Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

  Yet it had started as a day like any other.

  They were in the lull between harvest and sowing, the one time when it was possible to draw a breath without grudging the time it took to do so. The overpowering heat of summer was gone, the rains not yet arrived, and there was time to patch walls, clothes and the mind that had never ceased to ask itself Why? And: For how long? Time, even, for Helena to try to patch up her relationship with a husband who had grown as taciturn as the mallee, which she sometimes thought had found new life in the man who had dared attack it with roller and axe and fire.

  Outside the house the air was fresh with the first hint of autumn. A light breeze brought the scents of sandal-and sour-bush, of banksia and dust rich with remembered heat, but around mid-morning it died. All became still, the leaves of the mallee standing as though turned to stone. It grew dark with heavy clouds piling up in the east. Through the open doorway, Helena saw her husband pause as he crossed the cleared ground. He turned and looked up at the sky, raising spit-moistened fingers to test the wind, which returned as he did so, a sudden eddy raising dust.

  A splattering of raindrops left damp craters in the parched ground. For a few minutes that was all, then the rain came again and stayed, in the company of thunder.

  Ted came into the house. Helena had grown used to a life when for days on end her husband never spoke, but now he did.

  ‘We’ll start sowing tomorrow.’

  ‘You think the rain will keep up?’

  He turned in the doorway and scowled with what might have been hatred at the clouds now extending to every horizon. The rain was falling in rods of silver light upon ground where meandering streams had already begun to make their way. Through the roar of the rain on the roof she heard him say, although not to her: ‘It had better.’

  Helena nodded impassively but his expression as well as his words had pierced her. She had seen this look of thwarted rage in men’s faces before. In Italy, a neighbour whose only child had died had worn it for weeks before one day fetching his gun and killing both his wife and himself. Last year, with commodity prices through the floor and debt out of control, a settler had picked a fight with every human and tree in the district before getting up one morning, mounting his horse and riding away, leaving life and family behind him. On both occasions the expression, like the subsequent action, had signified the fury of helplessness. The realisation was a lock clicking shut in her head. The man to whom until that moment she had entrusted her life, despite all her doubts, would betray her not because he wished to do so but because it was not in him to do anything else. The only question was when.

  She could wait for that moment, accepting its inevitability, or she could write to her cousin in Monfalcone and ask him to use the funds he was holding to arrange passage to Italy for Lucia and herself. Do that and she would return to the land she should never have left. All this — the harsh and malevolent scrub, the man whose silence betrayed her every day, whose ultimate defeat she had just glimpsed — would become as though it had never been.

  And yet …The rain continued to fall. She had read only the other day that prices might at last be on the way up again. A good season with rising prices …

  Could it be enough to bring them back from the brink? There was the question of money, too. She had put some of the proceeds from the sale of her parents’ land into the farm when they had first bought it. If she left now she could kiss it goodbye. One good season and, even if Ted didn’t come right, there would be at least a chance of getting something back. That night, with Ted sleeping at her side, Helena lay with eyes open to the darkness and saw visions: the cauldron hanging from its chains above the fire; the farmhouse kitchen warm with the gold and red of polished brass and copper, of flame; the winter wind screaming outside the windows. The glass was patterned with frost, the cart creaked doggedly through the stone hills, the lake waters reflected the icy peaks of mountains, the gravestones lay silently.

  The life she had left but that had not left her. All night she thought about it. By the morning she had made up her mind. She would give it one more season and then decide what she would do.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1

  From that moment there was a momentum in her life that Helena could not have described or explained. She knew only that events had begun to move, unseen yet inexorable, that the pace of the movement, already beyond her control, would increase until it arrived finally at a conclusion. She watched the unrolling of the days. She saw Lucia, twelve years old now and in some ways already a woman. More than just a woman. A woman with the potential to be a singer. Not just a singer, either. A great, a very great singer. She was twelve, totally untrained, and sang like a woman of twenty. Helena heard her daughter singing around the house, outside among the trees. Her voice was a wonder and delight to her. Also a source of outrage, stoking the furies that simmered hotter and hotter inside her, mocking her for all her unfulfilled dreams.

  She knew now that she had ruined her life by coming to this country. One hope alone remained: that, through her daughter, something of value might be saved from the catastrophe. It would never happen if they stayed here. She owed it to herself as well as Lucia to do something about that; Lucia’s success. would give meaning and achievement to her own life. She would sacrifice herself and everything she had, gladly, if that could be achieved.

  But how she was to do it she did not know. This was an added frustration, and had its impact on her. Ever since she had come to this country she had crushed her native temperament. Now it burst forth again; the volcano, dormant for so long, erupted into new life.

  She was sullen and withdrawn no longer. Now she hurled her hands and voice into the air, spilling her rage amid the enigmatic silence of the trees.

