by Joy Dettman
‘He had been interfering with his little sister. He got her in the family way,’ Gertrude said. ‘She was fourteen at the time.’
‘His sister! That’s why you left him?’
Gertrude shook her head. ‘He told me his sister had tuberculosis, that we were going to Africa so he could study the disease. I was nineteen. I believed him.’
‘How did you find out the truth?’
‘He told me. I was on the other side of the world, had no way to get home, no money to get home, and back then women didn’t leave their husbands — or not women of my class.’
‘He looks like such a beautiful boy in that old photograph.’
‘If evil wore an evil face, darlin’, we’d all know when to dodge.’
‘When did you leave him?’
‘When your mother started growing inside me. There was some vital connection missing in Archie’s head. Maybe it was the drugs that did it. He used his drugs on me the night he took my little boy. I’d gone to bed, gone to sleep, and woke up with him standing over me. “All fixed, Tru,” he said, and my baby boy lying in a basin, his unformed little mouth trying to call out to me for help.’ She stood, shook her head, shaking that image away. ‘And there I go again, looking back. It’s never done me one scrap of good.’
She opened the glass covering the face of her old clock, inserted the key and took her time in the winding of it. ‘It’s past my bedtime,’ she said.
‘That’s like reading a book and finding the last pages missing, Granny. You have to tell me the end.’
‘There’s never been an end to it, darlin’.’
‘Tell me how you got home then.’
‘We were in India at the time. He used to do a lot of doctoring on ships. I saw countries I’d only read of in an atlas, lived in countries where no one spoke my language. He could make himself known. He was a clever man, and a good doctor, too, when he worked at curing. We were on a boat when Amber got started. It took us to India. Drugs were easy to come by there, and his allowance was due. His family paid him to stay out of Australia . . . Anyway, the money came through and Archie disappeared, as he was apt to do.
‘I’d been on my own for over a week when a boat full of diphtheria came in to port and one of the officers came looking for Archie. I didn’t know when he’d be back or if he’d be back. I told the officer I’d nursed diphtheria cases and asked him if I could work my passage home. An hour later I’d packed up that room and paid out my last coins to two porters to carry my trunks down to the boat. It brought me to Melbourne. I travelled with my trunks by dray to the station, and a day later I was walking down that track.
‘My mum and dad hadn’t seen me in near on eight years. They looked at me as if they were seeing a ghost. When I saw what was left of me in that washstand mirror, I thought I was seeing a ghost. I should have told them the truth, but if I’d told them the half of it, they would have thought I was losing my mind. I told them I had a baby coming, and that Archie had sent me home for my health.
‘I can remember that day as clear as I can remember today. I walked this land for hours, walked it end to end, corner to corner, vowing at each corner that I’d never leave again — which maybe answers your first question about why I never wed Vern.’
‘You should write it down. It’s like a book.’
‘A few of the pages would be banned reading, darlin’, which is why I don’t spend a lot of time in rereading it. I learned a lot from the years I spent with your father —’
‘Grandfather.’
‘With your grandfather. Some of it has been useful to me. The past is only useful to learn from.’
Jenny sat picking at a fingernail. The hour was late. They should have been in bed. Gertrude started taking the pins from her hair, but Jenny sat on.
‘You knew you had to come home, Granny, like I know I have to go back. I’m going tomorrow. You don’t have to come with me.’
‘I told you I’d go with you, and I will.’
‘You don’t have to. Just promise you won’t make me fight you again.’
‘Will you tell me who he was?’
Jenny shook her head.
‘You asked me about your grandfather. I told you,’ Gertrude said.
‘I sprained my ankle and Mary’s mother had died and Mary wasn’t there. He offered me a job cleaning his house.’
‘Was he a married man?’
‘No. He was . . . he was kind to me. He mightn’t have been a good man, but he wasn’t evil. He looked after me.’
‘Maybe he was looking after himself, darlin’.’
‘That’s what they do, isn’t it? We’re just things to them, just pretty things they want to play their dirty games with.’
‘Not all of them.’
‘Can I please go without us fighting?’
‘What you’re considering is putting your life at risk.’
‘I haven’t got any choice, Granny.’
‘No doubt it feels that way to you right now, but out there somewhere tonight, it feels that way for a lot of women who can’t carry their own babies. There are hundreds of married women who would sell their souls to change places with you, hundreds who would take your baby and raise it as their own.’
‘Is that what you want me to do?’
‘To me it’s the better choice.’
‘Would someone take both of them?’
THE ARGUMENT
Maisy wouldn’t agree to her granddaughter being signed over to strangers. She had the time to raise her, the room, and an addiction to babies. Since her birth she had been visiting Margot regularly. Through November, she spent hours with her. After Christmas, Maisy said, after Jessica’s wedding, she’d take Margot into town.
In late November, she’d carried her granddaughter across the paddock to visit with Jenny, convinced that no one could help but fall in love with that chunky, bald-headed infant.
Jenny saw them coming and went out via Gertrude’s window hatch. There was a cool spot beneath the tank stand. She’d used it more than once. Her condition was becoming obvious to the experienced eye.
