Thursday's Child

by Sonya Hartnett

  Tin: the thought of him leapt on me, making me leap, and I was charging, howling, for home. My bawling summoned everyone, including Izzy and Audrey. I remember Mam rushing alongside me and the ripping sound of the grass catching at her hem, her blue eyes wide with fearfulness and growing wider as she ran closer to the thing that made her afraid. She cried, ‘Why weren’t you watching him, Audrey?’

  But if Audrey had an answer Mam would not have stopped to hear it and by then everything was confusion. Da had his shovel and there was a splash of blood on it that had stained the wooden handle. He slammed the blade into the mouth of the hole and the ground fissured, loosing into the well a cascade of clods and stones. ‘Stop!’ yelped Mam. ‘You’ll close it in on top of him!’

  Caffy, hearing voices, intensified his wails. Izzy and Devon had thrown themselves on their bellies and were gouging the well’s maw. ‘Da,’ I said, ‘get Tin –’

  A lump of dirt sloughed off the hole and plunged into the blackness, Mam and Audrey screeching to see it go. Audrey did not stop screeching: she sank to the ground with her arms around her waist and shrieked into the earth. I spun and sprinted. Please Baby Jesus, I prayed, please make him near.

  I ran to the mouth of the newest tunnel, the one that slunk around the house, and shouted into it. Glancing back I saw my family clustered at the well, saw Devon on Champion galloping in the direction of the road. I ducked my head and roared out Tin’s name. I couldn’t see anything in the tunnel, it was as pitch as night when your eyes are closed. ‘Tin!’ I roared, my voice streaming along a passage I just had to trust was there. I flopped to my stomach, limp with exhaustion and frustration and despair. Why was he never around when I needed him, I wondered bitterly. I seemed to need him all the time, and he was never there.

  ‘Harper! Come here!’

  I sprang up and raced to where Da was standing with the halter and the lead rope swinging in his hands. I smelled old booze on him. ‘Chicken,’ he said, ‘be a brave girl. We’ll tie the rope to your ankles and you can go down and grab him –’

  ‘No!’ Mam yanked me away. ‘You’re not putting another of them underground!’

  Da grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward. ‘She has to do it! We have to try!’

  ‘No, I said!’

  ‘You want him to die? Do you?’

  ‘I want them all to live, you fool!’

  ‘Stop it!’ Audrey sobbed, clutching at her hair. ‘Let Harper go!’

  They each released their hold on my wrists and my arms dropped to my sides. Sweat was flooding down Da’s crimson face, while Mam’s was as white as a cloud. Caffy was crying, not strongly or loudly.

  ‘I don’t fit down the well,’ I mumbled, softly and ashamed. ‘I already tried.’

  Mam spun away from us, her hands fluttering to her eyes. She didn’t come close to the well, after that – instead, each step she took carried her further from it, until she hardly seemed there at all. Ghosting, she became ghostly: when I reached for her she could not take my hand because she was no longer able to touch. ‘Mam,’ I pleaded, ‘Mam –’

  Tin stepped from behind her, his gaze taking everything in. Caffy went quiet and Audrey lifted her head and in the silence Tin came to crouch beside me, his wrists resting on the flank of the hole. He bent his elbows until his shoulderblades jutted like wings and his nose hovered above the well and he sniffed, as if gauging the mood of the ground. He put an ear to the earth and closed his eyes, listening to the dirt’s soundless tune. He sat up and we watched as he crumbled a clod between his hands and passed his gritty fingers across his lips and chin. Then he got to his feet and walked backwards, carefully as though he were treading a wire, stopping when he was a dozen or more paces distant from both us and the well. He marked the earth where he stood with the scrape of a toe. Without a word, without looking at us or saying how we might help him, he shrugged off his rabbit rags and, naked, he started to dig.

