by Carmel Bird
One other wistful memory I have of Edda is that she would tell us of how, when she was a young girl, she went to Paris with her family for a wedding. It was in the church in the Rue du Bac, and Edda was very impressed by the prettiness of the pale pictures of the virgin on the walls. Then outside, as the bride and groom were being showered with rose petals, and the bells were ringing, a strange man shouldered his way through the happy crowd and seemed, Edda would say, to make a beeline for her alone. He was wearing a grey hat and a black cloak from the shoulder of which fluttered ribbons of many colours. He bent down and whispered in her ear, offering to sell her ‘time’. In French he offered her, for the price of one franc, ten years of life.
But you don’t even understand French, Aunt Edda, we would say, and she would say—ah, but that was the miracle, I understood him.
And you paid him?
Off courz I paid him. I take off my glove and I open up my little red velvety purse and I count out my coins, one, two, three, all of them, they are jinglingjangling in there all through the weddingz. Exactly one franc, it was as if he was knowing. He gave me a grey piece of paper with Latin writing on it. A certificate of time it was called. I fold it up as tiny small as can be.
So where is the paper now?
Ah, the paper. I looze the paper, but I have the years, I have my ten years extra.
You can’t prove it.
I do not have to prove it, I am here, you zee, that provez it. You get the idee?
And she would pass her hands over her eyes as if to summon the man in the cloak from the shadowy lichen-dyed cloak of her own dreams and imaginings and hopes. Whenever I recall Aunt Edda, I feel my heart lift, feel my own spirit infuse with the lilting childish optimism of her voice, with the glow of something like truth in her round pale eyes.
Tell us about the baby and the cat, we would say, and she would tell us about the floods in 1421, the Saint Elisabeth floods. It seemed to us that she had been there, that maybe she was the baby girl in the cradle.
And the dyke break up and the waters they come surging through the windows and the doors and slapping and walloping up up up to the nursery floor and the nurse goes flop and she does not have a minute to even zgream she is gone. Only her little white frilly bonnet—Dutch girl—goes floating and bobbing, still as little potato in her knitty pink jacket. And up up from the floor floatz the little rocking wooden cradle where baby Edda (was that you? Ah, I am not saying) baby Edda sails out onto the tricking ricking rocking water. She is doomed. She will drown. The winds fly down on her and spin spin her round and round and the waves go up and the waves go down and all along the wide water the windmillz cry out like great big giants in pain and they wave ze arms whirly whirly clackety clack clack clack! Then zuddenly, zuddenly the little grey cat come from nowhere flying along the rooftopz, wheee she goes, straight she flies—out to the rocking rim of ze little hood roof of the little Edda’s cradle. And all through the night, and all through the day of the great Saint Elisabeth flood, that little cat she runz, she runz backwarz and forwarz and backwarz and forwarz and the rocking cradle sails along on the terrible waters and I tell you, the baby iz safe and sound and warm and dry and she never even cries. She never even cries a very little bit-bit. And the brave little grey cat and the brave little baby they live happy ever after.
We had an uncle who lived on the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land at a place near Strahan, and from time to time he would parcel up some lichen from the graveyard on the headland there, and send it to Edda in the mail. You would have thought someone had sent her a packet of diamonds, she would be so excited. The colours she got from the lichens and all the other things were all shades of rust and ochre and saffron and grey and lilac and green. They were very very beautiful, I realise that now, the sort of thing that arts councils prize highly, and that sell for a fortune in tourist outlets. But back then we hated the colours of our clothes, and we also hated the knitting patterns that were so different from the things other kids were wearing. Sometimes the differences were subtle, like a certain kind of collar Edda used to do, but the other kids could pick them every time. The needles Edda used were made from tortoise shell—what, I asked her once, the shells of real tortoises? And she said in astonishment that of course they were real tortoises, what else? ‘What would ellz they be, you zilly boy?’ Tortoise shells for knitting needles and hair combs, elephants’ tusks for the keys of the old piano. The wonderful world was full of all manner of useful material.
