One Sunday

by Joy Dettman

  ‘To love is a good thing, my husband.’

  ‘I do not love,’ he said. ‘Love is a weakness that can be used as a weapon against the heart.’

  Then one afternoon, Christian brought Rachael to the kitchen and Joseph watched her, his eyes bewitched. She didn’t fear him, mimicked his gruff German words – and he laughed at her mimicking. That little Silver one, he called her. Always that Silver – as he had called his first wife, his love.

  Elsa had not sought love in her marriage, nor had she given more to Joseph than her labour, her loyalty, and often her pity. Tonight she felt great pity for the old man. When she’d gone to the bedroom to draw back the bedcover, she’d found him standing by the window, speaking English, wanting this land to hear and to understand his words.

  ‘You blooty land. How much more you want, eh?’ he’d said. ‘How much more blood you take for your dirt before you take old Joe?’

  She stood behind Kurt now, her hands on his shoulders, staring at the old book where words blurred and danced. Then she kissed his bruised eye. ‘Go find your brother. Be with him. It’s not good that he is alone tonight.’

  ‘I’ve tried, Mutti.’

  ‘Try again, my good, fine, beautiful boy. For me, try again.’

  He sighed, turned a page, then stood.

  That is what you did with life – if a page was bad, you turned another, and maybe it was better. There were many pages yet to turn. They would find a good one.

  good mates

  Tom tried concealing the shotgun by holding the barrel down beside his leg. He tried carrying it under his arm, until he glanced at his sons’ cricket bats carried proudly on Mike and Billy’s shoulders. Perhaps he felt that old jab of pain in his gut, but like all other might-have-beens, it didn’t change what was. He lifted his chin, lifted his gun to his shoulder, needing to walk proud beside those cricket bats one last time.

  Down they walked, past the sports oval, a few kids chiacking, a few more wanting to follow. Tom sent them back and the trio marched on until there were no more houses, only forest on the left and Dawson’s farm on the right, at which point Tom called a halt.

  The railway lines were close to the road, but on the other side of those lines was heavily timbered bush – which didn’t look inviting at this time of day and was probably crawling with snakes. He glanced at his boots, decided to tuck the cuffs of his trousers into his socks, which might offer his ankles some protection from venomous fangs.

  ‘I’m going over those lines here. I’ll work my way down to the river, along it a bit, then come back up behind that big hollow log. If I can’t sight them there, I’ll cut out though to the crossing and back onto Kennedy’s Road. Now, you know what you’ve got to do?’

  A sky of blood formed in the west was bruising, marbling with purple, the world growing darker, and those trees on the far side of the line looking gloomy. What if those two big buggers were still hanging around? What if there were more than two?

  ‘We’re not going to be much use to you here, Mr Thompson.’

  They weren’t far from wrong there, but he didn’t tell them so. ‘You’ll hear me yelling if I need help, or you’ll hear my gunshot. If you do, run for Dawson. Get him to phone the Willama police, then you stay inside that house until you’re told to come out. You do as I say now, or the deal is off and we all go home.’

  ‘Can we stand on the lines and brain them if they make a break out to the road?’

  ‘You can stand on this road and test out your cricket bats, that’s what you can do. And don’t lose that ball. And you can keep an eye out in case those city blokes come down here looking for me. You understand now, lads – I want no foolhardiness out of you.’ And he left them.

  The railway company liked dodging hills where it could. Kennedy’s land was flat. They’d gone straight though his river paddock then followed the river to town. They liked drawing straight lines too, where they could, and that river didn’t, so the land between line and river chopped and changed. At this point, the water cut deep into Squire land, thus the bush between the railway lines and the river was wide. Red gums grew thick here, and big. There wasn’t much of a rise up to the station, but the train took its time through Kennedy’s and over that crossing, making it easy for a freeloader to run out from behind a tree and scramble aboard one of the goods trucks – or for a foolish young girl to jump off. At night, not a soul would see them.

  With no path to follow, Tom’s progress was slow once he climbed over those lines. His eyes scanning the terrain for snakes – of the legless and two-legged variety – his ears alert for voices and movement, he was at the halfway mark to the river when he heard something behind him, and swung around, his gun pointing.

