There are to be eleven of them. Meredith, and Alun with his family, are the last to arrive. They pull over when the car has rattled past the cowstop. Alun and Meredith look across their father’s land to the sea. Dry pasture, with sinuous movement only in those paddocks which have been shut up. A breeze from the sea: the land breeze is rare, a memory of the night. The beach between the land and the sea is an uneasy meeting place. It cants steeply, and the unstable shingle rattles back behind each wave. The brothers feel no need to comment on what they see, for superimposed upon it is their common experience. They have long before made any communication that mattered with this landscape. Alun lets his breath out in an eloquence which says, yes, here it is. ‘Why are we stopping?’ says Jane. It reminds her father to go on down the track towards the house.
The family appear on the verandah, come out on to the grass, when they see Alun’s car. Mother has a thick apron over her dress. The apron has Pegs written on its broad, front pocket, but she uses it only in the kitchen. David’s boy dances in front of the car. ‘ They’re here. They’re here. We can have our presents.’
‘Presents after dinner, Rhys. You know that.’
Alun and Meredith see their father and Uncle Llewelyn behind the others, both with the same shy smile of reticence struggling with affection. Their father has his ankle-height slippers on despite the heat, and a pale, blue shirt that was bought to go with the best suit. ‘Ah hah,’ says Uncle Llewelyn during the greetings, ‘Ah hah’, and he smacks his hands together like two bricks, to show his relish in the family reunion. A light aircraft flies overhead, an intrusion on communal solitude. The family watch it pass; the sound comes back in the amphitheatre of the hills behind the house.
‘Now we’re all here,’ says Mother, and she leads the way into the house. Meredith and David linger at the front door, touching the verandah supports as if they wish to reach out to each other. The unfamiliarity of brothers is a surprise to them.
‘Nothing much changes, does it?’ says Meredith. ‘It’s stepping right back again.’ David thinks his brother lives too far away, and has forgotten what things were like. Then he absorbs new things into the pattern of the old. ‘Try me then,’ says Meredith.
‘The open hayshed wasn’t built when you left.’
‘It was. I remember collecting eggs in it. Several of the leghorns used to lay there.’
‘No, that was the old stack. It wasn’t even in the same place, but further back towards the yards. That hayshed wasn’t built till you’d gone to Auckland.’
‘It seems the same to me.’
‘The farm’s going back. I come over when I can, and Uncle Llewelyn still helps a lot. But Dad’s not the farmer he was. There’s hardly any cropping done at all now. All the fences need work. He still has sound stock though. I’ll say that. Always good with stock, Dad was.’
‘He hasn’t the energy anymore, I suppose.’
‘No.’
As they go through into the living room they can hear the excitement of Michael and Jane, helping Rhys put the presents beneath the tree. And they can smell the Christmas dinner. The fragrance is of this Christmas dinner, and all the others. There is a poignancy in the repetition. ‘And you’re not married yet,’ says David.
‘I’ve kept my freedom.’
‘What’s the matter with you? Deirdre, Meredith says that he dislikes women.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘What girl would have him?’ says Deirdre.
‘I don’t know why we married one of them each,’ says Margaret. ‘They’ve nothing to recommend them.’
‘Just sheer effrontery caught us off guard,’ says Deirdre.
‘Animal magnetism. We all have it.’ Meredith makes as if to kiss them both.
Uncle Llewelyn listens as he stands in the kitchen to enjoy the preparations for dinner. He marvels at the relaxed abuse, says ‘Ah hah’, smiles at the contestants in turn. Mother pushes on his back and he moves amiably out of the kitchen.
‘I think we’ll dish up,’ she says to the other women.
Three roast geese, larded with bacon strips, and with a thyme stuffing. Bread sauce, peas, new potatoes, sweet corn, and salad as a concession to the heat. The sweat runs down the side of David’s face as he eats. The quick sweat of a fit man. He opens the windows behind him, and the sound of the sea and the gulls comes louder to those of the family grown unaccustomed to the place. David, his parents and Uncle Llewelyn are no more aware of it that their own heartbeats. Rhys is rebuked for wanting to pull his cracker before it is time. ‘Own geese, own bacon,’ says Uncle Llewelyn on his brother’s behalf. ‘Everything but the corn.’ Mother is moved to a further distribution.
