Three Summers (5 page)

‘What does he
do
in there?' Joey Fenton had asked, and ‘What do you
think
he does?' Chris Larsen had replied, and at once a chorus of sniggering had broken out amongst the boys, with pushes and punches and hips thrust out and fingers stuck into the air.

‘You mean he's actually
got
one?' Joey Fenton had snorted. ‘I thought they cut them off in those places.'

That had brought a fresh round of sniggering, of course. Brian Geraghty had laughed so hard he'd tumbled to the ground and lay there, pounding his fist in the grass. The girls shook their heads and clicked their tongues; Fee had glanced at Ruth and rolled her eyes.

Iona Malloy had turned pale. Her brother Francis was in the seminary. ‘Do they?' she'd whispered, and the boys had fallen silent. ‘Do they – do that to them?'

It had been that brief time Tam Finn was at their school. He'd taken no part in the boys' rumpus, only stood on the edge of it, watching. But when Iona spoke he'd come forward and answered her. ‘No, they don't, Iona,' he'd said, in such a calm, even voice that you knew what he said was true. ‘They don't cut anything. Your brother will be all right, Iona.' Colour had flowed back into Iona's cheeks.

And then Meg Harrison had stepped out from the huddle of girls, walked straight to Tam Finn and touched him on the arm, a gesture so quick, so light, it was hard to believe it had occurred.

Except that it had. Everyone had seen. It was like they'd all been waiting to see.

Tam Finn's face had been expressionless, only his lips had moved slightly, settling into a simple line. He'd shoved his hands into the pockets of his school trousers, turned his back on them and walked out of the yard, away into the paddock and up the hill.

Meg Harrison had followed. They'd watched from the yard as she came alongside him, watched how Tam Finn had reached out and taken her hand, a small act that was without the slightest trace of tenderness; he might have been picking up a knife to peel a new green apple. Tam Finn with Meg beside him turned off onto the track that led to Perry's orchard. Whistles and catcalls rose from the boys then, and poor Kathy Ryan had begun to cry. Perry's orchard, like the little beach beside the creek, was one of the places in Barinjii where couples went to make love, especially in summer, when the grass was long and soft and there was a spicy scent of apples in the air.

MEG
Harrison had been married early the next year, though Tam Finn hadn't been the groom. Kathy Ryan had gone down to her aunty's place in Sydney. It was this kind of thing that made the mothers of Barinjii say Tam Finn was bad. And perhaps they were right – except, thought Ruth, it was Meg who'd walked up to him, wasn't it? It was Meg who'd touched his arm. But you couldn't say she was bad, either, or Kathy Ryan, or any of those other girls. They were like small soft birds who'd fallen into some kind of trap, a net woven from the long tender grass and the hot spicy scents of summer and everything that was beautiful on earth. Ruth thought of Father Joseph calling to her across his back fence. He didn't know a thing! It was typical that he never seemed to notice how many baptisms in Barinjii occurred six months after a wedding, and how some of the babies (ones who shouldn't have) had the black curls and rainy grey eyes of Tam Finn.

The sun was higher in the sky now; the day's heat was coming on. A smoky haze made the distant hills shimmer and the air itself had a trembly look, so that you felt you might be able to walk straight through it and find yourself in a different world altogether, like Alice through the looking glass. Ruth smoothed her skirt, ran down the slope and scrambled through the wire fence onto a narrow rutted path. She walked along briskly, arms swinging, hair bouncing against her narrow shoulderblades. It was brown hair, rich and tawny, and her eyes were brown too, and her skin had the golden honey colouring which had been her mum's. ‘My nut-brown maid,' Nan used to call her when she was little, sweeping the hairbrush in long gentle strokes, singing,

Ho ro my nut-brown maiden,
Hee ree my nut-brown maiden,
Ho ro ro maiden,
For she's the maid for me.

