Until that December morning Gertrude Foote had found little good to say for Vern Hooper’s new motor car. It was noisy, it stunk to high hell, and she’d ridden more comfortably on a camel’s back. That morning, she blessed its noise and ran indoors. If he’d come on horseback, he would have caught her head down in a dish of water, rinsing the dye out of her hair. There were things folk needed to know and a lot more they didn’t, and that she dyed her hair was one of the latter.
There was little vanity in Gertrude. The dyeing of her hair wasn’t about vanity; it was a means of keeping old age at bay, that’s all, and so far it seemed to be working.
She had a lot of hair; it took a lot of rinsing, more than could be done in one dish of water, but with no time now to do more, she grabbed a towel and got it wrapped on turban fashion. She emptied that telltale rinsing water around the roots of her climbing rose, propped the tin dish upside down on her tank stand and before the car came puttering and spluttering into her yard, she was waiting for him behind her chicken-wire gate. It wasn’t much of a gate — tall enough to keep her chooks away from the house and garden, though offering minimal protection should that motor car turn feral. But he got the thing stopped and she opened her gate.
‘You put my chooks off the lay for a week every time you bring that thing down here,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with your horse?’
‘He’s out at the farm and I’m in here.’
Vern Hooper unfolded his lanky frame from behind the steering wheel. There was a good six foot five of him to unfold, plus a thatch of wiry steel grey hair to offer a few extra inches. Apart from his eyes, lost years ago in the creases of a farmer’s permanent squint, his features were of a size to suit his build — big nose, big ears, long jaw. By no stretch of the imagination could Vern be called a good-looking man.
‘Cecelia Morrison just dropped dead,’ he said. ‘Ogden wants you, Trude.’
‘I’ve got an alibi,’ she said, and was rewarded with a grin. There was something about Vern’s grin, sort of shy, a little lopsided, something about it that made his face look just about right to Gertrude.
‘Guilty by intent?’ he said.
‘Could be too. What happened to her, Vern?’
‘Something very sudden.’
‘I’m halfway through washing my hair . . .’
‘Finish it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing better to do.’
Christmas was over, the New Year not yet born, and as far as Vern was concerned, those few days between the two just wasted time. Six years ago he’d wed a widow with a modern sawmill and a nice house in town. She was no farmer’s wife. He’d put a manager in on his farm and moved into town to learn what he could about her sawmill.
There was money in Woody Creek timber; there always had been, though it was hard fought for until a few years back. Three big modern mills, to the north, west and east of the town, had changed all that. Six days a week folk lived with the constant shrieking howl of the big saws, the constant stream of bullockies hauling logs in from the bush, of drays hauling cut timber up to the railway yards.
There was a shocked, lost feeling to the town when the mills shut down over Christmas, a lonely, waiting feeling, which Vern shared. His wife didn’t enjoy having him underfoot. His housekeeper didn’t enjoy him poking around in her kitchen. He’d been roaming, looking for something to do, and now that something had happened.
He followed Gertrude into her house, which was only a house by reputation. Rough-built fifty years ago, it was a two-roomed hut, its front door opening onto a clutter of kitchen table, chairs, stove, cane couch, washstand, dresser, big old Coolgardie safe and no room to swing a cat — if she’d had one to swing.
‘What time did it happen, Vern?’
‘Your daughter found her around ten . . . in the dunny.’
‘No.’
‘Fact.’
‘No.’
‘As true as I’m standing here. She told Ogden she hadn’t sighted her mother-in-law since breakfast and thought she must have been lying down. She said she went down to the dunny and there she was, skirt up, bloomers down.’
‘Oh my God! What a place to breathe your last breath . . .’
‘Yeah, but as Moe Kelly said when he saw her sitting there, it’s sort of poetic justice.’
Maybe it was. Cecelia Morrison was an overweight, overbearing bugger of a city dame who’d suffered from a severe case of delusions of grandeur. She and her stationmaster son, Norman, had moved up to Woody Creek eight years ago, and two years after that, Amber, Gertrude’s only daughter, had wed Norman.
‘Amber must have got a shock.’
‘She’s running the show. Norman, being Norman, is . . . being Norman,’ Vern said, and no more needed to be said.
