A Second Chance
Page 43
A sailor stood at the end of the gangplank, waiting for the last stragglers to come aboard.
‘You’re going back to the farm now,’ Milly told Eddie. ‘You’re going to have a good time there, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Eddie agreed readily. ‘Uncle Dave’s going to teach me to ride a big horse. And Granny said she’d buy me some lollies.’
Milly managed a smile. ‘Well, you’ll be all right, then.’ She glanced over her shoulder to where the sailor was rattling the gangplank meaningfully. ‘I’ve got to go now.’ She bent down and folded Eddie in her arms, determinedly dry-eyed but biting her lip so hard that when she stood up again Amy saw a drop of blood there.
Eddie clutched at her skirt, confusion on his face. It had all been explained to him: that his mother would be going away for a time, while he stayed behind on the farm, but it had meant nothing to him until this moment. His mother had been there every day of his life; the idea that the boat was about to take her away was too big for his head to hold.
‘It won’t be for long,’ Milly told him, disengaging her skirt from his fist. ‘I’ll send for you as soon as I can. Now, you be a good boy for Granny.’ She raised her eyes, now glittering with unshed tears, to Amy’s. ‘Will you write and let me know how he’s getting on?’
‘Of course I will,’ Amy said. ‘Every week.’ She took Eddie’s hand in hers and held it firmly as Milly made her way onto the boat.
Eddie watched the boat pull away, Milly standing on the deck and waving at them. His face was solemn, and he gripped Amy’s hand tightly, as if afraid she, too, might slip away from him.
The boat rounded a bend in the river and disappeared from sight. Eddie stood and looked after it for a few more moments, then he let Amy lead him away from the wharf and off to buy a large bag of sweets.
Eddie was uncharacteristically subdued for the rest of the day, though he ate his dinner with his usual enthusiasm. By the time he had had his second helping of pudding he was yawning hugely. Amy took him through to his little bedroom, got him into his nightshirt and tucked him in bed. Cautious enquiries as to whether he was used to saying prayers at night brought a determined ‘yes!’, followed by something that sounded like ‘Now lay me sleep soul keep die wake soul take,’ but said at such speed that she could not distinguish the individual words.
‘We might try saying that a bit slower next time,’ Amy suggested. She studied Eddie’s face, his bright eyes on her, showing little sign of sleepiness now. ‘Would you like a story?’
Eddie looked puzzled. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘You don’t know about stories?’
He shook his head.
Amy smiled. ‘It’s a long time since I had a little boy to tell stories to. Move over a bit so there’s room for me.’
Eddie wriggled across the bed towards the wall, and Amy lay down next to him. She cast her mind back to when she had been Eddie’s age, and her grandmother had told her stories from what had seemed a never-ending hoard of them. The details had blurred in her memory, so that some of the stories had become entangled with each other, but she did not think Eddie would mind.
‘Once upon a time,’ she began, ‘there was a castle on a mountain…’
Telling the story took a long time, as Eddie had a stream of questions regarding such matters as castles and dragons. But there was no hurry. It was not like when Malcolm and David had been small children. Back then she could only steal a few minutes when putting them to bed, before Charlie would call her away.
Eddie fell asleep before she had finished, and Amy left the room without waking him. But later, when the whole household had gone to bed, she found herself wakeful, thinking of the little boy who had never before slept on his own.
She went quietly through the house, every inch of it so familiar that she had no need of a light, and crept into the verandah room. There was a moon that night, and a gap between the two scraps of sacking that covered the window let in enough light for her to see the small figure in the bed. Each of his cheeks bore a telltale trail, turned to silver by the moonlight.
‘I’m not crying,’ said a small voice.
Amy crossed to the bed and slipped under the covers. Eddie snuggled into her arms, his body warm and solid against her. She stroked his hair and kissed his forehead, whispering soothing words.
Eddie was soon asleep again. But Amy lay awake for a long time, holding her precious burden close and planning the letter she needed to write to Sarah, explaining why she would not be coming to Auckland.
*
A day spent running around the garden, climbing trees, being led around a paddock on horseback, and eating a good deal of food kept Eddie from brooding on his mother’s absence, and when Amy put him to bed the following evening he assured her that he was a big boy, and not a bit frightened to sleep on his own. She checked on him during the night, found him peacefully asleep, and gave silent thanks for the resilience of children.
Amy had forgotten just how much energy a four-year-old boy had. Fortunately it tended to come in bursts, and after encouraging Eddie to run around wearing himself out she would be rewarded by times when he was content to sit quietly.
To her surprise and delight, Eddie appeared to enjoy her company. He was often happy to sit with her in the kitchen, most notably when she was baking. He took over the task of scraping out the mixing bowls, much to David’s disappointment. He had an inexhaustible appetite for stories; not just the fairy tales Amy told him at bedtime, but stories of when his father had been a small boy, and Amy’s own childhood memories of riding horses and swimming in the creek. He was even, she found, interested in her visit to Auckland the previous year, and fascinated by her account of seeing plays; ‘stories acted out’, as she explained them to him.
