Owen Marshall Selected Stories (20 page)

‘I swept out the storeroom today, Mumsie,' Zip said. ‘I swept out the bloody storeroom when I went to that place twenty years ago, and today I swept it out again. I was doing it when the buyers came and they all went past me and into Ibbetson's office. Ibbetson didn't say anything to me, and neither did any of the buyers. I'm the monkey on a stick.'

‘I thought you liked my sister,' said Mumsie. She dabbed at the blood with a paper towel, but Zip didn't seem to notice.

‘I'd like to screw her, Mumsie, you know that, but she wouldn't let me, and there's nothing else I want to have to do with her apart from screwing her. She's up herself, your sister.'

‘You're just saying it.'

‘I'm just saying it and it's the truth. We make a good pair, you and me, Mumsie. We don't take the world by storm. Two stupid people, and if we stopped breathing right now it wouldn't mean a thing.'

‘It would to me,' said Mumsie.

‘We're dead, Mumsie,' said Zip.

‘Don't say that.' Mumsie watched Zip, but he didn't reply. He seemed very relaxed. He looked back at the watching windows and his eyes jittered. Mumsie didn't like silences: talk was reassuring evidence of life moving on for Mumsie.

‘You're that proud,' said Mumsie. ‘You're so proud, and that's the matter with you. You'll choke on your pride in the end.'

‘You might be right there, Mumsie,' said Zip. ‘Most of us could gag on our own pride.'

‘You hurt my head then, you know. It's bleeding.'

‘You're all right. Don't start whining. I'll have to hit Ibbetson's head one day, Mumsie, and then there'll be hell to pay.'

‘Oh, don't talk about things like that.'

‘It's going to happen. Some day it's bound to happen, and there'll be merry hell to pay.'

‘Why can't you just be happy, Zip?'

‘I'm not quite stupid enough, more's the pity. I can watch myself and I don't bloody want to.'

‘Let's go into the good room,' said Mumsie. ‘We'll push the clothes out of the way and sit in there in the warm.'

‘Sure, but first Mumsie we'll have a cuddle in the bedroom. I quite feel like it, so you get your pants off in there and we'll have a cuddle.'

‘It's cold in there,' said Mumsie.

‘You get your pants off, Mumsie,' said Zip. ‘You know what your murderer did to the boatshed girls — shaved their hair all off, so you want to watch out.'

‘It's awful. I meant to watch it on the news to see if they've found him.'

‘You can't trust anyone but your family, Mumsie. You've got to realise that.'

‘I suppose so.'

Mumsie kept on talking so that Zip would forget to tell her again to go into the bedroom and take her pants off. She told him that after Mr Beresford died the blood came to the surface of his body, so Mrs Rose said, and his face turned black and his stomach too. ‘Maybe it was the tarbrush coming out,' said Zip. She told him about Mrs Jardine claiming the family care allowance, even though their combined income was over the limit. She told him again that the doorknob had come off in her hand, and about the niece or cousin of Debbie Simpson's who had a growth in her ear and they might have to operate because it was pressing on her brain and making her smell things that weren't really there. ‘What a world,' said Zip. He ran his thumb and forefinger up and down the bridge of his nose, and his eyes jittered, and their focus point was a little beyond anything in the kitchen. He lit another cigarette, and Mumsie didn't say anything about that, but went on talking about who did Mrs Jardine think she was, just because they both worked and she could afford plenty of clothes.

The light was banana yellow and the windows like glasses of stout, beaded with condensation. Mumsie had a magnetic ladybird on the door of the fridge, and the one remaining leg oscillated as the motor came on. Zip had no question on his face, and his hands lay unused on the table before him. ‘Mumsie's going to tell you now that I made some caramel kisses today as a treat,' said Mumsie.

‘You're a queen,' said Zip. ‘You're a beaut.'

‘And we'll have another cup of tea, and take it through to the good room with the caramel kisses.' Mumsie brought the tin out and opened the lid to display the two layers of kisses. ‘They've come out nice and moist,' she said.

‘They look fine, Mumsie,' said Zip. ‘You know I like a lot of filling in them.'

