Owls Do Cry

by Janet Frame

  No lawnmower now, it must be nearly afternoon tea time.

  The Withers children dangling, doing nothing, caught in the scruff of the neck by afternoon; looking through the fence at the Fletts who are Catholic dogs and stink like frogs and eat no meat on

  Fri-i-i-i-day.

  Then, let’s to the rubbish dump, the children cry.

  So there was Francie to look after them, to help Toby if he took a fit, and put a piece of stick in his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue, and lay him somewhere warm with a coat over him while he slept. And Francie to see they all stopped now and again for Chicks to catch up, because Chicks was smallest. And Francie to boss Daphne, and not let her be boss, it was one or the other.

  And they went to the rubbish dump to look for treasure.

  Francie wore her slacks, with zip at the side and a pocket, and her hand in her pocket, also a sixpenny shout from her pay for blackballs or acid drops or aniseed balls, it was toss up which. Daphne wore her tartan jacket, no particular tartan, that Aunty Nettie had sent in the last parcel, and her navy skirt with the petersham she had put on herself, after the last sewing class. And Chicks wore a red spotted dress, up over her knees. And Toby his navy pants and flannel shirt and braces.

  But it doesn’t matter what they wore, not like at a wedding, or if they were being described for the newspapers, it’s just so you can see them and know which is which –

  Francie, Toby, Daphne, Chicks Withers going to find treasure and knowing they would find it; the same way that grown-up people (they thought) go to shops and offices and factories, what they call their work, to find their grown-up treasure.

  It wasn’t far for the Withers children to go. Over the hill and down and then along to Cross Street. All the way there were people working in their gardens, mowing the lawn or digging; and ladies, on little rubber mats, kneeling over primrose plants and pansies. And all the way there were houses with lace curtains looped in front, and ornaments, dogs and frogs looking out of the window and being so surprised, perhaps, to see Francie, Toby, Daphne, Chicks on their way to the rubbish dump to look for treasure.

  They met Tim Harlow riding round and round on his bicycle. He stopped to talk to Francie.

  —Gidday, cutie.

  Francie put her head in the air and walked on, quickly, then she turned round and smiled at him. He smiled back.

  —The cheek he’s got, Francie said proudly.

  —Are you going with him? Daphne said.

  —Never, said Francie. Never put all your eggs in one basket. Besides, he’s younger. Oh look, a dead hedgehog.

  It was lying squashed and dead in the middle of the road.

  —Why, asked Chicks, coming up behind.

  Francie explained.

  —At night, she said, the hedgehogs think that because it is dark they can come out and walk quite safely, and what better place to walk than a road, tarsealed with a white line running down the middle.

  She was joking. She knew Tim Harlow was not far behind, and she was proud and joking. It was like Francie to do that, to joke when they came to something sick or dead, because she was growing up quickly and getting to know things, and left school to earn her living and what were hedgehogs, anyway.

  So she said,

  —It’s nothing, leave it. Don’t touch it with your clean hanky, Daphne. When I get married and have a car I shall probably run over hundreds and hundreds of hedgehogs without even knowing it. They’re a blot on the landscape.

  Daphne withdrew her hanky. After all, the hedgehog was dead and that was sad, but it was a squashed and dirty kind of death that made you turn your face away.

  They came to the rubbish dump, the stink and filth of it, with the toi-toi like a fringe of shawl; and they climbed over grass and dead logs and twisted iron, and sat together on a clean piece, cocksfoot and no ashes, for a rest and to take the gravel out of Chicks’ shoe. There was no real leaning-place so they sat upright with their knees up and their elbows on their knees. They compared knees.

  —Yours are nobbly, they said to Toby.

  Toby didn’t talk much. He just got angry and threw things, or he cried. He looked at his nobbly knees and then at Chicks because she was smaller and couldn’t argue so well.

  —Yours are nobbly knees, too.

  —I have got webbed fingers, Daphne said, spreading out her hands. Which proves I am part fish.

  —I have a wart, to put plantain on, Francie said. Then she sighed and shrugged her shoulders.

