Maude is still a town without a church. There is no statue in a park or bridge across a river. My father parks the car under a stand of gum trees. I post the letter to Callie, even though it says things that are slightly sarcastic, like how are your horses swimming? Four stamps with owls on them, eight eyes looking.
I follow my father across the parking lot to the hotel; he protects his eye from the dust of a passing utility truck. “You could get an eyepatch,” I tell him.
“It’s too far from the sea to look like a pirate,” he says.
The pub is dark inside. An old aboriginal woman sits at the end of the bar in a sailor’s hat with a cigarette drooped from her lip. Smoke curls from the end of it, then spreads in the breeze from the ceiling fan that stirs the air above her.
“Ginger Rogers,” my father says as we walk in, motioning in the old woman’s direction. He doesn’t take off his hat.
Other locals are in the lounge, sitting around tables eating porterhouse steaks and coleslaw. My father doesn’t notice them and they don’t talk to him.
A bearded man looks around at us and then averts his eyes. He leans forward, telling something to the people he’s with. I imagine the rumours of my father: the wife dead without a funeral, something strange about him since the bull kick queered his eye.
I sit near Ginger Rogers on a stool beside my father. He orders a beer from a tall woman in moleskin trousers standing behind the bar. She turns around and is Leonie, eleven years later. Her hair has gone from red to a rusty grey. She puts a strand of it behind her ear, smiles at him, and then sees me.
“Hello, Day,” she says with widened eyes.
My father combed his hair across his head, he shaved and changed his shirt before we came, but he never said Leonie would be here.
I don’t know what to say to her. I search for a glimpse of my mother in her eyes, the way I sometimes do with older women; in the twist of a blond sheath of hair or a braid like she would wear before bed, in an accent from Austria or Hungary, or the blue of her dress in the colour of a cushion. But there’s none of this in Leonie, just the passing of years, an awkwardness caused by my stare.
“Get him a beer,” my father tells her.
“I’ll have a cranberry juice.”
“Did you bring the cranberries with you?” he asks me, sharing his smirk with Leonie.
“A lemonade’s fine,” I say.
She pours it fizzy from a bottle into a tall glass, plops a glazed cherry in it, and sits it on a coaster in front of me.
“In America you get ice without asking,” I say. Leonie smiles but doesn’t offer me any.
I watch my father sip his beer. He follows Leonie’s arm as it wipes across the bar. She still has farmer’s fingers. The nails are bitten, the skin around them rough. She’s wearing my mother’s oblong watch.
“You don’t drink?” she asks me, her voice throaty.
“A horse somersaulted on me,” I tell her. “It split my liver.”
“Doesn’t your liver grow back?” my father asks. I thought he wasn’t listening.
Leonie pulls the tap and angles another glass for the right amount of head. She mixes two Bundaberg rum and Cokes, puts them on a tray.
“Are you still riding?” I ask her.
“Sometimes I go up to the squatter’s hut with your father,” she says and takes the tray out to a table. I remember them there, shunting on the bed above me.
“What do you think of how she’s fixed the hotel lounge?” my father says.
“Nice carpet,” I tell him.
The carpet has a pattern for all occasions. There are frosted lights stuck around the walls. I look up and watch the wobble of the ceiling fan, listen to it creaking, imagine the day it struggles free from its moorings, careens across the room decapitating lunchers.
“I hid under the bed up in the hut when you were with her,” I turn and tell my father. He looks at me as though he doesn’t know whose room or bed I’m talking about.
I get up to go outside for air, pass Leonie on the way. She would be pretty with makeup, if her hair was cut and off her face. She would attract more than my father. She still wears pants the same. I see her freckled hands around the tray. She’s taken off the watch.
Out in the car park, the air is getting thicker. Floats of nimbus build, an outside chance of rain. I can feel my father standing in the doorway behind me.
“Looks like rain,” I tell him.
“Looks like clouds,” he says.
Sometimes they come in dark with the tease of distant thunder, then roll right past to rain on someone else; on shady farms with green-grassed hills on the edges of the Great Dividing Range. Or if it starts to rain, the unseasoned will run outside and raise their hands up to it—until they realise it’s hitting too hard, water running across the ground in search of rivers, taking the last of the topsoil with it, scalding the backs of horses.
I walk with my father to the car.
“I think I’ll stay in town, make my own way back,” I tell him. He doesn’t look at me, he doesn’t want me alone with Leonie.
I slap the roof of the Vauxhall as he drives off in the dust. The town is flat and empty, I watch the car get smaller.
A single drop of rain puts a dent in the dirt beside me. Looking up I see a stream of sun between two grey-bellied clouds, sheds of corrugated light refracting above them, gilding their edges. “A glimpsing of heaven” my mother once called it, her unusual English, pointing up from her garden, her other hand shading her face.
I go back inside. Downstairs is for drinking, people stay upstairs. I follow the many-coloured carpet up along the banister, three stairs at a time, around a landing to the second floor, looking for Leonie’s room. Unseen, I open the door that has Private painted on it. It is hers. On the dresser is a recent picture of her riding with my father.
More comforts than I’d imagined. The bed has four posts without a canopy, a tablecloth drapes the window, softening the sun.
My mother’s Queen Anne chair is beside the bed, the one she’d sit in and sew. Its velvet has been replaced by dark green vinyl. I sit down in it and look around. Fake leather clams against my legs.
I slide open the bedside table drawer. In it there’s a silver matchbox cover, some unused Irish postcards, and, in the back, a small dark book. My mother’s initials and the year 1916 in blotted ink on the brown canvas jacket. It feels rough and smells old, the gold-edged pages frayed, silverfish. It reads from back to front. The inside cover says “Daily Prayers According to the Custom, Published Jos. Guns, Vienna, 1857.” The rest is in a language I haven’t seen; the alphabet is strange, notes in the margin, back-to-front letters, many of them dotted.
When I was very small, I woke up in the night to the sound of my mother murmuring. My father wasn’t home. Through the crack of her bedroom door I watched her sitting on bare boards, her hair in a braid, her face unpowdered, lit in the flicker of candles. A shawl-like garment wrapped around her, she looked like someone else, reading in a low-pitched voice, words I didn’t understand.
I hear someone in the hall, slide the book down the front of my pants. Leonie comes in and finds me standing by her bed.
“What are you up to?” she asks.
“I’m looking for my mother’s watch.”
She hands it to me casually from the pocket of her shirt as though it’s just a trinket. “She died a long time ago,” she says, gives me a hug I don’t anticipate, her arms around me hard. It’s as if to say she understands. She feels the book against her in my trousers.
“What’s in your pants?” she asks.
“Her book.”
I look outside. The clouds are plumper, eclipsing the sun. Softly, it is starting to rain, spotting the dusty window. Leonie pulls at an eyebrow, not sure what to say.
“Your mother was a Jewess,” she says.
I leave Leonie in her room and walk slowly down the stairs, the watch tight in my hand, warm and silver in my fingers, the book still in my pants. I hadn’t met Jews until I went to America. My father doesn’t like them.