Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  Silverspooners. They didn’t call them that here. They called them silvertails. He’d heard it in the Domain, and from the men he’d met when he worked a few days at Circular Quay, unloading ships. They’d cursed the silvertails, like he’d heard people at home, Pakeha mostly, curse the silverspooners. A silvertail was a person who sat down to work and earned a lot of money. One of the old stevedores had told him about a little Maori girl he’d met once, brought from New Zealand by an English couple. She was a cripple, in poor health, and had died on the ship while it was in port. The story had given him the shivers then and gave him the shivers now. He turned his attention to the portrait above Rufina’s head.

  An ancestor. Hers or his? Bearded, sharp-eyed. There was a pale rectangle on the wall beside it, where another portrait must have hung and was now taken away. Steam lifted from the tureen — he remembered the name for it, from meals with the vicar during that long-ago time when he’d thought about taking orders. He was only a boy then, younger than Jellicoe.

  The big blonde girl who had been hurried inside by the old lady carried the plates around the table. Joe and the rest were waiting, as if for grace — but there wouldn’t be one, because his father had told him there would be none of that. No religion. In a rare moment of sobriety, not long before Irving left, Eddie had explained that his mother’s Catholicism had overwhelmed his father’s religion, which wasn’t much to start with, and now there was none. ‘But I am Church of England,’ Irving had said, faithful enough to accompany his employers’ families to worship, if they were churchgoers. It was dispiriting how few were. Sometimes when he was away shearing, the farmer’s wife would come into the shearing shed of a Saturday and tell them — if anyone would like to come to church with us tomorrow, please do.

  He would talk to his grandfather’s widow, ask her where the closest church was. Rufina Fenchurch. Could be a Maori name. Ruwhena. Ruwhenua. Earth shaking.

  Beautiful, in her way. She was his grandmother, wasn’t she, though? Good as.

  The girl was at his elbow laying down his plate and he understood that she’d served him last in keeping with good manners, because he’s family. His bowl, unlike the others, was only half full. Meat, onions, sour cabbage. Pepper and salt.

  ‘Please start,’ said Rufina, as the girl handed around a plate of white bread and butter. He’d get that last, too.

  Family hold back.

  His stepmother said it, when there were guests. Not that she had to, since it was in their blood, from both sides. The last of the meat. The milk. The bread. The last of anything went to the visitor.

  Look after the guest.

  If this transaction was going to work, the return would be of such value that he would end by reversing roles. Eddie had said to make sure the farm was legally his. On paper. Godless Eddie, porangi with booze, a sinner and a wreck but with occasional words of wisdom that stuck in Irving’s head. ‘Make yourself the boss,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t let her push you around. Make sure a time comes when the farm is yours. On paper.’

  On paper. How is he to do that?

  Rufina had served nothing for herself and was leaning back in her chair. She had already eaten, he supposed. By the squat brown clock on the mantelpiece it was after nine. The serving girl was standing there quietly, her rough hands reflected in a narrow band of bevelled mirrors set into the wood.

  ‘So. Where have you been, young Irving? All these months. When exactly did you leave New Zealand? How long ago?’ Rufina sounded annoyed. She shouldn’t speak to him like that in front of the others, who were picking up their spoons and hoeing in. Brother Joe caught his eye while the others tried hard not to. If only they would talk the way they had on the road, all the long trip on the train, the joking and high spirits.

  Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, the servant girl swayed a little from side to side. Was she waiting for orders?

  Rufina followed his eye line and turned in her chair. ‘Off you go then, Lena.’

  As she walked away he saw something familiar in the set of her shoulders, the droop, the slump.

  Eddie.

  Rufina got up from the table to close the door after her and her momentary absence relaxed the men. Jellicoe and Bill nudged one another, Jell’s spoon slopping on the tablemat. Joe took a mouthful and sent Irving mimed disgust, eyebrows raised to his hair.

