One Sunday (9 page)

‘Who did you have in that ambulance this morning, Thomo?'

He ignored her question. ‘I'm here to get a list of the names of those you had at your alleged party last night, Mrs Dolan.'

‘It was Len Larkin's mother's birthday party. I just supplied the music.'

‘I hope she enjoyed it.'

‘Due to illness, she couldn't attend – and when you start ringing bells out the front of my place at the crack of dawn, then come knocking down my door and waking me up again a few hours later, I'd say I've got a right to know why.'

‘I doubt you would have been in your bed at the crack of dawn, Mrs Dolan, and if you were, by the sound of your greeting this morning you were up to no flamin' good in it –' He bit his tongue, closed his mouth, looked over his shoulder and scratched at his jaw. ‘Right,' he said. ‘Right. As I was saying, I want a list of the guests, male and female, and I want to know what time they arrived and what time they left.'

‘Then you're wanting to know more than I'm knowing, Thomo, my lad.'

‘If I can give you the respect of your dead husband's name, then I'll thank you to reciprocate, Mrs Dolan.'

‘Yes, officer. To be sure, officer.' She curtsied, lifting her colourful satin dressing gown enough to show one long white leg with a mole above the knee. He turned his back fast.

‘Get that list on my desk by noon, if you please.'

‘That ambulance was out front of Reichenberg's place. Did old Joe finally murder one of those boys?' He made no reply, so she shrugged and stepped outside, leaving the door gaping wide as she walked to the eastern end of the low-slung veranda where a breath of cool was coming off the water tank.

The hotel, constructed room by room over a longish period of time, wasn't much of a hotel as hotels go. Its roof was low, its rooms small and its veranda floors rested against the earth. The floors inside were not much higher, and the place smelled of age and beer, tainted by mushrooms. Out here, the air was thick with the scents of her garden.

Tom watched her fill a bucket from the tank tap then meter out good drinking water to pot plants, pouring a little around the roots of a wisteria that formed a solid green wall on the western end of the veranda and was well on its way to taking over the north side. A nice spot this, and that cane lounge waiting in the shade, inviting his legs to sit a while. He didn't sit, but walked determinedly into the sun.

Verandas sheltered all four sides of the hotel. Harry Dolan had put in six big water tanks, needing a reliable supply of water for his lodgers. She'd evicted them and was now using that water to keep the close surrounds of this place blooming – and tank water as precious as liquid gold these days, and him not having any.

He sniffed at the air. That circle of belladonna lilies had no fear of drought or sun. In full bloom, their perfume this morning resurrected memories of a small back yard in Melbourne, which he didn't want to think about.

‘There are families in town dipping their drinking water from the river and lugging it home in buckets, Mrs Dolan.'

‘What do you want me to do about it? Buy a Furphy and start deliveries?'

He walked away from her, walked down the eastern side of the building; she followed him with a second bucket of precious water. Plants by the dozen down this side, strange plants he couldn't name, bearing strange flowers he'd never seen before.

‘Were either of the Reichenberg boys at your party last night?'

‘Ask Len Larkin who his mother invited.'

He took a tobacco tin from his vest pocket, prised the lid off and packed a tight pipe, his mind pondering the pros and cons of coming to the point and telling her about the Squire girl. He wouldn't get any information out of her unless he told her. What to do next, that was the question.

She emptied her bucket and placed it down, her hair falling forward as she bent, her hand going to that hair, finger-combing it from her brow, her arm bare to the elbow. She was in her early forties, but that arm was still as firm as a girl's, as was the rest of her. Gutter-born, maybe, but a raving beauty in her time – certainly, the years were starting to show, though not forty-three years, and given the early life she'd led, the years should have been showing more. Time had stayed well clear of those amber eyes. They were looking at his pipe, looking at his matchbox. She liked a fag. He sighed, took the cigarette packet from his pocket and offered the lone white cylinder.

‘As you know, officer, I was never a one to take the last lolly out of a baby's mouth.'

He kept offering it. She shrugged a shoulder and took it. He lit it for her then lit his pipe with his last match, letting the match burn down, curl, turn black before tossing it. Turning on the heel of his boot he followed a narrow path to the cider pit, scattering a motley assortment of chooks pecking for what they might find.

The cider pit door, designed for broad midgets or fat barrels, was padlocked. A man had to bob his head low to get inside that door. Plenty didn't mind bobbing.

