by Joy Dettman
There was more distrust in the town now, or distrust of strangers. Denham moved them on, hunted those swagmen from his town. He went to the school to speak about the danger of strangers; he kept a closer eye on his own kids.
They were playing in the backyard the day old Betty, the Duffy matriarch, walked into town. She came in once a week for a few supplies but usually kept her distance from the police station. Not today. She went directly to Denham’s door, and the five or six mangy dogs that followed her everywhere proceeded to leave their calling cards on doorstep and wall—and dance back smartly to water Denham’s verandah posts when he opened the door.
‘Are them city coppers still hanging around here somewhere?’
Denham stepped back. The Duffy family washed less often than their dogs. From the safety of his doorway, he studied the woman. Betty didn’t waste money on corset or underwear but she ate well. Her rag of a dress stretched across sagging breasts, moulded her gross stomach, leaving little to the imagination. Her hair, whitened by the years, yellowed by nicotine, trimmed twelve months back with a carving knife, hung around her neck, stuck to her sweat-beaded face, caught up in facial crevices. The day wasn’t hot but her walk into town had raised a sweat, which at close range was a chargeable offence.
He stepped outside, closed his door, skirted around her and her dogs, and walked down the end of his verandah to the kid-trodden earth between his house and lockup, a natural wind tunnel. Betty followed him, her dogs followed her, peeing as they came. It never failed to amaze him how Mrs Duffy’s dogs could keep finding more pee. They didn’t look as if they had enough liquid in them to wet a match head.
‘What’s your trouble, Mrs Duffy?’
‘I just caught old Albert at Maryanne and I brained him with the backside of me shovel. He could be dead.’
As far as Denham could tell, someone was always getting at one of the Duffy girls. He stood upwind of her, took his cigarettes from his pocket. He knew Albert, known to most in town as old Noah, who was over seventy.
‘He’s a bit old for it, isn’t he?’
‘His type are never too old for it. I been letting him stay on me land, for his pension like, and the old bastard turns around and bites the hand that feeds him.’
Her hand was out for a smoke. Denham wasn’t having her touching his packet; he removed a second cigarette, tossed it, lit his own smoke, then tossed his box of matches.
‘Is he dead?’
‘Bleeding like a stuck pig.’ She tapped the cigarette on the matchbox, placed it between toothless gums, lit up, slid the matches into a pocket and spat a tobacco thread. ‘I see the dogs sniffing around Sophie’s place and I think the old bastard might have croaked, so I walk down to have a look and I catch him red-handed.’ She spat a second tobacco thread. ‘I roll me own,’ she said. ‘More horse dung than tobacco in these ready-rolled. Any rate, the kid’s got her pants off and she’s somersaulting and he’s bloody applauding her, so I pick up the nearest thing and give him the back end of me shovel.’
Denham stayed away from the Duffys when he could. There were six or eight women and near-adult girls out there, and the mental image of any one of them turning somersaults with her bloomers off wasn’t pretty. He turned away, turned to her dogs, one of them getting down to some serious foreplay with the wheel of his motorbike.
‘Clear off, you mongrel.’ He aimed a kick. It leered at him but kept pumping. ‘What’s he doing now?’
‘Me dog?’
‘Your lodger, Mrs Duffy.’
‘He’s Sophie’s, not mine. She reckons I killed him.’ She sucked more smoke, blew it at the gathering flies. ‘As soon as I saw that bastard sitting there smiling, I knew who done young Barbie and that Abbot girl. She’s nine year old.’
‘Who?’
‘Maryanne.’
That changed Denham’s outlook. He turned to his backyard where his kids had suddenly gone quiet. The little buggers would be standing around the corner listening in to this.
‘One of the children?’
‘Sophie’s girl.’
Denham wanted her away from his kids. He started towards his front gate, hoping she’d follow. The dogs followed. And it was a bad move. John McPherson’s car was parked out front of Charlie’s, his brown kelpie stepping sedately down from the front passenger seat. The Duffy dogs didn’t like toffs who rode in cars. As one, they took off across the road to rough him up.