  He was right. The food was bad. A thin broth, a faint rancid taste. Maybe they had it on the boil the whole time; maybe they just added a few gallons of water to an old stew. Why had she made them sit in this posh room full of stern ancestors when all she was feeding them was nothing better than the poor kai Mary served up at home? At least his men had relaxed a bit, talking in low voices.

  ‘Welcome.’ Rufina stood behind the carver at the far end of the long table, her arms resting along the chair back. The men talked on, so she tried again, and he heard a soft ‘v’ at the beginning of the word that wasn’t there before.

  ‘It is a pleasure to welcome you all to Jarulan. I won’t stand on ceremony but I need to know exactly who each of you are in relation to the family, and how you fit in.’

  There are only six of us, thought Irving. What’s her problem?

  ‘Joe is my cousin.’

  ‘And the others?’ Uzzers. It’s because she’s nervous. Her German-ness.

  ‘Met them in Sydney.’

  She looked surprised. ‘So many of you?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Now she was offended.

  Joe came to his rescue. ‘I was on the ship with Irving. We met these fellas in Sydney.’

  ‘Are there lots of you, then, in Sydney?’

  Bill nodded. ‘Been there coming up six years.’

  Irving would have corrected him but couldn’t be bothered. Bill hadn’t been in Sydney for six years — much of it he was out past Parramatta, shearing, and was black as an Abo from all the hard sun, which had aged him, lined his forehead and bleached his hair.

  ‘No. I mean, do lots of Maoris live there?’

  ‘People go back and forth,’ Bill said, after a pause. ‘Not many. Don’t know really.’

  ‘Do you like it in Australia?’

  ‘Pretty good. I was born here.’ Jellicoe that time, the youngest of them, his voice barely broken. Jimmy’s brother. Jimmy, taciturn as ever, hadn’t said a word.

  ‘And why have you come up north? Where are you going now?’

  They were looking at him for an answer to this one.

  ‘There is no work for you here,’ Rufina said. ‘Don’t think that you can stay. Joe maybe. Not the others.’

  He felt sick to his guts. Plate pushed away, he put his head down for a moment. He’d have to talk her round.

  ‘But I told them …’

  ‘What? That they could work here? You don’t know the first thing about it. I turn people away every week. Scads of them, coming to the door.’

  ‘Not us.’ He let her meet his eye. ‘We’re family. You said.’

  ‘Not all of you. Not all of you are family, surely.’

  ‘We saw them, people on the road. Everywhere. There were camps in Glen Innes. Met a man yesterday on his way to Cairns, said he hadn’t eaten for three days. But knew we’d be right. We’d be welcome.’

  She was staring at him, her lips parted, and he understood that he would be able to bend her to his will. She was just a woman, wasn’t she? A woman on her own, apart from the lumpy girl and old cook. The men who’d come to gawp at them when they’d arrived, the men who had taken the carter and his boy over to their quarters for a feed, some of them might have to go away if there wasn’t room here — but from the little he’d seen this was a big farm.

  ‘This is the boundary of the Fenchurch land,’ the carter had told him at the first bend of the river road. It had gone on for miles. The Big Scrub. That’s what they’d said it was called, people on the road, whenever they learned of their destination. Dry, gaunt mountains and green fields below, rolling away forever. Rive
rs and gullies, bush, long reaches of marsh. He had heard there was a cedar forest here years ago, so vast that it covered all the land from the hills down to the coast, ten miles away from where he sat now, at Jarulan. Fortunes were made cutting it all out. The Fenchurch fortune maybe, among others. His fortune.

  ‘You and I have to have a private conversation.’ Rufina rose from the table as if she would take him this instant into another closed room, more interior, more stuffed with death and the past. How could the small group of women fill a house this enormous?

  ‘The morning will be soon enough,’ he said, standing, his men following suit. He led them out the way they came, down the corridor and through the screen door, around the house to the carter’s truck, where they took their pikaus and blanket rolls from the tray and set up a kind of camp on the front verandah. What had he thought — that he’d be given a featherbed, a four-poster, silken sheets? At least the night was warm and dry and the wooden boards smoother than most of the beds he’d made since he took to the road.

