The Penance Room

by Carol Coffey

  I open the door and kick some sand around the porch, trying to think of what I can do with myself until dinner-time. I walk out to the road and walk slowly towards Maria’s house, glad to have some happy stories for her. As I walk to the end of our lot, I see Wilfred sitting alone in the garden. I try not to look at him as I don’t want to be sad. I think to myself, Wilfred, you are next.

  Saturday comes around sooner than I would have liked and I sulk as Aishling prepares for her date with Steve. Before they leave, they have a beer on the porch as they watch the sun setting. There is a light breeze blowing around the yard and I sit on my swing watching them talk. From time to time Steve looks over and smiles in my direction. He is an unusual man and seems to look right through me. He seems to know everything that I know and I wonder if he too was an unusual child. Aishling looks happy and I squirm as she flashes her bright eyes into Steve’s face and laughs at his words. I decide I have seen enough and as darkness falls I go inside the house and follow my mother around. Kora is still there and together they put the less able residents to bed.

  The only good news is that Mina was delighted with the offer of a part-time job in the kitchen and has even refused payment. The bad news is that Mina thinks she is in charge and that Li is her assistant but I have enjoyed watching Li slowly enforce her authority and Mina slowly back down. What Li really wants is for them to be equals and I know that she will achieve this in time. I wander upstairs where my mother is once again having trouble with Martin. She looks tired and not in any form to argue with him.

  “Martin, you and I both know that if you don’t take this medication, you will imagine all sorts of things later and have half the house up with your fears.”

  Martin shakes his head. “It’s the damn tablets that are causing it. I’m not taking them and that’s final.”

  My mother sighs. “Fine, Martin. Suit yourself,” she replies, walking out of the room.

  She looks angry and I can see large red veins bulging in her neck. I know that she cannot afford for Martin to cause trouble on a night that she is working alone so I decide that I will return to his room later to quieten him down when his fears begin.

  I follow my mother to Iren’s room. She is already in bed and Kora has given her a sleeping tablet. We all know that she is getting worse and that she is missing Aron more as each week passes. Even Mr Berman’s visits no longer seem to quieten her down. When she sees my mother, Iren sits bolt upright in the bed. She understands that my mother is in charge.

  “Please . . . husband?”

  My mother sits on her bed and smooths her hair. “Iren, Aron died. Remember?”

  Iren closes her eyes tight and shakes her head.

  My mother gently lays her back onto the pillow and sighs. Like me, the sadness here sometimes overwhelms her. As we leave Iren’s room my mother starts to cry but wipes her tears quickly when Kora calls her to assist with Jimmy who is refusing her help. When we get to his room, Kora is standing at the door. I can see that they have been arguing.

  “I can do it myself. I don’t want the likes of you touching my stuff. Probably creep back later and steal it,” he snarls at Kora who is standing red-faced in the doorway.

  I once saw my mother say that Jimmy never gave his wife enough money to run the house and that she had to steal money from his pockets when he was asleep. When he had the stroke she signed him in here because she didn’t want to look after him. She rarely visited him but her peace did not last long as she died suddenly two years later. My mother said he is still bitter about this and never understood why she would not take care of him. Usually my mother is very understanding of Jimmy but I know that she gets annoyed when he is unkind to her sister.

  “Jimmy, if you are going to be rude to Kora, you’ll have to find another home to go to,” she says. I can see her mouth ending in a tight line and she is staring at him with tired red eyes.

  Kora folds her arms and smiles smugly at him from the doorway.

  “She’s got you and that son of mine wrapped around her finger,” he spits. “Don’t be taken in by her. You can’t trust blackfellas. I know all about them!”

  My mother and Kora decide to ignore him and leave, but as Kora is closing the door he says something which causes her to freeze. My mother tries to hold her but she flings his door wide open and marches in.

