Pearl in a Cage (3 page)

‘She's over the road with Maisy. I can't have her here while . . .' Amber nodded across the passage to Cecelia's room.

Maisy, Amber's friend since kindergarten, had wed George Macdonald, a mill owner twice her age. She'd given him a baby a year and he'd given her everything that opened and shut. At times, Gertrude blamed Maisy for introducing Amber to Norman. At times, Maisy blamed herself for the same thing.

‘Did Moe say when he'd be moving her?' Gertrude asked.

The dead usually spent a night in Moe Kelly's cellar, which would be degrees cooler than this house.

‘It took four of them to get her out of the lav and up here. It'll take more to get her down Moe's cellar steps,' Amber said. She sat opposite her mother. ‘Eat,' she said. ‘I've cut the bread. Someone may as well eat it. Norman!' she yelled.

Gertrude helped herself to a slice. She baked her own bread. It was of a more solid construction than the baker's loaves, filled up more space in the belly, but she never said no to a slice of the baker's bread.

‘How many rooms have they got over at the hotel, Mum?'

‘Six or more, and they've got those sleep-outs the family use in summer,' Gertrude replied, mouth full.

‘I don't know where he thinks we're going to fit everyone.'

‘He's not expecting all of them to come up here, is he?'

‘They'd travel a week to watch a Duckworth dog fight,' Amber said.

‘The town won't see anyone go short of a —' Gertrude closed her mouth as Norman returned to the doorway.

‘Have you seen my spectacles, Amber?'

‘You took them off before you tried to lift her,' she said. He flinched, requiring no reminder of that awful moment. ‘Did you look on the shelf down there?'

He glanced in the direction of
down there
, but didn't want to go there, so he stood on in the doorway, lost, lonely, his eyes indecently exposed.

‘How many of your folk are likely to make the trip?' Gertrude said.

‘Two have passed,' he said.

‘Three now,' Amber said. ‘Which leaves twelve. Three unmarried. Nine couples, not counting his cousins — and there's umpteen of them.'

‘Where did your mum fit in?'

He turned to run, aware that he and his mother had never fitted anywhere, then the meaning of Gertrude's question became apparent. His jowls trembled as he lifted his chin. ‘She was the eighth born,' he said. ‘The middle man, and not one lost in childhood.'

He flinched again, his eyes daring a glance at the bulge beneath Amber's apron, then he was away, down the gravelled path to the lavatory near hidden by shrubbery at the bottom of the garden. His world a blur without his spectacles, his bladder could not force him back to that place; his need to see could.

Gertrude was eating a second slice of baker's bread when Moe Kelly, Ogden, Vern and George Macdonald arrived to move Cecelia to Moe's cellar. It took time — time enough for the dishes to be washed, the table cleared, time enough for Maisy to bring Sissy home screaming blue murder. Sissy hadn't appreciated her forced removal from her mother.

Gertrude left them to it and walked out front, hoping to catch Vern on his way home. Her main concern when she'd driven in this morning had been for Amber, but her daughter was sitting in the parlour now, relating her morning to her friend. Gertrude's afternoon would be better spent in giving her hair a hot olive oil treatment then a damn good wash. Every hair on her head felt as if it was trying to crawl away.

Cecelia Morrison died on a stinking hot Friday, and, as Moe Kelly had warned, Saturday was worse. He and the local ice man spent much of the morning carrying block after block of ice down to the cellar, packing them under her and around her. Something had to be done.

Then, around noon, a north wind gathering up dust from distant deserts hit the town, turning the sky red, the sun glowering through it like the eye of evil. Moe had nothing against a bit of heat, though he could do without the dust. Stripped to the waist, sweat running, he was in his work shed preparing timber for Cecelia Morrison's coffin.

He was a fine hand with wood. He could knock together a utilitarian cupboard or craft a fancy table, and he was known for his rocking chairs. He could turn out a good-looking coffin too when he put his mind to it, though he didn't appreciate his labour going underground.

