Summer at Mount Hope (12 page)

When the Crupps had first arrived at Mount Pleasant, they had called on old Hadley, his wife and his two young children, driving up to the exposed house between two rows of small, green elm saplings. As Mr Pearson proudly told them, he'd ring-barked all of the trees for sheep pasture and cut the rest down to build his six-room house. It had sickened Phoeba's heart and brought tears to her father's eyes. Mrs Pearson, young and pink then, had pointed to the lines of elm seedlings and said, ‘We'll call it Elm Grove.' Fourteen years later the house, gnawed at and frayed by the wind and rain, sat sagging in a swamp of saltbush and Widow Pearson still clung to the dream of the new homestead planned by her husband before he died. Robert always maintained Mrs Pearson had poisoned her husband – it was well known that she was a terrible cook – and that the last thing he saw, propped up in front of the window, was his great work, a salty bog eaten to the roots and punctured by the hooves of too many sheep.

Margaret climbed down from the sulky, saying to Phoeba, ‘Such a bleak property, I would never paint it.'

‘Paint the sheep,' said Phoeba, pointing to a regiment of fifty or so handsome erect sheep standing to attention in the paddock. They were square and straight-backed, standing on evenly placed feet with wool all the way down their straight legs. Chunky, thick neck folds tumbled down their wide chests and crinkly, thick cochlea-shaped horns wound at the side of their heads. She wondered why she had ever told Hadley she hated them.

Widow Pearson led them into her parlour. She sat in her Louis chair, her corset pushed up so that she looked like she had a book stuffed down her bodice. The vicar sat in the matching chair next to her and Maude, Margaret and Lilith perched opposite on the lounge. Henrietta and Phoeba went to the kitchen to organise morning tea.

Phoeba sensed something wrong: was it her? Was it the refusal?

‘We know life isn't fair, don't we?' said Henrietta all of a sudden, tipping milk into a small jug.

‘Yes,' said Phoeba, thinking she was about to be lectured on breaking Hadley's heart. ‘There's good luck, misfortune and Mother Nature, Henri, but all things heal.'

‘Not all.' Henrietta looked glumly down at her boots. They needed a good polishing.

‘I'm sorry, Henri, but I can't marry Hadley—'

‘No, it's Mother. She's getting married.'

‘What?'

‘Shhsss!' Henrietta bunched and screwed her skirt in her hands, tears welling in her eyes.

‘Married?' hissed Phoeba. It was absurd. ‘What on earth for?'

‘He's a bachelor?' Henrietta suggested. ‘Or he has savings? I don't know.'

Hearing Widow Pearson call from the front parlour they began to set the tray, loudly, then Phoeba put her arms around Henrietta and patted her back. ‘Just remember, Henri, one day your mother will be in heaven.'

‘Or hell,' said Henrietta. ‘She'll have to empty her own chamber pot there.'

They took the tea tray in together and the Widow said, loudly, ‘Put it on the sideboard above the drawer where the plans for the new homestead are kept, Henrietta.'

The girls served tea and sat together on the window boxes. Everyone sipped their tea then put their cups down in their saucers, politely: the milk was floating in blobs. It often curdled during the hot ride from Overton.

Sweat ran from the vicar's fringe, down his forehead, out over his cheeks and dripped onto his guernsey, as he spoke at length about his plans to finish the interior of the church. This prompted Widow Pearson to talk about the plans for her new house, ‘which will be built sooner than anyone thinks,' she assured them.

She passed around Hadley's silver-plated ham-bone holder and matching marrow spoon before turning her blue nose to Maude.

‘Mr Titterton tells me you let those anti-machinery people camp on your property.'

‘Mr Titterton is a constant help to you, isn't he, Mrs Pearson?' said Maude, pointedly. ‘A close friend.'

Widow Pearson drew herself up and placed her cup gently in its saucer. She smiled at the vicar, who cleared his throat. ‘Indeed, Mr Titterton and Mrs Pearson have—'

‘Mr Titterton and I are betrothed,' said the Widow. ‘You will read it in the Geelong paper tomorrow.'

Lilith couldn't hide her astonishment. ‘You're getting married?'

‘Congratulations,' said Maude, faintly.

Aunt Margaret looked away, pressing her lips together and stuffing a handkerchief over her nose, but her snicker was still audible.

‘It will be my first marriage ceremony at Bay View,' said the vicar and beamed at Henrietta. ‘And I hope that it will not be my last! There is nothing more comforting to a man alone. These are excellent pikelets. You must enjoy cooking, Miss Pearson?'

‘She hates it,' said Phoeba.

‘My fiancé is the overseer, as you all know, but our home will be the manager's house at Overton,' the Widow explained importantly. ‘It has a staircase.'

