Pearl in a Cage (60 page)

She found her horse in a back corner of Duffy's acre. He seemed pleased to see her. She was backing him in between the shafts when a flash of lightning near blinded her, and her horse took off, the harness dragging behind him. She followed its rattle, vowing she wouldn't be coming back to this place. She was past this foolishness.

The next clap of thunder rattled every sheet of corrugated iron on Duffy land, and there were plenty to rattle. The lightning
a constant now, one flash coming on top of the last. And the old bloke standing out in it watching the show, and looking for all the world like Moses, sent down by God on a lightning bolt with a new set of commandments for the Duffy family—or maybe to issue a refresher course on the old.

She got her horse and was bringing him back when two heavy drops fell on her face and bare arm. A few more hit her while she was backing him in, and maybe he was calmer with the weight of that cart holding him down, or with her nearby, talking softly, telling him they were going home. She led him to the road before climbing up to her seat, not wanting anyone to see how dog tired she was, to see her struggling to make that climb, but she made it and flicked the reins.

‘Home, boy,' she said. ‘Take me home.'

He needed no urging. He needed urging to slow, but they got home and before the clouds burst open.

Her beautiful boys were waiting for her in the yard. They took charge of cart and horse while Elsie took charge of Gertrude. She carried water for her to wash, then sat her down to a fine supper and a strong mug of tea.

‘It's too much for you, Mum. It's time you stopped doing this.'

‘It's too much for me on a stormy night with a ratbag horse, darlin', and the worst part of it is knowing that poor mite doesn't stand a chance.'

Tea was a drug. It could lift you up when you felt down.

‘Any news of Jim Hooper?' she asked.

‘Nothing we've heard.'

That boy should have died in infancy and half a dozen times since. He'd been cut too soon from his mother's womb. She'd had no milk to feed him; he'd weighed less at two months than he had at birth, had damn near died when he'd taken the measles badly as a three year old; at five, when he'd gone down with influenza, he was running temperatures Gertrude had rarely seen.

‘He's tougher than he looks,' she said. ‘Give him half a chance and he'll make it.'

 

Daily, the town expected to hear Jim Hooper was dead. A few weren't too certain his father wouldn't go with him. Vern was an energetic man, always on the go. He'd spent his days since the accident sitting by the telephone, or sitting on the verandah, the window between him and that telephone, waiting for the call.

Margaret called. Jim was unconscious. They wouldn't let her see him.

Then Moe Kelly, cabinet-maker-cum-undertaker, fifty-nine years old, fit as a mallee bull, dropped dead in his shed halfway through building a new sink cupboard for Maisy's remodelled kitchen.

‘His wife went out to call him in for morning tea, and there he was, on the floor, a plane in his hand,' Maisy said.

‘A good way to go if you've got to go,' George said.

‘If you're old enough to go! He was younger than you, George. It's like with Jean White. If I'd heard that Vern or Jim was dead, I might have been expecting it, but you don't expect someone like Moe Kelly to drop dead.'

Expected or not, he was gone, and who was going to bury him?

Through the good times and the bad, Moe had been planting Woody Creek's loved ones in pine box or fancy coffin. Through the good times and the bad, he'd taken folk on their last drive to the cemetery in his fancy black funeral van, and he'd never charged more than he knew a man could pay. It wasn't right that a stranger should be brought in from Willama to bury Moe. It wasn't right that Moe's last ride would be in a motor car. He'd never taken to cars.

The Willama undertaker got more than he'd bargained for on the day of his first Woody Creek funeral. He thought they were having some sort of fair. The shops were shut, the mill saws were silent, schoolkids were lining the road outside the church when he pulled in.

A mob came to meet him, led by an old chap with verandah eyebrows and purple eyes.

‘You can get the coffin out and go on your way,' he said.

The undertaker didn't argue. He hung around through a brief service, saw Moe loaded into an ancient funeral van, then led on his final ride through town by an old bloke clad out in full kilt, and on a muggy day when a shirt was too much to have on your back.

‘Moe had no more Scot in him than I've got,' people said.

‘Who cares what he had in him? He would have loved this.'

