Salt Creek (2 page)

‘Huh,' Addie sobbed on a sharp indrawn breath, and threw herself off to the other end of the dray to sulk. She would not have been so forward in the past. Mama had her better in hand before Georgie died, but she had become disobedient of late.

‘Mama,' I said.

Papa turned at the commotion from his high seat up front and showed us his narrow face of disapproval. We were all shocked – Mama too. She did not believe in striking children; she said that kindness and gentleness were better teachers. I had never before spoken so to her, yet she was the one to hang her head.

The natives appeared horrified: savages judging us. The boy plunged a hand into the bag slung across his chest and drew something out and loosed it at us with elegant power. The object could scarcely be seen. I ducked on an instinct and it thwacked harmlessly at the back of the seat next to Mama and Mary and bounced away. Mama flinched. It was a smooth round stone, about a quail's egg in size, which Fred picked up and threw gamely back. His face was twisted with rage and effort but it travelled only half the distance.

‘Fred,' I said. I shook my head.

Mama's face was wet from crying. Fred and Albert fell to playing a quiet but fierce game of thumbs. We were as oblivious as any creature to the future. The people we passed were no more than curiosities; confirmation that we had exceeded a boundary and were now in wilderness. When I think of what they became to us and how long I have been thinking of them I would like to return to that day and stop the dray and shout at our ghostly memories and the natives: ‘I am sorry. I am sorry for what is to come.'

‘Listen,' I said. Everyone lifted their heads, suddenly alert at a distant thundering.

‘It's the sea,' Mama said.

It sounded more like a storm than the waves we had seen once or twice before. From town to the coast had been a morning's drive across seven miles of cut up ground and mud. Mama and Papa had camped there years before while Colonel Light was determining the site for the town. I pictured Mama looking out to sea and dreaming of England, and Papa gazing inland through a shimmer of heat to where a civilization must be created, and Hugh paddling in the low curls of water. The waves there had sounded nothing like this roaring.

Mama took a handkerchief from her tucker and wiped her face and dabbed her nose. ‘Look at the birds.' We followed her gaze to a flock of pelicans flying in – enormous white things in which flight seemed improbable.

The sun moved behind us and as we passed along our shadows rode beside us growing longer, taller, stranger in the falling sun, rearing up against trees and faltering across bushes and plummeting to the ground. Their lives were filled with interest.

Finally, late in the afternoon when the sun had turned to brass, the cart began its descent down a side track. We were so tired and benumbed with boredom we hardly saw the low structure built on a rise, the wide ribbon of water below, or the strip of land on the opposite shore, or heard the teeming birds along the water's edge. The boys dismounted and the weathered timber wall they stood against took shape. They opened a door and went inside. We pulled up and Papa got down, his expression hovering like one of the small birds we used to see all around the flowers in our garden in town, trying to decide where to pause and insert their slender beaks. He seemed caught between pride and shame, which was strange. It was something to have already built this stable where there was no timber and no stone. I supposed the house was somewhere beyond, obscured from view. He held out a hand to Mama.
‘Come now, my dear,' he said. She stood and I saw then, finally, that this was our new home. Now there was reason to cry.

There was not the time with evening drawing near to look about the house, to step back and see if it improved from another prospect.

We boiled over the edge of the dray. Addie ran up and down the weedy path from dray to door. ‘Is this our home? Are we living here now?' Albert and Fred found sticks as boys always seem to and ran in circles mad as young dogs about the house, wider and wider, whipping the tall grasses until the seed heads flew in the late sun. Mama's eyes flicked from them to Papa. His clothes hung looser these days, his cheeks were a trifle sunken and the corners of his eyes were whiskered with lines from his hours squinting in the sun. Papa lifted her down with care – she was a brittle thing those days, a dry twig – and led her to the door. There was no porch at the front, only dirt and crushed grass about the house, growing longer against the walls where feet had not trod, and a veranda at the back which stared down the long strip of water.

For a moment it was silent, with Mama and me in shock and Papa waiting for someone to speak and the bullocks dumbly standing. There was just the sea and the wind: a mournful conversation.

Papa bent his dark head to Mama, so slight at his side, and smoothed back a strand of her soft brown hair that had fallen loose. His voice, when he began to speak, was quick but without trajectory, a ramble of sounds filling a space. ‘When there is more wood, Bridget, I will make you a porch. And when there is stone to be had, and the dairy is growing, we will build the finest house hereabouts. More people will move here when they see what this land can do. There will be company then, of that you may be sure.' His beard moved on his chest with his words. He stroked it and smoothed it. He was a handsome man, as Mama used to tell us in her tales of the time when they were courting. She spoke of his optimism and high spirits. Grandpapa was cautious and mistrusted enthusiasms; if ever a person were praised, or spoke in a way that he considered boastful, he would remark, ‘Pride
goeth
before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.' Papa must have seemed exciting.

It was hard to imagine him as light-hearted now. He had tended of late to grave reflection and would look at us and our squabbling as if we had failed him and, worse, our civilization. He wished for us to be exemplars of the best of the empire so that people, by which Papa meant the natives and lower born settlers, could have a model to aspire to. For, as he said, ‘Their condition is so mean that it can only do them good to see how we live and prosper and make use of this land.'

