Big River, Little Fish

by Belinda Jeffrey

  ‘I think the lambs are all about finished, Mot. Want to come by tomorrow and feed them? Reckon Dad’ll send ’em out with the rest of the flock soon. We could take the canoe down river for a way and take our lunch. What do you say, Mot?’

  ‘Come with me to check on everyone first?’

  Hannah smiles and punches him on the shoulder.

  Part of Tom wants to know what happened at the river with Harry, but the other part of him doesn’t. What bothers him most, he thinks, is the thought that she could be happy with someone else, somewhere else. Without him. Tom throws a rock at her feet and looks up to see headlights dancing through the darkness and the sound of an engine coming closer, grinding through the gears. Mr Guthrie’s ute coming back from the pub.

  ‘You know what kissing’s like, Mot? Like you’re swimming with your mouth. Biscuit likes you,’ she adds. ‘That was a lousy thing you did suggesting she kiss Harry.’

  Tom kicks the ground.

  Hannah stands and the headlights frame her body. The edge of her hair glows and Tom can see through her dress to the silhouette of her legs. He swallows and the feeling inside his chest is something he wants to shrink away from. She tilts her head to one side and waves. ‘You heard about Mum having a baby?’

  Tom nods.

  ‘Yuck, hey.’

  Tom waves as the ute disappears down the street. A cloud of dust settles at his feet.

  There was a time when he never thought about Hannah. Not like Tom does now. She was just there, a part of his life, like everyone else and he liked it better that way. Now he’s aware of her and he can’t help but imagine what it would be like if she was gone. He closes his eyes and imagines Hannah coming towards him, kissing him instead of Harry. But her face turns into Biscuit.

  Ted’s up earlier than usual and Tom finds him in the garage already, as he comes out of the house after snatching his breakfast from the bench. Ted’s whistling and he looks up, smiling. Tom finishes chewing the last of his cold piece of toast. He looks over into the corner of the shed to where the Caltex sign leans up against the workbench. Behind it, further to the back, Tom sees Harley. She’s been moved, slightly, and her sheet is gone. ‘Wherever you’re going, make sure you’re back in time for church,’ Ted says.

  A church pew must be the most uncomfortable chair ever made. Tom squirms on the seat and feels Marge’s eyes turning towards him. He makes one more effort to get comfortable before hearing Marge sigh. Miss Pinny sits in the pew directly behind him and he can feel her hatred on his neck. He gives up and sits still, tugging at his collar instead. He feels his hair springing free of the brylcreem he used to keep it in place. The congregation stands, hymn books in hand. It’s February, it’s hot and all Tom wants to do is feel Old Mother cooling him down. He’s thinking about her when Marge digs him in the ribs and clicks her tongue. Tom flushes and quickly picks up his hymn book, holding it open and singing from memory. Marge turns the book right way round.

  The sermon is longer today than most Sundays with the minister talking about the United Aboriginal Mission at Gerard near Berri. He’s asking for donations in addition to regular money in the plate. If only Hannah was Protestant, like him, then church might have something else going for it. But she’s Catholic and so is Harry and Wilson. Tom squirms again.

  It’s the better part of an hour and a half before Amen. It’s the one word Tom says with any conviction. He runs home to change.

  Tom has Murray’s letters in his pocket as he paddles the canoe with Hannah. It’s just the two of them alone on the river. Ducks honking by the side of the cliffs and Old Mother carrying them. No need for words and complications. An old river red gum trunk lies on its side, stretching across the water, thick roots sticking out into the air like broken teeth. It’s a favourite spot for pelicans; resting easy, waiting for fish. The skin sagging underneath their beaks, wings tucked back against their bodies. Now there’s a life, thinks Tom. Fishing from sun up to sundown.

  ‘So if I find more letters than you, you have to kiss Biscuit. And if you find more letters than me, I have to kiss a person of your choice.’

  Tom stops paddling, pulling his oar up to rest across the canoe. Water dripping from the ends in a steady run to the river. He turns around in his seat to face Hannah.

  ‘Come on, Mot. Or are you too scared?’ Hannah folds her arms across her chest.