That marriage had been a recipe for disaster, even without a live-in mother-in-law. Gertrude had tried to talk some sense into that girl, but trying to stop Amber from doing anything she’d set her mind on doing was like bullfighting with a handkerchief for a cape.
A heavy brown curtain hung at a gap midway down the western wall of the kitchen. Gertrude lifted it and disappeared into her second room, as long, near as narrow, more cluttered than its mate and offering less light. The head of her double bed was against the southern wall, her dressing table squeezed in beside it. She had two unmatched wardrobes set along the western wall, and crates, trunks, boxes, piles of newspapers and sundry filling the northern end. It was an unholy mess she kept promising herself she’d clean up one fine day, but she had a fifteen-acre property to run and on fine days she was busy — and on the other days she was just as busy. For the past twenty-odd years she’d delivered most babes born in Woody Creek, then stitched them up a few years later, set the limbs of a few. Always someone at her door wanting something, always more pressing things to be done than housework. Anyway, her mess was familiar and as long as she moved nothing around, she could put her hands quickly on whatever she needed.
She removed her turban, tossed the stained towel over the foot of her bed, found a comb amid the general clutter on her dressing table and proceeded to do what she could with two foot of copper-brown hair. Without fail, she gave her hair a hot olive oil treatment once the dye was rinsed out. No time for that this morning. Maybe tonight.
A centre part and she combed it over her ears, pinned it so it would stay there, then plaited what was left, coiled it and reached for a pair of ivory pins, bought in Japan thirty years ago. They held the plait in place, the pins crossed like a pair of knitting needles, which didn’t sit well with her working trousers and boots, but folk were accustomed to the way she dressed — or most of them were.
She peered into a mottled looking glass, shrugged, then as a concession to her daughter, or her daughter’s dead mother-in-law, she swapped her faded shirt for another, swapped her working boots for light Indian sandals, then returned to the kitchen.
A tall woman, she hadn’t put on more than a pound in the past thirty years. Height and slimness ran in the Hooper family. Gertrude and Vern were cousins, or half-cousins. There was something of the Hooper line in the strong bone structure of her face, though she’d avoided the large features. Her mother had sworn that one of her forefathers was a Spanish pirate who’d captured his wife from Tahiti. There could have been some fact in that tale; Gertrude had the dark eyes and olive complexion; they gave lie to her fifty-four years, most of which she’d spent out of doors working like a navvy.
Vern watched her walk to the bottom end of the kitchen where she leaned down and spoke to someone he hadn’t known was there.
‘I have to go into town for a while, love. We’ll get you comfortable before I go.’
Vern squinted to gain a better view. Still seeing nothing, he walked down to where a ten- or twelve-year-old darkie was lying on a mattress against the back wall, half-hidden by a chest of drawers.
‘You’re at it again, you flamin’ halfwit!’ he said.
‘I brought her in the day before Christmas and didn’t give her a snowflake’s chance in hell, but you’re coming good, aren’t you, love?’
The kid didn’t look too good to Vern — she looked to be made of matchsticks, and one had snapped. There was a splint on her left leg.
‘She’s not one of old Wadi’s,’ he said.
‘I doubt it. He’s got two new women out there with him now.’
‘Where’s he got them?’
‘About eight mile out. They’re in that old trapper’s hut. Mini, the one who came in looking for me, is one of the mission girls.’
‘Why didn’t she go to them?’
‘Wadi done like mission,’ Gertrude said, doing a fair impression of Mini’s accent.
Old Wadi, a half-breed black who had inherited the worst of both races, had been hanging around Woody Creek’s perimeter for years, helping himself to what he needed at the time, be it mutton, beef or girls from the mission.
‘You’ll get folks’ backs up again, encouraging him into town.’
‘I’m not in town, and when did you know me to give a tinker’s curse what the good folk of Woody Creek have to say about me?’
‘Not often.’ He grinned.
He watched her carry that kid out to the lavatory and back in, watched her wash a pair of narrow little hands not a lot darker than her own.
‘She’s light-skinned,’ he said as she placed the girl back on her mattress.
