The Year It All Ended (15 page)

Visits from either of the McCaffreys only made things worse. To see living, breathing men return when his only son would never cross the threshold of Larksrest broke something inside him. When Sebastian died, Papa was bewildered and enraged – not only because Thea had been so hurt, but that anyone could come home from the war and throw away a future for which millions of men had fought and died. Seb’s death triggered something deep and disturbing in each of the Flynns. The fractures that had riven the family since the news of Louis’ death became chasms.

Tiney dressed quickly in the dark, not wanting to wake Thea. The July night was cold. She slipped on a gabardine overcoat, pulled her hair back into a ponytail and flung a scarf over her head. She drew the front door shut as quietly as she could. In the street, there was no sign of her father. She closed her eyes, trying to intuit which way he might have walked. He always turned left if he was going for a long walk through the parklands to eventually reach the river Torrens. If he was going to North Adelaide, he’d turn to the right. But it was the middle of the night. Why would he be going in either direction? Instinctively, Tiney turned right and hurried towards Robe Terrace. The wide
street was empty. In the far distance she could see the lights of a brougham cab. A half-moon cast a thin light across the parklands.

Tiney could make out a dark figure moving slowly across the Pound Paddock, the wide stretch of raggedy grassland that separated Medindie from North Adelaide. The park had grown wilder during the war years, the grass a home for snakes, the paths untended. Tiney and her sisters avoided it. Clutching the collar of her coat she hurried across Robe Terrace, following her father.

At first she thought he was heading towards North Adelaide, and her heart sank. She couldn’t bear the thought of having to retrieve him from inside an illegal speakeasy, a dark and gloomy cellar, rank with the stench of alcohol. Frank had told her about those places, where returned soldiers went to drown their misery.

She quickened her pace, hoping to catch him before he crossed LeFevre Terrace, but as the gap closed between them, she became less sure of his direction. He seemed to be wandering in a purposeless fashion, weaving between the trees, disappearing into the shadow of a gum and then reappearing further east towards Kingston Terrace. It was only as he drew nearer to North Adelaide that Tiney realised they were not alone. There were two other figures wandering in among the trees in the darkness of the night. Tiney tried to keep her gaze fixed steadily on her father. She didn’t want to think of why there were other men in the park in the middle of the night, nor of what they might do to her if they decided to accost her. She broke into a run, racing to catch up with her father as he crossed into the top end of North Adelaide. He had quickened his pace too and she was just in time to see him turn left into a side street.

It was a relief to be out of the parklands and away from the
shadowy wandering men, but now she had lost sight of Papa. She stood clutching a fencepost, catching her breath. She had no idea her father could move so swiftly. She wondered if she could actually catch up with him. But the thought of abandoning the chase and then having to cross the Pound Paddock and return home without her father was more frightening than wandering through the sleeping streets of the town. As she debated what to do, Tiney noticed something odd. Though it was after two a.m., there were men as purposeless as her father wandering the streets. When she turned into Stanley Street and nearly collided with a young man, the man apologised gruffly, shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and kept walking. He neither registered nor cared that Tiney was a young woman alone.

Tiney heard a clock chime the hour. Three o’clock. Was this what the town was always like in the middle of the night, the darkness peppered with men wandering wild-eyed? She saw a man sitting in his dimly lit living room, framed by a window, his head in his hands. She heard a baby cry. A dog bark. Then to her relief she caught sight of Papa again, crossing over into the park, into the olive groves.

Papa had loved to take them for picnics in the olive groves when they were little. Nette and Ma thought it a shoddy place for a picnic. Why not the riverbank? Or the Botanical Gardens? But Pa like the wild scruffiness of the olive grove with its dips and hollows and dry yellow grass. He would tell them that the first Europeans to come to Adelaide had planted the grove and that the trees would still be there in thousands of years, like the Garden of Gethsemane. He told them it was a place where spirits roamed, where a man could find his god.

Tiney knew where her father would be heading for now.
There was a rock that Louis had liked to sit upon whenever they visited the grove as a family. Papa had christened it Louis’ Rock.

In a hollow between the twisted olives, Tiney found her father. His black hair had turned silver these past months, his eyes sunken deeper into his face. His hands were knotted together, as if in prayer, though she knew her Pa never prayed. She stood in front of him and slipped the scarf from her head so he could see her face in the moonlight.

‘Papa,’ she whispered. When he didn’t look at her, she put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Pa, we should go home. There are men, walking about in the streets. I think they’re soldiers. I want you to walk home with me.’

She sat down on the rock beside him and slid her arm around his shoulders. He was trembling and muttering to himself. She leaned her ear close, to hear his voice. ‘
Father, if thou wilt, remove this chalice from me. . . And there appeared to him an angel from heaven. . . And being in an agony, he prayed the longer. And his sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground.
’

Then he turned and looked straight into Tiney’s face and said again, ‘
Drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground.
The Garden of Gethsemane and the Rock of Agony.’

For the first time that evening, Tiney felt truly afraid.

‘Don’t, Pa,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have come out, you’re not well.’

‘Where can we go to mourn him? There’s nowhere to go. No place to remember him. Do you remember him here, in the olive grove?’

The moonlight caught the fever glistening in her father’s eyes. He coughed and shivered again.

‘We have to get you home,’ she said, wedging herself beneath
her father’s arm and standing up, forcing him to his feet. The top of her head barely reached his shoulder but it meant she was the perfect size to act as a crutch. All her fear was overridden by a sense of urgency.

