by Joy Dettman
He’d made her a gate from timber off-cuts.
‘Whatever possessed you?’ she said.
‘I couldn’t get the flaming thing open when I brought Charlie down here. I thought I’d have to lift the old coot over it and carry him down.’
‘There’s a knack to it,’ she said.
‘Face it, Mrs Foote. It’s knackered.’
She laughed. It was well and truly knackered, and had been so these past ten years. She’d been meaning to do something about it. She had the money; it was just a case of finding the time. And now he’d done it. And he’d cut her two new gateposts, thicker through than he.
‘They’re beauties,’ she said, rolled one with her foot. ‘They’ll see me out, love.’
‘You’re only a chicken, Mrs Foote. I might need a bit of a hand getting them in, though. I think I gave myself a hernia getting them on the truck.’
She lent him a hand. It took longer to get the old gateposts out than it might take to get the new posts in, but they got them out with crowbar and shovel, making the post holes deeper, wider, as they worked. Elsie brought up mugs of tea and toasted egg sandwiches for breakfast. She stayed to watch that first gatepost dropped in, stayed on to watch the dirt rammed down with the back end of the crowbar.
He’d spent his own money on hinges and a latch for the gate, and Gertrude wasn’t standing for that.
‘I’m paying you for those and for your time, Harry.’
‘You’ll insult me, Mrs Foote.’
‘You’ll insult me if you won’t let me pay.’
‘Righto. Then I’m paying you for my breakfast.’
‘I’m paying for those hinges and latch, lad.’
‘Righto. Then I’m paying for dinner the other night — and for those eggs.’
Like a pair of two year olds arguing, but working like a pair of men while they argued, and Joey laughing at both of them and Elsie laughing too — and making a joke later.
‘Are we going to add lunch onto his bill, Mum?’
They ate greens and corned beef at two, ate a fresh baked loaf of bread between them, then at five that afternoon, they lifted and hung the gate, all four testing its swing, its latch.
‘You came down here and measured up for that,’ Elsie accused. ‘We saw you.’
‘I saw you too,’ he said and grinned.
Pale blue eyes, stubby red lashes, but something about the way those eyes looked at Elsie. Maybe Gertrude hadn’t been too far wrong when she’d said that boy had his eye on one of them.
He ate with them that night then stayed on for a hand of cards. He was telling them how he’d asked Moe Kelly about gate-building when Vern drove in.
‘You’ve got a new gate while I’ve been gone,’ he said.
They laughed and introduced their gate builder.
Vern had travelled home with his family and their guest, but apart from time spent on the train, he’d seen little of them. He’d dropped them off at a rough little weatherboard house bought, sight unseen, at Frankston, where he’d left them to fend for themselves, hoping a bit of discomfort might give them an inkling of what this depression was about, hoping it might be character-building. His character already well built, Vern holed up in a city hotel for those same two weeks, where he’d spent his days talking up Woody Creek timber to whomever he could.
‘I’ve got orders, promises of orders. With a bit of luck I should have the mill back in full production a month from now.’
Irene Palmer, Hooper’s maid, took the news of Vern’s city trip home to her mother.
‘Go around and see him, Tom,’ Mrs Palmer said. ‘He said he’d keep you in mind when he started hiring again. First in, best dressed.’
Vern took on Tom Palmer, and told him to keep his eye out for four more good men. Word got around fast in Woody Creek. Twenty turned up for those four jobs. Vern took on six.
Then Walter Davies, a Willama mill man from way back, came to town and took a room at the hotel. On his third night in town, he knocked on George Macdonald’s door. Some men were down and out; some were down but climbing.
‘I’ve been poking around out at your bush mill, mate. I lost the shirt off my back in ’31, but I’d like to have a go at getting that old mill back into business. I’m in touch with a timber yard in Melbourne I used to supply. They’re willing to put the money up, take a chance on me. If you’re willing to take the same chance, you’ve got my guarantee that you won’t lose on the deal.’
That mill had been rusting, rotting, for five years.
