Wild Chicory

by Kim Kelly

  Stevie didn’t say ‘there, there’ or ‘shush now’. Into her anguish he said the only thing he could think of that was larger than this; he told her with all his heart as she cried: ‘I’ll always love you, Nell Kennedy.’

  She put her pebble in her shoe that moment, that day, and left it there, so that she would feel it wherever she went, every day for the rest of her life.

  FOREVER AND EVER, AMEN

  They were married on the sixteenth of March, 1924, the day before Saint Patrick’s Day, and all the jolly green bunting through the streets might as well have been for them, they were so happy. Nell was eighteen and Stevie almost twenty-one. He wore a smart suit of silvery grey he’d had made at Blumberg’s, the Jewish tailor in Foveaux Street, and she wore a gown and veil of ivory tambour lace she made herself from fabric she’d saved for and had put away for almost two years, love and devotion in every stitch. They were the most beautiful couple that ever lived, as all young newlyweds are.

  Even still, Nell’s mother had not relented in her attitude towards her one and only son-in-law. Despite their wait of six years, despite Stevie not going on to play any football as a result of an unfortunate injury to his left knee during a match against Saint Joseph’s in his final year of school, despite his getting a position as a junior clerk with the Department of Lands at seventeen and studying bookkeeping at night, despite his insistence that Nell herself go on to business college from high school to get her stenography and typing qualifications, despite his strong body and perfect teeth, despite his unfailingly kind heart, Brigid Kennedy considered Stevie to be merely a pig-farmer’s son from Armagh, and therefore not good enough for her daughter. No matter how much all her own sons teased her for her bigotry, she would not relent.

  No matter how much Nell tried to show how happy and bright her future was, she could not push open this door to shed even the tiniest crack of light upon her mother’s dark opinion. Nell knew that her mother still suffered the heartbreak of losing Peter the way they had. She knew that, for her mother, it was as if the sun would never quite rise again, that joy would never be hers to have or hold. Nevertheless, Brigid’s refusal to accept Steven as Nell’s husband, to treat him with any regard or warmth, forced a rift to grow between mother and daughter. There were no passionate words spoken, no tantrums or tears, but a cool and sorrowful drifting apart.

  ‘Don’t worry, Sis,’ Dan told her. ‘Ma will give it up when the babies come.’

  It was true that Brigid had treated Dan’s wife, Maureen, with similar disdain when they were married four years earlier – and Mick’s wife, Gwenda, when they married a year after that, and Pat’s wife, Marie, when they married last May, even though Marie was from Coolcaslagh, just east of Killarney, and Pat had dragged her out here from London, where she’d been a nurse in the war, and his nurse, too – just as it was true that the ice thawed with Mother Kennedy a little with each new grandchild born. There were four so far now: two boys from Dan, a girl from Mick and another boy from Pat. The only time Brigid Kennedy approached something like contentment was when she had a baby on her hip, but it was as if she wished those babies had been born from air rather than from her children loving others. Nell hadn’t been aware of the extent of all this until now, but Dan and Maureen had been waiting for approval since 1915 – since before he went off to war.

  Babies didn’t come easily for Nell, though. She spent the next three years in their little rented weatherboard house in Lilyfield making babies’ clothes for all her new nieces and nephews. As all her brothers, one by one, took wives, she made so many jumpsuits and bloomers and smocks she could have opened her own shop.

  ‘It’ll happen when it does,’ Stevie would hold her hand in the night and kiss her with ever more tenderness, but he was worried, too – for her. She needed something else to do, apart from making baby clothes in between counting out all the mysteries of life along her rosary beads and smoking cigarettes. He needed to do something to help her, other than kissing her as he left for the day and again when he returned, and taking her to the Catholic socials at Rozelle for a dance of a Saturday night. So he cooked up a bit of a plan, and one Monday evening when he came in from his office in town, he told her: ‘I got you a job at the Department of Public Works – stenographer to the City Architect.’

