, and that beauty could be shattered by any number of tiny things.
‘I member when I found out Jean was doin the dirty with that boy from school. I member him, all right. He played the football, but he wasn’t very big. Wasn’t very good neither, if I member correctly. I reckon she left us then too. She had that womanly way about her. She was prouder. Wore her shoulders back like this.’ The old woman’s back cracked twice below her shoulder blades, then quickly spasmed above her coccyx. She flinched, though no one would’ve guessed had anyone seen, such was her way with just getting on. ‘I never did tell you. No need to make you angry at your own blood. And you woulda been angry, Stompy. You woulda let that girl have it, through silence anyway. You never did touch her, did you? Just had to look at her the wrong way and she knew she was in trouble. She’d be sorry straightaway. Besides, you woulda just said that boy was only sweet talkin so’s he could get our Jean pregnant, cause we got pregnant, didn’t we? Not everyone is as unlucky as us, Stompy. Or as blessed.’
After Pearl poured her tea from the thermos into a plastic cup, she looked to the trees to find the lone redstart singing see, see, see, wondering if it had a partner who might sing back me, me, me. Courting is courting, whether it is done by bird or man. Stompy had put on airs to win her over. Wore that chequered hat as if he was something too big for their small town. Of course he was tethered to the land by his own blue veins and that was what had won Pearl over in the end. That and the fact he was a real man, ten years older than her seventeen. Each time she thought she saw one of those redstarts in a faraway branch, a flutter in another tree would distract her. It seemed the birds were everywhere and nowhere.
‘That boy didn’t have to do no sweet talkin to Jean because she didn’t need no winnin over. If Jean wanted to be havin relations, it’d be her doin the winnin over. She was a whipper, that one.’ There was the bird, its orange underbelly pushing through the limbs of an elm. Pearl rested with ease then, slumping further into her bones. ‘I member that boy too. He died a long time ago. Only young. Felt so bad for his mama. That’s when I forgave our girl for bein so silly as to risk havin a baby. I member thinkin that I was happy he got to know Jean in that
way. Young boy like him didn’t need to die no virgin. Glad he got the chance to know what it was to lie down with a girl and have your whole life change. She was a good girl, that Jean. No matter how old she was when she lost her innocence, she was good then and she’s good now. Don’t know why all the good people have to go and die on me.’ She wiped away a tear before it had a chance to fall, as if it tested her and she wanted to win. ‘Lordy Lordy, let our Johnny outlive me. Let him get on that plane with our granddaughter safe and sound and fly across that big old ocean and say goodbye good and proper, then get on back to this country, where he belongs, and let him live a long time, till he’s old and crippled and lost his sense.’
The hot tea felt soothing against the cool breeze at her throat. She knew where the sun had gone, wrapped up in that steady flowing river of white, but still, she looked for it. She closed her eyes, imagining the darkness before her was night-time in Australia, and thought about her grandson sleeping. They were separated by distance, and neither could get over the fact that they could talk on the telephone when it was both today and tomorrow, both yesterday and today. They were separated by age too, and joined by their love of Jean.
‘Ah, Stompy, how’d it ever get to this?’ The woman cried and didn’t let it bother her now. Outliving a child was the hardest thing a person could take. Even the redstart had quietened his song out of a curious respect. Animals know death. They know the sound of a mother grieving for her offspring. ‘She didn’t have no time to tell that little boy goodbye. She didn’t have no time to kiss him goodbye or leave him no note or nothin. Member when she left us for real that first time? Went to Colorado for the summer? Full of dreams and big ideas. Thought she could dance her way around the country but it turned out to be the world, didn’t it? She left a list for us. She was always makin those lists. I member two things on that list. One was real practical. She said: Put a nail in the wall by the back door so you can hang your keys on them and they’ll never go missing again.’ Pearl giggled, thinking back to Stompy’s old ways. He’d have lost his britches if he hadn’t belted them to his waist. In the end he’d lost his mind, and nothing could’ve kept it in its place.
‘The other was a real sweet one. She said: When Clover has her pups, kiss each one for me. Member that? Those pups lived under Jean’s bed when they was born. When she came home, what was left of them were sleepin on her bed.’ The woman smiled. ‘And there was another thing she said but it wasn’t on that list. It was in a note she left for me. She said: Find love with Dad again. Let it in. Hold onto it.’ Pearl closed her eyes and breathed in thickly through her nose. Her nostrils flared and her lungs filled and a wave of vertigo came, then left. ‘Them were hard times, Stompy. I never thought I was the type to overlook adultery but there I was, and you better thank your dead daughter for that one.’ She opened her eyes and looked for a break in the clouds where blue might have a chance. Where sun might have a chance. She wanted to see the arcs of clouds against shafts of light, not the single white plane that presented itself to her like a blanket of snow in early February or a soft shawl around her cold shoulders. There was no blue. Not even through the thinning clouds where it might seep in if stretched far enough. It was a tiny thing, and it was OK. If winter wanted to settle in for the long haul, it was OK. She wasn’t going to run to someplace warmer, someplace better. This was her home. This was her life, painful as it was, but here on this picnic blanket, talking with Stompy and remembering Jean, she knew it to be a beautiful thing.
‘Let’s both thank her, Stompy.’ Pearl closed her eyes but kept her chin raised to the sky, in case her daughter was there, looking down upon her on the woollen blanket. ‘Thank you, Jean Harley. Thank you.’
