‘It must have taken that kid an hour to get out to where she was,’ Vern said. ‘She was damn near to Bryants’.’
‘My God. What’s he thinking of?’
‘He thought she was with her sister at Macdonalds’. That woman has got too many of her own to take care of without taking care of his.’
Gertrude was seated on a packing case stool, squirting milk into a bucket she held gripped between her knees. ‘He’s struggling.’
‘He’s like a tightrope walker balancing on red-hot wire,’ Vern said. ‘A man alone wasn’t meant to raise kids. It’s not the way nature intended.’
‘I told him I’d raise her but he wanted her home.’
Flies swarmed around the goat and Gertrude, taking advantage of her busy hands. She flicked at them with her elbow, shook them from her face.
‘I heard something today I haven’t heard in a while. The little one told me she’s not allowed to live down here because Sissy said you got the prince’s pills off the trollops. Three guesses as to where that came from.’
‘I’ve heard it put worse.’ Milk squirted, flies buzzed and bit. She flicked at them. ‘Amber was a sweet-natured little girl until he came up here and filled her head with his lies. It’s like that man carried some infection around with him, Vern, some spoiling disease, and she caught it. She was never the same girl after that.’
‘Did you get back any word from the city?’
‘No. God know what she’s living on — if she’s living.’
‘Do you reckon he’s dead yet?’
‘Archie? He’ll never die. I’ve told you that before — or not while I’m alive.’ She moved to the next goat and her fingers worked again. ‘I’ve had the feeling lately that she could be with him.’
He lit a smoke and puffed a while. He hadn’t come down here to talk about Amber or Archie Foote. He had a proposition to put to her, but wanted to get the right reply. He eyed her, sucked on his cigarette, watched her send one goat on its way and start on the next before he broached the subject.
‘You could have some say in the raising of those girls if you lived in town.’
‘Live in that hot box? With Norman?’
‘With me, you flamin’ idiot. I’ve been thinking about bringing Jimmy home, letting him go to school up here for a few years. He was getting on well today with your granddaughter. It could be the making of him, having those girls close by.’
‘Where did you leave him?’
‘In the backyard, following ants, both of them. My housekeeper said she’d keep an eye out.’
‘You could have brought them down with you.’
‘Jimmy’s always pleased to get rid of me.’ He stood puffing smoke, listening to the rhythm of the milk squirting into the bucket. ‘We look to see ourselves grown better in our kids, hope to see ourselves somewhere in them. Every last one of mine ended up ninety-nine per cent their mother.’
‘They’ve got your height — or two of them have.’
‘That girl needs height like she needs a hole in her head. Where’s she going to find a husband?’
‘She’ll meet someone.’
‘I sent her to that university to meet someone and what did I get for my money? A know-all bugger of a girl with her mother’s superior outlook and a face you could crack eggs on.’
‘You’re a cruel man, Vern Hooper.’
‘I’m an honest man — and if you’re honest back, you’ll agree with me. She’s as ugly as sin.’
‘She’s already grown out of her flamin’ self.’ He dropped his smoke and ground it into the dirt. ‘So how about it? Moving in with me? We’ll take a trip to Willama, you come back with a ring on your finger and who’s going to ask if we’re wed or not?’
‘A few years back, I might have dropped my milk bucket and knocked you over running for the car. Things have changed in the last years, Vern. Your girls aren’t going to take kindly to having me move in.’
‘They know I’m not a man to live alone, and if they don’t by now they ought to. They won’t come home. I told them a while back they could toss a coin to see which one of them got to stay home and look after their brother and you’d think I’d suggested they earn their living on the street. How does a man like me end up with a pair of girls who think they’re above living with him?’
‘He educates them.’
She sent her last goat on its way, passed the bucket over the fence, then climbed between the wires. He led the way back to the house.
Apart from Elsie’s lean-to and a couple of chook pens, every building, every gate and most of the fences on her patch of land had been built by Gertrude’s father. He hadn’t been a tidy builder but he’d built strong.
‘You said you’d marry me forty years ago.’
‘You were better looking then.’
‘So were you — but I’m willing to cut my losses.’
‘Take that milk into Elsie for me, will you? I’ll feed my chooks.’
Her father had built her shed, a big one, or built three tall solid walls and roof, then knocked together two massive doors to fill a fourteen-foot gap. Gertrude couldn’t remember them being closed in her lifetime. Ten or fifteen years back, she’d given those doors a second life as walls for her cockerel pen. She made good money from her cockerels at Christmas time.