  One day, as for months now she had known it would, came the climax. Ted turned up at the house, not two hours after he had set out for his normal morning’s work. Helena was displeased — she, too, had developed her routines — but saw his eyes staring out of a haggard face drained of blood beneath the tan.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Thinking even as she said it, despite the concern that arose within her, Yes and Yes.

  Ted stared, as at a stranger.

  ‘Big Josh …’ It took him a while but he managed to get the words out eventually. Big Josh Conrad, whom everyone had thought the toughest of them all, had gone into his shed that fine morning and blown his head off. There were no bleatings from the vicar this time round. He knew when to shut it if he didn’t want his house burned down. The widow, dry-eyed, saw Josh into the ground and took off at once for Sydney, where, hopefully, her sister would be able to put her up.

  Helena and Ted, fresh from the funeral in what was the closest they had to fine clothes, watched as the trolley carried her towards the railway halt. When she was out of sight, Ted shook his head, staring at the ground before his feet. ‘It ain’t right!’

  But there was no longer any fury in the cry. Catastrophe had doused his flames, along with so many others’.

  And Helena knew.

  Afterwards she thought how there was a pivotal moment to all things, when the maybes and should bes became yes and now, introducing a cold certainty to what moments before had been doubt.

  She raged, screaming her fury at this country that would destroy them all, if she permitted. She did more than scream; fury was no longer enough. She wrote to her cousin, explaining her plans and what she wanted him to do.

  While she waited for the reply that would restore her to the tastes and sounds of what had been her previous life, now desired with a fervour that increased with every minute, she studied her husband, not with regret but purposeful calculation. Ted had never been a man for words but that she had not minded: love transcended words. What mattered was communication to fill the void that would otherwise overwhelm every individual on earth.

  Helena remembered her wedding in the small Italian village, so long ago yet ever present in her mind, in front of the prune-mouthed priest w
ho had not bothered to conceal his disapproval and indeed contempt for them both. She had sensed that Ted, sturdy at her side, had wanted to knock him down. The idea had made her choke with laughter that, in response to the glares of the impudent priest, she had barely troubled to hide.

  That moment’s sharing, knowing without words what each was thinking and feeling, had been the essence of what she had expected would be their life together. She still retained the anguished memory of those moments and of the times they had shared in their first years in the mallee. Afterwards, when communication between them had ceased, she had wondered whether what had happened had somehow been her fault. She knew better now. The gulf between the perennially silent man and herself, ultimately so destructive, had been inevitable, brought about by differences of background and temperament.

  Now all that remained was to bridge that gulf for what would be the last time.

  2

  The letter came. Guido warned that life in Italy was very different from how it had been. It was a fascist state now and Mussolini had doubts about the loyalty of the Slovene-speaking districts that until the war had been part of Austria-Hungary.

  He is forcing the population, or at least the officials, to move to other parts of Italy away from the frontier, he wrote. Many teachers have already gone, to be replaced by Italian-speakers from the south.

  So far it hadn’t happened to him, probably because his family, like the Sforzas, was Italian-speaking, but that was no guarantee it wouldn’t do so in the future. Indeed, it probably would: a local official of the Union of Fascists had spoken of a need for teachers in the countryside outside Parma.

  As you can see, life here is uncertain. Nevertheless, should you wish to share it, you will of course be welcome. As for music training for Lucia …

  There were teachers of sorts in Monfalcone and Trieste, while in Parma, birthplace of the great conductor Arturo Toscanini, the world-famous conservatorium was available for students of exceptional talent.

  Helena folded the letter meticulously, as though to enclose within the paper all her precious desires for Lucia and herself.

  She walked to the door and looked out into the yellow slant of evening sunshine. In the middle distance the mallee lay like an overly familiar shadow, dark beneath a sky without cloud. After all these years they had succeeded by unremitting toil in pushing it back a certain distance but it was still there. As the dead Josh Conrad had said, take your eyes off it for half a minute and it would be back.

  The air was full of dust; even so early in the season, Helena could taste it on her tongue. It had all the makings of a dry year. Well, she would not be here to see it out.

  If she were to have a chance of life, she had to return to her roots. She would take her daughter with her, this child brimming with the talent that Helena could sense so strongly. Through Lucia she would obtain the position in life that she had abandoned when she had agreed to marry the Australian airman whose soul was as arid as the mallee itself.

  Ted came home, arriving as always with the dusk. Everything always the same, on and on for ever …

  Helena watched him as he went to wash up. Neither spoke.

  He came back and sat at the table, his head’s white crown in stark contrast with the leather-burned face. For the first time she realised that Ted, not yet forty, was losing his hair. She should have felt guilt that such a precursor of age and death could happen without her noticing it, but the dryness that had entered her soul expunged guilt as it had all else.

  Ted finished eating. As usual, she had not eaten with him. She watched him, not with eyes but senses, to detect any change in him. She found nothing. She took his plate.

  ‘Where’s Lucy?’

