Thursday's Child

by Sonya Hartnett

  Into Mam’s ear I murmured, ‘He wouldn’t listen to me.’

  She stroked my head and hushed me. Later I heard that Audrey had pleaded with her to keep everything a secret which was why none of the neighbours had come to help me stop Da on his march toward Vandery Cable’s. I brooded on this for weeks, prodding resentfully at recollections in my head. I remembered the miles I had stumbled through in Da’s shadow, the heat and the insects and the scratches from the trees; I recalled crouching helpless within sight of the homestead, searching for words that might persuade Da, and the fear and panic which flooded me when he banged his fist on the door. I saw again the pigs, the flecked cobblestones, the frozen moments of the tumbling trapdoor. I remembered the dark and I remembered Caffy and I remembered, most forcefully, feeling certain I was going to die. All these visions I knew I would not forget, just because Audrey wanted things – mysterious things, that no one would explain to me – to be kept forever a secret. Whatever had happened to her, I reasoned, couldn’t have been so very dreadful: she could eat and talk and help with the chores and once the bruise on her cheek had faded she looked the same as always. But I myself felt bruised all over and every particle within me ached as though it had become a painful thing, just keeping my body alive.

  Audrey wanted things kept secret, but Cable was missing and she had surely been one of the last to see him: even if they didn’t care for him, in time people at least started to wonder where the farmer had gone. He had left the hogs and house and jinker and there was a hanging-room full of pork that was waiting to be salted. The more that people spoke of it, the odder and more suspicious these things began to seem. ‘Court,’ Mam said finally, sitting poised and still in her chair, ‘tell us, again, what happened out there. Tell us, again, what you saw.’

  From my place lying on the floor before the fire, I did not need to look up to know Da’s eyes had darted to me. ‘It was Tin, Mam,’ I said listlessly.

  ‘Ah!’ Da exclaimed, and his hand slapped the table.

  ‘What do you mean, it was Tin?’

  ‘Harper, enough!’

  I crooked my neck to peer at him. ‘We have to tell, Da. People are asking.’

  Da pressed his lips into thin pale lines but he knew as well as I did what needed to be done. We told the story again and this time told it true, while Mam and Audrey sat stupefied. I said almost nothing about being in the tunnels, except that I found them tangled and grim; I tried to sound as if my time down there hadn’t troubled me too much at all. But we told about the trapdoor, and the blood thrown all around; we told about the deserted house and the flat cool ghostly quiet. ‘He did it for you, Audrey,’ Da finished, watching her intently. ‘He’s always heard everything, that boy. If walls have ears, he is those ears. I reckon he heard you crying and telling your story, and I reckon he took off for Cable’s in a rage. He’s nippy enough to have been there and gone again while Harper and I were still walking. His instincts told him to do it, I believe – his heart, not his head. He’s never harmed anyone before and I don’t reckon he’s likely to do so again, at least not without good reason.’

  ‘You’ve no proof,’ muttered Mam. Her hands were shading off her face and her voice was vexed with grief. ‘You’ve no proof that this happened like you say.’

  ‘Thora, that’s true. There’s no proof. But if you had been there, as were Harper and I, I don’t reckon you could believe anything else. Isn’t that right, Harper?’

  I chewed my lip and said nothing, watching a slater scramble frantically the length of a smoking log. The heat on my face was making my eyes water and I saw swimming reflections of everything.

  ‘There being no proof will be good for us,’ said Da, mutedly. ‘It will be good for everyone.’

  Audrey, in her corner chair, had been silently weeping. Now she smeared a wrist over her eyes, crushing flat all the tears but for a stray that shivered from her chin. She said, ‘We have to save Tin. I want him to be safe. Da, I’ll say whatever you think I should say.’

  He and she turned to Mam, but I stayed watching the slater. It shuffled about and reared at the flames, its creased shell streaked with colour. I wondered if Mam was thinking of how she had lost Tin such a long time ago, how he had never afterwards needed a mother. He did not seem to care for her, nor for the sadness he’d caused. She must have loved him anyway, and believed him still her child. I knew without looking that she agreed with Audrey because when she nodded she caused a ripple in the shadows around the room. The slater rolled off the log and landed in a cushion of ash.

  From then on we had our story, and stuck unswervingly with it. Cable had been bedevilling Audrey, Audrey had come home. Da had gone to argue it out and discovered Cable flitted. This was almost the truth – it was hard to put a finger, exactly, on where the falseness lay – and Audrey, I think, soon stopped bothering to remember how things had actually been. Soon I could not mention Tin’s link to the tale without her frowning at me with no understanding, cocking her head blankly. In her mind, the untrue story became the way things had been, herself an innocent, Da the heroic, Mr Cable so craven. I don’t reckon she remembers at all, now, that evening when the slater ran the log.

  So we told the story and the story spread, touching down like a locust plague wherever it found the opportunity. The authorities came and heard it and went away again, puzzled but empty-handed. To me, the tale sounded so full of holes that I longed to laugh scornfully at anyone who believed it. I began to see that people, like cattle, can be led by the nose. And then one day, when months had passed and almost no one mentioned Cable, Jock Murphy was lolling on the veranda relaxed as a sun-struck cat when he said, ‘You know what everyone’s saying, Court?’

