Thornwood House (23 page)

Samuel’s eyes narrowed. ‘What about you, Aylish? Are
you
pleased to see me?’

I gazed up into his dear face. Pleased? Could he not guess how I’d missed him, how sick with longing I’d been while he was away? How worried, how desolate, how lonely I’d been? Of course not, how could he? The letters I’d written to him were probably still mouldering away in some forgotten camp storeroom.

I smiled. ‘You have no idea how pleased I am.’

But this time Samuel didn’t return my smile. A change had come upon him. My familiar Samuel was gone, the cold stranger had returned. His eyes were empty again, his mouth grim. Withdrawing his fingers from mine, he gripped my wrist hard.

‘You didn’t even know who I was.’

I tensed. ‘Samuel, let go. You’re hurting me.’

‘Have you met someone else, Aylish? You have, haven’t you?’

‘No! Don’t be ridiculous, Samuel.’

‘That’s the real reason, isn’t it?’ He jerked down on my wrist. ‘That’s why you never wrote, why you never came to see me at Greenslopes.’

‘Stop it, Samuel, you’re hurting me!’ I tried to pull free, but he held firm.

‘And the little girl, she’s not mine, is she? She can’t be, I’ve been away for years . . . what do you take me for, Aylish, a bloody fool?’

‘You’re wrong,’ I cried, sensing curious looks around us, knowing that we were making a scene, but too upset to care. ‘I
did
write. I don’t know why you never got any of my letters! There’s no one else, Samuel. How can you say that? There’s only ever been you. And Lulu . . . of course she’s yours, she’s nearly four, why would I even tell you about her if she wasn’t your daughter? Please, Samuel . . . you’re not well – ’

‘Well enough to know a lie when I hear one.’ He released my wrist as if touching me repulsed him. Then he added quietly, chillingly, ‘You’ll be sorry for this. By God, Aylish, you’ll be sorry.’

His mouth worked as if he wanted to say more, but instead he made an animal sound in the back of his throat. A snarl, a sob, I couldn’t be sure. Turning, he limped away along the street, his stick jabbing the pavement, his shoulders set; a tall emaciated bear of a man careless of the pedestrians dodging out of his path.

Audrey, January 2006

T
he Lutheran church was on the airfield road north-west of town. It was perched on a plateau of threadbare brown grass, a tiny whitewashed chapel with a tall roof and twin cypress trees guarding the entryway. Under one of the cypresses was propped a gleaming vintage motorbike.

Leaving my Celica on the verge, I hurried across the grass towards the little cemetery tucked away at the rear of the church. I passed a few modern plots – flat marble plaques implanted in the arid soil, invisible unless you were standing over them. The older gravesites occupied the furthest corner of the property, marked by a wire fence and shaded by red gums. On the other side was a paddock of dry lucerne inhabited by ghostly-white Brahman cattle. Behind them in the distance, a huddle of purple-blue volcanic hills.

I took my time weaving between the graves, pausing here and there to crouch and touch my fingers to weathered names, dates, endearments. I’d brought along my old Minolta but now that I was here it seemed too intrusive to start shooting; even the barely-there whirr of my shutter would have been out of place. The morning was too serene, the graves too peaceful. Deep quietude cocooned the graveyard, occasionally broken by
the slipstream of noise as a solitary car sped past. I might have drifted through a crack in time and into another world.

The graves in this section were largely pre-war; many of the inscriptions were written in German, evidence of the immigrants who’d settled the area in the 1870s.

One tiny marker begged a closer look. I knelt beside it and brushed at the flaking inscription until letters appeared: In Loving Memory of Mary Irene, Aged Eleven Years. Same age as Bronwyn. The blackened headstone struck me as too sombre a final home for the spirit of a vibrant eleven-year-old girl and I hastened away, only to stumble upon more children’s graves. One of them, surrounded by a collapsed iron-lace border, lured me back. Its unadorned headstone bore a single date – 21 April, 1907 – but there were two names: Edith, seven years, and Wilma, two days. Beloved daughters of Napoleon and Isabella.

My breath caught. How had she fared, the mother of these two lost girls? Had she stood where I now stood, a bereft young woman hugging her ribs in an attempt to hold herself together, fighting a losing battle against the grief that would tear her apart? How could she have moved on, how could she have taken the first step back towards life, when life had betrayed her so cruelly?

A raucous cry interrupted my reverie, drawing my gaze skyward in time to see a pair of grey-green dollarbirds swoop from the branches of a gnarly old red gum at the furthest end of the cemetery. Tumbling and rolling around each other, their coin-like underwing markings flashed white as they hawked for butterflies. They swept off across the paddock, diving over the Brahmans before riding an updraft back to their tree. I found myself following them, curious for a closer look. The sunlight warmed my arms, I grew languid. It was peaceful here, I hadn’t heard a car for more than five minutes. There was just the dollarbirds’ barking cries, the murmur of cattle, and the ever-present whisper of windblown leaves.

I loitered beneath the dollarbirds’ tree, gazing up. It was a pristine day, the sky a cobalt dome, the sun gloriously hot. Everything seemed so
alive
. It was an odd observation to make in a graveyard, but I could feel the energetic hum and thrill in the air around me, like swarms of invisible insects. I felt alert, in the grip of a sort of vertigo, as though I was standing on a precipice with one foot lifted in the act of striding out over the edge . . .

Reflex made me look down.

The grave at my feet was neglected. Weeds struggled through cracks in the masonry slab, and the headstone – a massive granite cross engraved with a Celtic knot – was pitted by what looked like bullet holes. As though someone had used it for target practice.

