Pearl in a Cage (6 page)

‘Can you . . . do something with her hair, Mum?'

She couldn't, but Moe Kelly removed the pins and settled it around her shoulders. John moved his equipment closer, close enough to capture her face in near profile.

‘Can you move some of her hair over that grazing, Mr Kelly?'

The hair was moved, then, overcome by sadness, John hid again beneath his black sheet to clear his eyesight before capturing the final photograph of a beautiful stranger he'd caught sleeping.

 

They buried her at eight in the morning on the first day of January, 1924. Vern Hooper was there, Gertrude, Constable Ogden, the local parson, Moe Kelly, John McPherson and his
mother, and the grave diggers, who stood back, studying their blisters.

What was there to say about a nameless woman no one had yet missed, when you didn't know if she was Catholic, Muslim, Jew or Callithumpian? What could you do but go to the good book and find something to say? The parson chose a brief passage. Then she was gone.

It wasn't the type of funeral any one of those mourners might have wished for themselves. No one wanted to hang around. The parson and the McPhersons left together. Vern, Ernie and Gertrude followed them to a big old gum tree growing on the far side of the cemetery gates. Ernie's bike leaned against it, Gertrude's horse was tethered to one of its low-hanging branches, Vern's car was parked in its shade.

‘What's happening with the infant?' Vern asked.

Ernie was more interested in his bike's back tyre. It had a slow puncture or a leaking valve.

‘I spooned some water into her before I left, but there's so little of her. She's weakening,' Gertrude said.

‘We've got nursing mothers in town. There'll be one amongst them who'll take her in until we can see if any of her folk are found,' Ernie said, applying a bit of spit to his valve, which didn't seem to be leaking.

No problem at all in finding a nursing mother in Woody Creek; the begetting of kids was the main activity after sundown. Finding one willing to take on an extra baby was the problem. Ogden had already asked a few chaps if their wives might be willing. He'd found no takers. Kids came, wanted or not, and their folk welcomed them, but it took a special type of person to put the same time and effort into a stranger's infant.

‘Paul Jenner's wife is a kindly sort of girl,' Vern said.

‘She's got enough to deal with right now,' Gertrude said.

‘Could you see your way clear to getting the babe down to Willama?' Ogden asked Vern.

‘I'd have Joanne down there if I thought the car would make it. These temperatures would have her kettle boiling before I hit the ten-mile post.'

‘What's wrong with her?' Gertrude said.

‘The usual, aggravated by too many folk treating her house like a hotel.'

It was Joanne's house, built for her by her first husband. Vern had done the wrong thing by offering to put up the Duckworths.

‘There's still a few hanging around, I see,' Ogden said.

‘Not at my place,' Vern said with feeling.

Ogden mounted his bike and pushed off; Gertrude freed the rein, swung up to the saddle and was away. Vern stood on alone, watched her ride.

He may have been the wealthiest man in the district. There wasn't much in life he couldn't have if he wanted it — apart from what he'd wanted since his eighteenth birthday and maybe even before that: Gertrude. He'd told her she was marrying him that day. She'd put up no argument, though their folk had. They'd been deadset against cousin marrying cousin. He'd argued that they were only half-cousins and half-cousins didn't count as blood; he and Gertrude had shared a grandfather who'd gone through four wives. Vern hadn't won that argument — or Gertrude.

As he watched her turn to the right at the town hall corner, he sighed anew for the interference of dogmatic old men, and for the rare race of sons he and Gertrude might have bred. She'd wed a city man, and left him in India a few years later, but by the time she'd left him, Vern had been wedded to an Englishwoman with five hundred pounds a year but slim hips. It had taken him a while to get her with child, and he should have known better than to do it. Hooper infants had a bad habit of killing their mothers. A Willama doctor had saved his daughter but couldn't save Vern's wife.

He'd been made a fool of in his second attempt at wedded bliss. She'd popped his second daughter seven months after the wedding, and in the time it had taken him to get a saddle on his horse. She might have given him half a dozen more — had he believed her first was his own. He hadn't, so she hadn't. He hadn't touched her in eight years, hadn't planned to touch her in another eighty, but she'd come to grief beneath the hooves of a stallion she shouldn't have been riding, and he hadn't mourned her.

