by JH Fletcher
Kath said, ‘I’ll come with you.’
His dark eyes regarded her. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to go by myself.’
He was gone long enough for Kath to wonder whether to go looking for him. He would hate that, but what if he’d fallen, or run out of puff? In his head he seemed as tough as ever, but his body was a different story. Hedley’s frailty had shocked and horrified her, as it had all the people who had come to the house. Everyone knew that the prisoners of war had been treated badly, but reality outstripped the worst of their imaginings.
So far Hedley had said nothing about what had happened to him. The questions had bubbled in Kath’s mind, but one look at the stone-hard face and she had known not to ask. He would tell her when he was ready or not at all. She would say nothing, as now she did nothing. He had not survived in order to die on his first day home. When he was ready, he would be back.
She went into the kitchen to see if there was anything she could do to help her mother-in-law. Who, up to her elbows in suds and unwashed dishes, greeted her with a wry smile.
‘He won’t come to any harm. Not here.’
‘He’s lost so much weight. Some of the men at the station …’
‘He’ll mend. It’ll take more than a bunch of Japs to get rid of Hedley Warren.’
Apparently she was right. Half an hour later he returned, still with nothing to say for himself but with a renewed air of purpose about him, and she remembered what he had said during their honeymoon in what, she already knew, had been a totally different world. Next Sidney Kidman, that’s me …
She wondered how it would feel to be married to the next Sidney Kidman. Perhaps, she thought, I am about to find out.
First, though, there was the ordeal of the coming night. She had no idea what would happen. Would he love her? Ignore her? Confide in her? Would he rant and scream in her arms, drenched with the sweat of nightmare? Would he be able to sleep at all? Would she, in the company not only of this man who had grown so unfamiliar but of all the things that had divided them since last they had lain in bed together?
You will not think about it, she instructed herself. You will make ready for bed. You will accept whatever comes.
Easy to say. Her body obeyed, but her mind … A different story, indeed.
She waited, lying motionless in her clean white nightie, in her ears a dying fall of music, a voice that she had dispatched so unceremoniously from her life. At the corner of her vision flickered the image of an experience she had never known before nor, she feared, ever would again.
‘Dunno what you’re expecting from me,’ said Hedley, as though she had come on to him.
‘I’m not expecting anything. I’ve an idea what you’ve been through.’
‘No-one who wasn’t there can have the slightest bloody idea.’ His voice was as harsh as granite.
‘To be here, with you safe —’
The word triggered something in him. He seized her through the nightdress, hands as harsh as his voice. ‘No-one’s safe. No-one knows what’s going to happen.’ With each word his fingers pincered her flesh. ‘I seen blokes go mad. Screaming, crying. I seen a bloke grab a piece of stick, attack one of the guards.’
I can bear it, Kath thought, if it will ease him. I must. But did not know whether it would be possible. She did not know whether to speak or not, but decided that his silence demanded a question. ‘What did they do to him?’
‘They put his head in the fire.’
Oh God. She was horrified less by what the guards had done than the matter-of-fact way her husband spoke of it.
Now the movement of his hands changed. She would have forgiven had he been clumsy, but what was happening to her now had nothing to do with clumsiness. Hedley was reclaming territory that was his and that he would therefore possess. Love, affection, were coins devoid of value in what Kath came with mounting horror to realise was to be her world, now and forever.
He ripped away her nightie, he crushed nipples that she had been prepared to offer him so tenderly; like a conquering army, his fingers reconnoitred her thighs, her cringing belly. He thrust himself into her with brief violence, he laid claim to what once again was his. He slept.
While Kath, unsleeping, waited for the light. She feared that in the morning he would renew his assault, but he did not. At the first glimmer of dawn he rose, chucked on his clothes, and was gone. To reclaim his land as he had reclaimed his wife, but with consideration and not brutality, the bridegroom returning to what had always been his true bride.
Little by little they settled back into the skin of their shared lives. Or perhaps not. The pale tranquillity of the light that Kath remembered from the first morning of their honeymoon remained. But the other objects and feelings could never be recaptured because neither was the person they had been before.
There were times, towards sunset mostly, when Kath walked alone through the paddocks, the ripening heads of wheat and barley scratching their needle points against her legs, or stood on the veranda of the house, thinking about the land that held them all in its silent fist. It would never have occurred to Hedley that the land was not his slave, but Kath was less sure. Sometimes, in what she supposed must be moments of weakness, she wondered whether it was theirs at all or would remain forever withdrawn from those whose origins, in terms of centuries, were rooted in another place.
She thought also about Walter, who was likely to be another problem. He had grown used to being the only child of an only parent. All his life he had been told that his Dad was a Hero fighting for King and Country. He’d had this idea of what a Father might be: someone a good deal larger than the men with whom he was familiar yet who, on a day-to-day basis, did not exist at all. Now the hero was home, and Walter found it hard to relate the idea to the man. Harder still for him to accept that the hero-now-man, so reduced by reality, could be in any way connected with himself. The man took space that had previously been unoccupied; the air carried the smell of the unfamiliar flesh, his breathing intruded upon the core of Walter’s life.