She'd been small for her age right up till she'd turned sixteen, when her body had begun to develop the kind of gentle rounded shape which made the men standing outside the pub or the post office turn suddenly quiet when she walked past. Occasionally one of them would whistle, after she'd gone by. Ruth ignored them.

‘Never look,' Fee had counselled her. ‘Never say anything. Pretend you don't hear. Pretend you're deaf and dumb. Unless it's someone you fancy, that is.'

‘There's no one,' Ruth had replied.

‘That's true,' Fee had replied serenely. ‘There's no one here would suit you.' She'd smiled. ‘You really
will
have to go to Sydney, won't you?'

It was true, probably, thought Ruth. She couldn't imagine being married to someone like Joey Fenton or Chris Larsen or Brian Geraghty. She couldn't imagine being married at all. Her future seemed unimaginable, despite the letter from the university. In the accident that had killed her mother, Ruth had been thrown clear. ‘Thrown clear to have a
life
,' Nan had said all through her childhood, in that low passionate voice which always made Ruth feel uneasy. ‘A
special
life, Ruthie.'

Only what if she wasn't special? Ruth walked on along the path. For a while it ran beside a windbreak of tall poplars whose bright leaves flashed with light, and whose long shadows striped the land. Then the windbreak ended and the path went on across a stretch of open land until it reached the crossroads where the Old Western Highway met the Barinjii Road. This was the place where her mother had died. She and Dad had been coming home from a trip to Narromine when their car had hit an unlighted semi on the turn into Barinjii. Her father had been in hospital for two whole months and had come out of it a different person. ‘Your dad used to be a laughing kind of boy,' Nan had told Ruth. ‘He used to sing – you'd always know when Ray was about because you'd hear the singing.'

Ruth couldn't imagine it. Dad was grey and quiet as a shadow; you forgot about him, you hardly noticed he was there. To think of him laughing was difficult enough, but to imagine him singing was impossible, like trying to imagine a horse crowing, or a big old rooster barking like a dog.

Her mother had simply died, her blood leaking out on the highway long before any ambulance had arrived. Ruth had been a baby in a carry-cot on the back seat. She was strapped in, but the cot hadn't been, and when the semi ploughed in, the cot had sailed out of the open back window onto the verge of the road.

Thrown clear. It did seem special, though in a rather frightening kind of way. She walked out into the middle of the crossroads and stood there quietly. Since they'd built the bypass five years back there was very little traffic; you could stand like that for half an hour without a single car going by, and there wouldn't be a sound except for the wind and the chirp of crickets and the twittering of tiny birds in the long grass of the verges. Ruth closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face and a small warm breeze that teased gently at her hair. She waited.

After a few minutes she sensed her mother come from some other place and stand silently beside her. She could feel her there.

‘Do you think that's crazy?' she'd asked Fee. ‘Do you think it's crazy that someone would come back from being dead just to see you?'

‘No,' Fee had answered. ‘No, I don't. She was your mum; of course she'd come back to see you! I'd come back to see you, if anything happened to me.'

‘Oh, Fee!'

‘I would.' Fee had smiled. ‘And I'm not even your mum!'

Ruth reached into the pocket of her skirt and took out the crested envelope. She opened the flap, drew the two sheets from inside and held them out as if inviting a person standing next to her to read. ‘This is the letter from the university, Mum,' she whispered. ‘And these are my marks, see? And the scholarship.' She gave a little skip. ‘Oh, Mum! I'll be living in Sydney, imagine!'

A bird sang out in the sky. The pages trembled in Ruth's hand, and it seemed to her that beside her on the deserted road there was a small ripple of delight and excitement, of purest, happy glee.

five

With a big box under one arm and the basket of hydrangeas over the other, Margaret May went in through the wooden doors of Saint Columba's. The interior of the church was dim and brown, except for those places where the sun pressed against the high arched windows and its light fell through the jewelled robes of saints and kings and angels.

