Pearl in a Cage (19 page)

Didn't want to deal with his wailing daughter. Couldn't deal with her. Told her to go back to Maisy, then cringed from her when she ran bellowing into her bedroom.

One of the church ladies had brought him a bowl of soup and a slice of cake. He'd been fighting one-handed to heat the soup when Cecelia arrived. He spilled it into two bowls, halved the cake, called her to the kitchen.

She emptied her bowl, ate her cake and his, drank the little milk remaining in his jug. Now he had no milk for his tea. And he wanted a cup of tea. Wanted to place his head on the table and howl.

‘You must return to your Aunty Maisy. As you see, I cannot care for myself, Cecelia.'

‘I'm not going back there, I said.'

No energy to fight her. He went to bed without his cup of tea. She went to her own.

He had managed alone before — when he'd had two hands. He had spent three months in this house with Jennifer. A different time. A different child. He had been a younger man. His shoulder hadn't throbbed, itched, ached, screamed when he rolled onto it in the night. The wound wasn't healing. Vern was driving him to Willama in the morning, leaving early.

He smelled urine when he rose at seven. He couldn't handle a wet bed this morning. He left her sleeping in urine, closed her door, fought with his clothing for half an hour then scuffed across to the station, tripping over his shoelaces. His station lad tied them, then made him a cup of tea. At nine, Norman left him in charge and drove off to Willama with Vern.

A long and painful day, and Cecelia waiting for him, surly because he'd gone missing for most of the day. He'd bought sliced ham in Willama and a loaf of bread, a tin of powdered milk. He mixed a little and placed the rest up high. They ate the ham with chunks of fresh bread. Difficult to cut a fine slice with one hand. She demanded more ham. He had no more. He mixed more milk. She drank it.

‘I am going to my bed, Cecelia. Go back to your Aunt Maisy.'

He walked to his room. She followed him.

‘I'm not going there, I said.'

He propped against his bed, looked at his shoes, aware he must untie the laces but lacking the desire to begin. ‘Then go to your own bed.'

‘I'm not sleeping there either. It's wet.'

‘Then you may sleep on the floor,' he said, forcing one shoe off by applying pressure to the heel with his other.

She stood watching him struggle, then went to her bed. One side was almost dry, though not by morning. A whiff of ammonia can raise the senseless from a faint. The pervasive stink of stale urine roused Norman from his cave of itching, aching self-pity.

He found clean sheets, filled a bucket with warm soapy water, then offered Sissy instruction on how she might remove the saturated sheets, wash down the mattress protector, dry it thoroughly with an old towel, then remake her bed. She looked at him as if he were mad.

He went to work. She went to school, uncombed, unclean.

The church ladies delivered a pot of stew that afternoon. He poured it into a pot and placed it on the stove. He'd renewed his supply of fresh milk, and that night he fought her for it, one-handed, then stood guard in front of his ice chest while she stamped her feet and screamed.

‘I will pour you a glass of milk when your bed has been stripped and your mattress protector washed, Cecelia. As you can see, I have but one good arm.'

She went to her room, kicked the bucket of water, spilled it on her floor, went for a slide on slippery linoleum, landed hard and remained on her back to howl. He didn't attempt to lift her. He closed the door on her noise and returned to the kitchen, closed that door also, then stood staring a large potato in the eye. It took some considerable time to peel it one-handed, but by nine his potato, well boiled, was mashed and keeping hot on the hob, the donated stew shrinking as it simmered. Cecelia was silent. He crept to her room and found it empty. She was in the nursery,
in the narrow bed, fast asleep. It had no rubberised protector. He could not leave her there.

He shook her shoulder. ‘Your meal is ready, Cecelia.'

‘You woke me up!'

‘You are in the wrong bed. Up, my dear.'

‘I hate you! Get away!'

‘One wet bed is more than sufficient.'

‘I'm sleeping in here, I said.'

‘You did, and very definitely.'

