Mateship With Birds

by Carrie Tiffany

  ‘Did you know that the crucifixion wasn’t ever really through the hand? It’s a misunderstanding that we think that. When Jesus says to Thomas, “Observe my hands,” he really meant, “Observe my wrists.” A nail driven through the palm will be dragged out between the fingers by the weight of the body. So the crucifixion nails were hammered in here – just here between the small bones of the wrist.’ He pushes his thumb into Betty’s pulse. ‘And how are those children of yours – a boy and a little girl, wasn’t it? Have they been warming up the pews lately?’

  This is why Betty left the city. To get away from the insinuators; to give the children some air around them, to put some distance between the woman she is now and the ardent girl of her past. They don’t need the church, she’s sure of that – they have each other. Little Hazel has Foot Foot now, and Michael has Harry and the farm. Betty is aware of the talk behind her back when she comes to town – her children referred to as ‘Betty’s bastards’. If anyone ever said it to her face she’d crucify them – through the wrist or through the hand.

  Betty’s old men die in batches. Dennis Popp goes first, then Bill Sickle. The children know there is a funeral because she takes her good shoes to work in a brown paper bag. Flowers come home, and fruit or cakes that have gone uneaten. Relatives give her gifts – cheap talcum powder and soap – or they give her dead men’s things they can’t be bothered taking home. Michael and Little Hazel are wary of combs with broken teeth, of faded bed rugs and pencil stubs that look well licked or as if they’ve spent time behind an aged ear. Michael and Little Hazel don’t hesitate to tell Betty that she smells bad sometimes after work.

  After Bill Sickle’s funeral Betty cleans out the trunk beneath his bed. There’s half a bag of chaff in there and the crankshaft for a ’48 Holden; the harmonic balancer at the end is wrapped in a Masonic towel. There is also his dead wife’s wedding dress with a note on it, in Bill’s shaky handwriting, ‘For Betty’. Betty takes it home and puts it in her wardrobe with her good winter suit and her day dresses and uniforms because she doesn’t want to throw it out and she doesn’t know what else to do with it. It’s not as if she was a stranger to him. She was his lunchtime-wife for a good four years.

  The winking owl is on the washing line again as Betty rinses her cup before bed. It looks over its shoulder to Foot Foot’s paddock behind and Betty is surprised to see it move so graciously, all the time its eyes tracking like searchlights. Tonight it lifts one claw and transfers something small to its beak. A baby mouse, perhaps, or a beetle.

  Shopping after work, Betty falls in the rain. Her heels slide out from under her on the wet timbers of the verandah in front of Oestler’s Fruit and Veg. She goes down heavy, face first; puts her tooth through her lip, bleeds a lot of orange sticky blood over her uniform. Clive Oestler sees her fall and rushes out from behind the counter. As he bends over, a big dirty potato rolls out of his apron pocket and hits Betty on the head. He can’t stop apologising and Betty has to reassure him over and over again that she hardly felt the potato (it’s true, hitting the ground was much more painful). He hurries back inside the shop and carries out a stool and insists that Betty sit on it, in the middle of the verandah, while she gets herself together. Betty perches on the edge of the stool, the back of one hand pressed to her lower lip to staunch the bleeding and the other hand clasped around the potato that Clive seems to have forgotten about in all the commotion. She sits. A few people walk past and look at her sideways. She tries to smooth out her breathing. She chooses a tree over on the bank of the Gunbower to look at so she won’t have to meet anyone’s eye.

  After a little while she stands and picks a wet leaf off her leg where it has stuck to her stockings. She goes inside to thank Clive, buys some tomatoes that she doesn’t need and walks back to the car without the rest of the shopping. The windscreen wipers aren’t working properly and as she drives home the sound of them scraping across the glass sets her teeth on edge. She has a strong urge to pull over to the side of the road and rest her head on the steering wheel, but it won’t do. She puts her foot down. The tyres slap through the deep puddles on the side of the road. She thinks about what they’ll have for tea and about getting her dress in to soak quickly so that it doesn’t stain.