‘Go for your life,’ George said.
Six more men got work with Davies. It could be a month or more before they started cutting, but until they could, George would fill the timber yard’s orders. He took on a couple of extra men.
A few kids returned to school wearing new shoes, a few had a new frock or shorts. Nelly wasn’t with them. An inseparable foursome of little girls had become a threesome, and threesomes are uncomfortable when a school desk only holds two. But Nancy Bryant’s daughter had come home from Sydney, and Nancy’s granddaughter rode her bike into school each day. Mr Curry sat her with Gloria. He sat Jenny with Dora, and not once did he confuse their names.
The city police came and went, and came again, until one day they came no more. Nelly’s oldest brother left town. He should have watched his little sister. Ian, the second boy, refused to return to school. Grace Abbot had a nervous breakdown and spent three weeks away at a city hospital, but life went on.
Charlie White hadn’t developed a taste for living, but as the alternative meant dying, and he’d found he had no taste for that either, he reclaimed his grocer’s aprons and took back his shop. There was little pleasure in living without Jean, but he took what pleasure he could in baiting his son-in-law.
‘You gave old Betty Duffy credit! Any bloody fool in town knows not to give a Duffy credit, you one-handed mug of a man!’
At eight o’clock on the third Monday in February of 1935, the town lifted its collective head and turned to the near forgotten howls of George’s and Vern’s competing mill hooters. They kept it up for half an hour, neither one prepared to allow the other the final hoot, and women who had once complained of the noise walked out of doors to listen to the fine music, and men who hadn’t got lucky with work got up from the breakfast table, stopped milking cows, feeding chooks, to walk down to the corner, hands rubbing unshaven faces, tongues licking dry lips, hope in their eyes, though shading that hope with hands gone soft from lack of labour.
‘Unemployment is falling in the cities, falling slow but steady.’
‘The building trade is getting things moving.’
‘That Davies bloke from Willama has got some big orders they say.’
‘I wonder when Mick Boyle will start up.’
‘Old Mick is past it and young Mick never was a mill man’s bootlace.’
OF MUTUAL NEED
By May, Harry Hall had a permanent invitation to Sunday night tea at Gertrude’s house, sharing what they had. They ate a few rabbits. Joey liked trapping, and you had to taste Elsie’s rabbit curry to know what a curry was.
Gertrude had little time or aptitude for cooking. These days she rarely peeled a potato. She’d decided she had no aptitude for teaching either, during her first years with Elsie. Hours she’d spent with her, trying to interest her in writing her name and learning her ABC. Then Amber had disappeared and Gertrude had invited Norman and his girls to share their Christmas meal. She hadn’t made a Christmas pudding in years, but she’d dug out her old recipe book and, her finger following directions, she and Elsie had rounded up the ingredients. That was the day Elsie saw some sense in knowing how to read. She’d taken a fancy to that recipe book, learning quickly to see the difference between a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of salt. Once Joey was old enough to take an interest in pencil and book, Elsie progressed along with him.
With card-playing, Elsie had never required a good reason for doing it. She and Joey both might have been born with a pac
k of cards in their hands. Mention a game and they’d drop what they were doing to play. They were playing five hundred on a Sunday night in June when rain started pouring down and hissing onto the stove. Harry smiled when the women rose from the game to place saucepans in strategic places, which stopped the hissing but began the song of the drips.
‘Better than some of that music you hear on the wireless,’ Harry said.
‘What?’ Elsie said.
‘The music of the drips, Else.’ He played his card and the game continued. ‘It reminds me of Collingwood,’ he said. ‘Of playing cards in Collingwood. We used to have a wireless.’
Harry never spoke of his home. He’d talk about the news, the town, the truck, anything other than his family, but he’d opened the door so Gertrude asked her question.
‘Are your folk still down there, Harry?’
‘Dead,’ he said and he played his card.
‘Your mum and dad both?’
‘And two little brothers. Your turn, Else.’
Elsie wasn’t playing. She was staring at him. ‘How?’
