by Joy Dettman
‘Keep your hand in that bucket for as long as you can stand it,’ she said.
He couldn’t stand it, so she took his wrist and plunged the hand in again.
By the sixth or eighth plunge, the water in the bucket had lost a degree or ten and when she told him to leave his hand in the water, he did as he was told.
She made up a poultice of bread and boracic acid, crushed garlic and enough honey to bind the mess into a paste, then she plastered it over the wound and bound it there with sheeting. She emptied the last of her brandy into a glass, sweetened it with honey, soured it with the juice of a lemon, crushed two aspirins into it, added a dash of boiling water.
‘Drink it.’
‘I can’t keep anything down.’
‘You’ll keep this down. Drink it.’
‘I’m not a drinking man.’
‘Stop arguing, Vern, and do as you’re told for once in your life!’
He drank it, and when it stayed down, she saddled her horse and rode into town for salt, metho, aspirins and a bottle of rum, known to heat the blood faster than brandy.
Gertrude’s treatment was never pretty and usually painful, and the more she learned about healing, the more she knew how little she knew. She treated infections with heat and salt. She’d seen it work in the old days, and she’d make it work on Vern. She loved that pig-headed fool of a man; she may not have wanted to live with him, but she didn’t want to live without him.
Every two hours, on the hour, she prepared that scalding bath for his hand, and that night, she helped him to her bed then offered a larger dose of her rum and honey brew. She told him to sip it, but he emptied the glass and it went to his head.
‘Get in with me, Trude.’ It was the first time he’d been invited into that bed.
‘You’d be lucky to raise a finger tonight, my lad.’
‘Hop in, and we’ll find out.’
‘There’s two kids a wall away. Go to sleep.’
‘I tried to get them further away and the bugger foiled me. One kiss, my bonny sweetheart . . .’
‘You’re drunk,’ she whispered, but she leaned down and kissed his lips.
‘That’s not a kiss. That’s an insult.’
‘I need two good hands to hold me, darlin’,’ she said, escaping his one good hand. ‘When you’ve got two, I won’t insult you.’
‘Promise?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’
‘You’ll marry me?’
‘A weekend in Willama. Now go to sleep.’
He was snoring peacefully when she bedded down on the couch, a hard bed, but she’d slept on worse.
Three nights he spent in her bed, and for three days he spent a good percentage of his daylight hours with his hand in that bucket of steaming saltwater. On the second day the poison stopped creeping up his arm, and by the second evening the swelling in his hand started centring where it had begun, in his wedding finger. On the third morning, the wound exploded, and what came out of the hole she’d dug had to be witnessed to be believed. He didn’t believe it, but he started mixing his own saltwater.
He drove home on the fourth morning, promising to follow her instructions to the letter. It took a week for the infection to ooze away, and when it did, and that hand, though peeling, was back to its dinner-plate dimensions, he held her, kissed her and told her she was an independent bugger of a woman and he’d never loved another and how about that trip to Willama.
In March, she left Elsie in charge and kept her promise. They planned another trip in April, but Lorna brought Jimmy home in April.
‘You’ll have to stay home to care for him,’ Vern said. ‘I’m run off my feet right now.’
Lorna had engagements in the city. She was involved with a bunch from the university, intent on changing the world.
Through May and June, Jimmy remained in Woody Creek, and what was a man supposed to do with a nine-year-old boy who didn’t like sheep and ran from the dogs when Vern took him out to the farm? And what the hell could he do with a boy who couldn’t stand the noise of the mill when Vern took him there, who came home worrying that his nose or his lungs were full of sawdust, who wandered around half of the night afraid he was suffocating?
Vern hired a maid to help his housekeeper and he started leaving the boy home in their care, until he came home one afternoon to find Jimmy washing dishes in the kitchen wearing the maid’s apron. The boy seemed happy enough, but he had too much of his mother in him already without putting on a woman’s apron.
In July, Vern took him back to his schoolmasters. In September, Lorna and Margaret brought him home. They stayed two nights, then he was on his own.
