Ruthy was coping by writing and writing and I was picking great sores in my head and Caleb was beside himself.
He said he kept wetting the bed and that made Aunty Maisie cross, and she had taken to insisting he wear a big nappy at night like the ones she put on Grandpa. This made him cry and cry. He said she didn’t say mean things to him or smack him, but she was like a strict sergeant major and just roared out rules and commands to be obeyed, and he was always frightened. She made him eat porridge for breakfast, which he hated, and once he chucked it up on her new breakfast banquette, which she’d had reupholstered with orange and avocado flowers on it. This made her very angry. She gave him a rag and told him to clean it up and then made another bowl of porridge and put it in front of him when he had stopped puking.
She slicked down his cowlicks with too much sugar in the water, and he said he looked as though he had horns when he went to school. He rushed to the long drinking troughs at school and stuck his head under a tap most mornings to try to fix them, but that meant water sloshed all over him and down the front of his clothes. Bruce Wauch and Barry Plover called out, ‘Wilson’s a wetter! Wilson’s a wetter!’, and his friend Lincoln punched Barry at recess time and told him to lay off or he’d piss on his sports shoes when he wasn’t looking. So Caleb stopped trying to tame the mess with water and decided to try to trim the sugar-starched horns himself with crimping scissors from the art classroom. This was, to say the least, an unsuccessful strategy, and Aunty Maisie had a fit when he went home with jagged hair and bald patches at his forehead and crown. She marched him to a local barber who shaved almost all of his beautiful snow-white wavy hair off, and he wet the bed again that night despite the nappy. Aunty Maisie said he was an evil boy who did it deliberately, despite him promising and promising that wasn’t true.
He was at least able to go to our usual school, which was a blessing for him compared to Ruthy and I, because at least he had his friends and some things seemed familiar. At Sunday school, I would hand him a note for Maynard, and he would sneak an answer back to me the next week. He had to be very careful Aunty Maisie didn’t see it in case she decided to take it hostage. Maynard’s notes were reassuring and newsy, and some weeks it was the only thing I had to hang on to from one weekend to the next. Caleb said his teacher asked him if he was okay, and he said yes, but he wished he had said, ‘No, I am living with an evil witch and someone needs to rescue me.’ But he knew that would just make Dad cross.
At least on Sundays he spent more time with Dad than we did, which I was jealous about, but which seemed fair given he was just a little boy. Sometimes Dad took him for drives in the car or to pick up things for Aunty Maisie from the few shops that opened on Sundays. They brought Grandpa out of his sunroom bedroom when Dad visited, and Caleb rather liked sitting next to Grandpa, who didn’t say much but whom Caleb felt sent out kindly sorts of feelings into the room. Caleb liked Grandpa’s white moustache and big hands and the fact that he always wore a tartan waistcoat, suit trousers and black shoes and socks even when it was very hot. He cleaned Grandpa’s shoes for him every day, and if Grandpa wasn’t well enough for him to take them in to see him, he left them on a rag by the door for Aunty Maisie to take in when she dressed him. He admired Grandpa’s gold Waltham pocket watch he was given as a retirement present, and which he was never without. Caleb thought he might sleep with it on but he snuck into Grandpa’s room one night and found it on his night stand. Most Sundays Grandpa let him open it up and put it to his ear.
He was still obsessed with the idea that Dad was going to be sacrificed, and every Sunday asked Ruthy if she had done more research on how we could prevent it from happening. He was sure that we had been farmed out to different families because Mum wasn’t coming back and Dad was going to be hung on a tree branch with nails like Jesus. He said he couldn’t cope with living with Aunty Maisie forever and we had to do something to stop Dad from being crucified.
One of his theories was that Mr Bednarski had sent Mum away so she couldn’t stop him from sacrificing Dad on account of Mr Bednarski being a Jew and that was who had done Jesus in. And because Mr Bednarski also had a building business, Caleb was sure this meant he would have the materials needed to nail Dad up in a cemetery when the time came. It was all he wanted to talk about when we caught up, and it didn’t matter what we said to him, he was quite convinced he had it right.
He would become so upset when Dad was due to leave after dinner on Sunday night that Dad would promise to come to see him after the evening meeting to say goodnight and sit with him until he went to sleep. I only know this because Aunty Maisie told Sister Everude who told Sister Jack who told Anne King’s mum who told Anne who told me.
