Eloquent Silence

by Weise, Margaret

  A largely Australian custom, this one of segregation at parties and she had been led to believe, but one that wasn’t conducive to meeting members of the opposite sex, should one so wish. The beer keg on another planet would have been an appropriate description of the arrangements for entertainment.

  Not that she was particularly wishing to meet anyone of interest. It was merely something to do with another Saturday night in the sticks.

  The old Aussie barbecue, minus children, strict ostracism in place, although not intended to be unfriendly but simply showing the knowledge that men and women had little in common to discuss. No one objected to this, at least not openly. There may have been murmurings of displeasure between couples when they arrived home, but at the time of the party this was how the lines were drawn.

  Thus Maureen was left to sit idly in a room full of totally stranger women, hating every minute of it, sipping a glass of Chardonnay and pretending to be having an excellent time. She didn’t know anyone from a bar of soap and they were all obviously well known to one another. Chatting animatedly amongst themselves, the women looked at her and smiled politely but none of them broached the conversation barrier.

  The men much preferred the outdoors at these gatherings, talking cattle and grain, weather and farming, leaving the women inside to talk clothes and children. Or such was the general impression Maureen received as she listened to these women who had all known one another since the bears were bad in the woods on the hill behind the sturdy red brick house with the log fence.

  Dusk had settled on the street outside in the Australian summer, but the deep, heavy heat persisted. It was enough to make the men very thirsty as they worked their way through the keg of icy cold beer exchanging chummy male banter.

  John had come in through the front door and would have had to run the full gamut of the women to get to the male-dominated area out back but he stopped when he saw the stranger sitting there in relative isolation. When introduced to her, he blinked, as if in surprise, as though a shiver of recognition had run through him as Maureen felt it had run through her. They exchanged smiles as he sauntered over to her rather shyly, and gave her a quizzical look before he paused beside her, noticing she looked as lost as he felt.

  After the preliminary introduction and conversation John sat on the floor beside her to talk, seemingly oblivious to the unspoken rule of segregation that was a bylaw in this one horse town. But not so oblivious that he didn’t wander off from time to time to refill his beer glass with light beer as he had the normal dread of losing his driver’s license.

  He always returned to her side, hardly skipping a beat and resuming their conversation where they had left off. The goodwill in his eyes as he looked at her was almost palpable and she basked modestly in his obvious pleasure of her company.

  She drank a little white wine while he sipped his beer. John was a bachelor. So was his brother Bryan, one of the circle outside around the keg talking cattle and crops. Maureen recalled reading an article recently about men of Irish heritage and their above average tendency towards bachelorhood, a hangover from the days of the Great Hunger when many men couldn’t afford the luxury of a wife and children.

  John’s tightly curled, springy, dark blonde hair hung in a mop on his forehead, thick and abundant even at forty-three. His blue eyes were narrowed, a habit he had assumed from squinting against the glaring Australian sunshine in his busy days of tending cattle, clearing large tracts of scrub, cultivating, planting and harvesting crops.

  He sat beside her in his open-necked shirt, jeans and riding boots, the uniform he wore everywhere except to the occasional wedding or funeral, as do so many of his ilk. His unlined forehead was open and honest, his eyes candid and friendly.

  Maureen’s ancestors had also hot-footed it out of Ireland when times of starvation and oppression overtook the country in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. She was drawn to him not only because of his sometimes-brogue and his dry Irish wit., but at a deep level there was a connection present, a recognition soul to soul. She experienced a feeling of shelter which was new to her, a pleasant tremor at the nearness of his body, tall and strong, reliable and honest as she understood him to be without even really knowing him at all.

  At thirty-nine, quite happily divorced, she was content with the way things were for her, ready to start her life anew if and when the occasion arose, but in no hurry to do so.

  Experiencing many layers of defensiveness from her prior commitment to the father of her children, there was no way she was going to lower any of her hard-won defenses in a hurry for any man to walk over her until she met someone who would treat her with a gentle strength and compassion.

  Free for two years, she felt a liberation of her body and soul, of her whole being and thought there was no urgency to rush helter skelter into another marriage when the one she had recently discarded had been so disastrous. She had her family of four growing up around her and her days were full to overflowing. Nights, though...the nights could be a little lonely.

  She had classical Irish coloring with jet black hair, azure blue eyes and a milk-white complexion with rosy cheeks. Five feet tall, she was diminutive, fine-boned and slight. Her size contrasted with John’s raw-boned height and breadth of shoulder.

  ‘So you don’t even have a day off on Sundays, John Donohue?’ laughed Maureen, her eyes fixed in admiration on his face. She watched him trustingly, admiring his level gaze and his dry humor.

  He looked at her in surprise.

  ‘I finish a little early to go to evening Mass on Sundays,’ he replied with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Otherwise my mother gets after me if I don’t make the time to go church.’

  ‘Have all your family been such hard workers then?’ Maureen asked, surprised at his devotion to duty in the laid back work ethic times of the 1980s.

