Kelfie
Like many young people I suppose I am afraid of the very old—perhaps feeling threatened by my own prospective confusion, decrepitude and (it seems) indignity. When I entered the dayroom of the Resthaven Home for the Elderly its occupants at first appeared to me to be a collection of bodies—not people—poised on the verge of death. They were disturbing, all sitting, waiting—like a crowd at a bus station or ferry terminal—for tea, or sleep, or the TV to be switched on. My initial response was to try to mentally put them at a distance; their frailty, quiet and timidity made me feel clumsy, dangerous and loud.
The nurse who accompanied me was saying, ‘Her hearing is really remarkably good. And she’s a mine of information about the area, if you can get her going. Of course, if you do get her talking it can be hard to stop her.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s about eleven now, lunch is at noon, and the residents always take a lie-down after lunch, so you have an hour.’
She stopped before an old woman, slumped in a chair by the wide, deep dayroom windows. ‘You have a visitor, Mrs Harper.’
‘I’ll bring you a chair,’ she said to me.
‘The floor will be fine, thanks.’
Looming proprietorially over the old woman, she raised her voice. ‘Are you all right, dear? I’ll come and take you to the bathroom before lunch.’ She glanced at me, seeking some sign of complicity or understanding, then, seeming satisfied, she went away.
Emma Harper was shrunken and humpbacked, her body shapeless and limbs thin. Her eyes, seen through her thick lenses, were round and gave her face the look of an aged baby, alert and vulnerable. They were faded blue, one perpetually leaking tears, both lashless and surrounded by delicate, puffy, pinkish-white skin. She stared at me, her lined, cushiony face neutral.
‘Mrs Harper? My name is Keith Kelsey.’
Her waiting look changed to bafflement. She peered after the nurse, probably more willing to question her, than me, about my identity.
I decided to fall back on my amorphous, irrelevant, invented credentials. ‘I’m a history student. I’d like to talk to you about your brother, Mark Thornton.’ I unfolded my wad of notes. ‘Private Mark Thornton of the Canterbury Regiment?’
‘Mark is dead.’ Her expression was apologetic and defensive, suggesting she imagined I was some creditor of her brother’s—some official out to settle his affairs.
‘I talked to your son, Euan, in Nelson. I explained to him that I’m studying the letters of World War One soldiers. He told me that your brother kept a journal, and that you have it. Diaries of enlisted men are fairly unusual, since they had to be kept illegally. I’d very much like to look at it, if I could.’
Continuing on her own train of thought, she said, ‘He was just twenty-one.’
I waited, then decided she expected some response and was about to express my sympathy, but she added, ‘That was in 1920.’
‘Yes, I read his death certificate—’ (Cause of Death: Heart Failure. Weakening of the respiratory system by Gas Pneumonia.) ‘—and his war record.’
‘Did Euan tell you that Duncan was twenty-one when he died, too?’
This had some significant symmetry I was expected to appreciate. I asked, ‘Who was Duncan?’
‘Euan’s brother. Our eldest. He died in Africa during the second war.’
I nodded. ‘I saw Mark’s stone in the churchyard at Canaan.’ (Macrocarpas, magpies, uncut grass. Grave decorations: smashed glass domes containing porcelain flowers and foliage, all white, as though bred for centuries in the underworld. The headstone was a garlanded marble needle. The whole scene was like the Sutton painting, Norwester in a Cemetery.)
‘Jack and I picked that stone: I loathe those war graves.’
(Oblong bronze plaque: cross, fern, and fatal years.)
‘Have you seen the farm?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I have. Your son says he’s leased it for a pine plantation.’
‘Not the house and the home paddocks.’ She leaned forward and touched her chest with her bird’s-foot fingers. ‘Everything from the old wood to Jack’s gateway is still mine.’
How long is it since anyone’s lived there?’
‘I haven’t lived there for a long time—since Jack died—1970.’
