Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  At the cottage there was no cat, and the dog—a kelpie bitch who in any case barely flinched her eyes from Colin’s face when I called her name—went out at dawn with Colin into whichever one of the vast flat paddocks needed him that day. He and the dog returned together after dark, and it wasn’t unusual for Colin to fall into bed in his clothes. Mr Palfrey’s hens sometimes scratched with their big yellow feet in the cottage yard, but they were ugly, flighty birds with small, barely feathered heads and they would take fright and scatter, kicking up dust, if ever I disturbed them at peck.

  I remember the time I laced my feet into a pair of Colin’s old working boots and followed the track down to the farm dump, a mound of debris that had grown up around the chassis of a broken vehicle in layers of wire and rusting tins, corrugated iron, shattered glass and flies. I’d gone there before your grandfather did because when he came, it would be with an empty grain sack and length of baling twine and deaf ear to the mewling as he bundled up a nest of tabby kittens on his way to the dam. The yabbies would work their way through the sack, Colin had said. The kittens would be a good feed for them, and, come Christmas Day, we’d make a meal of the yabbies. I chose quickly, without too much thought for what would happen to all the others. I picked the one with the longest white socks, but it was so young that when I looked I mistook its parts, and called a baby boy cat Shirley. I tried my best with Shirley, but he was feral through to the core and after the third time he woke Colin in the night with the sound of him crunching the bones of rabbit kittens under our bed, there wasn’t much I could say or do to save him.

  It wasn’t long after Shirley had come and gone that I shifted Lad’s feed bin from its place near the shearing shed to a post of the cottage fence which I could see through the kitchen window. I filled it with an extra helping of chaff and watched until he came. When at last he did, I went out to him, walking slowly and thinking of how I might scratch behind his ears and feel the worn-down velvet of his nose. Getting closer, I clicked my tongue at him. Chuck chuck. Chuck chuck. At the sound, he looked at me, his black eyes like wet billiard balls stuck into either side of his head. I could see the grey arches of his teeth as he continued to chew, and how the skin on the inside of his lips was salmon pink dappled with black. Flecks of lucerne clung to the rubbery skin of his muzzle like iron filings on a magnet.

  He looked back at me, standing there in my white apron turned apricot from the orange-dusted air that had dried it on the clothesline, my hair coming loose from its bun. Again I made the noise with my tongue inside my teeth: chuck chuck, chuck chuck. It was meant to be a cheerful greeting in the only language that I knew for speaking to horses, but when he replied it was in English, in a voice that I do not think passed through my ears on its way right down to my core: If your mother could see you now, her heart would break in two.

  But even if it were true that I’d been hasty, and even if I might have done better, I had done what I’d done and it couldn’t be undone. If I’d been even as quick as Reggie, and not even necessarily quicker, it might have been me living down closer to town in one of those three little red-brick cottages that Mrs Kingsmith Snr had wanted built—at a respectable distance from the big house and from each other—so that none of her three boys would ever have to leave home. The cottages were pretty, with the same white window frames as the big house, and they even had green gardens out the front since the Kingsmiths could afford to buy in more water on top of what they got from the scheme.

  I didn’t ever really mind that it was Reggie who married Teddy, and I didn’t covet that neat red-brick cottage, or even the geraniums in particular. Of all the things Reggie had and I didn’t, it was her mother-in-law I might almost have been jealous about. Mrs Kingsmith was a tall woman with firmly set auburn curls and strong olive skin and if there was a carven quality to her long face, which remained uncannily still even when she spoke or laughed, it didn’t matter because of the clear way her emotions showed in the narrow almonds of her green eyes. She managed her own angora goat stud and I had it from Reggie that she also did clever things with buying and selling shares. She treated all us young ones as if we were somehow her business, and I thought her warm and wise. It seemed all wrong to me that the daughter-in-law she’d been given to love was Reggie, who had a mother of her own still, while I had only Mrs Palfrey, who wanted nothing I had to give. When Colin and I told his mother that we were expecting Mark, she nodded resignedly and went back to worrying in the gloom behind her curtains.

