Autumn Music

by Dulcie M. Stone

  “You’re the one who started this.” Settling Sean and his toy cars at the table, he squashed into one of the narrow benches. “Take your time.”

  Beth dismally re-traipsed after her through the tiny rooms, the chill sitting room, the rusted bathroom and returned to the kitchen complaining, “There’s no lav!”

  “It’s outside.” Rory led the way down worn back steps into an enormous back yard.

  What had once been the lawn was circled by a ring of golden wattles, lazily stirring in the rising evening breeze. Halfway between the back door and the high back fence, a stand of spectacular lemon scented eucalypts guarded a splintered grey shed and a lopsided W.C.

  “It’s awful!” Beth fled indoors.

  Beth was right. It was awful. But it was free from unbearable ghosts, from intolerable pressures, from close neighbours. It was safe.

  “It’ll be beautiful.” She hugged Sean. “It’ll be beautiful.”

  Deciding not to take a break in a wayside motel, they started on the long drive home. Her mind was in overdrive. Rory had opened an unforeseen door. He wanted his own business. He’d cited many logical reasons. He wanted to be entrepreneurial, to be in control, to free himself from the servitude of answering to a boss, to choose when he worked, how hard he worked, holiday breaks. He wanted to please his wife, to nurture his family.

  His motives, both the readily admitted and the deeply buried, had to be mixed. As always there’d be memories of his dead mother, the legacy of the hard men of the high mountains, his confusing dissimilarity from the muscle men he’d grown up with and the ambition to prove himself equally worthy. There’d be his concern for Beth; an impossible mixture of contrary considerations. Beth needed both the freedom from the constant pressure of bigotry and the experience of country living. She also needed a stable education and maintenance of established friendships. Consideration of Beth’s needs alone was confusing.

  There could also be a burden of personal guilt, unhealed scars of the honeymoon night. Could it be that, though the church would have long ago proclaimed forgiveness and imposed penance, he’d not forgiven himself? Could the proposed move be motivated in part, not by ambition or desire to escape the city, but by a need for penance? Had heartache already broken him? Stop thinking…

  One thing was certain. The immediate major problem was going to be Beth. Happily settled into secondary school, she shouldn’t be uprooted. The time was not right. The matter would have to be thoroughly discussed. Though not now, when Beth was sulking in the back seat and Sean was joyfully shooting his unloaded water gun at passing traffic.

  “How are you there in the back seat?” Rory did not divert his attention from the highway’s central white line.

  “How long before we’re home?” Beth whined. “I’m tired.”

  “So go to sleep.”

  “I’m tired, Daddy,” Sean echoed.

  “You go to sleep too.”

  “Maybe we should have stayed overnight,” she suggested. “Do you think we should try to find somewhere?”

  “I want to go home!” Beth cried.

  “It’s at least another two hours.” She peered into the unrelieved blackness ahead. “Maybe we should stop over.”

  “I don’t care! I want to go home!”

  “Go to sleep!” Rory thundered.

  Sean was crying, Beth soothing him.

  “It’s been a long day for them,” she argued.

  “For God’s sake, Tess! Do you want to try to settle him down in a strange room? For the sake of two more hours!”

  He was right, of course.

  “Turn the wireless on, Tess. Find some decent music. That’ll lull him off.”

  Lull him off. Settle him down. Sean, of course. He was bothered about Sean misbehaving. Not Beth. Never Beth. Stop thinking.

  The back seat grew quiet, the motor purring in the clear air, the headlights piercing the moonless night, the wireless softly comforting. She closed her eyes. The awful house offered a new life. Beth would come round. Sean would be safe. Rory would be…

  “Hang on!”

  The car lurched, rocked, left the road.

  “Hang on!” The headlights hit the sky. The car spun.

  Beth screamed.

  The headlights readjusted, the car steadied, jounced across uneven turf and stopped. Rory turned off the headlights.

  “I can’t see!” Beth screamed.

  Rory turned on the overhead light.

  “Sean! Where’s Sean? Sean! Dad…!”

