Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  A week later I went down to the farm with my mother to give Cliff a hand with farm jobs, while she helped Evie and Samantha to sort through Sonia’s clothes and personal belongings. Without Aunt Sonia the house was like a clock with the spring broken. All at once the place seemed smaller and shabbier, transformed no longer by her energy and warmth. Evie was temporarily in her own room again, and the glimpses of it while passing strengthened the disconcerting mix of feelings I had on my return: gratitude for the acceptance and support I’d received, but also the stirrings of an agony which had been caused elsewhere, but suffered largely there.

  Cliff said I could sleep in the little side room, which had filled up over the years with household items no longer needed, but too good to be thrown out. But I took blankets onto the side porch, and slept on the bed wire propped up on beer crates which each year was used to dry the walnuts. The nights were warm and I slept okay there, despite the foraging noises of hedgehogs and of possums, the sudden lighthouse beams of the moon among the passing clouds, and flashes of memory that came as dreams.

  Maybe clearing away the personal remnants of someone’s life is even sadder than the farewell of the body. My uncle found it impossible to face so the three women combined their fortitude to tackle it. The clothes and shoes with fragrance and signs of wear, and nothing to enclose; the jewellery, trinkets, and mementos of travel; cards and photos which have gained an inexpressible sadness. And those inexplicable possessions of esoteric significance to people we thought we knew. The closest, dearest litter of a person’s life open for selection. My mother accepted a silver bracelet, wept over it briefly, then was a comfort to others again. She found a diary Sonia had kept of her time in Sydney on the scholarship, and some letters from an older, married man. ‘It all ended most unfortunately,’ my mother said. ‘A very painful period in her life, I’d say.’ She and my cousins had known nothing of Sonia’s brief musical career, and I realised too late that I’d been privileged to have her talk of it.

  My mother and Evie and Samantha decided not to say anything of it to Cliff, not to show him the diary, or the letters. It didn’t matter how much, or how little, he knew, it was better left in the past. It was a buried life, as Sonia herself had suggested to me that evening on the veranda when Cliff was replacing Evie’s weatherboards in Petone. It was one of those dead-end roads from which you have to retrace your steps, and find another way, though the journey remains with you always. So memory works on association, not logic. ‘The music became part of the pain,’ my mother said.

  But Sonia had kept the diary, the letters, the scholarship scroll — hidden evidence of the buried life. And she would have had her memories too, which would come unbidden as a visitation to shake her in later life, just as I had my own. Things seep into each other. Back in the farmhouse after Sonia’s death I felt her loss, but also the presence of my disturbed, earlier self. While lying on the porch walnut dryer in the warm night, I saw again Richard, Rebecca and myself on another bed that last time.

  It was the Monday dusk of a reluctant spring. We’d talked, laughed, smoked shit and ended up, as so often, in that intimate almost naked huddle which was Rebecca’s massage. Everything that was the world seemed to move and slide with her; everything that I wanted was there. ‘You guys are terrible,’ she said, and she arched her back slightly so that her breasts rose further, and she smiled at the ceiling. ‘You’re always after it, aren’t you?’

  Richard laughed and put his arms firmly around me, and I felt an intense anger that he was there, that he was touching me, that he was any part of what Rebecca and I did. It was anger and confusion I could no longer repress. ‘Will you just fuck off,’ I said and pushed at his face with the flat of my hand. He said something; I don’t remember what. I do remember Rebecca sitting up abruptly, so that her breasts formed contours of new allure.

  ‘You’re always mad keen to be fucking me, but not so keen to be fucked yourself,’ she said. ‘Ever thought about that? You piss off. You’re the one to piss off, right now.’

  ‘Yeah, get the fuck out of it. We’ve had a gutsful of you,’ said Richard.

