Stories about Rose of Tralee
PLENTY OF PEOPLE claimed to have understood Rose. Con the Brake and Mrs C. Rasmussen in particular, naturally, but they were by no means the only ones. Theories about her were worked up over a beer at Red Minifie’s, the men arguing about her background and potential as if she were prize bloodstock, not a small girl. Stories about Rose were swapped around firesides or over a cup of tea and a scone. Just about every step Rose took was observed, retold, commented on and embroidered, until it was hard sometimes to distinguish the reality of the child from the folklore.
At Denniston, of course, everyone was known, more or less. But with Rose it was different. She was on the loose so much, knocking on the back doors of houses, with a smile as if she’d been invited. She became regarded as common property — an intriguing, unclaimed extra. You could welcome Rose in if you felt like it, listen to her chatter, pump her for dreadful new stories from home, then send her off to that same home or to somewhere else, with a clear conscience. All care and no responsibility.
No one denied her charm and good looks. Even at six years old. Rose had those tight blonde curls that made you want to bounce the palm of your hand on them. Totty Hanratty wasn’t the only woman who had popped Rose into a hot bath and scrubbed at the knotty, coal-streaked hair just for the pleasure of seeing those curls come out full of light and springy again.
And her skin. Grown men dreamed about it. Pale cream and flawless, not the scruffy, scabby, nondescript stuff proper children flaunted in front of their elders. Rose, freshly washed, had a pink and white delicacy, a dimpled sweetness that melted hearts and encouraged rumours of a mysterious parentage totally unconnected to Jimmy Cork or Rose’s mother.
Wise or discerning people noticed and discussed a fragility, brittle as glass, behind that wide, winning smile, that perky chatter. She might come into your house or office with a cheerful announcement: ‘Hello Mr Carmichael, here I am!’ or ‘It’s me, Rose of Tralee! Can Michael play?’ But if the response was less than welcoming the facade crumpled. Rose would stand, transfixed by even a slight rejection, the famous smile first setting like rock, then bleeding to death in front of your eyes. She would simply wait, looking down, not crying or throwing a tantrum, just waiting there until someone rescued her with a kind word or a biscuit. As if the light went out on her world for a while, and she had not found a way of turning it on again herself.
This response unnerved Denniston people. They learned to welcome Rose properly, to avoid crossing her, even when things disappeared. Little bright things — a glass marble, a blue medicine bottle, a teaspoon, things you would rather have but could do without — those were the things that disappeared sometimes, after Rose had paid a visit. No one could prove she took money. Sometimes the bright thing reappeared after a few days, sometimes not. People didn’t mention the losses, though — not to Rose or to each other — not until much later. Later, much later, Rose’s thieving became a favourite topic of conversation, but at this time there was a kind of collective will to protect Rose, or maybe to avoid facing her stone-wall act.
Everyone had a favourite story to tell about her. Old Huff McGregor came in to the men’s quarters once after late shift. He felt his way in the dark past the row of sleeping, snoring workers. His hands, reaching for his own bunk, came down on something soft and squirming. Huff thinks it’s some animal come in for the warmth and lets out a great scream that wakes the whole bunkroom.
‘By Christ, you could hear the uproar clear up to the Bins!’ says Huff. ‘Men shouting and flailing around in the black dark. We had a full-scale war in there for a minute, till Straw Nugget gets a candle lit and we see who it is. Little Rose of Tralee! Kneeling up on my bunk ready to run if she could tell where to. Jesus, you’d think the child would choose a safer harbour on a stormy night. She was a tempting sight for starving men, all right, golden curls standing on end in fright, eyes like an owl’s in the candlelight.
‘But the men wouldn’t touch her. Not even Straw or Brando. Not Rose. She’s like a mascot down at the Camp, you know.’
‘So what did you do, then?’ asks Red Minifie, leaning over to fill Huff’s glass. Red knows the story, but it’s a good one and some newcomers in the saloon should learn about Rose.
‘I don’t do nothing. Just tuck her down at the end of my bunk and climb in the top end, keeping well away from the girlie. I’m none too clean after eight hours at the Bins. There’s a bit of a mumble goes around the hut. You know? A good sound, I mean. The men sort of like the idea that Rose chose their rough draughty old place to hide out in. So Straw Nugget blows out the candle and we go back to our snoring.’
