by Kim Kelly
‘In New South Wales, you idiot,’ he was told, and they dragged him over to the map that sat under glass on the forecastle wall. ‘About as far south-east from Dublin as a man might go.’
As far away in any direction sounded like it might suit Jim. He traced a finger along the route south-east and when he saw it really ended at New Zealand, he asked the men: ‘What’s the price of an acre here?’
‘Don’t know.’ They shrugged, but one said: ‘Best grazing country on the globe – best country for butter and wool out there.’
And for all that Jim knew practically nothing about farming, that was his mind made up. He said: ‘I’m not after the best. I want country good enough for raising pigs.’
At which the men only laughed at him again, another telling him: ‘No wonder you don’t drink – you don’t need to, you weird bastard.’
He shut his mouth altogether from then on, keeping his dreams to himself. He told them only to the creaking of the timbers and the rigging, sent them up into the sparkling night skies upon that long, long sea, sent them out to whomever might heed them. Jim O’Halligan dreamed of his fields, sure that the more he dreamed them the sooner they would be found.
It took a long time – seven years carting fresh produce between the railhead and Paddy’s Market in Sydney – before he saved the money to purchase his land. If times were ever rough, and they often were, he never looked back to the old country. Occasionally, in darkest times, he did think of his poor mother in Armagh, but he did not think on her for long. He could not. She had three other sons, all of them as battered and bullied as any ever were by his father, and Jim himself would not be one. He clothed himself in that grey cloak of relief at being gone from him, and that was all. Yes, he was a hard man himself, Jim O’Halligan, and mean with every penny, too. He had to be.
Deliberate and careful in his every act, and with his ear to the ground at the markets for a bargain, he bought his first parcel of acres in the rugged but fertile high country that lay between the towns of Bathurst and Orange, out west from the city. It was at a place called Guyong – a place he’d never heard of before, and had baulked at initially for the name of nearby Orange. Was it a Protestant town? It was, just as Bathurst was Catholic, but the only trouble that went on out there, he was assured, was on the football field between their rival teams. It was rich potato country, he was also told, and most importantly what was good for potatoes, he learned, was also good for pigs. He spent seven more years saving and learning before he was ready to make his long-held dream come true: to purchase his pigs, to build his home among the hills. But then, just as he was ready to go, fortune smiled on him like it had never done before: the market for both land and pigs crashed in the trade depression of 1894, and he was able to get more than he had ever hoped of each so cheap he might have thrown his hat into the air with glee.
But he did not. He had no time or cause to be content, or so he reckoned. There was too much more to accomplish now, too many decisions to make. Where best would he build his dam? What feed would he sow for his pigs? As always for Jim, much thought went into these things. The grain of his dreams, he’d realised, would not be an ideal crop for his animals, as it was expensive to grow and unreliable to harvest; his pigs and he would thrive instead on a diet of root vegetables, and so all the fors and againsts of every root had to be considered before Jim could decide which he would plant, and when he’d decided that mangold, chicory and beets would be his crop, he had to decide then how much of each he would plant and where in his acres he would plant them, then who he would trust to sell him good seed. He was often more weary at the end of each day from all these concerns than he was from all the labour of farming.
Jim had been warned by a few other farmers against putting any chicory in for his pig feed. ‘It’ll only run to weed all through your paddocks,’ he was told. ‘Troublesome stuff. Near impossible to dig out once it’s in,’ they said. But when they told him it was lacking in nutrition and couldn’t be sold on if ever there was an over-abundance, Jim knew they were lying to him. Chicory, it was true, was certainly not for the slovenly farmer – it needed to be diligently managed. But chicory, of all the feed he put in to his fields, would bring him a small profit in itself in a good year. Jim had done his research; the other farmers just didn’t want the competition. So, he planted twice as much chicory as anything else, and reaped the rewards, year after year. He sold his excess at five pence per pound – better than anyone else in the district – and once, when he had a really big bumper crop, he slaved day and night cleaning it off for best price and made eight shillings per hundredweight. That year he made almost £56 in pure profit. His pigs did very well on it, too.
