He looked at Satchel, and blinked his lashy eyes. The foreman’s eyes and eyelashes were a pretty, startlingly feminine feature in his otherwise lined, blokey face. “How’s your pa?”
“The same as yesterday, Gos.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s fine.”
Gosling nodded contemplatively, reassured of the normal state of things. He said, “They tell me they’re going to plant native trees around this place when it’s finished. Just like the ones they cut down years ago.”
Satchel made a short effort of brooding over this irony. Then he asked, “Where do you want me to start, Gos?”
The foreman gave him instructions and Moke rambled autonomously around the adjoining land while Satchel worked beside the roofers, stepping along timbers that dropped to nothingness on either side. He heard the train pass through the town’s centre and thought of Leroy and his haphazard luggage boarding it when it pulled into the station near Satchel’s home, and knew that when he ate dinner that night Leroy would be just arriving in the city, rumpled from the journey but brimming with the thrill. Some time after midday the builders paused for coffee and sandwiches and then worked languidly into the afternoon, while Moke slept in the shade of the wagon and Satchel rolled up his sleeves to absorb the milky warmth of the sun.
They ate in the dining room because William liked the evening meal to be formal, his wife at one end of the table and himself at the other with Satchel’s seat midway between the two, the little family separated by expanses of oak that forced them to stretch to reach the pepper grinder. This was the best room in the house and except when eating they used it rarely, so Laura O’Rye kept in here the things she valued which might be broken by regular contact, housing them in a glass cabinet. Here were angular glass animals and precious cups and saucers, a marriage certificate and Satchel’s christening mug, a parade of porcelain figures and a framed etching of Laura as a girl. Here too was something that it always pained Satchel to see: a small plate propped on a plastic stand with the words I Love My Mom and a bouquet of pansies printed on the plate’s yellowed surface. He remembered buying it as a child with money his father had given him and being so proud to present it to Laura for her birthday. He was pleased she still treasured it but its ugliness appalled him, and as a teenager its bland sentimentality had embarrassed him before his friends. With Leroy gone, it occurred to him that there was no one left to laugh at it now.
As soon as William sat down he said, “No, I didn’t fix the chainsaw, but I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“What did you do, then?”
“I have my projects. I attended to my projects.”
Satchel’s father, since abandoning the service station, had pursued an artistic career. He painted miniature watercolours, a magnifying glass hovering between his face and the bristles of the brush. His subject matter was exclusively religious and he favoured in particular imagined scenes from the childhood of Jesus. In William’s imagination, Jesus’s youth had been polluted with omens, and he was forever encountering a young, wicked, gambling Judas, or getting splinters in his palms. Hung above the cabinet was a series with which the artist was evidently especially pleased, for he had enclosed them in silver framing: the first depicted Jesus assisting Peter when the future Pope had slipped over a rock, the next showed him handing a shiny coin to the beggarly waif Barabbas, and the last had the adolescent saviour the only person who stood upright in a quivering crowd round Pontius Pilate. These miniatures, painted on thick expensive paper, mortified Satchel, for Jesus was always a replica of himself as a child, slender and blue-eyed beneath a mess of shaggy hair, and Mary resembled Laura, and Joseph, who featured frequently, was William O’Rye himself.
It was humiliating enough when William showed off his art to visitors; Satchel lived in fear that one day he would produce a set of Christmas cards, or donate a piece to the church.
William clasped his hands above his meal and his wife and son followed suit. “We thank you for what we are about to receive,” he murmured, “though I’ve never greatly liked pasta.”
“You’ve never complained before,” said Laura.
“Complaining is not my way,” said William.
His wife flicked up an eyebrow. Turning to Satchel she asked, “How was work?”
“Good. Gosling says the project is hypocritical.”
William chortled. “But he doesn’t mind building it, though. He doesn’t mind taking money for it. You should think about that, Satchel.”
