Summer at Mount Hope

by Rosalie Ham

  ‘Yes, Dad. I want to learn to make wine properly.’

  ‘Right. But what about your sister?’

  ‘Lilith will get married and have a grandson for you and I will leave my lot to him when I die.’

  ‘Seriously, Phoeba, if she doesn’t marry or if she marries a farmer and you’re single—’

  ‘I know, there’s a risk her husband would want Mount Hope, or at least Lilith’s half and he might even insist I pay him out. But you could prevent any of that in your will – specify that I’m to manage it, for grapes. I planted them; we planted them. I’ve pruned them every year and harvested alongside everyone else and I would do more only I have to the make cheese and milk the goat and cook … don’t worry about Lilith,’ she finished, ‘I’ll be fair.’

  ‘You could make her live in the shed,’ he suggested. Then said, ‘I’ll see about it.’

  ‘I will never run sheep or tear out your vines for wheat, oats, apples, anything.’

  ‘It’s an awful lot of work and your mother will object.’

  ‘She’ll be pleased when I’m here to care for you both in your dotage.’

  His face brightened and he leaned close to her, whispering conspiratorially. ‘A few more years, all going well, just a few more harvests and if we reinvest the returns we will triumph. Mark my words, Phoeba Crupp, one day this whole area will be covered in vines. Covered in them! My grandchildren, your grandchildren, will be rich.’ His face was ruddy with joy. He kissed his fingertips and placed them lightly on her cheek. ‘You are my cornerstone, Phoeba.’

  Later, Lilith came in and tore off her clothes, threw them in a pile on the floor and settled into her bed.

  ‘Turn the light down, Phoeba. I’ve gotten used to going to sleep in the dark.’

  Phoeba ignored her. Lilith turned the lamp down herself. Phoeba turned it up and as she opened her mouth to call out to her mother Phoeba snapped. ‘You are an incomplete person, Lilith. You have no tolerance, grace or generosity. You are motivated by your own superficial needs and sadly, it seems, you are indestructible.’ She waited for Lilith’s wail, but there was silence.

  ‘And why, Phoeba,’ asked her sister very quietly, ‘do you imagine that you’re not all of those things too?’

  ‘And you’re not very clever either.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to be,’ shot Lilith, tugging the sheet up to her ears. ‘You’ve got no sense of humour, Phoeba, and you’re … ungenerous.’

  Phoeba felt her equilibrium slightly rattled. She knew it was true. She could be sour – but only, she was sure, when she was around Lilith. Her sister brought out the worst in her. She went back to thinking about Rudolph and wondering what ‘unfettered liberty’ implied.

  Saturday, January 27, 1894

  There was a calm between the sisters when they woke on Saturday morning, and Phoeba did something she rarely did. While she laced Lilith’s corset – with its new strings – she asked her sister’s advice: what should she put on her face and skin.

  ‘Lemon and cow’s milk,’ said Lilith, with great authority. ‘Actually, Phoeba, you could look quite attractive if you put in some effort.’ Lilith sat her at the dressing table and stood behind her in her under-garments.

  ‘Now look,’ she said, pulling hairpins from the tight bun at Phoeba’s crown. She brushed her sister’s hair out then twisted it to a loose bun at her nape. ‘You look less like you’ve got a tomato stuck to your head now.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Phoeba, and wondered if Rudolph thought her bun looked like a tomato. Her hair did look nice, she thought, but it wasn’t appropriate for vineyard work. She wound it back into a tight bun and went to find her father at the start of the first row.

  ‘Right,’ he said, looping his thumbs into his vest pockets. ‘You must listen very carefully to everything I say, understand?’

  She nodded.

  ‘We have just gone through the stage of—’

  ‘Berry set. The tendrils have grown long and the flowers turned to berries.’

  ‘Correct. The grape is a conservative plant, it does not rush to growth in spring and it takes time to ripen. So deciding when to harvest is our most difficult and important task during the entire grape-growing and wine-producing process.’

  ‘Yes, Dad, and grapes must have good composition. Harvested too early, grapes will lack sugar. Low sugar means low alcohol content. In cooler climates grape sugar and flavour develop slowly. Overripe grapes lead to coarse taste and slow fermentation.’

  Maude called. They ignored her.