  Eventually Bill and the others went to sleep and Irving lay among them, trying to recall the conversation he’d had with Rufina all those months ago at home. Did she say he was to come alone? He couldn’t remember. In fact, she’d wanted him to bring his sister Gracie but Mary would have none of it. Not my best girl, she’d kept saying, not my baby. Gracie was the one Mary raised from infancy after the death of their mother.

  A soft flickering caressed his shin, a tentative, spindly motion towards his knee — a creature larger than a mouse, many legged. He brushed it off. A spider, was it? He couldn’t see in the gloom or hear it either, scuttling away. It might have been poisonous. He should stand up, make sure it hadn’t transferred itself to Bill or Joe or any of the others. But how could he see without a candle? He listened hard — perhaps there was a faint tapping along the boards, going away from the men.

  *

  Just after dawn he woke to the memory of a pair of dusty women’s boots planted squarely in front of him, a pair of shapely white calves rising above them. A pool of golden light had trembled on the boards; there had been a lamp clasped in a female hand and lowered towards his face. ‘It’s all right.’ Spoken softly. ‘Go back to sleep.’ And he’d done as he was bidden, must have done, like an obedient boy.

  7.

  ALL NIGHT PACING. PACING AROUND JARULAN IN THE DARK, from room to room, corridor to corridor, wing to wing, with her stomach roiling and mind blank to everything other than the arrival. What had she done to offend him? How could Irving have done this, appear with all those extra mouths? Where were his loyalties? It was a bad omen, the way he held those men around him.

  Just after midnight she had tried to sleep, lain down in the small room she had taken after Matthew’s death. It was the room he’d had when they first met, his boyhood room. A single bed. A chest of drawers, a view out over the yard and the low-roofed servants’ quarters. South-facing, cooler in the summer. It had comforted her to be there. Sleep had evaded her in the months after he died, but she could sleep there. Close to him, but not too close, not lying in the deathbed. Forgiven.

  The forgiven part was very important. She’d done everything wrong. That was what the doctor had told her. She had washed the wound, once they’d found it. Matthew couldn’t tell them where it was, since he hadn’t felt the bite, just as he hadn’t seen the snake. She had encouraged him to walk from the paddock up to the house. She should have kept him still. She should have called for help from one of the hands, someone who knew what to do, how to find the site, make the cross-cut and draw away the poison.

  Why was she here then, in the spacious matrimonial bedroom, with its buggy old bedstead and sooty fireplace? Matthew shivering with cold those last awful hours, the fire banked high. After the funeral Rufina had given instructions for the master bedroom to be closed. Locked.

  The key weighed cold and heavy in her hand. She must have gone downstairs to fetch it from the cupboard in the washhouse, gone down the stairs and out the back door still half-asleep, barely conscious. Or had she already taken it on her earlier drifting about, raising the kerosene lamp to the board and slipping the key off its numbered hook? She couldn’t remember. The tablets were mucking her up, two of them, taken soon after she climbed into the single bed. As good as strapping herself down, usually. Or not.

  How many nights had she spent like this, pacing hot and restless? The day’s heat was retained here, because the room was at the front of the house, facing west; the air damp and curled like a weighty, dusty cat, the curtains hung thick at the windows with moonlight showing as a pale fuzz at the join.

  Rufina put the lantern on her old dressing table, crossed the room and flung the curtains open to the glistening tops of the trees, the shadowy fence-lines in the near paddocks, the driveway glowing white on its last meander before the gate. It would be refreshing to open the window, push open the screens and breathe in the night. But her lamp would bring insects of the nocturnal kind, which were even more alarming than those of the day, even after all these years — especially the ones that came at you from the dark, whirring, huge, banging at the lamp shades or incinerating themselves in candle flame. One night, in this very room, a moth the size of a small bird had flown above her head with its wings aflame, and she had shrieked in horror while Matthew laughed from the bed, laughing more when she raced to join him and drew the sheet over her head. In the morning on her return from the lavatory, still outside in those days, she had found a small pile of ash by the bed, the flame so hot it had devoured even the moister parts of the body.

