Stone Yard Devotional, page 15
‘There was even Deborah, a leader of Israel,’ Josephine said urgently. She asked, what about Jesus’ talk with the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years – was that not compassionate? And the Samaritan woman at the well! Women were at the crucifixion; it was women who entered the empty tomb of Jesus.
I nodded at Josephine the whole time she was telling me these things, and I felt sorry to have caused this pain in her, so visible as she spoke. I had traduced something she found beautiful and profound, and I know what that feels like, to have something you cherish ridiculed. It’s a horrible reduction in your sense of yourself. It makes you feel stupid and ashamed, and I was so sorry to have done that to Josephine.
I apologised for having been so dismissive, and said I could see now that she was right, that there were many powerful female figures in the text. She nodded in a stiff, injured way at my apology. I knew she could tell I couldn’t care less about Ruth and her mother-in-law and the Tamars and Deborah, and that were she someone else – Simone, Richard Gittens, even Helen Parry – I might take her on and argue further. Josephine’s face took on an even higher colour from knowing that my words were false, and I was sorry again, particularly as it must have been preoccupying her for weeks and weeks. My apology was real, even if the agreement was not.
It makes me embarrassed to lie in this way, and it shows. We parted on good terms but it’s there between us now, a knot of real discord, and it won’t be easily undone.
Simone looked at me afterwards, and I knew this was the kind of thing she had tried to get me to see in the past. I nodded at her that I understood, and I would try harder.
~
The chickens were ecstatic about being let out into the garden while I worked cleaning out the henhouse. I could hear the mice everywhere among the plants, and the chooks pelted after them, careering through the beds; swerving, savage.
THE RAIN HAS started again, has kept up for days. At first we were hopeful, because it could mean the end of the mice. But it has merely driven them indoors and they are much worse. I stop to speak to Carmel and have to stamp my foot to prevent them scampering over it. Last night, as I sat reading, one ran up my leg.
In the church this morning, as I kneeled before the crucifix with a bucket – it was my turn to change the flowers – I noticed a lump on the floor not far away. It was the peaceful dove; it had found its way into the chapel again and must have rammed itself against the big window trying to escape, and hit the floor. But as I moved closer I couldn’t help letting out a loud cry. Two mice were busily at work, gnawing at the dove’s face. I shrieked and stomped on the floor; the mice fled. The poor bird’s black eyes were glossy, and its top beak intact, but from its jaw to its chest was nothing but chewed, bloody gore. I kneeled there by the crucifix and held the cooling, headless creature in my hands. It’s the worst desecration yet. My heart would not stop thumping.
WE HAVE MADE a storeroom of one of the most recently renovated, best-sealed guest cabins. There was a brief lull, but now the mice seem worse than before, as if the plague needed to rest for a few days to gather its strength. Now we can’t store vegetables in the kitchen at all unless they are in the fridge.
Helen Parry came with me to forage for our meals today. We unlocked the door (stomping and shouting to scare any mice from the dark entrance way) and stepped inside. I slammed the door shut behind us and then we both stood, looking at the green linoleum covered in pumpkins and swedes and the window hung with ropes of garlic. The kitchenette benches and sink house three giant yellow Ikea carry bags filled with potatoes. Three plastic buckets of brown onions on the desk. Other vegetables fill the fridge.
We nosed about, checking traps and the cupboards in the cabin. Mercifully there were no mice, and no sign of them yet. We exchanged the hardened lumps of cheese on the traps for fresh ones, or for smudges of peanut butter. Then we stepped silently about the room, filling our plastic baskets with what we need for the week.
In the cabin Helen said to me, ‘You remember my mother, don’t you.’ It was not really a question, as she counted out potatoes and handed them to me from the Ikea bag.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do.’ I didn’t know what else to say.
Our eyes met for a brief moment. Then Helen nodded and said, ‘I thought you would.’
She opened the fridge and lifted out heads of cauliflower and broccoli, and I put them in my basket. On the wall above us, Jesus hung on his cross, sorrowfully keeping watch over this strange harvest.
~
One of the people my mother visited was a woman with such severe depression that she had decided to take her life. How this decision became common knowledge I don’t know, but a group of friends arranged a roster of people to stay with her in her house, which was on a property outside town, until she recovered from her illness.
Each morning the visiting friend would rise from bed in the woman’s spare room and creep down the hall to wait silently outside her bedroom, listening for movement, to make sure she still lived.
The woman had a terrible sort of patience for these people who wanted to stop her doing what she most wanted. She was not grateful, and she did not allow them to think they were doing a kindness for her, but nor did she send them away. My mother spent the time with her doing jigsaws and looking at gardening books. She would open the curtains so the woman could see her garden, but this was in the middle of winter and the view did not inspire hope. The trees were bare and the frost lay on the ground. Still, they talked softly and my mother made tea, and the woman drank it.
One day the woman said to my mother with light affection, ‘Don’t worry; I won’t do it on one of your days.’
The woman didn’t do it on one of my mother’s days. Once it was over, my mother said, the friends who had tried to keep the woman alive went back to their families, and the terror of those mornings waiting outside the woman’s bedroom was gone. But there was a feeling of catastrophic failure that never went away.
