by Toni Jordan
The woman juts her chin. ‘Why? Why do you like that one best?’
Caddie thinks. ‘It’s the word “bear”. You know some mornings when you wake up and wish you hadn’t? You’d give anything not to have to face the day? You just want to shut your eyes and roll over. Inga understood exactly what that felt like. Yet she kept going. She makes us all want to keep going.’
‘Oh, lord. How maudlin. I have never felt that way in my entire life.’
There’s a toot. A yellow cab has pulled into the driveway. The driver leans out the window and waves. ‘Taxi for Rachel?’
The woman settles her bag in the crook of her elbow and stands. She turns towards the cab, steady on her feet now, as Caddie opens the back door. Almost as an afterthought, the woman stops.
‘That fellow’s wrong about the mafia. It wasn’t them.’
‘What?’
‘Not that it matters. She’s long gone.’ Then the woman clasps her hands behind her back like a child reciting. ‘Here’s a puzzle for you, Caddie. That line of yours. It’s my favourite too, as it happens. And in the end, all we have are the hours and the days, the minutes and the way we bear them, the seconds spent on this earth and the number of them that truly mattered. What fun it’s been to meet you.’
The woman sits, the door shuts. The taxi makes an illegal three-point turn and vanishes around the corner. Caddie sits on the concrete. Something is wrong. It’s the heat, perhaps, or the strange woman. That quote. Surely not. She is making an error. The air swims around her and she becomes conscious of her heart banging into the underside of her ribs. She grabs her bag and flies back up the stairs to the entrance, past the ticket counter to the door of the exhibition, where a guard sticks out his arm.
‘Whoa. Hop on the end of the line, that’s the girl,’ he says.
‘But I’ve been here already.’ She’s shaking.
The guard puts one hand on his walkie-talkie and asks for her ticket, which she finds by turning out every pocket.
‘OK.’ He thumbs behind her. ‘But no bag. Cloakroom’s back there.’
She drops the bag at his feet and darts through the crowd. There is a tangle of schoolchildren in front of page 200 now, laughing and shoving each other. Some are sketching the fragments in notebooks, but she can see over and between them. There it is, her line, her father’s favourite line.
She reads it. She reads it again.
Caddie’s legs are frozen but her hands move of their own accord. She pats down each pocket of her jeans. Her stuff is in her bag, on the floor outside. She prays to a god she doesn’t believe in: don’t let that sentence fall from her mind. She turns to a spotty boy in a blue-checked uniform, conscientiously sketching.
‘Please. A pencil and a piece of paper.’
He looks around for a teacher but then, despite the wild in her eyes, he tears a sheet from his sketchpad and hands her his pencil. Caddie folds the paper over; with sweaty hands, she tries to write. The lead punctures the sheet.
‘Here,’ the boy says, and he flips his sketchbook closed and holds it out to her.
This boy. Kindness, where she would not expect it. She takes the sketchbook with both hands and, moving her lips with the words, she records the woman’s phrasing in block letters, four lines across the page. When she’s finished she reads it aloud, tapping each word with the pencil. She thanks the boy and returns his things.
He moves away. The fragment is sleeping inside its glass case as if it were a piece of Inga herself, suspended and waxen, waiting to be woken by—whom? By Caddie? Why not? Caddie understands waiting.
The sentence in the glass case reads: And in the end, all we have are the hours and the days, the minutes and the way we bear them
There is nothing else.
Nowhere can she read the seconds spent on this earth and the number of them that truly mattered. There is only the black-rimmed space burnt by the fire that killed Inga Karlson and destroyed every copy of The Days, The Minutes, her long-awaited second novel, almost fifty years ago.
2
Outside Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1928
On the morning they’re due to leave the farm, Rachel slips from her bed and dresses in the cool dark in her best gingham plaid smock and apron, white collar and stockings, church shoes. She reaches under her pillow for her copy of The Magical Land of Noom and tucks it under one arm. Everything else she owns is already packed in the suitcases at the end of the hall. She’s quiet because George is asleep in his cot across the room, one knee drawn up almost to his soft chin, thumb in his rosebud mouth. A tiny whistle as he breathes out. He’d want to come, if he woke. He always wants to come with Rachel, teetering on his white jelly legs, gripping her around the thighs.
