Obviously I had walked into the middle of an ongoing controversy over the rituals of grief. 'Their Lord isn't ours. Structures crumble and we've got no more than our own minds and our own kind to build a culture. Don't you find, Margot, the intensity of being among so many who loved, knew, even loathed Maria difficult?'
Not knowing what she was talking about, I made a face.
'What do they know of the vast potentiality of the woman's heart? What do they expect? Spinsters.' She walked off.
When I entered the hall, the atmosphere of suppressed tension was palpable. Heather Bishop singing 'If You Leave Me Can I Come Too' was abruptly stopped mid-phrase, and replaced with a morbid churchy dirge. Tiger Cat had changed the tape. She smugly looked for approval from the elderly couple, brushing her eyes past the Larrikin who, if her expression was to be believed, wanted to strangle her. All-out turf war over the music was prevented by the arrival of the hearse and the chorus of readiness as the casket was wheeled in and left in the centre of the room. I was not really aware of anything anyone else was doing after that. I sat cross-legged on a cushion, my hands resting one on the other, and didn't move, except for tears which had a will of their own. I was stunned by my weeping, overwhelmed by the pure feeling of sorrow. Even if I had wanted to I couldn't have seen people beyond shapes and movement. I was too taken up to be curious. Yet I could not have experienced this meditation without the presence of others, without the focus of the box and the candle flickering behind the fronds of fern or bracken, the trick of Maria being both there and not there. A state of answerlessness had me entranced, suspended in stillness, in total surrender for some time.
Grief at Maria's dying is sincere, both maverick and communal. She is in death even larger than she was in her life, that of a significant Australian radical lesbian in a milieu of her peers sharing a wave, making a wave, on the tides of time passing. The coffin arrives in the hearse at two o'clock, rolled out by the pall-bearers to rest in the hall for an hour. The suitably grave guys open it and leave. Lying in a silky shroud, the body is a human-sized earth mother, a supine shape of the Venus of Willendorf, crafted twenty-five millennia ago. Her face is exposed, serene and round. Along with the draped trestle table holding her valuables, vases of flowers, vessels of drink and wreaths, the hall is decorated with photographs stuck to the rough wood of unplastered walls. The pictures pan a biography begun before the Second World War and finished in the new century. From tiny white-trimmed brownish snaps of a babe in arms to those showing the unrecognisable girl in school uniform, through teenage moments in sporty tunics with family pets, professional shots of a debutante at a ball at an outback barn, the staged portfolio of her marriage in wedding regalia as artificial as can be, as a young mother in feminine curves of 'fifties styles in spotty dresses, then with daggy long hair and drippy skirts of her hippie stage, to the loose clothes in expression of freedom from brassieres and other restrictions. The majority are many interestingly angles of Maria as a women's libber, recognition of her protest, well-framed moments of pride in poses of power, accompanied by dozens of coloured rectangles depicting her in the bush, on the beach, overseas, at parties, in the desert, then documenting her increasing weight and widening friendship over the years, her gentle ageing caught by the haphazard presence of someone's camera.
Maria's mourners lament. The assemblage of many women who have shared so much hosts such a well of emotions it is as if a raging river is dammed for a moment. Members of her realm acknowledge her lifelessness with votive offerings, invocation and keening, with tears and dry eyes, with pause and reflection, with thought, feeling and emptiness, withal an appreciation of absence. Egos seeking meaning for themselves feel dwarfed by the magnitude of loss yet exhilarated by the importance of living. The reality of her corpse enhances psychic impressions of her spirit hovering, hearing, freefalling between worlds. Flying.
