by Joy Dettman
Cecelia’s demise had traumatised her son; the place in which she’d chosen to do it had embarrassed him; the weight of responsibilities fallen to his rounded shoulders confused him.
His mother had not encouraged him to make decisions. He’d grown to adulthood doing what she’d told him he should do. Moe Kelly was now telling him what he should do, but it was not what his mother would have wanted him to do. This much he knew.
The shock of seeing her so seated, the stress of the past hour, the brandy Amber had poured for him, had drained his strength — and drained it straight into his bladder. Desperate to urinate, but unable to consider returning to the place from which they had so recently removed his mother, Norman’s mind was in turmoil.
‘All I’m saying, Mr Morrison, is we’ll peak at around a hundred today and tomorrow will be hotter. We have to bring a bit of logic to this.’
Moe Kelly’s voice was nasal — too many years of taking sawdust up the nose. It was hard to tell if he was male or female by his voice. He had the height of a woman, hair a woman might have killed for, a deep auburn, thick and wavy, but the muscle and sinew of a man. He could saw and hammer from dawn to dusk, then take his wife out to a ball and dance her off her feet.
‘As you are aware, Mr Kelly, there is no train until Monday evening.’
‘Forget your trains for a minute, Mr Morrison. What I’m trying to tell you decently here is that a woman of your mother’s size can’t wait until tomorrow, let alone Monday.’
Norman grasped the mantelpiece for support as his blood drained down to his ankles, threatening to release his bladder on the way. He’d been an unattractive child who had grown into an ugly man. Now in his fortieth year, the family curse of fat settling on him, his face was being absorbed, his small features forced into its centre. When he’d possessed hair, when he’d stood shoulders straight, head high, he’d brushed the six foot marker, but his hair was gone, his shoulders, permanently rounded; they had rounded more since seeing his mother slumped against the lavatory wall. He was much smaller now. He felt smaller than Moe.
‘You must understand, Mr Kelly, Mother’s relatives are spread far and wide. Her senior sister lives on a vast property in central New South Wales, her senior brother resides in Portsea. There is another in western Victoria. The Reverend Duckworth’s parish is, I believe, a good hour from the city.’
‘Duckworth?’ Moe asked.
‘Mother was a Duckworth. Her brother, the youngest of the family, will wish to read the service.’
Moe released a nasal sigh. ‘Then what I’d suggest, Mr Morrison, is that you get in contact with your Reverend Duckworth and you explain to him that we’ve got none of the city’s fancy storage facilities up here. He’ll no doubt advise you to move things along.’
‘It will be done on Tuesday, with dignity, Mr Kelly,’ Norman said. ‘With dignity.’
‘It’s your funeral,’ Moe said, and he took off out the front door mouthing ‘Duckworth’.
Norman made a beeline for the back door, along the verandah and out to a tall wooden gate in his eastern side fence, which gave him access to the railway yard and to the station’s tin-shed lavatory. He ran the last fifty yards.
Gertrude and Ogden watched him go. Cecelia’s bedroom window looked east.
‘He’s not going to make her wait until Tuesday, is he?’ Ogden said.
‘It won’t be done with much dignity if he does,’ Gertrude said.
They closed the door on their way out. Ernie returned to the kitchen to have another word with Amber, while Gertrude had a look around Cecelia’s parlour — while she wasn’t in it.
There was a display of peacock feathers used to screen the fireplace. Beautiful things set in a large blue-green vase. It, and the feathers, matched the heavy window drapes. It was a fancy room, or the furniture was fancy, designed for better than a railway house — as was Cecelia. The house, built by the railway department to a proven design, looked like a thousand others. Passage leading from front door to rear, giving access to six rooms: the main bedroom, bathroom and kitchen on the west side; the parlour, Cecelia’s bedroom and the nursery on the east side. It had verandahs front and back. Gertrude coveted its verandahs, but she wouldn’t have given a brass farthing for the kitchen. It was a good size, but with the stove always burning and windows on both north and west walls, it was hellishly hot during the summer months.
Ogden left via the rear door. Gertrude waved goodbye then took his place in the kitchen where Amber stood at the north window, looking for Norman.