  His voice was suddenly intense, and I picked up my clothes awkwardly while they watched shoulder to shoulder, and I left that room for the last time. As I went through the shabby kitchen, I heard them start talking to each other, quietly, intimately, as if I had never been there. I was shaking so much I had trouble breathing, and I was rendered excessively clumsy and skinned my big toe on a door frame. It came to me that all along there had been no chance of it being just Rebecca and me.

  Even after just the four days that I was on the farm after Aunt Sonia’s death, I could tell how Cliff was going to live thereafter. He didn’t spend more time inside the house than he had to, for it reminded him of a family now all departed, and a life quite changed. He talked briefly of his future on the morning my mother and I were leaving. He and I stood in the sun by the sheds, and in a breeze which had the ends of the branches nodding. ‘Work’s the best thing, I reckon,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I’ve still got the farm. You never know — one of the girls might marry a farmer yet,’ and he lit one of his roll-your-owns, which flamed briefly. He knew the chances of that were pretty slim, but he didn’t have any hang-up about keeping the property in the family. It would see him out and that was all that mattered. Those quiet, dry hills, the stock he managed, the store of water Caspar Waldren had promised him waiting beneath his land. And when his life was finished there, another, final, dispersal would take place, sweeping away the evidence of Sonia, Evie, Samantha and of himself, except for the physical imprint he made on the land, and except for the different recollections of those who knew him.

  The smell of tobacco and peppermints, or prime West Coast shit; the folded North Otago hills, or the narrow North East Valley of Dunedin; Sonia’s laughter through the farmhouse, or Rebecca’s knowing smile and the flash of the whites of her eyes; the texture of freshly shucked walnut shells, or cold, crumbed lino beneath my feet. All an uneasy mix in which I catch, just rarely now, a glimpse of a former and fugitive self.

  Facing Jack Palance

  After an ordinary day of selling bathroom fittings, you have a dream in which you must stand against Jack Palance. It wells up through the subconscious, perhaps as a psychic relic of all those matinée films seen in childhood, but its experience now is sober and adult; its issues fundamental and inescapable.

  You know without specific recollection that you haven’t long been in this small, dusty town, that behind you stretch lonely saddle days in gulches, or high plains drifting, and nights level pegging with a coyote moon. Your lips are chapped, your eyes narrowed to the sun and the horizon, but you walk with the slow ease of a tall, lean man.

  The heat rises from the dusty main street, and also presses down from a burnished, implacable sky. So high is the sun that shadows don’t lean out from their origins, but crouch close in. Jack Palance is in black, so he and his shadow are as one.

  As you walk towards each other, all else seems to draw back to form a dramatic amphitheatre. Townspeople scuttle into doorways and down alleys, the women overawed and tremulous in the face of decisive action beyond the comprehension of their gender, the men furtive, craven, as they slip away. There is the piping, emasculated voice of the fat sheriff as he finds his false duty elsewhere, but no one is listening. The most beautiful of the women bites her lip, and her eyes widen beneath her bonnet.

  Black Jack Palance gives a bitter smile, and teeth glint in his wolfish jaw. ‘Well lookee here, now,’ he says softly. His hands butterfly over the ivory handles of his six shooters which are in sloping holsters for speed of draw, and the belt buckle of Mexican silver glints in the harsh, western sun. Many a man has fallen to the guns of Jack Palance, but you don’t let that deter you from what must be done. You remember the advice you had from old Wyatt during a poker night at the Lazy Z, about one gun being enough for any man, and usually one bullet too.

  Past the old corral you walk, and the Si
lver Dollar Saloon with the batwing doors quivering from the mass of cowering people within, who know they see the Titans clash, and will afterwards silence conversations to say — I was there, I was there that day. But the only person you care about is Jack Palance, and you walk real easy with the balance on the balls of your feet, and your gun hand real easy at your side, and you think of the brother and friend you no longer have because of Jack Palance in El Paso, and the lover lost because of Jack Palance in Wichita, and all those sturdy Johnny Reb homesteaders and ranchers’ daughters in check shirts, who look to you for justice. And your voice is an even drawl when you say, ‘Howdee, Jack. I’ve been hoping we’d catch up maybe.’

