by Joy Dettman
Elsa Reichenberg, Joseph’s second wife, was Australian born. A big-boned woman, thickset and strong as a man, she’d worked alongside Rob and Joan during the Spanish influenza plague, when their wards had been full of the sick and dying. Over three and a half thousand were taken by it in Victoria, but worldwide the Spanish influenza claimed more lives than the war. Black days, those, and while folk dropped like flies, those army boys kept coming home, bringing more of the killer disease in with them.
Molliston had given its sons willingly to the war, thinking to welcome them home again in a few months’ time. Too many hadn’t returned. Len Larkin had, but he left one hand and his younger brother over there. Bluey Wilson came home, one trouser leg pinned high. Tige Johnson returned a raving drunk, Ned Walker with his lungs ruined by German gas. Norm Macdonald came through it intact, the sole survivor of four Macdonald brothers who’d gone over together. Dave Kennedy, one of the first to volunteer, returned on crutches. Arthur Squire, the last to volunteer, returned two years after the war ended, so badly disfigured that the only time he left the property was to return to hospital in Melbourne. Freddy Squire hadn’t come home.
So many gaps had been left in this town, so many girls made widows before they’d been wives. And who did the town blame? German hatred may have gone underground when the war ended, but it hadn’t died. It was still alive and doing well in Molliston. And it had to be one of Joe Reichenberg’s lads who’d found the wife of heroic Lieutenant Dave Kennedy. Few hated the Germans more than he, or had more cause to hate them, though Nicholas Squire may have given him a run for his money.
The two men turned to watch three bony cows being driven to water, two half-grown kids walking slowly behind them on the hill, the girl carrying a kerosene tin bucket, the boy holding a stick. That bucket would be carried home between them, full of drinking water.
‘I thought the water pipes were finished out past Hay’s place,’ Rob said.
‘Supposed to be.’
Those cows knew their way to the river, stepping up their pace as they turned down Kennedy’s Road, the kids lagging behind, staring at Rob and Tom and wanting to see more. The lad was coming to have a closer look too, but Tom waved him back.
A still morning, even the leaves of the towering gums were silent. The night birds had left, the day birds were out looking for those worms, and from a nearby branch a kookaburra surveyed the scene. Not a lot to laugh at this morning. He started slow, like an old man clearing his throat, then shook his head and began cleaning his beak on wood.
‘I’d better go and get Kennedy. What the hell was that man thinking about, leaving her alone down there with a mob of pickers camped on her back door step?’ Tom said, picking up his bike.
‘She didn’t leave the house tonight with a fruit picker behind her, Tom. When rape is threatening, a girl doesn’t wait to put on a pretty dress and high heels.’
kurt reichenberg
Sunday, 5.45 am
His shirt and trousers left where they’d fallen, Kurt leaned against the washhouse door clad in his boots and home-made calico drawers. He watched the ambulance come and go, its ringing bell like a harbinger of doom in the stillness of the dawn. It had woken his mother; he could see her emptying ash from the stove onto her manure heap.
Elsa’s garden was her joy. She dug the earth, carried the water, harvested her produce and what she couldn’t use or bottle was given to the hospital. No hand assisted her. The garden was women’s work.
Kurt needed clean clothing, but as he moved from the washhouse, Elsa walked towards the woodheap, so he retreated. She’d ask him about the ambulance. He was not yet ready to speak of it.
The doctor had done nothing for Rachael – as if there was nothing he could have done. He hadn’t even bandaged her head. Was she dead? Kurt had almost asked him that direct question but, fearing the answer, he hadn’t. Now he could think of nothing else.
He’d known her since infancy – or known of her since one hot December afternoon at the swimming bend when he’d sighted a tiny pixie of a girl playing on Squire’s side of the river. She’d called to him, waved to him while she paddled – with her shoes on – and her frantic governess stood on the bank holding a second infant’s hand.
‘It’s my birthday, and Mummy said I can do anything I want.’