  “It was your son that asked me to marry him all those years ago, not the other way around. Do ya want to know why I said no? Because of you. And I loved him but you told him I wasn’t good enough. It is because of you that Jeff sits alone out on that farm with no one to talk to. It is your fault. He didn’t want anyone else. He wanted me.”

  My mother moves Kora from the doorway and pulls Jimmy’s door shut so quickly that I don’t get a chance to see his reaction. She hugs Kora tightly.

  “I’m sorry,” Kora says but my mother hugs her even tighter and then leads her to the kitchen where they sit in silence at the old wooden table that once belonged to their parents.

  I walk out to the porch and wonder where Aishling has gone with Steve although I don’t want to think about this too much. Kora leaves for the night and my mother slowly goes from room to room turning lights off. She knocks on Wilfred’s door. He is still reading and she smiles and waves at him from the doorway, wishing him a good night’s sleep. She opens her room where my father is sleeping soundly. She turns off his bedside light and kisses him gently before going out to sit down at Aishling’s desk outside my room with a book. I smile when I see what she is reading. It is an English-Gaelic dictionary. I go to my room to collect my paper and pens and when I return to her desk her eyes are already half closed with tiredness.

  I open Martin’s door and sit quietly on the chair by his window. He is asleep but I know that after midnight he will wake and face his demons. But at three it is me who is afraid as I wake and feel the familiar vibrations of the train beneath my feet. I jump up from the chair in Martin’s room and for a moment I forget what I am doing there. He sits up suddenly, awoken from his sleep and stares wildly at me. His thick grey hair is standing on his head and his glassy blue eyes are trying to focus on me in the darkened room.

  “Well, if it’s not my brothers it’s you!” he shouts but I put my fingers to my lips and plead with him to be quiet. I don’t want my mother to know that I am in here nor do I want her to know that the imaginary train has woken me once again.

  “There is no train!” he shouts but I see his face soften quickly and he suddenly looks sad, “There’s no train, son,” he says again but this time I know he is speaking quietly as I don’t feel his words vibrating off the bare floorboards of his room.

  He pats the bed for me to sit with him but I hesitate and sit back on the chair.

  He lets out a long groan and looks about the room.

  “There are no brothers either, are there?” he asks but I know he is not asking me this question but that he is talking to himself. His eyes water and he slowly swings his legs out of bed and sits at the side, looking at the pale coloured wall before him. He rubs his wrinkled hands together and coughs loudly.

  “I haven’t smoked for twenty years. Still got the cough though.”

  I understand what he means. He is still suffering for his past.

  Minutes pass and he continues to rub his hands together as if he is trying to wash them clean. Eventually he coughs again, a hard cough that racks his body and turns his pale face red and purple.

  I feel the vibration of the front door slam and I know that Aishling is only coming home now. I look at the clock above Martin’s bed. It is almost three fifteen. I walk toward him and touch his arm. He feels cold even though the room is hot and stuffy. He shifts slightly and looks directly at me.

  “I had three brothers and two sisters. There was more than that but only six of us survived, typical Catholic family. We lived in town for years, renting two rooms in a rundown boarding house. Called all sorts of names because we were Irish. My father was proud, always getting into fight
s. Couldn’t walk away if people called him names. He used to say that he came here to be free so no one was going to get away with treating him bad. My mother, now she was a tough one. I saw her lying in the bed, screaming with a new baby coming and afterwards she got up and cooked a meal. She was something, you know. I was afraid of her. Took me a long time to understand that.”

  Martin quietens and I am afraid that that is all he is going to say but he licks his lips, takes a drink of water from his locker and continues. His eyes are facing the wall and I have to strain my head to read his lips. It is as if he is not talking to me at all but is reliving his story to himself. I wonder how often he does this or if this is the first time he has done it out loud.

