Brother Sister Soldier Cousin Page 10

  In the kitchen I turned the kettle on, then phoned the Oakleys. It was a repeat of the nightmare night Dad died, though this time Mrs Oakley didn’t stay the night and there was no funeral to arrange. Mr Oakley rang Jess and Ruby. Mum seethed to them over the phone at the army’s incompetence, and declared that Harry was alive.

  Mr Oakley frowned and Mrs Oakley beckoned me into the kitchen. “Pearl’s in shock, denying what’s happened. How are you, love?”

  “Awful,” I cried. I didn’t want to talk about Harry missing. There was nothing we could do, only imagine what had happened to him.

  When I woke at six thirty, I went to the cowshed. R. Brown, hunched with embarrassment over Harry missing, looked like a turtle as he scurried from cow to cow, not looking at Mum or me.

  Today was my fourteenth birthday and there were supposed to be presents and hugs, but Mum had forgotten. She milked cows automatically, her thoughts with Harry.

  She phoned Mike and told him of the cablegram and that she was positive Harry was alive: “Inside myself I feel he is alive. A mother knows; it is our intuition across space. He is not dead.”

  Mike spoke to me, too. “Helen, are you keeping your hopes up?”

  “No, Mike,” I whispered.

  “You’re right, kiddo,” he said abruptly.

  I didn’t go to school for three days, but cooked tea, polished the floor, put five late irises in a vase on the mantelpiece, washed the smalls… Mr and Mrs Moore visited, the vicar came, and Mrs Oakley taught me how to make scones. Mrs Bradson visited.

  “Harry is not dead. In my heart I know it’s an army bungle,” Mum told Mrs Bradson.

  “In the Great War, my first fiancé was killed.” Her eyes burned into Mum. “This Second World War has taken the life of my only child. For months I couldn’t believe they were dead.”

  “Harry is not dead. It’s an army bungle,” Mum parroted.

  Goose pimples rose on my arms. Would Mum go barmy the way district gossip said Mrs Bradson had? She went to seances and spoke to her dead son through a medium. I hoped Mum wouldn’t get burning-eyed and try to contact Dad and Harry.

  Mum didn’t want to go to town so we didn’t have my birthday treat in Miss Wilson’s Tea Rooms, or buy my petticoat. Disappointment gnawed at me. With Harry missing, probably dead, I felt guilty at being so childish about this non-event. Ruby phoned me that night and wished me happy birthday but Mum never even remembered.

  The home paddock was closed to the cows so the grass could grow for hay. I put Ginger in the orchard. When I cried for Harry, Ginger instantly put both ears up and shook his head, no, which seemed a sign Harry might be alive.

  “Ginger is full of arthritis,” Mum had said. “Another month of walking to school will be enough for him.”

  I brushed his coat and mane, and looked at his hooves. “This is it, Ginger. You’ll have your retirement in the orchard, as promised.”

  Ginger swished his tail at the flies and walked off to eat the long grass.

  We were sitting Proficiency in two weeks. I felt excited and scared at the same time. What if I didn’t pass? Mr Moore said I had studied well and if I was away sick I would be rated on my year’s work, but I shivered thinking about a national examination.

  Jess phoned. She had left Waikato Hospital and was coming home to live. Mum was excited, not so witchy-looking or sad, and she said Jess would have Harry’s room and they would make new curtains for it.

  A sinking feeling came over me. “Jess was planning to nurse soldiers overseas,” I said to Mum.

  “She’s having a baby,” Mum said softly.

  I felt stunned. For hours I was half dopey. I couldn’t imagine Jess cooing over a baby. A memory came to me of Jess packing her case to go nursing. She had said, “I’m getting away from stinking gumboots and cows.”

  Why couldn’t it have been Harry coming home? I would have leapt with joy.

  Mum’s eyes shone, though. “She wants to live on the farm with her baby, and I don’t want my grandchild boarded out with a stranger — Jess nursing and seeing her baby only during time off. If Jess speaks sharply, Helen, take no notice. She’s had a stressful time: marriage, then Herman’s death, State Final examinations, Harry missing …” Her voice wavered.

  We’d had a stressful time, too. Jess wouldn’t have even spoken to us yet if Dad hadn’t died. Jess’s continual pin-pricks that turned into barbs made me want to shout rude replies.