A cheeky one, Rachael, even back then. Of course she wasn’t dead. She had felt warm. Her blood was on his clothing, and the dead do not bleed. He’d read in a newspaper of a man who had remained unconscious for two weeks then woken in perfect health. She was probably awake now. But he should have asked the doctor.
His bike, with the milk billy looped over the handlebars, also leaned against the washhouse. He worked a few hours at the dairy each morning, and each morning he carried that empty milk billy there and returned with it full. Willie Johnson and the two Wilson girls milked the cows; Kurt delivered milk to those within the town’s limits, and assisted with the lifting. He was no milker. The Wilson girls could strip two cows to his one. They laughed at his hands – harmless laughter, though. He liked going to work, and he had to go there now.
Would Willie Johnson be at work this morning? Kurt had heard the doctor’s words, had heard the constable’s reply. Ruby Johnson with a baby? Her twin sister had been in the infants’ grade when he was in grade four. Ruby, born with a twisted foot, hadn’t gone to school; she’d been educated with the Squire girls. Ruby and Rachael: one poor, one rich, one plain, one pretty, one father working for the other – perhaps today they would share a ward at the Willama hospital.
Kurt turned to the horses, fine big Clydesdales that would work all day for a feed of hay, gentle giants with honest eyes and a good smell, not like the busy tractors that left their noise and stink behind. Many landowners in this district used horses in the plough, and many bought Reichenberg horses because they were the best. Men came from Willama to buy them, placing their orders before the foals were grown. Watching those beauties driven from this land was like losing a friend, but that was the way of things with farming – you loved the foal, you trained the horse, you said goodbye, and Joseph Reichenberg had more money to seal into his jars and bury.
Like the dead, that money – gone into the earth and forgotten. Except by Christian, Kurt’s younger brother. He wanted his share, spent a lot of time prodding into likely places with his sharp spike, driving it deep beside fence-posts, beneath trees, hoping to find that treasure. He wanted a lot of things he couldn’t have, and had a lot of things he shouldn’t have wanted. There was a lack of control in Christian, and too much anger since Rachael had wed Kennedy.
Once, twice, three times, Kurt shook his head. He knew too much. He should have told the constable what he knew this morning. He should have, but he’d said nothing.
He stared at the haystacks, the early morning sun glowing on them, turning the straw to gold. They had plenty of hay. Even in the best seasons his father made preparations for the bad – a good farmer, but a cold man and a miser. Kurt accepted his lot in the certain knowledge that one day this land would be his. What use was there in kicking against the harness now when the master of all he coveted held the whip? Christian, not yet eighteen, kicked, but he didn’t covet the land, only his share of what was buried beneath it. He wanted to leave the farm and live in the city, drive cars, fly aeroplanes.
A shudder travelled down Kurt’s spine to end in his bowel. He had to go to work. Still he leant there, staring beyond the haystacks to his neighbour’s land, blood red beneath the early sun.
Larkin, a wheat farmer, was struggling, as were many of those who concentrated on wheat. Forced now to compete for overseas sales, many had taken large loans from the banks and this drought would see the end for some. It was whispered in town that Larkin, already heavily in debt, had borrowed more to buy his tractor so he could plant more. He’d planted, and managed to get a sparse strike too, but with no rain since July, his paddocks changed from green to brown, then the winds came, swept his topsoil away and tur
ned his fields to red. It was whispered in town that he would be sold up by the bank, that Len, his one-armed son, kept the wolf from the door by working as an agent for an SP bookie in Willama.
Joseph Reichenberg did not gamble. He did not borrow. He toiled from dawn to dark. And if Larkin’s land went to auction, Joseph would make the highest bid. These last months he had set his eye on that neighbouring property and, like a bird of prey watching a dying animal, he waited.
A year ago he had bought Dolan’s neglected twenty acre paddock behind the hotel where, in the years of good rains, water from the hill collected in a swamp. With only a fence separating it from Reichenberg land, Joseph had coveted the swamp paddock ever since Kurt could remember. He’d made many offers, but not until the publican was dead did he get to possess it.
He had money enough to buy more land. He had tins of sovereigns from years ago. He had bank notes, wrapped in oiled paper, sealed into glass jars with paraffin wax. His sons watched him select a jar, melt the wax, but never saw where he hid his treasure.
