The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (2 page)

A
LL THE SUMMER MONTHS
, my mother carried water from the river up to the garden. Sometimes as she laboured up the slope with a full bucket in each hand, she wondered about piping it up, but Donald always said it would be uneconomic to take it past the cowshed. And it was true they had never run out of the rain water they caught in the tanks during the winter months, except once in a drought and that had been cruel.

That dry garden really troubled her. Donald was proud of her garden, and helped dig the ground over in the early spring, but he could never understand about the water. She stopped, dug for a man's handkerchief in her overall pocket, then wiped her face and carried on.

‘Jeannie,' she called. I went to the door, feeling as guilty as sin, knowing she was carrying the water again. ‘Give me a hand, dear,' her voice rising like the hazy heat itself from the valley floor.

So I went down the hill towards her. She was a small person, deeply tanned by the sun, cropped hair turning grey. Together we hauled the buckets up over the brow of the hill, until at last she stood panting by the neat rows of the garden.

‘Maybe it's too hot to water them now,' she said. ‘D'you think I should leave the watering till evening?'

‘The peas would love a drink right now, Mum,' I said.

‘Right, we'll take a chance.' We splashed the water up and down the rows, drenching the moth-like petals amongst the green foliage. ‘There'll be peas for Christmas after all,' remarked my mother.

‘There always are. Don't know why you worry about it every year.'

She smiled, as if contemplating a banquet. ‘Yes, we'll have a great Christmas dinner.'

‘Except that I'll choke on every morsel of Rufus,' I said.

‘No you won't. Your dad's raised a fine fat duck there, and he'll be delicious.
I wish he'd clip his wings though. Muscovies are terrible fliers, you just can't stop them once they get away.'

She mentioned it again to my dad that night but he laughed at her. ‘Rufus'll be all right, Mother. How are the peas coming along? Be ready in time for Christmas?'

And when she assured him that they would, he smiled a slow contented smile, and nodded. The next morning he carried the water for her, but of course he had forgotten about it by the following day, and she was carrying it again. I used to rage about it sometimes, but she would just say, ‘Stop your squawking Jeannie, and give me hand. Think if I lived in a big city.' For a moment her eyes would wander away into some private vision, before she took up again. ‘Why, I'd have a great load of groceries to cart home from the shops every week. Where's the difference?'

And as her thoughts slipped away into a past dotted with city lights, and a fun-filled time, when there had been no young man with a faraway country look in his eyes, and no money, mine would surge forth into the future.

Auckland was my enchanted city, and at fifteen, as I turned that year, it lay ahead of me, business college the Mecca which would endow me with the poise and capability I needed to enter the world. The long Christmas holidays stretched just weeks away, I felt as if they would never end. Later, I was to think back, and remember them as a time held in suspension, the last interlude before childhood finally deserted me.

A week before Christmas, my mother and father would go to town to collect the Family Benefit from the Post Office, then they would buy the presents. When I came home there would be a scuffle to hide everything. Everything, that is, except the sherry.

I would come in from school, and, as I heaved my books down and changed out of uniform, I could see the bottle, standing on the bench. It was my job to bring in the cows, not too bad unless they were on the scrub hills — and they often were, for there was too little pasture to rotate as it should have been done. I was lucky, though, for the dogs worked better for me than anyone. Usually I could sit on the slope by the river for a good twenty minutes before I had any work to do, that's how good those dogs were. When I came in for afternoon tea, my parents would be sitting waiting for me, rolling themselves some smokes to have on hand during the milking, and they would eye that bottle up and down. Then they set off to the shed, and I would start my homework and prepare the meal. At last they would return and, as they had done every year for as long as I could remember, my Dad would say, ‘Well Mother, what about it.'

She always came in right on her cue, and said, ‘Well Donald, maybe we could spare a thimbleful.'

So Dad would undo the cork and they would have a half tumblerful each and pour a drop for me too, which would make for a merry dinner, and Dad would forget to say, ‘Burned the spuds again, Jeannie?' After that the sherry went away in the cupboard until Christmas Day and not one of us dared cast an eye at it again.

But that year was memorable. There were two reasons why, and the first was Rufus. Dad said, how could I call a duck Rufus when it wasn't red, but I reckoned it was a Christmassy sort of name, and as he was destined to be a Christmas duck, Rufus it was. The night before Christmas Eve that year, we all three of us sat on the porch steps after our evening meal. The sun was drifting out of sight like a fat falling marigold, and the air was cool. I dug my fingers into the earth beside me. If I wriggled them down past the parched crust I found soft moist soil. ‘Soon they'll make me leave all this,' I thought, with sudden fierceness.

But I knew that that wasn't true, that they would keep me there for ever, given time to think about it, only they didn't let themselves. Instead, they told each other I must get away from the farm and not get married to one of the lads before I knew what the world looked like. A chance in life they called it. And I knew I would take it, that that was what I wanted, and nobody was making me leave.

Right then, as I was thinking along like this, there was a rush of wind over our heads as a great bird lifted its wings and soared into the gathering night, like an emblem against the sky. My mother gave a cry and reared up off the steps. Dad just sat there, awfully still and never said a word.

At last Mum said forlornly, ‘That's the way they go. Never knew a Muscovy fly off like that at sunset, and come back.'

‘He might,' said Dad, full of despair.

But we all knew Rufus had gone. I would have been glad actually, if it had not been for the look on their faces.