From the forked branches of a gum tree at her back door Edda used to hang the dyed fleece out to dry. It was known as the haberdashery tree, and whenever I see one of those particular gums I think of Edda, remember her tree dripping and dangling and flapping with clouts of coloured wool. After the spinning came the winding into skeins. For this a child had to stand for a long time with its arms held up as if about to embrace a lover, hands stiff and draped with wool, while Aunt Edda stood in front rapidly winding the wool into a ball over the fingers of her left hand. We cried because our arms ached, but she was relentless. While we are on the subject of Aunt Edda, I must add that her brother, Uncle Willem, must have been inspired or infected by the idea of the lichen, because when he became a herbalist, he used to go to a place in Russia every five years or so to collect the lichen from a particular stand of trees. He put this stuff into one of his cures for cancer. I think it’s worth noting that he lived to be one hundred and three. He was a Hobart eccentric, living for years in rooms on the top floor of Hadley’s Hotel, and celebrated for his impeccable grey suits and burgundy silk cravats with a diamond pin.
Aunt Edda appeared to be a childless widow, and I just assumed she was. But she had in fact had a daughter. One day I was looking through a box of old photos.
‘Who’s this?’ I asked, having unearthed a whole series of hand-tinted pictures of a fat, round-faced, blonde child in a pink and green dress, her arms around a large dog.
‘Put those away,’ my mother said in a quiet and warning tone, ‘that’s Dorothea.’
‘Who?’
‘She was Aunt Edda’s daughter. She died when she was very young.’
‘How? I didn’t know Aunt Edda had any children. How did she die?’
‘As a matter of fact, if you must know, she ate a hydrangea.’
‘A hydrangea?’
‘Yes. They’re very poisonous. Now put those pictures away. And promise me you will never say anything about Dorothea to anybody. Let sleeping dogs lie. She has been forgotten now, and that’s for the best. Poor Edda was destroyed, but she had to get on with her life. It broke up her marriage. There were no more children. It was a terrible terrible thing, Paul.’ My mother was weeping.
It is so vivid to me, that scene with my mother, the tone of her voice, the sadness of the pictures, hastily tipped back into their box, never to be seen again. I had known that Aunt Edda’s husband was killed in an accident on the Hydro, but this was a whole new dimension. An unknown dead child, poisoned by a common flower. It was one of those key moments in childhood when you see the abyss opening up at your feet. I suppose it’s called growing up. No wonder Edda was a bit nutty—but as I say, she was also very loving and sweet. In retrospect I realise how wonderful it was that she could pour so much love on us. But it was also eerie that she would send us to the cemeteries all the time.
My thoughts have often returned, in moments of reflection, to Dorothea and the hydrangea. Her parents and forebears had survived the wars in Europe, had travelled to this strange remote and hostile place on the edge of civilisation to fashion a haven, ultimately to carve a bright future, had found a safe place for Dorothea to run and play in the sunlight, far from the guns, bombs, pollution, starvation, death camps and insanities of the old world.
And then one day, as sunlight quivers in the tops of the eucalypts, as it dapples the path, and dew sparkles on the grass that is sugared and sprinkled and spangled with daisies, through the gate, past the bleeding furrow of a swathe of Flanders poppies, skipping
on chubby legs, her hair a saintly nimbus, her pinafore a sensible shade of mustard, comes Dorothea. She is three years old.
Leaning over a new stone wall, sheltered by a stand of thick reptilian ferns, is a luscious bush of puffy ragged hydrangeas, ready-made bouquets for brides and ladies. Dorothea settles on the wall, and she reaches out to cup the flowers with both hands. Her guardian angel, thinking the child is part angel herself, and therefore safe from lightning strikes and falling trees, snakes and tigers and raging rivers, has left her to her own devices. Dorothea arranges a small tea party for the fairies who live in the hedge. Her neat little fingers nip from the hydrangea bush the tight curled flower buds, and then she places these in tidy piles on plates made from leaves all along the warm stones of the wall. Time passes and the fairies do not eat their portion; Dorothea nibbles hers, nibbles theirs, until only a few traces of the buds remain.
