by Joy Dettman
Joy Dettman was born in country Victoria and spent her early years in towns on either side of the Murray River. She is an award-winning writer of short stories, the complete collection of which, Diamonds in the Mud, was published in 2007, as well as the highly acclaimed novels Mallawindy, Jacaranda Blue, Goose Girl, Yesterday’s Dust, The Seventh Day, Henry’s Daughter and One Sunday.
Also by Joy Dettman
Mallawindy
Jacaranda Blue
Goose Girl
Yesterday’s Dust
The Seventh Day
Henry’s Daughter
One Sunday
Diamonds in the Mud
Joy
Dettman
PEARL IN A CAGE
Pan Macmillan Australia
First published 2009 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Joy Dettman 2009
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Dettman, Joy.
Pearl in a cage / Joy Dettman.
9781405039574 (pbk.)
A823.3
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Typeset in 11.5/13.5 pt Times by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
Pearl in a Cage
Joy Dettman
Adobe eReader format: 978-1-74198-643-3
Online format: 978-1-74198-587-0
EPUB format: 978-1-74198-755-3
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CONTENTS
Cover
About Joy Dettman
Also by Joy Dettman
Title page
Copyright
Dedication
BOOK ONE
THE MIDWIFE
THE RELATIVES
THE STRANGER
HOT GOSSIP
EXPECTATIONS
A CRUMBLING HOUSE
RECOGNITION
AN UNTIDY LIFE
THE BIRTHDAY
GROWING FAMILIES
DESERTION
AN AGREEABLE CHILD
THE RETURN
PAPER PETALS
AMBER’S ESCAPE
SIMILARITIES
LOST AND FOUND
THE PROPOSAL
OLD LOVERS
DISCOVERY
PROBLEM CHILDREN
CASH SALES ONLY
MAKING IT THROUGH
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
DISTANT PLACES
LOST AND FOUND
BOOK TWO
COMMUNICATIONS
MIRACLES
MRS MORRISON
DAFFODIL YELLOW
BLUE ANGER
SAND IN THE DESERT
RIPPLES IN THE CREEK
LIFE GOES ON
OF MUTUAL NEED
BIRTHS AND MARRIAGES
OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
ALL HIS WORLDLY GOODS
BABY BREASTS
LIKE WHITE SILK
THE LIMELIGHT
PEARLS IN GOLDEN CAGES
GALLERY OF FOOLS
GOLD CREPE AND BEADS
MEMORIES
THE RADIO QUEST
THE AFTERMATH
THE WINDOW
PILLS, PAIN AND NEWSPAPER
AMBER ROSE
FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
FORGIVENESS
UNIFICATION
DUFFY’S DOGS
THE WOODEN SPOON
THE BALL
EXPECTING THE UNEXPECTED
VINDICATION
THE SPIDER AND THE HORNET
CHOICES
SORTING THINGS OUT
SEPARATION
THE MIRAGE
Dedicated to my Mum. She’s dancing the Charleston in high heels, singing ‘Ramona’ – out of tune. She’s sweeping up stardust to powder her nose, playing hide and go seek with the moon.
To Don, who read the first draft of Pearl in a Cage as the pages came hot from my printer, and to Kay Readdy, insightful friend and trusted early reader, I offer my heartfelt thank you.
BOOK ONE
THE MIDWIFE
Until that December morning Gertrude Foote had found little good to say for Vern Hooper’s new motor car. It was noisy, it stunk to high hell, and she’d ridden more comfortably on a camel’s back. That morning, she blessed its noise and ran indoors. If he’d come on horseback, he would have caught her head down in a dish of water, rinsing the dye out of her hair. There were things folk needed to know and a lot more they didn’t, and that she dyed her hair was one of the latter.
There was little vanity in Gertrude. The dyeing of her hair wasn’t about vanity; it was a means of keeping old age at bay, that’s all, and so far it seemed to be working.
She had a lot of hair; it took a lot of rinsing, more than could be done in one dish of water, but with no time now to do more, she grabbed a towel and got it wrapped on turban fashion. She emptied that telltale rinsing water around the roots of her climbing rose, propped the tin dish upside down on her tank stand and before the car came puttering and spluttering into her yard, she was waiting for him behind her chicken-wire gate. It wasn’t much of a gate — tall enough to keep her chooks away from the house and garden, though offering minimal protection should that motor car turn feral. But he got the thing stopped and she opened her gate.
‘You put my chooks off the lay for a week every time you bring that thing down here,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with your horse?’
‘He’s out at the farm and I’m in here.’