Maria's body is taken to the Crematorium, a low brick veneer building hidden in the newer suburbs of Port Water. The shiny surfaces and careful decorum of the chapel contrast with the anarchic lamentation out at Pearceville. Not all go to the ceremony. The hearse, a large powerful vehicle, once on the highway, disappears ahead of the gurls' cars. Some are lost in similar streets while Maria's corpse is turned to ashes. A few give homage, read messages, recall her life and say what she meant to them personally or go to the pulpit to weep uncontrollably. An a cappella group sings. White ladies officiate and usher. A psalm is read. Mrs Freeman talks about the difficulty of her child's birth in the hard years of the Depression. Finally, Maria's own voice on scratchy tape sings the congregation out within the allotted half-hour. Margot takes Chandra to the Crematorium in her Suzuki. They are silent returning to the wake. Sofia is not among the mourners at the cemetery. Nor has Sofia got herself entangled in the maze of parallel and dead-end streets. She is escaping from her grandparents, not far from the Mechanics Institute in Pearceville.
Because no one else was talking to them, after the ceremony, I went up to Maria's parents and introduced myself and offered my condolences. They had not seen much of Maria for forty years. They hardly knew Sofia. It was one of the biggest regrets of Mrs Freeman's life that she did not know her granddaughter.
'So what happened?' I asked.
The old man grumbled angrily, trying to dismiss me. I waited in their personal space until the woman decided to talk.
'It was a beautiful Christian wedding, and he was a good boy. We didn't, we couldn't, believe Maria when she told us, well, me really, that he battered her during the honeymoon. But it was true. She wouldn't listen to me when I said that was how men were. It is a wife's job to control her husband and that when she had children, it would all settle down. She left him before the baby was born. We knew it would come to no good. She had no money, but she would have nothing to do with us. Even when I begged her to give Sofia to me, if she couldn't manage, she refused. But she let her go with strangers! Oh, I find it very hard to forgive. God has given us grandchildren to love. Maria denied us that.'
'How?' I demanded of this soft, round old lady, who was as hard and sharp as nails. She, possibly, could control a husband, or be blinded to his faults.
'She gave her mother hell. Hell! She doesn't know the pain she caused,' he responded, from behind her shoulder, ungraciously.
'Calm down, dear. Maria is at peace now, in the arms of the Lord,' Mrs Freeman said piously, incidentally putting him in his place. He fiddled impatiently. She described the den of iniquity and squalor she found Maria living in with a babe in arms and laid down the law. Either she took the child or she gave her up for adoption. Eventually Maria took the latter course. Sofia from the age of one to some time in her teens was with a wealthy diplomatic family, she thought. I could see she didn't really know, but was firm in her righteousness in getting Maria's baby away from her. 'If she felt guilty then that was God's punishment.'
The milling lesbians among the roses and the metal plates on brick walls of the ashes of humans or standing in groups on the asphalt carpark were invisible to her, their solemnity, their sorrow, their love of Maria Freewoman completely ignored. Not by me. I saw how many there were, how big this funeral was.
'Well, Mrs Freeman,' I said, 'it's a pity you didn't know what a wonderfully kind and intelligent person Maria was, what a devoted mother and genial friend. She will be missed.' The predominance of their Lord was the tar and cement and regimented graves, not spiritual love. Not here, not today anyway.
Sofia journeys among ghosts in a world of her own making, neither truly historical nor intrinsically mystical. She mutters, exploring the derelict buildings to reconvene with the people who once lived there.
