The Salt Madonna

by Catherine Noske

*

  All evening, Father John reads the Gospels, Luke and Matthew. When he finally leaves it and sleeps, he dreams of the girl again, lying flat on her bed. He wakes, and he can feel his wife beside him, her body alongside his, the softness of her skin. He knows that it is true. She is there; this time she is real. He doesn’t open his eyes, but holds on to the image of the girl, imagines his wife waking, turning her face towards him. Except that she isn’t turning towards him but towards a soft light coming from above. She does not speak or move. A dove appears to hang over her, its wings spread with the benevolence of His love. The brilliance of it in his mind makes the world seem dark. He had forgotten it, forsaken it, that love. There is hope, there is light. His wife’s body is beside him.

  When he wakes in the morning, something again is alive in him, pushing him, even more than before. The revelation of the night sits deep in his chest as a continued energy, a burning heat-source. There is a righteousness to it, and a familiarity. It feels like a culmination, a point of natural climax. He realises that he has been coming to this for some time. As the day rises, he hardly notices that his wife has disappeared again. He goes straight to the Burnetts’ house, his Bible under his arm. On the way, Ellen’s husband passes him in his truck; he can see the man staring at him slit-eyed through the windscreen, but he doesn’t care. He knocks at the door and has to wait for the woman to drag herself downstairs. It is early, still, he realises. Without a word, he makes his way straight upstairs to the girl, pushes through her bedroom door. She wakes with a jolt, her body recoiling under the sheet as though to protect herself, eyes wide as she stares at him. She opens her mouth to speak, and he steps forward, leans in, but in his eagerness he misses it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘what did you say?’

  His voice is overloud in the close, dim room. She seems loose around the edges of her body, her limbs almost blurred. He leans towards her, waiting, but nothing comes. The girl shudders; her face solidifies into glass.

  ‘Never mind,’ he says, quieter this time. ‘It’s okay. I know, now. We’ll help you.’

  Never mind, never mind. He leaves her and goes back downstairs to the mother. In the kitchen, he finds his wife is somehow again present. She is more real than she has ever been before. She moves to him, rests one hand on the back of his neck and squeezes gently. Her face is solemn. The light outside begins to open, frail through the window. It is going to be a beautiful day. He looks up at his wife a moment before drawing his Bible to the table. Her name is still there, yellowing on the flyleaf. The frontispiece shows a dove and a rainbow which has faded into a mild array of blues and pinks. He touches it gently with one finger. His wife withdraws her hand from his neck and moves back to stand in the corner. Ellen Burnett sits down opposite him, frowning with confusion. Her lips are moving; she is praying again. He looks at her and lifts the Bible, opens it at random. The delicate paper settles at Ecclesiastes, and he lets his eyes catch on the first passage he sees.

  ‘Who is like a wise man?’ he reads. ‘And who knows the interpretation of a thing? A man’s wisdom makes his face shine. And the sternness of his face is changed.’

  The woman stares blankly at him, trusting but confused. He knows the verse, he has read it often. But suddenly, there with the morning light and the glow of his wife’s presence, it means something new. A chance. Change. He turns the pages to Luke and reads once again the words of the Angel Gabriel.

  ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God. For with God, nothing will be impossible.’

  He pauses.

  ‘Father?’ Ellen asks. She is unsure, but smiling at him. And remembering his dream, the girl turned towards the light, he nods, he smiles back. The way is clear. There is praise in this, there is salvation for them all. He looks across at the woman and the hope in her face blossoms into joy, eagerness. He imagines the girl, simple in a white dress, standing before the congregation. The beauty of her young body swollen with child. He wants to laugh.

  ‘We need to be ready,’ he says.

  The woman is leaning towards him, her mouth open. The light of the day is beautiful and precious around him.

