Gibber’s Creek Gazette, 17 December 1975
Gibber’s Creek Says Goodbye . . .
JED
They came like an army of black ants across the landscape. Women in black summer dresses and hats, men in black ties, their jackets abandoned in the heat, and shirts with rolled-up sleeves.
There was no more room to park along the road to the church, except for the three parking spaces left for the family.
And so they walked, more than a kilometre, to say goodbye, nodding silently to Jed, Nancy, Michael and Scarlett as the big black funeral car passed, at Tom and Clancy, in black ties too, in miniature suits exactly like their father’s, sitting on Nancy’s and Michael’s knees.
So many people. A whole district grieving. For this was the woman whom their grandmothers had told them had hounded off the debt collectors when they’d tried to repossess farms in the Depression, who had led the CWA, the Red Cross and countless other women’s organisations through World War II.
If a child had needed glasses or treatment for a stammer, there had been cheques in the mail from Drinkwater. Christmas hampers arrived with ham, turkey, puddings, shortbread and presents for the kids if the man of the house was unemployed, or his wife was sick. And if you needed a job, she’d find you one. If you were prepared to work hard. ‘My land, my rules,’ she’d said. A tyrant, but a kind and compassionate one. Their tyrant. One of Australia’s last.
The car drew up outside the church. Nancy and Michael got out first, setting the boys down, while Michael unstrapped Scarlett’s chair from the roof rack.
Jim and Iris and their boys were waiting for them, Sam and his parents and sister hovering behind.
Jed held out her hand to Sam. He took it, kissed her, then kept hold of her as Jim and his family preceded them into the dimness of the church, sitting in the right-hand front row, while Sam and Jed, Michael, Nancy and the boys sat on the left, Scarlett and her wheelchair on the far side near the wall.
The coffin lay on a table, below the altar. Such a small coffin. The table and coffin were laden with flowers, white lilies, whose scent filled the church, and white carnations. But there, in the middle, were two small bunches of everlastings, papery and golden.
Had Tom and Clancy gathered them? Tears prickled Jed’s eyes. She fought them off. Time to cry later.
She glanced back to the church doors, to a wall of black. The mourners must cover the hillside, she thought. They must have known this one church couldn’t hold them all. But still, they’d come.
The service began. Conventional, for a woman who was not conventional. And yet Matilda came to this church every Sunday, thought Jed. Matilda would have thrown off religious conventions as happily as she had thrown away her corsets, as soon as it was no longer scandalous to do so. Matilda came because she believed.
Believed what? Of all the things they had discussed, almost an entire lifetime, this had never come up. Matilda had accepted that Jed came to church only for weddings and funerals, and on Christmas Day.
A hymn. ‘Jerusalem’, of course. A reading. ‘I will lift mine eyes up to the hills, from whence cometh my help.’
And Matilda had, despite all the teachings of Auntie Love, old Mrs Clancy. Pagan teachings . . . No. Jed could almost feel Matilda, the eyebrow firmly raised, next to her. No more pagan lore than Pythagorean laws, or the water cycle on the blackboard at school. Just knowledge. If immunology wasn’t in the Bible, but was not a heresy, then why shouldn’t the deep oneness with the land be reality as well?
For Matilda, at least, there had been no conflict. She had been so wise about many things. Why had Jed assumed that Matilda of all people had unthinkingly followed tradition? Or Nancy and Michael?
She glanced at Sam, found him watching her. He took her hand again. A comforting hand, calloused and capable.
She’d pushed her tears away so well that now they wouldn’t come.
Michael stood in front of the small bloom-donned coffin. He spoke of the mother he loved, the woman he admired; then Jim talked, and if he spent more time on Matilda’s ability to foretell sheep prices and breed merinos, that was fitting too, as were the spilling tears he carefully ignored.
Flinty McAlpine stood then, to tell stories Jed hadn’t heard, of the two women roaming the land on horseback, with old Mrs Rose Clancy.
‘We’d camp out with the stars for a blanket, and our breakfast still hopping somewhere in the night. We’d talk and we’d listen to Rose, and when we came home, we were slightly more ourselves than when we left.
‘It’s not easy to be happily married to a stroppy woman. But I was and Matilda was too, stroppy and happy with her Tommy. Matilda was not just a mother, or a businesswoman. She was a friend, the best it is possible to have. And she was a wife, a damn good wife in a damn good marriage, and the best judge of horseflesh down on the plains.’
There was a hint of laughter at that. Even Flinty managed a smile, through tears. Nicholas rose to his feet to help her down.
