Owen Marshall Selected Stories (41 page)

Paul sat beside her. ‘Thanks for helping,' he said. Her heels went up and down, up and down. The sun was warm on their faces. ‘She'll be okay now I'm sure.'

‘Did she have a miscarriage? My aunt had a miscarriage, but she had children again later.'

‘I don't really know,' he said.

It could have been awkward because of who they were in the school, because they didn't know each other, because of what they were talking about, but events had pushed them past all that. ‘Look, I'll run you home,' he said. ‘I have to go up to the hospital to get Mrs Beale anyway. All this has made you late, hasn't it.'

‘I don't live far,' she said. ‘Maxwell Street by the park.'

‘Mrs Norman lives somewhere there, doesn't she?'

‘Sometimes I babysit for her.'

‘Good on you anyway,' he said. ‘I'm going to have a word to your form teacher.'

‘I didn't do much. I'd better go now.' She stood up and he noticed how small her hands were, and that the cuffs of her jersey had been folded back twice because it had been bought for her to grow into. ‘What was that girl's name, Mr Broussard?'

‘Her name's Susan Bates.' He knew he shouldn't be telling her, but she deserved such a confidence. ‘Remember she had a part in the last play. She was the fat witch, but it wasn't a big role.' Nadine nodded and went off down the path with her noisy shoes, and her fair, metallic hair frizzed in the sun. Paul sat and watched until she turned the corner of the science block. He lifted his heels and let them drop again, over and over. He found it oddly relaxing.

P
icture this if you will — a silky, summer's night and the porina moths in pale, whiskery candlewick are a clumsy mass intoxication in the warm air. There's the fragrance of the trees gathered in the still night: macrocarpa, pinus radiata and walnut around the yards, more subtle essences from the last of the native bush in the gullies higher up. The boy stands very still, the better to look and listen. He holds the .22 loosely in his right hand, and the long metal torch and a school backpack in his left. The backpack hangs with the weight of three dead possums. Far down the valley lights are winking, glowing and then cutting out, glowing again, as the car, or truck, goes from bend to bend.

The boy stands and listens, watches: at ease in the night. His face is round and smooth, his hair thick and fair and soft, but his body has begun a growth spurt for adolescence so that his arms and legs have a slight clumsiness, although outdoor athleticism is always on the point of catching up.

The lights come closer, pass the turn-off to Heyworths' and Annans'. For the first time he can hear the engine. The sound doesn't carry as well as in the frosty air of winter. He recognises the sound of the ute: his father must be coming home.

The boy begins walking back through the trees and across the yard before the farmhouse. He goes from the shadows through soft moonlight and into pine shadows again. One of the dogs slinks out of its kennel, the chain clinking like coins, but it doesn't bark,
perhaps because he has the rifle in his hand. The yard is almost bare of grass, just stones and earth because of the mobs of sheep that have passed, and the movement of machinery, and the scratching of the chooks that now roost hidden in the implement shed, or the lower branches of the pines, maybe even on the perches built for them in their own house.

He throws the possums onto the jutting timber of the tank stand to be skinned tomorrow. He washes blood from his hands in the laundry and goes inside. He puts a small handful of ammunition into the box in the kitchen drawer, and after checking the chamber of the .22 he leans it at the back of the hot water cupboard. He stands in the open back door for a time looking down towards the garage, but the summer night is thick with the flight of moths and the light attracts them so that they come tumbling towards the doorway, like lobbed paper pellets. So he closes the door and stays outside with all around him in the shadows of the night, or the soft, indistinct light of the moon. Picture it. And so he waits for his father with the confidence of one who has rarely been disappointed in affection.

The ute comes up the steep, uneven drive, and its lights flare and glance on the dark mass of the macrocarpas, then break out across the open space of the yards. The ute noses into the open sheds next to the tractor, and when the boy's father turns the engine off, the noise takes time to dissipate, and the small natural sounds take time to resume: the fluffle of a chook in the lower branches, the distant dry cough of a sheep, morepork echo from the far bush. Listen and you will know them.

