50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 1 20th Anniversary Edition (3 page)

They drove in silence back to the hospital. Reebie absorbed in the dreadful ramifications that would surely befall her as a result of losing her charge, while Jack was wondering what sort of cook she might be, and if she’d be the type to pitch in and help around the farm. He was con­vinced that she wasn’t the golfing type. When they reached the nurses’ home, Jack nervously asked Reebie if he could phone her the next day. ‘I’d like to know how it all works out, and also to make sure that you’re alright,’ he said solemnly.

Reebie was startled. For the first time, she took a long hard look at Jack. She hadn’t really paid much attention to him. He sat there at the wheel of his car, dressed in his good jacket and tie which he always wore on special occasions, like travelling to and fro from Dunedin. His hair was flecked with blond, his eyes a startling blue in a face burnished red by the sun. But it was his smile that appealed most of all to Reebie, his wistful curl of a smile.

‘I’m in Room 12,’ said Reebie. ‘You’ll need to know that if you call.’

‘Oh, I’ll be calling alright,’ said Jack, encouraged. ‘There’s no two ways about that.’

Reebie got out of the car and Jack cursed himself that he’d missed the opportunity to kiss her. That would have been something to tell the boys at footie, though he supposed he could claim the achievement anyway and no one would be any the wiser. Reebie walked self-consciously up the path to the nurses’ home, certain that Jack’s eyes were following her. She turned to wave and also to check, and sure enough, he was still hanging out the window, grinning at her. She waved and he waved and she waved again. Then he thought to start the car and drive off.

Reebie phoned the charge nurse from the nurses’ home. She couldn’t face him. But to her enormous relief, Maxwell was safely back in the villa. He had been apprehended in the lingerie department of Farmers in Oamaru, undressing a display mannequin. Reebie was praised for her dedication and resourcefulness in trying to find Maxwell.

Jack rang the next day to see if everything was alright and to ask if he could take her out for tea to McGregor’s on her next day off. Reebie happily accepted. Their excursions to McGregor’s became something of a ritual on Ree­bie’s days off. It was over a McGregor’s mutton pie that Jack asked Reebie to marry him. Reebie agreed. She was always delighted by something new. ‘Just don’t buy me a ring yet,’ she insisted. ‘Wait a few months until we’re absolutely sure.’

Jack agreed happily. He preferred not having to spend money until it was essential, and supposed that Reebie thought the same way. It didn’t occur to him that she was only saying maybe. He realised the significance of a ring when he started taking Reebie out and introducing her as his fiancée. People would look to her finger for the ring and not finding one, would smirk and whisper. Reebie didn’t even notice. She was too preoccupied dreaming about her new life on the land. She had visions of herself tending a flour­ishing orchard, wandering through the hills composing lines of poetry, baking her own bread and perhaps tossing the odd bale of hay to some grateful sheep. Her first visit to the farm, a month after Jack’s proposal, seemed to confirm these notions.

Jack had insisted that they all take a day off work and concentrate on trying to impress Reebie. Not many outsiders married into Mawera. Patrick McDonald’s fiancée had broken off their engagement after her first visit, when she discovered where he expected her to live for the rest of her life. Not that it was that bad. Admittedly, there was no shop, no pub, no post office or bank. However, those facilities were available only sixteen miles away in Crayburn and another sixteen miles beyond that there was Glenora, the seat of the county council and quite a thriving little town. There had been a pub in Mawera once. It had been the heart and soul of the community, incorporating the store, post office, telephone bureau and library as well. But it burnt down in 1953. The community lost all its businesses and services in one fierce blaze. They were never restored.

Mawera was tucked up in a valley, high above the Serpentine plain, in the south-west corner of the county. That was where the Red River started. Up in the hills behind Mawera, fed by creeks and streams. The river twisted across the Mawera valley and then dropped down through a gorge to meander across the great expanse of the Serpentine plain. The twisting course of the river provided the county with its name.

One thing Mawera could boast over Glenora was a tourist attraction: an old stone-walled gaol built in the 1860s which luckily was left untouched by the 1953 hotel fire. Those with an interest in the history of the early settlers came to inspect it and gasp over the chains that the prisoners had been cuffed to, still dangling from the stone wall. These tourists didn’t mind in the least that the tar-sealed road petered out halfway to Mawera. They liked to step back in time. The gaol had been used by the police escorting the gold transport through from the Central Otago goldfields to Dunedin.

