Brother Sister Soldier Cousin

by Phyllis Johnston

  Barbara’s aunt came out of the supper room and sat beside me. “Here we are then. I’m off home, but I have a little something from Barbara to give you.”

  My friend had thought of me! “Is it a letter?”

  “No … no. We’ve had no news of Barbara. You lent her this a few months ago and I’m returning it.” Barbara’s aunt took something out of her handbag and pressed it into my hand. There was a glint of brass. Ahmed! Aunt eyed me. “No doubt you’ll be glad to have the ornament back.” She stood up. “Bye now.” She walked briskly out of the hall.

  Relief at having Ahmed back flooded me. He balanced on his hooves in the palm of my hand, his hump shinier than the rest of him. Disbelief speared me. Barbara had taken Ahmed out of my school bag. She was the thief! She had said nothing when I was so worried at his disappearance and had even helped me search my desk. I would have lent her Ahmed if she’d only asked. Barbara could have had him stay for weeks! Well, he had stayed for months. Had Barbara stolen the school apples, too? I knew now that she may have. She had stolen Harry’s gift even though she was supposed to be my best friend.

  I put Ahmed in my pocket and thought of the lilac soap I had given her and of the plans we had made for high school. Would Barbara have given Ahmed back to me? Perhaps she meant to and left him behind with Aunt with instructions to return him to me. But if she’d felt sorry for taking Ahmed, she might have found a way to return him: put him in the class rubbish tin, for example, then pretend she’d found him, rejoicing with me that the thief had thrown him there. Before today I would have believed anything Barbara told me, but never again.

  I stood beside Mum and she grasped my hand tightly. A lady eating a meringue with crumbs spraying down her front told Mum not to work too hard, to rest each day. Mum’s face was closed, polite.

  At last we were in the Oakleys’ car again and going home. Mum said she would milk that night.

  “You are still in shock, Pearl,” Mrs Oakley said sharply.

  “You can’t milk the herd on your own,” Mr Oakley said.

  “My daughters will help.” Mum’s voice was flat. “You have been generous. I will never be able to thank you enough.”

  Mrs Oakley started to protest but Mr Oakley put his hand up.

  “Okay, Pearl,” he said. “Give me a ring if you ever need help. Tomorrow I’ll come over and cull the cows with you.”

  Mum and I, Ruby and Jess walked up the path two by two, like animals going into Noah’s Ark, only we were all females.

  A sense of Dad was in the porch. He was easing his boots off. “Did you have a nice day?” he would say. Mum flinched as though she felt his presence too.

  Ruby switched the kettle on, sat on the form, undid her ankle straps and eased off her high-heeled shoes. Mum went to change her clothes. Jess sat in Dad’s fireside chair and took off her hat.

  In my room I bawled into my handkerchief. Mum came in and put trembling arms around me. I couldn’t tell her about Ahmed, that I had had a thief for a friend. It was too shameful and unimportant now Dad was dead.

  “You’ve been a good help through this sad day,” Mum said. We rocked together. “Try not to answer back at Jess.”

  “I haven’t. But she criticised my home dress.”

  Mum patted my back. “Jess is angry with her family. Her love is dead. And her father.”

  “She’s as prickly as a hedgehog. Was Herman killed in the Solomon Islands?”

  “I don’t know anything. She may not want to talk of her marriage, or of his death.”

  We had a cup of tea and I went to fetch the cows. When the pigs saw me they squealed, thinking I was going to feed them. The cows stood at the paddock gate. Tip barked and rounded them up to the shed. I tried to close the Taranaki gate and could hear Dad’s voice saying, “Put the bottom of the post in first, Lenny, push it down.” I pushed the bottom of the post down hard and the barbed wire and gate post stood up properly. I pulled the wire loop over the top of the post and the gate looked part of the fence.

  Mum had the motor started. Thrunk … thrunk … The older cows ambled into the bails as Jess filled the water buckets.

  Mum put her hands up in dismay. “The pigs! No one has fed them today.” She took the knobkerry and a bucket and went to the pigsties behind the cowshed. Skim milk was piped to tanks there, where it settled into stinky whey which was fed to the pigs.