  “The father, he worked in the mine. There wasn’t much else to do around here. Whole town almost ran on the mine. He was lucky to get in. Not many Catholics got steady work. It was the pommies. They said we weren’t to be trusted, that we were lazy and stupid. You should have seen the things used to be printed in newspapers. You wouldn’t have believed it. Anyway, my father worked hard and for a while until he saw sense, he drank hard. I think he drank heavy back then because he found it hard to be accepted. He used to come home and take it out on my mother. He said to her one day that he would not be happy until he had a small patch of land to call his own. So he saved and took any extra work going at the mine. Sometimes he worked double shifts and came home long after we were asleep. He would fall into bed and be gone again the next morning before we were up. When I was just fifteen he got me and my brother a job in the mine but Tom’s chest was weak and my father took him out even though we needed the money. We were twins but I was always bigger and stronger than him.

  “When my father finally saved enough he bought a few acres out of town and started to grow his own vegetables and keep a few sheep. Tom looked after it mostly. He wasn’t much good for anything else with his coughing and wheezing. But I loved it and I wanted more than anything to get out of the darkness of the mine and into the fresh air. It was in my blood. Both my parents had come from farms in Ireland but they favoured Tom and his uselessness and kept me in the dark where I sometimes worked twelve hours a day. Danny, my younger brother, had no interest in farming and was delighted to go to work in Sydney with my mother’s brother so it was just me, my younger sisters and Liam, who was the baby of the family.

  “One night when I was about seventeen, I listened to my father and mother talking in the kitchen late at night. I heard my father say the land would eventually be left to Tom. I could feel my heart beat fast as I tried to pretend I was asleep in the next room but I was so angry that I thought my heart would jump out of my chest. They never cared about what I wanted. It wasn’t my fault that he was frail. I didn’t make him ill but yet I was paying for it. I got out of the window and walked the whole way to town. I went into the pub and spent a huge chunk of my savings. A few shillings would get you drunk in those days and I didn’t have much anyway, gave most of it to the mother to run the house. I stayed there until I was rotten drunk but it didn’t ease my anger and I walked home in an awful temper.”

  Martin stops talking and licks his dry lips twice. His head lowers slightly and I know that he is finding it hard to tell me what he did next. I touch his arm to reassure him but he pulls back quickly as though my touch has burned him.

  “What happened next?” I write.

  His mood changes. His eyes darken and I almost feel afraid of him.

  “Why don’t you mind your own bloody business? Daft bloody kid!”

  I move a few steps back but remain in the room.

  “You’re just like the bloody rest of them. Why doesn’t anyone ever believe me? Eh?”

  I put the notebook that I had hoped to communicate with him through back into my pocket and move toward the door. He moves forward suddenly and I can see that he doesn’t want me to leave.

  “When I got back . . . a fire . . . started in the barn. My mother blamed me. I could hear our nag moving at the back but it was too late to save her.”

  Martin hangs his head lower and starts to cry.

  “My father worked long hard hours to save for that horse, useless that she was. When the blaze took hold I tried to get her out but it was too late. She was trapped and I could not get to her. I can still hear the awful sound she made as she burned. I . . . Tom heard her too and came running. He was naked from the waist up and I shouted at him to get away. He pushed past me and tried to get the horse out. Without her, the work was too hard for him. He ran into the barn. He was coughing with the smoke and I called to him. I shouted, ‘Tom, come out for Christ sake! It’s too late!’ but he mustn’t have heard me. My father was fast behind him. He shouted at me to get a bucket but I stood frozen to the spot. Tom came around the side and tried to pump water as fast as he could. He was wheezing so bad that my mother had the get the little ones to pump water while Tom and my father tried desperately to save what was left of the barn. In all that time I just stood there and watched my family try to save our livelihood. The smoke was throwing black clouds into the air and neighbours started coming from around with buckets and sacks. Tom fell to the ground and my mother tried to sit him up but he could not breathe. The smoke was in his damaged lungs. Even in the noise and shouting, I heard my mother say to my father ‘He’s gone!’ I heard my father scream as my mother cried quietly for Tom. I had never seen her cry before. He was her favourite. I watched my father grip his chest and fall into my mother’s arms. Two neighbours carried him inside while another put sacks over Tom so the little ones wouldn’t see him. Someone went for Doctor Alder. It’s his youngest son that is the doctor round here now.

