Jarulan by the River

by Lily Woodhouse

  ‘Like a lamb to the slaughter. That’s what the German told me it was like, their first time. Poor bastard. When she seduced him he wasn’t even twenty years old.’ Evie turned her empty sherry glass round and round, the flickering tiny stem in her brown nicotine-stained fingers. Sunseeker and heavy smoker she was, with a glint in her wrinkly old Irish eye. She had a gentleman friend with a boat and for years they’d sailed the Pacific. They were naturists — nude tannings — and liked a drink.

  ‘Greeted me like a long-lost friend, like she’d forgotten what a bitch she was before I went away. She was full of talk about the swaggies that had moved in and stolen from them, how she’d gone a bit mad and thought one of them was me.’ She lit a ciggie off the one she’d nearly finished and struck a pose, presenting me with her profile. ‘Don’t s’pose you remember me, do you, boy?’

  I was hardly a boy that night in the bar, a year off thirty. There was a nasty stink in the way she called me that. I shook my head, not that she noticed, since she was fascinated more by our horn player Api, handsome in those days, who was packing up, bedding down the trumpet and the sax in their velvet-lined boxes. The barman came out from behind and wiped down the front of the bar, a waitress went round with a bucket and a damp cloth and emptied ashtrays, another one came out of the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches for the band and my puku rumbled — I was a skinny wee fella then. Not that I’m any taller now, just rounder.

  ‘Of course you don’t remember. You were what? Just a bubba.’

  ‘1939?’

  ‘Thereabouts. Just before she went back to Germany. We knew then, you see, that there would be another war and she was a Kraut to her toenails. She wasn’t going to go through all that again, being an alien. She was frightened that they’d take the farm, lock her up in a camp like they did to the Germans the first time round.’

  ‘But how long had she been here, this Rufina?’

  ‘Long time. Twenty years. She’d come out as a lady companion before the first war. A paid friend. And not to say she didn’t love Australia, or the little bit that was hers. Jarulan. She did, almost as much as she loved you, sport. You slept in her room until the very last night.’

  Api joined us, bringing more sandwiches — one for Evie as well — and asking the barman for a drink.

  ‘I want you lot to bugger off,’ the barman said. ‘Closing time.’

  Evie waggled her empty glass at him. Together she and Api joked and teased and barracked until he broke the law and poured two more beers, while I sat there imagining my small sleeping self in the German woman’s room. My great-grandfather’s widow. Did she get up to me if I cried in the night? Did she feed me? Two children of my own by this stage, one back in New Zealand and one here, and bugger all to do with either of them — not a good dad for my first kids. All I knew about babies then was that they cried in the night and someone has to get up to them.

  ‘You’re wondering why she didn’t take you with her, aren’t ya?’ Evie’s attention had swum through the bottom of her glass back to me.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘When she went back to Germany. It was my daughter Lena who looked after you until your dad took you home. A couple of years. You were nearly three when he took you back.’

  A face, suddenly. A broad, flat smile and loving blue eyes. A long high room with bright hot windows and her hand leaving mine as I ran towards a man standing at the distant end, his arms out to catch me. My father. And nothing else, except a memory of an aching heart, that she was gone, and that my father carried me to a waiting car.

  Evie leaned forward and took my hands, cigarette still burning between her fingers.

  ‘Shit, love. You didn’t know. I’m sorry.’

  She was, too, in that moment, sorry for me, so sorry she kissed me with her thin, hard smoky mouth, and I feel a little sorry for myself now as I look down at seven-year-old Rena asleep in my arms, hot and sticky, her hair slicked around her face. Lucky Rena, youngest daughter of my youngest son Brad and his beloved ditzy Sue. Her mother would never abandon her, not for quids. Rena will always know who she is. The little one is the reason I’m remembering all this. Earlier she was asking me where I lived when I was a baby.

  ‘Jarulan,’ I told her, ‘The grandest house in the north.’

  ‘In Aotearoa?’ she asked, and was surprised when I told her New South Wales.

  ‘Can we go there? Where you were borned?’

  ‘Maybe. One day.’