Normally she would have taken two steps for every one of her father’s, but that night his gait was reduced to a shuffle. She tried not to listen to his ravings. He muttered of tombs and blood and sacrifice, and coughed and wept.

Tiney kept her head down. The tie in her hair fell out. She dropped her scarf. But still she kept walking, past the lonely wandering men in Stanley Street, through the Pound Paddock, ignoring the shadows and her fears. By the time she finally led Papa under the portico at Larksrest, she didn’t care if she woke the whole house. She lifted the brass knocker and banged it down hard.

When Thea opened the door, Tiney wanted to cry but instead she spoke urgently. ‘I think Pa has the influenza,’ she said, keeping terror from her voice.

Tiney slept heavily but only for a few hours. She woke at dawn. Thea wasn’t in her bed beneath the window. Tiney put on her dressing gown and stepped out into the hall. In the kitchen, her mother was at the stove and the kettle was boiling on the hob, sending up a plume of steam into the crisp morning air.

Across the hallway, their father lay in the cot in his study. Thea sat in a chair beside him, a small bowl of water in her lap. She dipped a cloth into it and wiped Pa’s brow. His face was a strange colour, almost blue, and a tiny fleck of foamy blood was
caught in his beard. Thea wiped it away as Tiney drew close.

‘Mama called the doctor but he can’t come until later,’ said Thea.

‘But we need him now!’ said Tiney, alarmed by how much worse Papa had grown in the course of a few hours.

‘I wish Nette was here,’ said Thea, lowering her voice. ‘We need Nette.’

‘You know she can’t come to Adelaide with the baby while the influenza is still raging,’ said Tiney. ‘It’s Minna we need. She’s the one Papa misses most. We need Minna to come home.’

Papa made a desperate gargling sound in the back of his throat and shuddered. Thea looked at Tiney and put her finger to her lips. Papa began to shiver, his whole body trembling and shaking until the bed began to knock against the wall.

‘Mama!’ called Tiney, as she and Thea tried to loosen their father’s shirt. Mama came into the room with a bowl of cold water and cloths.

‘We must bring his fever down,’ she said.

Together, Thea, Tiney and Mama wiped his trembling limbs with cool water. When Papa seemed less feverish, Mama covered him with a cotton sheet. Mama and Thea carried the cloths and bowls from the room. Tiney pulled a chair away from her father’s desk and sat beside his bed to keep vigil.

By the time the doctor arrived, Papa had lapsed into a rattling, restless sleep. The doctor said there was no point in taking Papa to the overcrowded hospital when he had three women to nurse him at home. He placed a quarantine order on Larksrest and instructed each of them to take every precaution to protect themselves from the disease. It killed the young and healthy even more quickly than older adults. They would know in ten days
whether Papa would improve or whether his condition would worsen, if and when pneumonia took hold. Tiney went to her room and took the cotton mask that Mama had embroidered with pale blue flowers from the chest of drawers. A choking sob rose up in her chest as she tied it in place.

They divided the days into shifts where each of them took turns to sit beside Papa. They were the longest ten days of Tiney’s life. Tiney took the night shifts, determined that Papa wouldn’t be left alone for a moment. Her father had done the same for her and the story of her birth was etched so deep in family lore, she knew she owed her life to Papa.

When Tiney was born, the doctor thought there was no hope for her. She had come too early into the world, her eyes shut tight like a baby kitten, her body covered with fine dark hair. The doctor had told her parents to keep her safely at home with them until she died because surely a baby so premature couldn’t possibly survive. But Papa was stubborn. He had put Tiney in a shoebox and sat beside the stove for a month. When the nights grew cold, he would place his youngest daughter, wrapped in a soft pink wool rug, on the edge of a spade and hold her over the rising warmth from the woodstove. Slowly, over the weeks she shed her downy black hair. Papa fed her with an eyedropper to begin with and then from a tiny spoon. His patience and pigheadedness gave Tiney her life. The least she could do for him was to match his devotion all these years later.

Slowly, in small steps, Papa began to recover. He stopped his ravings, the fever abated and he lapsed into a state of quiet exhaustion.

The doctor’s bills were frightening. Bottles of Nutone Brain and Nerve Tonic cost half a crown for one single pint. It saved
on buying lots of little bottles but when Papa finished the first course the doctor suggested another, so yet another half-crown had to be taken out of the household budget.

The Alstons left a care parcel on the front steps, but no one would come to the house to visit while it was officially in quarantine. Only Frank McCaffrey crossed the threshold, against advice. He would come from the Adelaide Markets, with a basket of fresh fruit over one arm and a bag full of bottles of aerated water in the other. Even though he hadn’t known Seb or Louis very well, he spoke of them with ease, as if they were old friends. When the screen door broke in a high wind, Frank came with his toolbag and repaired it.

Then, on a bright July morning, when Papa was sitting up in bed and Tiney arranging a vase of jonquils to cheer his room, they heard the doorbell ring and Frank’s voice in the hall. Thea called for Tiney to join them in the breakfast room. Tiney kissed Papa on the forehead and promised she would be back in a minute.

Frank was sitting at the end of the table, his hat on a chair while Mama and Thea sat either side of him. For a moment, Tiney’s heart leapt. Frank had something to say to her, something terribly important. But surely he should ask her in private? Then she saw the letter: a single page spread out on the table in front of Frank. He laid his palm on the smooth lavender-coloured sheet. ‘I’ve found Minna,’ he said.

Peace Day, 1919