Yesterday's Dust

by Joy Dettman

  Didn’t make much of a job of it, Bronwyn thought, but offered no comment. Get Granny going and you couldn’t shut her up.

  Bessy was talking, Ann was nodding, nodding, but looking at her watch, looking at Bronwyn.

  ‘Save me,’ the younger girl signed.

  Ann smiled, backed away from Bessy, backed into fat old Fletch.

  ‘No!’ Bronwyn moaned aloud, aware that her sister would not be so eager to get away from him. What was he doing here anyway? He wasn’t a relative. She considered asking the old dame, but Gran’s mouth was moving again – or still.

  ‘Now you take your mother, she’s got staying power. She’ll make old bones. You need staying power in this life, girlie. You need to find a reason to go on when there’s no bleeding reason to go on.’

  ‘Tell me about it, why don’t you, Gran.’

  ‘Humph,’ Gran said, eyeing her guest up and down, but a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush. ‘Never could see how anyone with half a mind could do hisself in. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, I always say.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  ‘Now you take old Fletcher’s wife. She done herself in, but she was as mad as a hatter, that one.’

  ‘Married to that bloated old toad, who’d blame her?’

  Granny chuckled awhile, eyeing the toad in question, but from the corner of her eye she saw Bronwyn sidling away. ‘He wasn’t such a bad-looking coot when he first come to town. Sort of baby-faced he was, and only a shadow of the man he is today.’

  Bronwyn shrugged, lit another cigarette as Bessy joined her at Gran’s ashtray.

  ‘What are you on about now, you old reprobate?’ Bessy was doubly related; not only had her maternal aunt forged a direct connection to Granny Bourke, but Mickey, her only son, had married one of her great-granddaughters.

  The old dame basked a moment in the glow of attention as Ellie Burton followed on the heels of Bessy, Jim Watson one step behind.

  Bronwyn caught Ann’s eye, pointed her thumb towards the door, signed, ‘Five minutes and I’m walking.’ Ann nodded, and Bronwyn turned her eyes to Jim Watson, who looked like his mangy old blue heeler cattle dog.

  ‘Having a good day, Gran?’ he said, his red-rimmed, stubby lashed eyes not leaving Ellie.

  ‘Humph,’ the old dame replied before returning to her previous conversation. ‘And Lou Evans. You’d remember her, Bessy. She drowned herself and her three kids, she did. Remember that day? Mad as a hatter, that woman was. Always was. Got herself born with a clubfoot, she did. No one ever thought she’d find a man and have a family, you know. Mad as a hatter.’

  ‘Lou-lou with her built-up shoe?’ Bessy said.

  ‘To her dying day, Lou’s old mother blamed the priest for her misfortune. Reckoned he put a jinx on her because of her marrying out of the church. He had a clubfoot, you see. O’ course, Lou’s father, him not being of the faith, he blamed the priest too. But not for the same reason, if you get me drift, girlie.’ Granny jabbed Bronwyn with a witch’s finger and she cackled.

  Granny knew this town, knew every skeleton in every closet, every man who had ever strayed, every woman who had produced a child who did not bear his true father’s name. Superstitions, adages slid readily from the old dame’s tongue while her voice rose and fell, keeping time with the minute hand of an old marble clock that tick-ticked, tick-ticked, tick-ticked, much slower than its city counterpart.

  Her eye wasn’t straying far from that clock today, that old killer, Time. Someone had given it to her for a wedding present. Like a malevolent god, it had sat on this mantelpiece since the war of 1914, counting her girlhood away, counting her life’s seconds down to nil.

  ‘What’s the time say, girlie?’

  ‘Quarter to four.’ Bronwyn yawned, her eyes straying back to Ellie and Jim Watson. He’d married Granny’s youngest, and only recently buried her. Always keen on the Burtons’ river frontage, he’d tried often enough to buy some of it, but Ellie wasn’t selling. For his stock’s sake, it looked as if Jim had decided to wed some of it.

  Granny’s eyes were also on Jim. ‘He won’t be a widower long, that one. Ugly as a bag full of whippets, but he’d be a good catch for your mother,’ she hissed at Bronwyn from behind a hand.

  ‘Over my dead body.’

  ‘Haven’t found no sign of your father’s yet.’