  When Reggie and I ended up side by side in the hospital with our newborn babies—she with Katharine, me with Mark—it wasn’t envy that I felt about the expensive layette (‘ecru’, she said) that she’d ordered from an exclusive boutique back east, or about the soft pale blue gown with the satin trimmings that she wore while she nursed her baby daughter. I was happy enough with my lot: with my new baby boy and with the wildflowers Colin brought me; even if they were spindly, they were also delicate in their little glass vase alongside Reggie’s towering hothouse arrangement.

  Back at home, I stepped out of the ute with that posy tucked into the crook of my elbow and baby Mark wrapped up in a crocheted rug that my mother would have spotted from a mile off wasn’t square. I’d never been much chop at crochet and the tension was loose and sloppy on the bottom edge, but better and tighter by the time I got up near the top, turning the whole thing into a rhomboid. I didn’t mind and Mark couldn’t tell, but there between the ute and cottage, switching at flies with his tail, was the horse with his eyes like black mirrors. I remember how I heard him inside of my ribs, as if my heart had grown its own mouth: If your mother could see you now, her heart would break in two.

  Jimmy was born only ten months after Mark. I don’t know why I didn’t think to just send up a sky-writing plane to tell the whole district that I’d let your father back into my bed when Mark was barely a month old. I imagined the best of people calling me a rabbit and the worst of them calling me a whore. Can you imagine—one baby ten months old and the other newly born, and barely enough water to wash ourselves more than once in a week? And yet I had to spend my days soaking and rinsing nappies and watching what might as well have been gold for all the difference it made—it was so precious and rare—pouring away murky and brown.

  People say their babies’ early days pass in a blur, but I was never so lucky as all that. I don’t think there’s been a time in my life with edges so sharp as those years when the boys were little and I was home with them near enough to all alone. We felt flush for a couple of weeks after harvest, but for the rest of the year there was no money spare and everything that might have been just a little bit easier had to be done the hard way.

  Although there was nobody but my parents-in-law at the big house to see, they were audience enough, and all the performance I could put on for them was the way my washing was hung. I had to do it with Jimmy bound across the front of me in a sling and Mark strapped in tight to his high chair out in the yard, and as I pegged I’d sing: Four and twenty blackbirds and Hush, little baby, don’t say a word and Oranges and lemons just to try to keep them quiet for long enough to do it properly. Shirts are pegged at the armpits so the marks don’t show. I knew that, of course, and how to hang the towels and the cleanest of the nappies on the outside strands of wire, screening off the inner wires where I could hang my bras and my underpants, although I pegged those at the crutch to hide what I could of that terrible, intimate yellowing. Those inside wires were also where I’d hang the towels whose side seams had burst and frayed, but even if they were hidden from the big house, the horse could still see. If your mother could see you now, her heart would break in two, he said. And, embarrassed at being caught out, I took down those towels and mended them wet before putting them back out on the line.

  Shearing came around when Jimmy was barely three months and, although neither he nor Mark needed any less feeding, or made any fewer nappies between them, there was a huge batch of scones to bake each day for smoko. I made good scon
es, I know I did, and each time a tray of them came out of the oven tall and fluffy, I thought of my mother and that extra teaspoon of cream of tartar she’d taught me to add, and the lightning fast way she just barely scrambled together the buttery flour and the milk on the bench.

  The cottage wasn’t far from the shearing shed and it was nearly impossible to get my babies down for their daytime sleeps, the penned-up lambs screamed that loud for their mothers. I remember standing there at the kitchen sink with the scones all set out in baskets and the jam in bowls and the enamel mugs crammed into leaning towers on a tray on the bench. The big enamel teapot stood ready in the sink and the kettle was whistling. I poured the boiling water, knowing there was nothing I could do about Jimmy squalling in the other room; he was overtired, but he wasn’t dying, so he was just going to have to wait. As if I needed the horse’s bony face to appear in the window right at that moment, and glare down into those enamel mugs all stained orangey brown in rings down their insides. If your mother could see you now, her heart would break in two. My cheeks burned at the thought, and, although the shearers drank out of tea-stained mugs that day, it was the last time, even if it meant sometimes I had to stay up past midnight with a tub of bicarb of soda and an old toothbrush scrubbing the enamel until it gleamed.