The father comes carrying supermarket bags, and the boy opens the door for him and follows him inside. ‘You okay then?' the father asks, and the son nods. The man puts the bags on the bench without interest in them, and goes through to the lounge with its worn vinyl suite and large television. He sits well down in a chair so that his knees are almost level with his head. He is a tallish man, but most of his height is in his legs, and his bare forearms are burnt to the colour
of copper. ‘We'll have something to eat soon, eh,' he says.

‘Okay.'

‘We'll rustle up something from the can tonight.'

‘I don't mind,' says the boy. The father has a habit of rubbing his hands on the tops of his thighs, and the sound on the twill fabric is like soft rain on the roof.

‘Your mum sends her love.'

‘When can she come back?'

‘Not for a while yet, I'm afraid,' says the man. He lets his head rest back on the chair, gives a small yawn of discomfort, then sits up ready to say more. The boy is leaning on the back of the sofa, and his father flaps a hand to get him to sit down.

‘She's okay, though?' The boy sits and smooths his hair down at the same time. He feels no great apprehension, as his mother talked it all through with him before she went: about the lumps in her breast and the need to get rid of them in case they became a nuisance.

‘Look,' says his father, ‘it's a matter of things being more serious than the doc first thought, that's all.' He doesn't hesitate much; he's obviously spent some time while driving home getting sorted what he wants to say. ‘There's some more tests to be done and that, but he reckons there's no sign of anything really bad. You know that sometimes women get cancer there?' The boy shook his head. ‘Well, they do, and that's the worst thing they could find, and it's not that thank God, but the doc still wants some tests to find out why your mum's tired all the time. A night or two at most. It's not worth her coming all the way home and then back again for tests.'

The father waits then, looking at his son, giving time for the boy to ask anything else, but there are no questions. The father gets up purposefully from the chair; he claps his hands together. ‘Right,' he says. ‘Time for something to eat, or we'll be here all night.'

It is as they leave the room that the man turns the television on. Neither considers it unusual that they should half watch it through the open kitchen door as they make a meal. Neither of them is
accustomed to continual conversation, and the lack isn't a source of awkwardness. They have Wattie's baked beans on toast with two poached eggs each as well. The boy has a Coke, which is something of a treat, and his father a beer, which is routine. They take their meal back to the lounge to eat, and watch a movie about gangsters which is set in a country on the other side of the world. They don't bother to draw the curtains: they live three miles from their neighbours, on a country road that is little used. Picture the simple weatherboard house with a red, tin roof set on the river terrace close to the sheds and yards. In the moonlight, of course, the red roof is another colour altogether, and the yellow spill from the lounge window shows the rough lawn, the struggling azaleas and the netting fence that keeps the stock from the garden. And yes, the heavy moths labour through the warm air, attracted to the light. A summer blizzard of insects whirls there in the waning window light, but to the father and his son it's just life, and the soft pattering on the glass is unremarked.

When the gangster movie is over, the man tells the boy that he'd better shoot away to bed. ‘Maybe tomorrow you can come in with me to see your mum,' he says. ‘If I can get a good run at things tomorrow morning, we'll go in after lunch. I'd like you to help me in the yards.'

‘I'll get up when you do,' the boy says. He knows his father will be outside by seven.

‘No, that's okay. Just come on over when you're ready. I've got crutching to do.'

The boy is in his room when his father talks to him from the lounge; it's not far away, and with the television off there's no need for the man even to raise his voice. ‘I haven't forgotten about us going pig hunting,' he says. ‘It's just this thing with your mum is what's important right now.'

‘That's okay.'

‘We'll go soon and knock a few over. We'll get Geordie and his dogs.'

‘I got three possums tonight,' says the boy.

‘Good riddance to the buggers,' says his father. ‘Goodnight.'

‘Night, Dad.'

The boy lies in his bed with a strip of moonlight across his legs and angling across the room. It's so quiet he can hear his father in the lounge rubbing his hands on his knees, and he knows he'll be sitting well down in the soft chair, with his long legs like trestles before him. The boy thinks he'll get up really early in the morning, and be there to help when his father goes outside. He's made such resolutions before and not managed them, but he tells himself this time will be different.

Even with his father so close, there's a sense of absence in the house. The boy is old enough to realise that there are reasons his father might not be telling him all the truth about his mother, and he hopes that's not so. He's briefly shaken by an aching desolation quite new to him, and then feels better again. His father is only a wall away: tomorrow he'll see his mother and she'll maybe come home with them. Things will be okay. He has experienced nothing so awful in his life that he would think otherwise.