She walked on down the side aisle, her flat court shoes ringing on the wooden floor which was polished to such a deep shine that Margaret May could see herself reflected there, like a skater on dark ice. She passed the statue of Christ with the briefest of nods, the kind she might give to a stranger who stepped aside to let her go first through a door.

There'd been a similar statue in the chapel at the orphanage, Christ with his arms outspread in blessing, his long face bland and smooth as cream. ‘
Suf-fer the lit-tle chil-dren
,' the six-year-old Margaret May had read, the words inscribed in gold letters above his head. Those words, together with the outstretched arms, had made her think the man in the long white robe might understand her, she'd thought he might be kind. ‘Yes, we do suffer,' she'd whispered, holding out her cracked chilblains for him to see, and the mark on her arm where big Sarah Tyler had got hold of the skin and twisted it right round, and the bruise on her leg that Sister Monica had made. They suffered from the nuns and each other, and some kind of indescribable loss etched deep into their hearts which they could barely understand. There was the crying in the night, too, which Margaret May hated; it sounded like the moaning of the wind in big forgotten trees and it made her think of the grey wolves in the story Sister Barbara had once told them. When the real wind blew and the real trees threw their great black shadows on the barred windows, then the long grey room in which they slept seemed to move as well, sliding forward like a great sled pulled through the snow.

Margaret May had knelt down in front of the statue of the kind man, her hands folded together as the nuns had taught her and prayed and prayed and prayed, ‘Please, please, let someone come and take me away!'

But no one had ever come, and in those long cold noisy nights she'd believed that they hadn't come because she'd been bad. She'd prayed to be taken away from the Sisters, and this was bad because the Sisters were good. Of course they were good. Hadn't Mother Evangeline told them that the Sisters were brides of Christ? Christ wouldn't have bad people for his brides, would he?

Only sometimes they didn't seem good: Sister Monica with her sly little pinches and funny smile,
she
wasn't good. And Sister Therese with her whacky whistly cane, she'd torn out a whole fistful of Noeline Jennings' hair, just for leaning against the wall. How could that be good?

Was she bad to think they weren't good? The thoughts of badness and goodness had chased each other round and round in Margaret May's head, so fast and furiously that sometimes she couldn't get to sleep and she'd climb out of bed and creep down to the chapel and pray to the statue again, ‘Please let someone come and take me away.'

Ah, it's a long time ago, thought Margaret May now, though inside her, however old she got, that long grey room seemed as close as ever, as if it was right next door to her own pretty room above the shop and any day she could step down the hall and turn the knob of a door and find herself back in there. ‘Ah no,' she whispered, looking down at the little wooden Virgin standing in her corner beneath the long window where Saint Columba sailed in his coracle of wickerwork and hides.

The Virgin was small, only half as tall as Margaret May. She wore a plain straight shift which fell in simple folds about her body and halfway down her bare, slender legs. Her feet were bare too, and her hair hung at her shoulders, plain and straight like the shift. She had no veil or halo, only a wreath of leaves twisted around her forehead. She was young, about Ruth's age, and there was no child.

‘Are you sure it's the Virgin?' Margaret May had asked Father Joseph.

‘Eh? Who else would it be, out there in that old church?'

‘Oh, I don't know. Just any young girl.'

The statue's face had a kind of patient calm, and the square hands curved protectively across the small round belly that pushed against the shift's wooden folds. ‘Yes, you're like all of us,' whispered Margaret May, laying the basket of hydrangeas on the end of a pew, opening the cardboard box. Inside were the two big drip-trays she'd borrowed from the shop storeroom; they'd been designed to hold motor oil or paint but they would hold water just as well. She filled the kettle in the kitchen behind the sacristy and poured the water into the trays. The blue hydrangeas floated there, jostling and quivering against each other, and Margaret May gave a tiny gasp of pleasure, because it looked so perfect, exactly as she'd imagined it in her garden this morning: the girl's small brown feet stepping out into a soft blue sea.