One Sunday (24 page)

Dave Kennedy picked his peaches by touch alone, barely seeing what he picked, but he was getting them in. If a man decided he was going to do something, then he could do it, and do it alone if he had to. What he couldn't get off these top trees today would be too ripe tomorrow for the cannery, and that was life, man trying to defeat nature and nature putting the boot in every time.

He'd been down to the pickers' camp and, like Tom, found no one home. He'd gone out to see Reg Curtin, who'd had five blokes working, plus himself, his missus and three kids. He'd stopped picking long enough to offer his condolences. His wife stopped long enough to run into the house and return with a cake they'd intended bringing around later on. They hadn't offered any pickers.

Len Larkin would have lent a hand, in the singular, if he'd been at home to offer it. Tige would have been here, picking since daylight, if he'd been alive. Bazza, Maurie, Norm, Ken – they all would have been here, the whole bloody football team would have been here, if they'd been alive.

‘What was the use of it all, Tige? And what's the bloody use of this?' he asked the sky as disciplined fingers plucked peaches, placed them down.

Nicholas had been by, with Arthur. He hadn't offered any of his Johnsons, so Dave hadn't offered any tea and cake. He couldn't start thinking about Nicholas Squire. Not today. He had to get these top trees stripped, get his peaches across to Willama tonight. By tomorrow the cannery would be picking and choosing.

Overhead an aeroplane buzzed across the blue glare. It sounded like a blowfly. Where was it going, and why? How did it stay up there? How did it push itself through thin air – or did it pull itself through? Dave couldn't answer that one. He didn't know how they flew, didn't know how the burning of kerosene down the bottom of a refrigerator made ice form up the top, didn't know how a voice could move along a telephone line from Melbourne to Molliston, or how the wireless at the Melbourne hotel had picked up music and voices from the air and pushed them out through a wooden box. Some things you had to accept without question – because they were, and the why and the how were unimportant.

Some things were beyond acceptance. Letting Squire get his hands on the deeds to Kennedy land – that was beyond acceptance.

‘Don't think about it,' he warned. ‘Think about ice. Now, you put a block of ice up the top of your metal-lined ice chest and it cools down the bottom. That's logical. That a man can understand. No ice in that chest today. I should have bought her some before I left Willama.'

He called in to the Willama iceworks regularly, always making sure there was plenty of ice for Nicholas Squire's little German-loving slut. He'd crawled around her like a kelpie pup, waiting for a kick in the guts. Couldn't think about her either. It made his head burn. Maybe it was the sun burning his head. So, what could he think of that might be safe. Sunburn? Sunstroke? That bloody sun was up there taunting him and ripening his peaches, telling him it had won the war.

He looked at his arms where the sun-bleached hairs showed white against red-brown skin. He looked at his hands, hard, calloused, and for a moment he thought he was looking at his father's hands. They were better hands than his father's. Right from when he was a kid, he'd given those hands a task and they'd found a way to do it. They'd learned how to crack lice and to throw bombs, they'd picked wild flowers, lifted corpses into shallow graves. They'd trembled too. When the shooting started, when those first shells exploded and bits of bodies started flying, when the boats started bringing in boatloads of the dead, those hands had trembled. World full of smoke and noise and death. Ocean full of blood. A hand reaching out to him from the mud – and no body attached to that hand. Whose hand had it been? A good hand, bigger than Dave's but nothing to drive it, no brain attached.

Discipline had got him through those first days. A man was nothing without discipline. Then, somewhere along the line, he'd lost his fear and become a killing machine, a pair of eyes, two steady hands and hatred. Hate those bastards, sight unseen. Shoot the bastards, dodge their bullets. One more dead, one less to kill.

He couldn't remember half of the places he'd been. All the same place. All smoke and stench and trenches full of bloody corpses and boys looking like walking corpses. He'd fought for towns he couldn't name in countries he hadn't seen. Just the guns and the lice and the mud and the blood while the bullets whizzed around him, getting the poor little bugger standing beside him, or behind. Dave Kennedy, the lucky bastard, the born leader of men. He'd been a hero in the army. Now he was no one. Nothing. All of his work here in vain, all of his dreams dead.

‘And that's the trouble with chasing dreams, Tige. It's better not to catch them, mate, better to let them stay green on the tree. Dreams are like peaches, they rot fast once you pick them, bruise them, hold them in your hand.'

He moaned, trying to force his mind and his hands back to those peaches. He had to keep going, keep picking those bastards and beat that sun. One less peach on that tree was one less he had to pick. Couldn't make those hands reach out, though. Arms aching, leg, hip, back aching. No feeling in one foot. Maybe that numbness would creep up, kill all of his aches.