‘It’s been empty that long?’
‘Oh no. My granddaughter Joanna Roberts and her husband David kept goats there for several years. They went to Australia, took the children out of school, packed all their belongings into twenty-four tea chests, and moved over to Australia!’ This was obviously a momentous step, one Joanna’s grandmother had not approved.
I steered her back onto the subject. ‘How long has the house been empty?’
Again that neutral look. Was she was working it out? ‘It has been six or seven years since anyone has lived there.’
‘Why didn’t you sell it? I’m sorry—you’ll think I’m a real estate agent, going on about the house—really it’s just curiosity.’
She didn’t seem able to follow this, and ignored my question. Instead, she tapped me on the shoulder with a hard fingertip. ‘Will you ask Christine to fetch the journal from my locker. There’s a photograph you might like to look at.’
The nurse who escorted me had worn a name tag—Christine. I went in search of her. Through a screen door I saw her standing on the lawn overlooking the estuary, smoking a cigarette. I opened the door; she turned, dragged deeply, then threw the cigarette down on the wet grass and came over.
Christine carried the journal—a thick book with a worn, stained, red cloth cover—back to Emma Harper, who was asleep.
I told Christine not to wake her.
‘Are you sure? She mightn’t stir again before lunch.’
‘There’s always another day.’
Christine shifted a pot plant off the small table near Mrs Harper and replaced it with the journal. Then left us alone.
For several minutes I watched the old woman doze, the rigid, curled quotation marks of her hands rested in her lap.
The wind was picking up outside, pressing on the large pane of glass, tossing the yellow lichen-covered branches of the dead pear orchard, parting the brown reeds on the estuary to reveal flashes of their cherry-red roots, and whitening the thin film of water over the sand. Beyond the estuary Mount Burnett stood black and unmoved, with cloud suspended over its summit like sea foam above a rock.
The window shuddered and flexed inward.
I picked up the journal. Its spine was broken in several places and its pages coming away from dusty, yellow glue; the pages were brittle and brown at the edges—scorched by time. Though I opened it slowly and stealthily, its leaves crackled. The old woman continued to sleep, her chin on her chest.
Each page was dense with words in unparagraphed, space-saving blocks. The sheer volume of writing was intimidating, but I found a poem and paused to read:
From here
it takes too long for any word
to get to you:
so I shall write
this to last—
neither dated nor staid
narrative.
If I come home
you will read it.
If I do not come home
you will read it.
It has rained for five days
like the long rain
that curtains Canaan’s hills
and
indistinct from each other
in little light and much mud
the men have burrowed
into the earth.
This place is a gross imitation of home
here farmers fight
and forget how to speak
instead of meeting at
the Rat Trap
for an after-work drink
and lazy talk.
Like home
the hills are pitted with holes
but these ones burst
afresh every day.
At home, I knew where to walk
to avoid the pits
>
even at dark—
but yesterday
as I trudged between dugouts
a hand crept out from the duckboards
to trip me.
At home the holes do not have hands
to wave you down while walking home to tea.
And no
I cannot send this.
You know that there is death in war
and you have heard
the din
that rocked the hand
that wrote unsteady letters
to you.
But as I cherish you
I cannot describe a dead man’s hand
wedged, black and branchlike,
between the rotting boards.
Beneath this I read:
Dec. 1, 1917. The last post brought three letters and already I’ve mislaid one—Gordon’s account of the lambing. I do not want to lose this, but think the Capt. suspects I have a journal illegally. I wonder if anyone will ever know what is not said by the officers and is omitted from our letters—like the Lancs, left out on Bellevue Spur. If I wrote about it, it would read like a testimony, not a eulogy. I cannot overcome what I know by putting it on paper. Yesterday I found a firm footing in the mud by stepping on a dead man’s head, but slipped when his scalp tore away from his skull. Mother used to complain ‘Be respectful!’ when I stepped on the graves in the churchyard. But who can support the burden of being respectful now? In a million years some geologist will halve a rock and marvel at the deep sediment of death, four years’ worth, a thousand years thick. (I wonder where I lost that letter? The old man I saw on the way in, fleeing down the Menin road with his clock, copper pans, and brass firedogs in a hand cart, has more than any of us.)