  Harry likes to use the word ‘nippy’ in Betty’s company. Betty estimates that between 1951 and 1953 Harry says ‘nippy’ to her on over a hundred occasions – many of them not even during the winter. He says that the wind is nippy, the air is nippy, it is nippy in the shed, paddock, garage, kitchen, main street, post office and butcher’s. Various places other than Cohuna are nippy, or so he’s heard – London, for instance; Iceland, Latvia, the Sahara Desert at night. Even Bendigo, Harry says, can be a bit nippy for his liking. Some of the cows get fractious when the weather is nippy. Milk yields drop in nippy conditions. His dermatitis is always worse when it’s nippy. Betty knows it’s coming, she’s used to it now. In the early days she dropped her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. Now she looks at him dead-set. She puts her shoulders back and hoists them up a little higher. She imagines herself as Mae West. Mae-West-Betty would say to Harry, ‘Don’t beat around the bush, Harry. This is what you want. Come over here and get it.’ And she would lean forwards and tip her breasts out of her bra, the nipples linty and crumpled, but pointing straight at him.

  Podiatry or office work. Little Hazel pulls a face. The verdict of the vocational guidance officer has been sent home to Betty on a slip of pink paper. Little Hazel doesn’t like feet. Old people’s feet are disgusting. She’d been hoping for jockey, or explorer. Her breasts are coming in. She checks them each morning when she gets dressed. She wears two singlets to push the nipples flat. Last week a mouse ate the crotch out of the knickers she left on the floor.

  In the winter school holidays some of the children in Little Hazel’s class are going on a bus trip with their mothers and fathers to see the snow at Mount Baw Baw. Little Hazel has never seen the snow. On the school holidays Little Hazel stays home with Michael or goes to Acacia Court with Betty.

  Walking through the back door of Betty’s house, Little Hazel’s sleep-out is on the left, Michael’s is on the right. The sleep-outs are a closed-in section of the verandah with unlined timber boards halfway up the walls and louvred aluminium windows above them. Green paint has been slapped on top of the boards, but many tufty, barky bits show through. In the summer it is good enough. In the winter Little Hazel buries her head under the blankets to get to sleep and often wakes in the morning with an earache from the draught.

  Harry is wary going into Little Hazel’s sleep-out. He is anxious about being confronted with ‘girl’s things’. But there is only the messy bed, a pile of clothes on a chair, a little table with her drawing pencils, some pictures of mudlarks thumbtacked to the wall, a doll, a rabbit knitted out of grey wool, and a diorama of the forest at night made from painted Cornflakes boxes. Harry does his work carefully, starting from the ceiling. He uses binder twine to construct a hammock for the silky fibres of the kapok and then spends a long time winding more kapok around the twine so it doesn’t show. He tries to imagine how the kapok-snow might have landed on the windowsill and bed and table and floor if it had really fallen from the sky. He takes care to ‘snow’ the diorama; the white looks very striking against the black paint. As a finishing touch he gently snows the ears of the rabbit and even places a wisp on its tiny snubbed nose.

  When Little Hazel returns from taking Foot Foot for her afternoon walk Harry is already back at home and setting up for the milking. She opens her bedroom door to throw her jumper in so she won’t be in trouble when her mother gets home. Everything is white; the ceiling is a hummocky white mass, the floor, the bed, the table. The room is covered in a soft, quiet, spidery whiteness. Little Hazel put her hands to her face in surprise. She notices how the whiteness muffles the sharp shapes and edges of everything it covers. The objects in her room seem more important, more symbolic and statuesque, in their blank pallor. There’s a gentlene
ss about it too.

  Michael, and later Betty, also stand quietly at the door and admire the snow. Betty buys Harry a new pillow at the co-op as a replacement although he insists he used an old one and has no need of it.

