The Home Girls (3 page)

“Whee-eee-eee!” they called as they flung themselves out of her way clinging to the rails while she flung the old Ford across, sending the temporary wooden planks on the gaping floor sliding dangerously and landing the car on the gravel bridge approach.

It paused a second with the workmen expecting it to dive backwards into the creek, then with a groan negotiated the little ridge with the back wheels spitting stones and dust.

A little Torrens screamed in ecstasy (or relief) and standing behind her mother scooped up handfuls of Kathleen's magnificent red hair and laid her face in it.

“Stop that!” cried another little Torrens beside her. “Mumma can't drive the car properly if you do that!”

The little Torrenses told their father this and Harold although not often moved to do so repeated the remark to the mill hands and for weeks afterwards Tantello feasted on it.

“Mumma can't drive the car properly if you do that!” they chuckled over and over above the screams of the machinery cutting timber, not always seeing each other clearly through the smoke from the smouldering sawdust.

“How many stories have you got Dad, on Raging Torrens?” asked a little Cleary one night from the floor where he was doing his homework.

He was Thomas Cleary, aged eleven, and Thomas senior, when there were no fresh stories on the rages of Mrs Torrens to relate or repeat, boasted to the mill hands on the cleverness of his son and his promising future.

“Head stuck in a book all day long,” Thomas senior would say disregarding the predictions of other workers that he would end up in the mill like most other youth of Tantello.

Seated by the stove fire now Thomas senior burst into proud laughter at this fresh evidence of his son's calculating mind and whispered the sentence to have it right to tell at the mill next day.

“How many stories have you got on Raging Torrens?” he whispered into the fire averting his face so that his wife would not see.

Thomas and Evelyn Cleary no longer shared anything. She was a stout plain woman with a lot of hair on her face who pulled her mouth down at most things Thomas said. The day before Thomas had brought home a gift of turnips from a fellow mill hand but Mrs Cleary threw them to the fowls declaring they gave her wind.

“Now the eggs'll give you wind,” said Thomas but the little Clearys did not laugh with him because they sided with the stronger of their parents in the uncanny way children have of defining where their fortunes lie.

As far as the stories on Raging Torrens or Roaring Kathleen went there were too many to list here.

There was the time when she charged out at midnight and flung Harold's pay in the creek.

It was an icy July night with a brilliant moon and when the catastrophe was discovered all the Torrenses went to the creek to try and recover the two pounds in two shilling pieces.

“Oh, Harold I must be mad,” moaned Mrs Torrens thigh deep in water groping around a rock and coming up mostly with flat stones.

(Harold did not tell the mill hands this.)

“My little ones'll die of pneumonia!” she cried, “Oh my little Dollikins, forgive your wicked Mumma!”

Harold had to rise at four o'clock next morning for an early shift so it was he who said they should go home.

“What will we eat now?” murmured a little Torrens old enough to understand the simple economics of life, like passing money across the counter of Bert Herbert's store before goods were passed back.

“Oh, Harold,” moaned Mrs Torrens, “We can't even make a pot of tea. There'll be none for tomorrow if we do!”

“O, my poor mannikin! You can't go to work with your innards as dry as the scales on a goanna's back!”

She stood in the glow of the stove fire which Harold had got going among the little Torrenses all crouched over it. Her nightgown slipped from her shoulders showing her white neck threaded with blue veins. Her red hair wet from her wet hands was strewn about and her blue eyes welled with tears. Harold stood staring long at her and the little Torrenses looked from him to their mother and back into the heart of the glowing stove. In a little while without anyone speaking they scurried off to bed.

Kathleen rubbed one icy foot upon the other clutching a threadbare towel about her waist under her nightie to rub dry her icy thighs and buttocks.

“Lie down on the floor close to the fire,” whispered Harold. “And afterwards I'll rub you warm again.”

“Of course,” she whispered back and sinking down reached up both arms to him.

