Kevin stopped eating and brushed crumbs from his lap. He looked back and forth between us.
“That ‘sheila’, Hoggs, was actually a Bessie! And she’s an old, old friend who went missing wa-a-y back . . . back when you, Hoggs, were a little nose-picker fogging up the glass of my display counter. And she is a fortune teller! A good one! She could look at your hands, Hoggs, and tell you exactly where they’ve been this past week! And what they’ve done.”
“She could not!”
“She could so! And she would! Because once the old witches look, Hoggs, they have to tell! No matter how horrible the truth is, they have to tell. It’s part of the code! And she wouldn’t forget, either. Even if she had to track you down, years later! Would you like me to introduce you?”
“No fuckin’ fear!” The humour’d gone out of Hoggs. “Not into witches!”
“No? But you don’t believe me, do you? And yet, I can tell you for a fact, Hoggs, there’re folks in this very town whose hands Bessie looked into years and years ago!” He was like a mean older brother telling a ghost story. “And even the ones who ran off when they saw the look in her eyes – she’’s still carrying what she saw! Still waiting to tell!”
“She looked into my hands,” I said. “She told me there was trouble there!”
“Uh-huh. I heard.”
“Yeah?” said Hoggs. “Well maybe it’s her, dja ever think o’ that? Like maybe trouble’s followin’ her around, eh? ‘Cause I can tell you for a fact, the mayor wunt impressed about her showin’ up in Sugar Town again neither! Hey, whyn’t ye ask her about your letter, Ruthie? Get ‘er to look into ‘er own hand an’ see where it was back then eh?”
“Not a bad idea, Hoggs!” Kev answered with a sideways look at me.
“It’s a fuckin’ good idea, is what it is! An’ hey! When yez’re talkin’ to ‘er, yez could ask ‘er why she run off in the first place, eh! If she had people here she needed to talk to so bad!”
“Well now there’s the irony! I always thought she’d gone looking for a particular man – part of her witch’s calling, you know? Which I thought was going to be too bad for either her or for him, because I knew that particular man and he was a nasty, mean-assed piece of work! But it turns out she had other reasons.”
“I hope they were spectacularly good ones,” I said.
I knew Kevin well enough to know that, in his own mind at least, he was speaking hard truths. But I had no sympathy for her. Even though I knew we McFarlane kids hadn’t been any of her proper responsibility in life, you don’t just up and leave a kid to bring up other kids.
Kevin rocked a little on his crate. “Might o’ been, I think. Not that it would make ‘em easier to forgive, I guess!”
“People worry, God smiles, Ru’!” said Hoggs happily. “Crazy ol’ black baker name o’ Kevin Truc tol’ me that once! I don’ remember much o’ the airy fairy shit he goes on with, but that one made sense to me. Made me think like maybe good reasons, bad reasons – it don’make any difference! It’s all jus’ God, fuckin’ with our minds.”
Kevin nodded slowly. “A vibrant image, Hoggs!”
“Yep. Sometimes ye get crap, sometimes ye get donuts! Nothin’ ye kin do. Get a bit more sleep an’ wait for the nex’ spin.” He drummed on crate with his knuckles. “Trouble gonna find ye when it wants ye! End of!”
Strangely enough, something in that conversation caused a flinty little spark to appear in the back of my mind.
“Is that what it was with the people in the village, Kev’? They could claim to be whatever they wanted, because nothing that happened was their fault anyhow?”
Kevin opened his mouth to speak but Hoggs jumped in first.
“’Zackly! But they’re not the point, see! Fuckin’ queen’s the point! She’s screwin’ with ‘em . . . like we’re all bein’ screwed with! Jus’ to see what happens! She don’ give a rat’s dick what they think, ‘cause she gets the same crowd either way! Bitch’s prob’ly not gonna pay ‘em anyways!”
“Don’t forget,” Kevin said, “there’s good ways to be paid and bad ways to be paid. You said yourself – sometimes you get crap, sometimes you get donuts!”
Hoggs stared at him briefly, then let his head roll back. “You’re tryin’ to confuse me, aren’t ye, ye crafty ol’ fart!”
