One Sunday (35 page)

‘Good evening, Constable. Would you have a moment?'

‘I'm pretty busy right now –' Busy feeding a dog. Old Blue didn't like Miss Lizzie. He left Tom in the lurch. ‘What's concerning you, Miss Martin?' he asked – as if he didn't know.

‘My sister and I, at times, are forced to overhear certain snippets of private conversations…' she said.

Tom stepped back, considered the hill, and taking off down it. She was going to go him for blowing that flamin' whistle in her ear all day.

The spike Christian had been driving randomly into the earth since midday had been put aside. He was now convinced Joseph's hidden money was in the locked room, and that's why the crazy old bastard kept it locked, not as a memorial to his wife, as Elsa believed, but because it was his own private bank vault.

I'll take his bloody door off, he thought. I'll break his bloody window. If the mean old bastard had given me ten quid when I asked for it, Rachael would have been alive today. His fault. If she hadn't been born a Squire. If . . . Life was full of ifs.

Always the outcasts, Kurt and Chris Reichenberg – and who wouldn't be with that bloody name? – but at least they'd been outcasts together until Kurt turned fourteen and left school. That was the year Mr Connor retired and Miss Ross came to teach. She'd looked younger than some of the semi-mature boys in seventh grade and had no control over them, so she'd sat them in a second classroom, set them work, then left them without supervision. It was easy to steal outside, smoke stolen cigarettes. Easier to become one of the rebels than remain an outcast.

The school's back fence led onto the football oval, providing an easy escape route to the swimming bend, and if Miss Ross knew her senior boys were spending their days down there, she dared not tell their parents.

Gwyneth Murphy and Sarah O'Brien had joined the band of rebels. They'd been yabbying downstream from the bend when Rachael swam across from the other side. She knew the girls from church and she'd stayed talking to them until they heard the school bell and had to run like hell to get back there. Just a mob of kids at play.

Christian left school in December and joined Kurt in the paddocks. He didn't see Rachael again for months, until one day she came to the fence. He left the paddock and walked her back to the swimming bend and sat with her on the bank. She took his hand, just to look at his blisters. He had a lot of blisters back then. Heady stuff, that hand-holding, breathless stuff, sitting close to her while she spoke about Melbourne, and how she was going to study music in Melbourne. Maybe that was the day he'd fallen in love with her. He kept holding on to that hand, just holding it and sitting, listening to her, barely able to speak a word. He was fourteen. She was a few months older.

Through that summer they met at the river, until her father caught them swimming one evening.

‘I won't be allowed out for a month, but just over the bridge, almost opposite Green's house, there's a dead tree with a hole in it. I'll write to you and put it in the hole,' she whispered. Then she swam one way, and he swam the other.

He still had that first letter, five pages of it, still in its envelope.

Months of letters – and a few stolen meetings, sweeter meetings because they were stolen.

They'd laughed about their first kiss, but then there had been more kissing and not so much laughter – then more than kissing. Breathless touching, and the finding of secret places; they'd done everything – almost.

It was early spring when she came knocking on his window, her frock and hair wet from her swim. He gave her a towel and a blanket, and he took her to the washhouse.

‘I had to see you, Chris. We're going to England to bring Arthur's wife home.'

‘When?'

‘Next week, but we're going to Melbourne tomorrow. We'll be away for months.'

She took her frock off, wrapped herself in the blanket and sat drying her long hair with his towel. She had a yard of it back then, so he lit a fire under the copper, and they sat close while he held her frock before the flame.

‘Are you as much in love with me as I am with you, Chris?'

‘More,' he said.

‘Do you want to be married before I go away?'

‘You said you were going tomorrow, and we're too young. They wouldn't let us.'

‘Butterflies only live for a day, so they have to do everything in one day – hatch, fly until they meet their mate, lay their eggs, then die. And I don't mean married in the church – just married like the butterflies. They don't need butterfly priests or their parents' permission.'

