As the Earth Turns Silver (3 page)

Edie McKechnie was digging in the woodpile searching for slaters, spiders, beetles, anything wriggly with lots of legs, when her brother, Robbie, came racing home with his friends: the show-off big kid, Billy, who always bossed the others around; Wally, who looked like he'd eaten a chelsea bun too many; some other silly, dirty boys.

‘Want to see a trick, Edie?' Billy asked.

Edie glanced up, then ignored him. She lifted a piece of wood. Underneath, in the dirt and damp wood dust, she found four slaters. She flipped one onto its back with her nail, watched the pale eyelash legs wave, the soft grey armour curl.

‘Look!' yelled Billy.

Edie noticed the stick for the first time when Billy reached out and flicked off Wally's cap.

‘Hey,' said Wally as he scrambled to catch it, then picked it up from the ground.

‘Let me, let me try,' said Robbie.

As he grabbed the stick and aimed at Wally's head, Edie noticed dirt all over her brother's clothes, grass and who-knows-what in the mess of his thick red hair.

‘Ow! Ya bounder!' yelled Wally. ‘I'll knock yer blimmin' head off!'

‘No blimmin' way!' Robbie laughed and ran off, with Wally and the other boys chasing.

‘Was that Robbie?' Their mother stood in the doorway, her face flushed from thumping irons onto sheets, shirts, petticoats, skirts, swapping them as they cooled with a hot iron from the range.

‘He's taken off with Wally and Billy again.'

‘Bother. I need him to chop wood. You'd better come in and help me cook dinner.'

Edie looked down. Her slaters had disappeared, even the one she'd flipped onto its back. She'd have to come out later with a jar. She wiped her hands on her skirt, stood up and went into the house, trying to remember what slaters ate for dinner.

*

Katherine McKechnie's neck and shoulders ached. She still felt the effects of hauling yesterday's wet washing and today the effort of lifting heavy irons. In winter, the range and the irons and the work kept her warm, but now sweat plastered her bodice, her petticoats, to her skin.

She stood at the bench and lopped the top and bottom off an onion, peeled away the skin. She should have started earlier, not finished ironing shirts that Donald wouldn't need till Thursday or Friday . . . Ow! She examined her nail. Thank goodness, no blood. She blinked. What was God thinking when he created onions? She wiped her eyes, hurriedly chopped, shoved the pieces into the hot fat, tossed a second onion into the bottom of the pantry. Glanced at Edie.

‘Careful . . . If you cut off a finger it won't grow back, you know . . . Here . . .' She took the knife from her daughter and showed her again. ‘Keep your fingers out of the way. As you cut, you have to keep moving your hand down the carrot away from the knife . . . That's more like it . . . When it gets too little, just leave it and start another. I'll finish off.'

‘Mum?'

‘Yes?'

‘What do slaters eat?'

Katherine looked up from the kidney she was slicing. ‘Well, I don't know. What do other insects eat?'

Edie stopped chopping. ‘They're not insects, Mum.'

‘What?'

‘Insects have six legs.'

Katherine stared at her daughter. She wasn't even seven. ‘Where did you get that from?' she asked.

‘You know – that book we got from the library.'

Katherine laughed. Of course. Both the children could read beyond their years. How could they not with their father a newspaperman,
a purveyor of words
, as he liked to say. But it was Edie, the youngest, who seemed the most eager, dragging Katherine to the Newtown library each week, bringing her novels by Jane Austen or George Eliot – surely she couldn't really understand them – and non-fiction books with beautiful colour illustrations on any subject – ornithology, Egyptian history, Etruscan architecture. Robbie, on the other hand, seemed to thrive on the exploits of Revolver Dick or Jim, the Slayer of the Prairies. If he'd been old enough, one of his favourite pastimes would have been the games evenings at the library. But they were shut down for ‘destructiveness and rowdiness'. Katherine smiled grimly. Give him a few years and he'd likely be one of the chief culprits.

She scraped chunks of beef and kidney into the pot, looked across at Edie. ‘So how many legs do slaters have?'

‘Fourteen.' Edie grinned. ‘I counted.'

‘So what do you call slaters if they're not insects? Did it tell you that in—?'

The front door slammed and Robbie came running down the hall to the kitchen. Peered into the smoking pot. ‘Steak and kidney . . . Can I have something to eat?' He reached for the biscuit tin.