  ‘Hard to tell, Blondie,’ he responded dubiously. ‘Grandfather got off the tractor and died under a pepperina tree at the ripe old age of thirty-three. Dad had a heart attack and dropped dead in the dairy at forty. Hard to say when the men of the family seem to be in the habit of popping off early.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be from hard work, would it?’ Maureen asked with a smile.

  ‘Perhaps there’s something like that involved,’ John admitted. ‘In their cases it was probably a combination of hard work and no medical attention whatever. That’s they way a lot of farmers lived back then. Some still do.’

  ‘Not too many, John,’ Maureen said, shaking her head. ‘They’re a dying breed.’

  They both chuckled at the little pun then she continued, ‘Don’t you play any sport? Have any recreation—nothing except work?’

  ‘No time for sport. Never was big on cricket and tennis like most men in these parts,’ he told her, apparently quite disinterested in the idea. ‘I have a couple of drinks after the cattle sales on Mondays, though.’

  ‘How come you let yourself be talked into the idea of coming to a party, then, when you don’t go in for recreation at all?’ she asked him curiously.

  ‘Ken caught me in a weak moment. My defenses must have been down,’ he laughed as he sipped his beer.

  After chatting for a couple of hours she asked why he repeatedly called her ‘Blondie’ when her hair was as black as coal.

  ‘You remind me of Dagwood Bumstead’s wife, Blondie, in the cartoon in the Courier Mail. Just the way you express yourself, I guess. Unintentionally funny and naive,’ he told her.

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’ she queried, feeling her cheeks grow hot with embarrassment.

  ‘No way. It’s very endearing. You’re refreshing, Blondie. Don’t ever change, will you.’

  ‘If you say it’s a good thing, then I’ll try not to.’

  The party began to break up with the women gathering up their handbags and standing to leave, going to the kitchen door to summon their husbands to get ready to go home. But Don, the friend with whom Maureen had arrived at the party, wasn’t about to leave until the keg was drained. Maureen wa
nted to go home. She saw no point in sitting there half the night while Don and the remaining men sat drinking and yarning.

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ John volunteered quietly.

  ‘Okay. Thanks,’ Maureen agreed.

  She said goodnight to Don and to their hostess who was flitting busily around gathering up the women’s glasses and trying to hurry along the last of the beer drinkers who clung tenaciously to their spots keg-side.

  John was waiting for her outside in the driveway, standing beside his white Ford pickup. In the back rested a bale of hay, a calf-crate and a bag of grain. They climbed into the front seat and he moved a shifting spanner and an ax onto the floor of the passenger’s side to give her more room for her feet before wiping the seat down to make sure there was no trace of oil or grease. He gave her his broad, strong hand and helped her inside the cabin of the pickup.

  She smiled at him. ‘Thanks for that.’

  He grinned right back. ‘Not your usual mode of transport. Not used to having a lady onboard.’

  Off they went, rattling along in fine style to her home some miles away in the little town of Lagoon Creek. They conversed about the weather, cattle prices, books they were reading. When they arrived in front of her home, he reached out shyly and drew her to him, kissing her soundly.

  ‘Would you like to go out with me on Monday night?’ he asked tentatively.

  ‘After the cattle sale?’ she laughed. ‘Okay. I’d like to do that.’

  And so began their relationship which soon blossomed into a deep mutual love and caring. The small ritual of Monday night meetings was rapidly established and soon grew to include Saturday nights as well. Maureen loved him with a piercing intensity she could not comprehend or find a reason for. Sometimes as she counted down the hours until his arrival, she thought, I have always been waiting for you, John, although I didn’t really know it. It’s been a constant in my life, waiting for you to arrive.

  Each time she saw him she felt a rush of love for him and was inclined to think that he experienced the same glorious emotion when he saw her. Their lives followed completely different courses and they had little in common except a rather odd sense of humor, keen appreciation of books and a deep love for each other. They found time to meet only once or twice a week for a few hours. Yet their minds were preoccupied with each other and every time they met their joy at being together was boundless.

  From different background experiences they had only two things they really shared; their Irish descent and that odd sense of humor that enabled them to see the comical side of most situations.

  At first they thought they could share a future together but John’s strong Catholicism posed a barrier to a union. He had no concept of how he could marry a divorced Protestant woman and still find acceptance within his family and the Church. The times and rules for living were still rigid in the late 1970s and 80s in rural Australia. As a confirmed bachelor well into his forties who had never faced commitment to a woman in his whole life, he was afraid to try.

  He felt very badly about what he saw as an unforgivable weakness in himself.

  ‘Love and marriage should go together,’ he had told Maureen firmly in the early days when he was certain he would be able to live up to his traditional values. ‘If two people love each other then they must marry no matter what the obstacles—religion, family or anything else,’ was his firm opinion, yet he found himself unequal to the task.

  ‘I love you so dearly, Maureen. You are my alter ego, the other half of my soul. Never forget that.’ His tone was soft and gentle as he held her to him.

  ‘I never will,’ she promised. ‘I’ll treasure that in my heart always.’

