The Serpent's Skin

by Erina Reddan

  ‘You gotta get up there, Dad, otherwise he’ll think there’s something up.’

  He grunted. ‘Right.’ He grunted again. ‘Right. You were always the clever one.’ But he didn’t say it like a compliment.

  ‘I’ll have your room, Tessa,’ said Aunty Peg when she arrived off the train after Father McGinty had gone, and we’d done the dishes and Tim and Tessa and I had been over everything.

  ‘Dad was out of his mind,’ was Tessa’s opinion. ‘You said he was crying. It was the grief talking.’

  ‘But to avoid the priest,’ Tim said. ‘That’s not natural. That’s not Dad.’

  ‘Shut up, Tim. What would you know?’ Tessa said. ‘You’re just a boy.’ As if that explained all his shortcomings and should be the end of it.

  Tim and I exchanged a look behind Tessa’s back because being a boy had nothing to do with anything.

  Dad set down Aunty Peg’s suitcase in the middle of the kitchen like it was the final step of a very long journey.

  ‘My room is all ready for you, Aunty Peg,’ said Tessa. She’d even put wattle and lilac in a vase by the bed.

  ‘Take this case in, then, Tim,’ said Aunty Peg. ‘I’ll get started on the vegies.’

  Tessa smoothed Mum’s apron over the front of her. ‘All done, Aunty Peg. Cup of tea?’

  ‘Rots your gut,’ she said without blinking.

  Dad rolled his eyes behind her back and passed the suitcase to Tim, who took off with quick feet. I was betting he’d be out the window of Tessa’s bedroom just as soon as he’d dropped Aunty Peg’s case.

  ‘I’ve got to set up for the milking.’ Dad disappeared out the front door.

  Aunty Peg pulled out two chairs. She sat on one and hefted her feet onto the other. ‘Drainage,’ she said to the air. ‘That was the trouble with your mother, no drainage from the brain.’

  I stepped back out of Aunty Peg’s line of sight and crossed my eyes. Philly giggled.

  ‘Giggling’s for babies,’ said Aunty Peg.

  Philly stepped back beside me to poke her tongue at Aunty Peg’s back.

  ‘That’s why she married your father.’

  Tessa sat opposite Aunty Peg; Philly and I pulled out two other chairs. This was getting interesting.

  ‘Could have had James Ryan, the one with the hardware place in town. Mad for her, he was.’ She looked straight at me. ‘Get me a glass of water, will you, Philly?’

  I nudged Philly.

  ‘She meant you,’ said Philly, elbowing me back.

  ‘She said you.’

  Tessa sighed and got up from the table.

  ‘Philly a bit lazy?’ asked Aunty Peg to Tessa, meaning me. She turned back to me. ‘Give us your hand.’

  I held one out, but only got it halfway before she tipped forwards and yanked it towards her. She bought it almost to her nose and stared hard into it and ran one cold finger across the middle of my palm, then she nodded like she found what she’d expected and flung back my hand. She started to ferret about in her handbag as if she’d moved on to the next thing.

  ‘What did you see in Philly’s hand, Aunty Peg?’ asked Philly, grinning.

  ‘Hasn’t got enough layers of skin between her and the world. She’s all trouble that one.’

  ‘Philly always is,’ I chimed in, grinning myself. Philly crossed her arms and shook her face in mine.

  ‘James Ryan?’ I prompted Aunty Peg.

  ‘Had prospects. Instead your mother chose love and dirt. Where’d that get her?’ Aunty Peg looked from one side of the room to the other. ‘Eating dirt for breakfast, lunch and tea.’

  Tessa swung around from the sink, a brewing storm. I stepped into the gap. ‘But Mr Ryan hasn’t got any hair.’

  ‘Bald as an egg then too, but at least she would have known what she was getting into.’

  ‘She didn’t get into it, though, did she?’ I said. Seeing as I was Philly for the minute I was using up my free ticket.

  ‘So she ended up with you lot. Half killed her, you did. Especially you, Philly. Nearly did for her. Poisoned her from the inside.’

  Tessa dumped the glass in front of Aunty Peg on the table and said she had to go check on Dad and those cows.

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘JJ will stay with you, Aunty Peg. She’s really sweet.’ I skipped away.

  Tessa came marching back and yanked Philly from her chair. ‘JJ’s not sweet at all. I need this one to collect the eggs.’ The words could hardly get through her tight-together teeth.

