by Robert Drewe
He told the Yips, ‘We have high hopes for these young pinot noir vines,’ his vigneron’s expansive gesture encompassing not only Whipbird’s present state but its fruitful future. ‘We’re so fortunate that the terroir all comes together here. Soil, rainfall, temperature, altitude. Everything the grapes need.’
‘We loved China,’ Christine was saying to the top of Audrey Yip’s veiled head. Christine’s hand lightly guided a protuberance, buried and swathed in lengths and twists of gauzy and silky materials, that she hoped was Mrs Yip’s elbow. A lumpy bit of Mrs Yip anyway. The sun was clouded and lay low over the trees: the chance of an unprotected Mrs Yip suffering sun damage was close to zero. Still, she was taking no chances on the weather.
‘The vines are just sticks,’ said Cyril Yip.
‘Dry twigs,’ plump son Milton offered helpfully.
‘We’re letting the vines grow and sprawl at present, for trunk and root strength.’ Hugh said. Jesus, this is what young vines look like! Next year we’ll be training them onto the wire. The third year they’ll start producing grapes.’
‘We were in China only last year,’ said Christine. ‘Isn’t Shanghai marvellous? The French Concession is just like Europe! The Bund – what amazing architecture! We found a late-night bar where elderly local fellows were playing 1940s jazz in tuxedos. I half expected Humphrey Bogart to walk in. They were so ancient they had to be helped up from their seats after each set.’
‘Hangzhou more beautiful than Shanghai,’ interrupted Mrs Yip’s muffled voice. ‘We live in Hangzhou.’
‘Soon to host the G20 Summit and the Asian Games,’ Cyril Yip broke in.
‘The simple fact of the matter is there’s no better place in the world for pinot noir grapes,’ Hugh was saying.
Cyril Yip grunted. He broke off a bud from a vine, sniffed it, licked it, then flicked it away and spat into the dirt. Milton did the same, then brushed a speck of phlegm from his sneakers.
A neighbouring and inconsolable cow called for its calf once more. A drawn-out plangent moan. Audrey Yip lifted her veil. A face mask still covered her mouth and nose. She nudged Christine. ‘That noise?’
‘Cows. Moo-moo.’
‘Wild animals here? Goannas with poison bites? Choking snakes? Tree bears?’
‘None at all.’
‘I’m scared of tree bears,’ said Mrs Yip.
‘Rest easy,’ said Christine.
‘Pinot is very finicky about temperature,’ Hugh went on. ‘It likes a long, cool ripening season. In its growing season, right now, September to April, you want it to be between 14 and 18 degrees Celsius. Here’s a pertinent fact,’ he enthused. ‘Our average temperature over the last five growing seasons has been 15.75 degrees Celsius. You can’t get much better and closer than that!’
‘What about 16 degrees?’ said Milton.
7
I hear a breathy whisper – soft murmurs like buried horses. Over and over, the words buried horses. Grim images begin to appear too, from Sly’s befuddled brain, I’m sure, not from me.
Buried horses? Never ridden a horse myself and never wanted to. I was infantry, on foot in the Foot. Some Maoris rode horses, I was surprised to see. They weren’t just savages with rudimentary weapons. Another shock at Taranaki – their smoothbore firearms. Shotguns and muskets as well as their war axes. Even more surprising to see some wild warriors riding horses. With bridles and saddles and everything.
As I remember every time I sit down too quick, I’ve definitely been introduced to shotguns. Receiving an arseful of shot on the Taranaki hillside did accomplish that. (‘Christ! Run like bloody hell!’) And a hillock of chopped-off soldiers’ heads showed what axes could do. That heap of our boys’ shocked faces all staring in the same direction – towards our bivouac. Eyes open in all but the drummer boy. His cheeks were tear-streaked through the mud. How’s that for a warning!
We buried the heads. But buried horses?
The Maoris chanted words they considered mighty magic as they galloped towards us. Hapa, hapa! But when we shot their horses out from under them, they didn’t stop to bury them. No horses interred under the red tussock grass of Taranaki.