Although she accepts that she killed Maria, by wishing her dead, baking a cake, being born or having a pet, that is not the point. She must get one of these deceased hags to read her cards. The future dances like flame-shadows, looming agents of her destruction, but that is nothing new. Dear old women in the crinoline in cobwebbed corners with sneaky looks in th
eir eyes know more than they have ever told, but Sofia is convinced they will tell her. She clears a three-legged table, yes yes, they would like it wiped. She spits and rubs it with the material on her elbow, with house-proud intention. The power of thought; it is the thought that counts. She rolls a forgotten stump from outside to sit at the table. She is ready for the seance. The dead are beautiful. 'You are beautifully dead now, Maria, in the congress of expired Amazons.' Sofia is reverent. 'The goddess whose image you aped, who lived a quarter of a million years ago plainly did not have to till the fields or walk about collecting water or gathering berries or digging roots from the ground. Queen of Willendorf sat still long enough for someone to knock out a sculpture of her. If there was one chubby duchess, there must have been many. Power women who were fed when hungry, probably didn't even lift up a fork, used their fingers.' Ladies in crinoline do not come to her table. Sofia realises she has dressed them all wrong. These bushwomen are insulted by her BBC drama costume for them. Sofia bows in frenetic apology and explains, 'I know you are hard-working, hard-talking millers' wives. Your knuckles are red, your skin blotchy, the cloth of your clothing raw cotton or something and you have not even got the time to wipe yourself properly.' She resketches a past in her mind and makes it a present and immediately the educated tenet of her tone changes. She and they engage in foul language and home truths for a while. She knows these women understand mercy killing. They have chicken, snake, heifer, baby blood on their hands. Sofia inspects their palms, 'Is any of this husband blood?' she inquires. Wouldn't she like to know! They are too cunning to be caught then, or now. 'Is any of it' Sofia hesitates, 'mother-blood?' she asks. Her companions are horrified, they resound echoing, disappearing, 'No. Our mothers were our only friends.' 'Come back,' cries Sofia, 'don't go. I understand you lived and died in this backwater, and all your lives were full of travail, it doesn't make you ignorant, does it?' But, they are gone.
Sofia climbs the antiquated chimney to make a spectacle of herself against the western sun. She cooees into the air, but the sound does not carry. The defunct timber mill absorbs her words. The silver wood creaks underneath her, moves. There is danger. Sofia balances with two feet on the loose timber. Cars return from the crematorium. The wake is under way. She pursues the adventure of regaining the ground.
Virginia sees Sofia playing like a child on the unstable scaffold surrounded by a nimbus of madness. She does not panic. Untamed kittens slink in and out of discarded piles of stuff and rusted bits of machinery.
Heavy vibes in the night when Mars squared her Pluto conjunct Uranus, too much electricity, lightning, thunder, then a clear day, Alison paces a patch of shade as if trapped in a cage like a Sumatran tiger in a carriage on a circus train. The pupils and irises of her eyes roll out of her face leaving the whites to witness life around her while she wanders the universe of her brain, a solitary prisoner in a cell. Cybil, in contrast, resides in her curiosity, outside herself, at the centre of things, crying appropriately, constantly watching.
The sun sets, the new moon waxes in the west. By evening the embers are glowing inner potency and the campfire is surrounded by figures, moving shadows, coming, going and staring, murmuring, singing, calling. Gurls who are used to pushing back their feelings with recreational drugs are not without supplies. Fewer indulge. Although stoned, they keep the food up. They clean the hired dishes, cups and glasses. Rory resolves not to touch a drop of alcohol. She joins the teetotallers who have a pot of tea stewing. Everyone wants to be there for Sofia, but no one can find her. Libby Gnash is the one who is looking systematically. Unsuccessful alone, she organises gangs to find her. By the time Libby returns from her section of the search, Virginia has brought Sofia to the fireside.
Jill David's brown eyes are almost black with intensity. Milt and the Larrikin come back with several slabs of beer. Wilma Woods bots a bud from each city white woman she can find rolling joints. Em wraps her arms round her daughter, Serena, while Cassie and Venus play with Tilly. Maria has left behind her plenty of stories and the tone of these is her generosity and love of life, her tolerance and joy in others' happiness. Women who haven't spoken in ages choose each other to talk to.
Rory sitting beside Chandra says, 'I simply wonder what to do. Being a Solanasite, it's like being a revolutionary in fascist Spain. I like the idea, but when it means giving up the security of my existence, when it threatens to put me on the wrong side of the law, I get a bit edgy.' But Chandra directs questions at each woman who happens to come close enough: does she know the Web, if so, has she visited her website, okay then, what handle does she use?
Rory continues quietly. 'The thing that makes Valerie different from Christ is that she practised what she preached, or at least tried to.'