Kevin laughed. “Am I?” Then he looked slyly at me. “Or am I just confused myself? Or have I got my eye on the donuts, as any good baker should?”
At that moment, a timer went off inside the bakery and the sun finally put its fingers over the edge of the horizon.
* * *
It wasn’t yet seven when I got home. Asael had hardly moved in my bed but Bridie was up and in the shower. I thought guiltily of my phone, still in my backpack, still with a flat battery. If she’d looked in my room and seen me gone, she would’ve tried to call me. The previous night’s quarrel, I knew, though it had gone on for nearly an hour, hadn’t yet ended.
When was I ever going to grow up, she’d demanded, scolding me for the cheek I’d given the mayor and the ‘insult’ I’d given her by sticking personal papers on The Grand Gourd. And I’d answered, maybe I’d grow up when she started to face up . . . to reality! What was with hiding the Reverend’s letters in the first place and deceiving herself about the Agnes connection? She accused me of immaturity and insensitivity and I accused her of hypocrisy. We were screeching by then and Asael, trying to end it, had made it worse by changing the subject to The Thing in the cane.
“You took your brother out into the cane? In the night? Looking for space debris? Ruth, what is wrong with you these days? And for Amalthea to let herself be drawn into such . . .!”
On and on.
* * *
I must have felt at least a little fortified by my visit to the Harmony Bakery because I was ready to finish it by the time I got back. I took my backpack into her room and sat cross-legged in the middle of her unmade bed.
In my mind, the only important part of our argument had been the bit about the Reverend’s letters and the so-called ‘Terrible Deed’. Admittedly, I could’ve pulled my head in and simply accepted that my family had experienced some bad, unlucky, now-forgotten karma and been rewarded with – as Hoggs had put it – crap. That would’ve been what Bridie wanted – no muddied waters and life stuttering on as usual. But I wanted to know, for better or for worse, why we’d missed out on the donuts. And of course, I still had Johnathon Cranna up my sleeve!
I dumped the contents of my bag and scattered them on the mattress around me. Phone (with its flat battery), empty water bottle, spare t-shirt, wallet, the remaining letter and clippings, a few old hair bands, some bandaids and tissues and Bridie’s ‘MISS FREEDOM HOUSE MINISTRIES’ Banner. Then I sat back to wait.
I spent my time studying the room. The decorations were more little- girlish even than the stuff in my room. Teddy bears, pink flounces, cartoon-princess prints on the curtains. One thing that caught my attention was a framed family photo of the Reverend, Rita, Grandma G, Bridie and me, on the wall beside the bed. One of those spontaneous, unplanned things that’d caught us unawares. I hadn’t looked at it closely in ages.
In the left of the frame, there was Bridie’s twelve or thirteen year old self, long-legged and lean, backed into the Reverend’s arms, holding his crossed hands against her bare midriff. He looked to be whispering to her; a joke that had made her laugh. To the right, apart from them and with her back to them, Rita was bent over, listening to a serious comment from an animated two or three year old, which was me. And in the background, Gramma Gracie held out an inviting hand to someone outside the frame.
It was an image from a long ago morning before Asael was born, and it was one of the few items that remained from our parents’ occupation of that room. Bridie’d left it up because, she said, it reminded her of how happy we’d all been. I always had the impression that it actually spoke of three separate happinesses; or maybe two and a half separate happinesses – little pairings that
seemed to have stumbled into the one photo. The ‘half’ being Gramma G, who’d been reaching for someone outside the picture. Someone the photographer had eliminated.
I spent the last of my waiting time numbering off events from the time of that photo. Within a year, Asael would be added and Gramma G would be subtracted. In less than two years, Rita would also be subtracted. I imagined the photo with the two women gone. That left the Reverend and Bridie and their joke on one side and me, alone (or with baby Asael) on the other. Not so much later, of course, the Reverend would go as well. Then there’d just be Bridie and half a joke left on her side.
Bridie, wrapping her hair in a towel, was in the room before she saw me. We both opened our mouths to speak and both stopped, each waiting for the other. She looked at the stuff on the bed, picked up the phone, checked the battery and put it back without comment.
I tried to be conciliatory. “Here’s the rest of the stuff I stole from the memory box. Minus the letter that Garlic ate.”
