The Jovian Legacy (23 page)

Of
course! How can I be here when it was way before I was even born!
he
comprehends.

He
wanders back down to the kitchen again, where everyone is hungrily
cleaning up their bowls. The father heats up the water in the kettle
again, no doubt in readiness for the washing up.

The
children have creamy milk in their white enamel mugs with a blue
trim, the milk giving them white moustaches.

After
breakfast the boys dress themselves in woollen shirts and pants held
up with braces. The older three boys and their father don thick
oilskin coats, and go out into the cold and crisp morning air.

Jack
watches them go through the house-gate and into a paddock to catch
their horses, and the mother and young girl are left to clean up.
The younger boy is instructed to fetch firewood.

Everybody
seems to have a job to do.

These
kids don’t have much fun,
Jack
thinks.

He
looks at the baby again.
Cute
little boy. Looks a bit like me when I was little.
The boy looks up and grins at Jack.

“What
the?”
he says
aloud, taking a step back.
That kid can see me!

The
boy has one little tooth and still grins at Jack while smacking his
hand on the tray of his highchair. He had poured some milk out of
his baby cup onto the tray. Milk splashes in every direction. His
mother sighs. She doesn’t look well. In fact, she looks aged,
Jack considers, too old to have such a young family. It looks as
though having six children has taken its toll on the older woman who
is pasty-faced with dark rings around her eyes. The girl seems to be
doing most of the work for her.

Jack
watches the girl as she starts making bread the manual way.

No
Breville breadmaker in this kitchen.

The
mother takes the baby out of his high chair and outside to play in
the morning sun. She sits on the grass to watch him while the girl
continues making bread. Jack steals back down the hallway to have a
squiz around, going into the lounge where another fireplace takes
precedence over the room. It smells musty in there too and doesn’t
appear like it is used much. The deep red drapes with gold brocade
are still drawn, the floor bare apart from a large gold rug that
offers the room a more cosy look, though the floorboards feel cold
underfoot. A mushroom-coloured Chesterfield lounge suite is
strategically placed around the rug. Gold cushions are neatly placed
about and small gold protective covers lie over its backs and arms.

A
black and white framed photo sits atop the mantelpiece. Jack picks
it up and takes it over to the light. It is the parents’
wedding photo. The husband wears a World War II Air Force uniform
and the bride a gown with a V-necked and gathered bodice. From there
her silky white gown falls in gentle folds to the floor with one of
her white shoes peeping out from beneath her gown. Jack stares at
the picture for a long time. He is sure he has seen it somewhere
before. At that moment he hears someone coming up the hallway and
quickly places the photo back up on the mantelpiece. He turns and
sees the baby, who has crawled up the hallway and now sits in the
doorway, staring and showing his toothy grin. Jack crouches down in
front of him.

“Can
you see me, little man?”

The
little boy chuckles and grins. A dribble slides down his chin and
drops on the floor. Jack puts his hand out. The baby babbles baby
language and raises his arms. Jack doesn’t know what to do.
He wants to hold the little boy but doesn’t know if he should,
or even can. He gingerly places his hands under the baby’s
armpits and lifts him. The baby smells lovely and baby fresh, and
reminds him of Megan’s clones as babies. Baby Benjamin
chuckles and snuggles into Jack, grabbing hold of his shirt. At that
moment the girl appears at the doorway and freezes, her eyes like
saucers and her mouth agape.

Of
course! She can’t see me. The baby will look like he’s
suspended in mid air!

Jack quickly places the boy down on the
floor, who doesn’t think much of that idea and starts to cry.
The girl stands stockstill. Jack steps back from the baby but
Benjamin crawls quickly towards him, wanting to be picked up again.
The mother appears, looking like thunder. She brushes past the girl
and whisks up the little boy.

“Why
didn’t you pick Benjamin up, Marjorie?” she demands to
know. Marjorie has turned white.

“Oh
for Heaven’s sake, go and start making the lunch,” her
mother barks at her. “You have to take it down to your father
and the boys; they’re in the hay paddock.”

As
she carries Benjamin out of the lounge the little boy puts his arm
out towards Jack, tears flowing down his chubby pink cheeks.
Marjorie, still in shock, says nothing, turns and follows her mother
back into the kitchen.

What
a mean mother,
Jack considers.

Feeling
unnerved by it all, Jack decides to go outside for some fresh air and
finds a door off the lounge leading to the verandah. Once outside he
inhales deeply. The fresh air is invigorating, the morning sun
generating more warmth outside than inside the house. The photo he’d
seen on the mantelpiece is still nagging at him. He feels sure he
has seen it somewhere before.

The
farmhouse overlooks a gentle sloping valley, Jack noticing an old
shearing shed in the distance with a young oak tree alongside it.

Wait
a minute! That looks like the old shearing shed on the farm where I
grew up, only the tree is a lot smaller,
he
regards.

He
turns around and stands back, gazing at the house. It looks similar
to the one he’d grown up in, but it too is a lot smaller.
Jack
then gets the shock of his life when he realises, and needs to sit
down on the grass.

“
This
is
my old house!” he says aloud, remembering that more rooms had
been built onto it by the time he’d come along. “Man,
that means I’m back in our old farmhouse in 1949!”

He
also realises that the wedding photo is of his grandparents. He
remembers that his father used to keep it in his dresser drawer, and
that he used to pull it out and stare at it for ages. Reality dawns
on him once again when he thinks of the baby he’s been holding.

“The
baby! His name is Benjamin. Bloody hell!” he exclaims,
emphasising the words.
“
I
was holding my own father! Oh Man, this is very, very weird.”

