by Joy Dettman
‘If I said I’d marry one of them, would you say it was for the best, Daddy?’
‘I would never advise —’
‘It would make her happy, wouldn’t it?’
He didn’t deny that. His jowl rags folded in on themselves.
‘Maisy said it would be a marriage in name only. I’d live with her, not them.’
He couldn’t advise. He couldn’t think. The Willama sergeant had told him to speak to her. He’d ridden down here to speak to her, but could find no words to say. What did he think? What did he want?
The peace of death.
She read his mind, or his eyes, and looked away. ‘Constable Denham and that old policeman told me what it would be like in a courtroom. Do you want to sit at my side in a courtroom?’
‘If that is your decision.’
‘She wouldn’t let you.’ She set out the cards for another game. ‘Anyway, I’m not doing it. Jennifer Morrison, Woody Creek songbird, sings in court — do you want to see those headlines in Mr Cox’s shop?’
‘No,’ he admitted.
‘Me either.’
She flipped the cards. This was a bad deal. There were too many black cards turned up. She needed a red jack, a knight in shining armour who would come through that door to fight off all the infidels, but Gertrude came through the door with that whimpering white worm in her arms.
Norman turned to look at the featureless being, bald, its ears crumpled. His index finger reaching out to touch was withdrawn and he turned back to the child he’d fallen in love with. Her head was down, her concentration on her game of cards. She didn’t acknowledge the infant’s presence and Gertrude took her away.
‘A nameless child has no future,’ he said.
‘Fair is fair. It stole mine.’ She placed a red eight on a black nine. ‘Sit down,’ she said.
He sat, sat in silence, watching her flip through the cards. She got the ace of clubs. That was better. She placed it, moved the two of clubs, and turned up the ace of spades.
‘Looking better,’ he said when the silence grew too long.
‘Better and better.’
The king of diamonds made it better still. The queen of clubs to the red king and suddenly she had a game.
‘They made me filthy,’ she said. ‘I’ve had three baths and I can’t feel clean. Their lawyer will make me filthier still. So will your very dear Mrs Morrison.’
She got a red four, which meant she could move the black three. And she turned up the jack of diamonds. She was going to win this game.
‘Do you know if she’s still got her wedding gown?’
‘Your mother?’
‘Mrs Morrison,’ she said. ‘It would fit me.’
‘I . . . I believe . . . so.’
‘Saved for Sissy?’ She smiled. ‘That’s a joke, Daddy. Smile.’ He tried to smile and it looked like a death mask. Looked away, looked away fast. ‘Tell them I’ll get married if I can wear her dress — and my pearl in a cage pendant and earrings.’
‘It wouldn’t be . . . be . . .’
‘Fitting? Am I too soiled to get married in white?’
No reply. She turned the king of hearts, showed it to him before placing it in the space, which meant she could move the queen of spades, which meant turning up her last hidden card.
And she had it. She smiled, pleased with herself, almost his Jenny-wren’s smile. Older, though. The child was gone from her face. That sweet innocence was gone from her eyes.
‘You never know what is going to happen next, do you? Maybe a toad will turn into a prince when I kiss him at the altar.’
If the news of Jenny Morrison’s baby had gone through the town like a dose of Epsom salts, news of her wedding sent the town’s collective bowel into spasm.
Margaret Hooper learned about it at Blunt’s when she went in to buy two more skeins of maroon wool for a sweater she was knitting for Vern; he needed more room in his sweaters these days.
‘Amber and Maisy were in there with what looked like an old wedding gown,’ she reported back at the house.
‘Hmph,’ Lorna said.
The twins were released from their cell on 26 April, the day Bob Menzies was voted into the top parliamentary job. Maisy wouldn’t let them into the house until they’d bathed and shaved. They considered taking off for Melbourne, but Denham had their bike chained to a tree in his backyard. Not that the idea of a wedding wasn’t appealing, not that the gaining of legal right to Jenny Morrison wasn’t very appealing, except they couldn’t both have her.