‘With your breathing problems it'll probably kill you,' mumbled Aunt Margaret.

‘Pardon?'

‘She said,' Maude hastily cut in, ‘you'll probably take Henrietta, will you?'

‘Of course, it will be good for her,' said Widow Pearson but Henrietta made a small involuntary squeak; Phoeba took her friend's hand.

‘I will be mistress of the manager's house. It will be very good for Hadley too. New opportunities will arise,' said the Widow and looked directly at Phoeba. ‘We'll be swept into a higher class of people. Hadley will find a wife. Someone suitable.'

Phoeba felt a great tightening loosen inside her. ‘I couldn't be happier for him,' she said brightly.

‘We must call,' said Maude, and the vicar said, ‘Oh yes! We'll come for tea.' Then he turned to Aunt Margaret. ‘Mrs Pearson tells me you are selling your house in Geelong to move to Melbourne, Miss Robinson?'

Aunt Margaret looked very pleased. ‘I am!'

‘Lodgings?' asked Widow Pearson. And Maude said hastily, ‘Of a sort. Will you be honeymooning, Mrs Pearson?'

The Widow ignored her. ‘What sort of lodgings, Miss Robinson?'

Maude looked afraid. Margaret put her teacup down gently. ‘An artistic community, a sort of naturalist camp with seven free-spirited men and two other gay spinsters. It's most convenient, and we'll all have such fun together.' She winked at Phoeba.

‘Gracious,' said Maude, fanning her reddening face with the end of her jabot, ‘it's almost time for lunch!'

‘You will stay, of course, Vicar,' said the Widow. She turned to Maude: ‘Henrietta will see you out.'

The second wedding cake

Monday, January 8, 1894

P
hoeba woke on Monday feeling unsettled. She had spent the night worrying about Henrietta. Fancy spending years running after Mr Titterton. She'd have to eat with him as well. All sorts of opportunities would be open to Hadley with a reference from Overton and Mr Titterton's influence. He would find the right girl. Everything was in its place. But there was something gnawing at her. She put it down to the windy day.

Her father rushed up and down between his vines, though there was no rain in the clouds and they blew rapidly out to sea. It was the dust and the thrashing leaves he was concerned about, but there was nothing to be done to stop it, so Phoeba left him alone. Her sense of unease was still there as she milked Maggie and harnessed Centaur to take her aunt to the train.

During breakfast, the itinerants moved stealthily down from the outcrop past the house along the bright lane to Bay View.

‘They could be stripping the church crop today,' said Robert, doubtfully, ‘but in such a wind …' The steam boiler would surely send sparks everywhere and confound the scythers, and the chaff would scatter as it fell from the thresher.

Aunt Margaret was dressed and chipper in plenty of time for her train, but Maude arrived at the breakfast table in her nightie. She was unwell.

‘Margaret has given me a headache and palpitations,' she said. ‘She was mischievous and provocative and now the Widow will tell everyone she's a naturalist and Hadley won't want to marry Phoeba.'

‘Rot,' said Margaret. ‘Your malaise is nothing to do with me. It's the change. You're the right age. And anyway, you can't really expect poor Phoeba to marry into that family, can you?'

‘I don't know why you go there,' added Robert. ‘You either come back poisoned or insulted.'

‘Phoeba should marry Hadley,' said Lilith, arriving at the sulky in her Sunday best, ‘if only to get the farm before Mr Titterton does. That would upset old Widow Poison.'

Phoeba paused: she hadn't thought of it like that. Then I can have what's mine, he'd said. But surely Elm Grove belonged to Hadley. He was a son, the land was his, and it wasn't as if Mr Titterton was going to retire there in the next week and start bossing him around.

‘I don't have to marry anyone,' said Phoeba, tying her hat ribbon under her chin.

‘Well what will you do?' cried Maude.

‘I am already doing something.'

Aunt Margaret threw her carpetbag into the back of the sulky, looked at the huge clouds moving swiftly overhead and shoved an extra hatpin through her hat. She buttoned her old dustcoat all the way up to the top button and climbed into the carriage. ‘If you had a barouche or a Hampden, Robert, we could have put the top on.'

‘It would have blown off today,' said Robert, checking Centaur's harness again.

‘More importantly,' said Phoeba, ‘if we had a bigger carriage there'd be room for Dad and Mother would make him come to church, or worse, visit Widow Pearson.'

Lilith pulled her hatnet over her face and reached for the long cane prod, flicking it through the air so its tip bounced.

‘Right,' she said. ‘I have decided to drive. I need to be able to move about since Phoeba may get married.'

Aunt Margaret opened her mouth to object but Phoeba put her hand up. ‘There's no point if you want to get to your train without a war.'

