Three Summers (4 page)

‘I suppose so,' said Ruth doubtfully, and a scarce second later, without even meaning to, she cried out, ‘But Nan, it's so
far
!'

Margaret May's face became stern, a fierce light gleamed in her eyes. ‘Far doesn't matter,' she said, looking down at the letter in her hands. She stroked the crest, running her finger along the lion's curly mane. ‘You're going to have such a wonderful time at the university. You'll meet all kinds of people, people you can talk to about the things that matter—'

‘I can talk to Fee. We talk about things that matter.'

‘Of course you do. But there are other things, so many other things, Ruthie—' Margaret May spread her hands. ‘A girl like you should see the world.'

‘You didn't,' countered Ruth.

‘That was different. Those were harder times.' Margaret May looked out into the distance and the orphanage shadow came into her eyes. Ruth could hardly bear to think of the place where Nan had grown up, abandoned now, though you could still see it from the highway, all turrets and towers and barred windows on top of its rock-strewn hill.

‘See those rocks up there?' Nan had said one afternoon when they were passing in the bus. ‘They were one of the punishments.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘We had to pick those rocks up and cart them around to the back on Saturday afternoons. Big as babies some of them were, and didn't they tear up our hands! And you know, however many we moved, there still seemed just as many next time. We said the nuns made the big girls carry them back to the front at night when we little ones were asleep.'

‘What did they punish you for?'

‘Just for being there. Because we were the children of sin.'

‘But it wasn't
your
sin.'

‘It wasn't anyone's.'

After the orphanage her grandmother had been been sent to
Fortuna
to work as a housemaid. ‘Nan, what was it like at
Fortuna
?' Ruth asked now. Her voice lingered on the beautiful name; she had a longing to hear the great house described because it was Tam Finn's house, the place where his family had lived for generations. She felt she would give a little piece of her heart to see its rooms and passages, the famous garden with its lawns and flower beds and peacock, the lake and the great English trees.

‘
Fortuna
?' said Nan. ‘Why did you think of that place?'

‘No reason. I was just remembering how you went to work there. What was it like, Nan?'

‘I can barely remember it. A great cold kitchen, as big as our whole upstairs it was, and dark, and, oh!' she flung her hands up in the air, ‘Rooms, Ruth! Endless hallways of them, upstairs and down, rooms, rooms, rooms, all for us girls to clean!'

‘And the garden?'

‘I hardly saw it.'

‘But you were living there!'

‘Working there,' corrected Margaret May.

‘And after that you got married.'

‘Yes.' Margaret May half turned her face, so Ruth couldn't see her expression. An image of Don Gower had strode into her mind: handsome Don Gower on the day she'd first met him, standing at
Fortuna's
kitchen door, the big box of groceries hoisted on his shoulder, looking down at her. ‘Here, let me do that,' he'd said, when she'd gone to take the box from him, and she'd watched his shapely fingers arranging the jars and packets on the kitchen table, felt the warmth from his body as she stood beside him. After all these years it still gave her a whip of fury to remember how she'd burned for him.

‘Nan? What's the matter?'

‘Nothing.' Margaret May fought hard for a smile. ‘Just a goose walked over my grave.'

‘Oh,
don't
!' Ruth grabbed at her grandmother's hand. ‘Don't
say
that!'

‘It's just an expression,' said Margaret May. ‘Have you ever seen a goose in Barinjii?' She rose from the bench in a single fluid movement. ‘You'll have a different life from me,' she told the girl firmly, ‘a different life altogether.' She nodded and handed the letter back. ‘Here, you take care of that while I get on with my watering.'

‘Let me help.' Ruth jumped up and reached for the watering can.

‘No need,' said Margaret May, taking it from her, and Ruth felt that in this small gesture Nan was closing a door on her, gently but firmly, sending her away.

‘Please let me carry it,' she pleaded.

‘There's no need, it's empty,' said Margaret May. ‘I can manage.' She twirled the big can from her hand. ‘Light as a feather, see?'

four

On this beautiful morning Father Joseph was also out in his garden, his shabby black cassock moving amongst the rows of tomato plants. Back home in Ballyroan he hadn't seen a tomato till he was ten years old, that blessed day he'd run a message for Mrs Stavely at the White Stag Hotel and she'd given him threepence and a round red fruit he'd thought was some kind of plum. He'd bitten right into it and the juice had spurted down his chin and he thought he'd never tasted anything so grand – like eating a bit of sunshine, a warm summer's day on your tongue. The next time he'd got hold of a tomato had been in the seminary: a whole basket full of them left on the steps by some kind soul.

Two tomatoes in ten years! And now he had a whole garden full of them, all types and sizes: Harbingers, Cardinal Kings, Ruby Queens. The Harbingers were at their peak: the old man parted the leaves of a healthy bush and found a great plump beauty, so ripe it was, so ready, that the moment he cupped his hand beneath it, the fruit fell from its stem into his palm. He sniffed the perfume of its skin and dropped it gently into his pocket – with some of Mrs Ryan's bread, a dab of fresh butter, black pepper and a few leaves of Maidie's fresh basil he'd have a feast fit for a king!

He bent to pick up his gardening fork and then straightened again. A young girl was running across the paddock outside his back fence. It took him a moment to recognise that the girl was Maidie's little granddaughter. Ruth, she was called.

Only she wasn't so little now. His old eyes widened, he was astonished by the size of her. Why, she was almost a young woman! ‘Ruth,' he called. ‘Ruth Gower! Come over here a minute!' He hadn't seen that one in church for a long, long while. ‘Ruthie!'

The girl kept on running. ‘Can't stop! Something I have to do!' she flung back over her shoulder into a mass of wild brown hair.

