Let me tell you about men. Great Aunt Beulah drew Anna to her in an exaggerated pantomime of dread secrets being withheld from ordinary ears: We don’t want that old bat listening in. Her outer and inner garments crepitated, the springs moaned in her chair, she drew in a ragged breath: My father was a hard father to us, and a hard husband to our mother. Men were, in those days. It was expected of them. They ruled the roost and watch out if you disagreed with them or disgraced them in any way or disobeyed them. Anna heard a new sound, of ancient bellows huffing into action, and realised that Great Aunt Beulah was laughing: Poor old Father, I did all three. Then she was crying: The one true love of my life and he forbade me to be with him. Anna sought out her mother, who confirmed everything: He was a hard man, all right, your great grandfather. Rarely smiled, apparently. A big, bony fellow, according to the photos we have of him. We always believed he treated my dad badly. Made life a kind of test for him, always setting him obstacles. For example, his will. Enlightened, you might say, leaving it all to his daughters. I’d say pragmatic—he thought my dad wasn’t coming back. And I’d say mean—he wanted my dad to have to struggle, as he’d had to struggle. When Grandfather Ison died, leaving everything to Kitchener, Anna’s mother sat drained of energy at the kitchen table, twisting a handkerchief in her hands: Just goes to show, if someone does you a mean act it can make you behave meanly to someone else. Hardness breeds hardness, Anna, and don’t you forget it. Hardness and the desire to control everything around you. Anna said: Dad’s not like that. Her mother smiled: No, he’s not. Well, maybe a little. A father can’t afford to be too slack when his kids are growing up. So Anna began to look for signs of hardness in her father. She could not see any, but one day Hugo began to go through a peculiar phase. He’d announce: At footy, Dad, at school, and trail off. Yes? And blurt out: I got six kicks. Two more than yesterday. Or he’d say: I haven’t cried once since Saturday, and then he’d wait, watching for an acknowledgement, but what he got was always faintly crushing: Try for seven or eight kicks tomorrow, all right? Let’s hope months and months go by before you cry again, okay? Anna brought Lockie Kelly home to meet everyone. Afterwards, when he was gone, her father said: The Kellys are Catholics, you know. So? Anna demanded. Her father was harsh suddenly: So he’ll put you up the duff and then where will you be? I don’t want you seeing him again, you hear me? You can do better than the bog-Irish Kellys, for Christ’s sake. He pushed the air at her with his palms: Nope, subject’s closed, find yourself someone else. When Lockie received his call-up papers, he drove the length of the Main North Road on a day of hail and sleet to show Anna. She looked Lockie up and down scornfully: It’s like the government’s some kind of autocratic father and you’re a bunch of biddable sons, doing as you’re told. Three years into the marriage, Sam said to Anna: I’ve slaved my guts out for this place, new methods, new equipment, new crop strains, you name it, and the old man still treats me like I’m in short pants. A wage? Christ, pocket money more like it. Having to account for how we spend every penny. Giving you a hard time if you ring your mother, planning our kids’ education, wearing us down with all this conspiracy rubbish, totally controlling our lives. What’s the bet my mother doesn’t even know how to write a cheque? I want to make a go of it on my own. How about it, sweetie, you game? But blood counts for something in the end and patriarchs need sons. Sam and his mother got the lot when the old man died. When Anna thought about it, years later, it occurred to her that Wesley Showalter had breezed on through life after knocking her off the road because for generations the Showalters had been seen as patriarchs of the district, a habit of mind not easily altered. People saw it as a shame that her son had been killed, but not a shame that Wesley Showalter had been negligent and got away with it. Old attitudes linger. Sam has lost all that he invested in the Park’s sperm-bank scheme, yet he can’t bring himself fully to blame Wesley Showalter. The Showalter name stretches back in time. It means patrician sons and wealth and something solid. Anna has come upon this passage in Mrs Showalter’s 1950 history of the Park:
Young Hugo Ison, of the original Ison brothers, visited the Pandowie head station on Noltenius Creek, where he noted that a neighbour had ‘as ornaments a couple of blackfellows’ skulls pegged through the eye sockets to the wall of his hut’. Hugo also recorded that he went hunting with another man (who will remain nameless, out of deference to his descendants) reputed to have shot more Aborigines than anyone else in the district, and who, while discharging his firearm at a mob of kangaroos with young Hugo, boastfully declared that he ‘never missed a black who wandered into his sights’.
Anna wonders if that man was a Showalter. Maybe Mrs Showalter wanted the fact to be recorded but could not bring herself to name her husband’s forebears. One day Anna will hear Rebecca argue: Patriarchy’s talent is for compartmentation, separating intellect from emotion, emotion from action, vision from reality. It sets up disconnections and institutionalises them. Women, on the other hand, connect. We don’t fix the boundaries of our egos. We find it difficult to distinguish between our own needs and those of others. And Rebecca will hark back to her father’s confusion about the new baby and family notions: Think about it, Mum—when Mikey was killed, Dad was left with me, a daughter, and we all know that daughters don’t carry on the family name. Not only that, I ended up living with another woman. Not only that, I presented him with a granddaughter without being the biological mother. And to top it all off, she was conceived as though his half of the race were irrelevant. Remember that lapel button we pinned to her little jumpsuit?—‘My family is my mother, my mother and me’. It was ages before he could bring himself to introduce the poor little thing as his granddaughter, or his daughter’s child. It was always: This is the child of my daughter’s friend. Poor Dad. Anna will retort: That’s enough, Becky. He grew to love and accept, that’s all that matters.