‘Meredith, you’ll have some more peas and potatoes.’
‘I couldn’t, thanks.’
‘Nonsense.’ She spoons vigorously, as she would have done twenty-five years before. ‘All our own, as your father says.’
His father’s smile refuses credit for what he has achieved, and what he hasn’t said.
Steamed pudding, with ten cent pieces smuggled in on the way from the kitchen to please the children. Pavlova, fruit salad and farm cream which is not whipped, yet so thick that it must be encouraged with a spoon. Some of the crackers don’t explode, but all yield party hats, debased elephants and riddle sheets. Nuts, ginger, chocolate, and each adult pretending not to know what’s black and white and read all over.
The heat and the occasion redden Mother’s face; not her cheeks, but beneath her eyes, the side of her nose, and again along the chin line. Emotion in their mother takes a form of fierceness which they remember from their childhood. Margaret lets slip that Alun has bought her a car for Christmas. It’s waiting for her in Sydney. ‘I hope it brings happiness,’ says his mother, and is angry for some time afterwards. She wants no glimpse of a way of life that is not her own. Alun is general manager designate for Australasia, but here Mother is determined he shall not outgrow the old relationships. ‘Alun was always the complaining one,’ she explains to the family. ‘Always wanted something better than he had. I remember him moaning when he had to walk up to the school bus in winter. Neither of the other boys minded the same.’ Alun smiles. He understands that every mother must punish a son who can succeed without her. Yet his mother’s intensity surprises him. David is the favourite: he became a farmer like his father. None of them resent that, least of all David, who has the greatest cause. Being the favourite is a test of character. ‘You were always difficult to please,’ says Mother to Alun. ‘Maybe Sydney will please you if your own country doesn’t.’
The men sit on the verandah. They drink the beer which was not considered seemly at the table. Uncle Llewelyn is very much like his brother. His legs are too short for his heavy shoulders and forearms, and his face is lumpy and indistinct. Mother always says the brothers are typical of Welsh pudding-face working class. Uncle Llewelyn was his battalion’s wrist wrestling champion in North Africa. He and his brother sit there, with green, crepe party hats above their lined, pudding faces. They confront the hills of the farm with composure, and add their presence although saying little. They are not accomplished with machines, and listen to David talking of the new seed drier. He is acknowledged to understand the voice of the motor. Yet with all his enthusiasm and youth, he has the gentleness of his father and uncle. A gentleness compounded to sadness perhaps. In many years the nature of it has eluded Alun and Meredith, yet on each return they recognise its presence. As the scent of ocean is never forgotten, yet impossible to convey without its presence.
‘It’s a nuisance to be growing old,’ says Uncle Llewelyn. ‘Do you know I can’t sleep a night through now without a piss. I’m up for a piss every hour or two. And I find it difficult sometimes to swallow toast and bread. It gets stuck at the top of my chest.’ The others laugh, and Uncle Llewelyn is not offended. It is accepted that a list of ailments will be mocked provided there’s no immediate pain.
‘A wife would cure everything,’ says David. It is the best joke of the day.
The children have been waiting for the women to finish the dishes. They raise a cry for presents. ‘Time for presents then, is it,’ says Uncle Llewelyn, when Mother has given approval by her arrival. He carries Jane effortlessly to the lounge, the broad forearm a bench for her. The Christmas tree is a pine branch in a brass preserving pan, and the family presents are heaped around it. Mother allows the children to announce and deliver each in turn. It is the social ritual of which Confucius so approved. To Uncle Llewelyn from Meredith, to Alun and Margaret from Mum and Dad, to Uncle David from Michael, to Jane from Grandfather. Mother allows no distraction from the interlacing address to family members. Whatever the disparity of age or conviction, she will have it established that this is the family; this is the pledge to a continuity which cannot be disputed. This is the lineage of them all. To Mum from Deirdre; to Grandfather from Rhys. There is a lot of nodding and display; appraisals and thanks. The children wrench out their presents, but Mother picks at the sellotape, and folds the special paper with the future in mind. Jane cries because of the excitement, and because she hasn’t a separate present for Uncle Llewelyn. Meredith gapes a little in the heat. He thinks of the beer still in the fridge.