They found two brass rings in one of Joseph's boxes of bits and pieces, one too large for her, one too small for him, but they spoke their marriage vows to the moon, lifted those rings to be blessed by the moon, then consummated their union on that blanket, on the floor of the washhouse.

She giggled when they were done, and he thought she was laughing at him.

‘I was just thinking that if that was all mating was about, butterflies wouldn't bother crawling out of their cocoons.'

‘I was . . . was just practising.'

Too cold near dawn for swimming, he walked her the long miles over the bridge. They practised again in a clearing, in Squire's wood paddock. She didn't laugh that time. ‘I love you, Christian Reichenberg. I don't care if your father is a German or not. I love you and I love your name and every part of you. Each night before I go to bed, I'll close my eyes and think about you and you have to do the same. Please don't forget me.'

Forget her? He'd been afraid she'd forget him.

It was March when next she came to knock on his window, a hot and sultry night. They made love on the haystack, thunder cracking overhead, a lightning show in the western sky, and they were oblivious to it, and to the prickly hay.

‘So that's why the butterflies fight their way out of their cocoons,' she said, and they both laughed, thunder shaking the earth and their haystack.

It was always that way with them, always fun and laughter and love, so much love. They'd shaken that haystack many times with their lovemaking, they'd shaken the earth at the swimming bend, shaken the trees in Squire's wood paddock, never considering the consequences, thus there were no consequences – until last September. If only…

Christian turned to the house as a small light moved away from the porch. Kurt and his lantern.

‘Let there be light, and there was light,' Christian said.

‘No luck?'

‘It's in his locked room. I'm going to take that door off.'

‘Touch that door and he'll go for his shotgun.'

‘It's coming off tonight.'

‘You won't find any money in there.'

‘Where is it, then?'

‘No one lives forever,' Kurt said.

‘He'll take that money with him to the grave.'

Kurt turned the wick higher then walked to Elsa's garden, to the east of the barn, and he placed the lantern close to Elsa's carrot patch, lighting a circle there. ‘He has worked hard, has bought good land – not for him. It will come jointly to us.'

‘Have you seen his will?'

‘No. I've read his list of instructions, brother.'

‘Always the crawler.'

‘If you say so.' Kurt turned away, walked to the barn, stepping off the length of the eastern side, heel to toe, heel to toe. Ten steps. Then, at a right angle, twelve steps more, which took him into that circle of light, the toe of one boot on Elsa's carrot patch. ‘Where is your prod?'

Christian was at his side, the prod offered, taken and driven deep by his brother. For too long Christian had sought this hiding place. He was on his knees when he heard the scrape of metal against glass. Kurt stepped back, leaving the prod in the earth.

‘You'll need a shovel.'

‘It will be another bloody bottle. I've found half a dozen or more.'

It wasn't a bottle. A foot down he unearthed a small jar, sealed by a rusting lid.

‘That list has been pinned behind the door since he was sick with the influenza in spring. He didn't plan to die and take his money with him,' Kurt said.

‘You've known this was here since September? You knew I wanted money to get her away. Why didn't you tell me then?'

‘Why didn't you tell me why you wanted to get her away? Why didn't you tell Mutti there was to be a grandchild? She would have given you all of her money. You told no one. You wanted what you wanted and no explanation,' Kurt said, taking up the shovel to refill the hole and tidy the garden bed.

‘Do you want half of it?'

‘No.'

Christian worked the lid of that jar. It wouldn't budge. He turned away, walked into the dark. ‘Rachael has gone beyond your reach and beyond mine, brother,' Kurt said. ‘If you leave tonight, whether you are arrested or not tomorrow, I have also lost you.' He picked up the lantern and followed Christian to the washhouse. ‘Wait until Tuesday. I'll go with you to the funeral. Mutti will go with you. Perhaps our father –'

‘You think I'd want that mean old bastard there?' Christian said, swinging around to face him.

‘Rachael would want him there. She knew he cared for her, as I know he cares for us, as Mutti knows he cares for her – in his own way.'

‘Bullshit, he cares.'

