by Joy Dettman
‘Never reward the distrustful,’ Mr Croft warned on Kurt’s first morning driving the milk cart. ‘They’ll take you for a fool and try to go one better.’
Mary Murphy’s billy was a large one. It waited, as it did each morning, behind her gatepost, a clean half-pint jar beside it today. Kurt swapped that jar for a full jar of cream. She only bought cream on Sundays but had a standing daily order for four pints of milk. Eight half-pint dips he measured into her billy, then a half-dip more.
The horse turned down Station Street, eager for her paddock; they were on the home stretch. Old Mrs Wilson, the station master’s mother, lived in a tiny cottage with half a dozen cats – and she was as wily as they were. At least once a week she’d be watching from behind her curtain while her small jug received its half-pint and an extra half-dip more, then out she’d come, suddenly remembering she required a full pint. She’d offer an identical jug, which had to be filled with the same amount as the first. Some mornings Kurt saw her hiding and raised his hand in a wave. Her antics usually made him smile. Not this morning.
‘Who was in the ambulance, sonny?’
‘Sorry,’ he said with a shake of his head. Rarely did his customers engage him in conversation. Several women had asked that question today.
Late starting out from the dairy, late returning, he glanced at the sun, judging the time as he unharnessed the horse and released it into the paddock. The cart unloaded, he walked into a large high-roofed shed.
‘The handle of the milk dipper is near worn through, Mr Croft,’ he said. Willie Johnson and eighty year old Herb Croft were busy at the separator.
‘Leave it on the bench, laddie. I’ll get to it.’
Those two worked as a team, Willie pouring the milk in, Herb turning the handle with a steady rhythm – turn it too fast and the cream was too thin, turn it slow and there was waste. No waste here. No modern machinery either. What had been good enough for the dairyman’s father was good enough for him – apart from his ice room, a recent addition.
It was dark in the windowless shed, with only a wooden shutter that each morning Kurt and Willie lifted high. It allowed a little light in and offered a small access to buyers – and beggars. Through that gap, Kurt could see a familiar figure making her way towards the dairy, a large billy in her hand. Three mornings a week that woman walked into town to beg a little milk for her children.
‘Mrs Walker is here again,’ he said.
‘She’s making a bit of a welter of it, isn’t she? Has she got that big tin billy with her again?’ the old dairyman asked, the rhythm of the separator handle not altering.
‘Yes.’
‘Which just goes to show you, laddies, that rewarding greed turns the greedy into gluttons. Give her a bare pint today. Her husband has got money enough to spend on grog and gambling.’ He peered out at the woman, shook his head, then returned to his labour. ‘Give her a pound of that old butter too – if she wants it.’
An undernourished, toothless woman, she lived with her husband and sickly children on a few poor acres a mile east of Dolan’s hotel, which gave her a good three mile walk uphill to the dairy situated beside the river at the western end of town. This morning she turned her nose up at the scant pint of milk, but accepted the offer of butter with a grudging ‘thank you’. Kurt didn’t approve of her or her drunken husband, although, like the old dairyman, he pitied their half-starved children.
The butter wasn’t stale, just not quite fresh. He wrapped it well. First a small square of brown paper must be used to keep the butter clean, then several sheets of newspaper to keep it cool. A large coil of string hung from a hook overhead, and with it he tied the paper in place. A twist of the string around the middle finger, a sharp jerk and the string snapped clean – and he had a new page of newsprint to read. Old news from last year or last week, it was all the same to Kurt, just contact with a world he knew little about. Always reports of someone robbed or murdered, of some pilot flying across an ocean, or disappearing over the ocean, always football news, cricket news.
He’d grown up in the twenties, in a time of wealth, if much of it borrowed. He’d seen girls with beautiful hair cut it short, seen them smoking cigarettes like the men, seen skirts rise until the girls’ knees had started peeping boldly from beneath their gowns. Rachael’s skirts had been short. She’d cut her hair.
