The Tying of Threads
Read The Tying of Threads Online
Authors: Joy Dettman
About
The Tying of Threads
In the final instalment of Joy Dettman’s beloved Woody Creek series, we return to the small timber town where it all began . . .
GEORGIE: Independent and spirited, Georgie is her mother’s daughter through and through. But after a house fire both takes the life of her sister, Margot, and burns her home to the ground, Georgie is lost. She flees town with nothing but a cardboard box and the determination to be somebody, anybody, else.
CARA: After almost losing her adopted daughter, Cara’s view of the world has radically shifted. She’s decided that life is to be lived and love is to be cherished, even when that means crossing boundaries she’d never dreamed of. But is any love great enough to overcome an unimaginable burden of guilt and shame?
JENNY: With her nest empty Jenny is more lonely than ever. Rattling around her big old house with too much time to think, she’s left to wonder: should her secrets stay buried forever or will revealing the truth set her free?
As the new millennium draws ever closer and Woody Creek struggles to survive, one thing becomes clear – in order to face their futures, Jenny and her daughters must first make peace with their pasts.
If it’s not too late . . .
ONTENTS
Woody Creek Characters, Past and Present
For Joan, sister poet of that dark old bedroom
and
for Lois, sister dependable, who pleaded with us to
shut up and get to sleep
OODY
C
REEK
C
HARACTERS
,
P
AST
A
ND
P
RESENT
J
enny, born of a brief relationship between Archie Foote, the philandering husband of Gertrude, and Juliana Conti, a foreign woman who died in childbirth, was raised as the daughter of mad Amber and pompous Norman Morrison. Her early life was chaotic.
Margot, first born of Jenny’s three daughters, dies in a house fire in 1977, and if not for fate and a fallen fence, Georgie, Jenny’s second born daughter, would have burnt with her. Georgie escaped with her life and little else, and has since escaped Woody Creek.
Cara, Jenny’s third daughter, given at birth to Myrtle and Robert Norris, was drawn back to that town on the night of the fire. She has since disappeared with her two children.
Jimmy, only son of Jenny and Jim Hooper, claimed as a six year old by his grandfather, Vern, and later adopted by Margaret Grenville-Langdon (
née
Hooper), took his adopted English father’s name and is now known as Morrison (Morrie) Grenville-Langdon.
AMILY
T
REE
ART
O
NE
T
HE
S
TORM
T
he good seasons and the bad came in cycles to Woody Creek, the rich years when the rains came as required, when the crops grew tall, the sheep grew fat and the cows gave cream-rich milk. Then there were those other years when too much rain fell and the creek escaped its banks to spread for miles across low-lying land. A cow would swim, sheep drowned and crops turned to slime beneath mud-brown lakes.
The red gum forests surrounding Woody Creek celebrated the flood years, their roots drinking deep enough to sustain them through the droughts when passing clouds refused to give up their rain, and the crops wilted, and the cows grew gaunt and sheep lay down to die in dustbowl paddocks.
The bad heat had always come in cycles, that baking, blast furnace forty-degree heat that sucked the sweat and breath from Woody Creek, those days when children followed the shade and old men who had no more sweat to shed eyed the cemetery as friend not foe.
The town fathers had chosen land too close to town when they’d planted their first crop of the dead. Woody Creek had grown around it – and for reasons known only to those who lived there, was still growing.
A mill town, Woody Creek. Thirty years ago there’d been five sawmills in town and the bush mill; no man capable of labour was out of a job. By ’78 only two mills were still cutting, Macdonald’s and Davies’, and unemployment figures were high.
Land was cheap there, and so it ought to be. Woody Creek had no rolling hills, no nearby ocean, no lake. It had a corner pub, a scattering of shops, acres of red gum forest – and the creek. It had Willama too, a large inland city a half-hour drive to the north-east, where a small building block two miles from the Willama post office might set you back four times what you’d pay for a good-sized block behind Woody Creek’s cemetery, or down near the old slaughteryards where a bowling club was currently under construction. Its lawns would no doubt appreciate the blood and bone of generations of cow, pig and sheep.
By ’78, the local butcher no longer slaughtered local cattle on local land. By ’78, much of the meat eaten in Woody Creek arrived in town pleasantly presented on supermarket trays.
The council had built a swimming pool on the corner of Cemetery Road and Slaughter Yard Lane. Kids who used to cool off in the creek behind Dobson’s and McPherson’s land now congregated at the pool where their massed screams competed with Macdonald’s screaming mill saws.
Back after the first war, old George Macdonald had built that mill on the outskirts of Woody Creek but, like the cemetery, the town had surrounded it. Its saws were silent during the week between Christmas and New Year and the silence was deafening, though not this year. Fire truck sirens had bellowed through the town that week.
Forest fires travelled hand in hand with those red north winds of drought years and there was not a lot a man could do to fight them. For a time it had looked as if Woody Creek might go up in smoke, but the wind had turned and sent that fire back on itself.
‘God’s hand was in it,’ the old folk said.
‘Why did he start it in the first place then?’ the kids asked. Their generation wouldn’t waste their Sundays in church. They’d marry there. They’d attend burial services there.
There were two funerals at the Anglican church today, old Pop Dobson’s and Margot Morrison’s.
‘It’s such a bad day for it,’ Maisy Macdonald said. ‘It reminds me of when we buried old Cecelia Morrison. The temperature peaked at a hundred and fifteen that day.’
‘You would have all been dead, Nan,’ her twelve year old grandson said. ‘You would have been sizzling like bacon if it ever got that hot.’
Kids today knew so much more than their grandparents would ever know – and they knew so much less. They’d never heard of Fahrenheit, but knew that the forty-four degrees Celsius promised by the television weather man last night made it too hot to go outside.
Jenny had parked the car in the shed, for its shade, not the car’s protection. It was a write-off, the insurance company said. Jim had ordered a new car, and been waiting for days for a call to pick it up.
She backed it out to Hooper Street, named for Jim’s family; they’d built on that corner before the street had a name. Once again she looked for Georgie’s red ute. She’d been looking for it all morning – listening for it for days.
She expected to see the ute parked out front of the church. No red ute. Only four cars there – and the undertaker’s car and the hearse – and Margot’s funeral was due to start at one thirty and Jenny needed Georgie at her side today.
Five days since she’d had her stitches removed – and Jenny had to phone the hospital to find out that much. Not one word from Georgie.
‘She’s not coming,’ she said.
‘She’s an adult, Jen, and we need to get in there,’ Jim said.
An old red-brick building, the church stood on the corner of South and Church streets, and today, surrounded by dead lawn, it looked abandoned. Little Jenny Morrison had sat at Norman’s side on its hard pews each Sunday of her childhood. These days she entered that door only for funerals.
They were close to its shade when another fire truck bellowed through town.
‘Something’s burning again,’ she said.
‘It’s the day for it,’ Jim said, stilling his feet to listen. By the sound of it, it was heading towards the bridge, to the west of town. There wasn’t a lot left to burn out that way.
An atrocious day for a funeral. It would have been worse had the church been crowded. No crowd there to say goodbye to Margot Macdonald Morrison. Few had known her, fewer had sighted her these past ten years.
Elsie and Harry Hall were there with their sons. Teddy and Lenny Hall would carry the coffin. Maisy Macdonald was there with four of her eight daughters and two adult grandsons, also pallbearers. John and Amy McPherson, Robert Fulton, his elderly mother and Miss Blunt. Jenny nodded to them as she walked by to the front-row pew.
