by Joy Dettman
Elsa had known his first family, the dead son, two daughters, and the wife who had slept with Joseph in that locked room. Diphtheria had struck this house when Elsa was eight years old. Having spent her early years in a tent on the gold fields where children died fast or grew strong, the illness had bypassed her, but she remembered clearly the day Joseph’s wife died. Every item of furniture was carried from that room and burned. Beautiful furniture, each piece made by Joseph for his wife. Silver, he had named her, a small woman with long silver blond hair. That day he’d locked the bedroom door and boarded up the window.
Perhaps when he sat in his barn carving patterns into wood, Silver came to sit with him while his lost children swung on that rope and filled his barn with laughter.
Not much laughter on this property. Christian had sought it elsewhere. Always the daredevil, the older brother in many ways, he had tested, tasted life. And he’d been with Rachael . . . as a man is with a woman. Since her marriage, he’d forced Kurt from their bed with his drunken talk of this. True, he didn’t know what he was saying when the drink was in him. Perhaps this is why he drank. This is why Kurt didn’t join his brother over that fence; he was afraid of who he might become. The fight was in his belly too and his father’s cold anger sometimes greased his tongue.
Kurt looked at the rope, which was always there when he walked by, always moving, tempting him to play. What would happen if one day he and Christian swung across the barn on it, screaming their war cries as Joseph entered? What would happen if they climbed to the rafter, untied that knot and allowed the rope to fall? It was a good rope, heavy, but greying, and each year fraying more until its end now looked like the tail of a horse.
He coiled it, threw it at the rafter and for a moment it clung – and for that moment, Kurt felt jubilation. Then again it fell, heavily, weightily, its tail swishing, rhythmic, hypnotising, taking Kurt’s mind back and back to last summer at the swimming bend, Christian and Rachael swimming from opposite sides, meeting in the middle. Kurt swimming alone, filled with envy.
He’d loved Rachael since childhood. What was there in her not to love? When they had sat together in the mulberry tree, and he’d tried to clean the purple juice from her hair with green mulberries, he had loved her. And when she’d smiled at him with her mulberry lips, God, how he had loved her then.
Like a pendulum, that rope, moving time backwards and forwards. Less than twelve months ago Nicholas Squire came knocking at the front door, and it was as if the King of England had come to call upon his lowly subjects. A thin little man in a city suit and hat, his fine-boned hands kept clean in gloves, his mouth his only weapon. And weapon enough.
Elsa hadn’t known this. Flustered, but so pleased to see him at her door, she’d patted her hair, straightened her apron then opened the door wide.
‘Please come in,’ she’d said, believing that Rachael’s father had come to ask about Christian’s intentions, which was the right way of doing things. And with those two, far better that the arrangement was made sooner rather than later. Smiling, trusting Elsa, raised to know nothing but hard work. No time to think, to grow, to learn the ways of the rich, who had too much time to think.
‘Keep your German scum away from my daughter,’ Nicholas Squire said. He said more, but these were the words that cowered Elsa, made her cover her face with her apron, made her run to her kitchen and cry.
She was not one to weep. Those unfamiliar tears caused Kurt to lose control of his tongue that night, or to find that cold control he had not formerly known was his.
‘Forgive my mother,’ he said to Squire. ‘She is not yet accustomed to the language of the Australian gutter.’ And he’d closed the door while Nicholas Squire was speaking.
Certainly Kurt had not helped his brother’s cause, but with Squire, nothing would have helped. His two sons had gone to war. Freddy hadn’t returned; Arthur had, but was blind, his face so badly mutilated that his wife left him and returned to her father in England. Nicholas Squire had lost too much to the Germans. No daughter of his would be allowed to change her name from Squire to Reichenberg.
‘Make the cut now, and with a sharp clean knife,’ Elsa had said to Christian and Rachael. ‘Don’t let what is pure and beautiful become soiled. There is no hope for a marriage here.’
They’d made no clean cut. They’d allowed their love to ulcerate and fester, infecting others around them.
