Joan Makes History (17 page)

Now I was paying for all that. For Duncan and I were there,
husband and wife, about to be the father and mother of someone or other, but Duncan was no longer that man who adored me. Duncan now was a man whose eyes tended to slide away when they met mine, who could submerge into long silences in which I had no part, who did not reach for my hand as we strolled along beaches or pavements. He let me take his hand, he even gave it a squeeze or two, but his heart was not in the palm of my hand, as once it had been: he was now someone with a membrane around himself.

I was frightened of words, having used too many in my life, too glibly, rolled great numbers of them together into constructions of deceit. On such sweet mornings with Duncan, I tried out some in my mind, for the press of feeling demanded outlet, and I went through all the worn-out phrases I had heard, the suspect phrases about love and passion and for ever and ever. I tasted them but they frightened me still, and were sullied by all the other times they had filled the earholes of trusting men and women who had wept in bitterness later, finding the words hollow. So all I could do to relieve the press of my painful tenderness was to make a sound that I heard with surprise was a sort of groan or moan, and touch with a finger that trembled slightly that bit of cheek pushed back by the small secret smile of my husband.

Are eyes the windows of the soul?
I asked one morning, staring into his. I asked that somewhat theatrical question when what I would really have liked to do would be to speak of my good fortune and the awe in which I held it. I would have liked to find the words for my gratitude and amazement that I was now exchanging love with the eyes of this man, and feeling his giant
dancing within me, instead of eating the savourless bread of lonely pride.

Duncan was too wise to listen too closely to anything as sly as words, and wrapped his long arms around me, so I sighed with the bliss of being held tight by him. After some time he said,
Yes, they are the windows and doorways and gravel driveways and gateposts with lions, if you want,
and we lay in silence then, for it did not matter what words passed between us.

Now, as I had never done before, I worried about death, although not my own. Now that I knew Duncan again, I could not envisage life without him, and like any fond and foolish lovelorn girl I brought a cold sweat of dread to my skin, imagining him lying dead and knowing he would never open his eyes and slide a bony arm around me. Is
there a price to pay for every damn thing?
I cried at him, and Duncan, wise man, did not answer, for not knowing what I meant, but seeing some rage in me that did not make sense.

My sleep now was full of dreams: I dreamed that I lay curled like a tight green bud in a warm green room with walls made of leaves: I dreamed of sailing among islands that closed in until they formed a tunnel that I did not notice until it was too late. I dreamed of all the men on the station: Duncan, the men in hats, and the black stockmen, all lined up while I cut their hair with a pair of scissors made in the shape of a stork.

I remembered the last time I had felt myself growing full of someone else, when the whole thing had seemed a prison, so that I had grown frantic and blind like a hysterical cat in a bag. How different all things were now! I had looked into the face of destiny and found it cold: I envied no one now, hankered after no greatness, dreamed no dreams of crowds cheering my
name, armies following where I led, the ardour of artists inspired by my face: all that was an empty mockery, while sitting with my feet up, dreaming away the days and nights in a smudge of sentiment, seemed a finer thing to do than any of those.

I would never have believed that it would have been enough history for me to grow huge and sluggish, gaping at nothing and whispering in my heart to the small being within me.
Women!
I would have scorned,
It is all lies and believing what other people tell you!
and I despised them for knowing what a matinee jacket was, and how to deal with a nappy pin. But small affairs of nappies and names were beginning to interest me, after a lifetime of laughing at the small pink hams in cribs over which mothers crowed and clucked.

I had taken to smiling a great deal: my face had never been the sort to shape itself easily around soft emotions, but now when I caught sight of myself in mirrors or felt the muscles on my face operating from within, a yellow buttery-smooth smile was usually happening on my cheeks.

I dreamed and gazed at nothing, and could spend a whole day at a time moving an item or two from one room to another. I mused, full of happiness: although there were also times when I woke sweating from foul dreams of blood and grief, and sprang out of bed as fast as my bulk would let me to stop the memory of the last time.

Duncan never spoke of the last time: our silence on that event was profound. But he coddled me with tepid eggs, and tempted me with delicacies out of brown paper bags. He had not forgotten during my embittering absence what it was that could tempt me.