He
needs to collect his thoughts. He remembers his father telling him
that he is the youngest of six children and his five siblings are
actually his half brothers and sister. The half siblings’
father had been killed in World War II and the father’s best
friend (Ben’s father Arthur) returned from war and married his
friend’s widow. From their marriage came the birth of
Benjamin, Jack’s father. The mother was well into her forties
by that time, and as a result grew sick. Marjorie, the eldest and
the only girl, had to essentially do everything her mother would have
done had she not been sick. Jack remembers his father telling him
that he was only nine when his mother died.

He
decides to go back in the house to see Benjamin again, the only one
that can see and hear him. His
father
. As soon as Benjamin
spots Jack again he clambers off his mother’s lap and hurriedly
crawls over to Jack. Not wanting the same thing to happen again Jack
quickly strides back outside into the garden and sits down in the
middle of the lawn. He doesn’t notice an old dog saunter out
of a washhouse that is separated from the house. The dog stops in
its tracks, and with its head bowed starts to growl and show its
teeth.

Oh
Shit! The bloody dog can sense me!

Marjorie dashes out with a worried
expression, looking in the same direction as the dog, but can’t
see a thing. Benjamin emerges from the house and heads straight over
to Jack, crawling with his knees off the ground.

Smart
kid,
Jack thinks, regarding the
child’s way of getting around.

Benjamin sits down in front of Jack and
grins at him again, chortling away in baby language, still dribbling.

The
dog stops its growling and retreats back into the washhouse with its
tail between its legs. Jack feels a wave of relief and smiles back
at his ‘baby father’, studying him in awe. Benjamin tries
to climb up onto Jack’s lap, but Jack quickly moves away. The
baby thinks it is a game and chuckles. He tries again to sit on
Jack’s lap but Jack moves away again. He catches sight of
Benjamin’s mother at the kitchen window with a murderous look
on her face. She says something to Marjorie who had been watching
her baby brother flailing his arms about and crawling around madly on
the lawn like he was chasing something. She was obviously told to go
and fetch him, but there is no way Benjamin’s fun is going to
be interrupted this time. He screams and arches his back as Marjorie
tries to pick him up. His face reddens with rage and he wriggles
away from his sister, crawling flat tack in the direction of Jack
again. This time Jack gets up and makes his way out through the
house-gate and into the front paddock. He observes the look on poor
Marjorie’s face yet again when she witnesses the gate
unlatching, opening and shutting all by itself. Now
she
screams. The mother struts out in her pale grey house frock with a
dirty apron and demands to know what all the commotion is about.

Man!
thinks
Jack, s
he’s gone
to the dogs since her wedding day, even with five kids from her first
marriage.

Jack
decides to take a walk down to the old shearing shed, a favourite
haunt when he was a boy. He stands in front of the much smaller oak
tree. As a youngster he used to climb and swing on its low sweeping
branches. The tree would have been around forty years older at the
time.

He
scales the fence of the sheep yards and enters the old shed. It
smells of sheep, precisely the same smell. For a few moments his
mind harks back to when he helped his dad sort the sheep out for
shearing. His dog Bud helped too. The young dog used to run across
the sheep’s backs that were jam-packed in the yards ready for
shearing. Jack would jump in the fadge holders - huge sacks full of
wool, and jump up and down to pack the wool down. He loved shearing
time as it was a time when the whole family and some friends worked
together as a team, his mother turning up with flasks of tea and
freshly made scones for smoko that were still steaming from the oven,
with lashings of butter dripping through them.

I
wonder if Dad did all that too when he was a young boy. Too small
to ask him about it yet, though I can’t imagine that old trout
bothering to make scones for smoko - probably got Marjorie to do it.
Probably would’ve karked it by then anyway,
Jack
thinks hard-heartedly.

From
the top of the sheep run he surveys his old familiar surroundings,
taking in a deep breath. It is an extraordinary feeling to be
viewing his old farm in such an unreal phase of reality. He looks up
at the house to see Marjorie pass through the house-gate, holding a
leather satchel that she proceeds to strap to a saddle.

Must
be the boys’ lunch.
He
watches as she mounts the horse as if she has done it a hundred
times, and canters off. Jack wants to follow her and goes hunting
for something.

“Won’t
find a quad around here,” he snickers to himself. He spots a
couple of pushbikes that are leaning up against the side of the
shearing shed, so grabs the least rusty one and rides off, keenly
trying to catch up.

Thank
goodness she hasn’t looked behind her or she’ll see a
bike ripping down the hill after her by itself. She’ll
definitely freak out, and probably the horse too,
Jack
thinks amusingly as he pedals even harder.
The old-fashioned
bicycle has a horribly hard seat with straight up and down
handlebars.

Not
exactly the most aerodynamically designed bike, the bloody thing even
has a bell,
he laughs, hitting a
lumpy track where the cattle have been through on a rainy day, then
the sun turning the muddy clay hard as concrete. He rides up the
track after Marjorie’s horse that is fast disappearing from
view, and his backside starts to ache. He pedals with all his might
to keep up, the bike jiggling along the track. He comes across a
brow of lush green grass and sees the old orchard, except that all
the trees are still young. He wants to go through the orchard, but
doesn’t have time. At last he catches sight of the boys and
their stepfather working in the hay paddock with their pitchforks,
making a huge rounded haystack in the middle of it.

I
guess that’s how it was done in those days,
Jack
deduces as he rubs his aching bottom.

When
the boys become aware of their sister’s arrival they drop their
forks and gather around, taking out their flat tin bottles from
leather cases that are attached to the saddles. Guzzling from their
water bottles it takes a mere five minutes to scoff down all of their
sandwiches.