A wilful fool, Christian, and God help him if Rachael’s injuries were serious – but no more time for thinking. Joseph was coming and his horses had not been harnessed. He marched from the porch, tall and soldier straight. He looked at his great horses, ready and willing to work for him. There was a dam to be dug and he wanted it to go half-way to China.
‘Attention. Your master approaches,’ Christian mocked in German, his heels clicking, his hand saluting; the old man could not see him yet.
Kurt hurled the rope at his brother’s head. ‘He is not my master, and we are the ones who will benefit from that dam. Do you think he believes he will live forever?’
‘By Christ he does. And he probably will.’
Kurt walked to the harness and lifted it down. ‘Make the effort to at least look as if you’re working. This day will be long enough without you two at each other’s throats.’
‘I’m leaving tonight. I’ll ride over to Willama and take her from the hospital before that gimpy bastard can bring her back here. We’ll go this time. We’ll go so bloody far away, they’ll never find us.’
‘I have four pounds saved. It’s yours and Rachael’s. I only pray you’ll need it, brother. Now, help me with this.’
poor rosie thompson
In anticlockwise circles, Rosie shuffled around the kitchen table, clutching a china teapot to her breast. Perhaps she knew she held a teapot and not a child, perhaps she didn’t. Not a pretty picture, poor Rosie Thompson, clad in her faded shroud of a nightgown, its long skirt hitched high, used as a blanket for her teapot child. Her broomstick thighs were exposed, her gnarly knees, knots of ankle, bony feet in trodden-down slippers. She’d embroidered that gown once with many roses. Couldn’t remember the needle or the thread, couldn’t remember now the purpose of a needle and thread, but remembered she liked that gown.
Thump of boots on the veranda. She knew he was coming. Knew he’d done it. Couldn’t think now what it was he’d done, but he’d done it. Head full up with what he’d done. Bitter words in there. Mouth too dry to speak them right now. Gums munching, her feet shuffling, Rosie watched the passage doorway, waiting for him to come.
The police station had two front doors, one giving direct entrance to the business section of the building and one to the vestibule. The same key fitted both and Tom kept both locked when he was out. The house, put together with no great care or technique, trembled in strong winds. There was a wide crack in the dining room wall, gaps in most of the rooms where walls and ceilings should have met. Half the doors refused to close, but the roof didn’t leak, so Tom counted his blessings and ignored the cracks.
His lock-up was a joke in a town this size. Solid as a rock, it had two big cells, each one roomy enough to pack in a dozen; however, during the eight years Tom had been in Molliston, he’d used only one cell maybe six times – and Tige Johnson was responsible for five of those.
He liked his veranda, spent a lot of time on a cane chair out there – a nice place to sit in the mornings when the gum tree cast its mottled shade across the front of his house – and better in the afternoons when the sun was behind his house.
Rosie had been impressed the first time she’d seen where they’d be living. ‘What a lovely veranda, and look at that window,’ she’d said. ‘Oh my! And we’ve got a vestibule, Thomas.’
They’d put their hall stand and a pot plant in that vestibule, but the plant died and the hall stand became a convenient dumping place for junk which eventually overflowed onto the floor. Cricket bats and stumps, a spare bike wheel, an old tyre, two tubes, old coats and cases – none
had made it further indoors than Rosie’s vestibule, and each year the junk in there bred more of the same.
With a sigh, he picked up his billy of milk, which should have been put in his ice chest an hour ago, turned the key and entered, and in one continuous movement, removed his helmet and tossed it onto a wall peg.
A door to his left led into the station office, or to its long counter. A second door, set at right angles to its twin, was closed. It led into his residence. He dragged it open, dragged it shut behind him, and with the boards beneath his feet complaining, he made his way down the passage to his kitchen, and to Rosie.
‘Morning, love. Did you sleep well last night?’ No reply. He eyed her then turned away. ‘Pull your skirt down, Rosie. You’re showing your legs to me.’ Still no reply. Bad-day morning on the rise.
The kitchen had a man’s stamp on it: no cloth on the table, four chairs painted green – Tom had painted them, and he was no painter – worn greenish brown lino on the floor that needed a sweep. He’d tacked a bit of the leftover lino onto his table top, and it needed a wipe. He wasn’t much of a housekeeper and he didn’t care.
