by Joy Dettman
Jack remembered Woody Creek’s pea soup fogs. He emptied his mug, kissed her cheek, told her to look after herself, and he left.
THE CAST IRON
FRYING PAN
The fog-shrouded land kept morning at bay; no sunrise for the rooster to crow about so he didn’t crow. Georgie had set her inflatable mattress close to the stove’s hearth, a cosy enough bed last night. Only cold ash in the firebox this morning. She’d stockpiled wood in the rear sleep-out, had found newspapers aplenty, and within minutes twigs were crackling and flames offering the suggestion of heat to her blackened billy.
She wanted a coffee, wanted a smoke but refused to light a cigarette until the steaming mug was in her hand. Wished she had an electric jug. Wished she was someplace warm. Fed the fire larger pieces of wood and thought of warmer places, a few she’d wished cooler – but whichever direction she’d driven, she’d ended up in towns that were much the same, had ended up dealing with people who were much the same.
She had no idea of the time. It could have been seven or eleven when she walked out to the back steps to look towards Joe Flanagan’s land. There was nothing there. No fence, no trees, even the goat paddock had gone – and the blackened square of earth behind it. Knew it was still there – she could smell the dank ash stink of it riding the swirling fog banks. Turned her back on it and returned to stand before the stove, to dip a finger into the billy. The water hadn’t warmed – and whether she was staying or going, a small electric Birko wouldn’t take up much space. The three disciples had carried one to heat soup, beans, boil eggs and water – when they’d had power to plug into. She didn’t have much but she had power.
Robert Fulton always opened his doors at nine. He might have a Birko in stock. She glanced at her wrist, missing her watch this morning, then dipped a finger in again. There was barely warmth enough in the stove to heat its own metal. She glanced out at her ute. It would be warmer, or would warm up faster.
The decision made, she added more water to her billy, fitted its dented lid, then closed up the flue and walked out to her ute.
The motor started. It always started. It stalled too as she backed out to the road. Knowing it well, she gave it a bit more choke, got it going again, then drove off into the fog, the only proof she was on the road being the occasional passing white post.
Stock Route Road had gone missing, but it was wider and had a broken white line painted down its centre. Keeping to the left of the line, she drove on, seeing little other than a truck or two rising out of the fog ahead then disappearing back into it. Mission Bridge was still there, looking eerie as it rose out of a fog bank, but she crossed over and continued on towards Willama.
Too many houses in that town for the fog to cancel their presence, the roads wide, well kept and tree lined. A clean town, she knew it well.
The emptiness of Coles supermarket’s car park told her that the hour was early; she parked close to the entrance and walked in. Its wide aisles were warm and she wandered them, tossing items into a trolley – a bag of potatoes to bake on her oven tray, two apples, two bananas, a loaf of crusty bread still hot from the baker’s oven, two tins of preserved peaches, on special this week – and they reminded her of Charlie.
No Birko to be found on Coles’ shelves, but a choice of three electric jugs. She chose the smallest of them, and a toaster. Picked up a pack of three glasses, just in case Jack came back again to share her beer. Looked at a set of screwdrivers then, with a shrug, tossed them into her trolley, aware they were too cheap to be much good but that they might well do what she had in mind for them to do. No one queuing at the checkout, she emptied her trolley and, just for the hell of it, offered her brand new credit card to the assistant, and was surprised when it worked.
It paid for a watch later, then a pair of shoes, a pair of stretch jeans that looked as if they’d fit. It paid for two sweaters, woollen and warm. The bank charged no interest if the bill was paid on time.
By eleven thirty the sun was out in Willama. Woody Creek fogs had a bad habit of hanging around all day, so she drove around to the Holden showroom to look at the new ute, a beauty and she wanted it, then, feeling guilty for wanting it, she shouted her old ute two new rear tyres, or her card shouted. It could prove itself the best invention since the wheel should she decide to hit the roads again. Maybe she would. Maybe she’d buy that new ute and a small caravan and keep on driving around Australia until she ran out of money.
By one, the sun was strong enough to follow her home, strong enough to shine heat on Elsie’s west-facing window. The kitchen felt warm.