Nicholas. She had forgotten even to look for him. She smiled at the small coffin on its flowered bier. Right once again, old woman, she thought.
No other speeches, nor hymns. Instead, up in the gallery, children’s voices rose in song.
‘Once a jolly swagman . . .’
Michael stood, with Tom and Clancy and Jim and his boys. Michael nodded to Sam too. The boys and men crossed to the coffin and lifted it on their shoulders, Tom and Clancy walking among them.
The men of Matilda’s family carried her from the church as the song echoed across the churchyard . . .
‘Up jumped the swagman and sprang into the billabong
“You’ll never take me alive,” said he.
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong . . .’
You gave me everything, old woman, thought Jed. Come back. Be a ghost for me. But her visions had mostly vanished. She’d had her one and only glimpse of Matilda as a girl, that morning of complete happiness before her father died.
‘You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.’
This was goodbye.
The graveyard was below the church, not far to carry a coffin, especially one as light as this one. The men from the funeral home took over as the crowd stood back to let the family through, and the coffin descended smoothly, as if Matilda herself was orchestrating it. Tom threw in the first flower, an everlasting, then Clancy. Jed wished she’d thought to bring some too.
But flowers were symbols only. The old woman in that coffin wouldn’t know of them. It didn’t matter to Matilda what Jed did now.
‘Of course it does.’ Jed blinked. No, not a glimpse of the past or future, nor even sensing a ghost, as she’d sensed Fred a few times, and smelled his sausages. A voice, not a vision.
Matilda’s voice.
It had to be imagination. But it was what Matilda would have told her. ‘I saw the woman you’d become in the girl I knew. If I could predict a drought, young lady, I could predict your life too. So you had better make sure it’s as excellent as I expected it to be.’
Matilda might have been standing next to her. Jed looked at the rest of the family, watching as the earth was piled in the grave. Had they heard Matilda’s voice too?
But they were sombre, all with tears on their cheeks, Nancy’s and Michael’s arms around each other, their spare arms around a son each, and Jim and Iris mirroring the younger family. For the first time she could see how Michael and Jim looked utterly like brothers.
Sam put both arms about Jed’s waist. ‘You’re allowed to cry, you know,’ he whispered into her hair.
‘I can’t remember how.’
‘You will,’ said Sam.
Blue stepped over to them, and hugged them both. ‘Thank you, God, for children,’ she murmured, then left them to walk back to the car with her husband.
‘Sam?’
‘Yes.’ They began to walk too. There was the wake to get through now. She wanted to be alone. She wanted to think, to try to feel what this new world with no Matilda in it was. But they had to do her proud. One last big party for Drinkwater.
‘Sam, do you believe in God?’
‘Ask me a hard one. Like how long a solar panel will keep generating electricity.’
‘No. Really.’
He looked at her seriously. ‘Only because without that belief there’d be a God-sized hole, with nothing else to fill it.’
Socrates had said to follow the religion of your community. There were many paths to everywhere, so why not to God too, or whatever name you wanted to use to fill that hole?
‘That’ll do,’ she said.
As wakes went, it was perfect. Trestles for bring-a-plate dishes and the best of Anita’s cooking and Mah’s and Leafsong’s, the Blue Belle shut for the day and probably yesterday as well. Scones and brown rice salad, gado gado and sliced ham, chocolate cheesecake and squished-fly biscuits, pikelets with jam, asparagus rolls, curried egg sandwiches, spinach quiche, great tubs of ice creams in dry ice, more tubs with beer, champagne and soft drink, urns of tea or water for instant coffee, with special cups from Matilda’s percolator for Jed, kept filled by Leafsong.
Over in the shearers’ quarters someone played the piano and as the shadows grew longer Leafsong joined them, and Raincloud with his guitar. Jed heard the singing, but could not go to join in.
‘No,’ said Gavin as Moira offered him stewed apple, then unsteadily reached a chubby hand towards an ice cream.
Something wet touched Jed’s ankle. She peered down. Maxi, her nose curled round her body, almost to her stumpy tail. The dog had leaped into the car that morning, then slept on its seat throughout the service. ‘Maxi!’ Jed kneeled. ‘Has no one been looking after you?’
‘On the contrary,’ said Iris, holding a tray of mini asparagus quiches. ‘She’s been playing the poor abandoned dog for me, Anita and anyone else she could cuddle up to. I think she’s had at least fifty sausage rolls.’
