Beyond the Black Stump (32 page)

Mollie said, “I’m sorry—my name’s Mollie Regan. I’m stopping with the Lairds. Helen said there were some diapers here wanted washing.”

The woman smiled wearily. “I’ll say there’s some diapers. About seventy or eighty. I’m Ruth Sheraton. Have you come to do them?”

“That’s right,” said the girl. “I’ll take them and do them in our machine, and bring them back as soon as they’re dry in the morning.”

“They’re all yours, sister.” She went and fetched a bulging sack of waterproof cloth. “This is mighty nice of you,” she said. “You don’t want to carry them, though. Wait till Pa comes back with the car, ’n he’ll drop them off at the Laird house for you.”

“I can carry them,” the girl said. “They’re no weight.”

“You don’t mind walking down the street with a sack of diapers?”

“No. I don’t mind.”

The woman looked at her with interest. “Say,” she said, “you’re English or somethin’, aren’t you? You wouldn’t be the girl came back with Stanton from Australia?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“Well, what do you know! Say, I’m real glad to know you. Chuck and Stan were mighty good friends.”

“I know,” said Mollie. “It was a terrible blow to Stanton when he heard.”

The woman nodded. “It would have been …” And then she said, “Chuck always had lots of fun, whatever he was doing. But when you go having lots of fun in airplanes, I guess things are liable to happen, and that’s all there is to it.”

The girl nodded. “I suppose so.” She picked up the bag.
“I’ll let you have these back as soon as they’re ready, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

“I’ll be real grateful,” said the woman. “’Bye now.”

Stanton, coming to the house from work, found Mollie hanging out row after row of newly washed diapers on the clothes lines at the back of the house. “Say,” he remarked. “Getting a bit ahead of the game, aren’t you?”

Aunt Claudia, overhearing, said, “Stanton Laird! How dare you say a thing like that! You start right in now and apologise to Mollie!”

“That’s all right,” the girl said equably. “I’m used to that kind of a remark.”

“I never heard such behaviour! Make him apologise, Mollie.”

To keep the peace, Stanton said, “Guess I’ll apologise.”

“Apology accepted.”

“Say,” he asked, “are these all Ruthie’s?”

“No,” she said. “They’re the baby’s.”

Aunt Claudia, disgusted, went indoors.

He grinned. “That’s mighty nice of you, Mollie. I just looked in to see how she was making out, and she told me you’d been over.”

The girl said, “I’m so glad to be able to do something to help. She looks as if she’s had a rotten time.”

“I guess she has …” He picked up a few moist diapers and began hanging them on the line with her. “It’ll be better for her now she’s back in her home town.”

She nodded. “It was probably a mistake staying on in Texas, wasn’t it? I mean, the associations?”

“Uh-huh. It’s been kind of difficult for them all round. They had to live somewhere till Dan got the cottage ready for them.” He paused. “He was in the office today, wanting to sell his Ford.”

“Sell his car? They’ve only got the one, haven’t they?”

“That’s right. Fifty-one model. He won’t get so much for it.”

“Is that to pay for the cottage, Stan?”

He nodded. “I guess it’ll be pretty rugged going for them for a while.”

“But she gets a pension, doesn’t she?”

“That’s right. But a lieutenant’s pension ain’t so much, honey. She’s reckoning on finding some kind of a job later on, when things get settled down a bit. Half time.”

He wanted to talk to Mollie about Ruth and her first-born, but no opportunity arose that night. In the Laird home the plight of the Eberhart family was the main topic of conversation at supper, as it was in many of the homes in Hazel. The girl from Australia found this open discussion of another person’s troubles to be distasteful, an invasion of privacy that ought to be respected. Yet there was no denying the sincere good feeling and desire to help that lay behind it. The women talked of nothing else all evening, but through all the talk ran a current of plans to assist. Even Mr. Laird said once to his son, “You know somethin’? I guess I’ll offer him ten fifty, ’n be prepared to go up to eleven hundred.”

“It’s not worth that much, Dad. The motor’s just about shot.”

“We might not lose on it. Anyway, it’s a coupla hundred more’n he’d get any other place.”

