1915 (6 page)

Amos was a traveller for a brewery, and had just come from Forbes where Pat Reilly had entertained him.

“How was the menu?” asked Frances, who was able to conjure the mood of the kitchen, the shape of a day at the Albion, from the conjunction of entrée and main course, main course and pudding, pudding and its accompanying sauce.

“As good as ever, but Mavis,” said Amos, “is not so good.”

“Her heart,” Frances whispered to Diana, who had heard countless stories of the Albion's saintly cook.

“Now here's the worst news about her, “not the heart, but her old man. He just can't get work, and it's killing him. Mavis has to find for all six kids and she won't take a scrap from the hotel unless Pat forces it on her.”

“He'd have to,” Frances agreed. She loved Mavis, the warm slab of her body shuffling round the kitchen in slippers which she wrapped in newspaper and tucked beside the stove ready for the next day, the pink leather of her cheeks — above all Frances loved her good will, her unwillingness to be drawn, her slow refusal to be unkind — even when pecked. You couldn't argue with Mavis, or even talk to her much. But the kitchen would be cold and practical without her: the
objects there took on warmth, the scrubbed wooden handles she gripped, her particular care with knives, her chair and fraying cushion. Mavis counted, not to millions, but to her flock of children and her unlucky husband alone. Amos had seen the husband on the river road, axe on shoulder, a dray of shingles grating along behind. Mavis counted to the hotel too, but not momentously. Outside her family the world dived into darkness. Were the true saints those who never would be? No-one ever saw Mavis coming to work at five in the morning through frost leaving a hot breakfast at home for her family, few even saw her at nine at night heading back, a boulder of a woman in a man's overcoat. Frances had caught her during her siesta on the daybed off the storeroom, panting like a dog at the end of a chase, and talked to her there. And it seemed that Mavis alone held the secret of goodness, closing her fingers around Frances's unblemished wrist, gripping it for the blunt duration of a breath, saying, “Dear, don't you never think I'm unhappy.” That was the only thing that ever passed between them, except for kitchen talk. Her burden showed up her goodness, and she treasured it, otherwise there would have been no test; and she thanked Frances with those few words for her recognition of the virtue that floweres in rough places. Frances needed her own test — longed for it — but it would occur a thousand miles from Mavis's. It would have colour, romance, display, those things for sure. Certainly no silence. Stubbornness? But for setting-out, not for digging-in. Kindness? Now Frances reached difficult ground.

She looked at her mother, at Diana, at the solid shape of Amos Hart as he talked. They don't realize how worthless I am, she thought, these people who
love me. Yet there was no self-condemnation in this feeling of worthlessness. It was a practical inadequacy — a mark of the distance ahead. Under everything Frances argued her way towards an outcome in which she would have pride. And the world — it must! — would spin its head around to take a look.

Examinations were over: Walter had taken his last tram ride from school. In the luggage room at Central station, dumping his bags, he thought of a momentous act to suit his circumstances — a lightning trip to Cremorne Point to say hello to Frances Reilly. He had two hours to kill, why not? But he bought a pie and a cup of tea and leaned on the counter, numbly alone, denying the warming impulse to go. By the time he finished he had reduced the thought by ridicule. Months ago at the theatre she had ignored him. He did not exist.

On arrival that night he had nervously scanned the audience, knowing she would be there, but then the flute and drum began, the lights dipped, and the curtain split open: and Walter had gasped (as Buck the English master said he would) at those walls of pastel brick, the arbour of velvet roses, and stiff clouds floating across a fabric sky. The stage world was soft as a cushion: people when they sneaked on were gentle, their feet made no noise — only a whisper now and then, and a timbery thud when they leapt: the land of Illyria had been all female, and it instructed him.

Then, in the brief interval before Act Five, Walter saw her. He'd been looking for a St Catherine's uniform — but she wore blue velvet, looking somehow sunken and younger than he'd remembered. He stared
across twelve rows and their gazes linked. He tried again after half a minute and by God she must have seen! Buck elbowed him, so he stopped, thankful for the fading lights and the stir of programmes. Darkness dissolved his alarm that hundreds of faces had seen him turn, and must have whispered to their companions about his predicament.

When he looked again, at the end, she had gone.

 

The Sunday after the play he had decided to write the promised letter to Billy. He told him everything, filling three pages with a blunt confession. But long before the end he knew the letter was not for posting. Still, he wrote furiously for his own benefit. How had it helped? It was like scratching at hives. During prep he'd smoothed the letter out, then screwed it up, compacting it like a stone, and thrust it deep in a pocket. It would never have done for anyone to find it, this erotic concentration, there in the senior's room or anywhere. After the letter he'd attempted calculus — hopeless — and opened Guerber's
Myths
for history revision, then flung it closed, but wait, there (he cut back to the page that caught his eye): “Diomedes, King of Thrace, a cruel and eccentric prince, was wont to feed his horses upon human flesh. The Eighth Labour of Herakles was to obtain and bring to Eurystheus these famous though fierce animals. This he accomplished …” Walter's mind stuck on the strange words, now momentarily lucid, spoken by Mr Fox at the Parkes Show: “From Eurystheus I come.” He took out the letter and unwrinkled it.