Dorothea hops down from the wall and returns to the house, where she sits on the verandah on a small willow chair next to her grandmother who is shelling peas. She nibbles on a pea or two. And shortly doubles up with a pain that is attributed to the effects of the fresh peas. What else did you eat? Flowers. Dorothea goes into convulsions, with fever, violent vomiting and diarrhoea, is put to bed, the doctor called for, she goes blue. By the time the doctor arrives she is in a coma and beyond help. They find the hydrangea buds in her apron pocket, and the remains of the fairies’ feast out on top of the new stone wall.
Dorothea’s pictures are put away, lost until I bring them to the surface many years later, and her short life and her tragedy have had the time to acquire the haven and the patina of legend. I am still afraid of hydrangeas, and during childhood I was phobic about them. At the sight of their powder puff pink and blue bunches the memory of the photographs of Dorothea and her dog comes swiftly to the surface of my mind, hangs before my vision like an hallucination, a warning of treachery and danger. I still think ‘hydrangea’ rhymes with ‘danger’.
I searched for Dorothea’s grave in the cemetery at Woodpecker Point, and when I didn’t find it I tentatively asked my mother where it would be.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they buried her in the orchard. You know the little statue of a girl with a duck? That’s where she is. There’s a beautiful climbing rose that goes all over the fence there—I think it’s Reine Marie Henriette.’
‘Why didn’t they put up a headstone?’
‘Well, Edda wanted just the statue and the roses. I don’t know.’
The tone of impatience and discomfort had returned to my mother’s voice. It’s a tone that says stop asking questions if you know what’s good for you. So that’s all I know, really, about Dorothea.
I told my brothers and sisters about the life and death of Dorothea, and Anika, my most sentimental sibling, and I went out to the orchard and paid our respects to the weathered statue of the girl and the duck, and we picked an armful of the brilliant cerise blooms from Reine Marie Henriette who had gone completely mad all up and down the orchard fence. We took the roses home, and my mother knew where we had got them from, but she said nothing. There would forever be unspeakable pain surrounding the memory of Dorothea. She is a tender loss, a gap in the emotional landscape of the family. I begin to understand why Edda told the story of the baby in the cradle with the cat. And as I think of Dorothea now, my thoughts run ahead to the chasm that is the lost village of Skye, where many many Dorotheas died, where one hundred and forty-seven people were incinerated in 1992.
I must now return to the day I first saw Caleb Mean, the child who would grow up to eliminate his family, his community, in one cataclysmic hit. Come with me to the picnic at Duck River. The ski-mask we had for the truth game was a hideous rust and slime coloured stripy stocking that covered your whole head, with red-rimmed holes for eyes and mouth, and a little red tuft on the crown for decoration. Somewhere in Peru there’s a glacier where people go to worship at a shrine of El Niño, and they wear truly grotesque masks just like ours. Well, I, free at least of my pirate’s black patch, was sweating under the woolly mask—and under the probing questions of Anika, trying to lie my way out of questions about tobacco and alcohol and sex and violence and theft and lying itself—when a vision appeared as if out of nowhere. It was a boy with pale gold hair which was cut short and that stuck out at all angles like the leaves of a pineapple, or perhaps the spines of a hedgehog, and he had fine English skin, huge pale ice-blue eyes, and a mouth full of the most enormous dazzling teeth I have ever, even to this day, ever seen. And although his teeth were ugly, his smile was incredibly and strangely attractive. He was dressed in a white suit, like a little band-leader, with silver lapels, and he was suddenly there, above us, beside the old she-oak, gleaming with a supernatural radiance. He looked ridiculous, yet he had the power to suck our whole attention towards him. There was never a moment when we might have laughed or thrown stones at him. He was a magnet, a star shining above us. And there was about him a look of the wild-haired boy with the huge long fingernails on the cover of Struwwelpeter—awesome, angel/demon, and yet, in him I think we saw something of ourselves. That was the truly strange, compelling and disturbing thing, that when we looked at Caleb Mean, we were looking at ourselves, our deepest hopes and fears, our souls.
