by Fiona Kidman
‘Who looks at you?’ I mentally scanned my more recent forays into adult territory, trying to work out whether the watcher had been watched.
‘Nobody. Here make yourself useful, learn to hold a gun at the very least.’ And he put the gun in my hands and showed me how to hold it up to my shoulder, although the weight of it was almost too much for me to support. ‘Look, we’re out to get a pheasant or two for dinner.’
The sun was rising in the sky and in the golden glow of grass and light I saw something move and my finger squeezed the trigger. A feathered creature rose straight up from the ground and fell back; it was a soft brown hen pheasant. All of a sudden, I was a huntress, a poacher.
Sour fright filled my mouth. I don’t have much of a taste for death.
My mother plucked and gutted the two pheasants that we took home (my father shot the second one), her fingers carefully searching for shotgun pellets. She cooked them with rare brilliance, using some of the leftover wine from Frank’s visit, and told my father to go out and shoot some more.
Like Frank, my mother got work in the orchards, climbing ladders and picking oranges and lemons with sharp steady snaps of her secateurs. She earned one shilling and sixpence for every case and she filled them at twice the rate that Frank did; my father didn’t try again after the first time. She and Frank began to show signs of a camaraderie that hadn’t been there before, although the banter was mostly of her making. ‘And how many boxes did you fill today?’ she would begin. ‘Ten, oh my, but then I noticed you picked the lower branches first.’ My mother, being small and light and fast, cleaned out the tops of the trees but it was harder work. After a while the orchardists began to pay her a bonus of sixpence a box. By and large it was my mother who paid the bills, while my father worked in a desultory way at home during her absences. His face brightened on the days when she was free to work alongside him.
Sometime round the middle of last century the climate began to change. I suppose it did everywhere but the people in Alderton thought it was a sign that their luck had run out. The summers became drier, and droughts set in: in one year whole orchards wilted and died. At a price, a trucking firm would deliver water, but without natural rainfall, the settlers were at a loss. They ran hoses from taps, but as most of them relied on water stored in tanks from the winter rains, this soon disappeared and then they had only river water to drink. You could see them toiling up and down the banks of the creeks and river tributaries that meandered through their properties, carrying buckets and pots. Sometimes they just sat among the long grass and aromatic pennyroyal near the waterways, looking lost. We didn’t come here for this, you could hear them saying, if not aloud, in their hearts. A few packed up and left.
Others installed pumps, or built reservoirs in their backyards which filled with brackish dirty water, unfit for drinking, but temporarily at least, they provided water for the orchards and gardens. My father and Frank built a reservoir behind our house: it needed the two of them to pour the concrete. Frank had thick wide shoulders that he bared to the sun. His fair skin burned easily, so that for days he walked around looking raw and stripped, but he kept steadily trudging backwards and forwards between the mounds of cement and sand. He’d been up north a couple of years by this stage. There didn’t seem any pretence that he would go back south now. He was still a big man, but he’d got harder, the edges of his flesh more crisply defined. My father took many breaks, stopping to smoke in the shade of the gum trees, torrents of coughing hurtling out of his lungs. My mother, observing the slow progress of the reservoir, picked up a shovel and carried concrete too, straining against its weight.
This was a summer that held little for me. I had turned ten and my friend Jocelyn had gone away for the summer. Sometimes, in the holidays, I would go south on the train to stay with my grandmother, but my parents had no extra money that year. Water and cement had soaked it all up. My mother was in one of her stubborn frames of mind and wouldn’t take charity from her family. One afternoon, I stood under a gum tree with my father, wishing the day would end, because then it would be tomorrow and I could start doing nothing all over again, and it might turn out better than today. Frank saw my father watching him, and came over.
‘There must be easier ways than this to find water,’ he said.
‘Tell me,’ my father said, wearily, leaning on his shovel. He hadn’t shaved for days and his face looked gaunt and grey, the worse for the cloudy film of cement.
