Mud and Gold (5 page)

It felt the most lavish praise anyone had
ever given her. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ Amy said. She smiled
hesitantly at Charlie and watched him eat several more slices
before he even started on his bacon and eggs.
I’ve done
something he likes. I’m learning
.

After the success of her bread, Amy felt
brave enough to rattle off a long list when Charlie asked what she
needed from town later that morning. She stopped when she noticed
he was looking incredulous.

‘What do you want all that stuff for?’ he
asked. ‘What do you need hops for? And caustic soda?’

‘Hops are for making yeast, and soda—’ she
picked up a bar of soap that was lying on the bench. She had
already noticed its suspiciously regular shape. ‘Do you buy
this?’

‘I don’t get it out of a cow’s backside.
Where do you think it comes from?’

‘It’s just that I always made it at home.
I’m sure it’s cheaper making it myself. That’s what I need the soda
for.’

Charlie grunted. ‘Well, you can’t have all
that stuff, anyway. Tell me two things you really need.’ That was
discouraging, but Amy resigned herself to building up her kitchen
stocks gradually over a few months.

When the evening meal was over, Charlie
announced, ‘We’re going to church tomorrow. My mare’s quiet enough,
you can ride her.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t ride a horse,
Charlie.’

‘What are you talking about? I used to see
you riding to school, years ago.’

Fancy him remembering that
.
It was
so long ago—I was only twelve when I finished school
. ‘I used
to ride like a boy then—you know, just throw a blanket across the
horse and ride astride. But I can’t really do that now. And you
haven’t got a side-saddle.’ She had already checked the shed that
held Charlie’s tack.

‘Oh. Well, it’s maybe for the best. It would
only encourage you to wander if you could ride. I’ll go over and
see your pa first thing, see if he’ll take you in his buggy. I
can’t put you behind me on Smokey, too hard on his back to have you
bouncing around all the way into town.’

Pretty hard on my bottom, too. And I wish
he didn’t make me sound like a straying cow
.

‘I suppose you’ll want a bath tonight,’
Charlie said.

‘Yes, please—if it’s not too much trouble.
I’d better start fetching some water.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Charlie said in the tone of
one making a great sacrifice. ‘It’d take you half the night to
fetch enough.’

Amy draped her nightdress and Charlie’s
nightshirt over two of the chairs. Charlie carried a tin bath into
the kitchen from one of the sheds, then made several journeys to
the well carrying a large bucket in each hand. He watched Amy heat
up water on the stove and pour it into the bath. He seemed to be
thinking through a problem, and at last he said, ‘You can have the
bath water first. Don’t let it get cold.’

‘Thank you. I’ll try and be quick.’

When Charlie had left her alone, Amy
undressed and climbed into the little bath. She had to suppress a
foolish urge to giggle.
So there is something good about being
married after all. No more having to use Susannah’s bath water
.
A small laugh escaped her; she stifled it before it turned into
hysteria. She squirmed around to check her shoulders and found a
livid bruise on each side.
That doesn’t matter. No one will see
those. And the bruise on my cheek’s faded a lot now. As long as he
doesn’t hit me on the face before tomorrow no one will notice
anything
.

Amy found small bruises at the tops of her
thighs, and knew they must be from Charlie’s rough thrusting. Like
the bruises on her shoulders, they were tender to the touch, but
she ignored the discomfort and scrubbed herself all over. After
three nights of Charlie’s demands it was blissful to feel clean
again. Perhaps she would only stay clean for a few more hours, but
in the meantime she was going to enjoy it.

*

Amy woke on Monday morning feeling weary and
despondent. Sunday had got off to a good start, with Charlie
leaving her alone on Saturday night. At first Amy had been afraid
he was annoyed with her, but he had said nothing, just groped
half-heartedly then rolled away and gone to sleep. After his
importunity of the first three nights it had puzzled Amy, though
she was grateful for it. She had no way of knowing it was one of
the differences between a man of twenty and one well past
forty.

