The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  Three days before Trudy was due to pick Peter up, Tom took him down to the river to fish. This was the boy’s favourite thing, fishing for the small rainbow trout at the confluence of the creek and the river where the water rattled over the small round stones. He’d developed a handy way with the rod, Peter. As small as he was, he could still get some decent loft on his cast and he knew how to flick the bale back over the line at just the right moment and draw the line in at a speed that kept his lure off the riverbed. When a trout took his lure, he knew to play it at the right tension and keep the tip of his rod up. He couldn’t net a trout while still holding the rod, not yet, but he was pretty good all the same.

  This day, Tom let him catch three little trout before giving him the news about his mother. One of the trout was a brown, a bit bigger than the rainbows. Catching a brown was a prize. The rainbows were maybe more beautiful with their mottled colouring but the brown trout were stronger and fought harder and their hatred for the person on the other end of the line was obvious.

  The boy made a small pool in the shallows of the river using rocks as a wall and in the pool the dead trout kept fresh. It was necessary to check every fifteen minutes or so to make sure that yabbies hadn’t invaded the pool to pick at the trout. It was not unknown for a big yabby to drag a small trout back into the current of the river and make off with it. Building the wall of stones that hemmed off the current of the river was something that gave the boy as much pleasure as catching the trout.

  Tom said, ‘The thing is, old fellow, your mum’s coming up in a few days’ time. You know who I mean, don’t you?’

  ‘Trudy.’

  ‘Trudy, yeah. And she wants to take you back with her, wants you to go and live with her.’

  The boy looked puzzled. But he didn’t say anything. Instead he dashed to his pool to check for yabbies. Tom walked down to him and put his hand on the crown of his head.

  ‘Bit of a bugger, isn’t it?’ he said.

  The boy said something too soft to carry.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Tom.

  ‘I can’t,’ said the boy.

  ‘You can’t?’

  ‘I can’t,’ the boy said again. He’d begun to cry.

  Tom crouched down, his hand now on the boy’s shoulder. In the rock pool two small yabbies were making towards the eyes of the brown trout. Tom picked them up and tossed them into the current. ‘Peter, it’s not what I want,’ he said. ‘She’s your mum, you see. It’s not what I want.’

  Tiny squeaking sounds were coming from the boy attempting to stifle his tears.

  ‘I can’t,’ he managed to say again. Then he reached into the pool, seized the brown trout and threw it out into the river.

  Tom had Peter ready at eight in the morning, everything packed in a small suitcase and two cardboard boxes. The three lengths of the boy’s split-cane fishing rod were tied together with twine. His Ambidex reel with its ball-bearing spool was wrapped inside one of Tom’s socks and packed in the suitcase.

  It was going to be a warm day, the sky an intense blue from horizon to horizon. At this time of a day that was bound to get hot, Beau would normally be pestering Tom for an early dip in the dam. But he looked at Tom and the boy standing around at the front of the house and went to hide under an old Humber Tom had up on blocks beneath the cypresses.

  A little after ten in the morning a red Volkswagen turned into the drive from the highway. Tom had left the main gate open. The Volkswagen pulled up at the second gate and Trudy stepped out from the passenger seat. The other two figures in the car remained where they were as Trudy opened the gate and walked to the front verandah, where Tom and her son were waiting. Her hair was cut short and she was thinner than at any time Tom had known her. She was wearing a green belted dress that had something of the look of a uniform. She walked with her arms crossed below her breasts. A silver crucifix hung at her throat.

  ‘Hello, Peter. Hello, Tom.’

  She stepped up onto the verandah, then knelt down and put her arms around her son. She said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’ When she stood and put her arms around Tom his nostrils filled with the aroma of lavender soap. She said to Tom, ‘I have something for you.’ She reached into a small pocket in her dress and brought out a tiny parcel of purple tissue paper. She unfolded the parcel to reveal a small gold crucifix on a fine chain. ‘I hope you will think about wearing this, Tom. To show that you forgive me.’

  Tom made no move to accept the crucifix but he allowed Trudy to slip it and the purple tissue paper into the side pocket of his suit coat. He had dressed himself in his good clothes for the handover.