And yet none of this gave him any pause to feel the slightest sweet breeze of contentment. He had all that he wanted, but he could not see where he was. Almost every afternoon, the sun would blaze down through the wide arms of the eucalypt trees on his western boundary, turning their leaves to black lace against a sky gone wild with great splashes of every colour of the rainbow. But he never saw it. Occasionally he marvelled that the rainfall in this high country was higher than he’d ever known in Ireland, but puzzlingly there was twice as much sunshine too. It was a farmer’s paradise, but still Jim O’Halligan could not know it as such.
In 1900 he married, more because he thought he ought to than for any need to share his bounty. He advertised his eligibility through St Canice’s at the nearby village of Millthorpe, where he attended mass only often enough as would be seen to be decent, and it wasn’t long before a suitable match was arranged. He was thirty-seven years old, and the girl, Mary Ann McCall, was just gone twenty-two. She was soft-spoken and obedient, and although he cared for her in every practical sense, he never knew her. He never knew that she could laugh or dance; he never knew how the sun kissed her flaxen hair of an afternoon as she bent to tend the garden or milk the cow. He never knew how she wept with the great splashing wildness of her joy when her children came: first a girl, Paula, and then a little boy, Steven. They were the roses on each of her cheeks, those children were; they were the brightness of her smile.
There was one fleeting moment, when the boy was born, that Jim thought it strange he felt no lightness of spirit as men are supposed to do at the birth of a son. But he dismissed it as quickly: there was work to be done. Always so much work on the farm, so that he did not notice when his wife began to ail. He did not see her skin grow pale, or her smile begin to dim. He would only become annoyed at her increasing weakness.
For the darkness of the cloud Jim O’Halligan carried about him lay right across his eyes; a cloud that never stormed to release its rain. A ghostly cloud of grief that he could never articulate, much less see the trail it left, two hundred years in length.
He could not see that the little boy, Steven, planted in this grow-anything soil – as far to the south-east as an O’Halligan had ever gone – had taken on the sun and shed that trail of grief. Jim would watch him with some curiosity and even envy, but he could never fathom his child’s cheerful disposition. He often took the boy’s own bright smile for insolence and beat him for it. Jim could not see that he beat his son just as his own father had done, down and down the line.
But no matter how often or how brutally young Stevie was beaten, his smile could not be robbed from him. He would only try harder at whatever there was to try: football, mathematics, football, cricket and football. For he had promised his mother, as she lay dying, that he would never grieve while he could instead be grateful for being alive. It was a promise he held fast to, whatever his life would bring.
The man called Stevie O’Halligan would always be that little snowy-haired boy with the sun in his eyes, running and laughing through a chicory field, midsummer seeding and four-feet high. Why did the spell break here, with him? Why did the fae ones let him be? No-one will ever know the reason but that Stevie himself chose to break free.
AWAY ON THE SWEET BREEZE
‘Clean your teeth!’ Mum
shouts at me as I bolt across the hall and up the stairs, on my way to shout my ‘good morning’ at Grandma.
I don’t stop at anything Mum says. I reckon I’m pretty good stuff, and I’m too happy. It’s the last week of school – no more primary school forever after Thursday. I’m twelve and now that I’m here, I can’t wait to get to high school next year. Not for the boys, though. I still hate boys, except for David Bowie, and maybe Daryl Braithwaite. I want to get to high school because you get to study poetry there, and mad history – like the Emperors of Rome and the Chinese Opium Wars. I’ve just finished reading Dad’s copy of Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory and although I didn’t understand half of it, I’ve got so political I stayed up last night and wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, telling him people are more important than money. Mum said I should be careful making my opinions too loudly known, but I know Grandma will laugh her little giggle laugh and tell me I’m brave and clever.