‘I made them after I'd been to the shop,' said Mumsie. ‘It'll be warmer in the good room, and the clothes should be dry.'

When the tea was made, Mumsie put it on a tray. She was pleased
to be going at last to the good room. She paused at the door. The blood was smudged dry behind her ear. ‘Bring in the caramel kisses for me,' she said.

‘Sure thing, Mumsie,' said Zip. He heard Mumsie complaining about there being no knob on the good room door.

‘This bloody door, Zip,' said Mumsie. Zip cast his head back quickly and made a laughing face, but without any noise.

‘All right, Mumsie,' he said. ‘I'll come and do it now,' but he stayed sitting there, his hands on the table, his face still once more, and only his eyes jit jittering as bugs do sometimes in warm evening air.

T
he Trumpeters were a family of very tall, very quiet farmers, who had looked down on other people over many generations — not in a patronising manner, but as if in commiseration at the mutual necessity of striking some sort of compromise with life. The Trumpeters were old inhabitants; not wealthy, but with the livelihood of their property beneath their large feet.

Their farm was in Trumpeters' Road; an indication of the family's ties with the district. An unsealed road amongst the downs, white with dust like white pollen in the summer, and a yellow pollen sign at the corner with Trumpeters' Road marked in black. It was limestone country, karst country, with sink holes and ruled limestone outcrops which were weathered grey, or showed pale yellow as a more recent skin. The larger caves had faint, attenuated, Maori drawings, written over with the bolder egotism of Killjoy was here, Wanker, and Pink Floyd.

Neil Trumpeter was my age. My father had taught us both in the two room primary school. Trumpeters were not scholars, but each generation did its time patiently there, and then at the High School: purgatories completely foreign to their natures, but borne as some sort of social exaction before they had earned the right to return to their land. Old Man Trumpeter admitted that there was a need for boys to mix with others for a while. He made it sound a part of his creed of stockmanship. It was difficult however for a Trumpeter to mix — always head and shoulders above anybody else.
Trumpeters were born distinct by both build and temperament. Old Man Trumpeter came to the parents' interviews and sat on a primary chair. My father would try not to smile, and the folds of Trumpeter's best trousers would envelop the little chair. Old Man Trumpeter's hands were like dragons' feet, and he laid them neatly at a distance on his knees. He never began a conversation, and in reply he spoke slowly, almost as if he were watching one word out of sight before releasing the next. His country sentences had gaps for wind and clouds to gather in, for crops to be observed, for memories to well up powerfully behind the eyes. Old Man Trumpeter advanced on to language as he would an untried bridge — with caution and reserve. ‘That's about the size of it,' was his persistent idiom of concurrence.

When I was at school with Neil, his grandfather was still alive. I saw him once sitting bowed in the passenger side of the truck cab, his head framed like a Borgia engraving, and once waiting in the sun at the road gate for the rural delivery man. Age had shrunk him to almost human proportions, and his head sat directly on his shoulders, the neck retracted or the shoulders risen. The grandfather lived to be ninety-eight, but Old Man Trumpeter didn't live anything like as long, and died only a few years after his father, leaving Neil and Mrs Trumpeter alone on the property.

Neil was rather progressive for a Trumpeter. He enjoyed sport at High School and did well in the long jump and high jump. He was liked well enough — there was an absence of malice in the Trumpeter character — and his height and reserve gave him an individuality that pleased his peers. He was called Dawk, not because of anything unusual about his genitalia, but because all Trumpeters were called Dawk at the school. The nickname, once coined, was passed on in a serviceable continuity. Neil failed his exams with equanimity and a sense of tradition, and returned to the property in Trumpeters' Road.

Neil and his mother were apparently quite happy to work their land together after Old Man Trumpeter died, but if it had been
otherwise they would have seen it as no one's concern but their own. When Neil was in his late twenties Mrs Trumpeter died suddenly, in a hot summer, my father said, and only a few days after she and Neil had been stung by bees when they knocked a hive over with the tractor and trailer. The doctor said that it wasn't the stings that had anything to do with her dying, that it was haemorrhage of the brain, but anyway she'd barely lost the swelling from the stings when she died, and Neil told the beekeeper he wouldn't have hives on his property any more.