Caleb wrote a letter to Daniel and asked Ruthy to post it for him. It was already sealed when he handed it to her, so Ruthy didn’t like to open it. I was quite happy to do so, but she told me it wasn’t our business and what could it say anyway? Suddenly there were more letters from Daniel than ever before, and all of them were handed over by Dad to Ruthy on Sundays. Ruthy said some of them didn’t make sense to her. It was as though Daniel thought he had explained things to us when he hadn’t and was referring to situations he’d never written about before. She handed them on to me, and I studied them carefully. After reading a few I had a suspicion that at first I didn’t want to consider, but did seem pretty obvious to me. I thought Daniel had written to us a lot more than we knew, and something had happened to some of his letters. And I had a horrible feeling I knew what it was.
It prompted me to write to him myself. I sent him all three of our addresses just to be sure he knew where to find each of us, and I wrote the following:
Dear Daniel,
First, we miss you like mad. I hope you are impressed that I started with ‘first’ and not ‘firstly’. As you can see, Ruthy is rubbing off on me.
I have read the last three letters Ruthy passed on to me. I’m not sure if you know this, but we usually only get a letter from you every six weeks or so. I now think you’ve been writing to us much more often than that. I wouldn’t like to say what happened to them, but the good news is at the moment Dad is handing them straight over to us, so you can be pretty sure we will see them all at least for the time being.
I don’t want to worry you because I am sure you have enough to worry about as it is, but I don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know when Mum will be back, and it is very hard on Ruthy, and Caleb in particular. If you have any news, can you send it to me, or ring me on the number I put on the back of the envelope? If you know anything hard, can you tell me first so we can work out how to tell the little ones?
Dad is getting very skinny and he doesn’t sing the tenor bit in the hymns anymore, and he doesn’t have a hanky in his pocket, even a snotty one. I am sorry I haven’t written to you before but you know what I’m like and I know Ruthy does it for all of us. Please ring me if you can. We are sad, but we are okay so don’t worry.
Love Dorcas
PS And we really miss you and I wish you were home.
PPS I don’t care what Peter Royston says, whatever happened you were right.
PPPS I was considering marrying Peter Royston if a knight didn’t show up, but I would rather live in Peter’s old footy boot with his socks after a long game in summer than live with him now, so don’t worry about him being your brother‑in‑law.
One night after dinner the phone rang and Aunty Jean answered it. Her voice sounded weird straight away. She said, ‘She isn’t here right now but I can take a message,’ and I thought that was strange for a minute because all the ‘shes’ in the house were definitely home. I wondered if it was a boy for one of the girls but thought that unlikely. I had a feeling it was Daniel, but I couldn’t be sure, and there was no point making a fuss about it. I went to Uncle Paul’s room to ask if I could ring Daniel, but he said it would be best to ask Aunty Jean first, so I gave that up as a bad joke.
I had posted the letter to Daniel on a Monday, and the following Monday he wrote back.
Dear Dorcas,
I tried to call you but Aunty Jean said you were out. I hope you were doing something fun.
I have written to Ruthy almost every week, so it is strange you haven’t had many letters from me. I’m glad Dad is passing them all on to you.
I don’t know any more than you do really. I have tried to talk to Dad about it but he just says Mum is on a holiday and will be home soon. I’m sure that’s right. I rang Ruthy last week and she cried on the phone but she said the Hodgesons are very kind to her and she doesn’t mind too much. I’m not sure that’s true. I rang Caleb and he seems sure Dad is going to be crucified. Where on earth did that come from? I felt a bit worried about him, but I’m sure Aunty Maisie will make sure he is okay.
Try to comfort the little ones as much as you can. I am going to ring Mr Driver to see if he has any news we don’t have. I miss you, Dorcas, and thank you for looking after the babies and for writing to me.
Love you always.
Your big brother,
Daniel
Well, I must have read that letter about twenty times the first night I got it. It made me sad, happy, sad, happy, sad and then happy. But most of all, it made me feel relieved that my big brother knew how we felt and was going to try to get more information. I could have kicked myself for not thinking of Mr Driver. I bet he knew stuff we didn’t. For the first time in weeks, that night I didn’t pick the sores in my head and I didn’t have nightmares.
The next Sunday behind the store shed at church we all met up and swapped any news we had. Caleb looked a bit shocking with his head almost shaved. I could tell when Dad first saw him on Sunday morning he wasn’t at all pleased, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Caleb said he was teased at school about it and the nasty boys called him Caleb the Bald Eagle. I thought it might have been worse, but anything called out in a nasty way sounds upsetting, even if it’s ‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’. It’s often not about the words, I reckon.
Caleb was even more certain now this was all part of a lead-up to Dad being sacrificed. He said Lincoln told him at school that they shaved the heads of sympathisers in the war, and he didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he had a lot of sympathy for Dad, so he could see this was a bad sign.
I wish now I had listened to Caleb more carefully, or asked him more questions about what he was thinking, or found a way to reassure him. I wish I had told Dad about how upset he was getting. But I didn’t.