It is the women’s turn to rest, and the men’s responsibility to take the children for a swim in the stock dam. David and Meredith carry bottles of beer and orange, to put in the water there. Michael is amazed by all the droppings, and Rhys, though younger, laughs at his ignorance of the country. ‘But there’s poop everywhere,’ says Michael.
‘A farm’s mostly poop,’ says Uncle Llewelyn. ‘Poop and grass. Two forms of the same thing.’
‘I don’t like it,’ says Jane.
Uncle Llewelyn is very gallant. ‘Quite right. Ladies never do,’ he says.
The ground of the gateways is worn bare by the passing of sheep, but, more than that, the earth itself is worn away, so that there is a dip which becomes a puddle in the winter. The gates drag even so, and are held by a collar of thick wire. The ends of the wire have been turned to a latch by the power of their father’s hands.
The stock dam is large enough to keep the water clean. No one considers trusting the sea, for its undertow is a local legend. There remains a sense of irony, however, if only visual. For the group of them gather at the stock dam while the ocean stretches to the horizon. The three children squeal, and stir up the mud to make the water yellow. They smack with their hands, and splash the men on the bank.
‘I stood on something.’
‘Eels, eels,’ they shout, enjoying the terror of their imagination.
‘When do you leave for Australia?’ David asks.
‘I must be in Sydney in three weeks.’ Alun lies on his side, propped on an elbow. He draws grass stems from their sheaths, and lances them into the pond. A flock of yellow heads sweeps by, bobbing like corks.
‘Sometimes I feel I’d like a change myself. Living and dying where you were born isn’t so wonderful a prospect.’
‘It makes self-deception that much harder.’ Alun plucks the grass, thinking of the way to continue. The wind blows his lank hair from one side of his face to the other. ‘Change can sometimes seem a personal progress, when the essential journey bears no relation to distance at all.’ Alun was able to talk of things that would make his family uneasy from any other source.
‘Get your head right under, Michael,’ calls Uncle Llewelyn. As he watches the children he shares their joy. He laughs when they do, his calls match theirs. He sits with his brother, a little apart from his nephews.
‘I’d quite like to farm in Australia,’ says David. ‘I saw parts of Victoria that I could be happy in.’
‘Imagine Mum and Dad if you went.’ Wearing Joseph’s coat has never been easy. The skuas gobble like turkeys, or give their keening cry, which hints at an essential hollowness of things.
Meredith, David and Alun watch their father. He has worn glasses for years, yet they are still an oddity. He puts them on awkwardly. The thin stems puzzle his fingers. The glasses are incongruous across his seamed, moon face. Glasses and hats don’t suit their father. He has greater idiosyncrasies, with half a life of another way, and not even a letter since his parents died. Only Uncle Llewelyn can join in tacit reminiscence. Nothing is regretted it seems, but something sacrificed nevertheless for the new life. Alun points out to his brothers that their father never faces the sea when he rests. As a test they stand and talk to him, drawing him around to them. But soon he unthinkingly turns again, not right away from them, but so he can regard the downland, and the gully running up towards the road. He lifts his glasses, and rubs where they have rested. The Welsh are not great lovers of the sea in spite of all their coastline. Welsh men are miners, preachers, farmers and soldiers. Beneath the extravagance of song and poetry, an inward-looking people. Their father wasn’t poet or singer, but he had a Celtic heart. His absurd glasses catch the sun, so that for an instant as his sons watch, the lenses silver over and his calm eyes are lost. His best blue shirt is open,, and the hair of his chest begins abruptly at the razor’s edge, grey and so dense it hides the skin. Meredith moves to get more beer, and Uncle Llewelyn brings his brother’s glass and his own. David tells the children to keep away from the top end of the dam where there might be snags. They have had enough. Rhys and Michael begin to quarrel over the one stick they have between them. Jane is thin, and as she comes from the deeper water her knee caps flick up and down as she shivers. ‘Throw that stick away now, boys,’ says Alun. ‘We’re going back to the house.’
‘Let’s all play cricket,’ says Michael. ‘We always play cricket on Christmas Day.’