Her shopping dumped on the table, she ripped her way into her screwdriver set, determined that the kitchen remain warm. An hour later, a door removed from the east-side bedroom now swung in the kitchen doorway. It didn’t swing well, but it closed.
For dinner that night she ate two baked potatoes swimming in butter, with cheese and black pepper – and, thanks to the door, she slept warm, though became aware that her new door might well have been the only support for that bedroom wall when she heard new creaks in the house, but not a breath of wind. She slept like a log and dreamed of Jimmy. They were playing hidey beneath Elsie’s house.
Woody Creek’s fogs had a habit of coming down day after day once they started. She expected to wake to fog, but instead woke to blue sky. Her old habit when waking had been to look first at her watch. She slid back into old habits that morning. The time was eight fifteen.
Elsie’s outdoor lavatory, built well away from the house, necessitated a walk through grass to reach it, icy crackling grass, every blade of it a spear of white that morning. The drip puddle beneath the tank’s tap wore a coating of ice; the ute’s windscreen wore a layer, the hose feeding the kitchen tap had frozen solid but the tank gave up its water, and it felt warm.
She stood, full billy in hand, looking at Granny’s land, its wintry green turned white. The rooster, no more impressed by frost than fog, crowed out his protest from the burnt-out site. She watched him stepping from foot to foot on something that had survived that fire. She hadn’t been across the goat paddock yet. Hadn’t walked that blackened area. Looked for it this morning but saw only white.
Her coffee made, strong coffee, she lit her first smoke of the day then returned to the back door to look again for the black. Not a sign of it, so with coffee mug in one hand and cigarette in the other, she walked the track across the goat paddock. Margot had kept it well worn. With no Margot to walk it, the grass was encroaching.
She went no further than the small wooden gate to Granny’s home paddock where she leaned, seeking the rooster who no longer crowed on his perch but pecked at the earth with his harem where Granny’s house had stood. With the chicken wire fence on the ground, the chooks had the run of Granny’s home paddock. She counted fifteen hens. There must have been forty in ’77. She could see only one rooster, a Red Orpington, who might have been a chick the last time she’d seen him. A big, bad-tempered White Leghorn had ruled the roost eighteen months ago.
She sucked the last from her butt, tossed it onto the icy grass, emptied her mug, set it down on a gatepost, then walked through the gate and across to the shed seeking wheat to bribe the chooks back to their own yard. They remembered her, or recognised the feed basin, and ran to her feet to curtsy for wheat. Bugs and grubs might go down well enough, a bit of grass might help with the digestion, but nothing settled so easily in the crop as familiar grain.
Glad-to-see-you-back, the rooster crowed. Hope-you-stay-a-while.
She saw Granny’s stove standing where it had fallen, saw the big tank lying on its side. Walked by the site to the chicken wire gate and out to the fowl yard where she tossed wheat beneath the walnut tree. They came squawking behind her, through the gate, across the fallen fence, and when she’d rid the home yard of chooks, she walked across the fallen fence wire to stand staring at fresh dung on the stove’s hotplate.
There was a load of dung inside the big tank, evidence that many hens had found shelte
r there. If they wanted its shelter, they could have it, but in their own yard, not in Granny’s. She rolled it across new grass. It jibbed at the chicken wire but she repositioned it and rolled it again until its thunderous momentum was halted by the walnut tree where she propped it with chunks of wood and broken brick.
The weak sun creeping higher twinkled on icy fenceposts, those standing and their fallen mates. She looked at the fallen as she crossed back to the other side to stand a while staring at the rectangle of cement floor where Raelene had died. With the sun shining on its coating of ice it looked like a granite slab marking a grave. Crazed granite, the cement laid by Bernie Macdonald’s working bee, that had little depth to it. Its first crack had appeared two months after Georgie and Margot moved back home.
Someone had knocked down the brick chimney and carted the bricks away. She walked to where it had stood, then turned to look at the place where Margot died, a brief glance, then fast away to that slab of concrete. She could look at it without flinching.
It covered the area of what had once been Granny’s kitchen floor. She remembered that room as a roaring wind tunnel of fire. Could still hear it in her head but shook it away and walked back to the stove.