‘There was an old codger down Hunterville way used to be able to divine water, you know, find it in the ground so you’d know where to sink a well.’ Reaching out, he pulled a slim branch from a young gum tree, choosing one with a forked stem. He took out his pocket knife and started whittling a three-pronged Y-shaped twig.
‘See,’ Frank explained, ‘the old joker turns the stick with the long piece pointing upwards and he holds the sides one in each hand.’ He demonstrated how to hold it, curling his fingers right around the two stems, his thumbs pointing away at either side. ‘Then he walks along and when he comes to the place where there’s water, down where you can’t see, the stick begins to turn, pointing out where the water is.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Well, I saw what he did a couple of times when I was a kid. He’s gone now, long dead that old joker.’ He threw the stick aside. ‘I tried and tried but I never could make it turn. Wood’s wood.’
‘I have heard of that, now I come to think of it,’ my father said. ‘A dowser.’ He picked up the stick and holding it the way Frank had shown him, began walking through the paddock.
‘You have to think water. Go on, mate, you’ve got to concentrate — just think water, water.’
‘Jesus, that’s all I think of.’ My father was going to throw the stick aside in disgust, but my mother had just come down to the paddock, and she asked to try too.
‘Go for it,’ said Frank, ‘you could make money out of a trick like that. Not that the old joker ever seemed to have much — probably spent it all at the boozer. He was a queer old bandicoot.’
My mother was solemnly pacing along, holding the stick upwards. ‘How will I know?’ she called out.
‘They reckon you know, that you can’t stop the thing once it starts. Reckon it’s got a mind all its own.’
‘Ah,’ she said, after a while, ‘I don’t believe in that sort of baloney. It would’ve been a trick you saw.’
‘There mightn’t be any water underneath this bit of dirt,’ Frank said, not unreasonably. ‘Maybe some people who’ve got the knack can find water, but only if there’s water there to start with.’ He sounded huffy as if my mother had called him a liar.
Nobody had offered the stick to me. When they started work again, I picked it up, held it in my hands, the way the others had done, and walked slowly down past the hen house and along the hedge line.
At first nothing happened. Then something did begin to stir. Like some live creature struggling to get away out of my hands. I thought water water as if I was thirsty and the twig curled down towards the earth. It’s almost impossible to tell what something as strong as this feels in your hands: something bucking, like riding horses bareback, stronger than the kick of a gun. I think now that it was more like a sexual tension, not something children are supposed to have. By the time I was grown and married, this ability to locate underground springs had all but vanished. I looked up and saw Frank, gone to take a pee, watching me behind veiled eyes.
I wanted to say, it’s a secret, but I could tell that it wasn’t going to stay one, and besides, what was I doing, watching him about his private business?
‘I can do it,’ I said, returning to my parents. ‘I can make the twig bend.’
‘I reckon she’s a little witch,’ said Frank, who had rejoined the group.
‘You’re fibbing, Mattie.’ My mother looked furious.
‘No, I’m not,’ I replied hotly, wanting to prove myself now.
‘Show us,’ my father said.
‘Don’t
encourage her,’ my mother said. But, egged on by my father and Frank, I began to show them how easy it was. My mother watched for a moment, and then turned away, as if I was behaving badly.
When the reservoir was finished, a sudden storm erupted, a timely opening of the skies that caused flash floods and slips on the dry land. The reservoir filled with water almost overnight, and then the summer went back to being the same as before, bone dry, sere heat, blindingly bright. Frogs gathered in dozens at the reservoir, sheltering from the relentless sun. I put on my bathing suit and swam with them, allowing them to cling to my legs with their tiny pulpy hands. I let them use me as a floating log, a dozen or more sitting on my back while I floated on the scummy surface of the water.
‘Funny kid,’ Frank said to my mother, thinking I couldn’t hear him.
‘You just leave her alone. Leave my kid out of it,’ my mother said.
‘Out of what?’ Frank said, lazily.
