Owls Do Cry (8 page)

said the sparrow on the tree
.

Francie, come in you naughty bird, the rain is pouring down, the fire is pouring down. Now be careful kiddies, for wherever you walk you may meet an angel; for angels walk upon the earth among people, and the day Christ comes He too will walk unknown upon the earth. And blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven
.

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth
.

Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God
.

And childhood is nothing, it is only the wind in the telegraph wire for crying there, the toothache in the cavity of night, the too big body curled up in the cot too small, the grandmother breaking her back in the hot Virginny sun, grandmother what big eyes you have; and the boy in the fox’s belly, unstitch, unstitch, boy girl or day locked in the suffocating belly of memory
.

Now that Francie is dead, I, Daphne, am the eldest sister, the eldest in the family, not counting Toby who takes fits and lies sometimes in hospital with his lips lolling together like rubber and covered with saliva and his face twisted and his eyes bulged. He does not know us when we go there at visiting time, and the nurse leads us along a corridor to a room like a cage, with bars, where Toby lies on a high bed white and clean as a china plate; as high as the bed where the princess lay, under twenty mattresses; the
real
princess. Toby, when you get better we will go to the rubbish dump
and find things. A diamond. A lump of gold. A moa bone. Toby we
must
find things that other people have thrown away as no use, all day and night they are standing on the edge of the cliff and throwing, and sometimes in the night they cannot see what they throw; in the night or sleep or dream; till they wake too old and late.

Toby when you come from hospital and they have paid the bills – but they will never pay the bills. The window letter will come from the hospital board and our mother will put it inside the clock or pin it to the calendar, and our father will reach for it when he comes home at night, hold it up to the light to read through and be prepared, then slit it open and throw up his hands or dance out of rage, like Rumpelstiltskin, though not going through the floor, and cry

—Money! Money!

And a little mouse will crawl from a hole in the corner of the bin and whisper, in a voice like hundreds and thousands, Money? In the bin we keep old shoes and books and pieces of leather that our father uses for mending. Where’s the last, he calls out. Who has seen the last, and the hammer, and the box of tacks? And men in peaked blue caps come at night to help him mend our shoes.

Oh. Toby. Our father doesn’t wear glasses to mend. He can see quick as light in the dark corners, or quick as the troutlet that moves to hide under the river-bank, its belly to the earth. So perhaps our father is not going blind yet. You remember Grandad wore glasses and pushed them up on top of his forehead as if there, in that shiny spot before you got to his hair, the shiny spot that in old people and
babies gets covered with scales, again like fish, was a secret pair of eyes that needed help with looking. The case he kept his glasses in was rubbed and shiny too, with orange spots. Were they polka dots? What are polka dots, Toby? I heard someone say polka dots, I think it was Aunty Nettie, you remember we watched her one day through the door. She had a case with a paua shell cover, on the duchesse in front of her, and a powder puff in her hand, and was patting her face and smiling a private smile to herself in the mirror. A smile full of delight and arrangement and what is called wisdom. And then she turned and saw us and went red.

—How dare you watch me put on my face.

It was a sin. To have watched Aunty Nettie putting on her face. And it was worse for her, I suppose, because now we knew she had another face and another smile to it. We had found her out, like a thief. She kept blushing.

—You rude children.

As if we had been watching her on the lavatory or picking her nose or doing any one of those things you do in private, to yourself.

But Toby you do not get better. You do not know us or speak to us, and Chicks and I play together and wait for you to come home, and the children at school say,

—Your brother takes fits, Ya-ha.

And then when you come from hospital and walk down by the sea and they find you having a fit, the people say to our mother,

—Mrs Withers, your boy will have to be sent away.

Now Toby, I know about people being sent away and I wonder where away is. Perhaps it is down Rio where they
sing a song of the fish of the sea. Away down Rio. You remember the woman up the road had to be sent away because she kept going out in the street with no clothes on, like the emperor in the story, except that people were wise, like the child, and noticed, and said,

—Hey you. You can’t get away with that.

So they put her away somewhere, and also the other lady, Minnie Cuttle, who stood on top of the hill and dropped swears like hailstones on everybody in the valley, even on our mother, who would have given her food and clothing, not that she needed them but that was our mother’s way of love, like giving us milk and milk to drink, and keeping a jersey cow that breathed in our face the breath of grass and cavern of milk, like love; though Chicks was too small for an extra mother, at first, and was kissed more, but not our father who said

—Get away can’t you, if our mother put her arms around him or touched his shoulder.

Our father was sad, though he had a new bicycle in exchange for Francie’s and had burned Francie’s slacks, at last, under the copper, setting fire to them in secret, and he was guilty now and did not like to be kissed.

—Get away can’t you.

And our mother would put the kettle on for a cup of tea, and when the kettle began singing and the pot stood warm and ready on the side of the stove, with two teaspoons of tea in it, no, three, one for each person and one for the pot, as it said on the outside of the packet, our mother would say with the same look she gave our father when she wanted to kiss him,

—Have a cup of tea, Bob.

And our father, deceived, would smile,

—Just what I need. Why didn’t I think of it before?

So our mother would have given the lady on the hill, Minnie Cuttle, a hundredweight of tea in exchange for a hundredweight of swears; but they put the lady away who dropped hailstones in the valley; and they did not put you away Toby for our mother said, always,

—No child of mine. No child of mine.

And so on and on. And we walk like Theseus or an ashman in the labyrinth, with our memories unwound on threads of silk or fire; and after slaying by what power the minotaurs of our yesterday we return again and again to the birth of the thread, the Where. And what Theseus or ashman will wear in his hair a scarlet poppy made of paper, or tie up his trousers like a parcel, with string, fasten the legs of them like two Christmas crackers with a gold thread?