  I slapped cows’ backs into the bails, washed udders and teats, and put teat cups on. I was slow compared to closed-face Jess moving from bail to bail, swiftly pushing on teat cups, and jogging to the separator room to make sure the cream was flowing properly. I felt like the tortoise in the hare and tortoise fable.

  “Milking cows is a breeze compared to one nurse having twenty-five patients to care for.” She tucked a stray hair into her hairnet and started stripping Maudie.

  With my head against Mabel’s warm hide, fingers pulling on her spotted teats, I watched milk squirting into the bucket. The plump lady at afternoon tea had relished the prospect of my not going to high school, of my having to be a farmhand instead. What she was really saying was, “Ha, ha. You’re not going for higher education. You’re going to stay on the farm like the rest of us.”

  Mum was beside me. “Scoffer stood up, put his front hooves on the top wire and screamed at me.” She waved the knobkerry. “I was glad I had this.”

  Ruby, handkerchief to her nose, on tiptoe in her high heeled shoes, picked her way through cow muck. “Doll!” She raised her voice above the motor. “How do you bear the smell of these animals.”

  Suddenly I felt annoyed with Ruby calling me Doll, as though I was vacant and china-faced.

  “As a dairy farmer’s daughter should.” I spoke like Dad. I was glad he was my dad, though he wasn’t my real one. I couldn’t imagine being curled up inside Ruby; that seemed liked a silly dream. Now the questions I wanted to ask her pushed up in my throat as though I was choking. She and Jess were leaving in three days and I still hadn’t asked her a single question.

  “Why didn’t you answer my letter?”

  Ruby’s face reddened. “Silly me,” she said, putting one manicured hand to her cheek and pulling a Charlie Chaplin face. “I’m the world’s worst letter writer.” She rolled her eyes. “I knew I would have to phone you.”

  Jess ducked past Ruby to grab the teat cups falling off Mother Two-Tit. Ruby went to the separator room to get a jar of cream and the billy of milk. I let Mabel out of the bail. If Ruby didn’t want to talk to me alone, I would ask her questions tonight in front of Mum and Jess.

  When milking was finished, Ruby had a small fire burning, the table set with the best table cloth, the cold corned beef carved and fanned in slices on the ashet, and the last jar of pickle set in the best crystal dish. The tureens were on the kitchen bench, ready for the vegetables, which meant extra dishes to wash, but it was good to sit down with the meal ready. I felt as weary as when we had spent all day forking out, picking up the potato crop. It was strange without Dad in his fireside chair, the living room had an air of something missing. Mum wept when she saw that Ruby had pushed Dad’s place at the end of the table against the wall.

  Ruby put her arms around her. “Do you want to sit in Henry’s place?”

  “No … no. It’s Harry’s place now.”

  Jess looked at Dad’s place and at Harry’s photograph above the fireplace. “You should sit in Dad’s place,” she said. “The farm belongs to you, now.”

  “Jessica,” Mum’s voice rose. “I don’t ever want to sit in Henry’s place.”

  Ruby brought hot tureens of potatoes, carrots and cabbage to the table. At the end of the meal she sighed and leant one elbow on the table. “Those draught horses!” She grimaced. “They trotted after me. Sniffed me. How are you going to handle those brutes, Pearl?”

  “Bob and Crazy Horse are not brutes. They’re friendly and wanted a pat on the nose,” Mum said. “Crazy Horse is so gentle, we should change his name.”

  “He’d still get calle
d Crazy Horse,” I told Mum. “You’re the only person who remembers to call me Helen.”

  Jess looked at Mum. “Why wasn’t I named Helen, after Grandma Wellwood? I was the eldest?”

  “You were named after Granny Forbes,” Mum said.

  “Jess,” I said, “Herman must have liked your name.”

  “You’re so gauche.” She grabbed her plate, knife and fork, jumped up from the table and rushed into the kitchen.

  “Chain Tip-dog up, Helen,” Mum murmured.

  Red-faced, I grabbed the torch and went outside. Tip was snoozing in the porch and followed me to his kennel. I chained him in and patted his coat. Anything I said offended Jess. Gauche meant tactless, rude. It is what she used to call Te Miro boys.