‘She’s damn near white. Those mission folk need their backsides kicked for leaving kids like that out there,’ Gertrude said, cutting bread, spreading it with treacle and dripping, filling a mug with goat’s milk then stirring in a heaped spoonful of sugar. ‘I counted six kids and they all looked half-starved.’
She offered the bread and milk to the girl. ‘You drink the lot now. You eat every crumb.’
Wood poked into the firebox, its door closed with a slam, the flue closed, kettle moved to the hob, and she reached for a black wide-brimmed felt hat she’d owned ten years or more, not a feminine hat, and well worn.
‘If we’re going, we’d better get going,’ she said.
It wasn’t the first time she’d ridden in Vern’s car, though she still didn’t trust it. It stank of petroleum, and the knowledge that she was sitting on a tank full of stuff likely to explode didn’t instil her with confidence. It saved the saddling of her horse, and that’s about all she’d say for motoring, except that it got her the two miles into town in the time it would have taken her to bring Nugget down from his paddock.
Amber was in the kitchen with Ernie Ogden, the local constable, a stocky, freckle-faced bloke in his late forties, a likable bloke who Gertrude had known long enough, had had dealings enough with, to call by name. Norman and Moe Kelly, the undertaker, were in the parlour, a wall away from where the mound of poor old Cecelia Morrison lay on her bed, covered by a sheet Gertrude had no desire to lift. She’d spent the past four years dodging that woman when she could.
Ogden lifted the sheet. ‘Constipation can bring on a stroke,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them go like that before.’
‘A normal-sized heart in that sized body can’t be expected to keep on pumping, Ernie.’
‘She was sixty — so your daughter says. She must have had Norman young,’ Ogden said.
‘He’s not forty yet.’
‘Is that right! I would have thought he was my age. So, what do we write down?’
‘Heart stroke,’ she said. ‘Cover both options.’
A doctor may have made a more accurate diagnosis. If they were prepared to put him up for the night, they could bring one in on the train. In an emergency, if the emergency wasn’t too acute, they took the injured party down to Willama, thirty-nine miles of rutted road away. There were three doctors and a hospital down there. Gertrude handled the minor emergencies.
‘It is not an option, Mr Kelly!’
Norman was a wall away but there was no mistaking his voice. He didn’t sound like Woody Creek, didn’t sound like a stationmaster either; he might have made a good parson. Gertrude flipped the sheet back into place while Ogden opened the door. He wasn’t above eavesdropping. Nor was Gertrude. They stood side by side listening.
Cecelia’s demise had traumatised her son; the place in which she’d chosen to do it had embarrassed him; the weight of responsibilities fallen to his rounded shoulders confused him.
His mother had not encouraged him to make decisions. He’d grown to adulthood doing what she’d told him he should do. Moe Kelly was now telling him what he should do, but it was not what his mother would have wanted him to do. This much he knew.
The shock of seeing her so seated, the stress of the past hour, the brandy Amber had poured for him, had drained his strength — and drained it straight into his bladder. Desperate to urinate, but unable to consider returning to the place from which they had so recently removed his mother, Norman’s mind was in turmoil.
‘All I’m saying, Mr Morrison, is we’ll peak at around a hundred today and tomorrow will be hotter. We have to bring a bit of logic to this.’
Moe Kelly’s voice was nasal — too many years of taking sawdust up the nose. It was hard to tell if he was male or female by his voice. He had the height of a woman, hair a woman might have killed for, a deep auburn, thick and wavy, but the muscle and sinew of a man. He could saw and hammer from dawn to dusk, then take his wife out to a ball and dance her off her feet.
‘As you are aware, Mr Kelly, there is no train until Monday evening.’
‘Forget your trains for a minute, Mr Morrison. What I’m trying to tell you decently here is that a woman of your mother’s size can’t wait until tomorrow, let alone Monday.’
Norman grasped the mantelpiece for support as his blood drained down to his ankles, threatening to release his bladder on the way. He’d been an unattractive child who had grown into an ugly man. Now in his fortieth year, the family curse of fat settling on him, his face was being absorbed, his small features forced into its centre. When he’d possessed hair, when he’d stood shoulders straight, head high, he’d brushed the six foot marker, but his hair was gone, his shoulders, permanently rounded; they had rounded more since seeing his mother slumped against the lavatory wall. He was much smaller now. He felt smaller than Moe.