  The two of you hold up walking, and stand in the dusty main street beneath the witness of that pitiless sun. Jack Palance, who knows about these things, has you set against the wall of the bank, while his backdrop is the more difficult shimmer of the side street where the barber and coffin maker has a shop. But you don’t care about that. There’s a faint smell of whisky and saddle leather in the air, and an even fainter one of juniper berries.

  ‘Are you pushing me?’ Jack Palance says, and he gives his executioner’s chuckle, like the sound of a small scree slide on the mesa’s edge.

  ‘I’m pushing, Jack. Why don’t you make something of it?’ You know your face is saturnine, inscrutable, with a faint, fleeting Mitty smile. All your life has been leading to this point and destiny is writ large in this small town.

  There’s a long history between the two of you, of course, and although there’s no fear in the eyes of Jack Palance, there is acknowledgement that perhaps you are the one: the one sent on this blistering, wind whispering western afternoon to deliver the gift of death. Jack Palance has so often been that emissary, but today for the first time he considers another conclusion. As you face each other there is a sense that despite all that lies as difference between you, there is also an equality in courage and resolve. You and he share something which the ruck of men don’t know, but in black Jack Palance it’s been traduced and selfishly used.

  ‘Make your play, Jack,’ you say evenly, and the only sound is the wind blowing in from the sage brush and tumbleweed country, or is it the indrawn breath of all those invisible watchers, and behind that a faint cosmic music like guitars at the end of a sad, cowboy song. That’s how it is all right, and you have a feeling at the inner core of yourself of something both calm and exultant, the serene knowledge that this is the time to do what you have to do, and this is the end of the line for one, or both, of you, clean-cut destiny played out for all to see. Good and evil under the noonday sun. And Jack Palance makes his play with defiance and malice in his dark eyes. His hands are sinuous and devilish quick to the ivory butts of his Colts. Your own gun comes up as naturally and smoothly as a deer’s head from a mountain pool.

  The sound of those guns blows you right out of your dream, and you sit up abruptly, waking your wife. Almost at once that clean, manly and magnificent resolve begins to fade, though you explain all to her eagerly in an attempt to hold it. ‘Weird,’ she says agreeably, but then she never was one to wear a bonnet.

  She needs your help today, she says, to move the ‘Peace’ rose from one side of the garden to the other. And you just give your faint, inscrutable, ironic, sardonic, fleeting smile, knowing that although logic and incident in dreams may be bizarre, the emotion is always true. ‘I think we can manage that, pilgrim,’ you tell her.

  Family Circle

  Naylor had known since he was five years old that he was adopted. The only mother he knew told him, in the presence of the only father he knew, and because he loved them both it didn’t bother him. As far as he could recall, no one during his childhood had accused him of being a bastard on any other grounds than personality, and being adopted was an okay thing. He’d known several kids who were adopted and it was no big deal.

  Although older than most, his mother and father seemed much the same as other parents; better than many too. He’d invited mates home feeling quite easy about his position there and his friends’ reception. Naylor and his parents ignored his adoption. The three of them were happy with the family the way it was. Naylor didn’t spend time in adolescence looking at himself in the mirror and wondering about his genetic inheritance, or whether he was related to someone famous.

  He knew he was loved, but even that he thought little about. He just got on with the selfish and absorbing business of growing up — and he was good at it. He did well physically and intellectually. He worked quite hard and got prizes, but not so hard that he isolated himself from his fellows, or aroused animosity. His parents gave support and encouragement without promoting an exaggerated view of him as special. Both of them were achievers, and so achievement was accepted, even expected in a non-demanding way. Opportunity, application, achievement was the natural sequence.

  When the crisis came, adoption wasn’t the cause, or at the centre of it. His parents, Helen and Greg, became seriously ill together, as they had done most things together and seriously, although their afflictions were different. Helen was diagnosed with leukaemia, and Greg with systemic heart disease two months later.