Whatever Vern might have felt for Norman Morrison, respect had never come in high on that list, but with that boy like a millstone around his neck, he found himself drawn more often to the station to have a smoke with Norman while Jimmy sat around drawing or looking at books with a four-and-a-half-year-old girl.
‘I was running amok at his age,’ Vern said.
‘Children are not always what their parents hope they’ll be, Vern,’ Norman said.
In October, he had a smoke with Norman and ended up inviting him and the girls around to share his Sunday evening meal. Jimmy and Cecelia were of similar age. If his boy wanted to play with girls, then Vern might at least supply him with one his own age. Norman accepted the invitation, and Vern went on his way to the post office, Jimmy left to play.
Wished he could take that invitation back when he picked up his mail and saw a letter wearing an English stamp and postmark. Didn’t want to open it. Took it home and sat looking at it for ten minutes before he found the nerve to see what was inside it.
‘Christ save me from that,’ he said.
Henry Langdon was Vern’s first wife’s younger brother. Vern had met him a week before their wedding, then spent the next three months trying to get rid of him. England was half a world away. Folk who made the trip felt obligated to get their money’s worth before making that trip home. Langdon had made the trip a second time to see his sister’s grave and to meet his motherless niece. Now he wanted to repeat the exercise, and he was bringing his wife with him.
Vern pitched the letter, and damn near got his housekeeper who’d come in to see what he wanted. He wanted his flamin’ youth back; that’s what he wanted. Twenty-four when he’d wed Lorna Langdon, who had looked much like her daughter and been seven years Vern’s senior. If the truth be told, he’d wed her for her five hundred pounds a year — and because Gertrude had gone sailing around the bloody world with Archie bloody Foote.
‘Visitors,’ he explained to his housekeeper, picking up the letter. ‘Visitors you can’t get rid of.’ He pitched the letter at his table, watched it slide down the polished surface. ‘And we’ve got more on Sunday evening. The Morrisons. Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what his kids eat.’
They were good eaters. Maybe they weren’t accustomed to much. The older girl’s table manners made Jimmy look like a young gent. Little Goldilocks used her fork as a spoon. A silent meal, just the scrape of knife and fork. Vern had other things on his mind, namely Henry Langdon. He had nothing in common with him. And not much in common with Norman. He looked at Jimmy and Cecelia and knew that all they’d ever have in common was their age. He wouldn’t be repeating this exercise.
Then Jimmy disappeared and didn’t return. Cecelia took to roaming his house, picking up things she shouldn’t have been touching, while Goldilocks sat on the floor as close to the wireless as she could get, watching for the little men to fly out. Vern had picked up a station playing decent music. Listening to it gave him a reason for silence. Between songs, he and Norman managed a few words to say about Melbourne, a few to say about the weather, then Vern went looking for Jimmy and found him reading in his room.
‘We’ve got guests, lad. Get yourself out to the sitting room and do the right thing by those girls.’
The boy was obedient, Vern would say that much. He followed his father back
and sat beside Jenny, near the wireless.
Jessie Macdonald had already told her that there were no little men in wirelesses and no racing horses either. She’d said there were records inside, though she hadn’t known how the horse racing her father listened to got inside.
‘Are records inside that, Jimmy?’
‘No. They play them on transmitters that turn them into air waves, and inside the wirelesses they’ve got valves and things that catch the waves and turn them back into . . . into music.’
‘Even racing horses can make . . . make the waves?’
‘Everything can.’
‘What does . . . what do the valves look like?’
He pointed to the electric light globe. ‘A bit like that globe, but they just make . . . like red spots instead of light.’
‘You have a bright boy,’ Norman said.
‘He’s bright enough,’ Vern said. ‘Bright enough to get out of going to school. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. Don’t know what I’m going to do with any of them. And I’ve got a pair of mad pommy relatives coming over to spend Christmas with me and I don’t know what I’m going to do about them either.’