‘Never mind,' Mum said more briskly. ‘I'll kill a chook tomorrow and give it a bit of a pot-boil, then roast it up on Christmas morning. It'll be just as good.' Never a word of reproach about those wings, mark you, and that's the sort of thing I like to remember about them.

The other thing happened on Christmas Day itself. We had just come in from early milking, Dad and I, because of course Mum had things to do in the house on Christmas morning. We had hardly had time for a Merry Christmas to each other, when there was a knock at the door. On the doorstep stood a man, forty-ish, I would say, brisk and rather smooth-looking.

‘Merry Christmas,' my father said.

‘Uh huh, compliments of the season,' said the stranger, a bit on the impatient side. ‘Got a phone?'

‘Yes.'

‘May I use it? I'm heading home for Auckland, but my car's broken down outside your gate. I got held up yesterday and should have been home last night to the family. Took this short-cut through the hills and here I am, a pretty sort of mess. I'll have to rustle up a garage.'

‘Sure,' said Dad equably. ‘Come right on in.'

We all took ourselves off to another room, so as to look as if we were not listening, but of course we were. So would everybody else in the valley; there were ten on our line and they would all have seen him arrive in a cloud of red dust at our gate. We heard the man ring his family, reversing the charges, and tell them what had happened. There was a long silence after he had explained, and he sounded very unhappy when he said goodbye. Then he rang our local garage which Dad had told him to try. We heard him describe the problem with his car a couple of times over, very patiently, and then start cursing. Mum pursed her mouth up, but after a moment the man quietened down.

In a few minutes he came out and told us that the garage refused point blank to come until after midday.

‘Can't say I blame them,' my father said. ‘It's eleven miles out here, and not much of a road as you'll know by now, and I expect Les wants his Christmas dinner too.'

The man glared. ‘Look.' My mother jumped into the breach. ‘You can't sit in your car all day, Mr …?'

‘Dalgliesh.'

‘Mr Dalgliesh. Stop and have a bite of Christmas dinner with us.'

‘Well …' He looked awkward: I could see it was difficult for him either way. He'd have looked dumb sitting in a hot car all morning while we watched him. ‘If it's no trouble.'

‘Of course it's not.' My mother sounded quite excited by this sudden change of plans, although Dad gave her an odd look.

Then we forgot about the stranger for a good half hour, because we had our presents to open. Well, nearly forgot, for first my mother had to take me into the kitchen to give me one of my presents; a book called
Sex
for
Teenagers,
which I could gladly have done without. When I had promised to read it, we went back in with Dad and Mr Dalgliesh, to see what was in the other parcels. A box of Evening in Paris face powder for me, my first, and a blouse my mother had made me while I was at school. It was a strange dark shade of green, which she said was the colour of my eyes when I was happy, and nothing
would do but that I went into my room and changed into it there and then. Dad got a book he had been hankering after, ever since he had first borrowed it from the Country Library van. Mum had managed to pick it up in
paperback
on a trip to town. For her there was a set of glasses. I cannot think why we had chosen them, for they were whisky glasses — and I mean glass — and they never drank whisky, but you would have thought we had given her the Queen's Crystal.

I saw Mr Dalgliesh give us a funny look, not pity exactly, which was lucky for him. Rather, I'd have called it patronising, except that there was something kinder at the back of his eyes, and at the same time he glanced out the window at his car in the roadway. I didn't think much about that until afterwards, when I was going down to the shed to collect some more cream which my mother was sure we would need, what with the extra, although I knew that there was already an abundance of good food in the house.

As I came up the slope, which veered between the road and the house, Mr Dalgliesh was shutting up the big shiny black Buick and winding the windows down a little way, so that the crackling Northland sun would not be stored inside it while he ate with us. In the back of this classy car, I could see, piled right up to the back window, stacks of parcels wrapped in Christmas paper.

‘I guess your family will be awfully disappointed that you didn't get home,' I said, walking over to him. ‘I mean … no Christmas presents …'

‘There'll be plenty without these,' he said off-handedly. Then he looked at me and I could see his look softening. ‘How old are you Jeannie?'

‘Fifteen, nearly sixteen, and I'm going to business college this coming year.'

His hand strayed uncertainly towards the parcels and I knew he was going to offer me one, so I started to run. He caught me up near the house, and gave me a rueful little smile of apology, and after that we all seemed to get along fine. He talked to us on our terms, and didn't blink an eye when Dad offered him some of our sherry out of the new whisky glasses. By dinner time we were all laughing at his clever stories of business life, and he could turn a joke on himself as well as the next.

And dinner, even without Rufus, was excellent. Our visitor didn't have to pretend to enjoy it, because he really did. The peas were as young and tender as Mum had hoped, the potatoes sweet melting white marbles that exploded between our teeth, and she had done us proud with the trifle and masses of clotted cream.

My parents always became nostalgic at Christmas time, it was a matter of form. Mum's eyes would go big and shiny, and together they would remember people and events before I was born, or contort memory into the shape of my
early childhood. It was a world that shut me out, and sometimes embarrassed me, but this year I had an ally. Mr Dalgliesh and I caught each other's eye like silent conspirators, sitting in opposition, till the spell broke and the
conversation
flowed pleasantly between us again. Nevertheless, the strain began to show by the end of the meal, as he glanced uneasily at his watch. As one o'clock drew near, he could hardly keep his eyes from the road.

About one thirty, Les, the mechanic, did come out from the garage, and by two Mr Dalgliesh's car was ready for the road. We were glad for his family's sake that he was on his way home, but we were sorry to see him go.