Three Summers Page 3

  ‘And the garden?’

  ‘I hardly saw it.’

  ‘But you were living there!’

  ‘Working there,’ corrected Margaret May.

  ‘And after that you got married.’

  ‘Yes.’ Margaret May half turned her face, so Ruth couldn’t see her expression. An image of Don Gower had strode into her mind: handsome Don Gower on the day she’d first met him, standing at Fortuna’s kitchen door, the big box of groceries hoisted on his shoulder, looking down at her. ‘Here, let me do that,’ he’d said, when she’d gone to take the box from him, and she’d watched his shapely fingers arranging the jars and packets on the kitchen table, felt the warmth from his body as she stood beside him. After all these years it still gave her a whip of fury to remember how she’d burned for him.

  ‘Nan? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Margaret May fought hard for a smile. ‘Just a goose walked over my grave.’

  ‘Oh, don’t!’ Ruth grabbed at her grandmother’s hand. ‘Don’t say that!’

  ‘It’s just an expression,’ said Margaret May. ‘Have you ever seen a goose in Barinjii?’ She rose from the bench in a single fluid movement. ‘You’ll have a different life from me,’ she told the girl firmly, ‘a different life altogether.’ She nodded and handed the letter back. ‘Here, you take care of that while I get on with my watering.’

  ‘Let me help.’ Ruth jumped up and reached for the watering can.

  ‘No need,’ said Margaret May, taking it from her, and Ruth felt that in this small gesture Nan was closing a door on her, gently but firmly, sending her away.

  ‘Please let me carry it,’ she pleaded.

  ‘There’s no need, it’s empty,’ said Margaret May. ‘I can manage.’ She twirled the big can from her hand. ‘Light as a feather, see?’

  four

  On this beautiful morning Father Joseph was also out in his garden, his shabby black cassock moving amongst the rows of tomato plants. Back home in Ballyroan he hadn’t seen a tomato till he was ten years old, that blessed day he’d run a message for Mrs Stavely at the White Stag Hotel and she’d given him threepence and a round red fruit he’d thought was some kind of plum. He’d bitten right into it and the juice had spurted down his chin and he thought he’d never tasted anything so grand – like eating a bit of sunshine, a warm summer’s day on your tongue. The next time he’d got hold of a tomato had been in the seminary: a whole basket full of them left on the steps by some kind soul.

  Two tomatoes in ten years! And now he had a whole garden full of them, all types and sizes: Harbingers, Cardinal Kings, Ruby Queens. The Harbingers were at their peak: the old man parted the leaves of a healthy bush and found a great plump beauty, so ripe it was, so ready, that the moment he cupped his hand beneath it, the fruit fell from its stem into his palm. He sniffed the perfume of its skin and dropped it gently into his pocket – with some of Mrs Ryan’s bread, a dab of fresh butter, black pepper and a few leaves of Maidie’s fresh basil he’d have a feast fit for a king!

  He bent to pick up his gardening fork and then straightened again. A young girl was running across the paddock outside his back fence. It took him a moment to recognise that the girl was Maidie’s little granddaughter. Ruth, she was called.

  Only she wasn’t so little now. His old eyes widened, he was astonished by the size of her. Why, she was almost a young woman! ‘Ruth,’ he called. ‘Ruth Gower! Come over here a minute!’ He hadn’t seen that one in church for a long, long while. ‘Ruthie!’

  The girl kept on running. ‘Can’t stop! Something I have to do!’ she flung back over her shoulder into a mass of wild brown hair.

  The old man returned to his tomatoes. ‘She’ll keep,’ he muttered, reaching for the fork again. But as he dug the prongs into the rich crumbly earth a frown deepened across his broad forehead. ‘Aaw,’ he breathed, recalling how Maidie had got the idea in her head that the girl would be going to the university down in Sydney. Sydney University! That sink of iniquity – hardly a week went by that you didn’t come across some scandal about the place written up in the newspapers. He needed to talk to Maidie, get some sense into her, and the girl too, if that was possible.