  WHEN A RIVER IS blocked, fertiliser washing in from upstream can pool at the closed point of the mouth. Stagnant, the temperature of the water rises. Instead of washing away, the fertiliser increases the level of nutrients in the water, feeds the weed, and the rise in temperature supports its growth. The weed starts to grow algae, which rises to the surface of the pool. This blocks the water from the air, so that the layer of well-oxygenised fresh water, natural on the surface of every river, is depleted. The layer of brackish, under-oxygenised water rises. Fish start to die at the mouth, or move further upstream. The dead bodies break down, add more to the nutrients in the water. It starts to smell.

  When a river mouth is opened artificially – to relieve flood or because of the smell, this pestilence – it is only the top layer of the water that is released. A trench cut at the mouth never echoes the general depth of the river. From the bank, you see the river wash out, pulling the algae with it. It looks clean. There is a current again, temporarily, and the water clears. But it is only ever the top, oxygenated layer that flows out to sea. Bad water rises upstream. The amount of oxygen in the river as a whole is again depleted. More than just a handful of fish at the mouth, now thousands of fish all along the river start to die from the lack of oxygen. This is a fish kill. Whole populations, whole species can be wiped out.

  IX

  May 1992

  Ascension Day, 28 May

  WRITING THIS, IT OCCURS to me that everything might have been different were it not for the parade. The image of Mary raised above us – it was all people could see, later. Falling into belief was a natural progression. At one point, much later on, I saw a knot of women all sobbing in each other’s arms, one word shared between them: mercy, mercy, passing from mouth to mouth like an illness. That came from the parade, the possibility of her, someone to answer. Mary, conduit to grace. When they raised her up, everything else was offered to our imagination. I saw it, even then: the way they clustered together to follow her up the hill, the way they moved as one. I noticed; I was just too caught up in nostalgia to see it as something new and different, the beginnings of effect. Faith has preconditions in need and hopefulness. It doesn’t require actual hope, just the willingness for it, and the need for change. We all of us had need.

  My need was selfish. I know that, in hindsight. My need was to feel loved, feel accepted, feel myself belong to something and someone again. I had nothing else. It isn’t an excuse, but I wasn’t coming from a good place when I went home to Chesil. I was lonely, unhappy, I was isolated. I was leaving a bad position at a challenging school. I think Sophie was trying to save me, or trying to give me a purpose. And I think she knew how much I needed to reconcile. In hindsight, my need was infantile. There were other needs around me, to which I was blind: people who lacked opportunity, or independence, or safety. And Mary. I saw her, of course. I thought that I was trying. But I didn’t really see her need. I didn’t try to imagine what it might mean. It was wilful blindness. I was a child, there.

  I have looked for statistics, since then. In the most recent report, two hundred and eighty-four girls aged fifteen or under were recorded as pregnant by hospitals in our state across the year. Forty-six of those were in our area. The Department was proud of this figure. The numbers had declined by roughly thirty-five per cent in the ten years they had been recording.

  Do you understand? I saw her, but I didn’t really see what had happened. I saw her as one of those forty-six.

  I have started dreaming, writing this. Living on an island is always a form of dreaming. People walking the line between water and land, making sure it hasn’t moved. We had to hold Chesil together with our minds or it would dissolve entirely. Because you can ignore the land, where
there is a vast expanse of it. On the mainland, I can sometimes forget it entirely. But on an island, you have to be aware of it. The sea is constantly hungry, constantly eating away. Looking at the sea from the shore of an island is like looking at the inevitability of time.

  I have been dreaming of the chestnut, a horse that went missing. He belonged to my uncle Mulvey. It is the one time in my childhood that I remember my mother talking to him. It had been raining for days, and we searched in the forest, our own horses cold and wet, unhappy. The low land around the village flooded, the river split its banks, the water the colour of iron. My dream always starts with the water and with waiting. In real life, I was the one who found him. We broke up into groups and rode out – my mother and Darcy, Sophie and me, my uncle and some of his men. I spotted the horse from the top of our favourite hill. We had galloped up, and when I turned to look back there he was below us, a strange lump, bright and wet down in the bottom of the gully. He was sprawled like a dancer, his legs tossed to one side.

