Not the Same Sky (24 page)

It was Honora Raftery who died first. It was on an early autumn day. She would have liked that. She always said autumn was her favourite season, full of relief that another summer was over. Leaves blew in and around the streets of Yass that evening, scampered in the wind, rustled like paper and flew off to God knows where. Her coffin was brought to the chapel in Yass—she would be buried from where she had been married and had prayed. She was also well pleased that she had seen 1900. She told Cook that, who it turned out was only ten years older than Honora, give or take a year or two, it was hard to be sure. She was still going strong, living in her own house now with her second husband. The house was low, had a corrugated roof and was as close to a clump of trees as was safe. The trees cast a shadow in the afternoon, which fell near the house. Cook could sometimes be seen taking her chair outside and moving with the shadow. The best thing about the house was that it had a verandah at the front. Cook’s second husband was handy—you could marry a man because he could build a verandah. Honora had told her that the new century would be much better than the last and that she was glad to wipe her feet of the old one, ‘Not that I haven’t been happy here, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that at all.’

This reference to here surprised Cook because Honora never talked about here and there, not like some, whose conversation could mist over at the most unexpected of times.

‘But I’ll be gone before you,’ Cook said, to this unexpected conversation.

‘Not necessarily,’ Honora said, as if she knew. She got up, moved over to the table and placed an envelope on it. ‘You can open it when I die,’ she said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Cook said, but lifted the letter and put it away, only opening it on the morning they brought her the news. She put away the part of the correspondence that applied to herself, it would take an evening to read and could wait. She brought the funeral instructions to Honora’s son, David, who lived over at the north end of Yass. David worked in the bank and would become a politician for sure. He was surprised by the letter. Honora had left specific requests for her funeral, in particular, she had listed the names of six women. She was not sure if these were entirely correct now—in the case of two, the spelling might have lost a letter or two, in the case of one she knew she had married three times but believed the second and third husbands might have had the same name. About another she was not sure if she had ever married, so her name might be her own. She listed the husbands’ names as best she could. In the case of the last two she said she was including them without much hope they could be contacted. It might be an impossible venture. She advised that no more than a night and a day be spent trying to locate these women, and she enclosed money for wires. And if her son wouldn’t mind, could he pass on a small box that was inside her trunk in the bedroom if any of them turned up. If they didn’t he could destroy the contents. The box was marked ‘Girls’.

In the end David managed to locate only Anne Sherry and Cissy Weir, who came together by coach, having kept up a sporadic acquaintance over the years. Anne Sherry had been married three times but luckily had come back around to Sherry the third time, which made it possible to find her. And Anne knew where to find Cissy Weir. There were four local women who looked quizzically at them and were themselves looked at, before they all fell on each other with varying degrees of warmth and noise, depending on what kind of woman they had become. Inside the church the stained-glass windows glowed, throwing yellow, red and blue streaks of light across the seats. The floor was comfortably cold. The priest spoke of Honora’s life. It appeared to begin at her marriage, flourish with her children, the six of them all here today, and glowed nicely with her grandchildren, twenty of them, also all here today. No deaths were mentioned, except for that of her husband a decade and a half ago. The two strange women and the four locals walked behind the coffin like ghosts from another place. When they reached the grave one of them could be heard saying, ‘There you go.’

They buried Honora on the hill that rose above the town. From here you could see the dried-up ruin of her first house and the hill where she had stood after her first week here. You could not see the river. David invited people back to Honora’s home, and it was sometime after much tea and some sherry, that he asked if the women would like to see Honora’s trunk. He wasn’t sure why he had done that, instead of getting them the box she had left them, but they seemed pleased, and he was glad.

‘Look,’ Anne Sherry said, rubbing her fingers over the name, still clearly written.

Cissy Weir opened the bedroom curtains. She and Anne Sherry stood at the head of the trunk, the same as the one they had at home. The others moved towards it, respectfully, as if it was a holy thing, then opened it slowly, letting the squeal of the rusted hinges settle into the room.

