The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (24 page)

From the bed the old man starts to sing in a reedy whispering voice: ‘I wish I were in Dixie, hooray, hooray …'

She goes to him and he clutches at her hand, but not so that he will hurt her this time. Tears squeeze out of the corner of his eyes. Playing for sympathy.

‘I'm sorry, Dadda,' she says, giving him the old childish name: She hasn't said it in years. If she hadn't said that she might have said, die, you old bastard, hurry up and get it over.

Out in the kitchen there are voices, Harry's and the vet's.

‘I'll come and fix you in a minute, all right?'

The young vet's face is full of regret. ‘There's really nothing else for it. She'll have to be destroyed,' he is saying.

Nora closes the door firmly behind her as she joins them. ‘You can't do that.'

‘The animal's in pain. I can't leave her suffering.'

She shakes her head, no.

‘I've just been explaining to your husband …'

It's Harry's turn to shake his head. ‘It's for Miss Duthie to decide.'

The vet looks startled but it's not his business to comment on their domestic arrangements.

So Nora tries to explain, in halting sentences, how the horse comes to the window every morning to see her father and that that is what keeps him alive, it is all he has. And this morning he is fretting already.

‘Shouldn't you get the doctor then?'

‘It's the horse he wants, not the doctor,' says Nora, and the vet looks at her curiously as if the thin greyish woman might be simple. Still, she goes to the phone and rings the doctor, who is already on his rounds up their way, and before long the kitchen seems full of them all.

‘I can't leave that horse to suffer,' says the vet as matter-of-factly as he can, when the doctor has given old man Duthie a sedative. ‘The animal should be destroyed.'

Doctor Elliot is almost as old as the vet is young. ‘And I can't allow you to destroy my patient.'

‘I'm not God,' the vet says sharply and too loudly. He falls silent as they all
look at him. He and the doctor consider each other awhile and the doctor is perhaps thinking that the vet is a fortunate young man to have learned such a complex lesson already.

‘Will he really die? If the horse does?'

‘How can I tell you that?' asks Dr Elliot. He is a round old man, overfond of the bottle and food. Harry often says he has seen him in the pub on Friday afternoons. It is Friday that Harry goes to the stock and station, and has a jug at the hotel. ‘I seen Dr Elliot,' he says when he comes home, ‘full as the family po again.' But the doctor is wise in the ways of his patients who are also his friends. He reflects now. ‘It could happen, though. What do you think, Nora?'

She sighs and rests her head on the beam by the stove where she is turning pikelets for their lunch. ‘I don't know. I don't think he knows how to die. Or you'd think he'd have done it by now, wouldn't you?'

Their silence thickens. ‘I think he'll die though.' She ladles out more of the creamy mixture on to the stove.

The doctor says, ‘I could have your father taken to hospital in the
ambulance
while he's sedated. We could try and keep him alive.'

‘You ought to do that. Something's got to be done,' says the vet, wishing to end the dilemma.

‘Oh so that's your advice, is it?' snaps the doctor, thinking that the vet hasn't learned much after all. But maybe it's not his fault.

He looks at Nora and then at Harry. He has known one of them a lifetime, and Harry — well, long enough. Nora places food on the table as he watches them; the steaming pikelets, a dish of tomatoes ripe from their vines, and some pale glossy ham that Harry has cured. She uses a
Reader
'
s
Digest
for a mat under the fresh pot of tea. The rough hands shake, she is not used to so much company. On her left hand there is a thin worn ring which has become part of her, as most women's wedding rings do. Only this isn't a wedding ring, but a small insignificant engagement ring; it wasn't expensive when Harry bought it for her all those years ago, the year of the accident.

