One Sunday

Joy Dettman was born in Echuca in Victoria and now lives in Melbourne.

Joy, a mother of four, is a full-time writer and a published author of several award-winning stories and the highly acclaimed novels
Mallawindy
,
Jacaranda Blue
,
Goose Girl
,
Yesterday's Dust
,
The Seventh Day
and
Henry's Daughter
.

Moths in the moonlight, angel wings,

Wraith-like shapes, they flit and fade

Trapped by the moon waif's mystic glow,

Prey to a night bird's swooping raid.

Anne Perkins

About the Author

Also by Joy Dettman

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Epigraph

Midnight in Molliston

Sleepless

Rings and Things

The Darkest Hours

Molliston

A Grim Dawn

Kurt Reichenberg

Thinking

Phone Calls

The Dairy

Peaches and the Widow

The Reichenbergs

The Empty Room

Poor Rosie Thompson

The Hub

Dust Fairies

Escape Artists

Rules

More than Meets the Eye

A Bumper Crop of Peaches

Midday in Molliston

The Truth of the Matter

Sunday Dinner

The Squire Estate

A Respectable Woman

The Handbag

Beribboned Bouquet

The Cider Pit

Haystacks and Wars

Go Easy on the Butter

City Shoes

Insanity

The Better Man

Keeping to the Shade

Getting to the Truth

Dinner for Four

Man of Little Faith

Nightfall

Good Mates

Butterflies Only Live for a Day

The Sound of Baby Tears

Hunting by Moonlight

The Wood Paddock

Moon Madness

Dead Roses

Train Whistle Blowing

All Tuckered Out

Sunday, 13 January 1929, 12.00 am

One hand raised, Tom Thompson lay immobile on his bed, listening to the droning buzz of a mosquito, intent on his blood. He was immune to their bites. If they'd drink in silence, he wouldn't have begrudged them a meal – Doc Hunter kept telling him he had to get his blood pressure down.

It went for his ear, and his hand whacked. ‘Got you, you little bugger!'

Strange how a man's hardened fingers could sense something as small and insignificant as a squashed mozzie. He couldn't see it, but he knew he'd got it.

‘A man's time on this earth has got about the same degree of import as a mosquito, and that's why the bloke who makes tombstones is in business, Thomo,' he commented, wiping the corpse onto his sheet. He gave his pillow a thump, then rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling and wondering how many more of those buzzing little buggers were lying in wait up there.

There was moonlight enough to show the cracks where his wall and ceiling supposedly met. He'd need to do something about that. His windows needed flyscreening too, but if he didn't get to sleep and get some relief from this heat, he'd need a tombstone more than house repairs.

‘Constable Thomas Alfred Thompson was here, 1/4/1879 to –'

He couldn't complete his epitaph; he didn't know if the calendar had already flipped over to Sunday, or if it was still Saturday night. It didn't matter, anyway. Who was going to buy him a tombstone and carve those letters into it? He had no grandchildren, no children who might one day give him grandchildren, he was heading fast for his fiftieth birthday and his ailing wife, Rosie, was two years his senior.

Raising himself on an elbow, Tom lifted the muslin curtain and peered through the mosquito netting he'd tacked up there. Not many stars showing through that murky sky but a big red devil moon riding high, lighting the land with an eerie, treacherous glow.

The heat was ruthless. It sucked at a man's hope, drank his sweat then scorched the marrow in his bones. Nothing to be gained by opening the window. The air outside wasn't fit to breathe, not with a bushfire burning out of control twenty-odd miles from town. No fan to move the air he'd trapped inside either, unless his own arm was driving it; no electricity yet, or not in Molliston.

Even the dogs couldn't sleep tonight; every mongrel in town was out, howling at that moon or barking at the herd of kids playing Tally-Ho in the streets. Miss Lizzie, the older of the two old-maid Martin sisters, wasn't helping matters. Her head out of the post office upstairs window, she screeched at those kids every time they ran past. Mary Murphy had a crowd on her veranda again, singing along with her gramophone – not that those Murphys needed visitors to create a crowd.

There had been some great advancements since that war, mainly in the cities, but even in the bush gramophones were commonplace and horses were slowly giving way to motorised vehicles. The things those airmen were doing! There was a time when Tom had walked his boys ten miles just to see one of those machines take to the sky. Now every week or two, the newspapers carried a story about some incredible, if foolhardy, flight to somewhere.