Picture him asleep in the small, plain bedroom of the farmhouse, with the moonlight through the window forming a pale, blank screen on the wall, as if some film is about to start and tell us more about his life.

T
hey're gathered up: met here to travel south to help me celebrate my ninetieth birthday, but I couldn't wait any longer. Such decisions are made for us, and death has released me to accompany them on the journey to my funeral. Better they don't know the change of plan.

They cluster ready for departure in this summer morning. Donald's my eldest, and become pompous, though he's family minded and reliable. It's his car they're using and his Aaple Motels they're leaving from. Nigel isn't his, of course. He's Ruth's youngest, and she's my youngest — only forty-six. I never know what to make of Nigel. I can't understand what he says. He talks in an adolescent mumble while he turns his face away. Andrew's my second son. His father always said he was the deep one, but his brains don't seem to have made him happier than anyone else. ‘All aboard who's coming aboard then. We'd better be on the road,' says Donald. It's his car and he's the South Islander on his own ground. Nigel asks if he could drive for a while, but Donald says maybe later, on a quiet stretch south of Ashburton perhaps.

‘Oh, make no promises that bind us all as passengers,' says Andrew. ‘All life hangs by a thread.' He's right there.

‘I told Mum not to expect us until this afternoon: that we'd have lunch on the way down,' says Ruth.

‘But she'll still be expecting us earlier,' says Donald. ‘Whatever time I arrive she says she thought I might have been there earlier.

One day I'll come at daybreak.'

‘Mum will have the bed turned down from the night before,' says Andrew.

Ruth will have organised the boys. She will have said they should be coming down to be with me on my ninetieth. She and Nigel flew down to Christchurch yesterday morning and Andrew on a later flight. To be honest, their talk has often bored me, but I think about them a lot. I've had close, special things to say, but rarely said them when the opportunity was there; instead fallen back into the old pattern of trivial, nothing, everyday talk. Sometimes the more you care for people the less risk you take with them.

It's nice, though, that they're gathered up, that they're coming as a family to see me.

Ruth makes herself comfortable in the back with Nigel. It's a long time since she's driven from Christchurch to Oamaru. Her mood is one of family reminiscence and reflection. ‘I had a dream about Mum last night. We all gave her our birthday presents, but she wouldn't look at them. She said she wanted to buy back the farm so we could live there again, and she took sets of false teeth out of her mouth one after the other as she talked.'

‘It wouldn't take much to buy it back today, by Jesus. I'm glad I got out when I did, that's for sure,' says Donald. Nigel mumbles something about getting out with a packet too, and Donald complains that he can't understand a thing he says.

‘All those false teeth in your dream,' says Andrew, ‘one set after another, you said. That's an odd thing. Maybe it's a repudiation of age: going back to the good old days of personal virtue and the horse.'

‘For all your fancy notions, the age of the horse may well be in front of us as well, the way things are going. Don't write horses off.' Since boyhood, Donald has been impatient with his brother's departure from practical considerations.

So they talk of horses! What do people know or care of horses
now. Today they're on the race track, or they're runts of ponies for children to ride. Ralph and I worked in the breath of real horses — draughthorses of strength and even temper, and riding hacks of a decent size. There were drays and traps, waggonettes and sledges. As a girl I went to town on wet days in the gig, when my father couldn't work outside.

The Depression kept horses on, Ralph used to say. Most of us couldn't afford tractors for years and kept the horses going through the thirties. A working horse sweats a lather like sea foam, and at the large concrete troughs, big almost as country swimming pools, they'd stand to drink, and you could hear the water rattling by the gallon down their throats. And after winter work the steam would drift from their great bodies as if they were gradually smouldering away.

Andrew passes the time by gently ragging his older brother. ‘When technology fails, you could corner the market in horse transport. You should start secretly now, breeding Clydesdales, and make a killing when the world is desperate. There'd be jobs for all of us too. Nigel as a pooper scooper, for example. A sort of human dung beetle.'

‘Keep it in the family, you mean,' says Nigel. He smiles, but continues to watch the houses thinning into the flat farms and orchards south of Christchurch.

