Pearl in a Cage (24 page)

He should have got that boy back into school in February, but he had too much on his mind to worry about schooling a boy who didn't want to be schooled — and who didn't need it anyway. The drought was on his mind, and his hungry sheep. And the creek bordering his acres was down to a trickle, and Max Monk, his neighbour, worse off than he. Monk had more
stock, more staff, was dependent on his land for his living — and he enjoyed the high life. Vern had his mill. He could afford to buy feed for his stock.

Then, as if he didn't have enough on his mind, his farm manager went and broke his wrist and was less than useless.

‘Independent bugger of a woman. Useless little bookworm bugger of a boy.'

He dragged Jimmy away from his book, forced him into the car and out to the farm. Couldn't get him outside. He wanted to sit in the manager's parlour reading out-of-date newspapers. He dragged him from the newspapers, showed him how to spread a few bags of wheat for the sheep. He walked him down to the creek where he found two of the woolly-brained buggers stuck in the mud. He went in, up to his knees, and hauled one out while Jimmy stood in the shade hunting flies from his eyes and howling over an old ewe, stuck to her neck and barely worth saving.

‘Get back up to the house if you don't like seeing what life's about, boy.'

Thigh deep, up to his armpits in greasy, grey mud, and something stabbed him on his wedding ring finger. He considered it a sign from Jesus telling him he wasn't meant to wed that independent bugger of a woman, or maybe that he was meant to hang up his hat to Nelly Dobson — which would save him a bit on her wages. He got the ewe out, saw her up on her feet, then walked down to where the creek had a bit of sand to walk out on, where he washed the mud off.

Three days he kept that boy out there, and by the time he got him home, he was mozzie-bitten, fly-bitten, had sore eyes from the dust and was more than willing to return to his schoolmasters. Vern paid John Dean's oldest boy to give his manager a hand and he took off for the city to get rid of his son. He was staying at his half-brother's house when his wedding finger started giving him pain. Maybe he should have stayed down there, but he took the train home and was halfway back when he noticed the swelling. By the following day, his hand was up like a rubber balloon. He put it down to a city spider bite. His housekeeper didn't. She told him to get down to Gertrude.

‘That independent bugger of a woman,' he said. ‘I wouldn't go near her if I was dying.'

By late afternoon, he felt like dying. He didn't go to Gertrude. He drove down to Willama and drove home with a bottle of blood-cleaning potion and sulphur pills, and his hand throbbing and near useless.

The pills worked on his belly, not his hand. He was as sick as a dog, couldn't keep a thing down. His housekeeper noticed the red streaks creeping up towards his elbow.

‘I've seen a man lose his leg, then his life with blood poisoning,' she said. ‘You get yourself back to those doctors, Mr Hooper.'

He didn't want to lose his arm — or his life. He got himself out to the car, got it started, but knew he'd never drive the distance. There are times when a man has to swallow his pride. His went down like burning bile, but he drove to Gertrude.

‘You fool, to neglect something like that,' she yelled. ‘Get down to Willama. I can't deal with this.'

He'd sat on her cane couch and doubted he'd ever leave it. She was holding his hand and it felt good. ‘They'll cut it off,' he said.

‘How did it start?'

‘Something bit me in the city. What's it matter?'

‘It matters. Where did the swelling start, you fool of a man?'

‘My ring finger. It was Christ warning me off women.'

‘Then it's a pity it didn't bite you years ago.'

‘Who are you to talk?'

‘I only did it once.'

She was holding his arm now and her hands were cool. She studied each finger.

‘I love you,' he said. ‘I love your hands.'

‘I love yours too. What did you get up to in the city?'

‘None of your business.'

‘If you want to keep that hand, it is. How did you do that?'

She'd found the stretched scar of something newly healed on the pad of his ring finger, half an inch from where it joined the palm.

‘A man can't recall his every scar, and I'm too crook to care.'

‘Then start caring, Vern. Can you drive if I go with you?'

‘I could fly if you were with me, Trude.'

