For the time of year it was warm. A dry spell, Bern’s father had said, peering at a cloud, a big, shining, white one, which had slid quietly over Bassett’s hill on its flat bottom, its top, dollops of mashed potato. Another fine day.
Bern wasn’t interested in the weather, just then, although it was always easier in fine weather, you weren’t stuck in the house or a shed.
He sneaked off without anyone seeing him except Vic who watched from under the quince tree to see if he was only going to the lavatory, saw he wasn’t and followed him down past the calfshed, past the cowshed, along the hedge and over the railway to the bank, which looked north over the river to Ridge’s and Edward’s.
Bern sat on the grass amongst the ferns, which would make him hard to see by anyone over the river. The spaniel lay beside him, on his belly with his head resting on flat paws. His ears were touching the ground, his eyes were soft and dull, but followed the boy’s slightest movement.
Bern reached a hand to lay it on the dog’s shoulder. Only the eyes moved. If there was a problem, they would share it.
But there was no problem; not one you could write down or talk about. It wasn’t as simple as that. An unease, an ache, that he couldn’t describe; yet alleviated in a way just by sitting there, where he was, alone with the dog and everything familiar about him; like the relief of a poultice on a boil. But this was not something you could put your finger on, like you would touch a boil with the tips of your fingers and feel the core of hurt, an electric contact with the brain.
As he stared blankly across the river he began to focus on a vague something that caused his brows to lower and glower, and his mouth to pucker; an unattractive face, scowling and angry-looking. If you reminded him he could tell you how Mrs Webster had mistaken this look of deep concentration and stopped in mid-sentence to stare at him and say: Wipe that scowl off your face! And he had been amazed and said belligerently: I wasn’t scowling. Don’t dare answer me back, she had said. I wasn’t scowling! (more belligerently) How dare you! Give me that cane! (pointing to the boy in the front desk). And Bern had jumped to his feet: I’ll get it. And hurried down the aisle past the teacher, grabbed the cane from behind the piano and handed it to her, almost poked it at her, standing there angry and temporarily nonplussed. He could tell how she vented her anger by slashing at his hand and sending him out to the sheltershed to wait until she told him to come back: how when school had finished and the others had gone home and she had imagined he had gone with them, he had stayed, still angry and pigheaded, in the sheltershed for an hour, until he had attracted her attention by dropping a board: how she had come out to the shed amazed and shocked to find him and ask him why he hadn’t gone home when the others had left. And the culmination—his victory—You told me to stay until you called me.
If Mrs Webster had come across him sitting there on the bank with the dog she would have recognized that same ugly frown but it is possible that in his eyes she would have been just another nebulous object like the willows, the white gums and Ridge’s barn on the hill (stuck there like an oversized dunny).
It was to do with the Cullens. For all of Bern’s twelve years the Cullens had been neighbours at the end of the road. And now the property had been purchased by the Shekletons.
Cullens! Mum, can we go up to Cullen’s? Dad, do you want us to take that fork back to Cullen’s? Or they had a fish to drop in. Or their mother, realizing the boys liked to see the Cullens, would ask them to take some little thing to them.
There was always a welcome there, perhaps because their only son, Frank, had been tragically drowned, and unmarried Stella was no longer living at home; perhaps, because the boys had no grandparents, they had adopted this old couple. Tom, who forever seemed to be singing tunelessly his deedle-um-de-de, and was apparently never busy, at least never too busy to stop and talk with the boys; and Clare, whose short, thick body was always clothed in a black and sombre dress, which contrasted markedly to the warm smile of welcome. ‘Don’t go far away, boys, and I’ll have some scones out of the oven in two shakes,’ or, ‘Would you like to pick yourselves some mulberries? Or cherries? The starlings’ll get them if you don’t.’
There was the time when they were close to the house and the boys heard Mrs Cullen call: ‘Tom! Tom! What do you think. The old goose has hatched out her goslings—nine of them.’ ‘Nine, did you say, Clare? Well, well, well, I’ll go to beggery. I’ll go to beggery.’ It was another Cullen contribution to add to the boy’s store of mimicry, as well as: ‘Come and have a cuppa-tea, Tom.’ ‘O.K. Clare, deedle-um-de-de, deedle-um-de-de.’