Down the hall now, past the lurking, hateful suitcases. The oldest case, brought from New York: her mother’s from when she first came here to marry Rachel’s father, is tan leather with fat straps and buckles and shiny clasps and corners. The next is thinner, sturdy but worn in spots and bearing someone else’s initials in chipped gold. A respectable case, passed from her Lehrer grandfather to her father and, in the years to come, to George. The last two cases, holding Rachel’s clothes and George’s and the spare blankets and tablecloths and towels, are cardboard with tarnished clasps that won’t close, tied with string.
Through the kitchen, and a dozen times she wants to stop. She feels eyes looking at her from everywhere. She wants to vomit. She knows where to place her feet on the wooden boards and where to push the screen door so it doesn’t squeak. She grips the book tighter.
Outside a cloud of bats darkens the night sky and she can hear peepers in the stream at the other end of the field. There’s an owl in the elm beside the barn, squatting plain as day between the ropes that hold the swing. He swivels his heart face straight at her but she doesn’t stop, she crosses the small yard and dodges the washing-line poles and a rake they won’t be taking with them to the new house in town. Past the apple tree that will soon be alive with bees, until there it is in front of her, glowing in the late moonlight. A swaying sea of corn.
This is her only chance. By first light it’ll be too late. There is a hint of softening in the sky now, and she pauses on the edge of the vast green and takes a breath. She steps in. The field closes behind her. The ears, smallish but forming perfectly, are above her head. She smells the soil moist with dew and the last of the corn pollen. The parchment leaves rustle as she passes, brush her from crown to ankle. The corn will miss her, she knows. It’ll miss her father and the way he tends it. Her father speaks the language of growing things. Soil in his cupped hand, held to his nose. The early soft leaves folded between his fingertips. To see the last of the stars vanishing, she tilts her head all the way back because in every other direction she can see only stalks and leaves and ears tightly wrapped.
After walking a little way, she stops and sits. Her book is hugged to her chest. The stalks are dense around her. There’s no one here but her and she’s tired now. She’s done all that she can. Now, it’s up to chance.
She wakes to the tickle of a ladybird crawling across the back of her hand and the grainy feel of dirt on her temple. Her feet ache. The sliver of sky above her is the palest blue and as she watches, a flock of blackbirds swing across it. She’s thirsty. At first she thinks it’s the crickets that have woken her but then she becomes aware of a larger rustling, coming closer. The leaves near her begin swooshing and swirling as if they anticipate what’s coming. She prays it’s a buck from the forest behind the farm but then, before she can see him, she knows it’s her father.
She says nothing. She wraps her arms around her knees and shuts her eyes and imagines herself smaller than a cricket but she can feel the air change as the corn in front of her opens. Then everything stops. The leaves, the insects.
‘Up,’ he says.
She doesn’t move. She can’t. If she only keeps her eyes closed. Tight. Tighter.
‘Up, I said.’
She opens her eyes when his rough han
d takes her wrist and jerks her to her feet. Others might get lost in fields the size of this but her father knows each plant, every breeze, the gentlest rise and fall of his family’s land, and he strides back toward the house, unwavering, hauling her stumbling behind him, his fingertips pressing the flesh of one arm as she clutches her book tight in the other hand.
Out into the clear of the yard and Mr Debrees is there with the horses and wagon loaded with their furniture strapped down, the four cases and mattresses on the top. The black farm horses, pawing the ground and tossing their heads. Her mother, with George wriggling on her hip.
‘This morning of all mornings,’ her mother says. ‘What’s gotten into you? And the sight of your dress. You’re nearly ten years old now. You should know better.’ She lets George slide to the ground and takes Rachel’s other wrist and jerks her free of her father. ‘Mr Debrees, waiting all this time. Your father, up on the roof in his Sunday clothes. No help with George, no help whatsoever. As if I don’t have enough to do, worrying about you. And dragging that book through the dirt! Treat it like that and I’ll tell Aunt Vera you’re never to have another.’ She slaps the dirt from Rachel’s skirt and sleeves with the flat of her hand, then spits on her own sleeve and rubs Rachel’s cheek.
