Wedding Bush Road

by David Francis

  “Are your horses still here?” I ask. The pair of plump Anglo-Arabs I’ve heard about from my mother, her voice loud on the headset in my office on the forty-first floor, telling me how one of those “useless creatures” foaled unexpectedly and Earley went ballistic, ordered them off the property. How they keep reappearing, mare and foal and other stray ponies, munching on the precious pasture saved for the cattle my father still thinks are his.

  Sharen has a hand on the mantel, a certain swivel in her hips, reminding me how she pays her rent and horses’ board “regular.” And I’ve heard how she visits the big house, speaks loud enough so my mother can hear, charms her in front of the old AGA stove. She brings treats for the dog and drinks tea and partakes of my mother’s stale Arnott’s Teddy Bear biscuits, laughing. She helps with the jigsaw puzzles, placing tricky pieces in the blue miasma of sky. Sharen Wells is not stupid. She will not be railroded.

  “What’s going on with Ruthie?” I ask. Perhaps this is the reason I’m in this house at ten o’clock when I should be with my tight-lipped mother.

  Sharen looks up at the stains in the ceiling as if deciding what to tell. “If only he’d been there to see it,” she says, still talking of the fire. “I mean I lit it for him and I reckoned at least they’d call him out of Elsie’s bed, but only after did I find out he was gone. Serve me right for blazing a joint and drinking a Tooheys at once.” She lights a second cigarette as if reminded. “The next morning I took her a bunch of jonquils. What Ruthie puts up with here, poor old thing, out there in the night when she shouldn’t have seen all that.”

  I assume she means the night of the fire.

  “I don’t reckon she even had shoes on. I had to do something for her. Ruthie’s my only real friend around here so I got her flowers, you know, from near Genoni’s gate, the bit where it’s green from the septic, along the fence of the caravan park.”

  “I just want to know about her health,” I say. “You know how she won’t see doctors.” The time on the phone when she made me repeat: No more hospitals. Made me promise, even though I wasn’t here.

  “I don’t blame her,” says Sharen. “You know I’m a psych nurse over at Dalkeith in Koo Wee Rup so it’s good to have me here.”

  I’m looking at her as if that’s a plus.

  “Anyway,” she says. “I would have gone through the paddocks because it’s direct but those three black horses snort me down like I’m some toy, and it’s not bloody funny the way they are. One always lifts its head and they all stampede, so I have to go round by the road. They still came over the front paddock hill with their necks all up like big black swans. As if they smell me.” She sips her tea, pleased to have an audience. “It’s always further than you’d think, the walk from the Station Road corner.” Her strange need to give me the details, the way she’s almost poised when she gets going. “Cars whip through there like sharks on wheels. Jimmy Saddler in his trailer piled with plumbing stuff. He usually slows down to take a squizz but he didn’t even wave.” I imagine this woman on the gravel with her flowers, the shapes of those horses along the fence, taunting her, the clouding dust from Jimmy Saddler’s Ute.

  “I got no house or car, just blisters on my feet and flies on my eyes and those limp flowers.” Is she really trying to woo me with quaintness? “Sometimes I get the bipolar, the merry-go-round in my head.” She talks as though I might understand. “Ruthie’s nice to me when no one’s around, the time she saw that cut on my arm and she knew somehow it wasn’t an accident.”

  I feel a bit woozy, sitting on one of the wooden fruit boxes surrounding the enormous grease stain on the floor.

  “The jonquils in December were a sort of Christmas miracle anyway. A septic miracle.” She laughs at her joke and I sip from my grandmother’s teacup. A Women’s Weekly on the floor, an empty Tooradin Pizza box, her laundry basket draped with socks, the wall bereft of pictures. An ache behind my eyes.

  “Because I felt awful for what I done with the car. Ruthie there to see it.” She pauses in a kind of reverie and I can’t tell what’s for effect.

  I imagine her passing the row of old stumps that snapped clean off in some freak storm, as if the devil blew down on this place only and felled half the trees. Some would have seen it as Biblical but my mother just called it a face getting stripped of its features.

