The Salt Madonna

by Catherine Noske

  Her mother nods as she comes up the drive. She is still out shuffling the barrow of grapes into the crates.

  ‘Good girl,’ she calls. ‘That was quick. Feel nice?’

  Mary just nods and turns to go in. She feels guilty as she does, a hot and silent rebellion, somewhere in her stomach, but she swallows it, pulls off her wet bathers, runs herself a bath. Her father won’t be far. She locks the door, stares at herself a moment in the mirror. Even from the bathroom she can hear the sounds of her mother in the yard.

  *

  Mrs Keillor watches the Burnetts in the vines, mother and daughter doing it by hand, hauling the buckets. Harry is off at Mulvey’s, the butchering today. He’ll come home with mince or some blade steak in freezer bags, hand-labelled. She is alone. She can hear the lilt of the Burnetts’ voices rising and falling as they chatter, and wonders what it would have been like to have a daughter. She imagines making dresses, cooking together. She can hear the mother laugh, high and harsh. Their home is not feminine. It is marked by the rusting frames of a dead tractor, the chassis of a car. There is a lean-to shed which is falling down. She wonders how they manage.

  She potters about with her watering can, an apron over her house dress, and checks her plants. They are drying out. She has been saving grey water for them, and there is a soapy residue showing in places around the terracotta pots. She fingers it, finds it greasy – fat from the washing-up. She fishes out an old rag and works her way around them all, wiping it off. It feels good to be doing something outside, something green. In sympathy with them, with their picking. She hums as she goes.

  She sees when they make it to the end of their row. She watches them pick the barrows up, trundle back towards the house. The girl emerges again almost straight away, a towel around her shoulders. She comes light-footed down the drive. Mrs Keillor sighs. Inside, then.

  Her kitchen is neat, clean. The dinner is already set, everything prepared. She has made a casserole from the last of the Christmas leftovers. There is nothing else to do. A second, smaller dish has been put aside for Father John. She looks at it and thinks a moment before packing it up in tea towels. Harry won’t be home for a while. She carries it to the car and nestles it into the front seat, then drives: out the gate in the same direction as Mary, onwards to the church.

  The church sits just above the village, the graveyard looking out over the water. The rectory is shaded in the afternoon sun, the shadow of its veranda reaching out across the garden. Wrong orientation, really, for a garden. Not like hers. She contemplates it, noticing again the grass growing from the gutters, the weeds. His wife used to take care of the garden. She did the flowers for the church, too. Mrs Keillor wonders if he is avoiding it, or if it is simply too much. Maybe if she offered to manage it for him, just with Val perhaps.

  Father John meets her at the door.

  ‘I saw you coming,’ he says and gestures to his study, the window overlooking the drive. There are papers open on the desk, and a Bible. ‘My sermon.’

  He seems calmer, more relaxed than last weekend, his strange energy at the Christmas service and New Year’s Day. He leads her down the hall to the kitchen, puts the kettle on the hob and brings out two cups. Mrs Keillor allows herself to feel relieved.

  ‘I brought you a casserole,’ she says. ‘I thought you might like an easy dinner.’

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  ‘No, no,’ she says, fluttering. ‘It’s nothing.’ She puts the pot down on the table and then lifts it up again, waits for him to turn to her. ‘It’s still hot,’ she says. ‘I don’t want it to mark.’

  He takes it from her, sits it on the stove. They both wait in silence as the kettle boils. He makes her feel like a young girl again. She can remember visiting the rectory with her mother, growing up. Father Richard, it was then, with whiskers, calling her his little princess.

  ‘I like the writing,’ Father John says. ‘I feel more like myself when I am writing.’

  ‘Oh?’ She doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘Yes. Margaret used to sit here in the kitchen, leave me to work in peace. I look out at the ocean until an idea comes. She always says that watching the water helps.’

  Mrs Keillor notices that he has slipped into the present tense.

  ‘What are you writing on today?’ she asks.

