Owen Marshall Selected Stories (5 page)

 

I
t was the third in a series of summer droughts. North Otago must be as bad for droughts as anywhere in the country, I guess. In March the landscape lay stretched and broken like the dried skin of a dead rabbit, shrunken away from the bones and sockets. The pale yellow clay showed through the tops of the downs like hip bones, and even the willows along the bed of the Waipohu Stream had the blue-grey of attrition.

Wayne Stenning and I were selling raffle tickets so that the club could have new jerseys for the season. All over the district we went, and despite the cost of the petrol it was worth it. Most we called on had some connection with the club, and even if they didn't directly, then as country people they identified with the district name and gave anyway. Usually they bought whole books, not single tickets, which made the tripping about worthwhile. Wayne and I had been at it most of the afternoon and we were cutting over the old quarry road to call at a last few houses. The dust was bad. Some people had oiled the road outside their gates, but it didn't seem to do much good. In any case you couldn't see where the dust had settled, for everything was much the same colour.

Wayne was pleasant company, always ready with a joke, or a laugh at somebody else's. He'd been training most of the summer. Keen as mustard he was, and with some cause. Last season he made the local representative side and got his name in the rugby almanac's list of players from lesser unions worth watching. He had the right
build for a prop — not all that tall, but his chest was so thick that his clothes hung out all round and made him look fat, which he wasn't.

I hadn't realised that Bernie Dalgety lived on that road, but we turned into a farm and found him at the yards, drafting sheep. I'd met him a few times at the gun club. He took three books. The only drawback was that Wayne got some grease on his slacks when we sat on the drill, waiting for Bernie to get the money. Wayne said they were his best trousers and his wife would be peeved. He hadn't been married long. He couldn't stay worried, however, and told Bernie the joke about the librarian and the lion tamer. He did a bit of running on the spot, too, before we got back into the car — said he'd been having some trouble with cramp in the thigh muscles. Bernie and I told him the cause of that and he laughed, but said he was serious. I hadn't begun any training myself. I'd reached the stage at which the most usual adjective applied to my game was ‘experienced'. Anyone who sticks with the game reaches that point eventually — a sort of watershed after which you're no longer capable of improving, and it takes cunning to disguise the fact that you've gone back.

We nearly missed the place after Dalgety's. It was in a fold of the downs, and well back from the road. New farmhouses go for a view: prominence before all else. The old houses of the district seem to have been sited chiefly with the idea of escaping the wind. There was no cattlestop and no name on the letter-box. Wayne opened the gate and told me he'd close it and run up after me. Needed the exercise, he said, so I went on. The drive wasn't used much, I could tell, for the dry grass in the centre strip scratched and flurried underneath the car as I drove. I could see Wayne in the rear vision mirror, jogging easily along, doing a few quick knees-ups from time to time. He let his arms hang loosely and flapped his hands to ensure relaxation. Our coach was very keen on relaxation; he trained anyone who would turn up three hours a night in the name of relaxation.

The house was of old-fashioned dark brick. It had bay windows that bulged outwards and heavy, green tiles. The shrubs and trees
must once have been in ordered harmony with the house, but in old age had attained a freakish disproportion. Shattered pines along the south side reached over the tiles and mounds of their needles lay in the guttering. The path to the front door was obstructed by the growth of a giant rhododendron, mostly wood, but with a few clusters of leaves that defied the drought. The tall macrocarpa hedge down the other side had been cut so often that there was little foliage, rather a series of massive, convoluted branches that seemed barely contained in the rectangular shape the years had imposed on them.

Wayne and I avoided the rhododendron and walked along the concrete path towards the back door. At the far corner of the house was a sunporch that had been glassed in comparatively recently, for its large panes contrasted with the windows of the rest of the house. Wayne stopped suddenly at the corner, and I stumbled into him from behind. ‘There's someone in there,' he said. ‘We can ask him.' We stood a little foolishly by the glass doors and looked in. The place was well chosen, for despite the hedge the late afternoon sun was a warm pressure on the backs of our heads, and suffused the room with an amber glow. The rich and heavy light was liquid, and its slow current bore dust that glinted and eddied, dissipating the shape of the dark dresser and falling like a fragile veil in front of the old man who sat facing us.