The sun was thinking of setting, the coffin taking shape, when Horrie Bull, the publican, and one of the wood cutters carried Horrie's best customer into Moe's shed feet first. Old Willy Duffy, father of Betty, living on borrowed time and donated grog for the past fifteen years, had succumbed with an empty glass in his hand. Fate was putting the boot into Cecelia Morrison née Duckworth. Died in a dunny, wrapped in a canvas shroud, packed in ice, and now sharing her quarters with a man who'd been a stranger to soap and water since birth.

Moe didn't waste a lot of time on old Willy. He dropped him into a pine box and hammered the lid down, aware he was donating that box, just as the grave diggers would be donating their labour to dig that thieving old coot's hole. The Duffy family was not known for the paying of bills.

They got Willy in the ground at eight on Sunday morning, dust swirling, more dogs than mourners in attendance, and by ten Moe was back in his shed, screwing fancy handles onto a fancy coffin he'd make Norman Morrison pay for dearly.

A busy day that dusty Sunday jammed in between Christmas and New Year of 1923. At the hotel, Horrie Bull and his wife were running around like chooks with their heads cut off, preparing rooms. At Vern Hooper's house, the housekeeper was airing beds while the telegram boy spent his day running backwards and forwards between post office and Norman's house. He didn't have far to go. The buildings were separated by a paling fence.

Amber had aired Cecelia's vacated room and made up her bed with clean sheets. It wasn't as if she'd died in it. She changed the sheets in the nursery, cooked cakes and biscuits, tidied her cupboards, swept and polished the floors, dusted the furniture again while Sissy followed in her wake demanding attention.

‘Norman! Will you get her out from under my feet for five minutes? I've got things to do.'

As had Norman. He was up to his elbows in paper, matching names to available beds. To date he had thirty-three replies to the affirmative and only twenty-six beds.

‘Come, Cecelia,' he said. The girl didn't come. ‘Look at your book, Cecelia,' he said. She didn't look at her book. ‘We will have to accept the Bryants' offer, Amber,' he said.

‘What's wrong with the Bryants?'

‘Distance from town.'

He chose a clean page and began again.

 

Bryant: Bess and John. Wilber and Millicent.

Hooper: Olive and Frederick, Louise and Martin. Bernice and Victoria.

White: Viv, Grace and Lorris.

 

The list grew longer while the temperature rose. At three he received a telegram from his Box Hill cousins. All three were coming, thankfully without their wives. Not that Norman had anything against their wives. Finding beds enough was the major concern.

At four o'clock, Paul Jenner, one of the out-of-town farmers, rode into town to get Gertrude. His wife had gone into labour two weeks before her time. It was her first, and could take all night in coming. There was no gain in telling him that though, not when his wife was screaming in pain. Gertrude fed her chooks early, milked her goats, set milk, water and biscuits within reach of little Elsie, saddled her horse, tied a wet handkerchief over her nose and mouth bandit fashion, and by five she was on her way to Jenner's, a good three miles out along Cemetery Road. Two hours before dawn, while wind near picked up and shook that house, she delivered a poor wee boy with a withered foot.

‘The blood supply has been cut off by the cord,' she said. ‘It's stopped its growth.'

‘It'll be getting through now though, won't it?' the new father said.

Maybe it would.

‘It could do just that, love,' Gertrude said, knowing she was giving false hope, but knowing too that at such times she had nothing else to offer. ‘The doctors in Melbourne might be able to do something — if it doesn't improve by itself. Those chaps can do some remarkable things nowadays.'

She stayed with them until there was light enough for her horse to see where he was going. He took her home, where she got his saddle off, got her boots off, then fell face down across her bed. Near midday, she awakened, her goats unmilked, her chooks unfed, her garden unwatered.

Two o'clock: Woody Creek frying beneath a blazing sun and a crow fell dead from the currajong tree growing in the railway station yard. The kids playing beneath the tree tried feeding it water, and when they couldn't raise it from the dead, they dug a grave with sticks and had their own funeral service.

At three, a bunch of older boys playing on the stacked timber behind Macdonald's mill found a snake with two heads, both ready to strike. They killed it then carried it around town, displaying it at front doors for a penny. Some paid. They got a better look than the ones who didn't. Moe paid up, grateful for that snake. It had cleared the kids away from his cellar window. A dead body sleeping on melting ice couldn't compete with a two-headed snake.