  And then his big face cleared – ah, it would be all right. The girl didn’t stand a chance of winning that scholarship, not with competition from every high school in the state, and from the great private schools in Sydney: Ignatius and Riverview, Saint Joseph’s! With boys from those grand places, boys from the rich old families, how could a girl like Ruth Gower, a shopkeeper’s daughter from a little place like Barinjii, ever stand a chance? The whole thing was a daydream; Maidie had always been a bit of a daydreamer, her nose in a book whenever she could get hold of one, and from all he’d heard, the girl was very likely the same. But daydreams fade and she’d get married like all the rest of them. She’d have a family and settle down.

  From the house behind him came the faint, aching shrill of the telephone and Father Joseph’s large foot went still on the edge of the fork. He waited, chin lifted, eyes narrowed, like a big rough dog scenting trouble in the wind.

  The ringing stopped. He pictured his housekeeper, Mrs Ryan, in the hallway, the receiver held close to her ear.

  At this time of the morning it would be Tom Lester again, for sure, ringing about his daughter Ellie, wanting to know whether Father Joseph had spoken to the Finn boy. As if you could speak to that one! As if you could do anything! Nothing short of exorcism would do for that young devil! Father Joseph waited for the squeal of the screen door and Mrs Ryan’s voice calling, ‘Phone call for you, Father!’

  There was nothing. One of Mrs Ryan’s cronies ringing for a bit of a natter, he decided, relief surging through his hard old veins, and set to work with the fork again.

  He’d spoken to the boy last night, and he’d had to drive all the way over to Fortuna to do it; the boy wouldn’t come to him. He could tell from the expression on old Mrs Finn’s face when she saw him in the hallway that he wasn’t welcome. The old lady was the boy’s grandmother; young Mrs Finn had run off when Tam was only small.

  That boy! Father Joseph had waited a full twenty minutes, cooling his heels in the long gloomy room they called a library before Tam had come sauntering in. ‘You wanted something, Father?’ he’d asked insolently, and Father Joseph had said his piece while the boy sat perched on the edge of the huge mahogany table, legs swinging, answering to no one, least of all the parish priest. ‘Will that be all then?’ he’d said at last, and sauntered out again, whistling.

  The tune had sounded familiar, it had got into the old priest’s head; he’d been halfway home along the bumpy road before he’d realised that the boy had actually been whistling a hymn. ‘Cradling Children in his Arm’, it had been. The words were still playing over in his head:

  Cradling children in his arm,

  Jesus gave his blessing.

  To our babes a welcome warm—

  The insolence of the boy took your breath away. The sheer hide of it, whistling hymns about the good Lord cradling children in his arms, when Tam Finn had got half the girls in the district in the family way! There’d be no father to cradle those poor babes!

  The boy’s own father was away on business in Sydney; but even if Harry Finn had been at home, the old priest knew he’d get nothing out of him: he’d been the same in his own young days. You were powerless with people like the Finns. Lords of the district! They didn’t bloody care! He’d got nothing last year when he’d spoken to him about Mrs Ryan’s niece, Kathy.

  ‘Wild oats, Father,’ Harry Finn had said. ‘Know what they are?’

  ‘But the girl,’ Father Joseph had protested, and then stopped, the contemptuous curl of the grazier’s lips suggesting that the girls of Barinjii got no more than they deserved. ‘Remember Saint Augustine, Father,’ Harry Finn had counselled, showing the priest to the door. ‘He sowed his oats, eh? Bushels of ’em!’

  Father Joseph threw down the fork and rubbed at his aching back. A tiny bre
eze blew up, warm as a breath, teasing the feathery leaves. There was heat in the day already, and a faint smoky scent which reminded him of the winter peat fires, the long rainy winters of his childhood home. He only had to close his eyes and he was back in Mam’s kitchen: the scrubbed wooden table with the teapot and striped jug always in the centre, the smoke-dark wall above the big black stove. He saw his mother’s feet in boots, cracked brown leather, one heel worn over, and the hem of her long blue dress, such a deep blue that the colour brought a little ache to his heart. ‘Ah, Mammy,’ he whispered. ‘What use am I at all these days?’