  ‘I was thinking about the characters. In the parables, I mean – the characters we recognise but don’t really know. Christmas, I suppose. It got me thinking. We all know the Christmas stories, but their lives, we don’t know them. We only really know the disciples as a group. Even the three Marys. But we do know them all through Christ’s love. That is their defining feature: that they loved him, and he them.’

  ‘I love the story of Mary Magdalene,’ Mrs Keillor offers, after a pause. ‘Her redemption.’

  ‘But that is what I mean,’ Father John cries. ‘That is the Hollywood version! She wasn’t redeemed – she didn’t need to be. She wasn’t the fallen woman Christ anointed with oil. That was Mary, sister of Martha. Mary Magdalene was simply a faithful supporter.’

  ‘So there are four Marys?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you might say that. But only three who followed him, who stood at the foot of his cross.’

  ‘And you want to talk about their lives?’

  ‘No,’ the priest says. ‘I want to talk about Christ’s life, and how it shows us theirs.’

  It seems an academic distinction to Mrs Keillor. She isn’t sure she understands. ‘So it isn’t their lives,’ she ventures, ‘but his love that makes them important?’

  ‘Yes,’ Father John says. ‘If you like.’

  The kettle whistles. Mrs Keillor stands and takes it from the hob, moves automatically to make the tea. The priest stretches his legs out under the table.

  ‘I will start,’ he says, ‘with the Virgin. An easy example. She is defined by Christ, isn’t she? But we feel we know her, really. That’s the Lord’s power. And we should know that, recognise it.’

  Mrs Keillor nods over the teapot. Yes, yes.

  *

  Mary lies in the bath with her eyes closed, feels the grit under her back and the metal of the tub. A piece of weed from her hair floats by one knee. The light has slipped from the surface of the water, crept up the walls and faded. The water is cooling, returning slowly to the tepid state of the river. With the orange of the sky outside, Mary can imagine the tea stain of tannin. She trails a hand through the bath, drips water from her fingertips up her ribs, her sternum, across the bridge of her chest.

  Her mother bangs on the door. ‘Out! I need a hand with dinner!’

  Mary winces, drops her hand. ‘Coming!’

  ‘Make sure you are,’ her mother calls, softer, and Mary can hear the stairs creaking as she heads down to the kitchen. Outside, a dog barks in the distance, and someone yells. A car approaches along the road, and Mary recognises the broken tone of her father’s ute. A door bangs and one of the steers in the paddock behind the house bellows hopefully. Her mother calls out below. Mary stands, and water runs from her body down into the tub. She reaches down to pull out the plug. Her father’s voice is in the kitchen, loud.

  ‘Chuck steak,’ he is saying. ‘Fucking chuck. Not even a lump of mince.’

  Her mother is an undertone, indecipherable.

  Mary draws her towel from the rail and wraps it around herself, uses a handtowel to wipe the basin.

  ‘She still in there?’ her father asks. ‘She finished? Am I going to get a chance to relax at all before we eat?’

  She can hear him coming up the stairs and slips from the bathroom, closes her bedroom door and leans one shoulder against it.

  ‘She’ll be out, love,’ her mother calls after him. ‘Mary? Dinner!’

  ‘Coming,’ Mary says again, too low for anyone but herself to hear. She pulls the towel up to her shoulders and starts to rub herself dry.

  *

  Father John picks over his meal uncomfortably. The house is cold and dark now that he i
s alone. Afterwards, he cleans the dishes and wipes the stove. He pours himself a glass of port but doesn’t drink it. He thinks of Mrs Keillor, her kindness, her company, the sermon. He tries to ignore the suffocation of her pity, the biting sarcasm it draws out in him. He sits for a while before washing his face, brushing his teeth and going to bed. He contemplates praying and then, almost instantly, he sleeps. As though exhausted, as though desperate for the respite.

  He wakes in the night, emerges fully conscious into its silence. His dreams have been loud, vivid. Lying in his bed, his wife’s absence is a cavern beside him. He might roll into it, he thinks, fall endlessly into her loss. The thought mixes with dream, with childhood memory, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and her absence is suddenly populated with fantastic beasts, hot air, aliens, sulphur and light. I am dreaming again, he thinks, but knows he is not. He reaches for his wife automatically, rolling over. All he feels is his face wet on the pillow, and her weight gone, inexplicably lost, again and again she isn’t there.