  “Will she help milk the cows?” I muttered.

  “No. You’re my milker at night.”

  “She’ll moan about the lavatory.”

  Mum gazed at the table. “Jess has a nursing friend whose brother is a plumber. Jess has paid him to put a flush toilet under the tank stand. Mr Steadman is coming on Monday to install it.”

  Jess always got what she wanted. “Jess doesn’t own the farm!”

  “It’s a gift to us.”

  A gift that suits Jess, I thought nastily, then felt guilty. A flush toilet was a luxury.

  “How will she pay a plumber?” I asked.

  “Jess has an American soldier’s widow’s pension.”

  I told Ginger that Jess was coming home. He put up one ear, snatched at grass and didn’t make a sound. He was loyal. Ginger had carried Jess, too. It was Harry I wanted back. Harry, where are you? Every day that passed, I knew more surely that he was dead.

  Mr Steadman came on Monday and by Tuesday night the toilet was installed. It looked like a mushroom wearing a wooden cap. He showed us how to flush it and said that special toilet paper was to be used. “Do not use newspaper.” He stared at me. “Or the pipes will block. This china toilet bowl and wooden seat have to be scrubbed every day,” he stated. I bet he had never cleaned a long-drop seat. He had a cheek telling Mum and me how to clean a toilet.

  When I got home from school, Jess had arrived in her Baby Austin 10. It was wrapped in a canvas cover and parked by the wood heap. Jess wore a gathered peasant skirt and blouse and looked fatter, though I wouldn’t have known she was six months’ pregnant. Unsmiling, she nodded at me.

  “Hello Jess,” I said.

  “’llo,” she yipped at me and sipped her tea, chatting on to Mum about clothing coupons, and buying white wool and viyella fabric. She thought the last impossible to get. I went to fetch the cows. Jess had not asked me about school, did not look at me or include me in conversation with Mum. Dislike of her rose like sick in my throat and again I felt guilty. It frightened me to feel such hostility towards my sister cousin.

  Mum didn’t weep into the cows’ sides now Jess was home. “It will be lovely to have a baby, a new life in the house again,” she said.

  I wanted Jess’s unborn baby to be with its grandmother and second-cousin aunt, but it wasn’t “lovely” to have Jess home. Now she lived on the farm again, I sometimes gasped aloud, sensing how intensely she disliked me. It was in the air we breathed. If I went into my bedroom and shut the door, the feeling was there, too.

  Dad used to quote, “I do not like thee, Doctor Fell. The reason why I cannot tell.” And it was like that — Jess’s dislike of me and the sick feeling I got every time she sniped at me. Before, the sharp things she said to me had been just Jess’s way. When I was small I spent more time with Harry, who was younger. Now Jess was queen of the castle because she was having a baby and Mum’s grandchild. The years of her snippety ways had hardened into solid dislike.

  Mum and I were cutting strips of worn rubbers saved from teat cups to use as elastic.

  “Be big-minded, tolerant of Jess,” Mum said. “It’s difficult for her to adjust to motherhood without a husband.”

  I counted twelve strips for our undies. “She is so picky, she never stops.”

  “Jess says hard things to me, too. She is a perfectionist. She has her own high standards, needs her own home.”

  The newspaper headlines blared about the shortage of houses, about people living in one room. Housing was scarce because of the war.

  I sat Proficiency. It s
eemed an ordinary school day, but the grass and trees gleamed, and everything looked different because I was one of the Standard Six girls and boys of New Zealand sitting the examination. I left for school early. I didn’t want to be late but Ginger had slowed down even more and I couldn’t kick his sides all the time to urge him on. The FJC club told a scary story of a boy in the South Island who hanged himself with worry over sitting Proficiency. I felt sick and then sweaty. I couldn’t talk to Julie Smithson about her doll when she started up. Dolls!

  Miss Cristal took all the classes in the school, except Standard Six, for a nature ramble, because Mr Moore said we must not be distracted by any playground noise. The blackboard was covered in questions on maths, science, geography, history, and a handwriting sample to copy. The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. We could write six verses of a poem, or a book review. I wrote about Caddie Woodlawn. For my essay about a famous person, I chose Napoleon. I found out later I got some different maths answers to the boys, but felt I had put the right answers in for geography and history.