  Naylor received the news of the outcome of his mother’s tests while he was at Bristol University doing the postgraduate one-year MSc course in management. ‘Your mother’s got leukaemia, I’m afraid. We’ve just come back from the clinic,’ said his father, emotion and constraint at odds in his voice. The window of Naylor’s second-storey flat faced Wales, he was told, but all he could see was the high façade of a shoe shop with giant advertisements. He watched the colours leach out, the poster expressions become more fatuous as he talked with his father. ‘No, we think you should see the year out, Naylor. It’s the sensible thing. But your mother looks forward enormously to your return, you know that.’ In blatant refutation of Naylor’s sense of the world, the early promise of sunlight was on the city.

  It was dark, however, and slanting rain glinted multi-tinted in the shifting light of the shoe shop neons, when his mother rang two months later. Naylor stood at the same window to receive the second blow. It occurred to him that was the typical way of it — his father ringing to pass on the bad news about his mother, and then she in turn being emissary for Greg. Both undoubted concern and a desire for control were evident in that perhaps. Was it easier to question an intermediary rather than the sick person personally? ‘They think it’s a congenital thing,’ she said. ‘At least that persistent tiredness is explained now. There’s a decision to be made concerning the advisability of surgery. The worrying thing, too, is that he insists on looking after me when he’s not up to it.’

  Nothing truly awful had happened in their lives before, and now two of them faced imminent death, and the third was on the other side of the world in pyjamas, watching sleet machine gun a street slick and gleaming in the night. ‘We want you to stick it out over there and finish the course. Only a few weeks to go really, aren’t there, and it doesn’t make sense to come back so close to completion. Your father’s very keen on you finishing and not worrying too much about us.’ The typical rationality of it took him closer to tears than any discussion of symptoms, or prognosis, for it was so much part of their natures, and he had benefited from it so often. In his final weeks at the university he began to have powerfully disturbing dreams of childhood, and his academic work suffered. His world was breaking up.

  It was not Bristol’s fault, but his year there became almost entirely negative in retrospect: pleasant things were overwhelmed by concern for his father and mother, and guilt for staying on, although that was their wish. The city that he had found unpretentious, yet truly cultural, became just a place of exile, and the university course an unwelcome tie. He took no gifts from England to bring home, and instead bought jade turtles for his parents at Singapore airport on his way back. What he would have liked to unwrap for them was good health, but that was beyond him; beyond him also was an adequate expression of his love and gratitude.

  He m
ade the attempt on his first evening home, when he and his father sat by his mother’s bed, and Helen and Greg told him of the rather precipitate sale they had made of their joint optometry practice, and their hope that his firm wouldn’t shift him away from Wellington now that he was back, so that he could live in their home as he had for so many years. The house had been built by Greg’s father and had a clear view over Evans Bay, where the planes would come flying low on their descent to the airport when the wind was southerly.

  His mother had a special pillow, rather like a massive and inflated bow tie, which both raised and supported her. She was at a stage of her illness which gave her a passing elegance as she thinned. Only too soon that attrition would become monstrous. ‘We’ve decided not to have treatment,’ she said. ‘The specialists say medical intervention wouldn’t gain a great deal of time.’ Naylor’s father had told him all that in considerable detail, but he realised his mother gained some comfort by being able to go over it all now that he was home, with her again. He held her left hand, which throbbed with a surprisingly strong pulse, and was warm and dry to the touch. ‘Your father wants me to be able to stay here as long as possible, and of course I want that, but only if he doesn’t insist on trying to do everything himself and jeopardise his own health. I’m going to have someone to help, in addition to the hospital nurse visits. It’s expensive, of course, that sort of private care.’

  ‘Naylor doesn’t care how much it costs,’ remonstrated his father.

  ‘You must have everything that helps,’ said Naylor. The term medical intervention still lingered in his mind: one of those expressions that doctors proffer, and patients accept for the small comfort of its precision.