Katherine smacked away his hand. ‘Go and chop some wood and bring it in, and then you can help yourself to a slice of bread and dripping.' She looked at his filthy face, the grass stains and dirt on his clothes, his black-edged nails. ‘But wash your hands first. I don't want dirty marks on the loaf.'

After he'd gone out, Edie asked, ‘Do you think slaters might like bread?'

‘I don't know, dear. Ants do. And birds.' She noticed a chunk pulled out of the loaf. ‘And naughty boys.'

An hour later, Robbie put down his fork after just one mouthful. ‘I'm not hungry,' he said.

Katherine sighed. ‘Well, you shouldn't have eaten so much bread then, should you? I did say
one
slice.'

Donald McKechnie spat into his plate. ‘No wonder the boy can't eat! How long did you cook this for? Five minutes? How many times do I have to tell you?'

‘Then perhaps you shouldn't insist on steak and kidney on Tuesdays. It takes all day to do the ironing and that doesn't leave much time for cooking.'

‘Then put the dinner on in the morning, woman! Haven't you got anything in that skull of yours?'

Katherine examined Donald's red face, his twitching moustache. She had more teeth in that skull of hers than he did, that's for sure. What did he say? Fed up to the back teeth? It was his back teeth, or lack thereof, that was the problem. She imagined his mouth stuffed full of tough, sinewy stew, his jaw working and working, gravy leaking from the corner of his mouth, from his ears. She looked down and tried not to smile.

‘Eat it tomorrow,' she muttered without meeting his eyes.

She took his plate into the kitchen and scraped the stew back into the pot, sliced the last piece of Sunday's roast, cooked till it fell from the bone (thank goodness on wash days they ate leftover roast), and laid it on the remains of Donald's gravy. She could have told him that Mac had run out of kidneys, that he'd told her to come back in the afternoon. She could have told him to wait another hour for dinner instead of always insisting it be on the table at six. She spooned more gravy over the top and took the plate back out.

Donald was telling Robbie about some incident at work: ‘. . . and then the peabrain . . .'

Katherine could hear them laughing but she didn't know, didn't care why. She felt tired. Very tired.

She'd met him at her sister's wedding. She noticed the way people listened to his stories, laughed at his jokes. The way women could not help but flirt with him. Even her mother and sister. She watched, fascinated, almost horrified at how he moved through the room, a steamer moving through water, leaving a wake behind him.

Did he feel her watching? He looked up, directly at her, made some excuse and made his way across the dance floor.

He told her the radiance of her dress brought out the light in her eyes like the wings of a
Doxocopa cherubina
. A butterfly, he said. From Venezuela. Peru. Had she heard of those places? Its uniqueness, he said, lay in its iridescence. You might look once and see only a plain but lovely green, but look again, down its wings, and it was like gazing into a prism – shimmering strips of blue and green.

‘What about the whites of my eyes?' she'd said recklessly. ‘Do they remind you of cabbage butterflies?'

He'd stared at her, surprised, and she blushed. She turned to leave, but he caught her by the arm – she could feel the tingle of his hand on her skin. He looked deeply into her eyes and said, ‘You should come and see my collection. It is but a small affair, but the
Doxocopa cherubina
is well worth perusing.'

Within the week he was walking her around his parlour, stopping at each framed, winged body. ‘Katherine,' he said. ‘Kate . . .' He placed the palm of his hand upon her back as he guided her from one specimen to another, told her butterflies and moths belonged to the same order
–
only butterflies were the more beautiful. Later she discovered he'd bought them from a lepidopterist he'd interviewed for the
Post.
He'd memorised the Latin names, country of origin, distinguishing features of male and female.

The
Doxocopa cherubina
was still pinned and framed on the wall of their parlour. Breathtaking if, as he said, you looked down, not up, its wings. It was very still. It had lost the capacity to breathe.

As Katherine watched her husband eat soft meat and gravy and cauliflower boiled till its grey lumpiness mashed in the mouth like small brains, she saw very clearly – had she not always known, if not for a temporary madness? – all of Donald's women were
Lepidoptera
: either a moth to the flame or merely part of his silent collection.

‘. . . the gravy's not bad, I suppose, considering . . .'

Katherine felt Donald's gaze.

‘. . . but put in some more onion, for godsake. Didn't you learn anything when Mother came to stay? God bless her soul, may she rest in peace.'

Katherine gathered up the plates and took them into the kitchen – Donald's and Edie's eaten clean, hers and Robbie's barely touched. She could hear Donald getting down the dictionary that had passed from McKechnie father to McKechnie son. ‘
Procrustean
,' Donald was saying. ‘Robbie, what does
procrustean
mean?'

