Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

  She knew better now. She had been willing to love, but it had evaded her and her failure had brought her only hurt. Now she thought it was just as well. To love would have meant opening herself to others and the world, and anyone forced to survive on a diet of willpower and privation could not afford that. The days of thinking of Ted as an active component of her life were gone. He was there, as the mallee and the years of unrelenting hardship were there: facets of the life that had brought grimness to her jaw, wariness to a face lined and weathered by sun. There was no more point railing at him than at the mallee itself. Helena knew she had to work out her own life, keeping herself inviolate from both man and landscape. She would show herself harder than the life that from its beginning had bruised her whenever she had given it an opening. She would survive.

  7

  In the year of Lucy’s fifth birthday the rains came early to the mallee. Along the banks of the river, in cleared sections further into the interior, the ex-soldiers looked up at the clouds and told themselves it was going to be a good year. Ten years after the Armistice they still had the ingrained optimism of men who had survived the war and were determined to make a go of this, too. Most were strong men, with strong women to back them. It was as well. Prices had been falling steadily, making it hard to keep up the repayments on the land and the equipment they had bought to work their holdings. There had been other problems. After several years of planting and burning, the soil was showing signs of wheat-sickness: the paddocks guttering after rain, the air heavy with dust during a dry spell.

  The blokes from the Agricultural Department had warned them. The experts had said that planting to wheat year after year would eventually rip the guts out of the soil. Let it lie fallow, they had told them. Give it a chance to recover.

  The settlers heard what the experts said. In their hearts they knew the advice was right but what was a man to do? Let the land lie fallow and the mallee would have them by the throat. The only way to deal with the stumps left by the rollers was to burn and, without the build-up of trash from planting, the fires of February and March would not generate enough heat to kill them. No-one who had survived Lone Pine and Menin Road was going to be frightened by a bit of dust.

  One good year was all they needed. Good rains, good crops, good prices, and they would listen to what the Inspectors had said. One good year. That was a promise.

  Now, with the rain bucketing down weeks before anyone had expected, perhaps that one good year had arrived.

  8

  Two years after that one good year, people were saying the same thing. It hadn’t happened the first time, the season ruined by late rains, but this one …

  Out of the box. Or so the world said. From the way their neighbours were talking, the words should have been written in fire, traced in wind-frayed letters across the sky.

  A good year …

  Perhaps, but out of the deep wells of her bitterness Helena had learned to be suspicious of good years. When the crops were bagged would be the time to talk. In the meantime …

  What had changed, after all? The drudgery of all the years since they had come here, expending so great a portion of their lives upon the recalcitrant land, without promise or even expectation of return: that had not changed. All the times she had told herself how she hated this foreign land, rejecting it and herself for coming here: that had not changed. Yet, because the sun had smiled, the rains fallen, because there had been no bushfire, flood or other catastrophe, the world believed that all, now, would be well.

  Fools.

  And yet, after harvest, it seemed they might have been right. This year, Ted had garnered three thousand bags of wheat.

  Three thousand bags …

  Each night he sat at the beat-up table, sweat-stained hat on the back of his head, fashioning from a confusion of figures, sprawling and clumsy, a world of dreams. Seven bob a bushel. Seven and six, maybe. So much for the bank, gotta keep them bastards happy. So much for a new plough. Down-payment on a tractor, one of them crawlers that the salesman claimed would make light work of the crumbling and sandy soil …

  ‘Might even manage a new dress for you, girl! And for the kid! What d’you say to that?’

  Ted, it seemed, could not live without hope. Yet hope unfulfilled, far more than any disaster, could kill. So Helena said nothing, watching his enthusiasm with all her fences raised.

  They brought the bags to the siding, stacked them neatly, along with all the other bags from the settlers throughout the district. Side by side, waiting for the train, they made a proud show.

  ‘Bumper year, that’s what it is! Real bumper year. We won’t forget this one in a hurry!’

  Nor would they. It was 1930 and a few months earlier, on the other side of the world, bankers had been jumping out of windows as stock markets across the globe collapsed.

  9

  There was a letter. Helena watched as Ted frowned over it, lips working as his finger laboured along the typewritten lines. Eventually he looked up.

  In the doorway Lucy, now seven years old, watched in silence while her toes drew nervous lines in the dust.

  Helena did not speak.

  ‘It says …’ He scratched his sunburned neck.

  Still she waited. A rock could not have been more still.

  ‘The bank reckons we should hold on.’

  ‘Why?’

  The question scratched the air like flint.

  ‘Because the price is down. Tad under five bob a bushel. Which is ridiculous.’ Now the words were pouring in a torrent as hope replaced the initial shock. ‘They’ll store it for us.’

  ‘The bank?’

  ‘Some mob they know. They’ll store it until prices go up again. No charge! That’s what it says here. They’ll pay us an advance — three and six a bushel, not bad, eh? — and we can sell whenever we like.’