  Tom said quietly, dipping his head close to Trudy, ‘It’s cruel to do this, Trudy. You left Peter behind. He only had me. I love him like he was my own flesh and blood. And Trudy, he doesn’t want to go. You only have to look at him.’

  ‘Oh, Tom,’ said Trudy, ‘you just don’t understand. Tom, Peter will live in a house full of love. Tilly’s children will wrap him up in love. This is just a farm, Tom. A lonely, lonely farm. On the island Peter will have children his own age and a proper school, a blessed school. We can’t be selfish with children, Tom.’

  ‘I’d like to come down and see him,’ said Tom. ‘Once a month, something like that.’

  Trudy shook her head so readily that she must have been expecting the request. ‘Oh no, Tom. I don’t think that would be a good idea. No.’

  Trudy’s sister and mother had stepped out of the red Volkswagen and were now standing one each side of the car. They wore identical spectacles with oversized lenses and identical broad smiles, as if this were the happiest day of the year.

  Tom carried the two cardboard cartons, the fishing rod and the suitcase down to the car in one load. He lifted the boy up and gave him a fierce hug. ‘Well, old fellow. You write to me, won’t you? You find the time to post me a letter, won’t you?’

  The boy nodded in a defeated way and allowed Tom to pull the front passenger seat forward and pop him onto the back seat. Trudy climbed into the back seat beside her son. Trudy’s mother took the front passenger seat and Tilly the driver’s seat. The boot at the front of the car was raised. Tom packed in the suitcase, the boxes and the fishing rod.

  Then the car wouldn’t start. The engine turned over and came briefly to life but one of the plugs wasn’t sparking. Tom knew what the trouble was. He said, ‘Better let me take a look.’ He was ignored.

  Trudy’s mother said, ‘It always does this.’ She turned the ignition key again and again. Peter looked out of the window at his father with something like hope in his eyes.

  Tom said again, ‘Better let me take a look.’ He lifted the engine bonnet at the back then went down to the shed for his socket wrenches. When he returned to the car some sort of silent tussle was going on in the back seat—Peter trying to get out and Trudy restraining him, all of this wordlessly.

  Tom said, ‘He can help me.’

  Trudy released her grip on her son and stared fiercely away from where Tom was standing. The boy scrambled into the front of the car and over his grandmother. Tom opened the passenger-side door for him. Tilly and Trudy’s mother maintained their broad smiles.

  Tom opened his socket set and told Peter the size socket he required. The boy took the socket from its place in the set, fitted it to the wrench and handed it to Tom.

  ‘Got a dirty old plug here,’ said Tom. He removed the plug he suspected of causing the trouble and cleaned it up with a thin strip of emery cloth. He let Peter replace the plug and tighten it and fit the distributor lead.

  ‘Give it a go,’ Tom said to Tilly.

  The engine kicked over and roared to life.

  Tilly climbed out of the passenger seat so that Peter could climb into the back seat again. But the boy flopped down on the grass like a dog that doesn’t want to do what it knows it will finally be forced to do, and Tom had to lift him up and return him to his mother. He kept up the same playing-dead trick on the back seat, lying hunched up and facing away fr
om Trudy.

  Instead of turning the car around Tilly backed it slowly all the way down the drive. At the highway, she got the car facing in the right direction by fits and starts, and then it was gone. Swallowed up by the dip on the city-bound side of the highway just past Tom’s gate, then screened from his view by the poplars along his front fence.

  Tom sat on the front verandah and rolled a Capstan. He kept glancing up, hoping foolishly for the red car to reappear. His insides ached so badly that he couldn’t even bother with the relief of a smoke and he crushed the cigarette after two puffs. He picked up his socket set, locked the lid and walked down to the shed. Beau, still worried, followed at a respectful distance.

  Chapter 3

  THE SUN dried the moisture out of the hill paddocks well before autumn that year but the grazing still pleased the woollies. Tom ran a channel down to the waterhole from a spring that bubbled up above the granite boulders. The flow of the spring came up to the world, looked around, then dived back into the earth. Ferns that couldn’t be found anywhere else on the property thrived along its bed. The sheep could make their own way up to the spring, but Tom didn’t encourage them. They had a way of propping there until it was dark, then the ewes would become spooked and bleat themselves silly.

