Sweet Bitter Cane

by G S Johnston

  They drove away from the coast, away from the rising eastern sun, through a patch of low buildings, the small dash of civilisation quickly snuffed out. He drove the truck on the left side of the road, and the sensation was vertiginous. They moved through a valley between two parallel rows of mountains. Those on her left gave way to the coast. Those on the right, more substantial, rose on the inland. The land between was flat, as if it had been made just to grow sugarcane. The plants rose, higher than her, a row of tan near the earth topped by green reeds and feathery white crowns. They were tightly packed. They waved, like a gentle sea, slow in the late-morning breeze, welcoming her, she imagined. They passed neat field after field, well over an hour of them, occasionally a straight path leading away from the road into the labyrinth. All so planned. She saw a bird, large and lazy in the sky, and imagined its view, this tile of green fields. This was her new home.

  Ahead, a locomotive ran on tracks along the roadside. Slowly, they overtook it, car after car of cut canes lying neatly across the trays. When they passed, the men in the engine waved but Fergus made no motion back, nothing to indicate he was even aware of them. But she smiled and raised her hand.

  She turned to the oncoming road. Though the truck’s windows were open, Fergus emitted a sharp odour, that of a working man, pungent over the cigarette smoke. They passed a sign at an obtuse angle on a pole – Babinda. There it was, simply written, although it hastened her heart. Nothing save a few splayed wooden buildings, a train station but no church spire. There was no-one about, no life at all. Fergus didn’t slow the truck. And quickly they were between the fields again, Babinda just a sign.

  Up ahead, from the middle of a field, thick black plumes of smoke spiralled into the sky. She looked at Fergus’s impassive face.

  ‘Fire,’ she said.

  Fergus pushed his hat back and nodded. He appeared unconcerned, but nothing had cast emotion on his face since she’d met him.

  The smoke hung heavy. Without warning, Fergus slowed the vehicle and turned from the main road towards the fire, closer and closer. Did he intend to help? She panicked. She had no handkerchief to cover her mouth. Was Italo’s farm on fire? The smoke hid the sun, the light tinted orange, and yet they drove closer, the fields blackened, smouldering, those ahead still burning. Why had he turned into this? The fire was dangerous, and so much cane had been lost.

  In a small clearing, a group of men stood about with trucks and other machinery. What could they do against such a fire? All that could be done was to pray for rain, but despite the pressing humidity the blue sky gave no sign. There was a sense of calm. Fergus slowed the truck and stopped. He said the first word he’d said since they left Brisbane.

  ‘Italo.’

  The word had an odd sound, the stress all wrong. Amelia turned towards the group of blackened, indistinguishable men. Fergus came to her door. She stepped to the ground. The earth was covered in a hard type of grass, which had been scythed. She walked around the front of the truck, towards the men. None of them moved. No-one came to her. No-one said a word. They held large metal cups in their hands. The hot, smoky air made it hard to breathe. To the side, a small train engine with several trays like those she’d seen on the open road stood half loaded. No-one came to greet her. How could there not be alarm with fire?

  Three men came out of the burning field, from between the rows of cane, stopped and stood, looking at her. Then one man advanced, his pace slow at first. He was tall and thin, the sleeves of his once-white shirt rolled, and his thick forearms and hands black.

  ‘Amelia,’ the man said, his front teeth glowing against the char. ‘I’m Italo.’

  She looked at him. Her heart beat harder. He was indeed the height she’d expected but she was hard-pressed to link him to the photograph. His sooted face … Sweat had run clean rivers down his temples, onto his cheek, only for them to be darkened again. But even through this camouflage, he was much older than his photograph. And his head, with that thick black hair, was almost completely bald. This couldn’t be him. This was some trick. But his eyes were blue. And she’d seen the ocean now and could agree with his aunts, but the black skin made the contrast shocking.

  ‘This wasn’t how we planned,’ Italo said.

  ‘No,’ she said, her first word to Italo.

  ‘You’re dressed in white. I can’t touch you.’