  But it doesn’t happen like this when I dream it. None of it happens. The dream stops with us waiting at the corner for Mulvey, my mother looking down and watching the rain eat away at the limestone beneath her horse’s hooves. In my dream, the rain slowly rises, like a tide, like the sea, until we are all drowning and bobbing in the water. The island has disappeared beneath us, and the chestnut’s body comes sailing towards me like a ship.

  THOMAS WALKS TO THE lookout. It is rumour, dirty rumours, but he knows it is true. Mary has disappeared. She has stopped coming to school. He waited for her the first few days, standing by her gate. But she didn’t come. She doesn’t come. And the women in the village have been talking about it: Mary is pregnant. Sarah at the store told his mother. She was excited, she was laughing. She said it like it was a joke.

  He finds himself at the lookout without really knowing how he got there. It is clear, but cool. The sun is high and white in the sky. The few clouds lacing their way across the endless blue are reflected as dark smears on the water. He is alone. He can see people in the village below, their movements random and meaningless. He has never been up here alone before. The gravel is dry, it crunches under his feet. He swats a fly from his face. Hi t-shirt sticks, damp across his lower back. He props himself against the granite block with the plaque at the point of the bluff. In memory of John Granville Mulvey Esq., pioneer of Chesil, and all the brave men who explored this coast. They only come up here on Australia Day. The stone is sun-warmed, the grass so long around him that he is almost hidden from view. An empty Coke bottle rattles towards him, the breeze tugging and dragging it through the dust. It must be true. It can’t be true.

  A blade of grass tickles at his neck and his hand snaps back to pull it out from its sheath. He winds it around his finger, pale gold and rigid, tighter, tighter until his finger pulses white. There is a heavy rustling beside him and a blue-tongue comes charging out, stopping suddenly when it sees him. It stares at him, beady eyes unblinking. It flicks its tongue out as though laughing, and just as suddenly flips its body around and scuttles back into the grass from where it came. Thomas stares. He breathes in, and stands, and screams, yells into the sky, kicking at the grass and the stone and the Coke bottle, kicking and thrashing at the world. A group of parrots burst startled from a tree. He turns and runs back down the hill.

  He can feel his body pick up as he goes. He can feel the gravity of the hill pulling him on. Head down, and his legs are furious beneath him, his hands clenched in fists and swinging at his sides. There are sounds which he does not recognise as his own. Run. And then he is through the village and down to the harbour, the jetty, and he can see Picnic fishing from the breakwater as though nothing is wrong, as though the world has not changed. He is almost blind by the time he gets there. He swings as soon as he is close enough and it glances off the back of Picnic’s shoulder and Thomas can’t stop himself, he is still running past. Picnic seems to crumple, bends at the knees and then pulls himself back up, pivots around with his fists raised. There is a pause and Thomas turns to face him, and immediately Picnic plants one in his guts. Bent double, Thomas almost smiles. He hurls himself upright again and throws himself back at Picnic, arms flailing. Picnic steps sideways and swings to catch Thomas on the side of his face. And they are connected somehow, now, and Thomas finds his fist in Picnic’s face, and Picnic is hitting back and it is hot and messy and glorious and clean. Thomas swings once more and for a second they both teeter, frozen on the edge, and good, Thomas is thinking, good, fall, break your neck, and it is hard in the front of his mind. And then they both go, and Thomas feels his foot connect with Picnic’s fishing rod, and he feels it go flying with them, down into the water and the rocks. The cold shock of the water only cushions them a moment before they hit. And suddenly Thomas’s body is a mess of pain. Reeling, he pushes away from Picnic, from the rocks, and comes up to the surface yelling. ‘Bastard!’ he is screaming. ‘Fucking bastard!’

  He is still punching, he can’t stop, it is coming up out of him without any control. His arms are heavy in the water. Picnic splashes up beside him and drags him under, holds him with hands on shoulders and head, holds him under until finally he goes limp. He feels the fight draining from him. He feels tired. Picnic releases him and Thomas opens his eyes, and the world is grey-blue, sand rising in clouds around him. He feels himself rise through the water and when he breaks the surface he can see Picnic watching him warily, and from the look on his face Thomas isn’t sure if he is crying or if it is just water running off him.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Picnic says. His lips are curled back in anger, the lower one split and bleeding.