He would have framed John McPherson's photographs. John took three shots of Moe's rig: one as it passed over Charlie White's crossing, one with the hotel as a backdrop, and one of the procession, old Jim McGee flashing his knobbly knees while squeezing hell out of aged bagpipes.

‘I've heard a few get better music out of squeezing a bloody cat.'

‘Be decent, Horrie.'

‘Be decent nothing. I've heard Moe say the same thing himself.'

‘Hooroo, mate.'

‘Hooroo.'

‘I always thought you'd bury me, Moe. Have a good journey.'

Down and around Blunt's corner, over Blunt's crossing and back to Cemetery Road, Moe riding proud in his old funeral van, his two sons driving his elderly black horses, resplendent for the last time in their finery. A memorable day. In fifty years' time, the kids lined up in the street would talk about the day Moe Kelly was planted.

 

The Willama undertaker would speak for thirty years of his first Woody Creek funeral. It started a rush of business. Before Moe was in the ground, he'd got his second customer. Old Jim McGee, eighty if he was a day, sat down to catch his breath for the final bagpipe salute and he never drew it. They thought he'd nodded off, but when his son nudged him into action, the bagpipes fell to the earth and old Jim toppled with them.

‘A good way to go if you've got to go.'

‘He had a good run did old Jim.'

‘We'll miss his bagpipes at the concerts.'

‘And by the living Christ, I'll be thankful to miss them too.'

There was a second storm the day old Jim was buried. A tree out on the Willama Road was struck by lightning. It took a power pole down with it and the power wires. Woody Creek residents, grown accustomed to light at the flick of a switch, were lighting candles again, attempting to read by the pale yellow glow of kerosene lamps. The power wasn't back come morning either. Charlie White and the local garage bloke did a roaring trade filling beer bottles with kerosene, just enough to tide folk over. Wirelesses were silent. Wind-up gramophones were dusted off, new needles found and near forgotten records played once more. Folk had become accustomed to eating their meals to the accompaniment of the wireless. Mr Cox sold out of newspapers before midday. Folk missed hearing the nightly news.

‘Bloody refrigerators. Why did a man go and pitch out that old ice chest?'

‘How long are they going to be fixing those wires? Has anyone heard anything?'

‘They say they're down all over the place, that it could take days.'

‘How the hell did we manage before electricity?'

They'd managed, and most had managed not to burn down their houses. Man becomes lax. He forgets. His wife grows old.

Anyone who'd had recent dealings with old Mrs Miller from the boot shop knew she was losing her memory. The boot shop went up in smoke with Miller and his wife asleep in the rear residence. If not for the Macdonald twins, the Willama undertaker would have got himself two more customers. Those boys dragged the old couple out through a rear window.

Constable Denham was inclined to believe that if the twins had stayed in Melbourne, the boot shop wouldn't have gone up in smoke, but no one was dead, the shops to the right and left were saved, so for a day or so the twins were heroes—tormenting, drunken, brawling, whoring little bastards, but heroes nonetheless.

Not so to Jenny. She'd loved living with Maisy, had learnt so much about cooking and sewing and knitting, and now she couldn't even have a bath in peace, couldn't go to the lav without the twins throwing things at the door, the roof.

‘Just ignore them, love. Their sisters learned to ignore them,' Maisy said.

Hard to ignore those who don't wish to be ignored. Hard to ignore that blackened gaping gash of ash and blackened timber, of twisted corrugated iron, propped up by Mr Miller's blackened sewing machine. Hard to ignore the burnt boots.

And the sheets of rain washing rivers of black ash across the footpath where the boot shop's verandah had once stood, filling the overflowing gutters with ash, running down, and down, and down, to drain into the creek and leave its stain there.

Mill men couldn't work in the rain. Tree fellers couldn't cut down trees in the rain.

The forest rejoiced. Washed clean by the downpour, washed green, it drank its fill, and in the mud at its feet, a million seeds stirred.

 

Then Vern Hooper took the phone call he'd been waiting for, and finally he left his verandah to give his roses some attention.