It's strange that the ordinary circumstances of your life become novelties with the passing of time. We used to go on school picnics to the top crossing in a wagon. People were admired for skills that aren't known or understood today. Ralph was thought to be the best stacker in the district. He used to go all over the place, from farm to farm in the early days, stacking oats and wheat. Who knows anything of stacking oats before threshing now? Who cares for the skill of the ploughman, the smith, or the water diviner, like Wally Nind who found over forty good wells with a branch of willow.

There was nothing glamorous about it all, God knows, but there were skills that gave livings and personal satisfaction then, that are
nothing today. Time gives things a sense of quaintness, and the quaintness disguises the same serious business of living that's always there, so that even your own children are cut off from your early life. In the end you find yourself part of your grandchildren's projects on women in the Great Depression, or the aftermath of the First World War.

They pass Burnham, and Andrew and Donald swap anecdotes of the National Service as eighteen-year-olds. The barracks and the AWOL trips to the city: the regular instructors and the platoon hard cases. They weren't there together, but the experience seems much the same.

Before that there'd been a real war, of course. My young brother, Clem, died at Maleme airfield in Crete, May 1941. Ralph and I had a radio in our bedroom. It had a varnished case almost as big as a grandfather clock. We were tired in the evenings after the farm, but sometimes we would listen for a while, particularly during the war, for news of how things were going.

Ralph would fall asleep before me, especially in the winter. In the winter too, we often lit the fire in the bedroom. The fire would die down during the night. I remember waking up now and then late at night, because there was a sudden last flame behind the guard which lit up the room with flickering patterns, so that the wardrobe would bob, and the varnished radio case and tongue and groove ceiling would glimmer. The last brief flame would soon be exhausted and the dark return, and I'd lie in the warm room waiting for sleep again. There would be the call of a morepork perhaps, or the wind in the woolshed pines like an ocean close at hand, or the rattle of the chains as the dogs slunk in and out of their kennels.

I used to wonder what other people were doing all over the world. I felt for people who were up against it in some way: up against war, or famine, pain, or loneliness, up against sly old age itself.

They're coming to Dunsandel on the plain, and Donald decides he may as well fill up there. He reminds the others that it's the place
Ken Avery wrote the song about, and sings a line or two — ‘By the dog dosing strip at Dunsandel …' Andrew joins in. ‘A dead and alive place really,' says Donald afterwards. ‘I remember coming potato picking here one May school holidays, and Dad thought I should have been helping at our place.'

‘That's a while now, Donald,' says Ruth.

‘Nineteen forty-nine it would be. One of the guys had beer hidden in the water tank, and when he climbed up to get it he gashed his hand, and had to be taken to hospital. Old man Keen told us he'd get lockjaw.'

‘Did he?'

‘He may have for all I remember. Old man Keen said, “He's a goner, lads, with lockjaw and he's brought it on himself, you see.”' Donald pulls up at the pumps, and leaves his story to get out and talk with the pump attendant.

Andrew asks Nigel what job he wants now that he's leaving school, but Nigel is uncommunicative as usual. Andrew looks out at Dunsandel and wonders what makes Nigel tick. His own adolescence is so far behind him. I guess Nigel still thinks there's some special life in store: opportunities to make the changes he dreams of, but won't talk about. He's about to join the dole queue, but won't be doleful either way. Youth is never completely daunted by circumstance.

Keep moving, Nigel. That's the secret. Keep moving. Too many weighty considerations and you're through the thin crust of things and into quicksand beneath. All those supposed meanings, motives, spiritual assessments and the paralysing self-consciousness that nails you down. Keep moving, that's the story. Keep bobbing and weaving, and don't ask for any reason with your rhyme. Keep moving and talking inside: fast talking, sweet talking, soft talking, smooth talking, tall talking. Keep moving, talking, so that the reflex hit men at all the doorways of life don't grow bored and tighten their trigger fingers in their boredom.

Nigel begins to sing what he's picked up of the Dunsandel song,
and Andrew joins in more confidently. ‘Stop it. They'll hear you,' says Ruth, but she laughs anyway.