He shook his head, turned a page, read an advertisement for a wireless. If you lived in Melbourne, nineteen guineas would buy that wireless. Or would you prefer a Frigidaire? If you had a spare seventy-eight guineas, you could own a Frigidaire, guaranteed to keep food fresh for days and even weeks. No more ice man in his clod-hopper boots, traipsing through the kitchen with his tong-held blocks of ice. No more water trays overflowing onto the floor, just a neat machine which made its own ice if you plugged it into an electrical power socket – if you owned a power socket to plug it into. Rachael’s parents owned two kerosene refrigerators –
‘Isn’t it time for you to get going?’ Willie Johnson asked.
‘I came late, Willie.’
In Molliston there was no need to describe a Johnson; it was enough to say he was a Johnson, which automatically conjured red hair, narrow frame, large teeth, blotch of freckles – they all looked the same, and were all reliable workers. Their father had come from England, secured a position on Squire’s estate, then wed the middle Martin sister. They had five surviving sons and seven daughters, all born on Squire’s land. As each Johnson offspring reached working age, Squire put them to work. Willie had been set to work in the garden, but at fourteen he’d decided that roses were prickly and lawns only fit for cow food, so he’d walked off the job and come knocking at Mr Croft’s door. Now approaching seventeen, he near ran the dairy.
‘I can start the butter for you,’ Kurt said.
‘Go for your life,’ Willie said.
Each day, yesterday’s leftover cream was made into butter, and fine tasting butter it was too, though many in town preferred the factory’s more expensive but neater blocks, wrapped hygienically in factory paper. Kurt transferred the cream then, his mind wandering, turned the creaking handle, convinced that one day the ancient churn would fly apart and splatter the walls with cream.
Mr Croft’s father had turned this same handle; he’d wrapped his first pats of butter in mulberry leaves – or so the old dairyman said. Three mulberry trees still grew beside the river. Good eating, those berries, good pie filling. In season, the town children were invited to climb, to pick and eat what they would.
Kurt had climbed each year, and one day he’d found Rachael up a tree, her mouth full of mulberries, her beautiful dress stained by the juice, her silver blond hair streaked with purple.
‘You’re that German boy,’ those mulberry lips said. ‘I’m not allowed to talk to you, but it wasn’t your fault, was it?’
Eleven, she’d been then, he twelve. It was still vivid, that image of Rachael high in the mulberry tree. Vivid, too, the image of her last night, clinging to Christian’s arm, and his drunkard bastard of a brother pushing –
Willie was at his side wanting control of the churn’s handle, wanting to turn it faster, either having greater confidence in it holding together for a few months more, or hoping it wouldn’t hold together, so Mr Croft might buy him a modern replacement. Kurt gave way. He ought to go home. Instead he walked to the hatch and leaned there watching Willie.
Once again, the churn did not fall apart. Once again, Willie removed the mound of golden butter, his face never expressing pleasure or displeasure.
Tige, his oldest brother, was just sixteen when he went off to war. Hard to believe a lanky boy could have been given a gun and taught to hate, to kill. Hard to forget these lessons when that boy returned and the gun was taken from his hand. Could hatred be so easily taken away?
Fredric Buehler, an old and beaten man on his release from Langwarrin, had thought the war and hatred were over. He’d learned otherwise. When fire was put to his house in the night, old Fredri
c surrendered and sold his forty neglected acres to Kurt’s father.
Most of the German families had been targeted. Schultz had been deported. Others quietly left town until, where there had once been a large enough community of German families to fill the little Lutheran church, and elders to preach there in German, now only three families remained. The Renmans, who had bought acceptance by giving a son to the war; the Smiths from the boot shop, who, since the old man’s death, denied their German ancestry; and Joseph Reichenberg – who denied the English language.
‘Guten Morgen,’ he greeted all, though he lifted his hat to the women. ‘Mein blut versorgt dieses land,’ he’d said, when called a German bastard in the street. ‘My blood nourishes this land.’
‘Buyer,’ Willie said.
