Trails in the Dust

by Joy Dettman

  ‘It’s good,’ he’d said when he finished it. ‘Publish it when I’m dead, Jen.’

  She’d never publish it now.

  Georgie would. It was in Jenny’s will that her computers and discs would go to Georgie. A final Juliana Conti, published posthumously, might keep a roof over Trudy and the twins’ heads. Nick wouldn’t.

  The uniformed men were at her now for the name of a friend they could call to sit with her until her girls arrived.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll stick around,’ Harry said. He’d been ‘sticking around’ for most of Jenny’s life, more brother than friend.

  He stoked the stove when the officers left. He opened the refrigerator, removed a cask of red wine from the top shelf, found and filled a glass. ‘Get that into you, Jen.’

  ‘I’d rather drink fly-spray,’ she said.

  He wasn’t a wine drinker. He took the glass to the sink, emptied it, rinsed it.

  ‘All things pass, Jen,’ he said. ‘I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but it gets easier. After I lost Elsie, I used to go to bed at night telling myself that all things pass and wake up still saying it in the morning. Then one day I started believing that it could have been so.’

  ‘He’s broken something inside me,’ she said. ‘Some nerve that’s supposed to feel can’t. I feel hollow.’

  ‘Eat something.’

  His words reminded her about the chicken casserole. She opened the oven. The dish and chicken it contained looked black. A tea towel protecting her hand she removed the dinner that never was and placed it on the sink. She lifted the lid of the potato saucepan, one of her near new saucepans. Its contents were black but black potatoes might soak off. That casserole dish wasn’t worth soaking. She tossed it into her kitchen bin.

  Lila sniffed it. She’d missed out on her dinner tonight. There were cans of dog food in the pantry and an electric can opener on the bench, and when it didn’t work, she slammed open her cutlery drawer and tossed things around, looking for an opener that would work. Had to gouge the can’s solidified contents into Lila’s bowl. Harry made tea, then sat and removed the makings of a smoke from his pocket.

  How many times had she watched him open that old tin with a coin, remove his cigarette papers, place one on his lower lip so both hands were free to pinch out strands of tobacco, to shape then roll those strands in fine paper. A lick, then behold, one of Harry’s ultra-slim cigarettes.

  ‘I suppose I should change the girls’ sheets,’ she said. ‘Georgie’s haven’t been changed since she was up here at Christmas time.’

  ‘I sleep in mine until Vonnie starts hounding me for them,’ Harry said.

  ‘Dust mites in the bed feed on our skin particles, according to the six o’clock news.’

  ‘Just another one of their fear campaigns,’ Harry said. ‘I remember a time when the biggest danger we had to face in bed was bedbugs.’

  ‘And unwanted pregnancies,’ Jenny said. ‘Roll me a smoke, Harry.’ He rose and tossed his smoke into the stove.

  ‘I didn’t mean for you to do that,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I didn’t need it,’ he said. ‘It’s just a habit.’

  ‘People died a lot happier from smoke-related diseases than they do from diabetes and obesity.’

  ‘You’re in no danger of that. When did you last eat?’

  ‘I’m not hungry. Roll me a smoke then go home, if you don’t want to watch me light it,’ she said. ‘And take Lila with you.’

  ‘You don’t want that.’

  ‘I don’t want a lot of things,’ she said. ‘I don’t want Trudy trying to drive herself and the boys up here tonight, and I don’t want him in this house. It’s a case of which one I don’t want more, I suppose.’

  Lila licked her bowl clean and returned to Jenny’s side, to plead her case with her eyes. She would have appreciated a bite of Nick. On the few occasions they’d faced off, he’d been lucky to get inside with his jeans intact – not that Jenny was concerned about his designer jeans, but he’d be carrying one of her boys tonight. She cared about them. They hadn’t taken Jimmy’s place in her heart but had carved out their own space there.

  THE WIDOW HOOPER

  That west wind, grown stronger in the night, had the chimneys wailing for Jim when Jenny woke before dawn, woke to that sledgehammer blow of knowledge that he wasn’t in bed, that never again would he be beside her in bed. Unable to handle that knowledge in the dark, she reached to turn on the bedside lamp. The switch clicked. The globe offered no light.