  Da stiffened, and reached for his flask. ‘No, I don’t, Jock. Tell us.’

  ‘Everyone’s saying that wherever Cable ran to, he’s still running. They’re saying that, when he heard you were coming to exchange a few words, he took off faster than his jinker could move, that’s why he left it behind. He recollected he was only a hog man, you see, and that you yourself are a soldier. He could prance in lecturing you about this and that, but he couldn’t teach you a thing about looking after you and yours. You’ve become the most admired man around here, Court. Everyone’s in awe of your honour, coming to your lass’s defence like you did.’

  ‘Is that what they’re saying?’ Da puffed himself out.

  ‘Certainly it is. And that’s what I’m telling them happened, as well. When I hear someone talk about it differently, I’m quick to put them straight.’

  Da gazed at Murphy. He said, ‘I never laid a finger on Cable, Jock.’

  Murphy smiled shrewdly. ‘Righto, Court. I believe you.’

  My heart was battering choppily and I wandered off, bouncing a rubber ball and pretending to be composed, but beyond sight of the house I ran berserkly helter-skelter, hot air gushing down my throat and grass lashing my stumbling knees. We would never be set free, I reckoned; we would be haunted, eternally.

  Autumn flagged and winter sulked after it and, despite the eggs the chickens laid and the milk we got from the cow, we found ourselves sometimes cold and vaguely hungry. I didn’t complain, though, not like I used to. Some things were, to me, less important than they had been; I was thin, and twitchy as a dying fly, but being cold and hungry no longer had power to plague me. I worried, however, that Mam and Da and Audrey did not feel the same, and when Devon sent a letter but apologetically no money I exhumed the notes I had buried nearly a year previous and been saving for emergencies, and gave them to Mam. Audrey cut short her glorious hair as well as her old dresses, trimming them all over until they fit onto me.

  It was a cool spring evening the last time we saw Tin. I had not searched or called for him since the moment I’d rolled out of the tunnels. I knew I should not be afraid of him and I believed he had no wish to hurt me, but I could never think of him without a tremor. I could never quite smother an image of him lunging, of his raised striking arm, nor stop hearing the
whistle that traced the arc of the pick head as it rent through the air.

  The nights came early on those tender spring days and we were tucked into the house by evening. To give myself other things to think of I had returned to writing my stories and Audrey would read them page by finished page, correcting my spelling with a red-inked fountain pen. This particular night I was writing and Audrey was improving, Mam was darning and Da was tacking a patch of leather to the sole of his shoe: these ordinary things we were doing when the dogs let loose a booming, each of us settled in our private meditations and in no way expecting what was next going to happen.

  Mam got up to open the door and I glanced without interest over my shoulder, reckoning on seeing a tramp or one of the neighbours. Instead, a small scuffed creature was lit by the lamplight slanting from the door and the dogs were milling around him, sniffing his feet and wagging their tails. The creature held a great bundle of something tied up in a rag. For a moment we stared, not recognising him, but who else could it have been, is what I wonder now, who else but wandering Tin. We saw his naked limbs, his waxy skin, his discoloured hair, his hooking razor-sharp nails. He raised lashy eyes to us and we saw the lined face of an old man, a face on its way to another world. Da murmured, ‘Jesus.’

  It was Tin, who was mythical, and he looked just that way. He looked nothing like the boy he was supposed to be, ten going on eleven. He seemed to hover above the earth somehow, the curious glow of his flesh illuminating him. I would not have been surprised if wings had opened up behind him and he’d shown that he could fly.

  Whatever it was he cradled in his arms he placed carefully on the veranda and stepped backwards, holding his eyes upon the thing as if wary of it getting away. After a moment when he seemed surer it was safe he looked into the room, at us. He looked first at Mam, then Da, then at Audrey, then me. When his eyes settled on mine I felt something inside me shake free, and go to him. I didn’t give it – he wanted it, and it went to him. Then he smiled, only slightly, but enough so we agreed, afterwards, that we had seen it done. With that he turned and vanished and the dogs barked but didn’t go.

  Mam bent, and peeled the wrapping from the bundle. Audrey and I stood at her elbows and Da brought over the lamp. In the flickering light I thought I saw the wrapping move and I guessed what the bundle was then, a baby. Tin had filched a baby thinking Mam might fancy to keep it, having lost so many of her own. The idea left me reeling with both glee and dismay.

  But, the rags off, we found nothing except a lump of dark earth. I was relieved and disappointed about the baby. Da leaned down and prodded the clump with his finger. ‘What is it, Da?’ I asked.

  He didn’t reply. He hefted the earth and the burden of it made him stoop. It hadn’t made Tin stoop, he had held it easily as a little animal, but Da swayed and winced his way across the room before dumping the load in the washing water. ‘Oh, Court,’ Mam scolded, because the water had been dirty and was now splashed out everywhere, but Da paid no attention. He grabbed the cloth and began sponging the dirt. Audrey held the lamp up and we all gathered around.