The idea of Nora marrying the hired man who came in for the haymaking hadn't pleased her father. Since the accident with the baler he had had fifteen years of lying under the coloured coverlet that Nora's mother had made out of patchworks and scraps of bleached flourbag to think about it. It pleased him even less after all this time than it did at the beginning, which he was fond of telling them. What it amounted to was this, that she could have the farm one day, but so long as he lived it was his, he was having no hired man marrying her with aspirations to a fortune, and his brother's sons would be
pleased to have the place if she didn't behave herself. The fellow could stay for the milking, which he supposed being a woman she couldn't manage on her own, and that was all. No funny business.

If they'd gone just a few days earlier, in the full path of his rage, instead of staying around to finish the hay that fateful season, hoping that in doing so they would bring him round to their way of seeing things, it might all have been different, he might have gone to hospital and stayed there, or the accident might never have happened, or any of the other human variations that could be imagined might have occurred. Might. It didn't matter any more, none at all, his lying there year after year had made it impossible to run away. For Nora anyway, and so, it seemed, for Harry too.

Even if she was no dancing partner, she had energy and a way of getting on with the work which suited him, who'd been after his own place for a while, and worked here and there, sometimes on the roads, sometimes on the farms, a man from nowhere special. Perhaps it was true, that once he had sought a fortune, although looking at the Duthies' place he must have decided to settle for rather less. He'd stayed around one Christmas and bought her perfume from the Rawleigh's man. She'd told him to go away once or twice and then she'd let him stay.

Now the ring with its diamond chips is dull and plain like its wearer.

‘His time's got to come,' the doctor says. ‘Shall we just wait and see what happens?'

She jerks her shoulders up and her eyes burn. ‘You've no right.'

Dr Elliot looks back at her. ‘I've done as much as I can. Haven't you?' He spreads raspberry jam on a pikelet with delicacy, skimming the knife. ‘There's a time, you know.'

He eats the pikelet and takes another one. In a reflective way, he says, ‘The hospitals are full. It's not usual to admit a man because his horse is dying, you know.'

In the afternoon the horse dies, and the vet who has felt oddly compelled to stay comes to tell her before leaving to make up his lost day.

In the night Nora and Harry take turns at watching beside the old man's bed. He opens his eyes once and whispers in singsong, ‘I wish I were in …' and lapses back into a sleep or a coma.

‘Soon, soon,' says Nora, and while her back is turned, fetching Harry, he slides off the edge into death.

In the morning when he has been taken away, the bed turned down and the windows opened wide, Harry comes up from the milking, and from burying Trixie with the help of neighbours who have called since the word
spread, soon after dawn. The room is quiet and empty except for the two of them, a hiatus in the comings and goings.

‘The Hammonds say you can board with them if you like,' says Nora. ‘I can hire you for the milking if you want to keep it on for the moment.'

‘The Hammonds?'

‘You can't stay here. It wouldn't be right.'

‘And us?'

She slides the worn ring off her finger, dislodging it with difficulty over the knuckle. ‘I'm not sure that I'd know how to be married now, Harry. Not to … well, change anything, you understand.'

He nods. Nobody watching her would know whether she was
disappointed
that he hasn't argued with her, or whether it is what she really wants. It is unlikely that she knows herself.

And there is no time to think about it for the arrangements have to be made and lawyers to be seen (the old man has been meticulous about his affairs, the lawyers had their instructions to attend at the house once every six months, for the old man was never sure that Nora wouldn't try to take over the farm behind his back; they had told him she couldn't but he didn't believe them and each time they called they had to produce his will for him to check each page to make sure it hadn't been tampered with), there is the decision whether to have the organist or not (she decides she will) and whether to have the funeral the next day or hold it over three days because the gravedigger will be away (she decides on the next day) and in no time at all it seems, since the horse took sick, on a sour day to which winter has temporarily returned, they are burying Nora's father.