A lot of building was going on in the cities. It was remarkable what man could achieve when he wasn't making war – like that bridge they were building across the harbour in Sydney, a valiant undertaking, though it wouldn't be completed for a few years yet. Out in the opposite direction, a railway line was crossing a desert, connecting up Adelaide to godforsaken Alice Springs, and Tom wasn't the only man asking what for. What most folk in this district were concerned with was the drought.

There'd been no real rain since July; the only storms they'd seen recently were dust storms and now, all over the state, the forests were burning. Chooks were off the lay, milk cows threatened to strike, the orchardists' fruit ripened faster than their pickers could get it off the trees, and those thoughtless flamin' kids were back.

‘It's gone twelve!' Miss Lizzie screeched. ‘Get in off that street now before one of you does himself an injury.' That postmistress had a voice on her that could put a young lad off marriage for life. Being closer to Tom's window than the Murphys' gramophone horn, it killed that song for a bar or two.

‘Constable Thomas Alfred Thompson was here 1/4/1879 to 13/1/1929,' Tom sighed, completing his epitaph. Miss Lizzie always had the right time.

He lifted his curtain higher as the tail-end of that yahooing herd of half-grown kids disappeared down the post office lane. Like moths drawn to the lamplight, give kids a hot night and a moon to play by and they went moon mad. No one was going to get any sleep tonight.

For two hours now, Tom had been fighting his pillow, and enough was enough. He rolled from his bed, padded across the passage to the kitchen, feeling his way around the chairs and table to his sink, where he found an enamel mug upturned on the draining board. There were two taps over his new sink, he found the one on the right, turned it on, and held his mug hopefully beneath the spout – and he heard a trickle turn to a slow drip.

‘So that's the flamin' end of that too,' he commented. Like the dams in the paddocks, his rainwater tank had run dry. He had the town supply; residences in the centre of Molliston were connected up to it three months ago, but what came out of those pipes looked more mud than water at times. He'd bound a bit of old sheeting around the tap's spout as a filter, which caught the worst of the muck but did nothing for the taste.

A cup of tea would have gone down well – if he hadn't let the stove go out at midday. Keeping a wood stove burning in these conditions was out and out lunacy. Dying of thirst not being an option, he topped up his mug with town water and emptied it in one long swallow. His tea-towel needed a wash. He tossed it into the sink, soaking it then draping it dripping around his neck before stepping out of his under-drawers and wetting them down too.

The moon, playing a broad beam of white light in through the western window, exposed the naked form of Tom Thompson, and there was a lot of him to expose. He had a solid pair of shoulders, a broad chest, well forested with wiry black hair. He'd never had the proportions of a Greek god; he had the height, though not a lot of that height in his legs. Footballer's legs, Tom's, big boned like the rest of him, strong legs, if shorter than the average, or so the inside leg measurement of his new uniform trousers told him – of course, the leg length always increased along with the waist measurement, and his waistline was no longer what it had once been. Blame it on age and the pull of gravity, on lack of exercise, on lost interest in exercising and pretty much all else lately; blame it on his love of ice cream and fresh bread and a police station too close to both café and baker.

‘Kee-rist, that feels good,' he commented, clad again in dripping under-drawers. ‘Maybe you'll live another hour or two, Thomo.'

He hadn't owned a pair of under-drawers until he'd wed, hadn't known many young chaps who had. Rosie'd hand-stitched that first pair, then nagged him into the habit of wearing them. She'd had a lot of fancy ways about her back when they'd wed, which she'd picked up during her five years spent caring for a tribe of little toffs. Dainty Rosie Davis with her pretty blue eyes, who'd liked to tell folk she was a governess, which sounded classier than a nursery maid. For a few years he'd tried to make Rosie's ways his own; most had gone by the board – other than his under-drawers.

No wind tonight. This last week he'd got so used to hearing it howling around his chimneys and wailing in that town tree, the world felt motionless without it, as if it were squatting out there on its haunches, waiting to pounce. If it squatted long enough, those Willama chaps might get control of that bushfire tonight. For days now, this part of the state had suffocated under a filthy red-grey shroud of dust and smoke and ash, while in the sky that hazy molten ball kept sending down more heat and exploding more forest, and not much a man could do except watch them burn.

