The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (46 page)

M
IRACLES, MIRACLES
. Anna was sitting at her desk preparing an interview when the phone call came. Anna works in a radio station, running a magazine programme about lifestyles. She is a personality in her own right and people seek her views on all manner of issues. She feels strong and vital and people say she is a powerful woman, but she has also reached that more private age when her children worry about who will mow her lawns and what will happen to her. The name of her caller was Kathryn Fox, Kathryn spelled with a K and a Y. She was phoning from Auckland, from an insurance company. Anna could see her behind the desk, cool and efficient, with over-sized pads in the shoulders of her severely cut suit, a muted but pretty scarf arranged artfully at the throat of her plain cotton blouse. She could hear her asking claimants the correct spelling of their names, an instinctive precautionary gesture which she carried into her own life — this is exactly who I am, Kathryn with a K and a Y. Mrs, she added, Mrs Kathryn Fox.

‘Yes, Mrs Fox?' Anna said, preparing to tell her either that she had more life insurance than she could afford, or that she couldn't spare an opinion on the subject this morning.

‘It's about my father,' said Kathryn Fox. ‘I believe you knew him when he was young, before he married my mother. His name was Douglas McNaught.' Her voice had become less assured, dropping a note, as if she expected a rebuff, but she hurried on. ‘I never thought of you knowing him.'

‘How did you make the connection?' asked Anna, the interviewer at work.

‘I heard you on radio once and you mentioned Fish Rock. You described a man you had known there, at work in his cowshed. When the cows got stroppy and wouldn't do what he wanted, he used to yell at them, “I might as well talk to Jesus.”'

‘Lachie McNaught.' Anna had put down her pen and begun to listen intently.

‘My grandfather. Are you with me?'

‘Yes,' said Anna, ‘I am.'

‘My father was dying and I had been sent to my grandparents' farm so that my mother would have more time to nurse him.' Kathryn Fox's voice had assumed a relentless quality. ‘I was very small and I sat on the railings of the yard and listened to my grandfather say that every evening one summer. “You might as well talk to Jesus,” he said, and I knew he was talking to more than the cows. I've never heard anyone else say that since. Soon afterwards he died, and not long after that, my father died too.'

‘So your father didn't die on the farm?'

‘He'd been overseas to fight in Malaya,' Kathryn said. Anna already knew this, but she didn't interrupt. ‘When he came back he had some jungle illness. He went back to the farm but he was never able to work the way he had before, and he and my mother moved to town.'

Anna hadn't known this. ‘Did he work again?'

‘He went into the stock and station, and worked there for as long as he could. You did know them, didn't you? I'm not wrong?'

‘Yes, I did know them,' said Anna slowly. ‘But I don't know how I can help you.' She guessed that her caller would know that she was asking herself whether she really wanted to.

‘Just tell me what my father was like,' Kathryn Fox said, and Anna liked the way she didn't sound pleading, just matter of fact, and ready to give information of her own. ‘My mother remarried, she couldn't see that it
mattered
. She was very happy with my stepfather, and he was good to my brother and me. “What is there to tell?” she used to say, when I asked her about my father. “He was sick and he died.” Whatever it was that she fancied in him, she'd forgotten. Oh, I don't mean to embarrass you, I don't expect you to be able to tell me that, but just something, some of the things he might have said and done. Forgive me, perhaps you don't remember much about him at all.'

‘He was a gay dog,' Anna said.

‘Gay?' she said.

‘It's what we said.' Anna recognised the distance between them, between Kathryn's age and her own, between knowing and not knowing her father. ‘He did a fantastic set of Lancers. Well, we just did a set occasionally at the end of square dancing.'

‘Let me get this straight, you're telling me my father square danced?'

‘Yes. But not only that. He was a knockout. I mean, he was very
good-looking
.'

After a silence, Kathryn said, ‘I would never have thought of that. Nobody ever told me he was good-looking.'

Anna thought that now it was Kathryn who was sorry she had rung. She thinks I'm romancing an image for her, Anna thought, or that I don't remember him at all.

‘Was your mother called Rhoda?' Anna asked.

‘No.' Kathryn mentioned a name of a woman Anna had never heard of, who, she said, her father had met in hospital soon after his return from the jungle.

That was the miracle, a chunk of missing history, offered to Anna on a morning when the wind whistled between buildings and the traffic five storeys down was blocked by a blown water main and the tower block next door had been evacuated by a faulty alarm system.

Immediately after Anna left school she went to work in the drapery store at Fish Rock. She pushed her way to the head of a queue of young women who thought it might be fun to work on the main (and only) street for a year or two while they got their glory boxes together. She had turned down the idea of going nursing or teaching. For other women, outside the Presbyterian circle of Fish Rock, there was that other burden of Catholic choice, to be a nun, but that was beyond their experience, a bizarre impenetrable mystery. Who, they asked themselves, in hushed voices, would want to live amongst women?

‘Why do you want to work in the drapery shop?' Miss Macdonald, the proprietor, asked her. She was a tall, thin woman with hair escaping in wisps from a huge bun. She was proud that she had not cut her hair for twenty years, although no one had ever seen this massive accumulation let loose.

‘I want to earn some money while I decide what to do next,' Anna said.

‘You mean, until someone comes along and offers to marry you? I don't want boys hanging around here,' said Miss Macdonald.

Anna thought it wiser not to tell her prospective employer that she had already been forsaken by Douglas McNaught, although, who knew, he could still turn up again some day.

‘It'll be hard for my parents if I leave now, just when they're getting the farm going,' said Anna instead. ‘I can still help out with the milking at the weekends.'

