This Red Earth

by Kim Kelly

  My heart won’t take another beat till she tells me: ‘Yes, that was the news we’ve been waiting for. Our Gordon is home, and very much alive. But he’s not well, not in a good way at all. Taken his father’s old utility and gone off, sped off through town like a maniac. Emma doesn’t know where. Last word, he was looking for work shearing, so she’s tried everyone she can think of, put the word out to all the stations, the length and breadth, but no one’s seen him since.’

  The first breath I take is a sharp one: you’ve come home and you haven’t let us know. How damn blooping dare you, Gordon. Even if he was cross at not getting a letter from me, thinking I’d called it off; even if he went round to Arcadia and found no one there and thought we’d all abandoned him – oh! Not letting anyone know – for all this time. That’s not sulking for Australia. That’s cruel and terrible. The second breath I take is a painful, angry one: something cruel and terrible has happened to him. I know it has.

  I go back to my pile of dreams on the dressing table and finish tying the bow. Don’t think I need a second opinion from Mrs Zoc any longer. I’ll match my Rock for maniac: I sit down and type a letter to Wonder Publications.

  Don’t hear anything from either of them. Through summer’s tomatoes and the autumn’s beans, there’s a rasp in the rhythm of the irrigation pump as she takes in more and more Murrumbidgee mud: Let him go.

  Mitch comes home for Easter on the Good Friday and finds me in the water, checking to see when we’ll run out of the stuff here at Riverbend.

  ‘Hey,’ he waves his hat at me, ‘don’t you go out beyond the pump line there.’ Making fun of his mum’s perennial warning.

  I smile back, sort of, and look out at the danger: the snags. They’re so exposed now you could almost walk across from bank to bank on them.

  When I turn back to Mitchell, he’s taken his shirt off, so that I have to look away again.

  He says: ‘Mind if I join you.’ Not asking.

  ‘Just getting out,’ I say, and lie: ‘Getting a bit cool.’

  Don’t look at him as I go to pick up my towel. Then do: he is tea-stain gold all over his chest too. He says as I pass him: ‘You can’t keep up this worry forever. Maybe he doesn’t want to be found.’

  That makes me prickle all over with some kind of chill. Doesn’t want to be found? Just like his poor father, perhaps? Who knows what happened to him? History repeating bleeding misery. I don’t say that, though. I snap: ‘You don’t know anything about it. Do you.’ Neither of us do.

  ‘No,’ he says, embarrassed and I don’t care. ‘I just mean–’

  ‘Bernadette!’ Mrs Lockhart calls across the yard. ‘Telephone!’

  And I run back to the house, barefoot over the bindies, telling Mitch, telling Hughie: See, it’s him now. Who else would telephone on a Good Friday? It must be Gordon.

  ‘It’s the publisher fellow – Mr Jacobs.’ Mrs Lockhart is sparkling with anticipation, pushing me down the hall.

  ‘Oh.’ I don’t want to speak to any publisher fellow now; not until I’ve recovered my enthusiasm from somewhere in this Murrumbidgee murk. But I pick up the phone. ‘Hello, Bernadette Cooper speaking.’

  ‘Ah, yes, good afternoon, Miss Cooper. It’s Abe Jacobs from Wonder Publications here. Now, yes, your novel. My apologies that it’s taken so long to get back to you, but ah, now that I have you on the line …’ His voice sounds different from the man I spoke to all that time ago, not so gruff. But he is just as impatient: ‘I’d like to make you an offer.’

  ‘What?’ Somewhere I am happy at this news, stunned and hurling myself round the sitting room with excitement, but for the most part my heart is squeezing around it as a failure.

  ‘I said I’d like to make you an offer. An advance of fifty pounds – we can go through the details later. Is that attractive to you?’

  Fifty pounds; I don’t know what that means at the moment. But I say: ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Good, good. I’ll have the contract drawn up and mailed to you for your consideration. You’ll see on it that the publisher will appear as Myrtle Books Pty Ltd – that’s our literary imprint. Our company has expanded a good deal since we last spoke.’ He’s pleased with himself, and then kind and warm. ‘One of the only advantages of this terrible war, I’m afraid, all the tariffs and embargoes on American books, the British paper shortages … It’s a good time for Australian literature. But tell me, it wasn’t clear from your letter, will you be writing under the name of Monica Brockley or Bernadette Cooper, or … ?’