The Cullens were poor, as every farmer in the district was poor, except for Mr Norton Smith, the manager of the Van Diemens Land Company, who owned ‘Amberley’, a beautiful and fertile property on Roberts’s eastern boundary.
But Cullen’s property was small and hilly and mostly covered with ferns and scrub. Mr Cullen grew a few potatoes, and oats for the horses, and turnips, and milked several cows, but since Frank’s death he had little heart for the extra work required to halt the yearly advance of bracken, and rushes on the flats.
What little money they earned was barely enough to buy the few necessary items of food, and to allow the two old people to hold their heads erect on Sundays when the congregation’s donations were read from the pulpit. Their Sunday clothes were used sparingly and with extreme care; they were the same they had been wearing for twenty years or more.
Their clothes, like the house, the sheds, the horses’ harness, and the water tank (which sprouted countless bits of rag and tarred wooden plugs) in spite of constant care and attention, were deteriorating to the point where they were becoming gradually unserviceable.
Notwithstanding all these problems, the Cullens were able to take pity on Old Jim, who they found destitute and sick, lying on the side of the road, to take him home with them, where he lived for years in Cullen’s hut.
Yes, Bern knew, it was to do with the Cullens. There had been deaths in the district, plenty of them: old people, babies, a young man he hardly knew had pulled his gun through a fence and shot himself. None of these deaths had caused him pain. Old Jim had died. But then Mr Cullen. It was Bern’s first real feeling of sadness, of loss—much more (although he would never admit it) than the sadness he had felt when his aunt, his mother’s sister, had died. The aunt who had painted the picture hanging in the hall, and who had carved the breadboard and the breadknife handle, but who he had barely known.
‘Poor Mr Cullen has died,’ his mother had told them one afternoon, when they came home from school. And he had gone down to the stable and climbed up to the loft. It was the first time he had cried over someone’s death. He thought how Mr Cullen, a few weeks earlier, had taken him and Harry into the house to show them something that someone (was it Stella?) had given them: an His Master’s Voice gramophone, which he had wound up and played for them.
The record was an old one which scratched, and went from loud to soft, a man who talked and sang and finished a monologue with the line: Yours to the last drop, George. Several times it was played for them and each time the old people kept their eyes fixed upon those of the boys, revelling in their attention and their smiling appreciation. It was a gift, even bigger and better than the scones and mulberries. ‘Come back and hear it, any time,’ they had said as the boys ran off to tell their family.
Then Mr Cullen had died. Simply and suddenly. The farm was sold and Mrs Cullen had gone to Wynyard to live.
Now, she too was dead. His mother had told him, told them all. She had died four days ago. And his father didn’t know and had missed the funeral.
Only a few days before she died, on the Saturday, Bern and his mother had driven, with Star in the jinker, in to Wynyard to see her and to take her some eggs and vegetables. She was living in a tiny two-roomed cottage near the brickworks by the racecourse. Mrs Cullen was upset because she only had an open fire and wasn’t able to bake scones for them. ‘A man is coming next week,’ she said, ‘to put a camp-oven in for me.’ She played the gramophone for them but only one record: ‘Take a pair of sparkling eyes’. The other one, which the boys liked, had been broken in the move.
When they were leaving Mrs Cullen asked them to wait. She hobbled back up the dirt track and into the house and came out with a jar of raspberry jam. Bern’s mother had kissed her wrinkled old cheek and as they drove off Bern noticed his mother had tears on her cheek, which she didn’t wipe off.
Now Mrs Cullen was dead. There was only Stella left. And she was ten years older than Bern. He hardly knew her, apart from seeing her often on the road with Florence Smyth, riding double-dinked and bare-back on the piebald pony or cantering down the road with sox on her hands, in the winter, for gloves.
Bern stood up. Immediately Vic stood too and looked up at the boy as if to say: what will we do now? Bern scratched behind the floppy ear, ‘Do you remember when Rover died, Vic?’ he said. ‘Of course you don’t, you weren’t even alive then.’