The Daughters of Mars (2 page)

For he would need to do the milking even on the morning of his wife’s death.

But she finds it hard to face him, Sally perceived. Naomi—who had tried to avoid the weight of home and its taint of illness—had certainly assumed the weight now. She’d taken up station on the far side of the bed, across from where Sally, on her knees, put reasonable Methodist coloration on the poor, released features.

Naomi said, I didn’t have any idea till I came
home that it was as bad as that. Her pain was the whole world to her. She could see nothing but it. Well, not any longer.

Sally was engrossed with her mother.

It was easy, Mama, to steal what you needed. I cut out two pages from the drugs record book. Former nurses who had managed the drugs register had done similar excisions because they did not approve of some missed or untidily written entry. Then for your dear sake I copied the dosages on fresh pages, adding an extra dose of an eighth of a grain of morphine in this case and that, until I’d created a phantom two grains, which I then fetched from the drugs cabinet and brought home to you. It’s unlikely a doctor or matron will remember a specific dose as months go by. But I don’t care if they do.

She had kept the tablets hidden behind the bed linen in the hallway dresser. These two grains when mixed in solution and injected would bear away disease and the fuss of enduring all useless treatment. They would reach deep into the body and halt the mechanism of agony. And had now.

She kissed her mother’s brow before gracing it with the powder. Eric Durance would be astonished by his wife’s beauty in death.

Naomi declared, I gave her half a grain and we kissed and held hands, though I had to be careful—a touch would break her bones. Then she went.

You were standing over her? said Sally.

They both knew how rare it was that a patient expired while the nurse was standing there to observe and hold a hand. The dead went almost secretively.

By good fortune, said Naomi without flinching but without bothering to look at her sister. By good fortune I was there.

Again, Sally’s astonishment that Naomi had done the right, fierce, loving, and hard thing Sally had meant to do! Even in this she was not to be outshone, the half-mad Sally thought. But Naomi was there because she had found the secret cache and took the burden of soothing her mother’s breath down to nothing. A solemn loss and rejoicing were the day’s order—Mama’s freedom now from a world she had never since their babyhoods seemed accustomed to. As for her children, they must now get accustomed to something new. To new love and new hate and mutual shame.

The roads being firm just then, Dr. Maddox arrived by motor at midmorning. The town—ignorant of medicine—loved him for his kindliness and punctuality and a lack of airs in a place where a doctor could easily play the grand wizard. But the hospital staff knew he was one of those tosspots who could carry it off well; that some unforgettable and disabling past event drove him to it. Though he
performed surgery only when the other town doctors were not available, he was still a better surgeon when sober than most country doctors. It was peripheral things he was negligent at—paperwork, including death certificates. His method with the town at large was to hide it all behind an air of universal brotherhood and to breathe an impeccably mentholated breath over the sickbeds of the shire.

That Saturday morning Dr. Maddox came to lower his face over Mrs. Durance and to ask Naomi about the last injection and how many grains, and to accept what she said and then breathe, Good woman—good, poor woman. Then he prepared a medical certificate, which he showed Naomi and Sally and which said Mrs. Durance had died of cancer, nephritis, and exinanition. There were in the valley many people Dr. Maddox had certified as dying of nephritis and exinanition. Nephritis and exinanition was the cited verdict all along both banks of the river and inland to the blue, wooded hills where the timber workers camped and always died of nephritis and exinanition, unless a tree fell on them. Farmers who had taken poison to escape the bank had their death certificates compassionately marked by Maddox with that saving formula.

This morning of the death, over tea Sally made while keeping her eyes from straying to Naomi, Dr. Maddox sat at the kitchen table and spoke for a while to the girls’ father. These were very much men’s mutterings, half-embarrassed and platitudinous. Their father wore large, mute features, the same he brought to his labors. They had not yet crumbled in grief but somehow promised soon to do so.