  He smiled, then looked back at the other men and said something to Fergus. ‘We must finish here. Fergus will take you home. I’ll be home this evening—’

  ‘Did the field catch fire?’ she said.

  This distracted him. ‘We set fire to it. It’s controlled. Safe. Perhaps we could discuss it this evening.’

  Italo smiled, lingered, his gaze intense. But he turned away to the men, who all went back to whatever they’d been doing. He was lean. Behind her, Fergus opened the passenger’s door. Still walking away, Italo stopped and picked up a rod of cane. With a knife, long like a machete but far broader at the extremity, he slashed at the end, the blade an extension of his hand. The rod fell to the earth. He started towards her, slow at first but then with some pace. He held out the few centimetres of cane. It was a yellow-green but its skin was black. She reached out, touching Italo’s fingers as she took it. He smiled, let go of the cane and skipped back a step. He looked into her eyes and smiled again. He turned, waved his hand above his head.

  She couldn’t move. Was it the heat? The lack of air? Were her feet stuck? She looked down at them. She just had no will. She watched him. Without turning, he disappeared into the smouldering cane rows.

  In the truck, she held the cane between two fingers. So that was it? That was all? She’d come all this way and he gave her a damn piece of burnt cane, a charred bouquet, and disappeared. Blue eyes. He was fifteen years older than her. What a fool she’d been to believe the photograph, probably taken before he’d even left Italy. But it irked her that after all this travel and all this time and all this planning, he chose to harvest cane rather than care for her. She understood the pressure of a harvest; when her father’s apples were ready all hands were pressed to service. But there were many men here. Surely, he could have been spared. Even for just a day. Today. In a real sense, his wedding day.

  At the main road, Fergus said something. She looked at him, and he motioned to the piece of cane and then lifted his fist to his mouth, a cigarette trapped in his finger, and flicked his tongue about it. The gesture was obscene but despite her shock, he motioned again. She looked at the blackened object in her lap. He nodded. Slowly, she raised the cane to her mouth, flicked the tip of her tongue across the cut surface. She winced. It was surprisingly sweet. Fergus smiled and turned back to the road. She raised the cane to her mouth, but he swerved the truck, jolting her hand, and her tongue caught the burnt edge. It was bitter, exceedingly so. Had he done that on purpose? She clamped her expression to conceal her discomfort. She rubbed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, swallowed the unpleasant spit. Why would they burn something sweet to bitter?

  After a broad curve in the road, Fergus pulled off to a track that led along the base of a small hill, one of the few such interruptions to the flat valley. They passed a long, low wooden building. On the other side were the endless fields of cane. Fergus stopped. She looked around her. The only building was a small house, rough wooden shingle walls and an iron roof, a wide verandah with a metal awning curving over at the outer edge. Fergus was out of the truck and hauling her trunk from the rear tray.

  Was this Italo’s home? She walked towards the building, raised from the ground, five wooden steps to the front verandah, which seemed most curious. Why bother with such an arrangement? Above the steps, interrupting the curve of the roof, was a large semicircle piece of wrought iron filigreed three smiling sunflowers. Such artifice amongst so little. She mounted the steps. The verandah was covered in leaves and other debris, the boards with gaps between them, the wood grey and splintering. This hadn’t seen a woman’s hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ sh
e said.

  He nodded, remained, his eyes lowered to the ground.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again, more because she had nothing else she could say. The humidity was absolute, as if the air itself was wholly water. She raised her hand to loosen her collar and then extended it to him. He pulled back but then raised his eyes to hers, raised his hand to hers. The skin was wrought, glazed hard. Timpani thunder rolled in the distance, across the plain. He pulled his hand from her.

  ‘Signora Amedeo?’

  The voice was a woman’s and came from the dim recess of the house. When she looked to Fergus, he’d turned away, already down the front stairs and towards the truck. She heard footsteps on the hall’s wooden floor: a woman in her mid-forties, her light brown hair cut close. She wore a loose dark-grey dress with no apparent style, made from light cotton.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said, holding out both hands. ‘I’m Maria Pastore.’

  Amelia could find nothing to say.