  Tom reaches over the side of the canoe and wets his hand. He flicks Hannah with the water and she laughs. Her eyes change. Mischief. She wets her own hand and flicks him back as Tom grabs the sides of the canoe and begins rocking it.

  ‘Mot!’ Hannah says, ‘Don’t you dare!’ she tries sounding serious, but she laughs and Tom is smiling. ‘I mean it, Mot.’

  Tom stops rocking and reaches into his pocket, pulling out the packet of cigarettes to light one up. He breathes out the smoke and passes the cigarette over to Hannah.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, taking it from him. ‘Agree.’

  ‘And what will Harry say when I win?’ Tom takes back the cigarette.

  Hannah looks at him for a while, thinking. ‘He doesn’t have to know.’

  ‘Okay. You’re on,’ says Tom.

  ‘Good.’

  Hannah slips off the seat to lay her body along the floor of the canoe. ‘Come on,’ she says.

  They’re squashed together, side by side, head to toe in the canoe, looking at the sky. The canoe rocks slightly and Tom has no idea where they’ve drifted to.

  ‘You ever think about your parents doing it, Mot?’

  ‘You kidding,’ he says. Tom feels his hand resting against Hannah’s leg and brings both his hands up across his chest.

  Hannah laughs. ‘Gross, hey. I think your folks are too old. Probably past all that. Whereas my folks,’ Hannah pauses. ‘I’ve heard them some nights, you know.’ Hannah sits up, her legs still out straight. ‘Dad ignores her ninety per cent of his life. Then all of a sudden he’s sitting at the table after dinner and he looks at her. You know, like ... that. And then one morning, Mum’s rubbing her stomach and telling me she’s having a baby. And I think she’s happy. And my dad, you know what my dad says?’

  Tom shakes his head, he’d rather not be talking about this.

  ‘He says “it’s about time, Kate. You might turn out not to be such a bad stick after all.” Bad stick, Mot. That’s how much he thinks of her.’

  Hannah lies back down and they close their eyes and feel the sun’s warm breath on their skin.

  Big river, little fish.

  There Old Mother goes. Talking again.

  A year ago Tom went with Ted and Marge to a dance at the Swan Reach Town Hall. Tom pretended he didn’t want to go but he discovered he liked dancing and, whatever problem he had between his hands and brain and words, he didn’t have with his feet and music. He had a flair for it, even though it was his mother who claimed his time most of that evening.

  It’s a common opinion around the town that Kate Guthrie was the prettiest girl in her day, and that her looks haven’t disappeared. All that night, Kate Guthrie sat on her seat, smiling and the music going round and round. And Mr Guthrie outside talking to the Labor candidate for the next election. It wasn’t until the final set that Mrs Guthrie accepted an invitation to dance from Old Blake Finlay – after looking at the door every few minutes all night in the hope Ray would come looking for her – and turning Blake down at least three times. The last song had just started when Ray walked in through the doors and saw her there on the floor. He grabbed her hand and all but dragged her out of the door. Tom had been sitting with Hannah when that happened. She kissed him on the cheek that night. Before leaving. And he wonders now, what it would be like; to swim with his mouth.

  ‘Ah, Tommygun, you’re not trying,’ Jimbo whispers.

  They’re lying face down, up on their elbows in the grass by the river, with their slingshots out in front
of them. Bum-crack’s beer bottles are lined up along the jetty and so far neither Tom nor Jimbo have made a direct hit.

  Tom pushes his thoughts of Hannah aside and closes one eye. He pulls back on the slingshot in the fading light and lets the rock fly off. SMACK. The bottle smashes.

  ‘Get the bloody hell out of there!’ yells Bum-crack from his shack. Tom hears the sound of the screen door slamming and he and Jimbo jump up out of the grass and take off down the length of the river towards Jimbo’s shack.

  ‘I’ll get you, ya black bastard!’ Bum-crack is yelling. ‘I’ll shoot your black arse off!’

  ‘He still thinks it’s Murray Black,’ Jimbo laughs.

  Tom laughs, too, as he overtakes Jimbo. It feels good knowing Bum-crack is saying something to him. Anything is better than nothing. Yell all you like, Tom thinks. Come and get me, if you want.

  ‘Come back to my place and I’ll give you a rabbit to take home to your mum.’