‘How are you feeling, darlin’?’ Gertrude said.
‘How should I be feeling?’ Amber replied. She was in the eighth month of her third pregnancy. Her firstborn, a girl, named for old Cecelia, was near school age; her last born, a son, Clarence, had died at birth.
‘Vern said you found her.’
‘I didn’t know she was dead. I thought she’d passed out,’ Amber said, placing bread on the table, a wedge of cheese, a little butter melting in a butter dish. She glanced again through the window. ‘I tried to rouse her, then yelled for Norman. He knew she was dead. He went red. He went white. He started shaking like a jelly. I had to run over and get Ogden.’ She set two cups on the table.
Gertrude, eager for crumbs, sat down to listen. Amber was more talkative than usual, or for once had something to talk about. Her eyes were brighter, her face more animated. She wasn’t mourning her mother-in-law.
There were few in town who would, which may have been why Norman was determined to bring his relatives up here. There was nothing more lonely than a funeral no one attended.
‘He’s been over to the station lavatory,’ Amber said, taking down an extra cup, pouring three cups of tea. In the past four years Gertrude could count on one hand the times she’d been offered tea in Norman’s house.
He was surprised to see her in his kitchen. He stood in the doorway eyeing her — or eyeing his mother’s chair, which she’d had the temerity to sit on.
She nodded her greeting while searching for words she might say. Gertrude wasn’t often lost for something to say. ‘A sad time for you, Norman.’
He nodded.
Accustomed to seeing him wearing spectacles, she stared at a face that looked unclothed — his eyes caught with their pants down. They were the big sad eyes of a bloodhound, one who had misplaced his mistress and couldn’t sniff out her trail. Gertrude felt what might have been a wash of pity for her son-in-law. He was chinless, jawless, his cheeks melting into jowls; his snub nose, set too close to his upper lip, looked lost in the bulk of his face. About the only positive thing Gertrude had ever had to say about Norman Morrison was he didn’t look like his beak-nosed mother — though she’d had more character in her face.
She glanced at Amber, and for the umpteen-dozenth time wondered what that girl had ever seen in him. Amber had been cut from a fine fabric, which may not wear well but was too pretty to pass by without a second glance. She’d never reached her mother’s height, had never reached higher than five foot five. She had the build of her father’s family, had taken after them in colouring too. She had their curly hair, blonde once, still blonde where the sun bleached it, but darkening at the root.
‘Are you eating today, Norman?’ Amber called.
He’d disappeared into the bathroom, a small room a wall away from the kitchen. They could hear him in there, but he didn’t reply.
‘Where’s the little one?’ Gertrude never used her granddaughter’s given name. She called her little one, Sissy, pet, darlin’, anything bar Cecelia. Loathed that name — or the woman who had previously worn it had given her an allergy to it.
‘She’s over the road with Maisy. I can’t have her here while . . .’ Amber nodded across the passage to Cecelia’s room.
Maisy, Amber’s friend since kindergarten, had wed George Macdonald, a mill owner twice her age. She’d given him a baby a year and he’d given her everything that opened and shut. At times, Gertrude blamed Maisy for introducing Amber t
o Norman. At times, Maisy blamed herself for the same thing.
‘Did Moe say when he’d be moving her?’ Gertrude asked.
The dead usually spent a night in Moe Kelly’s cellar, which would be degrees cooler than this house.
‘It took four of them to get her out of the lav and up here. It’ll take more to get her down Moe’s cellar steps,’ Amber said. She sat opposite her mother. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘I’ve cut the bread. Someone may as well eat it. Norman!’ she yelled.
Gertrude helped herself to a slice. She baked her own bread. It was of a more solid construction than the baker’s loaves, filled up more space in the belly, but she never said no to a slice of the baker’s bread.
‘How many rooms have they got over at the hotel, Mum?’
‘Six or more, and they’ve got those sleep-outs the family use in summer,’ Gertrude replied, mouth full.
‘I don’t know where he thinks we’re going to fit everyone.’
‘He’s not expecting all of them to come up here, is he?’