  It wasn’t until Philly and I got to the chook shed that I saw Philly’s hands were shaking. I nudged her. ‘I was just kidding back there with Aunty Peg. You’re not any kind of trouble.’

  She pursed her lips up like they’d been button closed. I nudged her again. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  I took the collecting tin away from her. ‘It’s not nothing, little duck.’ The chooks clucked around us. ‘Missing Mum?’

  She nodded. I narrowed my eyes, but she turned her back on me, clucking at the chooks. They followed her to the wheat bucket. Mum said Philly was our queen of the chooks.

  ‘Move over, Baby Beak,’ she murmured.

  The chook stretched its neck into its breast and let Philly take two eggs from under her. If I was trying to get under that chook, she’d be pecking me with that beak of hers, which was a lot sharper than a baby’s. Philly got the wheat out to them, but not in her usual arch of rain. Instead, she puddled it out of her bucket onto the ground.

  ‘Let’s go, Philly,’ I said. I couldn’t breathe through the sad. Was it because this was what Mum and Philly used to have together? Like Mum and I had flowers? Like Tessa and Mum had baking?

  ‘Your father told you I’m mad yet?’ asked Aunty Peg, biting into the chicken. She was eating both the drumsticks when usually Philly and I got one each. Dad’s eyes stayed pointed on his plate, just where they’d been since he sat down.

  ‘Are you?’ Philly asked Aunty Peg.

  ‘Eat,’ Dad said.

  ‘Been mad with grief since I was five,’ said Aunty Peg. ‘You never get over a thing like that, your parents dying when you’re young.’ She looked around the table.

  Dad belted the table with his fist. The salt and pepper headed for the ceiling. ‘That’s enough, Peg.’

  She waved her chicken leg. ‘Not you lot.’ She looked around at all of us. ‘You’re all too old to be affected. You don’t have the gift, anyway. Besides, Sarah wasn’t good at painting, was she?’

  Dad put his palms in the air. ‘Don’t ask.’ His voice weary with the weight of it.

  But I did. ‘What’s painting got to do with the price of fish?’

  Aunty Peg looked at me. ‘Which one are you again?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Sassy, aren’t you?’ She picked up her knife and fork and headed for the roast potatoes on her plate. ‘Sarah was like that.’

  I sat up straight.

  ‘Sarah would tell you the blue sky was yellow and you’d believe her.’

  I sagged. Nobody ever believed me.

  ‘Why didn’t you have kids, Aunty Peg?’ I asked.

  ‘Bleed you dry. Look at Sarah. Went into the ring eight times.’

  Philly plucked at the neckline of her T-shirt. Tessa and I frowned at each other.

  ‘Less talk, more eat,’ said Dad.

  ‘It was so, Jack bloody McBride,’ said Aunty Peg. She sniffed. ‘Not so handsome any more, are you? Where’s all that charm now?’

  While everybody else was gasping at a lady swearing, at the kitchen table and in front of children, I asked, ‘Where are the rest of us?’

  Aunty Peg bent down with a groan to look under the table. ‘Not there.’ Then she laughed as if she’d told us a great joke. ‘Eight pregnancies. Every one made her sick as a dog. But this one,’ she gestured with her knife towards Dad, ‘wouldn’t let her be.’

  ‘Be quiet, woman,’ thundered Dad. He leaped to his feet, the chair screeching backwards across the lin
o. ‘Have you got your pills?’

  Aunty Peg waved her fork.

  ‘I suggest you take them if you want to stay here even one night. I’ve about had enough of you.’

  Aunty Peg shook her head from side to side, mimicking him.

  Dad stalked off, leaving his food uneaten.

  ‘You don’t frighten me, Jack McBride. That’s what the doctor said, fair and square. She nearly died with the last one, Philly, or JJ, was it?’

  ‘Instead she died of something else,’ Dad yelled back.

  ‘True enough.’ Aunt Peg turned. ‘Dead now, so what does it matter?’ She cut into the pumpkin. ‘What did she die of again?’

  ‘Burst appendix, Aunty Peg,’ said Tessa.

  Dad came into our room that night for the first time since Mum’d gone.