The poem and this entry were close to the end of the volume. I turned the pages. Mark Thornton had made only six more entries. There were long intervals between them, and one was undated.
July 1918 Hornchurch. Letter to Euan June 12. Letter to Emma June 18. Letter to Andy June 14. to Andy June 21. to Emma June 25. to John June 30. to Emma (Bellevue) July 5.
Gifts.
Emma—Silver-backed brush and mirror.
Great European Art.
Edith—Silk, Columbo.
Euan—Diaries and Letters of Captain R.F. Scott.
Gordon—?
Olive—Silk?
10.18. Andy wounded near Le Quesnoy, a bullet in the thigh, sent to Brockenhurst.
Visited the Lt. at Balmerlawn. Why say it to myself when I am unable to say it to him?
S.S. Marama. Nov. 13, 1918. Today a school of about 50 killer whale. Glossy black and white in the blue water. Playing, strong and unconcerned. It is hard to imagine atrocities in the middle of the ocean. These animals were lovely, transcendent and reassuring. Our recovery is of no consequence to them.
News that the War is finished came over the wireless yesterday. Our way of life secured for good, missing its limbs and strapped into a chair. They decided to stop it, and Andy and John will get home after all.
Jan. 1919. Discharge delays. Standing about for hours and not a band, not a flag, not a cheer. Emma had to buzz around with red tape at every turn. She says everyone wants their soldiers out of uniform as soon as possible, so we can all put the whole thing behind us. She couldn’t conceal her shock when she saw me, and I resent her for it. She says the influenza has been terrible, particularly in the cities, where the police were having to break into houses where whole families were afflicted, and that in Auckland there were rows of coffins in one of the city’s parks, awaiting burial. This is all new to people here. Aunt Olive lowered her voice in horror to say, ‘We think it’s some kind of plague—the bodies go black!’ I did not mention the lung cases, or the stories I heard about phosgene gas casualties. Olive gave me some BAXTER’S LUNG PRESERVER which makes many positive promises, and tastes appalling.
Feb. 15, 1919. It is as if I have been asked to wake up and go about my business after a bad dream in an interval of sleep. I will not write any more, there really isn’t any point.
The final entry, written in a different hand, read:
What did you expect from me, darling? They would not let me follow you.
Shortly after your funeral Andy McCauley wrote to me to express his sympathies. He said also that Lieutenant Given had died in hospital in England.
I had a terrible dream, a very real dream. In it I was standing on a lawn near a slow green river. A thin man in glasses with round black lenses was sitting beneath a tree at the top of the slope down to the water’s edge. He suddenly began to weep and got up to run, stumbling, down the lawn, then fell and crawled face first, like a lizard, into the water to drown.
I do not believe you were used up by the war. Nor do I believe all your pain, and all your friends’ pain, and mine, can be used up by death. When you were sick you said your shadow was the man-sized mouth of an abyss. All this is true—the wounds, losses and abysses, but it is also true that you would never have known how terrible life could be if you had not left home. And, had you not left, you would be able to see what I see now, and that is our neighbours—Margaret, Beth and Jack Harper, and old Mrs Walsh—coming into the garden for a visit. They are crossing your ‘minted sun-spots’—the gold coins of light under the apple trees. The window is closed between me and them and the silence is vivid. I know you are beside me and I love you, Mark.
Jack is waving. I will go out to them.
Jill
Over the Hill to Motueka; along the road beside the river to Motupiko, and on to Highway Six; through the Buller Gorge to the Inangahua function; down Highway Sixty-Nine to Reefton; through the Lewis Pass to Hanmer.
