Owls Do Cry (4 page)

Francie Withers has a brother who’s a shingle short. She couldn’t bring the fuji silk for sewing, she had to bring ordinary boiling silk that you shoot peas through, because she’s poor. You never see her mother dressed up. They haven’t any clothes and Francie hasn’t any shoes for changing to at drill time, and her pants are not
real
black Italian cloth.

She hasn’t a school blazer with a monogram.

But Francie Withers is Joan of Arc, and she sang at the garden party –

Where the bee sucks there suck I

In a cowslip’s bell I lie,

There I couch when owls do cry.

When owls do cry, when owls do cry.

But not any more there I couch when owls do cry. There are owls in the macrocarpa and cabbage trees and they cry quee-will, quee-will, and sometimes at night because of the trees you think it is raining for ever and there will be no more sun, only quee-will and dark.

But the day, for Francie, left school, will be forever, with them all having breakfast and their father going to work, smelling of tobacco and shaving soap and the powder he sprinkles on his feet to stop them from becoming athletic.

—What shift, Bob?

—Late shift, Amy. Home at ten.

But very often he did not call her Amy, only Mother, or Mum, as if she really were his mother.

And she would call him Father, or Dad, as if in marrying him she had found another father.

Besides Francie’s grandad.

And besides God.

—Yes, late shift, Amy. Home at ten.

—Oh Dad, you’ll never get your sleep in.

—If I’m off tomorrow I’ll fix the waste pipe.

—It needs fixing.

—Of course it needs fixing. Haven’t I told you time and again not to put grease and stuff down it?

—I’ve been emptying the dishwater outside, on the roses, to keep the blight away.

—You didn’t last night.

—I forgot, Dad.

—Good Lord, is that the time? Make sure you keep those kids away from that rubbish dump, they’re the talk of the town, them going and playing in all that rubbish, strikes me they can’t tell what’s rubbish from what isn’t rubbish.

—Yes, Dad.

He almost kisses his wife then, and is gone, wheeling his bike around the corner, and Amy stands looking after him. She wipes her hands on her wet apron, it is always wet, a wide patch of wet where she leans over the sink to wash the dishes.

She thinks for one moment, because she is romantic, of herself and Bob and the time he courted her and sang to her, what was the song –

Come for a trip in my airship

come for a trip midst the stars,

come for a spin around Venus

come for a trip around Mars;

no one to watch while we’re kissing,

no one to see while we spoon,

Come for a trip in my airship

and we’ll visit the man in the moon.

And when they walked down Waikawa Valley, as close to the moon as possible, they met the old Maori running from the ghosts and he called out, Goodnight Miss Hefflin, only he said it like Heaven, and she laughed.

Perhaps Amy thinks for a moment of this, or is it only in books, where cried-for moons are captured, that they think this way?

And then the children are off to school and the littlest one plays in the backyard, that’s Chicks, chicken because she’s so small and dark; and Francie’s there, who’s not small but twelve, thirteen after Christmas, but left school now to make her way in the world and get on.

And be part of the day that is forever.

And it is quiet now for Francie. She thinks, now the girls at school will be marching in for prayers. A new term has begun. The headmistress will be standing on the platform and raise her hand, not for silence because it is hushed already but because she likes to raise her hand that way. She is big, with a head shaped like a bull and no neck to speak of and you can never see what she is wearing under her gown because it wraps her close like a secret. She is standing, in majesty, before the school and saying Good Morning, girls.

And then it is the National Anthem and the headmistress welcomes everybody for a new term, singing with them, or opening her mouth like singing,

Lord Behold us with thy blessing

once again assembled here

onward be our footsteps pressing

in thy love and faith and fear

still protect us still protect us

by thy presence ever near.

—The Lord, the headmistress says, after the Amen, is very very close.

And she wraps her gown more secretly about her body. She opens the Bible then, and reads about the Sermon on the Mount.

—And seeing the multitudes he went up into a mountain.

—And, she says the Beatitudes. Blessed are the peacemakers and those that are poor in spirit and those that mourn, and how Christ taught them, saying.