‘Matilda always said a sheep dog’s stomach was endlessly elastic. Maybe Doberpersons have elastic stomachs too,’ said Jed, and realised she could say Matilda’s name without loss tearing every cell. That she could even smile.
More cups of tea. Jed helped serve them, suddenly realising: this is my duty, as Matilda’s had been.
She slid the empty tray into the sink, then picked up another, tiny cheese puffs this time. Leafsong and Mark could feed an army. Then she stopped at the sound of a pipe sputtering in the scullery.
Or a man.
Michael’s face was in his hands, his body shuddering with sobs. He looked up from a chair in the corner as she peered around the door.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’
His face was wet, swollen. The choking cry came again. He breathed deeply. ‘I . . . I can’t seem to stop.’
‘Your mother’s dead,’ she said gently. ‘It’s all right to cry.’
‘You . . . you don’t understand. I should have been with her! We sat with Dad, she sat with her great-grandfather . . . I should never have left her here alone that night.’
She grabbed a kitchen chair, hauled it into the semi-darkness of the scullery, sat in front of him and grabbed his hand.
‘I felt guilty too. Then I realised.’
‘What?’
‘She’d have asked if she had wanted us to stay.’ Jed hesitated. ‘She knew this land, Michael. And she was part of it. She knew her body too. When she kissed us good night that night . . . she knew she was saying goodbye.’
‘Mum knew she was dying? Why didn’t she tell me?’ Fresh anguish.
‘What did Matilda say to you when you left that night?’
‘Sweet dreams. She hadn’t said that to me since I was a kid. She said, “Sweet dreams,” to Tom and Clancy too, though they were already asleep.’
‘Sweet dreams,’ repeated Jed. ‘That’s a pretty good goodbye, don’t you think? Your mother was a dreamer all her life.’
‘Mum? No way. She did things.’
‘She dreamed them first. She told me a lot about her life. Back in Grinder’s Alley, dreaming of a farm. Then at Moura, dreaming of the farm it might be, of a marriage that was a partnership like hers with your father.’ Jed smiled wryly. ‘And of building the biggest empire in this part of New South Wales and making sure everyone did exactly what she dreamed was best for them.’
Michael’s sobs had stopped.
She said, ‘Keep dreaming, Michael. I think that’s what she was telling you.’
‘But she was alone,’ he whispered.
‘Michael, your mother was here with her family, her friends, her memories.’
The eagle, she thought. Did you see it, old woman? I bet you did. And if it hadn’t flown here by itself, you’d have called it down.
She kept her voice soft. ‘I think being alone meant she could be with all of us. She was smiling when I found her, Michael.’
‘I thought maybe the undertaker did that.’
Jed found a laugh. ‘Do you really think anyone in Gibber’s Creek would have the temerity to change Matilda’s last expression?’ She hesitated again, hugged him briefly — she still had to think how to give hugs. ‘She’s smiling still. And, if you’re going to cry again, do it where Nancy can comfort you. She deserves that.’
‘I don’t want to bother . . .’ Michael stopped, gave an almost-smile. ‘You’re right. She’d want to.’
‘Of course she would,’ said Jed. She picked up the chair and went to fetch the cheese puffs, leaving Michael to wash his face and prepare himself again for all the neighbours.
Guests were leaving. Jed moved out to say goodbye, to accept kisses and handshakes.
And at last there was Sam, his arm around her, and Scarlett on the other side, on the veranda with darkness in front of them, and Maxi sprawled out over Scarlett’s lap as if her paws could no longer support a poor grieving dog who had nosed her way under every trestle and shrub, snuffling for scraps.
‘I’ll bring the ute around,’ said Sam. ‘You okay in the ute again, Scarlett? We can put your chair in the back.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Scarlett. She waited till Sam strode down the steps, then took a breath. ‘Jed, I want to stay in college when I’m at uni, just like you did. I’d like . . .’ She hesitated, then said more firmly, ‘I’d like you to pay for a room and bathroom to be remodelled for me. Then anyone who needs a wheelchair-friendly room there will have it after I graduate. And I’d still like the car. Please. I know it’ll cost a lot.’
Jed felt Matilda smile. Matilda’s money had done good things, had flowed past her like the river.
‘There is no other possible use for money,’ said Jed gently, ‘than giving you the future you deserve.’
She stepped off the veranda and onto the driveway. The last of the guests had left, apart from a few still singing in the shearers’ quarters, the hundred and eighth repetition of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. And there were Sam and the ute, exactly when she needed them. And Maxi, jumping up when Sam opened the door.
And still. Still she hadn’t cried.