The service had been something to endure,
with Amy only too aware everyone was staring at her as she sat near
the back of the church at Charlie’s side. It had been even worse
afterwards, with everyone rushing up to give meaningless good
wishes and congratulations. Amy knew they were all speculating on
why she had married Charlie. She had seen a gleam in Mrs Carr’s
eye, and was sure Mrs Carr had been eyeing her belly, expecting to
see a guilty swelling there.

After the humiliation of being inspected by
everyone, Amy had had to fight off feeling sorry for herself all
the rest of that day. It hadn’t helped that, being Sunday, she had
not been able to weary herself by working as hard as usual. That
meant she had been wide awake at bedtime, when Charlie had seemed
to want to make up for his wasted time on Saturday night. He had
taken a long time over it, too, leaving Amy feeling bruised and
battered. The final stroke had come when Charlie at last rolled
away from her, and Amy, lying awake with her mind racing, had
remembered the date: it was once again the eighth of February. One
year since Jimmy had proposed to her, and one year since they had
lain together under the stars.
I used to like it with him, and I
hate it now. I must be really bad to hate it with my husband. And
we made Ann together, and I gave her away
. She had sobbed into
her pillow for much of the night before drifting into an uneasy
slumber.

And now she had washing day to cope with. At
home Amy would have sorted the clothes into piles and put the
dirtiest ones in soak on the Sunday, but there were no washtubs
here, so she would just have to scrub them harder. She had found a
filthy washboard on the earth floor of one shed, where it had
obviously lain neglected for years, but there was no copper or any
other sign of laundry facilities. Over breakfast she asked,
‘Charlie, where do you do the washing?’

‘That’s your job!’ he said indignantly.
‘It’s woman’s work!’

‘I know it is, I didn’t mean it like that.
It’s just that I don’t know where things are yet, and I wasn’t sure
where I’m meant to do it.’

‘Oh. I used to give things a bit of a splash
down at the creek. I expect you to do it properly, though. I want
things nice around the place now there’s a woman here.’

Doing it properly without anything to boil
the clothes in was going to be difficult. Amy thought hard while
she did the dishes, then went through to the bedroom, pulled the
sheets off the bed and bundled the dirty clothes up in them. At
least there was only two people’s worth of washing to do.

She checked her wood heap, and was relieved
to find it full. She dragged the tin bath out of its shed and piled
the firewood into it along with a cake of soap, some newspaper and
matches, with the clothes on top. There were several empty kerosene
tins lying in the shed. Amy carried out two of them and managed to
fit one into the bath with the wash board inside it. She looped the
second tin over one arm and struggled down the hill to the creek,
juggling her awkward load.

She lit a fire on a level spot close to the
creek, filled both kerosene tins with water and set them on the
fire. It took load after load to fill the bath with boiling water,
and the sun had been up for hours before she had enough.

The washboard came clean when she dipped it
in boiling water and rubbed it hard with soap, and after a rinse in
the creek it was ready for use. Amy managed to get all the
underwear, her work dress and aprons, and Charlie’s shirts and
socks washed before the bathful of water was soiled enough to need
emptying. She tipped it over, narrowly avoiding a nasty scald, and
looped the steaming clothes over a stick to carry them from the
tub. The creek was the best place to do her rinsing, though it
meant keeping a tight hold on each item as she swished it about in
the water.

After stopping for an hour to make lunch and
bolt down her share, it was time to carry on. Her fire needed
stoking again and a fresh bathful of water had to be boiled before
she could wash the sheets and the rest of the clothes. She left
Charlie’s work trousers soaking in the hot water while she finished
rinsing the sheets, which were particularly awkward to hold on to
in the creek. Although she added more boiling water, Amy could not
keep the bath of water at a high enough temperature for the
dirtiest clothes. Even after having been soaked, the trousers took
a long session of hard rubbing against the washboard before they
came clean, and Amy skinned her knuckles against the wooden
board.

The edges of the tin bath had cut into her
hands when she carried it down the hill, and wringing the steaming
hot clothes by hand wore the skin raw. Her head ached from being
out in the hot sun for so long, despite her straw bonnet, and her
bruised shoulders protested painfully. Amy sat on the grass for a
few minutes to rest her back, which was aching from hours of
hunching over the washing. She tried not to think too longingly of
her lovely big copper with the two tubs beside it where she had
done the washing so many times over the years.