  Nell couldn’t believe her ears – unless you knew someone high up, it was very difficult at that time for a woman to be employed at such a public-service job, with all the men returned from the war given preference, even in taking shorthand and typing up letters, and it was unheard of for a married woman to get so much as a look-in. When she managed to make her mouth work, she said to her husband: ‘But how?’

  ‘Luck of the Irish.’ He winked. ‘All in the knowing of who to have a beer with at lunchtime.’ And then he told her: ‘But you have to pretend you’re my sister.’

  Her jaw dropped open again at the lie, and then she smiled, returning her husband’s wink. Oh, how she adored him. He was only a lowly, middling clerk in the accounts section of the Department of Lands, but he was a king to her.

  Naturally, luck of the Irish being what it is, this all meant Nell became pregnant with their first child within a month of starting with the City Architect – just as she’d made two new suits for herself, too. But, luck working its strange way again, any embarrassment at their fibbing was spared the young couple as, the month after that, they were compelled to leave Sydney altogether.

  Stevie’s father had taken ill, out on his farm at Guyong: some sort of heart trouble. In all the time they’d been together, Nell had never been to the farm, and she’d only met her father-in-law once – at the wedding – and even then, it was brief – mercifully. For all that she knew him so little, though, she knew well enough that he put her own mother in the shade for vinegar on the soul – or ‘shit on the liver’ as Stevie would say in moments of starkest honesty. Jim O’Halligan was not a pleasant man. Nell wondered if he actually had a heart to trouble him. He had never spared the rod or become acquainted with ideas such as friendliness or forgiveness or generosity of spirit, but he was Stevie’s father and Stevie was his only son.

  And Stevie’s only sister, Paula, had had enough of him. She arrived on their doorstep in Lilyfield one night and in floods of hot despair said, ‘I can’t do it anymore, Stevie. I will kill him if I spend one more day with him.’ Which was fair enough, too. Paula went to Aunt Hannah over in Cooper Street to begin her life anew, at last and at twenty-seven, while Stevie and Nell made their way to Guyong to begin – well, something different.

  As much as Nell was not looking forward to living under the same roof as her father-in-law, she embraced the adventure ahead – both the coming baby and the move, whatever it might bring, and for however long it might be. She hadn’t known anything of the countryside since she was a small girl, back in Ballymacyarn, and after one hundred and fifty miles on the train, going up through the Blue Mountains and into the Central West hills, the scenery, at least, didn’t disappoint. It was as gold and green as a Fenian flag.

  Nell O’Halligan put aside that look of horror that had come over her mother’s face when she’d told her they were off to the bush, and the frigid silence that had followed. She had her pebble in her shoe, Nell did, portable shame and guilt enough for a lifetime – she could go anywhere she liked! She also put aside the fact that all those years ago, when Stevie had first appeared for a term at the age of ten at school, it had been because his mother was dying from pernicious anaemia in Sydney Hospital, and he’d come alone to stay with his Aunt Hannah then, because his father wouldn’t leave the farm to come, and wouldn’t let his sister, Paula, come either, to say goodbye – poor Paula, just thirteen, cooking and cleaning for that miserable crank as her mother faded away. Most of all, Nell put aside the fact that Stevie, ordinarily so full of chat and cheer, sat silent on the train the whole journey, his own thoughts churning: it was only that one of the Christian Brothers had taken an interest in his potential rugby worth that Stevie h
ad got away again at all – and now he was going back. How could he not?

  ‘We’ll make things work out well,’ she told him, squeezing his hand. ‘I’ll see to it.’

  She did her very best, but the next three years would go down as their very worst, and her loneliest. Her baby didn’t come: there was a sharp pain and a rush of blood; the doctor, in Bathurst, said it simply didn’t take, dismissing her from his rooms. She wondered if it was the churning that was always going on inside her that had churned the baby out. Stevie tried to offer his shoulder to her, but she wouldn’t take it – he had too much on his hands dealing with his father. Jim O’Halligan would neither let go of his hold on life, than he would give over any control of the farm; he used his son as labour, tending the pigs, getting them to market, and running round for him at every harsh word. Oh but how Nell dreaded the sound of the squealing when the pigs would get carted away – they knew what was coming. Their cries reminded her of her old pet pig, back in Ireland, although she could not now remember his name.