The widow hadn't followed him. She leaned against a veranda post, drawing on her fag and holding her gown around her, holding most of her in. All greens and reds and blues, that gown. Colour. The last Mrs Dolan had been a black-clad toothless mouse.

He turned to Reichenberg's land, looked at the whitewashed buildings. No sign of life over there – other than the red steers and those horses, beautiful animals, in beautiful condition. Tom wasn't in the mood to face their owner, not before breakfast.

Making a wide circle around the widow, he was on his way back to his bike when he ran into the wheelbarrow and almost fell on his face.

She laughed, and that woman had a bugger of a laugh. Even as a kid, she'd had a bugger of a laugh on her.

‘Get that list of names on my desk by midday – if you please, Mrs Dolan.'

‘And what if I don't please, Thomo?'

Sunday, 8.05 am

Kurt placed the billy of milk on the work table and Elsa, her hands busy, offered her cheek for his kiss.

‘Wake your brother. He's already been threatened with a bucket of water.' She spoke English this morning, only Kurt to hear her, and the cat, a sleek bilingual black she'd named Katze. ‘The constable is at the public house. I heard the ambulance vehicle close by this morning. Was there an accident there?'

‘Close by, Mutti,' Kurt replied, peering out the kitchen window. It faced east, giving an optimum view of the comings and goings from Dolan's hotel. No sign of the constable, but his bike was still there.

‘Did you see?'

‘I was late to work this morning,' Kurt replied as he walked out to the passage.

He and his brother, Christian, shared a bedroom at the rear of the house, each year becoming more annoyed by a third bedroom, empty, its door locked, its boarded-up window like a closed eye, refusing to acknowledge Dolan's hotel or the rising sun.

Through the open back door he saw his father walk from the barn, answering his stomach's call. Each morning Joseph worked at his art. He'd served his time with a master furniture maker in Germany before catching gold fever. It was over fifty years since he'd come to Australia to seek his fortune with a pick and shovel, his woodworking tools travelling with him, good tools made in Germany. They'd put food in his mouth during the bad times. At seventy-eight, his eyesight not so keen, it took longer to achieve the results of his youth, so he worked longer hours. A perfectionist, Joseph Reichenberg, the German dealer in Willama paid well for the privilege of selling each piece those old hands produced.

Kurt had great respect for his father, but he didn't wait to greet him. He stepped back and into his bedroom where Christian lay, sprawled on his stomach, limbs spread like a starfish, the stink of grog oozing with the sweat from his pores.

‘Have you been bathing in it?' he asked, shaking his brother's shoulder. ‘Wake up, and wash yourself.'

‘Clear out,' Christian moaned, rolling onto his side.

The slam of the screen door, heavy boots on wood, the slap of a hand on their door and a guttural growl. ‘
Steh ouf!
'

‘He is up, Papa,' Kurt replied in German, the only language allowed in this house when his father was within earshot, the language both boys had been familiar with until entering the classroom. Christian, thirteen months Kurt's junior, now refused to speak his father's language.

‘Get up.'

‘What's the time?'

‘It's after eight.'

‘It's Sunday too. Go to buggery.'

Kurt grasped the corner of the pillow and dragged it free. ‘It's Sunday and a bloody Sunday, brother, and I need to talk to you.'

Christian sat up for an instant. ‘Oh, shit,' he moaned, and he was down again, his face buried in the mattress.

‘You drink, you suffer. Your brain is pickled by grog, the room stinks of it, and if he comes in here, you'll get his bucket of water, and our mattress will be wet again. Get out, wash yourself and gather your wits. We have to talk.'

‘I like them better scattered.'

‘What did you do after I left last night?'

‘It's none of your business what I do.'

‘Not mine, perhaps, but it has become police business. Rachael was taken to Willama in the ambulance this morning.'

That got his brother from his bed, or got his feet on the floor, got him sitting, looking at Kurt with bloodshot eyes, which made the blue a paler shade.

They fell silent as they heard footsteps returning. Waited, watching that door, ready to dodge Joseph's bucket of water. It was only Elsa putting Katze out before her husband's heavy boot evicted him from her kitchen.