  You could see what Da had seen so early, how he had the digging gift. His hands, they flew, and you didn’t see them as ten separate fingers but rather as two curving claws which left rents in the density of the packed solid earth. Izzy was staring with his mouth lazing open, never having seen Tin but having heard as much as anyone knew – heard of the hair that had lost its curl and chestnut colour and now hung scraggy down his spine and no shade you could accurately describe; heard of the eyes stained with only a faint wash of the deep blue they had been, larger and rounder than you would expect them and ringed with thick, protecting lashes; heard of the ears whose tips folded over like a dog’s can, to keep the mechanisms clear. He’d heard, too, of Tin’s neat smallness, of how he grew slowly and looked older than his eight years, of his skin being translucent and somehow looser than it should be so he could twist about freely within it, and how it was glazed, almost waxy, for warding out the damp. Izzy had heard this, but never seen it before. We had seen him, but we had never seen him like this. The old mystery was solved, that day, regarding what happened to the dirt Tin threw from his diggings, which we had never been able to find. The answer was that there was no dirt, or none worth speaking of. The earth simply fell away beneath his hands, like water parts for a swimmer. It was as if the ground adored Tin’s attentions and, as a dog will shift its legs to better allow a belly scratch or a cat will bob upwards to meet a petting hand, the earth eased his way by offering no obstacle and did what it could to encourage him. I held my breath to watch him, understanding for the first time that Tin was not simply a boy who lived underground: he was loved and wanted under there, and irresistibly summoned.

  But nonetheless his digging took time, as though the earth were willing but doltish and in need of tolerant guiding. He never glanced up from his work, not when Mr Godwin and Mr Murphy arrived and stood about with brows knit helplessly, not when Audrey sang down the well for Caffy, not when Caffy’s noise became weak and broken, not when Mam sat in the grass and cried. He was digging at an angle, knowing exactly where Caffy hung and meaning to meet him at a junction. Mr Godwin murmured, ‘Surely it would make faster digging if he went straight down.’

  ‘Let him do as he thinks fit. If anyone knows about excavation, it’s him.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Caffy? Tin will get you. He’s making his way to you. Good lad, Caffy.’

  Tin was beyond sight now, burrowed in the earth. Sometimes a dog would disappear after him and emerge to shake off sandy clouds. Cicadas started calling suddenly and I could feel my skin beginning to burn. Caffy was groaning feebly, and not all the time. He’d been trapped down the hole for more than an hour.

  ‘How much longer, do you reckon?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know nothing about this. A child isn’t stuck in a well every day.’

  ‘You still there? Caffy?’

  ‘Do you hear us, Caffy?’

  ‘Caffy boy? Caffy?’

  Caffy. Audrey was slumped beside Mam but not touching her. I crawled to my sister and she put her arms round me. My face was scarlet, sunburned to the bone; her face was grey, pale and dulled as a winter sky. Other neighbours arrived, stared down the well despondently, stood with their shovels idly by. Mrs Murphy gathered up Mam and coaxed her inside the house. The cows watched from the shade of the shelter, turning their jaws pensively. Godwin’s lean greyhounds lay about, chiselled ribcages heaving, insects twinged from delicate ears.

  ‘Jesus.’

  A heft of earth had split from the side of the hole and plummeted.

  ‘Maybe it never found him.’

  ‘Caffy?’

  He didn’t answer, but he’d been quiet for a time.

  ‘That hole should have been filled right after it was dug,’ I heard Harry Robertson say low. ‘Flute’s become a careless man.’

  Bernie Osborne sucked his yellow cigarette. ‘He’s keeping his head for the moment, though.’

  ‘Not like that business with the shanty. He was a sorry sight, then. Needed a good shaking.’

  ‘He’s not the man he once was,
even now. Hard to talk to, and the like.’

  ‘Maybe he can’t sink any lower than he is and that’s what’s holding him upright.’

  Robertson smiled wryly, and they both turned away when they saw me standing there.

  Unexpectedly Tin stepped out of the ground, smearing his face on his forearm. Over his elbow he looked at us, the useless crowd. He shook his hair and flexed his fingers. He had a torn knee which was weeping a colourless fluid. If he had wanted something, a drink or water for rinsing his eyes, he changed his mind and went without. If he’d had something to say, he chose to say nothing. He went back down. ‘Lawd,’ whispered someone. Over two hours had passed.

  ‘Caffy’s probably sleeping down there. Probably asleep.’ ‘Aye, he’s sleeping, that’s what he’s doing. He’ll be awake all night, having slept the day away.’

  ‘Tin’ll find him all cosy as a kitten, laughing at his dreams.’