I swing round from the top of her stairs to the door of her room, and I always get a funny feeling when I do. I know I’m too old to sleep with her anymore – I’ve been too old since I was ten – but somehow it always seems wrong that I don’t.
Something seems wrong before I even see her today. Something is too quiet here. Grandma is usually up already, and doing the crossword, waiting for me. She says that when you get to a certain age you can stay in bed and read and do the crosswords as long as you like.
I think she’s still asleep. Her eyes are closed, her hands are folded over her stomach – that’s just how she looks when she’s asleep. Her hair isn’t red anymore; she let it go white after Granddad died. Her white curls circle her face, her head hardly makes a dent in the pillow – yes, that’s exactly how she looks when she’s asleep. Her pretty little bird head on her pale-green pillowslip; Jesus looking down on her from his crucifix.
It’s warm up here in the flat. It’s going to be another hot December day, so I go back out and open the window above the sofa, to let the breeze in. I look round the flat: everything else seems normal: the kitchen is tidy; cup rinsed on sink; ashtray empty and cleaned. I look out the window at the dirty city sky: it looks like someone tipped an ashtray on it. A train screeches into Marrickville station; the brakes of a bus squeal down on Illawarra Road.
I should wake her up. I am running late now.
‘Grandma?’
She’s not asleep. I know she’s not asleep.
She’s gone. Away.
I don’t know what happens for the rest of this day. I don’t think I am crying. It’s worse than that. It’s like all the stories, our stories, are falling out of my head.
AND THEN DOWN THE LANE
I stop the car on the track when it happens again, for the third time – this odd shiver running through me, as if I have been here before. But I couldn’t have been. The map on my phone remains as it was when I last looked at it two minutes ago: Graham’s Lane, wherever that might be, somewhere between Millthorpe and East Guyong. Why does this all look so familiar to me? A dirt track snaking through hills, an old, decaying hayshed, a line of brown cows along a fence looking at me with a query: and who, may we ask, are you?
I’m Brigid Boszko and I’m here to look at a block of land – ten acres of well-earned escape that Rick and I are keen to find. I glance at the phone again: about half a k further along this track. We’ll know what we’re looking for when we see it – or I will. Rick is interminably tidying his desk in Sydney, before we can get out of there for good. Am I looking at our future now?
Guyong. Why do I think I recognise that name only now that I am sitting here stopped in the car on this track? I know Granddad grew up in the countryside somewhere past Bathurst – that’d be a hundred years ago, just about exactly – was it around here? Guyong. Yesterday, when I saw the property online, it seemed just another far-flung name that meant nothing to me, apart from the magic words of ‘established trees’, ‘four bedrooms’, ‘two bathrooms’ that came with it. Pretty pictures of a rambling old weatherboard homestead, not in need of renovations. Welcome to Wiradjuri Country, the sign back up on the highway told me. Hello? Something makes me want to know who and what lives here.
I pull the car over to the side of the road and get out. The sun is warm, the breeze is too, but my shiver deepens, plunging into the centre of me and swirling around. I’m excited, and I don’t really know why.
It’s probably just that we’re so close now, to making this long string of wishes a reality. Finding our place, where I will write, and Rick will make his mad sculptures out of discarded engine parts, and we’ll have a yard full of chickens and an orchard. And peace. The kids, Sam and Flynn, have grown and flown, and now it’s our time to explore what we’ve always wanted to: each other, uninterrupted. Our friends think we’ve lost our minds. Shouldn’t we be furiously working on our superannuation stockpile so that we can live out our days travelling the world? No.
We’ve done our travelling: separately and together. I’ve done the European tour three times – first, when I was twelve, that winter after Grandma died, that whole year I barely remember at all except as series of strange, dislocated postcards, then back again with Mum and Dad at seventeen, where I whinged the whole way through France and Italy, plagued by some mysterious adolescent malaise – both times missing out on getting to the promised lands of Poland and Ireland, because of a persistent Iron Curtain drawn down on one, and never-ending Troubles in the other. When Rick and I took the kids in 2007, Poland was too far out of our budget, too many miles away from London, where his cousins are, and Ireland was a melancholy detour from there. I dragged my little family to Tralee, looking for the village Grandma was born in – Bally-something. I thought the name would come to me, once we were there, but it didn’t. There are about fifty places starting with Bally in County Kerry and it could have been any one of them. In all the trivial and stupid things I’ve scribbled down throughout my life, I could have scribbled down that one important name, but I never did. And Mum wasn’t here to ask, by that time.