They bathed but didn’t shave. They put on the clothing Maisy had laid out on their beds, helped themselves to a few bob from her purse and headed over the road to the hotel.
Denham cut them off at the pass. ‘If you want another dose of your cell, keep heading the way you’re heading.’
They didn’t want the cell. They went home.
By April’s end, they were fighting over which one should get her, but too well matched in height, weight and reach, knowing the other one’s move before he made it, left both of them bruised but no closer to a decision. Bernie was the oldest by five minutes. He argued that it was his right to wed first. Cecil, still known as Macka, said he was the first on her that night, that the kid had to be his, so he ought to be the one wedding her.
The date had been set. The wedding was to take place at eleven thirty on Saturday 24 May. The sooner the better, Maisy said. The baby, still unnamed, unregistered, could be registered late and who was to know the difference. She drove her sons to Willama to be fitted out for wedding suits. Neither twin had owned a suit since they’d grown out of their boarding school suits.
George tossed a coin that night. It came up tails for Cecil, but Bernie refused to accept one toss, so they made it two out of three. The coin came up heads on the next two tosses, so Cecil wanted three out of five. George could have stood all night tossing that coin. They wouldn’t have agreed.
A week before the wedding, Gertrude watched Maisy’s car pull up in front of Elsie’s house, a common enough occurrence. Then she saw George and those raping little bastards step from it.
‘You can’t mean to go through with it, darlin’.’
‘Stop worrying, Granny. It’s turning your hair grey.’
Grey hair was the last of her worries.
‘You don’t want to raise that baby. You loathe those boys and you can’t do it. It doesn’t matter what Maisy says she’ll do — or what those boys won’t do, so soon as you’re wed to one of them, you’re giving him the right to take what he wants from you, whenever he wants, any way he wants.’
Jenny smiled and played with the knotted threads keeping open the holes pierced in her lobes. Gertrude had used a red-hot needle, which brought back memories of Amber’s needle but hurt more. They’d almost healed. Norman had brought down the pendant and earrings. She couldn’t wait to try them.
‘You’re throwing your life away.’
‘You know, in one of Itchy-foot’s books, they write about the old people sacrificing virgins to the gods so the tribe stays healthy. They mated virgins with horses, it could have been worse, Granny.’
‘Don’t talk like that. You sound like your grandfather.’
‘I look like him too — even if you won’t admit it.’
Gertrude had cut her hair short again, short like a boy’s. She’d wanted it short to show off her earrings. Her face was thinner than it had been a year ago; she was thinner, still a beautiful girl, but damaged, and vengeful.
Jenny glanced out the door. The Macdonalds were talking to Elsie, or Maisy was talking to her. George and the twins were looking across at Gertrude’s house. She shrugged, walked to the dresser drawer and removed her playing cards, drew out a chair and sat shuffling them.
She had no fear of them. Maybe they’d stolen her fear along with her innocence. She walked that bush road now and didn’t flinch, walked it alone by night. We all need a little fear, Gertrude thought.
The light from the window behind the
card player turned her hair into a glowing halo of gold. He was in that hair. He was in the lift of her chin, the shape of her brow. He’d had no fear. He’d dragged Gertrude into places few white women had seen. She’d feared. For a time she’d lived in fear.
Shook him from her head and turned back to Jenny, saw him in her eyes and again turned away.
‘God help you, darlin’.’
‘He’s already helped me. He got it out of me before I even knew it was coming out. Now I’m helping myself, Granny.’
Someone had been watching over that little girl while Gertrude had been walking in the moonlight — and had been helping her since. She’d been up eating pancakes the next morning and outside reading for the sunny part of the day, making up for lost time, she’d said, or taking back lost time.
They were coming, Maisy leading the way, George behind her, their duo walking side by side behind him. Strange how features are passed down through a family, Gertrude thought. Those raping little bastards were the image of their father. Strange too how the eye seeks out family resemblances. Man’s instinctive need to find a continuity of life. That baby’s eyes were a slaty grey, as were all babies’ eyes at birth; they’d end up the Macdonald purple. There was little of Jenny in her.