‘Sorry I wasn’t around earlier,’ he said, opening the ice chest and removing his milk jug, a green enamel vessel with a lid. It felt cool enough, smelt fresh enough. He emptied the new milk into the old, then lifted the lid of his ice chest. Still a bit of ice left. It might last him today. The water tray was overflowing. It overflowed a bit more as he carried it out the back door to pitch on his lavender bush.
Set up for convenience this kitchen, his convenience, between the sink and the ice chest a greying floor cloth was spread to dry over an upturned enamel bucket. He used that cloth now, mopping up the dribbled water, plus a bit of grit and grime, sopping up what he could reach of the water beneath the ice chest. Good enough. Jeanne Johnson would be here tomorrow to give the place its weekly spit and polish, and do the laundry. Or maybe she wouldn’t be in now, not if her little sister died, which seemed likely; he’d popped into the hospital before coming home. With no wasted effort, he tossed the floor cloth back on top of his bucket then turned on the tap.
His bar of soap lived on the window ledge where it had eaten into the paint. The tap trickling slowly, he soaped his face and neck, stuck his head under the trickle and wet it down. Whether it was drinkable or not, having that town water connected was a godsend – and a gold mine to Andy Morrison at the hardware store. He was doing a roaring trade in taps, sinks and chip heaters. Tom had a chip heater on order, though he knew he shouldn’t have been spending the money.
‘She’s going to be a sizzler today, love,’ he said, removing his vest, hanging it over the back of a chair as he glanced at Rosie, or at the teapot. It was one of those cheap china pots, all flowers and fuss that wouldn’t pour a decent cup of tea. Its spout dribbled, and if you tilted it too high trying to squeeze out the last drip, the flowery lid fell off in your cup. The boys had bought it for her birthday – because it had roses on it.
‘Roses for Mummy Rose,’ they’d said.
Beautiful boys, those two. That bloody war had taken the best and left the rest.
He coughed, drank more water. ‘The old tank ran dry last night, love. I had to fill the kettle with river water but I don’t reckon any shrimps got through. Give that teapot here and I’ll make us a cup of tea, eh?’
‘You . . . you made . . . you,’ she said, her words slow, unclear. Sleepwalker, sleep-talker, Rosie Thompson.
‘What’s that, love?’
‘You . . . you made them . . . go. You…’ She stood looking through him, and scratching at her scrawny backside, her gluey mouth wanting to accuse him, but not much coming out of it. She had a set of dentures but choked on them lately, spat them out in odd places. No one saw her, except Rob and Joan, Mary Murphy and young Jeanne.
Dry as a wooden god, his stomach telling him it was getting ready to get rid of a few of Kennedy’s peaches, he needed to put something solid in it, and fast, and he was near ready to kill for a mug of tea but she wasn’t giving up that pot, or hitching her skirt down.
She had decent nightgowns. Lately she’d taken to stripping them off, and in the shape she was in, she looked better covered. Never a large woman, she’d shrunk away to nothing in recent years. He tried to make her eat, tried to keep her clean. Terrible smell of old age about her now – a smell of decay. He knew he ought to get her back to the city, get her some treatment, though she still had a few reasonable days – which might have been classified as intolerable three months back. Rob kept telling him she was getting worse, so did Joan, so did Mary Murphy. Maybe they didn’t need to tell him – he was the one who lived with her.
She hadn’t been too bad until six months earlier when she’d made a laughing stock of herself in the grocer’s shop. He’d let Rob and Joan Hunter take over that day. They’d called the ambulance and sent her to Willama, and the doctors there packed her straight off to a state asylum in the city. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought her home, but she was his wife. She’d been the mother of his boys. How the hell could he live with himself if he’d left her in that place?
He was playing it one day at a time, still hoping one morning he’d get up and she’d greet him with her teeth in and a smile – or at least with her teeth in. Hope, that’s what kept a man going. And she couldn’t get into too much trouble up here, not if he kept her locked in. He wasn’t out much, and when he had to be out for more than an hour or two, Jeanne Johnson or Mary Murphy sat with her.