‘The battle of the orchard has been fought and lost. Fall back, chaps,' he said, stepping back. ‘Fall back to yesterday, and we'll try again tomorrow.'

And his leg went from beneath him, sitting him down hard in the dirt. And the tree mocked him, tossed down a peach to hit him in the groin. Tomorrow the ground would be littered with peaches. He couldn't pick the lot, even if he did get up. And he didn't want to get up, anyway. What was the use of getting up only to fall down again?

‘No bloody use at all. You knew that, Tige,' he said.

He hadn't slept last night. Hadn't eaten anything solid today. And bloody Nicholas Squire with his beribboned bouquet, standing there, expecting him to stop his picking so he could go with him and place his bouquet in the dust.

Dave picked up the fallen peach and brushed it clean on his sleeve before biting into it, the juice, like warm blood, dripping between his fingers. ‘The peaches are rotting, your bouquet is wilting, your pretty little whore is dead, Nicholas, and that's life. That's life.' He bit again, sucked on the seed, studied the seed, then pitched it at a cluster of peaches. They didn't fall. His hand raised, his index finger pointing like a gun at the cluster, he sighted down the barrel of his finger. ‘Bang! Fall into that crate, you bastards. Pick your bloody selves.' Still they clung there. He aimed his finger gun again, gave it three shots this time. The peaches refused to fall into his crate, so he turned his index finger to his head. ‘You're a failure. You failed, Lieutenant Kennedy. Bang!'

And he fell onto his back, his arms outstretched in the dirt, and he laughed, laughed hard, because a soldier learned not to cry.

‘The city coppers' car broke down, so Mr Thompson doesn't know what time they'll get here now,' Mike Murphy said, passing on the latest police information to the widow Dolan.

Ten minutes after three and a few thirsty men had wandered down, sighted the widow sitting on her cane outdoor couch, and wandered away again.

She was still considering the situation and Mike wanted her to make up her mind so he could get back to the river. He couldn't leave her in the lurch, though. Her rooster roster was steady work and he didn't want to lose the job, but he wanted to find that handbag, and sitting here, waiting for her to decide what she was doing, was a waste of valuable diving time.

‘You know how I thought someone had pinched your bag and threw it in the river? Well, it's turned out to be Rachael Squire's, so if there's not much chance of me working for you today, we'll get back to the river.'

‘I'm thinking about it, Mike.'

She must have been someone's daughter, though she'd given little thought to the woman who had dumped her on the steps of a Catholic church, thus subjecting the newborn to an early education in privation, purgatory and a hairshirt brown dress. Her first memory was of that brown dress and that itching, and of a black-clad nun holding her down in an iron barred cot while another tied her hands to those bars, determined to stop her scratching.

One black-clad old biddy had tried with religious fervour to belt that scratching out of little Kathleen. She may have earned her place in heaven for her diligence too, but within Kathleen there had been an embryonic will that would not submit to tyranny. She'd taken a run at the old biddy one evening, head-butted her in the middle, knocking the wind clean out of her sails. Close to her eleventh birthday at the time, she'd gone over the fence and run for freedom, soon learning that freedom wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

For a year or so she'd slept with the cats and urchins in the alleys, eating when, and what, and if she could. Maybe she'd been twelve the night Sam flattened her when he caught her ransacking the kitchen of his establishment, and pitching what she could find out the window to the others. They left her to her fate, and when she regained her senses, Sam and one of his women had given her a lump of bread and dripping, which she made the mistake of eating. She was tossed into a tub of cold water laced with phenol, scrubbed, deloused and, when judged clean enough, taught a thing or two by Sam.

After a week or so, little Kathleen learned enough to realise that a little girl had to do what pock-faced Sam told her to do if she didn't want a beating and wanted to eat. So she'd done it, and he'd given her dresses that didn't make her itch.

Perhaps her forebears had been Irish. Some uncanny luck saved her from the rampant disease of that establishment, but too soon she'd grown tall, had rounded out, so Sam moved her to another of his establishments, closer in to the city.

Life. It's just a series of accidental happenings, some good, some bad – like the night a dissatisfied customer blasted a hole through Sam with a shotgun. During the following melee, Kathleen grabbed what she could and took off, heading west.

Two days later, admiring the pies in a baker's window and considering the possibility of getting off with one, she'd seen the sign in his window:
Elderly gent requires Woman for cleaning, cooking, shopping. Must be of good character.
Not yet fifteen, she couldn't cook, knew little about cleaning, but could probably do the shopping. She'd given her face a lick and a promise, drawn her hair back tight and walked in.

