A Waltz for Matilda

by Jackie French

  ‘Do you have any daughters?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just thought … your auntie … she keeps showing me things.’

  He nodded. ‘She’s like that. No, I don’t have daughters. Good thing too. Drinkwater only wants blacks for stockmen. Wants white women in his kitchen, these days at any rate. Don’t want daughters of mine sent to the reservation.’

  She had thought that reservations were good places, where natives learned to speak English and live in houses. There were collections at church to buy Bibles for the natives on reservations. But something in Mr Sampson’s voice said that maybe they weren’t like that at all.

  ‘Would Mr Drinkwater send Auntie Love to the reservation?’

  Mr Sampson looked at her impassively, as though this was an answer he didn’t want to give.

  There was too much here she didn’t understand. It’s because they think I’m a child, she thought. Mr Drinkwater, Auntie Love, even Mr Sampson. There are things they aren’t telling me. Another thought came to her. ‘Mr Sampson, are you in the union?’

  For a second she thought she had offended him. Perhaps native men weren’t allowed in the union.

  He shook his head. ‘No.’ He paused and added, ‘Not yet.’

  Chapter 22

  Dear Tommy,

  I hope you are well.

  Mr Doo has just been and taken the last letters. I hope you get them soon. Mr Doo was very kind. He had heard that my father died. I think everyone around here knows now, it is like the cockatoos fly from tree to tree and yell out all the news.

  I will be able to give this letter to someone to post when I go to town. It is my father’s funeral today. I am glad I have Mum’s black dress to wear. I want to look right for Dad.

  Mr Doo gave me more vegetables. He would not even let me pay tuppence for them. It is a whole sack of potatoes, and a string of onions and two big cabbages, they will last for ages with just the two of us.

  You will be glad to hear I am not living here alone. Auntie Love is still with me. She is not my auntie but that is what everyone calls her. She is a native but not like a native in the books, she is very nice. She does not carry a spear or anything and she wears clothes.

  Mr Doo said something about my teaching someone English. I am not sure what he means, but it may mean I earn some money or maybe he will pay me in vegetables which will be as good. He looked all around the spring and showed me where it would be a good place for a vegetable garden and fruit trees. I think he and his brother mean to help me plant them.

  I do hope your arm is getting better. If you get a chance could you write to me, or ask someone else to write if you cannot write yet, to tell me how you are? Mr Drinkwater who lives next door stopped my letters getting to my father but I am going to tell him that he has to give me my letters or else.

  Your loving friend,

  Matilda

  PS I do not know what ‘else’ is yet but I will think of something.

  No one had told her when they would pick her up for the funeral on Saturday. So she dressed at dawn, and got Auntie Love settled with more tea and toast on the verandah, and fed the dog the meat they hadn’t eaten — it was going off fast in this heat, even though she’d cooked it.

  Auntie Love seemed stronger. She could lift her left hand now, and only dragged her foot a bit as she walked. But she had made no sign that she wanted to go home, wherever home was. Matilda had a slightly uncomfortable feeling that ‘home’ was here now.

  She didn’t know if she minded or not. She had never had a chance to ‘mind’ things before — adults or fate decided, not her. But at least with Auntie Love here no one could say she was too young to stay on Moura alone.

  The morning passed. Auntie Love limped out of the house, waving Matilda back when she started to follow. She came back with an armful of dried grass stems. She sat in ‘her’ chair on the verandah again, and began to plait them, weaving one layer of grass into another, then handing it to Matilda to continue.

  It was peaceful, sitting twisting grass stems, watching a sort of netted cloth slowly appear under her fingers. Auntie Love took it back now and then, to twist it in different ways. By the time Mr Gotobed’s wagon clattered through the cliffs there was a basket, in stripes of gold and white and faded green, big enough to keep vegetables in, the colours of the landscape strangely captured in its fabric.