With his mother gone, Neil must have become very aware of his bachelorhood, whether for reasons of personal comfort, or the sharper realisation that he was the last Trumpeter, I can't say, but in his deliberate way he began to look for a wife. He was seen standing amidst race-goers, sports supporters, revellers, even committees. A decent, single man of property looking for a wife. He married Tessa Hall within a year. She was a librarian, and quite new to town. She wasn't at all what you'd expect of a librarian, for Tessa was glowing, chatty, impulsive. She sang parts in the local repertory, and entered the Floral Princess competition — and won. Other men envied Trumpeter his wife's looks, and other women endorsed Tessa's wisdom in annexing security. She wasn't tall, but then the height of Trumpeter women had never affected the inexorable gene that persisted through the male line.

I imagine that the routine and isolation of farm life were something of a shock for Tessa Trumpeter. People were the world as far as she was concerned, and the chaffinch flocks above the crops, easterly drizzle caressing the downs, thick flight of grass grub in the night, dark lucerne in the evening light: what could she make of it? And they were drought years, which while not really threatening a debt free and established farm like Trumpeters', nevertheless meant that there wasn't money for shopping trips to Auckland, or major renovations of the farmhouse. I did hear someone say that the marriage was in trouble early on, but you hear that about most
marriages at some time, maybe with truth.

Neil sold out after about five years of marriage. He and Tessa moved to town, and Neil bought motels on the main road — the Shangri-la Lodge Motels. Neil joined Lions, and had his photo in the paper several times with a salmon on opening day. Tessa did most of the work at the motel, and the bustle of people, new and familiar, suited her. They were a popular couple. I saw them occasionally on the modest social round of a country town: once or twice at their own place, with Neil standing above his barbecue guests with an expectant smile, even when it was over. Who can say concerning the happiness of others; the greater part of our life is wasted in pretence of one sort or another.

Yet by chance alone, I know something of how it worked out for Neil Trumpeter. I had been staying the weekend with my parents in the schoolhouse, and I went running in the evening — part of a forlorn effort to stave off middle age. The privacy of the country saved me from the derision of town acquaintances. The dust of Trumpeters' Road puffed out beneath my feet as I jogged in the late amber light. I kept to an easy pace, and had time enough to watch the car and tall figure on the roadside. There is a point on Trumpeters' Road, high on the downs, which gives a good view over much of the Trumpeter place and adjoining properties. You can look down and see the thick, Oamaru stone posts at the entrance, the track from the road gate, the farmhouse and outbuildings, the creek course marked with rough growth in the hills. I could see all that; I could see the abandoned machinery in the grass behind the equipment shed, a record of the Trumpeters' modest technological advance over several generations. Each piece of machinery cannibalised of useful parts, and left just thick tines, flaps, rods and springs in a clenched frenzy of rust. Neil Trumpeter could see it all as well. He had a casual shirt in the fashionable fitting cut, and blue with contrasting white collar and cuffs, yet I could sense the indifference to what he wore, so typical of a Trumpeter. His plain face was clean shaven, with just a
patch of thick hairs on each cheek above the shaving line. I stopped beside him and had a spell. It's always difficult to avoid feeling small and fussy beside a Trumpeter. ‘Looking at the old place, Neil,' I said, and watched the birches at the road gate and the lengthening shadows amongst the downs.

‘That's about the size of it,' he said. He had one hand over the head of a wooden fence post as if it were struggling to leave the ground.

‘Do you see much of the people who have it now?' I said. Neil didn't answer. From his quiet height he gazed over the farm he knew. There was a sense of enquiry in his look, as if he wished some response from the place itself. He looked on the lost land that slow Trumpeter voices had sounded over for a hundred years.

‘Sweet, sweet Jesus,' he said. ‘What have I done.'

M
y friend Esler is sick again. His mother rang, and implored me to hurry to the bedside. She spoke in a whisper, not in deference to the sinking Esler, but from fear that her husband might overhear. Mr Esler hates me.