  ‘Um …’ The mud drags at my soul. How thrilled would Mum and Dad be if they were here? Literature … Mum wouldn’t know what that meant, and Dad and I would have fun with her, not knowing what it meant either. I wouldn’t know literature if it bit me on the nose in good light. I tell this Mr Jacobs: ‘Bernie. My name is Bernie Cooper.’

  ‘Ah! Very good – nicely ambiguous. Bernie Cooper it is. And have you thought of a title for the novel?’

  ‘No. I …’ can’t speak.

  ‘Never mind, Miss Cooper. That can be discussed later. It’s a little overwhelming, mm?’

  ‘Mm.’

  It almost rains in the first week of September, two fat drops, and my page proofs come in the mail. Page proofs for a novel called Too Much To Lose, a title Mr Jacobs has chosen to reflect our collective yearning for victory, particularly amongst the women he’s gambled on buying it. Mr Jacobs has also taken a sharp red pencil to the wilder flights of my imagination and my language, and now all that’s left to do is decide on whether to give the elusive hero a name other than Gordon or change it to the more enigmatic G, before I send these dreams back to Sydney to be printed. In January.

  January 1944. I can’t believe it’s going to be 1944 in January. How did that happen? It’s all unreal.

  But I can decide upon G. Enigmatic and impossibly distant, he possibly long ago ended our love story going off into the sunset with someone else. Most recent last news: someone who knows someone who knows Mitchell ran into Gordon in Broken Hill, said they’d heard he might have gone off to New Zealand with some government posting. He seemed well and happy enough, they said. How can he possibly be happy without me? Because he’s moved along with his life, hasn’t he.

  Time for me to do the same. I run my finger over the title again: Too Much To Lose. At least I have this, don’t I? I’m about to become a published author. I will be excited about it. Eventually. One thousand copies with my name on the cover. In January. Only four months off, printing manpower willing. And it’s going to be a little six-penny after all. But a posh one, just like a Penguin, only Australian. Antipodean as all genuine penguins are, said Mr Jacobs, and printed on the nastiest sheet newsprint available. Mr Jacobs said he needs to make a penny off me while he can – before Angus & Robertson pinch me off him. Wowee. But all I can seem to see is one thousand pairs of little newsprint wings beating out across the country: Rock, please. You can’t end it here.

  What am I going to do between here and January to distract myself from the limitless impossibilities? There’s no farm work at the moment to lose myself in, not now that the authorities have finally seen the sense in releasing the Italian boys to do it: Mitch has had a couple fencing for him recently, and Mrs McDoughal’s got three of them planting out the toms now, three dreamy-eyed slaves, one of whom is doing his Valentino best to woo her niece Chrissy and give the bush telegraph a scandal to send flying up and down the Paddock. Tongues long enough to lick their own toes out here – for a handsome foreigner. Could well be what Mrs Lockhart is nattering about right this moment: she’s up with her sister Ivy in Wilcannia, for a few weeks, or so. With the emphasis on so. Ivy’s not been well, with headaches and dizzy spells. Leaving me on my own at Riverbend, lonely with the plain old blues.

  I should lose myself to wondering what sort of a story I might write next. Mr Jacobs has asked, twice, and I don’t have a clue. Because I’m not really a writer, am I. Fluked this one. Fooled you all. I wander into the little sunroom bet
ween the back verandah and Mrs Lockhart’s bedroom, to pinch one of her magazines there; could I write for one of them? Write a silly serial? A proper romance. Flick open the one on top of the pile that tells me: Less Butter and Sugar – it’s doing your family the world of good. The blessings of rationing. Let’s count them: be grateful I have no children moaning that they want butter on their sandwiches and sugar on their porridge. Our baby, if it had lived to become one, would be around about turning three now. That hurt spears into me, has me reaching for my jasper B and Mum’s ring, and then just as quickly tells me it’s time I took them out of my pocket, took the comb from my hair too. Put all charms away, in my box of precious things. Past things. Get on with the future. Whatever it brings.