  “Them Pond Paddock ponies coming to sniff at me over the fence, that skewbald pony Patch and that spotted creature that came all the way from Singapore.”

  Spotted creature? A description my mother might choose, borrowed. Sharen wants me to know she’s part of life here.

  “Ruthie’s roses searching out at me like starving children. I plucked a healthy red one and pricked my finger. Serve me right. Took a jasmine from by the tank.”

  Apparently, my mother didn’t answer the door. “So I went up the hall, I’d never been into the inner sanctum. Found your mother laid out on the little bathroom tiles like a rag, her head caught over the rung of the wooden chair.” She felt my mother’s breath against her fingers, pried her neck from the chair legs. “How long had she been there?” I ask, but how would Sharen know? The medical pendant around my mother’s neck, the one she’s supposed to press to call for an ambulance. The one she refuses to use.

  “She was breathing,” says Sharen, “but real soft. I rolled up a towel and cradled her head, not sure if I should just stay and hold her, you know, let her die in my arms. That’s what she’d want, I reckon. But I did my Reiki on her. I’m not a master yet but I’ve done my level two online.”

  I’m not sure whether to smile or cry. Sharen rubbing her hands together and tracing some sign in the air, cupping a palm on my mother’s brow, or her chest. My mother prone, like a small palsied bird, her pale breasts visible through the frayed cotton nightie, while this woman with chipped indigo nails plays healer. My mother who isn’t keen on being touched.

  Sharen’s gaze is off me now, her eyes are tight. “The dog licked Ruthie’s face,” she remembers, and I wonder how much of this is for effect, if her unmade-up eyes are greener in daylight. “I told her you love her lots, and I said I was sorry, just in case.”

  I imagine the oblong of sunshine from the narrow bathroom skylight funneling down onto my mother’s face. Sharen humming, her hands curved about my mother’s ears.

  “Anyway, so we fixed her, me and Pip.” She blows her cigarette smoke softly over toward me.

  THE BURNT-OUT CAR appears in the dark as the carcass of a gutted beast, chunks of charred wood underfoot in the grass, the rocking horse somewhere among them. And Sharen Wells now standing in the window, watching. Samaritan, healer, psycho, snake. I’m not sure, too exhausted to take her on properly. Isabel warned me: “Don’t get too involved—get in, get out.” Still, I imagine my buckled-up father before the Tenancy Tribunal, fending off assertions. An old man accused of shuffling around his own mother’s furniture, brandishing his cheeky smile, some fumbled but fervent pursuit of flesh. Then yanking out her marijuana as vengeance, using eviction as currency. It’s not his reputation I care about; that’s been lost and gone. It’s an elderly man on the dock of some petty assembly, collapsing, carted away without a chance to limp down the end of this short, dark hallway and climb alone between the sheets of his mother’s four-poster bed.

  “You’ll kill him,” I told Sharen before I left the cottage, but she just stared out past me, into the bay-windowed night, as if the pleasure would be all hers. She’s staring out at me now.

  “Then I’ll go to the police,” I said and she smiled as though she wouldn’t mind. Or maybe she knows that I won’t.

  The night is clear, the garden light turned on up at the big house on the distant hill for my benefit. Evidence of my mother. Then, at the edge of the night I see her by the windmill gate, a frail shape in the dark. In her pale blue nightgown, like a sheet in the breeze above the grass. A skeletal woman, waiting, hugging herself in the dry night air. And I feel the sadness that doesn’t invade me deep like this in California.


  I walk over to her. She’s wearing her jeans under her nightie, moored to the earth by my father’s oversized boots, her shiny button eyes. “Accomplish anything?” she asks. Her nightie blowing against her ribcage. She’s almost phosphorescent, as if she’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, betrayed but undaunted. Her face gleams as if lost territory must be retaken. But her body seems shaky.

  I wrap her in my jacket and place an arm about her shoulders, an unlikely liberty. I find myself wishing for Isabel; maybe she’d think all this was charming and strange, and maybe I would too, but without her here I feel the old unrest. Walking my mother through the silence.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “That spindly little English stuff, you could barely use it anyway.” She exhales dismissively and together we trudge through the night, back up to the main house. The tiniest sliver of moon.