‘They’d travel a week to watch a Duckworth dog fight,’ Amber said.
‘The town won’t see anyone go short of a —’ Gertrude closed her mouth as Norman returned to the doorway.
‘Have you seen my spectacles, Amber?’
‘You took them off before you tried to lift her,’ she said. He flinched, requiring no reminder of that awful moment. ‘Did you look on the shelf down there?’
He glanced in the direction of down there, but didn’t want to go there, so he stood on in the doorway, lost, lonely, his eyes indecently exposed.
‘How many of your folk are likely to make the trip?’ Gertrude said.
‘Two have passed,’ he said.
‘Three now,’ Amber said. ‘Which leaves twelve. Three unmarried. Nine couples, not counting his cousins — and there’s umpteen of them.’
‘Where did your mum fit in?’
He turned to run, aware that he and his mother had never fitted anywhere, then the meaning of Gertrude’s question became apparent. His jowls trembled as he lifted his chin. ‘She was the eighth born,’ he said. ‘The middle man, and not one lost in childhood.’
He flinched again, his eyes daring a glance at the bulge beneath Amber’s apron, then he was away, down the gravelled path to the lavatory near hidden by shrubbery at the bottom of the garden. His world a blur without his spectacles, his bladder could not force him back to that place; his need to see could.
Gertrude was eating a second slice of baker’s bread when Moe Kelly, Ogden, Vern and George Macdonald arrived to move Cecelia to Moe’s cellar. It took time — time enough for the dishes to be washed, the table cleared, time enough for Maisy to bring Sissy home screaming blue murder. Sissy hadn’t appreciated her forced removal from her mother.
Gertrude left them to it and walked out front, hoping to catch Vern on his way home. Her main concern when she’d driven in this morning had been for Amber, but her daughter was sitting in the parlour now, relating her morning to her friend. Gertrude’s afternoon would be better spent in giving her hair a hot olive oil treatment then a damn good wash. Every hair on her head felt as if it was trying to crawl away.
THE RELATIVES
Cecelia Morrison died on a stinking hot Friday, and, as Moe Kelly had warned, Saturday was worse. He and the local ice man spent much of the morning carrying block after block of ice down to the cellar, packing them under her and around her. Something had to be done.
Then, around noon, a north wind gathering up dust from distant deserts hit the town, turning the sky red, the sun glowering through it like the eye of evil. Moe had nothing against a bit of heat, though he could do without the dust. Stripped to the waist, sweat running, he was in his work shed preparing timber for Cecelia Morrison’s coffin.
He was a fine hand with wood. He could knock together a utilitarian cupboard or craft a fancy table, and he was known for his rocking chairs. He could turn out a good-looking coffin too when he put his mind to it, though he didn’t appreciate his labour going underground.
The sun was thinking of setting, the coffin taking shape, when Horrie Bull, the publican, and one of the wood cutters carried Horrie’s best customer into Moe’s shed feet first. Old Willy Duffy, father of Betty, living on borrowed time and donated grog for the past fifteen years, had succumbed with an empty glass in his hand. Fate was putting the boot into Cecelia Morrison née Duckworth. Died in a dunny, wrapped in a canvas shroud, packed in ice, and now sharing her quarters with a man who’d been a stranger to soap and water since birth.
Moe didn’t waste a lot of time on old Willy. He dropped him into a pine box and hammered the lid down, aware he was donating that box, just as the grave diggers would be donating their labour to dig that thieving old coot’s hole. The Duffy family was not known for the paying of bills.
They got Willy in the ground at eight on Sunday morning, dust swirling, more dogs than mourners in attendance, and by ten Moe was back in his shed, screwing fancy handles onto a fancy coffin he’d make Norman Morrison pay for dearly.
A busy day that dusty Sunday jammed in between Christmas and New Year of 1923. At the hotel, Horrie Bull and his wife were running around like chooks with their heads cut off, preparing rooms. At Vern Hooper’s house, the housekeeper was airing beds while the telegram boy spent his day running backwards and forwards between post office and Norman’s house. He didn’t have far to go. The buildings were separated by a paling fence.