  —What children you are, it’s a wonder I can bear to look after you on a Saturday when I could be doing all kinds of interesting things with certain friends of mine. What did we come here for, anyway? I’m sure I’m not going to sit here all day in a dirty old rubbish dump.

  —But, Francie, you used to come with us, before.

  —Before what?

  —Before you left school and everything was different. Wouldn’t you like to be at school again, and Joan of Arc. She was a Saint.

  Francie giggled.

  —Saints are not in my line. And I’d much rather be grown up. Tell you what, though, let’s go down over there where they’re burning things, and watch. For half an hour, mind you, then we’re going home, and we’re getting acid drops and not aniseed balls on the way home.

  Chicks started to cry. She hadn’t really wanted to come to the dump, for it was a long way to walk and have to catch up all the time, but Francie had said aniseed balls, and all the way Chicks had been imagining them, brown in the mouth first, then white with a tiny blue rim or shadow, then pure white like a warm hailstone.

  —But you said aniseed balls, Francie.

  —Did I? How fascinating. Well threepence-worth of each, then, and no more snivelling.

  They went over to see the fire. It was bigger than they thought, and smoky, with the smell of petrol and kerosene and rubber and stifled rags. There was a man guarding it, thrashing it with a bag to subdue it, and sometimes poking it with a stick to make it flame. He turned to the children standing at the top of the hollow.

  —Get away you kids or you’ll be blown up, or burned.

  Francie stared at him. Why, she thought, it’s Tim Harlow’s father. And he said his father was a surgeon in his spare time, performing operations and wearing rubber gloves and masks of gauze, and having the sweat wiped off him by nurses as pretty as me, and everything handed to him. And he’s only a Council man. She moved closer to look at him.

  And then no one can describe exactly what happened, but it happened, and Francie tripped over a rusty piece of plough and fell headfirst down the slope, rolling, quickly, into the flames. And Tim Harlow’s father, the Council man, tried to grab her, and leapt high, like a ballet dancer, to reach her, crying as he danced,

  —Help, help, or get a doctor, or help!

  His sack shadowed red from the flames that he danced to and dared, like a matador; beating in the air and on the ground.

  And Daphne and Toby and Chicks ran forward, calling out,

  —Francie, Francie, Francie, as if her name, three times said, would bring her alive, like magic.

  —For God’s sake, yelled Mr Harlow.

  And he grabbed hold of the children and thrust them back. And people came from everywhere, like an ambush, and there was a woman tearing up a sheet and it was Mrs Peterson from the Plunket, and she was flat and dark, like a blackboard, with horror chalked on her face. And Daphne and Toby and Chicks were taken over the road to Harlow’s and given a drink of hot milk and a piece of seedcake, to wait for a car to take them home. And they sat on a sofa that had a dusty piece of stuffing bursting from its middle, like the inside of a dead hedgehog.

  They sat in a row, with their legs dangling because the sofa was too high and they held tight to their piece of seedcake, but they didn’t eat it, and it got squashed with being held, and warm, and the crumbs dropped on Harlows’ carpet; but nobody minded. Mrs Harlow, who was a light woman, curved like a feather, with hair yellow like toi-toi, looked in the door at
them. She had a piece of seedcake in her hand and seemed not to know where to put it. She looked quickly round the room as if to find someone to give the seedcake to, but there was no one else there but Daphne, Toby and Chicks; so she put the cake in a dish, beside a packet of needles and a wad of darning wool, and the seedcake sprouted into a tall gold flower growing up through the roof and further than the sky, and Daphne saw it, and picked one of its petals to take home in the car.

  —There’s a car coming soon, soon, my dears, said Mrs Harlow. Now drink up your milk and eat your seedcake, why the littlest one’s nearly asleep and so pale, the poor little mite.

  And they sat for years and years on the sofa till it grew dark outside or seemed to be dark, there must have been something wrong with the sun, yet it wasn’t dark really, for when Daphne looked sideways out of the window there it was, daylight, with the sun out, and the street with the cars going up and down tooting their horns, and little dogs hopping about, and people walking. And the mist coming on the window, a dampness in the air that made people take their washing from the clothes-line, and button their coats and collars.