• • •

Sally had less reason to stay in the Macleay Valley now. She was maybe a year beyond the age girls left home for marriage. Her sister had returned to her Sydney duties. Mr. Durance took sturdily to his work and employed the Sorley boys when needed. But Sally did not yet feel entitled to go. To flee would be obscene. It would be an insult to her mother’s spirit. Her sister could escape because escape was her forte. She’d managed the trick before. But while it was easy for strangers
to declare Eric Durance independent—a freestanding fellow—he did not seem so rugged to Sally.

The country hospital had its own retaining power too. On the Wednesday following her mother’s funeral she found that a fourteen-year-old boy with peritonitis she was nursing had died in the night, and she believed her stinging tears were a debt paid to her mother and a sort of tax paid to the valley. So by horseback, or more often by sulky, she continued traveling in her uniform—along the broad yellow-earth road and unreliable bridge over the river—to and from the home at Sherwood. She was a figure located essentially amidst the green paddocks, one who could not glibly get away.

It was in the corridors during her night shifts that the mercy they’d given her mother took on the demeanor of a crime never to be argued away. Did I do it because I was tired? Fed up with all-day working and all-night watching? In the nurses’ cubicle at the end of a public ward which contained—with all injuries and diseases there present combined and counted—no pain such as that of her mother’s, Sally wept without consolation, since no night pleadings from an entire hospital of patients seemed to come close to the daytime pleadings she’d heard from her dead but eternal mother.

This young woman of twenty-two—or near twenty-three—years was considered by those who bothered to see her to be possessed by a wistfulness which some people thought represented that greatest crime of bush towns: aloofness, flashness. Either that, or she was a cause for sympathy. A spinster-in-training.

T
hen—after eight months—the thunderclap. It would alter earthly geography. It altered the geography of duty and it enhanced all escape routes. It was not the thunderclap of war—at least in the clear and direct sense. It was not the declarations of the prime minister or the news that the enemy was in Samoa and New Guinea, and his flotilla of cruisers and raiders was already at sea, or about to take to it and make the Pacific and Indian Oceans perilous. It was not the rush to make a full-blown army out of a mere framework of weekend militias. It was not a renewed awareness that the valley was numerous in Bavarian Catholic cow-cockies, now likely to be less loyal even than the Irish. It was a letter addressed to her father and her by Naomi in Sydney.

There is a call for military nurses. Unless you have sharp objections, I’ll apply. But any acceptance is unlikely. If Sally feels that she would be left without proper help, I will of course . . .

Recently Sally had begun to favor the day shift for its busyness, leaving the house with stew and potatoes bubbling on the great iron range fueled with the fallen branches of ring-barked trees. In her noon absence her father would eat some of this and when she returned at dusk always declared it had been top-class. It was good that he was not a complainer, that his hard-mouthed taste was not broad, and
any food involving meat, potatoes, and green peas fulfilled his idea of nourishment, as long as it was served scalding. But even before the great change in the world, she had known in some secret chamber of the mind that she
was
readying herself for an escape, one all the more—not less—daring and reckless because it did not involve tunneling or scaling walls.

On the excuse she would be home too late from the hospital, she had started to get the Sorley girl to cook her father the evening meal. Many would see what was coming their way—the womanless homestead which would be his lot—and they would rant and plead. But Mr. Durance did not show any sign he intended that. He stated a thoughtful and unblaming awareness that in the end both the girls would go, for Naomi had already proved it to him. Neither love nor blood nor begging, he wisely and grievingly knew, could hold a man and his children under one roof and unto death. At some time the roof would change itself into a wheel which spun off the children. This month—if the occasional
Herald
which reached the farm could be believed—the roofs of the world had become a wheel for crushing the breasts of mothers and fathers. If Naomi could be shrugged off by this roof in the Macleay, then she, Sally, was fit also to be thrown out on a tangent over earth, and perhaps over oceans—whose scope might even reduce her crimes as a daughter to the size of an atom.