Tom stood leaning on his brand-new sink, peering out at the night. The south side window looked out on his lock-up. He fought that window open and stuck his head out, craning his neck around to view the sky. There were a few stars up there. He sniffed at the air – still smoky, but nowhere near as bad as it had been earlier. Tolerable. Another mug of town water poured and downed, then he walked the house, opening a few more windows before resuming his fight with the pillow, flat on his back, that wet tea-towel draped like a sheet across his chest and meeting up with his wet drawers.

‘Now, get to flamin' sleep,' he said.

That's what he used to say to his boys. ‘Stop your talking in there and get to sleep, you two.' It had worked sometimes.

Tom loathed that song, loathing most its insult to the English language – what sort of message was it sending out to impressionable kids? He visualised rising again, walking over and belting on the Murphys' screen door, confiscating that record and smashing it. He visualised it – couldn't do it, due to having to rely on Mary Murphy to sit with Rosie at times. And, if the truth was told, he didn't mind listening to their music when they played decent songs – not that they had a lot that might qualify as decent.

The record ended and he lay there, waited for the next one to begin, knowing it would, and wondering which one it would be – which was more disturbing than waiting for that last one to end.

Nothing moving on the street now. Those kids, hunted by Miss Lizzie's screeching, had taken their game out of her hearing range. With a sigh, Tom thumped his pillow, uncrossed his feet and wished his bed a few inches longer – a few inches wider wouldn't have done any harm either.

Not moving a muscle was the trick to getting to sleep, emptying the mind of disturbing thoughts, refusing to hear that dog barking, ignoring that cricket chirping under the tank stand, refusing to scratch that itch in his shoulder, move that foot – that was the trick.

He'd meant to fix the time on his clock while he was up. His old mantel clock gained five or ten minutes a day. Probably twelve-ten, twelve-fifteen. Not too late. If he could get to sleep now, he'd probably stay asleep until eight. Rosie rarely woke before eight.

That old clock used to
dong
out the hours and half-hours when he was a kid, a comforting sound in the night, but he'd removed its donger a few months back. Since her stay in the city, Rosie had taken a dislike to ringing bells and sudden noises – taken a dislike to a lot of things.

He was sliding down, his mind flitting, shifting into that pre-dream state, when the itch in his shoulder moved to his back. He had to scratch it. A back itch wouldn't be ignored on a hot night; it grew if you ignored it, and started creeping until it got into a part of your back where you couldn't reach, until it got to the stage where you didn't know whether the itch was in your head or in your feet. He caught this one between his shoulderblades, scratched, and one big broad foot, given leave to move, raked against the other. At peace then, he composed his limbs and forced his eyes up to stare at the ceiling, working on the principle that if he stared until his eyes couldn't stay open any longer, the lids, once allowed to slide down, wouldn't be so eager to open again.

It was better with that window open, a bit smoky, but better. He rolled onto his side and was already slipping into dream when they started playing his song.

What was it about some songs that could hit you where it hurt, reduce a grown man to tears, yet keep him going back for more of the same punishment? Propping himself on an elbow, an ear to the open window, he allowed the music to wash over him, allowed his eyes to leak if they wanted to.

He'd thought his heart was broken clean down the middle when he'd lost his boys to that bloody war, but it took more than a broken heart to kill a man. Life was a series of losses, and if you were going to get through life, then you had to keep altering your options, taking different roads and just keep moving on. He'd never known his mother; his birth had killed her. He'd lost his dad when he was nineteen, lost his old grandma to a runaway horse when he was twenty-three. He'd lost someone else around that same time, though he kept all memory of her buried deep.

Ninety-one days of laughter and loving and her soft, clinging mouth. Sweet oasis, Katie's mouth. Just a boy and a girl who'd found true love – except the boy had already had a man's responsibilities. He'd done the right thing. He'd stuck with Rosie.

He shook his head, forcing that memory back down where it belonged as Mary Murphy began singing along with his song. That woman had a good voice – though he heard it yelling at her kids more often than he heard it singing. She had eleven offspring, ranging in age from thirteen to near on thirty. Irene, her eldest, was a nurse over at the hospital. Mike was her youngest, and that little bugger had discovered the secret to life without sleep; the only time he went home was at mealtimes.

The song ended, and for the time it took to wind the gramophone handle and put on another record, Rosie's snore was supreme. She had the front bedroom, sharing a wall with his office, her window offering a view of Willama Road. He had the back bedroom, his window three feet from the post office lane – entertainment supplied.