Amber had aired Cecelia’s vacated room and made up her bed with clean sheets. It wasn’t as if she’d died in it. She changed the sheets in the nursery, cooked cakes and biscuits, tidied her cupboards, swept and polished the floors, dusted the furniture again while Sissy followed in her wake demanding attention.
‘Norman! Will you get her out from under my feet for five minutes? I’ve got things to do.’
As had Norman. He was up to his elbows in paper, matching names to available beds. To date he had thirty-three replies to the affirmative and only twenty-six beds.
‘Come, Cecelia,’ he said. The girl didn’t come. ‘Look at your book, Cecelia,’ he said. She didn’t look at her book. ‘We will have to accept the Bryants’ offer, Amber,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong with the Bryants?’
‘Distance from town.’
He chose a clean page and began again.
Bryant: Bess and John. Wilber and Millicent.
Hooper: Olive and Frederick, Louise and Martin. Bernice and Victoria.
White: Viv, Grace and Lorris.
The list grew longer while the temperature rose. At three he received a telegram from his Box Hill cousins. All three were coming, thankfully without their wives. Not that Norman had anything against their wives. Finding beds enough was the major concern.
At four o’clock, Paul Jenner, one of the out-of-town farmers, rode into town to get Gertrude. His wife had gone into labour two weeks before her time. It was her first, and could take all night in coming. There was no gain in telling him that though, not when his wife was screaming in pain. Gertrude fed her chooks early, milked her goats, set milk, water and biscuits within reach of little Elsie, saddled her horse, tied a wet handkerchief over her nose and mouth bandit fashion, and by five she was on her way to Jenner’s, a good three miles out along Cemetery Road. Two hours before dawn, while wind near picked up and shook that house, she delivered a poor wee boy with a withered foot.
‘The blood supply has been cut off by the cord,’ she said. ‘It’s stopped its growth.’
‘It’ll be getting through now though, won’t it?’ the new father said.
Maybe it would.
‘It could do just that, love,’ Gertrude said, knowing she was giving false hope, but knowing too that at such times she had nothing else to offer. ‘The doctors in Melbourne might be able to do something — if it doesn’t improve by itself. Those chaps can do some remarkable things nowadays.’
She stayed with them until there was light enough for her horse to see
where he was going. He took her home, where she got his saddle off, got her boots off, then fell face down across her bed. Near midday, she awakened, her goats unmilked, her chooks unfed, her garden unwatered.
Two o’clock: Woody Creek frying beneath a blazing sun and a crow fell dead from the currajong tree growing in the railway station yard. The kids playing beneath the tree tried feeding it water, and when they couldn’t raise it from the dead, they dug a grave with sticks and had their own funeral service.
At three, a bunch of older boys playing on the stacked timber behind Macdonald’s mill found a snake with two heads, both ready to strike. They killed it then carried it around town, displaying it at front doors for a penny. Some paid. They got a better look than the ones who didn’t. Moe paid up, grateful for that snake. It had cleared the kids away from his cellar window. A dead body sleeping on melting ice couldn’t compete with a two-headed snake.
Seven fifteen: the sun setting behind Charlie White’s grocery shop; Moe Kelly sitting at his kitchen table totalling up the cost of fancy handles, timber, labour and ice; Norman pacing his station platform perusing his latest list, the two-headed snake hung out to stink and dry on the railway yard’s fence, little Cecelia asleep in her parents’ bed, and the train announced its coming with three elongated hoots.
Amber removed her apron, slid her arms into a loose-fitting smock, forced her feet into shoes, combed her sweat-soaked curls, then walked out the side gate and the fifty-odd yards to the station in time to see the first Duckworth step down to the platform.
They kept on stepping down, from the first and the second-class carriages. Aunt Louise, Cousin Ottie, Aunty Milly and Uncle Wilber, Uncle Charles the parson, his wife Jane and son Reginald, Uncle someone, Aunty Bessie . . . A babble of Duckworths. A scream of them. A smack of air kisses, of roving greedy eyes measuring girths on those unseen since the last wedding, the last funeral. They were too much. They were too many.