They repeat then, the Lord’s Prayer, not looking, with a special word added in case there is War, to make the soldiers not afraid; and they sing a long hymn, conducted by the music mistress who is deaf and lipreads and is related to Beethoven; and the hymn has so many verses that if it is a hot day some of the girls faint or have to walk out into the cool air and are able to boast about it afterwards,

—I fainted. I walked out of Assembly, when they sang the long hymn.

O give me Samuel’s ear, they sing. His watch the little child the little Levite kept. A real watch, a ticking kind that
slices and doles out day like best cake, or the looking watch that you live, sitting your life in a dark house like a box, in case an enemy should come?

It is a sad hymn, the little Levite one, and some of the girls, even the ones with two-storied homes and cars and caravans, will cry; yet when it is finished everything is school again, and the headmistress not any nearer to God; as if there had been no Bible or Jesus going up to the mountain where the air is cool, tasting of snowgrass that grows all the way up; and He passes a dead sheep that the hawks have eaten, and some live sheep sitting side-saddle upon the grass and chewing their cud. And it is a most beautiful mountain out of geography, a Southern Alp, but lessons never teach you how to write it; you only make shading like featherstitch.

So it is all gone in a cloud, and the headmistress is crossing her gown over her bosom and saying

—Girls, there were a number of navy coats and panama hats left at the end of last term. If no one claims them they shall be given to the Chinese Relief Fund.

—Girls, some of you have been seen in the street and not wearing gloves, or talking on corners to the boys from the High School. Girls, girls.

The headmistress is very stern.

The Invercargill March then, and soon the hall is empty.

And Francie is at home caught in a forever morning where every sound is loud and strange. The kitchen clock, the old one that belonged to her grandfather, ticks with a nobbly loudness, staring with its blank dark eye where
you put the key to wind it. The front of the clock opens and inside are kept for safety, receipts and bills, art union tickets, and all things that must never be lost or the Withers will be up before the court or bankrupt.

Yet the clock is time, and time is lost, is bankrupt before it begins.

Francie sits in the kitchen. The fire burns with a hissing sound, then a roar until the damper is put in. Sometimes the coal makes a pop-pop.

—It’s the gas, Mrs Withers explains. The coal we buy never has it, only the coal your father gets from work.

—Does he pay for it?

—No, Francie, he just brings home what we need.

The forever morning has a bird outside on the plum tree, a dog barking, the voice of the baker calling on the next door neighbour and saying,

—Did you get your bread at the weekend?

and the words seep through the holly hedge, are pricked on the way, come dropping through the kitchen window, firm and red words like holly berries and smelling like bread and primroses and the inside of a teapot.

And why, it
is
teatime, morning tea, and Mrs Withers is sitting spread out on the bin by the fire and drinking tea, with a home-made biscuit leaning wet to the waist in the saucer; and the tide rises and drowns the biscuit and she rescues it, though some of the soggy parts drop on the floor, and she dunks the remains in her tea. And the fairy ring of criss-cross that she made around the edge with an old knitting needle, for decoration, is crumbled away.

And still lunch time does not come. The world is stuck and over and over like a burning spinning and hurt record, and the world is empty,

a blue and white sack, hollow, with no people in it, save Mrs Withers and Chicks in a far corner

and the sack gets filled with a bird on the plum tree, and the baker saying

—Did you get your bread at the weekend?

and the clock making a stifling ticking that hops round and round droning, like a swarm, in the sack, and is never let free.

—Francie, Mr Withers said, will go to work at the Woollen Mills.

It was teatime. Poached eggs with pale yolks, bought from the store where the eggs are kidnapped from the hens and put in the dark and stamped on the shell with blue writing, and made valuable. The Withers’ own hens had stopped laying and though they gave them greens and let them have the run of the garden, and ground up oyster shells for them, the hens would not lay any more. They were retired hens. They made Bob Withers angry. He would go to shoo them in at night and they would sink before him with their wings outspread and their feet doubled up, in a kind of cramp, and not move, and Bob Withers would get angry and call them names, though not really bad names because the man who lived next door belonged to the Church, a missionary, who had been to the Islands, and was queer
of course, for he sunbathed in the nude, and the children looked through at him. Their mother and father did not know they looked. Francie knew about him, but did not look, because she was left school and grown up and ready to make her way in the world; besides, she didn’t need to look,

—I have plenty of opportunity, my dear Daphne, for looking at things like that.