We looked up.
I imagined at first that he had come upon us by chance when he was out for some celestial stroll, but when we discussed it afterwards we decided he must have sought us out, must surely have come after us. He had his say, which was actually brief enough, but it seemed, coming from his lips, to be a magical incantation that could make time stand still. Then he raised his arms in blessing and returned to a white panel van that had crept up towards him, his father at the wheel. We were part of their mission to the world. Why didn’t they stay to enlist us? I don’t know. Perhaps he was just practising on us, perhaps we were merely a step along his way. Were we his entertainment? He certainly was ours. Astonished, I peeled the mask from my prickly red face, squinting in the light. We all stopped as if frozen or paralysed, staring up at the figure above us, and he, calling more or less to the air and the clouds, shouted in a voice that rang with hysterical conviction: ‘He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.’
We didn’t know the Bible well enough to realise that he was reciting Psalm 147. It sounded so beautiful and magical, pouring from the lips of this skinny boy in his shiny clothes. And that was all he did—he called the Psalm to us, his audience transfixed below the rock. Then he blessed us with his open arms and his sparkling teeth, fixed in a frightening grin, then he went. I have after-images of a swirling silver cape, a crackling of sparks as his heels struck the ground, a plume of dust as the van sailed off, gathering speed, sailing in a kind of haze, disappearing over the horizon. It wasn’t really like that, I know. It was a mundane enough departure, yet the storyteller of the mind likes to import the trappings of drama and fantasy—something comic-book, something nightmare, something of sinister promise.
We stood there blinking for a minute, then we ran back to the picnic spot to tell everyone what had happened. We were all talking at once, but the folks could understand well enough that the Preacher Boy from out at Skye had paid us a flying visit, and they were none too pleased. The settlement at Skye was viewed with deep suspicion, even fear, and the legend of the Preacher Boy was one of the more colourful scandals of the place.
‘That boy never went to school. It’s criminal what they’re doing to him. There are laws that say children have to go to school, but those people can do as they like, they can get away with anything. They should be reported to the authorities.’ And so on. The smoke from the men’s pipes drifted in the air, a silent accompaniment to the fascinated outrage of the women.
They had ‘been reported’ plenty of times, but the authorities considered them harmless, living as they did in apparent peace and harmony on a stretch of country that was to all intents and purposes otherwise god-forsaken, on the sea coast, just outside governmen
t land. My family had a special interest in them because one of my mother’s cousins—a weird and beautiful girl called Betje—had ‘got mixed up with them’ and had eventually married a strange man called Jethro Mean. My family could not know, as they gossiped and discussed the wrong-headedness of Caleb’s education, that the lives of Betje and Jethro and their children were in fact so skewed that they were on a course to grotesque disaster and tragedy. And leading them on would be the Preacher Boy who had just mesmerised all of us from the top of the rock.
The other very memorable time I saw Caleb Mean as a child was one day at an Agricultural Show in Burnie. I was about six, on the merry-go-round, sitting in the swan-boat with my brothers and sisters, and there, up ahead on the wildest white horse with the maddest fire eyes and the flying foamy mane tipped with gilt, sat Caleb, so regal, so shiny, so silver, his head thrown back in a kind of ecstasy, holding on to the gold barley-sugar pole like a great straight sceptre. The carousel went round and round and the white horse rode slowly up, slowly down, to the blaring music of the fairground, amid the smells of the cows and the sheep and the fairy floss, pink as clouds in the sunset. You had to look at him; you could not look away.
