Jarulan by the River Read online

  Rufina kicked Boss on, though he hardly needed the encouragement, and rode ahead of Fenchurch all the way back to his house. The rain was sleeking, delicious, and as she rode she tipped her head back to let it trickle down her throat. She could feel his eyes on her all the way home, even when a bend in the road would have obscured her.

  16.

  EVEN FROM THIS DISTANCE EVIE COULD SEE THAT MATTHEW had eyes only for the German bitch, the back view of her riding before him and turning in at his lion gates so that he didn’t notice the black and white dog bounding away towards the Tyrells’ place, and neither did he see Evie, passing through the long grass behind it. Evie saw them though, riding back separately and without the doctor.

  ‘The doctor was taken away last Wednesday,’ she could have told them if they’d bothered to ask, since one of her brothers had told her when they’d met on the lower field. She hadn’t asked Donny what he was doing there and neither had he asked why she wasn’t at work up in the house; instead he’d told her the latest news. She’d wanted to tell someone of her own developments, but Donny wasn’t the one. If it had been either of her closest sisters, Bridget or Teresa, she would have told her, told her everything. Everything!

  The Fenchurches wouldn’t miss her. Besides, she couldn’t stay another moment in a house where she wasn’t appreciated, and that was in any case haunted. On her return from the river Nan had taken her roughly by the shoulder and given her a shake. The German had tittle-tattled on her after Evie pulled her hair and yanked her dress, sitting at the kitchen table with her eyes swollen from crying and her nose red.

  She should toughen up. Evie had been on the brink of telling her so and giving her a slap, biding her time until Nan went off to perform a task elsewhere when they had heard Matthew calling from the yard. He’d sounded panic-stricken, and Evie had flown to him, Nan and the German following. Between them they’d carried Louisa inside, Nan going ahead and giving directions to one of the musty downstairs rooms. It was pink and gilt, with a rolltop desk and a glass dome that contained a poor platypus and a cruel bird. Who would want to look at such an ugly thing, full of mouldering death?

  When I am mistress I will have it carried outside and tossed on the rubbish heap, Evie had thought, and risked laying her open hand on Matthew’s back as he bent over his prone daughter. Either he didn’t feel Evie’s touch or he ignored it — Louisa’s mouth was open at a peculiar angle, as if she’d dislocated her jaw when she fell, and she was breathing loudly, while the German was untying the black ribbon at Louisa’s throat and Nan shaping the pillow under her head to keep her airways open. Then Nan was opening one of Louisa’s sightless eyes, and then the other, until Louisa opened them for herself and looked up at them all.

  She was like a dead person coming back to life. When her father felt the hinges of her jaw and clicked them in place, Louisa cried out. Then they asked her to move her limbs and she did, with Nan gently squeezing along them, checking for breaks.

  ‘Just stunned, I reckon,’ Nan said, ‘from the fall.’

  Evie retreated to the door and suffered a wave of nausea, which she tried to lessen by taking hold of Matthew as he passed a moment or so later from the room but he pulled sharply away, hissing at her, which so destroyed her that she was unable to reply when Nan asked her to go for the doctor. Then, after the German rode off instead of Evie, Nan had said, ‘She’s losing the child,’ and sent Evie to boil water and fetch towels, and Louisa was crying and screaming and clinging on to Nan, so as soon as Evie had fetched the things that were needed she went out to the yard and whistled again for Llew’s dog.

  She came straight away, as she always did, happy to leave forever a life of imprisonment and neglect. She would be happy at her new home, where the younger children would love her, though Evie considered that they may not get that far, this particular field being alive with snakes. One day, only a couple of years ago, when Llew was here, he and Donny found a whip snake, a young one, not yet grown to full venom. And they’d seen others, bigger, with yellow faces, more poisonous. Evie hoped they were still here, in their hundreds: death adders and tiger snakes, hurrying now to her bare legs and feet, looking for life to feed off and choosing her. Mr Fenchurch could find her body bitten all over; he could weep and wail, he would regret treating her so shabbily.