  I never have gone back. I’m frightened of what I might remember.

  That long-ago night in the club, as the chairs were stacked on the tables around us and the floor swept and the stage lights dimmed, Evie told me, ‘She did the right thing, leaving you behind. Likely you would have been with her in Berlin and killed like she was. Blasted sky high by the bombers. And besides, look at the colour of you — Hitler wouldn’t’ve liked you one tiny bit!’ And her wheezy old laugh ricocheted around the brown varnished walls of the empty club.

  I needed to be alone for a moment. I couldn’t breathe. She was rattling on, wanting to know if Irving had gone away to fight, nodding when I told her he hadn’t.

  ‘Yeah, too gentle, I reckon. One of the gentlest men I ever did meet.’

  I had heard other women say this kind of thing before about my father and if I hadn’t been so pole-axed I would’ve told her that he’d tried to sign up but he was too deaf and they didn’t want him. He was a good father to me, found himself a proper Maori wife, gave me siblings, worked hard to make a successful farm that he bought with the sale of Jarulan, money that he only ever said came from the Australian side of the family.

  Evie was going on, ‘I saw the way he cared for you, the way he carried you around with him. And half in love with the German, I reckon. Didn’t want to be, but he was.’

  I sat on my stool, longing to get away to clear my head, to walk through the cool streets and think about all this, to try to make sense of it. My father loved my great-grandfather’s widow. He had loved her. And then I wanted more of the story, as much as she could give me, so I invited Evie to my digs, and later, as the sun came up, for breakfast at the always-open-for-business greasy famous Hasty Tasty on Darlinghurst Road. She didn’t stop talking until we’d eaten our fill and emptied three pots of tea.

  By the time she’d finished I knew who I was. And I knew that even though I was only a baby when I left, I have carried that house with me all my life. On my back. In my bones.

  2.

  Jarulan

  WE ARE JAMMED INTO THE CAR, MY YOUNGEST SON, HIS WIFE, the two gangly teenagers, Rena, the itchy, scratchy dog, and me, on the long trip north. Halfway, we stay the night at Coffs Harbour with a friend of my son’s who is a successful businessman, in his big new house in Solitary Way with a view of the moana. His tall winsome daughter is a dancer, with an MA in Maori Culture from a local university. She is called Mackenzie like the famous South Island sheep rustler, and has never once set foot in her ancestral home. She makes a fuss of me; I am famous again, in a small way, or so it seems — the show bands I played in, the songs I sang. She tells me she saw me interviewed on Maori TV, a spot I did a fair few years ago for a doco on the showband era.

  Marvellous, it all is. A big new modern house, all white walls and glass, wide dusky windows giving out over the ocean, the horizon growing closer as the sun slips away across the wide land behind us. The dancer finds Rena and me in the vast living room on a black leather sofa the size of a waka, staying out of the way of the dinner preparations in the shiny kitchen and avoiding the giant-screen footy in the adjoining room.

  ‘This house you’re all going to,’ says Mackenzie. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s not there anymore,’ I tell her. ‘It burned down.’

  ‘How?’ asks Mackenzie. ‘By accident or on purpose?’

  ‘Well, my great-grandfather had built a memorial on the hill above the house. Rena and I found a news story from the seventies all about how there was a bit of glass on the very top t
hat shifted in a hail storm and turned around a little so that the sun shone through it on a particular angle. One summer day it was so hot that the forest caught fire and then the grass and then the house.’

  ‘Cool,’ says Mackenzie. ‘Spooky. It means fire, you know, Jarulan. I looked it up. It’s an Aboriginal word for a fire started by birds.’

  ‘The fire wasn’t started by birds,’ says Rena firmly.

  Early the next afternoon we’re on the road again, all the way up the coast to Ballina, where the wide flat river is brown and mottled as a working dog’s belly. Across the bridge we go, inland towards Lismore, through the flatland sugar until the hills rise and climb, the trees change — less palms, more figs and gums, coffee plantations, macadamia. We are even more jammed in, the two youngest under a single seatbelt in the six-seater four-wheel-drive, because we are joined by Mackenzie who is filming us on her phone.