  After we finished, Fred tossed his school bag high. “I’m free–ee,” he yelled. He was not going to high school. “I’m going to own Dad’s farm one day. Why do I care if I pass Proficiency? What do I need stuck-up old high school for?”

  I wanted a career when I left high school and not a lifetime of cows and muck. There were good sides to farming, like owning the land and cattle, but a mortagage took a long time to pay. I might become a teacher, or an actress, but not a nurse.

  “One needs to go to England to study at RADA in London, to become a professional actress,” Ruby had said. “Amateur theatricals and stage experience is not enough.”

  I bridled Ginger, threw the chaff sack on his back, and set off for home and sniping Jess. There was a week of school left then Mum and I were going Christmas shopping and having my delayed birthday treat in Miss Wilson’s Tea Rooms. Jess was going to a friend’s place before Christmas and would come back on Christmas Day in time for dinner. I counted the days until she went. Mum tried not to upset Jess’s perfectionist ways, saying she wanted Jess to be calm for the last months of her pregnancy.

  “Be tolerant. Don’t take Jess so personally, Helen.”

  Though Jess cooked and did housework, Mum insisted we do the dishes at night and that Jess put her feet up because her legs were swollen by night time. I ended up doing the dishes alone while Mum did the ironing so Jess wouldn’t stand. Jess never thanked me for taking her a cup of tea, just snapped that I should remember to use a tray to carry it.

  “I’m not a probationer nurse,” I grumbled.

  Jess stopped counting knitting stitches and eyed me coldly. “You would benefit from nursing training, Lenny. Nursing discipline is habit-forming.”

  “I will never be a nurse.” I did not want to be Miss Efficient, always sniping and criticising, and I would have said that but was trying to be tolerant.

  Mum still thought Harry was alive and refused to believe the army’s cablegram. “Men went missing in the First World War but some were eventually found.” She spoke with authority. “We must be patient.”

  Behind Mum’s back, Jess frowned and shook her head at me. I hadn’t said a word. I wouldn’t argue about Harry and squash Mum’s hope. Jess was trying to control me like a puppet, as though I would speak as she indicated. Did she think I had no brain to think for myself? Would Jane and Emily treat me as a puppet, if I met them, and disapprove of things I did?

  After the dishes I went to bed early to get out of sniping Jess’s sight. I stroked Ahmed who was braying endlessly. He was ugly but he was my direct link to Harry, to the far-away look on Harry’s face when he told us of the Bedouin camp and Ahmed the Arab man. Harry later said they had missed capture by a whisker, and could see the enemies’ dust on the horizon. Perhaps if he had been captured he would be in a German prisoner of war camp now, instead of dead. His absence was like an aching tooth. I couldn’t believe I would not see him again. Mum knelt on her bedroom floor every night, praying for Harry to stay alive. The floor was too hard for me to kneel on and prayer was hard to do so I just hoped he was alive.

  A space showed between the curtains, and I pulled them closed in case an enemy plane spotted the light. Mr Oakley said a Japanese invasion was not possible now the Allies were winning battles in the Pacific islands, where he said that jungle war was deadly and malaria was an adversary, too. For months I’d stopped half-expecting to see Japanese soldiers biking or marching into Te Miro. The FJC club no longer held meetings three times a day, though they still planned to help the Home Guard or a partisan group.

  In six months everything had changed and all the men in our family were dead. With paid help we kept on farming and I felt proud of that. Te Miro’s farmers had been doubtful women could work a farm but we were doing so.

  I had two days of primary school left. I put wood in the copper fire-box and kept it stoked. Mum had lit it for Jess’s bath. Jess was used to bathing in the morning. I made the porridge, cut my lunch, and set the table, wanting to be gone before Jess got out of bed.

  The peach, nectarine and pear trees in the orchard had tiny green fruit. With the bridle and chaff sack under my arm, I looked for Ginger. He wasn’t waiting by the gate. I saw him leaning against a peach tree, with his legs folded beneath him.

  I opened the gate. “Come on, Ginger. Two more days to go.” Ginger did not move. His head was slumped down and his eyes stared wide. He was dead. Flies crawled out of his nostrils and there was a smell like rotten cabbages.

  A sound like an air raid siren howled out of my mouth and echoed in the orchard. Mum ran up the side of the hay paddock, but I could not stop the noise.

