Settling the Account (44 page)

The door slammed. Amy slumped against it,
the wood rough against her face. She could hear the pounding of her
heart, making a counterpoint to her thoughts.
It’s my fault
Mal’s dead. He wouldn’t have gone away if I hadn’t given him the
money. I’ve killed my son
.

‘Ma?’ The sound was thin and stretched,
quite unlike David’s usual voice. She looked up to see him standing
there, the telegram clutched in one hand. ‘It says Mal’s dead. He
can’t be dead, can he? It’s a mistake or something, isn’t it? Isn’t
it, Ma?’

She felt his anguish like a cruel hand
squeezing her own heart, and gasped with the pain of it. All
through David’s life Malcolm had been there, the big brother to
trail after and try to keep up with. The world without Malcolm in
it, without even the knowledge that Malcolm was riding across the
plains two oceans away, was beyond his imagining.

‘I’m sorry, Davie,’ she whispered, and with
the words she felt hot tears spill from her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

She stumbled towards him with her arms
outstretched, and they fell into a close embrace. For a long time
they stood locked together, bodies convulsing with shared sobs, as
the early darkness of winter began to creep into the house. Through
the closed door, softly at first, then gradually building into
throbbing, wailing roars of pain and loss, she heard the sound of
Charlie weeping for his son.

May – July 1902

Charlie did not emerge from his room until
late in the following afternoon. He seemed to have aged years
overnight, Amy thought as he walked into the kitchen with an oddly
shambling gait. His shoulders were more stooped, his face grey, and
his eyes were red-rimmed within their swollen lids.

She and David had muddled through the farm
work that could not be left for even one day, like tending to the
horses, stopping only to help each other prepare rough attempts at
meals when hunger drove them to. David’s face showed the telltale
swelling hours of weeping had left, and she knew her own must bear
similar signs. David had finally fallen into an exhausted sleep
somewhere in the cold, dark hours of the night, his head resting in
Amy’s lap while she sat in an armchair, but sleep had been beyond
Amy’s reach while grief and guilt warred for mastery.

Of the three of them, Charlie was the only
one who had achieved unconsciousness for more than a few hours, but
the whisky-induced stupor had clearly done nothing to ease his
spirit. They stood and stared at one another for a few moments,
while Amy struggled to find something useful to say. But it was
Charlie who broke the silence first.

‘His name will not be mentioned in this…’
His voice cracked. He shuffled over to a chair and slumped onto it.
‘In this house. He went against me. He’s no son of mine.’

He raised his gaze to study Amy and David.
His eyes narrowed as he took in her black dress and David’s arm
band.

‘There’ll not be any mourning worn for him,’
he said. ‘He’s no part of this family. Get that thing off,
boy.’

Amy put a hand on David’s arm, knowing he
would object. She felt his muscles stiffen beneath her fingers.

‘Get that bloody thing
off
,’ Charlie
said when David was slow to respond, thumping the table to
emphasise his words. The thump was a feeble parody of the sort of
gesture Charlie usually made, barely rattling the dishes on the
table.

‘Let me, Dave,’ Amy murmured, tugging at the
black cloth. She squeezed his arm encouragingly and slipped the
offending band into a pocket of her apron.

‘And you can fetch me a drink before you get
out of your crow’s weeds,’ Charlie said, turning his attention to
Amy. She was fairly sure he had meant something other than the cup
of tea she set before him, but although he frowned at the cup he
picked it up without complaint. He took large gulps of the hot tea,
gnawing absently at the day-old bread spread with butter and jam
that was the best food Amy could offer him at short notice.

Weariness made it difficult to be sensible.
Amy felt an irrational urge to fling herself at Charlie’s feet and
beg forgiveness for having robbed him of his son; to do something
to try and comfort him. But she recognised the futility of the
impulse even as the strength of it brought tears to her eyes. She
could offer Charlie no comfort; still less could she hope to draw
comfort from him.

That did not mean he was going to rob her of
the right to mourn Malcolm. She served Charlie in silence, and
waited until David had left the room before she spoke.

‘I’m going to wear mourning,’ she said
quietly.