  ‘I’m putting it up live on my blog,’ she tells me. ‘I’ve got two thousand followers.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ I tell her.

  ‘Do you wonder sometimes what it would have been like to have grown up here? To have had a mother identifying as German after the Second World War and being Maori in New South Wales?’

  ‘It would have been untenable,’ comes Rena’s serious voice. She has the tail end of a green jelly snake hanging from her mouth to below her chin. ‘Australians are very racist, you know.’

  Mackenzie turns her camera on the jelly snake. ‘How do you know that, Rena? Have you heard people say racist things?’

  ‘Koro said it would be untenable.’

  Mackenzie is back online and reading aloud the story of Jarulan since the Fenchurch family left, how the house fell into disrepair for many years and was believed to be haunted. How in the 1960s a commune was established there for a peppercorn rent, and how it was gutted by the fire some time after the hippies left. The original farm had been broken up, sold off to lifestylers and nut farmers, coffee growers, a boutique hotel, an organic garden, and a transcendental sexual healing centre, whatever the hell that is.

  ‘How much further, Dad?’ from one of the teenagers.

  My son taps the GPS — fifty-seven kilometres. Not far. The screen gives away nothing of the actual country, just a white expanse and a red teardrop marking our destination on a wavering line, which I’m not sure is the river or the road.

  ‘Any of this look familiar, Mattie?’ asks Susie, sitting up front with my son. A very quiet, steady boy, always was. None of the Fenchurch madness. They’re holding hands. On the black console their wrists glitter with gold chains and watches; a diamond in Susie’s bracelet catches the light and beams it into one of my eyes, sharp as a laser. I suppose Brad is as successful as his friend in Coffs Harbour. He’s in that world. Corporate, cut-throat. Held on to his house in Coogee, now worth millions. I have no idea which way he votes.

  ‘Are you remembering anything at all?’ he asks.

  There are jacarandas in flowerless winter mode, rolling green hills, horses wearing blankets, narrow white gauges on the roadsides to measure floodwater.

  ‘None of it,’ I tell them.

  ‘Well, I suppose you wouldn’t’ve travelled through here so quick,’ Susie says. ‘Like, you would have had a horse and cart, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘We had a truck.’ A red Chevy, which my father so loved that it came on the ship with us. The Chevy and a mob of barking blue heelers. The voyage, source of my earliest memories from 1941. I remember the fiddles on the tables to stop the plates slipping in high seas, the striped cream blanket on my berth, and a flash of my father turning his head to try to catch the words of a fellow passenger on the windy deck while he exercised his excitable dogs. He had kept his word and stayed on the farm until we had news of Rufina’s death. He wept, Evie had told me, wept buckets. Then started on his plans to go back to New Zealand.

  On the river road we stop at a memorial at the crest of a hill, a grey stone column topped with a twisted finial that once held the glass. We all pile out and the kids read the names, excited to find an ancestor.

  Pte Llewellyn Mungo Dominic Fenchurch.

  41st Battalion of 11th Infantry Brigade

  Died of wounds. Aged 20

  Fell December 25th 1916

  Western Front, Armentieres, France

  ‘Christmas Day,’ says my son.

  ‘He has a whole face to himself,’ observes Mackenzie.

  ‘Face?’ asks Rena.

  ‘A side. See?’ She puts her hand up to the name. ‘He’s all on his own.’

  ‘It was built for him,’ I tell her, ‘for my great-uncle who died in the First World War.’

  We walk around the memorial in the winter sun. There are lists of Robinsons, Pidcocks, Braes. The stone is peppered with bullet holes, as if larrikins have used it for target practice. Might have been a bullet that twisted the finial.

  Hands in his pockets, my son is moving away from us to look between the trees down the bush-covered hill to where the land rolls away towards the east. I follow him, and together we take in the lofty view, the lifestyle blocks and regimented rows of coffee and nuts. It’s more densely populated than I would have thought. There are scatterings of cattle, small white gleams of sheep. The house site must be down there somewhere, in a direct line, because it had a clear view of the memorial. At the foot of the hill a winding indentation leads away from the river road. It’s a driveway, grassed over, and the shape of it brings something to mind. Two stone lions. They stood on either side of the gate.

