Yesterday's Dust (10 page)

‘What happened to the little girl I left on the road?'

‘You left her on the road,
and life happened to her, and death happened, and years of searching for you happened. I didn't care
what I might find either, just as long as I found you, knew you were alive, safe. I didn't expect to find a fifteen-year-old boy. I wouldn't have cared if you'd sold cars, ran a brothel, yet you expected to come back here and find poor little dumb Annie still waiting for you.'

‘It's all gone.
All changed,' he'd said. ‘Hating that bastard is all that's left from back then. Everything else is lost. If I let him get away with what he's done I've got no reason to wake up in the morning. Can't you see that?'

She had walked to the sink, filled the jug and set it to boil. ‘Have a cup of coffee with me. Sit down and let's start again.'

‘Come to the police with me. That's all I want from
you.'

‘Look at me, Johnny. Inside I'm still that little kid and she's standing here still screaming out to you. For God's sake, listen to her!'

‘Help me to put him away and I'll listen. He killed Liza. He killed his brother. He's a murderer, Annie.'

She had sighed then, swiped at the tears now trickling. ‘Liza took a blow aimed at her rapist who was using her as a shield. Dad didn't want to
hurt Liza. He loved her. The day Mandy died I understood what he has had to live with. He
loved
Liza.' The jug had boiled, boiled, turned itself off. ‘Maybe a priest can't understand that sort of love, that sort of loss. You've probably buried little kids in the cold bloody earth and watched the mothers cry, blessed them and told them that their child was in a better place. What better place than
safe in her parents' arms, Johnny? I watched Dad dying the day Liza died. I can still hear him crying.'

‘He's not crying now. He's down there playing the toff, having a ball. He's got everything he always wanted. He's got that mansion, that property, and May.'

‘And he has to look at that rose garden, that cellar every time he steps outside the door, and he has to do it stone-cold sober. May
won't let him drink.'

He had laughed then. ‘So he'll come back.'

‘If he sets one foot in Mallawindy, I tell it as it was. He and May know it.'

‘I can't live like this. I can't lie to Mum and Ben for the rest of my life. I can't do it, Annie.'

‘Then find a way to do it. I have. I hide in this house all day, and at night I sleep in Mandy's bed.'

He'd left then. He'd walked away from her into
the night. Six years on, their conversations were brief and polite.

‘How's your foot?' she said.

‘Better by the minute.'

Just words. He kept up his end. He found enough words, cold, guarded things, each one censored, checked before it was spoken. That's how he lived these days. Hiding self. Hiding knowledge. Losing self. No black suit and dog collar to hide him, or give him identity. No longer
Father Burton, so who was he?

He watched Ann as she turned to David. She hadn't told him where she'd driven to that night. Like Ellie, David had grown accustomed to his partner's disappearances. She'd told him she'd argued with her father then driven away to clear her head, bogged the car out at the ten-mile. She'd told the same story to the police when they'd found the gun in April.

Destined
to live a lie. But these days she was handling it better than he. On the surface she was handling it.

Johnny filled his wineglass and he toasted the dog that had dug up the leg bone.

Let it be over. Thy will be done.

Wine was flowing freely and for once he was having his share. He'd sleep tonight. One way or the other he would sleep tonight.

He raised his glass to Ann. She glanced at him,
then away. Her face was all angles, still the eight-year-old face he had left behind, still the wild black hair, pinned high tonight. Half of it was pinned high but, as always, corkscrew curls escaped at ear and neck and
brow.

He used to tie up her hair with rubber bands, try to keep it out of her eyes when she was a kid. She'd let him comb it. Refused to let Ellie near her with a comb after
her return from Narrawee. Refused to go near Ellie, but she'd stayed close to her father – until he taught her not to. Six years old when Liza died, nearly eight when they'd found Sam's bones. Almost thirty years ago. She'd be thirty-seven come Christmas, hair still as black as coal. He leaned closer, trying to see grey amidst the black. If there was any, she covered it well. His own hair had shown
a little grey at thirty-nine; at forty-four grey was winning the war.