The boy watched this strange and threatening presence that seemed to brush him to one side, that he came swiftly and instinctively to resent. He did not know what he could do with a father who had materialised, it seemed, out of the air.
Hedley was grappling with many problems, of which the boy was not the least. He, too, did not know what to do with a son who was legs and arms and feet and a cold and questioning look, impervious to smiles that, in any case, meant nothing.
‘Hold him,’ Kath urged her husband. ‘Talk to him. He doesn’t know you.’ Hedley could not, had already begun to accept that he might not discover his son.
The mother watched the bruised air that divided her son from the man who had returned. She saw that she would have her work cut out with the boy, that an absent Hero might be easier for him to understand than a stranger who made no attempt to reach out to him.
Walter was perhaps not alone in that. Kath was afraid for Walter and herself. After the empty years, she had been hungry to share love with the husband who had returned. Love might excuse or even bury past events that were so reluctant to be buried. Now she was coming to realise that this might not be possible, that her future might be an emptiness devoid of communication or love, punctuated only by the bruising concussion of the sullen flesh.
The futility of such a life filled her with horror and — worse — a resentment, unforgiving as stone, that gathered in the corners of her mind and heart. She sensed that resentment might take over everything, if she permitted, and was frightened by what she might become if it did.
It would have been easier had Hedley been willing to talk to her about his experiences. ‘I am strong,’ she told herself as she scoured the iron pots or poked resentfully at the springtime torrent of canary-yellow oxalis that threatened to drown her delicate plants. ‘I can put up with anything, if only he will talk.’
He did not. His silence was not so much a veil drawn over past terrors as a wall of stone and steel
, jagged with glass, shutting her out from present as well as past. To say nothing of the future, that threatened so balefully.
So Kath, too, turned to the land as she sought to ride out the silent storms of her husband’s return. She watched the first golden light glinting upon a fence post, heard the chink and bark of birds calling hoarsely from the trees that stood with their backs to the wind which, even in October, could be cold. Her clenched body, clenched mind, shut out the temperature as she watched the dawn and the distant figure of the man standing alone at the far end of the paddock. Even from here she could detect a possessive slant to the blue-shirted figure as it leant over the land.
In the orchard below the house were the fruit trees that had been planted over the years by other men and women. No doubt those earlier people had also stood and watched the dawn spread across their acres, felt the land’s gift of fulfilment and insatiable desire. There was apricot, nectarine, almond, walnut, quince. And oranges, whose bride-scent came to her now upon the errant breeze. Before the end of the month, the great apple tree would be a sunburst of red and white blossoms. A fig’s contorted branches promised sweetness.
‘A plum,’ Kath said aloud. ‘I would like a plum.’
She mentioned it to her husband, but to Hedley such talk was nonsense. Wheat and barley, some oats, peas and beans were the only serious crops. Hay, too, perhaps. The rest was frivolity, a woman playing games with the land when she would be better occupied within the house. Doing whatever women did.
As to vegies, he was willing to be tolerant. In a patch of level ground behind the orchard Kath had sown cucumbers, pumpkins and vegetable marrows. Now she planted out rows of tomatoes, cabbages and sweet potatoes. She thinned last month’s sowings of lettuce, carrot, radish. She lugged a bale of straw from the shed and spread it between the rows to mulch the well-watered ground. If she were to gain fulfilment, she knew that she, like her husband, would have to identify with the land.
Months after his return, there were times when exhaustion still caught up with Hedley. One day, looking in through the living room window, Kath saw him sleeping in the chair that he had designated his own. He was no more apart from her than when he was awake, and Kath recognised that she was watching not simply a sleeping man but her future. All her life this man would be deaf to her, forever shout down her concerns beneath the clamour of his silence. She wondered how it would be possible to survive.
As Emily had warned, there were those outside the house who would have chosen to make her survival impossible. In particular Madge Stacey, smiling and spiteful, who waited avidly for retribution to engulf the woman who had sinned while her husband was away.
‘She needn’t think she can fool me,’ she told her husband, who had learned patience over the years. ‘The whole town knows about her precious Yank. As for that so-called job down the south-east …’ Her derision was like knives. ‘Wonder what she did with the kid?’
Yet none could have been more solicitous when she met Kath in the shop. ‘How is your poor husband, Mrs Warren? Getting his strength back, I hope?’
Which might have meant Hedley’s ability to do a farmer’s work, but did not.
‘He’s coming on nicely,’ Kath acknowledged. She could read Mrs Stacey’s thoughts, would not let them bother her.
‘Nothing I can do,’ she informed the indifferent trees. She would not have undone what had happened, yet it was as though a stranger had walked the darkened Adelaide streets with a man not her husband, had by him been introduced to the mysterious wonders of music. Another woman had eaten and drunk with him, had lain with him in a room redolent of dust and desire.
Only the child was hers. Again and again she felt it leave her body, to be taken from her at once, like a secret too shameful to be seen. To the Mrs Staceys of the world, she supposed it was. To herself, too, she thought, since she had been willing to give up what should have been hers.
