Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  ‘It’s Saturday.’

  ‘It never is. It’s Monday. Washday.’

  She had seen the gun. ‘Llew’s.’

  Observant girl, then. Why would a scrubber like her notice a gun, unless she’d seen it at close quarters? Had they gone out, she and Llew, rubbing stirrups? Surely not. Wasn’t like that, Llew. Not like some of us. The Fenchurch men, taking their pick.

  He watched her look along the line of dogs.

  ‘Which one? Which one is it you were going to shoot then, Mr Fenchurch?’

  She was talking to him as if she was his equal or his nursemaid. He supposed she hadn’t seen him in his pyjamas before. She said ‘were’, as if he’d changed his mind. Had he? He didn’t answer, ashamed suddenly of his naked chest and crossing his arms.

  When had the clergyman come? If the girl was right, then yesterday was Sunday, the one full day of the week the parasite had to work, his busiest day. He wouldn’t have made the trip from Clunes then, unless he’d received the telegram on Friday and held on to it. Ludicrous. Mudguts Dog-collar visiting the families of the district laden with doom, intent on plumbing the faith of the newly bereaved.

  He tried to remember. There had been a knock on the door and he’d opened it to a fat man he hadn’t seen since after Min’s funeral.

  No, that’s not it.

  He had been sitting alone on the verandah, the summer evening in full flow, a fiery sunset in the distant west. A long green and blue dragonfly had come to rest on the post, its wings spinning and flashing like blades, and he was about to get up to look at it more closely — damselfly? — and to decide whether or not to kill it when he saw a horse and rider come along the path beside the river. A big man in a black hat. The white horse red with dust. The Anglican vicar.

  Then he was on his feet, looking for escape, standing by the heavy grapes hanging purple and lush on the trellis above the steps with the engines of hidden wasps near and far among them, and the boards at his feet suddenly leading away to nowhere. He remembered this as if he had stood a distance off, watching the horse bear Death up to the house, watching two men shake hands, watching one lean in and whisper, rummaging in his coat pocket for the proof.

  And then? He drew a blank.

  ‘Should you not be getting back to your bed, Mr Fenchurch?’ She was offering her arm as if he was an invalid and here was old Nance steaming along towards him, face like a fried egg, and the women were one on either side, one big, one small, both persuasive — ‘Come on, dear, let’s find your clothes.’ But somehow they didn’t, they were hauling him up the stairs and here he was, the sheets tucked so tight around him he could barely breathe, staring at the ceiling rose and trying to think what he’d done the last two days.

  *

  Early evening he woke to Nance coming in with soup. He watched her place it on the bedside table, light the lamp and pull the blind on the deepening sky, and quelled a desire to empty the bowl over her head. But it was tomato soup, sweet and thick, the way he liked it and he suspected she’d made it specially to tempt him. The spoon had left a round entry mark in the surface on its way to rest at the bottom of the bowl. Little flecks of melted butter floated, yellow flowers on the grave. Had they buried him? Did they know where he fell?

  ‘Nance?’

  She was on her way out. He didn’t want her to leave him alone just yet. She looked old. Older than him.

  ‘How old are you now, Nance?’ Rude to ask a woman even if she was a servant, but weren’t they about the same, and he was feeling old and she might commiserate.

  ‘Forty-six,’ she said resentfully, as if he should know the answer, as if he’d kept tally of the decades she’d been at the family’s disposal.

  Younger then, ten years. He had never liked the way her arms hung heavily at her sides when she was idle, the muddy shadows in her damper dough face, how her knuckles were red and swollen enough to notice. To be waited on by the pretty Irish girl would be more cheering, but he supposed she had gone home, back to the Tyrells’ hovel.

  ‘I told you about Llew,’ he said now, absently, in the same tone he might tell her the farrier was coming for the horses, or that a tourist boat on the river might call in for refreshment, yet another enterprise of his son’s finished for good.

  ‘Yes. You came into the kitchen to tell me.’

  ‘Did I?’ He didn’t remember.