Vern Hooper unfolded his lanky frame from behind the steering wheel. There was a good six foot five of him to unfold, plus a thatch of wiry steel grey hair to offer a few extra inches. Apart from his eyes, lost years ago in the creases of a farmer’s permanent squint, his features were of a size to suit his build — big nose, big ears, long jaw. By no stretch of the imagination could Vern be called a good-looking man.
‘Cecelia Morrison just dropped dead,’ he said. ‘Ogden wants you, Trude.’
‘I’ve got an alibi,’ she said, and was rewarded with a grin. There was something about Vern’s grin, sort of shy, a little lopsided, something about it that made his face look just about right to Gertrude.
‘Guilty by intent?’ he said.
‘Could be too. What happened to her, Vern?’
> ‘Something very sudden.’
‘I’m halfway through washing my hair . . .’
‘Finish it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing better to do.’
Christmas was over, the New Year not yet born, and as far as Vern was concerned, those few days between the two just wasted time. Six years ago he’d wed a widow with a modern sawmill and a nice house in town. She was no farmer’s wife. He’d put a manager in on his farm and moved into town to learn what he could about her sawmill.
There was money in Woody Creek timber; there always had been, though it was hard fought for until a few years back. Three big modern mills, to the north, west and east of the town, had changed all that. Six days a week folk lived with the constant shrieking howl of the big saws, the constant stream of bullockies hauling logs in from the bush, of drays hauling cut timber up to the railway yards.
There was a shocked, lost feeling to the town when the mills shut down over Christmas, a lonely, waiting feeling, which Vern shared. His wife didn’t enjoy having him underfoot. His housekeeper didn’t enjoy him poking around in her kitchen. He’d been roaming, looking for something to do, and now that something had happened.
He followed Gertrude into her house, which was only a house by reputation. Rough-built fifty years ago, it was a two-roomed hut, its front door opening onto a clutter of kitchen table, chairs, stove, cane couch, washstand, dresser, big old Coolgardie safe and no room to swing a cat — if she’d had one to swing.
‘What time did it happen, Vern?’
‘Your daughter found her around ten . . . in the dunny.’
‘No.’
‘Fact.’
‘No.’
‘As true as I’m standing here. She told Ogden she hadn’t sighted her mother-in-law since breakfast and thought she must have been lying down. She said she went down to the dunny and there she was, skirt up, bloomers down.’
‘Oh my God! What a place to breathe your last breath . . .’
‘Yeah, but as Moe Kelly said when he saw her sitting there, it’s sort of poetic justice.’
Maybe it was. Cecelia Morrison was an overweight, overbearing bugger of a city dame who’d suffered from a severe case of delusions of grandeur. She and her stationmaster son, Norman, had moved up to Woody Creek eight years ago, and two years after that, Amber, Gertrude’s only daughter, had wed Norman.
‘Amber must have got a shock.’
‘She’s running the show. Norman, being Norman, is . . . being Norman,’ Vern said, and no more needed to be said.
That marriage had been a recipe for disaster, even without a live-in mother-in-law. Gertrude had tried to talk some sense into that girl, but trying to stop Amber from doing anything she’d set her mind on doing was like bullfighting with a handkerchief for a cape.
A heavy brown curtain hung at a gap midway down the western wall of the kitchen. Gertrude lifted it and disappeared into her second room, as long, near as narrow, more cluttered than its mate and offering less light. The head of her double bed was against the southern wall, her dressing table squeezed in beside it. She had two unmatched wardrobes set along the western wall, and crates, trunks, boxes, piles of newspapers and sundry filling the northern end. It was an unholy mess she kept promising herself she’d clean up one fine day, but she had a fifteen-acre property to run and on fine days she was busy — and on the other days she was just as busy. For the past twenty-odd years she’d delivered most babes born in Woody Creek, then stitched them up a few years later, set the limbs of a few. Always someone at her door wanting something, always more pressing things to be done than housework. Anyway, her mess was familiar and as long as she moved nothing around, she could put her hands quickly on whatever she needed.
She removed her turban, tossed the stained towel over the foot of her bed, found a comb amid the general clutter on her dressing table and proceeded to do what she could with two foot of copper-brown hair. Without fail, she gave her hair a hot olive oil treatment once the dye was rinsed out. No time for that this morning. Maybe tonight.
A centre part and she combed it over her ears, pinned it so it would stay there, then plaited what was left, coiled it and reached for a pair of ivory pins, bought in Japan thirty years ago. They held the plait in place, the pins crossed like a pair of knitting needles, which didn’t sit well with her working trousers and boots, but folk were accustomed to the way she dressed — or most of them were.
She peered into a mottled looking glass, shrugged, then as a concession to her daughter, or her daughter’s dead mother-in-law, she swapped her faded shirt for another, swapped her working boots for light Indian sandals, then returned to the kitchen.
