The Story of Danny Dunn (59 page)

Helen had found that she couldn't ignore Danny's political campaign and discovered, to her surprise, that she was a very good strategist. Coming so close to winning against all the odds had made her realise how very much she missed the thrust and parry of life outside the university. Danny was almost certainly committed to fighting the next election. Far from being discouraged, he'd had a glimpse of victory and what it might mean. ‘Darling, the only way things will change is if we are in a position to influence them, to call at least some of the shots.' Helen was beginning to realise that she might never be able to call any of the shots in her academic life.

Brenda was still enjoying being a grandmother and doted on the twins. She'd pick them up in the morning, and then take them from school to swimming training and then, as often as not, back to the Hero for a spoil afternoon tea before bringing them home. Helen and Brenda had always got on like a house on fire and Helen admired her enormously. The Hero was by now the biggest pub in Balmain, and Brenda, always careful with money, was, by local standards, now a wealthy woman. But more and more Brenda spoke of retiring. She'd been in pub life for forty-two of her sixty years, and with six o'clock closing no longer the law and pubs open until ten at night, she was feeling the strain. While Half Dunn had come good, so to speak, and ran the pub after six, he too wasn't getting any younger.

This had all come to a head when Rose, Brenda's ageing mother, visited the chickens early one afternoon and didn't return. Patrick went looking for her that evening, and found her sitting with her back against the laying boxes, dead from a heart attack or, as Brenda silently believed, a broken heart.

Brenda had driven down to Wagga for the funeral and afterwards stayed for a week to try to persuade Patrick to return with her to Sydney. He'd stubbornly refused. ‘This is my bed of thorns and this is where I shall lay, girlie.' She'd secretly been grateful that he'd wanted to stay put – a cantankerous 83-year-old man was not what she needed in her life – but she was aware of her responsibilities as his oldest living child. Before she returned to Sydney, she'd elicited a promise, in return for a weekly stipend, that her twin sisters would take turns visiting the farm once a week to check on his welfare. The arrangement wasn't to last long; a month after Rose's death, Patrick left a short note on the kitchen table, held down with a jar of Rose's homemade marmalade. Brusque to the last it simply read:

Gone to join Rose.

He'd put the barrel of his single-gauge shotgun to his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Brenda returned from Wagga after she had given Patrick a funeral with all the trimmings, which was attended by the twins and their fifteen children, all of whom were dry-eyed throughout the ceremony. At the wake, held at her old pub, Brenda watched as her sisters, brothers-in-law and several nieces and nephews got motherless drunk, then summoned a taxi to take them all home in two separate trips.

She was devastated that her father, in comparatively good health for his age, would think to take his life, and she wept quietly at the realisation that he had loved her mother but had been too bitter with life to show her affection of any kind. And her mother, the soft enduring Rose, had finally given up and died of a broken heart. While Brenda and Half Dunn had grown closer over the years, she returned from Wagga determined to mend any matters between them and to give him the love he deserved in return for the loyalty he had shown her.

She'd been back only a few days when she drew Helen aside after delivering the twins home one afternoon and asked if she would come to dinner the next night.

‘We'd love to. It's a Friday, so the twins can stay up later, and I'm sure Danny will be free.'

‘No, me darlin' girl, this is just you and me. Mick has been told to make himself scarce and I was hoping Danny would be home to look after the twins.'

Helen often spent time alone with Brenda, and they regularly had lunch together at Charity's, where they knew the chef – Pamela, a pretty Queensland girl – and her husband Graham, who was chief bottle-washer and roustabout, as well as a gifted clarinet player. Italian pasta dishes dominated, and although the food was plain, it was excellent. The whole family ate their evening meal at the Hero once or twice a month, usually on a Saturday evening, so it was an unusual request but one to which Helen was quick to agree. She knew Brenda must have something on her mind.