  ‘You have to tell the girls. And write to him in New Zealand.’ ‘You write to Eddie, Nance, if you must.’ A look crossed her face then and he knew she already had, or was about to, and that she had possibly written to him before. Perhaps she made a habit of it, keeping up with Min’s favourite.

  He couldn’t care less. He closed his eyes and turned towards the wall, willing her to go away.

  2.

  NANCY ELIZABETH DEAN WENT DOWN THE STAIRS FULL OF resolve, Nan to the four little Fenchurches now grown up, gone or passed on. She and Min had brought the children up together in accord, so that Nance grew to love Min and Min to love Nance, more than either loved another living adult. The love Min gave Nance — quiet, unspoken, not demonstrated in any open way — had begun like a bruising, a result of her husband’s anger and neglect. It was like that at first, Nance would sometimes let herself remember. She had begun by offering comfort, before the love grew to be its own self, with its own nature and rules.

  At the bottom of the stairs Nance closed her eyes for a moment, partly from exhaustion — twenty-one rooms and none of them closed off! — and the rest from a moment of doubt.

  Am I right to do this, Min?

  In answer, her footsteps led her down the hall towards the morning room, exactly as it was when Min died, nothing shifted except for the dusting. There was a carved emu egg that showed the colours in the layers of shell, a pair of china dogs on the mantle linked with a gold chain, a pink Dresden clock and an American eagle under a dome, who shared its house with a moth-eaten platypus, its tail fashioned from mottled wax. There was a browned parlour palm, silver-webbed by spiders, scarcely more alive than the ill-paired taxidermied creatures, who could never have met in real life, much as Matthew and Min should never have, if it wasn’t for rich people’s liking for travelling and gawping at other people’s countries, which is what Eddie had done with possibly disastrous consequences.

  Thrown over the back of the green velvet settee was an Indian silk shawl, which Nance had tried to rearrange as carefully as Min had thrown it carelessly in the week before she died six years ago, the exact drape and folds, but it was artless, the spirit flown. She snatched it up again, held it to her face, but the scent was almost gone, more imagined than real.

  At the small bureau by the French window she took the tiny silver key from its hiding place under the blotter, and after a brief struggle — longer than the last time, which was years ago now — the rolltop retreated. But then Nance was good with keys; she had a feel for them after so many years in the big house. There was the compartment that held pen and inkpot, and the little stoppered bottle of water to mix with the ink; there were paper and envelopes and, best of all, the soft suede-covered notebook which held the addresses of the children, as well as those of many mysterious Californians.

  Nance lit the lamp and put her glasses on the end of her nose. She’d thought she would write to them all more regularly after Min died, but she hadn’t. It was not for wanting to — she did — but because she could think of nothing that would interest them. The girls would not have been curious about Llew’s changes to the farm because they’d married — one to a Queensland cropper, the other to a wealthy Sydneysider. And neither would Edmond, dear Eddie, Min’s favourite, who after her death had taken himself off to New Zealand. He was the oldest son and the one most like his mother — impulsive, trusting, high-spirited, intoxicating to everyone other than his father. If only she could rest her eyes once again on his lovely liar’s face.

  Before Min died she had shown Nance the money, hundreds of American dollars, stored in a locked chest in the belvedere
. Give it all to him, she had said, and let him get away.

  From one of the cubbyholes Nance pulled out the last letter from him. Four years ago, the first and only communication since Min’s death. She knew it almost by heart — that he had bought a farm on the North Island and had married a Maori lady, the daughter of a chief! She didn’t know whether to believe him, all of it or some of it. A farm or a wife, the daughter of a chief, or an ordinary woman, Maori or not. There could even be a child now, or children. She had never breathed a word of it to her employer and he never went near Min’s desk. Did he know anything about his son? Bad enough Eddie had lost so much money in the first place, bad enough he’d had to leave, worse that he’d gone to New Zealand, and who knew what old Fenchurch would make of a Maori daughter-in-law, if she really did exist. Once or twice she’d thought she might bring it up with him, but not now, not after this tragedy.