  Bronwyn ignored that one.

  ‘He’s no more drowned than I am, girlie. He wasn’t mad, just bad. My word but he was a handsome devil when he first stepped into that bar. I never seen a nicer looking boy. They were a good-looking couple there for a few years – your mother and him.’

  Bronwyn blew a perfect smoke ring at the ceiling. Jack wasn’t mad, just bad. She’d go along with that. She glanced at Ellie. Her face was pink and Jim Watson was walking away, heading for the bar. He wouldn’t get Ellie’s river frontage, or any other frontage. Each year that passed, Jack Burton came closer to achieving sainthood status in Ellie’s eyes.

  ‘What’s that sister of yours doing these days?’

  ‘Bloody good question, Gran, and I wish she’d stop doing it.’

  Granny Bourke looked at her guest, head to the side. ‘Humph,’ she said. ‘Your mother was telling me that she was having another one?’

  ‘Mum? Christ! Not Jim’s, is it?’

  ‘Your sister! Annie! Don’t you go getting smart with me, girlie.’

  Bronwyn smiled and looked at Ann’s long sweater. It hid the six-month bulge, but there was so much length in her that her babies probably had room to sprawl out flat on their backs instead of rolling up in a heap. She never looked pregnant until the last weeks.

  ‘Terrible about her first, wasn’t it?’ Granny’s tongue worked around her teeth, it licked thin lips eager to rehash some old drama. Bronwyn wasn’t playing ball. She lit another cigarette, and lit one for the old dame. ‘Thanks, girlie. Your blood is still worth its bottling, even if you’re not much of a talker today. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Nothing, Gran.’ She sucked smoke, looked at the old dame; she liked her guts, and she sighed, tried. ‘I see the newspaper photographer was here. You’ll make headlines tomorrow.’

  ‘Cruel buggers. I’m not worth photographing these days, but there was a time when I was the belle of this town.’

  ‘Not a lot of competition in Mallawindy, Gran.’

  ‘You’ve got your father’s tongue, girlie, and it’s laced with acid. He’ll never be dead while you’re alive.’ She puffed smoke, closing her grey lizard eyelids against it, and Bronwyn moved back a pace, preparing again to edge away. Granny’s eyes opened, caught her on the move.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I miss your father. He livened this old town up.’ She aimed her ash at the ashtray as a camera clicked, trapping the action. ‘Everyone treating me like a two-headed freak show just because I turned a hundred,’ she said. ‘Nowhere else to go after ninety-nine, is there? Except the bleedin’ cemetery, and I got no intention of going out there for a while yet. They’re all dead out there, eh? No one to talk to.’ She cackled again, but swallowed it as a camera flashed. ‘Might as well hang a sign around my bleedin’ neck,’ she yelled. ‘Get your last chance photographs here.

  ‘Time waits for no man, girlie. From the day we’re born we get dragged along towards the grave, like it or not,’ she said, glowering at the two females standing in front of her clock. Hiding time.

  Then a baby wailed and Bronwyn flinched. She loathed that plaintive wail. A woman moved to silence it, just as the hand of the mantle clock jerked forward, deducting another minute from Granny’s life.

  ‘You haven’t started your family yet?’

  ‘Not married, am I?’ Ann had disappeared. Hopefully to the toilet.

  ‘They don’t let that stop them these days. Anyway, what’s a pretty little thing like you doing not getting married? I thought you had a good bloke.’ Gran’s finger prodded and an ember fell onto her dress, bought new for this day.

  Bro
nwyn swiped at it, knocked it to the floor, ground it into the carpet while the old girl glanced around, gnashing her jaws.

  ‘Don’t you dob on me. They’ll nick my smokes.’

  The screaming infant was only metres away, and its mother undoing the buttons on her blouse. Bronwyn swallowed hard, watched a pink balloon breast emerge, watched the small cannibalistic mouth bite in, suck. And the old lady watched her watch, her wicked eye roving from her guest’s expression to her waist, then back again.

  ‘You’re not drinking much today, are you, girlie?’

  ‘I’m on a diet.’

  ‘Pull the other one. It’s made out of rubber.’