~
I don’t think my mother, or anyone else, ever visited Mrs Parry.
OPENING THE CAR door now takes mettle. Bonaventure’s lumbar cushion has had to be thrown away. Yesterday I lowered myself too heavily into the seat and felt a squirming sensation at my back that made me roar and hurl myself from the vehicle, twisting my ankle as I did. A dozen mice exploded into the air from behind the cushion, bounced around the driver’s seat and footwell trying to escape. It took me twenty minutes to find the courage to get into the car again. Now I open the doors before starting the engine, and wait for them to escape (or hide) before I get in.
~
Some time before I came here for good, my friend Beth received the news of her cancer’s incurability, that she would die within one or two years at best, six months at worst. We, her friends, got busy and needy. We called, and sent emails and text messages and cards and flowers. We delivered homegrown vegetables, massage vouchers, food to feed her husband and son when she could not eat herself. We loved her, couldn’t bear to lose her. We wanted to do anything we could to save her, though there was nothing to be done. We sent soft clothes, helped her son with homework, raised money for his future education. But we knew the futility of all of it, and a current of panic ran beneath our every attempt to contact her.
Or beneath mine, anyway. I knew it, because I’d felt it before: desperate, bargaining, grasping. Beth could not answer the phone or most messages: she had to conserve her energy. We understood. Of course we understood.
I kept my needfulness to myself, but if I learned another friend had seen her when I had not, I felt almost physically wounded. Not by Beth, for I had no special claim on her, least of all at such a time. But wounded all the same, and desolate, as if something had been taken from me. I suppose it had to do with my mother’s illness being the same as Beth’s. It’s not sophisticated to realise that inside me – in the primitive brain, where real terror lies dormant – that old grief had woken up, and panic was flooding in. There was a violent feeling of trespass, and that made me ashamed. I spoke to nobody about this, and made sure to hold myself back from her, limit my messages, let her be.
On the afternoon I lay with Beth on her soft green lawn – the same lawn on which she had collapsed with a seizure that first terrible day – we talked about her life, and what she had learned. She told me she felt her life had been a lucky one, and while I could not agree about her luck (there had been many sorrows in her life), I knew she was telling the truth about her feelings.
As we lay there, a soft breeze cooling our bare feet, she told me that someone from her past, a man who had long ago done something very wrong (she didn’t say what) and caused a great rupture between them, had written to her the day before. He had reached the ninth step in his twelve-step treatment, and he wanted to see and speak with her, to make direct amends for what he had done. To complete his treatment and heal, he needed to right the wrongs he had done her. She laughed softly as she told me this. She had her son write back to the man to tell him there was no possibility of them speaking. The man’s approach at this time, wanting her forgiveness, made her feel sick, she said. She was too tired for anger but it would not be possible for her to do the work of forgiving him, or even listening to him. She was no longer capable of a compassionate lie, she said. In her remaining life there was only room for the truth, and sometimes that would be brutal. It was sad, but it was too late; she had to prepare herself for what was to come. Only what was essential could be allowed to reach her now.
I listened to her speak and did not know how to express my gratitude that she had let me come to see her that day. When she turned her face towards me we saw tears in each other’s eyes, and she reached out her hand and I held it, and we lay on our backs on the grass like that, and looked up at the sky while we talked for a little longer. She made me laugh, and I made her laugh – although she was a person who laughed easily, this felt at that moment like the greatest achievement of my life – and then I knew it was time for me to go. We went into the house and she lay on the sofa while I gathered up the bags from the meals I’d brought for her son and husband, and her slobbery old dog followed me to the front door.
I saw her only once after that day. I had been given more than I deserved and it was time for me to step back, make space, ask for nothing. I left food on the doorstep, contributed to a house-cleaner fund, sent funny video clips to her husband. I was always grateful for that hour on the soft grass, that moment of holding her hand. It was only six months, in the end.
Sometimes I think about the man who wanted to make his amends but was rejected. I wonder whether he knew my friend was dying at the time he made his approach, and if he did, what he expected from her. I wonder if he was sorry for not offering to make amends in the long decades before she became sick. I think about his living out the rest of his life knowing she died without accepting his apology or granting forgiveness, and I think how that kind of regret might never leave a person.
I suppose they tell you to expect this, in twelve-step programs. I imagine there are a lot of people who don’t want to hear those apologies, who want nothing to do with your amends. Who say: too late, too late.
~
A feeling that something is coming, waiting to be born, out of this time. Almost physical, like before a period, or a pregnancy, or vomiting. Something is getting ready to resolve itself.
HELEN PARRY FOLLOWED me to the chook house this morning. She held out her hand and I had no choice but to place a fresh egg in her palm. I kept about my business, ducking my head into the shed to reach into the laying boxes, pushing under a warm hen to draw out the eggs. One by one she kept taking them from me.
After filling her pockets with the eggs, Helen stood and surveyed me there in my overalls, as I unlatched the feed bin and scooped out the pellets, scattered them on the dirt. The chickens rushed at it and I stood in a pool of feathers.