Her father still beside her, hands on his belt buckle, brooding like a storm.
Her mother raises her head as if she’s forgotten he’s there. ‘On the seat beside Mr Debrees,’ she says. ‘Quick, Rachel. Take George. Now, I said.’
‘Girl needs teaching,’ her father says.
Rachel knows better than to move.
‘She’s an angel most of the time,’ says her mother.
‘Most of the time isn’t all of the time,’ says her father.
‘Well,’ says Mr Debrees. He’s older than her father, rounder, with pale blue eyes and a brood of grandchildren on his own farm on the other side of the field. That’s where Butter and her calf are now, and Lolly, Birdie and Minnie and their laying boxes. ‘Most likely wanted to say goodbye to the corn, didn’t you, Rachel? No harm done, Walter. No need to make a fuss.’
Her father, not moving. Rangy and sun-gold, skin like dried leaves.
‘A day like this,’ Mr Debrees says. ‘Hard on everyone.’
Her father takes hold of the end of his leather belt and hitches it back. ‘Not doing her any favours if she doesn’t learn.’
‘Later, then,’ says Mr Debrees. ‘I need to drop you folks off then get back.’
Her blood, ice in her veins.
Her father releases his belt, rethreads it through the loop and nods. ‘Later, then. Rachel, in the back with me.’
Her mother and Mr Debrees look at each other, but her mother kneels beside her and ties her bonnet under her chin, then turns to climb aboard with George on the high front seat next to Mr Debrees.
‘Horses,’ says George, as he settles beside her mother. ‘This one’s Robin and this one’s Dooley.’
‘A good eye for horseflesh, this lad,’ says Mr Debrees. ‘Never you fear, Georgie. There’s horses in town too, and plenty of ’em.’
At the back of the wagon, her father lifts her and they sit side by side with their legs dangling: her father’s, long in black; hers in the damp and dirty pinafore. Her book is safe beside her. There’s a jerk and the wagon begins to move. Rachel can feel the power of the horses, their great muscles and straining necks. They pass the house, their old house that Lehrers have lived in as long as anyone can recall. They pass along the side of the field, down the drive. The corn sways and waves to her.
Her father pushes his hat further down his brow. ‘You ever pull that again,’ he says, ‘and I’ll tan your hide so you won’t sit for a week.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
He slides a hand into the pocket of his coat and pulls out his closed fist. Opens it before her. It’s a miniature ear of corn the length of his hand, wrapped in its papery skin. He peels it, leaf after leaf, and then he pulls back the tendrils of silk until it is revealed: tiny, golden, plump, shining in the morning sun.
He takes a bite then passes it to Rachel. She holds it, one small hand at each end, and feels the balance, the weight of it. She bites too. It’s raw and crisp, warm and milky.
‘You’ll never taste the likes of that again,’ her father says. ‘Just picked, from your own land. Nothing like it.’
At the end of the drive the wagon turns along the long straight road that leads toward their new home, near her father’s new job and away from this field, this house, the whole of her world. On the hill in the middle distance under two oak trees are the graves of all the blood on her father’s side, sprinkled with white daisies. On the white of her arm near the wrist, the red marks left by her father’s fingers will soon ripen to a dark purple. As the wagon sways, Rachel eats the rest of the ear. Every sweet, fading bite.
3
Brisbane, Queensland, 1986
Inga Karlson was the stars and the light and the true north in the history of the twentieth century. She was beautiful, and that helped, people being what they are. She wrote from her feelings for all of humanity, a kind of herd empathy that only wanted the best for us. In that tiny forest cottage in the mountains of Austria, she sat up at three months, held a knife-sharpened pencil at six months, said ‘I see bird’ to her illiterate farmworker parents when barely a year old. When she was eight, the village took up a collection to send her away to school. She was marked from the beginning. Chosen.