  ‘Bernadetta!’ Mrs Zoc is running across the yard and up to gate to meet me. ‘What did I say, bella! What did I say!’

  Her smile just about knocks me over, before she does. Italy has capitulated and the camp is in such a riot that Ken has a paper party hat on, a stripy one, all the guards do, and not just because Major Payne is not around to put the kybosh on a celebration. Fifty Italian women and attendant children intent on kicking up their heels: I’d like to see any man have a go at stopping them from doing so. They’re just about the only families here at the moment, too, apart from a handful of genuine bona fide Nazi mothers who don’t join in anything, so the guards are kicking up their heels a bit too.

  I hug Mrs Zoc back. ‘Tell me, what did you say?’ Although I remember her prophecy exactly.

  She says: ‘Aha! I said to you we would be free the next spring, and it is the next spring! I know these things, bella, I know.’

  ‘Aha.’ I laugh. Yes, Mrs Zoc, you really are a fortune teller.

  ‘Aha,’ she shakes her finger at my doubt. ‘I tell you we will be free. I tell you that Italia surrenders when the Allies free Sicilia. I tell you that you will write the book about love for the Wonder people. This all has happened. Now Gordon will come home too.’

  ‘Gordon is home,’ I remind her. Wacky-doodle-do.

  ‘Home to you,’ she throws her hands in the air. ‘It is over! The war is over!’ She stamps her feet in the dust and dances a circle around one foot, like a compass. She’s no elderly woman of sixty in widow’s black crepe, she’s the girl who made the boys of Palermo faint. I watch her, somehow liberated too. Three years she got for not throwing out her husband’s old anarchist literature, and for them signing up as members of the Fascist party to avoid being shot on the way out of Italy. And today, as she completes her compass circle, she shouts: ‘I love Australia! I love this country!’

  She holds no regret, no bad feeling. She’s just so happy it’s over.

  Let it go.

  The war is over here in this little quarter of this little town of Hay. Ken is dancing around inside a circle of ladies. Their men are working in our fields; some of them out in citrus orchards owned by Italians who came out after the last war to dig the irrigation channels here. One of the children runs up to me with a bowl full of almond shortbread – where did they get the butter rations for them? Some kindness from someone, somewhere here. For a moment my whole world is filled with good people. Our only enemies, the Nazi men and the Japs, are separated from the rest these days, behind bars in the old gaol on Church Street, and I hope their new world order is causing them to tear each other apart in there. But here, there is peace. Mr Curtin’s war for peace is won. He won his election last month in a landslide, because he calls ladies women and reckons that their eighteen-year-old sons are old enough to vote if they’re old enough to kill. To win this peace. It’s what everyone wants: the happy ending.

  Piccolo rubs my ankle and meows as Mrs Zoc grabs my arm. ‘Ahhhhh, but bella, I hope my bad boys are not allowed to go back to Queensland too soon, ha?’

  Manny, Tony and Arthur, her mango gangsters. ‘Do you think they will murder that neighbour?’ Whatever his name was, the rival farmer who slandered them.

  ‘Noooo. I don’t really think so. Antonio has promised me again in his last letter that they will only poison the trees.’ I’m not sure if she’s joking or not. She’s not; she adds: ‘They have a friend now from Tatura camp, who will buy that land when the sale is forced. This friend, he wants to grow the peppers there anyway.’

  There’s a tidy revenge.

  ‘Besides this,’ Mrs Zoc throws her hands in the air again, ‘they promise me that they will do nothing to make me fail to become Australian. I made a promise between me and God that I would become Australian when the war is over. So, now it is over!’ She stamps her foot. ‘I will be Australiana!’

  She’s delirious. Contagiously. Australiana. I could take flight again any second.

  But we are still at war, I remind myself. Keep both feet on the ground. Colin is still in New Guinea somewhere, as hundreds of thousands of our boys are. There is wire still strung along our beaches, guns on our jetties, arsenals hidden all through our hills, and you can’t even have a cup of tea without considering its weight in coupons. But for the first time, I will dare a prophecy of my own. For the first time, I believe we will win this peace. We might not be many, but we are too vast to take. Too vast in spirit.