But suddenly the letter's heat had gone. Walter's
words were the scratch-marks of prodigal emotions lying in the shadow of something greater. Out in the darkness Mr Fox went about his burdensome task. For a moment Walter glimpsed the pain of a man for whom even a light remark demanded courage: he seemed bent over, with a wedge of the curved earth on his back, in a search for the key to something the rest of them — Walter, Billy, the town — already had in their keeping. The puzzle led further on, though its clues were carried in things as ordinary as horses and horsemen.

That night Walter had written to Billy after all:

Billy's reply shot back:

After Walter's all night train trip his father handed him the reins of the sulky and asked him to drive his mother home while he set off separately in a wagon loaded with twine, poison, and grease-clotted harvester parts. Down past the racecourse Walter gave the horse its head and ya-hooed until his mother objected, quietening him with news of district “developments”, reddening enthusiastically over the Bindogundra New Year Dance (he was expected), then describing a missionary meeting as she probed uncertainly towards a change of subject: Billy's mother was in hospital with something serious. Billy — he'd been found drunk in a horse-trough in October — now had himself well in hand for the harvest, and Mr Mackenzie had been at church every week since Elsie's illness. (
What
was wrong with her?). Oh yes you'll be interested to hear that Mrs Scott at Cookamidgera has married one of her late husband's brothers.

When Walter persisted she told him: a cancer.

They were on a side-track because of the washaway at Cobblestone Creek. From here, half a mile off-centre, the familiar countryside looked strange, like somebody else's. He missed none of the landmarks he knew — the six white ringbarked trees, the decayed cottage where rabbiters camped, the thirty-foot dip they called “the plate” where the soil changed and their
wheat paddocks began — but farther off the suddenly — revealed distant view was altogether new. Where had the red gash in the hills come from? That lone pine standing above the rest, he'd never before seen it. And whose house was that, lying like a bent nail under the blue-hazed ridges?

“Ours,” said his mother.

The imminence of death, Billy's mother's death, distorted his apprehension of familiar places and things.

Later, eating lunch without much appetite, Walter heard his mother say, “Elsie doesn't have long. A month at best.” She performed plain tasks as she spoke: but the bread board, thought Walter, the cold mutton and the tea caddie would be remarkable to Mrs Mackenzie now.

 

That afternoon Walter wandered for miles around the wheat, skirting the edges then plunging in. The harvest would soon bear it away, this stalk-town of heat and dust and pale light, but for the moment it was endless. On all fours no-one could tell where he was, except the quail that skimmed between glassy stems and disappeared, except the nesting rabbits, the mice, the worms in the dry ground, the sparrowhawk twitching overhead. Emerging under the box tree at the centre of the paddock he rested in its unrelieving iron shade, where in a week or two waterbags would hang dripping from branches. With his hat on his knees Walter was itchy from the straw, messing his hair as he scratched, still unsurprised that at nineteen he should be engrossed in a game that had absorbed him at ten. Someone else might have said that the paddock mur
mured in the heat, but having crawled under its roof Walter heard each click and hiss and screech separately. The house was out of sight along with fences and outbuildings. Wheat alone dropped away in all directions: and he saw himself at an elevated point at the top of a ripening world. Soon the life of the paddock would go down before the blades of the harvester: then it would rise again. Here at least there was a pattern to hold to. Fear, which in the city was abstract and confusing and could conjure brick walls only, had ground to contend with in the bush, and on the ground life. It was good that Mrs Mackenzie would be able to see all that if she looked out the hospital window.

The place crackled with work towards Christmas. His mother, he now noticed, was indeed distressed about Mrs Mackenzie. She asked Billy and his father over for meals when they could manage and then the strain showed. Mr Mackenzie had sworn off the bottle (Billy confirmed it), but when Walter and Billy strolled down to the yards to look at the new draught horses, and Walter led with his question about the old man's whisky habits, Billy deflected from the unspoken fact of his mother and swore instead about Arnie Scott's double dealing widow.

For three weeks Walter finished work at midnight and started again at dawn. His energy seemed inexhaustible. When Douggie arrived home with John, his school friend who was to stay till Christmas, Walter found time among everything else to saddle horses and take them shooting. The harvest began and it was like a solid dream repeated day after day. He did the sewing when he wasn't handling one of the harvesters and went at it so fiercely that his father left him there — with a leather hand-pad, loops of twine on his belt, and
a canvas hat pulled low over his eyes to cut the smashed-glass glare of the fallen wheat. Blacky and Ned Reid shared the work (they brought their machinery, and would have the Gilchrists' help next).