The two sisters climbed up into the sulky and settled their skirts across their knees. And with Robert calling warnings that the thresher was about, Lilith steered Centaur through the gate.

Spot watched them go, his soft chest pressed against the fence and his black mane lifting in the wind. At his ankle the rooster stood and beside him Maggie chewed her cud, her green eyes following the sulky down Mount Hope Lane. Spot whinnied lowly.

Hadley had woken at sunrise, was first at the kitchen for breakfast and first at the shed. Now he waited at the classing tables with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his apron tied neatly. No one came. The other classer, McInness, the pressers, wool rollers and rouseabouts didn't appear; no tar boy came, nor one single shearer. It was Mr Titterton who found him worried and alone in the vast shed between the two empty tables, a cage of sharp lightbeams boring down from nail holes in the roof. He patted Hadley's arm and said, ‘Son, the foreman has called a meeting because the shearers have suddenly decided they need five shillings more per hundred. I think they should be grateful in these hard times, but there you have it: plain greed.'

Hadley felt his heart skip a beat. He removed his glasses and polished the lenses with the apron Henrietta had so carefully starched for him, blinking away tears and trying to still his aching heart. Nothing was going right. Out on the loading dock he cursed the wind whipping across the dry, red dirt. He looked beyond the grain sheds and the haystacks to the gums lining the creek where the shearers camped, but they weren't coming.

‘There are plenty more who will do the job,' said Mr Titter-ton, but Hadley knew skilled shearers were valuable, that itinerants couldn't do the job well and that things could easily turn bad if they tried to. Newspapers told him daily about sheds and hedges set alight, about riots breaking out and entire flocks stolen. He never thought those things would reach them at Bay View.

Mr Overton would pay the men what they wanted, if he wanted his sheep shorn and the wool sold, thought Hadley. Just as he himself must be able to plant trees at Elm Grove and sink a bore, and fertilise his land and start to show Phoeba how it could be.

Guston Overton had Marius stand by his side when he confronted the foreman and his crew, eighty lean, bearded men and a dozen Chinese.

‘This is the way to deal with the rabble,' he whispered to his son, and offered them two shillings more, like it or lump it. The shearers turned away and went back to their swags.

When Marius and his father walked away, Rudolph Steel spoke to them. He spoke reasonably, reminded them that they had better conditions than most, that the cook was reliable and the tucker plentiful. Would they take three shillings? He left them to discuss it.

Hunger brought them dribbling across to the cook's hut at smoko. They lined up at the kitchen for sweat black tea, sandwiches and scones. At the sound of the first bell, they were on the board with their shears in their hands, facing the pens. At the second bell, they sprang to action.

Finally, Hadley was in his element, fist deep in greasy wool, the warm air saturated with sweet lanolin and foul sheep shit, and the sounds of the shearing shed. Bleating sheep, the patter of cloven hoofs on greasy floorboards, and the sharp shouts of shearers to the roustabouts, the scrape and click of metal shears slicing through tepid, moist wool – white gold.

The shed had sixty-four stands, the biggest in the district. Upwards of sixty men skirted ten slatted tables, quietly tugging dags and muck from fleeces flung artfully like eiderdowns of cloud. The low roof was suspended by thick eaves already snowy with wool fibre at the season's start, its corrugated iron heat bank pulsing hot waves onto the men that swelled the buttery atmosphere. At ten-foot intervals a door in the roof swung out propped on a pole, and letting in molten squares of hot light. The thermometer registered 114 degrees but the mercury shot to 142 when the foreman left it out on the iron for five minutes.

Hadley worked conscientiously, eagerly, a little too buoyantly. Mr Titterton had given him a lump of a fellow called Harry to work with, a slow, open-mouthed but constant lad who looked to Hadley for instruction. A rouseabout dumped a fleece onto the table and Harry watched Hadley take a small wool staple, snap it, study it, gauge the colour, crimp, length and tensile strength. He smelled it, rubbed it between his fingers and showed it to Harry, told him which bin to throw it in. Soon it was Hadley's table the rouseabouts came to more often than not to leave their fleeces. The other classer, McInness, was a hesitant judge and slow to fill the bins.

Hadley felt someone watching and when he turned, he saw Rudolph Steel.

‘Good work,' he said, and walked away. A stranger, an Englishman, had just approved of Hadley. A warm glow spread through him; recognition, appreciation, success. He turned back to the fleece spread on the table and grabbed the warm blanket of golden wool in his hands.

Centaur had danced and shied as he overtook some of the sun-downers on the road, and Lilith's confidence faded when she reached the church paddock. The big green and red steam engine puffed and cackled and a giant wheel turned a long, flat pulley belt that stretched to the threshing machine, driving the rattling, thrashing thing. Dusty straw spewed onto the brittle stubble behind it.