Brenda had prepared a macaroni cheese and she served it with a salad almost immediately after Helen arrived. Then, over a cup of tea, she said, ‘Helen, it's now sixteen years into your marriage and I feel I know a great deal about you, darlin', and all of it's good.'

Helen grinned, waiting. ‘But?'

‘I've never seen you sew.'

Helen breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn't known what to expect after being summoned, albeit nicely, by her mother-in-law to dinner at the Hero. Certainly, she could never have guessed it was to discuss sewing. ‘I suppose that's because I don't. Until Mrs O'Shea left to stay with her son in Queensland, she did the mending and, I confess, while we did a little embroidery at school, it wasn't called the Presbyterian Ladies' College for nothing. Sewing was thought to be only slightly ahead of scrubbing floors in the skills required to prepare us for marriage. In fact, anything you couldn't do out of bed while wearing white gloves and a hat – apart from a little genteel cooking, perhaps – was deeply frowned upon.'

‘Embroidery? Well, I suppose that's something,' Brenda said.

‘If you don't mind my asking, it does seem a curious question. Is it important?' Helen asked, intrigued.

‘Yes and no. I daresay you can learn, and embroidery isn't a bad place to start.'

‘Brenda, what on earth are you talking about? By the way, I should confess that I wasn't all that interested in embroidery,' Helen added, laughing. ‘My mum used to finish off most of the pieces I attempted – I remember once throwing a particularly nauseating piece out of the train window – but without her help I'd never have passed what was sneeringly known as domestic science.'

‘Would you be after learning if I was to show you?' Brenda asked, still not explaining. ‘You see, I don't want to pass it on to one of the twins' daughters – my twin sisters, I mean, not your twins – they're a poor and disappointing lot and really can't be entrusted with such an important family matter.'

Helen held up her hand. ‘Brenda, you have to stop right there.' She took a quick breath. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘Why, the quilt, of course!'

‘What quilt?'

‘Well, I'll be darned, that boy really
can
keep his mouth shut,' Brenda said, pleased. ‘Mick says he told Danny about it, but asked him to keep it confidential.'

‘When? Danny doesn't keep much from me.'

‘In 1945, after he got back from the war.'

‘Maybe he did, that was a long time ago,' Helen said, feeling a little exasperated.

‘You'd have remembered if he had, darlin',' Brenda assured her. ‘Come along, I've laid it out in the dining room.' She rose and Helen followed her.

Laid out on the table, its sides almost reaching the floor, was a multi-coloured quilt that, at first glance, looked as if it was made up of different-sized patches of cloth, completely lacking the symmetry usually associated with an Irish quilt. Nevertheless, it was vibrant and eye-catching and might even have been described as spectacular, except for the traditional border. It seemed to be made up of isolated scenes peppered with Celtic crosses.

‘Goodness!' Helen exclaimed, not sure how to react.

‘It's the quilt of Sorrow and Travail with the Far Corner of Joy,' Brenda explained, as if such a name were natural enough. ‘Come, let me take you through the generations – only five, I fear, because it was only then that my great-great grandmother Caoilainn learned the gentle art of quilting, when she was serving as a lady's maid at Kylemore Castle, County Connaught.'
Brenda lifted part of the great quilt that hung over one end of the table. ‘See, it is embroidered here in Gaelic. I'll translate it for you.'

‘Brenda, you never said you spoke Gaelic!'

‘No, no, darlin', that I don't. These words were taught to me by Rose.' Brenda first read them in Gaelic and then recited them in English.

This is the work of Caoilainn and it be

with the greatest humility dedicated to:

The most pious Saint Caoilainn who quickly

won the esteem and affection of her sister

nuns by her exactness to every duty, as

also by her sweet temper, gentle confiding

disposition and unaffected piety.