  And the four of us were bent over the basin with the lamp pouring its yellow light onto our heads, each of us bursting to ask questions but not saying anything so the silence of the room was, in an instant, almost unbearable, when a piece of earth sluiced away from the lump and the glitter of gold broke through. I remember the glint was a lively, living thing, a dragonfly that flashed around the room, a sprite winging its way on the lamp beam and returning to settle brightly on the crest of its brilliant home. Inside the hunk of dirt lay a gnarled, besmirched, pitted and boot-sized chunk of gold.

  I gripped the rim of the basin, teetering on my heels. Mam clapped her apron to her mouth and the lamp slung down to Audrey’s side. Da stepped clear and we gazed at it, that mighty and spectacular nugget rising from its lake of filthy water. The moment was only that, a moment – for Da whooped then, catching Mam in his arms and making her dance crazily around the room, his bare feet thumping the boards – but it is the moment I wish could have stayed forever, when we stood staring at our fortunate future and none of us were talking or even breathing, turned to stone by the incredibility that was Tin’s gift to us.

  And then when Mam and Da were dancing and Audrey had her head thrown back and was laughing, a black bird of ingratitude darted through me, swooping out of nowhere and flashing away just as sharply, chattering with a voice that has not spoken to me since. It cried that it was cheated, that this was a coward’s way of concluding the story. I think that voice belonged to the child I was, and she did not come with me when I left the land. I think she is still out there somewhere, rebellious in her rage, scouring the tunnels for Tin.

  Everyone decided that was what Tin had been doing all those years, prospecting. They reckoned that the catacomb of tunnels, the life lived so lonely, those big flat watchful eyes, all these things and everything else were purely devoted to gold. That’s cods, of course. The nugget was something Tin found in his travels: having no use for it, he had no reason to keep it from us. He must have known that his gift would change things, and maybe make us leave him. He must have decided that he didn’t care, if such a thing was to happen. He already had what it was he wanted; he was already content. Tin dug, and I’ve always believed it, because digging was what he was born to do.

  Not all things happened, though, the way he might have expected them to.

  The four of us talked all night about the life awaiting us within the nugget. While Da composed a letter to summon Devon home, Audrey said her deepest wish was that we could go away. I said I would like that, too. ‘Oh Mam,’ I said, clinging to her and hopping on my toes excitedly, ‘let’s go somewhere far away.’

  Mam nodded, understanding. ‘But where? Where would we go?’

  ‘We should go to where the ocean is,’ I decided dreamily. ‘We would have a little house on the edge of the sea.’

  And that’s what we did, that’s why I can see the ocean from the window, that’s why Audrey and I are here. It’s only she and me, just the two of us. I didn’t honestly believe it would happen, but Mam made sure we got away. I write to her often, urging her to come here, but she says she should not leave Da. He needs someone to look after him, she explains. He’ll tire of digging eventually, she says, and then both of them will come and things will be better that way, she won’t have to worry. Da, you see, has been bitten by the mining bug, and spends his time scratching feveredly at the land. He thinks there must be plenty more, wherever the nugget came from. Tin’s gold was a fine thing, but it wasn’t enough to content our Da.

  It has been a long time since I’ve seen either of them, Mam or Da. It has been years. If not for the tiny brown pictures that I’ve closed inside my locket, I would have forgotten the look of their faces.

  The ocean is dazzling, as I knew it would be: the first time I saw it, it dazzled me more than my first sight of the gold. I sit on the sand and watch the waves roll and I think about everything that happened to my family and me. The mudslide, the shanty, the cows, and poor Caffy, each so different and spread far apart, but also so tightly entwined. Each fits into the other with the simple neatness of a pin. Looking back, life seems, in its way, like a fall from a great height, the outcome decided even before the event is begun. I love to be here, where I feel finally secure, but often my heart jolts and wrenches, tripping on its own memories.

  I miss the muzzy faces of our dogs. I miss our house, the way it shone in the sun. I miss my Mam and Da. I miss Devon, who has gone to the front, and I miss Izzy, my sister’s elusive sweetheart, who is also fighting the war. I miss that little girl, too, the small one who stayed behind.

  And I miss Tin, who would be a young man now but is, in my memory, still a boy. Devon writes that they could use someone with his gifts at the frontline, someone who could scoop the trenches smartly. Devon is joking: we are all glad Tin is safely underground, ploughing past the bones of cavemen and dragons, a young boy only because I haven’t seen hi
m for years. But sometimes, just lately when I’ve been sitting quietly and remembering everything I had to know, I think I have felt the slightest waver and heard, so softly, the shifting of the sand. The soil here is grainy and loose and the ocean makes a roaring sound which must travel as a murmur for miles underground. I have put my hands to the earth to feel for him; I have put my ear to the ground to listen. If Tin steps one day from the earth dusty, blinking his pale clear eyes, I will be the first thing he will see. His hand will be dirty when he places it in mine, and mine will not be clean.