Heartland (2 page)

Bull's lace

Vera takes the long way down to Bull's place that evening, never mind if the dinner gets cold. At the end of Miro Street, she passes the old ladies' darkened house, turns into Hohepa and trundles the pram over the grass verge to get a better view of Donny's little cottage. The light's on. No shouting, no one sitting angrily on the front porch. Smoke drifting out of the chimney. All good signs. Perhaps it'll all work out.

Across the road and one door down, the Virgin Tracey is sitting as usual on the front porch of her squat, keeping an eye out for invading forces. She gives Vera the finger.

‘Up yours too,' says Vera. The exchange is more routine than aggressive. Vera's attitude towards the Virgin has progressed from glacial to grudging respect; she admires the girl's astonishing survival skills. Nevertheless, she hurries on past, her mind on the task ahead: Bull's lace exhibit.

Vera wrestles with Bull's massive gate-lock, difficult with a full pram of food, but she's used to it. Bull will be standing behind his own solid door, ready to open when he hears the rattling dishes.

Safely inside, and warmed by the first sips of whisky, she's ready to bring up the subject, but Bull beats her to it. He unwraps the tissue paper, spreads the lace carefully across his immaculate table. He's always anxious at first, doubtful about his exhibits.

‘What do you think then?'

Vera fishes her bargain-bin specs from a grubby cardigan pocket and peers at the lovely stuff. Bull waits. Vera takes off the glasses and stands back for the full picture, then goes back in to study a detail. She shakes her head and sighs.

‘Bull Howie, I don't know …'

Bull twists his massive hands and looks down.

‘No good this year?'

‘No good?' says Vera. ‘No
good
? You dumb ox. This is too good for life on earth. This is more delicious than Mona's pavlova. This lace,' she says, tucking the specs into her bra and preparing for battle, ‘is going to win first prize, and you, Bull, are going to exhibit in your own name.'

‘You like it then?' says Bull. ‘What about the kotuku?'

‘What about it?'

‘Is it right?'

‘Bull, don't ask me is it right. You're the artist. Every bloody thing about that tablecloth is right, is more than right, is
Art
. So fold it up before we spill tea on it.'

Bull Howie spreads his arms, thick as fence-posts, pinches the edges of the cloth as if taking up salt and lifts the airy thing off the table, folding it in two quick movements. It almost floats.

Over gravy-beef with carrots, baked potatoes and Brussels
sprouts, which Vera has brought down from her place ready cooked, as she does every day of the week except Sunday, placing the dishes — the red casserole, usually, and the Pyrex pie-dish or sometimes the double-boiler if it's cauliflower cheese — placing them in the old pram, covering the hot food with a piece of army blanket and wheeling the lot down to Bull's at the other end of Manawa, down by the railway line, rain or hail, you could set your clock by her, though not many in Manawa bother with clocks … over this meal, Vera brings up the matter of the Easter exhibition.

‘No fictitious aunt of mine,' she says, rubbing at a spot of gravy with her napkin, ‘is going to take credit for that
gorgeous
creation, Bull. This year you're going to stand up and be counted.'

‘They'd never give it to a man,' mumbles Bull through a full mouth. He always enjoys his food; is a huge but neat eater who rarely spills gravy or anything else on the good corduroy jacket he dons every evening ten minutes before Vera arrives. He spears a sprout with his fork, inspects it carefully and pops it in. Chews. ‘Your sprouts have done well, Vera,' he says. ‘Mine are weeks away yet.'

‘I'm serious,' says Vera.

Bull frowns and eats on in silence.

‘It's getting ridiculous,' says Vera, who is not one to give in once she's started. ‘Last year when my
old Aunt Veronica
—' she snorts and looks sideways at Bull — ‘my
sweet old aunty
won for a second year running, they wanted her to come down and run a course. Demonstrate, that sort of thing. I say she doesn't have a phone. They say write to her. I say she doesn't answer
letters. They say
well, how did she hear about the competition!
They know something's fishy, Bull. Half of them think I buy your lace from some Chinese emporium up in Auckland and flog it off as my aunt's …'

Bull throws down his napkin. ‘Anyone with two eyes,' he says, rising and stomping over to the bookcase, ‘any half-blind idiot can see my work's not Chinese. Look here!' He pulls a book out, changes his mind, goes for another, flips through its pages, stabs with his square finger. ‘Here! Nothing like! Look at it, Vera!'

She looks.

‘Now look at this.' He picks up a lace piece, delicate as snowflakes, which drifts in an irregular pattern over his oak dresser. ‘Now tell me, does that say Chinese to you?'

Vera grins up at him. ‘There's my point, Bull. It's them you've got to persuade, not me. Di Masefield and the rest of them.'

‘Di Masefield!' Bull clears his throat again. He carries plates to the sink, crashes around with water. Vera packs the empty dishes away in the pram. Then Bull measures Nescaf into two cups, adds generous slugs of whisky and a dash of boiling water from a kettle on the range. Bull still uses the old wood range because the chopping keeps him fit. Plenty of sportsmen, he says, run to fat once they give up, look at the rest of his year — flabby tubs of lard if they're not dead. Bull's legendary frame has remained well packed with muscle.