‘You must understand, Mr Kelly, Mother’s relatives are spread far and wide. Her senior sister lives on a vast property in central New South Wales, her senior brother resides in Portsea. There is another in western Victoria. The Reverend Duckworth’s parish is, I believe, a good hour from the city.’
‘Duckworth?’ Moe asked.
‘Mother was a Duckworth. Her brother, the youngest of the family, will wish to read the service.’
Moe released a nasal sigh. ‘Then what I’d suggest, Mr Morrison, is that you get in contact with your Reverend Duckworth and you explain to him that we’ve got none of the city’s fancy storage facilities up here. He’ll no doubt advise you to move things along.’
‘It will be done on Tuesday, with dignity, Mr Kelly,’ Norman said. ‘With dignity.’
‘It’s your funeral,’ Moe said, and he took off out the front door mouthing ‘Duckworth’.
Norman made a beeline for the back door, along the verandah and out to a tall wooden gate in his eastern side fence, which gave him access to the railway yard and to the station’s tin-shed lavatory. He ran the last fifty yards.
Gertrude and Ogden watched him go. Cecelia’s bedroom window looked east.
‘He’s not going to make her wait until Tuesday, is he?’ Ogden said.
‘It won’t be done with much dignity if he does,’ Gertrude said.
They closed the door on their way out. Ernie returned to the kitchen to have another word with Amber, while Gertrude had a look around Cecelia’s parlour — while she wasn’t in it.
There was a display of peacock feathers used to screen the fireplace. Beautiful things set in a large blue-green vase. It, and the feathers, matched the heavy window drapes. It was a fancy room, or the furniture was fancy, designed for better than a railway house — as was Cecelia. The house, built by the railway department to a proven design, looked like a thousand others. Passage leading from front door to rear, giving access to six rooms: the main bedroom, bathroom and kitchen on the west side; the parlour, Cecelia’s bedroom and the nursery on the east side. It had verandahs front and back. Gertrude coveted its verandahs, but she wouldn’t have given a brass farthing for the kitchen. It was a good size, but with the stove always burning and windows on both north and west walls, it was hellishly hot during the summer months.
Ogden left via the rear door. Gertrude waved goodbye then took his place in the kitchen where Amber stood at the north window, looking for Norman.
‘How are you feeling, darlin’?’ Gertrude said.
‘How should I be feeling?’ Amber replied. She was in the eighth month of her third pregnancy. Her firstborn, a girl, named for old Cecelia, was near school age; her last born, a son, Clarence, had died at birth.
‘Vern said you found her.’
‘I didn’t know she was dead. I thought she’d passed out,’ Amber said, placing bread on the table, a wedge of cheese, a little butter melting in a butter dish. She glanced again through the window. ‘I tried to rouse her, then yelled for Norman. He knew she was dead. He went red. He went white. He started shaking like a jelly. I had to run over and get Ogden.’ She set two cups on the table.
Gertrude, eager for crumbs, sat down to listen. Amber was more talkative than usual, or for once had something to talk about. Her eyes were brighter, her face more animated. She wasn’t mourning her mother-in-law.
There were few in town who would, which may have been why Norman was determined to bring his relatives up here. There was nothing more lonely than a funeral no one attended.
‘He’s been over to the station lavatory,’ Amber said, taking down an extra cup, pouring three cups of tea. In the past four years Gertrude could count on one hand the times she’d been offered tea in Norman’s house.
He was surprised to see her in his kitchen. He stood in the doorway eyeing her — or eyeing his mother’s chair, which she’d had the temerity to sit on.
She nodded her greeting while searching for words she might say. Gertrude wasn’t often lost for something to say. ‘A sad time for you, Norman.’
He nodded.
Accustomed to seeing him wearing spectacles, she stared at a face that looked unclothed — his eyes caught with their pants down. They were the big sad eyes of a bloodhound, one who had misplaced his mistress and couldn’t sniff out her trail. Gertrude felt what might have been a wash of pity for her son-in-law. He was chinless, jawless, his cheeks melting into jowls; his snub nose, set too close to his upper lip, looked lost in the bulk of his face. About the only positive thing Gertrude had ever had to say about Norman Morrison was he didn’t look like his beak-nosed mother — though she’d had more character in her face.