‘You're running a fever and it's no joking matter. This is bad. We've got to get you down there.'

‘They're not cutting it off. Do something.'

His finger was purple, his hand was getting to be that way, and he'd kept nothing other than his pride down since yesterday morning. He wasn't a passing out sort of bloke, but he was about to do it. He lay back on her couch, his head resting on one end, his knees hanging over the other.

‘It's more likely that cut has had some infection in it and healed over, than to be the bite of something. I've told you a hundred times that farm cuts need looking after.'

‘Stop nagging me and do something.'

‘Remember you said that, my lad.'

She poured boiling water into a small bucket, stirred in a few tablespoons of salt, added a dash of lysol, placed a clean towel over a kitchen chair, the chair beside the couch, the bucket on the floor, dipped her lancing tools into the bucket, added cold water enough to drop its temperature down from boiling to steaming point, then she took Vern's wrist and plunged the hand in and out of that water, and while he was yelling about the heat of it, she punctured the balloon of his wedding finger, right over the stretched scar. Hand back into the bucket, then her lancing tool went back into the same hole, opening it deeper, wider.

‘Keep your hand in that bucket for as long as you can stand it,' she said.

He couldn't stand it, so she took his wrist and plunged the hand in again.

By the sixth or eighth plunge, the water in the bucket had lost a degree or ten and when she told him to leave his hand in the water, he did as he was told.

She made up a poultice of bread and boracic acid, crushed garlic and enough honey to bind the mess into a paste, then she plastered it over the wound and bound it there with sheeting.
She emptied the last of her brandy into a glass, sweetened it with honey, soured it with the juice of a lemon, crushed two aspirins into it, added a dash of boiling water.

‘Drink it.'

‘I can't keep anything down.'

‘You'll keep this down. Drink it.'

‘I'm not a drinking man.'

‘Stop arguing, Vern, and do as you're told for once in your life!'

He drank it, and when it stayed down, she saddled her horse and rode into town for salt, metho, aspirins and a bottle of rum, known to heat the blood faster than brandy.

Gertrude's treatment was never pretty and usually painful, and the more she learned about healing, the more she knew how little she knew. She treated infections with heat and salt. She'd seen it work in the old days, and she'd make it work on Vern. She loved that pig-headed fool of a man; she may not have wanted to live with him, but she didn't want to live without him.

Every two hours, on the hour, she prepared that scalding bath for his hand, and that night, she helped him to her bed then offered a larger dose of her rum and honey brew. She told him to sip it, but he emptied the glass and it went to his head.

‘Get in with me, Trude.' It was the first time he'd been invited into that bed.

‘You'd be lucky to raise a finger tonight, my lad.'

‘Hop in, and we'll find out.'

‘There's two kids a wall away. Go to sleep.'

‘I tried to get them further away and the bugger foiled me.
One kiss, my bonny sweetheart
. . .'

‘You're drunk,' she whispered, but she leaned down and kissed his lips.

‘That's not a kiss. That's an insult.'

‘I need two good hands to hold me, darlin',' she said, escaping his one good hand. ‘When you've got two, I won't insult you.'

‘Promise?'

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.'

‘You'll marry me?'

‘A weekend in Willama. Now go to sleep.'

He was snoring peacefully when she bedded down on the couch, a hard bed, but she'd slept on worse.

Three nights he spent in her bed, and for three days he spent a good percentage of his daylight hours with his hand in that bucket of steaming saltwater. On the second day the poison stopped creeping up his arm, and by the second evening the swelling in his hand started centring where it had begun, in his wedding finger. On the third morning, the wound exploded, and what came out of the hole she'd dug had to be witnessed to be believed. He didn't believe it, but he started mixing his own saltwater.

He drove home on the fourth morning, promising to follow her instructions to the letter. It took a week for the infection to ooze away, and when it did, and that hand, though peeling, was back to its dinner-plate dimensions, he held her, kissed her and told her she was an independent bugger of a woman and he'd never loved another and how about that trip to Willama.