  “When there was nothing else to be done, I slipped inside and hid in my room and lay in my bed. I just lay there. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I was sort of numb. The doctor gave my father medicine and put him asleep. He helped the women lay Tom out in the room he shared with me and I sat and looked at my brother’s corpse as the sun rose. When the flames had died a neighbour called my mother outside. I saw her talking to him as he handed her something. I couldn’t see what it was. Suddenly she was standing at the doorway with it in her hand: a broken bottle of whiskey. She threw it at me and I remember the sound of it smashing against the wall so clearly. It seemed like I was asleep until I heard that sound. She knew I’d been drinking. She knew I’d been in town.

  “She said ‘You – you –’ but she could not finish her sentence. She could not say what I knew she was thinking but I knew it. I could see it in her eyes. ‘Get out,’ she said coldly, ‘and don’t you ever set foot back near here.’ I stood up and walked past her. She followed me into the yard and threw the few clothes I had after me onto the wet ground. I didn’t pick them up and I didn’t try to explain. I walked from the farm and walked the whole way to town with only the clothes on my back.

  “My father never recovered from his heart attack and could not return to work. Danny had to leave his life in Sydney and replace my father in the mine. He was only fifteen. I worked with him for forty years in the mine, side by side, and he never ever spoke to me. I didn’t blame him. Liam was taken from school and tried to work the land with my mother. He was only a little boy, around ten I think. She never got over Tom. I saw her in town from time to time and it saddened me to see her lovely dark hair turned snow white. My father died three years later. I left town for a while but I came back here. Even though I knew that everyone blamed me, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. In time, my sisters married and moved away. Most of them are dead now. Danny married and had three boys of his own. He called the eldest one Tom. I’m sure that made my mother happy. I never went to either of my parents’ funerals. I thought I wouldn’t be welcome. Danny’s on his own now and lives out at the farm. Liam was killed in the war. He never had a chance. The whole family, ruined because of that fire . . .”

  Martin looks up at me and then looks around the room as though he has been dreaming. I move towards him and hug him.

 
“I see them at night: Tom, wheezing and black from the fire pointing at me and Liam, a teenager, staring back at me as if he would rather be anywhere else than marching with a rifle to his death.”

  I take my notebook back out of my pocket and write him a note. “Did you start that fire?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “If you did, they forgive you,” I write but he turns his face away and lies back down on his bed to face the wall. I can see his back tremble and I know that he is crying.

  Chapter 14

  The following morning, Jeff arrives early to take his father to the farm as my mother suggested. Kora is working early with Greta while my mother sleeps and, as she opens the door, she moves closer to Jeff and turns her body sideways to avoid anyone overhearing. She has to be sure that Jeff will give her the answer she wants.

  “That dance you asked me to, it running next weekend?”

  Jeff flushes with embarrassment. He was not expecting this. I watch his lips and know he is stammering.

  “Y– y–yes.”

  “Fine, then I’ll expect you to pick me up Saturday at eight. That is, if you still want to ask me?”

  Jeff nods and looks around him quickly. Kora has taken him completely by surprise.

  “Y–yes. I do.”

  Kora winks at him and walks quickly away. Jimmy is already dressed and waiting for his son inside the Penance Room. Kora knows he has been watching them and I can see that familiar smug smile on her lips. She has had enough of people making decisions for her.

  Penelope and Victoria’s nephew Henry is coming later with his fiancée and the sisters have been looking forward to his visit all week. Victoria is already sitting in the lounge room and is wearing a new dress that she bought when Greta took her shopping. It is mostly white with small red flowers all over it. I climb the stairs and see that Greta is trying to work her magic on Penelope which is no easy task.