When Stanton went to bed that evening he was troubled and unable to sleep. He was deeply concerned with the plight of Ruth, but even more concerned that he had not told Mollie yet about their early escapades. He felt that he had drifted into a position of duplicity without in the least intending to do so. He knew now that he should have told Mollie about Ruth much earlier, back in Australia before ever she had come with him to the United States, and yet it had not seemed important then, an old trouble that was practically forgotten. It was going to be far more difficult to tell her now, but she must be told. Somehow or other he must find an opportunity to tell her the whole thing next day, or on the day after at the latest. In far-away Australia he had never dreamed that a position like this could arise.

He lay in deep distress, wondering how he could get Mollie alone next day and broach this difficult matter. About midnight he reached out for the Bible by his bedside and began to leaf it through in search of guidance. He found nothing relevant to his particular situation and was growing drowsy through the comfort of the familiar verses, when one that was strange to him jerked him suddenly awake:

He stared at the words aghast; surely they did not refer to him? He read the context; they very well might. He had
looked for a message in the Book, and he had got it with a vengeance.

He did not get a lot of sleep that night. He lay tossing restlessly in bed till it occurred to him that he was hot, and he got up and turned the heat off at the register, and half an hour later he felt cold and got up and turned it on again. He went on exercising the thermostat all night, and still he couldn’t sleep. When dawn came it found him thick in the head and tired to death, but completely resolved that he must tell Mollie all about it, and tell her at once.

He did it after breakfast. He said, “Say, Mollie, come out in the garden. I got somethin’ I want to tell you.” She followed him, wondering, and he led her round behind the barbecue where there was a little privacy. And then he said, “Say, did you ever get in trouble when you were at school?”

“Lots of times,” she said.

“I mean, in real trouble. Like when somebody gets killed, or has a baby, or gets liable to go to the reform school or the penitentiary. Did you ever get in real trouble, Mollie?”

She shook her head. “I never did, myself. I know people who did, of course. What’s this all about, Stan?” She looked at him keenly. “Are you all right this morning?”

“I guess I didn’t sleep so good,” he said miserably. “I got to thinking about things, and then I thought maybe I ought to tell you. I got in real trouble one time, ’n you’d better know about it. I guess I should have told you long ago.”

“Lots of people get into trouble,” she said quietly. “Tell me if you want to, Stan, but sometimes it’s better to let things be. How long ago did this happen?”

“Thirteen years,” he said. “It was in 1942.”

“Thirteen years!” she exclaimed. “But you …” She thought quickly. “You were just a kid then. You were sixteen?”

“That’s right,” he said. “We were all sixteen. I guess you’re old enough to get in plenty of trouble by the time you’re sixteen.”

She smiled. “Tell me about it if you want to, Stan,” she said. “But I shan’t lose much sleep over anything you did before you left High School.”

“You’d better wait till you hear it,” he observed. “Maybe you’ll be so mad you’ll never want to see me again.”

There was only one thing that could upset him so, she
thought; born and brought up on Laragh Station this was no novelty to her. “What did you do?” she asked. “Get a baby?”

At least he hadn’t got to beat about the bush with her. “I dunno,” he said unhappily. “Sometimes I think I did and sometimes I think I didn’t. But that’s not all of it. Somebody got killed.”

To her, that was much more serious. She reached out and took his hand. “Tell me about it, if you want to. I shan’t get mad at you.”

He hesitated, uncertain how to begin. “I guess you must think I’m a straight-laced kind of a guy,” he said at last. “Only drinking cokes and like that. I wasn’t always that way. Chuck ’n me, we went kind of wild when we were kids together, in high school. Both of us had old torn-out jalopies. We used to get bottles of rye ’n drive out some place in the country, ’n get tight. Used to take the girls along, ’n they got tight, too. And then we’d get to playing tag on the way home …”

She wrinkled her brows. “In the cars?”

“Uh-huh. First I’d bump him just a little, ’n then drive away lickety-split while he tried to bump me.”

She smiled. “Sounds a good game.”

“Maybe. I guess we didn’t know the chances we were taking. But that wasn’t all we played, taking the girls along, ’n getting tight all together.”

She nodded. “I don’t suppose it was.” A light began to dawn on her. “Do I know any of the girls?”

“Ruth Eberhart was one,” he said unhappily. “The other was a girl called Diana Fawsitt, but she got killed.”

“Got killed, Stan?”

