Ricochet Baby (18 page)

And my mother? She was dressed in a beautiful dark blue dress, cut high round her white throat. Her hair was brushed back and held simply with a single, unadorned comb.

It had come on to rain when we walked through the cemetery behind the coffin, my father and mother leading the way. Although hats were not in fashion at the time, my mother wore a dark felt trilby like a man’s, only more stylish, with the front brim slouched over her left eye. The aunts whipped out stubby umbrellas and, stumbled along, trying to keep hold of them and sniffle into their handkerchiefs at the same time. They took their husbands’ arms (Arch had to have Joan and Dorothy on either side, and they kept bumping him in the eye with their umbrellas). My older brother, Michael, was a pall-bearer, his knees almost buckling, along with Kaye and Jack’s son — the two eldest grandsons. The other four were Freemasons, as my grandfather had been.

My mother kept on walking, with the rain streaming off the brim of her hat and down her shoulders; she appeared not to notice. As the minister, a Presbyterian with an old, cold face and white bristly hair, read the service, my mother stared straight ahead, as she had in the car the night before, her chin tilted upwards slightly. Dorothy, who had nursed my grandfather through his final illness, was bubbling away incoherently; Arch had to hold her up. We turned and walked back the way we had come,
surrounded
by stone angels.

It was then, walking through the cemetery, that we came upon another group at the far end. Two men, who stood checking a newly dug grave for another service, looked up as we approached and stood still, watching us. When my mother drew near, one of the men walked forward, his hand extended to her. She stopped beside my father, and the whole entourage had to halt behind her.

‘Father Bird,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘How very nice to see you.’

‘And you, Edith. Will we see you in church?’ He was a slightly stooped man with tired, kind eyes.

‘I’d like that.’ It was neither a promise nor a commitment, but it was clear for all of us to see, that my mother would like it very much indeed.

‘That’s not little Michael?’ he asked, his eyes following the
casket
, now being placed in the hearse.

‘It is,’ she said.

‘How he’s grown. A credit to you, Edith.’

While they were speaking, the other man looked on, with nothing more than a nod in my mother’s direction. She did not know Alec McNulty at this stage. It would have been their first meeting.

My father turned away, as if to walk on without her. She smiled at Father Bird and resumed her walk with my father, her eyes full of tears that the rain could not disguise. The aunts and uncles followed, shocked into watery silence.

The days immediately following the funeral felt very long. There was decent mourning to be observed, and the family could not hurry away, or so they thought. Kaye and Jack owned some land they had been breaking in a few kilometres away and Joan and Arch did market gardening down the road, so the four of them, and Dorothy, were able to ‘come and sit’ as they called it.

Sitting meant just that, sitting in the sitting room darkened with half-drawn blinds, exchanging sad little comments, and
saying
, ‘Well, do you remember this?’ or ‘When we were children, we did such and such.’ The tedium threatened to stifle everyone in the stale, lifeless room. The heavy lounge suite covered with fawn moquette crouched on the old rose-splattered carpet, crowding us into corners. How our mother loved this room, exclaimed Joan, during one of their interminable dialogues. Yes, they murmured, our mother had style. For her time. How Dad missed Mum. Yes, they sighed, I guess it was what killed him in the end.

Occasionally, they noticed me. My brothers had vanished, to explore the farm, they said, meaning that they were getting the hell out of it, so they could find a place to go and smoke. It was
difficult
to find a place for myself, because Dorothy still occupied my bedroom. At nights she tossed and turned in the bed opposite, and when she did go to sleep she snored in deep, stentorian honks. With all her things there, it no longer felt like a room that I could go and sit in on my own. My mother made endless cups of tea and delivered them to the mourners. I could see that it gave her
something
to do. Later in the day, they would have two whiskies each, out of crystal glasses. No thank
you,
the Presbyterian minister had said, with a frosty smile, at the wake, reminding them of
grandfather’s
days in the Temperance Union. Just as well times change, Dorothy commented later. Still, when you get down to tin tacks, said the sisters, it’s better to have a minister of the old school.

My father appeared at a loss; he could see, on the one hand, that Edith was contemptuous of the wake, and of him, each time he joined it, but it was equally clear that he perceived it as a duty to be present. So I sat near him, and maintained my own silence unless I was spoken too. My hair was plaited in a single long braid that I could almost sit on. I sat on the floor with my back to the wall, curling the end of my plait around and around in my fingers.

‘What a dear little girl,’ Joan commented, now and then. ‘So like the Nichols family.’

My father flushed with pride.

‘Yes, a real Nichols,’ Kaye said.

‘No, she’s not,’ my mother said, passing with another tray of tea.

‘Do you let her have sweeties, Glass?’

‘Oh, one or two, Kaye.’

‘Well, here you are, dear.’ And another paper bag of jubes slid my way.

They had children of their own, but most of my cousins were older, except Sally, Joan and Arch’s late bonus baby, as they described her. She was being minded while they sat. My aunts had already forgotten how to deal with a seven-year-old.

I searched in vain for some conversation that would reward them for their sweets and their uncertain overtures. I lit on my autograph book among the bag of treasures my mother had hastily packed on the night we fled to Walnut. Michael had given it to me
the Christmas before; it was almost empty because my friends were still barely old enough to sign their names.

‘Would you sign my book?’ I asked.

‘Autograph book,’ they enthused. ‘Oh yes, now there’s an idea.’

Joan wrote the first autograph:

They rocked with laughter when she read this out, their moods lightening at last.

‘Give it here,’ said Kaye. She paused for a moment before scribbling down her verse; when she finished she blew on what she had written as if the ballpoint pen were real ink. Handing the book back to me, she read aloud over my shoulder while I studied it.

Her audience was helpless with mirth.

‘I think you can put that away now,’ said my mother, who had returned to wipe up a spilt ashtray.