  But she reached the sagging fence that marked the boundary safely, without incident, and climbed over. There was the yard, turned to skilly mud by the rain; there were the rusting low roofs of the house and the outbuildings, the bulging wattle-and-daub walls of the rooms her father and brothers had added to the original small house. Out by the dunny the house cow nosed through a slew of brown cabbage leaves and it seemed she was the only one home until Evie saw that the door to the chicken shed stood open. Ma’s rear view was only just discernible in the gloom of the fowl house — the raggy bow at the back of her pinny, the trodden-down backs of her boots. The white chickens showed as luminous as Ma’s pale legs and Evie felt a slight pang. She thought perhaps she had missed her mother, missed home. People were supposed to, weren’t they? Even if home was just over the fence.

  ‘Ma?’

  Ma spun round, astonished. ‘You’re back?’

  ‘Standing in front of you, ain’t I?’

  Her mother came out into the light, a chipped enamel basin of five eggs in her hand and looked closely at her. ‘So you are. With a face like rent day. They treating you well up there?’

  Evie nodded but the tears welled. ‘Look what I brought you.’ She turned away from her mother for a moment to pull the chemise from the leg of her bloomers, the puff of silk and lace. As she spun to face her again it caught the light and shimmered, and she saw now that it was smaller than she’d thought, that it would not fit her mother. She was a bigger, bonier woman than the rightful owner. How out of place it seemed here in the rank fowl house. It would seem less so when they went inside. She would smooth it out on the bright crocheted quilt of her mother’s bed.

  ‘Your brothers have gone to the Eltham pub,’ Ma said. Not a word of thanks for the gift but a hard look. Evie saw that she knew it was stolen and that she was not grateful for it.

  ‘And the children?’

  ‘Bridget and Teresa are in the house with the babies. In you go.’

  Ma held the chemise away from her, as if it would burn her.

  ‘If you don’t want it, Ma, I’ll — ’ and she put her hand out for it but Ma shook her head.

  ‘Did they pay you all right?’

  ‘I’ll go back for it,’ Evie said, realising as she said so that she would have to, that if she was quick they may not even have noticed that she’d gone. Nan would have, of course. There would be Nan to deal with. She’d be on the warpath.

  No, she couldn’t possibly go back. Nan would be the least of it. Evie had slipped for a moment into that alternate world where there was no child to be thinking of. She’d ask Tessa to go up to collect her wages. Tessa would be avid for it, to be going up to the big house that rose like a fairy tale on the tongue of the land, to see them all there and hang around as long as Nan would let her. All the Tyrell children, the ones old enough to remember, had loved to go to Jarulan when Min was alive, to see the beautiful lady who gave a children’s Christmas party, who had sent for the kindly old doctor when Bridgie had fallen into the fire.

  There was a flash of marbled black and brown and white, a dash from behind Evie to the shed, a joyful bark and explosion of feathers. Llewellyn’s dog. She had forgotten all about it and now it was killing one of Ma’s best layers, the chook’s open beak jagging back and forth with the dog’s vigorous shake, the other fowls flying in all directions until Ma waded in, shouting, drawing back her heavy boot and kicking the dog in the guts. It reeled back, teeth bared, barking, bloody mouthed.

  ‘What the dickens is going on?’ Youngest sibling on her hip, Bridgie had come out onto the porch to see what all the commotion was and Evie wanted right away to go up to her and tell her what had been burning in her he
art these past few weeks, but the chicken killer had come to weave itself through her legs, still barking, and Ma was yelling something about her being a dingbat and a fool, and to go back and get the money, and the only thing to do was to run.

  It wasn’t until she was halfway across the snake field that she remembered seeing the chemise leave Ma’s grasp to land in the mud, and how Ma had trodden it in as she’d lunged towards Llewellyn’s dog, and how the last word ringing in her ears that exploded from Ma as Evie put a safe distance between them was ‘Thief!’

  ‘You or me?’ she asked the dog.