She shook out her hair and bent, towelling it dry. Her face was hidden but her voice had the forced flippancy of someone who’s been hurt. “Is that what happened to it? Well it doesn’t matter. Anyhow, that stuff belongs to you as much as to me.”
“Yes, it does!.” This was a good sign, I thought; reality asserting itself. “Which is why I was so hurt you never showed it to me! This stuff should be part of my memories. But it’s not. And I still don’t understand why.”
She turned her back on me and walked to the window, still towelling. I could tell she was crying, trying to hide it. All those years that we cried together in this room, the three of us; I knew the signs. But I’d stopped crying over this stuff long ago. And she was still going.
“You said yesterday that we were going to have nothing but the truth between us, Bridie!” I continued, as gently as I could. “From here on in! You, me and As’! Remember? No more crying over the past and only the truth between us. Remember?”
She shook the towel hard in front of her, making it crack, then draped it with exaggerated care over the back of a chair.
“Yes, Ruth. I remember.”
She turned to me and I could see the outline of her body through her nightie, the rapid rise and fall of her chest. Her eyes were fiercer and yet somehow sadder than I could ever remember seeing them. Sadder even than when the Reverend pushed her away, all those years ago. But it wasn’t enough to make me let her off the hook.
“Are there other things you haven’t shown me, Bridie? Things you’ve not told me? About them?” I pointed at the photo. “About us? About everything?”
“Ruthie, why do you . . . !”
“JUST TELL ME!” If I was close to tears myself, I was comforted by the fact that mine were tears of frustration; not of self-pity. “I know that you have a block, Bridie! That some things are gone! But whatever’s left, I need to see it, hear it, know about it! Why is that so much to ask?”
My shout had woken Asael who rushed into the room, tousled and unnerved. He took a step toward me, but I warned him off with my eyes and he went to Bridie instead, wrapping himself in her arms. She fluffed and cooed over him and false- started several times but, eventually, memory was the only place to go.
Mostly it was little, unconnected things – Rita’s quiet laughter in the kitchen; Gramma Gracie’s songs and clapping games; a myriad of nameless people coming and going. And orchestrating it all, the powerful, insistent presence of the Reverend – ‘daddy’, in Bridie’s telling. Working in his study, booming out sermons in the church; spreading a cloak of righteousness over everyone. Until suddenly, for no reason she could remember, there was just us and Bessie Crampton. Everyone else was gone.
“Bessie Crampton,” I interrupted, “is back in Sugar Town. Did you know that? I saw her yesterday.”
“You what?”
“I saw her. I talked to her. At the showgrounds, with Kevin. Apparently she’s a fortune-teller – travelling with the Showies.”
“Bessie? You’re sure it was Bessie?”
“Course I’m sure! She was with Kevin, I told you! They’d been around here looking for you, as a matter of fact. Apparently she has something that she ‘took’ when she left. Stole, I guess she means! And if you want it back, whatever it is, you have to go see her at the Showgrounds. Madame Zodiac, she is now.”
Even through my anger and sarcasm, I could see Bridie glassing over, as she always did when we talked about the past.
“Are you even trying to listen?” I shouted. “She has something!” I snatched up letters and clippings from the pile in front of me and waved them at her. If she’d been closer, I’d have thrown them in her face. “Something that belongs to us! To me, if you don’t want it!”
My shout had made Asael jump, which was gratifying, but Bridie maintained her distant impassivity. She was like the kid in the back corner of the classroom who carries on a private conversation with his eraser. I was about to walk out on the pair of them when her mouth finally opened.
“The story!” she said. “I forgot the story!”
This is the story that had come back to her – the story that Bessie used to tell her.
* * *
Once upon a time, on a night just like this, long, long ago, there was a little girl. And the world collapsed on top of her. It was a night of calamity, which the little girl’s father promised would be the worst she would ever know. Be strong, now, he told her. Don’t cry. This is how we survive things; one moment at a time. Nothing worse can happen. How do I know nothing worse can happen? Because not even God would think to look for a little girl under all this heap of pain! He loves little girls.