  Ken has never moved paper along the line faster, to get the Italian families out of here. Not two days later I’m on the platform seeing off Mrs Zoc, and Piccolo in his cage, and I’m promising: ‘I’ll come home for Christmas, to Arcadia, to spend it with you.’

  She holds my face in her hands. ‘You can come home, or not come home for Christmas, bella. It does not matter. Don’t you worry about me. Everything is good now. You will see. You will see.’ The fires of Sicilia bright in her dark eyes assure me. ‘He will come for you now. Soon.’

  No, he won’t.

  But it’s all right, isn’t it, Odds, I ask her where she’s waiting under the vanilla gums by the station. She snorts and stamps her foot, but not because she cares. She’s keen to get home. I wonder if Pete might be there, but I don’t wonder too much. I’ve just caught a glimpse of what I will write about next, a new story, something about things ending … Finding yourself at the end of the line after Grong Grong, Narrandera, Willbriggie and The Middle of Nowhere. Maybe. Lines popping into my head all over the place, not easy to grasp and keep, apart from one going round and round all the way home to beat of Odds’s trot: The river laughed and I turned around to see it was laughing at me.

  Till I see Mitch waiting on the front verandah for me.

  He’s looking grim, hard-faced; demanding: ‘Where’ve you been, Dette?’

  ‘Seeing Mrs Zoc off.’ And don’t you address me like that.

  But he’s not interested in the answer anyway. He takes off his hat and rubs his forehead, ashen with worry. ‘I need you to come up to Hell with me, I need your help.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’ It must be terrible if you’re asking me, asking a girl.

  He says: ‘Snowy come off his horse yesterday – it’s a mess.’

  ‘Oh?’ Snowy is one of Mitch’s most reliable blow-in rouse­abouts. I’m sure he’s a fine man, but don’t ask me to look after him, or any mess of that sort; I’m not a nurse, I wouldn’t know the first thing, and I am certain that ‘mess’ means complete and utter gut-wrenching catastrophe.

  But before I can suggest I telephone the hospital, Mitch manages to get the rest of his sentences out: ‘Yeah. He’ll be laid up ’til Christ– Sorry. I’ve got no one to help me with the lambs coming now. I can’t get any other labour, not from anywhere. You’ll have to come up with me,’ he says through clenched lion jaw, the inference being: Please, don’t make me ask.

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ I tell him. ‘Let me pack a bag. Of course I’ll help you.’

  He says: ‘I’ll go round next door and let Mrs McDoughal know what’s going on.’

  He speeds off in the ute as I run into the house, and I’m frantic with concern as I throw things into my suitcase: you poor man. The worry on his face, in the deep lines on his forehead. He’s too young for s
uch lines. He’s only just turned thirty. Those lambs, you’d think they were his children, and they’re not even his best ones.

  I have a selfish thought as I clip the case on Good Companion, hoping Mitch won’t mind me thumping it: I wonder if I’ll be there with him over the summer and I’ll have to miss going to Sydney for the party Mr Jacobs is throwing for me at his wife’s cafe, the Ginger Jar, for my non-existent love story. I’m so nervous about that party; it’s in Kings Cross. Oh so Bohemian. What will people think of me, and my book? I don’t want to know.

  I’m nervous about being alone with Mitch, too, out there, miles from anywhere. Apart from a pub. That’s only ten miles from the homestead, apparently. No phone. No electricity. Where the country is so wild half the stockmen are Aborigines and the brown snakes are plentiful. Where I’ll be doing what to help Mitch? Feeding the lambs, I suppose. I don’t know.

  But my nerves twist and shoot into some kind of thrill in tea-stained glimpses. Alone with Mitch. A new adventure. Can I dare to imagine that? Maybe I’m ready now. Ready to move along.

  I take my jasper B out of the pocket of my strides. I look into its pink and caramel stripes and splotches, and I kiss it, for the last time. I place it into my box of precious past things, with Mum’s ring, and my hair comb.

  Goodbye, Rock.

  I love you. Always.

  But it’s time. It’s time to say goodbye.

  My lovely one that got away.