Kurt turned to see Mr Macdonald and his horse at the hatch. ‘A pint and butter.’ The order spat from the saddle, the billy tossed through the hatch, and if Kurt’s reflexes had not been good, it would have hit him. He retrieved the lid from the floor, measured in the pint and a little more; he cut and wrapped a block of butter. The old man wouldn’t take the goods from a German hand, so Kurt set them on the counter.
No word of thanks, only hatred in the old man’s glance as he reached for his goods, tossing his coins to fall where they would. Of the four sons that man had sent to war, just one had returned. Only death would kill the palpable hatred in Mr Macdonald’s eyes.
Kurt picked up the coins, placed them in the cash drawer then returned to the newspaper, the new page showing an advertisement for Snows, the drapers of Flinders Street. They had pure silk ties for two shillings and sixpence, or three for seven shillings. Kurt had no need for silk ties. He owned no suit.
He measured more milk, filled a jar with cream, cut and wrapped more butter, wondering whether the actor staring back at him from the newsprint would have liked to know his photograph ended its life wrapping butter, a string dissecting his face. He was in a movie that could talk. It was said that as his lips moved on screen, his singing voice came from the speaker as if he were standing there, singing those words at that very same moment.
The sun burning down, flies about too. He folded a few pages of newspaper, swatted a fly, then removed two more pages, folded and tucked them into his pocket. His father didn’t buy newspapers. Four months ago Christian would have sold his soul to get his hands on that article about a pilot.
Only an instant between the end of the old and the beginning of the new month, but a dark line had been drawn between September and October of last year.
August, the best of months for Elsa. A letter had come from a city legal firm, advising her of four hundred pounds left to her by Mrs Buehler. Joseph, having paid out good money for Buehler’s land, considered Elsa’s inheritance his own money now returned to him. He had not been pleased when she wouldn’t return it. He’d been less pleased when she’d given her legacy into the safekeeping of the post office bank, then spent a large amount on bicycles for her sons.
They’d followed the train to Willama one night and hadn’t returned home until dawn! The unaccustomed ride had been worth their father’s anger, and the stiff calf muscles. Kurt saw electric light so bright it turned the skin on Christian’s face white and made a woman’s painted face look like a clown’s. So many shops – big shops with lights in their windows – and so many streets the brothers lost their way and rode in circles looking for the railway line and the road home.
Good days through September. They’d ridden south on Bridge Road, just to see what they might see. They’d seen little, other than a hill too steep for their good bikes to climb. Then, while resting beneath a tree before that long ride back, an aeroplane had appeared, coughing and swooping in the sky like a bird in its death throes as it sought a place to land. It came down on that road, safe, and they’d run to it in time to see a youthful, freckle-faced flyer jump to the ground. They’d been expecting a god.
‘Got a blockage in the fuel line, chaps. Help me push her into the shade.’
They’d remained with him for an hour until he’d once again taken to the sky.
To go so high, so far, to put at risk his life dodging mountains. Why? Just to prove he could go faster from one place to the next. Was the next place better?
One of Nicholas Squire’s guests had flown all the way from Melbourne, and the flyer had taken Rachael up in the machine. She’d said that looking down on Molliston was like looking down on a patchwork tapestry, the river coiling like a snake through the Garden of Eden. The paddocks of wheat, the orchard paddocks, the sheep paddocks, all cut from oddly shaped scraps of fabric, each of a different texture. She’d said that one day everyone would fly, for having seen what she had seen, they would never want to walk the earth again, but be a bird with wings.
peaches and the widow
Even at this time of day Kennedy’s new house looked hot. It was locked up tight. Big windows, three on the eastern side, all hostages to that sun and not a tree to shade them. Until his marriage, Dave Kennedy lived in a two roomed hut, near hidden by shrubbery, and to Tom that hut looked a damn sight more habitable than the house – or this morning it did.
Not many in town locked their doors, but with the railroad running through his land and a lot of freeloaders jumping on and off that train at the crossing, and with those fruit pickers camped in his river paddock, Kennedy had no doubt learned to keep his house locked up tight.