Uncle Llewelyn is asleep on the verandah. His hands are as broad as they are long, and the folded skin of his brows almost hides his eyes. The dogs are not usually allowed within the house enclosure, but nothing is denied the children on Christmas Day. So sheepdogs play awkwardly at being pets. Jane has gathered Uncle Llewelyn’s presents on his lap while he sleeps: tobacco pouch, patterned socks, petrol vouchers, handkerchiefs, cigars, parka, a box of twelve-gauge cartridges number five shot. There must be a good deal more to Uncle Llewelyn than such things represent, but it’s not subject to easy scrutiny. If he is ever disappointed at being a supernumerary at his brother’s Christmas, there is no sign of it. No outward show of affection either, yet they are rarely far apart. Every task on both farms which could not be done by one man, was accomplished by the two of them through the years.
Meredith stands for a time beside his mother, and they watch Alun and David play cricket with the children. Physical work hasn’t yet stiffened David, and he is lithe and admirable. Alun has tapering, office legs. ‘Soft as butter,’ says his mother. ‘The boy’s as soft as butter.’ There is an element of real contempt. ‘And what does he want to go to Australia for, I’d like to know. We kept hearing how well he was doing in his job here.’
‘It’s a big job he’s got over there. I don’t think you realise just how much responsibility Alun has in his work. You’d be surprised, I think.’
‘I blame Margaret as well. All these ideas. A car for herself, she said, and talk of a sauna bath in the house.’
‘You know it’s not Margaret. Things have always been different in the city; different tempo, other goals.’
‘What Alun had wasn’t good enough. He was always the discontented one.’ She wouldn’t relent. Any threat to old values and established patterns was received with bitterness. David must endure being favourite, Meredith being taken for granted, and Alun the guilt of finding his parents’ life insufficient.
Tea is an attack again upon the food of midday, with the addition of ham, Christmas cake and strawberries. Daylight saving makes it only afternoon, and there are hours and hours for travelling, Mother says. She is reluctant to think of any member of the family leaving. For this one day in the year she can protect herself from the bare hills.
The bacon on the last goose has shaped itself to the breast, and Uncle Llewelyn makes a sandwich of it and thyme stuffing. ‘Costs are beating us,’ says Uncle Llewelyn. ‘No matter what we do about production, the costs beat us every time. Most of the expenses we have no control over.’ Uncle Llewelyn turns to his food again, and the pause is more than their mother can allow.
‘Every union hanger-on in the country, every unnecessary middle-man and bureaucrat taking a fat living.’ Her bitterness is unashamed. The family, each with an individual expression of wry restraint, carry on eating as she talks. Mother hasn’t been educated to expect two sides to every situation, and the lifetime here hasn’t suggested it.
‘Workers in the city. . .’ begins Margaret, but then she catches Alun’s eye and falters. His mother carries on ready to start on the freezing workers, and her voice quickens in anticipation.
Michael puts strawberries into his mouth one after another. The sequence goes on and on. Uncle Llewelyn watches in admiration. David argues some point with his mother. ‘Have you got the tree hut ready?’ Meredith asks his mother. When he was ten David stole a fruit cake, and hid in the tree hut all night. No one had disturbed him, and the next morning he had returned for his breakfast, bringing the remains of the fruit cake as a token of submission. The children enjoy the story. David only grins and says he can’t remember it. Each of the boys is the subject of some childhood anecdote, and the wives have learnt to join the laughter and the provocation.
Alun helps his mother sort the dishes to be washed. For a while they are alone by the window, and approach each other with a concern that always has the guise of exasperation. ‘This job.’ The manner in which she says it has a message in itself. ‘This job of yours in Australia. Your father and I hoped that you’d be happy in Auckland.’
‘The firm has its central office in Sydney. It’s the opportunity, you see. It won’t come again.’
‘I thought at least you might have considered your father. I thought your own country would satisfy you.’
‘It wasn’t easy. Margaret and I spent a lot of time talking it over.’
‘But you’re going nevertheless.’ Each, with an effort, says no more about it, for it is Christmas Day. They work in silence until Deirdre comes back from collecting the best cutlery.
‘Uncle Llewelyn and Michael are still eating,’ she says.