And the sky is now a blue mask to cover memory, the ledgers, the wonder beneath glass
,

Rapunsel, Rapunsel, let down your hair
.

Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe
.

—
Sings Daphne from the dead room
.

I talk of the woodlouse and his traffic across the wall, the turtle-turn of him and his legs writing in the air his telegram to pity
,

—
Come quick. I burrow in the closed eyes of wall and wall for trickle-taste of light
.

sings Daphne from the dead room
.

I kept a dream of two thieves under my pillow, and my thieves

are gone, full with my last meal of sleep

to a beach blessed with shell

where winter pours velvet sunlight

where small buttons like pearl

green as karaka leaf

are sewn to sleep in shrift of tide

in seabed of my brother’s grief
.

Listening at keyhole of summer
,

I hear the roar of snow
.

In case the sunlight kill

I will make you, Toby, a salt shirt

with small buttons like pearl

white as manuka bud

sewn in the sleeves that sweep the sea

all winter with your life’s blood
.

Looking at green wave through glass of fire

I see the red shadow
.

Toby, I will give you a loaf of blue air from wheat that grows in the sky, and trawl the wasting seas for paradisal shoal of love, and when you die

sings Daphne from the dead room
.

I will say you lived in a half-world, a microscopic place of bitten oranges like blighted sunfall, where neither the wind blowing the way forward nor the way back, articulate with ripe fruit of night could feed or make you whole
.

—
Rags bones bottles scrap iron old steel a life to sell

sings Daphne from the dead room
.

Now Toby, what will you be, what will you be
,

in freezing works west-coast mine or foundry?

Now Toby where will you live, where will you live

—
in hovel or bungalow God forgive
.

Now Toby how will you die how will you die

—
dug and dumped in the pit of why
.

Hard cash.

Toby Withers unrolled his bundle of ten shilling notes and put them down in a layered and crumpled confection of soft rust upon the table that was small and shaped like a cell of black honey.

A world ago the hives with their hats on in the corner of the paddock and the bees in a swarm in the gorse and the apple-blossom and the world-size apples where a child’s reach exceeds his grasp else what’s a heaven for, Granny Smith, Kentish Fillbasket, Rome Beauty, Delicious, Jonathan, Irish Peach, and the stripey ones like eating green ice cream, else what’s a heaven for?

Hard cash.

The ten shilling notes were from the freezing works where Toby worked in season with good money, overtime, bonus, boots provided, strip the guts all day and bring home
a kidney in your pocket a spare for your old man who’s retired, sixty, sits in the corner by the stove, jigging his knee or tapping on the edge of the table with his three middle fingers, remembering the war, which war,

Fall in A

Fall in B

Fall in all the company.

The old man–

—Toby,
never
call your father the old man.

Toby’s father takes pills in a narrow bottle with a red wrapper insect-ridden with instructions and warnings. Toby takes pills too for his fits that happen now only sometimes, and then it is his mother, faded, shrunk, stolid, vague, with the hardened arteries and swollen belly of salt, who will comfort him. Toby is a man, thirty-two, new-minted from adolescence and the twenties, a gold coin, silver coin, copper coin, ten shilling note of rust lying upon a black cell of honey.

It was half-past ten, the three clocks told it, for where one had stood on the mantelpiece in the Withers kitchen, fed year after year with bills and receipts and tickets, two more have been put for companionship, a gloating and clucking collection of time, a triple blackmail, the old grandfather clock and the two alarms with their moon-faces and humped shoulders. They all pointed to half-past ten, and were believed.

But the radio
knew
, and its telling, in a human voice, gave comfort to Bob and Amy and Toby Withers, sitting in the kitchen, under the spell of the thirty-six inhuman eyes.

—A quarter-past ten, the man on the radio said.

—The clocks are wrong, said Bob Withers, looking at the mantelpiece triumphantly; but even as he said The clocks are wrong, he knew they were right, and they looked down at him, idiot-shining they were, and told him they were right, and he said,

—What’ve we got three clocks for, anyway?

—Now, said the man on the radio —A session for bandsmen, conducted for you by Walter. Good morning, Walter.

—Turn it off, Toby said. I can’t count my money while the radio’s on.

He had taken a pile of silver from a tin on the mantelpiece and shaken it upon the table, and now was arranging it in columns not quite as high as the Eiffel tower.

—Turn it off.

He spoke to no one, really, but his mother appeared from the scullery, as she always appeared when he called; tied, like a gentle echo, to his talking. She held an oven cloth and her face was flushed from bending over the electric stove that stood just inside the door, in the corner,

—Oh Toby. Your grandfather belonged to the first brass band in the province. He was bandmaster. They used to parade on a Sunday. Listen. But I’ll turn it off if you want it off.

—I can’t count my money with the noise in my ear.

His mother obediently turned off the radio. His father looked up from the coal range where he sat, cosy as a cricket, hopping his eyes over the morning paper. He had read the news page and the local, skimming the overseas notes about China and the Far East, and was reading up the truck accident, where young Fred Maines had been injured and removed to hospital, condition fair. Then he would turn to the comic strip at the back, though he usually liked to read that first; though sometimes he tempted himself by keeping it to the last.

—Do as your mother wants you. Leave the radio on. You could have counted your money last night or any other time. Anyway you count it so often you ought to know how much you’ve got. Not that
I
get any of it, or your mother, for the house.

—But, Dad–

—You don’t have to live here if you don’t want to, if you think your mother and father are getting too old and niggely.

—Oh Bob, Toby would never think that about us, would you Toby?