He took her upper arm, then, dodging the worst of her blows, manually removed her and most of the blankets from the bed, deposited her in her own room, found the key to the nursery door, fought her away from the door, then locked it against her.

She was weary, as was he. He stepped over her on his way to the front door, which he closed behind him. There was a bench seat down the eastern end of his verandah and a packet of cigarettes on the parlour windowsill. Two left in it. He slipped one out, got it into his mouth and, with practice, learned the best means of striking a match without setting fire to his sling. He sucked the first cigarette down to a butt, then lit the second from the first, hoping to borrow energy enough to continue the battle.

She grabbed his leg as he stepped over her on his way back to the kitchen, almost overbalancing him, but he saved himself, freed his leg and continued.

His stew was drying out, his potatoes required heating. He breathed deeply, left both pots on the hob, and prepared a second bucket of soapy water, added a dash of phenol, found the soggy cloth, plopped it into the bucket.

‘Shall we work together on this, Cecelia? My one good hand is at your disposal.'

‘You go to hell.' Her mother's words.

Epic battles are recorded in history books. Men who achieve great feats are hailed worldwide as heroes. Norman was nobody's hero, but he fought the epic battle of the wet bed and at ten forty-five that night he won. They washed the
mattress protector together, they dried it, got clean sheets roughly spread; and at eleven ten, they sat down to a sloppy mush of potatoes— he'd added too much boiling water — and a very tasty stew. They ate bread later, neat enough slices. She held the loaf while he sawed.

The following morning, she tied his shoelaces, or knotted them.

‘Train a child up in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it
,' the Bible advised. The reverse also applied: ‘
Raise a child in the manner of a wild animal and God help the trainer when the child grows large enough to bite
.' His sin, his most grievous sin. From her birth, he had taken the easy road with Cecelia. He could blame none other than himself now that the road had turned rocky.

He was a man of books, accustomed to written instructions, but with no instruction booklet to guide him in the taming of his child, he turned to the past, to his own boyhood — not to his mother's child-training methods, but to his months spent with his aunts Lizzie and Bertha and their many dogs. They'd owned five, all near human, and each one knowing its place in the pack hierarchy; puppies trained to know their place, good behaviour rewarded, poor behaviour receiving the aunts' turned backs. During the weeks of Norman's incapacitation, he applied his aunts' rules of puppy-training to his daughter, and though she may never heel nor sit, beg or roll over on command, her snapping and howling decreased significantly. Her bed-wetting persisted, until he found the dusty commode in the washhouse, placed there when his mother had outgrown its narrow confines.

Sissy's rewards were great when for a week her sheets were dry, her chamber-pot emptied. His arm grown stronger, he pumped up his bicycle tyres and away they went, west, out to mushroom country where they collected a billy full, which they fried in butter and ate on toast. They rode east to where the city men were stringing their electricity wires so Woody Creek might shine more brightly at night. In May, they rode south out along Cemetery Road and spread their blanket on damp grass,
picnicking on hot chocolate from a flask, on ham and cheese sandwiches.

The frosts of winter, the wet or foggy days, interrupted Norman's training. They couldn't ride through a pea soup fog and she punished him for it. He purchased a dozen unbleached calico sheets. Urine and frost bleached them white before the daffodils started opening their trumpets to a weak sun.

They found a field of daffodils out near the Three Pines siding, where together they explored the old mill workings. He attempted to make their Sunday rambles instructive. She was a child who required, demanded, instant gratification, but that day he discovered her interest.

‘
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze
,' Norman quoted as they surveyed the daffodils.

‘Miss Rose knows that one,' Sissy offered.

Encouraged, he recited more. ‘
Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretch'd in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay
. . .'

‘All right,' she said.

 

Given time, man can move mountains, or tunnel through them, or fly over them. Given time, a bad haircut grows out, bruises fade clean away and some memories fade with them, or go deep underground. Given time, those city workmen erected enough poles, strung enough wires, and electricity came to Woody Creek.

There was a celebration at the town hall for the turning on of the lights and Vern Hooper was ready for it. He was the first in town to buy an electric refrigerator, though not the first to buy a wireless.