There was as well a problem she had with a farmer’s son named Ernie Macallister—about whose suitability for her and her suitability for him it seemed a number of people had already decided. She’d let herself be taken to Crescent Head to swim and once to the flickers at the Victoria. The college of women—her late mother too—had just about chosen to allot her in their minds to young Macallister like real estate. The tedium of all this frightened her.

The federal letter calling for nurses arrived at the Macleay District the same day as Naomi’s and was left in the nurses’ room by the matron in case any of her four charges felt the drag of history. Sally approached her matron and told her that she would like to apply. It
would probably be for nothing. The matron was, however, English-born and ardent on the Empire and the war, and she gave Sally leave.

Sally intended to try to fit the business of potential enlistment in Sydney into two days and two nights. She sent a telegram asking to stay not at Naomi’s flat but at the more spacious Randwick house of her Aunt Jackie. She knew this would be considered by Naomi as a stringent step. That it would be correctly interpreted as resentment of the urban sister and an avoidance of the unease rising from the murderous succor they had extended to their mother. But something was rampant in Sally, something that said crazily that Naomi should not feel entitled to keep the whole of the war and leave Sally with the crumbs of a languishing peace.

In Sydney by morning and rushing by tram to Victoria Barracks, Sally entered a drill hall where other women stood half-bewildered, and filled out a form about her nursing career and her own medical condition. She queued for the interview at which she was to present two papers—her nurse’s registration and a health certificate from Dr. Maddox—to an elderly militia colonel, whose manner was paternal, and a senior matron who sat with him at a table, whose manner was dry. The pressure of unconfessed murder nudged up around the edges of the two printed forms, and she was pleased to pass them over.

Even so, Sally suspected she would not be chosen. She might make this slight and feeble move and then go back tamed for years more to the duty of daughterhood. She suspected she might in fact go back with as much secret relief as disappointment. She was willing to go back. That forenoon as she left the hall, she resigned herself to return on the following night’s coaster. The tin roof would not spin her far off and had already begun its pull inwards.

She spent the rest of the day with Jackie. The aunt was the better part of ten years younger than her mother and—married to an accountant—did not seem to possess that worn quality which ultimately marked anyone who associated themselves with dairy cattle. She was jolly too, and had a genuine gift for levity, whereas Sally’s mother had
maintained her silence and air of endurance rather than give way to irony. This afternoon was not marked by any particular urban excitement designed to comfort Sally for her imminent return to the bush. A journey to the Italian greengrocers; some wurst for her children’s and husband’s lunches. Though the powers of the earth had decided that wurst would be called “devon” now, the meat was still in the process of taking on that new, solid British identity. Then to the grocer’s—Moran & Cato’s. Dazzling metropolitan experiences!

It was four o’clock then. The children whom the aunt intended for university were studying in their rooms—they possessed their own desks, no homework on kitchen tables in this house—and Naomi Durance arrived. Her knock was answered by her aunt while Sally was reading a magazine at the kitchen table. Sally heard her arrival and settled herself for facing her sister. Entering the living room she saw Naomi wearing a white jacket over a light blue dress, and carrying a straw hat with a blue band. She managed with an easy, urbane air her clothing and her striking green eyes and long features and her mother’s sweetness about the long lips. She was also fit to be feared and worshipped in the best of makeup. Even their aunt greeted her as if she were an exciting visitation. The kids came out of their rooms wearing smiles of anticipation. She had brought with her a box of chocolates.

When the kids had taken chocolates back to their desks to help them with Euclid, Naomi began. What a surprise I got, Sally, when the colonel and matron told me another Durance—yes, Sally Durance—was down here.

She spoke softly like a magistrate pretending it was pleasant information but really taking it as another instance of human folly for which Sally would need to pay. This brought out something unwished-for and sullen in Sally.

Naomi said, Why didn’t you ask me, instead of bothering Aunt Jackie? I could have put you up.

Yes, Sally wanted to say. The two killing daughters together. What a happy arrangement!

I just wanted to make my own plans, Sally mumbled. No offense intended.

And who’s looking after Papa? I was just wondering.