Joanne, his current wife, had given him a son, and for that son Vern loved her, which had nothing to do with the way he felt about Gertrude. Young love is unrelated to older love. What he felt for Gertrude hadn't altered since he was an eighteen-year-old boy, and if he lived another forty years, it wouldn't alter. He loved her. He wanted her. And he couldn't have her.

A couple of times, between wives, he'd come close to getting his heart's desire. Amber had been the fly in the ointment each time. Gertrude put her first in everything. After a time, a man grows tired of coming in second place.

Vern sighed, and folded himself into his car, but sat on looking down the wide dustbowl the locals called Cemetery Road.

Woody Creek was spreading south along Cemetery Road, the younger folk preferring to see ghosts walking in the night than floodwaters creeping. If things kept going the way they'd been going since the war, that cemetery would end up in the centre of town.

Lack of transport had a lot to do with the town's growth. Most born in Woody Creek stayed on to wed, which may have led to a bit of inbreeding but it kept money earned in the town working for the town. The rains had been coming when they were supposed to come; the farmers were doing well, which meant the businesses were doing well. Not that Woody Creek relied on her surrounding farmers to keep her afloat. Timber had got this town growing. The railways' order for sleepers was up each year. Timber was used in the mines. They built wharves from red gum, bridges, used it for fencing, and burned what was left over.

Vern was making money hand over fist, as were his mill workers, tree fellers and the bullockies who dragged those logs into the mill. A lot of folk lived well off timber. The big steam-driven mills could cut more in a day than the old pit mill could do in a month.

Uncountable tons of timber were freighted to Melbourne each year, yet barely a dent had been made in that forest. There was wood enough around this town to keep those mill saws screaming for a hundred years.

A forest doesn't evolve unless it finds the right conditions. It doesn't ask for much, other than space in which to spread. It will stand up to years of drought — if that drought is balanced by a decent flood every once in a while. The creek, twisting through the forest like a stirred-up snake, could be relied on to strike more or less regularly. Crops were lost beneath its floodwaters, stock drowned, families washed from their homes, but that forest drank her fill and gave birth to saplings.

Gertrude was eyeing a healthy clump of the things growing beside her boundary gate as she dragged it shut, looped a circle of rusting wire around a leaning gatepost — and for the umpteenth time promised her gate a new gatepost — and the gatepost a new gate. She'd been making similar promises for a year or two now, but hadn't got around to keeping them. She promised that clump of saplings an axe — and that was a promise she'd need to keep before the things started pushing over what was left of her fence. Everywhere she looked this morning she saw something that needed doing.

Her father had wrestled these fifteen acres from the forest, fenced them, then spent the remainder of his life fighting an ongoing war against red gum saplings hell bent on reclaiming his land. Had he followed his father's wishes and wed a neighbour's daughter, he might have ended up with more. An independent man, Gertrude's father, he'd learned to live without money — as had his daughter. In this old world, some are written down to do it easy but most are born to do it hard.

Amber had chosen a harder row to hoe when she'd wed Norman Morrison. She'd had a few nice boys come calling, then ended up with the worst of the lot — which Gertrude blamed on the last flood. The Morrisons had offered Amber a bed for the duration, and after three weeks in that railway house then coming home to floors covered in mud and green slime . . .

They'd been shovelling side by side for an hour or more, scraping up that stinking mud and pitching it out the door, Gertrude pleased to be home, pleased she'd had no floor coverings to lose, when Amber had let out a howl of the damned, pitched her shovel out the door, then followed it.

‘To hell with it,' she'd said. ‘I'm marrying him.'

‘Who?'

‘Who do you think!'

‘Wally Dobson?'

‘Norman!'

‘Norman Morrison! You don't suddenly decide to marry someone like Norman Morrison just because you're sick of shovelling mud. Now pick that shovel up and get me some water. We'll sweep the rest of it out.'

‘I deserve something better than this.'

‘Then you don't marry a man like Norman Morrison, you fool of a girl. You don't love him.'