  Harry comes around a bit those school holidays. He often has to borrow something or return it. Sometimes Little Hazel pretends Harry and Sip are formal guests and shows them through to the front room where they drink tea together and read books. They look at a pictorial gazette of the New Age of Transportation Little Hazel borrowed from the school library. There are pictures of modern cars and trains and aeroplanes. One of the pictures shows a gigantic car ferry that travels between England and France. A huge mechanical ramp leads to the inside of the ship where cars of different models are lined up, some with picnic baskets tied to their roofs. Well-dressed families stand around the cars, the children are bare-legged but in the fitted coats and socks-with-sandals of the foreign rich.

  ‘Young Sip here would like to go to France on a car ferry,’ Little Hazel says lazily, stroking Sip’s ears. Sip hears her name being spoken. She blinks in recognition and licks her needley teeth. Harry and Little Hazel laugh at her so she gets up haughtily and takes herself over by the window where there is a patch of sun.

  When Harry comes the next day, Little Hazel tells him that she dreamed about the ferry. In the dream Betty’s Vauxhall is in the hold of the ferry and Betty has forgotten to put the handbrake on (not unusual) so all night, as the passengers sleep in their bunks above, Betty’s car has rolled backwards and forwards with each sway of the ferry. Betty’s car hits the car in front of it, and then the car behind it, until the force of this loosens the brakes of all of the cars, causing them to slide into one another like marbles on wet glass. In the dream Harry and Betty and Little Hazel and Michael are having breakfast in the ferry’s grand dining room with tinkling chandeliers and runny eggs. Only Little Hazel knows the carnage that awaits them as soon as the ferry docks and the gigantic ramp is let down. She wants to warn her mother, but her mouth is stuck with egg. And there’s a stranger at the table with them – a woman who looks a bit like Michael’s friend Dora, but has the wrong hair. Whenever Little Hazel tries to speak this woman interrupts.

  ‘I woke up feeling as if something bad will happen and I’m not going to be able to stop it.’

  Harry makes a noise at the back of his throat. A calming noise he makes when the calves are frantic for their bottles.

  ‘Do you think I should tell Mum?’ Little Hazel asks. Her face is red. She sniffs and rubs her nose.

  Harry puts his hand on the girl’s shoulder. Then he takes a handful of hair that’s fallen from her ponytail and tucks it back behind her ear. ‘It’s alright,’ he says. ‘Settle, petal. It’s alright there.’

  At school number 2502, Cohuna, Little Hazel’s teacher sets aside fifteen minutes on a Friday afternoon for the class to write up their nature diaries. There is a prize at the end of the year for the best diary, with marks awarded for composition and illustration. The boys are doing a comic strip – Eagle Versus the World. Out of all of the boys only one of them can draw. Little Hazel brings pressed leaves and flowers from home and traces around them on the page, but they break apart and it takes too long to colour in the outlines, so she writes. She takes some advice from Harry and she tries to write what she sees.

  HAZEL REYNOLDS’

  NATURE DIARY

  February

  When we came back to school we moved into the top classroom. There is a bird table outside the window. We take turns filling up the dishes with water and birdseed. Already there have been rosellas a butcher bird and a thrush.

  It was a very hot day to-day. There were 17 magpies on the grass outside the window. At lunchtime our teacher put the sprinkler on and in the afternoon there were 63 magpies on the grass. It looked like they were having a conference.

  The thrush comes to the bird table all of the time. Our teacher can get very close to it and we watch from the window not making the smallest noise to frighten it away.

  We saw the thrush on the bird table so much because there are actually two of them. There is a baby thrush and a mother thrush. The baby thrush will take a worm from our teachers hand.

  March

  To-day there were many crimson rosellas at the bird table. Our teacher calls them red lories. They have strong beaks and are a great bane of life for our fruit growers. All of the birds are happy when there are rosy tips in the sky.

  Yesterday mother thrush hopped through the window. She flew around the classroom. The boys stood on the desks and took the model of the solar system down in case she got tangled in it. She hopped on the teacher’s table and she gave her a worm.

  April

  A kind lady said she would do the bird seed over the easter holidays. There are no birds at the bird table now that we are back. Our teacher said they will thicken up soon.

  Some girls playing on the swing found a little budgie with blue feathers. Its beak has grown into a hook. It has escaped from a cage. The girls are allowed to keep it in their classroom until someone comes to get it.