By December, anyone with a good pair of eyes could see she was in the family way. Vern required glasses. He’d have to be told.
Gertrude chose her moment. Jenny was off somewhere reading. She poured two mugs of tea, cut a wedge of apple pie, then sat and said her piece in as few words as possible.
His response was not what she’d expected — or maybe it was. ‘That’s where she got the money for her snakeskin handbag,’ he said.
‘Not another word, Vern.’
‘I told you when I first set eye on that handbag that she’d been with someone.’
‘Eat your pie and forget I mentioned it.’
‘Admit that I told you so.’
‘Change the subject. I don’t want to argue with you.’
‘There’s no argument to be made. I told you she hadn’t bought those things on a maid’s wage. Whether she was with one or fifty-one, she earned that handbag on her back.’
Gertrude reached for his plate of pie. ‘Go home, Vern.’
‘You can’t deny the truth in what I’m saying.’ His grip on the plate was stronger. She released it, and he filled his mouth. ‘Who does she say is responsible?’
‘She’ll tell me when she’s ready to tell me.’
‘Or take a stab in the dark when she sees its eye colouring,’ he said.
‘You force me to take sides in this and you know whose side I’ll take.’
‘Like you took your snake-eyed daughter’s side against me all of your life.’
‘If you hadn’t put your grandfather’s acres before me, I would have married you when I was eighteen years old.’
‘Don’t you start dragging that up again and throwing it at a man.’
‘I’ll drag up more than that if you don’t drag your mind out of the gutter when you’re in my house.’
‘House?’ he said. ‘I live in a house, and I’ve asked you a hundred times to li
ve in it with me, you independent bugger of a woman.’
Through the years Vern and Gertrude had disagreed on many topics. There was rarely a lot of heat in their disagreements. Hoopers were slow to burn, but get a good fire blazing and the embers took a long time in dying. They knew it. Gertrude allowed him the last word and, content, Vern spooned up his pie, then lit a cigarette.
‘Who is going to raise this one?’
‘My tank has got about two inches of water left in it. I’ll need to fill it tonight.’
‘I asked a civil question.’
‘I made a civil statement. I could have been uncivil and told you that it was no concern of yours.’
‘It concerns me. I spend half my bloody life hanging around down here after you. Who does it concern more than me? Charlie bloody White?’
‘Count to ten, Vern.’
‘Don’t give me your count to bloody ten. She’s been back here for weeks; you’ve known she was in the family way for weeks and you didn’t even have the decency to tell me.’
‘And look what happens when I do tell you. Go home.’
‘The day the Salvos brought her home, Lorna saw her running by the house, dressed up like a little trollop, advertising her wares —’
‘Anyone who dresses like a lamppost in mourning has got no right to sneer at the way others choose to clothe themselves.’
Vern was allowed to insult his daughters. She wasn’t. He stood, pitched his cigarette at her hearth, and was out the door.
‘She’ll be dropping her brats on your doorstep until your dying day,’ he said.
‘If you stay away you won’t need to see them, will you?’ She followed him out.
Kids were running around over at Elsie’s. Kids’ voices carried.
‘Your bloody land is looking more like Betty Duffy’s every bloody time I come down here.’
‘And you’re looking more like your pig-headed grandfather every time I see you — and sounding more like him.’
‘He was your bloody grandfather too, you pig-headed bugger of a woman.’
There would be no winner. There would be no backing down. The argument continued out to the car, the insults becoming more personal.
‘If you’d try using your legs to walk on instead of cramping them in behind a steering wheel, you might be able to reach your bootlaces for a few more years. You’re getting a gut on you like your father had.’
‘It won’t be worrying you, I can assure you of that.’
‘I was pitying your pallbearers.’
Maybe Vern got the last word to her chooks. He left in a cloud of dust and chook feathers, leaving one hen squawking on the track.
*
He stayed away all week. He stayed away for two weeks, three.
Charlie rode down a week before Christmas, his bike crate loaded with stale goods for the chooks and a tin of condensed milk for Jenny. He never came empty-handed. He offered a pound of butter, one corner of it mutilated by a rusty nail. Butter was a rare treat; Gertrude didn’t waste money on it. She cut off the mutilated corner and Jenny boiled it up with brown sugar and honey, then added it to oatmeal, flour, crushed walnuts, a good teaspoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of vanilla.
Charlie and Lenny had shelled the walnuts. They sat side by side at the table, waiting for their hot-biscuit payment. If Charlie noticed the young cook’s swelling belly, he made no comment. No one had cooked him hot biscuits since Jean, and no one else in town had told him he’d been right about the war either. He’d liked that kid since the day the postmaster had snatched her battered little body from her mad mother, and they’d laid her out on his shop counter, thinking she was dead. It would take more than a beating to kill that girl, and more than a swollen belly to turn him off her, so he ate hot biscuits and drank his tea, with condensed milk. Like Jenny, he couldn’t stand the taste of goat’s milk tainted tea.