Oh, Mum. I know she’s really why I am standing here on the side of this dirt track, in this weird muddle of emotions. She died suddenly ten years ago, from an aggressive tumour in her stomach – cruel but quick. Terrifying. Dad couldn’t cope: he died three years after her. He sat in front of the TV complaining about there being nothing on it: ‘No stories, only blah blah blah, people yelling at you.’ He sat there and stared at the yelling until he shrank into the lounge chair and faded away. They’d worked so hard all their lives, Mum and Dad – saving, saving, scrimping for their wonderful reward on retirement. They didn’t get to enjoy it for more than six months.
It’s not enjoyment I’m after, but work of a different kind. Work I’ve always wanted to do: to tell my own stories. These stories that whirl round my head, the rush of them getting wilder the older I get. I’m scribbling them down all the time, notes scrawled on post-its at the office, on the back of shopping dockets, tearing out pages from my kids’ exercise books over the years. My laptop is stuffed with them: snippets, sketches, whole novels. I’ve even had a couple of them published here and there; one of them sold okay, too. But I want the time and the space now to let them come out as they will, not worked around other things, like drawing up contracts of sale on other people’s properties, as I have done part-time and mindlessly for the past twenty-odd years to make a buck for our family business: Boszko and Braddon Conveyancing. That’s not work: that’s just marking off days. I have a lot to say before I die. I’m forty-seven: my life is at least half done, if I’m lucky. I need to make the last half count. I need this place – wherever you are.
Are you here?
‘Bridge, you are nuts,’ my brothers Shane and Tim say about our plans, but they’ve always said that about anything I do or am, haven’t they. And they are tax accountants, both of them: they don’t know life any other way. Money, money, money. When we were sorting out Mum and Dad’s estate, they actually argued over the fair and pr
oper distribution of the kitchen appliances. Seriously. ‘But Bridge,’ said Tim, ‘if you retire early your kids will end up with nothing when you go.’ They’ll cope. Flynn is a lawyer, just like his pa, and Sam is just finishing up her degree in architectural design.
And I’m not retiring, thanks. Women don’t retire: I see the old wax paper wrapper Grandma’s circle bread used to come in, folded neatly by her kitchen sink, waiting to receive the day’s garbage scraps, waiting there even on that day she died. Nothing wasted; not a moment, either, when it could and should be filled with love and care of some kind.
‘You still doing your little writing thing?’ an old girlfriend from those schooldays asked me a few weeks ago.
Yeah, my little writing thing. That, apart from my babies and my lover, means everything.
Everything.
Mum knew that. For all that we were never really mother-daughter close, not in that cheesy cheek-to-cheek way at least, she kept every scrap of every silly thing I wrote when I was a child: file after concertina file, the Z pockets at the back stuffed with doodles, odd little musings, on my revolting brothers, school, trains full of strangers, and Sharon who lived across the road, as well as a surprising number of grandly ambitious narratives mostly abandoned at around page three. My mother collected all of them, up until I turned twelve. Up until Grandma left us. I held my stories close after that. I don’t think I wrote anything apart from a university essay then until I was about twenty-seven. Something in the bright-blue questions I found in my own children’s eyes, something about their wonder at the world, started to bring my words back to me.
And now, just as I smile at the memory of my babies’ always-asking eyes, something catches mine – a flash of blue in the tall grass ahead, over the other side of the track. It’s a flower. I know as much about flowers as I do about farming – half a tick above nothing – but I know what this flower is. It’s chicory.