  ‘And if prices go lower?’

  ‘How can they? Five shillings’s already way below where it should be.’

  The dresses, certainly, would be on hold. The plough might manage another season. But the down-payment on the crawler: that might still be possible.

  To Helena, who once might have fancied the figure of her man on a motor tractor, the prospect held the reek of doom.

  10

  Months passed. Whenever Helena saw her neighbours the words to celebrate what all had thought would be a bumper year were no longer etched in fire above their heads.

  There were more failures. Men, overcommitted, destitute of both money and hope, took off, some with their families, some without. Like wind-blown sand streaming across the dry countryside, the ruined families drifted in steadily increasing numbers towards the shanty towns that rumour said had sprung up around the cities. The price of grain? Lower still, now.

  Four bob, three and six, two and nine …

  Another letter came from the bank. Again Ted’s blunt finger traced the rows of needle words. He stared at Helena in horror.

  ‘They say we gotta put up the difference.’

  ‘Difference?’

  ‘Between what they lent us and what the grain’s worth now. To regularise our account is what it says here.’

  ‘Have we got it?’

  ‘Of course we haven’t!’

  ‘And if we can’t?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  But he did; they both did. If the bank foreclosed, they, too, might join the drifting columns of the lost.

  ‘I don’t reckon they got the right!’

  He searched, feverishly, for the agreement. He dug it out and read it with eyes willing to pour flame. His shoulders slumped.

  ‘Oh God …’

  The bank, master of fine print, was right. Of course it was.

  Helena watched her husband. She knew how close he was to tears. Weep and she thought he would break. She had never told him about the money she had in Italy, from the sale of her parents’ farm. She could bring it over, save them, at least temporarily, from ruin.

  She went to the doorway and loo
ked out at the land that had consumed so much. She knew she would not do it. Bring the money here, pour it into the endless sink of this land, and her last avenue of escape would be gone. She would not commit the rest of her life to what, more and more, she was convinced was a hopeless cause. She turned on her heel and walked back into the shadowed room.

  ‘You’d better go and speak to that tractor salesman.’

  For Ted, the tractor had been both hope and future. No longer. Regrets helped no-one.

  The supplier cancelled the agreement for the crawler. It had never been out of the shed, Ted had not so much as sat on it, but the cancellation cost them. What was left of the deposit went to keep the bank happy: at least for the moment.

  Still prices fell. A sheep that had cost two quid to raise was now fetching ten bob. Barley? Forget it. And wheat was down to one and nine.

  Once again the bank was pressing.

  ‘If those bastards hadn’t told me different, I’d have sold the lot at five bob!’

  Which might, or might not, have been true. Either way, it made no difference now. They sold eventually. One and seven.

  Bloody, bloody hell.

  Helena came into the house one afternoon to find Ted staring into space.

  She watched him. She wished she was able to do what she would have done once: go to him, put her arms about him, use the warmth and consolation of her presence to restore him. She tried to make herself do it but could not. Her body resisted her. Her will, adamantine in other things, could not prevail in this. Even if she went to him, she knew that his bruised sensibilities would recognise the falseness of the gesture. A man near breaking, he deserved better than that.

  She filled the kettle and made him, and herself, a cup of tea. At least there was still tea to make.

  11

  Whenever she could get away, Lucy went out into the mallee. Her mother would have scolded her for going out alone but she would have been wrong. Lucy was never alone nor would be, because the mallee was her friend. Its tangled black branches enfolded her. She lay full length on the warm ground; she listened to the voices of ants, the burrowing roots of grasses. They filled her with their singing. They belonged to her and she to them. She stood surrounded by the bush, she sensed its spirit. The land was her own. Here was peace. She could hear in the distance the clank and crash of the iron rollers as her father and the other men waged furious war upon the bush. Her mother, too, was at war with the life that held them all. Lucy loved her mother but could not share her pain, because this land was hers, and its myriad voices sang in her heart.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

  It was 1932 and Helena’s resentment had become a stone, pressing ever harder against her heart. Ted had married her, brought her far from everything she knew to this new and uncouth world like a desert where she could relate to nothing, where she could make no friends, where he alone was the sole beacon to guide her. And he had failed her, or — more and more it seemed to her — he believed that she had failed him.

  Why?

  Again and again she ripped the question from the depths of her hurt and incomprehension. What have I done? Failed to do? Tell me what you want of me. I am your wife. I would love and support you if I could. If you would permit me, trust me. Yet pride, too, had a place. He would not explain and she would not demean herself by pleading for what was hers by right. Yet it was not her nature to remain silent for ever. She was filled with a steadily increasing certainty that her life was being wasted, each day blowing into oblivion like the sand that filled the arid air.

  A dozen times she tried to talk to Ted about it. Her protests broke like waves upon the rock of his own incomprehension.

  ‘Lots of other women in the same boat. They don’t belly-ache all the time.’

