Ross didn’t come into the house until six-thirty, and even then he didn’t look at her or speak. He was pale-faced and tense, staring intently at the pattern on the tablecloth, and didn’t even appear to be listening when Bruce told them all the funeral would be on Friday, three days away.
‘Her sisters and brother and their families will be coming as soon as they can,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably get here Thursday night. The women can all sleep in here, and the men with me out in the bunkhouse. They’ll all give you a hand, Dulcie, we’ll have to lay on a bit of a spread too for after the funeral.’
Dulcie was glad to know she had something to fill the next two days. She had gone with Betty twice to help neighbours prepare food for such occasions, so she knew what was needed.
‘If you write out a list of what you need, Dulcie,’ John said. ‘I’ll get it all tomorrow. I’ll sort out the bunkhouse too and make up the beds. You’ll have enough to do in here.’
Dulcie shot him a look of gratitude.
‘Have you got something black to wear?’ Bob asked her, his lips trembling.
Dulcie shook her head.
‘Reckon you can find something in town?’ Bruce asked. ‘Betty’s got a nice black hat in the cupboard, I think she’d like you to wear it.’ He glanced round at his men. ‘You all got black ties?’
Dulcie dished up the supper, listening to Bruce talking about moving the sheep into a new paddock. She guessed he felt like her, thinking if he found enough jobs to do he’d feel better. She noticed he was forcing himself to eat, his movements were slow and deliberate, yet he gave up halfway through the plateful. ‘It was good, Dulcie, but I don’t feel like eating,’ he said.
‘It’s okay,’ she said gently. She couldn’t eat her own either, and John was struggling.
But Ross kept on eating, silently and intently.
‘Do you want to come down the pub?’ John asked Bruce when the meal was finally over.
‘Nice of you to ask, but no thanks,’ Bruce said. ‘I’ve got a heap of phone calls to make tonight. I’d best make a start on it.’
Dulcie began stacking the plates to take them into the kitchen. She hoped Ross might stay behind to help her. But he didn’t, he followed John and Bob out and didn’t even say goodnight.
By nine Dulcie was in bed. She could hear Bruce’s voice in the living-room as he made yet another call. She guessed he was weary of explaining the same thing over and over again, of listening to all that sympathy. She had offered to make some of the calls for him, but he’d refused, simply saying, ‘Betty was loved by a great many people. It wouldn’t be right for me not to speak to them myself.’
Dulcie was exhausted. Since Betty became ill she’d never got to bed much before eleven-thirty, and then got up again in the night. Yet even though it was good to know she could sleep through uninterrupted till morning, she felt so empty. Why hadn’t Ross spoken to her? Did he think she was to blame in some way? Maybe Betty had been right about him after all?
She cried then, long and hard, feeling even more alone than she had while she was at the Masters’. She had thought Betty’s illness was the only obstacle in the way of getting married, now it seemed that Ross didn’t even want her.
‘You stinking dingo,’ John hissed at Ross as he slung out a right hook and landed him squarely on the jaw, knocking him clean off his feet so he fell back into a puddle outside the pub. ‘Call yourself a man! You’re nothing but a heap of shit.’
‘That’s it, leave him,’ Bob said, urgently trying to haul John away. ‘Bruce won’t like to hear you’ve been fighting.’
John had been seething with anger at Ross all day. He’d noticed how he’d ignored Dulcie and how he’d said not one word of condolence to Bruce. But he’d controlled himself, expecting the kid was waiting for the right moment to speak to both of them. Then when Ross followed him and Bob out of the house John’s anger had risen again. By the time he’d had a couple of schooners of beer, he wanted to knock his block off.
Yet he suppressed the desire and tried to speak to the lad. He pointed out it was ignorant not to express sorrow when someone died, even if they weren’t well known to you, but when it was someone like Betty, a woman who’d taken him in and cared for him, it was just plain insulting, callous and inhuman.
To his astonishment, Ross had belted him in the guts, right there in the bar, and told him to mind his own business. As John was well known and well liked, a couple of blokes had grabbed Ross and hurled him outside. John and Bob had quickly followed and that was when John hit him.
‘I won’t hit him again,’ John snarled. ‘Let him slither off into the bush like the snake he is.’ He glowered at Ross lying there on the ground. ‘You aren’t normal. You’re like a block of bloody ice, you’ve got that lovely young Dulcie wanting to marry you, but you couldn’t even give her a bit of comfort.’