‘And in the morning?’ prompts Red Minifie.
‘Well then, in the morning Rose is still there, curled up under the blanket like a puppy. Sweet and warm. I’m pretending to be asleep still. Late shift, you know? But I’m watching the early shift leave, just in case. Every single one of those buggers comes past my bunk, and most of them reach out towards my Rose. They never touch her, mind you, but you can tell the cracked, grimy old fingers are itching to wrap around those golden curls, or stroke the downy skin …’
‘Get on with it, Huff,’ Red growls, giving him the eye.
‘Keep your hair on, man. You know this is a clean story. So. It gets a bit lighter then, and Rose, who’s slept through all the men’s boots clumping on wood boards, opens her eyes. I’m watching through half-closed eyes. Don’t want to startle her. To tell the truth I’m hoping she’ll settle down again. But she sits straight up, not even noticing I’m there. Out comes the grin. No one can turn it on like Rose of Tralee.
‘What I hadn’t noticed in the dark, see, was the gifts. Rose’s end of the bunk looks like Christmas morning. There’s a carved ship and some other wooden thing, a piece of coal shaped into a face, a square of chocolate. A little book, even — could have been a Bible. Someone put down a crust of bread, only thing he could find. Rose is surrounded by little offerings. Far as I know no one discussed this. Probably every damn man thought his was the only gift sneaked there. I have to shut my eyes for a bit to keep the tears in.
‘When I open them Rose and her treasure have gone, light as a cat, and the hut is just a cold old men’s quarters again.’
Lord Percy’s story was darker. One Sunday he worked his way down to Jimmy Cork’s end of the Camp looking for small rocks. Borrowed Con the Brake’s barrow for the purpose. Lord Percy believed you could grow vegetables on the Camp if you put up a windbreak, though it seemed the rock wall was Lord Percy’s passion, rather than the few scruffy silver-beet plants that survived. Well, he was down near the Corks’ chicken yard and heard a bit of a to-do. Rose’s mother was chasing a mad chook around the yard.
‘Hard to say which was madder, fowl or fiend, haw, haw!’ Lord P would say.
Rose stood pressed against the fence, looking rather white around the gills. Her mother grabbed the frantic flapping thing by the legs and brought it over to Rose. She would have been only five at the time, not much bigger than the chook and clearly frightened by the squawking and pecking.
While Lord Percy watched, the mother held the chicken towards Rose, shouting at her to grab the silly thing and give her mother a hand for once. Rose shook her head and drew back further. The mother, in a wild fury, swung the bird, clipping Rose on the head with it. Rose, crying, but more quietly than the bird, took the feathery lump as her mother instructed, pinning the wings, and trying as best she could to hold the darting head over the chopping block.
‘The weapon descended,’ Lord Percy would say, his long arms demonstrating the act with lurid embellishment, ‘in a decapitation worthy of the most skilled of executioners, and resulting in a spectacular sanguinary display.’
The head flew into the yard, blood spurted from the neck, and Rose, screaming, dropped her headless friend into the mud.
You’d think that would be the end of it. Bad enough to force a little tot to help in such a gory activity. But no, Rose’s mother had t
o teach her daughter better. Without a word, she retrieved the running, headless thing, blood still gouting, and forced Rose to hold it properly, wings pinned again, until the blood stopped and the twitching was over. Rose stood there in the mud, white and trembling, blood all down her smock, until the mother, with a curt little nod that could have meant approval, took the chicken and clumped over to Jimmy’s hut, leaving Rose crying in the yard, and Lord Percy’s patrician heart melting.
‘Naturally, I wished to comfort the little damsel in distress, but the mother, in one of her moods, is not to be crossed, as I have experienced to my discomfort on more than one occasion. It is not a matter for self-congratulation that I turned my half-filled barrow and headed for home sweet home. What could one do?’
Billy Genesis will never tell his story. He was drunk at the time. The mixture of excitement and shame — what he remembers of it — he relives only in his mind.