Duncan's pride in his shapeless wife, his wife in various bags
of flowered cotton, was frightening, as if the bulge I carried under my ribs, the source of his pride, was something apart from me. There were times when I had to fight a pang of envy for the creature inside me, which was untainted, and so someone he could love without reservation. Perhaps he guessed, for he would whisper,
Ah Joanie, you are magnificent,
and his hand would move over whatever part of my bloated body was closest.

He smiled over me and his face went gaunt with pleasure when he laid his palm on the bulge of tight skin under which that new person lay: when his hand did this, timidly, for the first time, I saw his face go pale.
I am already doting,
he said after a moment and laughed. He had more words, but they stuck in his throat, I heard him choke on his own doting, and I lay with my eyes full of tears. I, cool Joan, woman of destiny, was reduced like all the women I had laughed at to a bulging mother-to-be in washed-out cotton flowers, filled with sentimental tears and squeezing tight the hot hand of her husband.

Ken was a good man, with a strong right arm with an axe, and I had married him knowing that my plain face could not expect a miracle in the way of a man, and knowing that a good man with an axe, and a man whose large warm hands were honest in what they did and a comfort when they squeezed mine, was a good prospect for a lifetime together.
I am no great shakes, Joanie,
he had said, watching the backs of those freckled hands of his while he proposed. I smiled and hung my head modestly, but I also said what I believed:
I am no great shakes either Ken, you are good enough for me.

In the end it seemed no great shakes to stay where we were in Budgeree, with Ken coming home to our hut at night, silent with the tiredness of having chopped all day for someone else, or even worse, the gloom of having tramped from place to place and found no one who wanted his strong arms. It was on the day of rest, after the kneeling and creaking together under the blast of heat from the roof, that he came out of his silence and said
You know, Joanie, I have been giving it some thought.
We had been man and wife for long enough now that I knew better than to be impatient and ask,
What, Ken, what have you been giving thought?
I knew by now that Ken could be as slow as a bit of
grass growing, and that it was necessary to be patient and wait until he was ready to speak.

We walked up the dusty track in a throb of cicadas and I pretended Ken had not spoken, so I would not be impatient to hear what he would say next. Patience was not in my nature, I was always a woman of fire and flame, slow deliberation was not my style. But I had learned at last that Ken was not to be hurried, that he closed down into silence altogether if harassed to speak, and I had learned a few tricks of patience, and was at last rewarded now with what he had been thinking.
See, there is no future for us here,
he said, and I pressed back the words wanting to spring from my mind, because he had more to say, and I did not want to frighten his speech away by being impetuous.
Plenty of water this time of year,
he said out of another long silence.
And I can get any amount of wild tucker.

I had not only learned patience, outlasting the long thinking silences of my husband, but I was learning ingenuity too, to follow all the gaps in the slow stream of his ideas. I was ahead of him, already on the road, when he said loudly,
We will get on the road, I reckon, and do a bit better for ourselves somewhere else.

I was not too sorry to leave the hut, where no amount of damping down and sweeping up ever made the earthen floor any smoother or cleaner, and where hunger had started to become chronic. We were not over-burdened with goods, either, and when we left, without much fuss, on a morning of gleaming light and optimism, there was plenty of room in the waggon behind old Jess for our few pots and pans, the axe and the shovel and a blanket or two. I sat feeling a little dry of throat and damp of eye, because all changes seem to be sad, even those that can only be for the better, holding in my apron the scones Mrs Leeming
had made for us. For once I felt not quite the lively woman ready for a laugh and life and adventure, but was strangely a little queasy, a little unsettled, rather as if I would like to cry and also be sick, just a little, over the back of the waggon, as Jess jerked forward and we were, no turning back now, on the road.

We had left our run a bit late, and half the country seemed to have had the same idea of escaping hunger by taking to the road, and there was nowhere we came to where things were any better than what we had left behind. There were too many gaunt men tramping along the track who could swing an axe as well as Ken, and whose bewilderment at what was happening was hidden behind thick beards, and whose mouths had gone thin and bitter: and in any case the lucky folk who could call a bit of land their own were not doing well enough to pay another man to do their chopping for them. Every bit of hillside or river valley had its selector's hut where a pair of earth-coloured dour people would come to the door or lean on something to pass the time of day with us, but they had nothing to offer us, and had almost as little as we did ourselves.