  Those flamin’ kids were creeping in after him. He hid behind a broad tree trunk, making a grab at Mike’s shirt as he stole by – and was lucky not to be brained by his bat-wielding mate.

  ‘I told you little buggers to wait on the road,’ he hissed.

  ‘What if they sneak up on you and knock you cold? We thought we’d come in a bit so we can watch your back, Mr Thompson.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I could have shot you just now, one barrel each, and I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing if I have to watch your backs as well as my own. Your mothers will have my guts for garters if I get one of you hurt; now, go back to that road or no money in the morning.’

  ‘We’ll stay here, Mr Thompson. We won’t move from here. Promise.’

  Tom eyed those eager faces, and maybe it was only those bats, but for a split second or two they reminded him of two other kids. ‘You did a bonzer job for me today, so don’t you go undoing it now, deputies. If those coots are still hanging around here, they could be anywhere. They’ve killed once, so they’ll do it again. This is no cops and robbers game, lads. This is the real thing.’

  ‘We know that, but we’re both good bushmen and fast on our feet, and if we see anyone, we’ll just say we’re looking for our lost cricket ball.’

  Tom gave up and headed for the river bank. No sign of them down there. No sign of anyone. Those mongrels were long gone. He turned, circling back towards a hollow log that might have been some ancient relative of the town tree. Only its shell remained, but a shell large enough to house a family of midgets, and a popular camp for the swaggies, being within a stone’s throw of the railway lines.

  Using a clump of saplings to screen himself and keeping his finger on the trigger and that gun barrel pointed towards the sky, Tom crept up on the log. It was too dark to see much; colour had a way of dying in the dark, and with colour went form. He checked the ground at his feet, checked over his shoulder, feeling knives in his back and fangs in his ankles. A man had to be mad for doing this. Those mongrels could have been creeping up behind him while he was creeping up on them, half a dozen of the buggers, armed with knives and broken bottles.

  No one behind him. No sign of those kids either, but before him there was a hump on the town side of that log that could have been a body with light hair. He stood for a minute, waiting for that head to move. It didn’t, so it probably wasn’t a head. Two more halting steps forward and again he checked behind him, checked both sides, checked the ground. Then, taking a better grip on his gun, he moved forward, his eyes never leaving the hump that could have been a body.

  And it was a body – or a definite head resting on a bedroll, the body hidden by the bedroll. There was a second one too, lying right alongside that log, sprawled out flat on his back, closer to Tom than the head on the bedroll but blending in better – except for his pig-grunting snore.

  It was a bit of an anticlimax, really. Not that Tom felt like arguing about that, but those murdering mongrels were both sleeping – or dead drunk. He stepped in fast, damn near shoving the gun barrel up the big Pommy’s nose.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he warned.

  They didn’t move, barely flinched. And no bloody wonder. There was an empty whisky bottle between them and a couple more not far away. They hadn’t gone thi
rsty today.

  ‘Morris Mo Riley and Lefty Logan, you’re under arrest for the murder of Rachael Squire. Anything you say may be used in evidence against you.’ They still weren’t hearing much; he wouldn’t have bothered repeating it, if not for the benefit of the lads, who might have sighted those murdering mongrels before he’d sighted them. As soon as he shoved his gun in Mo’s face, they’d come belting out of the timber like a pair of scalp-hungry, yahooing red Indians. That woke his prisoners.

  He got Mike to point the gun while he cuffed the pair, hand to hand and ankle to ankle, then he searched them. Not much on them. He searched their bedrolls. Nothing worthwhile there, either. All he ended up with was a ten bob note and seven and six in coins.

  ‘Where’s the money?’

  They did a bit of snarling, which didn’t include the whereabouts of their share of Dave Kennedy’s stash, so Tom took their boots. Hard to deny him anything with a gun barrel waving around close to their noses and a kid’s itchy finger on the trigger. No bankrolls in their boots. The buggers had hidden that money somewhere.