The old man was dressed, but over his clothes he wore a pink candlewick dressing-gown, and in front of the cane chair he sat in, his zipped leather slippers stuck out, shiny and without the wrinkles of wear. Something in their positioning made it seem they had been placed by someone else, rather than the random result of movement. A green towel lay across his lap and his hands rested there, the fingers curled and trembling slightly. ‘Hello,' said Wayne. He said it uncertainly, because he felt odd speaking through the closed door, yet he couldn't keep looking in at the old man only a few feet away without saying something. There was no coarseness of age in the old man's face, no warts, enlarged pores or tufts of hair. He seemed to
have passed the time of excrescences and, like driftwood, only the essential shape and grain remained. His head and face were entirely smooth, polished even, the skin in the amber of the afternoon sun responding with a slight sheen.

‘Don't think the old coot heard me,' said Wayne softly, and he turned his face away to snigger uneasily. The old man's neck did not stand up from his collar, or the folds of the candlewick dressing-gown. Instead it protruded parallel with the ground like the neck of a tortoise, and so his head, to keep his abstracted gaze level, was tilted back. His head and neck were not directly forward, however, but rested more along the line of his left shoulder.

When I was a boy I had a favourite marble with a coloured spiral at the centre of the glass. Gradually the surface got crazed; little pits and star bruises appeared on the glass until it was clouded and the coloured spiral had lost its vividness. The old man's eyes were like that, and the lower lids had fallen away somewhat, revealing moist red linings that emphasised the bruised opaque eyes, and contrasted with the pale sheen of his skin.

Wayne would have opened the door, but the old man was alone in the room and there didn't seem much point. We carried on round the house until the back door, where we knocked and waited. After seeing the old man Wayne needed reassurance of his youth. He performed several jumps from the crouch, leaping towards the tiled roof and patting the guttering. No one came to the door in answer to our knocks, or Wayne's acrobatics. ‘Strange sort of an outfit,' he said. ‘There must be someone else about, surely.' We were going to leave when there was a lot of noise from hens, and moving round the end of the hedge we saw a woman feeding white leghorns on the bare ground in front of the farm sheds.

She was a big woman in cardigan and dark stockings despite the heat. She came heavily towards us, the last hens falling off behind her when they realised she had no more grain. In one hand was an old milking bucket half-filled with eggs, and she leant to the other side
against the weight. At a distance she didn't look so old, but when she was close, though the strength was still there, the age was more apparent: rosettes of pigment stained her skin, and as she set the bucket down before us the swollen joints of her fingers clasped on the handle had difficulty releasing, nearly pulling the bucket over.

‘We're selling raffle tickets on behalf of the Waipohu rugby club. For new jerseys.' Wayne seemed to assume that all old people were deaf, and he shouted into her face.

‘Where have you been?' she said in reply. Wayne didn't know how to answer that, but she meant what other people in the district had we visited, and as we told her the ones we could remember, she murmured ‘Yes, yes,' as if the familiar names established our authenticity. Her voice was flat and worn, but steady enough. She came back with us to the house, refusing to have the bucket carried for her. ‘Dad would like to see you,' she said. ‘I'll take a ticket for Dad.' Dad must have been her husband, not her father, yet the term she adopted for convenience in family times had stuck. Culland was the name she wanted on the ticket. I wrote it for her, because she said she found writing difficult. Watching her swollen fingers attempting to get money from her purse, we could understand. That was later, though. First she left the eggs at the back door, and took us through the dark, wainscoted hall to the sunroom to see Dad.

The old man hadn't shifted, but we approached him from a different angle and, like a figurine, his aspect altered. He'd been a big man once, but his shoulders seemed folded and the pink candlewick fell away loosely. ‘These young people are from the Waipohu rugby club, Dad,' said Mrs Culland as we sat along the window seat, the sun behind us again, the golden dust drifting once more before the old man's face. ‘Selling raffle tickets, Dad,' she said. Wayne nodded his head and chuckled, as if selling raffle tickets was a good joke he wanted the old man to share. Mrs Culland said nothing for some time. She forgot us and had a rest, breathing slowly and massaging the joints of each finger in turn.

