Heartland (6 page)

Donny's baby

Little Lovey Kingi finds George and Donny leaning over the bike, several pieces of which are on the ground. She runs up and tugs her dad's trouser leg.

‘Trouble,' she says, with some pleasure. ‘You better come, Dad.'

Donny looks up. ‘Hey, Lovey, I'm back!'

Lovey stares at him through her black fringe. ‘I know that. You better get back home. Nightshade's screaming.'

George Kingi straightens. ‘The baby?'

Lovey shrugs. ‘Maybe. One of the old ladies is over there flapping her hands. Nightshade is useless. Just screaming.'

Donny gathers the loose pieces of bike, drops them again. ‘Whoo hoo, Mr Kingi, what'll I do? The bike's not ready.'

George sighs. ‘I can't take you today, boy, the carrot-picker's coming. What about the old ladies? They've got a car.'

‘They'd be no use,' says Lovey firmly. Four years old, she possesses a full knowledge of the doings of all permanent residents, their animals and their oddities. ‘They get lost even driving to 'Kune.'

‘I'll ask Bull,' says Donny.

‘He won't,' says Lovey. ‘Too far.'

George gives his daughter a soft cuff. ‘All right, Missy Bossy Boots, ask Vera to ask Bull, then she must go with him. Donny, you go back to the lady.' He eyes the fidgeting boy. ‘Is it really yours then, Donny?'

‘I guess.' Donny's uncertain grin is painful to George. He's angry with this Nightshade. ‘Well, don't let it mess with your rugby, eh boy? We need you.'

That brings out a real smile. ‘I'm fit, Mr Kingi, feel!'

George chuckles, feels the muscles, then sends Donny off home. He turns back to the bike, shaking his head. Goodness knows how all this will pan out.

Bull, pale and sweating, turns left off the main road past the service station and on to the Raetihi road. Fields of carrots and Brussels sprouts shine in the sun, ploughed paddocks display the rich red volcanic soil ready for the next crop. Bull grips the wheel and concentrates on the road.

Vera keeps up a stream of conversation to take his mind off. ‘Your lace looked good in the
Bulletin
. Streets ahead of the second place.'

Bull nods.

‘
B. Howie
, it said. Why didn't they put
Bull
?'

Bull keeps his eyes on the road. Nightshade's moans and screams never let up.

‘I suppose people are thinking who's this B. Howie? Belinda maybe, or Barbara.'

‘Or Bella,' says Donny from the back seat, and lets out a bellow of laughter. ‘Pretty Bella Howie!'

‘I'm trying to drive, Donny,' says Bull through gritted teeth. ‘See if you can settle Pansy down.'

Donny puts his hand on her belly, feels the baby inside kicking and squirming, feels the muscles tightening during the contractions.

‘Hey, little fellow,' he whispers. ‘Hey, son.'

But no one can calm poor Pansy. She screams her way through the broad main street of Raetihi and on up the hill to the hospital. Bull sounds his horn to signal an emergency, and a nurse walks out.

‘It's coming, it's coming!' shouts Pansy. ‘Bloody hell!'

‘All right then,' says the nurse calmly. ‘Come on in then and we'll see.'

The baby is not in any way disposed to be born that day; is nowhere near ready, according to the midwife. Three days later Donny learns, via a phone call to George Kingi from the hospital, that Pansy has produced a healthy son, and she will be ready to be picked up on Friday afternoon. George gets the impression that the hospital is keen to discharge a troublesome patient.

‘Is there someone who can keep an eye on her and the baby,
George?' the nurse asks. ‘She doesn't seem well prepared for motherhood.'

George sighs, promises to keep an eye, and drives the tractor down to Donny's. George Kingi prefers engines and horses to his own legs, unless he's deep in the bush.

Donny, grinning ear to ear, shows George his preparations — a cradle made from a wooden carrot box lined with layers of soft woollen blanket, a tin of milk formula and a feeding bottle from the supermarket in case Nightshade's milk doesn't come in, and several assorted baby clothes from Notso Smart's second-hand ‘Emporium' in Manawa.

‘Cracker, Donny,' says George. ‘Who told you about all this?'

Donny, it seems, has sneaked over to the Virgin's squat and copied her set-up.

‘What about nappies?' asks George, pleased with Donny's plans (and outraged that Nightshade seems to have made no effort at all).

Donny lets loose a shout of laughter. ‘Oh
yeah
! I forgot nappies! I'll get some at work tomorrow.' Donny's job as a shelf-stacker at the supermarket in Ohakune has been reinstated, due more to a lack of other contenders than goodwill, though perhaps also helped by the current feud between the management of New World and Di Masefield, who was instrumental in sending Donny to jail.

‘Mona can lend you nappies,' says George, ‘and you can borrow the truck for the pick-up if you bring it straight back.'

‘Whoo hoo,' says Donny Mac. ‘Riding in style! Thanks, Mr Kingi.'

The last of the McAnenys

Aureole McAneny, at seventy-eight the youngest of the three McAneny sisters, and easily the most emotional, stands on the railway embankment, shedding a tear over the poppies. Not that she really remembers her brothers, those two stern young men who have always looked down from the mantelpiece and who ‘never came back’. It’s more the sight of the poppies themselves that move her: blood-red in the wind, so tough and so fragile, bravely fronting up to thistles and dock.