  ‘Right then, Miss know-everything, you can tell me when ripening has commenced.’

  Maude screamed from the veranda.

  Robert handed Phoeba the Collector. ‘You’re so good at everything – you shoot all the birds.’

  ‘I will,’ said Phoeba. Her father went to his wife, large and pink in her dressing gown, her corset strings dangling. Phoeba obediently shot at birds, then she harnessed Angela.

  Maude arrived at the sulky bound and strapped in her best brown silk taffeta carrying an overnight bag, a parasol and jacket, a purse and a handbag. Behind her, Lilith held a basket of Phoeba’s scarce eggs, cold meat and goat’s cheese for Aunt Margaret – Maude was off to help her empty the house in Geelong. But Lilith wasn’t dressed for town.

  ‘I offered Lilith new threads and embroidery patterns but she won’t come,’ sniffed Maude in her most hurt voice. ‘I’ll have to travel alone. And only last year a stoker was killed while they were crossing a particularly unstable bridge.’

  ‘He leaned out too far and fell from the cabin,’ said Phoeba.

  ‘Are you suddenly paraplegic, Lilith?’ asked Robert, perplexed.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Phoeba. ‘Lilith has taken up walking, haven’t you, Lilith?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m strengthening my ankles for the harvest dance.’

  Phoeba rolled her eyes.

  ‘Don’t look like that,’ said Lilith, sounding hurt. ‘She thinks it’s rot.’

  ‘It is not rot, Miss Impertinent!’ said Maude. ‘There’s nothing more debilitating than having a turned ankle. Why are you being like this, Phoeba? You are rude to our neighbours, you act like a boy working outdoors – so much so you’ll end up looking like you wash with harness soap. All I have done is try to bring you up to be a dutiful daughter and a nice young lady and you repay me by being pertinacious.’

  ‘Let’s get back to discussing why Lilith isn’t going to Geelong, shall we?’ said Phoeba, narrowing her eyes at her sister. ‘The focus has passed from Lilith to me.’

  ‘It’s that bump on the head!’ said Maude, turning her bottom to her husband so he could heave her into the sulky. ‘The dangers of country life. And I’ll need £10, Robert.’

  ‘Ten?’

  ‘For longcloth combinations – and the girls need undershirts. And while I’m gone you must do the thistles; the countryside is puce!’

  Robert drove. Spot neighed loudly at them as they drove through the gate but the rest of the trip to the shop was very quiet. They found Mrs Flynn uncharacteristically glum. She put her hands on her ample hips and said, ‘Well, you look a fright, don’t you, Phoeba Crupp?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Phoeba, gaily. ‘Just one ticket for Mother, please.’

  ‘Lilith not going? Sick is she?’ asked Mrs Flynn sticking her tongue behind her front teeth to concentrate on writing out the ticket.

  ‘Has my peach parer come?’ asked Maude, fanning herself with a medical pamphlet advertising cures for biliousness, constipation and urinary ailments.

  ‘Na.’

  Robert walked around the shop, his hands behind his back, peering behind coils of wire and lifting tins on the counter. He walked out on to the veranda, looked up and down and came back again. There was not a newspaper in sight.

  Feeling a scene brewing, Phoeba sat on a flour sack. Once, a long time ago, her mother had displeased Mrs Flynn by mentioning that there was rat dirt in the rolled wheat. A week later Robert had rus
hed to the shop and threatened legal action because Freckle wouldn’t deliver newspapers or mail. Mrs Flynn simply crossed her brown arms over her grubby apron and said cheerily, ‘Well you just tell me when I have to be at the law court and in the meantime you can ride to Geelong for your papers.’

  Robert had relented, apologised on behalf of his rude wife, declared that there must be rats in their own larder. Mrs Flynn had magically found a pile of newspapers a week old and Freckle arrived with a sack of mail that afternoon.

  ‘Mrs Flynn,’ said Robert, lightly, ‘we haven’t had any papers this week?’

  ‘There’s been a flood.’ She snatched the fare from his hand.

  ‘I know nothing about a flood.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t. You’ve had no papers.’ She fanned herself with Maude’s train ticket, one hand on her hip.

  In the distance, a faint train whistle screeched.

  ‘Do we owe Freckle money for papers or rabbits?’ suggested Phoeba.