  ‘Can Aunty Peg stay a few extra days?’ I asked, wanting him to feel better after the day he’d had being mad with grief and then mad with Aunty Peg. I squashed down what he’d said in the dairy until it was flat into the mud and I didn’t see it any more. Tessa had to be right. Dad had been full of normal when he’d had his cuppa with Father McGinty. Talked about the hymns Mum liked best. Father McGinty had found a better reading than the one they’d picked out together in the presbytery the other day. Dad had sandpapered up his chin, allowing as how that was a good one and just right for Sarah, and thanking Father McGinty for coming all that way to suggest it. He was just like always.

  ‘Cheeky bugger.’ He swatted me now as I lay in bed, with a ghost of a grin, but there was no fuel in his tank. ‘Been saying ya prayers?’

  We nodded. ‘We say them to each other,’ Philly said.

  ‘Good girls.’ He sat on the side of Philly’s bed. His eyes travelled the ceiling, corner to corner. ‘Your mother would be proud of yous,’ he said.

  I blinked. Not once but three times. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ he echoed, searching my face for answers. ‘She always was’ was the best he could do. For me, it had been a serious question. If I knew, I’d do more of it.

  ‘Is Mum our guardian angel now?’ asked Philly.

  ‘Reckon so.’

  ‘So can we pray to her?’

  ‘Reckon she’d like that.’ He kneeled down beside Philly, turned our bed light off. We all said our Hail Marys together. Afterwards, he leaned back on his heels. ‘Don’t listen to Peg, girls.’

  ‘Peg was right, though. I did nearly kill Mum,’ said Philly matter-of-factly, her hands tucked under her little monkey face.

  I saw it then—that was why Philly had been upset in the chook shed. She must have believed Aunty Peg telling us she’d poisoned Mum from the inside when she was growing in her. I put my hand across the space between our beds, but Philly just looked at it like it came from The Planet of the Apes, so finally I snuck it back under my covers.

  ‘Peg’s a sick woman,’ said Dad.

  ‘Why isn’t she up at The Hill, then?’ asked Philly.

  Dad sighed. ‘She should be, by rights. But it’s not a nice place. Your mother was nursing up at that loony bin on the night shift for years.’

  ‘If they put Aunty Peg there, she could have ended up like Old Mary,’ I told Philly with authority.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Don’t go frightening ya little sister,’ Dad said. He got to his feet and lifted the blankets to Philly’s chin. Smoothed them down.

  ‘Night, little chickens,’ he said.

  ‘Night, Dad.’

  He closed the door just enough to leave a strip of light across our beds. I wished he’d smoothed my blankets as well. Maybe he thought I was too old now.

  We listened to the thud of his footsteps back to the TV.

  ‘Who’s Old Mary?’ Philly whispered.

  ‘They locked her in a padded cell and had one little slit that they opened to give her food. Mum said she was wild. Said she was the only one who could calm Old Mary. Mum was worried about her when she quit but more worried about me cause my hair had turned to straw and fallen out with her not being around in the nights, so she had to stop work. Mum reckoned they would have put Old Mary in a straitjacket.’

  ‘What’s a straight jacket?’

  ‘One of them things you can’t move in, it’s like torture.’ I had only the haziest of ideas. ‘It’s white all over, white for madness.’

  ‘Do you reckon Aunty Peg is as mad as Old Mary?’

  I considered. ‘Aunty Peg can still cook and stuff; don’t reckon Old Mary could have done that.’ Mum said Aunty Peg wasn’t mad all through. Said she made a meal of it whenever she got around Dad, just to rile him up good. So maybe she was also as brave as brave.

  ‘I’m glad Aunty Peg isn’t up at The Hill,’ said Philly. ‘But she’d better go home after the funeral.’

  THE MORE THAT DOESN’T ADD UP

  The next day I was staying out of Aunty Peg’s way and her cut-cut eyes. I wandered across a paddock or two and found myself on top of the gully. Before I could give myself a chance to say no, I skidded down the mud into the long, dark crack between the two hills to kick at a few old bones. I squatted to line them up to see if I could tell which bone had been what. But give them enough time, all bones ended up dried out, white and cracked through so you couldn’t tell the difference. The skulls were good, though. I did a better job there.

  I got hold of a beauty, almost perfect, little lamb’s skull, I reckoned. I rubbed the dirt away and stared long and long into the black hollows, trying to put the eyes back and give them a bit of spark. One day Mum’s head would be all empty gone like this. I traced the eye sockets of the lamb with the tip of my finger. I wouldn’t want Mum’s bones to be here, kicked around and left for dead. I was glad she died in a hospital where there was somebody to look after her.