  ‘Dear Eddie,’ she began and went no further. She could not write the same as other letters she’d heard of: ‘It is my solemn duty to inform you …’ though she could see why people did write that. It meant you didn’t have to think. She couldn’t remember what she’d written after Min died but then Min had been sick for a long time. Released from suffering. At peace at last. That’s what she wrote.

  Do not think of Min, Nance told herself sternly, and tried instead to remember the exact wording of the telegram. The fat Proddy priest had showed it to her, after Mr Fenchurch had fallen wailing to his knees on the verandah, after the priest had half-carried him through the house to the kitchen, where they’d propped him in a chair and fed him brandy, which had done him no good. After they’d lugged him up the stairs to bed — the vicar was a big man, twice the size of Father O’Donnell, overfed by his wife but strong even so — and after that, back in the kitchen she had given him the boss’s brandy while she read the telegram, now crushed. They’d had to prise Mr Fenchurch’s fingers apart to retrieve it. What were the exact words? She couldn’t recall.

  ‘Dear Eddie’, the words stood alone for another few moments until she took a deep breath, dipped her pen and went on, ‘I have verry sad news. Your brother Llew has been killed in the war in France. Your farther is not himself otherwise he would have writen himself. I know you wood be verry sad to read these sad words. I hope your life in New Zeland is all you hope.

  ‘I am always, as ever, your loving,

  ‘Nan.’

  She read it over and thought perhaps having ‘sad’ three times was not ideal composition, and neither was ‘himself’ twice, or ‘hope’, and that if she was back in her brief years at St Margaret’s, Sister Horatio would likely give her a rap over the knuckles, which pained her now even more than they did then, especially when, unaccustomed, they were forced to grasp a pen.

  Determined, she wrote two more letters, one to each of Eddie’s sisters, word-for-word the same but substituting Sydney and Queensland for New Zealand in her hopes for their happiness.

  Sealed and addressed, Nan pocketed the envelopes deep in her apron and went upstairs to collect her patient’s bowl.

  3.

  THE RAINS CAME AS SUDDENLY AS ALWAYS BUT IN APRIL, two months later than usual. There was an idea, a long way south in the Government, that the north was wet and didn’t suffer the drought. Not a real drought. A real drought wasn’t made of low rivers and putrid dams, of stock not yet starving but fast losing condition, of fruit only days off withering on the vine. No proper wet for two years. That wasn’t a real drought. Oh no. The fools.

  So finally, when the rain came, all of the Big Scrub relished it and would do so until newly nourished fungi flew to afflict man and beast, until mould flecked clothes and bed linen and set them reeking, until food spoiled quickly enough to be able to watch spores settle and form pustules, until the ongoing deluge forced cockies rich and poor to move stock away from the rising river.

  Yesterday afternoon, from high in the belvedere, Matthew had watched the squalls coming down in lines, enjoyed seeing steam rise in great veils off hard-baked land. The she-oaks on the riverbanks were shaking off their dusty coats and the vicar’s horse was returned to her grey-white. Matthew had watched her come along the river road and her rider pause outside the gates, not game enough to come in to see how Matthew was faring, before he had gone on up the hill to gauge the progress of the memorial.

  Now Matthew was set on the same business, which was more his business than the vicar’s, riding out to the site chosen for its peace and beauty at the westernmost corner of his estate. The sun was shining fitfully between clouds and the country was glittery, washed clean. It would rain again soon, you could feel it.

  He was in no hurry, this new slow mood of optimism allowing him to breathe the fresh moist air and think hopefully for the first time since February — of the future, of what it could bring, how the war must end soon, of the imminent visit from his married daughters. As he let his horse take her own pace, a familiar figure came dawdling in and out of the foreshortened shadows of the ghost gums that lined the long carriageway.

  The Irish girl. Their paths had not crossed since February when he’d had a slate loose. Taking her time — his old horse progressed at the same rate as she did, which gave him plenty of opportunity to watch her, slight and bony, hair hanging rainsoaked around her face, wet dress clinging to her small high breasts and skinny legs. Her eyes, when he got around to them, were black lashed, challenging, lifted up to him, the only blue in the near world.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning, Mister.’ She said it to the horse, stroking the mane.

