Three Summers (8 page)

She'd almost got past him when his hand shot out and seized her ankle; the long fingers with the tufts of black hair were strong as iron.

‘Let me go!'

Surprisingly, he did. The heat of his fingers melted away from her. It was like loss and the unexpectedness of it made her look down at him. The wind blew and the trees shivered and their shadows fell over his face so that all at once he looked quite different, like an ordinary boy who felt ordinary sadness and could be comforted if you put your arms around him and pressed your lips against the softness of his hair, and she remembered how gentle his voice had sounded that time in the playground when he'd said to Iona Malloy, ‘Your brother will be all right.'

The shadows moved and his face changed again and he laughed up at her.

She stopped. ‘What?' she whispered. ‘What?'

‘Oh, nothing.' He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Off you go now, little Ruthie.'

‘I—' Some person inside her wanted to stay, but Tam Finn waved at her again and she began to walk away. Where the lane turned she looked back and he saw her looking and leaped to his feet. She began to run then, running blindly, half sobbing, and the rain came pouring down and she ran and ran and she could hear him coming after her, and she hated it and yet she loved it too: the running and the rain pouring, and Tam Finn so close behind her she could almost feel his breath upon her skin. But when finally she turned to meet his face, he wasn't there. No one was there. The lane was empty in the hissing rain.

seven

The path to the presbytery took Margaret May past the small graveyard where her husband was buried.

Don Gower's stone was in the new section, second line, third on the right, a plain granite slab with his name and dates. Margaret May knew people in Barinjii thought it ‘funny' that there was no more to the inscription, but she honestly hadn't been able to think of any phrase which would be both suitable
and
true.

He'd had the most beautiful eyes, that was all. So soft they'd been, so deep – she'd been knocked all of a heap, opening the kitchen door at
Fortuna
and finding the tall young man with the beautiful eyes gazing down at her. They were eyes you could trust, she'd thought, being a green, skimpy know-nothing girl. ‘Here, let me do that,' he'd said when she'd reached out to take the big box of groceries from his arms.

‘Here, let me do that.' No one had ever said such a thing to her before.

They'd begun walking out together; it was barely a month before he'd asked her to marry him. She'd thought she'd be safe, married, but it was as though she'd been out wandering in a wilderness and a big storm had come and she'd found a cave where she could shelter and crawled inside, and then a great heavy stone had fallen across the entrance and shut her in. She'd felt no grief when he'd died, only a sense of relief, as if someone had come and lifted the stone away. ‘Thank you,' she'd whispered at the funeral, not to God, exactly, but to the earth, the sky, and the great consoling trees.

The truth about Don Gower wasn't hard to find. He was a sulk. Nothing ever pleased him; she'd discovered that almost right away. The first time he'd made love to her, he'd dragged himself from her body and muttered hopelessly towards the ceiling, ‘Is that
all
?' He could turn anything to dust; even the birth of their first child had failed to raise a smile. ‘That him, eh?' was all he'd said, and after he'd taken himself from the room, his footsteps echoing down the corridor of the cottage hospital, Margaret May had lain in her bed with little Charlie and she couldn't help remembering the christening of Milly Lachlan's first child a month back; how Frank Lachlan had stood in the church with his arm around Milly and the baby and his smile had been like melted gold.

Don could sulk darkly for weeks. He wouldn't answer when you spoke to him; the boys kept out of his way. ‘Dad's in a mood,' she'd hear them whisper, scuttling away to their rooms; it didn't seem right that they should have to live like that. Or he'd pick a fight with one of them and then go rushing off into the night. In the early years she'd stayed awake, waiting for him to come back. Later, she slept on. She'd begun to find it hard to say his name, the name which, long ago in the kitchen at
Fortuna
, it had almost stopped her breath to hear.

Don. Like a dead bell tolling.