  A third bedroll that Billy pulled out of the hollow log was more productive. Tom found a filthy shirt, small enough to fit Vern Lowe, and stinking of him too. What fell out of that shirt when he unrolled it was something better than money, something that would tie these bastards up tighter than a few five pound notes. It was a hairbrush, its highly polished wooden back and handle inlaid with silver. It looked old, and as sure as God had made little green apples, it was the one Joe Reichenberg had given to Rachael.

  His barrel prodding his prisoners in turn, just to help them keep in step, the lads walking behind, carrying the bedrolls and cricket bats, up the middle of Railway Road they went. The city tenderfoots, like Siamese twins with three legs between them, weren’t managing well, but the law enforcer and his deputies marched triumphant, their heads held high, just as the lamp outside the railway station was lit and day gave up the sky to the stars.

  ‘You got another telephone call from those lost policemen, Mr Thompson.’ Jeanne and Miss Lizzie occupied his cane chairs. ‘They’re still miles away. Their car won’t keep going so they had to leave it out in the middle of nowhere and walk to . . . where did they say they’d walked to, Aunt Lizzie?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, dear.’

  Jeanne’s expression, like Tom’s, suggested she doubted her aunt’s words. ‘Oh well, it wasn’t too far from the train line anyway, because they had to walk to some station, and he said they’d be coming in on tonight’s train.’

  ‘Thanks, lass. What have you done with Mrs Thompson?’

  ‘She ate her eggs then got mad about something so she ripped her dress off. I got her into that nighty she likes and she put herself to bed.’

  ‘She’s been asleep half the afternoon.’

  ‘I didn’t put her to bed, Mr Thompson. I tried to stop her, told her she’d mess up her pretty hair, but she got in anyway. I keep checking on her every few minutes. She’s sound asleep.’

  Tom prodded his prisoners through the side gate and down to the lock-up door. He handed the keys to young Billy and let him do the honours, seeing as Mike had got to hold the gun.

  ‘Where’s my water and fags?’ Vern yelled. Tom could smell him, though he couldn’t see him in the gloom, could barely see where that cuffed pair landed when they tripped over their three feet on the way into his second cell.

  ‘I brought you some mates instead, Vern,’ he said, locking the second cell door. ‘They’ve got tobacco on ’em.’

  ‘Shit,’ Vern replied.

  ‘Use your bucket,’ Mike said.

  Not another word came out of any of them until Tom and his deputies were outside. A bit was said then, and it wasn’t the sort of language Tom wanted lads to be hearing, so he dismissed them for the night, though he stood listening beneath the barred window.

  ‘You give us up, you breenlus fooken fool.’

  ‘I told him nothin’. I arst for a solicitor, and that’s all I said to him. And I wasn’t so fooken breenlus as to get fooken breenlus dead bloody drunk, was I?’

  Tom left them to it. He wanted his pipe; it wasn’t in his pocket and he couldn’t remember where he’d last seen it. Not wishing to run into Miss Lizzie on his veranda, he entered his residence via the back door, lit his kitchen lamp, found his tobacco tin but couldn’t find his pipe. Maybe he’d left it in his office. He checked on Rosie as he walked by her room. She was sleeping. With no lamp to light his office, he couldn’t see much. He’d have to put some kerosene in the dining room lamp, bring it in here, but he didn’t have the time or inclination to do it right now. He wanted his pipe. He had a quick feel around in the dark, struck a few matches and found Vern’s tins of cigarettes, so he helped himself to two, one for his mouth and one over his ear for later, then he walked to his open front door where he listened a moment to the lads exaggerating the tale of the two drunks Tom had caught napping.

  The mob now congregating on and around his veranda cleared a pathway to let him out. He didn’t hang around for congratulations, but headed diagonally across the circle to the café, was halfway there when he heard his telephone jangling.

  ‘Get that for me, Jeanne,’ he called, continuing on his way while Miss Lizzie hurried home.

  The café sold pipes but he didn’t much like their price tag. Needing to cash his fiver and pay off those lads, he bought a couple of boxes of matches and another ice cream and walked back across the road, licking it.