The weather was the other thing Mawera was famous for. They always got more snow than down the plain. Sometimes feet of it. When that happened only tractors could negotiate the roads and no one could get in or out of the valley. There had been occasions when the twice-a-week mail and grocery delivery truck couldn’t get through for over seven days. The county grader always seemed to have other priorities before getting to the only road in and out of Mawera. School would be closed sometimes for days, and the children would help their fathers instead, digging sheep out of the snowdrifts and feeding out hay. The electricity could be off for days too. Nan kept the old coal range in order for just such an eventuality. It was weather of extremes: hot in summer, cold in winter. Very cold.

Luckily, Reebie paid her visit at the height of summer. Jack slowed the car down once they reached the beginning of the family property, so that Reebie could admire ‘the feed’ and ‘the stock’. She ohed and ahed and didn’t admit her ignorance of the terms.

Nan had hot scones with her homemade raspberry jam waiting for them up at the house. She rushed to the phone as soon as she saw the car turn up the drive, to advise Janet Scott of their arrival and her own excitement. The car slowly made its way up the willow-lined drive, the dogs running to greet it, yapping and biting at the tyres. Nan trotted down the path from the kitchen door to welcome them. Grampy emerged out of his workshop, and stood there by the door, watching. The car pulled to a stop and Reebie opened her door and hopped out. Almost at once, she was surrounded by the dogs, barking and sniffing and jumping up.

‘Get down, get down,’ snarled Jack, but it was too late.

They had already put their dirty paws all over her dress. Nan could see her dream of central heating in Crayburn going out the window. Patrick McDonald’s fiancée had screamed when she saw his dogs, had jumped back into Patrick’s car and refused to get out until they were all tied up. But Reebie was smiling, actually laughing and stroking the dogs and even encouraging them to jump up higher. ‘They’re so friendly,’ she said.

‘That’s typical of the country,’ said Nan, coming forward. ‘Everyone’s friendly in the country, even the dogs. I’m Junior’s mother, just call me Nan. And this is his father, Jack.’

Jack winced at being called Junior, but Reebie seemed delighted at the name. She moved forward to meet Grampy, who was ambling towards her. ‘Welcome,’ he said, and then quickly pecked her on the cheek.

‘Thank you,’ she said, looking round, taking everything in.

The sun was beginning to fade and the colours in the landscape were at their most vibrant. Sunlight spilt out from behind frothy clouds, flushing them dusky pink, catching on the water in the streams and swamps and glinting silver. The hills rose up from the valley floor, crumpled into lavender brown folds, like some carelessly tossed eiderdown. The snow still gleamed on the mountains beyond, smooth and glossy, like glazed royal icing on one of Nan’s Christmas cakes. Reebie felt exalted, inspired. She rather wished she had a pen and paper with her to jot down a few lines of her first poem.

This landscape confirmed Reebie’s vision of her new life. When she began to prattle on about her plans for composing verse and baking bread, no one said anything to contradict her. Both the Jacks stared at their shoes pretending to be preoccupied, leaving Nan to say, ‘that would be nice.’

No one wanted to ruin anything.

Driving back to the hospital the next day in the car, Reebie snuggled up to Jack and told him she was ready. ‘It’s time we started making some plans.’

Jack didn’t stop when they reached Cherry Farm despite Reebie’s laughing protests. They drove on to Dunedin, to Weatherall Jewellers, where Jack got out his cheque book and told Reebie to choose her ring. They were married five months later at the Presbyterian church in Crayburn. Reebie was enchanted to arrive and find the church half-buried in snow. It struck her as a symbol of the pure and fresh new existence she would lead. Her father was less impressed. He got the car stuck in a ditch concealed by a snowdrift, and had to carry Reebie the last five hundred yards to the church. By the time she got to the altar she was shivering so much she couldn’t make her vows. The locals were intrigued and delighted. Jack had to borrow Nan’s fur coat and wrap Reebie up in it before she could finally utter the magical ‘I do’.

The snow put paid to their honeymoon plans for Queenstown. By the time they were ready to leave the reception, the radio was announcing that the road there was closed. There was nothing for it but to spend the night at the farmhouse. So it was there, in Jack’s bedroom, with the two single beds pushed together, that Reebie discovered that Jack was as keen to begin breeding himself as he was for his finest Charolais bull. And he went about it in a similar brutal, overwhelming fashion. Several times.

They never did get away on their honeymoon. The demands of the farm held them captive. Reebie soon realised that she was expected to toss more than the occasional bale of hay to the sheep. She was expected to feed out over two hundred bales a day, seven days a week, whatever the weather, while her husband drove the truck. Her other plans went similarly awry. The climate was so severe, it was inconceivable to plant fruit trees. ‘The only things that grow up here are thistles and tussocks,’ Jack informed her.