‘It's going to take a while, but he's awake and he spoke to the girls today,' Vern said to one, to all. ‘He's knocked out most of his front teeth, but the doc said they'd needed to come out anyway.'

He worked on his roses until the sun went down, and for the first time in over a week was able to see the beauty of this land, most of it in the sky, red as fire tonight. He dead-headed roses until that red sky faded to salmon, faded to purple, then to grey. Lack of light sent him back to his verandah. He was sipping tea when he heard a lad calling at his fence, one of Clarry Dobson's lads, his maid's nephew.

‘Your aunt went home an hour ago, lad.'

‘It's Barbie, Mr Hooper. She's wandered off somewhere. Dad says can you get the constable? It's getting dark.'

Dobson owned a couple of acres down behind Macdonald's mill, half of it cleared, half of it heavily timbered.

‘I've got no car, lad,' Vern said, returning to the fence. ‘You'll run faster than me.'

‘Sorry. I didn't think. How's Jim?'

‘He's coming good. Now run, lad.'

Too dark to see anything much. Vern went inside for his flashlight, and walked off towards the creek to lend what light he could to the search.

Denham had a motorbike. He was down there with a handful of Dobson's neighbours. Barbie Dobson was eight years old, a pretty little blue-eyed blonde, and not the type to go wandering around at night. She'd been playing hidey with her brothers in their creek paddock and had hidden too well. The boys gave up looking. They'd spent the last hour working on their billycart. Their mother had a new baby. Their father had come home late. No one noticed that Barbie wasn't around until their father told them to get inside and clean themselves up for bed.

‘I've told her not to go near the creek unless her brothers are with her,' Clarry said. ‘I've told all of those kids that those banks are treacherous since the rain.'

Within fifteen minutes, fifty men, women and boys were down at the creek, calling to Barbie, scouring the forest alongside the creek, searching McPherson's land, Macdonald's mill, slipping, sliding in mud, walking the creek's shallows, feeling for her around snags, while the dark soaked up the little light from lantern and flashlight.

‘Barbie! Barbie! You answer Daddy when you're called. Barbie!'

Only the frogs and night birds answered.

‘We'll find nothing in the dark,' Denham said. ‘If she's lying hurt somewhere, we could be walking right by her.'

‘Barbie! You answer me. Barbie!'

Clarry Dobson and a few more stayed on, but Vern's flashlight batteries had given up. He gave up too and went home, but was back at daybreak, working his way downstream. A few kids had drowned in that creek. They hadn't found one of them for
five days. They'd never found Ray King's body. It was a treacherous bastard, coming in too close to town before it started its curve to the west. Full of snags, silt feet thick in places, more water in it since the rain and moving faster, and the gutters from town pouring more in. A little dot like Barbie could have been carried for miles.

By late afternoon the next day, over a hundred men were searching both sides of that creek. A truckload had come up from Willama with a police sergeant and two constables. Out-of-town farmers had come in to lend a hand. Anyone with a boat had it on the creek, prodding now for that little body, dragging chains with cruel hooks attached, the town certain there had been another drowning.

Joey Hall found her, just before sundown, when he took the horses down to the creek for a drink.

He saw a small bare foot. A step closer and he recognised a leg. Blonde hair. And no face—like the last time. Same girl. Same place. Beneath the water-pumping log.

Then the young horse smelled the blood and took off downstream, and Joey took off for home.

Old Nugget limped closer to the dead child to stand guard until Gertrude came.

Only a stranger can dissect a town, pare it down to the core and feel no pain. Only a stranger can ask the multiplicity of questions that turn every man's eye on his own neighbour. For days the town was overrun by strangers, strange policemen driving strange cars, big black cars.

The hotel was overrun by police; and Norman, queuing to use the limited facilities, was embarrassed by his situation, by the questions, by the cracked lens of his spectacles he was learning to look around. The older Dobson children had told the city men they'd seen him down at the creek one day, that he'd had a stick in his hand, that Barbie had spoken to him. He wasn't the only one they'd seen. Folk cut across Dobson's land on their way to the bridge, always had. Dobson's timber paddock was treated like crown land, as was McPherson's.