  Of the child he might occasionally speak, but for information only, not to seek her out. Which did not mean he did not care for his daughter but that life had wearied him to the point where more complex communication was no longer possible.

  ‘Staying with Alison.’

  A friend from school.

  He neither answered nor acknowledged the information in any way; an observer might have doubted he had heard her.

  Ted Fisher sat in silence while the lantern light cast bronze shadows across his furrowed features, the texture of his muscled arms. Helena came to the table and sat facing him, drawing her chair close so that her back was straight, the better to give or receive a blow.

  ‘I have had a letter.’ She unfolded it slowly under the gaze of his pale and expressionless eyes.

  She read it to him, translating it with neither pause nor inflexion. When she had finished, it was as though her voice had been swallowed by the silent room. Helena watched her husband, waiting for him to speak.

  For a while he sat, still wrapped in his silence, then nodded several times, quickly, as though behind the pale eyes he were assessing the truth and significance of the words.

  Now she thought he would speak and so he did, but not directly of that.

  ‘There was a bloke come through here once, a drifter who said he was looking for work. Not that he was looking that hard.’

  ‘I never saw him.’

  ‘He saw you. You must’ve been up the school and he spotted you as he come past. Someone must’ve told him you were from Italy. He said,“People been telling me you’re the bloke with the wog sheila. All right, is she?’”

  Ted’s eyes were still, inward-looking; his voice, rusty with disuse, was uttering more words than it had in a year. And words like this … They would have been unbearable once, but Helena had shut both mind and heart from the moment she had decided to write to her cousin. Now the words, quiet, reflective and utterly unexpected, beat unavailingly against her. She heard them but they did not enter. ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Told him to get on down the road or I’d flatten him.’

  ‘You should have told him the truth. You should have said no, I wasn’t any good. Because I never was, was I? Not from the first.’

  She spoke without apology, the words flowing proudly out of the upright body, as cold and plain as the slow unravelling of circumstance that had brought them to this moment.

  His eyes returned from whatever place they had been. He looked at and into her, perhaps seeing her properly for the first time. ‘Dunno what you want me to say. I promised you a life. This is what it is. It ain’t much, I know that, but it’s the best I could do.’

  ‘A life? Is that what you call it?’

  ‘Reckon you may be right.’ That was all: except that, getting ready for bed, he said: ‘You’d think maybe a woman’s job was to hold things together.’

  ‘You never let me.’

  Again it seemed that he had not heard her.

  ‘Never thought you’d do a runner. Always thought I’d be the one to break. I was wrong. It was you.’

  She would not have that.

  ‘I have not broken. I knew that from the first — I still know — that we could have beaten this land, if we’d been together. Together, we could have done anything. But we never were.’

  He did not speak but she knew from his expression that, once again, he did not know what she was talking about. It became important that he should, if not understand, at least hear her thoughts.

  ‘You turned your back on me. You left me alone to face a land that was never mine because you would not share it with me. I am leaving, yes, not because I never wanted to hold things together, but because you give me no choice.’

  She was right, of course she was, yet felt a fleeting spurt of hatred for the man who had not spoken properly to her in years, but who now had managed in so few words to make her doubt. She grew fierce, reinforcing her denials. ‘I have no life here. No future for myself or Lucia. Nothing. I have not broken, not at all. I intend to do something about what is lacking. That is not surrender. It is a challenge to life. And I shall win, make no mistake.’

  ‘That right? And where does Lucy fit into all this?’

  ‘She will help me regain the position I once
had.’

  3

  Lucy was doing what she did so often nowadays, when she had the opportunity. She was wandering alone through the mallee, singing. The sound filled her and overflowed effortlessly into the sunlight. The black branches of the mallee were arms, applauding her as she sang. She thought no further than singing to the trees; this was her place. Yet she was singing to herself, too, listening to the purity of her own voice as it reached nimbly higher and higher, to the treetops and beyond them, to the white puffs of cloud and beyond them, too, then down again, up and down, up and down; songs she knew, songs she made up, a seamless paean of praise.

  She was radiant with singing, with the land that enfolded her. Then she went back to the house that was her home, set amongst the trees that were also her home, and found her mother waiting to tell her that they were leaving.

  Others had left, forced out when their money had run out. That was the way of life in the mallee. That she would have understood. But not this, the idea that they would not be going together, that she and her mother alone were leaving while her father stayed behind … The notion was horrible. She refused to believe it. She did not despair; she told herself her father would not permit it. She waited for him to rescue her from the impossible, and was devastated when he did not.

  He said nothing. She pleaded with him, demanding that he prevent what she refused to believe could be happening. Still he said nothing.

  ‘I don’t want to go! This is my home! You are my father!’

  ‘Your mother is unhappy here.’ He spoke with enormous difficulty as though the words were being torn bleeding from his throat.

  ‘Then let her go. I shall stay here with you.’

  But that, it seemed, was impossible.

  ‘You want me to go?’ Anger as well as hurt enabled her to ask the question.