Being travellers for the duration—and we could not know how long it might take for us to find our promised land—I made a pretence to myself for the longest time that it was the travelling upsetting me, the jolting, the uncertainty. And Ken made me fans from cabbage palm, and let me be reckless with the water in the water bag, wetting a rag for me and handing it to me to wipe my yellow face. Ken was a good and kindly man, his hard hands the greatest comfort to me under the stars at night, but he was as obtuse as I was trying to be, and finally had to be told in blank words, I could not think of any fancy ones, and anyway on a damp night of over-generous dew under our
bit of stretched canvas it was not the time or place to be fancy.
Ken, love, I am in the family way,
I said into the dark, imagining the words floating out of my mouth and into the air like a smell, coming in at his earholes to be sniffed at. He lay for so long in silence I wondered if I had really spoken, and whether I should say it again, that speech that I had rehearsed so often in the last few days that the words had no meaning any more for me. It had been an effort to make the words come the first time, but I took breath to say them again:
Ken, love,
I began, but he began to speak at the same moment:
Joanie, love,
he said in a voice dark with feeling,
You are a little beauty.

I was filled with joy that Ken was glad, but it was all hard going, and I knew that things would be harder before they were easier. How I envied those skinny selectors now! They might have had no more in the way of goods than we did, but they were at least able to stay put in the one spot, and become familiar with the shapes of their own trees and hills.

We would pull up outside one of those huts and Jess would drop her tired head and nuzzle the dust while Ken and I got down stiffly: then the man would stand with Ken, kicking, both of them, at a bit of dirt in front of their boots and exchanging a rumble of words now and again to punctuate the silence. The woman and I would stand by her door or in her sad makeshift hut, and she would be soft with me and my huge belly, and a silence would fall that was pity on her part. I would imagine how later she would say to her husband
What a terrible shocking thing, that poor unfortunate wretch, on the road behind a horse, with only a few pots and pans and a bit of canvas overhead at night, and the baby due any minute.

The kindest ones urged me to stay, urged me to persuade Ken
to tie up the horse next to theirs for a few weeks until the child was safely born.
It could come in the middle of the night, and no one near,
they would say, those too dim to think that I might not have thought of that myself. Those I would have loved to stay with until my time came, the older, fatter ones with a squalling and scampering brood of their own and comfortable hands and eyes: they did not need to put my fears into words for me, but looked into my face and saw them there, the fears and the great weariness.

As my time grew closer my fear grew so great I could not blot it out of my mind, for I knew so little of what I must expect, only that it would be a pain that would make me scream and groan, and that it might go on and on, and that I might die like that, clenched over something unbearable, or with my red life seeping away unstoppably between my legs.

God was on my side, though, holding me in his hand in spite of all my private abuse of Him from time to time, for making life such a hard road. He provided me, at the last moment, when I knew my pains were about to start, with a short stout woman whose voice could have cut through ironbark, but with fat competent hands full of compassion, and knowing brown eyes full of kindness. She asked me nothing and suggested nothing, only looked hard into my face and pushed me into the hut and made me lie on the sacking bed, and felt my gross belly with her squat shrewd hands. She palped and smiled at me at last from her brown eyes, that got lost in her cheeks when she smiled, and said in that voice that could have brought the cows in from five miles out:
Well, you have a good big babe there, love, and it is ready and waiting to come and join us all.

At the door, black shapes against the sunlight, her own children
peered and jostled and whispered sibilantly to each other, and without turning or taking her hands off my belly she said,
Youse kids will get the strap if youse don't make yourselves scarce now.
The doorway stood square and blank again and she looked into my face and winked, so I could have wept with the relief of being under the hands of this woman who knew so well how to manage.
It is your first, love, am I right?
she asked, and hardly needed to see me nod, because this was a woman who knew what was what.

Then she got up from where she had been squatting on the dirt floor beside the bed, pushed herself up with her stubby hands on her knees with a grunt and went quickly to the door. I got up, more slowly, because I enjoyed lying on the bed for once, even this bed that was just a bit of bag stretched over a few saplings, but I made myself get up too and face the glaring sun outside and the silent hanging trees.
Bob,
she called across the clearing to where the men were kicking away at a bit of fence post and swapping their few phrases,
Bob,
she called out of her stout little chest,
these two are gunna be stopping here till the babe comes.
Her husband just nodded once, then again, and turned away back to Ken, who stood beside him looking like no one more important than another man taking refuge behind his whiskers and brown hat. I watched Ken with love, unworried for once under the wing of this stout woman, and I knew he was much more than just another wordless kicking man, and safe now in competent hands I loved him all over again.