Eat, Kurt thought. Leave the fool with his stink and his problems. Instead, he leaned against the door, watching Christian pick up the shirt he'd worn last night, smell it, then toss it onto the bed. He was of similar height to Kurt, though his bones were heavier. He'd inherited the build of his mother's people, but not her temperament. Elsa, always a big woman, was becoming a broad woman. In some distant future Christian too might become broad. This morning he looked much like his brother, though his features were set in a scowl and his sweat-soaked hair appeared darker.

Kurt sighed, picked up the discarded shirt and stuffed it into the calico bag hung from a hook behind the door. ‘I found her unconscious on the road, close to our gate – and only minutes after you came stumbling into this room at dawn. Did you leave her bleeding there?'

‘What do you think I am? Is she all right?'

‘I don't know who you are these days. Would you know what you did last night? You couldn't find your own bed.'

‘Is she all right, I said?'

‘I don't know that either. Her head was injured. I left her with the doctor and the constable. He's at the hotel now and will be here next.'

Kurt stripped the sheets, shook them, turned them top to tail. He smelt the pillow Christian had slept on, tossed it onto the bed. ‘If you weren't with her when it happened, then who was she with?'

‘If she'd let that gimpy bastard touch her, she'd let anyone.'

‘You stink, brother, like a rutting dog. In your head, in your heart, you stink. Soil my bed with your filth if you must, but not her name.'

He moved to the other side of the double bed they had shared since infancy, and he stretched the top sheet taut, tossed the coverlet over the lot. It was never left on the bed at night, and so had not absorbed the stink of sweat and booze; perhaps it would seal it in. He pulled the curtains open, anchoring them on hooks each side of the window frame, hoping air might circulate. When he turned back to his brother, Christian was pulling a clean shirt over his head.

‘You put a clean shirt on that? Wash yourself!'

‘You sound more like the old bastard every day,' Christian sneered. ‘No wonder everyone in town hates your guts.'

‘I don't seek the approval of everyone, and I seek a drunkard's approval less than most, and how I talk is my bloody business.'

Christian was slow to remove the shirt, slow to reply. ‘Did she say anything?'

‘She was unconscious, I told you. Her head was bleeding.' He stood a moment looking at his hands, then walked to the door. ‘The doctor handled her as if she were dead.'

‘Shut up with that shit.'

‘It's shit, all right!' His hand on the doorknob, Kurt turned. ‘All morning I've been thinking about that shit you made for yourself, and I've been standing in it with you too, right up to my neck. A year ago you were warned to stay away from her. Those people might play around with others but they marry their own religion, their own class.'

‘Gimpy bloody Kennedy class? His father was a mongrel-bred bastard.'

‘And his grandmother was Molly Squire's daughter, which in this town makes him good enough.'

Kurt leant against the door, his gaze moving across his brother's face, attempting to see something he couldn't find there. He shrugged, turned to the window as his hand moved to his cheek, wiping at it, remembering old man's Kennedy's spittle landing there. He'd been in the grocer's, buying tea and flour. The war was over, and soon his mother could go into town and do her own shopping, soon he would be asked to play cricket in the schoolyard. That was the day he'd known that to some, he would always be a German bastard, and German bastards did not play cricket. They walked on eggshells around many in this town.

He looked at his hand, shrugged. ‘Perhaps you needed to feel that spittle on your face,' he said, suddenly weary, wishing he could climb back into bed and begin this day again.

‘It probably helps you with licking the old man's boots too,' Christian said.

‘Christian, Kurt. Come to breakfast,' Elsa called. No English now. Obedient wife, Elsa.

‘We come now,' Kurt replied in his father's tongue. He ran his fingers through his hair and turned again to Christian. ‘One thing is for sure, you will never fill those boots. Now wash, and don't mention the accident at the table.'

‘She'll be all right.'

‘Ah, so my brother is God, eh? If he says she'll be right, then the dead will arise and walk.'

‘Of course they'd send her across to the Willama hospital. Old Hunter doesn't know his arse from his elbow.'

‘Nor do you, brother. Nor do you lately. Now wash, and come to breakfast.'

 

Through her kitchen window, Elsa watched her nearest neighbour. She liked that woman's garden but did not approve of the gardener. Loose hair suggested loose values. Elsa wore her hair plaited tight.