It had been pouring with rain, that last time he'd rushed off from the house. The creek had flooded for the first time in thirty years, all the dams were brimming – just thinking of that night made her mouth grow dry, and she almost ran past the graveyard, suddenly overcome by a childish fear that he might come back, rise up accusingly from beneath that granite slab, large with forbidding life, or quite simply walk out from behind a tree. There were nights when she couldn't sleep for fear that someone like him might come for Ruth, some big handsome Barinjii boy who knew nothing and wanted to make sure Ruth knew nothing either. Men didn't like it if a girl was clever, and they sensed it right away. It didn't matter if you were tied down with a house and babies, it didn't matter if you never had a moment to yourself, if your life was as thick and stupid as a cow bailed up in a milking pen, leg tied; they didn't like you being clever and you had to pay. She didn't want Ruth to pay.

The path brought Margaret May to the back of the presbytery, where she could see Father Joseph's bulky figure in the garden, forking the earth round his tomato plants. He was the nearest she'd ever come to having a parent, and she loved the old man, though there'd been times when he'd let her down. Like that time way back in the orphanage when she'd given up praying to the statue and complained to him about the nuns. ‘Ah, but they're hardworking women, Maidie,' he'd said, ‘and they have their sorrows, too.' He'd swept the damp hair from her eyes and then laid his big hand on the top of her head where it had felt like a promise of some kind, but it wasn't enough for her, it couldn't make up for all the cold nights and the pinching and pushing and the sting of Sister Therese's skinny cane.

‘But they're
cruel
!' she'd insisted.

He hadn't answered.

‘Father?' she'd whispered, tugging at his sleeve. ‘Father Joseph?'

‘Sorrow can make us all cruel, Maidie,' he'd said at last.

She'd stamped her foot. ‘But they're
nuns
!'

On and on he'd gone, then, as if he'd been addressing a whole churchful of people instead of one small, unhappy girl. ‘Ah, the sorrows and the cruelties of this world, Maidie, they make us what we are. That's why we must always try to be kind to others, see? Like the good Lord was kind.'

‘He wasn't kind to
me
!' she'd bawled, remembering the statue in the chapel, the endless, useless prayers.

She'd been eight at the time. Later on, when she was fourteen, he'd found her the job at
Fortuna
. He'd driven her over to the property himself – his horse, she remembered suddenly, had been called Patrick. Father Joseph would have been quite young then: black hair came to mind, and ruddy cheeks, and a way he had of running up the broad stone steps of the convent, taking them two at a time.

Now he was old, and old-fashioned too. She longed for him to share her joy at Ruth's good fortune, but she knew he still believed that a woman's place was in the home. He hadn't said much when she'd told him about her hopes for the scholarship, but she suspected this might be because he'd thought Ruth hadn't stood a chance of getting one, and she felt a little stab of anger for the way a clever girl had to prove herself over and over again.

‘Father!' she called, and the old man turned and saw her and his big craggy face was like a shadowy country lit up by the sun.

‘Maidie?'

She burst out with it straight away. ‘The letter's come!' Her voice trembled with triumph and joy. ‘Ruth's got the scholarship! She'll be going down to Sydney in a couple of weeks!'

She watched his face change, the light go out of it, the furrows deepening between his brows. ‘She has?' he said, and she could see him struggling to take it in: how a girl could have won this glittering prize and what might happen to her now. A breeze blew up and the leaves of the tomato plants swayed and a few big drops of rain fell.

‘It's the greatest chance for her!' said Margaret May.

‘The greatest chance?'

‘She'll have a life!'

Father Joseph sighed. He leaned forward and touched her lightly on the arm, an arm still so slender that his big fingers could easily have encircled it. ‘Margaret May,' he said, and his use of her formal name seemed to sound a warning, ‘shall we go inside to the study then, and have a little chat?'

THE
study, dimly lit from one small window, crowded with ponderous old furniture, made her feel weak and suffocated. It was in this very room that she and Don had sat to discuss the arrangements for their wedding, and except for the layers of dust and old newspapers, it seemed unchanged. Before she could stop herself, Margaret May had taken the very chair she'd sat on all those years back, and Father Joseph had settled into his. The third, Don's chair, was piled with books and yellowing notes and a scattering of junk mail.