‘Look at that,’ they said, ‘and this,’ moving some things to the side and some on to the bed.

‘Does anyone remember Julia Cuffe?’

‘Yes,’ they said together, and wondered silently what might have happened to her.

‘Look at this,’ Cissy said, fingering a bonnet, ‘I put mine away too.’

And then Anne Sherry lifted the paper. It began ‘Dear …’

‘I don’t know who it’s to. And I don’t know if we should be reading this …’

But she began.

There was a title: ‘What I Remember. Why Not To Remember. Ways of Forgetting.’

‘He who learns must suffer, and, even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’ Aeschylus

But remember that I was happy too.

Mise Raifteirí an file, Lán dóchas is grá …

So you are surprised. I did get my dictionary. But I had to wait twenty years to see the book of quotations that David brought from the Mechanic’s Institute. The poem I know by heart. Like many things that are not much noticed here, the Institute was a great consolation to me and cheered my life greatly. I could not of course go into the lending room, but I could see into it when we went to dances there and David brought books home for me. Although you may find that quotation particularly hard, there were others that lightened my days and gave me new ways to look at what was around me. You see, I did like to remember but I knew it was bad for me and might have stopped me living in the present. Teresa Furey would not allow me to talk of before we came here. We talked about all other things—we were good for each other—and often I know I could not have lived so well without knowing that she was within a score of miles from me. We would talk about our wedding days, our children born and how we had managed. We were so afraid to hold a baby in our arms the first time, what might it do to us, all that longing … But we became used to it. And we became used to new vegetables and fruit, making jam and talk of making ice—she was the first to know there was ice being made in Geelong, she was the first to know many things. Some people are like that—news comes to them on air. And because it does, people learn to tell them things because if you want things to be known, you must tell the news to gatherers. But I would have liked to have lived close to someone else too, someone who would have allowed me to talk about before. But perhaps no one would. Teresa says that there is no ‘us’. She says that to see the 4000 of us as ‘one’, is nonsense. And yet it was she who told me 4000—I had not known that number. I had to listen to her because she was louder and surer than me. But she was wrong there. I was told in Ryan’s that they had a debate in the London Parliament about ‘us’. It proves that we are one. And our names are all together in an office—I’m not sure if that’s true, but I heard that in Ryan’s too, it’s always full of ticket of leavers and others. There are brick houses going up around there and there are plans to castellate and crenellate Ryan’s house. As well as ice and vegetables, we talked about new materials and wool and how to get things added on to our houses. We talked about the Chinese going through and we talked sometimes about the Aborigines, who watched us and walked past us. But when I said that I didn’t think they liked us, she said that was nonsense, why wouldn’t they, and I said that maybe we had taken their land, and she laughed at me and said, ‘Look at me, how much land have I taken?’

So I let it go. But I had my own thoughts. There’s a man around here who watches me. He saw me before I saw him. He was here first. I know what he thinks of me. I want to say to him that I do not want to be in a house on his land, I have my own spot, even if I cannot get to it. But it doesn’t matter to him if I think that, I’m still in a house on his earth. When he saw us coming he stared, then after staring long enough he thought that maybe he could share with us, but then he realised that we didn’t want to share, we wanted to own. I’ve thought this out myself, because, after all, I’ve heard it before. I would have liked to talk to Teresa about that more. But she laughed at me a lot and I learned to move on to other things. She came with me to hear a talk about Jane Franklin, about how she travelled. I had a dream about Jane Franklin holding her bicycle close to her, as if this treasure might run away and disappear if she did not clasp it tight. The bicycle was all she needed. I would be like that about a bicycle. And was like that about other things too, as I learned to count my blessings. Teresa came to the talk and then said it was rubbish and what had she let herself get talked into by me. ‘I’ve more to be doing,’ she said, but then started about something else, as always, and never held the lecture against me. She came to the opening of the train station with me and we looked up the track and wondered would we ever be on it, going out there. ‘That’s the way to Sydney,’ she said. She came to the town with me when the clock was installed at the post office. It was she who told me that the first wire had been delivered to the Royal Hotel, to an upstairs room. She said that there had been a great fuss in the town and that she thought she knew what was in it, but wasn’t sure, and then went on to something else before I could get her stopped and put back over it. I wanted to know how a wire came. When I mentioned it again she said she had never told me anything about what was in the wire, that it was a silly thing for me to say and so I had to believe that maybe I had imagined it.