He laughed, raised his glass again. ‘To grey hair,' he said. No other glass was raised, so he drank alone. What else was there to drink to? The speeches droned on. Johnny filled his glass and drank to speeches, to the new bottle a Smith placed before him while his mind again wandered the past, then back again to the sister
seated beside him.

She was wearing a black pantsuit, the top loose and long, her only colour red lipstick, large gold earrings and the long red and gold scarf. Maybe she looked her age. He didn't know. He couldn't see the adult. He could see Bron's age, Ben's, his own, but never Annie's – just the little kid with the wild hair he had left screaming on the road. Guilt had embedded that image in
his brain and he couldn't get it out. Maybe he could wash it out with wine, but the more he drank tonight the more she looked like that little kid. Her little hands signing, ‘I come, my Johnny. I come with you. I love Johnny.'

He was going to become a howling maudlin drunk in a minute, and he knew it. Quickly he glanced away, found Ben up at the bridal table. Never much interested in suits but,
like Ellie, Ben scrubbed up well. Little Benjie, scared stiff of his father, yet he'd never left Mallawindy. Always said he was going to be a farmer like Grandpa when he grew up. He and his partner Bob Dooley had inherited the shop when Bert Norris died, but at heart Ben was a farmer, and the
image of Grandpa. John's eyes turned to Bronwyn, matching her big brother drink for drink.

‘Bless me,
Father, for I have sinned.' Bron had found him in the top paddock a month or so back and she'd wanted to talk. ‘I'm pregnant, Father, and I'm going to sue the bloody doctor who gave me the antibiotics, and I'm going to sue the bloody dentist who bummed up my tooth in the first place. If I have an abortion, it's murder, Father, and if I don't have an abortion, life is going to be murder, Father, with
a thousand Smiths fighting me through the courts for one more Smith. As you know, Father, the world is short on Smiths.'

‘Lay off the Father bit, Bron, and of course you can't have an abortion.'

‘You can take the priest out of his church, put him in a cow paddock with hay seeds up to his bum, but you can't take the church out of the priest, Father. So what do I do?'

‘You've been living with
Nick for six years that I know of. You're probably overdue to get married, aren't you?'

‘Stuff marriage and happy families, Father – if you'll excuse my French. I've seen enough of them to last me a lifetime.'

Sisters. Three of them he'd known.

Liza. Miss Tiny Tot.

I'm telling Daddy on you. You wait till Daddy gets home, and you'll get it
.

Daddy. He'd ruined the lot of them. Liza too. What
might she have been without him? Just a normal wilful kid like Bron. He liked Bron. There had been no past to come between them. Only two years old when he'd left, they'd met as strangers. Bron had nothing against strangers.

Memories were rushing at him from all sides tonight, but the constant tension he lived with had gone. His neck wanted to give up the effort of holding up his head, so he
rested his chin on the palm of his left hand, his right still occupied with his glass.

On Monday he'd drive his mother back to Daree and have a
look at what they'd found of the bastard, and he'd spit in his eye socket. Would he recognise anything? What would be left apart from the teeth? Would he recognise the teeth outside that cruel, cynical mouth?

Have a go, you cowardly little bastard
.

Maybe he'd tell the police that he'd finally grown up and had a go. Put the barrel to the bastard's head and pulled the trigger, then loaded him into the car boot and buried him. It might be a relief to go back into hiding, this time in a cosy cell. No cows to milk, no post holes to dig in there. They'd give him a big pile of rocks and a little hammer.

He laughed at the image, and faces turned
to him as he stood – tried to stand. His foot stopped the laugh. He couldn't stand, couldn't drive to Daree with Ellie on Monday either. No foot to drive with. He looked at his fat plaster cast in its blue hospital-loan cotton shoe and he filled his glass, drank to his broken bone as David stood to retrieve the crutches leaning against the wall.

‘Do you need a hand, John?'

‘What I need is a
toilet.'

With David steadying him, John manoeuvred the crutches beneath his arms. He stood head down, waiting for the walls to still or for the impetus that might move his one good foot forward then, David still at his side, he made his slow way to the door and through the mud to the old toilets where he struggled with Jack Burton's zip.