She could not understand how she had found the strength to do such a thing, which now she saw as the only shameful action in the entire sequence of actions. To be unable to speak of it, ever, might prove to be the most potent means of dividing her from the husband with whom she had never been re-united.
She wrote to Aunt Maudie who, she hoped, might be willing to share the burden of her unconsolable anguish. In reply received slow, measured letters, as between friends. Maudie said nothing that might identify guilt should the letters fall into other hands but, between the patient words, Kath read the memory of all they had shared and was a little comforted.
17
HEDLEY
1945
Benjamin and Wilf had assumed that Hedley would want to get down to work at once. He did not. He said he wasn’t fit enough, which was the truth. He was as feeble as a chook, ran out of puff before he’d reached the gate, although his mind, thank God, was as hard as steel. Not everyone was so lucky. There was a bloke called Dougie, some cove Ruth Ballard had met in the war, who told Phil Goodings that every night he woke screaming, bathed in sweat.
Bloody git, Hedley thought. He had no patience with those who mouthed off about what had happened to them. A bloke should keep it to himself, not shout it from the rooftops.
It took him two months to get back to work again. While he waited for his body to mend, he put his steel-hard mind to work. He hardly ever left the farm. Every day he got up at first light, grabbed a bottle of water and went out into the first grey stirrings of the dawn. As soon as he could manage it, he started to quarter the paddocks. Every few yards he bent, reverently lifting the clodded earth to his face. He breathed in its hot, peppery fragrance, even crumbled tiny pieces and put them into his mouth. He inspected every shed and implement. He checked the condition of the sheep, the horses, the handful of cattle. He examined the dams and windmills, he prowled the scrubland at the top of the range, where sometimes they pastured the sheep. He lay full stretch amid the growing wheat and listened to the earth’s slow breath. The land enfolded him in lover’s arms.
‘I’m back.’ Again and again he repeated it, with every breath drawing into his strengthening body his unity with the land. He was filled with wonder, a sense of having returned at last to the centre of creation. ‘I’m back.’
One evening he stood in the patchy shadow cast by a great gum tree and watched a mob of kangaroos feeding. They were taking grazing that might be used for livestock. Wilf’s let things get out of hand, he told himself. Grab a rifle, we’ll soon get rid of that lot.
Each day he returned to the house only at dusk. He had not eaten, had felt no need for food. He was fuelled by an implacable resolve to claim as his own, forever, the land to which he had returned. Every breath he took, every blow of his boot heels upon the earth, proclaimed it.
Nor would he share it with anyone else; he was not in the sharing business. This would no doubt create problems, but none that he couldn’t resolve. He must; otherwise, the price he had paid would have been too high.
‘No-one is going to stop me,’ he told the weathered buildings. He opened the creaking gate and walked upon crunching boots to the kitchen door. ‘No-one. Never again.’
He went indoors, ate at the kitchen table. Afterwards chucked himself down in a chair while the gravel voices of his brother and father discussed crops and sprays and rainfall; he was aware, without listening, of the twitterings of the women. He said nothing. He knew the others thought him difficult, changed, but did not care. He kept his thoughts to himself. He went to bed. Even there he barely spoke, taking his wife with the same cold ferocity as on the night of his return. She was his, as the land was his; it was his duty and his right to re-assert his claim to both.
Kath, wary of his wartime experiences, tried to get him to talk about the future instead. He would not. She was a stranger, as they all, the world itself, were strangers. Hedley knew that if he reached out to these ghost-like beings, he would find nothing. They did not exist, nor would. He was alone. The land was the only thing that mattered.
With time, Hedl
ey learned that he had to return to the world in order to possess it. As a first step, he practised his smile while walking through the scrub. When the earth whispered, he spoke back to it. When he was ready, he began to talk to his family.
He listened to the creaking of his voice, as though to a stranger. It was hard; it was not enough to speak, he had to say something, and he had nothing he wished to say. He persevered; little by little he came back, watching from behind shuttered eyes as the family fell over itself to welcome him. Kath seemed willing to forgive even her nightly pounding.
‘We were worried …’
‘What about?’
‘You were so strange.’
Only Walter maintained his distance. Hedley would have done something about it, if he could. Even now he sensed the reserve in Kath’s eyes; for him to become close to the child might be the only way that he would ever regain full possession of her. So he tried, but Walter would have none of it. When Hedley held him, his body was stiff and unyielding. He answered in nervous monosyllables whenever Hedley spoke; he volunteered nothing.
One day Hedley watched as Walter ran towards the buildings, one of the farm dogs cavorting at his heels. He heard his laughter and knew that this was a battle he would not win. He told himself he did not care, that in the scheme of things Walter was of no account, but that night he carved his will even more ferociously upon his wife, seeking to discharge within her unresisting flesh not only his semen but the anger and isolation that had become a permanent feature of his life.
One night he went to the pub, sat silently in a corner while he consumed a single beer. Men came and went. They knew him and would have spoken, but his manner inhibited them. Two days later he was back. Here, too, he gained ground, re-discovering the knack of chat. He kept his opinions to himself but drank in the other men’s news: how many points each farm had recorded in the last rain, what was happening to the wool price, the prospects for the year’s harvest.