Kaye flushed. ‘I suppose we’ll be having the priest round here now, will we, Glass?’ she said, with a mean edge to her voice.

My father didn’t answer, and it was left to Arch to intervene. Arch had helped the old man with the milking, earning extra income while he and Joan were getting established in the market garden, or that’s what Arch said, as if the establishment were now a fact.

‘D’you reckon you’ll be needing a hand, mate?’

At this time of year the cows were dried off, so the question was not one that required an immediate answer. But it marked a turning point in this process of mourning. It was time to plan the future, and already some of the boundaries were being staked out.

‘We just wondered,’ Joan said, unable to keep the anxiety out of her voice. ‘I mean we’re not quite sure where things stand.’

What they meant was, what was in it for them, now that the farm had slipped out of their grasp. The sisters had all been left money, but the real treasure lay in the land.

‘Well, I guess Edith’s a pretty handy milker,’ said Jack, nastily

‘She’s a good milker all right, faster than me,’ said my father.

My mother was standing at the door. ‘I won’t be milking on this farm,’ she said. ‘I’ve finished with milking.’

There was one of those palpable awful moments that you wish you didn’t have to live through.

My father said, evenly, ‘I’ve got two sons, Arch. Thanks anyway.’

Everyone packed up soon after that, except Dorothy, who slipped off to the room she and I shared. My mother didn’t leave the kitchen while they said goodbye to my father and me. I felt guilty because I had stayed with him, and not gone to her, yet, I understood that he didn’t want to be on his own.

‘You didn’t say,’ my father said, standing at the door of the kitchen when the last car had pulled out of the driveway. ‘I thought you were in this with me.’

‘You didn’t ask,’ said my mother.

‘I did.’

‘No, you didn’t. You asked me if I would come with you, Glass Nichols. It’s less than a week — have you forgotten that quickly? The choice is mine, you said.’

‘So what are we arguing about?’

My mother picked up another overflowing ashtray and tipped its contents into a rubbish tin.

‘You told me there was no choice for you. That you had to come.’

‘How could I go anywhere without you?’ my father said. ‘I couldn’t live without you.’

They looked at each other, full of painful yearning that I already knew would end in their entwined limbs and lush
breathing
on a double bed, wherever that room might be. They were like two creatures locked into an embrace that you sensed they would like to break out of, but never could. You could say, Dr Q, that it passed for a kind of happiness. Or, perhaps, that to be outside it was unhappiness. But I don’t know the difference, because I don’t know about passion.

‘Y
OU DON’T
?’

‘Not really no, I’ve never experienced that.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘I’d like there to be some kind of hormone injection so that I could get it over with. You know, a shot of experience rushing through my veins.’

‘Nothing long-term?’

‘It causes a lot of bother.’

‘But you’d like to try it?’

‘Sometimes I feel caught in the middle, you know? It’s like I know and I don’t know.’

M
Y GRANDFATHER HAD
not forgiven my father for a hasty marriage, one summer, to my mother, when Michael was on the way. But he allowed the couple to stay on the farm, provided my mother stayed clear of the church. There was a baby coming, and he felt it his Christian duty to ensure that his grandchildren were brought up in a proper way. This child, as his son’s child, was all that would be left of the Nichols name.

But my mother is my mother, and of course she didn’t stay away from the church. Her father had died in the mines down south, not long before she met my father; she lit candles for him. Everyone knew she was skiving off to mass from the word go, except for my grandfather. He found out when Michael was a baby. She took Michael to town to have him baptised, because you couldn’t hold a baptism in secret, at least not in Walnut. What was worse, she took the old Nichols family christening gown with her and had him done in that, and his picture taken. Grandfather heard about it, anyway, which was when he told them to pack their bags and go.

You would wonder how he got away with it. But this was 1959, the world was a different place. Grandfather Nichols was never spoken of when I was small. His photograph was still on the wall when we returned to the farm from which my parents had been banished, although I didn’t get long to study it. It disappeared in the purge. As I recall, his was a dour face, pinched around the mouth beneath a narrow moustache. I looked for a gleam of
gentleness
in his eyes but I couldn’t see it.

Perhaps Edith swore to herself that she would never come back. We’ve never talked about it, she and I, but she told my brother, Michael, who is her favourite child. Me? Oh, I don’t know where I come in the list. Why did she weaken? Was my father an addiction that she would, later, replace with others?

These are the things I ask myself now, not then. At the time, my mother made a great to-do of cleaning up after the relatives, banging dishes noisily and vacuuming out the room where they had sat. When she finished, she walked down the dark passage with its flower-infested walls and carpets, and threw open the door where Dorothy sat on a bed.

‘You. Time for you to pack,’ said my mother, her chin in the air.

‘I looked after Glass’s father,’ said Dorothy. ‘You can’t just throw me out like this.’

‘Glass will write you a cheque,’ said my mother. ‘Ten
thousand
dollars, take it or leave it.’

On top of what Dorothy had already been bequeathed by her father, I guess this was a generous offer. Dorothy left that night.

In the morning, all the furniture in the house left too, taken away by a local trucking company my mother had hired. I don’t know when she had had time to order furniture, but that same night, the trucks came back to the farm, loaded with new beds and chairs and a table. The decorators moved in the following week. My father didn’t say a word, or not that I heard.

But that was only the beginning. Shortly afterwards, she tore out the existing garden, all except a stand of magnolias and an avenue of old and graceful trees. In the spring, she began a new
garden
, and all through that summer, and every summer since then, although mostly it is piped now, she carried water from the river at night, until her garden became a miraculous profusion of colour. It was not a riot of colour, as they say, because my mother has always known where she would put every plant in her garden, and she has followed their progress, in the same way that my father appears to know every stem and blade of grass on his farm.