  ‘Bloody electricity company. Bloody trees.’ In Woody Creek, trees had a bad habit of flinging their branches at power lines. Her ice-creams would be melting, chocolate coated she’d bought for Jim. The meat she’d bought for him yesterday wouldn’t have had time to freeze. The girls and their men might eat it tonight, or Lila would.

  She’d placed a torch under Jim’s pillow when she’d got into bed last night. It was still there. She turned it on, then lay on her back, allowed its circle of light to play over the high ceiling, down deep blue drapes, across the fireplace.

  There was a lot wrong with the design of this house, its many fireplaces the worst of it. It had six. In the days when ladies had sat on their backsides with their embroidery, ringing bells for maids to bring more wood, six open fires may have burned from summer’s end to spring in Vern Hooper’s house. Jenny, the last Mrs Hooper, cook, laundry maid and wood carrier since she’d moved in, had sealed four of the chimneys with newspaper and cardboard cartons, then hidden her work with fabric-covered masonite screens. Only the sitting room and kitchen chimneys hadn’t quit the smoking habit. All six wailed.

  Her moving circle of light disturbed a spider, a hairy huntsman snoozing in the corner near the door. With too many trees growing too close to the house, they had frequent eight-legged visitors. This one ran from that narrow light beam towards her dressing gown, hung last night with Jim’s behind that door. The spider moved her from her bed. She snatched her gown before he reached the door, then, checking that his mate hadn’t spent the night in her slippers, she picked them up, opened the door and walked through to the entrance hall, a large place of wasted space, furnished with a hallstand and a scattering of photographs above dark wooden panelling. Her gown on, slippers on her feet, torch lighting her way, she crept through the hall to the kitchen.

  Her sister, Sissy, had coveted this house and its bathrooms. Jenny had never wanted to live in it. She’d argued with Jim for two months before agreeing to move back to Woody Creek. A couple with one baby hadn’t needed two bathrooms or six bedrooms. A couple with one baby had needed a modern, three-bedroom home in Ringwood.

  He’d promised to modernise the kitchen, and had, forty years ago. It was a large room with not an inch of wasted space in it. A warm room, the only warm room in the house in winter, because of its slow-combustion stove. She’d stoked it last night before going to bed.

  Georgie, Paul and Katie had arrived an hour before the others. They lived in Greensborough and knew a faster back way out of the city. Katie’s eyes had been red rimmed and swollen with weeping. Thank God she’d been asleep before the others arrived.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Trudy must have said a dozen times, and how could Jenny deny that. She had. A dozen times last night she’d denied it. A dozen times she’d told the lie of the accident, the lie of the house being built out there, the lie of the dropped cardigan. Didn’t want this day. Couldn’t take it.

  The kitchen chimney had a whistling wail that harmonised with the haunting howl of a big, old oak tree, planted too close to the western veranda. One of its branches provided the rhythm, tapping against the guttering.

  How many times had she paid to have that limb cut back? She used to nag Jim to have the tree removed, to have a few of them removed. He’d liked trees, or liked the privacy they’d offered. No gum trees grew on Hooper’s corner. Gums were killer trees, Jim said. He could name a dozen men felled by the forest they’d worked in.

&
nbsp; Jenny’s first husband, Ray King, had died when a log stack rolled and he’d been standing in the wrong place. A fallen branch had crippled Ray’s father. Big men both, bred to labour in the timber industry.

  The harvesting of the forest that surrounded Woody Creek had built this town. Sawmills had screamed their way through Jenny’s childhood, five in town, two more in the bush. All gone now, and without them, Woody Creek was dying.

  One of the twins coughed. Jenny turned in their direction, not eager for a repeat of last night. They’d slept their way home and hadn’t been ready for bed when they’d arrived. It had taken an hour to settle them.

  They looked like their father but had Trudy’s eyes. Nick was a good-looking man. In their wedding photographs, he’d looked like a long-haired young Greek god. He was her junior by a few years, a detail Trudy failed to pass on when they’d married.

  ‘He’ll stray,’ Jenny had said when those photographs arrived.