I brushed at the flaky stone, and when that failed to clarify the ravaged lettering, I sat back and pondered it. Regarding it through narrowed eyes, I could just make out the ‘S’ at the start of the inscription, and the ‘R-I-O’ that I presumed were the first three letters of the name Riordan. Everything else was chipped away – dates, epitaphs, loving memories – as though the elements had seen fit to wipe all trace of him from the face of existence.

I knelt closer. Not the elements; I’d been right first time. Someone
had
taken pot-shots, probably with a small calibre rifle, and from a fair distance. Not enough to shatter the headstone, but adequate to pit the granite surface and spoil it with rings of shallow chipping. I glanced around, puzzled. I hadn’t noticed that any of the other graves were vandalised. Just this one.

Who would bother to deface a gravestone – bored kids, local louts with nothing better to shoot at? And why this grave? Was it coincidence, or had resentment and suspicion followed Samuel into death and beyond?

‘That’s the nature of tight-knit communities like Magpie Creek,’ Corey had told me. ‘People know each other’s business, and they have long memories – ’

Gravel bit into my knees. The sun had burned a heat rash on my shoulders and a headache had begun to gather behind my eyes. The liveliness of the morning seeped away. I was limp with exhaustion again, or maybe it was defeat. I entertained the idea of stretching out on the sun-warmed slab among the shards of powdery rubble and weeds, laying my head above the place where – six feet below – Samuel’s bones nestled in the dark earth.

Foolish thoughts.

I stood, brushing grit off my jeans legs. The dollarbirds had flown away, leaving the Brahmans to snore in peace. Silence reigned supreme, there was only the creak of windblown eucalypt branches and the distant drone of a plane.

Whatever I’d hoped to find here – a sense of communion perhaps, or a touching of spirits that might validate my belief in Samuel – eluded me. My quest to prove Samuel’s innocence had turned up little in the way of absolute truth. At least, not the truth I wanted. Hearsay, innuendo, prejudice, unfounded accusations; and now the senseless destruction of a gravestone. All fragments of a larger story whose ending I was beginning to dread.

Since I wasn’t really looking, I found her easily. She’d been laid to rest at the edge of the old section that slumbered in closest proximity to the church – nearer to God, perhaps.

I stopped, my heart squeezing out a few extra beats in confused surprise. Aylish’s final resting place would have been impossible to miss. It was a humble affair, elegant in its simplicity, uncluttered with sentiment. The grave itself was protected by a masonry slab, cracked and pitted by the passage of years, not so different from any of the other graves that surrounded it, apart from a glaring absence of weeds and rubble.

And a vase of fresh roses.

The headstone was traditional, a simple arch with a circle engraved at its heart. Inside the circle was a relief carving of a wildflower: a delicately stylised waratah. I bent to read the inscription.

Aylish Lutz

Beloved of Jacob

Taken to God, 13 March, 1946

Aged 22 years

Once again I had the giddy sense of falling forward.
Taken to God
. They were only words, but they spoke in a chill whisper of that distant night. I could see her so clearly in the eye of my mind. She was curled in the shadow of a tall boulder, her limbs skewed under her, black trails of blood leaking from her wounds, her face hidden from the moonlight. As she waited.

Waited for death. Or for Samuel. Whichever came first.

I was on my knees, though I didn’t recall making the decision to move. Reaching for the roses, I bruised a petal between finger and thumb, disturbing its dark-red perfume. Not a dream, then. Real. The great blowsy roses were plump and unwithered, their stems erect, the water in the vase clear. They’d been placed here late last night or early this morning.

Minutes crawled by.

In the privacy of my secret mind, I was coming to feel that I knew Aylish intimately. Out here – in the dust and sunlight and baking heat of reality – I had no claim on her. She was a stranger to me, a faceless young woman who had died sixty years ago.

Yet someone remembered her. Someone cared enough to clear the detritus of time from her grave, remove the weeds. Bring roses. I touched the crimson-black petals again, drank in their scent. In this heat, they’d be dead by nightfall.

It could only be Luella Jarman, I reasoned. But after all I’d learnt about Luella – the elusive hermit who drove an hour and
a half into Brisbane to avoid being seen at the local shops, and who refused to open her door even to old friends – the image of her tending her mother’s grave seemed unlikely.

I looked over my shoulder at the church.

I couldn’t see the entryway from here, just the tall siding with its leadlight windows. The door had been ajar when I arrived, and I hadn’t heard anyone’s car arrive, nor had I heard the old motorbike rumble to life and roar away. The place looked deserted, but there was a slim chance that the pastor or church attendant might be skulking about inside.

It was a long shot, a wild gamble; a wager thrown forward by a brain in the grip of unhealthy obsession. Of course, I could stake-out the cemetery for the next week in the uncertain event that Aylish’s visitor would return, but that seemed insane. Wasn’t it easier to ask?

Before I could talk myself out of it, I was weaving my way back through the gravestones towards the little church, my heart set on beating the odds.

The darkness was cool, a relief from the scorching sun. Muted light filtered through the stained-glass windows, drenching the gloomy interior in crimson and green, gold and subterranean blue. The dry air smelled of furniture polish, turpentine, candle wax, musty books . . . and curiously, of chocolate.

I could still hear the barking chant of the dollarbirds, but their calls were distant now, subdued and otherworldly. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness I began to make sense of the topsy-turvy shadows. Pews draped in white, a stone basin on a pedestal, a bookshelf crammed with hymnals.