  Maureen was bitterly disappointed. She loved him to the nth degree.

  They fell to discussing the situation at length each time they were together, preoccupied as they were with their stalemate position. Nothing worked. John could not find a way around his enigma. He could not face the responsibility of having a wife at his mature age when he had never experienced such a concern in his life so far.

  There was nowhere for them to go from the place where they had become stuck. Such was their background and difficulties that it was impossible for either of them to enter the homes of the other to live without the blessing of the church.

  Their hidebound parochial background put up distinct barriers to the choice of a de facto relationship and even so, John could not find his way through the strict Catholic family values he lived with on his family farm. Some of his visiting cousins were parish priests and would frown on Maureen if their union could not be blessed by the Catholic religion. As a divorced woman she would be unacceptable to these deeply committed and traditional people.

  He was deeply apologetic. She understood his upbringing and values, realizing that they did not lessen his love for her, only made him miserable and uncomfortable, unable to get past his constraints.

  One night they sat quietly together as they often did in the stillness, listening to the gentle breathing, each of the other, his arm around her, her head resting on his shoulder. She loved the consciousness of his steady heartbeat, treasuring the nearness of him, wishing this moment could last forever and a day. The silence was so deep that she could hear her own heart beating, its rhythm gentle and slow, peaceful.

  ‘Maureen, I love you with my whole heart, you know that, but I can’t do anything about it,’ he whispered.

  ‘I know, John, I know,’ she replied sadly.

  They stayed there together, enjoying the warmth and closeness of their rare hours together. Into her mind came a vision of another time, another place. Cold fingers brushed her spine as the vision unfolded before her.

  Suddenly she felt chilled to the bone as she became aware of the mind picture behind her eyes. She knew the place was Ireland and that the time was some remote period in the past. Inside the stone dwelling with the thatched roof, two small children played near the hearth. A woman in a long brown dress and a small white bonnet stood talking to a man who wore black clothing and a black hat with a tall, conical crown. Maureen thought it was called a stove-pipe hat. The faces were different from those they wore in this lifetime, but he was he and she was she, of that there was no doubt.

  A voice inside her head said, ‘He took the blame for what you did and died a terrible death because of you. There’ll be no more in this lifetime. Be content with what you have had and walk away from him. You damaged him too badly.’

  The picture changed. The woman and children stood amid a village crowd who glowered, silent, gruff, expectant. Four horses ripped the man asunder in the village square.

  ‘He died a terrible death because of what you did,’ the voice told her again.

  She agonized over this experience for weeks, thinking he would judge her queer and superstitious if she tried to explain her vision, maybe even crazy and unhinged. She finally took the chance and spoke to him about it, ready to hear him laugh and taunt her in his softly cynical way.

  It was no surprise to him. He already knew there was some old barrier there, he said.

  They continued their friendship for many years until life changed their circumstances again. Their intensity faded but they always cared about each other.

  His time came in his fifty-ninth year when he died alone in the house his family had occupied for three generations, Australian born but Irish to the core. All the other family members who had lived there had predeceased him. There was only him, John, with the bright blue eyes the tight, springy curls, the strong arms and wonderful sense of the ridiculous.

  Maureen continued to love him as she had done all his life from the moment she had met him, just as she knew that, although they were not together, he had loved her still all the way down through the years until his death.

  ‘You don’t need to see another person all the time to go on loving them,’ she had told him in one of their increasingly rare meetings as the years rolled by.

  ‘Indeed you do not, Blondie. Indeed you do not,
’ he replied. ‘We’ll have another go at it later on. The world will keep on turning until then.’

  On his passing, Maureen mourned him in silence, the constant love for him still living in her heart like an invisible, breathing thing. She wasn’t very impressed with the ending. She had hoped at least to be able to say goodbye when one or the other of them was leaving this life.

  Love comes when it will and you can’t forcibly hold on to a person if they need to be free You can only keep the precious memories and the warm comfort of the endless love in your heart.

  Perhaps in another time and place there will be a happier ending.

  They can but try again to get it right.

  9. Writing About Writing

  Deep down I know instinctively that I was born to write. While some are born to rule, some to paint, others are destined to nurture pockets of Mankind hither and yon. Still others arrive to grace this mortal coil purely for genteel, decorative purposes, or to amuse their fellow travelers as they struggle over life’s terrain, but my motivation is to self-express. Sadly, I wasn’t induced to participate in any of those other significant purposes in life, but I know that my major purpose on the mortal coil is to scribble tirelessly.

  There seems to be only one abominable problem that plagues me relentlessly and that is I haven’t got a clue what to write about. Not a sausage! So year in, year out I feel obliged to keep a detailed diary of everyday events around me, earth-shattering moments surely recorded for future generations of our family. Brett’s first shave, Carl’s first tooth, Liam’s first needle, Sheila’s first boyfriend, electric fan bought at auction for $10, along with deep, meaningful and appropriate comments about life and living. Very hot today, very cold or wet, according to the circumstances of the current climate. Riveting stuff.