  If there’s a God, then when he made me, he decided I’d be the type to learn each one of my life’s hard lessons the hard way, and maybe not even the first time around. Stephen was born a week before Jimmy’s first birthday, three months before Mark was two, so don’t ever let anyone tell you that breastfeeding will do in place of precautions. I’d never even had a chance to get back into my monthly cycle before I was pregnant again, but I didn’t want to believe it had happened so soon. When I took myself off to the doctor in town, it was with the hope that he’d come up with some other explanation for the sickness and the tiredness and the acid reflux that burned in my throat.

  But I went home from the clinic with my fears all confirmed, and pegged out a bucket of nappies, crying as I inched along the wire, not knowing where the water would come from to wash half as many nappies again. Nor the physical strength. I’d lost so much weight bearing and feeding the first two boys that I looked, now, like a bag of bones with a disgusting, inflated belly. The doctor said it would be dangerous for me to feed the third baby myself, there was so little left of me. But where would the money come from to buy bottles or the formula to fill them?

  I got to the end of the wire, the full length of it fluttering with flannel squares that nobody in their right mind would call perfectly white. I went around the end of the clothesline to hoist the full side high up into the drying air, and nearly tripped over the horse, standing there behind the flapping of the half-clean laundry. He looked at me then and peeled back his lips. If your mother could see you now, her heart would break in two.

  Nobody knew exactly how old that horse was. The best guess was that he’d been more than fifteen when he came as a worn-out hand-me-down to Colin as a boy, and twenty years had passed since then. Colin never paid the horse much attention although he was fond of the animal in a distant, careless way. It was supposed to happen once a year, but in truth it happened every other year or so that Colin tethered up the horse and filed his hooves and teeth. Just occasionally, but hardly ever, I’d see Colin pause on the path to stroke the old horse on the neck, mutter a word or two in his ear.

  ‘How long do horses live?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean Laddie?’ Colin shrugged. ‘That old bugger’ll go on forever.’

  And it was true that in all the years I knew the horse, he didn’t get to looking any older than when I’d first seen him, although perhaps that was only because there was nowhere left for him to go on that front: he already looked as old as he could look without being dead. I think that he might have become a little deafer, though, as there were times when I’d turn a corner and surprise him—in the cool of the machinery shed, or behind a stack of hay bales—and he would whicker at me, peevish and surprised. But if his hearing was imperfect, his eyesight remained keen. How hard I tried to always see him coming, and how hard I worked to give him as little as possible to see. If ever he peered, mid-morning, through the windows of the cottage, he would find all the boys’ beds were made.

  But even if the boys’ beds were made, there were still the boys themselves. Whatever power my mother had for controlling six of them was not strong enough in me for only three. Those boys were so wild that their grandparents locked the doors to the big house, and suffered their company for brief Christmas lunches and Easter Sunday breakfasts. If Stephen was the softest of my boys, the one who used to kiss me on my eyelids and crawl into my bed in the night, that was all gone by the time he was four. Although I mended the knees of their jeans and scruffed hold of them for long enough to slap a wet cloth onto their faces before meals, the only real way I had to control those boys of mine was to call for Colin if he was near enough by, and he’d come, wearily unthreading his leather belt from his pants as he walked. Oh, the times that horse looked at them, filthy and feral and rude, and shook his ancient head. If only your mother could see you now, her heart would break in two.

  And then, when Stephen was seven—a decent interval at last—there was you. You were with us, although I didn’t even know it yet, on that day in early spring, when your father and your three brothers and I went for a picnic up on the ‘hill’ that I’d insulted your grandfather over, back when I was new to the farm. He’d mentioned the hill and I’d laughed without meaning to be cheeky; I really did think he was making a joke. Still, it was the biggest thing we had for a landmark and in a place this flat even an undulation lets you see for miles and miles.