  ‘Didn’t Italo tell you I’d meet you here?’

  Amelia shook her head.

  ‘Typical.’ She sighed. ‘I’m your neighbour. Come in. I’ll make you some tea.’

  Whilst this woman spoke Italian, her accent was odd, and Amelia couldn’t place it. She heard Fergus’s truck start.

  ‘Who’s that man?’ she said.

  Maria came out onto the verandah. ‘He’s the son of your other neighbour. Nice boy – well, he was, before the war.’

  Amelia’s expression curled in confusion. ‘But the war was in Europe.’

  She smiled. ‘Many Australians fought, for Great Britain. Fergus was in France, I think. Come, let me make the tea.’

  Amelia stood in the doorway and watched Fergus’s truck move off.

  ‘You should change that pretty dress,’ Maria said.

  The truck disappeared behind the small hill, but she could still hear it. She looked out at the cane fields running from the bottom of the hill to the rim of the next forested hill. How odd to live and work in the same place. Her father’s orchard was some distance from the house, and they’d lived in the village. Here, the house was surrounded by nothing but cane. And what an expanse. She moved a pace or two into the hall but could still hear the drone of Fergus’s truck. A patter began. She looked to the ceiling. Rain. Perhaps the humidity would break.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The air inside the house was close and musty. Fergus had placed her trunk in the hall between the two front rooms. Both were bedrooms, Maria explained.

  ‘Yours and Italo’s is on the right.’

  Maria leant forward and pushed the door. The bed had a metal frame, above which hung a large white veil.

  ‘It’s to keep the mosquitoes out,’ Maria said. ‘I made the bedspread for you.’

  She’d never seen such a thing, small patches of blue silk sewn to large swathes of vivid green wool, together in a ragtail map, no regard to suiting one piece to another. She hated it – ghastly – but hated more she’d be forced to live with the gift. She coloured, averting her eyes, but smiled.

  ‘You’re too kind,’ she said.

  And across the hall was another room. Two bedrooms.

  ‘Does someone else live here?’ Amelia said.

  ‘Just Italo. And yourself.’

  Maria moved a few steps down the hall. All this space to just the two of them? The front section of the house then stopped, connected to the second by what Maria described as the ‘breezeway’, an area floored and roofed but partly open on both sides, the rain demarcating a sharp line of wet and dry, dark and light, on the rough-wood floors.

  ‘I don’t know the Italian word for that,’ Maria said.

  ‘Loggia.’

  Maria nodded. Across this area, two more steps led to a doorway that entered a large rectangular room, midway along the long wall. A fireplace stood at the left-hand end, surrounded by three armchairs in a horseshoe. In this heat, how could a fireplace ever be necessary? And at the other end of the room stood a table and four chairs.

  ‘The kitchen’s through here,’ Maria said.

  She walked to another doorway, up two more stairs. A large wooden bench stood in the middle. There was no stove, a fire on a slab in a chimney being all there was for cooking. The floor was bare, dark earth, the walls papered with layer after layer of old newspaper, a small window interrupting the wall opposite the fire.

  ‘There’s a washroom out the back.’ Maria pointed to the back wall of the kitchen. ‘And up the hill is the toilet.’

  Amelia looked at the wall.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Maria said. ‘Outside, you have a water tank, filled by the rain. The tap’s here.’

  In the corner of the room, a dulled pipe thrust through a rough-cut hole in the wall. A brass tap shone at the tip.

  ‘In all the years Italo’s lived here,’ Maria said, ‘it’s the only thing he’s done to the house.’

  Amelia continued to stare at this wonder. The hours and hours she and Emma had spent carting water from the village well, each with two buckets balanced on the ends of a long rod held on their shoulders. This tap brought water directly into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s no great wonder,’ Maria said. ‘If there’s one thing we have in Babinda, it’s water. We pride ourselves with the highest rainfall in Australia. Let me make you some tea.’