“Gosling has four children to feed,” Laura replied tartly. Satchel looked at his bowl, and he and his mother sat in suspense for a moment, but William let the comment go by. “When you go to town tomorrow,” he told his son, “pick me up some sketching paper, you know the type I like.”
The family applied itself to its spaghetti and for some minutes the only sounds were those of rowdy sparrows roosting beyond the window and the clink of cutlery on porcelain.
“Leroy left today,” said Satchel, and his parents looked at him. They knew about Leroy’s going, and he wondered why he’d said anything.
“No doubt he’ll get into as much mischief there as he did here, and it’ll be worse than ever. Stupid of his mother, to let him go.”
“It wasn’t stupid at all, William. What was Leroy supposed to do? How else can he get a house, a car, some sort of security in his life? There’s nothing here for a boy like him, there’s no work and nothing for him to do. He can earn his living in the city, do what he’s been trained to do. I think he’s done the sensible thing.”
Again, the ground she trod was precarious, but Laura seemed not to care. “If Satchel couldn’t get any work,” she added, “I’d expect him to do exactly the same.”
William glanced at her sullenly, twirling his fork in his bowl. Laura turned to her son. “You’ll miss Leroy,” she said, “won’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Maybe, when he’s settled, you should visit him for a week or two.”
Satchel nodded. “Maybe.”
“It’s not good,” said William, “when we’re all here together, to talk about one of us leaving.”
Laura gave him a steady look. “We’ll talk about it when the time comes, then,” she said.
William was fidgeting: the conversation had agitated him, as they all knew it would, and Laura waved Satchel’s attention to his dinner. They ate quietly, William shaking more and more salt upon his food. Their conversations were often punctured by these long, stressful silences, the family letting cool an argument that a guest may not have even noticed. Satchel knew that his parents loved each other, and that they loved him too, but it seemed to him that affection must be a weak kind of thing, piddling compared to apprehension.
Yet it was hard, sometimes, not to talk about working, when work was all Satchel and his mother did. They could not even talk about Moke, because the dog had spent the day at the building site and, if William was really as upset as he seemed, that slim connection would be enough.
So they talked about the weather, and the night’s TV programming, and the chicken that had gone off the lay. Later, when William had left to take his bath and Laura and Satchel were clearing the table, Laura said, “I’m sorry, Satchel.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“My hands were hurting.”
“Show me.”
She turned up her palms and he came close to examine them. Laura was a nurse at the hospital in the big town and in the past year her hands had started reacting to the pills she had to crush for the feeble patients. Now, everything seemed to make the problem worse – detergent in the washing water, the lotions she liked to buy. Gloves would make her skin sweat, and moisture made the condition blaze. The doctors had tried everything that might fix it, and it would not go away.
The flesh of her palms was cracked so deep that Satchel could see into depths of angry red. The skin around the cracks was heated and peeling and the flesh was vaguely swollen. Her hands looked so sore an
d abused that he winced, feeling a sick kind of heartache. “Mum,” he said, “you can’t live like this. You have to quit.”
She scoffed bravely, as he had known she would. He was much taller than his mother, and he looked down at her desperately. She seemed so small, smaller than she’d ever been. Her hair was dyed because she did not want it being drab and grey. She always dressed as well as she could and the stubbornly jaunty daisies knitted into her jumper filled him with a wretched grief. He hated it that she had to do the grim heavy work of a hospital, hated that she had to work all night because it paid more, and he hated that she shouldn’t be allowed to rest now, when she was getting older and so much of her life had been difficult.
“They’re never going to get better,” he said softly, “unless you leave the hospital.”
Laura pulled her hands away and turned back to the table. “Go and check that your father hasn’t drowned,” she said, impatient with him now. Instead he went and washed the dishes, running the hot tank empty so William could not refill his bath.
Later, when he was curled up in bed reading and he thought she had gone to bed, she came into his room in her dressing-gown and set some money on his desk. He asked, “What’s that for?”
“For the paper William wants.”