The old man returned to his tomatoes. ‘She'll keep,' he muttered, reaching for the fork again. But as he dug the prongs into the rich crumbly earth a frown deepened across his broad forehead. ‘Aaw,' he breathed, recalling how Maidie had got the idea in her head that the girl would be going to the university down in Sydney. Sydney University! That sink of iniquity – hardly a week went by that you didn't come across some scandal about the place written up in the newspapers. He needed to talk to Maidie, get some sense into her, and the girl too, if that was possible.

And then his big face cleared – ah, it would be all right. The girl didn't stand a chance of winning that scholarship, not with competition from every high school in the state, and from the great private schools in Sydney: Ignatius and Riverview, Saint Joseph's! With boys from those grand places, boys from the rich old families, how could a girl like Ruth Gower, a shopkeeper's daughter from a little place like Barinjii, ever stand a chance? The whole thing was a daydream; Maidie had always been a bit of a daydreamer, her nose in a book whenever she could get hold of one, and from all he'd heard, the girl was very likely the same. But daydreams fade and she'd get married like all the rest of them. She'd have a family and settle down.

From the house behind him came the faint, aching shrill of the telephone and Father Joseph's large foot went still on the edge of the fork. He waited, chin lifted, eyes narrowed, like a big rough dog scenting trouble in the wind.

The ringing stopped. He pictured his housekeeper, Mrs Ryan, in the hallway, the receiver held close to her ear.

At this time of the morning it would be Tom Lester again, for sure, ringing about his daughter Ellie, wanting to know whether Father Joseph had spoken to the Finn boy. As if you could speak to that one! As if you could do anything! Nothing short of exorcism would do for that young devil! Father Joseph waited for the squeal of the screen door and Mrs Ryan's voice calling, ‘Phone call for you, Father!'

There was nothing. One of Mrs Ryan's cronies ringing for a bit of a natter, he decided, relief surging through his hard old veins, and set to work with the fork again.

He'd spoken to the boy last night, and he'd had to drive all the way over to
Fortuna
to do it; the boy wouldn't come to him. He could tell from the expression on old Mrs Finn's face when she saw him in the hallway that he wasn't welcome. The old lady was the boy's grandmother; young Mrs Finn had run off when Tam was only small.

That boy! Father Joseph had waited a full twenty minutes, cooling his heels in the long gloomy room they called a library before Tam had come sauntering in. ‘You wanted something, Father?' he'd asked insolently, and Father Joseph had said his piece while the boy sat perched on the edge of the huge mahogany table, legs swinging, answering to no one, least of all the parish priest. ‘Will that be all then?' he'd said at last, and sauntered out again, whistling.

The tune had sounded familiar, it had got into the old priest's head; he'd been halfway home along the bumpy road before he'd realised that the boy had actually been whistling a hymn. ‘Cradling Children in his Arm', it had been. The words were still playing over in his head:

Cradling children in his arm,
Jesus gave his blessing.
To our babes a welcome warm—

The insolence of the boy took your breath away. The sheer hide of it, whistling hymns about the good Lord cradling children in his arms, when Tam Finn had got half the girls in the district in the family way! There'd be no father to cradle those poor babes!

The boy's own father was away on business in Sydney; but even if Harry Finn had been at home, the old priest knew he'd get nothing out of him: he'd been the same in his own young days. You were powerless with people like the Finns. Lords of the district! They didn't bloody care! He'd got nothing last year when he'd spoken to him about Mrs Ryan's niece, Kathy.

‘Wild oats, Father,' Harry Finn had said. ‘Know what they are?'

‘But the girl,' Father Joseph had protested, and then stopped, the contemptuous curl of the grazier's lips suggesting that the girls of Barinjii got no more than they deserved. ‘Remember Saint Augustine, Father,' Harry Finn had counselled, showing the priest to the door. ‘He sowed his oats, eh? Bushels of 'em!'

Father Joseph threw down the fork and rubbed at his aching back. A tiny breeze blew up, warm as a breath, teasing the feathery leaves. There was heat in the day already, and a faint smoky scent which reminded him of the winter peat fires, the long rainy winters of his childhood home. He only had to close his eyes and he was back in Mam's kitchen: the scrubbed wooden table with the teapot and striped jug always in the centre, the smoke-dark wall above the big black stove. He saw his mother's feet in boots, cracked brown leather, one heel worn over, and the hem of her long blue dress, such a deep blue that the colour brought a little ache to his heart. ‘Ah, Mammy,' he whispered. ‘What use am I at all these days?'

RUTH
rushed on over the prickly grass of Larsen's Paddock, skirting the big green cowpats, batting away the small black sticky flies. She knew what old Father Joseph wanted: he'd be after her to go to confession, but she was never going again, and when she got down to Sydney she was never going to church either – she only went now,
sometimes,
because of Nan. At the top of a small rise, where the long grass gave way suddenly to bare stony ground, she stopped, gathering up her skirt to pick off the clusters of small brown burrs that had stuck to its hem. She glanced up at the great blue emptiness of the sky: as if some old man was sitting up there, watching you, checking up on your sins! There was only an old man down here, sitting in a stuffy box on Saturday afternoons, where you could smell the tobacco off him, and mould, and sometimes even a whiff of the chook manure he used on his tomato plants.

People wondered what he did in there on those long sad Saturday afternoons when no one came. Ruth knew; she'd peeped round his side of the box one day when she was helping Nan with the flowers and there on the narrow seat she'd spied a Superman comic and a half-eaten banana. Superman! She hadn't told anyone because though Father Joseph was an old busybody, he was still her nan's friend, and somehow the comic, crumpled and faded as if he'd found it lying on the road, had made her feel sorry for him. She hadn't even told on him that afternoon when a group of kids had been hanging round in the playground and the subject of confession had come up, because the next day was a Saturday.