  Our teacher can get the mother thrush to come in the window when she whistles. She hops on the backs of our chairs. She tried to eat some spaghetti on Shirley Timms collage but it had gone dry.

  May

  This afternoon mother thrush sat on my hand. I have a tiny scratch mark like from a twig.

  Mother thrush came into the classroom four times to-day. She got a worm each time. When she comes in we stop our work to watch her and see what she will do.

  To-day our teacher had three red lories feeding from her hands. She wasn’t quick enough with seed for the biggest one and it gave her a bad nip on the finger. We got the first aid box from the office.

  It is cold today so all the windows are closed. We were having our spelling test and our teacher was walking up and down the rows saying the words and putting them in sentences. We heard a bang on the window. We didn’t know what it was but Ron Hodge went outside and the mother thrush was dead under the window. Some of the girls cried then we buried her.

  June

  A jacky winter came to the bird table to-day. It is a melodious bird with a many magic lilting notes.

  Our teacher told us a story about two kookaburras. The kookaburras had a nest in a tree hollow near her house. The top of the tree where they were nesting came down in a big storm. The next day the mother and father kookaburra used their beaks to try and hammer a hollow further down the tree, but the wood was too hard and they gave up. In the afternoon she saw them flying around a tree further down the road near the saleyards. They were harassing a big old possum and it worked. He got sick of the noise and the pecking. When he moved out the kookaburras moved in. Our teacher says kookaburras are opportunists.

  Some magpies have started swooping already. Two boys were swooped near the bridge on the Leitchville Road and one had blood coming out of his hair. They mainly swoop boys.

  Harry drains the oil on the Waratah. It’s a complicated job due to the awkward position of the sump plug. He has the front end of the motorcycle hoisted over the rafters in the dairy to get some rise on the mid-section and set the oil moving. A quick ride around the farm warms the oil up, but by the time he’s got the bike in position it’s cooling again. Harry crouches down and watches the thick liquid pool around the lip of the plug. Oil has something of the herd about it – piling back up on top of itself, wanting the familiar, being reluctant to spill forwards into the new unlubricated space. He rocks the bike back and forth to loosen the oil within, to make it run faster. The oil trickles out of the plug. He shakes the bike again. The oil is sluggish, it doesn’t want to run. He’s getting frustrated. Harry wants to kick the bike, but he tries to lift the whole weight of it in his arms and jolt it in the air instead. It swings viciously on the rope; the handlebars jackknife sideways one way and then the other. When he leans over to check the oil pan, to see if it is finally filling up, the back tyre catches him on the side of
the head and neck. It clocks him hard, bounces away with the impact and comes back for another go. Harry has his arms up by then, protecting his face. He lets himself fall over sideways so he’s flat against the bricks. The bike swings above him. He lies still, fingers his cheekbone for a break and rubs his temple where the tyre tread has broken the skin. The oil drips from the swinging bike and traces a figure-eight pattern on the ground – some of it within the pan, some of it outside. It’ll need shovelling up and covering with soil so the cows don’t slip in the morning. Harry puts that out of his mind for now. He lies still and listens to the sound of the rope sighing where it is pulled tight around the rafters. He watches the oil making its pattern; slower, slower, slower. He puts out his hand, feels the oil slide across his thumb and seep between his fingers. ‘Yes,’ he says. And, ‘Yes,’ when it comes past again.

  Harry takes his sore head over to Betty’s for an assessment. She has a pot of something for bruises – arnica? They’ve just finished tea. Dora from the poultry farm is making up the foursome at the kitchen table – completing the family axis – making it square. Dora, Betty and Little Hazel are hunched over a magazine. It’s a picture of young Queen Elizabeth smiling with her neat, chalky teeth. Dora traces the Queen’s hat with her fingertip – it’s a flat oval-shaped cloche pinned across the middle of her head like a saddle. Dora says she’s thinking of knitting something similar. Harry comes in for a closer look. Nobody has noticed the blood on his temple. ‘You could achieve the same effect with a placemat, or a large pikelet, even,’ Harry says.