‘He says he mightn't see the night out,' said Mrs Esler. ‘He's had a dream again about a Big Woman, and she turned out to be a preammunition of death.' Mrs Esler is loyal in her way, but for a mother of that son her vocabulary is less than impressive. ‘The doctor's been twice already,' she whispered. I suppose that a really Big Woman, and irrational as women often are in dreams, could quite well be a sinister omen.

I put down my work at once. I knew it was no joke if Esler said he was dying: well rather I knew that he might laugh about it, but die all the same. Esler fights a persistent and terrible battle against the world, but it is a losing battle.

My moped was in the shed, but before opening the door to it, I rattled the neighbours' fence to start their dog barking. A melancholy and majestic sound that dog made: deep bells in the cold air. Why should anyone sleep if Esler was dying? I interspersed the hound's barks with appeals to Odin, the god of my ancestors. I didn't want Esler to die, for he is one who speaks my language in this town.

On my moped I set a course from the forlorn suburb in which I lived, to the forlorn suburb in which Esler lived. Mrs Esler was watching for me: she was at the door when I approached, hoping
that she would be able to smuggle me through to the laundry without a confrontation with her husband. I saw half of him in the doorway of the living room, one arm, one side, one leg, one eye looking down the passage to the front door, and half a sneer to have seen a grown man arrive on a 50 cc step-thru. ‘It's only you,' said Mrs Esler. She pulled a face. ‘The doctor's been twice. Oh, it's bad, it's bad.' She made another sudden face. Pulling faces is the qualifier Mrs Esler uses when her husband is at hand. They are the briefest flashes across her long face, semaphore by tic that hints at the hospitality, gratitude and compassion she can't speak of. They are spasms of emotional intent, and probably quite unconscious. ‘You can't stay long,' she said, as we went up the passage, and then a fleeting contortion to nullify her tone. ‘Mr Esler and I don't want you coming around really,' she said, and touched my arm. I turned at the laundry door, and went back, and put my head into the living room. I could see the back of Mr Esler's head as he watched sport on the television. There was a worn patch at the crown, as if he had a habit of twisting his head into the pillows at night.

‘Mr Esler.'

‘Uh,' said Mr Esler.

‘I'm going through to see Branwell.' I said it loudly so that it would carry to Esler in his bed.

‘Oh, it's you,' said Mr Esler. He didn't turn towards me.

Esler had his blue tartan dressing-gown on in bed. He looked bad enough to be dying, but he was trying to laugh. He flipped his hands on the covers, and further down I could see his feet jerk. ‘Branwell, Branwell,' he wheezed. ‘I love it.' As well as liquid at the corners of his eyes, there was white gathered there, like a little toothpaste. On his cheeks were patterns from the creases in the pillow. Esler is balder than his father, but in a different way, going back a long way at the temples, and the hair between quite downy. ‘Branwell's good,' he said, ‘and look!' He put his hand under the pillow and produced a flat bottle of brandy. ‘You see before you
indeed, the Earl of Northangerland.'

Esler's voice was squeezed out, as if someone was sitting on his chest. The Big Woman perhaps. His wrist buckled with the effort of getting the brandy bottle back under his pillow. I'd thought up the mention of Branwell as I went over, something to give Esler a lift. He becomes depressed without literary allusions from time to time. He began to tell me about his fantasy of the Big Woman. ‘As did the Pharoah I have a dream,' said Esler. ‘Each night this vast and determined woman comes to wrestle with me.'

‘All I get are nightmares of rooms without doors, and sinking ground beneath my feet.'

‘Night after night,' said Esler, ‘she seeks me out, and we must love and fight.'

Esler's room had been the laundry, but his mother now has an automatic washing machine in the old pantry, alongside the deep freeze. The laundry tubs have been taken out, and Esler's bed moved in, and a small table by the window. Esler's boyhood room has become a guest room, which means it's never used. His father refuses to let Esler keep it, because he is thirty-six years old, a poet, and still at home. Living in the laundry is one of those strange and bitter compromises that families have, and which remain incomprehensible to outsiders.