Katherine's finger stung where a line of blood pooled beneath her nail. She scraped the uneaten food back into the pot. Left the onions to rot in the pantry.

When Donald came home in the wee hours reeking of whisky and tobacco, Katherine pulled the eiderdown over her face and feigned sleep.

‘Met a fascinating gentleman tonight,' he said, his words slurred and slow. Katherine pictured a giant snail, with Donald's waxed moustache, sliming across the room.
But snails do not lurch drunkenly into bed
, she thought.
I'm being unkind to snails.

‘. . . Terry's a splendid specimen of a man,' he said. ‘And don't you get any funny ideas about it . . . We had a few drinks with . . .'

A few?

Donald rattled off names of
prominent
Members of Parliament, as he called them.

Katherine waited, but before he could say more he had slumped over the bed, letting out loud,
immelodious
snores.

Katherine smiled. Did Donald know that word? Had he found it in his dictionary? Now, such words came to her only in his absence.
Immelodious.
The sound of birdsong, even more beautiful than
melodious
. The sound of contradiction. Like waking in the night and seeing for the first time. Like falling out of love.

For days Donald couldn't speak of anything but Lionel Terry.
Terry, graduate of Eton and Oxford. Terry, descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte. Terry in the Transvaal fighting the savage Matabeles. Terry, friend of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger. Terry the poet and painter.
How could Donald remember? Hadn't he been drunk? Was he having lunch with the
splendid specimen
every other day? (And wasn't that the word you used to describe dead things? Things you collected and pinned under glass?) Katherine swept around Donald's feet with the hearth brush, making him move one foot, then the other. She swept in front of the fireplace and then came back again – and again – imitating the perversions of a small, obstinate fly, but nothing could dampen Donald's enthusiasm.

‘He walked all the way from Mangonui to Wellington carrying just a walking stick and a knapsack. Bet you a shilling you have no idea where Mangonui is, eh. Kate, he pretty much walked the entire length of the North Island!'

Katherine swallowed. He hadn't called her Kate for years.

‘Damned fine poet, too,' Donald continued. ‘Gave me one of his tracts.' He waved it at her, but she excused herself to empty the dustpan.

‘Yes indeed, a fine example of a British gentleman,' he was saying as she left the room.

Katherine had a suspicion of British gentlemen. They had the right accent and excellent manners, which concealed any number of vices. Good riddance to bad rubbish, she thought as she watched coal dust and ash fall into the bin in a small cloud.

‘I've invited him for dinner Sunday,' Donald called from the parlour.

Katherine examined Mr Terry upon his arrival. He was at least six foot five. Athletic. Handsome. He stood very erect – obviously a man with military experience. She had to admit, reluctantly, that he did
appear
a splendid specimen of a man, though his abundant hair had turned prematurely grey.

‘Mrs McKechnie,' he said, ‘a pleasure.' He smiled. ‘Is that roast mutton I smell cooking? I'm sure you are an excellent cook, Mrs McKechnie, but regretfully I do not eat meat. Our carnivorous tendencies are an unhealthy obsession and play havoc with our constitutions.'

Katherine was at a loss for words. She had never heard of anyone who did not eat meat. All she could do was summon the children to set the table.

Terry ruffled Robbie's hair. ‘Let the boy join us in the parlour,' he said.

From the kitchen, Katherine could hear their outbursts of laughter. Edie sniffed.

‘Blow your nose, Edie. It does a young lady no favours to sniff like a dog.' Katherine bit her lip. She could hear her own mother's voice – the same words, the exact same tone. My sakes, she didn't want to be like her mother!

She watched Edie wipe her eyes and blow into an embroidered handkerchief. She put her hand lightly on her daughter's shoulder.

‘If you hurry and set the table, then you can call them straight in for dinner.'

‘Mrs McKechnie,' Terry said as he entered the dining room, ‘where may I ask do you buy your vegetables? From an honest Briton or do you buy them from the heathen?

Katherine stepped back, for Terry towered above her. ‘The Chinaman's fruit and vegetables are cheaper,' she said, ‘and fresher.'