Whichever way you looked at it, 1928 had been a bad year for Vern, first with Gertrude refusing to move in, then his lanky daughter developing her communist leanings, and his other fool of a girl stuck to Lorna’s elbow, following wherever she led and without the brains to know into what she was being led. He wanted those girls out of that city — or wanted Lorna out of it before she got herself and her sister into trouble. He’d never concerned himself greatly with Margaret, who had about as much Hooper blood in her as that little goldie one — now attempting to get her head inside the back of his wireless — had Morrison blood.
That thought sent a jolt through Vern. It shook up a decent dose of guilt from deep down inside him. Norman showed no preferential treatment with those girls — and if he did, his leaning was towards the little one. The reverse applied with Vern. He’d always treated Margaret as a ring-in, had more or less ignored her. Not that she’d missed out on anything. He’d spent as much on her schooling as he had on Lorna’s and more on her clothing. It was just money, though. He’d spent no love on that girl, wasted none of his dreams on her — blamed her for her bloody mother’s trickery and nine years of hell, that’s what he’d done.
He sat watching Norman while some tenor filled the small sitting room with his voice and that little girl sat enraptured, head up, hands clasped, knees folded, Norman watching her, pride enough shining out of that man’s hangdog eyes to light the room — until his other girl whinged to go home. She washed the pride away.
Maybe the night wasn’t a total waste of time. Maybe Vern learned something about himself. Gertrude spent a lot of time calling him a pig-headed man, telling him Margaret was a better daughter to him than Lorna would ever be. And maybe she was. She was the one who had knitted his elongated sweater — the first he’d ever had in his life that fitted. And he hadn’t mentioned her in his will. Not that he’d left much to Lorna — she’d get her mother’s money and maybe a bit from the Langdons. They weren’t breeders; Lorna was the last of that blood line. Most of what Vern owned would go to his boy, his hope for the future. Not a lot of hope there. If he could get him back to school, he might turn him into a parson.
Norman left at nine thirty. Jimmy went to bed, and Vern wandered and scratched his head, knowing there was no way out of that Langdon visit. By the time his letter got to them, they’d be on the boat.
‘Just when you think things can’t get a whole heap worse, they surprise you,’ he muttered. ‘However . . .’ and he went to Joanne’s library, to Joanne’s — or her first husband’s — desk. Her writing paper was still in the drawer, her pen and ink. He didn’t do much writing.
Dear Lorna,
I just got word from your Uncle Henry. He’s on his way. I’ll need you to find out the details of when his boat gets in, and to be down there to meet him when it does. He’s bringing his wife with him this time so I’ll need you up here. Of course, I realise it might interfere with your social, or socialistic, life, but going by the last times he came out here, he’ll stay for months, and I can’t take more than half an hour of him, so you’ll need to give your landlady notice that you’ll be moving out. It’s no use me paying rent on your rooms if you’re not using them. You can get something else when you go back, or move in with my brother at Balwyn . . .
The Langdons arrived in early December. Leticia Langdon had an accent you could cut with a knife and she never shut up, and she looked like something the cat might drag in on a wet morning. Vern started cutting lunch with them on the second day of their visit. He started cutting breakfast. By the third week he was cutting dinner, and by the fourth Jimmy had developed a sudden interest in farming. They spent days out there, then days and nights. Vern taught him to drive the new tractor, taught him to swim, and that kid started getting a bit of colour in his face, though he still ran from the dogs — who enjoyed the game.
The Langdons stayed through January, then February came and maybe they’d got the hint. They were packing up to leave.
‘As far as I see it, lad,’ Vern said to Jimmy, ‘you’ve got yourself two choices here. You go back with your sisters to the city when they take the visitors back, you stay with your masters, you stop playing sick and you learn to be a city man; or you start going to school up here and you learn to like sawdust and flies.’
‘Righto,’ Jimmy said.
‘You want to go back to your schoolmasters?’
‘I want to stay with you.’