  ‘Late, aren’t you?’ There must have been an edge to his voice because the girl looked up at him then.

  ‘Keep your wool on.’

  ‘Watch it, lass — ’ and he gave out a sudden, astonished laugh, a single bark that rang out in the still morning like gunshot. The horse weaved a little, but the girl took hold of its head and soothed it, talking softly.

  ‘When I’m late Nan goes butchers,’ she whispered to the horse. ‘He don’t need to as well.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said shortly, it being no concern of his. He would have moved on then but the horse was taken by her, head lowered and mumbling the bit. A flock of white cockatoos shrieked overhead, the pink undersides of their wings flashing, and settled in the nearest gum. Girl and horse took no notice, the rhythmic hand went on stroking Flora’s lowered head. The wind was coming up — it stirred the mane of the horse and the top of the glossy black head.

  ‘Where do you sleep?’ he asked her.

  She looked at him directly now, but said nothing.

  ‘When you stay on Monday nights, where do you sleep?’

  ‘In the kitchen. Nan puts a shakedown by the range. She says the servants’ quarters have been turned over to storage.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There was a hint of belligerence in her upturned face, lips pressed together so hard they showed white. ‘Do you remember my mother, Mr Fenchurch?’

  ‘What was her name?’

  He was trying to please her, he realised. How about that? Matthew Fenchurch trying to please the little Tyrell who rubbed her fingers raw washing his clothes. He nudged the horse.

  ‘Do you know my name?’

  ‘Kathleen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bridget?’

  ‘No.’ She giggled like a child.

  ‘Donah? Cheeky Moll?’

  She stepped back then, abruptly, eyes wide, letting go of the horse — he’d offended her, not meaning to, so he went on until he reached the gate with its twin stone lions, where he turned for a moment in the saddle. In the dappled light the girl stood stock still, waiting, as if she knew he would want to turn back to her.

  ‘Evie Tyrell!’ she called, with a kind of unappealing shrillness. ‘That’s my blinkin’ name!’

  He would give no indication he’d heard her. A Tyrell. Black Irish, multitudinous, two of her brothers slammed in the Lismore lockup. None of them volunteering, when the army coul
d be the making of them, if it took them on. In the Catholic way, the father had inherited an unviable run, a scrap of steep land that was his share after division among a second generation of half a dozen sons. He’d been dead a year and the family were still scrabbling for a living off it, with only two sons moved away, and that at His Majesty’s Pleasure.

  You had to pity them, poor devils. Min had taken an interest in them, since they were the same colour of church, and she would make him turn a blind eye whenever they stole a beast as long as it was only once a year. Years ago, she’d even paid for a doctor when one of the children was badly burned in a fire. He’d kept his distance since Min died, tried not to employ them on the farm, sent the hands round to rough them up after the last stolen steer. But there it was: a Tyrell laundry maid.

  The horse, accustomed now to these early morning jaunts to the crossroads, turned towards the memorial site without any prompting. As they went along, the clouds began to thicken and blow in from the northeast, bringing more rain. As expected.

  *

  The mason was there, with his boy. Horse and dray waited in the lee of some spindly she-oaks. The rain sounded heavier than it really was because they were close to the falls and you could hear the river, swollen in the wet. River and rain beyond the eucalypts, almost indistinguishable one from the other. A family of kookaburras huddled sullen in the upper branches, quiet now it was raining. He’d heard them calling for it as he rode up the hill, yelling like larrikins, and now they’d got what they wanted they didn’t seem to enjoy it, sitting still and hunched.

  The memorial had made little progress since yesterday. From the vantage point of his horse, Matthew could see the pegs and string marking out the square for the plinth, the large slab of glistening grey aggregate dug from a nearby hill. Quarry-faced ashlar, the old mason had called it. It stood still in the dray, though the mason had his pulleys and ropes ready to move it to its resting place. Until a week ago he’d had a grown son working with him, but the lad had signed up for the colours and overseas adventure. The new boy, squatting up there beside the stone, looked like a half-wit, a mouth-breather, flat-footed.