  Bronwyn glanced at the leg in question – more like a plucked sparrow’s ankle than rubber. Hands like gnarled mallee roots. One was flung out, old fingers snaring a box of chocolates. She helped herself to one then offered the box. Bronwyn shook her head, but watched the old dame’s hands work hard at removing the purple foil, watched her tongue urge the fingers on until thin lips closed around the chocolate and her tongue caressed it, pressed it, savouring the sweet.

  ‘You got that look about you, you know.’

  ‘What look is that, Gran?’

  ‘That breeding look.’ Granny sniggered, drooled chocolate. ‘It’s in the eyes.’

  ‘Not for long,’ Bronwyn muttered.

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘Nothing, Gran.’

  ‘I’m not deaf yet, and I haven’t lived for a hundred bleedin’ years and not learned nothing either.’

  Gran’s tongue flicking in and out, reclaiming lost chocolate, she squinted at the young face. Large brown–green eyes, deep set today. A pretty face, but pale against the long nut-brown hair. High breasts beneath a dusty pink sweater, black slacks.

  ‘Well you just put this in your modern little pipe and smoke it, girlie. It’s an ill wind that sheds no good along its pathway, and new life was never “nothing” and that’s a fact.’

  Granny Bourke’s words were like some virulent virus. They hit hard, hit Bronwyn below the belt. She ran for the toilet, lost her glass of wine, three corn crackers, and the dry biscuits she’d managed to keep down at breakfast time, but she found Ann.

  It’s an ill wind that sheds no good along its pathway.

  ‘Are you okay, Bron?’

  ‘I will be. I’m going up to Sydney tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s too late for that.’

  ‘Shiiiiit. What am I going to do, Annie?’

  ‘Sneak out through the bar. They won’t miss us.’

  a full set of teeth

  Friday 8 August

  Mallawindy had been battered by ill winds for weeks. Mini tornadoes swept through, determined to flatten the town, to wipe it from the face of the land. They failed, but they shifted Bill Dooley’s house a foot to the south, exposing his termite-riddled stumps. They lifted the roof from the new garage and dumped it on the Central. The hotel remained open for business.

  The winds ripped a tree from the earth and it fell across the old river road and onto a panel van, just as young Bob West and old Vera Owen were getting down to business. Vera swore that Bob was a hero, that he’d thrown himself on top to protect her, but they were both naked from the waist down when cut from the wreckage. Only big Charlie, Vera’s much cuckolded, truckie husband believed the story. Vera had always preferred the dominant position.

  Ill winds were still wailing when Bessy Bishop came to the mud brick house on that Friday in August. She’d been born and raised in this house, knew every brick, every creaking board. Ben had bought it back in the eighties and lived alone there until his father went missing, when Ellie and John had moved in with him.

  ‘Ellie!’ Bessy bawled at the front door. The wind picked up her words, tossed them away.

  She let herself in. ‘Ellie. Where the hell are you?’

  The kitchen was a small black hole, the dining room as dark and not a lot larger; twin doors and two deep steps down separated it from the lounge room, which was cluttered with furniture. The bedrooms might have made good walk-in wardrobes these days, but this morning Ellie wasn’t in any of the rooms.

  ‘Ellie! Are you up there? I’m not climbing those bloody stairs,’ Bessy yelled up to the bedroom in the roof. Low beamed, larger than the downstairs rooms, it was Ellie’s room. Always had been.

  ‘Ellie!’

  Born a gosling, old age had not turned Bessy into a swan. Some argument between her Granville/Vevers genes had set her pugnacious features at conception. Sun-dried, windblown, she wasn’t a pretty sight today.

  ‘Ellie!’ On the back verandah, her face near lost beneath a thatch of steel-grey hair, she turned from east to west, her darting eyes scanning the back yard. ‘For Christ’s sake, will you answer me! I got something to tell you.’

  ‘I’m in here. For goodness sake, stop your yelling, Bessy.’ The reply came from the outdoor lavatory, a long path away.

  ‘They’ve found him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve found Jack.’

  The chug-chug-a-lug, the rumble of water, the hiss of old pipes refilling the outdated overhead cistern, then Ellie emerged, her skirt blowing in the wind, her smile triumphant, her belief in prayer justified.

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Bessy turned her back to the wind and to Ellie; she took the makings from her pocket and rolled a cigarette.

  ‘I was just going over to do the chooks, Bessy. Where has he been?’