  The craw of a crow came long and sharp. I looked up and found her standing bold as bold on the short limb of a stunted tree in a crease in the hill. Not much got a hold on living in this gully, so I reckoned good on the tree for giving it a go. The crow gave another long moan across the valley. Against the greys and pale winter greens there was a slice of orange on the ground under the tree. I stopped breathing. Mum had an apron with oranges on it. I knew it couldn’t be; Mum died in a hospital with all the doctors and nurses, not here, all alone and forgotten, but I was up and running over there before my brain could tell me otherwise. The lamb’s skull, forgotten, bumped away down the hill. The crow took off in a hell of a panic seeing me rushing hard at it.

  I could tell, way before I got there, but I kept going anyway because I couldn’t stop, my feet kept running, as if the devil was after me. My chest was burning and heaving, but still I kept going.

  At the tree, I collapsed over the torn strip of faded orange ice-cream container and cradled it to my heart as if it really was a piece of Mum. I hiccupped out a strange wailing that sounded like it belonged in this place of old skulls and dry bones, so I let it go and go with nobody to hear but the dead. I wondered if Mum could hear me, and decided she had to because she was an angel now. After a while, the animal in me faded away and I was just crying normal, thinking about Mum and all the good things we did. I was the lucky one who got to sit beside Mum when we shaved the hair off the dead pigs last spring. She gave me one of her aprons, not the oranges one, and I tied it around me good. She had to tie Philly’s for her. I got to the stool beside Mum first and Mum cuffed at Philly for whingeing about it.

  That day it was a cold coming-out-of-winter day so I had my gumboots close to the flame under the old bathtub. Mrs Tyler told me to worry about my boots melting, so I dragged them back under me. But when she looked away I scooted them to the flame again, keeping my hands close to the water warming in the tub.

  Then the ‘look outs’ and ‘mind your noggins’ as Dad and Pete came in loud, hefting one pig over our bathtub, and Mr Kennedy and Mr Tyler brought in the second for the other tub. Pete pretended to drop his end on Tessa’s head and she screamed. Then the laughing and cuffing and carrying on, and the worrying about bei
ng splashed. Mrs Tyler put the radio on to 3XY for music. Tim grinned at me. It was all ABC and Blue Hills where Dad was concerned, but he couldn’t argue with Mrs Tyler, over to help. Then the razor blading. Philly nicked herself straight away. I shook my head. Mum told Philly to get herself a Band-Aid from the packet on the bench and get back on the job. I hid my smile in a tricky bit on the stomach, getting in right close. Mum patted my hair back behind my ear and told me I was doing a real good job this year, not leaving one hair behind and that would make the butchering and the cooking that much easier. I was all warmed up on that and I folded my boots under my stool. In the nick of time, I’d say, because they did feel kind of melty.

  She had a winning way with her, Mum did. That’s what Dad called it. She’d always roll her eyes and swat him, tell him he was carrying on. He’d just laugh, dodging her tea towel and get in there past it to tickle her, her pushing him away and laughing back. But Dad was right. Mum was magic. And he’d never have hurt her and left her here to rot because he’d never do anything bad to her. I felt a flush of hot that I’d even for one moment thought it. I scrunched up my face, though, because there must have been something wrong or why’d she tell him she was leaving him?

  Suddenly there was an almighty crash just along the way on the far side of the boxthorns. I jumped to my feet, fright spiking through me. Backed away hard into the tree. Then I saw it was only a roo as it gained the ridge and bounded away. But I was all jangled and rawed up, and had had enough of all those dead things, so I took off the other way. I ran and I ran and in the end I saw that I was running to the top paddock where Dad kept the Grey.

  Dad said you can’t name a brumby until it’s broken in. You could only name it when you knew it, through and through. So it had to be special and not any old Tricksy or Daisy. Dad had told me I could name her this time. Only with Mum and everything, he’d probably forgotten. But I’d thought of a name already.

  I saw that I was running towards her because it was time she got that name, broken in or not. Ever since the police came, she’d been thundering from one side of the short paddock to the other. Dad saying she’d have to wait with everything he had on his mind. I reckoned it was because there was no pool of peace inside him to get the brumby to and convince it to stay.