The view is ever the same from the window above the bench. The blank wall of the garage, old when he was a boy, older now. The wood is swollen and distorted as rotten wood is. Successive coats of paint disguise the worst of it. At the corners the decay is complete, for there the water can get into the joints of the timber. He could put a fist right through it without pain. On the garage wall are the two safes for dog tucker, or game before it’s dressed: gauze sides and simple wooden latches. The brown grass of the lawn ironed to the contours of the ground. The macrocarpa hedge with holes maintained in its denseness by nesting birds. The pipe-frame gate to keep out the hens and dogs, and a clean sack folded on the path before it. A pipe hammered into the garden, with the radio earth attached. And the dry bank beyond the macrocarpa, with the ice-plant like a wave mocking the drought. Behind it the pines, the downs, the persistence of the ocean’s sound.
At the end of the day they are at the front of the house, and Meredith and Alun are wanting to leave. The children are still playing. ‘Don’t let the dog lick you, Michael. Never let a dog lick you,’ says Mother. ‘They’ve got germs you see, dear. In their mouths. Wash your face and hands, and use the hand towel.’ Margaret begins to gather their things into the car. When Michael comes from washing, Alun tells his mother that they must leave. ‘But you can stay the night. Of course you can stay the night. The children would love that.’ She is sweeping them briskly along with her opinions, establishing any opposition to her views as selfish. Alun is surprised at the anger it raises within him. Anger not so much at her doing it, but at her assumption that he would not recognise it, that he and his brothers had not known and suffered it all their lives.
‘We can’t stay, Mother. I told you when we wrote. I’m sorry, but we must be away by eight, with the distance we’ve got before us.’
‘Very well.’ The red patches on her face flame.
Their father is baffled by the need to say goodbye. He shakes his head as he says the words. He puts a large hand on Michael’s head, and then on Jane’s. ‘God bless now,’ he says. The cadence of his youth has never been lost.
David comes with his brothers up to the turn-off. The three of them get out and stand together for the last time that day. ‘I may have had my last Christmas here,’ says Alun.
‘Australia’s not that far away.’
‘It’s not so much that. Mum’s getting worse. All this compulsive manipulation of other people. We seem to have lost patience with each other. It’s difficult for Margaret too.’
‘That’s why I’ve come this far with you, in a way. Not Margaret, but Mum, and what she’s been trying to tell you both all day, and couldn’t. The more difficult it was, the angrier she got.’
‘About what?’
‘Dad’s going blind. One eye’s all but had it now, and the other is just a matter of time. There’s nothing can be done, they say, nothing can be done.’ The brothers look down to avoid the glare of the setting sun. Margaret has no knowledge of what has been said. She leans across the car to the window.
‘We should be starting, Alun.’ He gives an odd gesture of dismissal and agreement.
‘Is that the way of it then,’ he says to David.
‘We should go back down to them,’ says Meredith.
‘Not now. Not on Christmas Day. It’ll only upset them both. Dad won’t talk about it, even to me. Like everything else it’s left to Mum. And this time she can’t do it. For blindness she can’t find a beginning.’ David doesn’t find it easy himself. So little is words, so much is feeling. ‘I’ll write to you,’ he says, ‘and I’ll get Mum to write to you.’
Meredith and Alun watch him go back; his long shadow reaches down the track ahead of him. ‘Poor Dad, poor Mum,’ says Alun. ‘She’s been wanting to tell us all day. That’s what it was. She couldn’t do it.
‘We could still go back.’
‘Dad would know why. He wouldn’t care for himself, but our knowledge of it is what he fears most. Christmas Day, and Dad’s going blind, eh Merdy. There’s a vision for you. Blind, calm Dad, and Mum keeping the world away from him. And there’s nothing to be done, David says. You see that. Nothing can be done.’
They watch David almost at the house. The wind blows in from the sea as ever, and the seagulls cry our lives away on those long New Zealand beaches.
‘Effigies of Family Christmas’ was most recently published in The Best of Owen Marshall’s short stories (Vintage Book, 1997).
Owen Marshall has written, or edited, over 35 books. Awards include the CNZ Writers’ Fellowship, residencies at the universities of Canterbury, Otago and Massey, and the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, France. His novel Harlequin Rex won the Montana New Zealand Book Awards Deutz Medal for Fiction in 2000. In that year he became an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit and in 2012 was made a Companion of the Order. He has received the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and an honorary Litt D from Canterbury University, which in 2005 appointed him an adjunct professor.