When the pain of the loss of Harold's pay had eased it actually became a subject for discussion. Gathered around the meal table the Torrenses talked about what the two pounds would have bought.

“Pounds and pounds of butter!” cried a little Torrens whose teeth marks were embedded in a slice of bread spread with grey dripping.

“How many pounds then?” asked Harold. “How much is butter? One and threepence? How many pounds in two pounds? Come on, work it out! Thomas Cleary could!”

“What else would it have bought Mumma and Dadda?” cried the seven year old Torrens.

“Tinned peaches, jelly, fried sausages!” screeched her sister.

“Blankets! One for each of our beds!” cried Mrs Torrens unable to contain herself.

Then she dropped her face on her hand and shook her hair down to cover her lowered eyes and dripping tears.

“A new coat with fur on it for Mumma!” said an observing little Torrens.

Kathleen lifted her head and shook back her hair.

“I like my old coat best!” she said.

“See,” said Harold clasping his wife's hands. “Mumma doesn't want a new coat. So the money was no use to us after all!”

Although this deduction puzzled some of the little Torrenses they were happy to see their mother smiling and ecstatic when she flung her head towards Harold and fitted it into the curve of his neck and shoulder.

They trooped outside to play soon after.

The creek figured in many of the rages of Mrs Torrens particularly her milder ones.

When in one of these she took the children to picnic just below the bridge on a Sunday afternoon.

The normal Tantello people considered this the height of eccentricity, the place for Sunday picnics being the beach twenty-five miles away available to those with reliable cars, and for the others there was the annual outing with the townspeople packed into three timber trucks.

Tantello Creek was a wide bed of sand with only a trickle of water in most parts, but there was a sandbank a few yards upstream from the bridge with a miniature waterfall and a chain of water holes, most of them small and shallow petering out as they moved towards the main stream.

This is where Mrs Torrens took the children for a picnic in full view of Tantello taking Sunday afternoon walks across the bridge.

Mrs Torrens spread out the bread and jam and watercress gathered by the children and they ate on the green slope below the road with an occasional car passing in line with their heads and the walking Tantello staring from the bridge.

“Go home you little parlingtons and stop staring!” cried Mrs Torrens waving a thick wedge of bread towards the bridge.

“Are you swearing at us, Mrs Torrens?” said one of the starers.

“You know swearing when you hear it! Or do you plug your ears after closing times on Saturday when your Pa comes home?”

“Oh, Mumma,” breathed an agonized Torrens named Aileen, the eldest of the family.

She shared a seat at school with the group on the bridge.

Aileen left the picnic then and moved with head down towards the water.

“Only mad people make up words,” called a daring voice from the bridge.

Aileen lowered her head further in the silence following.

Mrs Torrens jumped to her feet to herd the little Torrenses to the water to join their sister.

“We'll gather our stones and hold them under the water!” she cried and the little Torrenses with the exception of Aileen dispersed to hunt for flat round stones that changed colour on contact with the running water.

The little Torrenses watched spellbound when the stones emerged wet and glistening and streaked with oche red, rich browns, soft blues and greys and sometimes pale gold.

“Oh don't go dull!” screamed the little Torrenses hoping for a miracle to save the colours from merging into a dull stone colour when the water dried.

Aileen some distance away dug her toes into the sand and stared down at them. Her lashes lay soft as brown bracken fern on her apricot cheeks.

“Come on Snobbie Dobbie!” called Mrs Torrens.

“Come and wash the beautiful stones and see the colours!

“They're brown and beautiful as your eyes, Snobbie Dobbie!”

“Come on, come on!” called the other little Torrenses.

In the end Aileen came and the high voices and peals of laughter from the creek bed had the effect of sending the walking Tantello mooching home across the bridge.

There came the rage that ended all the rages of Mrs Torrens in Tantello and drove the family from the town.

Harold lost the fingers of his right hand in a mill accident.