  She could have beaten her head against the branches of the trees that more and more she believed would end by strangling her.

  I am not these other women. They were born here; perhaps that makes it easier. I am myself, and lost.

  She would have torn out the mallee by the roots, had he given her his trust. At his side she would have fought the world, the indifference of a land whose heart seemed barred to her. She would have accepted rage, even blows. What she could not accept was Ted’s endless silence. More even than the contorted branches of the mallee, it was this that imprisoned her. Yet the problem lay not only with her husband. From the first she had spoken to Lucy in Italian, hoping to hold her more securely to herself. By the time she was five the child spoke it fluently but with increasing reluctance. One day she would not answer when Helena spoke to her.

  ‘I am Australian! Speak to me in English! I want to speak English!’

  It was to be expected, yet was a blow to Helena’s heart. With every day her child, with friends and a life of her own, seemed more of a stranger to her. Even when she was alone …

  There were days when Helena watched the little girl, seeing how she fabricated a life of wonder and imagination out of the air, from fragments of earth and stone, from leaves. Here, too, there seemed no place for the mother who was more and more cut off.

  Helena walked for miles through the scrub, she talked to the silence. It would have been irrational to blame the child; instead she cried aloud against fate and the man who had shut her out. She beat clenched fists against her loneliness. Even her husband’s weariness conspired against her. In the evenings he was so tired, a man almost dead. The hope that had sustained them for so long had vanished and its absence was more burdensome than fatigue. There remained only a sullen refusal to admit defeat, an exhaustion that each night plunged them both into unconsciousness.

  Speech had no place, yet she knew that silence, like the mallee, would end by strangling her, if she permitted. Exhausted or not, she had to get him to talk, yet knew she would never get through to him. Despair and guilt made her angry; that, too, did no good.

  ‘What d’you want me to say? You know how crook things are.’ What made it even worse was that he was right. She did know how things were. They were the three no’s: no rain, no markets and no hope. Ted might be determined not to let them beat him but talk resolved nothing. She could have borne even his silence, had they been united. There would have been a grandeur in defeat, had they shared it. But not this. His silence shut her out. She was useless, irrelevant, unwanted.

  She could not bear it.

  ‘I am doing no good here.’

  ‘Good as anyone else, I reckon.’

  Perhaps he was right but that, too, was no good. It meant she could look forward to nothing better. She made a final effort.

  ‘Maybe we could go somewhere else? Make a new start?’

  He stared at her. ‘And give up everything we’ve put into this place? We’d have to be barmy!’

  She might have been talking Zulu.

  2

  The school had been open four years. Now there were thirteen children with a teacher, Sylvia Powell, who to some settlers didn’t look much more than a child herself. Knew what she was doing, though. She started a library, asking the parents who could manage it to chip in. Current prices didn’t leave much room for generosity but those who could — and some who couldn’t — put in a bob or two.

  The children created a garden outside the hall, grew flowers and a few vegies. Lucy presented her mother with a radish. It was woody, as hot as flame, but the child watched with the fierce concentration of an incipient tyrant until Helena had forced it down.

  It seemed that Lucy had the potential for things other than tyranny. Or so Miss Powell said.

  ‘Lucy has a really remarkable voice.’

  That was nice, if not very practical. They had a bit of a singsong to mark Arbor Day. Lucy sang a solo — fancying herself no end, said one mother, nose out of joint at Lucy’s selection ahead of her own pride and joy — but others, more charitable, remarked how well she’d handled the occasion, and the song.

  Helena took her home and made her sing it through again. And again. The teacher was right
. Lucy did have a good voice, or better. It was early days but Helena had an Italian pride in her own musical judgement. She thought she was listening to the first flourishes of what might become a very good voice indeed. Even, perhaps …

  It was too soon to be thinking of that. All the same, she went looking for her husband. She told him what Miss Powell had said, what she herself thought.

  ‘She needs lessons.’ Singing lessons in the middle of a depression. He didn’t even bother to answer: it was out of the question and both of them knew it.

  Helena turned away and saw Lucy looking at her with wide eyes. Her frustration overflowed. ‘Yes,’ she told her daughter bitterly. ‘You might have been a great singer, with the right training.’

  But what hope was there of that, in this place? Again she thought of the money that Guido was holding for her in Italy. She hesitated but eventually decided to leave it where it was. Even with the money, proper coaching would be impossible in a place as remote as this. And how could they move? Everything they had — money, past and future — was here. To think of selling up in a world without buyers was no more than a sick joke.

  Besides, she was beginning to think she might have other plans for her money.

  3

  1935 was the year Helena finally accepted the inevitability of change. It was to be another year before the shutters of her life came down on the past, as they had in 1917 when she had returned from her aunt’s house to face the cataclysm of blood and flame, but it was on 10 April 1935 — the date as well as the moment engraved for ever on her memory — that Helena knew that her world, for the second time, was coming to an end.