  There were months when the farm was nothing but tilled earth, and months when it was all hacked and dry and stubbled. It looked like money to us when the wheat was high and tawny, but the place was only ever really pretty for a couple of weeks in spring when the paddocks were green and the wildflowers thick in the places that couldn’t be sown. There were quiet moments in spring, too—days when we’d have nothing much to do but watch over the growing crops, and hope for the best. I made a big deal of that picnic, making cakes and pies, and dressing the boys in good shirts and the better of their felt hats. I had in mind to take pictures, proof, of us happy and together and tidy.

  Those photos were the best part of that day. The sun shone through a thin layer of cloud that made the light too soft for strict shadows, yet strong enough to make the flowers bright and give a glow to the places where the granite showed through the dirt. But your father wasn’t used to spending time with all of us at once, and he kept looking at me as if I ought to have a way of stopping Jimmy from whining every time it wasn’t fair, and getting Mark not to wind up poor Stephen.

  I’d wanted to stay there all afternoon while the boys wandered off and played. I’d wanted to sit with your father and sip wine, and wait until the big red kangaroos came out at dusk. Your father grew up here, but I didn’t, and the way those big reds covered the width of those paddocks without ever touching more than a square foot of the earth beneath them was never going to seem ordinary to me. But none of that happened. Instead the boys hovered like blowflies and, although I held on for as long as I could, trying to jolly everyone into making it the way only I could see it should be, in the end I got a headache and packed away the food. In the car on the way back I sulked a little, not exactly because the picnic had been a disappointment, but because I couldn’t imagine the day when it might be any different than the way it was.

  That was what I was thinking about when your father made a noise halfway between a shout and a curse word, and swerved the ute without warning through a torn-open section of fence, its broken wires strung with pale wisps of fleece. The boys whooped from in the back as the ute shuddered and jounced over ruts and ditches, and came to a stop in the middle of an untidy ring of dead ewes. We got out, all of us, and looked around. The sheep were a mess: the backs of their legs badly scoured, their
eye sockets hollowed by birds. Not far away was a stand of low trees and shrubs: a banquet of spring greenery the sheep had forced the fence in order to reach, and threaded through the understory was a dainty shrub with sparse, waxy leaves and tiny blooms shading from red through orange to yellow.

  ‘Bloody box poison,’ your father said. ‘Christ.’

  There were twenty or more animals on the ground and later, once the corpses had rotted down a bit, Jimmy and Stephen made a tidy sum from plucking out and selling the long-stapled ‘dead wool’. They got themselves nearly a bale. For now, though, all three of your brothers solemnly inspected the carnage, copying the pointless way their father nudged one of the beasts with the toe of his boot.

  Killing something always makes you think about life and what exactly it’s made of. Not long after I moved to the farm I’d had to learn how to get a chook, all by myself, for dinner, so Colin showed me how. First you got a loop of baling twine and pulled it tight around a bird’s neck. You hooked the other end of the looped twine onto a bent nail in the shed wall, then all you had to do was pull the chook’s feet out as far as they’d go—pulling tight the string and the bird, both—and that way the chicken couldn’t shrink its head back down into its shoulders and the neck would be all nicely stretched over the top of your chopping block.

  The hatchet we had was small and sharp, and afterwards I’d turn my face away from the headless bird that I still had by the feet, waiting for the blood to stop squirting and the wings to stop flailing against the air and the side of my skirt. Instead I’d look at the little floppy head left lying there on the chopping block, or sometimes it would have bounced down onto the ground, and always it would occur to me that no matter how sorry I felt, there was nothing now that could be done to reverse it. There was no amount of wishing or wanting that could join that head once again to that body, and no amount of regret that could restart the thing I had stopped. Life didn’t come in any form that you could pump back into a limp body through a mouth or a beak. It seemed a strange oversight to me that we could control the process only too well in one direction, but not at all in the other.