No. The warriors wriggled out from under the carcasses and marched straight towards us, proud and upright. Under a new officer since the running-away episode, Lieutenant Digby Bullock, we’d got clever, built a fort and challenged them to come to us. Boldly and unwisely, they accepted the invitation. And from the safety of our redoubt, from the loopholes in our fort, we, Bullock’s brave and sheltered boys, picked them off. Fish in a barrel. They didn’t duck. Or run away. Just held up their right hands, palms out, to ward off our bullets, and shouted their magic incantations. Hapa, hapa! Our bullets ripped through their magic anyway.
So that soft undertone I hear – buried horses, buried horses – must come from Sly. Something’s emerged from the jangled web of nerves and impulses in his ‘dead’ brain, a deep memory. Gradually I’m guessing how and why.
Around and around the vineyard’s home paddock right now there’s an Arabian, a grey, galloping and bucking. Its ears are back, its eyes are rolling. Something’s spooked it. That stupid boy in black is running around the riding arena, swinging his arms wildly. Now he’s clapping his hands and making Hugh’s peculiar whipbird call.
‘Toooo-whit! Choo-choo! Wee-wee!’ the boy goes. Over and over.
Why tease a nervy horse? I wonder. What’s the point? That’s what has set Sly off. He’s troubled by the frightened hoofbeats and flying mane of the Arabian. The way he’s all shuffling and shivery, I feel the horse’s fear has got through to him. That’s a surprise. So he’s still capable of being affected by something. Upset by a panicked horse.
There’s a whistling sound in his teeth that I’m forced to share. His fingers are drumming on his thighs. I’m trembling with his tremors. Abruptly, I’m registering something: his vivid recall of a sad time for Willow. A time when she was overwhelmed by buried horses.
Eye abscesses forced them to put down Sasha, the beloved old Shetland she’d had since she was a toddler. Moreover, he was dead horse number three – three within a month. Before he was terminally resolved, a young gelding with colic had rolled over and died suddenly, and before that, a foal foamed and fell from a brown snake’s bite. Both buried in the field behind the house.
I’m sensing all this like it’s been laid out before me. By the time it was Sasha’s turn to be dispatched, the sight of the vet and his bag of death arriving once more, and the Bobcat driver following the vet’s van down the driveway, threw Willow into a spin. The Bobcat was there to bury Sasha. Horses need long graves, and deep ones. When they’re prone, even ponies take up a lot of room.
Sly’s words in my head say Sasha sensed his fate. Sobbing Willow was sure of that. The pony tried to flee, chunky little legs forcing a gallop. His bad eyes couldn’t see properly and the vet caught him easily. He didn’t try to nip, just gave a little optimistic kick.
To avoid the indignity of bulldozing his body across the field, they buried Sasha where he fell, under the kitchen window. The grave mound there for Willow to see every day thereafter.
It dawned on her flawed and broken father, just returned from the American tour disaster to a marriage break-up and a career in ruins (possibly his last sensible realisation), that her pony’s death was another ending, another loss, to Willow.
For a few moments this weekend at Whipbird, Sly’s brain murmur of buried horses broke through his stony mental numbness.
And when the stupid boy eventually tires of the mischief and disorder, and wanders off, lighting a cigarette and chuckling to himself, and the Arabian comes to a steaming, snorting halt – and Sly gradually calms, too – I sense a love for Willow so strong that the hoofbeats and heartbeats still thud loud and clear in me.
8
Me, I’m from a harder century. When the Imperial forces withdrew in 1870, I stayed behind. Still in the Ordnance Depot in Victoria Barracks in St Kilda Road, Melbourne. How could
I not? Mary and I had five Australian kids by then. Goodbye Britain. This was home.
No longer a staff sergeant, I was a civil servant now, with the same job: controlling supplies for the new Victorian military.
No, ‘ordnance clerk’ doesn’t have the same ring to it. But any job to do with weapons carries a certain kudos. Responsibility goes with it. When arms and ammunition are involved, your customers wait patiently to be served. The same with clothes and food. Any soldier wanting trousers that more or less fit, boots that don’t pinch too much, and food packs of a fairly recent origin shows you the same respect. Especially the second time around. Even officers.