  ‘It would have been a quick death, I suppose,’ she had said. Matthew was dressing at his tallboy, pulling on work clothes, running a comb through his hair.

  ‘Wouldn’t’ve felt a thing,’ he’d answered. ‘Wouldn’t’ve known it was alive in the first place.’

  ‘Every animal knows it’s alive.’

  On the windowsill was a tiny lamp — a modesty lamp, they were called at her boarding school — set in the curtainless dormitory window to render the room inside invisible. Her mother had sent it to her in a box with some other things from her childhood, a favourite doll, a tattered book of Brothers Grimm stories. She lit it with a taper from the mantelpiece, then pulled away the flyscreen and opened the window, unhitching it on the casement and flinging it wide. The glow wouldn’t be enough to draw the insects.

  Fresh air, warm, smelling of the river and the eucalypts, of flowers and dust. Moonlight, a glint of water, the dark shape of the hills, the faint gloom of roses in the near garden. Behind her the dark of the room and the lantern guttering suddenly. She turned it up, just a whisker, to be on the safe side. But she wouldn’t be here for long, would she? She’d be back to her narrow bed in a jiffy, not in this room alone in the dark. Since Matthew’s death she had only come here in the daytime.

  A figure passed from the ground floor verandah to the edge of the rose garden to relieve himself. It was the one with the odd name, the youngest of them. Jelly something. How lucky men are that they can do that, she thought, watching him. It was one of the first things she’d had to get used to, out working with Matthew on the farm when she was first married, the way the men didn’t go far away enough to be decent. On his return the boy glanced up at the house, directly towards her.

  But he would be able to see nothing from there. The glow of the lamp shielded her. For him to have seen her she would have to have opened the French windows and gone out onto the verandah, treading above the sleeping men.

  *

  Heartbreaking. Lying on the boards like vagrants. Earlier on her rambles she’d gone to look at them. Only one of them woke up — she thought it was Matthew’s grandson; it was difficult to tell in the dark. And she had been looking for the Irving as he looked the only other time she had met him, she realised, in New Zealand, not as he was now, with the marks of experience and defeat on him. He had had a hard time of it on the road. Too thin, a sadness in his eyes.

  She went to the bed,
laying her hand on the dustsheet, then found that she had sunk to sit on the edge of the mattress — a puff of dust-laden air and a scurry of departing beetle on the floor.

  What would Matthew say about all this if he was here?

  This would never have happened if Matthew was here.

  If he was here she would lie in his arms now, she would have him. She felt like it, she needed it, more than she ever did when she was younger. Her thirties had brought with them the full force of her appetite — frightening, swollen, gross, a weed grown out of control since the gardener died. A flash of them together — entwined, lustful, private. How good it was. How he had known how to please a woman. He had taught her that there was no shame in it.

  Lying down now, her hand between her legs, above her the same moulded plaster cornices and ceiling roses that her eyes had opened to for fifteen years. Unchanged — though a spider had made her nest between two plaster roses, an elaborate, translucent column of criss-crossing filaments shifting gently in the breeze from the open window, beautiful if you want it to be beautiful. And she did. She wanted everything beautiful, and why not?

  Afterwards she lay dreaming about how she could make this room hers again, and made a mental list of the things she would have to buy or fix. It was a state of mind familiar from her married life, how her thoughts could run along the most prosaic channels after those mysterious joyful waves of sensation that Matthew hadn’t known the name for and so neither had she.

  Irving hadn’t liked her. He hadn’t liked the dining room or the food. He had refused her invitation to a private conversation. He was wary of her when she’d given him no reason. Why hadn’t she intuited when she met him how arrogant and unbiddable he could be? He had seemed a sweet naïve country boy, a poor relation whom she had imagined would enter a state of obedient gratitude.

  Did he realise that she hadn’t had to go and fetch him? She could have found someone on her own side — a distant cousin in Germany, if any had survived the war and remembered her. For exactly half her life she had been in this new country. For most of the time, since she left the Schneiders, she had barely spoken a word of her mother tongue.