“If he wants paper for his drawings he should pay for it himself.”
“Satchel,” she sighed. He gazed at her bleakly, but she smiled at him. “It’s the money from the Pipers, for him fixing their machine. So he is paying for it himself, really.”
He folded the book and dropped it to the floor; his mother wished him a good night. When she’d left the room and he’d turned off the lamp Moke came creeping out from beneath the bed and jumped up to sleep beside him.
On Sunday they went to church together, Satchel going because it was easier to go than refuse. They had to drive all the way to the big town because the priest only came to the little town on the last Sunday of every month. When he did so, the pews of the tiny wooden church would be crowded, and people would stand along the walls: Satchel could look around and recognize every face, and hear the thoughts behind them. He knew who was dying and who did time in purgatory, who needed a miracle and who had not been seen or heard from in years. Above and below these was the common prayer, the unanswered, eternal prayer: the one that asked for rain, for real, drenching rain in place of mouldering drizzle. But the church in the big town was a huge construction, built in stone and paid for with gold. It was very cold inside it and half its seats were empty, and Satchel could hear nothing except the monotony of the priest. He sat beside his mother and looked up at the vaulted ceiling: he counted seven pairs of buttresses supporting its great length. The windows were wide and dazzling and through the coloured glass he could see the shadow of protective wire. He didn’t listen to a word the priest said, and cast a startled glance at the altar only when a jangle of bells sounded as the priest raised the host to the sky.
He wondered what Leroy was doing. On Saturday night they had often caught a lift to the big town and gone to one of the many hotels. At the end of the night they would try to find someone with a car that was going their way, and failing that they’d hitchhike, and more than once they had walked the entire distance home. Last night Satchel had sat in the lounge room watching television, fighting off the feeling that this was how he would spend the rest of his life.
A hymn began and he reached for the song book, looking at his mother’s copy to see what page he should be on. He glimpsed the raw flesh of her hands as he did so, the deep bloodless cracks that had opened in the creases of her palms, the red slivers at the base of these cracks. He closed his eyes and asked a God he didn’t believe in to cure his mother’s hands. She needed her hands, and he needed her hands to be better. Please, he prayed, I never ask you for anything.
The wounds in Laura’s palms reminded him of something, and for a time he couldn’t recall what it was. The cracks in her flesh and the redness underneath resembled a creature splitting its skin in order to step from it as something changed. His mother would emerge red all over, as if she’d been terribly burned. And then he remembered the dog he had seen at the mountain, with its back and its flanks lashed with stripes. It, too, had looked this way: it looked like the animal had grown a black coat beneath its fawn hide and that it would soon step forth unrecognizable. Its new jet colour would disguise it, and show that it was wild.
He heard William’s impatient mutter and opened his eyes to find his parents staring at him and the rest of the pew empty. He scrambled into the aisle and as the queue edged forward for Communion he could hear his mother humming the hymn behind him, and William’s flat, hesitant attempts to sing.
But on the way home, William surprised them by saying, “I don’t believe I agree with everything that priest said today. I don’t think we should be unquestionably forgiving. There’s plenty of things that don’t deserve forgiveness.”
Laura glanced in the rearview mirror, and Satchel in the back seat caught her look. If William sang, it usually meant he was happy, but now it seemed they couldn’t even rely on that. “Breach for breach,” said William, gazing through the window at the speeding scenery, “eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him.”
“Revenge is mine, says the Lord. Not yours, Dad.”
“Fools despise wisdom and instruction, Satchel. Surely you see there is a difference between taking revenge, and refusing to forgive.”
“I see it. But isn’t there something about turning the other cheek?”
William sighed, patiently. “If someone were to murder you, Satchel, and chop you into little pieces, and leave the pieces floating in a drain, would you want me to forgive that someone?”
“I don’t suppose it matters what I want, Dad. You’re the one who’s always doing what you say God has told you to do.”