  Peter had been gone for two months. Tom was sure this was one of those things in life that can never get better. He was no farmer, but he had the makings of a good father; that’s what he said to himself when he was about the place and the sense of failure that troubled him became too much to bear: not much of a farmer, poor husband; but he’d made a good job of being a father. He could say that in his defence. Then one morning, tramping uphill to the orchard with Beau, he stopped and smiled: a moment of insight into the strain of self-pity in his fantasies of failure.

  ‘Bloke’s done his best, eh Beau? Do you think? Not exactly fly blown, am I? So shut up. Not you, me.’

  Those in Hometown who knew all the details of Tom’s story—half-a-dozen people, Nigel Cartwright and his wife, Bev; Trevor Clissold; the Noonans; Juicy Collins, the butcher—showed their sympathy by never saying a damned word about Trudy or Peter. Juicy, who’d been a friend of Frank Hope, the uncle who’d left Tom the farm, came closest. He made a habit of singing songs with a breezy theme whenever Tom called in for snags and mince as he did each Tuesday. He called Tom ‘the cavalier of the hills’ and sang in his creamy tenor the opening verse of ‘Don’t Fence Me In’. And then: ‘Don’t fence young Tom in, you hear me? Don’t fence our Tommy in.’

  ‘Take it easy, Juice,’ said Tom.

  ‘He’s the Sheikh of Araby, our Tommy,’ said Juicy. ‘Up and down the bloomin’ hills on his camel, have a care for your missus. Nice to be a free man, isn’t it, Tom.’

  ‘If you say so, Juice.’

  Juicy kept up the banter while he wrapped the week’s meat for Tom in the broadsheet pages of the Herald. Radio 3XY played in the background—up-to-date rock ’n’ roll favoured by Juicy, the only man of his age (forty-three) in Hometown who had a good word to say about the Rolling Stones. On the white-tiled wall at the rear of the shop hung a portrait of the Hometown Robins of 1963 in red guernseys, premiers of that year, Aussie Rules. The boys with their arms folded, half of them sitting, half standing behind: shy faces, others cocky, the three bad boys of the team wearing foolish grins.

  Juicy’s satire veiled a type of contempt, and Tom felt it. The real Casanova of Hometown was Juicy, who gave himself to adultery so unapologetically that past lovers would take a moment at the counter to ask about the progress of more current affairs. And it was Juicy who got about the hills—not on a camel but in his bronze and black Monaro—advertising his perpetual adolescence.

  Tom had not the least interest in finding a woman to replace Trudy. His wife was divorcing him. Documents from a legal firm in the city had arrived in the mail. The grounds for the divorce were given as: Sustained emotional cruelty and abuse. Articles in evidence included a letter written by Trudy’s mother, in which she stated that her daughter had come to the Jesus Camp on the night of March 1st, 1967, soaked to the skin and sobbing as if her soul had been torn out of her body. Tom, reading the letter, remembered Trudy arriving back at the farm, years ago, also soaked to the skin and sobbing. Had it appealed to her sense of drama, arriving in rainfall? Maybe she had another chap lined up.

  Late in the summer, when all the pears and apples and nectarines had been picked and despatched on Terry Nolan’s truck to the agents in Healesville, Tom wandered up to the orchard with three saws and a brace ladder to start work on the pruning. His uncle had always pruned at the end of summer rather than in winter, and it was best to follow custom.

  Tom had had Peter with him while he was pruning last season. He’d call down to the boy, ‘What about this bugger, Petey? Will we lop him off?’ What often surprised him was how little it mattered that he wasn’t Peter’s true dad. He thought, Would I love him more? He couldn’t see how that would be possible.

  He moved the ladder from tree to tree, taking off the growth of the past season with the curved-blade saws, with the secateurs. It was work. You couldn’t avoid it. And the day was as hot as a bastard. Tom said, ‘See, if you know what you’re doing, Tommy Hope, you start earlier.’ His bare arms, stretched above him, ran with sweat. March flies lumbered around his face, falling on his flesh when they saw the chance. The flies were attracted by the sheep dung under the trees, then by the blood of the scratches on Tom’s forearms. He said to himself aloud, as if he were the second party in a conversation, ‘Life’s not over yet, Tommy. Jesus Christ.’