Baumgartner’s Jump
He’d been sitting in the dark for fourteen minutes. The sun had gone down and the room was a large beige shadow. Years ago, back in the minimalist days at his shack in Katherine, Philip would have closed his eyes and meditated, letting the nerves of his body go somewhere beyond the hairs of his skin and emptying his mind. Such was the impact of Jean Harley’s death that he’d actually considered giving it a go, but the deeper he went into remembering that time, all the damage and the urgency, the more he did not want to empty his mind, and his first beer was going down so well.
Jean Harley. It’d been more than twenty years since he’d heard her name out loud. His old friend Jim Sanford had left the message on his answering machine. ‘I thought you might want to know.’ This was the girl he’d left his partner and job for, even though he was nothing but a transient love affair to her. A reckless experience. An older man. Hell yes, he’d want to know.
He would ring Jim back when he finished his beer. He would forgo the marking, just for the night, and suffer his students’ complaints that they’d turned in their essays a week ago and how long does it take to assess them, anyway? He would search the internet instead. Type in a few keywords and obsess over Jean’s accident. A van and a bicycle on Diagonal Road, a road he knew well. She’d been on her way to Flinders University, where she’d been a casual tutor in dance; Flinders, where they had met so many years ago when she was the girl he’d lost his marbles for. They’d spilled all over the place: one rolling this way, another that way, one falling down the sewer, another being kicked by a passer-by, and by the time they were completely gone, so was she. That’s when he had packed some belongings into a ute and driven off into the bush, leaving his partner and his job behind. The last thing Philip had said to Jim was: ‘I’ll ring you once I’ve settled. But you’ve got to promise me you’ll never mention her name again.’ And Jim hadn’t, not until today when he had left the message on the answering machine.
Rebecca was a child psychologist who worked in linguistics. From Monday to Friday she would listen to small children learning to speak and, through their speech, she diagnosed and offered therapy, theorised and applauded. After five years of cohabitation with Philip and at the age of thirty-six, it had been time to have a child of her own. Not so with Philip, though. He hadn’t wanted a baby, but when she’d said they didn’t have to try, she could just go off the pill and ‘see if anything happened’, he thought it reasonable. He certainly didn’t want to lose Rebecca and if a baby would make her happy, he could give it a go. He’d warm to the idea, surely. He himself was thirty-six and had a permanent position at a university. He felt like an adult.
But nothing had happened. Rebecca kept getting her period and Philip kept hiding his enormous relief.
After a year of the same, the sex had become more frequent and, in due course, mechanical: this hand goes here, this tongue there, just a little faster, just a little deeper, slow down, babe, you’re going too fast, are you done? Each orgasm made him feel less of a man and more of a prop held up by the V of Rebecca’s legs. It was at this point in his great confusion that Philip had met Jean Harley.
She was barely out of high school. Her stomach was flat from what Philip assumed was proper metabolism and the right of youth, but later learned was from regular exercise. Jean was a dancer. And she had an amazing aura.
He was a new-age hippie who believed in material pleasure and was willing to pay top dollar for it. They had a good life. A beautiful home. He and Rebecca were both vegetarians, he meditated every Saturday morning, was active in campaigning for Indigenous rights and environmental issues, smoked weed from a small bong and wrote bad poetry afterwards. He saw the connectedness between the earth and his body and other people and other living creatures. He saw auras. Looking back now, he thought it was a load of rubbish.
Jean’s aura was the brightest mix of red and yellow – but it wasn’t anything close to orange. It incorporated citrus fruit and blood, distracting him the moment she walked in the room. What he knew about her was that she was young, she was from America, and her studies proved her to be diligent, zealous and confident. One day after class she’d told him she was planning to cycle around Tasmania for three weeks and would therefore miss the
first lecture back from holidays. ‘I love Tasmania,’ he’d said, though Philip had never been.
‘Really?’ The corners of her lips rose to her soft, brown-freckled cheekbones, her eyebrows and her interest rising too. ‘I’ve just begun planning my route, but I don’t know anyone who’s actually been, so I don’t have any local knowledge. Just maps and travel brochures.’
‘I’ve got some time now if you want to grab a coffee.’
Jean looked like she’d been caught off guard, but only momentarily. As if she didn’t understand his accent or the common tongue of their shared English language. Philip thought, This girl is the purest thing I have ever seen.
‘Come on. I’ll shout you a coffee.’ He opened the door for her and turned off the light, leaving the lecture room empty.
She was majoring in dance and psychology, wondering how to stay in Australia once her student visa was up. Philip imagined Jean teaching dance to troubled children as therapy, then realised it was quite close to Rebecca’s field of work, and then felt a pang of guilt.
‘Maybe I’ll marry an Aussie,’ Jean’d said.
Was she flirting? Was she flirting? Philip felt his insides brighten as he briefly imagined she was thinking of him. Then his insides slouched into his bones, as he realised she could never marry him; he was already committed.
‘Maybe I’ll marry you,’ he’d said. Had he? Really? Said that? He’d then felt the need to shit. Something toxic in his body wanting out.
Their next cuppa had led to merlot. Philip kept his cool, though Jean Harley had him on a gossamer thread snagged on a hangnail she hadn’t even known existed. All she had to do was talk about something, anything – the black swans in the River Torrens, for instance, and how they compared with the white swans of her America – and there was that accent, the freckled flesh of her breasts as she leaned forward in a defining movement of keenness. He wanted to touch her and show her what passion was, what an older man could do for her, do to her, but he kept his cool. He played the sophisticated philosopher, the laid-back academic, the new-age hippie older man, and sensed that it was working.
Jean Harley Was Here Page 8