Using his cupped palms as blinkers, Tom squinted through the windows as he worked his way around the house. Not a lot to see, until he came on a bedroom, the double bed stripped, the bedding piled on the floor – odd, or maybe not in certain cases. That was pretty much the way he left Rosie’s bed if she had an accident in the night.
He should be getting home to her instead of poking around down here, but it was early yet. She wouldn’t be waking for a while and Kennedy should be back soon. He carted fruit for the cannery, left at dawn and was usually back before eight.
The shade of a big old timber shed beckoned to him. He walked over to it and inside found a kerosene tin bucket overflowing with peaches – probably pig food, but Tom wasn’t fussy when it came to peaches. He helped himself to one.
Kennedy was fussy with the making of his kero buckets; he’d slid the fencing wire handle through a piece of rubber hose. He had a dozen or more of them, all with that same handle. Easier on the hand than wire when carrying a loaded bucket.
Every family in town owned a kero bucket or two. Just remove the top square with the trusty old tin opener, hammer down the jagged edges, take a length of strong fencing wire, bend it to shape, hook the ends through two nail holes in the sides, and you had a new lightweight bucket at no cost. It stank of kerosene for a while, but time took care of that.
A lot of kerosene was used in this town. Each night in both well-to-do homes and hovels, table lamps, functional or fancy, received their measure of kero. There was a smell about them, always a whiff of kerosene. Tom’s washhouse smelt of it – that’s where he kept his kerosene tin – and he always managed to spill a bit while decanting enough off to light his night.
How had man survived without kerosene? And how would he continue to survive in this town when the electricity finally came and he didn’t have his constant supply of kerosene tins? Lightweight, square, and twice as tall as they were wide, they came in handy for a hundred uses.
‘Beautiful peaches.’ He helped himself to another one. He wasn’t accustomed to wandering around before breakfast – there wasn’t a lot of early morning police work in Molliston. It was the wrong thing to do, eating peaches on an empty stomach; they’d probably go straight through him, but that pain was for later and the pleasure for now. He sucked the flesh from the stone, then pitched it in a different direction to the last stone, spreading the evidence like a guilty boy.
Kennedy’s peach trees were loaded, the fruit was ripe, and there wasn’t a picker in sight. Maybe they started late on Sundays. No fun picking today – that sun was already burning do
wn.
He took out his notebook, a pencil stub attached to it by a length of twine, and he scribbled a brief note, walked back to the house and slid the note beneath the front door. Of course, a lot of folk never opened their front doors. He wrote a second note.
Mr Kennedy. Time is now six am. It was now near eight, but the first time he’d pedalled out here it wasn’t. Please contact the police station at the earliest opportunity. Thompson.
He slid the second page beneath the back door, ripped off a sprig from some dead shrub and poked it in the keyhole, just to catch Kennedy’s attention, then he did the same at the front door, hoping the twig wouldn’t break off and jam the lock. He pulled it out, and it came out intact, so he pushed it back in again. A bloke with a locked door couldn’t miss those twigs, which might make him see one of those notes instead of walking right over them.
His notebook and pencil suggested he ought to write his few thoughts down – before he forgot them. Missing handbag? Upended bedroom. Kennedy left for cannery around four-thirty. That information had come from Mason, who had heard the truck start up and seen the headlights through the trees while he was collecting wood to brew up a billy of tea. Party dress, Tom wrote. Party handbag?
To Tom’s knowledge, there’d been no party in town last night, apart from Murphys’. Rachael wouldn’t have been there. The Murphys and the Squires didn’t move in the same circles. No dance on, nothing happening at the RSL club, no movie show, so why the party dress?
Party at the Squire house? Tom scribbled, nodded, liking that theory and trying to follow it. Kennedy had maybe left the party early, knowing he had to deliver those peaches, thinking his wife would stay there the night. That girl had done a good bit of traipsing backwards and forwards since her marriage. So why had she decided to leave her parents’ house and walk home? Could she have walked all that way in high-heeled shoes? Maybe. That girl had done a lot of walking, though why walk further than necessary? She would have come over the bridge and straight down Railway Road, which led to Kennedy’s gate.