  You can imagine what it would have been like back then in 1940. A black man from the mission, who shouldn’t have been so far from his work gang cutting mallee wood for the army quota, finds a woman leaning up against a tree. Dead. Blood leached into the ground, her dress pulled up and a baby, close to death, in her lap. So the black man picks up the baby and, thinking he should have something to wrap the little mite in, tears away at his mother’s dress for a strip of material wide enough to wrap him in. He soothes him with his little finger and walks all the way up Big Bend Road, down Victoria Street to the police station and its ‘hello, hello, what do we have here?’

  Black is made to wait at the station and all eyes are on him and everyone’s running up and down the street talking about it. Black in town. A white fella in his arms and a woman dead by the river.

  The police take off in their cars and the doctor, and a few townspeople, clamber into the Vita-Brits delivery truck and head on down to the river. A trail of suspicion puts him in the lock house for a week or more. Thought you could get a bit of money for a baby, did you, Black?

  Doctors take Tom in for a while until he’s sucking milk without a fuss from a bottle, but it’s Ted and Marge that take Tom home. They’d always wanted a baby of their own.

  ‘You could have taken me in,’ Tom said to Murray Black, once, and he just laughed.

  ‘You gotta lot to learn about the world,’ he’d said.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you, Tommygun,’ Jimbo said the first time Tom asked. ‘I moved here after you were born.’

  Tom breathes on the window in his room and draws through it with his finger. It’s become a habit before going to sleep. Mr Guthrie has his pipe on the veranda, Marge her cup of tea, Ted has Big Band Hour, for Tom it’s the window and his breath.

  Not long before she died, Miss Ladley brought in a bucket of fresh-picked lemons and had the class squeeze them into empty ink-pots. She handed out paintbrushes and clean sheets of paper and told everyone to dip the brush in the lemon juice and write a message to someone. Everyone thought she was crazy; who’d ever heard of writing with lemon? At first you could just see what you’d written as a faint wet trail on the paper before it dried, invisible. When the class was finished, she brought in her clothes iron and heated everyone’s page one at a time and the letters appeared, brown and steaming, like magic. Words from nowhere. She strung the paper sheets across the classroom, pegged to a string of rope and when the wind blew through the windows, they rustled like leaves. Even the smart kids had trouble reading what was written on them because it’s hard to write subsequent letters and words, to know where to place them and how big to make them, when the one before it has dried up and disappeared. That was the last time Tom remembers his own writing looking no better or worse than anyone else’s.

  The imprint on the window fades and shrinks, and is gone altogether. The window is just a mirror in the night and, looking at it this way, it’s as if he’s really there, on the other side looking in. And it’s that person, that Tom, who must know how to write the right way round.

  BIG RIVER

  March 1956

  It’s a shock for Tom to see Mrs Guthrie standing at the door. A small pile of books in one hand, a string bag in the other. Her stomach slightly rounded against her dress. Tom hadn’t thought to ask who his afternoon teacher was going to be. In not thinking about it, perhaps it would go away.

  ‘Mrs Guthrie spent a year in teacher’s college, Tom,’ Marge says, walking forward to take the pile of books from Mrs Guthrie’s hand. ‘Come in, make yourself comfortable,’ she points to the kitchen table.

  Tom leans against the wall, watching Mrs Guthrie settle herself at the table. Stacking her pile of books, laying out the chalk on the slate. Marge sets a plate of scones on the tablecloth and a pot of tea in a green tea cosy. She smiles again, her cheeks rosy with anticipation, and touches Tom on the shoulder as she passes through to the passage. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she says, disappearing from the kitchen.

  Mrs Guthrie pats the seat of the chair beside her. ‘I won’t bite, Tom. Promise.’

  Tom can’t think of any option other than to sit down. He walks slowly to the chair and Mrs Guthrie pours them both a cup of tea.

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Let’s see where things are at.’ She smells like fresh oranges and sweet milk and she smiles and her voice is soft and gentle and Tom doesn’t like it at all. She looks like Hannah, only wiser. And it doesn’t feel right having her here, staring at his inadequacies. But there is Harley, and Tom’s promise. And underneath it all, buried somewhere inside himself, there might even be hope.