  “Sean!” She opened the car door.

  “Don’t get out!” Rory warned. “We’re in a ditch. I’ll do it.”

  “He’s stuck, Dad. He’s stuck behind Mum’s seat.”

  She reached for the seat’s forward lever.

  “Don’t touch that!”

  “Can you see?” She dared not move. “Can you see him?”

  “Sean?” Exiting the driver’s seat, Rory opened the rear door. “Sean…”

  “Sean stuck, Daddy.”

  Thank you, God!

  “Don’t move, Tess! Don’t move!”

  Beth and her father eased Sean free.

  “Want a drink,” Sean demanded.

  “Is he all right? Can I move?”

  “Don’t get out that side! God knows what’s there.”

  Wriggling across the driver’s seat, she landed on the prickly stubble of recently harvested wheat.

  “Watch your legs, Tess. It’s sharp as a knife.”

  In the back seat, Beth and Sean were drinking coke.

  “Are you all right? Is Sean all right? What happened?”

  “He’ll have a few bruises on his bottom. Nothing serious. He’s all right. You’re all right, aren’t you Sean? He’s all right.”

  “What happened?”

  “A kangaroo. Jumped out of nowhere. A bloody kangaroo…”

  She started for the back seat. “Let me look at your legs, Sean.”

  “I told you! It’s not serious!”

  “I have to…”

  “Bloody hell, Tess!”

  He was upset. Of course, he was upset.

  “He’s all right, Mum. Honest.”

  Shaking, she retreated. “Is the car drivable?”

  “Let’s see.” He assisted her back across the driver’s seat, took his place behind the wheel and turned on the ignition.

  The motor fired. He switched on the headlights, turned off the distracting wireless, negotiated a lurching return to the highway and warily resumed the journey. Minutes later, he pulled to the roadside and switched off the motor.

  “What’s wrong?” Beth cried.

  “Be quiet, love,” she whispered.

  “Daddy…” Sean began.

  “Shhh…” Beth urged.

  The only sound was Rory’s sobbing.

  She could offer to drive. He wouldn’t accept. She switched on the wireless. A raucous beat of Country and Western muffled his distress. The announcer interrupted to forecast a prolonged heat wave; the music resumed.

  Rory shuddered, turned on ignition and headlights and returned to the road.

  The city lights were filling the night sky when he said. “I thought I’d killed him.”

  After negotiating finance to buy the hardware store in the township of Heatherfield, Rory finally owned his own business. The nearest commercial opposition was twenty miles away in Roland, the regional centre. Employing a single assistant, the store was rundown, its stock a decade or more behind large city businesses. To make a profit, his long experience and quick mind would be needed.

  They also put a deposit on the lonely weatherboard house at the end of the lonely road and committed themselves to an additional bank loan. That was to finance exterior and interior repairs and painting, a motorised lawnmower, green linoleum for the kitchen, a toilet in an enclosed back verandah, installation of a septic tank, removal of the dining fixture, purchase of a new seven-piece dining setting and material to make new curtains, cushions and rugs. While Rory set Heath
erfield’s ailing hardware business on the path to a healthy future, she’d transform the ugly house into a comfortable country family home.

  Though he was undertaking uncharacteristic financial risks, Rory was happy, as happy as he was ever going to be. He wasn’t a city man, his wife wasn’t a city woman and his son wasn’t socially acceptable. The single significant cloud on their limited horizon was Beth’s resentment. They’d had little choice. She, as much as they, were both blessed and cursed by Sean’s condition. The blessing – Sean. The curse – the people who ostracised him. This was a chance to begin again. Here, they were far from family, from friends, from neighbours, from preconceived expectations, from memories. Here, there were neither O’Reillys nor McClures. Here, they knew no one and no one yet knew them.

  Even Katherine was pleased. Rory would be the success he deserved to be, Sean free from overt bigotry, Tess back in the bush she loved. As for Beth, her cherished granddaughter would grow up away from the violent suburbs and still have the safety net of a reliable grandmother whenever she was needed. Travel was travel, down to Melbourne or across country to the tiny village of Heatherfield.