He gave her a look that was clearly meant to
be forbidding, but there was no power in it. ‘I say you’re not.’ He
waited for her answer; when she gave none he spoke again. ‘You can
get out of your weeds right now. Go on, get on with it.’

Amy shook her head, calm in the knowledge
that in this, at least, she was doing the right thing.

‘Defying me, are you?’ He scowled at her,
the weary droop of his mouth spoiling the effect.

‘I don’t want to go against you, no. But I
will if you make me.’ She sat down opposite him and held his gaze,
though the pain of loss that she saw in his face made her wince.
‘Charlie, our son—’

‘He’s no son of mine,’ Charlie interrupted,
his voice cracking as he repeated the harsh litany.

She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘All
right, then,
my
son. My son’s dead, and I’m going to mourn
him properly. You don’t have the right to stop me.’

The bitterness in his stare made it hard to
keep her eyes fixed on his face. ‘Since when did you care a damn
about my rights?’

He turned away. ‘Please yourself, then. Wear
black for the rest of your life if you want, like some old crone.
It’s no affair of mine.’

No more was said about her mourning clothes,
though Amy knew the town must be talking about Charlie’s lack of
any outward sign of being in mourning himself, and even more about
his rebuff of anyone’s attempt to mention Malcolm’s name in his
presence. But other people’s gossip was the least of her
concerns.

All the trouble and worry Malcolm had given
her over the years seemed insignificant. He was the child she had
carried inside her for nine long months, and who had ripped her
open in his eagerness to enter the world. He was the little boy she
had taught to walk and to talk, and had nursed through all his
childish ailments. He was the son Charlie had longed for; the one
she had put so much effort into protecting from his father’s anger,
and whose wounds she had patched up when her protection failed. He
was her son, and he was dead.

She had not been there to nurse him through
that last, fatal illness. He had gone off to a foreign country to
find adventure; instead he had found himself a grave. And it was
her fault. She had sent him there. The pain grew even sharper when,
a mere two weeks after they heard of Malcolm’s death, the papers
were full of the news that the war had been won.

But she could not let herself wallow in
grief, not when she had Charlie and David to worry about. David had
been left distraught by the loss of his brother, and being
forbidden to mention Malcolm’s name in Charlie’s hearing made it
even harder for David to cope.

Amy gave him all the opportunities she could
to talk about his brother. They passed many hours sharing whispered
memories in the darkness of David’s room. Often David’s dog and
Amy’s cat crept into the room to keep them company in a silent
sympathy broken only by an occasional scratching of fleas.

Only a few nights passed before David asked
the question that Amy realised must have been preying on his
mind.

‘Ma, did it… do you think it hurt Mal?’

Amy sat in the darkness and considered the
question, anxious to give an honest answer without upsetting David.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t really know what that
enteric fever’s like. I hope it didn’t…’ Her voice betrayed her,
and she had to wait a few moments before she could go on.

‘It’s a fever, though,’ she said, clutching
at a sudden memory. ‘I remember your Uncle John had a fever once,
years and years ago—it was when he cut his foot open. I looked
after him. The fever didn’t hurt him, it made him get muddled in
his head. Maybe Mal didn’t really know what was going on, not
when…’
when he was dying
. ‘Not right at the end.’ She hugged
him tightly. ‘Let’s hope not.’

‘That sounds right,’ David said, his voice
full of optimism. ‘I bet he had a good time, anyway.’

‘What?’ Amy was startled out of brooding on
Malcolm, alone and feverish, by David’s abrupt change of mood. ‘How
do you mean, Dave?’

‘Before he got sick. I bet Mal had a good
time. You know, riding around and all that. Like you and me used to
talk about.’

He made it sound like something they had
talked of years ago, though it had been their main topic of
conversation just the previous week. ‘So we did,’ Amy said,
snatching gratefully at the memory. ‘Yes, I think he did have a
good time. I think he had the best time of his life.’

‘He got away from the old man, anyway,’
David said, resentment giving his voice an edge. ‘Pa was rotten to
him. And he doesn’t even care about Mal being dead—he won’t even
let us talk about him.’

‘Oh, he cares all right,’ Amy said softly.
‘Your father misses Mal as much as we do. Maybe even more.’