‘You’re a beautiful girl, and cutting off your nose to spite your face will only make you ugly. Go to court like Denham and that Sergeant Thompson want you to, and let the judge punish them. I’ll stay by your side all the way.’
‘I know you would.’ She picked up the battered old queen of diamonds and turned it front and back. ‘It’s filthy, Granny, and you can’t make it clean again. Too many hands have been on it. That’s what I feel like — as if nothing will ever make me clean again. Going to court would be like letting more hands touch me. And the newspapers too. They’ve got photographs of me when I was clean and new. I’m not letting everyone make them dirty.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘Who cares, if it’s on the news?’
The twins were in her yard and Gertrude couldn’t stand to look at them, couldn’t keep her mouth shut if she was in the same room as them. She went to her bedroom, leaned against her dressing table.
‘Are you there, Mrs Foote?’ Maisy called.
‘The door is open,’ Jenny said.
Maisy came in, followed by her men. ‘Is your grandma about, love?’
‘Try the orchard,’ Jenny said.
‘We’re here to see you, girlie. We had a talk to the minister this morning,’ George said.
She eyed him and slapped three cards down, then three more. Her game wasn’t progressing.
‘The problem here is we’ve got two very willing grooms. We need you to make the decision.’
‘There are legal papers the minister needs filled in, love,’ Maisy explained.
‘He says we can’t both have you,’ one of the mongrels said.
‘Why not? You did last time,’ Jenny said, sweeping the cards together, collecting and shuffling them while Maisy coloured and George looked out the door.
She dealt the cards then, in two piles, one in front of each twin. She dealt the pack, slapping the final card down hard. ‘Whoopie. You win.’
Bernie won her.
Cecil, the losing twin, won a drive out to his brother-in-law’s property, where he was told to remain until he cooled down. He left for home when they left, and by sundown Bernie couldn’t sit still. At seven that night he set off to meet his twin.
At the same time, Jenny, the third point of this ill-shaped triangle, left on her evening walk. She went the same way each night, through the bush, up to where the road forked, then back again. That road, always her demon, had kept her from Granny’s house. All of those wasted years of fearing strangers hiding behind trees. Danger didn’t come from trees and strangers. It came from mothers and boys you’d known all your life.
Loved the bush now, loved the sound of the bush by night, the night things, the whispering of the trees. Loved the walking too, and feeling the strength returning to her legs.
She’d let herself get sick because of them. Every day now she ate like a horse and every bite she ate made her stronger. She’d be strong enough when the time came.
Gertrude had timed her walk last night. She was back in twenty-three minutes. Tonight she watched her to the gate, looked at her clock, then went to the lean-to where she reached for the old shoebox placed on top of that wardrobe the night Ernie Ogden had given the stranger’s few belongings into her keeping.
Back in the kitchen, the purse emptied to her table, she looked again at the handkerchief and the brooch pinned to it. It was a beautiful thing and valuable. She turned it this way and that, watching those stones flare. But that wasn’t what she’d gone looking for; nor the old luggage label, that bleeding ink no clearer tonight than it had been fifteen years ago. Less clear. She set her reading glasses on her nose, got the light at the best angle. The T and the V were clear — clearer now that she knew what had been written there.
The sheet of paper Ernie Ogden had placed into the purse resented giving up its folds, but she flattened it and held it close to the light. And it was there. Albert Forester, Ernie Ogden’s handwriting still black and clear. Albert Forester. No fixed address. Inquired after identifying jewellery.
It was no real surprise. Gertrude had known it since she’d cut Jenny’s hair, had known it when she’d seen her silhouetted against the window, when she’d seen her smile as she’d watched the Macdonalds walking back across the goat paddock. She had his eye colouring, and, like his, Jenny’s could change in an instant from the clearest, purest of blue to the chill of the ocean floor. He’d been in her from the beginning. She should have seen it earlier.
And she had his voice.
The first time Gertrude had set eyes on Archie Foote, he’d been at Monk’s piano, looking at her and singing ‘Greensleeves’. She’d been wearing green that day. She’d known he was singing it to her. He’d charmed her with his voice.