  School mornings, after her father dropped her off at the highway bus stop, Beth joined the dozen other teenagers travelling to Roland High School. Evenings, after leaving the bus, she walked the half mile home. She hated it. She hated the loneliness, the house, the grasslands, the spindly forest, the midget mountains, the insular township and the clumsy bush people who wore careless clothes and talked with rough country voices. She hated the leather-faced women with the sun-bleached hair, scraggy bodies, calloused hands and smug self-satisfaction. She despised the hard-drinking men who boasted of superior horses and dogs and cattle and crops, incessantly condemned the weather, reviled immigrants and smoked stinking hand-rolled cigarettes. She loathed their children, the wild untamed monsters who ridiculed her city mannerisms and laughed at her pampered skin.

  Accepted as an experienced hardware man, Rory made new friends, attracted additional customers, modernised the displays, cleared decades of accumulated junk from the store room, refurbished the attic above the shop, spent weekends painting and sprucing and, finally, employed an extra salesman. As for the lonely house and the arid forest and the silent nights with his wife, he avoided them. The new business demanded weekend work, overnight stays in the refurbished attic and travel to the city warehouses. His family saw very little of him.

  She loved the house. For the same reasons Beth hated it and Rory found busy ways to keep away from it, she loved it. She loved the loneliness, the silence, the inhibiting dirt road, the absence of treacherous family, censorious neighbours, lost friends; even the additional distance from Katherine and Monica was a relief. Katherine’s frequent and unpredictable visits, though always helpful, had also inevitably been unsettling. While Monica’s black habit, though comforting, had also been a constant reminder of unresolved disenchantment with the church.

  The countrywomen offered friendship. The farmer’s wife from the red-roofed house across the paddocks brought a basket of welcoming fresh-baked scones, the families of Rory’s customers sent jams and preserves, the church community invited her to fellowships and coffee mornings. She remained polite, courteous, aloof, wary and alone.

  Fridays, with Sean in the pusher, she walked to the bus, bought the week’s supplies at Heatherfield’s family store that stocked just about everything, walked to Rory’s hardware store down the road and journeyed home. Sundays, before Rory disappeared, they drove across town to attend Mass in the old timber church built at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Freshly painted in garish blue, St Joseph’s interior was an eyesore, its priest a dogmatic relic, its congregation a mixed bag. Farmers and tradesmen towing wife and family, usually large. Old people nodding off or piously mouthing silent prayers, some couples, some alone. Young people impatient to be gone, some couples patently on their way to parenthood, some alone. Children in Sunday best clothes on Sunday best behaviour and babies.

  Sunday Mass was the only link with the world from which she’d escaped. Regular attendance was habit and duty and fear. Fear that refusing to obey the obligations of the church would further displease the God who had already imposed too much. Best to placate the God who’d taken away more than she could bear; who could do it again. Illogical and already proven false, to believe that attendance at Mass would bribe Him. Inevitable. Pitted against the indelible imprint on a child’s mind, logic was powerless.

  Rory wanted to tell the priest that she could sing, that she’d been in church choirs for most of her life. Not this time, she’d protested. She would sit with her family. He hadn’t argued. Although he’d been more affectionate with Sean since the accident, he remained uncomfortable with monitoring his unpredictable behaviour;behaviour which was in fact no more unpredictable than any other small boy’s. But, as always when exposed to the public, Sean’s obvious physical differences brought unwanted attention. Although she missed singing and envied the choir, Sean needed her. At Mass she kept him quiet with colouring books and match-box cars, hurried to communion while Beth minded him and sometimes even left early.

  At home, in their long hours together, she taught him traditional hymns, age-old nursery rhymes and remembered songs from Beth’s kindergarten days. He would have flourished at kindergarten. Though his markedly Mongoloid physical features betrayed his disability, his mind was quick. He loved learning, he loved music, he loved learning new words and new songs. Though his speech was guttural and at times unclear his ability to comprehend new concepts seemed to be only minimally inferior to Beth’s at the same age. Was this an aberration? Or did all children like Sean have quick intellect, or some of them – or only Sean? She’d never know. Here, far from clinics and tests and curious eyes, Sean was safe. And so was she.