“Satchel,” said Laura, “be quiet.”
He slumped against the door and stared petulantly at the back of his father’s tufted head; William, too, went silent, but Satchel knew he wasn’t pondering any inconsistency in his creed. He had a stockpile of biblical quotations he could rattle out like ammunition, but he was finicky, a connoisseur: only certain, trusted references would pass his lips, and he uppishly spurned all others, as if they originated from a different, less credible source. When countered with something that didn’t suit him, he simply shut his ears.
Still, Satchel had reason to smile. When William disagreed with a sermon the conflict always ran deeply and the O’Ryes would not, as a result, be seen in church for a while.
* * *
He walked with Moke along the railway track, past fenced-off scrubby paddocks bare of stock or crops. The district called itself horse country, yet it was rare to see anything fancier than a thick-necked pony or a nag in the shade of an evergreen. Few people farmed sheep here, and no one bothered with cattle. The stock corrals and loading ramps were empty, and weeds grew high around them. The dams were overflowing with a flat livid water that was sipped and sieved by egrets and gave the ducks a place to bathe. The farmhouses were set well back on the land and obscured by the hills; Satchel saw glimpses of roofs and threads of smoke from chimneys, but no windows or front doors. The trainline was planted with bottlebrush and riceflower and they had to weave their way through it, Satchel taking his hands from his pockets unwillingly to push the strappy branches aside. A farm dog rushed them from behind, its approach unheard and surprising, making Moke yelp and spin: Satchel shouted and the animal retreated cringingly.
They took an unsealed side road that brought them back to town, passing the cemetery and the dilapidated flour mills, past a clutch of motley houses and the sign that welcomed travellers here and hoped they were driving safely. Of the dozen stores that lined the edge of the old road, seven stood sour and abandoned. The bank had closed, as had the doctor’s and the real-estate agent’s. There was a gift shop which had tried to sell the townspeople their own craftwork –
painted flowerpots and embroidered doilies, knitted teddybears and leather bound visitors’ books – and there was a notice on its door saying that it, too, would soon close. But there was a tearoom with gingham curtains, and there was a bakery. There was a hairdresser with posters in its window showing grinning, gormless models, their eyes bleached white by the sun, sporting styles the hairdresser could never replicate. There was a fruit seller who managed to survive the many roadside stalls set up along the highway. There was a meeting hall with a clock in its weatherboard tower, where now and then old movies were shown. And, dead-centre of town, there were two hotels that stood facing each other from opposite sides of the road, the brows of their second-storey verandas frowning in competition. No one was walking the footpath on this cold afternoon and everything except Timothy’s Take Away was shut for the day.
Timothy was behind the counter, his head like an enormous shrike’s egg, just as domed and flecked and bald. He was forever cleaning, and was inflicting his energy on the milkshake-maker when Satchel walked in with Moke at his side. Timothy’s mouth turned down at the dog and Satchel told her, “Out.”
“Regulations,” said Timothy.
Satchel couldn’t imagine a health inspector dedicated enough to come all the way out here but he had no desire to torment the shopkeeper, who called and chaired innumerable ill-attended town meetings and seemed to think it his sole responsibility to keep the township functioning. Moke went and stood on the footpath, staring dolefully through the door; after some minutes she wandered away.
He asked for a hamburger and Timothy carefully recorded the order on his notepad. Satchel turned to take a seat at the table and found Chelsea Piper sitting there with a milkshake, her magnified eyes watching him. “Chelsea,” he said, “hello.”
She plucked the straw from between her lips and said, “You can sit here, if you like.”
There was nowhere else, so he pulled out the chair and sat opposite her. The bubbles in the milkshake were popping rapidly, revealing the milk’s level and the parsimoniousness of Timothy. She sniffed at the sight, and looked up at him. Her eyes, behind her glasses, were huge and startling, stained a flat stony-grey. “Have you heard from Leroy?” he asked, for she evidently had nothing to say.
Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf Page 3