‘Come back here, you mob of mongrels,’ Betty bellowed. They didn’t come back. ‘Dogs will be dogs,’ she said, spitting another tobacco thread. ‘He was the bastard that ruint me, you know.’
Denham was watching McPherson. ‘How did he do that, Mrs Duffy?’
‘How do you bloody well think he did it? I was a fourteen-year-old girl at the time.’
‘Right.’
Charlie White, armed with a heavy broom, was out and attempting to break a few backs. Betty stood sucking her fag, sucking it down to the bone, sucking it until it burned her fingers, until she was forced to drop it.
‘Where?’ Denham said.
‘Where what?’
‘Where did you know old Albert from—when you were fourteen, Mrs Duffy?’
‘Out at Three Pines. Monk’s place. Me old man did a bit of work out there and he got me work in the kitchen. That old bastard used to come up there with a mob from the city.’
The dogs came back, one shaking its head, one licking its backside. ‘Mongrels,’ she said. ‘They all need a dose of lead but they’re not worth the bullets. Give us another smoke to go on with, will you? I’m shook up about this.’
He took two more from his packet. She had the matches. He accepted a light.
‘Your girl all right?’
‘Her mother took care of her with a broomstick. You’re not locking me up for it. He deserved what he got.’
Denham had too much respect for his cell. ‘I’ll follow you back out, Mrs Duffy.’
He stood on for a time, allowing her to get a head start. He’d signed the papers to get old Albert on the aged pension. Before he’d taken lodgings out at Duffy’s, he’d camped from time to time in McPherson’s hut. Denham knew him as a harmless old chap, an interesting old chap too if you got him talking. He liked hanging around the park, though. Always kids in that park. He spent time down by the creek. Kids liked hanging around down there too. He was in town when Barbie died. He could have been around when Nelly Abbot was murdered.
He pitched his smoke and walked to his motorbike. It stank of Duffy’s dogs. It would stink more before it was much older.
Six o’clock and the city police were on their way back to town. Old Noah, known to Denham as Albert Forester, transported in Vern’s new car to Denham’s jail, had left his blood on the upholstery. Leather washed down smelled of wet cow. Gertrude noticed it when she got in.
‘Old Betty brained her lodger,’ Vern explained. ‘She told Denham she caught him at one of her daughter’s, or granddaughter’s, kids. She’s made a decent hole in his head.’
‘I wish she’d done it earlier,’ Gertrude said, eyeing the evening sky.
‘Old Betty reckons he did the same to her out at Monk’s, back when she was working in the kitchen out there. Do you remember an Albert Forester ever being out there?’
‘There used to be a Forester working for someone out the Willama Road. He married one of the Dobson girls.’
‘It would have been before his time. Betty’s damn near our age.’
‘If she says she knew him, she did. She’s never bothered to lie.’
Denham’s jail was a green ten-by-ten box with a barred window and a solid door. Electricity had been connected but the first globe had blown the second time he’d turned the switch. He hadn’t bothered to replace it. There was little light left in the day and not much of it getting through the east-facing door.
They’d placed the old bloke on one of the bunks, on a bare mattress, and wrapped his head in a towel, now bloody.
‘You look like a wounded
Arab,’ Gertrude said. ‘Can you lift your head?’
He was conscious when she’d walked in. She’d seen one hand moving. His eyes were closed now and he didn’t lift his head, so she lifted it and got the towel off. The gash was two inches across, the bone exposed.
‘Has he been talking?’ she asked.
‘The women said he’d come around. He’s said nothing to me,’ Denham said.
She held a clean pad against the wound. His blood was still running. ‘I can put a stitch in it, which might stop him bleeding, but you need to get him down to the hospital. She’s probably cracked his skull.’
‘The city chaps want me to hold him until they get here.’
‘He could be bleeding into the brain.’
‘Stitch him,’ Denham said.
‘You’ll need to turn him around so I can get at him, and get me some light.’
There were two bunks in the cell and little room between them. They got him turned around. With his overcoat off, there wasn’t much of him to turn. Denham went inside to steal a light globe from his kitchen. Gertrude put her glasses on, then sat on the edge of the bunk to peer at the wound and the patient.