But I know what it is I have to forget. I do remember leaving Ireland. I remember being on the first boat. And I remember being cold at Plymouth. I remember some of the days on the ship, when all sense of dawn and dusk had been lost and water speeding under a ship was the only way of being. Sometimes it’s a ship and sometimes a boat. And I remember one sunny dry day, after looking up into the ropes and sails, having the nerve to put my hands on the rail and look out at the sea. I remember coming to journey’s end and knowing for sure that I would never do that again. And I remember the coves, following the coves into Sydney and the boat passing one, then another, sliding through them and another coming up and me thinking that they would go on forever and that the sea might open up again before us and that maybe we would never get off the boat. I remember the road coming here, parts of it, the ruts and the gullies and the scrub. Sometimes the hills were clumped together, but then when we crossed them we would suddenly see flat for miles. We could see so far. And I wondered when that would end. But then we would come to another hill, and that’s when I learned to forget what had passed, and only look to what was coming up. I remember someone saying one morning that what she was looking at reminded her of Ireland and someone else scoffing, ‘People can tell themselves anything. Look at the grass, it’s yellow.’ We all had to forget. ‘And there are no hedges.’

I think perhaps that I remember what fields were like in Ireland. They were small. I remember a bird drinking from a puddle on a lane that had grass running down the middle of it. And I remember my father telling me that the birds outside making that racket in the autumn were discussing the best routes to Africa. And then the starlings would come to take the place of the small birds when they had left for Africa. Not much of a racket really, not when compared to every morning here. But I knew there was no point in telling my children. My daughters and Teresa’s daughters sat together in class and knew nothing about their mothers. They might not have believed me. And I wanted my children to believe me.

The first day I saw a white tree I thought I would get used to that—forget it, if you will, for forgetting can be the same as becoming accustomed to—but I didn’t. Instead, every morning when I saw one, I marvelled and wondered how it could be. How could there be such a thing as a white tree? And I saw animals that never failed to surprise me, no matter how often I saw them. And the birds that were unbelievable. There were other reasons too, not to remember. My brother, Dan, did come here. But he did not like this town. He left soon after he looked at our fields, and instead followed on to where there was gold. I never saw him again. He brought me a brooch belonging to our mother—Florrie had kept it. Florrie had died too, and that I knew I had to forget. I knew that if I forgot, she could still be alive. My brother did not want to remember anything. He said that remembering brought only desolation. We had seen the abyss of hunger, the apocalypse of it. We had fallen into the open mouth of famine. Why would we want to remember? We couldn’t cry with sadness, there wouldn’t be enough tears. He was right about that too. You don’t want to know about the intricacies of my hunger, the shame it brought on me, or if you do, I cannot understand why, because I don’t need to know it anymore. I have forgotten about the workhouse and he’s right, I never want to remember it. He was excited about gold, he said. He did write to me, a few times, the last time to say that he now had three children, three fine children is what he called them, that the gold had dried up and that he was leaving now to go droving for a time. His wife’s name was Maisie, her father was from Wicklow and her mother’s people were from Cork they thought. They had forgotten fast. After the droving he had a promise of a job managing a farm, belonging to none other than the son of our landlord from back home. Imagine. I don’t know how all that worked out. Presumably he had to do extra forgetting.