by Wendy James
‘–thought we’d go to Bingo and have lunch at the club tomorrow–’
‘–after twelve and Cheryl had called the police–’
‘–but Bub doesn’t think she’s up to it. Her asthma.’
‘–and the hospital. John said he’d thrash him if he did it again.’
‘She doesn’t look well, not really–’
‘–But he’s sixteen after all–’
‘–and she still won’t see a doctor–’
‘–Boys will be boys.’
Suddenly Micky says something and they listen, enchanted.
‘Oh, isn’t he clever. Did you hear? “Hello, Aunty Ollie.” The clever little thing.’
Micky has his hand out. My grandmother has been feeding him jelly beans. I have been around the block and am back, in the right lane this time and make the turn, heading north, bridge bound.
‘Nother lolly,’ says Micky. ‘Wanta nother lolly.’
***
My great-grandmother was thin and bent and old when I knew her. Her face was bony and great ridges cracked her cheeks. She had a hunchback, a great misshapen hump of bone on her back, and walked with a stick. Bub has this hump too, and my father. So far my spine is straight, but I keep my shoulders back anyway.
***
It is after one when we get home and the old ladies are quiet, their seemingly never-ending supply of family gossip finally exhausted. My grandmother is having trouble with her seatbelt so I release her first and then my drowsy Micky. Bub has come to the front door and is standing, stooped and tiny with a fringed blanket around her shoulders, smiling and waiting. The kettle’s on and there’s soup defrosting on the stove, she tells us. Are we hungry?
***
My great-grandmother was Irish and Catholic. She came out to Australia on a boat with her publican parents and four brothers when she was a baby. They leased a pub in a western town and then another further west where there was no town, only the junction of three stock routes. It was a lonely life for her mother who was pious despite the grog and, once a month on a Sunday, Father O’Riordon would travel the twenty miles by sulky and perform a mass for the devout in the shed where they stored the kegs.
***
Inside, the three sisters sit around the table with cups of tea while I set out bowls and spoons, pepper and salt, Worcestershire sauce, butter, bread. The soup is a great frozen lump in a too small saucepan and will take hours this way so I transfer it to plastic and the microwave. Micky is wriggling on Bub’s knee, he wants to watch television, but:
‘No no no.’
‘Stay here, darling.’
‘So sweet.’
‘He has a look of Frank, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, just a little perhaps.’
‘Oh, but his hair.’
‘Always boys who get the curls.’
‘Remember when Frank was about this age and mum cut his hair?’
‘All those curls gone.’
‘And they never never ever grew back.’
‘Straight till the day he died, it was.’
‘But still black.’
‘And poor Joe, too.’
‘Though he kept his curls.’
‘Always boys who get the curls.’
‘Look, his hair’s in his eyes, poor mite.’
‘Perhaps a snip?’
‘Just his fringe.’
‘Lovey, can you bring me the scissors? Third drawer.’
But Mick’s down and away and gazing up open-mouthed at Sally Jessy on my grandmother’s big colour screen.
‘Never mind,’ sighs Ollie, as Nan passes back the scissors.
‘Maybe after lunch,’ says Bub.
***
My great-grandmother-the-witch was a small woman, terrified of cameras, but afraid of nothing else. My father captured her once on film, with his Hanimex home-movie camera in the sixties. You can see her briefly, all gnarled and spotted with age, and then her apron is over her head and she’s backing away through a doorway into the dark.
On her wedding night, her new husband – much older than her and on the road since he was twelve – had to drive a bullock team, leaving his new bride alone for many days. She kissed him goodbye demurely, and he set off with a swagger and a too tight gold band on his little finger. Halfway to Louth he pulled the heaving sweating beasts over to rest, and his young wife materialised – a red spectre at the campsite – having strapped herself beneath the wagon and endured hours of dust and stink and grind for love.
***
She had a green thumb, my great-grandmother who was a witch, her daughters say. At Comebella she planted orchards – oranges, lemons, apples, nectarines, peaches; and a great luscious garden of trees and flowers enclosed the farmhouse. There were vegetables too, and, of course, animals: poddy calves and broody hens, puppies and kittens; butterflies and honey bees and little whirring frogs. It stood out for miles, her daughters tell me, in that shimmering flat red country; an oasis, exotic and unexpected. When women from neighbouring stations visited they would ask, amazed, how she had done it. Their gardens were full of sad grey spindly things, though they lived as close to the river. They took home no answer, only, sometimes, a basket of apples or a jar of brandied peaches.
***
When they were children they looked alike, these three. I’ve seen them in photos: skinny, dark-eyed gypsy kids with pointed faces and bony knees. Bub and Ollie look alike still. They remind me of camels with their long, slow side-of-the-face eyes and thin, secretive mouths. When they eat they champ and suck and click their dentures. My grandmother has all her teeth and smiles nervously, compulsively. She was the beauty of the family and married well. She is nearly eighty, but her face is plump and unlined, her hair quite dark, and she can still, without bending her knees and despite her girth, put the palms of both her hands flat on the floor.