‘Shut up,' says Donald from outside. ‘A couple of bloody humourists,' he tells the attendant. So Andrew returns to his thoughts.

You need to be a humourist here in Dunsandel on the plain. I can't see anyone with lockjaw despite Donald's story. There's no railway station any more; just the compacted gravel and weeds of the yard, just the ramp facing the line. The tracks are rusted on the sides, yet worn shiny on the top despite so few trains passing.

Two garages and the yellow, roughcast tearooms. There's an antique shop, and a thin grey spire of the country church sticks up for its beliefs above the Honda sign, but proves, as it comes closer, to have been taken over for antiques as well. For a young country we are stuffed with antiques.

I look out at Dunsandel, but I'm thinking of Wolverhampton, and the rooms I shared with two art teachers. From my top-storey window I could see the canal's trapped water with its blowfly blue on the oily surface, and an unofficial cycle track among the rubbish on its banks. A quiet Canadian girl and I made love by the window of that view on a wet Monday. I think the dingy threat of the visible world urged us to make a show of defiance: to mimic creation in all that expanse of decay. Lying with her, and just a few post-impressionists, for company, I looked out and saw the rain on the blue-bottle water of the canal and streaking the fences, and the cartons thrown away. She talked of winter in Alberta Province, and I talked of summer in the Mackenzie Country. The two of us drawn close in disillusion with Old England — and camouflaging it as love.

There are Wolverhamptons everywhere, of course. You need to be strong in the Wolverhamptons of Taihape, Gore, Cannons Creek or Remuera, because they're hard on ideals and pretence. You have to pack in all your own spiritual supplies to such places, and not rely on any renewal while you're there.

Ruth is saying that they should take me out to the farm tomorrow, as part of my birthday. Other people own it now, but she thinks they won't mind a visit. I'm quite pleased it won't happen. Other people muck your place around, no matter how pleasant they are. ‘If she's well enough,' says Donald. ‘You haven't seen her for ages and don't know how frail she's got. You'll find Mum's gone back a lot.'

Of course I've gone back. Who wants to spend their time as a ninety-year-old widow? I've gone back in ways Donald wouldn't dream of. Now I'm free to go back altogether. I don't need any permission now, or any help.

Recently I've never talked much about the past. It's tiresome when you have to keep explaining things that everybody used to know. Like tin-kettling and first-footing. In our district we went firstfooting after midnight on New Year's Eve: farm by farm and some of the men getting the worse for drink as it went on. At Tolliger's once before the war, the men shifted the outdoor loo into the vegetable garden. Ray Tolliger lost his rag and threatened to push one of them down the exposed long drop. At least two of those men were killed overseas not long afterwards: killed in places where first-footing in the small hours had greater dangers even than Tolliger's long drop.

Our fun was local and inexpensive. Card evenings, tin-kettling, woolshed dances, A and P shows, weddings and send-offs, were the big things. Ruth talks of progressive dinners, ethnic restaurants, barbecues. I've never been to a barbecue in my life. I waited too long to have a decent kitchen around me, to want to go outside and cook without it.

I worked hard in country schools before I was married, and we slogged on the farm afterwards. Every fine Monday morning for years I lit the copper at six o'clock to heat the water for wash day. The electricity came to the district in time, of course, and I had a washing machine afterwards. Years later Ruth said she'd like the old copper bowl for her plants, and not long before he died, Ralph broke down the concrete casing and took out the copper, and patiently
scoured it clean for her. She had a wrought-iron stand made for it, to display her indoor plants. When I visited her in Wellington I sat and looked at that gleaming copper full of dark foliage in her lounge, and I thought of the hundreds of Mondays on the farm I'd stood in the lean-to and stirred clothes in that copper with a broom handle. There it was, after all that time, among Ruth's polished furniture and crystal. I admired the burnished curve of the copper in its stand, and the fronds she cleaned with milk which hung over the sides in green contrast. What's all that in the process of time passing, I wonder?

‘I'd forgotten coming down the Showground hill into Timaru like this,' says Ruth. ‘I've always had a soft spot for Timaru. Let's have our lunch on Caroline Bay and see what changes there's been.' She sees it all as Donald drives on down and parks by a wooden table on the grass. Recognition mixed with small shocks of change, arouse her recollections.