Her father had planted the orchard — and cared for his trees better than she. She hadn’t pruned them in . . . not since the year Amber wed. There was only so much time in a day, and a damn sight less on a winter’s day.
Good sense told her she ought to move in with Vern. They could never marry. She’d walked out on Archie Foote over thirty years ago, and when she’d tried to divorce him, he’d come back and ruined everything. She hadn’t tried a second time, maybe a case of leaving sleeping dogs lie.
Her granddaughters needed her in town and she knew it. Norman needed her in town. But Elsie and Joey needed her down here too. If Vern’s offer had included taking them with her, she would have gone in a minute. He never said a word against them, but there was no way he’d have them living in his house.
It was Vern who had suggested the lean-to. He’d paid for the roofing iron, donated the timber — his plan to get Elsie and Joey out of her kitchen. Then along came Norman and ruined his plan, for which she’d been grateful. They’d constructed a worthy addition to her house, big enough for bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers, which had cleared a lot of space in her kitchen and bedroom.
She scooped wheat from bag to basin, tossed it to her chooks, then turned to look at her house and Vern leaning in the doorway. His head near brushed the top of her doorframe. He always ducked it low when he entered, more habit than necessity.
She didn’t join him, not immediately, but stood, her back to her chicken-wire gate, attempting to see the house through his eyes. It wasn’t much of a house, but a pretty sight right now. A pink climbing rose had forgotten its place. It clambered up her western bedroom wall and over most of the roof, adding colour and insulation.
Vern’s house, by comparison, was palatial. He had rooms leading off rooms, verandahs leading into rooms, lawns and garden he paid Wally Lewis to keep weed free and a hedge of the finest roses in all of the land. She loved his roses. Maybe she could get used to a bit of luxury.
How would he feel though, when they came knocking on his door in the middle of the night, wanting her to bring the babies?
He was accustomed to it. Since he’d bought his first car, a lot had come knocking on his door.
Did she want to live in town, start wearing skirts instead of trousers? Vern didn’t like her trousers. He’d bought her the most beautiful blouse back before Amber had got involved with Norman. She hadn’t worn it since Amber’s wedding. Not that she had anything against pretty things; she loved pretty things — not a lot of use owning them if you had no place to wear them, though.
She glanced over her paddocks, her land, her safety. She’d sworn once that she’d never leave it; swore too that she’d never again join her life up to any man’s.
Vern wasn’t just any man. Vern was Vern and she loved him like a brother — though not always like a brother. Kissing cousins, she and Vern. We should have wed back when we were kids, she thought. Should have lived on his farm and raised a dozen sons. Should have. Could have. She’d been born to farm, born to breed.
Healing wasn’t in her blood. She was a midwife by default — or her fault for marrying a half-mad quack with itchy feet, who, depending on his mood when he woke in the morning, might set her up in a mud hut with a mob of missionaries intent on healing the hordes of Africa, or install her in a cabin on a luxury liner while he doctored the rich. She’d spent the best part of eight years following him around the world, and had nothing good to say about those years, other than what little she’d learnt of healing, she’d learnt from him — or on him.
She’d manhandled a black baby into the world one night when Archie had ridden off for supplies and stayed away for three weeks. The father of the babe had paid her with a scrawny chicken. She’d wrung its skinny neck and fried it for her dinner, picked its bones for breakfast then made soup out of them that night.
She’d done her first stitching of flesh on Archie when he’d come home bleeding like a stuck pig from a two-inch gash over his left ear. A mob of Spaniards had done their best to make her a widow at twenty-one, and in hindsight she would have been better off had they been successful. She’d stitched him up and they’d moved on.
He was an opium addict, had been an addict when she’d wed him, though she hadn’t known it at the time. He’d told her he had weak lungs, that the crate of medicine he’d carried to Africa was vital to his survival. Maybe it was; laudanum was a potent mixture of opium and alcohol. She hadn’t known what it was back then. She hadn’t known much back then. She’d cried for him the first time she’d seen him crazed by his need for his medicine. And when the madness left him, when he’d promised to use no more, she’d believed him. In Germany, in Japan, she’d believed him. Argentina, when he’d used his drugs on her and aborted her baby boy and almost killed her in the doing of it, she stopped believing.
‘All fixed, Tru,’ he’d said. ‘All fixed.’
She’d tried to leave him in Argentina. He’d told her she’d never leave him, that she was necessary to him. He hadn’t needed her; he’d needed the money his family paid him to stay out of Australia, and would continue to pay him while she was at his side. They wouldn’t let her starve, he’d said, though she’d done her fair share of starving.