The baker, not interested in her character, sent her to a crumbling house around the corner, where she met old Joe, an ancient Irish gent, blind, deaf, half crippled, living alone and no one to care if he lived or died – or not in Australia. He'd come of a good family and received a small annual income from them, so she remained with him, sleeping on the floor in the kitchen and caring for him in her own haphazard way while saving every penny he paid her, until the morning she cooked the porridge for his breakfast but wasn't able to wake him up to eat it.

Life. It's like walking through a gallery of portraits. Some you see and take an immediate liking to, so you stop a while, get to know those features and maybe wish you could take that one along with you when you move on, though all the while knowing you can't, because it belongs to someone else. Most of those portraits you ignore, forget about the instant you step away to the next.

She moved on to a derelict rooming house for a time, but if you couldn't pay the rent, you didn't get a room, and if you kept paying out money for that room when you had none coming in, you eventually ran out of the stuff. Out on the street again, wearing all she owned on her back, she wandered into the Fawkner cemetery to admire the flowers. There she considered her options and, just about to decide that she only had one, along came Mr Bowen.

When people meet in a cemetery, it's customary to talk about who they've lost, so Kathleen claimed the fancy tombstone of a Joseph William Brown, dead these past two months. She told Mr Bowen that she'd been forced to seek employment as a housekeeper since her father passed on.

An innocent man, Mr Bowen had been tied so close to his dead mother's apron strings, he'd never been game to look at another woman. He told her that he'd worked for thirty years in a menswear shop and how each night he'd come home from work and dear Mother placed a nourishing meal before him. He told her, too, of dear Mother's treasured collection of ornaments, and how the dust was building up on her ornaments, and how badly dear Mother's house missed her touch. He talked about her for an hour – then he offered Kathleen employment, one day a week.

She'd never been backward in coming forward. She turned up on his doorstep at seven the next morning and he paid her in advance. He was surprised to see her there when he returned late that night. She placed a meal before him – nourishing or not, she didn't know – the pie she'd bought out of her own pay at the baker's, the spud she'd helped herself to, then boiled in its jacket. He ate it. Being too late to send her out into the street where she'd be in moral danger, he allowed her to sleep in his mother's room.

He'd been the one in moral danger, though too innocent to know it. A week later, still innocent but enjoying the meals she cooked from dear Mother's recipe book, a neighbour suggested to him that it was not quite fitting to have a young servant woman living with him in the house. He wasn't the type to argue with a woman, so he suggested to Kathleen that she leave. She didn't. A month later, he suggested that some of the items in his mother's extensive wardrobe might be more appropriate than her own wardrobe. And her hair, perhaps he might style it as he'd styled dear Mother's. After three months of hurrying home to her each night, dodging the neighbours' stares, he suggested that in order to still neighbourhood and church gossip – if she was agreeable, then perhaps they could wed.

She was agreeable. She loved dear Mother's house and its garden, loved the pictures on the walls, loved dear Mother's piano – hadn't liked her photograph or her dust-collecting ornaments, but she kept them dust free. So she put her age up ten years and wed Mr Bowen in the Methodist church with a bunch of flowers from his garden, and he went to his narrow bed that night, and she went to dear Mother's.

And that's the way they lived for six years. Six long years of growing, of being fussed over, of never having to worry about where the next few bob would come from. Six years of learning from that odd little man, of allowing him to fuss with her hair, tuck it beneath dear Mother's hats when they walked out together. Six years of holding on to his arm and playing the fine lady, of keeping her mouth under control. Six years, too, of watching him glow when he introduced her to his work colleagues as his wife.

Life. It's an amazing journey. Mr Bowen ran out of life at fifty-eight. He dropped dead at work one day, and she howled like a banshee when they came to tell her. She howled at his funeral, howled when she went home alone to that empty house, wondering how the hell she was going to pay for the very fine funeral she'd ordered for him. She didn't know then about the will that left everything to her, his mother's ornaments, house, her piano, her pictures on the walls and one hundred and fifty-eight pounds of his own savings.

Only twenty-three at the time, with no one to advise her, no family and little education, she did everything wrong. Owning a house meant that things had to be paid for, things had to be fixed if they broke. Mr Bowen hadn't told her about that. She managed for a few years on his savings, and for a few more by selling what she could live without. The ornaments went first, then the pictures off the walls, though she missed seeing them as much as she missed seeing Mr Bowen bustling around the house. She sold dear Mother's dinner sets, her crystal, followed that with the linen and the beds, bar one. Last of all she sold her piano.