As for wandering through the hills composing poetry, she was told to take the shotgun with her and dispose of a few rabbits as she went. Poetry was impossible when she was expected to leave a slaughter in her wake. And when she asked for yeast at the Crayburn Superstore, she was told they didn’t stock it and why would she want it anyway? Bread was now delivered twice a week, a new innovation. It was ludicrous to make work when there was more than enough to do already. Reebie’s desire to bake bread became the favourite derisive story of the district for weeks.

Two months into her marriage, Reebie had not written a single line of poetry, but had fed out over twelve thousand bales of hay. She felt unsettled and bitter. Things had not unfolded as she had imagined. She tried   to speak to Jack, but he brushed her complaints away. A nagging suspicion that somehow she had been deceived began to fester in her mind, at exactly the same time as the new life deep within her began to make its presence known to her.

When the doctor in Glenora confirmed what she had suspected, she ran out of his surgery, out of the waiting room where Nan sat waiting gleefully for the news, out onto the road. And still she ran. Blindly. Until the street and the town ended abruptly in front of her. There was nothing before her but the wide, frozen expanse of the Serpentine plain, stretching out as far as she could see. It was there that Nan found her, down on her knees, weeping, at the edge of the town, accusing her and all of them of trapping her into a life she had never wanted for herself.

One year, my father made the calves pink. That’s my first vague shimmering of memory. My mother always smiles when I remind her of that day, though she protests that I must’ve been too young to remember. ‘You would only have been two and a half the year we made the pink calves.’

But I do remember. It was so piercingly cold that morning, how could I forget? The cold nipped at me and I howled my protest. But my father had insisted that I had to be brought to see his
first
Charolais calf.

It was like a winter’s day, though it must have been spring. There was snow everywhere, with a frozen crystal crust that I could walk upon without sinking into. It was like concrete when I inevitably fell over. I remember my mother gathering me up in her arms, soothing me, whispering in my ear, distracting me from the pain. ‘Look at the pink calf,’ she said. ‘A pink calf. Look at the pink calf.’

And I remember turning to look and being struck by the wonder of it. The calf, still wet and bedraggled, but against that pure white backdrop of snow, radiating an extraordinary colour, the shade of a delicate sunset.

My parents were both so excited by the calf. My father jabbered away to it in some nonsense language as if it was a baby, encouraging it to walk, as it stood there shaking on its four legs. My mother was flushed with elation too. My mother who these days barely pays attention to my father and his various schemes and dreams for the farm. There was a look close to rapture on her face. She was entranced by the sight, absolutely still, concentrating. Then her lips began to move, though no sound came out. I was pressed up against her cheek and I would’ve heard. She wasn’t speaking to me or my father. Those were secret words.

Later, maybe even a year later, when I was sick with the measles, she told me a story about the pink calf that she’d made up herself. It was a very clever story and all the words rhymed. Maybe she thought I’d be too feverish to remember because she seemed startled the next night when I asked her to tell it to me again. She was shy. ‘You wear a story out if you tell it too many times,’ was her excuse and she hurried away.

I doubt she would ever have repeated her story if I hadn’t tried to recite it back to her one night. ‘No, no,’ she pro­tested, ‘you’ve got it all wrong.’ And with a solemn expression on her face she told the story again. I clapped when she’d finished and she hushed me. ‘It’s our secret,’ she said, and I knew what she meant.

The story wasn’t for my father’s ears. He wouldn’t have approved. To him it would have been a waste of valuable time.

Bedtimes became clandestine. My mother had lots of her own stories up her sleeve but she only ever told them occa­sionally. ‘I have to be in the mood,’ she said.

This state of mind was frustratingly rare. I soon realised there was no point in begging for her stories. It only seemed to embarrass her, and she would hurry out of my bedroom without even saying good night.

So it was unlucky, given that she relented so seldom, that one night my father managed to overhear us. Perhaps he sensed he was being excluded from something. When my mother finished her story, one I’d never heard before, I looked up and noticed him standing there, grinning in the doorway. He didn’t say a word. He just smiled in a way that wasn’t really a smile. My mother didn’t see him. He was gone by the time she stood up to tum off my light. But he must have said something scathing to her in the privacy of their bedroom because there were no more stories after that. My mother was never ‘in the mood’ again. I didn’t dare to ask for one. Something in her face warned me not to persist.

But I knew she went on making up those stories and even wrote them down. There were times when I came upon her unexpectedly, seated at my father’s desk, and from the expression on her face I knew she hadn’t been merely attending to his accounts. There was that same intensity in her eyes that I remembered from that morning all those years ago when the first pink calf was born.