  Matilda had half expected Auntie Love to want to come to the funeral. But she and the dog just watched from the verandah as Mr Gotobed helped her into the wagon, then rattled the reins to get the horse moving. There was no sign of Bluey or Curry and Rice today. Nor was there any conversation beyond the initial, ‘You all right, girly?’ when they started out.

  She was glad. There was too much to think about to talk. Too much to feel too. Grief, but mostly anger, a sense of loss not so much for the man she had so briefly known, but for all the years they’d never have together. Mr Drinkwater had taken those, but there was a lingering deeper feeling that her mother too might have stolen time she could have spent with her father.

  But the years by the sea had been good ones. Would she really have wanted to swap her memories of Aunt Ann for ones of her father?

  No, there was too much to think about to want to talk now.

  It was a shorter ride back to town than she had thought, hardly two hours, even at the slow walking pace of the horse. Town seemed deserted; the houses had a strange blank look. It was only when they were almost at the Town Hall that she realised that every door was shut and every window had its curtains pulled.

  The combined funeral parlour-saddlery was around the corner from the Town Hall. The coffin was already outside on the hearse, a long narrow cart of dark wood; and there were black plumes on the heads of the two black horses. A man in black lifted his top hat to her. ‘My condolences.’

  She nodded, unsure what she was supposed to say. Tears pricked her eyes suddenly. Were she and Mr Gotobed to be the only mourners? She had expected at least Bluey and Curry and Rice to be here. Surely her father had other friends? Mr Gotobed had said the whole town would be at the funeral.

  Perhaps, she thought, they were afraid of Mr Drinkwater’s anger; maybe they’d lose their jobs if they were at the funeral of a union organiser. The union was paying for this funeral, but it seemed its members would stay away.

  The hearse began a slow pace along the road. Mr Gotobed’s wagon followed it. Along another street, then up a hill. Once more, each road seemed deserted.

  And then she saw them — a line, all the way along the street, men, women and children, some dressed in black, others with black armbands, standing silent, heads bowed as the hearse passed.

  The crowds continued as they drove into the graveyard, not just lining the road now but standing among the graves. The only sounds were the clopping of the hooves and the cry of a baby, abruptly hushed.

  The hearse stopped at the top of the hill, next to a freshly dug grave. Mr Gotobed helped Matilda out, then reached under the seat for another dusty hat, ragged at the edges but still black. He led her to the far end of the grave as twelve men marched forward. Their hats too were black — freshly dyed, thought Matilda — and each wore a coat, despite the heat, with a black tie, and black band on his left arm. The first two slid the coffin to the edge of the hearse. The others helped pick it up, then marched slowly to the graveside, and put the coffin down.

  There was no preacher. Instead Mr O’Reilly, also wearing an armband, stepped forward out of the crowd. He took off his hat, and held it across his chest. Once again he looked insignificant in his rusty suit until he began to speak.

  ‘Friends, we have come here to bid our last respects to Jim O’Halloran, a good man, a good friend, a good father, a good union man, brought down by the oppressors.’

  ‘Ere, ’ere,’ muttered someone. There was a chorus of ‘hush’.

  ‘I won’t go on about O’Halloran. You all knew him. You remember the time he swore he could shear anything, and the blokes bought
him a camel? Took him more ‘n an hour but he did it.

  ‘Remember how he’d give you the shirt off his back or his last crust to a mangy dingo? Remember how he started the union here, shouting down Drinkwater when we had that first meeting in the shed?

  ‘We all knew Jim O’Halloran. We won’t ever forget him.’

  He raised his voice till he was shouting across the hill. ‘You don’t kill a man like Jim O’Halloran. His body may lie here today, but the things he fought for live forever. His ghost will be heard as you pass by that billabong. It will be heard wherever men strike for the rights they are denied. It will be heard wherever those starved and beaten cry, “No more! No more!” and start to organise. It will be heard as we stand together, arm in arm, and forge a new nation, where every man is equal. A man like Jim O’Halloran never truly dies.’

  He stepped aside. A woman hissed: ‘Billy! It’s you now.’