She asked if she could come with me next time I went into town. I said yes, of course she could. All day afterwards, at the thought of going to our town with Helen Parry, I felt a hard, rough little kernel of tension, like a peach pit, in my chest.
~
My parents were members of a small community group dedicated to the ‘resettlement’ of twenty or so refugees who had fled the Vietnam War, travelled by boat to Australia and somehow, after this arduous, life-threatening journey, ended up living in our town. I don’t know whether they had a choice about where they lived – our town seemed as far from Vietnam as it was possible to get. Perhaps that was the point.
I don’t remember anyone speaking to us children about what they had endured, and we certainly had little to no idea about the war going on in Vietnam, but we had seen refugees on the television news for years, the screaming babies and exhausted families – the women so thin and young it seemed impossible they could be mothers – climbing from ragged boats onto dry land.
The families my parents befriended were extremely quiet people, except for one jovial man who often spoke on behalf of others, asking for what they needed. The group of townspeople found them houses to live in, jobs, furniture and clothes. Occasionally my parents would be invited to their homes for a celebration dinner, consisting of many small dishes of things we’d never seen before. There is a photograph of my father, by then grown pudgy, in the centre of a group of Vietnamese men who are laughing. One of the men is pretending to feed my father from his own bowl, and the joke is that my father, the only white man, is some kind of emperor. This was thought funny back then. The men in the picture appear to be enjoying themselves, but who knows what they really thought. I have always assumed this posing would not have been my father’s idea, rather a joke initiated by one of the men. But perhaps I’m wrong. I wonder if any of their children, as they grew up, saw a copy of that same photograph. I can imagine them looking at my father with hatred. I would too.
Occasionally a new family would arrive in town and the process of finding homes, work and so forth would begin again. There would be a barbecue lunch on a farm to welcome them, and show them what the real Australia looked like. Once, two tiny girls who had been separated from their parents came to be in our care for a few days. They were about three and four years old. I can’t think now what horrors these children had already endured, to end up in our house, silent and afraid. We spoke to them softly, and did not know how to comfort them, but my mother and father held them gently and put them to bed together, fed them, bathed them. I sang them nursery rhymes – ‘Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star’, ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, in hope that the gentleness of my voice would help them know they were safe. We took them to one of the parties out on a farm, where they would be taken into the care of other Vietnamese people. Soon they would have someone speak to them in their own language. We tried to convey this as we drove, our voices low, smiling at them lovingly. They sat mute on the back seat of the car with me, their tiny legs sticking straight out.
But once the car turned onto the road out of town, the little girls became terrified at what they saw out of the window – simply the bare, ordinary, dry paddocks – and hurled themselves to the floor behind the driver’s seat, sobbing and crying out, curling up very tight and clutching each other. I had never seen real terror before. We had no idea what was wrong, tried to tell them there was no danger. My father kept driving, speaking quietly, and I lay across the seat, stroking the little girls’ hair and murmuring that no harm would come to them. Eventually we arrived at the place, and they were taken from the car by Vietnamese adults, who took them into their arms and patted and soothed them as they cried.
Later, my parents said the girls had been thrown into terror because to them open countryside represented some dreadful danger – landmines, or bombs. I don’t know if this was true, or just some explanation they invented to make sense of what had happened. I remember that we drove home in silence, without the small girls, and saw our flat Monaro paddocks differently.
When I was about thirteen, I took my friend Kelly along to another gathering, this time a garden party for some new arrivals. I was sick of these occasions by now – of being polite to the homeowner strangers, and sick of the great opaque force of horror and trouble that had forced the Vietnamese families to make new lives in our town, and of what felt like the uncrossable oceans of difference between us. Not that I ever asked for or was given any details about them or their journeys here; I was too wrapped up in my own life to care. Kelly and I slouched about the lunch table, avoiding the Vietnamese food, picking out sausage rolls and party pies and taking our stacked little plates to a corner of the yard where we sat on the grass watching the people we knew and making sarcastic comments about them. But my mother called us back to the group to meet a very young couple, only a few years older than Kelly and me. Their names were Binh and Thuy, and they were – we assumed – boyfriend and girlfriend. They seemed happy to see some other young people, and smiled widely, said hello in English, and then giggled when we asked how they were. They could only say, ‘Hello pleased to meet you.’ We – of course – had learned no Vietnamese phrases at all. But the open friendliness of the couple led us to begin miming a kind of conversation, which had us all laughing and calling, ‘Ah!’ in recognition when we understood. The afternoon opened into beauty for Kelly and me. We led the couple away from the larger group and showed them things, teaching them the names of objects, and they teaching us in turn. Leaf. Jeans. Hair. Plate. By the end of the day, we felt something serious and true had taken place. We hugged them goodbye – they seemed a little taken aback – and there was a lot of smiling and waving, and repeating of ‘leaf’ and ‘plate’. I had a sense of some moral blossoming inside me, where it was possible not just to endure such occasions in awkward embarrassment but to find pleasure and freshness there.