‘He looks bloodless.’
‘He’s always looked bloodless,’ Denham said.
That globe was next door to useless. Wherever she moved, her shadow was in the way. Denham went for his flashlight and, with its beam directed on the scalp, she had a good look at Betty’s handiwork. If his skull was cracked, she couldn’t feel it.
Denham got her stitching thread through the eye of her curved needle. She took it and turned to her patient.
‘This is going to hurt,’ she told him. ‘I hope you’re not playing possum.’ She slapped his face, and maybe his eyelid flickered. ‘You might come over here, Vern, and hold him down.’
Then she lifted an eyelid and a blue, blue eye looked into her own, blue as the sky, blue as the ocean. The mind attempts to hang on to what it’s been told, to override what it knows, but reflexes respond. She stepped back onto Vern’s foot, dropped her needle and near fell on her face. Vern caught her, steadied her, and caught the look in her eye.
‘He’s dead,’ she said.
‘He’s breathing, Mrs Foote,’ Denham said.
Vern knew what she’d seen, and he stepped in to see for himself, to lift that same eyelid. A veiny white eyeball stared back. ‘It’s not him, Trude.’
‘Not who?’ Denham said, searching for, finding and picking up the needle, wiping it clean on his shirtsleeve.
‘It’s him,’ she said.
‘He’s dead,’ Vern said. Died in Egypt, and she had his money to prove it, had his microscope.
‘Who?’ Denham asked.
Gertrude picked up a hand, old hand, age spotted, fingernails still neatly trimmed, though not so clean. A bump on the bridge of his nose. That wasn’t there forty years ago. There was one way to prove it. Over his left ear. She forgot the blood, forgot the new gash, and felt for the old, separating that long blood-caked hair, separating it until she found what she knew would be there. And she found it. She hadn’t done much of a job on stitching that one.
Only a girl then, twenty-one or two. Blood everywhere that night—trying to pinch the sides of that gaping wound together, struggling to force the needle through his flesh, so much tougher than she’d expected. And his hair in the way. And unable to see for tears, washing that wound with her great dripping tears. Long, long before she’d forgotten how to cry for Archie Foote.
Like a magnet, that man, he’d drawn folk to him; then, like a magnet reversed, repelled them. He repelled her now. Her hands drew back from him, but his blood was dripping. She had to stop it. She had to touch him.
Took up her scissors with a shaking hand, rinsed them in her jar of methylated spirits, and told that hand it had work to do. Hacked off a hank of blood-matted hair and dropped it, hacked through another, and another, clearing the area of hair. She reached for the needle, sank it and its thread in metho.
‘You know him?’ Denham said.
‘A relative of Monk’s,’ she said. ‘I thought he was dead.’ And she drove that needle through his flesh and he opened his eyes. ‘Hold his head still, Vern.’
Maybe she put in more stitches than necessary. Maybe Vern took more pleasure than he ought in holding him down, but they got him stitched, they got that bleeding stopped, got wound and stitches doused with iodine, and hoped it stung.
Denham’s wife brought out a basin of water for Gertrude to wash in. She left it with soap and towel on the verandah. Gertrude stood soaping too long, her hands shaking hard now that their work was done. She soaped and allowed them their time to shake. Her legs shook in sympathy. She let them sit her down on the front steps while Vern soaped his own hands. She was no leaner, but tonight, when Vern sat beside her, she leaned. He slid an arm around her and they sat in silence, sat listening to Denham’s kids playing a wall away.
‘Are you going to tell Denham?’
‘What would that do to Amber? She’s just coming back to herself.’
‘Stop letting that girl dictate your life, Trude.’
‘He’s Albert Forester, Vern,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m saying. The name is even starting to sound familiar.’
They charged Albert Forester with the murder of Barbara Dobson and Nelly Abbot, and with the lesser charge of molestation of a minor. The city police took him back to the city and Woody Creek breathed a sigh of relief. They’d got him.