They shook hands on the deal, Hooper hand meeting Hooper hand. There was no doubting who that boy belonged to, not with those oversized hands and their double-jointed thumbs.
PROBLEM CHILDREN
Miss Rose had forty-seven children in her classroom that year, forty-seven children seated in four rows — her kindergarten group, her largest group, on her left; grades one and two in the centre rows. Then there was her upper second grade, created this year and situated on her right. These were her problem children, old enough to have moved down the verandah to Mr Curry’s room, but not sufficiently advanced to manage there. So Mr Curry said. He didn’t want them.
Then, a week after school went back, Vern Hooper delivered his son to her classroom, a great gangling boy, all legs, arms, head and ears. He was the height of a twelve year old.
‘Mr Curry?’ she said, her eyebrows disappearing beneath her auburn fringe.
‘We saw him. He suggested he might do better with you for a time,’ Vern said, and he left, closing the door behind him.
Her upper second grade consisted of three desks capable of seating six children. Ray King and Cecelia Morrison sat alone, not by choice but by choice of their mutual victims. Ray was a giant for his age, a docile, stuttering, barefoot boy, his hair clipped to the scalp and with a smell about him that suggested an unfamiliarity with soap and water. His father, district wood-chopping champion, also known for his ability to drink any man under the table, and his mother, an evil-mouthed, long-haired and lousy hag, survived in a shack opposite Macdonald’s mill. Miss Rose pitied Ray. She kept her distance, but did what she could for him, which was little enough.
Vern Hooper’s son was decked out in his private school uniform and toting an armful of his old school’s books. She couldn’t inflict Ray on him.
She glanced at Cecelia, still prone to occasional hair-pulling, which wouldn’t present a problem. The Hooper boy had little more hair than Ray. Cecelia was clean.
‘Do you know Cecelia, Jim?’ she said.
He flinched. A few children flinched for him, but Cecelia lifted her elbow and moved to the right of the two-seater desk. Jim placed his books down then sat on the edge.
The Macdonald twins were seated in the front row of upper second grade. The first day school went back, Miss Rose had attempted to separate them, had placed one alone in the front desk, one at the rear with Ray, but they’d made h
er own and Ray’s life a misery by mimicking his stutter in unison. How they did it, she did not know, but two voices speaking in unison was less unnerving when they came from the same desk. They were small for their years and of unfortunate appearance, toad-like, their most commanding features their violet-grey eyes — cruel eyes, if a child’s eyes could be cruel. Both boys were capable of learning when they wished to learn, which wasn’t often enough to learn much of anything. They enjoyed singing and had a natural ability with rhyme. They chased Ray home from school four nights out of five, chanting their cruel rhymes.
‘R-r-ray King is l-lousy,
His m-m-other is a f-frowsy.
He smells like a dog,
’Cause his f-f-father likes the grog.’
Could she blame them? Ray’s hands and neck had years of dirt ingrained into them, and no doubt as much where she couldn’t see. He was old enough to keep himself clean. Certainly he brought much of the tormenting down upon himself.
He gained some relief from the twins’ torments that day. They turned their joint attack on Jim Hooper.
‘Lanky poofter, drongo Jim,
Dropped his brain in the rubbish bin,
Scared to get dirty getting it out,
Or his sister will give him a punch in the snout.’
No one, other than their sisters, was safe from those wicked little boys, not the Catholic sisters or the few children who attended their school behind a tall green corrugated-iron fence. The twins walked by that fence twice a day, dragging sticks along it. They went cat-hunting on moonlit nights, bagging their catch then dropping them yowling over the convent fence.
The second Morrison child, delivered to the classroom this year, came in for her own share of verbal abuse. Miss Rose had kept her distance from Jennifer, fearing a second Morrison screamer. As yet, the scream had not come. A dainty child, she sat in the kindergarten row, her long hair pulled back tight in man-made, lopsided plaits, her frock, man-bought, too dark, too large, too long, her shoes too heavy for tiny legs.