‘We are an odd race, David. Conceived in drunken lust,
born of the virgin Ellie; alcohol and milk runs through our veins, and it's a bad mixture. Warm it up a bit and it curdles. The Vevers in us begin to feel pain, but the Burtons don't like feeling anything, so they top up the alcohol content . . . which uncurdles the curdle and kills all pain.'

‘Wine has always been Ann's happy juice.'

‘Ann. I don't know your wife.'

‘I'm not sure I know her
brother tonight. Are you right there?'
John was struggling with the zip, and required two hands. He released his hold on the crutch and David caught it before it hit the floor, wet with urine and tracked-in mud.

On their return to the hall, David remained standing. ‘Are you up to another dance, Ann?' he asked, unimpressed by this reincarnation of Jack Burton and eager to get away from that table.

‘The flesh is willing but the back is weak. Ask Mum. She loves to dance,' Ann replied.

Johnny had watched them dance earlier in the night. They were well matched on the dance floor. Maybe he'd envied them.

What was it that drew two people together? What was it that held them together? He turned to stare at Bronwyn and Nick and he smiled, wondered if they'd make it to their first anniversary.

He'd married a few score, spoken the words and blessed the rings. He'd advised a few score contemplating the union, or contemplating the dissolving of the union, but he'd never been with a woman.

He laughed, and poured more wine, drank to celibacy. He'd been perfect material for the priesthood. By the time he was eight years old he'd seen enough of the male animal rutting in the dirt to kill that
urge. Raping, murdering bastard.

Lay down and play dead, you cold bitch
.

He'd been three or four when he'd run to their room, afraid of the dark, and seen him on top, heard Ellie crying. He'd got a backhander for his trouble that night and he'd never gone to their room again, but a year later he'd belted his father with a piece of firewood when he'd found him on top of her in the kitchen. Six
or seven at the time, he'd seen Bessy's bull at the heifers. He'd known. He'd known too much.

Maybe that's what he'd expected to find that Christmas Eve. Time trapped. Ellie weeping in the dust, the bastard on top, laughing. He could have pulled him off, shoved the kitchen knife between his ribs, split his head open with the wood axe, blown him to hell with his own gun.

He laughed again and
this time Ann turned to him, a question in her eyes if not on her lips. His laughter continued until she reached for the bottle of wine, poured a little into her glass then placed the wine out of reach.

His reach was long and he poured more wine while staring at the bride's table, where David now stood behind Ellie. He watched her smile, watched her wriggle her feet back into her shoes, willing
to dance with a divorced man if it allowed her to escape the table of Smith aunties.

‘She was born to laugh, born to dance,' John said. ‘I remember that night at the shire hall, old Mrs Norris on the piano and her son, Bert, on the drums. Mum knew everyone in town. They all danced with her. She was laughing, happy. She used to have a beautiful laugh. Then that bastard walked in, stood at the
door and stared at her. She closed her mouth and cowered, left her partner stranded and walked to the door. A flighty little bird mesmerised by a venomous snake.'

‘Don't start on him tonight, Johnny.'

‘I'm not starting. I'm finishing. I'm having a wake for the bastard. Join me.' She reached for the bottle, pushed it down the table. ‘It's my party and I'll drink if I want to,' he sang, his face
close to hers.

‘You're making a fool of yourself.'

‘No. You made me the fool, sister mine.'

Bessy was outside having a smoke. A silenced Father Fogarty had driven Granny Bourke home. Whether he got her out of his back seat or not was another matter. Father Fogarty and Gran out on the tiles all night? That would set the old town talking.

The thought tickled John's funny bone; his head tossed
back, he roared with laughter, spilling his wine as he pointed his glass at cousin Mickey, dancing in his sleep, propped up by his wife.

At the far end of the table, Malcolm Fletcher, in deep conversation with Kerrie Fogarty, lifted his many chins to glare at Johnny; Kerrie lifted her eyebrows, smiled. His laughter dying as swiftly as
it had been born, John turned to Ann.

She didn't want to
be beside him. Her back was turned.

There was a time when she'd tailed him like a small shadow. He stared at her back, waiting for her to turn. She looked at her watch, at the dancers bouncing to the jarring, broken rhythm of some Smith band.