  And then Daphne looked back into the room where they sat, in the dark. There was the tall sideboard with the dish of fruit on one side, apples, an orange, a banana going bad; and on the other side, the darning wool and the seedcake in flower. And a gold plate with a deer in a forest painted on it; and on the wall a picture of dogs, four of them, with their noses in the air and their tails up, and a man on horseback beside them, a hunting picture.

  And so they sat still and not speaking, until Toby’s hand shook and his teeth chattered and it was a fit; and Daphne had to do what was Francie’s job, though it made her feel sick, fixing his mouth and letting him have more room on the sofa to lie down. And nobody came in the room for many years then, and it seemed they had been put inside there to sit still and grow staying there without seeing any more people or going home.

  Home?

  Years after, a man came in a car and took them home.

  12

  Mrs Withers disapproved of two kinds of people, insurance men and travelling salesmen. She had heard stories about them, and once, when the family had been living in the deep south where old grandma Withers toiled in the cotton fields as a negress, an insurance man had put his foot in the door, and Mrs Withers shut fast the door on his foot, nearly squeezing it in two, and squeezed feet are very painful, as people know, from their own new shoes, and from the faces of all the people who tried to fit the slipper left by Cinderella.

  —I told you, nothing today, thank you, Mrs Withers repeated, jamming the door harder in case the insurance man needed any more proof.

  No, she disapproved of them. Rooks, hounds, she called them. Bloodsuckers. Though really what they sucked was money which seems, however, to be another form of blood necessary for life.

  So the day the children went off to the rubbish dump and a man, like an insurance agent though it was Saturday, knocked at the back door, Amy Withers put her sack apron on the bench in the scullery and opened the door, just a little, then jammed it fast, for she knew the man was a salesman.

  —Nothing today, thank you, she said. I cannot afford it.

  The man was obstinate and put his foot in the door.

  —I’ve come, he said.

  Amy would not let him finish.

  —Nothing today thank you. I cannot possibly buy whatever you have to sell.

  The man smiled sadly, then pushed suddenly at the door, and walked in. He said he was a doctor and didn’t want to sell anything. He thought, as he entered the depressing and untidy kitchen, it’s a commercial world, certainly, where even death is bought and sold, and the world is bankrupt in death.

  —No, he said aloud, he didn’t want to sell anything.

  But he sold death, the terrible way, on the never-never, though Amy tried to keep him out.

  He told about Francie, and said

  —Pull yourself together, Mrs Withers. I take it your husband is up north with the Limited. He’ll be home any time now. He knows, but he doesn’t know the details yet.

  And when Bob Withers came home, with his workbag of coal in one hand, and his dirty blueys in the other, and his face puckered he stood in the doorway and saw Amy sitting in the corner on the bin, with her arm around Chicks, and the other children standing around and pale, and the kitchen fire out.

  He kissed his wife and started to cry and his overalls dropped on the floor and unrolled into the empty stained pattern of his other work-self, flat and robbed.

  —Oh Bob, Amy said. You’re home early. You’ve never been home early before.

  The children had never seen their father cry before. They had thought that fathers get angry and shout about the bills and wearing slacks, and laugh with the woman from the bookstall, and sometimes with mothers; but never cry.

  He looked like a bird, with his mouth down at the corners, the way a fowl looks when the rest of the fowls have been put in for the night, and the realization of their going has overtaken the last fowl; and she panics; and her beak drops; and that is how Bob Withers’ face seemed when he really knew about Francie. He knew later than the others. They had been warned, and driven, like fowls at night, inside, though not to warmth. Driven inside to outerness, as if the moment they passed through the door of knowing, they came, not to warm nests, but dropped down to dark, yet in some kind of comfort because they were together and close; and there was Bob waiting to be driven inside to share the darkness of their complete knowing, and not wanting to go, and being scared, like the lost fowl.