‘Flu,’ he said. ‘Or that’s what killed my little brothers. One was seven, one nine. I was going on twelve. We all got it. Five or six years back.’
He looked at the musical saucepans, looked up at the ceiling, expecting it to start leaking. The rain was thundering on the old tin roof, muffling their voices. Joey had placed his cards face down and gone to the window, expecting the power of the rain to smash through the glass.
‘How did your mother die?’ Gertrude said.
Harry lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and for an instant she though he wasn’t going to reply.
‘Killed herself, Mrs Foote. Blamed herself, Dad reckoned, for my little brothers dying — about six months after they died. It’s still your turn, Else,’ he said.
They were waiting for more. Joey returned to the table, waiting for more. Harry shrugged knowing he’d already let out too much of his private business, but the noise of that rain cancelled his words as they came out, so he set a few more free.
‘Dad’s eyes had started going wonky on him before Mum died. They got worse afterwards. He reckoned it was the shock of her doing what she’d done that made them worse. We thought they’d get better. He died a year after Mum. It turned out that he had a growth in his head, pressing on his eye nerve. They found out after he was dead.’
He glanced around at the listeners, and Elsie played a card — chose the wrong card. Joey took the trick.
‘I’ve gone and put you off the game,’ he said. ‘Don’t mind me. It’s just the rain. It washes off my outer layers, sort of gets under my skin a bit. I’ll get going home then.’
‘You’re not going out in this weather,’ Elsie said, as she may have said to Joey.
Harry slept the night on the kitchen floor, and the following morning, between showers, he fixed the leaking chimney. The lead moulded around it where it joined the roof had moved away. He hammered it back where it ought to be, and when skies opened up again, not a drip hissed onto the stove.
‘You’re a godsend, Harry Hall,’ Gertrude said.
‘Cut that out now or you’ll make me go all coy, Mrs Foote.’
That boy needed a family and she needed that boy. Her shed was dry. Its back corner, currently used as a bathroom, was partially partitioned. A bit of work could make that corner into comfortable enough quarters, or more comfortable than McPherson’s hut, and she could see that Harry ate regularly.
She told him he’d be doing her a favour, that he could work for his keep; told him that Joey needed a big brother to teach him things women couldn’t teach him. Harry didn’t put up much of an argument.
An odd relationship theirs, one of mutual need, mutual respect. Two independent people, a boy who looked sixteen but swore he was going on eighteen, and a woman past sixty, both more accustomed to giving than to receiving. He moved in that day, and a month later had added to the old partition and hammered down a rough floor. There was room enough in the corner of that shed to squeeze in two single beds. They moved Joey’s bed out of the kitchen.
An equally odd relationship was developing over Norman’s side fence. Jenny hadn’t told Mr Foster about Amber’s embroidery needle, but somehow he knew. On a Friday night in July, Jenny ran again from Amber, ran out the back door and tumbled over his back fence in the dark — and almost landed on him. He must have been out there listening, but he didn’t ask why she was there so she didn’t ask why he was standing outside in the dark.
She’d started visiting him on Saturday mornings, and he put her to work stamping Woody Creek’s postmark on the envelopes; she stood on a chair behind his counter sorting mail into the alphabetically marked pigeonholes.
The XYZ pigeonhole never received a letter. She watched it for months, then one day played a trick on the little postmaster. She wrote a letter to Mr Zebra, signed it Cara Jeanette Paris, and sneaked it into the XYZ pigeonhole while Mr Foster wasn’t looking. She popped in after school on Monday and the XYZ pigeonhole was empty again. Then, on Saturday morning, while she was filing new mail, she came on a rough-made brown-paper envelope, the stamp cancelled with a horseshoe footprint and the letter addressed to Miss Cara Jeanette Paris — in very clumsy Zebra print.
Give an imaginative child an imaginative friend and she’ll push it to the limit. Cara and Mr Zebra corresponded weekly for a time.