‘Well,' said Wayne brightly, in a manner that preceded comments about really being on our way and so on. Neither responded. Mrs Culland continued to rest, and the old man's terrapin neck and head remained extended, his eyes unblinking, and his hands trembling on the green towel. The mainspring of the world seemed to have run down, and time was held back in the amber warmth of the sunroom. The macrocarpa shadows stole further across the dry lawn, and the sound of Mrs Culland's coarse, swollen hands as she rubbed them together was like the sighing of a distant sea. Even Wayne stopped fidgeting and sat resigned, reading again the prizes listed on the raffle books he held. Three days at Mount Cook in the off-season, or the cash equivalent, was first prize.

‘Dad played rugby,' said Mrs Culland. ‘Not here though — in Southland. All his family played.'

‘Great game,' said Wayne a little patronisingly, and flexed the heavy muscles of his outstretched leg.

‘Played for the South Island twice,' she said in her flat voice. ‘Booby Culland everyone called him then.' She pronounced it as a title and, heaving herself up, went to the dresser and returned with a photo of her husband in the South Island team.

‘South Island,' said Wayne in an altered voice. The transience of it all seemed to catch him. Booby Culland's photo showed the arrogance of youth and strength. Guiltily, Wayne looked from the photo to the old man and quickly away again. ‘Lock,' he said.

‘That's right,' said Mrs Culland.

‘Line-out specialist, I suppose.'

‘Yes.'

Mrs Culland leant forward from the window seat, and held the old man's nearer arm, so that for a moment the hand stopped trembling. ‘We're talking about football, Dad,' she said. ‘Football.' The old man opened his mouth slightly, but if he wanted to speak he was prevented by his top dentures, which slipped down, exposing a swollen seam of artificial gum, as if he were bringing something up.
Mrs Culland released his arm matter-of-factly and pushed his chin up. But briefly his opaque, bruised eyes focused in revelation; for an instant the prisoner could be seen from the shadows and behind the bars. ‘Football, Dad,' she said again.

He tried once more. ‘Descent from the Flugelhorn.' His voice was almost identical to that of his wife — worn and even, as if she had adopted the practice of ventriloquism.

‘No, Dad, football. You know.'

‘Descent from the Flugelhorn,' he repeated, and his eyes turned away. A thin skein of spittle ran from his mouth down the pink chenille of his left shoulder, touching it with amber spangles in the sunlight. Mrs Culland pushed his chin up again.

‘He was very keen on music,' she said, in a form of explanation. ‘As he got older and the boys took over the property, he turned to music.' There was another pause, and we sat subdued in the unrepentant sun of the summer drought.

‘Lived for his football, though, as a young man. No doubt about that. They all did in his family but Booby Culland was the best of them. Played in the provincial side fifty-one times and was made captain for Southland on the day of his last game.' Wayne took it as a blow more than anything else. He still held the photo and he cast about for other things to rest his gaze upon apart from the old man. ‘I'll show you the jersey,' said Mrs Culland. I tried to tell her it wasn't necessary but she had become accustomed to following her own will and went off into the rest of the house.

‘Jesus, it's hot in here,' said Wayne. ‘We'd better push off soon. There are other places yet and we don't want to be too late.'

As we waited the old man gave three sharp, inward breaths, and then, as if something had given way at the centre of him, his shoulders folded still further. His big translucent hands gripped the green towel in his lap, and one foot extended on the wooden floor of the porch so that the soft sole of the leather slipper squeaked as it moved. There seemed to be no breathing out. ‘Jesus,' said Wayne.
The old man looked much the same, but his posture gradually slackened, and although his neck still lay along his shoulder, his face turned down and lost its level gaze. ‘Jesus,' said Wayne, and stood with his hands into fists as I tried to feel the old man's pulse.