The first letter from Milly arrived a week after her departure. Her handwriting and spelling were both a good deal better than Amy had feared; Milly must have been far more regular in her school attendance than had Malcolm, and was capable of writing a perfectly legible message.
There was a determinedly cheerful tone to the letter. Milly’s work was going well; everyone was very nice; and there was a promise that she would get a chance at serving in the dining room in another week or two.
The latter part of the letter was devoted to asking after Eddie, and its very last sentence was ‘Give Eddie a big hug from me.’
‘Come here,’ Amy said, holding out her arms to Eddie, who was busying himself with a large glass of milk and a plate of biscuits. He came at once, clambering onto her lap and nestling against her. Eddie’s ready affection was still strange and precious to Amy, difficult to reconcile with his startling likeness to his father. For the first few days she had hardly dared ask for these cuddles, as if she might break the spell that had produced this loving creature in Malcolm’s image.
She squeezed him gently. ‘There,’ she said, relaxing her hold. ‘That’s from Mama. She said in her letter I was to give you a big hug.’
Eddie looked at the notepaper on the table in front of Amy. ‘Where’s it say hug?’
‘Right here.’ Amy took his hand in hers and guided it along the words. ‘ “Give Eddie a big hug from me”,’ she read. ‘There’s your name, see?’ She placed his finger under it.
Eddie was fascinated by the idea that some scratchings on a piece of paper could convey such a thing as a hug and his very own name. He had Amy read them out to him several times, and afterwards he said them to himself under his breath. Amy watched him, amused by his intense concentration.
He lifted his bright eyes to meet her gaze. ‘How do you know what it says?’
‘That’s what reading is. You learn letters, then you learn how they join together into words.’
‘Can you show me how to do it?’
‘How to read?’ Amy said, startled. ‘Would you like that?’
Eddie nodded.
Cool logic suggested she should tell him to wait a few months till he turned five years old and started school. Amy i
gnored it. ‘That’s a good idea, Eddie. I’ll draw you some letters nice and big, and we’ll start tomorrow. And I’m going to write back to Mama in a bit—I’ll help you do your name at the bottom, so Mama can see what a clever boy you are. I think we’ll use a pencil for that, though,’ she added, envisaging the mess that would result from letting Eddie try a pen.
Eddie’s first effort at writing his name, even with Amy guiding his hand, required the partiality of a grandmother (or, Amy hoped, the mother who would receive the letter) to be recognised, but she praised him for it, and was rewarded with a beaming smile.
With Eddie so keen to learn, it seemed a waste not to try and teach him while he was in her care. Amy was careful to keep such lessons short; it was too much to ask a four-year-old to spend more than a few minutes at a time working at learning his letters. She soon found that when Eddie became frustrated with a task, he could show flashes of temper that recalled his father’s and grandfather’s. Fortunately he was more easily calmed than either of them had been.
Beth, used as she was to younger brothers, had an easy friendship with Eddie from the start, but Amy could see David struggling over just how he should behave with him. Sometimes he romped with the little boy as if he were a child himself, clearly enjoying their play as much as Eddie did. At other times he felt the need to show some sort of authority, and would try to tell Eddie what to do, or scold him when he did not respond promptly to one of Amy’s gentle requests. As Eddie ignored his instructions on any subject other than horses, on which he considered David an oracle, these attempts only made David uncomfortable while having no discernable effect on Eddie. Amy did not intervene; she was confident that David would, given time, realise he was wasting his energy on someone whose will was stronger than his own. Eddie, Amy could see, was a child better led by persuasion than command.
Milly wrote faithfully once a week; letters that tended to be short and unvarying. Her work was going well; she was saving her money (though Amy sensed that the amount was building up more slowly than Milly had expected); she hoped Eddie was being a good boy. She made much of Eddie’s gradually improving attempts to write his name, and of the drawings Amy sometimes had him do for his mother. And she ended each letter with a hug for him, which Amy was only too happy to pass on.
It was clear that Eddie was going to be staying with them for some time, and after the first month Amy’s fund of stories was running low. None of her own books seemed suitable for a small boy, so she wrote to Sarah, explaining the situation and enclosing a few shillings. A short time later a well-wrapped parcel arrived, and Amy opened it to find several small books with pictures of animals, dressed in human clothes, on the covers. A note from Sarah enclosed with the books explained that she had taken the advice of a bookseller, had been told these were quite new and very popular, and trusted that they would be suitable.
Eddie was entranced by the books, demanding to have them read to him night after night until Amy knew the simple stories by heart. When he asked if there were squirrels on the farm, she had to tell him the disappointing fact that there were none in the whole of New Zealand.
Eddie was not downcast for long; instead he turned his attention to the animals available to him. He searched the house for mouse holes, and prowled through the vegetable garden looking for rabbits, but there was no chance of finding such creatures in an entire state anywhere near the house; Pip, Beth’s cat, was too good a hunter for that.
When Eddie tried talking to Pip, he suffered nothing worse than a dignified silence, but when he tried dressing the cat in one of Daisy’s knitted jackets, Pip showed his disgust by leaving a trail of bleeding claw marks on the back of Eddie’s hand before making his escape.