The miners up at Burnett’s Face have only the one story about Rose. The day she and her mother brought a picnic to Banbury mine, and were surely an influence on Jimmy Cork’s actions that day.
A Confrontation of Madams
BELLA RASMUSSEN OFTEN lies awake in her pink velvet bedroom listening to the curses and screams clearly audible, even in bad weather, erupting from Jimmy’s place. Sometimes it is only the heavy sleeping arm of her husband, Con the Brake, that keeps her from climbing out of bed, walking across the Camp in her nightgown and snatching Rose from that warring cabin, carrying her home snuggled against Bella’s loving, yearning bosom, to a warm bed where the child would be sung to sleep properly and cherished like any little girl deserves.
Since the Scobie accident Jimmy Cork has been without work. Like everyone else, Bella expected the family to pack their bundle, ride the Incline down to the other world and disappear for good. But Jimmy sits stubbornly on. Con the Brake says it’s his gold, but what use is some phantom goldmine to a cripple outcast like Jimmy? No one would help him now, even if he asked, which he won’t.
It’s a mystery how they manage. Rose’s mother keeps her chickens, of course. Every Saturday afternoon Rose knocks on doors around Denniston with a basket of fresh eggs at a penny for two, but that is not going to keep a family of three fed and clothed. Let alone Jimmy’s liquor. Con says he must have a nugget or two stashed away, but if he does, someone else must cash it, as neither Jimmy nor Rose’s mother have left Denniston.
So they stay on, quarantined, in the far corner of the Camp. Jimmy rarely leaves the cabin. He is not so welcome in the saloon now, and where else would he go? Their presence is like a sore in the community. A festering that never heals. Even the baby’s death fails to thaw the chilly disapproval. Rose, coming and going, is a reminder that they are still there. Bella in her sprawling cabin at the Camp can hear, on still nights, the words slicing and tearing, on and on, inside the Cork cabin. It is the parents’ only form of communication. And Rose is marooned there.
Once, when Bella is cooking a good soup for Con’s dinner, with dumplings as he loves, she suddenly can’t bear it. She moves the pot to the side of the stove with one hand, unties her apron strings with the other, reaches for the coat hanging on the back door and, with no other thought in her head than Rose, purposeful as a fired cannon-ball, she tramps over frozen mud the several chains to Jimmy’s.
There’s no point knocking. Bella pushes open the door and fills the doorway, waiting for someone to notice. The whole of Rose’s life lashes at Bella’s eyes, strong and painful as a blow from Jimmy’s fist. Along the ceiling ridge of the one-room hut, sooty washing droops from a string. Over the open fire a blackened pot steams. Goodness knows how washing would dry, let alone what it was doing to Rose’s lungs. The child sits on a tiny corner bunk, back in a cave-like depression in the raw rock. She doesn’t see Bella, or is ashamed to notice, how would you know? A piece of something bright turns in her hands, back and forth, over and over, stroking and fingering. She is singing as she turns, very quietly; Bella can’t hear the words.
A heel of bread and three tin cups stand on a rough plank table.
Near the fire, on a larger bed, Jimmy Cork sprawls, trying to fight off the woman who drags at him fiercely. Jimmy, hoarse from the whiskey, shouts and rages; the woman’s voice cuts like a knife. Neither notices Bella.
‘Give off! I’m not hungry, woman!’
‘You will eat at the table like a proper man!’
‘No one here’s a proper man. Shove off, whore woman!’
‘You will take food at the table!’ Rose’s mother screams, and hauls back to strike Jimmy.
When she sees Bella.
Suddenly her whole manner changes. Cracked and dirty fingers smooth down her apron as if it were fine worsted. The face snaps shut, black brows squared above coal-hard eyes. The spine straightens. There is no doubt that this is a confrontation. Rose’s mother snarls like an animal at Mrs Rasmussen, who stands, stunned, at the door, forgetting what she has come for.
Good evening, Mrs C. Rasmussen,’ says Rose’s mother, spitting the title out word by word. ‘I did not hear you knock.’
Bella takes a deep breath. She can be formidable too. ‘There was little point in knocking, Mrs James from County Cork. I have come out of concern for the child.’
‘Oh? So? And how can you worry your head about my child? You, who have no understanding of such matters?’