Caddie Walker is not marked or chosen. She is twenty-eight years old, the same age as Inga Karlson when she died. Everyone expected Caddie would go to university and she did, for a while, but everything unravelled and her father was sick and then, when she was twenty-one, he died and everything stayed unravelled. The girls from school are all mothers now, or nurses or teachers, and every couple of years the part-timers at River City Reader lift off for Barcelona or London or Milan, where they intern at literary agencies or open sangria bars, and a new group, younger than before, bursts through the doors and Caddie trains them too, tolerating their airy confidence that they are meant for grander things. Sometimes she passes women on the street—suits and court shoes and briefcases—and she wonders what it is that they know and she doesn’t. Sometimes she wakes convinced she is in her room at home and the window is on her right and the ridges on her pink hobnail bedspread are soft fur under her chin and if she keeps her eyes squeezed tight her father will come in to open the blind and kiss her forehead. She brushes her teeth and washes her face every morning and every night. She is not afraid of effort but she is afraid of reward. She is thin and that’s fine with her: she’s suspicious of the soft, the obvious, the cosy, the comfortable, as though taking the easy road even once would lull her to death.
It is after four when she lets herself in. Soon the sun will set red and gold behind the television towers on Mount Coottha. Caddie is sticky and gritty-eyed. Her forearms are glowing pink and there is a new blister on her heel. On the bus on the way home she kept opening her bag to check the sheet of sketchpad paper.
As she opens the door a dense fug of sour air wafts past. She yells hello up the hall; Pretty and Terese hello back. She leaves her shoes at the top of the hall, lined up with the others.
She shares a house with Pretty and Terese but it’s not a share house. Those years are behind them: marijuana plants on windowsills and lounges scavenged on hard waste day and cigarette holes in everything and that peculiar smell of pepper and spaghetti that infests worker’s cottages teetering on their stumps in West End and Highgate Hill and Dutton Park. They live in Auchenflower now, in a house that barely leans at all. Pretty and Terese have the two smaller rooms on the left so they can sleep in one and use the other for their clothes and sports equipment and desks.
Caddie’s is the large room on the right, with wide boards and high ceilings, with a box window overlooking the sliver of garden and the mandatory jacaranda, a mass of purple on the footpath in spring. Against the wall is a heavy oak wardrobe—the k
ind with engraved panels and a centre mirror—that was her parents’. Books are piled in corners and double stacked on the bricks-and-boards shelves along the far wall, but fewer than you might expect—there is a grace to libraries that appeals to her. Next to her bed is her father’s copy of All Has an End, and also A Study in Scarlet and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
There is less dust than might be found in the room of a single woman in her twenties and a strange collection of found trinkets among the practical bits and pieces on her dresser: some foreign coins that seem too light for their size; a shiny black pendant of a domino she found in the street; a dozen tiny white bones, soothing to tumble through her fingers at night; and a perfect green glass marble that is always cold regardless of the weather.
She drops her bag beside the bed, retrieves the precious sheet from inside it and pins it to the corkboard. Later, she’ll transcribe it twice: in the purple-covered notebook she keeps in her bag and on a separate page to hide in her bedside drawer.
Now, though, she removes the salad roll, unrecognisable as food, from her hessian bag and takes it down the wide jungle hall past the white metal tiered stands and upended fruit crates and rusty stools on which sit a forest of plastic pots of anthuriums and ferns and peace lilies and snake plants, all with damp leaves like they’ve just been misted. The lounge/dining/kitchen is a thin open space. On the other side of the dining table there’s an oscillating fan on a tall plastic stand, humming like an insect and shaking its head in vague disapproval.
Pretty is lying on the couch, watching television with the sound off. He’s still wearing his basketball clothes and the deep neckline and long armholes show his ribbed chest. Caddie bumps his feet with her hip until he moves them.
‘Good day?’ he says to her, eyes on the screen. ‘Sell lots of books?’
‘Day off.’
‘Lucky for some.’