  ‘Dad, we’ve got to sell up,’ Stevie would beg his father, again and again. Since Stevie had been making his way in Sydney, the farm had been badly run down as his father’s health failed. The fields that for the past two decades had been planted with beet and chicory and mangold root for the pigs’ winter feed was a mess – there would be no adequate crop this year. And there was no point buying in feed for the animals, only to put the farm into further debt. Even the potatoes were poor this year, the young sprouts dying back inexplicably, when ordinarily they could grow themselves in this rich earth. They had to go – they had to sell up – for all their sakes.

  But Jim O’Halligan would not let go.

  It was so bad Stevie even took up smoking himself.

  Nell would take her little pebble out into the fields searching for solutions to problems she couldn’t begin to understand. This was not her land, pretty as it might be, and she was so far from any memory of her little hands in soil, she was no practical use apart from cooking and cleaning, and milking the cow. The cow didn’t even have a name – so Nell gave her one, more to spite Jim O’Halligan than anything else. She called the cow Bluebell, after the chicory flowers that were sprinkled through the paddocks. They were such lovely things, these blue flowers, blooming so sweetly out of their shabby, spindly stalks, that would rise up by midsummer shoulder-high. They became her new, giant forget-me-nots, in this new, so foreign place, and when she walked among them she would remember her own lovely father, that kind and lively colour to his eyes. She’d never known that chicory root had a blue flower. It’s always funny the simple things you don’t know, isn’t it? When she was small, there had always been a packet of chicory powder on her mother’s kitchen shelf – it’s what her parents drank all through the winter, to warm them on the inside. Healthful, economical, fragrant, the label said around a circle, and it had a blue flower right in the middle of it. A chicory flower, of course.

  Before this realisation, chicory had sat in the back of Nell’s mind as a sack of rotten, twisted witches’ fingers, and now it was something else again. Reborn. Replanted. So life goes; so wisdom grows.

  She made daisy chains from all this chicory run to weed and she’d wind it through her hair, sprinkling sky through fire, and she’d make a crown for Bluebell, too, to make her husband laugh through all his frustrations. When she needed fabric for a new frock, she would buy the brightest floral she could find, which would elicit a grunt of disapproval from her father-in-law for such ostentatious waste, which would make her twirl as ostentatiously as she could as she went about her housework, to make her husband smile. Though it was the worst, most drifting of times, they made love like there was no tomorrow out on that farm. Away from the old, draughty, make-do homestead, she made a place for them, a warm and secret place in a corner of the hayshed, where only the chicory could hear them; and on a few precious occasions, deep in the winter, only the softly falling snow.

  It was the first frosty morning of autumn 1930, when Jim O’Halligan finally let go, and let them go, too. Nell had gone out to the tankstand, as she did every morning, to fill the bucket to put water on the range for breakfast. As she waited for the bucket to fill, she was watching the ducks by the dam that sat in the front paddock – wild ducks who would come in some rhythm of seasons she still hadn’t grasped. In the frost, the ducks pecked at the earth and shook their beaks as if they were having some fun time about it. She wondered if they were just enjoying the ice on their little tongues, just the same way we all do, when something made her look over her shoulder back at the homestead. She saw Stevie there, on the verandah step, and she would never know how but in just seeing him there, she knew: it was over. Their trial had finished – or this one, at least. Jim O’Halligan had died in his sleep.

  She breathed out, and then she ran to her husband, leaving the tap on the tank to flow. It didn’t matter, though. It was not their farm for very long to worry about after that. Stevie put it on the market, more to be rid of it than for any sensible reason, and as the Great Depression had got busy sucking the worth out of just about everything, the O’Halligan farm sold for two-fifths of a song.