  ‘Mary,’ Thomas says. His voice is saltwater hoarse.

  Picnic’s face twists. ‘So?’

  There is an odd silence. Picnic turns and, slipping and plunging, wades back over the rocks. Thomas follows, and together they haul themselves onto the solidity of the concrete above. They both just lie there. Neither of them speaks. A cloud slips by above them.

  ‘We never fucked,’ Thomas says eventually. ‘It must have been you.’

  Picnic looks away, says nothing.

  ‘You promised me! You said she was into me!’ Thomas stares at him, empty.

  Picnic shivers. ‘Bastard,’ he mutters. ‘You owe me a rod.’ He stands and walks back to his tackle kit, packs it up. Thomas just lies there and watches as Picnic limps back to the village. Everything shrinks. It must be true.

  *

  Hannah stands in the doorway to her classroom. Mary has not returned to school. It has become a ritual, watching for her. It feels almost like penance, watching. She tries to tell herself that it has nothing to do with the scholarship, the form, but she stands there watching as if hoping for a sign that she has been forgiven, or that it wasn’t her fault. The playground is empty. The children are all inside. She fiddles with the door handle. Mrs Culliver has told her the rumour that Mary is pregnant. Hannah remembers her at the parade, finds herself hoping desperately that it is untrue.

  One of the boys darts suddenly across the front yard, running late. She steps aside to let him in. Picnic, with a black eye and a split lip. She gawks but says nothing, makes a mental note to check in with him at the end of the day. He ducks his head, drops his bag by the wall and slouches into his seat. Only Ben is there beside him – Thomas is missing as well. Hannah looks over at the office; Mrs Culliver is standing at the window staring out at her. Hannah sighs, waves and walks into the classroom.

  She calls again, after the day’s teaching has finished. The mother is getting sick of her; she can hear it in the woman’s voice. She hasn’t spoken to the father at all. Hannah makes herself sit at her desk in the office and pick up the phone. Mrs Culliver is swearing over the photocopier. There is no answer, and Hannah wonders if they are starting to ignore the phone. She drags herself through her marking. The hands on the clock plod towards 5 pm. Eventually, she gives in.

  ‘I’m going to stop by the Burnetts’ place,’ she
says.

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What’s the point? They’re not going to talk to you. And it was hardly helpful last time.’

  Hannah blushes. ‘They might talk to me.’

  ‘Let it go. She’s either sick, in which case she has to come back at some point, or she is actually pregnant like everyone’s saying. Nothing’s going to change by you going there, except making it worse with them, and either way, we’ll know for sure soon. My money’s on pregnant.’

  ‘How can you just leave it if you really think she’s pregnant? We need to know. We need to do something.’

  Mrs Culliver sighs with exasperation. ‘Well, fine. Go then. See what good it does. Just make sure you talk with the mother, not the father, like I said last time.’ She turns back to her computer and squints at the screen. ‘It won’t print,’ she says. ‘I can’t get it to bloody print.’

  Hannah picks up her bag. ‘See you tomorrow.’ Still frowning at the monitor, Mrs Culliver doesn’t reply.

  There is a breeze picking up outside. It plays with her hair and pulls at her jumper. The implications of Mrs Culliver’s words begin to niggle at her. The memory of the father rises up like a spectre. At the car, she fumbles for her keys. The idea of stopping grows in her mind. She remembers the mess of sheds outside, the gloom of the lounge room. Mary running. Hannah swallows and turns out of the car park. As she drives, the nerves rise up her back. When she nears the Burnetts’ drive, she slows. But she doesn’t stop. She drives home, telling herself to breathe, trying to ignore the needles of self-loathing that prick in the back of her mind.

  Darcy is coming down the front steps when she pulls into the driveway.

  ‘Hey kiddo,’ he says, leaning against the door of her car. ‘What’ve you two been drinking up here? Your mother’s gone all soppy.’