Willy coughed for a month, then another month. He had steam tents and tonics and sun baths, but he coughed and coughed. He sat in the yard in the sun with Henary Black, his skin white, his limbs like sticks, and black around his eyes and mouth from exhaustion.
Religion was a small thing to Willy, but he agreed to see the minister, for form’s sake. He stopped coughing, and they felt some hope, until they saw the poor boy was fighting for air, gasping for it, so he had to be sat this way, then that, so he might get air into his lungs. The day he died, he asked his father, gasping, if he could see the photo of his own mother. William showed it to him. Willy was in the picture too, just a baby, and he looked at it for a very long time. And William could see in his son’s features all the life and laughter he had so loved in his mother.
Willy died that night, his father cooling his brow with a wet flannel. There was no more to cough, and no strength to gasp, so it was a long painful death rattle, and in the end his poor boy was burned out of this life with fever.
Two deaths. Two boys. The number went through his head endlessly. They merged together, although separated by a couple of months. He couldn’t comprehend it. The troubles he had had; nothing had prepared him for this. Bridget’s two boys. They were not boys, but he thought of them as that. He could not think otherwise. His Johnny, and then Willy. Whatever way it came to him, it was unbearable, unendurable, the pain of the two. William knew others had terrible tragedies and suffered sore losses. It was the way of the world, but it was too much.
His Lizzie came to him, and he cried like a child as she held him. Afterwards, he could remember nothing of the notices, the funerals, the flowers, the cards, the letters, the visitors. Julia took care of all that, the fine memorials printed, the photographs in their black mourning frames, finely gilded, the coffins, the black horses with their plumes. He was grateful to her, for such things had to be done.
There was a great void in him, a blackness that stretched back to Bridget, to Jane and his dear brother Robert. But it went deeper than that, for despite all he had built and created in this new land, this loss of family was made worse by the separation from Knockaleery, from his early life, where they had all been laced together, woven into the fabric of family and parish that stretched back generations. Here, they were thrown together on the surface of this glittering city, and he felt the newness of it and the brashness of it in all those refinements of mourning and grief. He wanted no condolences or prayers, cards or photographs, for he could not bear them.
William came out of his grief slowly, but he did not quite come back into life. He found his mathematical temper again, where he added things and ordered things and got things done and ticked off lists and subtracted other things. These things had a busyness to them that occupied him and kept him up late at night, until he could do nothing but fall into tortured dreams of Johnny and Willy. Bridget and Jane and Robert and even his mother and father were there, and while such dreams were indistinct and fantastical, they felt more real than the hotel and the stables and the Exchange and the meetings of the lodge.
In the months after the death of his sons, he found that he almost always did what was suggested to him, because otherwise he would do nothing. Julia suggested he go to the stables. Danny Phelan suggested he stock the bar. Someone suggested he call a district meeting of the Licensed Victuallers, of which he was president. It surprised him to find that he was still president, because the time when he had last thought of himself as president felt as if it was from another lifetime, another country. He could not attend church at all, for that was the place where death was spoken of, and he could not see his way clear on it.
His children were around him, and he was glad of that, but he couldn’t be near them, not in the way he usually was – for the moment he was truly with them, he felt the risk and worry of the thing, so he kept them at a distance. The sound of their laughter or their quarrels came to him, their chat at dinner, but he could not go far into it, or else he remembered too powerfully that day in the gardens with the blue sky through the green leaves and the distant sound of the brass band and the laughter of Lizzie and Harold.
Julia was with him, which made it easier, for in no material way was she connected to the two. He found a quality in his wife which he had not known she possessed. This was the quality of simply being there, being present, without intruding or demanding anything of him. She was there, a stable solid presence upon which he relied. He needed her there in the night, to lay her hand on him, to be there in the morning so he would remember to get up, to be there so her presence would remind him of the tasks he needed to get done. And she was not just there as a reminder, but he felt, although it was not said, that she had great sympathy and understanding.
In the middle of winter, almost half a year after the deaths, she arranged for them to go to the seaside, to Queenscliff. He was surprised, because he thought of the seaside as a place for women and children only. Bridget had gone once or twice, but Jane loved the seaside and had gone with the children and a maid most years. Julia had continued the tradition, although not with the same enthusiasm, for she had no great love of the outdoors and worried when the children ran wild. So it surprised him when Julia caught him in his office one morning and suggested a holiday at the seaside.
‘Why would we go?’
‘It is most soothing, and there are no crowds in the winter.’
‘What will the children do there?’ He thought the children were too old for the seaside, except Harold. He could not imagine what she was thinking, but he relied on her, for his own thinking was no good at all.
‘We will not take the children. Lizzie can mind Harold and keep the house for the children. Cook will run the dining room, and Mrs Murphy will do the hotel housekeeping and check the maids. Mr Phelan will look after the bar, and the groom assures me he can run the stables for a fortnight.’
‘Why? Why are we going?’
She put her hand on his arm. ‘My dear William, you have suffered a grievous blow. You are not yourself. We need to go away together for a little while to allow you some recovery. I assure you, the hotel and the children can be left.’