  Francie did not come home that night to sleep in the bed in the front room. Although Daphne knew she was dead, she expected her to come and do her hair in front of the mirror and pull her dress tight around her waist, to see her measurement, if she were slim enough; and stand kicking her legs up, acting like a chorus girl; and practising her grand opera, though the free book had cheated and was not free and you had to pay twenty guineas for learning opera. And then squeezing out her blackheads, the ones in the seam of her nose and cheek. And plucking her eyebrows. Daphne expected all this, but it did not happen. Instead, the tweezers that Francie used for plucking stayed in exactly the same place on the duchesse. They stayed there for hours and days and weeks. Once, Daphne moved them a few inches to see what they were like moved, if they looked any different. And she went to the wardrobe and jiggled the clothes up and down, danced the evening dress backward and forward, though it had nobody inside it, danced it, the destiny and maxina, just to see. If only she could have seen! Just once more, only once, and then it wouldn’t matter.

  And through it all Amy Withers said,

  —Have faith.

  Through the funeral and the flowers and the cards that she put in a cane shopping basket, shaped like a cradle; to be gone through afterwards and the nicest ones picked out to keep, the ones with the white gloss on them and the raised cross entwined with flowers, and words to tell that Francie was not really dead, only sleeping. Through it all, Amy Withers said,

  —Have faith.

  You could not see faith, but it was somewhere to help, like the air that was to uncrease the school tunics; so, now, when the pattern of life had become unpleated and dis-arranged, it was, for Amy Withers.

  Faith will smooth everything.

  And also seeing Francie on resurrection day.

  13

  The long corridor outside shines like the leather of a new shoe that walks that walks upon itself in a ghost footstep upon its own shining until it reaches the room where the women wait, in night clothes, for the nine o’clock terror called electric shock treatment. They wear dressing gowns of red flannel, as if God or the devil had purchased a continent of cloth and walked, with scissors for stick, from coast to coast, to cut the dead mass pattern of mad men and women whose eyes will spring blind with sight of their world and the flag of cloth hung in the shape of sun across their only sky.

  Oh, but at nine o’clock, it is said, all will be well.
Their seeing will be blinded, the shade replaced across their eyes to restrict their looking to their plate, their tea, their cigarette; in practice for the world; stopped like a house to look forever on its backyard.

  Hairclips have been taken from them and arranged in rows along the mantelpiece. Their teeth are sunk in handleless cups of luke-warm water, arranged in circles, for companionship, upon the bony-legged table.

  —Take your teeth out, the women in pink have commanded. Take your teeth out.

  And soon the same god or devil who walked the continent of cloth will turn the switch that commands

  —See. Forget. Go blind.

  Be convulsed and never know why.

  Take your teeth out as a precaution against choking, your eyes out, like Gloucester, to save you sight of the cliff and the greater gods who keep their ‘dreadful pother’ above your head. Your life out as a precaution against living.

  And the women, submitting their teeth, their eyes, their lives, smile, embarrassed or mad in their world of mass red flannel.

  The nurse is pink, like a flower from the garden, except the wind that bends her body is blown from the same continent of swamp and trapped water with the voice of God or the devil in her ear, like the same small voice that drove the horse, said Gee-up, Whoa.

  on the sunniest of days, coloured like a single toi-toi with a sunflower in its heart of seedcake though the seeds were burned black in ash that the same wind that bends and crushes the pink body of flower had driven on and on through a million years to a world of blindness

  this room

  and a black blanket laid like an elasticised and bordered beetle upon the bed, and the women lying upon its furred shell with their temples washed clean in a purple gasp of liquid ethereal soap

  concealed in cotton wool. And the gabbling jibbering forest-quiet women wait in crocodile for the switch that abandons them from seeing

  and fear

  and no struggle to leave for in seeing they inhabit a room of blind where doors are moulded lockless, and those who enter from the corridor may cleave the wall with their bodies, and the same wall closes behind them in a velvet mass like a wave in the wake of a journeying saint or ship.