A Waltz for Matilda

by Jackie French

  She had never had so much — not just the things, but the feeling that there were people around who had loved her father, and who were there for her too.

  And then she saw the Heenans’ cow.

  It wandered up between the cliffs, its head down, as though it had no hope of greenery in this world of heat, seemingly unrelated to the barefoot boy who walked behind it with a stick.

  Suddenly the cow lifted its head. It stared around at the shadowed grass, then took a few swift paces forward and bent to eat, crunching each inch of the blades at its feet.

  The boy kept walking till he was on the verandah. ‘Present from Ma,’ he said. He turned to go again.

  ‘Wait!’ Matilda ran down the steps. ‘You can’t give me your cow! Don’t you need the milk?’

  Billy looked at her scornfully. ‘She ain’t in milk. Not till her calf is born. We ain’t got the grass for her, down our way.’

  ‘Maybe she could … could visit here. You can have her back when it rains.’

  ‘Ain’t never gunna rain again. Not proper like. I want ter go to the city. Ma says there’s water comes outta taps there.’ He spoke as though it was an almost unbelievable wonder.

  ‘But it’s better here —’ She stopped. What was right for her mightn’t be right for him. Besides, he was no longer listening, just loping back down the track.

  The cow didn’t even look up as he left.

  Chapter 24

  Dear Tommy,

  I have a sheep and a cow and calf and two hens and a rooster and chickens and a dog! The dog is still really Auntie Love’s, but the others are all mine.

  Another girl stayed here for two weeks. She is Chinese, but she was born in Melbourne. Her name is Patricia. She is going to be Mr Doo’s wife. Mr Doo is going to open a shop selling seeds and farm machinery and things, and he wanted me to teach her some more English, especially writing and our numbers.

  Mr Doo and his brother dug the vegetable garden for me and planted it and dug a channel from the spring. I have to move the stones every morning so the different gutters between the vegetables fill with water. It is much easier than watering the vegetables with a bucket.

  Patricia went back with Mr Doo yesterday. I miss her. She did not speak English much but she learned very quickly and she was only a few years older than me, which was good. Auntie Love does not talk much.

  I do not know if Patricia really wants to marry Mr Doo. He is much older than her. But every time I asked she nodded. He is a nice man though and I think he will be good to her. I will miss his visits here when he has his shop, but we will have lots of vegetables in the garden. The radishes will be ready to eat next week I think and the lettuce and the spinach are as tall as my finger already. There are carrots too, and funny cabbages that Chinese people eat and proper cabbages and spinach and onions and pumpkins and corn, but they are not ready to eat yet.

  Mr Doo says I have to plant potatoes, but Mr Sampson says he will do it. He comes over on Sunday afternoons to see his aunt and bring us flour and tea and sugar and meat. Did I tell you he is a native? But he is not the wild kind, he is very nice.

  He and Auntie Love talk in their own language sometimes. I did not know that natives had a proper language. Mr Sampson does not have a spear or a boomerang, either, so it is not at all like the paintings or the books at school. He has built a fence around the vegetables so Mrs Dawkins can’t get in.

  Mrs Dawkins is my sheep. I know it is rude but the sheep has whiskers just like Mrs Dawkins and the same expression sometimes too. I have called the cow Daisy and the calf Buttercup and the hens Fluffy and Feathers and the rooster is Old Biscuit because he tries to tell them what to do. I am glad we have enough water for them all.

  Matilda paused again to nibble her pencil. Auntie Love was funny about the spring. She made Matilda sweep the sheep and cow dung and wallaby droppings away from the pool every evening with the big straw broom, and she wouldn’t let Matilda dip the bucket in either, making her flick the water out into the bucket with her hand instead.

  It took much longer to fill a bucket that way, but Matilda didn’t dare disobey, not when the old woman stared from the verandah.

  She had got upset too when Mr Doo first started to dig the channel from the spring: she squatted in the shade of a tree and glared at the brothers as they worked. By the second day she seemed to accept the pool wasn’t being hurt.

  Sometimes Matilda wondered if Auntie Love realised that Matilda owned the farm. She had tried to explain the land was hers now, but Auntie had just nodded, as though it didn’t matter at all.