He knew she was right and that he was not himself. He agreed to go, although he could not see what the seaside had to do with any of it. He knew there was a steadiness about Julia he could trust. If there was anything that could be done, though he doubted that there was, Julia would know it, and she would do it.
As he said goodbye to the children, and gave them instructions on behaving well and not running wild, he realised that these deaths had affected them also. Harold seemed bewildered and clung to Lizzie, who was very grown up and responsible, but he could see the sadness in her eyes and her concern for him. Walter had recently started work at the bank and tried to be manly, but William knew how he had idolised Willy. Herbert and Robert stayed very quiet.
‘We shall be back soon. You can look to Mr Phelan or Mrs Murphy for help if you need it, but Lizzie will run the ship like clockwork.’ He saw Harold’s eyes brimming with tears, for the child had never been away from his mother. He produced a penny from his pocket. ‘I think you should spend that, young fellow, perhaps down at the sweet shop. And Robert, take care of Henary Black.’ He caught Julia’s look and winked at the children. ‘He’ll be fretting for your mother, for he’s most attached to her.’
At Queenscliff, William and Julia walked and walked: to the lighthouse, along the beach to see the wrecks, and through the town, admiring the tennis courts and the bowling greens. They watched the steamers, the fishermen and sailing ships in the harbour. The town was of interest to William, for it was a well-built place, mainly given over to relaxation and not a good deal else, so it did not have the serious purpose of a town like Ballarat with its mines, its markets, its factories and its foundries. He found this interesting and got talking to hotel keepers there, and to steamer captains and others.
He felt strange to be both at leisure and outside Ballarat, for he had never t
aken a holiday before. There was still his great grief and sadness, which hung heavily upon him.
‘Tell me,’ said Julia, as they walked up the path to the lighthouse on their third day, ‘of your first wife.’
‘Bridget,’ he said. ‘Bridget was Irish like myself. We were both young, but she had many suitors, so I was a long time courting her.’ And from that, he went on and told her of Eureka, the Star Hotel and its concert hall, their marriage, that first baby, of Willy, of Johnny, of Bridget’s death.
William had a great liking for the cliff walk, which gave a good view out over the sea. A few days later, despite it being cold and windy, they walked up there again, and Julia asked about Jane. William told her how Jane had come to them, and had taken over Willy and Johnny, and then had four more babes. By the time they reached the lighthouse, there was a powerful wind blowing and the sea was much stirred up, but he liked this wild weather, which felt powerful and cleansing. He felt he could bare his soul to her.
‘My brother Robert, whom I miss sorely, was the only one to come here with me. He was a little older than myself. Lizey was younger, and we were always together. And wherever we went, back there in Knockaleery, there were the people that we knew. There were our old Baxter grandparents over Tattykeel Hill and our other grandparents down by the stream. And in other places, there would be a cousin, or an aunt and uncle, or friends, but everywhere were those well known to us, so we were gathered in at every point.’
The wind was gusting fiercely, and he took Julia’s arm tightly, for he knew she disliked the wild weather.
‘When there was a death, they were all there. So those that died were going to those who had gone, and we were all known to one another.’ He was aware that what he was saying might not sound logical. ‘There was the same grief in it, but not quite the loneliness. It is what we lose when we come to a new place. I have often missed my dear family, but it is only now I see how great the loss has been.’
She clasped the hand that held her arm. ‘I never had such close connections,’ she said. ‘I came from something smaller. But it is true, there is an isolation here in the colony which is felt by many.’
‘I have not understood it until now,’ he said. ‘I wrote to them out of love and duty, but I did not see the whole of what I lost in leaving and which cannot be recovered, for it was in the life there.’
‘It is hard,’ she said. ‘I have only a few connections now, which still mean something, but somehow not quite enough. We only have what we build, and you have had a large part of that wrenched away.’ They did not say any more, but descended the steep path, William steadying her against the wind, looking out over the rough sea.
The next day was calmer and sunny, and as they walked they admired the many pretty cottages. He told her of Michael O’Connell’s death. ‘I felt the sadness then of dying in a strange land, and no-one from his family left to mourn him,’ he said. ‘But we were young, and much attached, together in young manhood and the brotherhood of that. And we had left such sadness in our native land; we thought that being joined as diggers and in the cause of democracy was a strong thing. While I still feel it so, it was a different thing. That brotherhood is not for a time like this.’
They walked on, and Julia asked a woman in one of the cottages if she might have a small cutting of a pretty geranium, and they took tea at a shop and started back to the hotel where they were staying.
‘I have been thinking much as we talk,’ she said, ‘of how we remember people. And I have been thinking of Johnny and Willy.’ She slipped her hand into his. ‘They had short lives,’ she went on, ‘but they had full lives, well lived. I think myself that their brevity does not detract from their meaning and purpose, for we are all endowed with that.’
