My sister, Elsie, was very beautiful. There were always stars in her sky but she never noticed them; the sun under which she walked was too bright.
She knew all about poetry but bugger-all about horses. If I said to her, ‘That horse has greasy heels’, she would say, ‘Yes’, and that was the end of it. When it came to horses she was as dumb as they come, but as Joe said, ‘You can’t have everything.’
Joe pumped the church organ for her when she was practising. She liked playing the pipe organ. The handle at the back of the organ was like that on a blacksmith’s forge and Joe lent his elbow on it and pushed it up and down like Mr Thomas.
He told me once he would only do it for Elsie and for no one else.
‘You see, I am a Catholic’, he explained, ‘and I’d get into a power of trouble if Father Guiness heard about it.’
‘To hell with Father Guiness!’ I exclaimed.
Joe shied away from me when I cursed priests. He thought he’d be struck by a bolt from heaven or something, standing close to me like that.
Joe was strong on righteousness. He liked Elsie but he thought Jeanie McLean had gone too far when she had a miscarriage after having had two babies to other men.
I was a bit vague about the miscarriage business. Anything to do with carriages always suggested horses to me, but I did know Jeanie McLean was a bad girl. Everybody said that.
She used to come to our place once a week with a lot of others from the church to practise songs for a church concert. Elsie used to play the piano and they would all gather round it. There was Fred and George Black, Minnie Sturgess, Ida Foster, Bill Atkins, Robert Barnes and three other girls who were members of the church choir.
They must have been pretty good because, once when they were singing Irish songs, Paddy Flynn, he was an Irish man and he was sitting in the kitchen with Dad listening to the singing from the front room, he said—and I heard him myself—‘I tell ye, Bill, it tears the heart out of me to hear the voices of them. They sing like bloody angels; by hell they do.’
I think it was Jeanie McLean whose voice tore the heart out of him because she was a hell of a good singer. Her voice was soft and gentle but you could always hear it somehow.
One night I was sitting in the front room listening to them singing when Jeanie suddenly knocked off and sat down. Later on she took Elsie aside and said, ‘I don’t feel very well, Elsie. I’ve pains in the stomach. I think I’ll have to go home.’
Elsie was concerned. ‘Wait until I get you a cup of tea, Jeanie. I won’t be a minute.’
Jeanie followed her into the kitchen and drank it out there while Elsie stood watching her with a troubled face. When she had gone Elsie said to mother, ‘I hope she’s all right.’
I thought she looked all right. Elsie used to worry over nothing. Next day mother told Elsie that Jeanie had had a baby that night. The doctor drove four miles in the middle of the night to help her have it—the doctor’s horse is a bay with white points—but she didn’t really have a baby at all; she had a miscarriage, which is quite different according to Joe who had heard his mother talking about it. With a miscarriage you are the same as you were before although you feel crook.
Elsie got a letter next day. It was delivered by Jeanie’s brother, a little bloke with a tooth out in the front. He delivered it because if it had gone through the Post Office Miss Armitage would have opened and read it. Miss Armitage was like that.
When Elsie read Jeanie’s letter it said, ‘Would you come and see me. I’d love to talk to you.’
Elsie didn’t want to go; she was afraid. She’d heard someone say that Jeanie McLean had had a baby but it died. Mother thought she ought to go. ‘She is a sad girl’, mother said.
So Elsie walked to Jeanie’s place and knocked at the door. Mr McLean opened it. He was a thin man like a drover’s dog, but he had a face that had been out in the wind and rain a lot. It was a good face. Elsie told him she had come to see Jeanie.
‘Yes, yes’, he said. ‘She’s in the bedroom. Go in to her.’
Elsie walked down the passage and went into a little bedroom like a box. It was lined with tongued and grooved boards, and the bed nearly filled it. But there was a chair there. Jeanie was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dressing-gown on.
‘I’m glad you came’, she said to Elsie. Elsie sat down on the chair. ‘I suppose you’ve heard about me’, Jeanie said.
Elsie said something but Jeanie went on. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Elsie, because Johnnie McPhee told me you had gone through the same experience. You went away for a holiday, didn’t you?—You know, about three months ago. When Hughie James came to see me, he told me he’d heard about it.’ Elsie stood up. She couldn’t think clearly. She kept saying, ‘It’s a lie, it’s a lie!’
Jeanie stopped when she saw her face and she talked about something else. But it was too late to do anything about Elsie.