Holding a length of timber against a screaming saw, a drift of smoke blew across his eyes and the saw made a raw and ugly stump of his hand and the blood rushed over the saw teeth and down the arm of his old striped shirt and the yelling of the mill hands brought the work to a halt and for a moment all was still except the damaging drift of smoke from a sawdust fire.

A foreman with a knowledge of first aid (for many fingers were lost at the mill although Harold was the first to lose all four) stopped the flow of blood and drove Harold twenty miles to the nearest hospital.

When the mill was silenced an hour before the midday break the townspeople sensed something was wrong and Mrs Torrens came running too.

A chain of faces turned and passed the word along that it was Harold. Mrs Torrens stood still and erect strangely dressed in a black dress with a scarf-like trimming from one shoulder trailing to her waist. On the end she had pinned clusters of red geraniums and on her head she wore a large brimmed black hat with more geraniums tucked into the band of faded ribbon. On her feet she wore old sandshoes with the laces gone.

All the eyes of the watching Tantello were fixed on Mrs Torrens who stood a little apart. She stared back with a tilted chin and wide and cold blue eyes until they turned away and one by one left the scene. When the last had gone she walked into the mill to the cluster of men around the door of the small detached office.

“We're sorry, Mrs Torrens,” said one of them.

Behind the men was a table with cups on it for the bosses' dinner and a kettle set on a primus stove. Mrs Torrens looked from the cups to the men's hands and back to the cups and a strange, small smile lit on her face.

Then she stalked to the timber stacked against the fence and climbed with amazing lightness and agility for a big woman onto it stepping up until her waist was level with the top of the fence. The men watched in fascination while she hauled herself onto the fence top and stood there balancing like a great black bird.

Her old sandshoes clinging to the fence top were like scruffy grey birds.

“Come down! We don't want no more accidents,” called the mill owner.

But Mrs Torrens walked one panel with her arms out to balance herself. Then satisfied she was at home she straightened up and walked back, coming to a halt at the fence post and standing there looking down on the men whose faces were tipped up like eggs towards her.

She stared long at them.

“What have you done to my mannikin?” she said.

They were silent.

“My beautiful, beautiful mannikin?” she said slightly shaking her head.

“Accidents happen,” said a foreman a small and shrivelled man who wet his lips and looked at the boss for approval in making his statement.

Mrs Torrens walked like a trapeze artist along the fence top to reach the other post.

She swooped once or twice to the left and the right and when she settled herself on the post she lifted her chin and adjusted her hat.

The foreman encouraged by the success of his earlier remark wet his lips again.

“Go home to your kiddies, Mrs Torrens,” he said. “They need you at home.”

He considered this well worth repeating in the hotel after work.

Mrs Torrens stared dreamily down on the men giving her head another little shake.

“My beautiful, beautiful mannikin,” she said.

Then she put out both arms and almost ran to the other post laughing a little when she reached there safely.

Someone had lit the primus stove and the shrill whistle of the boiling kettle broke the silence causing everyone except Mrs Torrens to start.

She merely lowered herself and jumped lightly onto the timber picking her way down until she reached the ground. She shook the sawdust from her old sandshoes as if they were expensive and elegant footwear.

Then she looked about her moving pieces of timber with her foot until she found a shortish piece she could easily grip.

She then walked into the office and swung it back and forth among the things on the table sending the primus like a flaming ball bowling across the floor and pieces of china flying everywhere.

The men were galvanized into action beating at the blaze with bags jumping out of the way of the stream of boiling water and trying vainly to save the cups and avoid contact with the timber wielded by Mrs Torrens.

After a while she threw her weapon among the debris and stalked off walking lightly casually through the mill gate and up the hill to where the Torrens house was. The little Torrenses home from school for midday dinner stood about with tragic expressions. Mrs Torrens broke into a brilliant smile.

“All of us will be Dadda's right hand now!” she called. “Dadda will have six right hands!”

She went ahead of them into the house.

“My beautiful, beautiful mannikin,” she said.