  Jess in her dressing gown stood by the fence, staring at Ginger. “Ridden till he dropped,” she said.

  I wished someone would turn the siren off, say Ginger wasn’t dead, that he would rise up, shake his head and say, “Hmmph.”

  “Shut the hell UP!” Jess yelled.

  Mum grabbed my shoulders. “Lenny … Lenny, love.”

  My teeth chattered together. She shook my shoulders. The air raid siren stopped. “Ginger’s old. He had to die some time.” Mum’s eyes bored into mine.

  I cried, “Not today, not today,” and smeared Mum’s shirt with snot.

  “There is never a right day to die,” Mum whispered into my hair. She held me tight and we rocked together.

  “Who is going to bury this horse?” Jess demanded. “I am not going to dig the hole.” She shuddered. “Those flies will be in the house next. We need fly screens.”

  Mum held me while I looked at Ginger. “I talked to him,” I wept. “He was my constant friend.”

  “Hush, hush, my little flower.” Mum patted my back.

  “Who am I going to tell things to?” I sobbed.

  “You will make friends at high school.”

  “I want Ginger,” I bawled and hiccuped.

  R. Brown walked into the orchard with the shovel over his shoulder. He had a smear of porridge on the side of his face. “Ms Newland said I have to bury the nag,” he grumbled. “What about the boiling-down works?”

  “No!” I screamed. “He’s not going there…”

  Mr Mullins climbed over the orchard fence. “Heard a banshee’s wail.” Bright-eyed, he looked at Mum and me. “A powerful thing to hear,” he said.

  “Ronnie, get the horses harnessed,” Mum said. “We’ll have to drag Ginger out of the orchard. There are too many tree roots here to dig through.”

  “I’ll away and have breakfast,” Mr Mullins said. “Then Shaun and I’ll help dig the hole. Have the nag buried in the shake of a lamb’s tail.”

  “Thank you,” Mum said. “It would take us many hours digging on our own.”

  “I’ll always help a neighbour!” Mr Mullins tipped his farm hat to Mum, jumped the orchard fence, and jogged away to the boundary fence.

  I bawled as Bob and Crazy Horse pulled Ginger’s body through the orchard, across the paddock and beh
ind the barn. I swatted flies from his face as Mum and R.Brown shovelled turf back and started digging. I got the spade and dug out small chunks of earth, too. Mr Mullins and Shaun arrived. The hole took shape and the earth grew into a pile. The flies were thick on Ginger and I could not swat them away quickly enough.

  Mr Mullins showed R. Brown and Shaun how to fill their shovels with earth. “Dig deeper, fella me lad. Hold the shovel so…” They grunted as their shovels scooped out earth and piled it up. Mum brought oatmeal drinks for them and asked me to check the water trough ball-cocks in the back paddocks. I took Tip who bounded around each paddock and I knew it was a task to get me away from Ginger’s burial. I was glad to go. When I came back Ginger was buried and Shaun and R. Brown were shovelling up the last of the dirt and piling it on his grave. They went inside to eat Jess’s hot scones and drink tea.

  I picked some daisies and laid them on Ginger’s grave. I didn’t feel as desperately sad as I had on finding him. He had been old, tired and slow, and had had a dignified burial. Just thinking about the boiling-down works made shiver, whereas here, as Mr Mullins said, there would always be a wee hillock behind the barn to remember Ginger by.

  “Ginger, thou good and faithful servant,” I intoned in a biblical voice. “Rest in peace.” I felt the blessing proper for Ginger, my horse, my loved best friend.

  Chapter Ten

  ON DECEMBER EIGHTEENTH MY BIRTHDAY PETTICOAT WAS finally bought and for a Christmas present I chose green and white flowered cotton for a dress. It was fun sitting in Miss Wilson’s Tea Rooms afterwards, drinking tea, and eating cakes, scones and sandwiches. Then I went out and bought Mum a black china cat and Jess a box of soap.

  Back home, R. Brown chopped the head off a pullet and plonked it in the back porch. It took an hour to pluck, and Mum took its stinking insides out.

  At Christmas dinner we wanted Dad and Harry and sensed their presence

  “Pass me the salt, Lenny,” Dad would say. I wouldn’t frown at the “Lenny” now.

  “Move over, sister cousin.” I could almost feel Harry beside me on the form.