***
Herbs she planted too, though their names are lost to her daughters who have never liked to dirty their hands. All around the back and the sides of the house they tell me (not at the front – that was always for flowers), she planted countless, fragrant herbs that were cut then dried and used for ... But they’ve forgotten this as well, or perhaps they never knew.
***
My grandmother has a huge framed sepia print of Comebella hanging above her mantelpiece. The original photograph was tiny, a few squared inches, no more, with one broken off corner, and blurry. Enlarged, it is still blurred, but the missing corner has become part of the sky. I’ve asked my grandmother when it was taken, but she doesn’t know. The photo shows the house in profile and it looks to me to be nothing more than three primitive huts, joined by tin-roofed walkways. There are two trees, big old gums, in the foreground, their shadows falling away from the house. The background is featureless: there are no trees, hills, roads, or rivers, and no people. Nothing but flat bare earth.
***
After lunch we wash up (‘Why doesn’t she use the dishwasher?’ I hear Ollie hiss) and then have more tea. Micky has crashed out in front of the television so I bundle him into bed though they say not to.
‘Why don’t you leave him, lovey?’
‘Such a dear little thing.’
‘So peaceful there.’
‘Oh, whatever you like, dear.’
‘Mother knows best, of course.’
‘Mustn’t interfere.’
I drink my tea black, but the three sisters have theirs with Carnation although there’s fresh milk in the fridge. I ask them why they prefer the thick sickly tinned stuff to the real thing but they can’t remember.
‘I’m sure Mum always had it at Comebella, there was never much fresh.’
‘Of course there was plenty of fresh!’
‘And what there was she always liked to save for the men.’
‘You mightn’t remember, but until I went away to school, I always did the milking.’
‘You did not. Mum milked, or one of the men. But not us.’
‘And there
was always more than enough.’
‘She never liked to see us doing that sort of work.’
‘Well maybe not you, but I certainly did!’
‘What rot!’
‘Wasn’t it during the war that we all started drinking it? Weren’t there restrictions? Rationing...?’
‘No.’ The other two shake their heads, agreeing to disagree with this contribution from my grandmother.
‘Well you two can think what you like,’ she says, ‘but that’s how I remember it.’
She picks up her tea and sips to hide her irritation, but doesn’t argue. She is the youngest and never does.
***
When my great-grandmother-the-witch was no longer young but before she was quite old, her husband my great-grandfather who was much much older, (‘Quite the usual thing in our day,’ says Bub, eyeing my grandmother, who married a rich man and younger) died of hard work and left Comebella to his eldest son, Frank. Of course, it was still her home, they tell me, and she would have stayed for the rest of her days if it wasn’t for Dolly, Frank’s wife. But Dolly being, well, Dolly, (she is still alive, so they carefully say no more) Great-Grandmother moved into town taking only her furniture and a pensioned-off cattle dog, Laddie.
While Laddie twitched away his days on the verandah, my great-grandmother taught herself to crochet from a magazine and made pale nylon dresses for kewpie dolls on sticks, or others, brighter, for Scarlett O’Hara dolls to wear over their toilet paper petticoats.
***
I ask my grandmother and sisters about their mother. What did she look like, I want to know. Was she pretty or plain? Tall or short? Dark or fair? They all agree she was beautiful. The most beautiful girl from Bourke to Broken Hill, their father always said. Tall – five foot nine or ten she was, surely, and with such a tiny waist. Huge blue eyes that none of them have inherited and blonde hair that she washed in lemon juice twice a week. Her skin was so pale and smooth with never a freckle despite the sun and hardly a wrinkle till the day she died.
I ask them if she truly was a witch, but Bub and Ollie look at me blankly.
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’
I tell them what my grandmother has told me: that my great-grandmother predicted all sorts of things – birth, death, drought and flood; that there were strange tasting homemade remedies for concussion, croup, influenza and measles; that, well, that that’s all I know, but I thought they might be able to tell me more...
‘She was always a bit fey, don’t you think?’ My grandmother is looking a little embarrassed, but still hopeful.
The other two shake their heads.
‘Rubbish,’ says one.
‘Mum? A witch? What bulldust,’ spits the other.
***
When my great-grandmother died I was at school and my mother collected me and two cousins and sat us in the car before she broke the news. The others sobbed and hugged one another. Mum passed them tissues. I hid my face and hunched my shoulders, but my eyes were dry and I was glad. On the day of the funeral we had a day off school and the three of us took turns jumping off our great-grandmother’s front fence at its highest point, wearing her big white back brace, a parachute without a ripcord.
***
We sit, with tea and biscuits, looking through old photographs. There are photos here of everyone, through five, no, six generations, but none of their mother.
***
My great-grandmother was excommunicated when she was in her fifties. Nobody quite knows why, though some say she was a witch. At her request she wasn’t buried in the Catholic or the Protestant section of the cemetery, but in a small strip at the end, reserved for non-christian souls. There is a small rounded headstone that simply states her name and that she lived and died. Hers is the only Irish name among the few Chinese and a lone Afghan buried there.
Only Aunty Bub and her daughters and grand-daughters are still Catholic. They take communion, regularly confess. In my grandmother’s house three plaster ducks fly south across the lounge room wall.