  A boy was pushed from the crowd. He was about Matilda’s age, dressed in too-big man’s trousers rolled up at the cuff and shoes that flapped on his feet, also borrowed for the day from an older brother or father. He too wore a black armband, ragged cloth cut from someone’s petticoat, perhaps. He cleared his throat and gazed across the crowd nervously. Then he began to sing.

  ‘Come let us be banded together

  And place in each other our trust

  And may we in heart never sever

  Or flinch from a cause that is just.’

  The boy’s voice soared above the graveyard. It was one of the sweetest, most beautiful sounds Matilda had ever heard. Tears sat hot on her cold cheeks. But people were looking at her, as well as the boy. I will not sob, she thought. I will be strong, for Dad.

  The boy’s song rose louder as he grew more confident.

  ‘Come give me your hand while we’re singing

  It will make it sound sweeter and then

  Our song through the world will be ringing

  With cheers for the Union men.’

  One by one the crowd held hands. Soon they were all singing too, except Matilda, who was trying to make out the words.

  ‘Three cheers for the Union men

  Three cheers for the Union men

  The place will resound with our singing

  Three cheers for the Union men.

  ‘So let us be true to each other

  Our rights we are sure to obtain

  For small is the loss and the bother

  Compared to the prize we shall gain.

  ‘When gone to our last cold oblivion

  And all earthly duties are done

  Three cheers by our sons will be given

  When told how the victory was won.

  ‘Three cheers for the Union men

  Three cheers for the Union men

  The place will resound with our singing

  Three cheers for the Union men.’

  Then it was finished. The boy shuffled his too-big shoes back to his mother. Four men slipped ropes around the coffin, and they and the eight others lowered it into the hole.

  She almost told them to stop, to let her see her father’s face one last time. But it wouldn’t be right, not here in public. Not when he had been dead for days. She shut her mind to what might have happened to his body in this heat.

  One by one each man threw in a handful of dirt. Mr Gotobed took Matilda’s arm, and led her to the grave. She bent, and threw in a handful of soil too. A pebble clicked onto the coffin.

  A sob escaped. She bit her lips, hard. The boy’s mother moved over and put her arm around her. Her black jacket smelled of mothballs as she led Matilda back to the edge of the crowd. People were already heading down the hill.

  The funeral was over.

  She made Mr Gotobed wait till the grave was filled. She didn’t want to leave her father till the task was done. Mr Gotobed seemed in a hurry, shifting from one foot to another.

  ‘Right,’ he said, as the last spadeful was tamped down, ‘let’s go.’

  She didn’t know what the hurry was — no one had been in a hurry at her mother’s or Aunt Ann’s funeral. Maybe, she thought, Mr Gotobed just wanted to get it over. She sat quietly in the wagon as the horse clopped down the hill again, then into the main street. The small town of Gibber’s Creek looked as crowded now as when she had first seen it, with horses and wagons tied to every hitching rail.

  Mr Gotobed stopped by the Town Hall. There was a space left, as though for them.

  ‘Come on!’ he urged. ‘I’m as dry as a dingo’s armpit.’

  She shook her head, bewildered. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘The wake!’ he said impatiently. ‘Got six barrels of beer. The bast— blighters will have drunk ‘em half dry already.’

  ‘You were in a hurry for … for spirituous liquor? At my father’s funeral?’

  Mr Gotobed grinned. ‘Nothing but the best for your pa.’ He ran up the steps before her, and vanished into the crowd.

  Matilda followed more slowly.

  The Town Hall was as full as before. Once again, men clustered down near the stage — where the beer barrels were, she supposed. This time though there were tables along the edge of the hall, topped with an assortment of shabby tablecloths and what she suspected were sheets too — and plate after plate of food.

  She wasn’t hungry, but at least walking along the tables gave her something to do. Most of the food seemed to be some variation on flour and lard or sheep: lardy cake without currants, scones, mutton sandwiches, jam tart, more tart than jam. A woman gave her a hug, then put a cup of tea into her hand — she was glad not everyone was drinking spirituous liquor. Another woman kissed her cheek, and handed her a plate with a scone, topped with melon jam, and a mutton sandwich spread with yellow pickle.