 

In March, she left Elsie in charge and kept her promise. They planned another trip in April, but Lorna brought Jimmy home in April.

‘You'll have to stay home to care for him,' Vern said. ‘I'm run off my feet right now.'

Lorna had engagements in the city. She was involved with a bunch from the university, intent on changing the world.

Through May and June, Jimmy remained in Woody Creek, and what was a man supposed to do with a nine-year-old boy who didn't like sheep and ran from the dogs when Vern took him out to the farm? And what the hell could he do with a boy who couldn't stand the noise of the mill when Vern took him there, who came home worrying that his nose or his lungs were full of sawdust, who wandered around half of the night afraid he was suffocating?

Vern hired a maid to help his housekeeper and he started leaving the boy home in their care, until he came home one afternoon to find Jimmy washing dishes in the kitchen wearing
the maid's apron. The boy seemed happy enough, but he had too much of his mother in him already without putting on a woman's apron.

In July, Vern took him back to his schoolmasters. In September, Lorna and Margaret brought him home. They stayed two nights, then he was on his own.

Whatever Vern might have felt for Norman Morrison, respect had never come in high on that list, but with that boy like a millstone around his neck, he found himself drawn more often to the station to have a smoke with Norman while Jimmy sat around drawing or looking at books with a four-and-a-half-year-old girl.

‘I was running amok at his age,' Vern said.

‘Children are not always what their parents hope they'll be, Vern,' Norman said.

In October, he had a smoke with Norman and ended up inviting him and the girls around to share his Sunday evening meal. Jimmy and Cecelia were of similar age. If his boy wanted to play with girls, then Vern might at least supply him with one his own age. Norman accepted the invitation, and Vern went on his way to the post office, Jimmy left to play.

Wished he could take that invitation back when he picked up his mail and saw a letter wearing an English stamp and postmark. Didn't want to open it. Took it home and sat looking at it for ten minutes before he found the nerve to see what was inside it.

‘Christ save me from that,' he said.

Henry Langdon was Vern's first wife's younger brother. Vern had met him a week before their wedding, then spent the next three months trying to get rid of him. England was half a world away. Folk who made the trip felt obligated to get their money's worth before making that trip home. Langdon had made the trip a second time to see his sister's grave and to meet his motherless niece. Now he wanted to repeat the exercise, and he was bringing his wife with him.

Vern pitched the letter, and damn near got his housekeeper who'd come in to see what he wanted. He wanted his flamin' youth back; that's what he wanted. Twenty-four when he'd wed
Lorna Langdon, who had looked much like her daughter and been seven years Vern's senior. If the truth be told, he'd wed her for her five hundred pounds a year — and because Gertrude had gone sailing around the bloody world with Archie bloody Foote.

‘Visitors,' he explained to his housekeeper, picking up the letter. ‘Visitors you can't get rid of.' He pitched the letter at his table, watched it slide down the polished surface. ‘And we've got more on Sunday evening. The Morrisons. Sorry,' he said. ‘I don't know what his kids eat.'

They were good eaters. Maybe they weren't accustomed to much. The older girl's table manners made Jimmy look like a young gent. Little Goldilocks used her fork as a spoon. A silent meal, just the scrape of knife and fork. Vern had other things on his mind, namely Henry Langdon. He had nothing in common with him. And not much in common with Norman. He looked at Jimmy and Cecelia and knew that all they'd ever have in common was their age. He wouldn't be repeating this exercise.

Then Jimmy disappeared and didn't return. Cecelia took to roaming his house, picking up things she shouldn't have been touching, while Goldilocks sat on the floor as close to the wireless as she could get, watching for the little men to fly out. Vern had picked up a station playing decent music. Listening to it gave him a reason for silence. Between songs, he and Norman managed a few words to say about Melbourne, a few to say about the weather, then Vern went looking for Jimmy and found him reading in his room.

‘We've got guests, lad. Get yourself out to the sitting room and do the right thing by those girls.'

The boy was obedient, Vern would say that much. He followed his father back and sat beside Jenny, near the wireless.