‘He looks like the angel Gabriel but they say he’s a prize mongrel,’ Vern had said. He’d known. As an eighteen-year-old boy, he’d known.
Always something biblical about Archie Foote’s looks. The angel Gabriel had aged into old Noah or maybe Moses.
Man’s mind is a mystery, she thought, how it works, what disturbs it, how it sorts and sifts information until the dross is shaken off and only a pure hard lump of knowledge sits waiting to be viewed beneath a magnifying glass — which was the way she’d come to realise what had once been written on that old luggage label. The V had once been attached to Via, the T was attached to Three. Whoever had used that label had been travelling to Three Pines Via Woody Creek.
Max Monk’s city guests had used that siding, as had others living out that way. Monk had last seen his mad cousin at Three Pines, a few months before Archie’s father passed away. Gertrude knew the date of her father-in-law’s death. He’d passed on in early March of ’24. Jenny would have been a bare two months old.
Had Archie taken his lady love up there in December of 1923 — or deserted her and she’d followed him, carrying that old label so she’d know where to get off the train? Got off at that old mill siding maybe, and found nothing there but acres of wheat stubble. Had she tried to follow the train lines back into town? Had she fallen — or been pushed? Had Archie drugged her, tried to take the baby, and she’d got away?
A fiction writer would have found an answer. Gertrude was just a woman with an enquiring mind.
She sighed, glanced at the clock, removed her glasses and slid them into their case. She folded the paper, tucked it with the handkerchief and brooch into the purse, placed the purse into the shoebox, the shoebox back on top of the lean-to’s wardrobe. Some things were better off left buried. Someone would find that brooch when she was gone. She wouldn’t be looking at it again.
THE MIRAGE
Sissy was the older daughter. She was supposed to be getting married first. The fact that Jim hadn’t asked her, the
fact that she hadn’t seen him in ten days, didn’t enter into the argument. She was five years older than Jenny and it was ridiculous, and ridiculous that they were letting her have a white wedding. Not that Amber’s wedding gown was worth wearing, not that it was even white, but they shouldn’t have been letting her wear it anyway. Jenny wanted photographs too, and they were giving her anything she asked for. And it was ridiculous her wanting it. Anyone else would be hiding their head in shame, and a lot of people were saying the same thing too, not just Sissy. It was worse than ridiculous. It was disgusting, and if anyone thought that she’d be showing her face at that church, then they had another think coming to them.
She prayed for a cloudburst, timed to drop its load on Woody Creek at eleven thirty on Saturday morning. Perhaps that was being too specific, so she prayed for it to arrive any time between Friday midnight and Saturday at eleven thirty. Jim was coming in on Friday to take her and Margaret to a dance. She didn’t want rain on Friday. Didn’t want a pea soup fog either, but she’d raised one by Friday morning and it hung around all day.
By four thirty, Woody Creek was a white-out. Jim telephoned his father asking him to pass on to Sissy that he wouldn’t be attempting to drive in through this fog. Vern rang Norman at the station, who forgot to tell Sissy until Amber had started on her hair at six thirty.
‘He can go to hell,’ she said. ‘And so can she. She’s a slut, and if you think I’m embarrassing myself by going within a mile of her wedding, then you’ve got another think coming.’
By six thirty, visibility was down to nil. Gertrude told Jenny that she wasn’t going out in that fog, told her it would be like feeling her way through a bag of cottonwool. Jenny walked every night. She knew that road. Tonight, she didn’t turn back when she reached the fork but continued on into town.
Vern was peering out his living-room window when he saw a dark-clad shape walk by. He couldn’t tell if it was man or woman.
She was wearing the black overcoat Gertrude had taken from the stranger. It reached her ankles, near wrapped her twice, but it kept her warm. She’d crocheted a beret from wool leftover from a pale green sweater she and Gertrude had spent a week in knitting. She wore it pulled low, her hair tucked beneath it — though not so low it hid her pearl in a cage earrings. She was wearing her pendant too.