  She slowed a little, decided to take her time. When Bridgie had come out, it had seemed for an instant that they had swapped places, and that she was looking up at herself, she and that particular sister being so alike, or so Ma said they were until Bridgie got burned. It had seemed, just for a second, that Evie’s life was going on at home regardless, with Bridgie wearing a pink and white striped dress that Evie had once favoured, now too small for her and stained and faded. And then, just before Ma began yelling, she’d seen the rest of it too — what would come. The desolate yard, the stink of shit and wood smoke, the baby on the hip her own baby, and the inevitability of her brothers’ drunken return. Da had brought them up to it and since his death last year they adhered to the family tradition. Some nights if you weren’t careful with your mouth or where you put yourself, it was easy to clock a blow going spare.

  She wouldn’t come back here. Or go to Jarulan. Neither place. Ever. Her feet led her on, aimlessly, to where the track branched, the sandier way leading back to the big house, the other muddier one down to the river. The poor dog was limping from where Ma had kicked it, looking up at Evie now and again as if to ask her what its future was, more so when they reached the river and took the track along the banks that was used more by the Blacks than anyone else. It was slippery-going, thick mud full of broken timber and stumps left from when the river gums were felled for fuel during Llew’s short-lived riverboat enterprise. Since then, boats rarely came this far up.

  Swollen and slate-grey, the river’s surface wrinkled and smoothed in patterns set by the currents and pocked with new rain. At the far bank, which was not so far — they could swim the distance as children — the bush was smoky, the ranges behind veiled in a skirl of wet and wind blowing in from the north. Evie found herself talking to the dog, crooning to it, soothing herself as much as it, asking why it never killed the Jarulan chickens, which would peck around it in the yard and not a whisker would stir.

  ‘What’s your name, girlie?’ she asked it. ‘I wish you could tell me.’

  One night in bed she’d asked Fenchurch the dog’s name and he’d drawn breath to tell her then slammed his mouth shut. It was perhaps their second time together, or their third. There was his face in the candlelight, wide and pale, and a wall coming up in those unearthly eyes. It had reminded her of the cats when they got sick, the white third eyelid that would pass across, only this time cloaking a bleary heart, and the thought of him as a sick cat had made her giggle. A sick old tom, battle worn, ears chewed, a kink in his tail. She’d tickled him in the ribs, kissed him, licked the sweat doglike from his neck. ‘Tell me.’ She’d wheedled and played. ‘What is its name, then, your dotie best doggie?’ And then she’d rattled on with nervous nonsense about how it followed her around, that it loved her, even though she could see he was closed to her now, that, somewhere a long way off, was growing angry.

  ‘Tell me its name, go on. What harm could it do?’

  Eventually, wearily, he’d roused himself enough to say, ‘There were tears when he said goodbye to that dog. I won’t hear another voice say the name, least of all yours.’

  She’d lain down beside him then, quiet, to let him sleep since that was what he wanted, and entertained herself with notions of how different they were but how much the same. You heard of men who took Aboriginal women in to live with them. There was one in Casino, and a farmer out on the heads. They were not as different as that, she and he; at least they were almost the same colour, though some of the Proddies called the Tyrells black. She wasn’t black, not like the Abbos were black. Love bloomed. It could bloom. If he let it.

  There was a stump up ahead, a little higher, where you could sit and look back at the river side of the house. The jetty and the launch were clearly visible, the boat tugging at its moorings. Just there the river was always swift. When the Fenchurch children had wanted to swim they would come up river to the same waterhole as the Tyrells, the safe one below the falls. In those days, before the river gums were felled, you could run along the track through the dappled shade, barely having to watch where you put your feet, passing the small Aboriginal settlement — really only a handful of houses and even poorer than the Tyrells — before the bush grew more dense and closed overhead. People came and went from those huts and houses and very often there was no one there at all, but Evie remembered long-ago days at the waterhole when a group of shy, slender children might appear and swim, their dark narrow limbs flashing in the clear sunlit depths. Llew and Edmond, who were the youngest of the Fenchurches and so closest in age to the oldest Tyrell girls, didn’t mind the Blacks coming to swim, but if Louisa was there she would send them away. Evie had only vague, indistinct memories of her from those years, being ten years younger: Louisa with her nose in the air, passing the washhouse on the days Evie had gone to help her mother; Louisa asking Jimmy Tyrell, who had worked as a groom, to saddle up one of the prime horses then leave it standing waiting for hours, drooping in the heat while she attended to some other matter more pressing, like sitting on the shady verandah with her book, or gossiping with her mother or sister. Even at five or six years of age, Evie had wished she had been born a Fenchurch and not a Tyrell, wished for pretty dresses and handsome horses, for a gentle mother with soft hands and kind eyes.