  All at once the crowd by the door grew silent. The silence spread across the room. Matilda peered through the crowd.

  It was Mr Drinkwater. He wore a black jacket, black boots and a black top hat, as if he had been at the funeral too, though she was sure she would have seen him if he had been.

  Mr Gotobed pushed his way through the crowd, a mug of beer in his hand. ‘What are you here for?’

  ‘To pay my respects. Like all of you.’

  ‘Well, you ain’t welcome.’

  He’s my father, thought Matilda. I should be the one saying that. She pressed closer till she was standing next to them.

  Mr Drinkwater glanced at her, then back at the crowd. ‘I have also come to say this: from now on Drinkwater will be a union shed. As Jim O’Halloran demanded, “The sheep will be shorn union or they won’t be shorn at all.”’

  There was silence, as though no one knew how to react. Mr Gotobed glared pugnaciously. ‘What about your stockmen? You let them join a union too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Someone at the back cheered, but then was silent when no one joined in. This was a funeral, after all.

  Mr Drinkwater turned. Matilda watched the man who’d killed her father walk away.

  Chapter 23

  Dear Tommy,

  I hope you are well.

  It was a wonderful funeral. I cried but it was good to see that so many loved my father, or maybe loved what he worked for. In a way it was as though I know him better now from seeing the people that he knew.

  It almost seems like I have been here for years. I woke up when the kookaburras called this morning and it was as though they had been waking me up all my life. Auntie Love had lit the fire and made a billy of tea and some damper. She does this every morning before I get up. I think she has worked in kitchens before because she knows how to wash up and everything. I do not think that natives wash up cups and plates in the bush. I have not seen any do that in the paintings.

  I try to tell Auntie Love to go back to bed and rest, like Aunt Ann’s friend did, because one side of her face still hangs down sort of funny and she can’t use her left hand properly either, and she shuffles like one leg does not work well too. I think sheunderstands what I say but she does not take any
notice. She calls the dog ‘Hey You’ so I do too.

  I do not know when this will get posted, but I wanted to tell you what happened anyway.

  Your loving friend,

  Matilda

  The visitors started to arrive the day after the funeral: men on horseback, women in sulkies. Each brought a gift ‘for Jim O’Halloran’s girl’; each stayed for a cup of tea, then left. Matilda had to brew the tea leaves many times over, till the last brew was just a pale tan, but at least, she thought, I’ve had something to offer them.

  Auntie Love kept the pot boiling and the teapot filled. No one spoke to her, but no one seemed surprised to see her, either. Nor did they speak to Matilda much. She lost count of the number of times someone said ‘he was a good man’ and ‘he’ll be missed’. What else was there to say?

  Except one woman, her skin dried to leathery folds from age and sun. She looked at Matilda with faded eyes, and lifted up the young hand in her own brown spotted one. She grinned. ‘You’ll stay, girl.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Calluses on your hands. No one with dainty hands has got a life out here.’ Then she was gone too, in another flurry of dust and hoofbeats.

  The gifts covered the table in the house, then spilled out onto the verandah: a cake, smelling of slightly rancid dripping; a battered ‘spider’ frying pan with long thin legs to sit over the fire; three hens and a bewildered rooster, their legs untied, then left to cluck around the house, and a ‘my Joe’ll be over this afternoon to build a coop. Got wire netting an’ all.’

  ‘Netting?’

  ‘To keep the dingos out, love.’ The woman sounded patient. Then she too patted Matilda’s hand and left.

  A tin bath, with a hole in one end. ‘You’ll find a use for it, lovey. Good to keep the kindlin’ in.’ A feather quilt, stained but clean. Two saucepans, a wooden spoon, a dozen big blue pumpkins. ‘Last season’s, love, so use ‘em fast before they rot.’ It was as though everyone around had heard that she was staying here; as though each felt the need to give something to her father’s daughter, anchor her to his plot of land.