  ‘They’re rabbits from our outcrop,’ hissed Robert.

  ‘He’s the one what traps them and skins them,’ said Mrs Flynn, indignantly.

  ‘And sells the skins,’ muttered Phoeba.

  ‘But it’s not money,’ said Mrs Flynn, putting her other hand on her hip, ‘it’s your sewing machine. It nearly killed him.’

  ‘I am deeply sorry,’ said Robert removing his pith hat and placing it over his heart. ‘I’ll make sure it never happens again.’

  ‘Killed him how?’ asked Maude, and as Mrs Flynn told them the story of the guard throwing the machine, a crimson flush crept up her throat and spread across her plump cheeks.

  ‘Surely,’ said Phoeba, ‘it’s between the guard and Freckle, it’s their war—’

  ‘But it’s your machine and machines is nothing but trouble if you arst me!’

  ‘Absolutely right,’ said Robert, ‘absolutely right. No more machines for us.’

  Mrs Flynn handed over the ticket and the newspapers as Freckle struggled past, heading for the siding and dragging a very large supply cart. It was a heavy, cumbersome, two-wheeled old thing with two thick shafts. Two lads Phoeba recognised from the itinerant’s camp walked behind the cart, their hands resting lightly on the back of it.

  ‘Do you want someone to help you pull, Freckle?’ called Robert, wobbling quickly from the shop.

  ‘Come,’ said Maude, bustling from the shop, ‘the train is arriving.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Phoeba as casually as she could, ‘if the new manager at Overton gets mail from England?’

  ‘He does,’ said Mrs Flynn, ‘but you’re too late for the stamps. Freckle collects them.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, wondering how to get Mrs Flynn to tell her more. Did he write back? To a woman? His mother?

  ‘Mysterious chap,’ said Mrs Flynn, sinking on her elbows to the counter. ‘That wagon Freckle’s got’s for a new stove. The guard telegraphed to say there was a great big iron stove had to be picked up and delivered. And it’ll be trouble too.’

  The subject of Rudolph had ended.

  The three boys lined up along the siding to watch down the line, their bare toes clinging to the edge of the sleepers.

  ‘The stove must be a wedding gift for Mrs Pearson,’ declared Maude.

  ‘You should get Mr Titterton to pick it up,’ said Phoeba to Freckle. ‘A stove’s a very heavy thing.’

  ‘We can make sixpence a mile,’ Freckle said, triumphantly.

  ‘Tuppence each,’ said the straw-headed kid with the grimy neck.

  The train appeared, the engine slid by and the carriages screeched to a stop.

  Robert boosted Maude up the steps and Phoeba handed the baskets and parcels to her through the window. Her mother looked nervous.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ said Phoeba, cheerfully.

  ‘You could have offered to come,’ said Maude, turning away.

  She could have, and probably would have once, but not today. A middle-aged woman with her daughter sitting opposite Maude was staring at Phoeba’s face, so Phoeba smiled at her. She commented that the weather was unseasonably hot.

  ‘Yes,’ said Maude, ‘it always is in this wretched place. I’m actually from Geelong, are you?’

  The mailman popped his head out of the goods van, looked at Freckle, his two friends and the cart and said, ‘Why did you bother bringing that big old cart across for?’ He waved his flag laughing uproariously, and Freckle was speechless with fury.

  There was no stove. It was one of the mailman’s tricks. Then Freckle’s face changed, revenge on his mind.

  The straw-headed boy said, ‘You still gotta pay us.’

  ‘We didn’t make any money.’

  The other boy shook his head. ‘We’ll have to burn your house down then.’

  ‘You’re a bunch of bloody extortionists,’ said Freckle. He threw his hat in the dirt, dancing in the dust, with his fists circling in front of him. ‘Put your dukes up, come on then.’

  ‘Right,’ said Robert looking at his fob watch, ‘we’ll have three rounds at a minute each, no hitting below the belt—’

  ‘Dad!’ cried Phoeba, grabbing the two itinerant boys as they squared up to Freckle. ‘Violence will get you nowhere.’

  ‘Bugger off, missus, this is business,’ said the straw-headed boy, and kicked Phoeba’s ankle.

  She biffed him over the back of the head; Freckle took a swing at his mate but he missed, and Freckle copped a punch. There was a terrible sound like cracking porcelain and blood ran from Freckle’s nose.