Old Betty and one of her granddaughters got an all-expenses-paid trip to Melbourne, accommodation supplied by the Salvation Army, along with new outfits and haircuts. But you can’t make a kid glove out of well-worn buffalo hide. They looked what they were, and when they opened their mouths, the jurors knew what they were.
The newspapers liked Betty. She livened up the proceedings, determined to tell how that bastard had ‘ruint’ her as a fourteen-year-old girl. She wanted him hanged. She said so several times.
The defence appreciated Sophie, who admitted she wasn’t too certain of her lodger’s movements on the day Barbie Dobson died, that he could have been out at the time, though she couldn’t say for sure that he wasn’t napping in his room, which wasn’t really attached to her house, which was why she hadn’t seen what he was getting up to with young Maryanne.
Maryanne, the victim, who had made a lucky escape, wasn’t called on to give evidence. The examining doctor was. He stated that the child was intact, that she’d admitted getting pennies from old Noah if she played rude games with him.
Denham stated that Albert Forester had been in town at the time Nelly Abbot was murdered, that he was sharing a hut fifty yards from where she had last been seen swimming with her brothers. He had photographic evidence to prove it—John McPherson dated every photograph he developed. Denham stated that the hut was situated seventy-five yards from Dobson’s wood paddock, where Barbie had last been seen. He said too that in his opinion, Albert Forester was capable of carrying a finely built eight-year-old child a mile through heavily timbered country, that he’d seen him lifting crates around in the grocer’s yard where he did a few hours’ work from time to time. He said that Albert Forester had spent much of his time down by the creek or in the park, places where the town children congregated.
‘Since the defendant’s arrest, I have spoken to Maryanne Duffy and to two of her female cousins, Teresa and Cristobel. All three mentioned playing ice-cream games with the defendant for pennies. To use the girls’ own words: “Like, I don’t scream and then I get a penny for an ice-cream.” ’
Denham was a good witness. The jury believed him.
Albert Forester took the stand late on the second day, making hard work of his climb up to it, requiring a supporting arm until he was seated. His right arm had been weakened by stroke, he said. He used his walking cane with his left hand. The defence council made much of his weakened state, of his great age, covering and re-covering the same ground until Betty took offence and was threatened with removal
from the courtroom.
The jury listened intently to Albert Forester when he said the girls came to him asking for money, that he had not put a hand on any one of them, that Maryanne had wanted to show him a game, taught to her by her mother’s boyfriend, that she had named it the ice-cream game.
Betty was removed from the courtroom at that point, and the timing was perfect. Place a well-dressed, courtly old gentleman beside a foul-mouthed old slut and see who the jury wants to believe.
They deliberated for two hours, between lunch and afternoon tea on the Friday.
Saturday’s edition of Melbourne’s favourite newspaper, which now claimed to sell 240,000 copies each day, carried the verdict and a photograph of Betty Duffy. ‘FORESTER INNOCENT ON MURDER CHARGE. FOUND GUILTY ON LESSER CHARGE OF CORRUPTION OF A MINOR.’
Betty and her granddaughter arrived home on the train that brought those papers to Woody Creek. Betty took her city shoes off for the long walk home. Two hours later, minus her city underwear, her feet comfortably shod in old boots, she was back and belting on Denham’s door.
‘What have you done with me bloody dogs?’
Denham and Tom Vevers had shot her bloody dogs, every last diseased mongrel. He told her what he’d done with them, then stood back and waited for her to ask what he’d done with her grandkids. He wasn’t guilty on that charge. The state had stepped in and removed eight Duffy kids ranging in age from two months to twelve years. The city orphanages left a lot to be desired but a few of those kids might learn something more useful than how to drop their pants for a penny.
‘Those dogs kept an eye on my Henry. He’s wandered off somewhere.’
‘He needs to be in a home, Mrs Duffy.’
‘You keep your bloody hands off that boy. He never done no harm to no one. Now you get out there and find him before he does himself a harm.’
THE WOODEN SPOON
Gertrude didn’t get her hands on that newspaper until Sunday, when she read every word of the report. Vern sat with her, sharing her paper and the afternoon sun.