I had not known what to expect—what woman can? and was in such a blur of being heavy and thick of mind as well as body that in the end I could not even seem to summon fear. At the first pang I had cried aloud
No! I am not ready yet!
but the
event was ready for me, whether or not I was ready for it. Then the pains began: at first almost something droll, the way they were so punctual, like a man with a dog walking past your front gate every five minutes exactly: it was such a clockwork thing in the beginning it was difficult to take it seriously. But of course the clock began to run faster and faster, so there was no time to laugh at the man with the dog before oh, there he was again, and there he was, and there he was, and there he was, and what had been in the beginning an experimental sort of hand clenching a handful of tissue in my belly became a giant's fist wrenching and clenching and then letting go, but coming again to grip and grasp and twist. At the start it was enough to take a deep breath and think of blue sky above a gum tree and a kookaburra laughing among leaves, but as the grip of the hand grew fiercer and quicker those deep breaths grew jumpy, they were a sort of hard-forced jerky laugh, or was it a cry, and my mind clutched at anything, but everything slid away—Matthew Mark Luke and John, Flumpty Dumpty, Oh God Our Help in Ages Past—and all that was left in my head was one two three four five six seven: numbers, which I had always disliked for being such straight-up-and-down things, came to me and chanted themselves through my brain until, in extremity, among groans so loud they made me hoarse, my daughter was born into the short fat hands of Amy.

Afterwards we all knew we could not stay, even though I had come to love Amy as I had never loved any woman, and could have lived forever by her side shelling peas together into a tin dish or plunging our hands into flour. Tears ran shining out of her brown eyes, and she gave up wiping them away with the corner of her pinny, but let them flow, so that the two youngest
clutched at her skirt and stared up into her face with their grubby fat faces creased with worry. They plucked with their small hands, wordless with anxiety in the face of some large event that was happening to that solid mother they knew, that dense and dependable small body that knew everything. As I would perhaps have many more sad farewells, bumping off down a track and seeing a loved face become nothing with distance, so these children were furrowing their faces with the first of many puzzling griefs.

You will come back, love, and give us a look at her when she is up a bit,
Amy shouted—even in grief her voice could have led an army—and I nodded,
Yes, we will come for a visit, and I promise she will remember you, Amy, she will never forget what you did for her.
We both knew that this was so much balderdash, Ken and I would never return this way, and our daughter would never again see the woman who had saved us both and delivered us into the world. But I would always remember Amy, and the best I could hope for would be some pale woman jolting down a bit of track that Ken and I would call our own someday, and me going out to help her down off the waggon and give her a bed and what help I could, until she too had to set off again into some dusty future. I could only hope to repay Amy like that, and meet her again disguised as some other poor wretch of a human in distress.

I clung to that vision of a future, with solid ground under me and some kind of roof over my head, as I clung to the baby over a thousand bumps and stumps and ruts, through days that passed in a blur of all that was awful, with fatigue like chains around me. It was with mixed feelings that I heard Ken say we had almost left the last of the selectors' huts behind. That meant an end even to what little feeling of safety I had had, the feeling that when tiny Lucy looked yellow, or blazed hot under my hand,
down the track there might possibly be some version of Amy, who could tell me that it was nothing to worry over, or that a bit of camphor on a hot rag would fix it in no time.

But now the track was almost no longer there and Ken spent most of his days up ahead with the horse, leading her by the nose around trees and stones and leaving us in the droning heat of midday to go ahead, looking for a drop of water in some muddy waterhole and a route through the trees that the waggon might manage. At dusk he would come back and stretch our canvas over a sapling or a rope, light a fire and get the billy going while I lay too weary even to watch, with Lucy, weary too after the heat of the day and a tiring tug on my nipples, fingering my breasts and sighing like a sad old woman. I watched Ken, and knew I loved him all the more for the way he had grown even more silent, worrying over his wife and daughter and wearying himself day after day with this heartless prickly bush country. I knew I loved him, but was too stunned even to feel such a thing as love, almost too weary even to make the blood continue to flow, however sluggishly, along my veins.