  It’s a poor start. Tom doesn’t know how much of his problem Marge explained to Mrs Guthrie, how much of a dunce she was expecting to work with, and there’s no clue in her expression, either. Tom can’t tell whether she’s shocked or surprised as she finishes their session by saying, ‘Well, Tom, I think that’s enough for one day.’ Perhaps she’s relieved to be finished.

  Marge appears at the kitchen door. ‘How did we go?’

  ‘Tom did well,’ Mrs Guthrie says, gathering her things. ‘Thank you for the tea.’

  ‘No trouble at all. See you again tomorrow, then.’

  Mrs Guthrie nods.

  ‘And you’re sure five afternoons isn’t too much bother?’ Marge says.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Pardon?’ says Tom.

  ‘Not now, Tom,’ Marge says to him holding the door open for Mrs Guthrie. She waves and watches her leave before closing the door and facing Tom.

  ‘But you said I could have an afternoon–’

  ‘You’ll have the weekends. You need the help and that’s all I’m saying on the matter. Run down to the post office and collect the mail, will you, Tom.’

  Tom walks along the road with a handful of rocks and he throws them on the ground one at a time with as much force as he can muster. ‘Damn writing, damn reading. Damn everything,’ he mutters under his breath. Weekends aren’t enough. There’s everyone down the river, helping his father in the garage. It feels to Tom like he’s a clock with hands too short to reach every hour.

  The sun is going down and over to his right, down the hill from the milk bar, Old Mother flows on by like he’s been left behind. He’s caught in a snag and no matter how hard he struggles, he can’t break free.

  Tom collects the mail from the post office and stops in at the milk bar. He tucks the letters under his arm and points to the jar of humbugs, holding up two fingers. He hands over the pennies and puts both humbugs in his mouth.

  Outside, his cheeks bulging he walks around to the side of the building and sits down with his back against the wall. He squashes ants under his shoe and, after a while, closes his eyes against the sun. His entire day has been stolen, but no one cares.

  ‘Mrs Partridge, afternoon.’

  Tom hears a couple of women leave the shop, the small bell tinkling after them.

 
‘You hear that Kate Guthrie is taking on that Tom. Giving him lessons.’

  Tom opens his eyes. The humbugs have stuck to the inside of his cheeks and he swallows to wet his mouth.

  ‘Lost cause from what I hear. I heard Jan at market the other day say that Ted suspended his car magazine subscription and Marge changed her hair appointments to every six weeks instead of four. And there were four parcels of sausages in her basket and no steak that himself likes.’

  ‘Always said them automobiles weren’t honest work. Can’t be doing so well.’

  ‘Bit rich, I say. Asking her of all people to come and help them now.’

  Tom jumps up with the letters in his hands and runs all the way back home. He throws the mail on the kitchen table and races back outside for his bike.

  ‘Tom!’ Ted calls, sticking his head out of the garage door. ‘Tom!’

  But Tom pedals hard and soon there’s a warm wind in his face and he’s breathless with the effort and the road is the only way out.

  Tom sits by the lambing fence picking grass from the ground and throwing it into the breeze. The sound of it tearing, its squeaky resistance, becomes a comforting rhythm.

  He wanders down the paddock, away from the lambs, to where the scrub grows wild. He kicks at the ground, swings his arms around, and lets his body move whichever way he wants. He stretches out his hands and spins around.

  The earth has a smoky smell and Tom begins digging the ground with a pointed stick. He jimmies it around the mallee roots, scooping away the dirt so ropes of mallee root arch up out of the ground. The sun is falling quickly and tree trunks turn to shadows. He looks among the exposed roots for shapes that might resemble letters, hacking away portions from the root mass, cutting and shaving the shapes. By the time the light has all but completely gone, there’s a small cluster and he fingers each one of the shapes, sorting them into two piles. When he’s finished, he throws one pile out into the darkness and considers each shape in the other pile carefully, one at a time. Squinting, he rotates them, flips them upside down, back to front, and to the side. They’re like spark plugs and pipes and cranks and shafts and these letters, this tangible weight in his hand, almost makes sense. Tom finds two letters out of the spaghetti of roots and pockets them before rubbing his hands together to loosen the excess mud, and wiping the rest away on his pants.