For near on eight years he’d collected that quarterly payment. It had followed them to India, to his opium paradise, to her heated-up hell. The trains were purgatory. They’d spent days on them, travelling native class, hard seats, chickens squawking, livestock bleating. The stink, the heat — she’d passed out and known why. Archie, too sick and sorry for himself, hadn’t noticed he’d planted another baby inside her.
There’d been nothing much left of Gertrude by then, other than hope for her baby, other than determination that he wouldn’t find it, other than the knowledge that she had to get away from him before he found out about this baby and murdered it too.
He’d got his money, got his opium, and she’d watched him and waited, able to read him now like her father could read the weather in the morning sky. She was almost four months along with Amber the day her stars had slipped into alignment. She’d got away.
Until her dying day, she’d never forget that coming home. The smell of the town. The scent of wet gum leaves. The goats, the grass, the orchard just bursting into bud. And the sounds of home, the cackle of chooks, warble of magpies. And her mother’s scream. And her arms, and her tears, and her father holding her, and the smell of his pipe tobacco. Safe. Safe. Home.
She’d been back for a week when Mick Boyle’s son went down with scarlet fever. Two weeks later, half of the kids in town started dropping like flies. She hadn’t known much, but the little she’d known was fifty years more advanced than what old Granny McPherson, the then midwife, knew of treating the disease. She’d worked with her for weeks, and about all she could recall of that time was the relief of being home and of her baby fluttering around inside her.
Granny McPherson brought Amber into the world, a pale, bald little mite, but with all of her bits and pieces in the right places. She hadn’t looked like Archie, not at birth. Maybe as a three year old she’d shown a fleeting resemblance to Archie’s sister, but she’d outgrown that. She’d never missed having a father, or she hadn’t while her grandparents had lived. They’d adored her and she’d adored them. Lost them too early. One after the other they’d gone, he first, and less than a year later she’d followed him.
Just Gertrude and her darlin’ girl then, living too far from town, scratching for every penny. And old Granny McPherson growing too old to deliver a difficult baby. Gertrude was young enough, strong enough. She hadn’t wanted the job, but they’d kept on coming to her door.
How many times had she lifted Amber from a warm bed then set her down on a strange cold couch? One too many. Amber had grown old enough to resent it. She’d grown old enough to resent any calls on her mother’s time, Vern included.
After the death of his first wife, he’d asked Gertrude to wed. She was thirty-nine at the time, young enough to have half a dozen sons. They’d had a daughter each. They’d wanted a few sons.
Fools, both of them. She should have moved out to his farm back then and lived in sin, but her own and Vern’s upbringing wouldn’t allow that. She’d heard nothing from Archie in thirteen years. Vern was convinced that he was dead. She wasn’t, so they’d set the wheels of divorce in motion. The solicitor sent the papers to Archie, care of his father, and six weeks later the sod turned up on her doorstep.
That was the end of her marriage plans — and her relationship with Amber. She blamed Archie Foote for ruining the bond she’d had with her girl. He’d rip a rare flower from its stem and crush it beneath his boot, for no reason other than he could.
And he wasn’t a good place for her mind to go wandering near nightfall. The sun and hard labour scared him away. Come nightfall and every memory of him was like a pit of quicksand, waiting to suck her down.
‘How old is she now, Trude?’
Gertrude turned her eyes from the past to Vern. He was still standing in the doorway, smoking again, maybe watching her face remembering. He could read her well, as she could read him.
‘She was thirty-two this year.’
‘The little one, Jennifer,’ he clarified.
‘Jenny? She’s not long gone four.’
‘She was talking away to Jimmy like a little old woman today — discussing tombstones.’
‘That’s Norman’s doing. He speaks to those girls as he might to his parson uncle.’
‘So, how about it — moving into town and having some say in her raising?’
Maybe he glimpsed the thought of refusal, which wasn’t what he’d come out here for.
‘Come down to Willama with me when I go to pick up the Abbot boy. We’ll stick a ring on your finger.’
‘I’ve still got one somewhere, Vern. I’ve been thinking about it, but we’re past making the change.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ he said. ‘They’re letting him out on Monday morning. We could go down on Sunday night.’
She sighed. And why shouldn’t she go with him? Maybe she didn’t want to move in with him, but there was no good reason why a couple of their age couldn’t spend time together.
‘I wouldn’t mind doing some shopping down there . . .’
‘We’ll make it an overnight shopping trip. Give you plenty of time for shopping,’ he said, happy now, that grin splitting his face and shaping it up just fine.
Something about that man’s grin had a softening effect on her heart, something about it — about him — made her smile.
‘I haven’t got that much to spend,’ she said.