Jill David comments, 'She wasn't an assassin with kill skills.' She hands Rory a bourbon and Coke. They laugh as she imbibes.
'Christ couldn't practise anything, except throw a few miracles around which proved he was the son of god. I guess he died for the idea of himself.' Rory unfolds her rolling tobacco.
'They crucified him because he had all these people following him already, trooping around listening to his every word and writing it down because, indeed, it became the gospel,' Fiona jokes.
'Andy Warhol of two thousand years ago, sexually ambiguous and famous,' Rory throws out her hands, and grins.
Yvonne contributes, 'He was a leader of a revolutionary movement. How many people have died in his name? I would have thought Valerie was more your John the Baptist.'
'You can't make lesbians follow, they won't. I want to build things, not destroy them. Structure without leaders, as such,' Chandra is serious.
'You're a power freak, Wheels, get real,' Margaret Hall says sarcastically, materialising from the shadows.
Rory confesses, 'I know The Manifesto, our bible, by heart, and at times, in the middle of the night, when I can't sleep, the sheer splendour of her intellect keeps me awake,' Rory chants. 'Harmful types are: rapists, politicians and all who are in their service; lousy singers and musicians; Chairmen of Boards; breadwinners; landlords; owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play muzak; "Great Artists"; cheap pikers and lechers; cops; tycoons; scientists working on death and destruction programs or for private industry; liars and phonies; disc jockeys; men who intrude themselves in the slightest way on any female; real estate men; stockbrokers; men who speak when they have nothing to say; men who sit idly on the street and mar the landscape with their presence; double dealers; flim-flam artists; litterbugs; plagiarists; men who in the slightest way harm any female; all men in the advertising industry; psychiatrists and clinical psychologists; dishonest writers, journalists, editors, publishers, etc.; all members of the armed forces, including draftees and particularly pilots.' The effect is to make gurls around her raise their voices, all know Rory can be a bore.
'Particularly pilots. What we forget is Valerie had a great sense of humour,' Rory says, finally dropping her favourite subject.
Meghan wanders from the tight band around Judith's soft acoustic guitar to stand by the big fire. The dynamic of the group gets a bolt of electric antagonism as she and Chandra exchange a loaded glance. Rory asks her politely where she is staying.
'Have to leave first plane in the morning. So Jill and I are staying at a motel tonight.'
The new energy attracts other individuals and expels some. Virginia heads to the hall to find a drink. Cybil passes her going the other way.
Tiger Cat calls to the music group, 'Stop being so selfish. Let's have a sing-along?'
Margot opens a bottle of red wine. Virginia and she sit on the step and together toast Maria. Hope stops for a minute. VeeDub introduces her to Margot, who hears the New Zealand accent and recalls the birth certificate at the dairy.
When we went back to the Pearceville Hall, I pulled in beside the red Saab. I recalled the Larrikin saying I would be surprised at who deals hard drugs in Port Water and the impression I had that it was some respectable member of the cr
owd. Chandra and I were not in the mood to give each other our deepest thoughts. She wanted to get away from me for some reason. Camps had been set up by those who'd travelled far to stay overnight: a couple of little two-person tents; a larger tarp; a camper van. The hall glittered with candle-light. Women took each other to look at the photographs together to find themselves and remember what might have been forgotten. The tape was playing the Coors' 'Forgiven Not Forgotten'.
Rosemary Turner and Lola Pointless were there. I overheard them commenting that the relationship between Maria and Sofia was abusive because of the age difference. I informed them they were mother and daughter, and Rosemary shrugged, 'Whatever.' Lola glared at me.
I shared my bottle of wine with Virginia, who appreciated the vintage. She was sad. Maria was a good friend, a long-time friend. I said it was okay for her to get drunk at a wake. Others were intent on the same result. I grilled her about past times on Lesbianlands, about Trivia, about rubies, and when Maria was there. It was a very long story about emotional entanglements ten years ago, a Dickensian list of characters and plots within plots.
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