‘Oh, oh,’ sobs Aureole, thoroughly enjoying herself, ‘cut down in your prime.’

Little Lovey Kingi, searching the railway track for anything interesting, is about to turn back rather than pass near to one of the weird McAnenys when she’s spotted.

‘Lovey! Lovey dear, I need your assistance,’ sings Aureole, who has never understood that she frightens children.

Lovey keeps her distance. She squints up at the awkward weeping woman whose long silk dress ripples like a flag against the sky, the blazing poppies between them.

‘What?’ says Lovey. She could boast to her brothers and sisters after, how she’s spoken to one of the McAnenys.

‘Pick me two poppies, there’s a dear. My knees are a trouble today.’

Lovey frowns and kicks at a poppy. ‘They’ll only die,’ she says.

‘Oh, oh,’ moans Aureole, ‘out of the mouths of babes!’ But recovers enough to direct Lovey towards two fresh blooms — and a third, as a reluctant afterthought, in memory of Mr Goodyear.

Lovey, hopping on bare feet over rocks and thistles, nimble as a goat, delivers the bunch into the other’s bony fist, and speeds away without looking up to receive the sweet and watery smile.

‘I touched her skin!’ she crows later to an admiring audience. ‘
And
talked to her. She smelled.’

The McAneny sisters almost never go out separately, and even as a trio are a rare sight in Manawa. Their big old house at the far end of Miro Street is screened from the road by a towering wall of macrocarpas. The wild warbling cries of magpies, nesting in these dark trees, tend to keep children off that stretch of road. And the three other houses, owned by skiers from somewhere else, are empty most of the year.

Vera, their nearest neighbour, sometimes leaves fresh vegetables
on the McAnenys’ back porch, as much out of curiosity as kindness, but even Vera knows little about them.

‘They’re sisters, I can tell you that,’ she reports. ‘All three
horse-faced
, all tall as men. And
old
. I swear you can hear the oldest one’s bones rattle when she walks. Little speckled eyes like a lizard, the old one — no wonder the Kingi kids are scared. And you can forget about your neighbourly chat.’ Vera shakes her greasy locks back and forth. ‘Goodness knows I’ve tried. The middle old lady — I’m guessing middle here, but that’s the way I read it — doesn’t seem quite right. Sits on the back porch in a chair, even on a wet day, taking not a blind bit of notice of anything or anyone. I saw a couple of George Kingi’s pig dogs tearing strips off each other, terrible racket, right under her nose on their back lawn. She didn’t turn a hair. Nor thank me when I put the boot into them.’

‘Go on!’ says Bull or whoever else might be listening. Everyone is interested in the old ladies and it’s frustrating to know so little.

The McAnenys drove in to Manawa five months ago in a black and shiny Austin Princess. The same day, a furniture van arrived, and most of the locals found a reason to pass by and size up the good oak furniture and the upright piano that went into the old house behind the macrocarpas. Bull had known Smiley Goodyear, who owned the place for years — a hunter and a recluse who died in the back bedroom, unmissed for three weeks, leaving no family that anyone knew of. The house stayed empty, like half of Manawa’s houses, till the old sisters arrived.

No one has discovered yet that the middle McAneny sister — the one on the back porch — is officially a Goodyear. Delia McAneny married Bert Goodyear, a butcher’s assistant, in
1939. After a few months of marriage — not a Good Year at all — her husband joined up and sailed for the war, where he died, blown up by his own side, leaving his wife with two hundred pounds’ worth of debts and no children. Delia Goodyear, a failure on all fronts, slipped back between her sisters and faded away. She never knew that her husband had possessed a brother, Smiley, until a lawyer tracked her down and handed her the deeds of the house in Manawa.

‘We will move to Manawa,’ announced Miss Munroe McAneny, the oldest sister. The others agreed as they always did. Roe McAneny, at ninety years old, treats Delia (seventy-nine) and Aureole (seventy-eight) as somewhat wayward children. A righteous and sternly ordered life — in other words, a life according to the rules of Roe McAneny — is, in her eyes, the only path to salvation. Roe prefers her sisters to call her Miss Roe, as a sign of her seniority in all matters. Mostly they comply.

The prospect of a move to Manawa was the most exciting event in a decade. The street in Auckland where the sisters — and their parents before them — had lived all their lives had gone downhill. Twice louts had lobbed stones through their porch windows. Their elderly neighbour had been attacked and robbed and left bleeding. They were frightened. The quiet little settlement of Manawa, close to the mountain, seemed a safe and a fitting place for the last of the McAnenys to end their days.

Aureole swings down the road past the magpies. She covers the ground all right, her thin shanks sliding under the silk, but the gait is angular, disjointed, as if some frames of the movie of her have been cut out. On the back porch, she flourishes her scarlet flowers in front of the dozing Delia.

‘Look!’ she says with a misty smile. ‘Poppies for the fallen brave!’

Her sister opens her eyes but doesn’t look.