  ‘… Bless him. God bless his little soul.’ I was dozing when Tin brought him out, my head on Audrey’s thigh. I opened my eyes and blinked at the glaring whiteness of the sky. For a moment I was in a colourless and noiseless world. I rolled over and saw the silver grass, the grey shirts of the neighbours, the blackness of a sniffing dog, the olive of the eucalypt leaves. Tin was standing, wanly luminous, cradling a dusk-blue bundle. Still there was no noise.

  Tin bowed his head and his hair fanned over Caffy. He smoothed down Caffy’s fair curls. Then he looked at us, his eyes flitting anxiously – I knew he was searching for Mam. Not seeing her, he came to Audrey. She stood and took the child from him. Tin, his arms empty, stepped away. Audrey’s hand fluttered on Caffy’s cheek. ‘He died,’ she said.

  Everyone drifted toward the house, following Audrey in a sorrowful procession. They didn’t stay to see Tin fold into the grass, shivering with exhaustion. His hands were battered and swollen and he held them away from his body; the ochre earth had stained and spattered him. I hesitated, my heart telling me to stay with him but my head not understanding why he should need comforting – he had hardly known Caffy, after all.

  ‘Tin,’ I said, ‘I know that you tried. I know you dug the best you could.’

  Such defeat and anguish came into his face that my heart lurched, and cleanly broke. I lingered there with nothing else to say, my throat and eyes parched arid, sharp-edged insects whipping by me through the white hot windless day.

  MY MOTHER AND FATHER had held up the sky, the sun, the stars and the moon, but they didn’t any more. The shanty had fallen and Da was different; I still loved him, but he wasn’t the Da from before. When you told him something, you couldn’t be sure he was listening. If you thought a thing was important he might curse or smile, and say it wasn’t really. He had stopped snaring rabbits when the pelts became wastage and had taken instead to shooting them, although we only had two boxes of shot and no money to buy more and although it meant picking black pellets from the stew, and the hours he had once spent scraping rabbit skins were spent wandering the district with a twig and a dog and the cows and his flask, a moth-eaten troupe lacklustrely seeking fodder. At home he would leave the rifle by the door, on a tilt like a kipping soldier. There was something about the rifle that always reminded me of Da, its ashy colour and thinness, the burden of its own weight. Devon quit school and took up doing most of Da’s old chores, as if Da were incapable or dead-weary. Sometimes, as Da had done, Devon took a thing to town to pawn. He pawned the box that Grandda’s money had come in and brought home second-hand shoes for me.

  Mam became a ghost at the mouth of the well and she stayed that way a long time. In evenings on the veranda she talked of how things had been when she was a girl, stories I had never heard before. When she told these stories, her eyes shone. She would dab at them with the corner of her apron, laughing while she cried. Through the heat of the day she moved like a wind-up toy, bustling with energy when the key was turned tight, gradually going slow and teetering and finally coming to a halt, emptiness ringing around her, staring ahead at nothing, forgetting what she meant to say. She might be doing something, something usual like stirring or pegging the clothes, and she would stop. She would walk off and disappear for hours, wandering the creek bed, the scrub and the hills. I would run about searching for her, calling out her name. Inside myself I knew she was safe, and that she would return, but I could not help it anyway: in the months after Caffy’s death I couldn’t bear losing sight of her. Audrey would bring me home, talking to me, holding on to my hand. She and I never spoke about Caffy, not even when there was no one around to hear. I had wanted to – I longed to explain that my intentions had been good, how I’d hoped so much for only good things to happen; I craved to speak of the sooty cloud which overhung me now, and how nothing would ever be good any more – but I stopped trying when I saw that talking about him might make a wind-up toy out of Audrey, too. Her eyes would go hooded, and I would feel her perishing inside. So I covered my mouth and buried my brother, for fear of losing a sister. I needed someone to care for me in the melancholy months that dragged behind that breezeless morning, and I understood that my mother and father were gone: Audrey and Devon had become all I had. Tin was digging as if the digging he’d done in the past was practice or pretend. We’d hear that he had been seen many miles off and, seen, had vanished into thin air. Only, there was no thin air in Tin’s world: if he vanished, it was into the opposite of air. If he could do that, so far from home, his web of tunnels must have become a kingdom and it would be futile to search for him. So, for me it was Devon and Audrey, Audrey and Devon and Izzy too, who visited most days and never spoke of Caffy either but was feverish for days after and fragile for a month, and I clung to the three of them. When it was winter and cold and I was hungry, it was Audrey I grieved to, not my Mam; it was Devon, not Da, who cracked my knuckles smartly for making the complaint. I fretted that a calamity would befall one or all of them and became a hectoring bore, badgering to know what they were doing and where they were going and how long they would be away. In private I composed chants and spells that I cast to keep them safe. By day my concern was loud and smothering; at night I would lie clutching my pillow, soundlessly praying that they would not leave me and go where Mam and Da had gone.