She glanced at Amber, and for the umpteen-dozenth time wondered what that girl had ever seen in him. Amber had been cut from a fine fabric, which may not wear well but was too pretty to pass by without a second glance. She’d never reached her mother’s height, had never reached higher than five foot five. She had the build of her father’s family, had taken after them in colouring too. She had their curly hair, blonde once, still blonde where the sun bleached it, but darkening at the root.
‘Are you eating today, Norman?’ Amber called.
He’d disappeared into the bathroom, a small room a wall away from the kitchen. They could hear him in there, but he didn’t reply.
‘Where’s the little one?’ Gertrude never used her granddaughter’s given name. She called her little one, Sissy, pet, darlin’, anything bar Cecelia. Loathed that name — or the woman who had previously worn it had given her an allergy to it.
‘She’s over the road with Maisy. I can’t have her here while . . .’ Amber nodded across the passage to Cecelia’s room.
Maisy, Amber’s friend since kindergarten, had wed George Macdonald, a mill owner twice her age. She’d given him a baby a year and he’d given her everything that opened and shut. At times, Gertrude blamed Maisy for introducing Amber to Norman. At times, Maisy blamed herself for the same thing.
‘Did Moe say when he’d be moving her?’ Gertrude asked.
The dead usually spent a night in Moe Kelly’s cellar, which would be degrees cooler than this house.
‘It took four of them to get her out of the lav and up here. It’ll take more to get her down Moe’s cellar steps,’ Amber said. She sat opposite her mother. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘I’ve cut the bread. Someone may as well eat it. Norman!’ she yelled.
Gertrude helped herself to a slice. She baked her own bread. It was of a more solid construction than the baker’s loaves, filled up more space in the belly, but she never said no to a slice of the baker’s bread.
‘How many rooms have they got over at the hotel, Mum?’
‘Six or more, and they’ve got those sleep-outs the family use in summer,’ Gertrude replied, mouth full.
‘I don’t know where he thinks we’re going to fit everyone.’
‘He’s not expecting all of them to come up here, is he?’
‘They’d travel a week to watch a Duckworth dog fight,’ Amber said.
‘The town won’t see anyone go short of a —’ Gertrude closed her mouth as Norman returned to the doorway.
‘Have you seen my spectacles, Amber?’
‘You took them off before you tried to lift her,’ she said. He flinched, requiring no reminder of that awful moment. ‘Did you look on the shelf down there?’
He glanced in the direction of down there, but didn’t want to go there, so he stood on in the doorway, lost, lonely, his eyes indecently exposed.
‘How many of your folk are likely to make the trip?’ Gertrude said.
‘Two have passed,’ he said.
‘Three now,’ Amber said. ‘Which leaves twelve. Three unmarried. Nine couples, not counting his cousins — and there’s umpteen of them.’
‘Where did your mum fit in?’
He turned to run, aware that he and his mother had never fitted anywhere, then the meaning of Gertrude’s question became apparent. His jowls trembled as he lifted his chin. ‘She was the eighth born,’ he said. ‘The middle man, and not one lost in childhood.’
He flinched again, his eyes daring a glance at the bulge beneath Amber’s apron, then he was away, down the gravelled path to the lavatory near hidden by shrubbery at the bottom of the garden. His world a blur without his spectacles, his bladder could not force him back to that place; his need to see could.
Gertrude was eating a second slice of baker’s bread when Moe Kelly, Ogden, Vern and George Macdonald arrived to move Cecelia to Moe’s cellar. It took time — time enough for the dishes to be washed, the table cleared, time enough for Maisy to bring Sissy home screaming blue murder. Sissy hadn’t appreciated her forced removal from her mother.
Gertrude left them to it and walked out front, hoping to catch Vern on his way home. Her main concern when she’d driven in this morning had been for Amber, but her daughter was sitting in the parlour now, relating her morning to her friend. Gertrude’s afternoon would be better spent in giving her hair a hot olive oil treatment then a damn good wash. Every hair on her head felt as if it was trying to crawl away.