  “I’m not gauche,” I muttered. She had flashed her wedding ring, announcing Herman’s death, and he was now my dead brother-in-law. He was family so why shouldn’t he be mentioned?

  In the kitchen, dishes clinked and Jess was yelling about love and war. Mum, white-faced and silent, was washing the pots. In my bedroom, Ruby stood at the dressing table wiping make-up off her face.

  She rolled her eyes at the wall. “Lordy. What a scene. Pure theatre. Jessica is so tragic, Doll.”

  Jess’s voice penetrated through the wall, yelling about blessings and thoughtfulness.

  “Ruby.” I hesitated. “Please don’t call me Doll. It makes me feel brainless, like a toy.”

  Her eyebrows rose. She looked dismayed. “Yes. Well. Is Precious One all right?”

  “Okay. Doll’s the sort of thing you say to a baby but then you never saw me after I was two weeks old, until I was four, did you?”

  Ruby looked at herself in the mirror. “I didn’t want to give you away but I had to. Haskell was married.”

  “Haskell was my father?” Haskell sounded made up, like a person’s name in a play.

  Ruby turned her back and rummaged in her suitcase.

  “Was he an actor?”

  “No. He wanted to be an actor but had to manage his father’s clothing store, Vale’s For Men’s Wear. Beautiful Haskell. Haskell Vale, the love of my life.” She brushed her brown hair. “You have his brown eyes, his look, searching, direct.”

  “Do I have half brothers and sisters?”

  “Two half sisters. I never met them. They would be grown up now, probably married.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Jane and Emily.”

  “I want to write to them.”

  “Not until you’re twenty-one. Darling Haskell and I decided it would be best to wait till you were mature to tell you of your birth parents and half sisters. My doctor thought so too.”

  Blow Haskell! Blow the doctor! What right did they have to decide when I would meet my sisters?

  Ruby tweezed out an eyebrow hair. “And then Harry let the cat out of the bag.”

  “What did Grandma Wellwood say when I was born?”

  Ruby grimaced. “I had to come back to New Zealand and live with her until you were born. I had no money and nowhere else to go.” She shuddered. “She said I’d ruined my life and broken her heart, that I was a fallen woman bringing shame to the family, a slut…” She waved her hand and shut her suitcase. “Oh, it went on until you were born. Pearl and Henry were kind. They understood. I never felt the same towards Mother again. It was hard for her generation to understand but she also had a heart condition so she was too ill to look after you. It was far better you were adopted by Pearl and Henry.”

  I stared at Ruby’s reflection in the mirror. “If they hadn’t wanted me, would I have been adopted by strangers?”

  Ruby fussed with the sleeve of a blouse and slipped a hanger through its neck. “Ye–es.”

  “Didn’t you want to keep me? Didn’t Haskell Vale want to keep me?”

  “Yes, yes. We wanted you, wanted to keep our love child, but he already had a family.” She shook the blouse and hanger at me. “To be an unmarried mother is a disgrace, Doll, for the mother and the child. You cannot imagine the snide comments some people make about unmarried mothers. It seems to give them a licence to say lewd things and I didn’t want you to grow up in a box!” She looked intense.

  “Box?” I echoed.

  “A wooden crate. You would have had to stay in one while I was rehearsing or on stage. Haskell paid for the doctor and nursing home but I had to work to support myself. I had no home and couldn’t earn enough money to pay a nanny.” She put the blouse and hanger on a nail in the wall. “In my first show, one of the actresses had a baby boy who slept and played in a box. Sometimes we picked him up, took him walkies if there was time. He always smelt, got TB at three, and died when he was five. No. Your life has been a far better one than I could have given you.”

  I put on my nightgown and got into bed. A life in the theatre might have been okay, for all Ruby’s talk of boxes and TB, but she still seemed more aunt than mother.

  “When did Haskell Vale die?” I could not say “my father”.

  “When you were a year old. He was killed in a car accident in the Blue Mountains. It devastated me.”

  “Did he see me?”

  “No. You were here in New Zealand.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  Ruby sighed. “Of course, darling … but Pearl wrote and sent photos. She was always a good girl. I was the naughty one.”

  “Mum says you were both naughty. She’s writing about it.”