  ‘We raised a sensible girl,’ Jim said. ‘She knows what she’s doing.’

  She’d stayed away too long, had been five months pregnant when she’d come home. Nick had seemed pleasant enough, until Trudy returned the hire car. He’d wanted to drive it back to Melbourne, to spend a few days with his parents.

  ‘We’ll catch the bus down,’ Trudy said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Give me this time, Nick. I need to catch my breath for a while.’

  Two days later he’d helped himself to Jenny’s car. She’d drive anyone anywhere, but never, never loaned her little car – which she’d told him in no uncertain manner when he brought it back. He’d caught the bus to Melbourne the next day. He hadn’t gone home. He’d phoned Trudy from Darwin.

  That was when she and Jim had found out who he was. He’d helped himself to Trudy’s bank card. She’d cancelled it. That’s when they’d found out that she had no medical insurance, and no money in the bank.

  There were embers in the firebox and wood on the hearth. Jenny opened the flue wide before feeding the embers a rolled-up newspaper and then wood. Several times a day she cursed that stove’s greed for fuel, but her kettle was boiling, and with the firebox open there was light enough in the kitchen for her to turn off the torch.

  She smelt the wax from last night’s candles. They’d done a brave job and were lined up now on the sink like a battalion of burnt-out soldiers. A few had fallen. Three replacement troops had been sent in late to take their place. They still stood tall. She struck a match and sent them into battle again. The fallen and the jars they were in were given a burial in her kitchen bin.

  It needed emptying. It always needed emptying. There was too much waste these days. Granny hadn’t owned a kitchen bin or any bin. Waste not, want not, she used to say.

  The fly-spray wine she’d placed beside the bin last night had been moved to the bench. Someone had helped themselves to it. Georgie’s Paul drank red wine. She returned it to the fridge, then removed the loaded supermarket bag she’d used as a bin liner and tied its handles. The back door unlocked, she stepped out into the first day of no Jim, a grey and blustery day, but light enough out there for her to see where she was walking.

  The green council bin lived between the outdoor laundry and the wood heap. She dumped the bag then picked up an armful of wood. Lila’s bed was in the laundry, an empty bed this morning. She’d be better off with Harry for a day or two. She liked him. He took her out to the forest and urged her to chase rabbits. She wasn’t allowed to chase cats or bark at possums at home.

  Jenny placed the wood down on the hearth, brushed the residue from her dressing gown’s sleeve, closed the door, then selected a large chunk to feed to the fire god. Her mind was on Lila, when from the corner of her eye she saw Jim walk by the kitchen window. For an instant, the barest flicker of an instant, she thought last night had been a nightmare.

  It was a long enough instant to drive a splinter deep beneath her ring fingernail.

  The pain immediate and excruciating, she forgot she had a house full of sleepers, forgot she was a widow, and she cursed that wood stove to hell. Smoke gushing down instead of up the chimney, that lump of wood jammed half in and half out, pain, anger and loss meeting head on, she kicked the wood and damn near made a minor accident major. Almost had to grab the chimney to stop her fall, but the wood went in, so she kicked the firebox shut – and lost its light.

  Glasses on the bench where she’d left them last night, she put them on. Torch on the table, she turned it on, then stood, studying that splinter. It was big and had gone in deep. No part of it protruded that she could get a grip on.

  The finger in her mouth, she moved to the window to look for that figure. She’d seen someone walk by, someone tall and wearing dark clothing. Paul wasn’t tall. Nick was shorter than Trudy – and Jim had never worn black.

  His sister had, Lorna. With Jim dead, had she come out of her grave to take her morning constitutional around the verandas?

  She used to. Every morning she’d march around and around the verandas, a grown woman when Jenny had been a girl. They used to spy on Miss Hooper, Jenny and her friends. They’d hide behind the rose hedge and count how many times she’d walked that square of wide verandas.

  Scissors, tweezers, Jenny thought, and her slipper-clad feet whispering on carpet, she walked down the hallway to the bathroom to fetch her pointy-nosed tweezers. If she cut that nail back hard, the tweezers might get a grip on wood.