Give a shy little man a pseudonym to hide behind and he can become a hero. While glancing at an issue of Methodist Mission’s Magazine, he read of a woman’s sorry plight and Mr Bob Zebra was moved to post off a small donation which he asked might be directed to that particular woman. He could afford it. He had few needs and a steady wage.
A week before Christmas, a card arrived from Melbourne addressed to Mr Bob Zebra. Had his little assistant not seen it, had her big blue eyes not been stretched to capacity by this magic she’d raised within a pokey little post office, he would have ended the game there. He could not deny those eyes. They opened the envelope together. It was a beautiful card with angels on it, a sheet of writing paper tucked inside.
Dear Mr Zebra,
Thanks to your kindness to a stranger, I am back on my feet once more, and this week I found a position as a copy typist. It is only for three days a week but this could increase if things continue to pick up. My disability restricts many activities, but I enjoy reading, writing letters and making new friends. If you should again find time to put pen to paper, I would be pleased to hear from you.
Best regards, Mary Jolly
Jenny wrote a two-page reply to Mary Jolly, about a brown elf who lived in a house built of letters. His house smelled like a papery bouquet of all the world . . . She signed it, Cara Jeanette Paris.
That child had magic in her soul and it was rubbing off on the little postmaster. And what harm could be done in posting off her little story? He could see no harm in it at all. He supplied the envelope and stamp; Jenny postmarked it and dropped it into the mail sack to ride the train to Melbourne. Perhaps that was the end of it.
But it wasn’t. A week later a letter arrived addressed to Cara Jeanette Paris.
My dear Cara,
What a pretty name you have. And how delighted I was to hear that my letter ended up keeping the cruel winds away from that little brown elf. I do hope that he has found a new door for his house . . .
Jenny, now eleven, was finally growing, and far too old to believe in fairies, but still desperate to believe that a few might survive at the bottom of some people’s gardens if not in Norman’s. A clothes line lived down the bottom of Norman’s garden and a lavatory and a few trees that didn’t care if they grew or not. Stinging wasps hunted in Norman’s garden for soft green spiders to lock in their umbrella-nest jails so their maggots could eat them alive. Fairies would never live there, but they might next door.
The elf’s garden is a dark forest of trees and vines all growing happily together, so that purple trumpet flowers bloom on gum trees and orange rose
s bloom on grape vines and flowers pop up from the weeds wherever they like, though they have never been planted there. It is the safest place in all of the world because a good spell has been cast over it which keeps all evil witches out . . .
Norman’s house smelled safe, smelled of polish and clean and cooking, but it wasn’t safe and Amber wasn’t safe sometimes. A lot of places that seemed safe weren’t. Like Granny’s forest wasn’t safe, and even the swimming bend. Nelly had thought her big brothers could keep her safe from everything, everyone, but people had to learn to keep themselves safe.
Mr Foster was safe. Mary Jolly was safe. She was like a forever book, a paper friend, and she’d stay safe while she stayed a secret. Whenever a letter came for Cara Jeanette, she read it to Mr Foster then folded it back into its envelope and he put it in a box beneath his counter.
Waiting for Mary’s letters could make a week go slowly. Writing back to her could make a Sunday be gone in a wink. Jenny could even write letters to her in her head, in bed at night, and at times make Sissy disappear from that bed.
Once upon a time, to a land called Creaky Woods where fairies once danced and played by moonlight, there came a wicked witch who was jealous of the fairies so she cast a spell over all of the land. No grass grew there, no flowers, and any tree where a fairy might find a hole to live in was quickly eaten by the witch’s sharp-toothed monsters who howled and growled all day of hunger . . .
Some nights Sissy refused to disappear.
‘Will you stay over your side, Sissy.’
‘Shut up your moaning. I’m trying to sleep!’
‘Then move over to your side and sleep!’
‘I am over my side!’
‘You’re not. I’m on the edge.’
‘Fall off then and go to hell.’
With her hair in rags, the only way Sissy could sleep was face down, sprawled on her stomach like a starfish, arms and legs spread. Jenny was half her size. She didn’t need as much bed.