Ross got to his feet, swaying from the blow and clutching at his jaw. ‘It ain’t your business what goes on between me and Dulcie,’ he protested.
Bob held John back.
‘That kid’s been nursing Betty for well over a year,’ John yelled at him. ‘She’s been getting up in the night to care for her, she does everything in the house, and I expect she’s tired out. Are you so fucking dense you can’t see that? Asking a girl to marry you means you love her, want to look after her. Or are you a poofter and you only want to get married so she’ll cook for you?’
‘Leave it, mate,’ Bob said.
‘I can’t,’ John said, turning to push Bob away. He took a couple of steps nearer Ross and stood legs astride, ready to hit him again if necessary. ‘Dulcie’s the best-looking sheila for miles around, God only knows why she chose you. You don’t deserve a sweet thing like her, but if you don’t start treating her proper, so help me, I’ll kill you.’
With that he turned and made his way back to the truck, Bob running after him. ‘We can’t leave him here,’ Bob said, realizing John intended to go.
‘Oh yes we bloody can,’ John said. ‘By the time he’s walked home maybe he’ll have worked out what I mean.’
John drove in silence for a couple of miles, then suddenly slammed his fist down on the steering-wheel. ‘I’ve done things to sheilas I’m not proud of,’ he exclaimed. ‘But I’ve never treated one as coldly as that. How can he be like that?’
‘He never had anyone to care for him, that’s why,’ Bob said quietly. ‘He don’t know lots of things, wherever it was he was brought up, he had it tough.’
‘You had it tough as a kid, so did I, so did Bruce and Betty,’ John said angrily. ‘As for Dulcie she had it even worse, shipped off over here like she was a side of beef. It hasn’t turned us into chunks of ice!’
‘I thought of killing my pa once when I was a kid,’ Bob said. ‘He came home from the pub and beat me black and blue for forgetting to get the wood in for the fire. I planned to whack him over the head with something and push him into the fire in the forge. I never tried it, he was too big and quick. I felt a failure because I didn’t.’
John grinned. He’d heard stories about Bob’s father, he was by repute the nastiest, most evil-tempered man that ever walked in Western Australia. ‘Don’t reckon you’d have lived to tell the tale if you had,’ he said. ‘But what’s that got to do with Iceman?’
‘Reckon he’s been where I’ve been, and worse,’ Bob said. ‘I never had the confidence to get a girl, Pa knocked it out of me. Ross is lucky Dulcie took a shine to him otherwise I reckon he’d never find one either.’
‘But he
has
got her, she’s crazy about him,’ John said in exasperation. ‘What you’ve said doesn’t explain why he’s so weird. Look at you this morning, you wrapped Dulcie up in a blanket. You knew what to say to her. Explain that?’
‘She looked like Ma did when Pa died,’ Bob said simply.
John could say nothing more. He understood completely why Bob was timid, he was a weedy, bullied kid, and he’d grown into a man who saw himself as second-rate. But Ross was young and strong, decent-looking, a nice enough bloke most of the time. Dulcie with her looks and figure was enough to make any bloke’s heart race faster, so why wasn’t Ross with her tonight?
Ross got a lift part of the way home, but as he walked the last few miles he was sobbing. When John told him Betty had died this morning he felt his whole world had crumbled. He worshipped her, owed her so much, for he always knew it was her persuasion that had stopped Bruce calling the police when he found him in his barn.
He had never had a woman touch him before that day, well, not since he was around five, and that was never tenderly. Betty washed him all over, dressed the wounds on his feet, fed him soup and all the time kept whispering,
‘My poor boy
,’ and
‘You’re safe now, no one’s going to hurt you.’
Yet as he got better he sensed he ought to tell her how much he appreciated it, but he just couldn’t – he felt the words in his heart, but they wouldn’t come out. It was easier to show it, by working hard, harder even than John and Bob. That’s all he knew, proving himself, just the way he used to with the Brothers, being harder, tougher than anyone else.