I shouldn’t complain. Pa told me Mama had
to do the washing down by the creek for years, before he got the
proper house built. There were four of them to wash for, too. Pa
used to carry the wet washing up to the clothesline for her
afterwards, because it was so heavy. I won’t even try asking
Charlie—that’s woman’s work
.

With that, the next problem struck her:
there was no clothesline.
Why does everything have to be so
hard?
But she had no time to waste on the luxury of feeling
sorry for herself.

She sought out Charlie, and found him
checking his potato paddock. ‘Charlie, can I please have a bit of
rope?’ she asked.

‘What for?’

‘To hang the clothes on.’

He stared hard at her. ‘Is that the
truth?’

‘Yes,’ Amy assured him, wondering at his
earnestness.

He studied her puzzled expression, and
seemed satisfied. ‘There’s plenty in the cowshed. You can fetch it
yourself.’

What did he think I wanted it for?
Maybe he thought I might hang myself with it
. Amy smiled at
the foolishness of the idea, until it occurred to her to wonder if
it really was such a ridiculous notion. No more struggling to
please Charlie, never knowing whether he would approve or lash out
at her. No more being mauled in bed, then lying awake wondering if
he would do it again.
How would Charlie feel if he found me
swinging from one of the trees?
She shuddered at the picture.
Maybe he’d feel guilty. I don’t think so. He’d be angry, but it
would be too late. That would get the tongues wagging—oh, it would
be terrible
, Amy realised abruptly.
Everyone would say Pa
forced me to marry Charlie, then I hung myself because I couldn’t
bear it. Pa would never get over that. It would be the worst thing
I could ever do to him.

Amy found a coil of rope, noting the grubby
butter churn lying neglected in a corner of the same shed; she
would have to clean that up and start making butter when she had a
little time to spare. She looked for two trees a convenient
distance apart, and saw a suitable pair some way further up the
hill from the house, in a spot sufficiently exposed to catch the
sun. Attaching the rope high enough so the clothes would not drag
on the ground was going to be a problem. Amy studied the branches,
and decided there was only one way to do it.

If there was one thing even more difficult
than clambering over fences in a corset, Amy found, it was climbing
trees. But it had to be done, and by taking off her shoes and
stockings she had at least given herself a chance of getting a grip
on the tree trunk. She knew she would make a strange sight,
clinging to a tree branch with her skirt and petticoats tucked into
her apron strings, but no one was likely to see her. One leg had a
deep scratch by the time she had secured the rope.

The wet clothes
were
heavy, and it
took Amy several trips to bring them up from the creek. She had to
drape them over the makeshift clothesline and hope they would stay
there, as there were no clothes pegs. That was another thing she
would have to ask for one shopping day.

Amy stood back from her clothesline and
studied the washing. It did not look as clean as she would have
wished, certainly not as clean as she was used to, but it was a
good deal better than it had been before. The sun was hot enough to
dry everything in what was left of the afternoon. It was essential
that they did dry quickly, as Charlie only seemed to possess one
pair of sheets.
No wonder he never bothered washing
them
.

By the time dinner was over and Amy had her
bread dough warming in front of the range she was drooping with
exhaustion, but she welcomed her weariness as a friend.
I’m so
tired I’m sure to drop off as soon as he’s finished. Maybe I’ll
even go to sleep during it
. That, she decided, was too much to
hope for. But another first had been conquered: her first washing
day. The sheets were back on the bed, smelling fresh and clean
instead of musty, and the clothes were all dry and ready for
ironing. It had been far more difficult than she could have
imagined, but next time would be easier. She wondered fleetingly
how she would manage during the scanty daylight hours of winter,
especially when the creek began to run muddy, but she thrust that
thought aside.
I’ll just be miserable all the time if I think
about things like that. One day at a time, that’s the best way to
be. And at least I’ve got a clothesline now. I won’t have to do
that again. I’m not much good at climbing trees
. She rubbed at
her scratched leg through her dress.