“Uh-huh. We got in a tangle, corner of Roosevelt Avenue and Fourth Street, both going about seventy. Those scars on Ruthie’s face are where she went through the windshield. Chuck ’n me got away with it, only broken ribs and like that. I guess that’s because we had the wheel to hang on to. But Diana, she got thrown out on the sidewalk. And she died.”

She pressed his hand. “Oh, Stan!” She knew the corner so well. She passed it every day on the way down to Main Street, an innocent suburban corner with grass borders and mountain ash trees, covered in red berries now. It seemed
incredible that tragedy could happen there. “Was she any relation to Mr. Fawsitt at the jewellery store?”

He nodded. “His daughter.”

She said quietly, “I’m so sorry, Stan.”

“I guess kids get to doing things that are plumb crazy,” he went on. “Like smoking marijuana cigarettes—we used to do that, too. We were all pretty tight, of course—Diana too, poor kid. I dunno how we dodged the penitentiary. Chuck ’n me got the Reform School but the Judge suspended sentence, and we went on at High. But after that I gave up liquor. It doesn’t do you any good, that stuff.”

“Not when you’re sixteen, anyway,” she said. There was a pause, and then she said, “But, Stan, that’s all over and done with now.”

“That’s not the whole story,” he said. “When they started digging into things, they found that Ruth was going to have a baby.”

“I see,” she said. “A lot of people have done that before.”

“Mostly they get married first,” he said.

She smiled at him kindly. “Not in the Lunatic. I’d say it’s about fifty fifty there.”

“I guess it’s different in Hazel,” he remarked. “Or anyways, folks like to cover up a bit more here.”

“Was Chuck responsible?” she asked.

“Honest, Mollie, I dunno,” he said. “Chuck, he allowed he was responsible, but I was just about plumb certain it was me. We spent all one afternoon trying to get it figured out when we got out of hospital, in the Piggy-Wiggy café.”

She burst into laughter. “In the Piggy-Wiggy café?”

“That’s right. It was the best place to meet, in the middle of the afternoon when most folks are off the street. You see, our jalopies were sold for scrap.”

“Over a couple of milk shakes, I suppose?”

“Chuck didn’t go much for milk shakes. He liked ice cream.”

“I see. Well, what was the result?”

“We agreed we’d leave it up to Ruthie to say. Her folks were at her, anyway. We wrote a note in the café and gave it to the janitor at the hospital to give to her. She took quite a while making up her mind, ’n then she said that it was Chuck.”

“I see; he was the bad boy. Is that when they got married?”

“Uh-huh. They got married about a month after she got out of hospital. I never did know how she settled it was Chuck and not me. Sometimes I kinda get to thinking that she settled it wrong.”

She eyed him keenly. “How do you mean, Stan—settled it wrong?”

He said, “Her first boy, Tony—he’s grown up to look a lot like me.”

He was glad, very glad, that it was over. Now there was nothing more to tell, no more to be revealed. But he was not prepared for her to burst out laughing again, and he was hurt. He said, “I don’t see nothing much to laugh about.”

She said, “Stan, it’s just the sort of thing that might have happened in the Lunatic!”

He was silent, very deeply concerned. The Lunatic was in a foreign country, where people lived to standards that were wholly alien to the United States, drank to excess in an outlandish manner, swapped wives for pistols, and cohabited with native women. It was the way of foreign countries to behave like that, and he could readily believe from his reading that worse things happened in France, but it was not the way of the United States. It was deeply insulting to suggest that things that happened in his home town could be in any way comparable with things that happened in the northern part of West Australia. Hazel was a part of the United States.

He must be patient, because she was a foreigner and would naturally take some time to learn their ways, and because he loved her. He said quietly, “I guess it’s kind of different here, honey.”

To her there was very little difference between this situation and that of a white stockman disputing with a friend the paternity of a yellow baby, but she didn’t say so because she knew that she had hurt him by her laughter, and because she loved him. Moreover, his case was worse, far worse, than anything in her experience that had happened in the Lunatic, for through his action and his games with Chuck a young girl had been killed. Girls might have casual babies in the Lunatic as they did elsewhere, but they didn’t casually get killed in the course of a drunken game as they seemed to do in Hazel. In the Lunatic, at any rate, a girl’s life was safe.