  Not bloody far from home, Bessy thought, but said: ‘Don’t you go over that bridge today. You’ll get blown off the bloody thing.’

  Ellie rinsed her hands at the garden tap and Bessy watched her, watched the water stream bend in the wind. She’d just heard some good news, but how to tell it was the problem. Trying hard to compose her features into a mask of concern, she lit the cigarette, pursing her lips around it, which hindered her satisfied smile but did not totally conceal it.

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Come in out of the wind. We’ll have a cup of tea and a talk about it.’

  Her hands wiped on her khaki apron, Ellie walked up to the house, her smile becoming a quizzical frown. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Jeff Rowan just rung me up. He said it might be better coming from me than from him.’ Ellie was staring at her now, so Bessy let it rip. ‘They found his body out the Daree road a couple of days ago but held off saying anything until the experts had looked him over. But it’s him.’ She sucked smoke hard, controlling her lips, but not her eyes.

  ‘No. Not Jack. No. It can’t be Jack?’

  ‘It’s him, all right.’ Bessy watched her sister sit down hard on the edge of the verandah and she sat beside her, placing an arm around her. ‘I done it all wrong, love. I know that. I opened my mouth and put my big foot right in it, didn’t I? But I’ve been looking for you for ten minutes. I’ve been right though your house. I could have pinched your handbag off the table.’

  ‘There’s not much in it.’ Ellie was staring at her wedding ring, twisting it. ‘It can’t be Jack, Bessy. It’s not Jack.’

  ‘He’s the right age, he’s big, he’s been dead around the right time, and he must have thought a bit of himself because they dug out the skull intact and it’s still got a full set of teeth. I mean, who else of sixty-odd, with his own teeth, is missing from around here?’

  A full set of natural teeth was as rare a find in Mallawindy as hen’s molars. Dentists cost money, and meant a trip to Warran or Daree. Bessy sucked tobacco from her own set of dentures while with one hand she patted her sister’s shoulder. ‘Isn’t it better to find his bo . . . I mean, you knew this could happen. You knew this was bound to happen sooner or later.’

  Her hand in her apron pocket, Ellie’s fingers played the rosary beads. Prayer beads, worry beads, they were always with her. ‘It’s not him, Bessy. It’s not.’

  ‘As they say, love, it’s an ill wind that blows no good. You’ll feel better about it if you can give him a proper funeral. You’ll be able to fo
rget about the bas – ’ She sucked the word back with smoke, swallowed it. ‘And you’ll get his insurance money and no more bloody messing around. You can build yourself some new milking sheds.’

  Eyes wide, her mouth open, Ellie lifted her head and stared at her sister. ‘I don’t want their money. I don’t need a new milking shed either. I wouldn’t take their money in exchange for . . . for Jack’s life.’

  ‘I know, love, but it’s yours. You’ve paid the premiums for years.’

  ‘I’ll . . . I’ll give it to the church.’

  ‘My backside, you will! You gave your son to the church and look what it’s done to him.’

  Johnny rarely left the property. When he wasn’t digging post holes and setting in new posts, he was stretching wires between them, or cutting hay, painting the old Burton house, milking cows. At it from daylight to dark, from Sunday to Sunday, he worked on, slowly, methodically, like a battery-driven robot. He’d keep on moving until his batteries finally ran down, then he’d start charging them up at the Central, start hitting the bottle and end up worse than his father, Bessy thought, though she never said it – not to Ellie.

  Bessy worried about her silent nephew, but could not get close to him. No one could. The whole family hadn’t been the same since Christmas 1990. Held together by some collective rubber band when Jack Burton had been around, his leaving had snapped it, sent them shooting off like scattered pebbles fired from a slingshot.

  Look at Annie, playing mother earth, for Christ’s sake. Never would have thought it of her. And look at Bronwyn; she was a loose cannon with a bloody short fuse, that one – and after the way she’d treated young Nick, it was a bloody wonder he was going to do the right thing by her too, and God help him. And Ellie – Ellie might have been her sister but she had the memory of a blind worm with its head cut off.

  Ben had done okay. He’d never changed. Even as a kid he’d just continued on doing what had to be done, and doing it well. He’d shed ten years and grown an inch the day he’d built his bridge, or maybe he’d just stood taller.