Around the turbulent machines, scythers stepped through the crop, their blades sweeping and the wheat collapsing into a thick straw mattress. Stookers paced and bent in a bobbing line behind them.

The vicar stood in the paddock watching the bundlemen collect the stooks and run with them to feed the thresher. Stackers waved straw bundles high on their forks, building a straw hill that caught the wind and rained stalks all around. Suddenly, the vicar's hat leapt from his head with a gust and danced across the field. Centaur threw his head back and skipped. Lilith tightened her grip on the reins.

‘My train is waiting,' said Aunt Margaret but the wind whipped her voice away. There was a lot of activity around the carriages as they sat on the wayside track, well away from the siding. Shunters were uncoupling trucks, leaving them for wool bales or wheat sacks. Perhaps, thought Phoeba, that explained why the itinerants had grouped behind the church: they were waiting to load wheat or wool.

Another crowd, passengers and workers from Overton, assembled around a freight truck to watch the Sunshine harvester being unloaded; a team, harnessed to a flat-top wagon, stood ready to haul the machine away. The harvester rose high in the air and stayed there, swinging from its chains and dangling beneath an A-frame winch like a monster pendant, an odd contraption with a curved hood and two huge double-spoked metal wheels. It had belts and sprockets, levers and chains, a bin to collect chaff and a seat perched on a C-shaped spring. Across the front protruded a drum with sharp combs. Centaur threw his head again. Phoeba clutched the armrest and Lilith slapped the reins over his rump.

‘That's enough!' she said in a thin voice. Surprisingly the horse settled, and she was able to guide him to Flynn's. She tied the reins through the sulky wheel twice, jiggling the brake lever, and said good morning to two young boys, one a tiny runt, grimy with dull straw-coloured hair, the other a large, dark-haired boy with a hanging bottom lip, but they just stared at her, apparently unaware they were witnessing her first drive. She turned her attention to a squat thing on legs like a cooper's barrel with a cog and flywheel and turning handle attached to one end. Aunt Margaret read the advertising sticker pasted to its top: ‘Lily White Washing Machine will wash the finest lace or the heaviest articles absolutely without damage'.

The women crowded the shop in their wide hats and full skirts, a draught sliding up through the floorboards, disturbing flour dust around their hems. Still in charge, Lilith ordered butter, dried fruit, more peel, nuts and tea – another cake, thought Phoeba – then asked if the machine was for the Widow Pearson.

‘Yes,' said Mrs Flynn rubbing her nostrils with the palm of her hand. ‘Just one more thing to upset the Luddites if you arst me. They must be paying Hadley well is all I can say, but it wouldn't do me no harm if Overtons paid me.'

Phoeba read a newspaper. The headlines screamed:
‘NEIGHBOUR BURNS BABY
. In an increasingly dreadful situation of hunger and poverty, a distraught mother in North Fitzroy declared she had no food to feed the rest of her family, let alone a new baby, when a neighbour smelled something like meat burning and enquired about what she was burning.'

‘What's the world coming to?' she said.

‘Ruin,' said Freckle, loping through the shop and out to the boys waiting on the veranda, three fish dangling from his hand.

‘He catches fish for them itinerants because they say they're tired of rabbit,' Mrs Flynn explained, ‘but they don't pay either. Up to no good if you arst me.' She dropped a chunk of butter on the scales. One corner drooped wetly, avalanching onto the counter. ‘Sun caught the side of the Coolgardie safe.'

Phoeba said nothing but Lilith said, ‘You should get an ice chest from Lassetters.'

‘That's a good idea,' said Mrs Flynn, sarcastically. ‘We could have the ice sent out on the train each day, couldn't we? Pay for twice as much as we need so we've got enough left after half of it's melted on the way. You're very lucky to get any of this. There's a depression, y'know, and it's hard to get, is butter.'

She set about shovelling tea from a huge bag onto bench scales that were peppered with rolled oats. Phoeba asked if the peach parer had come.

‘No parcels.'

They loaded their shopping behind the sulky seat and walked Aunt Margaret to the siding. Phoeba brushed chaff from the shoulder of her coat. ‘Just be yourself, Aunt,' she said, kissing her and wishing her luck at Esperance. And Aunt Margaret bravely boarded the train, though her legs felt like jelly. It had been a very long time since she had been to Melbourne, and she wished she'd asked Maude if she could take Phoeba with her. But Maude would say no – cities were dangerous places for a young lady.

Across the railway line the new Sunshine harvester was on the ground, workmen securing it to the harnessed team. Lilith pulled her net over her face, smoothed her skirt over her knees and took up the reins.

‘Lilith, I can drive back—'

‘No Phoeba. You can't be boss all the time.' She slapped the reins over Centaur's rump, steering him towards the intersection.