—Tim Harlow, Daphne said.

And Francie hit her. Though as a matter of fact it
was
Tim Harlow, and Francie’s parents were worried because Francie was, Mrs Withers said, a young woman ready to take her place in the world, and it was dangerous for her to be out with Tim Harlow, or any man. Why, Francie could get into trouble and be a disgrace to her parents and have to go away for a holiday up north while the baby came and everything was fixed up. And if the neighbours asked after her, Mrs Withers would be hard put to find an answer. She would have to say, swiftly,

—On holiday.

And then change the subject to how much cornflour to put in a sponge cake.

—So Francie, Mr Withers said, will go to work at the Woollen Mills.

Francie did not even wait to finish her poached egg or sop it up with bread and butter. She ran from the table and into the bedroom, crying when she reached there and no one could look.

Daphne followed her, but when she tried to open the bedroom door she found that Francie had fixed the back of a chair under the door handle.

—Let’s in, Francie, she called.

Francie didn’t answer. She was crying.

—Francie, let me in, you
have
to let me in, because I have a plan.

Francie opened the door and let Daphne in, then put the chair against the door.

—Why aren’t they coming, she asked, to storm us?

—I suppose they’re consulting. Francie, you
won’t
go to work at the mill?

The two girls did not really know what the mill was, except that years ago small children had worked in mills, never seeing the sunlight for years, so that when they were rescued they turned blind, like pit ponies, and had to be led about on a leather strap that scarred them for the rest of their lives. The two girls knew little of Francie’s mill. They knew that every morning at eight o’clock the mill made a scream like a fire siren and Francie and Daphne would look at each other and know that the mill girls had begun work. They rode bicycles, six abreast sometimes, though it was against the rules, along the main highway, going north, sometimes with the wind in their faces, riding on and on in the wind, with their permed hair going straggly unless it was covered with a gipsy scarf, and their coats flying open and their faces prepared and unsmiling; and leather lunch baskets strapped on the carrier of their bicycles, or money in their purse for pies at dinner-time from the nearby shop with the fly-specked window and the giant, dusty, and empty packets of Weetie and Kornie; and on the counter the jagged bright pink book of raffle tickets, the chance of a lifetime, first prize a washing machine and, consolation,
a vacuum cleaner; riding on and on, the mill girls, with the mill out of sight and the girls driven there by a secret siren in their head, that sounded in triumph over the whole town when it had captured every particle of its prey. It seemed the mill girls rode into a nothing of north wind, or the nor’wester that choked them with hot dust from the plains; or some days spurred and chased by the wind from the south, off the snow, Francie’s mother would say, and Francie and Daphne knew that over and over again the hundreds of girls, some Francie’s age, were bewitched into a dark room filled with wool, where they were forced to fight their way through mounds of thick dusty-smelling bundles, grey and brown, green and gold, and blue like the sky that was shut out. Some of the girls choked with the colours and died.

Suddenly Francie, who had stopped crying, took off the top of her dress, it was a little coat striped like wallpaper, with small roses, and Aunty Nettie had made it. Francie looked at herself in the mirror.

—I am grown up, she said.

She had pink bulges where Daphne had mere tittie dots.

—I am grown up and I have left school because there is not enough money. Not many girls of my age have left school, have they Daphne? And not many been in the plannies with a boy, have they Daffy? And sent away for the free book on becoming an opera singer, have they Daffy?

Daphne could have hit her, she felt so wild with her for being grown up. She fixed the button on the front of her dress, so Francie couldn’t see, and wiped over the mirror
with her sleeve, to smooth away sight of herself and her thin chest and brown straight hair; but only breath was smoothed away, like frost, and she saw her face with its green eyes pick the pie looking at her. She turned to Francie,