  Mrs Flynn came thundering across the lane and clouted the itinerant boys with a straw broom, sending them running.

  ‘I told you,’ she hissed, dragging Freckle by the ear. ‘Modern conveniences only bring trouble.’

  Robert and Phoeba arrived back at Mount Hope to find the last of the apricots and peaches were stripped from the trees and in the vegetable patch, carrots ripped from the soil, an entire row of lettuce gone, the bean bush torn from its trellis and lying in the dirt and a dozen rabbits grazing on the remaining radish seedlings because the gate had been left ajar. The sound of a fiddle wafted down from the outcrop.

  Lilith was nowhere to be seen.

  The itinerants were taking everything, bit by bit, but there was nothing she could do. She reminded herself they were unfortunate: the shearers didn’t want them, nor did the threshers. Her father needed them to harvest the grapes but they weren’t ready to harvest. And the vineyard looked so lush, so promising against the stunted grain crops and the rest of the parched country. In her mind’s eye Phoeba filled the entire landscape with great squares of vines. She imagined travellers returning each year to pick her grapes. They would help each other. She knew her family had done nothing to threaten their existence – on the contrary. She imagined an enormous corrugated-iron winery next to the dam, and outside it, the cart overflowing with fat, green bunches of grapes. Spot would be harnessed in front of it. He would be her first employee. But this theft, this pillage: this couldn’t go on.

  Below, in the yard, her father made his way to the house from the shed carrying his pipe and tobacco, wine jug and slippers. She smiled. With Maude away, he would throw her pillows on top of the wardrobe and put his ashtray on her dressing table.

  Lilith was late for tea, rushing in and plopping down, flushed and breathless. The top button on her blouse was missing.

  ‘I’ve been out walking,’ she declared, spreading a napkin on her lap.

  ‘You’ve got grass in your hair,’ said Phoeba.

  Robert stopped, his mouth open, a fork full of mashed potato and peas in his hand.

  ‘I lay in the grass to read a book,’ said Lilith, brushing the back of her head.

  Robert put his fork down. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Lilith paled. Phoeba played nonchalantly with the saltcellar.

  ‘You’ve never read a book in your life,’ he said, and ate his vegetables.

  Phoeba checked the animals before she went to be
d and her father locked and latched the doors, then took the Collector with him to his room. He leaned the gun against the dressing table and snuggled into bed with his pipe in his mouth and a glass of wine. He pulled the sheet up to his chin and farted long and luxuriantly.

  Next door, Phoeba lay in bed with her lamplight low, listening, waiting for the itinerants to come for more provisions – and raid their cellar, steal their goat. Spot would call out to her, she was sure. She looked over at her sister, angelic in the tousled white sheets, her pretty curls spread across the pillow. Phoeba knew what Lilith wanted and knew that nothing would prevent her from getting it. It occurred to her that, in that regard, they were not unalike.

  Sunday, January 28, 1894

  They woke to find nothing amiss. Spot followed Phoeba around the grapes and she discussed going to church with him.

  ‘I should go to support Henrietta and Hadley. It’s Widow Pearson’s wedding day. But people will stare at my face and I’ll have to talk about the bolting horse and describe the accident. Besides, we haven’t been invited, so Mrs Pearson will think we’re just coming to stickybeak. Or is that being too petty, Spot?’ She looked into Spot’s dark eyes but saw only her own reflection, long and top-heavy. ‘We’d better go and break the news to Lilith.’

  Robert was back in bed with his pipe and the newspapers. Lilith sat at the stove with her cold curling irons in her hand, rocking and wailing, ‘But I need to go.’

  ‘You can pray for your soul here,’ said Phoeba, knowing it was the pain of missing the wedding – and Marius Overton – that had upset her. ‘Why don’t you harness Angela and go?’

  ‘I don’t know how to drive the sulky!’ Lilith spat.

  ‘It’s the same as a brougham only there’s half as many wheels, horses and reins, but the church is the same as it always was and it’s still opposite Mrs Flynn’s shop.’

  ‘You just wait until Mother gets back, Phoeba. I’ll tell her —’

  ‘You will do no such thing!’ Robert stormed into the kitchen, threatening to tie Lilith to the sewing machine and throw her in the dam if she didn’t shut up.