Much time was spent at the work table beneath her window, meals were served there, pastry rolled, vegetables prepared, dishes washed in a large tin dish beside that window. There was no sink in Elsa's kitchen, no tap, but a tank stood close to her back door, and a pump in the washhouse supplied bore water. She dreamed of town water and shiny taps and sinks, stared at them each time she passed the hardware shop. Such conveniences. She had a fine house, but still had to bathe in the old tin tub in the washhouse, bucketing water first from pump to copper, waiting for it to heat, then bucketing it from copper to tub – as she had been bucketing water here for over forty years. And while she squatted in that tub she had to bend her great knees and be thankful for the plentiful underground water, which at times turned soap to scum.

The town pipes would pass by this land before the year was at an end, and continue on to the hotel. Joseph wouldn't pay to bring town water to this kitchen, he wouldn't pay for a sink, or build a new bathroom. Perhaps Elsa would pay with the money from her good friend, Mrs Buehler.

She smiled, a brief, tight smile, made so by her disloyal thought – and by the restriction of a meaty jaw and large prominent chin. Her eyes smiled. An oversight by her cruel maker, her eyes were far too fine to be stranded between those unfortunate jowls and the high broad brow. Since childhood, she'd worked hard for Joseph and been given no money to own, to spend. It was a fine thing to have money, not in a hole in the ground, but in the post office bank, where she could make a paper and say: ‘If you please, Miss Martin, I'll take five pounds today.'

When the legal papers came, she had not been able to write her name. Now she could write it. Kurt had held her hand, guiding the pen until she could do it alone. The name had power. All words had power. She could write numbers, and
cat
, then by adding another letter, make
cat
become
coat.
Warm things, coats and cats.

Her eyes turned to Joseph's German words, written on a sheet of paper pinned to the back of the kitchen door with a rusted drawing pin. Always, he'd pinned his lists there, with that same drawing pin. From when her boys were very small, he'd made lists of chores they had to do when they came home from school, and there was big trouble if her little ones could not read what those German words said. How many times had they stood before her with worried faces, sounding out the words so she might save them from their papa's anger? Such good little boys.

She looked at her sons now seated at the table. Not so small, but still her little boys. Again this morning, they were worried boys.

‘Perhaps the ambulance vehicle came for the public house,' Elsa spoke in the old tongue. ‘Perhaps this is why the constable was there.'

Christian glanced at the window. He'd been thinking of Dolan's cider pit, trying to remember what he'd done there last night. Just a blur of faces and voices and the redhead at the piano, playing popular tunes. Until three months ago, he'd rarely tasted grog. Last night he'd put away so much, he couldn't remember coming home, how he'd come home, or when.

Elsa placed a mug of tea and a plate full of eggs, fried tomato and home-made sausage before him. He drank his tea then stabbed at the sausage, watching it ooze fat. Shouldn't have done that. Everything she cooked oozed fat and he couldn't face her cooking this morning – couldn't face those greasy eggs staring up at him with yellow eyes, daring him to put them in his gut. Like when he was five, when she'd drawn him from his safe quilts, dressed him, made him eat an egg before dragging him up that hill to the school. He'd puked. Every morning for months he'd puked halfway to school, but she'd continued dragging him, or carrying him up there, Kurt walking obediently at her side. Always the obedient son, Kurt.

Christian listened to his brother jabbering, he watched his father nod, pour tea into his saucer, then suck it up like a pig at the trough. He filled his mouth with sausage – didn't allow sausage or tea to stop his jabbering reply.

They were talking about the new dam. It would be written on his list behind that door. He'd numbered his latest demands, one to six. Christian could read the numbers and that's all he could read. Whatever he'd written there in German gibberish hadn't been done. Since spring that same list had been waiting. The ink was fading, the paper yellowing.

They'd started on Dolan's paddock two weeks back, first clearing the site of scrub and reeds, then soaking it, ploughing it, now the crazy old bugger was planning to scoop out what they'd ploughed then soak it again. That was the way he'd dug his first dam and that was the way his last one would be dug. There was machinery now that would dig a dam faster, better. So what? Machines must be paid for. Joseph Reichenberg had horses and slave labour.

Kurt could switch from one language to the other mid sentence. He never put a foot out of place. They both used to sit at this table with that book of gibberish before them, their father behind them, boxing their ears when they couldn't see the difference between one word and the next. Kurt had learned to decipher that gibberish. Christian had learned to duck.

Until he turned fourteen, he'd spoken German in this house – until the day his arse got thrashed because he'd left Kurt to unharness the horses while he walked Rachael back to the swimming bend. That was the day he stopped speaking German.