Seven fifteen: the sun setting behind Charlie White's grocery shop; Moe Kelly sitting at his kitchen table totalling up the cost of fancy handles, timber, labour and ice; Norman pacing his station platform perusing his latest list, the two-headed snake hung out to stink and dry on the railway yard's fence, little Cecelia asleep in her parents' bed, and the train announced its coming with three elongated hoots.

Amber removed her apron, slid her arms into a loose-fitting smock, forced her feet into shoes, combed her sweat-soaked curls, then walked out the side gate and the fifty-odd yards to the station in time to see the first Duckworth step down to the platform.

They kept on stepping down, from the first and the second-class carriages. Aunt Louise, Cousin Ottie, Aunty Milly and Uncle Wilber, Uncle Charles the parson, his wife Jane and son Reginald, Uncle someone, Aunty Bessie . . . A babble of Duckworths. A scream of them. A smack of air kisses, of roving greedy eyes measuring girths on those unseen since the last wedding, the last funeral. They were too much. They were too many.

The in-laws were leaner, less vocal. They stepped to the side, stepped back, found walls to get their backs against. Amber got her back to a wall, got her hands protectively across her stomach.

Horrie Bull, armed with the hotel's trolley, came up the platform, fearing his next few days but mentally totalling up the money. His first approach was to the in-laws, who in turn approached their partners, but Duckworths had a way of discounting others when surrounded by their own.
Conversations unfinished on the train must be finished, sisters unseen in twelve months must be told twelve months of news. Now. Not later.

‘Just make sure I'm at the same hotel as Louise, I said.'

‘Tell them we need a room adjacent to the bathroom,' Louise said.

They didn't know what they were in for — nor did Woody Creek.

The sheer bulk of Duckworths overwhelmed Norman's little station; for ten minutes, the sorting out of them, the finding of and identifying of luggage, overwhelmed Norman. But he was a methodical man when armed with his lists. He sorted his relatives. He separated them. The three male cousins, late inclusions, initially allocated to the hotel, were scratched out and reallocated to Maisy and George Macdonald; Louise and husband reallocated to the hotel. Vern and Joanne Hooper had a large house — they took two couples, plus two female cousins. Lonnie and Nancy Bryant, who owned land four miles west of town, had plenty of spare, if worn, bedrooms. Norman allocated them two pairs, plus his unwed Portsea uncle. Charlie and Jean White took two singles. Parson Charles and wife Jane had been allocated Cecelia's vacated bed; their unwed son, Reginald, was to have bedded down in the nursery — until Norman sighted Aunty Lizzie, his maiden aunt, who had taken it into her head this morning to make the trip without her maiden sister. He scratched out
Reginald
, wrote in
Lizzie
, then scribbled
parlour couch
beside Reginald's name. He was young. He could tolerate the discomfort.

Horrie Bull took the rest. He and his trolley led them via a diagonal short cut, down a narrow path between tall dry grass, around a peppercorn tree and over a road to his hotel. Vern's youngest daughter, Margaret, led the Hoopers' guests down the same track, then continued on to Vern's house, while Vern loaded five into his car and delivered them out to the Bryants' farm.

By eight o'clock, the town had absorbed, or been absorbed by, Norman's relatives. By nine, they were fed; by eleven, all bar the three Box Hill cousins were in their beds. The cousins were
playing poker in George Macdonald's kitchen and telling tales out of school — about Norman.

 

Nancy Bryant, three months past her sixtieth birthday, had washed the last of her guests' dishes and reset her dining room for the onslaught of breakfast. She was emptying the dishwater onto her herb garden when she heard what sounded like an infant's cry. Surely a night bird, though no bird she'd heard before in the near forty years she'd lived on this land. A feral cat perhaps. Unconvinced, she walked deeper into the yard.

A country night is dark when the moon is hiding. Unable to see a foot in front of her, she returned to her enclosed porch for the lantern Lonnie had left burning there for his guests' convenience.

Chains rattled. The dogs were disturbed by that late light and by the scent of strangers, and as Nancy walked by their shed, old Boss-dog asked his low question.

‘Go to bed,' she said, eager to go to her own.

And she heard it again, louder this time, or louder because she was nearer. She'd borne seven children, was grandmother to twelve; she could recognise a baby's cry when she heard it.