  One of the union men built a chook run so the dingos can’t eat the chickens. I think Hey You would like to eat them too. I have heard the dingos cry at night. They do not sound like dogs. It is a high cry and strange and makes me glad Auntie Love is here, and Hey You.

  There is a lot of work to do here, but I like it, it is not like working in the factory. I have to weed the garden every day and in the afternoon I go to gather firewood, just branches, not the big hunks Mr Sampson cuts for us. It takes a long time.

  I am making a fence and a gate for a sheep pen. Mr Sampson showed me how. He says he will get more poddy lambs next spring and will give me some to look after, now I have a cow with milk to feed them, and I do not want them to run away. I would like to have many sheep here, good ones, because that is what my father wanted.

  The fence is half done, it looks good, but the gate looks lopsided and I do not know how to make it swing or what to use, but I expect Mr Sampson will know. Mr Sampson says if I have some sheep I can sell wool and lambs and make some money, not a lot but maybe I will not have to look for any sewing as it does not cost anything to live like this, so maybe my money will last till I can get some sheep next year and cut off their wool.

  Do you know what I did yesterday? You will never guess. Auntie Love showed me how to track a goanna. They make a big swish in the dirt. This goanna must have tried to get into my meat safe, as there were tracks all around. Goannas eat meat, did you know that?

  It was easy to track. It was in a crevice in the cliff, I could just see its tail. Goannas sleep all winter, I did not know that either, but it was warm enough for it to wake up awhile yesterday. But when I pulled it out it did not move, it was like it was dead.

  I was glad about that because it was very big, almost as long as I am. Auntie Love killed it with a rock, then showed me how to clean the insides out of it. I did not think that I could eat it, but it is like kangaroo, it is all right if you add enough potatoes. The skin is nailed up on the side of the house. It was pretty at first, all yellow and grey, but now it is going brown and curly at the edges.

  I am learning lots of things, but think of you often.

  Your friend,

  Matilda

  Matilda put the pencil down. She’d have to sharpen it with a knife before she used it again.

  Should she have mentioned eating goanna to Tommy? Maybe he’d think she had gone bonkers. She’d never have eaten goanna even a few months ago. But once you had learned that potatolike things sat under what looked like dead bare ground, once you had picked tiny native cherries from shaggy, dry-looking trees, or the little dark fruit on the wiry bushes at the edges of the gullies that Auntie didn’t give a name to, once you’d seen how live sheep got turned into chops and legs of lamb or mutton and chutney sandwiches, you sort of forgot that ‘real’ food was bought from the corner shop.

  There were other things she’d have liked to tell Tommy too. How she’d tried to make a rice pudding using Aunt Ann’s recipe with the rice Patricia had brought and how she and Auntie Love had tried a spoonful each then laughed, as though sweet, not-quite-cooked rice was the funniest thing they’d ever eaten.

  How Mr Doo showed her how to use the hen droppings and the manure sweepings from the spring to scatter on the vegetables — she’d never have eaten a vegetable back in the city if she’d known what they were grown with.

  But how could she explain to Tommy the peace of
sitting on the verandah in the dusk with a woman who rarely spoke, twisting at grasses to make the striped containers that now held everything from their daily damper to her sewing?

  It was so different from her life before, even more different from the life she had dreamed of with her father, the one with a white farm house and pink pigs.

  Grief for Mum and Aunt Ann sometimes stabbed like a knife. The sadness for what she’d never have with her father was always there. But she was happy — free in a way she had never been before. Auntie Love might make whooshing gestures at her till she swept the pool each dusk, but she didn’t expect her to get up at the same time every morning; she didn’t even tell her when to go to bed or what to cook for dinner.

  Matilda looked down at herself and grinned. What would Tommy think of a girl who wore her father’s trousers, tied up above the knee to make them shorter, and her father’s shirt and hat? It was impossible to collect wood and weed the vegetables in a skirt … well, not impossible, she supposed, as other women seemed to do it. But Auntie Love hadn’t even looked surprised when Matilda came out one morning dressed in the trousers.