Mrs Esler came and interrupted her son, just when he was describing to me the body lock that the naked Big Woman put on him in their struggle. All poets have a tendency to pornography. ‘Mr Esler says you've started him coughing again. I won't have it.' Her lengthening face, pulled inexorably towards the grave, convulsed to disavow the message she delivered. When she left, Esler continued to tell me of his Big Woman: a giant poster nemesis of sex. It was typical of Esler that even those things threatening his very life could only appear ludicrous.

His room retains a faint smell of soap and washed woollens. A fine mould like candle smoke covers the underside of the window
sill, residue from a more tropical climate.

‘Is he still there?' shouted Mr Esler. He must have been taking advantage of an injury stoppage on the television.

‘Night after night she comes, this immense woman,' wheezed Esler. ‘Hair like a waterfall, navel a labyrinth, thighs like a wild mare.' Esler's warm breath had scents of meatloaf, medication and mortality. His gums had shrunk from the palings of his teeth.

Esler's clothes are on plastic hangers on nails along the laundry wall opposite his bed, and his books are heaped beneath on shelves made from bricks and planks. What can I tell you of my friend that won't make you feel contempt or pity. What can I tell you of this man who is better than us, whose interests and principles have made him in a modern world a mockery, whose skills are as little considered as those of a thatcher, or a messiah.

‘Waikato have scored again,' shouted Mr Esler, and Mrs Esler made an odd sound of wifely concurrence, like the instinctive response of a duck to another call.

Esler and I have been friends since we ganged up at eleven to beat the second largest boy in the class: a prematurely hairy slob who used to hold us under water during swimming periods. We became one of those braces so common among boys — Brunner and Esler. We heard our names coupled more at school than we heard them separately. I can imagine the staffroom association.

‘Caned Brunner today.'

‘Who?'

‘Brunner. Fair-haired kid, hangs about with Esler. Caned him too.'

Or perhaps, ‘That's Esler, isn't it, smashing those milk bottles?'

‘No, that's Brunner.'

‘Both look the same to me, little buggers. Call him over.'

We fought together, smoked together, marvelled at the sky and stars together, took out the O'Reilly girls together. I have a scar on the underside of my left arm because Esler accidentally shot me with
a home-made spear gun. We both saw Bushy Marsden collapse and die in the gym. We began the dangerous experiment of taking words seriously and so resisting the process of attrition by which life betrays us.

‘The Big Woman has a scent of almonds and macrocarpa,' said Esler in wonder and dread. His tartan wool dressing-gown is also his lucky writing jacket, ever since he had it on when he wrote his Van Gogh sequence. Constant use without washing, a little lost food and the oils of feverish sweat from his asthma bouts, have taken the nap from it, have buffed it until it shines like silk, and the original tartan pattern is almost lost. ‘Read me something to take my mind off breathing,' said Esler. He had a hundred poets to choose from, and I read Seamus Heaney to him. He nodded his downy head and squeaked ‘Yes, yes' at the touches which moved him. The liquid and the white gathered at the extremes of his eyes, spread a little to the corner skin.

‘Will you stop that never-ending jawing in there!' shouted Mr Esler to me.

‘Exactly,' Mrs Esler said. I could almost hear the snap as her face, just for a moment, was contrite, bewildered.

‘Read on,' said Esler.

The laundry never seems a bedroom no matter how long Esler is in it, or how many clothes or hooks he lines the wall with. Images of soap flakes linger in the air as a false Christmas, and one corner of the lino always seems to be damp. There is more utilitarian aura than even poetry can dispel. ‘That's so,' said Esler as I read. In a paper packet on the second plank are one hundred and seventy-three green copies of Esler's poems, printed by the Whip-poor-will Co-operative Press. I have the dedication by heart: These poems are for Bruce Brunner and Frank Heselstreet, fellow poets and friends who share my belief that emotion is like ours a round world, and as far enough east becomes west, so is laughter to tears and genius to insanity.