  He didn’t know where it came from, that comment, Life’s not over yet. Who’d said it was? Life’s not over yet. In the way that an unbidden thought such as this can find its way to fugitive places, he recalled a fellow he’d worked with in the Tramways—Graham someone… Graham Kent—putting an arm around his shoulders one day in the welding shed and saying, ‘Matey, might never happen.’ Graham the whistler, one tune after another all day long, Hank Williams, Jimmy Rogers, ‘Jambalaya’ every hour or so. Tom at the time knew what ‘might never happen’ meant, but he was puzzled that Graham had thought he needed to be told. His sister Claudie had said once—a year or so before he took on the farm—‘Give us a smile, Tom,’ in the tone people reserve for hopeless cases they nevertheless love. Give us a smile, Tom. He was a wet blanket—was that it?

  Up in the boughs of a big apple, he tried a smile. How often had he smiled at Trudy? He’d smiled for Peter. Sure. He’d smiled for Peter all the time. So that proved he knew how to do it. He tried another smile, very broad. It felt dopey. But he made a mental note: Smile, for God’s sake.

  This was only the first day of the pruning. He’d need another three days to get through the apples, then he had the nectarines and the pears. He couldn’t afford an offsider. The farm gave him enough to live on, but Christ knows how he would ever get ahead. He had less security than at the Tramways. ‘But too bad about that, Tom,’ he said, and he smiled. For practice.

  It was Tom’s custom in the evenings to cook up whatever rubbish he intended to eat, then settle by the wireless with a bottle of Ballarat Stout. He’d get some joy out of the songs on the wireless, grow mellow as the alcohol kicked in. But this evening he took the stout up to the boulders, scaled the biggest one and sat there studying the sunset. A huge sheet of crimson and turquoise stretched above the hills in the west. Beau lay beside him, after ten minutes of desperate attempts to get a foothold on the stone and turtle his way up. Tom swigged from the bottle and patted Beau with his free hand. He was here to vary his experience.

  He’d sat years past with his Uncle Frank on this rock at this time of the day, this time of year, the sun setting. He’d been visiting, just by himself. Fourteen? Fourteen. His uncle wanted him to enjoy the beauty in the sky and so he had. But that lasted about two minutes. After that, he was merely being dutiful. He’d glance at Frank’s profile for some sign that this would all be over soon and they could go back to the ho
use. But it had taken a long time for his uncle to exhaust his interest in the sunset.

  So now Tom, trying to see what his uncle had seen, had to concede that the sunset was beautiful, but what most impressed itself on him was the loneliness of his house down there on the flat. The place was weatherboard painted a butter colour, faded now, a verandah on three sides, iron roof a rusty red. The old flood plain reached for a mile on each side of the river, which you could pick out by the line of ghost gums along its banks. The highway they’d built forty years earlier, Melbourne Road, cut through the flood plain on this side of the river. They’d surveyed it to leave Tom’s farm untouched—his uncle’s farm, at that time. On the other side of the river, a couple of miles back, the pasture hills of Henty’s property stood in silhouette, all of the trees taken out long ago. The hills were rounded and they graduated in size, like the knuckles on your fist.

  Henty ran three thousand woollies up his hills and over the plain, barely had to bother with them from one year’s end to the next, sent two thousand Corriedale lambs to the abattoir each summer. Tom kept fifteen hundred Polwarths and sent five hundred to the abattoir each year. He was building up the flock after Uncle Frank, in his last two years of failing health, had sold off all but two hundred and fifty. His uncle had brought in three shearers each year for a clip that was hardly worth bothering with. The shearers considered themselves bush royalty and asked an arm and a leg. By the time the bales went up to the railhead and on to the agent, you’d be lucky if you could fill your pipe three or four times with the profit.

  Tom kept a better watch on his sheep than Henty did on his. Henty kept the water up to them and blew the guts out of any dogs that came up from Hometown and went gaga in his paddocks, but he never had the vet along for a look-see; he shot any woollie that looked crook. And don’t talk to Henty about disease that could spread through the flock. It had never happened and never would. Clipping the hooves of the beasts? Never. No dipping, no worming. And he was no friend to the spring orphans. Tom fussed over his sheep like a paddock nurse and was disdained for it by his brother graziers. It wasn’t a quiet disdain; it was hearty and direct. ‘Fuck me, Tommy! You’ll be buying ’em gumboots next.’