‘
And
one for Mr Goodyear,’ says Aureole, ‘though are poppies right for the Second War?’ She is in a chatty mood today. ‘Of course it would be the wrong season in Gallipoli,’ she adds. ‘Why do we have poppies for Anzac, Delia, do you think?’

Delia doesn’t comment.

Aureole turns to go inside, then stops with a little cry. Her foot is poised over the carcass of a rabbit. It is skinned and gutted, the flesh firm and pink, and laid on a piece of newspaper. Clearly an offering.

‘Delia! A rabbit! Who brought it?’

Delia is no help at all. Aureole bears everything inside. First she arranges the poppies in a silver vase. The silver and the polished mahogany of the table gleam faintly in the light from the one cracked and rotting window. She calls down the dark passageway.

‘Miss Roe! Miss Roe, come and see!’

For a moment there is silence. Aureole waits. First her sister must gather the strength to rise, then she must rock back and forth to gain momentum, then she will lever herself, frail hands braced against the arms of the chair, until the knees and hip joints are in a position to take over. Once upright, Roe McAneny will breathe a few times waiting for the pain in the hips to subside, before creaking down the passage, ready to
take control of whatever situation has arisen.

She inspects the carcass. Smells it.

‘A rabbit,’ she says. Roe McAneny makes pronouncements rather than conversation. ‘Cook it,’ she adds.

‘But who can have brought a rabbit? We don’t know anything about it.’ Aureole is excited. The poppies and the rabbit. Two events in one day.

‘It will do,’ says Roe. ‘Pot roast with herbs.’

She takes up her stick and proceeds outside. Aureole follows. Roe stabs with her stick in the long grass, showing Aureole which herbs to pick. In the past someone has had a good vegetable garden here. Sage and thyme bushes, woody but aromatic still, fight it out with wild mint, parsnips — all head and no root — feathery dill and its twin, the poisonous hemlock. It is important to get it right.

A young man is digging in the garden next door. He raises his spade in a cheerful salute. Roe turns away, tapping Aureole with her stick to remind her of the work in hand.

Back inside, Aureole dares to speak out. ‘It might have been him! Miss Roe! That young man might have brought us the rabbit!’

‘He did,’ says Roe, pursing her lips tightly.

‘Oh, Miss Roe! We should thank him. He looks friendly enough.’

But Roe has turned her back and is rattling her way down the passage towards her chair in the front room.

A few minutes later there is a stamping of boots on the back porch and a smart rap on the door. Aureole gasps as the young man comes in, grinning and casual as if he belonged.

‘Hi! I’m Donny. Would you like spuds to go with the rabbit? Mine have gone wild all over the place.’ He lays a handful of muddy potatoes in the sink.

‘Thank you,’ says Aureole faintly. She keeps hold of the kitchen knife.

The young man is dark, maybe Maori. His body — there is a lot of it showing — is well muscled. Stubble darkens a strong jaw.

‘Whoo hoo, that smells good!’ The young man steps forward and Aureole, really alarmed now, backs away. His presence seems to fill the whole kitchen. She looks down at his curly mop of hair as he bends to sniff the chopped herbs. Perhaps Miss Roe will hear and come?

‘Would you put those with the rabbit?’ asks the man. ‘To be honest I’m not a great cook, and Nightshade …’ He turns to look out the open door towards his own place, suddenly caught, it seems, by some other thought.

‘Would you show me how?’ he asks after a pause.

‘I don’t …’ says Aureole.

Delia comes in from the porch. Sits at the kitchen table without a word. There is a moment’s silence as the man looks at the sisters, back and forth. His eyes ask a question.

‘She’s not well,’ says Aureole.

‘Oh,’ says the man. He smiles at Aureole. ‘I’m sorry.’ He seems to be waiting for something.

‘Thank you for the rabbit,’ says Aureole. She puts down the knife. Clears her throat.

The man leans back against the table, apparently ready to chat. ‘I’ve been away a bit,’ he says, looking at the floor, ‘but I’m back now. Did you hear about me?’

Aureole shakes her head.

He seems relieved. ‘Okay. Anyway, we’re neighbours and we should be friends, right?’

Aureole nods. ‘Yes.’

From across the back fence comes a torrent of angry abuse, and then a baby’s cry. Donny goes to the door; looks out; turns back. He’s breathing heavily. ‘Pansy is living with me for a while,’ he says. ‘We had a baby.’

‘Oh,’ says Aureole, ‘how lovely.’

‘Yeah. Anyway, if you’ve got work around the place I’d be glad to do it. Cheap rates. Eh?’ His smile is anxious.

‘Well,’ says Aureole, ‘I’d have to ask …’

But Roe is already there, standing grim in the doorway. She taps her stick. Even the cocky ease of the young man wilts. He nods at Roe, straightens and makes for the door.

‘Let us know, anyway. I’m quite strong.’ He stops and grins at the frail old lady from the safety of the back porch. ‘My name’s Donny Mac. Well, that’s what they call me. My real name is Donald Munroe McAneny.’ He steps into his gumboots and stomps off.

The McAneny sisters, stock still, listen as his whistle travels down the drive, out on to the road and in at the next gate.