The service is brief. Afterwards the cortège winds its way into the hills to a small hillside cemetery where Nora's mother and brother and grandparents lie. Only a few cars follow the hearse into the hills, for Duthie was never a popular man in the district and no one knows Nora well enough to feel more than a passing compassion, and even then they are not quite sure what form their sympathy should take. Or that is what their eyes say as they look uneasily around the tiny gathering, only its smallness reassuring them that it was a neighbourly thing to come. The old man's brother, Nora's uncle, leans on his stick and watches his two sons and Dick Hammond, Harry, and two other neighbours who have stood in as pallbearers carry the coffin to the grave. It is the presence of the other dead that reassures Nora, standing in the brisk wind, dressed in a cream crimpolene dress revived from the back of her wardrobe for the occasion. She has thought of touching up the outfit with a scarf of her mother's, kept away in a drawer, but it is green streaked with vivid red, and at the church door she decides that it is unsuitable after
all. Instead, she moves quietly to the edge of the grave and lets the scarf fall amongst the sullen clay. The neighbours look at each other and away, and afterwards one of them is heard to say that there might be more to Nora Duthie than meets the eye, and perhaps they have not thought well enough of her in the past. But what they think is not known to Nora, which is not to say that she does not consider the matter. That is why Harry is being sent to live with the Hammonds.

He moves forward awkwardly to stand beside her. He sees her as tall and fair and very beautiful but he cannot quite reach her to kiss her cheek. He touches her hand instead. The congregation averts its eyes again.

‘Nora?' he murmurs.

The voice of my beloved spake … Nora feels his touch, hears him. Her head is full of biblical response. After all, it is a solemn occasion.

‘Y'all right then, Nora?'

‘I'm okay'

There is a scurry of rain and they gather themselves for a dash to the cars. She catches her foot and nearly trips on her grandmother's grave. Three generations of Duthies, almost a family cemetery. That'll be it, she thinks, except for her cousins and their families. They don't feel like blood but she supposes she has to count them in. And at least she has her bit of a farm. She feels she has wrested it from them and doesn't much care. Her
grandfather
cut his land in two and gave half to each of his two sons — they were supposed to farm it together, but her uncle had sold up, so hard luck, uncle.

But it is hers now. The land and the old tumbledown square-cut farmhouse. All hers.

And empty.

So goddamn empty, as the spring passes on into summer. The cat splits open with her kittens like a fat yellow melon (she is a ginger cat) and for once Nora doesn't drown them. Correction. It is Harry who has drowned kittens for her before. Now that he's not here she can't do it herself. And the cat is so pleased and the kittens are company. Also, her father is not here to smell them. He always could, even from his room, and above his own stink. Now she can do what she likes.

She doesn't see Harry often, or not to talk to, though they talk business at the shed some mornings. The first week that he is gone she writes him a note at the Hammonds' place suggesting a timetable for the milking and offering him one day a week off for as long as he chooses to keep the arrangement, and a month's pay in advance. She offers to help out at the shed too, although with the herd as small as theirs he has done most of the milking on his own in the last few years. He drops her a note back, stiff and very formal in his
out-of
-practice
hand, saying that he can manage all right, though he'll accept her offer of a day off.

The days that she milks are harder than she expects and she is always tired the next day. It is difficult to accept how much she had come to depend on him.

But the weather stays kind and she slips into a routine that more or less suits her. Some nights she watches television too late and when she stands quickly after she has been sitting for hours she may be dizzy for an instant, but apart from that she is well. She wonders some evenings if she should ring Harry and check that he is satisfied with his terms of employment. Or if he will stay when the cows go dry. That is something she would rather not think about. She doesn't know where she would get someone else next season. Someone who would, perhaps, have to live in the house with her. That's something she doesn't think she could stand. She's only used to Harry. When she thinks that she turns the television up and blots out thinking.

By day she is too busy to think. As the summer proceeds she considers cutting down the number of pigs she runs. They are more than she can manage. One day she remembers the goats. A neighbour has Angoras, she's seen them when she's been driving into town. At the petrol station she mentions them to the woman attendant, who tells her that the goats she has seen are kept for their fleece. It's a nice idea, but not quite the same as a milking herd, which she had been contemplating. Though how nice it would be to sit and spin soft yarn.