  So Nell and Stevie had just about nothing and no jobs to go to when they returned to Sydney that year. Only they did have one small and precious thing: Nell was pregnant again – and this time, of course, with nothing to feed it but love, their baby would come. Four of them did: Jeannie came in 1931, Carole in 1933, Beverley fast following in ’34, and then Diane in ’37. They all lived in a tiny flat in Petersham, between the train line and Stanmore Road, and they called it the O’Halligan Sardine Can. Stevie got work through an acquaintance he’d made at the stock-and-station agent when they were selling up in Guyong – there was a job going as a clerk in the accounts office of the Dairy Co-op in Fairfield. It was a hike on the train there and back every day, and the Sardine Can was a squeeze that got tighter every year, but these were the best years of their life together. Nell kissed her husband every morning as he left for the day, and she kissed him again on his return. They never had any money – Nell’s palms were too flat to hold any coin, she would say with a shrug – but they had got what they had wanted most.

  Sometimes, Nell would get up in the night just to look at her four daughters sleeping. They made her so inexpressibly joyful, no matter what they did. For all these baby years, Nell’s belly never churned – it hummed, so that she wondered if people in the street could hear it. No matter how little money they had – and with the pay cuts all the men were forced to take throughout those rough years of depression, often that money was too little to get through the month – every Saturday morning, never fail, Nell would scrimp together whatever they had to buy their roast for Sunday after mass and three pipe loaves of sweet white bread – luxury! She made two cakes a week, as well – one on Saturday, and one on Wednesday – and iced them as thickly as her budget would allow. If love could be measured out in quantities of butter and sugar, Nell would have made her family diabetic with it. She never ate more than a sliver herself, because it wasn’t hers to have: it was all for them. All for the gratitude she took just in looking at them – at the icing smeared across her daughters’ little hands and faces, and the crumbs in her husband’s bushy blond moustache.

  She wasn’t making a cake or sewing bloomers, however, but out on the balcony hammering together a shelf for the girls’ room, the day her mother finally visited her home. There were toys on the floor of the sitting room, and the breakfast bowls still sat drying themselves by the kitchen sink; an ashtray sat unemptied on the windowsill. Baby Diane, in her cot by the kitchen door, had just sicked up all down her bib, and Jeannie was ‘helping’ by taking the dirty dust cloth to her sister’s face, so that Diane looked as though she had a little grey beard. It was February 1938, and it was stifling-heatwave hot; a couple of big, fat blowflies buzzed lazily through the flat, too, just to add a bit of class.

  Holy Mary, Nell thought, when she opened the door and saw he
r mother’s face. Of course she’d seen her mother often enough over the years, at every family gathering, for every wedding or christening, for the Kennedy ‘colony’ as her brothers now called it, but her mother had never come here – to her home. To this pigsty. Oh well, Nell shrugged, as she let her mother in. She might as well see her own daughter’s love laid out as it most usually is. ‘Mum,’ Nell said, wondering what she might want, what criticism she might like to make first, ‘this is a surprise.’

  Her mother walked into the sitting room, and she walked slowly these days. She was still strong and well-made, but she was getting on. Her hair, once richly auburn, was beginning to fade to white, making her widow’s black seem all the blacker. Brigid Kennedy was sixty-four years old, and for one fearful moment, Nell wondered if her mother had somehow come to say goodbye.

  ‘What’s brought you here?’ Nell said, and her voice was strange, half-choked and shrill as an engine whistle.

  But her mother turned with a mildly curling smile and said, ‘Can’t your mother visit you?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Nell and she said no more.

  ‘I only want to see my grandbabies,’ her mother said, picking up the little one with the grey beard, Diane, and slinging her onto her hip. ‘Don’t mind me – go back about your business.’

  So she did, and her mother visited every second Tuesday afternoon after that – she’d take the four stops up on the train from Redfern, which wasn’t too much of a trek as she’d since moved from the big house on Crown Street into a smaller one on Goodlet, nearer the station. No reason given for the change of heart; no amends directly made. Whatever enigmatic way this thaw might have occurred, Nell wouldn’t tempt it with a question. Not that Brigid Kennedy would ever forgive Stevie O’Halligan for marrying her daughter, and taking her into the bush for those three long years, but she thawed a little for him, too – enough to be quietly proud he kept his good job throughout the Depression, and was always able to pay the rent. There must have been something decent in the lad for him to have been able to see it all through.