  “The Munnings is gone,” I say.

  My mother squints up at me. She loved that painting too, the fine shapes of well-bred horses rendered in such perfect detail, walking back hot from the gallops. A print, but it was signed. She always had her sights on it. “Your father’s a sloven and a slut,” she says, then gazes ahead.

  “Would he have insured it?” I ask. “Any of it?”

  “He can barely keep a car registered,” she says. “But don’t panic.” She gazes out over the spread that extends flat and black as bitumen before us. “You’ll end up with all this.” Shrouding me back in an old unholy alliance. Me, the lucky one. Schooled as a boy not to care for my father, my mother’s disenchantment laid as a bounty at my feet. How she advised me quietly that my father’s side of the family may have been good-looking but they weren’t particularly bright, that my father’s parents, truth be told, were actually first cousins. “That’s why they had to leave England.”

  My father, the only surviving son of the runaways, charming, square-jawed. At nine, I could beat him at Scrabble, or would have if I’d bothered to play him, too busy doing crosswords with my mother, measuring up to her vocabulary, while my father was out chasing skirt. A mother too tough for my father to compete with: on a horse, at cricket, at cards.

  With her three sisters, she played on the first women’s polo team, against the men. She rode jumping horses in England at the Royal Windsor Show, studied agricultural science at Melbourne University, played tennis as if she were Margaret Court, and came second in the Australia-wide bridge pairs with Fidelia the cook. My father who’d begged her to marry him until she gave in. “He wouldn’t leave me alone,” she once told me. “So eventually I said yes to shut him up.” I was both prodigal son and surrogate husband. There was no competing here.

  The windmill creaks above us where the three gates meet, again the hoot of that unseen owl, and the weight of this old conspiracy, my arm around the matriarch—part-parent, part-child, her confidant. All I’d tried to escape conspiring against me already, on my first night here. I glance back at her and feel the weight of jetlag and misgivings.

  “We’ll get Old Nev to clean up the mess,” my mother says, forgetting that Neville’s as old as the empire, can barely cut wood to keep her in logs for the stove, that he could no more clean up that blackened wreck than run for mayor.

  I think of Sharen at the fire station telling her woes to the boys over smokes and a beer. “We should call the police,” I say, but my mother laughs. The laugh she uses when she hasn’t heard, in case what’s said is supposed to be funny. In lieu of a response she motions at the dark billowy shapes of the heavy horses in the distance, grazing quietly in the next field, as if all is forgotten.

  “We should just change the locks on the cottage,” my mother says, and I realize she’s heard all along, reminding me she doesn’t approve of involving outsiders; she’d have preferred we fought the fire ourselves.

  “We’ll also need to keep your father out of there,” she says. “Once he gets wind of this he’ll want to move back in with his harlot.” Poor Elsie. My mother seems to be gaining momentum, no longer a wavering stick in white cotton, but plotting as we did in old times. She might even have her hearing aid in. “Next thing you know he’ll be dead and we’ll be left with her.” She talks as if she isn’t six years older than him. She holds course for the lantern in her garden on the distant hill, where the dog is shut inside the enclosed part of the veranda, barking.

  We head along the old tractor path and she hitches up her nightie. “Remember at Carbrook we had those Dutch people?” She talks as if I was alive then, on the farm where she grew up. “They used our chairs as firewood. Too lazy to go out and chop their own.” It’s why I was taught to hate the Dutch. I realize I haven’t mentioned Isabel, let alone that her father was born in Holland, or that her mother is Venezuelan. That they were never married, or that her grandfather was a general in the army in Caracas. A black-and-white photo of a handsome man in cap and uniform with a crop-eared Doberman at his side.

  On the hill by the chicken coop she pulls free from my arm and climbs the stile unassisted. We both know if she fell she’d shatter a hip. Balancing in the night breeze she looks back down at me. “When I was a kid,” she says, “we used to ride our ponies bareback and help spot bushfires from up on Two Bays Road.” She shields her eyes as if we’re in broad daylight. “The firemen gave us canvas knapsacks of water and we’d spray the remains.” She goes to step over the wire but stops. “I’m a good firefighter,” she says.