Gertrude had too much to do to sit talking all day. She was at her sewing machine, running up a loose-fitting smock. The machine lived beneath her kitchen window, an eastern window, midway down the side of her kitchen, which offered a better light in the mornings than the afternoon. She was leaning in close to her work, reading glasses perched on her nose, when Vern arrived — and waited at the door for an invitation to enter. In the fifty-odd years he’d been coming down here, he’d never waited to be invited in. Gertrude knew he still had a bee up his nose.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘There’s tea in the pot, Jenny.’
Charlie was using Vern’s favourite chair. Jenny vacated her own to pour Vern’s tea. She passed it to him then disappeared into the lean-to.
Vern sat and Gertrude sewed.
The two town councillors sparred like a pair of roosters that afternoon; not well-matched roosters — Charlie, always a small man, had shrunk a little in the wash of life; Vern had expanded.
At four, Charlie gave up Vern’s chair, and Jenny came from behind the lean-to curtain to walk him out to his bike. She didn’t return. Vern moved to his preferred chair and sat alone until Gertrude brought her sewing to the table.
‘A man stays away for a couple of weeks and you start hanging your hat up to Charlie White.’
‘He’d be a good catch,’ she said. ‘He was saying how a few are paying off their bills.’
‘What does he think about your granddaughter’s addition to the family?’
‘He’s got manners enough not to comment.’
‘You’re saying I haven’t.’
She spread out the smock, a pale blue floral, and began snipping threads. ‘I’m saying he’s got manners enough not to comment.’
‘What’s he doing coming down here all the time?’
‘Jean White was one of the few women in this town I called a friend and he’s still mourning her, and if he wants to come down here for a cup of tea, he’ll be made welcome.’
‘You’re having a go at me now for not mourning any of my wives.’
Gertrude put her scissors down. ‘I’m not into censoring every word I utter, and I meant no such thing, but if the cap fits, feel free to wear it.’
‘You’ve had a bee up your backside since that hot-pants little bugger came back into this house,’ Vern shot back. ‘You don’t want her here any more than I do. She’s her parents’ responsibility, not yours.’
‘Her mother and sister snubbed me the other day in the butcher’s. My own daughter, my own granddaughter, the only blood I’ve got in this world, and they snubbed me, and you come out with something like that. That little girl has got less blood in this town than me —’
‘She’s doing something about fixing that up —’
‘Damn you for your thoughtlessness, for your heartlessness!’ She was on her feet. ‘A fourteen-year-old schoolgirl doesn’t go through what she went through and come out the other end unscathed, and anyone who thinks she does has got less brains than a rabbit and less heart than a worm. Go home to your old maid daughters. You’ve got more in common with them than me.’
‘At least they haven’t dropped their illegitimate brats on my doorstep. At least I haven’t had to go looking for them in lunatic asylums.’
‘And hell would have frozen over while they’d waited for you to go looking for them, too, you hard-hearted sod.’
Gertrude shook the smock and cottons flew. He lit a cigarette and she returned to her sewing machine, offering him her back while she hemmed one sleeve then set the other one up.
‘Are you going to sit there all day?’
‘I’m going to sit here until it’s done,’ she said.
‘You’ve got no room in your life for me.’
She swung around to face him. ‘I’ve got room in my life, just none in my bed, and that’s what’s been getting up your nose since Jenny came home — and if you think I don’t know it, my lad, then more fool you.’
Her words were too close to the truth. They bit. ‘Take your bed and go to buggery with it,’ he said. ‘I won’t be back.’
‘Don’t run over my cho
oks this time. You broke one of their wings the last time you drove off like a maniac.’
He stayed away through Christmas.
On the Saturday after Christmas, Jessie Macdonald married Joss Palmer. The couple didn’t want a formal wedding; they wanted a party. A handful of invitations were posted early to a few who lived out of town. A sign was posted for the rest in the newsagent’s window.
George Macdonald is getting rid of another one. Everyone welcome to celebrate with him at the town hall. Ladies, please bring a plate.
The party continued until the wee hours. The Willama band, hired until one, continued playing until two, and when the last of the guests went home, the party continued at George’s house. His eight daughters didn’t get together often. A night of bedlam, that one, the bride as rowdy as her sisters, the groom as drunk as his brothers-in-law.
The bedlam continued the following day, screaming grandchildren adding to it, and no mill for George to go to. The mills closed down between Christmas and New Year. George’s house was full until New Year’s Eve, then they left, all of them, other than Dawn, one of the middle girls he’d never get rid of.
He was sitting still though, wallowing in silence, when Maisy asked him if he was driving down with her to pick up Margot.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Someone is going to have to hold her while I drive, George.’
‘Not today,’ he said. Not tomorrow, or the day after either. He kept delaying the matter, in the hope that Maisy would forget about it, like he’d been delaying the purchase of the larger refrigerator she been after for a month or more.
‘When then?’
‘Haven’t you had enough of the little buggers?’
‘She’s as much our grandchild as any of the others.’
‘She’s Norman’s, too. Let him raise it.’
‘They couldn’t raise dogs.’
‘Then leave her where she is.’
‘Do you want your grandchild growing up calling Elsie and Harry Mum and Dad? That’s what’s going to happen if we don’t take her. The other kids already think she’s their sister.’
George couldn’t see a lot wrong with that.