  “I ate the Christmas mince tarts! Two every day for a week!”

  “Mum says you fell off the stage tap-dancing, but kept dancing on the floor.”

  Ruby pulled the light cord and pushed the curtains back. Moonlight flooded the room. She pulled the blankets up to my chin. Her face was a blur. “Helen. For your sake and mine I had to give you away. It still makes me sad at times and it was very hard for me to do.”

  “Mum and Dad feel like my real parents.”

  She kissed my forehead. “And Haskell and I gave you life. Sleep well, Precious One.” She partly closed the door.

  Big Ben chiming in the BBC News drifted faintly through the passage door. Sadness like a cold wind swept over me. I had two fathers and both were dead. I would never talk to Dad again, hear stories of his boyhood, or see his pleasure at my school marks. I had never met Haskell but had his searching, direct look. I had older half sisters, Jane and Emily. I wouldn’t wait seven years to write to them. I would soon coax Ruby to tell me where in Australia they lived.

  Chapter Eight

  MUM SHOOK MY SHOULDER. “TIME FOR MILKING,” SHE said.

  “Go ’way.” My eyes would not open. I drifted in sleep.

  “Helen! Wake up,” Mum said.

  “She’s still asleep,” Ruby said.

  Dad. He was dead. But the cows … I sat up on the side of my bed, yawning and pulling on cowshed clothes.

  In the kitchen Jess boiled milk and made three cups of cocoa and honey. “Get up early?” She snickered like a draught horse. I glared at her, even though Mum said it was worse for her because both Herman and Dad were dead. I know that, Mrs Iceberg, I wanted to say. And shut up.

  It was half past four and I never rose before six thirty. The living room looked extra shabby in the bright electric light. Jess yawned and Mum, dark circles under her eyes, hair flattened by a hairnet, looked old. Torch in hand, she went to let Tip off the chain.

  Jess sipped cocoa and stared through me. “It takes willpower to get up early.”

  “I know,” I yipped like Tip. I couldn’t keep quiet at her comments and, throwing my cocoa in the sink, I went to the wash-house and put on Mum’s old coat and gumboots.

  On the skyline, an edge of dawn showed like thin white icing on a cake. The cows were a black mass walking across the paddock. Tip barked as he herded them to the shed. Mum heaved up a Taranaki gate and I held the torch as she pulled the wire over the strainer post. Jess had the motor going and the shed lights glowed like a lighthouse.

  The cows spattered the yard with green muck. Mum said the
y were always worse in the morning. She wept quietly into Rosie’s side. Jess, grimacing, ran outside and sicked up.

  Mum said, “Go home, back to bed, Jessica.”

  Jess sluiced her face with water. “A tummy bug. Better now I’ve vomited.”

  The sun came up gleaming whitely on the cows’ backs. A fantail perched on Maudie’s head, looking inquisitively at me. For ages I washed dozens of cows’ teats, put teat cups on, took them off, stripped them. Dad was right: I couldn’t milk the herd of ninety cows alone. But I felt his presence and kept glancing in the separator room to make sure he wasn’t there checking the machinery.

  It was too late for school by the time we finished. Ginger looked over the top rail of the gate, swished his tail, crunched the carrot I gave him, and waited for the bridle. His lustrous eyes watched me in enquiry.

  We were eating porridge when Mum said, “Helen, it depends what the bank manager advises, whether you will go back to school.”

  My mouth dropped open. “I have to sit Proficiency to enter high school.”

  Mum looked haggard. “You cannot milk morning and night, help me on the farm, and go to school. The farm might be able to pay for help, but who can we get?”

  The plump lady had been right, rejoicing in my being a farmhand, ha, ha. I wanted to sit Proficiency and go to high school. Tears pricked my eyes and I pushed my plate way.

  Ruby patted my hand. “Doll, a farm this size will be able to afford a man’s wages.”

  Jess sipped weak tea. “What about Correspondence School? In my nursing class there was a student of the Correspondence School who lived in a lighthouse; she studied with them and matriculated.”

  High school at home was better than no high school, but there would be no other girls to talk to. What fun girls in English boarding school stories had, playing hockey, having midnight feasts — there was always a big group of them having a jolly time.