  Once, she had earned a slap from Ma for asking if she could go and live in the big house, asking if she could be given to them as a present. Thinking back on it now, it seemed the slap had been administered not from wounded motherly love, but more as if Evie had said something indecent.

  ‘You’re not a puppy,’ her mother had hissed at her. ‘And don’t call Nance Nan. You’re not family.’

  She tried now very hard to remember Matthew from those days. Perhaps little girls don’t notice grown men as much as they do women and other more grown-up girls. Matthew from those days had somehow merged among the other men of the farm, the white moleskins and faded blue shirts, the leather boots and straw hats worn by all of them.

  Evie drew her knees up against her stomach and propped her chin, letting the new rain slake her head and face. She was not born a Fenchurch, but her baby would be. She would make sure the world knew it was Matthew’s. She would lie if she had to, play a dirty trick and say he had forced her, when it had been the other way around. Not that she had forced him, really — how could she? It was an impossible thing for a girl to force a man, but that first night when she had gone into the dining room and sat on his knee, his pale eyes had lit more with surprise than anything else. Lust came later. No, she wouldn’t call it that. It was love. Love of a kind.

  She could have strung him along a little, not slept with him that very first night, but what would have been the point? It wasn’t as if she had anything else to give him other than herself. Rich people played all kinds of games before they banged; Evie supposed that was because of money. Why else? They had to make sure the other person was worth the price and then you only gave it over on the wedding night.

  Well. She wasn’t like that. She didn’t have that quality to sell, not like the first Mrs Fenchurch, the class and elegance, though she had the same religion. Neither did she know how you got hold of that quality unless you had been born with it; and it struck her with a warm, delicious flush that ran the length and centre of her bones that this child could have it. Quality. Matthew would know it was his. It would grow up at Jarulan even if Matthew wouldn’t marry her. No chance of raisi
ng it at home, overcrowded, unwelcoming and full of fleas. She could never do that.

  If they were to live in the same house they would have to be man and wife. She could see no other way. Other women had made clever marriages. An old man in Mullumbimby had married his young housekeeper, only sixteen. Because of the war there would be lots of marriages that would never have happened if so many young men hadn’t gone away to fight. Old men were all that were left and they were hitching up with the pretty girls.

  The rain had lessened but fell still. Once again the river dimpled and swirled with watery patterns and so much reflected the soft grey of the sky that it was almost white. It was like a length of satin or silk, thought Evie, the same silken cloth as the stolen chemise, but laid out for cutting into a wedding dress. Here is where you would cut the long sleeves, with a ruffle of bronzed river grass. Here is the stuff for the bodice, pure and undisturbed, the surface smooth as a pearl. And over there, where the rushing water pleated around the rocks in the shallows, that would make a skirt to fall gracefully from the waistband. The river was her wedding dress.

  She wriggled happily, sitting on the wet stump, and lifted her feet to examine them. Her wet frock clung to her legs and her feet weighed with great clods of mud. Less her trousseau, more her grave. Life was so exciting she didn’t know if she was delighted or terrified, if she wanted to live or die. She could throw herself in the west-running river right now and travel down past the house without anybody noticing, past Jarulan and the Chinese tobacco farm, past the orchards and fields and bush to Lismore, where perhaps somebody could fish her out, and then there would be a funeral and Ma and her sisters would weep at the graveside. Matthew would feel compelled to attend and would weep too, in spite of himself, and then everyone would know the secret of how he loved her. If God was merciful He would let her spirit fly around the church for long enough to see Fenchurch’s grief, before she was condemned to the Fires of Hell. She could see her dotie weeping, walking behind the coffin.