‘Do they not use the land, Papa?' Fred asked.

‘No, not use it, merely live on it and eat what is there and hunt what lives on it or passes through. We wish to make something of it. They also can profit from that.'

Looking about me, those ideals seemed distant, the situation as hopeless as could be imagined.

Papa stroked Mama's arm, shoulder to elbow, as a person might a trembling horse. ‘We will make it nice, Bridget. I know we can. You will see. You have such a way with things, and there are the girls to help.'

I moved away. Much help Addie would be.

My mother's limp skirts shifted in the wind, gusting salty now, shifting south, pressing them against her. Papa grasped the rim of his hat against a strong buffet and pushed it firmly down and then he thought better of it and doffed it, tucking it beneath one arm – a movement I knew well from when we went visiting or when he arrived home from some business venture – and took Mama's hand awkwardly, since she was holding Mary, and rubbed it.

She said nothing, but blinked and obediently moved her eyes about when he released her hand and began gesturing towards the narrow strip of water – the lagoon, Papa called it – a sort of pink-grey now, and the spit of land beyond. He was a conductor of our future at that moment, summoning a vision from the landscape. Such a dreamer. Strange that it could be a gift and a curse.

Mary's hands waved pale as moths in the dwindling light, and her wailing started up, thin but insistent. Mama pulled the shawl from her face with two fingers, tucking it beneath Mary's chin, and her tiny goldfish mouth started its blind searching. Truly, babies sometimes disgusted me, though I must not say that. They were just little animals. I didn't notice so much with Georgie or even Louisa. More was expected of me now. At least Mama had stopped talking to me about becoming a grown woman and what I might expect. I must be thankful for that.

Mary's cry intensified and Mama looked at me. She held Mary so loose.

‘Here. Give her to me.' I took Mary and put her to my shoulder and patted her back. ‘There. There.' She was so soft, boneless almost. Georgie had been all muscle and spring. Mary's head banged at my neck and shoulder, working herself up to something. My arm was about her, lower, and a dampness began to spread across my arm through her shawl after the sharp smell of her reached my nose. More washing and who was to do that?

‘Papa,' I said, and, ‘Papa,' again when he took no notice. ‘Mary needs seeing to.'

‘Yes, let us go in,' he said, and lifted the latch on the door.

I would not willingly go through that night again, or that first week. I suppose that is true for much of life. To experience so many things once is ample. Not all. Some things you would live again and again. I knew that things had gone ill for Papa, but when we entered the house I felt it too. We were inside our new life then.

Mama stood in the dark hall – the only light appearing from its end – as if she were wedged there, and in squeezing past her, Mary still squalling in my arms, a splinter caught on my dress. There was the hiss of tearing fabric as I jerked free. Mama said nothing and did nothing until Papa went back and took her by the arm and led her down to the half-light of the parlour, as he called it, speaking low, though I would not say she was frightened precisely, rather, quiet and tentative in her movements. Mary's waving hand found her mouth and she started a furious sucking of her fist and growled like a small animal at a bone.

‘We'll soon set it to rights.' Papa's voice rolled along. ‘Come now and sit here.'

Mama blinked once or twice at the words and sank onto the sofa, not troubling to smooth her skirts, though they would crumple, as she would have said once.

Papa plumped the cushion behind her. ‘There. I'll bring you Mary,' and then addressing me, ‘the baby,' and he beckoned me over with fingers aflutter, trying to create some picture of her that might anchor us to this place.

I handed her over and there was snuffling, a whimper of frustration, silence. The dampness on my arm struck chill without Mary to keep it warm. I said nothing, only looked around the room.

Our house in Adelaide had two storeys and a cellar. The wainscots were fine cedar wood and the walls whitewashed within and stonework without. There were sixteen-paned windows all through the house, two of them in the drawing room. Here, the room had only a small four-paned window, and the thin light that came in revealed little of the inside, which perhaps was just as well, or of the outside, which was unvarying. Papa had brought a few household goods before he came to collect us: a wooden settee, a chaise longue that Mama liked to rest upon, the large bureau with barley twists, the piano. As pleasant as it was to see these old familiar objects, they were a poor fit in this parlour, like a crowd of slumberous oxen in a small stall – dark shapes seen more in my memory than in that moment. The walls were grooved planks and the roof was wood too, and all of it brown. Without light how can there be colour? The room smelled stale and close after the days of travel.

Papa was watching Mama. ‘That's better,' he said.

But it wasn't better – Mama staring numbly at the brocade chaise that she had last seen in town, looking at the window and at the uninterrupted view of the fading sky outside. Her head fell. I knew the picture that Papa had in mind: Mama in her chair in the drawing room, her skirts crisp and her hair smooth, always a babe in arms whose head she would stroke absently because her love and her calm were boundless and fathomless; a book about her and a child at her side, sometimes me, who she would be reading to, and Albert on his stomach on the fine red Turkey carpet, playing with a toy, Fred drawing at the table, his tongue working. There had been no end to the serenity of her.