Ten years ago he’d bought Buehler’s forty acres; with Dolan’s twenty, he now possessed ninety acres of good land. It was not enough for him. A thousand acres wouldn’t have been enough. He had left the country of his birth to make a better life, placing his trust in this new land, but it had stolen from him the wife and children of his youth. He had once trusted the banks of this land, and had lost money in the depression of 1890. The earth having given him gold enough to buy his first thirty acres, now he trusted only the earth. It was permanent, and he would own what he could of it.
The air, cool yet, would not remain so for long; just as one small ember in the stove heated the kitchen, the sun, barely peeping up from the trees, was already heating the land. Kurt drew a deep breath, held it, then drew another, and this time it reached low, filling his lungs for the first time since he’d found Rachael.
He picked up his stained shirt and bundled it before pushing it deep beneath Elsa’s wash troughs. The trousers he’d put on clean this morning were only a little stained where his hand had rubbed against the leg. He could have washed it off and it would have been dry in the time it took to ride to the dairy, but the constable told him not to wash his shirt. He stood looking at the stain, at his hands, scrubbed red by the brush and steady now, then he folded the trousers and placed them with the shirt.
A pair of soiled trousers out of the laundry basket, he gave them a shake and found a faded shirt, one of Christian’s. It smelt of him, but this morning anything would have done. Clothed, he scanned the garden and hen house – only a group of chortling hens, discussing the egg situation. His mother must have returned to the house, and yes, he could now see smoke trickling straight and wispy from the kitchen chimney. She would be preparing her dough for the bread. Like a machine, Elsa never stopped working, and Sunday was no day of rest for her.
Before the war she had taken her sons to Sunday worship at the little Lutheran church at the top of the hill, sitting beside Mrs Buehler, neighbour and honorary grandmother to Kurt and Christian. He remembered the Buehlers’ son, remembered his death. He’d been the first taken by the Spanish influenza, and his funeral was the last to be held in the Lutheran church. Soon after, fire had been put to it, its pretty windows smashed, its door, hand-carved by Joseph, charred black.
Bad thoughts this morning, one too easily leading to another. He shrugged off the memory, picked up his bike and rode to the gate – a good wooden gate, made by Joseph; it swung well. Kurt closed it behind him, then looked down beyond Dolan’s; Mason and his dogs were moving the cattle onto the road. He glanced at the spot where Rachael had fallen and unexpected tears filled his eyes. That herd would defile the place where her blood had leaked into the earth.
Working quickly, he walked to the edge of the bush, picking up a sturdy branch with a forked end. Snapping it in two with his boot, he propped the pieces, one on either side of the bloodstain. With plenty of fallen timber about, he continued gathering sticks until he’d built a three foot high tepee. He broke off a green branch and stood it in the centre. Perhaps it would spook the mob enough to keep them away.
A right hand turn at the crossroads took him down past Dave Kennedy’s land. Kurt didn’t look at the house where Rachael had lived since her marriage. He saw only the red dust beneath his wheels, saw his boots pushing the pedals, saw the clear tyre marks of Kennedy’s new truck. He swung the bike left into Railway Road. It ran parallel to Merton Road, but was well kept and, being closer to the river, not so steep.
Nothing new to see this morning. But not the same. Yesterday his milk billy had rattled against the handlebars in the same way. Yesterday, his father had been a German immigrant, living in a town which had lost too many sons and husbands to German guns. Yesterday a heavy pall of smoke had hung over the land, yet the world had been a far, far better place, for yesterday when Kurt had ridden to work, he’d known that the bushfire would burn itself out eventually, that the rains would come and turn this land green again, and that time would one day wash away the sin of his father’s birth, forgiving Kurt his inherited sin.
Today his sin and his brother’s lay heavy upon him.
thinking
Tom watched the bike move out of sight, his own legs sighing with the knowledge that he too would have to mount up and push those pedals uphill.