Bella blanches at this low blow, but rallies.
‘A child in distress is everyone’s concern, Mrs Cork. No child should be subjected to such language and hostility.’
‘Ah!’ shouts Eva. ‘Keep your fancy lectures to the classroom. This is raw life down this end of the Camp, and Rose is part of it.’
Bella stands firm. ‘All the Camp can hear your battling. It is no better than a brawl in a whore-house.’
‘Well, you would know, you old madam,’ screams Eva. ‘One will recognise another, you should take care how you cast mud.’
‘You are a poor deluded soul.’ Bella’s words drop like stones, but her heart beats in fear now. Even so, she cannot resist another cast for Rose. ‘Perhaps Rose would be better off at our house for the night. To leave you free to care for your husband.’
But even as she speaks Bella knows she has made a mistake. She had pictured this differently. In her version Rose would cry out with relief at her entrance, come running to bury her little face in Bella’s warm skirts. The mother and father would be too depraved or too drunk to notice as Bella led the girl gently into the night.
In the real version, though, Rose sits through the exchange, cross-legged and unmoving on her bunk. She has seen Bella but has not come running. She has smiled — a tight secret greeting; not at all the sort a rescuing angel needs.
Eva sees the uncertain smile between the two and knows she has the upper hand.
‘Say good evening to your teacher, Rose,’ says Mrs James from County Cork. The sudden dignity, taut as stretched elastic, and malevolent, is deeply unsettling to Bella.
‘Good evening, Mrs Rasmussen,’ whispers Rose. She will not look again at her teacher, but stares down at the bright thing in her hand, turning and turning.
Bella feels the blood spread up over her bosom to set her face glowing. For a moment she feels she will be stuck in this doorway forever.
‘Well then,’ she says finally, ‘if the child does not require assistance I will take my leave.’
Rose’s mother nods. As she lays a hand to the door to close Bella out of their life, she speaks. Bella is terrified by the dark triumph in the woman’s eyes.
‘Rose’s home,’ shouts Mrs Jimmy Cork, ‘and her parents may not be what you, Madam Lah-di-dah, choose, but she is mine, not yours. You cannot take my daughter off like some bag of flour. No, you cannot! So. If your man cannot make you a baby, leave mine alone!’
Jimmy, like Rose, has not moved through all this exchange. Now he stirs and growls on his bed, a volcano preparing for its next eruption. Mrs James from County Cork closes the door.
&nb
sp; As Bella clumps back across the Camp under stars, her tears are such a mixture of emotions she cannot sort them out at all.
A Concert is Planned
THE CONCERT SEEMED a good idea at the time. Bella Rasmussen had been planning it for weeks. Her theory was that the communities on the Hill needed a focus to bind them, and that focus had to be her tiny but representative school. She was right, of course, but you can’t hammer human nature into a mould unless it’s ready, and as it turned out Denniston just wasn’t ready to be a tightly knit cosy little community.
The classroom at the back of Hanrattys’ is now bursting with the addition of two new children from the Welsh miners’ contingent. On this morning, March 18th 1883, Mrs C. Rasmussen’s cheeks are as pink as the little flowers she has embroidered on the yoke of her teacher’s smock.
‘Children,’ she announces, ‘we are to have an inspection from the Department. An Inspector is coming especially all the way from Nelson. We must make a good impression.’
‘Well, I better stay at home then,’ says scruffy Tonto Jowett, and the rest of them snigger.
‘Maybe you should, Tonto,’ says Mrs Rasmussen, which stops him in his tracks. At Denniston, no one would be seen dead missing an official visit, they are so rare.
‘What will he inspect, Mrs Rasmussen?’ asks Michael, ready as always to leap into a new project, polish up whatever is dull, and shine. ‘Will he hear our Tables?’
‘He will. And our Rivers of England. And our Capitals of the World.’
‘Not Spelling?’ asks Brennan, hoping against hope.
‘Spelling,’ says Mrs Rasmussen firmly, but adds, seeing Brennan’s worried face, ‘He will not fail the whole school if you get a word or two wrong, Brennan. And we will sing him a song to welcome him.’
The Denniston Rose Page 11