  RUTH rushed on over the prickly grass of Larsen’s Paddock, skirting the big green cowpats, batting away the small black sticky flies. She knew what old Father Joseph wanted: he’d be after her to go to confession, but she was never going again, and when she got down to Sydney she was never going to church either – she only went now, sometimes, because of Nan. At the top of a small rise, where the long grass gave way suddenly to bare stony ground, she stopped, gathering up her skirt to pick off the clusters of small brown burrs that had stuck to its hem. She glanced up at the great blue emptiness of the sky: as if some old man was sitting up there, watching you, checking up on your sins! There was only an old man down here, sitting in a stuffy box on Saturday afternoons, where you could smell the tobacco off him, and mould, and sometimes even a whiff of the chook manure he used on his tomato plants.

  People wondered what he did in there on those long sad Saturday afternoons when no one came. Ruth knew; she’d peeped round his side of the box one day when she was helping Nan with the flowers and there on the narrow seat she’d spied a Superman comic and a half-eaten banana. Superman! She hadn’t told anyone because though Father Joseph was an old busybody, he was still her nan’s friend, and somehow the comic, crumpled and faded as if he’d found it lying on the road, had made her feel sorry for him. She hadn’t even told on him that afternoon when a group of kids had been hanging round in the playground and the subject of confession had come up, because the next day was a Saturday.

  ‘What does he do in there?’ Joey Fenton had asked, and ‘What do you think he does?’ Chris Larsen had replied, and at once a chorus of sniggering had broken out amongst the boys, with pushes and punches and hips thrust out and fingers stuck into the air.

  ‘You mean he’s actually got one?’ Joey Fenton had snorted. ‘I thought they cut them off in those places.’

  That had brought a fresh round of sniggering, of course. Brian Geraghty had laughed so hard he’d tumbled to the ground and lay there, pounding his fist in the grass. The girls shook their heads and clicked their tongues; Fee had glanced at Ruth and rolled her eyes.

  Iona Malloy had turned pale. Her brother Francis was in the seminary. ‘Do they?’ she’d whispered, and the boys had fallen silent. ‘Do they – do that to them?’

  It had been that brief time Tam Finn was at their school. He’d taken no part in the boys’ rumpus, only stood on the edge of it, watching. But when Iona spoke he’d come forward and answered her. ‘No, they don’t, Iona,’ he’d said, in such a calm, even voice that you knew what he said was true. ‘They don’t cut anything. Your brother will be all right, Iona.’ Colour had flowed back into Iona’s cheeks.

  And then Meg Harrison had stepped out from the huddle of girls, walked straight to Tam Finn and touched him on the arm, a gesture so quick, so light, it was hard to believe it had occurred.

  Except that it had. Everyone had seen. It was like they’d all been waiting to see.

  Tam Finn’s face had been expressionless, only his lips had moved slightly, settling into a simple line. He’d shoved his hands into the pockets of his school trousers, turned his back on them and walked out of the yard, away into the paddock and up the hill.

  Meg Harrison had followed. They’d watched from the yard as she came alongside him, watched how Tam Finn had reached out and taken her hand, a small act that was without the slightest trace of tenderness; he might have been picking up a knife to peel a new green apple. Tam Finn with Meg beside him turned off onto the track that led to Perry’s orchard. Whistles and catcalls rose from the boys then, and poor Kathy Ryan had begun to cry. Perry’s orchard, like the little beach beside the creek, was one of the places in Barinjii where couples went to make love, especially in summer, when the grass was long and soft and there was a spicy scent of apples in the air.

  MEG Harrison had been married early the next year, though Tam Finn hadn’t been the groom. Kathy Ryan had gone down to her aunty’s place in Sydney. It was this kind of thing that made the mothers of Barinjii say Tam Finn was bad. And perhaps they were right – except, thought Ruth, it was Meg who’d walked up to him, wasn’t it? It was Meg who’d touched his arm. But you couldn’t say she was bad, either, or Kathy Ryan, or any of those other girls. They were like small soft birds who’d fallen into some kind of trap, a net woven from the long tender grass and the hot spicy scents of summer and everything that was beautiful on earth. Ruth thought of Father Joseph calling to her across his back fence. He didn’t know a thing! It was typical that he never seemed to notice how many baptisms in Barinjii occurred six months after a wedding, and how some of the babies (ones who shouldn’t have) had the black curls and rainy grey eyes of Tam Finn.