Twice this morning he’d been down to Kennedy’s place and found no one at home. On the second occasion, he’d circled back through the timber, up a sheep track, which led him to a fence. The sheep hadn’t climbed that fence, but the track continued through Kennedy’s forest land to the hotel gate – no doubt a short cut made by the fruit pickers.
Tom walked down the left side of the road, then back up on the right side, searching the gutters for that handbag or for some sign of a struggle. He found nothing. Rob Hunter was right; that girl hadn’t walked to where she’d been found.
He’d heard the widow Dolan’s car last night, knew it by the sound of her gear changes, couldn’t say exactly when, but sometime before he’d made that cup of tea. Ears had a way of ignoring most cars these days. There was a time when half the street would run out to stare if one drove by, he faster than most. He’d had an ongoing love affair with cars since he’d seen that first one. Watching them develop, learning a bit about their motors, getting to drive a few, had made that love grow stronger. If he had a dream left in him, it was to own a car, though he knew it would never happen – which made him envy every bugger who did own one.
‘Go home and check on Rosie,’ he suggested. A glance at his pocket watch told him Rosie wouldn’t be stirring for a while. The alarm clock in her head didn’t go off until around eight, and it was pleasant amid the trees, as if the sap of these tall gums had gone to ground in the night and was now coming up and flowing cool to the leaves. He walked deeper into the timber, found a convenient log with a convenient back rest against a tree, and he sat, drew his pipe from one pocket, tobacco from the other, and packed a tight pipe. His matchbox out, he started the usual search for a live head, pouring matches into his palm, sorting through them. Only two with live heads. The rest he returned to the earth from whence they’d come, scattering them with his boot, burying a few.
Dead leaves, dead grass and dead twigs had formed a thick carpet here, and beneath that carpet was another world of insects all grubbing a living from the dirt. And that was life – that’s what you did whether man, ant or jackass, you grubbed for a living and were never too sure of why you were doing it.
His pipe lit, he slid the used match back into the box, a habit he’d learned late – just pitch your dead ones into the gutter in the city and if the matchbox in your pocket rattled, you knew you had a light. Not since he’d come up here, though. Country folk suffered from communal bushfire paranoia which Tom had caught fast. He’d spent two days last week breathing smoke and watching a tinder dry forest go up like a roaring inferno. They’d been at Mason’s place, five miles down the Willama Road, waiting for the fir
e to come out of the trees and hit the paddocks. Like a living beast, it had taken a look around at the men waiting to vanquish it, then formed itself into this creeping red battle line advancing slowly, aiming to circle and kill them all. They’d killed it instead – saved Mason’s house, saved most of his stock, but not his paddocks or his haystack. He was struggling to feed his cattle and would probably end up selling most of his herd.
Tom closed his eyes, puffed smoke and thought of Rosie, who he’d left in the care of Jeanne Johnson and Mary Murphy during his days of firefighting. He’d felt alive for a while out there, fighting alongside the other blokes, had felt at one with them coming home, sitting on the back of that truck, black as the ace of spades and knowing that he’d done a good day’s work.
Eyes half closed, smoke coiled slowly from his lips, while his mind roamed from fires and trucks and Rosie, to his boys. Little bobby-dazzlers, those two, and that bloody war had taken both of them. He’d gotten over it. He prided himself on that. Most of the time he was over it. He’d hated those Germans as much as Rosie did ten years ago, but you couldn’t live like that, not every day of your life, every year – not if you planned to keep on living, you couldn’t. Like bushfires, those fires of hatred in your belly burned themselves out after a time, unless you kept giving them new fuel. Some did. There were a few families in this town who kept those flames leaping high.
And old Joe Reichenberg didn’t help matters. In the years Tom had been in town, he’d seen him around and said his good days, but that arrogant coot never once said good day back – or not in any lingo Tom could make head or tail of.
His wife always gave Tom a ‘good morning’ and a smile. One of those fresh-faced women who might have been thirty or fifty, she looked as German as they came, dressed in her old-fashioned boots and skirts and crocheted shawls. She’d helped Tom out one day with one of her shawls when Rosie wandered off to the grocer’s and made a laughing stock of herself.