  ‘It’s a Melbourne man from some newspaper asking a lot of questions, Mr Thompson. Do you want me to tell him you caught the murderers?’

  ‘No, lass. Don’t tell him that. Just say that a few suspects have been rounded up, and that Sergeant Clarence Morgan is on his way up here now, but he can’t keep his car going long enough to get here.’

  ‘Clarence Morgan?’ she yelled.

  Tom licked around the cone, allowing no drips to escape. ‘That’s him. Clarence Cecil Morgan. They’ll know who you mean.’

  The newspapers would like that. They’d give him a line or two tomorrow morning. He’d hated being called Clarence as a kid. Tom smiled as he continued walking the circle until, like the moths, the post office light drew him to it. He stood licking ice cream and watching the flame, watching the crazed circling of those moths, fragile or sturdy, spotted or striped, big ones and small, they were all slaves to that flickering glow. A few bats were flying about too, the ugly little buggers swooping, feasting on moths and mozzies.

  Funny how old Mother Nature had set things up. The bats ate the moths, the owls ate the bats, the feral cats ate the owls, the dogs ate the cats, and man, armed with his rifle, shot the dogs and left them to rot where they fell. Man, the only flamin’ one of God’s creatures who killed for gain, not food. Size was all important in the animal kingdom but it made no never-mind in the world of man. Money counted. Money bought the gun that killed the dog. Money bought power. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, old Lord Acton had said once, and truer words were never spoken, Tom thought, feeding the tail-end of his cone to old Blue. Then the post office door swung open behind him and one whom absolute power had corrupted abso-bloody-lutely stuck her head out.

  ‘Good evening, Constable. Would you have a moment?’

  ‘I’m pretty busy right now –’ Busy feeding a dog. Old Blue didn’t like Miss Lizzie. He left Tom in the lurch. ‘What’s concerning you, Miss Martin?’ he asked – as if he didn’t know.

  ‘My sister and I, at times, are forced to overhear certain snippets of private conversations…’ she said.

  Tom stepped back, considered the hill, and taking off down it. She was going to go him for blowing that flamin’ whistle in her ear all day.

  butterflies only live for a day

  The spike Christian had been driving randomly into the earth since midday had been put aside. He was now convinced Joseph’s hidden money was in the locked room, and that’s why the crazy old bastard kept it locked, not as a
memorial to his wife, as Elsa believed, but because it was his own private bank vault.

  I’ll take his bloody door off, he thought. I’ll break his bloody window. If the mean old bastard had given me ten quid when I asked for it, Rachael would have been alive today. His fault. If she hadn’t been born a Squire. If . . . Life was full of ifs.

  Always the outcasts, Kurt and Chris Reichenberg – and who wouldn’t be with that bloody name? – but at least they’d been outcasts together until Kurt turned fourteen and left school. That was the year Mr Connor retired and Miss Ross came to teach. She’d looked younger than some of the semi-mature boys in seventh grade and had no control over them, so she’d sat them in a second classroom, set them work, then left them without supervision. It was easy to steal outside, smoke stolen cigarettes. Easier to become one of the rebels than remain an outcast.

  The school’s back fence led onto the football oval, providing an easy escape route to the swimming bend, and if Miss Ross knew her senior boys were spending their days down there, she dared not tell their parents.

  Gwyneth Murphy and Sarah O’Brien had joined the band of rebels. They’d been yabbying downstream from the bend when Rachael swam across from the other side. She knew the girls from church and she’d stayed talking to them until they heard the school bell and had to run like hell to get back there. Just a mob of kids at play.

  Christian left school in December and joined Kurt in the paddocks. He didn’t see Rachael again for months, until one day she came to the fence. He left the paddock and walked her back to the swimming bend and sat with her on the bank. She took his hand, just to look at his blisters. He had a lot of blisters back then. Heady stuff, that hand-holding, breathless stuff, sitting close to her while she spoke about Melbourne, and how she was going to study music in Melbourne. Maybe that was the day he’d fallen in love with her. He kept holding on to that hand, just holding it and sitting, listening to her, barely able to speak a word. He was fourteen. She was a few months older.