Terry smiled. His upper lip twitched. He looked her in the eye and then, as if the leading man in some theatrical production, he began to recite, his voice resonant, deliberate, his bearing, his hands somehow embellishing each word:

See, advancing, grim, relentless, as a scourge sent forth from hell,
Comes the blighting curse of Mammon, in the white man's land to dwell;
Mongol, Ethiop, nameless horror, human brute from many a clime,
Vomited from earth's dark pest holes; bred of plague, diseases, and crime.
Swathed in rags and noisome odours, gaunt and fleshless, dwarfed of limb,
Visages like the grisly jackal seeking dead midst shadows dim;
See the horde of drug besotten, sin begotten, fiends of filth,
Swarming o'er thy nation's bulwarks; pillaging thy nation's wealth.

He pulled tracts from his suit pocket and handed them to the children. Katherine saw the brightness, the flush of excitement on Robbie's face, the fascination and uncertainty of Edie.

Suddenly, inexplicably, she wished the bowl of carrots in her hands were not chopped and boiled, but still whole and raw, sharpened, hardened like arrows. For one long moment she imagined tipping a water-filled pot of them; imagined Terry's astonished expression as he lay soaked and pinned to the floor, half a dozen carrots passing through his chest and into the floorboards. She could hear the tinny, frenzied piano accompaniment, the quick, jerky black and white motion of his neck, his arms, his legs, as he tried to pick himself up. She almost laughed, nervously, astonished at her ludicrous imagination. Instead she placed the bowl on the table and showed Terry to his seat while Donald carved the mutton.

Terry asked Robbie to pass a tract to his mother. Katherine pressed her lips into a thin smile. No one noticed. Terry had the poetic gift. He and Donald had enough conversation in them for the whole family.

‘We cannot eradicate the natural hatred between races with civilisation,' Terry was saying as Katherine passed vegetables around the table. ‘We have to end this insane practice of importing alien races . . . No, thank you. I'm sure you are a fine cook, Mrs McKechnie, but I do not eat food contaminated by Chinamen . . . This employment of alien labour is a criminal injustice to the British workman. It's the chief cause of poverty, crime, degeneracy and disease throughout the Empire . . .'

Donald raised his glass. ‘Hear, hear!'

‘Robbie,' Terry continued, ‘where do leprosy and bubonic plague come from?'

When Robbie could not answer, Terry said, ‘Why, from the filthy heathen, son. The Mongols and black savages . . .'

Katherine gritted her teeth. Robbie was
not
Terry's son. But Donald smiled, nodded, patted Robbie on the back.

Terry spread butter on a slice of Katherine's home-baked bread. He turned to Donald. ‘The presence of Asiatics in this country jeopardises the rights of our fellow Britons. We have to take drastic measures before it's too late . . .'

Terry chewed on his bread. ‘A wholesome loaf, Mrs McKechnie.'

To Donald he said, ‘As for the Maoris, there has never in the history of the world been a case of two races living together in the same country without the deterioration and decay of one or the other. The weakest race is always doomed . . .'

Katherine tried to consider at least some of Terry's words. After all, didn't the politicians say precisely this – that the Maoris required protection, that they were in danger of extinction?

Terry reached for another slice of bread. ‘The Maoris are now in such a state of moral, mental and physical degeneration that without complete and utter separation, their race will be beyond salvation. I see no practical solution but to exchange all lands in Maori possession for islands such as Stewart and the Chathams . . .'

Katherine wondered how much land was still in Maori possession. And how many Maoris were there left to be crammed onto the islands?

‘An interesting proposition,' Donald said. ‘But how to achieve the desired result – now that's the challenge.'

Terry swallowed. ‘McKechnie, my man, nothing worth its salt comes without hard work and sacrifice . . . As for race-adulterers, they should be transferred to outlying islands also. Mark my words . . .'

Race-adulterers
? Katherine had never even considered the mixing of races, but to use the term adultery seemed absurd. She accepted Terry's exhortation and drew a thick black line through every one of his words.

‘My petitions to members of Parliament, the Commissioner of Customs, the Minister of Native Affairs, etcetera, etcetera, have been to no avail,' Terry was saying.

He declined the roast mutton, the vegetables, even Katherine's bread and butter pudding. He did not eat foreign foods. Sugar, he said. He did not even drink tea. Katherine went to the meat safe to fetch him milk. She didn't know whether to be alarmed or to be sorry for the man.

Early the next morning before anyone else rose, Katherine searched for the tracts. She knew Donald had his, but hadn't Terry left another three? Where were they all? She found two and fed them, deliciously, to the coal range, filled the kettle and set it on top. How she would savour her porridge this morning, her sweet, milky tea.