‘Just stick to what you’re good at, whatever that is,’ my mother snapped, turning on him, as if her careful mask had slipped away. I remember that his face was flushed that evening, in a way it often was. He had made other friends in the village and he didn’t eat at our place every night, hadn’t done for a long time, although he was always there at the weekend, when he couldn’t find someone to gain him entrance to the Homestead bar.
There was, if I look at this now, a certain raffish charm about the way we lived. The eccentric settlers. Fruit and produce and self-sustainment. A delicate father with a taste for the good life. The devoted friend. The child, in one sense, abandoned to the natural world. The nurturing but busy mother. But then, in the same breath, there is the question of my mother’s life.
There was a day when I went looking for her. I had come in from Jocelyn’s place. Jocelyn, the same age as me, was a head taller and confident in everything she did. She always put her hand up in class even when she didn’t know the answers, as if by a bright and engaging manner she could convince those around her, and the teachers in particular, that she was clever. I often knew the answers where she failed to provide them, but I preferred to write them down, so that, puzzlingly to her, I often succeeded by examination in those subjects at which she had appeared to shine in class.
There was, between our mothers, a wary kind of friendship. Jocelyn’s mother, Viv, who had been a school teacher, prided herself on knowing everyone.
‘I’m not going to let all that class nonsense get in the way of things,’ she said. She was a meaty woman who wore her hair rolled up at the bottom, pinned at the sides with clips. ‘I like making myself useful to people.’ Ingratiating, my father said unkindly, but my mother was happy to have another woman to talk to now and then, and pleased there was some place I could visit. The settlers’ children kept to themselves. Many went to private schools and only came home in the holidays anyway.
If my mother was careful to keep a slight distance between herself and Viv it was possibly because she detected a willingness to pass on information about others. Or, you could say, Viv was a gossip. I think, on the day I was looking for my mother, Viv had issued an invitation for me to go swimming with Jocelyn, something like that. I called out to my mother several times. I was sure she wasn’t far away, because a pot was simmering quietly on the stove. Yet there was something abandoned about the place, that made me panic when she didn’t answer. I rushed outside, calling and calling again.
She must have been there all the time because suddenly, as if from nowhere, she said, ‘Yes, what is it?’
She was standing among the pale shapes of the blue gum trees, quite still. Absorbed into them, like a branch, or a group of leaves in the motionless air.
When I went towards her she was smiling, pleased, I think, that she had so easily vanished from view. I felt afraid and alone, as if she had been spirited away. But she had been there all the time, and she came towards me, calling cheerfully for me to take a billy of eggs from her, as if nothing had happened. I thought it odd, and began to notice other times when it happened.
This is not to suggest that my mother was other than a vital presence in our household, or that she was wilfully disappearing before our eyes. It was just that she had developed a certain aloofness, especially towards the men in her household. Not towards me, not as a rule. She and I had dialogues of our own, role-playing the characters on the radio serials. ‘You can pretend I’m Delia,’ she would say, and start vamping among the tamarillos. The fruit had drum smooth red skin, the insides held black seeds and rouge-coloured flesh and, to me, a tainted bitter taste. She clipped and slid the fruit, clipped and slid it, into a bulging pouched apron. ‘You can kiss me if you’re quick, but nobody must know, least of all your wife,’ she’d say in a la-di-da voice.
‘My wife no longer cares who I kiss,’ I’d say.
‘Ah yes, but she does, that’s half the pleasure,’ my mother would breathe. ‘We have our little secrets.’
‘How about we sail away in a boat together,’ I might say.
She would snort. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ The question was meant for me, not the character. When we held these sultry improbable conversations you’d swear, catching a glimpse of her hard at work in the orchards, that she was a man, with her overalls and close-cropped hair. I think now that my mother was in despair and that being still, being invisible, was her way of hiding it from me.
One night when Frank wasn’t there, after I was supposed to have gone to bed, I got up and found them, my mother and my father, dancing cheek to cheek on the ugly congoleum floor. The radio was playing — When your heart’s on fire/ You must realise/ Smoke gets in your eyes — and I saw that my mother was crying.