‘So, what do you say, Trude?'

He had a fine house and he wanted someone to share it. She chose to misunderstand his proposal.

‘It's all very fine. If our folk could see all this, they wouldn't believe it.'

Jenny couldn't believe it. She was attempting to see inside that wireless. There was a man inside it singing.

‘How did . . . how did he get inside?' she asked.

‘Electricity,' Vern said.

‘Where did it get from?'

‘It comes in those wires, girlie. Comes all the way from the city.'

‘Can I see it come?'

‘No one can. It's just there. All around us, they say.'

‘Like fairies?'

‘Something like that,' he said. ‘Some sort of magic.'

‘Is that man inside that thing like . . . like a fairy man?'

‘From what I can tell, it's a box full of valves, girlie.'

Jenny knew about gnomes and dwarves and elves. Now she knew valves, which were wireless men that sang, who she couldn't see because they were magic. Lots of things were magic. Granny was. She could make things on her sewing machine and make jumpers with wool.

Vern's Margaret was making a jumper for her brother. She'd said so when Granny asked. She talked funny because she went to school on the train, not to Sissy's school. Jenny liked listening to Margaret talk. She liked Vern's house too. It was a magic house with thousands of flowers and short grass she could play on, and pictures of lots and lots of people hanging on his walls. She liked photographs of people.

‘Why did you have just one, Granny?'

‘One what, darlin'?'

‘Picture.'

‘Have I got one?'

‘Your big boy and girl — with the fly-hitter thing.'

‘Where have I got it, my darlin' girl?'

‘You know. Wiff your thing for hitting flies.'

Gertrude's wedding photograph hung on a hook near her bedroom doorway, in the place it had been so proudly hung by her parents thirty-odd years ago. It shared its bent nail with her fly swatter.

‘That's Archie Foote. That's your grandpa,' Gertrude said.

‘Why is Itchy-foot my grandpa and not Vern?'

‘Damn good question, girlie,' Vern said. ‘I'm thinking to fix that, though.'

‘Itchy-foot was your mummy's daddy, like I'm your mummy's mummy.'

‘And Margaret's daddy too?'

‘I wouldn't put it past the weasel-faced cur —'

‘Shush with that in front of her, Vern,' Gertrude warned.

They left soon after. Vern's daughters were on the verandah, dressed in their Sunday best even though it wasn't Sunday. Jenny waved to them. Gertrude gave Margaret a second glance, then a third, as she walked by.

Lorna, Vern's firstborn, had inherited the Hooper height and more of it than Gertrude, which, when combined with her mother's looks, was not good. Margaret was a plump and fluffy girl who might have stretched to five foot three. There was no saying who had fathered her — other than it hadn't been Vern. She had her mother's platinum blonde hair, but with more curl. There was a lot of her mother in her, and more so since she'd grown into her woman's shape, but there'd always been someone else lurking behind Margaret's face. Out of the mouths of babes, Gertrude thought. Strange how even a child's eye sought out similarities, made its own comparisons — a leftover perhaps from when we swung in the trees, when the ancestors needed to judge fast who was family and who was foe.

‘Will Mummy's daddy come home sometime, Granny?'

‘No, darlin'.'

‘Will Mummy come home when I come home?'

‘I don't know, darlin'.'

Would she turn up at that station one day? Would Norman take her back if she came home?

‘Do I have to live in . . . in her house . . . when she comes, Granny?'

What did babies know? How much did they remember? Gertrude didn't want to send her home, but Norman wanted her home and he was her father — for all intents and purposes.

‘You've got a good daddy and a big sister in there, and you've got me down here. And you remember, darlin', that no matter what else changes in your little life, I'm going to be right here for you.'

‘Even when I'm very, very big?'

‘My word I will. Even when you're as big as me.'

‘Even when I'm big as Vern's Lorna.'

‘Don't go wishing that on yourself, me darlin'.'

Poor Lorna, she had the dimensions of a totem pole.