  The rain beat the metal roof. Maria stoked the coals and moved a large kettle into the embers. She chatted on. Her parents left Italy in 1882. They came from the north, Udine, in the Veneto, and first settled in Sydney, where Maria was born. That explained her; she spoke Italian but with an odd accent, an Australian accent, and peppered it with words and sayings used by older people in Amelia’s village, like Signor Gregorio.

  ‘They came to work in the cane fields in 1901. They brought a lot of Italians here then, to replace the Kanaka people. They were natives, brought from the islands to work the fields. But they sent them back.’ Maria faced her, lowered her voice as if someone were listening. ‘They didn’t want the same problems as in America, with the blacks. So they shipped in Italians and other Europeans. That’s how we came to be here.’

  Amelia bit her underlip. How harsh to send a group of people away because of the colour of their skin. And in many ways, they’d imported the Italians purely because of the colour of their skin. She shouldn’t judge what she didn’t understand, but it seemed heartless.

  ‘I’ve prepared your dinner,’ Maria said, her tone turned light. ‘It’s just a stew.’

  Maria mixed in confusing English words. Maria lifted the lid on a large metal pot at the side of the fire. Inside were vegetables and some kind of meat in a thick sauce.

  ‘It’s mutton,’ Maria said.

  Amelia smelt the stew – good, wholesome cooking. ‘So much meat,’ she said. ‘We only ate it two or three times a year.’

  ‘A year! I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Is there polenta?’ Amelia said.

  Maria laughed. ‘Lord, no. It’s damper and dripping.’ She walked to a small wooden box on the sideboard. ‘I made it today.’ Maria opened an earthenware pot. ‘It’s the meat fat, collected after cooking.’

  The odour was unsettling. Amelia strode from the room with the excuse to change her dress, its hem already quite blackened. Her trunk was still locked, so from her portmanteau she took the same dull blue-grey skirt she’d worn most days on the boat, and a darker-coloured shirt. The wool was too heavy for the heat, but there was no other choice.

  Maria brought a tray with the tea to the main room. Amelia stared at the pot, which wore a knitted cover, made of many coloured wools, a similar mix to the quilt, its spout and handle protruding from holes. Maria helped her set the small table for the evening meal. Like the verandah, the floors of the main room were wooden and bare and rough but worn smooth in patches, gaps between the planks. But they’d not been scrubbed for a long time. A small dark rug lay under the table. Amelia stared at them. At least the rough limestone walls of her parents’ house were imperv
ious to wind. Maria came to her side.

  ‘He’d hoped to build a new home before you arrived, but you’d like to have some say in how it’s built, I said.’

  Building a new house? How could such a thing be possible? Italo must have more money than either his aunts or his mother knew. Perhaps she would like some say in how it was built, but the cracks in the floor were a high price for such a voice.

  ‘I’ve two chickens you can have,’ Maria said. ‘We’ll just have to get a coop built.’ She gestured to a clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Look at the time. Mine will want to be fed. I’ll come in the morning, to see how you’re getting on.’

  Amelia thanked her for everything and, from the verandah, watched her walk towards the main road. She hadn’t asked Maria anything of herself – where she lived, if she had children, even her husband’s name. But Amelia could tell Maria was an honest soul.

  The rain cleared, cooling the air. What words did she have to describe this landscape to her parents? The ones she’d brought from Italy – flat, blue, plain, green, hill, cane – somehow failed. Of one thing she was certain: there were new words. The wind rustled the cane. There were birds with unknown calls. But there was no other sound. No-one’s voice. She’d grown used to the drone of a ship’s engine and close contact with people and had quite forgotten quiet. But she’d never heard such silence before. At home, there was always noise of some nature. She listened. Not here. It made her shiver.

  She needed to relieve herself. At the back of the kitchen was another small room with an outside entrance. Beyond that, some distance up the hill, a privy, built of greyed, splintering wood. The seat was rough and suspended over a dark pit. In the kitchen, she turned the bold brass tap, which required some force but eventually yielded. The water spluttered and streamed. She passed her hands in and out and into the cool ribbon and then shut it off. The tap dripped large, slow tears. Such innovation. She turned it on again and then off. Water, any time she wanted.