  The waves sound from the shoreline and he forces himself to listen. Everything alive is quiet to that constant percussion. The church, the village, the world turned to it. He imagines the weight of sleeping bodies all across the island breathing to the water’s rhythm. These people, his flock, all of them supposedly under his charge. She used to show him how he was needed. With her, it made sense. We give them normality, routine, she would say. There is nothing else solid, nothing certain on the island. But he hardly knows how to lead them now. The men don’t come, none of them, they drink instead, and he is pastor to a flock of bored, bickering women. He wonders if he hates them or hates himself more. He should hate himself. He should be protecting them, and he isn’t. One of the women is being beaten. He doesn’t know what to do about that. He can’t help them – they have all left him! Like his wife has. He hates himself for thinking that. Slowly the cadence of the waves steadies him, he makes himself hold on to it, gentle and unending. He falls asleep again wondering what the time is, and how long until morning, and if he is losing his mind.

  I AM IMAGINING, OF course. I warned you. I don’t know any of this, except what I saw for myself. I only saw Father John in person later, at the church. I didn’t meet Mary till I started teaching at the school. But I knew her life; I had lived her life myself. This is all I know of Mary, before it started.

  III

  January 1992

  The Conversion of Paul, 25 January

  HANNAH WAKES, THE LIGHT thin and bright through the curtains of the room. It takes her a moment to remember where she is. The room is hot and her body feels bigger than normal, square and overlarge in the narrow bed. The sheets are plastered to her. She rolls over, tries once again to find sleep, but the glare of the day coming in through the window reflects off the glass of water on her bedside table. White specks float in the water. When she sits up and raises it to her lips, it has the faintest taste of salt.

  She hears her mother moving about in the kitchen below her. A door is closed, and floorboards creak. Magpies warble to the morning sun. A spoon rings out on a china bowl. Everything happens so slowly, she thinks.

  Hannah gets up from the bed and goes downstairs. Her mother is sitting upright at the table, a bowl of porridge and a cup of tea before her. She is staring out the window at the birds in the garden and doesn’t notice Hannah standing in the doorway. As though for the first time, Hannah observes how fragile her skin has become, how sunken she is. It is like looking at a stranger. And then she senses her daughter’s presence and turns, and the spell is broken, and she is Hannah’s mother again – older, more worn, but still her mother.

  ‘There is porridge in the saucepan, if you want some,’ she says.

  ‘Too hot,’ Hannah says. ‘Cereal will be fine.’

  Her mother nods and stands, reaches a bowl down for her, places it on the table.

  ‘Please,’ Hannah says. ‘I can do it.’

  Her mother looks at her. ‘Yes,’ she says, and sits back down to her porridge.

  Hannah finds an unopened box of cereal in the larder, pours milk from the jug. She sits down opposite her mother. Her mother is looking out the window once more. ‘Blue wrens,’ she says. Hannah nods. It is strangely peaceful.

  As soon as she has finished eating, her mother stands and clears away the bowls, hobbles with them over to the sink. She stands splay-legged to rinse them. She moves like an old horse.

  ‘It is going to be a glorious day today,’ she says.

  ‘Would you mind if I took the black horse out?’ Hannah asks.

  ‘I wondered if you might.’

  ‘I thought he might like to stretch his legs.’

  Her mother says nothing but stacks the dishes neatly on the draining board, still staring out at the birds. It doesn’t occur to Hannah that she might be envious. She leaves her mother without really thinking about it at all.