‘Rabbits this year,' announces Vera. With a conjuror's flourish, she takes from the pram a plastic box of lumpy shapes — chocolate rice-bubble clusters. Last Easter she made chickens which looked identical, though Bull, always one to encourage
artistry, makes no mention of this. He mumbles praise.

‘I had that word with Donny,' says Vera. ‘Seems the baby could be his.'

Bull sighs.

They sip in silence, in their usual chairs, at the kitchen table. They'll probably play a game of Scrabble before she trudges back with the pram over the stony, empty road, arguing with herself, not even noticing the stars.

Now, though, Vera returns to the Easter craft fair.

‘Is it your rugby mates?' she asks.

‘Nah. None of the fellows would come within a country mile of the Lacemakers Guild.'

‘Their wives would.'

‘Whatever. I don't care about them anyway, Vera, that's all history.'

‘You might think so. I saw this good-looking boy on TV, about sixteen in the shade, laying down the law on some rugby thing. A record that was broken, something like that. There you were on the box! Did I tell you? Forty years ago, it said, and could've been yesterday for all the change in you. Charging down the field like a bulldozer. It was Sunday afternoon, you would have missed it.'

‘Yes.'

‘You saw it?'

‘No, I missed it.'

‘Well anyway. Look, Bull, look at it this way. Think what a boost to lacemaking if it came out that Bull Howie had won the regional senior open twice running. Not to mention what you'll win with this year's little beauty.'

Bull runs a hand through hair still as bristly and thick as it was all those years ago when he rammed it regularly into the necks of opposing front-rowers. He smiles the same crooked, half-apologetic smile he used when holding up the Ranfurly Shield for the fans to see. The whisky has loosened his tongue.

‘To be honest, Vera, it's Di Masefield. I can't face a fight with her.'

Vera sighs and he blushes, looks away. It's not just Di Masefield, and they both know it. Getting through his own gate and into town will be enough of a challenge without that dragon waiting at the other end.

They sip for a while, thinking of Di. Then Vera rallies.

‘When it comes down to it, Bull, what could she fight you over?'

‘That I'm not a woman.'

There is another silence. Bull bites off the head — or is it the backside? — of a second chocolate rabbit.

‘She hasn't a leg to stand on, you know,' says Vera, ‘not a leg. There's a man potter who exhibits every year. And several wood-turners.'

‘Lace is different, Vera, and you know it.'

‘Our Fitz was selling Maori kete that he'd woven at the Mardi Gras last year. No one turned a hair.'

‘No one bought them either.'

‘That's not the point, Bull. I'm talking principle here. Look at that golf competition down south. You could take it to the Human Rights Commission.'

But they both know that won't happen.

Vera can see that something has taken root, though, so
she leaves the argument and they get on with their Scrabble. Bull wins right at the end, changing her
RAPT
to
RAPTURE
, which puts him in a good mood.

As Vera buttons her old oilskin against the crisp air outside, Bull clears his throat — a tentative sound from a man so large.

‘I'll give it a go.'

‘Under your own name?'

‘That's what I said.'

‘O-ho!' Vera laughs out loud. ‘What wouldn't I give to be a fly on the wall when Di hears!'

‘Come with me then.' It's a plea.

But she won't.

She rides to town with him, though, crammed into the front seat of George Kingi's ute. The lace, its entry form filled in, and wrapped in spotless tissue, rests on Bull's massive knee. The selection committee is, as usual, the chairwoman of the craft fair, Di Masefield, who somehow manages to hold sway over half the committees in Ohakune, and deaf old Mrs Stonycroft who won third prize in a Scottish Lacemakers' competition in 1943. George drops Bull off at the dark doorway of the hall and Vera at the New World. Vera storms down the aisles with her trolley, thinking only of Bull left alone to face Di Masefield.

Bull's waiting on the road when they return. Looks down, pretending not to see Vera's raised eyebrow.

‘We've got a battle on our hands,' mutters Vera.

But halfway home he says, looking straight ahead through the windscreen, ‘They accepted it.'

‘No fuss?'

‘No fuss.'

At his place, he's out of the ute and through his gate before Vera can get a word in. He heads for the back garden, walking head down as if into a gale. As they drive on she calls out, ‘See you at tea time?' He raises one of his great beefy hands in acknowledgement, that's all, before he disappears behind the house.

Vera's own house, ramshackle and untidy — two unused and draughty bedrooms at the front, toilet on the back porch — at least possesses a proper electric stove. Bull's old wood-burner couldn't cook a sausage, in Vera's opinion. She stuffs a chicken (on special today at the New World), and roasts kumara and potatoes around it. All the time she's wondering what's up with Bull. Di must have had a go at him. She frowns to remember Di Masefield's poisonous evidence at Donny's trial, the way she managed to twist all the good words she and George Kingi had to say about him. A bitter, narrow woman; how she manages to fool other people beats Vera.