Nothing much else changed with my new situation. No military uniform for me any more, but in the Ordnance Depot I still had my old office and storeroom and weapons safe and desk and ledgers and inkstand and tape measure and teapot. The same paperwork in triplicate. The same drinking rights in the sergeants’ mess. The same military bearing. The same arseful of Maori shotgun pellets whenever I sat down.
So, buried horses? Why such unmuted sorrow at a horse’s burial? A different time, I know. Different generations. But dispatching a dead pet compared to the burial of a wife, a child? Wives and children plural.
I’m experienced in that matter. It was in our bedroom at 239 Swan Street, in the thirteenth year of our marriage, that Mary, my Mary from Templemore, just like me, a migrant to Richmond, Melbourne, Victoria, just like me, died of phthisis.
Jesus Christ, the bloody disease took its time. With our small house now crammed with six children we were confronted daily with Mary’s pain and suffering. Her last two years were agonising for us all.
Our oldest, Gabriel, was twelve, and the youngest, Elizabeth, only four months. In between were Ada, Marion, Patrick and Maureen. In the last months of her wasting disease they now call tuberculosis, I know Mary agonised on the effect her death would have on us all.
I’m a man who knows all about burials. I bought a plot in the Catholic section of the Melbourne General Cemetery and buried her two days after. Three months later, on their shared gravestone I had these words engraved:
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
Erected by Conor Cleary of Richmond In Memory of his Beloved Wife Mary who departed this life May 24, 1872 aged 34 years, and their dear child Elizabeth who died on September 12, 1872 aged 7 months. May their souls rest in peace.
While I pray their souls rest in peace I still ponder on a shame that haunts me. That after a second bottle of Southwark stout one Saturday night a randy and insistent Catholic fellow impregnates his terminally ill wife. A loving and accepting woman who, further sapped by pregnancy, gives birth to a sickly child, the strain of childbirth and nursing the baby weakening her further, and ultimately hastening her death.
There’s more, of course. Baby Elizabeth, suffering under a grieving and frenetic father’s loving but deficient care and lacking a mother’s milk and special attention, soon dies as well.
Such a man, despite the customary Catholic encouragement of Father Kieran O’Regan at St Ignatius (‘Conor, in God’s eyes your behaviour as a proper Catholic husband and father is impeccable’), might struggle long and hard for a peaceful soul. Even after his death.
From his demeanour today, my brain-troubled great-great-great-grandson Sly – who certainly wouldn’t fathom how many ‘greats’ we were apart – and I have a lot in common. Dead and ‘dead’, my fidgety and barely corporeal flesh-cloak and I both still long for a serene soul.
Serenity? With all those children to raise in a series of small rented Richmond cottages, serenity was an ill-afforded extravagance. I admit that expediency prevailed. Five months after Mary died, and one month after baby Elizabeth’s death, and not without cartloads of Richmond gossip and disapproval all up and down Swan Street (except for the encouraging Father O’Regan), I married Mary’s best friend, and little Elizabeth’s godmother, Bridget Meagher.
We tied the knot at St Finbar’s, Brighton. My idea. My choice of the Meagher’s local church was a concession to Bridget’s parents. Gerald and Cora Meagher lacked enthusiasm for the marriage of their nineteen-year-old only daughter (definitely her father’s daughter – she gave her occupation on our marriage certificate as ‘lady’) to a 34-year-old ordnance clerk and father of five.
Both my marriages were to women originally from Templemore. Although the Meaghers hailed from my home town too, our families hadn’t known each other. Nor did the Meaghers see the coincidence of our backgrounds as any way advantageous.
As the mining surveyor Gerald Meagher pointed out to me, from his office window in La Trobe Street, at any given moment he could look out on ‘a hundred bloody Irish boys, even plenty of boys from Tipperary, who aren’t so child-ridden, old and financially hamstrung as you!’
Good try, Conor, but as a sop to my new father-in-law, the St Finbar’s wedding venue didn’t cut the mustard, and after the ceremony he didn’t find it necessary to speak to us again.
Although Bridget took the ladyness on our marriage licence seriously – and exquisitely – she nevertheless birthed eight babies for us.
If I’d expected her father to eventually warm to our cause, perhaps to accept us when we lost our second and fourth children, little John and Beatrice, I was mistaken. Not even when darling Bridget, never a robust girl, succumbed to the tuberculosis as well.