A tall woman, she hadn’t put on more than a pound in the past thirty years. Height and slimness ran in the Hooper family. Gertrude and Vern were cousins, or half-cousins. There was something of the Hooper line in the strong bone structure of her face, though she’d avoided the large features. Her mother had sworn that one of her forefathers was a Spanish pirate who’d captured his wife from Tahiti. There could have been some fact in that tale; Gertrude had the dark eyes and olive complexion; they gave lie to her fifty-four years, most of which she’d spent out of doors working like a navvy.
Vern watched her walk to the bottom end of the kitchen where she leaned down and spoke to someone he hadn’t known was there.
‘I have to go into town for a while, love. We’ll get you comfortable before I go.’
Vern squinted to gain a better view. Still seeing nothing, he walked down to where a ten- or twelve-year-old darkie was lying on a mattress against the back wall, half-hidden by a chest of drawers.
‘You’re at it again, you flamin’ halfwit!’ he said.
‘I brought her in the day before Christmas and didn’t give her a snowflake’s chance in hell, but you’re coming good, aren’t you, love?’
The kid didn’t look too good to Vern — she looked to be made of matchsticks, and one had snapped. There was a splint on her left leg.
‘She’s not one of old Wadi’s,’ he said.
‘I doubt it. He’s got two new women out there with him now.’
‘Where’s he got them?’
‘About eight mile out. They’re in that old trapper’s hut. Mini, the one who came in looking for me, is one of the mission girls.’
‘Why didn’t she go to them?’
‘Wadi done like mission,’ Gertrude said, doing a fair impression of Mini’s accent.
Old Wadi, a half-breed black who had inherited the worst of both races, had been hanging around Woody Creek’s perimeter for years, helping himself to what he needed at the time, be it mutton, beef or girls from the mission.
‘You’ll get folks’ backs up again, encouraging him into town.’
‘I’m not in town, and when did you know me to give a tinker’s curse what the good folk of Woody Creek have to say about me?’
‘Not often.’ He grinned.
He watched her carry that kid out to the lavatory and back in, watched her wash a pair of narrow little hands not a lot darker than her own.
‘She’s light-skinned,’ he said as she placed the girl back on her mattress.
‘She’s damn near white. Those mission folk need their backsides kicked for leaving kids like that out there,’ Gertrude said, cutting bread, spreading it with treacle and dripping, filling a mug with goat’s milk then stirring in a heaped spoonful of sugar. ‘I counted six kids and they all looked half-starved.’
She offered the bread and milk to the girl. ‘You drink the lot now. You eat every crumb.’
Wood poked into the firebox, its door closed with a slam, the flue closed, kettle moved to the hob, and she reached for a black wide-brimmed felt hat she’d owned ten years or more, not a feminine hat, and well worn.
‘If we’re going, we’d better get going,’ she said.
It wasn’t the first time she’d ridden in Vern’s car, though she still didn’t trust it. It stank of petroleum, and the knowledge that she was sitting on a tan
k full of stuff likely to explode didn’t instil her with confidence. It saved the saddling of her horse, and that’s about all she’d say for motoring, except that it got her the two miles into town in the time it would have taken her to bring Nugget down from his paddock.
Amber was in the kitchen with Ernie Ogden, the local constable, a stocky, freckle-faced bloke in his late forties, a likable bloke who Gertrude had known long enough, had had dealings enough with, to call by name. Norman and Moe Kelly, the undertaker, were in the parlour, a wall away from where the mound of poor old Cecelia Morrison lay on her bed, covered by a sheet Gertrude had no desire to lift. She’d spent the past four years dodging that woman when she could.
Ogden lifted the sheet. ‘Constipation can bring on a stroke,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them go like that before.’
‘A normal-sized heart in that sized body can’t be expected to keep on pumping, Ernie.’
‘She was sixty — so your daughter says. She must have had Norman young,’ Ogden said.
‘He’s not forty yet.’
‘Is that right! I would have thought he was my age. So, what do we write down?’
‘Heart stroke,’ she said. ‘Cover both options.’
A doctor may have made a more accurate diagnosis. If they were prepared to put him up for the night, they could bring one in on the train. In an emergency, if the emergency wasn’t too acute, they took the injured party down to Willama, thirty-nine miles of rutted road away. There were three doctors and a hospital down there. Gertrude handled the minor emergencies.
‘It is not an option, Mr Kelly!’
Norman was a wall away but there was no mistaking his voice. He didn’t sound like Woody Creek, didn’t sound like a stationmaster either; he might have made a good parson. Gertrude flipped the sheet back into place while Ogden opened the door. He wasn’t above eavesdropping. Nor was Gertrude. They stood side by side listening.