He gave up on the teapot and reached for a large enamel mug, put in a heaped spoonful of tea, added boiling water and left it on the hob to draw. When he’d poked those two big chunks of wood into the firebox at five, he’d had no real expectation that they’d catch, but they had, and had left behind a nest of embers perfect for toast making. Fate had been kind to him this morning – if not so kind to some.
‘Into each life some rain must fall, but those poor Squire folk have had a deluge these last years, and no sign of it letting up either,’ he commented, stirring his tea-leaves, subduing the floaters with sugar, adding a dash of milk. ‘Sit down and have a cuppa with me, Rosie. We’ve got to get fluid into you.’
Not this morning. This was going to be a bad, bad day and he didn’t have time for one of her bad, bad days.
He cut thick slices of bread from a new loaf, impaled them on his long toasting fork then, his mug of tea in one hand and fork in the other, he gulped down the strong sweet brew while holding the bread close to the embers.
She moved towards him. Nope. She went around him and into his room. Next best to accusing him, she liked accusing his twin beds. Their boys had slept in those beds, and when news came through that they weren’t coming home, Tom had taken to sleeping in them, half the night in one and half in the other, gaining more comfort in those beds than in Rosie’s. For years now he’d been sleeping a week in one then a week in the other, showing no favouritism, as he’d shown no favouritism to those boys in life.
At times he thought about buying himself a new bed, a wider bed, had even looked at a few, all the time knowing that getting rid of those twin beds would be his saying of a final goodbye to his boys. He couldn’t do it yet – like with the cricket bats in the vestibule. They hadn’t hit a ball in fourteen years but he couldn’t give them away, have other kids putting their hands where his boys’ hands had been. Wonderful little players, Ronnie and Johnny Thompson, good all-rounders; one or both of them might have ended up playing for Australia.
He ate his toast, cut more bread, cut it finer for Rosie, toasted it lightly then made a fresh brew of tea, straining half of it into a floral cup, the last survivor from the tea set they’d bought two years back. Only one cup and two small plates left. She’d saved her crockery throwing for him until a while back; now she threw whatever she felt like throwing at whoever she felt like throwing it. Miss Lizzie had copped two saucepan lids the other day when Rosie caught her walking down the post office lane. Lizzie returned his lids.
&
nbsp; ‘Rosie,’ he called, cutting her toast into triangles. Twice he called before retrieving her manually from his bedroom, and he didn’t appreciate being so close to her, and that was a fact. Her hair needed a wash and so did the rest of her, but he carried her to the kitchen, sat her on a chair and offered a triangle of toast. She must have been hungry because she bit, gummed the toast a while, swallowed it and waited for more.
‘That’s a good girl,’ he said.
‘You made…’
‘Yeah, we already agreed on that a long time ago, love, now that’s enough about it this morning. You pick up a bit and eat it. You need to get some fat on your bones or you’ll never come good. Pick up a bit of that toast and put it in your mouth for me. I’ve got things I should be doing.’
And she screamed at him and the gummed toast fell down her gown.
He stood, stepped away. This was something much worse than a bad bad day. ‘Pull yourself together, Rosie. This is doing neither of us a scrap of good. I’ve got things to do.’
That worked like a broken accordion, which was pretty much what she sounded like. Anyone in a mile radius would think she was being murdered.
He left her to it and walked up to the parlour window where he stood peering out at the Murphys’ veranda. He’d have to ask Mary to sit with her. Not a good day to ask her, Sunday – or maybe the Hunters could take her at the hospital for an hour or two. He shook his head. No, not the Hunters – give them half a chance and they’d be sending her over to Willama again.
A young bloke doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into when he sets his eye on a pretty girl, Tom thought, his hand rubbing at the base of his skull. If a young bloke could see into the future, he’d run like hell – like the lad responsible for young Ruby Johnson’s problem had no doubt run like hell. The lads weren’t always to blame. Some of them were silly innocent little buggers and a pretty girl could lead them around by the nose – not that he’d expect that sort of behaviour from any of those Johnson girls, and Ruby least of all. She had a crippled foot, wore a heavy boot, and was the last in town Tom would have expected to go off the rails.