When Babe was old enough to understand the story of the pink calves, the two of us used to beg my father to make the calves pink again. But he’d always shake his head. He was aiming for white calves, the absolute white of a purebred Charolais. The year of the pink calves was the first year he crossed his new Charolais bull over his red Shorthorn cows. They were the beginning of the long process of building a purebred Charolais stud.

Grampy didn’t like the Charolais. ‘White beasts,’ he called them. They didn’t like him much either and one of them almost did him in. It was my father’s first Charolais bull, Bruno, the one he had brought over all the way from France, that bailed Grampy up against the railings of the cowshed. I was probably only four, but I remember my father and Mr Spratt carrying Grampy up the drive to the house and laying him on the kitchen table. His clothes were torn and I could see the skin beneath was swollen and broken. Nan was crying as she and my mother sponged off the blood. She begged my father to go out and shoot the brute at once.

My father refused. Not his beloved Bruno, the French bull he’d paid thousands of dollars for. But it wasn’t even the money. My father had a vision. Probably he’d deny it if I mentioned it now, but I remember him dragging me onto his knee and telling me that by the time I was halfway to being a man, there’d be a whole mob of white cows, just like Bruno, gleaming in the paddocks along the roadside. ‘They’ll be so white,’ he whispered to me, ‘they’ll dazzle the eyes half out of your head.’

But I didn’t want white cows. It had been the white beast who had hurt Grampy so that he walked with a limp from then on. I wanted pink calves again, like the one that magical morning, like the one in my mother’s secret story. To my mind pink calves were a good compromise between the white cows my father so ardently desired and the red cows that Grampy still stubbornly complained were superior. But they both ignored my suggestion.

Grampy moved out of our house because of the white cows. He didn’t want to have anything to do with them and started spending more time at the Crayburn house. He’d bought it to retire to, before I was even born, but he didn’t like it. ‘I’ve lived almost sixty years in this here farmhouse,’ he said to me. ‘It isn’t easy to just up and leave. I can’t sleep in that new place.’

He refused to help my father with the ‘white beasts.’ There were a lot of jobs that required two men and that mercifully were beyond me. Grampy figured that my father would eventually get tired of struggling on by himself and go back to Shorthorns. But he did no such thing. Instead he hired a boy to help and told Grampy he’d have to move out of his bedroom to make room for the new worker. For once Grampy was lost for words. He just drove off in his car. Babe and I helped Nan pack everything in their bedroom, accumulated over fifty years of marriage. We were both in tears. ‘He’ll grow to like the new place,’ Nan consoled us. ‘It’s got central heating everywhere, and a dishwasher.’

Nan loved working the central heating. When we visited them in the new house, she always turned it up as high as it would go so we could appreciate its full impact. Grampy complained it was like living in a glasshouse with windows that couldn’t be opened because of the double glazing. ‘It’s withering me up,’ he muttered to me one day. ‘Making me old before my time.’

There were locks on the door of the new house that Grampy shunned. He didn’t even want to know how they worked. ‘We never needed locks before.’ Nan would deliberately lock him in and go off for an afternoon’s golf. ‘Keep him out of mischief,’ I heard her tell my mother. ‘He’s getting to be an old man and he doesn’t like it one bit. He needs to rest but he won’t hear of it.’

My grandmother should probably have taken her own advice. She crumpled into Grampy’s arms one night as they were stacking their dinner dishes in the new dishwasher. Grampy grunted his approval. He thought she’d fainted from the oppressive heat of the house and that finally he’d be permitted to turn it down. It was only when her limbs began to twitch that he realised she was having a stroke. He carried her to the car and drove her to the hospital in Glenora. He didn’t want to waste any time. But when he got to the hospital, the doctor wasn’t there. Eventually he was found at a birthday party in the neighbouring county.

Nan never recovered. She was denied the house with all the modern features she’d waited so long for. The stroke plundered her body. She didn’t know anyone. She could do nothing for herself. It was as if her very soul had fled with the shock of the seizure but the body had been too slow and heavy to follow. She lingered on for several weeks in a private room in the hospital, her eyes betraying her bewil­derment at the family weeping round her bed who were strangers to her now.

Grampy seemed to grow attached to the new house after Nan died. He even kept the heating turned up because it was the way she had liked it. He wouldn’t hear of moving back to the fannhouse. He bought a colour television. He was the first to get one in the entire Serpentine county but he didn’t seem to realise how wondrous it was. He’d even criticise it, while Lou and Babe and I watched it in awe, speechless.