‘Why won’t he talk about him, then?’

‘Because… oh, I don’t know how to explain
it. Because he doesn’t like showing his feelings. It’s just the way
he’s made.’ She knew David would not understand her fumbling
attempts to explain his father any more than Malcolm had. ‘He loved
Mal a lot. I know sometimes he didn’t act like it, but that doesn’t
mean he didn’t feel it. And now he feels this. He feels it really,
really hard. But he doesn’t know how to talk about it.’

‘Mal used to reckon he hated Pa,’ David
said. ‘Specially when Pa gave him really bad hidings. Mal’d say he
didn’t care what Pa did, or what he said or anything. And after he
got the knife he’d reckon he was going to do Pa in one of these
days.’

‘Shh, Dave, don’t talk about that. It’s best
to forget those things.’

‘But it was funny, Ma,’ David went on
earnestly. ‘Mal’d say that, about not caring what Pa did and all
that. But then sometimes I’d hear him crying. Only when it was
really late at night and he thought I was asleep. I never let on I
heard him, he would have been wild if I’d said anything about him
bawling. But I think…’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I think he did
care. He just didn’t want anyone to know.’

Amy sighed. ‘I think you’re right. That was
the main trouble with Mal and your father, you know. They were too
much like each other.’

Consoling David was not difficult; not when
he instinctively turned to her for comfort, eager to share his
thoughts and feelings. David mourned for his brother, but he would
get over the loss in time, Amy knew, especially with his youth and
easy-going nature to help him.

But Charlie troubled her deeply. When the
trembling hands and grey face of his whisky binge disappeared, Amy
began to see the real scars Malcolm’s death had etched in him. The
mouth that had habitually been set in a stern, unyielding line now
took on a twist so bitter that she found it almost painful to look
at. When he thought no one was watching him, Amy would often see a
brooding resentment in his eyes. She sensed the course his thoughts
were taking. All the wrongs, real and imagined, that he had ever
suffered were epitomised in this one gross betrayal. The one thing
in his life that had mattered to him above all else had been stolen
from him. He might be unsure whether his enemy was the English
race; the New Zealand government; some mindless, all-powerful fate;
or even himself; but that made his resentment none the less bitter.
Whomever he blamed for it, he would never be able to forgive the
betrayal.

He stubbornly refused to talk about Malcolm.
In the early days after the dreadful news, any attempt by Amy to
raise the subject was met with a snarl that, if she persisted,
turned into roars of abuse. Later, when he was apparently calmer,
he was no less obstinate.

‘Don’t know who you’re talking about,’ was
his usual answer. ‘I’ve no son of that name.’

Charlie spoke less than he had in the past.
Sometimes a whole day passed with no more than a dozen words
exchanged between himself and Amy. He seemed reluctant to mix with
other people any more than he had to, often sending David to take
the milk to the factory instead of going himself, and constraining
Amy to beg a ride into town with John or Harry when she needed to
visit the store. Occasionally Charlie went out to one of the hotels
for an evening, but most of his drinking was done alone in his
room.

He would no longer attend church, but he
usually grunted an indifferent assent when Amy asked if she could
go. On one of her trips to church with her family, Amy heard the
news that had caught the imagination of Ruatane’s townsfolk.

‘John says they’re going to put up a
monument,’ she told Charlie over lunch. She studied his face as she
added, ‘A monument to Mal—to my son,’ she amended when she saw his
scowl deepen.

Charlie said nothing at first, but she could
see that the idea had caught his interest. ‘What do you mean, a
monument?’ he asked after a pause. ‘Are they going to put up a
statue?’

Amy shook her head. ‘Not a statue. A big
stone, sort of like a tombstone. We can’t get him back to bury him
here, but there’s going to be a proper stone to him in the
cemetery.’ The idea had already given her comfort; it had troubled
her that Malcolm was buried in a graveyard halfway around the world
whose name she could not even pronounce, and where she would never
be able to place flowers on his grave. Now, at least, there would
be a solid memorial. ‘People are putting in money for it, and as
soon as they’ve got enough they’re going to send away for a special
stone.’