I crept away without being seen. I could never tell how things would be between them.
Frank came around and said that a military chap, a Wing Commander Thorne, had heard I could divine water and, as he was about to put down a well, could I come round and check it out. My mother was out at the time. I remember my father looking doubtful.
‘He’ll pay,’ said Frank.
‘An air force wallah, eh? Must be one of the new lot. You’d better put on some tidy clothes,’ my father said, warming to the idea. I could see he was pleased to be asked. He didn’t ask me whether I wanted to come or not. Like the shooting expedition.
‘Suppose Mattie can’t do it?’ my father said, as we walked down the broad dusty avenues towards Hubert Thorne’s house.
‘She will,’ Frank said confidently. ‘You can tell she’s a natural.’
‘But we don’t know she really found water. We didn’t put a well down.’ (As it happened, my father had wanted to, and Frank had urged him and my mother to throw caution to the winds and sink a bore, but on this one matter my mother stood absolutely firm. There would be no bore. I think part of her was afraid that I might lose my new-found aura of magic.)
‘I can tell you,’ Frank said, ‘what that girl does wouldn’t happen unless there was water at the end of the stick.’
Quite a crowd had gathered round. All the wing commander’s family were there, including Maisie who went to St Cuthbert’s and her brother Cecil who was at King’s in Auckland, and some of the neighbours, along with the well driller and a man who worked for him. Wing Commander Thorne had one lazy languid eye and one that looked at you straight. That lazy eye didn’t hide the impatience of his manner.
The well driller had already put down a test bore and not struck water. ‘If he puts down another dud, I won’t be able to carry on. Too costly. Can she do it or not?’ he demanded.
The well driller was looking surly. ‘I’ve got it worked out now,’ he said to my father. He could tell by his calculations from the river flow, beyond the rise, which way water would go. You didn’t always get it right first time. He looked at me with a mixture of contempt and misgiving. I could tell how I worried him, a kid in a tartan skirt with straps over the shoulders of her white blouse.
‘She can do it,’ my father said, in a blithe way.
I felt an urgent sense of excitement, as if I was about to throw off my inhibitions and become a performer after all.
I was offered a twig that someone had pulled from a tree but I turned it down, preferring to choose one of my own. I took my time getting it ready, holding it out and measuring it with my eye, although that wasn’t really necessary. I knew when I could get a twig to work. All the same, I was nervous. It was one thing to feel that wild thing in my hand, but I didn’t know, any more than my father, whether there would be water below. The twig turning was something that happened to me, in a way, rather than because I made it happen.
I walked around with an earnest expression clasping the twig, and pacing slowly about. At first nothing happened. I heard Maisie and Cecil start to giggle. But I thought water and then the twig bent sideways, away from me, so that I had to follow where it was taking me. At a certain point, the twig pulled inexorably down towards the earth.
Someone started to clap, probably Frank, but others joined in. I walked backwards and forwards and the twig pulled only at the one place — five yards from where the well driller had reckoned on putting the well down.
‘I don’t reckon it’s there,’ he said. ‘You don’t know if this kid’s a fake.’
‘It always turns in the same place,’ said Frank.
‘Put a blindfold on her,’ the man said.
‘Excellent idea,’ said the wing commander. He spoke to my father. ‘How about it, old chap? Will you tie your handkerchief round the lass’s eyes?’
A flicker of concern passed over my father’s face. I think he realised that things had gone far enough. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You can do it.’
Because by now I knew that whatever force was pulling the twig, it would happen anyway.
And it did.
They sank the bore in the place I showed them. There was water there all right, buckets of beautiful clear water gushing out in a steady stream. Wing Commander Thorne gave my father five pounds for his trouble in bringing me over. ‘Buy the little lass a new dress,’ he said, which was an expression, more than a reflection on what I was wearing. Cecil and Maisie took up a game of croquet they’d been playing before I came, as if nothing unusual had occurred.