Its old iron chimney was gone. Granny had told her once that her father had bought that chimney from old man Monk, that it had replaced the original timber and mud chimney. Always a too massive thing for that little hut, Georgie had expected to see it lying where it had fallen. She hadn’t expected to see Granny’s stove.
How many times had she dreamt of walking here? The night after the disciples had given her a tow into Karratha, the first night she’d shared their tent, she’d had a nightmare about walking the burnt-out rooms where Margot’s hands had reached up through the ash to grasp her and drag her down. Never a sleepwalker, she’d attempted to take off in her sleeping bag and landed on top of Simon.
‘I’m ready, willing and able, Mum,’ he’d said and, having got a grip on her, he’d hung on. She’d almost loved those boys and sighed now for their loss, or maybe for the loss of their laughter.
She’d delayed coming over here, expecting . . . expecting to feel more. There was nothing left to feel much about, apart from the stove, the slab of concrete—
And the prongs of a fork reaching up through ash and ice, twisted prongs, like the clawed fingers of her dream—
She stepped back from it, then stepped forward, reaching down to give it a hand out of the dirt. It was blackened, but intact. With her thumb she rubbed soil from its handle and saw that old familiar pattern Granny’s cutlery had worn, like someone fanning a bare bottom, the Hall kids used to say. She placed it on the stove then squatted to see if the oven door still opened.
It opened. And Granny’s cast iron frying pan was on its bottom shelf! She snatched its handle, disbelieving what her eyes were seeing, what her hand was holding. How did it get into that oven? Who would have put it in there? Harry, maybe. Someone had cleaned up the site. Shook her head then, knowing that if Harry had found that frying pan he would have taken it home to Elsie.
Had it been in the oven the night of the fire? Margot had done that with saucepans she’d used when she’d heated up a tin of something and couldn’t be bothered washing the saucepan. She’d melted a plastic bowl she couldn’t be bothered washing one day.
For minutes Georgie stood feeling the familiar weight of that pan in her hand and, for the first time since the fire, forced her mind back, back beyond the fire, back to when she’d returned from Monk’s with Cara and found Jenny, Jim, Harry, Elsie and Margot in the kitchen. That was the last time she’d spoken to Margot. An hour later, with the search for Raelene called off for the night, Teddy and Lenny had turned up, and Margot had swallowed her sleeping pills and gone to bed. Georgie could still see her standing in the bathroom doorway washing those pills down and accusing Georgie with her pale purple/grey eyes.
Shook that image away and forced her mind further back, back to breakfast that morning. She’d fried eggs. Most mornings she’d fried eggs. Like Granny, she’d wiped the pan clean with newspaper and hung it on its nail. Had Margot cooked an egg for breakfast? Had she put her teeth in and eaten eggs on toast that final morning?
Georgie looked at the handle, cast iron like the pan, wanting to believe Margot had hidden the pan and its congealed grease in the oven, needing to believe her hand had been the last to touch that handle, that her desire for the eggs on toast she’d loved had inadvertently saved that pan. Eighteen months of rust had done what it could, which wasn’t a lot. Being sealed in the oven, its layer of fat and baked-on grease had protected it.
‘Steak and eggs for dinner,’ she told it, then, clutching her pan and fork, she walked to the shed to find a hammer to straighten the fork’s clawed prongs, and an axe. She’d need to restock her woodpile today.
The hens returned to peck and scratch at forbidden ground. Georgie drove into town to buy a slab of steak and a newspaper, and to use Jenny’s shower. Slowly the frost backed away to where only the shadows lurked.
It was after one before she walked back across the goat paddock to study the fallen section of fence. One post had been snapped off at the base, one midway up and a third had been scorched sufficiently to release its grip on the wire. A good six or eight metres of chicken wire lay on the earth, weeds growing over and through it as old mother-nature attempted to heal what Raelene had destroyed. Weeds can’t compete with determination, Granny used to say. They had no hope that day. Georgie found an edge to the wire netting then heaved on it until wire and weed lifted.