The moment came when I stopped and Dan walked ahead of me along the road. Then my thoughts came down their coiling paths like buzzards, or like abacus beads clicked into an equation—hundreds, tens, ones—a colour composition of a sum. And I saw the nearest, simplest fact, that what was happening was really happening, was not a story I was telling or being told.
The European plantings at Hanmer suggest a ‘location’, a scene from a film. (Birches in Sweden, a walk in the brittle woods.) Dan and I spoke as though we were scripted, a see-sawing dialogue of recriminations, strained loyalties, fear and power. We looked like a picture: the sallow-faced, red-haired man and his small blond wife. The trunks of the birches were black and white, spindly, slanted, confusing. There were yellow leaves on the trees and brown leaves on the path, veiling mud, tyre tracks, footprints.
The bare woods of Bergman, and I had been obedient to the script. I couldn’t remember what I had just said; but, like the woods, it was imported, insubstantial, seemed dead.
Dan had said, ‘Don’t be like that. I understand it’s difficult for you.’
And I thought, ‘I could run through this wood. That Tawa forest through which as kids Mary and I used to hunt each other with supplejack spears was treacherous to run through; a confusion of green light, shadow, stones, fungus, rotten logs and tree roots hidden by ferns. But I could run through this forest with my eyes closed, because it isn’t really here.’ Then I thought, ‘I’m not really here.’
And, at this, my ideas came like kites to a carcass, down the turning stair of a turret of heated air.
Dan looked back, enquiring, because I’d stopped and, in the script, his turning was the required response.
Then I remembered that I had said, ‘I wasn’t there, I couldn’t save her.’ And he had said, ‘Don’t be like that. I understand it’s difficult for you.’
I thought, ‘You make me feel like a murderer.’ Then thought these words again, several times, exactly the same—like an affirmation for Self-Transformation.
Some time ago I said something similar to Mary, in reporting a remark of Dan’s—I think what he said about how I was probably engrossed in my studio when Nicky was killed. Mary, colouring up, said, ‘How can you let him? I wouldn’t let anyone say something like that to me!’ But it isn’t a matter of ‘letting’; suddenly you are in th
e middle of it, the quake has struck and your house has fallen down. He didn’t even need to say such things to me, my mind was full of acrimony against myself, as though my lack of happiness before disaster struck had been a failure of commitment, yet another symptom of my mediocrity.
The easel had been fixed at a comfortable working height for Nicky, for some three months before the accident. There were scabs forming at the tops of my tubes of oil paint. My friend, Louise, the gallery owner, said when I married, about Nicky—not mentioning Dan—‘She’s sweet, but be careful, Jill, that she doesn’t make you shorten your stride.’ And added, ‘Children,’ like the final diagnosis of a dire illness.
Now I know I would walk with a chain between my ankles, shortening my step forever, to have her walking beside me. Because, though it is true that to care for her, teach her, include her, I had to slow myself down, it is also true that ambling is the fundamental pace of life. It is rising and retiring with the sun, retrenchment in winter, growth in spring, the elliptical return to memories of childhood which comes before the closure of death in age, and it is the lives of young men and women under occupation by children. It hurt me to choose that, though I didn’t choose it forever. But I chose it, and it was taken from me.
I watched Dan’s sad, impatient face, thinking, ‘You make me feel like a murderer.’ Not saying it, because saying things had become completely unsatisfactory. Then I realised I had been considering how safe it would be to bolt away through the woods, because that was what I was planning to do.
Dan said, ‘Jill?’ and I spun around and ran off the path and away through the slender, piebald tree trunks.
But, leaping down a slope, my foot found a patch of permanent shadow and a skin of unthawed frost, and I slipped, coming down clumsily on one hip in the spongy leaf-litter. Dan caught up with me, dropped onto his knees beside me and put his arms around me, saying, ‘I’m sorry, Jill. Please forgive me. I love you.’
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