The old priest folded his hands in his lap. ‘You'll never be letting her go to that place, Maidie?'

Margaret May's lips tightened. ‘You mean the university?'

‘I do.'

‘Of course I'll let her go.'

There was a silence. Father Joseph bent and flicked at a dead leaf which had attached itself to the hem of his cassock. When he straightened up again his voice was distant – she might have been any old sinner. ‘Have you considered the teachers' college for Ruth, Margaret May? Just down the road from Dubbo there? Why, she could board during the week and come home at weekends. You'd have her by you still.'

‘I love Ruth more than anything in this world,' said Margaret May. ‘You know that, Father. She's the joy of my life, but I don't want to limit her by having her stay with me, I don't want to imprison her. Teachers' college is all very well, but the
university
, it's such a great chance for her!'

‘A chance for
what
?' The last word came so fiercely that the newspapers fluttered on the empty chair and in the new silence which followed they were both aware of the shuffle of slippers outside the study, of Mrs Ryan listening at the door.

Father Joseph cleared his throat loudly and then waited while the shuffling faded away down the hall. He said more softly, ‘It's a sink of iniquity down there.'

‘Iniquity?'

‘Sin! That place, your
university,
is fit for Sodom and Gomorrah!' He leaned towards her. ‘Only the other day I was reading how there's teachers at that place who advocate free love! Who corrupt young minds, who think nothing of, ah, sleeping with the young girl students, of, of—' he spluttered, struggling to get out the word, ‘
ruining
them, Margaret May!' He drew a big chequered hanky from his pocket, and scrubbed at his brow, all the while staring at her angrily, eyes popping, as if in her desire for Ruth to have a life she was somehow part of this iniquity.

‘I—' she began, but he waved her words away.

‘Margaret May, do you know they have a thing down there for these poor ruined girls, a thing called the Abortion Car, and how twice a week it goes round the city, gathering them up, taking them to the doctors' surgeries?'

Down in Sydney, the Abortion Car had long since ceased to function, but Father Joseph had no idea of this: in his old mind its sinister black shape cruised the wicked streets of the city for all eternity.

Colour flooded into Margaret May's face, a tide of anger that he could only think of her clever granddaughter's success in terms of aborted motherhood.

‘My Ruth won't be in any Abortion Car,' she told him coldly. ‘She's got her wits about her.'

‘Wits mightn't be enough.'

His words made her flinch, brought a cold flutter of recognition to the pit of her stomach: recalling how her own wits had turned to jelly when she'd seen Don Gower standing at
Fortuna
's kitchen door. ‘They'll do to be going on with,' she said.

The old man shook his head and stared down at the floor. ‘She'll lose her faith for sure,' he said sadly.

She ignored this. ‘I want Ruth to have a profession, Father. I want her to get the best education possible. I want her to be able to provide for herself, come what may.'

The priest leaned back in his chair and his voice turned suddenly jovial. ‘It's some fine fellow who'll be coming along for your Ruth, Maidie! Some fine Catholic boy who'll give her a home and family – and isn't home and family enough for any good Catholic girl?'

Margaret May felt a flicker of hatred for her old friend in his big leather chair. How could he talk like this when he knew what had gone on with her and Don? And in other families round here? He'd seen the bruises, the black, punched eyes beneath the Sunday hats – he heard confessions, didn't he? Had his own wits been frozen over there in Ireland, long ago, when he was a poor grateful boy in the seminary? Could he never learn a new thing? With a small angry movement she turned from the sight of him and gazed through the small window at the dark side passage, thinking of her own marriage, the endless tedium: lighting the stove in the morning, crossing the dark yard to the woodpile, the copper boiling, cold washing flapping on the line, the children coming, Don and his furious silences. Closed up with him in the house: in winter the rain like a steel shutter at the windows, in summer the sun like a sword at the door. And this was the kind of existence he would wish on Ruth!