  The sun was higher in the sky now; the day’s heat was coming on. A smoky haze made the distant hills shimmer and the air itself had a trembly look, so that you felt you might be able to walk straight through it and find yourself in a different world altogether, like Alice through the looking glass. Ruth smoothed her skirt, ran down the slope and scrambled through the wire fence onto a narrow rutted path. She walked along briskly, arms swinging, hair bouncing against her narrow shoulderblades. It was brown hair, rich and tawny, and her eyes were brown too, and her skin had the golden honey colouring which had been her mum’s. ‘My nut-brown maid,’ Nan used to call her when she was little, sweeping the hairbrush in long gentle strokes, singing,

  Ho ro my nut-brown maiden,

  Hee ree my nut-brown maiden,

  Ho ro ro maiden,

  For she’s the maid for me.

  She’d been small for her age right up till she’d turned sixteen, when her body had begun to develop the kind of gentle rounded shape which made the men standing outside the pub or the post office turn suddenly quiet when she walked past. Occasionally one of them would whistle, after she’d gone by. Ruth ignored them.

  ‘Never look,’ Fee had counselled her. ‘Never say anything. Pretend you don’t hear. Pretend you’re deaf and dumb. Unless it’s someone you fancy, that is.’

  ‘There’s no one,’ Ruth had replied.

  ‘That’s true,’ Fee had replied serenely. ‘There’s no one here would suit you.’ She’d smiled. ‘You really will have to go to Sydney, won’t you?’

  It was true, probably, thought Ruth. She couldn’t imagine being married to someone like Joey Fenton or Chris Larsen or Brian Geraghty. She couldn’t imagine being married at all. Her future seemed unimaginable, despite the letter from the university. In the accident that had killed her mother, Ruth had been thrown clear. ‘Thrown clear to have a life,’ Nan had said all through her childhood, in that low passionate voice which always made Ruth feel uneasy. ‘A special life, Ruthie.’

  Only what if she wasn’t special? Ruth walked on along the path. For a while it ran beside a windbreak of tall poplars whose bright leaves flashed with light, and whose long shadows striped the land. Then the windbreak ended and the path went on across a stretch of open land until it reached the crossroads where the Old Western Highway met the Barinjii Road. This was the place where her mother had died. She and Dad had been coming home from a trip to Narromine when their car had hit an unlighted semi on the turn into Barinjii. Her father had been in hospital for two whole months and had come out of it a different person. ‘Your dad used to be a laughing kind of boy,’ Nan had told Ruth. ‘He used to sing – you’d always know when Ray was about because you’d hear the singing.’

 
Ruth couldn’t imagine it. Dad was grey and quiet as a shadow; you forgot about him, you hardly noticed he was there. To think of him laughing was difficult enough, but to imagine him singing was impossible, like trying to imagine a horse crowing, or a big old rooster barking like a dog.

  Her mother had simply died, her blood leaking out on the highway long before any ambulance had arrived. Ruth had been a baby in a carry-cot on the back seat. She was strapped in, but the cot hadn’t been, and when the semi ploughed in, the cot had sailed out of the open back window onto the verge of the road.

  Thrown clear. It did seem special, though in a rather frightening kind of way. She walked out into the middle of the crossroads and stood there quietly. Since they’d built the bypass five years back there was very little traffic; you could stand like that for half an hour without a single car going by, and there wouldn’t be a sound except for the wind and the chirp of crickets and the twittering of tiny birds in the long grass of the verges. Ruth closed her eyes and felt the sun on her face and a small warm breeze that teased gently at her hair. She waited.

  After a few minutes she sensed her mother come from some other place and stand silently beside her. She could feel her there.

  ‘Do you think that’s crazy?’ she’d asked Fee. ‘Do you think it’s crazy that someone would come back from being dead just to see you?’

  ‘No,’ Fee had answered. ‘No, I don’t. She was your mum; of course she’d come back to see you! I’d come back to see you, if anything happened to me.’

  ‘Oh, Fee!’

  ‘I would.’ Fee had smiled. ‘And I’m not even your mum!’

  Ruth reached into the pocket of her skirt and took out the crested envelope. She opened the flap, drew the two sheets from inside and held them out as if inviting a person standing next to her to read. ‘This is the letter from the university, Mum,’ she whispered. ‘And these are my marks, see? And the scholarship.’ She gave a little skip. ‘Oh, Mum! I’ll be living in Sydney, imagine!’