And she said it with such confidence that he began to see it was so, and he was able to see the lives of his dear boys a little better, not just as ending, but as having substance and meaning in them. And he felt that, for such a little woman, so neat and precise, she was an anchor to him, she was solid beside him, and would keep him afloat.
On their last day at the seaside, as they walked beside the bay and looked out at the wrecks, he told her how he and Michael had had to swim ashore with the horses and that, not knowing how to swim, he had sunk many times and thought he would perish, but then had pushed himself forward, and held to Apollo’s mane. He did not say so, but now he felt it was she who was holding him up. Back then, his new beginning was bright and full of promise in a way that could not be now, but he knew he could get through.
* * *
December 23 1888
Knockaleery
My Dear Brother and Sister and famely all,
I again embrace you with a few lines. I have writen so many times to you that I am almost ashamed to write to you and geting no answers. I canot tell the reason for I have not got a leter from you or one from the famely in the time I have writen 6 leters to you. I canot stop writing.
I hope you are alive and doung well and in good heath. Also Mrs Irwin and all the litle boys and Lizzy. I hope they will be a Comfort to you now in decline of years. Thanks be to God we are all well and in good health, only the trouble of Sister Ellenor’s death, it setting in very sevear on Br Joseph. But if any of us had stood the trials that you have got, we wood be a little hardened, but I hope, we all say, as the psalms say, it is good for us to be aflicted.
My Dear Brother I hope you write and give all news for I wonder what keept you from writing. If you hadn’t been so Kind and good we haden so much to lose. How is business doing and all the children coming on? Is William succeed in a situation yet, or Johnny?
Life is uncerten and God’s warning voice is to us evey day prepere to meet our God. I am shure you heard of troublesome times we had in Ireland, bad seasons set worse round here, but thanks be to God we have plenty.
John and James joins in Kind love to you and Mrs Irwin and all the famely
I remain you affection Sister to Death, Eliza Irwin
* * *
Eliza lay in what had been her parents’ bed, which still seemed to her to have their own dear smell so she could imagine them. She often woke like this very early in the morning, not so far past midnight, and this morning found herself a little agitated. She said the Lord’s Prayer, and then, to calm herself further, she thought back to the time when she was very young indeed: how the entire family had slept together in a corner of the kitchen. As the youngest, she had slept closest to her mam, and then there was Mary and Ann Jane, and then William and the other boys.
Then there had been the famine and it changed, for the land could not support them. It seemed less reliable in its increase, and it was then that they knew there was too many of them, and so the emigration started, first James, then William, Ann Jane and Mary, and Robert. There were many more in the neighbourhood and it was still going.
By the time they got this house, which William had sent the money for, she had been sleeping alone for many years, since Ann Jane and Mary had gone to America. Although she liked the comfort of her own bed, with Lysander tucked down the end, part of her longed for the days when all were young and all together. It felt like a life she had lost.
Although the long days of summer made it hard for her to sleep, she liked to watch the moon in the sky outside her bedroom window. She looked out at it and was most grateful the Lord had made it as part of His creation. He had made the moon on the fourth day, which was the Thursday, along with the stars. She wondered how He had come to the thinking of the moon, and then she started to think of her old question of why He had made the world at all, but she supposed He had His reasons. Even if it was just a fancy, it was a powerfully good one, despite the fall in the Garden of Eden. She thought He must have had a purpose in mind, but she could not decide at all what that might have been. She thought if she knew her purpose, she might feel less lonely.
Eliza’s life now was full of the Lord Jesus, and she understood the consolation her parents had taken in religion.
But life was easier now, for they always had enough food, and even if there was insufficient turf cut, they could afford to buy coal to burn on the fire. The hardness now was in the loss of those gone.
John, her slow brother, was still with her and ever would be, and she was glad of his company, although in truth Lysander was a better companion, for he did not complain if she chose to sing a hymn and he did not ask the same weary questions when she read from the Good Book. And he liked to walk with her and she could tell him a good many things.
Young James, her dear nephew, was going to marry Annabella this spring. She could see Annabella was a fine girl, but Annabella did not have much time for Eliza, or much interest in the things Eliza might be able to teach her or help her with. But still, Eliza thought of how she had persisted in friendship with James’s mother, Jane Cander, so maybe it would be the same with Annabella.
What hurt Eliza deep inside was that William never wrote now, for it was always William, of all her brothers and sisters, that she thought of the most. Often when she lay here, looking at the moon, she imagined he came up the stairs and stood in the doorway behind her. When she was younger, she had been able to see him, in his striped digger’s shirt, or in his theatre with the girls that danced and sang, but as a man over fifty, she could not imagine him at all.
He sent newspapers sometimes, but there had been no letters written for two years, or more, she could not quite remember, and although she kept his letters, they were somewhat in a muddle. She wondered if it was something she had done or written that he did not write for such a time, but she thought not, for she could not think of anything that might have given offence. She wondered if it was his English wife, for she heard the English were a strange, cold people. Last summer when she had brown cowtis in her chest, she had paid a little Scottish girl to do the dairy, and she had told Eliza you could not trust an English person.
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