‘Who are you to give advice on love? You left my father before I even knew him.'

‘He went missing.'

‘So you say.'

‘I wasn't much older than you are now, I had you in my belly, I was stuck in India and he was gone, and if I'd stayed there I would have starved. And he didn't worry too much about you starving either, my girl. Now get me a couple of buckets of water and the old straw broom.'

‘People don't live like this.'

‘No. There's a lot who live worse.'

‘And plenty who live better.'

‘Yes, well, I can tell you now, you'd be a damn sight more comfortable riding a wet log downstream with a chook
perched on one end and a goat on the other than in tying yourself up with those Morrisons. I didn't raise you to be a fool, so don't you go acting like a fool and ruining your life.'

Should have kept her mouth shut. Amber had wed him anyway.

Not that there was a lot wrong with Norman — or maybe there was nothing in the man to be wrong with him. He was lacking — lacking in self, or he'd had it drained out of him by his battleaxe of a mother. At times Gertrude made the effort to attempt some sort of communication with him, but it was like talking to a trained cockatoo — one trained by a parson. He could parrot plenty of big words, but when he'd finished what it was he had to say, you were left feeling that he'd said nothing at all — or nothing that made any sense. About the best Gertrude could say for her son-in-law was that he must have taken after his dead father, because old Cecelia hadn't had a lot of trouble in making herself clear.

For a time after the birth of Amber's daughter, Gertrude had tried to get along with Cecelia Morrison, aware that she'd need to if she wanted to play a part in her granddaughter's life. She'd delivered that crumpled little mite, had loved her at first sight. Every Friday she'd visited Norman's house, welcome or not. But old Cecelia had jumped Gertrude's claim, and she wasn't the type of woman to share her possessions. For six months Gertrude had persisted — while biting her tongue to a rag. Then one day she'd stopped biting it, and that was the end of that.

Things would be different with the next one. Gertrude may not have had anything specific against Norman, but she couldn't say the same for his mother. Her feelings towards Cecelia Morrison had been very specific.

The saddle off, she set it in a crook of her walnut tree, sent her horse on his way and glanced towards her chook pens. She'd have eggs waiting to be collected, but she had that baby and Elsie waiting inside. The eggs could wait a little longer.

Not a sound coming from the house. She opened the door, expecting to see Elsie lying where she'd left her. She wasn't there.

Old Wadi's been here, she thought. She'd near come to blows with him the day she'd carried Elsie away from his camp.

‘Elsie?'

‘She bin cryin', missus,' the girl replied from the bedroom.

Gertrude lifted the curtain, walking from bright light into dark. No window in her bedroom, but a wide wooden hatch. She lifted it, propped it wide, and as the light streamed in she saw the girl holding the new titty bottle.

‘You've got her sucking? You good girl,' she said. ‘You clever girl.' Elsie stood on one leg, her hip adding balance against the bed. ‘How did you get in here, love?'

‘Slided,' the girl said.

Gertrude checked the level of water in the bottle. It had gone down. She fetched a chair from the kitchen, got Elsie seated, and without disturbing that teat. ‘Let her suck for as long as she will, darlin'. It's thirsty weather.'

A large stone bottle of water lived in the Coolgardie safe all summer long. Gertrude filled two enamel mugs and carried them to the bedroom where she handed one to Elsie. No thank you was voiced, but those big brown eyes thanked her.

‘You like that baby?'

‘I gettin' one sometime.'

‘Some long, long time,' Gertrude said.

She went about her morning feeling a weight lifted. She'd ridden into that poor woman's funeral feeling sick at heart that she'd missed something, that her carelessness had allowed the woman to die. She'd been concerned that the babe might follow her mother. But she was sucking, and if she'd suck on sugared water she'd suck on goat's milk.

Eggs made up the bulk of Gertrude's income. Charlie White at the grocery store and Mrs Crone from the café-cum-restaurant took the bulk of them. A few buyers came to her door for eggs and vegetables in season. A few bought her goat's milk. The McPherson family, who lived near the bridge, were
regular buyers, and had been since young John's birth. They swore by her goat's milk.