The little girl looked to her mother and her grandmother and saw strange confusion in their eyes and she was frightened. But her father put his hand on her chin and turned her face back to him. God is love, he said. He loves you. He wants to teach you your strength. And the little girl felt how hard it must be for God, to have such a foolish and frightened child to work with.
I’ll be strong, she said to her father. I’ll make Him proud!
* * *
By the end of it, Bridie was seated on the bed beside me, holding Asael in her arms, staring into nothing; seeing a memory. I waited. Asael looked from me to her and back again. I shook my head. Not yet. Let her finish her memory.
“Bessie,” she said at last “used to tell me that story! How could I have forgotten? She’d sit with me and I’d ask for the story about the little girl.”
“A night of calamity?” I asked. “She told you a story about a calamity?”
“No. Yes. I mean that wasn’t the point of the story! Don’t you see? The point was the little girl; the little girl being strong, for God!”
I let that lay between us. It seemed to be a morning for cryptic fairy tales. First Kevin’s, about the queen testing her good - bad villagers. Now this, about calamities heaped on little girls – also a test. Why couldn’t people just speak plainly?
I said, “So what about Bessie . . . Madame Zodiac? You gonna go see her?”
She furrowed her brow, nodded, shook her head, nodded again. “Sure. Maybe. I don’t know. I mean, I’ll try! She didn’t say what she has?”
“No.”
I shuffled my fingers through the clippings and letters. I wasn’t certain what I’d hoped to get out of Bridie by confronting her – maybe just the satisfaction of having the stronger argument – but there was no point, I knew, in pressing her much further. We’d talked through the ‘Terrible Deed’ letter the day before and I was convinced that Bridie was as much in the dark about it as I was. I wasn’t over being angry about the Agnes letter but, in the first place, it was now poop in the bowel of a dead goat and, in the second place, I didn’t want Asael to have to listen to an argument about the Reverend’s sixteen-year-old, bare-breasted, live-in ‘convert’.
“So, are there more letters, Bridie? Others that aren’t . . . in the memory box? That stack seemed small.”
She gave me a
hurt look, as though I’d accused her of stealing coins from the tooth fairy. Although I could have forgiven her that, much more easily than I could forgive her the theft of my memories.
“You know he can’t write often, Ruthie! It’s not easy, from where he is!”
I waited, for a proper answer.
“There might be more in the study. But I’m sure I’ve read them to you! All of them!”
I waited some more. Asael looked back and forth between us, like a confused puppy.
“I want you to be proud of him, Ruthie!” she finally said. “Like I am! Like Asael is!”
She was getting her back up and everyone knows that backs-up people aren’t inclined to give very much. Even when they have it to give which, I supposed, Bridie didn’t. I looked over the scattered clippings. They were mainly random things Bridie’d gathered from the bottoms of drawers, from the pages of books and from dusty crevices behind furniture when she first moved into this room. She’d kept them and filed them away in the box but it was like she was the curator in a foreign museum.
I began scanning them, organising them into a tidy order. By date seemed sensible.
* * *
“FRANTIC ATTACK!” That was earliest one. It was the report of the attack on Gramma G.
“Local woman . . . . 62 years old . . . police baffled . . . massive trauma. Died in hospital on . . .”
* * *
And then there was, “SECOND TRAGEDY STRIKES FAMILY!” They were familiar clippings and I let my eyes flick over them rapidly.
“Body found . . . mangroves . . . two days. . . . Six months . . . unsolved violent death of her mother . . . depression . . . Wife of . . . Leaves behind three children . . . fifteen and four-year old daughters . . . infant son. Police investigation . . . no foul play suspected. Service to be held . . .”
The first was dated April 12, 1998; the second, October 19 of the same year. I looked for intervening dates and found one, hand-written on a little square that had been torn from the middle of a page – April 30, 1998. A name jumped out at me. Isak Jonas Nucifora.
“Isak Jonas Nucifora . . . wildlife management expert and accomplished bushman . . . not seen for two weeks . . . police inquiries . . . Also Leslie Barry Crampton, 31. . . well known journalist . . . uncharacteristic . . . wife’s concerns. Any information . . .” The heading was, “LOCAL IDENTITIES MISSING.”
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