  She folded another piece of paper up to make an envelope, and sealed it with flour and water paste. She’d give it and a penny to Mr Sampson next Sunday, and he could give it to one of the men to take to town to post.

  The letters to Tommy were the only things she had spent money on, except a reel of cotton from Ahmed the peddler who took his wagon from house to house every year. The cow was giving milk now, and Auntie Love had showed her how to milk it — her left hand still wasn’t strong enough to do it herself. Auntie Love showed her how to let the cream rise and whip it to make butter too.

  One of the hens had gone broody soon after it arrived. Now there were five tiny yellow chickens running out in the chookyard. The other hen gave an egg almost every day. With the free vegetables and fruit from Mr Doo, and the meat and flour and sugar from Mr Sampson, they had more to eat than they needed.

  Even the fences were made without nails: they just cut a square out for the next bit of wood to fit into.

  She walked outside, and sat on a chair on the verandah, next to the sleeping Auntie Love. It was too hot to weed yet. She looked down the track toward the break in the cliffs.

  It would be nice if someone suddenly came to visit them … Mr Doo and Patricia, maybe, or Mr Gotobed, or even Mrs Ellsmore, who had been so kind. But Mrs Ellsmore might be shocked at the unpainted, wood-shingled house, and anyway she suspected that Mrs Ellsmore and Florence had already gone back to town, and that the boys had gone back to their boarding school.

  She was glad the boys had gone. Perhaps there would be no more shooting parties now. Despite what Gotobed had said about wild blacks she didn’t think they could be so dangerous, not if Auntie Love had lived with them.

  She drew in a deep breath. All right, she was a little bit bored. But she was proud too. The new garden, the fruit trees brought carefully wrapped in old newspaper, and already showing new shoots. She even had a sheep.

  Matilda looked over at Mrs Dawkins, then ran over to the railing. ‘Auntie! Auntie! Look!’

  Auntie Love opened her eyes. Matilda heard the old woman chuckle as she ran down the steps, Hey You at her heels.

  Mrs Dawkins stood munching at a tussock. Two small white heads nudged their noses beneath her, wriggling their tails in the air. ‘She’s had lambs!’

  Soft and snowy, the first things she had ever seen out here that were exactly like her book. ‘Real lambs!’

  Hey You barked, then dropped onto his stomach, as though checking that the lambs weren’t about to invade the house and his territory.

  Auntie laughed again, sharing the joy or amused at Matilda’s enthusiasm. Matilda danced back up the steps. ‘We should do something to celebrate! Make pikelets … except we don’t have any jam left.’

  Auntie Love pushed herself to her feet. They were still bare — Matilda had offered her Mum’s other pair of shoes, but though Auntie Love had taken them, she had never worn them. Matilda had found Hey You chewing one beneath Auntie’s chair. It had hurt seeing Mum’s shoe in bits, but she hadn’t taken it from the dog. She had given the shoes to Auntie Love, after all. And besides, the one shoe left was no good to anyone.

  Now Auntie limped inside, and took a bucket from its hook on the wall and a long-handled wooden spoon. She gestured to Matilda to help her down the steps. She used a stick when she got around by herself now, but when she walked with Matilda she expected to have a shoulder as a crutch.

  Matilda put an arm around her. The old woman was as thin and light as before, seemingly existing on tea and damper. Even on their ‘fresh meat’ days she waved away the offer of chops or mutton roast from above the fire.

  Down the steps, one at a time, so Auntie could favour her good leg, then up behind the house, following Auntie’s gestures.

  ‘Baa!’ Matilda glanced round as Mrs Dawkins decided to join them, her twin lambs trotting at her side.

  Auntie stopped, which meant Matilda stopped too. ‘What’s wrong?’

  The old woman shook her head. She put a hand behind her ears, then touched her eyes. ‘You want me to listen? Look?’

  Auntie nodded.

  Matilda shrugged. There was nothing to hear, except the wind, high up above the ridges, a low moan like someone was crying in the sky. Nothing to see … or rather a lot to see: the cliffs, the gum trees waving up on top, an eagle trying to balance on the wind. But somehow she didn’t think Auntie meant any of those.