  I suddenly feel a strong desire to defend the dignity of this old woman, who stands up in the dark like something immortal.

  “You’re the reason I stay alive,” she says, then boldly steps down to the ground.

  She walks on ahead through the wood chips by the chopping stump, leaving me this side of the fence, split in pieces of my own—the part that yearns to be here with her, to stay like this forever.

  He don’t see me, just old ghost Ruthie floating through the dark, she hears me make my currawong sound, but she don’t look up, she got no need, she knows it’s Reggie Don sits up this windmill looking down on them. That son come all this way and now he’s flighty and indignant, but Ruthie, she’s the real one here, she knows what’s true on horses and this whole farm, even Sharen burning beds ’n’ chairs for nothing.

  Make my owl hoot and the son look up but he don’t have his night eyes back coz he been gone too long. Want to tell him how Sharen’s my mum and she’s unlucky sometimes, ’specially when there’s men.

  Peel my eyes on these two walking, the son with his arm round Ruthie now, he must want things. Why she saying about this all being his, after what she told me? Climb down from here and follow. The way she looks at him from up on the stile, all playful and proud like she might be ready to fly. I hope she don’t forget ’bout me now he’s here.

  Don’t worry about Reggie, I want to stay and scare ’em.

  I’ll hunk down on the veranda and see them through the window, breathe in the wood-stack smell where Pip lifts his leg and watches me. That dog doesn’t trust me, in there beside her as she plops into her big arm chair. He jump up beside her like always and do his dog stare out at me as if he about to growl. Ruthie hairbrush him so he arch his back and keep a secret. She eyes me too, out over her jigsaw table past her socks and undies on the clotheshorse like this window is the telly and it’s just me that’s on the screen. I’m the Reggie Dumbalk Show.

  If this son wasn’t here I’d go in and watch myself. We don’t really laugh at TV jokes, me and Ruthie. Just a smile

  that sneaks into the wrinkle of her cheek and she pretend she deaf but she don’t miss so much. Unless she got one of her old memories going. You better remember what you promise me, old girl.

  Some nights when she call out “Reggie” so I climb down from in her roof where I sleep sometime and ease in through her dream, how they gallop through her head and wire fences coming, mud flies up in her face but she rides on racing. The only one still left on top and all those other horses running with her with no riders and she’s afraid there’s no way home. I just say i
t’s okay, Ruthie, you just dreaming. I clear the mud from her old eyes.

  Flick my ciggie onto this veranda, watch it smoke. Yeah, it’s me, old girl, up in this window screen. Him there in his fancy dacks, standing over at the desk, his hair with gray already ash and dialing numbers on your phone. Trying to get through for something but I can’t hear him coz of the wind in the trees and those big birds from out the inlet landing. The way they squawk and streak the bark with shit. They kill trees.

  I seen that son once when I was small and up on Walker’s shoulders when we came down here for a one-time visit. Looked about this place from there on Walker same way I look now, from up in the roof and in the trees. Or right here window-level.

  Walker told me how he done the fencing and cattle and mucking out on this place when he was young and with my grandma Gracious. He never went to school like I never did hardly. They couldn’t keep me in the room, and then they said I had difficulties, like my mother. But I got eyes in the

  back of my head like Ruthie. Walker said she kill a snake as quick as look. Jump down off the horse and jerk a stirrup with her off the saddle.

  She come up to us that day and she was pretty friendly, considering. She knew what Earley did to my dad Walker. Then the son walk over all superior on a big dun horse he called Dunedin, as if he want Walker to know he owned the place already. Now he’s back and so am I. He got a hand in his pocket itching and his face gone red with talking Sharen and he keeps dialing over.

  Push my ear against this window and listen. “Isabel, hey it’s me, can you hear me?” He got a pretty-name girlfriend.

  He listens to the phone and looks around sly as if Ruthie can’t hear. “Yep, already.” Then he looks at Ruthie, recollects hisself as if he sees a sadness coming. “My father has this woman in a house out the back,” he says, “a tenant. She’s bipolar or something. She burned all his furniture.”