  Hannah rummages around in the shed. The saddlery is dusty and mouse-eaten. The stuffing has been chewed from her own saddle, stolen by rats, but it wouldn’t fit the black horse anyway. She runs a finger down the familiar bowl of its deep seat before moving on. Her mother’s saddle is safe in a vinyl cover. She takes it, a girth and a bridle, and carries them all to the back veranda to clean. They are filthy in the sunlight, stiff and awkward. The leather is spotted with a thick, green mildew and the metalwork is rusted. The cleaning gear is already laid out – the bowl of water, the saddle soap, the leather oil in a dish. She will need steel wool for the stirrups. She sits and hauls the old saddle into her lap. The sun is warm on the back of her neck. The cloth clears mahogany circles in the dust, the wet leather shines. There is a movement inside and her mother turns on some classical music, opens the door to join her, sitting on a folding chair.

  Hannah smiles at her. ‘Thought they could use a bit of love,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ her mother says, and frowns. ‘I should have done it.’

  ‘No point,’ Hannah replies. She works the cloth in rhythmic circles, in time to the rising swell of the music.

  ‘Tchaikovsky?’ she asks.

  Her mother nods. Her eyes are closed, her head resting on the back of the chair.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  For a while neither of them speaks. Hannah finds herself relaxing into the sunlight, the simplicity of purpose. ‘I’m meeting them at the school, this week,’ she says.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, to talk about the class structures, their curriculum.’

  Her mother says nothing. Her lips are drawn thin across her face.

  Hannah puts down the cloth, turns to her. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Fetch me the painkillers, could you?’ her mother whispers. Her voice is threaded and heavy with the weight of her breath.

  Hannah dumps the saddle unceremoniously, runs in to the larder. The box is there, a bulk one. The chemical ingredients are long and complicated. She presses two from their foil capsules and takes them back outside with a glass of water.

  ‘Thanks,’ her mother says.

  Hannah sits down, pulls the saddle back towards her. The next time she looks around, her mother is asleep.

  It is almost afternoon before her mother wakes again. Tiptoeing around to put out lunch, Hannah glances at her every now and again from the kitchen window. She is still and stiff in the folding chair. The saddle is clean and glows a deep brown beside her. The sunshine is good for the leather, helps the oil to soak in. And besides, she wants her mother to see it when she wakes.

  Lunch is ready when her mother does come in. She simply appears in the doorway, bent and bleary-eyed.

  ‘Cold meats again alright?’

  Her mother nods, and after a moment adds: ‘Sorry. These drugs . . .’

  ‘The kettle’s just boiled if you want a cup,’ Hannah says in response.

  Her mother shakes her head and lowers herself to sit at the table, resting her hands against its edge. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Water is fine.’

  Hannah stares at her mom
entarily, and then realises, turns back to the sink and fills a jug, trying not to mind. Things will have changed, she tells herself. Even tea. At the table, she resists staring again as her mother’s hands fumble with the cutlery.

  She goes out after lunch. Her mother insists on doing the dishes, so Hannah walks out into the clear afternoon and down the paddock to find the black horse. Lizards flee in front of her, tiny dry rustlings in the leaf litter and grass. A cockatoo playing sentinel eyes her from a giant gum at the head of the copse, screeching raucously in warning to the mate who is feeding in the tree behind. After the silence of the house, the abundance of life is almost overwhelming. She is smiling by the time she reaches the gate to the bottom paddock. It leans wide open, its head hung at a guilty angle and crooked on its hinge. Beyond, the two horses stand hidden in the shade of an ancient pine, tails swishing occasionally against the flies. Hannah walks towards them and they prick their ears. When she reaches them, they search her hopefully for the treats they know will be there. She slips a headstall over the black horse’s nose and buckles it loosely behind his ears. They both follow her up, Ghost a length behind. The black horse walks so his nose is just touching her back pocket.

  Her mother stands out on the back veranda to wave her off. Ghost calls from the yard she has left him in, almost comic in betrayal. She can see her mother smiling as she closes the gate. She looks back one more time as she reaches the road at the top of their drive. Her mother is still there but bent almost double in pain, one hand braced against the back of her chair. Hannah stops, and the black horse throws his head up at the suddenness of her hand on the reins. Silently, she watches as her mother unfolds herself, breathes and turns inside. The black horse, impatient, resumes walking and Hannah simply lets him. Ghost calls again. Hannah swallows and pushes the black horse into a trot, looks towards the shade of the forest and goes.