  Then she saw it — a flicker past her nose. And then another. And another …

  Bees.

  She glanced up to see Auntie look at her with approval, before sliding down to sit on the ground. She flapped her hand in the direction the bees were going.

  Matilda looked at her incredulously. ‘You want me to follow the bees?’

  Auntie nodded, then shut her eyes for a brief doze. She seemed to have the capacity to sleep sitting in any position.

  There was no arguing when Auntie just shut her eyes like that. Matilda advanced cautiously in the direction the bees had taken. Bees lived in hives, didn’t they? And they stung you. She had sat on a bee when she was small, and Aunt Ann had pulled out the sting. It had hurt.

  She stopped. There were no bees to be seen.

  She looked back at Auntie Love. The old woman opened her eyes, then pointed at an anthill. It was as tall as Matilda, somehow redder than the surrounding dirt, as if the ants had painted it.

  ‘That’s an anthill, Auntie. Bees live in hives.’

  Auntie held up her hand impassively. Matilda helped her up again, then put her arm under the old woman’s shoulder so Auntie could limp toward the anthill. She stopped a couple of yards away.

  And then Matilda heard it. A humming sound, more a vibration in the air than noise. And suddenly there were bees … long dark ones, hovering for a few seconds on the other side of the anthill, then vanishing inside.

  Auntie gestured for Matilda to move away. Matilda hesitated. What if Auntie got badly stung?

  But she had known where the bees were. Somehow she was sure that the native woman knew exactly what to do now too. What bee would dare sting Auntie?

  Auntie Love limped forward, the spoon and bucket in her good hand. She crouched by the anthill, then thrust the handle of the spoon into the structure and wriggled it for a couple of seconds, then balanced the other end on the rim of the bucket. She stepped back surprisingly quickly, making shooing motions to get Matilda to move too. They stood about ten yards from the anthill.

  Matilda stared. What was the spoon supposed to do? But even as she watched the handle began to darken. The blackness slid down the spoon then dripped into the bucket. Drip, drip, drip.

  Honey.

  Auntie looked satisfied. She leaned on Matilda’s shoulder again and limped toward the house.

  The sun was high when Auntie waved her hand toward the anthill.

  ‘You want me to get the honey?’

/>   Auntie nodded.

  What if the bees stung her? But Matilda nodded. You couldn’t argue with someone who used so few words, not when you never knew if they understood your words or not. And the bees hadn’t stung Auntie earlier.

  She stopped a few yards from the hive, then made a sudden dash, pulling out the spoon and grabbing the handle of the bucket in one go. A bee danced in front of her face as she ran back, and then another. She ducked, then glanced at the bucket. Half a dozen bees clustered on the lip, but even as she watched they flew back toward the hive. She kept on running, stopping only when she was inside, out of breath.

  Auntie laughed. She picked up the bucket and looked inside, then nodded in approval. Matilda peered down too. About an inch of honey rested in the bottom of the bucket. Two jars’ worth, she thought, or even three, all for a minute spent jiggling a wooden spoon.

  She looked up to find Auntie watching her. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  It was more than thanks for the honey. She suspected that Auntie knew that too. The old woman simply nodded.

  The scent of honey had filled the house. It had been more than a year since Matilda had eaten it. Even at Aunt Ann’s it had been a treat. Pikelets, she thought. She had an egg, and lots of milk and flour and butter, and now they had honey too.

  Definitely pikelets.

  The house smelled of hot butter as well as honey now. Matilda watched as Auntie Love flipped out another pikelet.

  Auntie had taken over making them when the batter turned lumpy. They were the best thing Matilda had eaten for over a year: hot from the pan, the butter and honey soaked in, rich and sweet and savoury. She spread honey on another, then slipped one — without honey this time — down to Hey You. The dog gulped it as swiftly as he had eaten the last four, then sat, waiting for another.

  All at once he cocked his ears. He gave his yelping bark, then looked from Auntie Love to Matilda and barked again as though to say: ‘Come on. I’ve told you someone is there. Now what are you going to do about it?’