 

So when the Gilchrists' harvest was finished Blacky called up to the house to discuss his arrangements. He came on a day when the last bags had waddled away on wagons for the siding, when the pace of work dipped and they found time to look about. Douggie and his friend took off for the hills (John was to leave for home on the night train), Mr Gilchrist eyed his empty paddocks, and his wife cooked for Christmas.

Blacky was tall, but looked even taller at the cane veranda table with his battered thumbs embracing Mrs Gilchrist's Karlsbad china and his long legs knifed up practically to chest height. As he drank, it was as though he'd hauled the cup down from an elevated position (like the handle on a bagging shute) to work the tea in, wave by wave, rather than taking it in sips, so that his every gesture, like his conversation, flowed to himself.

“We don't live so good as this over our way.” He took a slice of sponge cake and licked extruded cream from its compressed waist before taking a bite.

“It
is
Christmas,” said Mrs Gilchrist, who was hovering at his side with a fresh pot.

“Work don't stop for Santa Claus, Mrs Gilchrist.”

“Surely you'll take a rest on Christmas Day, it's the one day, here.”

“No fear. Come the twenty-fifth the wheat'll be busting to hop in the bag.”

“When do you want us?” Walter did the asking.

“Aw, about six in the morning will do. After you've been to church at the latest.” He slapped his leg. “Fell for it!”

“This year,” said Mrs Gilchrist with a cold smile, “the Christmas service is on the Sunday before.”

Her husband collected crumbs from his knee. He and Blacky shook hands: “Until later, Stan.” The proper name somehow subtracted the scaring factor — Blacky looked vaguely light weight.

“Boxing Day, then,” Blacky winked. But he couldn't have cared less about Mrs Gilchrist when he thanked her for the morning tea.

“Don't take any notice of Mum,” said Walter as they crossed the yard.

“Eh?” said Blacky. Then he snapped his fingers: “I don't go for this religion malarkey.”

“Why not?” It seemed out of character that Blacky with his animal appetites and machine-like constitution built for work should touch the philosophical.

“It's all words. All bloody hot air. You've only got to look at a dead cow some time. That's us, boy, skin and bones and guts that go off just like a cow. I want to meet the man who digs out the eternal bloody soul. I'll shake his hand. Christ, we've been waiting long enough to see it.”

Blacky grinned as he swung a leg over the saddle and bent to click the petrol cock. “It all fits. Christmas Day and the eternal soul mumbo-jumbo. Scratch one, you'll find the other.” He unhitched his goggles from the handlebars. “But you're right,” and he paused to let the adjective spit its opposite:
wrong
— “Christmas Day ain't for that. I reckon at lunch I'll be stuffing it down in the shade along with the best of 'em. The harvest be
buggered.” He kicked the motor and it spluttered. He pulled the goggles down and looked straight at Walter. “Right-oh, sonny. See you Boxing Day.” And he roared off with coils of dust bounding along behind.

 

Walter took Douggie and his young school friend John to town in the sulky. From the last rise they saw the headlamp of the train on its way up the line from Forbes. “I hope I miss it,” said John, but Walter snapped the whip. In the early dark they held a race with the miles-off engine, the boys cheering when the light slipped from view (now they were sure to miss it), and arguing with Walter as he forced the pace — even though the light wobbled, blinked, hovered as far away as ever.

When they reached the station there was no sign of the train. They quizzed Ozzie Deep but he shrugged. While Walter smoked a cigarette Douggie and John ran to the end of the platform to keep a look-out and listen for the singing rails. After another five minutes it occurred to Walter that the light they'd been competing against had been a star: the evening star, the planet Venus. He braced his mind on the thought: there was something magnificent about pitting a horse and sulky against a planet.

And suddenly the train from Forbes came right at him: waddling down the platform making friendly “oof-oof” noises. Douggie and John ran with it, then the train windows were dribbling past: deep golden pictures of glass and varnish which framed among much else a sudden flutter of white that was Frances Reilly. A man stood beside her wearing a drooping felt
hat and a pin-striped suit. Now their door swung open. Walter froze. Frances carried a yellow straw hat with a red ribbon. She jumped down and led the man over.

“Dad, this is the Walter Gilchrist I told you about.”

“It's a pleasure,” said Walter, hearing his voice boom.

“Charmed,” said Mr Reilly, fanning himself with his hat.

“I last saw your daughter at a play in Sydney,” Walter addressed Reilly man-to-man, then clumsily added: “Though she was too high and mighty to notice me.”

“That's not true!”