  There was no thought of going back to the suburbs. The magic days were worth anything, any cost. Except that, for her, there was no current cost. Every morning, after waving off Rory and Beth, she did the housework and Sean helped her. Together they made the beds, washed the dishes, cleaned out the fireplace, re-set the fires in sitting room and kitchen, swept and scrubbed and vacuumed floors, fed the fowls, collected the eggs, unchained and fed the dog. Most days there were extra tasks associated with seasons and weather; gardening, weeding, raking leaves, planting new seedlings, pruning bushes, making jams, soups, ice cream. Sean ached for the day his father would allow him to mow the lawns – on the ride-on mower.

  Expanding the lessons learned in regular formal lessons, she turned each chore into an informal lesson. ‘How many pegs, Sean?’ ‘How many spoons, Sean?’ ‘This is a weed.’ ‘Speak clearly, love – blow your nose.’ ‘Don’t interrupt.’ ‘Don’t forget the eggs today.’

  When he suffered his regular infections, she nursed him through the long winter nights and strengthened him through the unstressed days. He stumbled and fell, stumbled, fell again and learned to pick himself up again – and yet again. As Beth had.

  The day was no different from any other. Rory and Beth drove off in the early morning; she worked with Sean. At six years old, after almost two years away from chills and smogs, he seemed to be less vulnerable to chest infections. Or maybe his immune system was doing what it should have done earlier, as some doctor somewhere had predicted it might; if he didn’t die young.

  The summer sun was dying in the cloudless sky, the distant peaks were blushing and the cattle filing to milking across the road, when the family sat down for tea. Cold corned beef, potatoes and carrots from the farm, spinach from the garden. In the new refrigerator Rory had bought for Christmas was homemade chocolate ice cream, to be served only after the children had eaten their greens. As always, Rory was quiet, Beth impatient to be off to her room and homework and Sean chattering about his day.

  Without warning, Beth interrupted. “When’s he going to school, Mum?”

  As shocking as unheralded thunder, the question shook the room.

  Sean stopped ta
lking.

  “Not now, Beth.” Rory quickly recovered. “Eat your tea.”

  Beth shrugged. “I only asked.”

  “She only asked,” Sean echoed. “When can I go to school?”

  “See!” Beth argued. “You have to send him to school.”

  “Beth! Now is not the time.”

  “I want to go to school!” Sean cried. “I want to go to school!”

  “I said not now!”

  “I want to go to school!”

  Her heart raced. “Obey your father, Sean.”

  Sean shoved away his unfinished meal.

  “Eat your greens, Sean.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “We won’t have the sulks around here, son.”

  “He’s got a right.” Beth pushed her plate away. “I’m not hungry either.”

  “I’ll get the ice cream.” She collected the two unfinished dinners.

  “You spoil them, Tess.”

  “Beth’s right,” she argued. “We have to talk about school.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  He didn’t see why. Beth and Sean did; they’d obviously been talking about it. Beth would have been planning this for some time. But why tonight? Because the year was ending? Because Sean was past the usual school starting age and she thought he needed to move on? Because she was convinced Sean could learn? Whatever her reasons, they would be motivated by love. Though her brother had seriously disrupted her life, she’d survived the upheaval. She’d even learned to tolerate the isolated house and the isolated township.

  She attempted a diversion. “I’ll get the ice cream.”

  “I’ll do it, Mum.” Beth quickly offered.

  School had to be talked about, even though now was not the time. Or was it? Would there ever be a right time? They were seldom all together long enough to talk about anything thoroughly, even something major. Every night Beth needed to be doing her homework, Sean was impatient to be in his room playing with his toy cars and listening to his records and watching his T.V. And Rory was itching to be off back to the office. Or away at a meeting. Or updating his accounts. She could try to command them to make a time to talk – and thus alienate Rory before they even began.