Kurt placed the lantern on the floor then checked the copper's firebox, added more wood. ‘We've been good friends for a long time, brother. What we were to each other before, we can be again. I need your friendship.'

‘If I pitch this jar at that wall, it will break into a thousand pieces. That's how I feel now – as if some bastard has pitched me at a wall.'

‘Glass shatters. A body heals and the scars make you stronger.' Kurt stood, placed his hand on his brother's shoulder. ‘You feel solid enough to me,' he said. Silence then, only Mutti's jars of peaches rattling as they bubbled in the washing copper, and the steam. The washhouse had been turned into a steam bath tonight. Kurt walked to the door. ‘Come back to the house. Sit with us. Talk to us.' Then he was gone.

Christian stood on, rubbing the jar clean of earth, feeling the movement of what was sealed inside. Here was his share of that money, come too late. Why hadn't he used his prod in Mutti's garden? He'd prodded everywhere else. Why not there?

Because he hadn't believed his father capable of showing such trust in Elsa, such trust in Kurt – and such great disdain for his youngest son. Always Papa's good little boy, Kurt. Always knowing the German words, always reading Papa's new lists, working hard to read them when he was small. Always a good brother, sharing his knowledge.

‘We have to clean out the hen house today and pen that clucky black hen. Papa wants to get some more chicks.' And later: ‘We have to start on the post holes in the back paddock, brother.'

Six items on that list behind the door. Six jars, or tins. Kurt would know where each of them was buried, yet he sat on a milk cart each morning and churned butter for pennies.

The lid frustrated Christian's fingers. Easier to smash it, but he worked at that lid, worked it until it moved. Then it was off, exposing a plaster of paraffin wax, which he could not move. Elsa's knife, used for cutting soap into the washing copper, was on the window ledge. He cut the wax in half, then in quarters, removed it, and pulled out a roll of notes wrapped in oil paper and tied with string.

He had earned that money. With his blisters and his sweat, he had earned it. It was his by right. If he'd had it back in September he could have taken Rachael away to where her father would never have found her. She'd be alive now, holding him, loving him, laughing with him, growing round with his baby.

Too late for money. Too late for everything. Not yet eighteen, and his life was over.

He sucked a long slow breath between clenched teeth, holding that breath, hating his brother for having known where the money was hidden and not telling him. Hating him, too, for his words, and because he hadn't even looked at the money. And hating him more because it was his words and that hand on his shoulder which had brought the tears. Christian never howled, hadn't howled in years, so why was he howling now? Wasted water, that's all it was, but it was washing down his face, dripping down his nose, from his chin. He'd got what he wanted, hadn't he? He'd got his share of that money, so why bawl?

He walked across to Dolan's fence. No grog over there, not tonight. Plenty of money to spend on grog and no place to buy it. There were places in Willama. He'd heard blokes talking about always being able to get a beer over there. He could ride his bike across.

And Rachael lying dead over there. Dead.

Maybe he should ride there, find her and beg her forgiveness.

How could the dead forgive? The dead couldn't hear you.

She'd heard him last night.

‘So Rachael, the thief of dreams has turned to stealing money. I spit on that gimpy bastard and his money, Rae.' That's what he'd said to her last night.

‘Do you spit on me too, Chris?'

‘You think you can keep changing your mind, me one week, that piece of crippled dog-shit the next, now me again. Yes, I spit on you, Rae. You chose your bed, so go home and lie in it.'

‘I love you. We were married by that moon, Chris. We swore that it was forever.'

‘Yeah, well, you were married by your priest to Kennedy, and your father approves of him, so stay away from me.'

‘I wrote you a note, and you didn't come. Every day I was in Melbourne, I looked for you and you didn't come.'

‘Day after day I looked for your note, and you sent me nothing. Then I heard that you were married. You didn't even have the decency to tell me yourself.'

‘I was never married to him. I kept my promise to you. Every night before I went to bed, I thought of you. And every minute of every hour of every day since that wedding, I've planned this night. Come with me. When we're away from here, you know we can work it out.'