‘Some of those television people looked better in black and white. The colours they wear together are hard on the eyes.’

It was the seventies after all.

Grampy had bought the television to entertain himself when he was alone. When we visited he turned it off, much to our dismay. He wanted to talk. He’d give us each a bottle of lemonade, which he considered a tremendous treat, and sit us down at the kitchen counter and begin one of the tales we’d heard countless times before.

His favourite story was the Field of Blood. Grampy had heard about it when he was a boy, from some of the old shepherds who worked the big stations until they divided them into small runs for settlement. Before he started, he always brought out the greenstone relics and chisels that he and his brothers had fossicked for as boys. He’d lay out the evidence and encourage us to pick up the strange stones as he told his tale.

Two Maori tribes had met on the same trail, a trading route through to the Clutha valley, near the mouth of the Eweburn stream where it flows into Red River. The tribes fought each other to the death until the two waters ran red and that was how the river gained its name.

When the three of us heard the story for the first time, we raced down to the paddock to search for Maori artefacts. We spent an entire day down there, restaging the battle and then scrabbling around, digging holes in the pasture, vainly hoping to come upon some relic of the battle. We found nothing. Lou started pestering my father to plough the paddock, convinced that it would turn up all sorts of treas­ures and maybe even an ancient skeleton, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. ‘That paddock will never be ploughed,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go digging up any spirits and bringing bad luck upon myself.’

He’d heard Grampy’s stories too and held the field in a certain reverence.

Grampy warned us to keep away from the paddock. ‘Don’t go down there. It was a terrible thing that happened there. Steer clear of it. Never swim there. You’ll get a cramp and the water will pull you under.’

Naturally, being told not to go there made the paddock irresistible. We sneaked down at every opportunity, thrilled by the prospect of vengeful spirits and ancient curses. We never swam there. We weren’t allowed to swim without an adult supervising us. But we did sit on the river bank, dangling our bare feet in the water, tempting the currents. Then one day, we saw a big eel rise up only a couple of yards from where we sat. Hastily, we withdrew our feet. We didn’t tell anyone what had happened as we’d been technically disobedient in the first place. But it reinforced the gravity of Grampy’s warnings and the authenticity of his stories.

Despite the amount of time we spent down there and all our hopeful searching, we never did find any Maori weapons of war. All we ever found was a strange bone. Lou was being a Maori warrior and she trod on it while negotiating a swamp. We brought it home to Grampy, who identified it as a moa bone. ‘It was the swamps the moas fled to,’ Grampy said when he heard where we found the bone. ‘There was a huge fire, hundreds of years ago; centuries ago, a fire that almost consumed the entire South Island and the moas ran to the swamps to try and save themselves. But the fires were so fierce that the water couldn’t stop the flames. The moas were burnt to death, the swamp waters boiling around them, and that’s how the moas became extinct.’

It sounded a bit far-fetched, but we nodded our heads and gasped in the appropriate places. That was the local folklore we grew up on and at first it was fascinating. We clamoured to hear my grandfather’s stories. But then we got television and began to crave more exciting worlds. We wanted to be the Robinson family lost in outer space. We wanted to be a family of singers like the Partridge family and have a mother who drove an old bus. We wanted to carry guns and shoot rustlers like in ‘The Big Valley’. None of us wanted to be moas running from the flames any more. It just wasn’t exotic enough.

It was usually Lou, the boldest of the three of us, who’d ask to watch his television once Grampy had finished his story and before he had time to launch into another. He always looked a little startled but he never refused us. Aside from the television Grampy also bought five hundred acres of land outside Crayburn. At seventy-two, Grampy announced that he was going to breed Shorthorns again. He was determined to compete against his son in the interbreed cattle section of the Glenora Show. And win.

Neither of them ever managed to.

Victor Caldwell of Crayburn had a New Zealand cham­pion Hereford bull that he monotonously entered every year and which the judges always felt obliged to honour. Both Grampy and my father longed for Victor’s bull to go lame.

Meanwhile, my father, spurred on by these repeated losses to Victor and by Grampy’s revitalised career as a farmer, bought a second bull from France, Dante. This was a terrible mistake. Dante proved to be trouble. He wouldn’t stay in with the cows.

Dante was a monster. He was so huge, that when he arrived in the back of the transport truck, he wouldn’t fit down the loading ramp at the cowshed. The truck driver and my father had to prod him out of the truck and make him jump to the ground. ‘Hope you like ‘im,’ said the driver. ‘You’re gonna have to buy a wider ramp if you ever wanna get rid of ‘im.’