He had to learn so much in that first year at the farm. The work outside was no problem, he’d done all that and more back at Bindoon. It was how to behave in the house and around people he had problems with. He would eat till he was almost bursting, hide bread, cheese and fruit in his pockets, because he couldn’t quite believe there would always be food for him. He didn’t understand compliments, they sounded the same as sarcasm to him, and he didn’t know how to make polite conversation. He tried to copy John in everything, but the teasing remarks John made to people came out like rudeness when he attempted them. John could down five or six schooners of beer and still be sober – when he tried to keep up with him he disgraced himself by being violently sick. He couldn’t take criticism either, one sharp word and he smarted silently for days. He couldn’t trust or show appreciation, and he thought he could do everything better than anyone else.
When he looked back at that time he blushed with shame. Maybe if he’d told the men how Bindoon really was and asked for their help and guidance, he might not have made such a fool of himself. But asking for help was another thing unknown to him. At Bindoon you did what you were told, never questioned anything the Brothers said, they were all-powerful and the boys were nothing but their slaves.
By the time Dulcie came to the farm, Ross believed he’d cracked it all and that he was the same as any other man. But Dulcie with her endless questioning had made everything resurface. She made him feel a whole lot better about himself on the one hand, but on the other he had blinding flashes of inadequacy that he hadn’t until then been aware of. He couldn’t say or show what he felt, physical contact was very hard for him. All his life he’d been told it was sinful, especially touching oneself, and however hard he tried to dismiss what he’d been taught, it remained. He was deeply ashamed whenever he succumbed to the temptation of masturbation, vowed he’d never do it again, and even blamed Dulcie for arousing all these perverted feelings inside him. He did truly love her, she had every quality any man would want in a wife, she was on his mind from morning till night, yet he sensed she wanted more from him than he could ever give.
When Betty got sick and they had to put off the wedding, he was both relieved and disappointed at the same time, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. Worse still, Betty’s illness brought back problems he thought he’d overcome. He knew he ought to go into Betty’s room and sit with her like John and Bob did so often, talk to her, try and make her laugh. He tried it once but he failed miserably He panicked when he saw how ill she was. He couldn’t take her hand or kiss her cheek because he thought that would alert her to how little time she had left. He sat there by her bedside squirming with embarrassment because he couldn’t think of anything to say to her. He hated John because he could charm so effortlessly – even Bob who said little most of the time would look at magazines with her, talk about his mother, his childhood in Esperance, and ask about Betty’s family in Perth.
The more Ross stayed away, the worse it got. Almost every day he’d tell himself that tomorrow he would go in there, tell her outright what she meant to him, how she’d turned his life around and that he loved her. Yet every day he made an excuse to himself – she would be sleeping, he had an important job to do, she didn’t really want to see him or she would have asked for him. Sometimes he even felt angry that he wasn’t summoned because it showed he meant nothing to her.
Finally he was too late. Betty had died without hearing how much he appreciated all she’d done for him.
He’d wanted to tell Bruce that today, and maybe he could have if only Bruce had asked him to go to town with him to make the funeral arrangements instead of John. He was jealous about that, just as he was always jealous when John made Dulcie laugh, or said how lovely she looked.
He knew when Bob wrapped Dulcie up in that blanket this morning that he should have thought of it, but he didn’t because he was wrapped up in his own misery, and so he shot out to milk the cows. It was easy to show animals his feelings, no words were necessary, they just felt it all and responded. He supposed he imagined Dulcie would be the same way, that she would just know how he felt.
He had blown everything now. He had idolized John, seeing in him what he wanted to be, but John thought he was a worthless lump of shit just as the Brothers always had.
A dingo
he’d called him, and nothing came much lower than that.
How would he face Bruce tomorrow, knowing he had failed him by not speaking out and saying how sorry he was that he’d lost his lovely wife who was so very special to him? Why couldn’t he see this morning that his own grief was no bigger than anyone else’s? Every single person who met Betty had loved her.
And Dulcie. What could he say to her? Sorry that he didn’t think of her? Just admitting it proved his failure to act like a normal person.
He felt just the way he had back at Bindoon, a wretch with no purpose except to toil for the benefit of the Brothers, a lump of shit who could be abused in every possible way because he had no feelings and belonged to no one. He had tried to be like normal people, to learn their ways, trust again, but he would never be that way, a part of him was missing. Maybe John was right and he should just slither off into the bush like the snake he was. But he couldn’t, he needed Dulcie.