  Jim’s showering chair was in the shower recess where she’d left it after he’d washed yesterday. She was standing, staring at it when Georgie crept in behind her.

  ‘What are you doing rattling about at this time of day?’ Georgie asked.

  ‘Were you outside a minute ago?’ Georgie was tall and she wore little that wasn’t black.

  ‘I was asleep until a minute ago. What’s doing?’

  ‘I rammed a log of wood under my fingernail. Can you reach my pointy-nosed tweezers? They’ll be in the top, right-hand corner of the cabinet.’

  Georgie took the torch and saw what Jenny would have needed to feel for. Armed then, they walked through to the library, where Jim’s magnifying glass lived in the top drawer of an elderly roll-top desk.

  ‘You don’t do things by half measures, mate,’ Georgie said, examining the splinter under glass.

  ‘Do what you have to. It’s killing me.’

  Scissors from the sewing machine’s drawer, good light now coming though the library’s eastern bay window and a pincushion full of needles on the sewing machine’s bench top. Georgie operated at the window. When scissors and tweezers failed, she dug for the splinter with a needle until Jenny called it quits.

  ‘Trudy might be able to do it,’ Georgie said.

  ‘Let her sleep,’ Jenny said, and they walked through to the kitchen where Georgie found a frying pan and placed it onto the stove.

  She was about to add butter when Jenny offered her a bowl of dripping, saved from bacon and roast lamb. Granny had always saved her dripping, back before animal fat killed. It was living that killed – or not wanting to live.

  Twice in her life, Georgie had come within a whisker of dying, once by fire, once by knife. She wasn’t afraid of animal fat. A good dollop added to the now hot pan, she reached for a packet of sliced bread.

  Taller by half a head than Jenny, sixteen years her junior, her eyes green, her hair – hanging long this morning – still that dark copper red. She’d never looked like Jenny’s daughter, except a little around the mouth and chin. She knew what Jenny was thinking before she thought it.

  ‘Armadale?’ she said. ‘Remember frying your homemade bread? Jimmy wanted to use it as a football.’

  ‘It bounced,’ Jenny said. It had been edible when fried in pure white pig’s lard. In those distant days you could buy blocks of lard for a few pennies from any butcher shop. Lard had kept a lot of kids alive during the Great Depression. It had kept Jenny and her kids alive in Armadale in the late forties, when they’d lived with Ray. He’d been
a worker. They hadn’t seen a penny of his wages – and if she hadn’t behaved herself, he hadn’t fed her or her kids – or he’d brought home tripe and livers he’d known she’d refuse to cook.

  They were discussing the burying of those livers and tripe when they heard tiny footsteps running. Jenny opened the door to her dark-headed cherubs in their identical Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas.

  ‘Shush, you two, or you’ll wake Mummy,’ she whispered, cuddling both, one handed, the other held high until they settled sufficiently for her to show them her splinter. They had to kiss it better. She had to lie about their kisses making it much better.

  ‘If you sit quietly, Georgie will make you a surprise breakfast.’

  ‘An some cup-a-teas?’ Jamey said.

  ‘Wiff some litta bit a sugar, Nanny,’ Ricky said.

  They ate fried bread spread thick with homemade apricot jam. They drank their cup-a-teas, half milk, half tea with sugar enough to sweeten. Trudy didn’t approve of tea, sugar, fried bread or jam, but who, other than the experts who wrote their myriad books on child raising, claimed that a Nanny surprise breakfast was bad for little boys?

  Beautiful beings, they had no resemblance to the Macdonald clan, other than their duplication. Every generation of Macdonald had produced a set or two of identical twins. Georgie knew of their Macdonald connection. Trudy didn’t. Trudy knew that Jenny and Jim had adopted her but had never been told the details of her birth. Harry Hall and his family knew. They never mentioned what they knew – because of Jim. He’d preferred to deny Trudy’s Macdonald connection.

  ‘Where’s Papa?’ Jamey asked.

  ‘Sleeping,’ Jenny lied.

  ‘When him waked up, we can wide him’s go far,’ he said.

  Papa’s gopher was stuck in the mud, in the creek behind Monk’s. Papa was sleeping in a cold cruel place Jenny refused to think about.