  So when Vandery Cable arrived with his proposition, my heart was almost drowned by my terror. He stood at the door like the Reaper, saying, ‘It will ease the situation here.’

  ‘Mr Cable,’ Devon said flatly, not rising from his chair, ‘I’m surprised you haven’t had it to the teeth, being decent to this family.’

  Cable smiled grimly, brushing the insult aside. He had a purpose and kept his mind to it. ‘It would benefit both parties. I need a housekeeper, the occasional meal prepared. I’m told Miss Flute’s learned cooking from Rose Murphy.’

  Audrey was standing at the fireplace, the ladle drooping in her hand. In the cooking pot burbled a stew of rabbit and water. Cable couldn’t see into the pot from where he stood on the threshold. If I’d been quicker-thinking, I would have beckoned him over and made him look. ‘I was taught by Mam, mostly,’ she said.

  He ignored that, too. ‘I pay wages on the last Friday of every month. The money would be yours, to do with as you choose, but if some of it were to find its way into this house, I don’t suppose that would be a bad thing.’

  Audrey glanced across the room. Da was grasping the arms of his chair, straining forward like a hound on a chain. Mam’s hand had moved closer to Devon, as though touching him was sanctuary. Audrey asked, ‘May I have a few days to decide, Mr Cable?’

  ‘I hope you’ll consider it seriously, Miss Flute.’

  ‘I will. But I’m needed here, you see –’

  ‘You could do a lot of good, with the money you would earn.’

  She fumbled over her answer: ‘Thank you,’ she said senselessly.

  He gave her a final piercing stare before propping his hat on his head. ‘Good night, then,’ he said.

  As soon as the door was closed Devon growled, ‘No. Tell h
im no. That man’s a dog.’

  ‘Devon.’ Mam took her gaze from the table. ‘He only wants to help.’

  ‘Does he? Why? Why does he always want to help? What does he get out of it?’

  ‘Devvy –’

  ‘No – think about it! He’s not a charity, he’ll want his pound of flesh one day. Or maybe he’ll just work Audrey a week and send her home with nothing to show.’

  ‘Now, Devon,’ muttered Da, and Devon, though outraged, subsided, because no one wanted Cable’s escaped sows to come charging into the room.

  ‘He gave us the barn. Without it, we wouldn’t have the house. He’s given us some wise advice.’

  ‘Like selling Tin to the circus?’ I was hunched in a corner bristling, baring my teeth like a rat.

  ‘Hush, Harper.’

  ‘But he said our cows were useless, Da –’

  ‘And he hasn’t found that bull he promised.’

  ‘He didn’t promise anything, Devon. He only said he’d try.’

  ‘I think he is a decent man,’ Mam said, ‘although he struggles to show it.’

  ‘The money, too,’ said Da artlessly.

  Audrey lifted her eyes to them, but they were nodding at the floor. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the money. I should tell him that I’ll do it.’

  ‘Audrey!’ I squealed, springing up afrizz. ‘You can’t!’

  ‘Do whatever you think best,’ said Da. ‘A housekeeper who knows her job is never lost for employment.’

  ‘If she wants to be someone’s servant all her life,’ snapped Devon, but Da serenely did not hear.

  ‘If you felt inclined to give us a small amount each week, we might soon have enough to put in a crop, or buy a bull of our own. Of course, we wouldn’t expect it.’

  Devon looked deadly at him. ‘Jesus,’ he hissed.

  Later, when it was dark and the house was silent, I crept on my knees to her bedside. ‘Audrey,’ I whispered, ‘don’t go to Mr Cable’s. I don’t like him.’

  In the starlight slanting past the shutter I could see her eyes glittering and her fingers fiddled distractedly with the nightdress ribbon at her throat. ‘I don’t like him either. But he’s not asking us to like him, Harper.’