The last time Gertrude had harnessed her old horse into the cart was the night she’d delivered Sophie Duffy’s baby. Nugget, grown old, had grown lame. His age brought her own age home to her. As did Charlie White’s son-in-law. She’d delivered Alfred Timms, had watched him march off to war with the other boys. He was a balding middle-aged man now. With her horse lame, Alfred drove down each week to pick up the eggs and deliver her staples. Harry collected any mail she might have, not that many wrote to her. She had no real need to go into town.
In some dark pocket of her heart, she still felt love for her daughter; on a few dark nights, she worried about her, but never during daylight hours. She’d done her best, and her best was all that could be done.
Vern spent his Saturdays with Gertrude — now that her house was again her own. He ate the evening meal with her, sat with her in the moonlight — and went home at dawn.
He gave advice too readily — perhaps a Hooper failing.
‘I told you you’d be overrun by them,’ he said, eyeing the new house in the goat paddock, a small house, on tall stilts. Elsie had produced a son ten months after the wedding. She was pregnant again.
‘I told you I always wanted a big family.’
‘Your family is in town, where you ought to be — and your flamin’ granddaughter is making sheep’s eyes at my fool of a boy.’
‘She’s built to bear Hoopers,’ Gertrude said.
‘He hasn’t worked out what women are for yet.’
‘I’ve never worked that out myself,’ she said. ‘What men are for.’
‘I’m not having it.’
‘I could see a lot worse for both of them.’
‘She’s got nothing between her ears.’
‘Is that the first place men look?’
‘I’ve sent him out to the farm for a month or two.’
‘Did he want to go?’
‘I don’t know what he wants and never did.’
‘Talk to him and find out then.’
‘I saw her trying to kiss him a few nights back.’
‘Are you sure he wasn’t trying to kiss her?’
‘She was going at him.’
‘Unless he was fighting her off, putting a few miles between them won’t stop her kissing him — as I seem to recall. Leave them alone, Vern.’
‘I’m not having it.’
‘Maybe this is the way it was meant to work out, you and me a generation on, our blood mixed in our grandkids.’
‘Duckworth and Nicholas blood. She’s not you, and he’s not me. Lorna is more me. She should have had my grandkids.’
He’d developed a smidgen of respect for Lorna these past months. She was the one who had suggested sending Jim out to the farm. And she couldn’t stand Sissy Morrison; they had that in common.
‘You need to spend a week or two out at the farm with him and knock a bit of that weight off,’ Gertrude said patting his expanding waistline. ‘You used to cut a fine figure on horseback.’
‘I haven’t been on a horse in fifteen years.’
‘And look what it’s done to you. Your belly is keeping pace with the size of your cars.’
‘You’re an insulting bugger of a woman tonight, Trude.’
‘I’m just speaking the truth. Look at Charlie White. He’s still riding that bike like a madman, and not a skerrick of arthritis in him and no sign of a belly.’
‘Been giving him the eye, have you?’
Charlie had been at the house when Vern arrived. Since his accident he’d taken to riding down occasionally on fine Saturdays. Gertrude might have preferred his company on rainy Saturdays, but she offered him tea and let him talk about Jean. Charlie had aged ten years in the days after he’d lost his wife, though most would admit he hadn’t aged much since.
Age was on Gertrude’s mind tonight, her horse’s, her own. She needed a bottle of hair dye and had meant to ask Charlie to order some in. He used to say that she and Jean had discovered the fountain of youth in those little bottles. They’d never called it dye. It was their forever-young juice — and Gertrude was overdue for a dose of it. And her eyesight was letting her down lately. Years ago she’d bought herself a pair of glasses for close work. They were next door to useless now. She’d need to get into town the next time the eye chap came up. Vern would drive her in if she asked. He liked her asking. She liked her independence, and for independence sake, she needed a new horse.
‘He was a four year old when I bought him. I worked it out the other night that I’ve had him for twenty years.’
‘You’ve had me longer.’
‘True.’
‘That’s what he used to call you — Tru. I can’t hear that word without thinking about that bastard.’
‘He called me worse. You might keep your eye out for a horse for me, Vern. I hate being stuck down here, reliant on people.’
‘You’ve had Murph take a look at him?’
‘He says there’s swelling in his fetlock, that he’s too old for it to improve much.’
‘I’ve got swelling in my fetlock.’
‘Charlie is fine in the fetlock.’
He kissed her when he left, told her he’d speak to Paul Jenner who might be interested in selling his carthorse. He’d bought Vern’s old car.
She watched him drive off, his headlights washing over her land, and she thought of his first car, which he’d refused to drive after dark. A lot had changed in the last ten or so years — cars, her horse. The world had changed. During the twenties she’d delivered most babies born in Woody Creek. Women gave birth in Willama now, or the bulk of them did. The blokes on susso had done a lot of work on that road, built it up where it was low, graded and gravelled it, and, bad times or not, there were more cars around to get those women to Willama. She’d never asked for the job of midwife, didn’t miss being called out in the middle of the night. And dyed hair or not, she knew she was getting too old for the job. Her seventieth birthday was only two years away.
Seventy. It sounded ridiculous. Her father had died at seventy-two. Her mother had died a week before she’d turned seventy. At the time, Gertrude had considered them old. It could put fear into her if she thought about it. Not the dying part. The dead were dead and not worrying about much, but the dependence on others before the dying, that’s what concerned her. She needed to get on a horse’s back again, needed her bottle of forever-young juice to keep old age on the run.
‘The best years of my life, these last years,’ she told the night as she looked across the paddock to Elsie’s house. ‘The best — barring Amber.’
She still had three hundred pounds in the post office bank. She had a bunch of kids growing up in her top paddock. She had her accidental daughter, who loved her, and her accidental son too, and she had Joey, her boy, the love of her life.
She’d drawn that boy into the world, raised him as a boy should be raised, and she’d see him to maturity too and be around to meet his sons. Old Grandpa Hooper had sat a horse into his nineties, then dropped dead one day after a good meal. That was the way to live life, take off after dinner, the mind intact.
‘I don’t need Jenner’s old carthorse,’ she told the night. ‘I’ll get myself a young one with a bit of fire in his blood.’