I have eighteen copies in the top of my wardrobe. Frank and I buy
one from the bookstore when we can afford to, and have our reward later when Esler tells us another green pamphlet sold. Frank says we might end up with the whole edition of Esler's poems: a private joke, but what are friends for. Esler has always been absurd, but it is only one trait of character, as is deceit or shrewdness, composure or ambition. Just one aspect of my friend, but it makes it difficult to decide if he is dying or not. In a way I understand the Grim Reaper concluding that it is below his dignity to come for Esler, and sending a very Big Woman instead, who can laugh in her killing work and not be out of character.

Mr Esler appeared at the laundry door. His face was like that of a rock groper: reactionary and full of low cunning. ‘You're doing him no good at all. Leave him alone, can't you. I blame you for a lot of it,' he said. I never resent Mr Esler's antagonism. I see it rather as one of the few remaining signs of concern for his son — this determination to blame me.

‘I know you do,' I said.

‘How many did Waikato win by?' said Esler in his squeezed voice. His father knew that Esler didn't care, but couldn't deny himself the satisfaction of saying the score out loud.

‘Thirty-two, ten,' he said. ‘Thirty-two bloody ten.'

‘That means a season's tally so far of one hundred and forty-two for, and fifty-three against,' said Esler. ‘How many did Mattingly score?'

‘Fifteen.'

‘That makes him the highest scoring fullback in Waikato provincial rugby apart from Rawiri,' said Esler.

‘You don't care. You don't care!' shouted his father.

‘It's so, though,' said Esler. He didn't care, but it was so though. He spent fifteen or twenty minutes each day on rugby statistics, so that he could know more than his father and still disregard the game.

Mr Esler knew better than to dispute Esler's facts, instead he
looked around the laundry as a rock groper does another's cave. ‘This place stinks of idleness,' he said.

‘Mattingly has twenty-four points to go before he reaches Rawiri's record, and he's already played three more first class games,' said Esler. His voice became treble with an effort at volume as his father left.

‘Shut up,' cried Mr Esler from the passage.

‘Each night now she comes, my Amazon,' said Esler. ‘Beautiful, but so huge. Dear God. I try to oppose her with intellect and poetry when lust has failed. It's no use. She's killing me, the Big Woman, ending me with breasts and kisses.' Esler cleaned his lips by rubbing them with his fingers, and concentrated on breathing well for a time.

‘I've never been afraid of women, or been against women, have I,' he said.

‘I know.'

‘The power, the weight, yet the subtleness of her. I can't stand it.'

‘Take a sleeping pill or something,' I said.

‘I can't. Not with my regular medication.'

Esler is loyal and honest, totally without envy or malice in his friendship, perhaps because the only basis he knows for friendship now is poetry. I have watched his other means of communication atrophy. Esler can discuss anthropomorphic imagery with wit and eloquence for hours, but when the grocer questions him of necessities, Esler grips the counter, is helpless before yet another stranger, stumbles to tell of sliced bread, or free flow green beans. People exchange glances and knowing smiles at this evidence of the dangers inherent in any serious scrutiny of the mind. Esler tries to give Frank and me money from his savings account which has less than three figures; he writes to the
Listener
to point out that regional poets Brunner and Heselstreet have not received sufficient recognition. He is ugly, incongruous, annoying, ludicrous, and a true friend.

Esler asked me to bring a packet from the laundry table. ‘It's my new poems to go to Australia,' he said. ‘I want you to post it for me. You're luckier than me. Bless it before you put it in the box.' He made no mention of the postage charge: such things are incidental when you are dying. ‘Send it airmail, and don't let them use any stamps with heads on. They're unlucky for manuscripts, I always feel.' All the seams in the brown paper were traced with sellotape, and the parcel was quartered in string woven of green and red strands. I bet Esler had said a prayer or a curse over his parcel, and sprinkled on some of the lucky dust that he'd collected from beneath Honey McIlwraith's bed. Esler is that sort of intellectual and innocent. He really believes that there could be someone out there interested in poetry, willing to publish or pay for it, someone who will untie Esler's two-tone string, unpick his sellotape — and cry genius.

‘If the Big Woman comes again tonight,' said Esler, then trailed off and began wheezing. It became worse until he was flapping his shoulders, and his veins began to swell.