  ‘Come on,’ I say to the family. ‘Let’s go down.’

  They do as I ask, finding their places in the crowded car, stealing glances at me. Rena holds my hand. If I am remembering the stone lions, will I remember her, my mother, and the house that once filled the empty land at the termination of the spectral road?

  We park the car at a broken gate devoid of lions. ‘Private Land’ reads a lopsided sign. ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’. It has a couple of bullet holes through it, a patina of rust. There’s a grassed-over path between an avenue of mango trees and old gums, their high spreading boughs above our heads. The winter sun is low in the sky behind the western hills at our backs, casting long shadows. The nearest neighbour is perhaps a mile away across the flats, a roof distant enough to give the old place a sense of remoteness — but not as remote as it must have been when my mother came here. The children run with the dog ahead of my son and his wife.

  Mackenzie keeps pace with me at the rear. She has her phone trained on me as I make my way back to my past. I know the house has gone, it’s not as if I expect to find it still standing as we round the old carriageway, but I can feel its presence as if it is, as if someone is watching from a high room as we proceed towards it, the smaller children arriving before the rest of us.

  A cool breeze springs up, ruffling the avenue of gums, lifting our hair, and the girl from Coffs Harbour executes a half-pirouette, almost dropping her phone.

  ‘I thought — ’ she starts and I know what she was about to say — that she felt someone run past us. A young man, hell for leather, as if he was running for his life. If I was to turn around I might see the backs of his heels as he rounds the corner. Mackenzie draws closer to me, eyes wide.

  The gardens have gone, and the peacocks, but the wide verandah stairs still stand, weathered stone leading nowhere but a vast, shallow depression. The house site. Rena is standing on the top step, pretending she is the lady of the house and opening an imaginary door.

  ‘Do come in,’ she’s saying. ‘Do make yourselves at home.’

  I pass by, see how the river at the bottom of a flight of broken steps is running high and brown with unseasonable rain. With surefooted strides, my teenage grandson heads down to the water, disappearing under a canopy of camphors. Mackenzie pauses to film his descent.

  Susie is at my side, leaning her blonde head against my shoulder. ‘Tell us what it was like here when you were little, Mattie. Can you remember now?’


  But my eyes are on Rena, who is walking tiptoe down the vanished corridor, pretending to open doors into unseen rooms at either side.

  ‘This is where the staircase was,’ the child says, laying her hand as if on a vanished banister and looking up towards a long-gone landing.

  ‘Where did all the stone go?’ wonders Susie. ‘It wasn’t a wooden house to burn away to nothing.’

  ‘It was taken away and used to build other places around the district,’ Mackenzie says, as she passes through an invisible wall to film Rena’s game.

  ‘Come down to the river, darling,’ says my son, leading his wife away by the hand. ‘Let’s pretend it’s still ours.’

  I walk alone towards an odd circular grove near the perimeter of the vanished house — ti-tree saplings, trees I don’t recognise, with weaving vines. Closer, I see one long stem is not a vine at all but a green python. He is watching my approach, rippling his long muscles as I walk around his house. What is this — why has the vegetation formed this distinctive shape? I’m not game to push through to see what lies inside, given that the python might share his home with several of his mates, as well as his wife and kids, but very carefully I push apart the closest, finest branches and advance one step. Two. In the gloom pose figures in various stages of undress, some headless, as entwined with one another as the python on his branch, others rampant like the long-ago lions. There is the sound of water, a trickle, unseen.

  The memory comes with a rush, enough to make me feel nauseous. I am playing here, standing inside the dry pool, a fair-headed woman watching me, another woman coming to join her, and the weight of something cool and heavy in my hand. A toy tractor. Grey with yellow wheels, the red paint chipped off.

  Raised voices. Were there? Who was the other woman? A servant, perhaps, the old retainer Evie told me about. Nan, or Nance, was it?

  The fair woman … I remember her lifting me out of the empty pool, I remember she had running tears. I remember I tried to wipe them away and left a smear on one pale cheek.