‘Animals in stories aren’t like real ones, Eddie,’ Amy told him as she cleaned the blood from his hand. ‘You can’t dress them up. It’s just pretend.’ She dabbed away without comment the tears that had spilled onto Eddie’s cheeks. He was not a child who often cried, and on the rare occasions when he did, he usually tried to hide it.
When Beth and David came in, Beth was clearly torn between amusement and sympathy, with amusement gaining the advantage once she had seen that Eddie’s wounds were not serious. She fussed over his scratched hand, gave Pip some extra scraps to soothe his wounded pride, and repeated Amy’s advice that real life cats would not submit to being dressed, whatever stories might say.
‘Davie tried the same thing with Ginger when he was little,’ Amy remarked. ‘He put a baby’s dress on him.’
This time Beth did not bother to hide her amusement. She demanded all the details, and laughed aloud as she heard the story.
David did not seem to find much humour in it. ‘I don’t remember that,’ he said huffily.
‘Well, you were only little,’ said Amy. ‘Littler than Eddie—I think you were only three.’
‘Fancy trying to rock him in the cradle,’ Beth said through a fresh burst of giggles. ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t bite you.’
David scowled. ‘Anyway, you shouldn’t go opening people’s drawers and helping yourself to stuff,’ he said to Eddie.
‘I didn’t open no drawers,’ Eddie said, unabashed. ‘That jacket thing was just lying on the bed.’
‘I was thinking about putting it in the ragbag,’ Beth said. ‘Maisie was trying to teach Rosie to knit, and it turned out with one arm longer than the other. I don’t want to put a funny-looking thing like that on Daisy, especially with all the nice things Sarah sent her. Eddie’s welcome to it.’
‘Well… he shouldn’t have done it,’ said David. He gave Eddie a stern look, which was ignored.
*
Whenever the weather was fine enough, Amy made sure that Eddie spent much of the day outside. After having lived up till now in a series of rented rooms with no place more inviting than the street to play in, he delighted in running around the paddocks, climbing trees, and using the rope swing David made for him.
Once the paddocks were dry enough for a long walk, Amy took him to visit her old home. Her brothers and their households welcomed Eddie as part of the family, with their children cheerfully accepting the arrival of another cousin. They were all older than Eddie, and all at school, so could not be playmates for him, but he was a self-sufficient child, used to having only the company of adults.
And with the discovery of books and stories, he was showing every sign of a vivid imagination. When Amy was working outside and Eddie was playing nearby, she would often hear him talking away quietly to himself, though he seemed unaware that he was doing so. If she was close enough to make out the words, she usually found that Eddie was telling himself a story, something featuring himself and Daisy and, invariably, a horse.
Considering Daisy’s limitations as a playmate, Eddie seemed to find her surprisingly good company. When they both happened to be in the house at the same time, he would often chatter away to her, and Amy almost had the impression that he garnered some meaning from Daisy’s gurglings. He would sometimes sit beside her with one of his precious storybooks and “read” to her, as he insisted on calling it, though it was clear that he was telling the story from memory, with his own embellishments. Daisy showed every sign of delighting in the attention, whatever she made of the stories.
When the year’s batch of calves were born, Beth showed Eddie how to teach them to drink from a bucket, and he appeared to enjoy the novelty. But he showed no interest at all in the adult cows. After milking resumed, David took him down to the cowshed one afternoon while Beth was busy with Daisy, but he sent Eddie back to the house before the task was over.
‘He was playing up,’ David said when he arrived back himself. ‘I could see he’d be upsetting the cows if I kept him there much longer.’
‘Cows are stupid,’ Eddie grumbled.
‘No, they’re not!’ Beth said, visibly shocked. ‘They’re clever, in their own way. Especially the Jerseys.’
‘But they’re no use. You can’t play with them or get them to do anything.’
He smiled as he said it, but Amy was suddenly reminded of Malcolm and his contempt for farm life. Had Eddie inherited her own desire for a wider world than the valley could offer, just as his father had?
While Eddie found cows boring, his fascination with horses grew with his experience of them. Only bad weather excused David from what Eddie considered his obligation to give a daily riding lesson. He was as fearless as Malcolm had been. If he took a tumble (though this had become rare), he would pick himself up and at once demand to be hoisted back onto the horse. He could already walk and trot the patient old horse that David was using for him to learn on; in spite of his pleas, Amy had forbidden any attempt at teaching him to jump.
‘He’s going to turn out a better rider than I am,’ David said, watching Eddie urge the horse into a trot. ‘Just like Mal was.’
David insisted that Eddie learn to tend the horses as well as ride them, and in this he had no problem getting Eddie to obey him. They made a comical sight as they groomed the horses together, the little boy standing on tiptoe to reach as high as he could before stepping back to let David finish the job. David showed him how to clean the tack, which he had to lift down from its hooks for him, and was endlessly patient with his clumsy attempts. Eddie would self-importantly stride along beside David when it came time to feed the horses, fondly imagining that he was carrying a useful share of the weight of a feed bag.
August came and went, with a small celebration to mark David’s twentieth birthday. The weather grew finer, Frank spared some time from his own tasks to work on the new house with David, and Amy found that they had built in part of the verandah to make a third bedroom.