She tried her hand at a cleaning job, but cleaning up after others had never been her style. She tried being a shop girl, and she hadn't been the shopkeeper's style so, eight years after Mr Bowen's death, she packed up, sold her last bed, and his house, put the money in a calico belt, packed dear Mother's trunk with the best of dear Mother's clothing and took a cab to Spencer Street Station, where she caught a country train, not caring much where it took her, just knowing, vowing, she would never again return to the streets of Melbourne.

She caught a few trains over the next years, worked in a few houses, took a job as a barmaid at a hotel. That was the job she'd been born for: fast moving and fast to give the customers a laugh – and that's all she gave them, having seen enough of the ugly side of men during her time in the trade she was introduced to before she was old enough to know there was such a trade.

Turning forty and losing her first back tooth set her to thinking about her old age and finding another husband like Mr Bowen. She never equated what she'd felt for him as love – he'd been her mother, father and little boy. That heady romantic stuff only happened in fairy-tales. Handsome prince courts beggar girl, promising her happily ever after, not taking into account the Queen already ensconced in the palace, and the court fool, determined to break up the romance. That wasn't for Kathleen. What she needed was a husband to provide her with three meals a day, and losing that tooth set her looking around for one.

She was working at the Stockman's Hotel in Willama when Harry Dolan walked into the bar. He looked sixty-odd, was clean shaven, short, rotund and no fashion plate, unlike Mr Bowen. He owned a good looking truck, but she'd barely given him a second glance, until he returned a week later, and someone mentioned that he owned the Molliston hotel, and that he made the apple cider she sometimes poured. She also learned that the Dolans had been making that same cider for generations and how Harry had no surviving offspring who might continue the family tradition.

That was a real plus, and in more ways than one. She'd already tasted his cider, which could have taken the paint off a dunny roof.

‘You're the apple of my eye, Mrs Bowen, and I'm a man who knows his apples,' he said to her one evening, aiming to plant a kiss on her mouth.

She dodged it. ‘Are you thinking to take advantage of a widow, Mr Dolan?'

He invited her to Molliston for a weekend, so she caught the train down on a Saturday morning and he picked her up at the station and drove her out to his place. When she saw his land in that green valley, and his acres of front garden hedged by apple trees in bloom, it was like stepping inside one of the pictures on Mr Bowen's wall. She wanted it and he wanted her. That weekend they struck a bargain.

There were a few surprises at her wedding, which was conducted by Father Ryan in the Molliston Catholic church. She recognised Tom Thompson's face in the crowd of onlookers and, as it turned out, Harry had four permanent lodgers living at the hotel, plus a black-clad, live-in sister-in-law – and he wasn't as old as he'd appeared. The new Mrs Dolan may have had her reasons for choosing an old husband, but he'd had his own reasons for choosing a younger wife; he aimed to produce half a dozen little cider brewers and during the next twelve months worked himself to death trying to achieve his aim.

She wore green to the funeral. His sister-in-law wore black. And when he was in the ground, at the feet of his three former wives – no doubt they fought over which one would get to kick him first on the other side – Joseph Reichenberg had come to her fence offering cash for Harry's swampy bottom paddock. Never one to say no to a good deal, she'd taken Reichenberg's money while the sister-in-law turned the air blue, packed her bags and walked out. It seemed that Kathleen had made an unforgivable error in selling that land to the old German.

So there she was, widowed for the second time, a business owner with four lodgers who expected two meals a day, clean rooms and empty chamber pots. She left them to their expectations, packed a bag, loaded it into Harry's truck and headed off on a holiday, aware that she needed time and space in order to make a few decisions. She'd made them too, and made the right ones this time.

Now she had to make another decision, and had no time or space to think about it. O'Brien's truck was coming down the hill, its tray loaded with pickers. Billy skedaddled across the yard and up the pear tree.

‘Will I nick up and tell them you're not opening today, Mrs Dolan?'

‘No, Mike. Up you go, but keep your eyes peeled for that Russell Street car. We won't get much warning today.'

As Mike joined his mate up the pear tree, the widow walked down to the cider pit, a low hump on the landscape – a blot on the landscape, some called it, but a cool blot on a hot afternoon. It had taken a month to empty that pit of rotting apples, dead mice and other unidentifiable detritus, and a week more to scrub its walls and floor. Once furnished with a small piano, a gramophone, a table and a couple of chairs, there wasn't a lot of space left, but space enough for a barrel of ale and an empty tea-chest.