This appealed to Miss Macdonald, the notion of hard work and thrift, and also that she could hire Anna without committing herself for the long term. ‘You can have a three-month trial, and then we can decide whether we like each other enough for you to stay on,' she said, when she had thought it over.

This was how Anna came to stand behind the counter of the Fish Rock drapery, counting buttons, selling girdles and crêpe de Chine, ordering whirl
bras spiral-stitched to pencil-sharp points, suggesting sewing patterns to young women whom, only a month before, she had sat beside in geography, learning how to do rouleau buttonholes so she could demonstrate them to others, advising Miss Macdonald when they were low on three-ply in the knitting wool section, and all the while breathing in the steady crisp scent of new linen, which still reminds her of buttercups.

Miss Macdonald had hired Anna first and foremost to sweep out the shop and make cups of tea, all of which she did, but when Anna suggested they order cinch belts because she had heard that these were what the girls in town were wearing (and she yearned for one of her own), her employer gave her a long speculative look, ordered half a dozen, and sold out the next day. After that, Miss Macdonald took time out to go to town on a buying expedition and left Anna in charge. When the new stock arrived, turnover increased and so did Anna's wages.

Fish Rock is a string of shops divided by a main road. The Post Office has closed since the country was re-structured. People go to town for their clothes and the drapery shop has gone. A square white church stands beneath a spreading tree, a museum houses the ghostly unsmiling faces of the village ancestors, the community hall could do with a lick of paint, a monument to the town's war dead, surrounded by a heavy chain, stands sentinel beside the road. Douglas McNaught's name is not amongst the dead.

Douglas didn't fall in battle, and besides, his war was a jungle skirmish, his going a young man's response to the unanswerable in his life, not to a call to arms sweeping a nation. But his name is written on a headstone in a quiet cemetery near the sea where sand lifts and falls in drifts against the tombs, and dry grasses bend on windy days. Trooper Douglas McNaught, SAS, Malaya. This much Anna knew.

Her parents' farm was next to the McNaughts. The McNaughts were an old settled family, and the Emerys were newcomers, their land a fraction the size of their neighbours', neglected and over-run with gorse, except for three rich green river paddocks. Her family had driven into the valley one afternoon in summer near milking. Their cows were crammed in the back of trucks, their udders near bursting point. Gidday, said the men, standing on the edge of the road. Gidday, Anna's father had said, and gone into the tumbledown shed on the farm to milk.

One of the onlookers followed him. ‘Let's know if you need any help,' said the man. This was Douglas. He was a dark, nuggety man with a sinewy throat rising from his black bush singlet. His hair was crinkly beneath the battered grey felt
hat he wore. Nests of hair covered his short strong forearms.
When he lit a cigarette he balanced it for an instant with a delicate flick between the tip of his tongue and his top lip before drawing it down into his mouth.

Anna's father managed his farm with care. He's a dreamy bastard, he farms with a textbook in one hand, and a spade in the other, the neighbours said to each other, but they were interested. He used electric fences to make the grass go further. His butterfat average inched up, higher than the farmers around about. You might as well talk to Jesus, said his neighbour, Lachie McNaught, as try to tell my sons how to do that. Lachie's voice was without envy. He had enough. His three sons had worked on the land since they left school. Malcolm, the eldest, was married and lived in a house across the paddock from his parents, the second and third boys still lived in the old farmhouse. Alan smiled sleepily at people and worked without saying much. He drinks, Anna's father told her mother, but he's harmless. Douglas was referred to as the baby of the family, although he was twenty-eight.

The entrance to the older McNaughts' house was by way of a verandah bordered with curly wooden fretwork. In the morning it was full of fierce heat and even the geraniums wilted in the scuffed earth beside the path. In the afternoons the dogs slept there.

Inside, it was hard to pick that the McNaughts were well-off. Old
newspapers
and piles of bills were stacked on the sideboards, and ashtrays were emptied only when they were full. In the sitting room, a shabby suite of brown moquette was arranged around the walls. The walls were decorated with gaudy calendars from the local shops and two ornately framed
photographs
of Lachie's parents, formally posing in their best clothes; his mother wore a long dark dress with a high collar. An old piano stood beneath these portraits. The McNaughts played it on Saturday nights when friends came to drink beer and sing. Alan played until he passed out and then Tilly took over. They sang ‘Roll Out the Barrel', and ‘Comin' In on a Wing and a Prayer' and ‘She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain'
when
she
comes,
when
she
comes,
she'll
be
wearing
pink
pyjamas
when
she
comes.
Presbyterian they might have been, but they were new people now, they said. They didn't have truck with the old nonsense. ‘Well,' said Lachie to Anna's father, ‘the boys wouldn't hang around for long if we did, would they?' Douglas and Alan slept in the same room they had slept in all their lives, in two of three beds arranged dormitory style, across the passage from another room that had once belonged to their sisters.

‘They've got money all right,' Anna's father said to her mother. If you knew where to look, it wasn't hard to see. A racehorse cantered in the front paddocks and two long-finned American cars, shared by parents and sons,
stood in a ramshackle garage at the side of the house. Over at Malcolm's new house, his wife, Noelene, had arranged a cabinet full of crystal decanters and Belleek cream lustre china decorated with shamrocks. She hung lace curtains at the windows.

The McNaughts and Anna's parents accepted each other's differences. Tilly of the overflowing ashtrays and ungathered newspapers kept a scrubbed board and an oven that shone like song. Anna's father was crazy about the McNaught boys from the start. They made him feel like one of the people, a real farmer. Anna believes that her parents were happy there. Their marriage, which had appeared tired and slender, bloomed in the McNaughts' benign light.