It took the afternoon, but a sunny afternoon. It took the axe and sweat enough for her to remove her windcheater, but the trunks of a few more well-grown saplings turned into fenceposts, and once the clean red dirt was tamped down firmly around them, a roll of thin wire from the shed bound that bulging chicken wire to each sapling post. Rusting chicken wire, a twisted fence when she was done, but strong enough to hold back hens. It took the last hour of daylight and more wheat to bribe the hens back to their own yard.
An icy chill was creeping up from the earth before she had hammered in the final garden stake, hoping it would assist that sagging wire to stand tall. The stake hit something hard and would go no further. She moved it a little to the right and hammered again. Same result. Moved it to the left, where her hammering lifted a circular lump of earth. And when the earth was scraped away, out came the plaque which for most of Georgie’s life had hung on a nail over Granny’s front door: Ejected 2. 8. 1869, the letters and figures formed by small nail holes patiently hammered into one of Granny’s aluminium dinner plates by Jenny. Gertrude Maria Foote had been born on the second day of August in 1869.
Georgie squatted there, smiling while scraping dirt from it, rich dirt veined by charcoal. She didn’t see what the plaque had been sheltering, not immediately. About to continue her hammering, her stake disturbed a pale white/green sprout. It didn’t look like a weed. A sucker from Granny’s climbing rose maybe? Or the wisteria, or even that nameless yellow flowering thing with the overpowering perfume? Georgie didn’t care which one of the three it might be, only that something else had survived the fire. The stake and fence forgotten, she squatted to clear weeds from around the shoot to keep it safe until longer, stronger sunshine told it to grow.
Her days passed more easily then. She’d found a focus. There must have been two dozen garden stakes leaning in the eastern corner of the shed with Granny’s variety of shovels and spades, crowbar, rakes and the old three-pronged weeder, Granny’s favourite tool. Its handle had grown splintery. Every year she’d sharpened her tools and oiled the handles. The tin of linseed oil she’d used was still on the shelf in the shed beside her oilstone.
Why the tools hadn’t been stolen along with a good fifty per cent of the hens Georgie didn’t know. Thieves preferred to eat than to labour, she decided. An elderly pick, a crowbar, may have been worth a bob or two as scrap metal, but dead hens were easier to carry away.
She found G
ranny’s earth-turning shovel and, after sharpening it and giving the handle a good soaking of oil, she started turning the blackened earth, burying it, and leaving in its place a patch of clean brown soil.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Jenny used to say the town stood to attention and saluted when Trudy stepped down from the bus in her ladies’ college uniform, her lisle stockings and school hat. Most of the old brigade had been familiar with Vern Hooper’s daughters who’d stepped down from the train clad in similar garb. That uniform wasn’t all that marked Trudy as a Hooper. She had the dark eyes, the dark hair and height enough to be the granddaughter of the great Vern Hooper. She wasn’t, but there were few who knew it. She’d inherited her colouring and height from Teddy Hall.
She didn’t arrive on the bus that Saturday in August. She drove a white Torana sedan into the yard and parked it behind Georgie’s ute. No ladies’ college uniform that day. Georgie recognised the Torana but raised her eyebrows as a sneaker and jeans-clad Trudy stepped out. Jen and Jim waited to greet her. Georgie suffered her kiss on the veranda. She suffered a replay of the hair thing, and was pleased she’d wriggled into her new jeans, that she’d worn her new sweater, patched in her missing segment of eyebrow and decided to tolerate the pinch of new shoes.
Later, at dinner, she watched Jim’s eyes adore his daughter, watched Jenny fuss over her, and felt a minor twinge of envy. Trudy had it all – two parents, a beautiful old home, an education, and she’d have a career in a year or two.
‘Remember when Margot used to say she wanted to be a nurse?’ Georgie said. Jim stopped eating. Jenny stood to move the kettle over the central hotplate. Just a memory, a kinder memory of Margot as a fifteen year old, just an innocent remark. Georgie said no more.
By seven thirty, her duty visit done, Georgie was urging Trudy to move her car when Elsie, Harry, Teddy, Vonnie and their baby arrived, further blocking the ute in. She gave up – parried the hair thing again then, for Teddy’s benefit, relayed the tale of the rock through the sump thing, the three guys driving an F100 who had given her a tow to the nearest town, a hundred-odd kilometres away.