The more Helen looked at the quilt, the more fascinated she became with it. It wasn't a thing of great beauty, yet it was undoubtedly a magnificent repository of memory and, judging by the dates, it was a real expression of Ireland's history. Brenda explained that it dealt with seven generations, because Caoilainn, whose splendid name meant ‘fair and slender', had started her quilt with the stories of her grandfather and then her father, so that the first incident concerning her family dated back to the middle of the eighteenth century. It was a two-hundred-year history of the major events in the lives of an Irish family, and it struck Helen like a bolt that she was now a part of it, part of the quilt, part of the trail of sorrow and travail with the far corner of joy.

‘Let me take you through the history of one side of Danny's family, which, of course, is now one side of the twins' family, and then I'll explain why you are here tonight.'

Helen listened, fascinated, as Brenda took her through each incident she knew about, although there were many whose meaning had been lost in time that she couldn't explain. The scenes, montages and symbols, often very crudely done in appliqué and embroidery, were quite bewildering but also wonderful. Some had a short explanation stitched beside them in Gaelic and later in English, while a few had quite long explanations. Each quilt-maker decided for herself what she wished to represent without recourse to any other family members. The quilt was never on display, never explained, and the decision to record sorrow and travail, or to pay a rare visit to work in the far corner of joy, was absolutely the responsibility of the oldest woman in any particular generation.

But by looking at the dates, diligently embroidered beside often mystifying or quixotic scenes wrought with scraps of appliquéd cloth, Helen realised several of them involved even earlier events. The quilt, she estimated, covered a period of two hundred years, but it seemed fairly certain that the oldest images would have derived from oral history recorded by the first of the quilters. These seemed to start around 1740, then in 1798 came the Irish Rebellion. The 1829 emancipation of the Catholics was commemorated in the far corner of joy, but travail and sorrow followed in 1845 with the beginning of the potato famine, then again in 1867 with the abortive Fenian uprising.

Helen couldn't identify any of the events that followed, until the First World War, by which time Brenda's parents were already in Australia. Rose had added the deaths of her two
sons, slaughtered in Britain's unholy war fighting against the Germans. It was curious, or perhaps poignantly sad, that the only item in the far corner of joy was the Catholic emancipation, until Rose's addition of the birth of her little son, the first of the family to be born on Australian soil. Brenda had added Danny's birth, and now it would be Helen's task to add the birth of the twins, a responsibility she would take very seriously. Brenda had earlier pointed out a small paragraph embroidered in Gaelic, which explained that the quilt had been blessed with holy water and a promise made that, come what may, whether travail or disaster, the quilt must remain forever within the family.

The back of the ancient quilt was also uniquely revealing for it carried the outline of a tree with hundreds of names and birth dates, each on a single green leaf. But at the base of the tree lay hundreds of leaves in autumnal colours, yellows, reds, purples, russet, pinks and browns, and on each leaf was embroidered the same name as appeared on a green leaf, and the date of that family member's death.

‘Helen, you are the next in line as Keeper of the Quilt. Will you accept? And, in your turn, will you hand it over to one of the twins?' Brenda finally asked.

Helen wasn't in the least religious but nevertheless found ‘the oath', as Brenda described it, and the responsibility for the quilt overwhelmingly meaningful. Close to tears, she gazed at her mother-in-law, a woman she had learned to love and respect far more than she did her own mother. ‘Brenda, I would be enormously honoured, but I cannot sew or appliqué. Any idea you may have of my embroidery skills should be dismissed from your mind, and I draw like an intelligent five-year-old.'

Brenda laughed. ‘That, darlin', is why I called you in now and not on my deathbed. Are you willing to learn?'

Helen gulped. Of all the unlikely skills she might have thought to acquire, quilting, sewing, appliqué and embroidery were not among them. ‘Mother, I am overwhelmed with the honour, but most fearful of the result,' she found herself saying, in a formal manner that seemed to be required in the presence of the eccentric but venerable quilt. Helen, biting her bottom lip, thought hard. It was a decision from which there could be no turning back. Finally, she spoke again. ‘Yes,' she said, ‘yes, I am prepared to learn, but you in turn must be prepared to tell me if I don't succeed.'