When dear Bridget died after forty-one years together I was seventy-three and my surviving children ranged in age from fifty-one (Patrick, Mary’s son) to fifteen (Emily). It’s fair to say the feisty dozen offspring were not overjoyed when I married Eloise McGrath two years later.
Not as disconcerted, however, as Eloise’s family at losing their chief cook and bottle-washer at number 22 Malmsbury Street, Hawthorn. Not as alarmed as they were at seeing their 54-year-old, six-foot spinster aunt and daughter – their safely single, endlessly cheerful and willing skivvy, happily hitching up with a moustachioed five-foot-five and 75-year-old father of twelve on a civil-service pension.
Another unhappy parent of the bride. ‘What sort of fucking joke is this?’ growled my new father-in-law, two years my junior, at the wedding party.
What could I say? That his elongated spinster daughter had a previously neglected cheeky streak, a delightful impishness just waiting in the wings for its cue, a saucy dimpled mischief that I’d already sampled (why wait, at our ages?) and that she was most pleased to have encouraged? And that her mischief, mulled wine and minted roast lamb made me cheeky too?
The thing was, she kept me young. No longer the portly grey retired ordnance clerk from Victoria Barracks. Not the limping boulevardier of Swan Street, Richmond. Eloise saw beyond all that. She recognised the hungry ginger rascal of the 40th Foot. The sort of boy who’d steal a digestive biscuit from a crow.
We had ten years of married bliss. Bliss in every sense – you’d be surprised. At eighty-five and sixty-four we were still in jolly, bawdy love when we heard the news from the Somme. And – sorry, my dear Eloise – suddenly that was it for bawdy cheekiness. The death of a son in a cruel and bitter war killed it then and there. Suddenly, like Frank, I was shot of the gusto and romance of life.
A soldier too, my son Frank. But in a war more perilous than his gormless father ever imagined when he sailed into Melbourne on the Jupiter in 1864, pig-ignorant about his destination and the battles he’d signed up for. A boy merely desperate for the Queen’s shilling. Oh, there was another bitter coincidence: despite Frank’s Irish blood he’d enlisted to fight for England, like I did. Explain that? Well, it was the Great War. And we were Australians now.
When the 518th Field Company of the Royal Engineers took Frank to France, at least he had an inkling of his task: building bridges and bulwarks to defend the trenches under German artillery barrages. But did the engineer anticipate their air attacks – air attacks! – and the ferocious charges that came out of nowhere? This was a war beyond imagination. Worse than facing the axes of ferocious Maoris. War on another planet.
&
nbsp; But maybe not worse than fighting your own kind.
Two dates stay with me from the year 1918. March 22 and 23. A crisp Melbourne autumn. The deciduous leaves of nostalgically planted European trees crackling underfoot as Eloise and I stomp obliviously along the Yarra bank on our evening walks. A jolly sight, I suppose, we mismatched, be-scarfed and jacketed elderly ramblers. My lofty bride a good head and shoulders higher. An unsuspecting twosome.
It was spring in France of course. On the twenty-second the Germans launched their desperate Spring Offensive in the Arras region of the Somme. The next day Frank was killed.
As Major Francis Cleary served in the British rather than the Australian army it was six months before the news of his death reached us. The fighting was fierce and the casualties horrendous at the Somme. All we eventually heard was that Major Cleary died fighting on a French battlefield. Dead but not buried. Body not found. Never found to this day. Half a million British soldiers with no known graves and our Frank was one of them. Our lost dead Australian boy.
‘Died in Action somewhere in France’ said the eventual notice in The Argus. All I know is my youngest son must have been brave because his action won the Military Cross. They wouldn’t have awarded such an honour if he’d run away, would they? He wasn’t one of those cowardly types.
It was that phantom whisper, the insistent hiss of buried horses, that started me off on this melancholy train of thought. Sly’s given me access to these horsey reminiscences, vexing as they are. Whether I want them or not.
What does he feel about them now? Did thinking of his daughter’s old sadness break through? Is he moved by mingled sorrow and love? Is he less ‘dead’ now? Is he maybe coming ‘alive’? Hard to tell with his condition.