The Publican's Daughter, page 16
Katherine let Dudley know that she was going to bob over to Pearl’s for a bit. The house was empty, but she’d prepared soup and cold cuts on standby for casuals. Being on the phone, Dudley turned away from Katherine with an irritable shoosh, bringing the mouthpiece to his lips as though to kiss it behind cupped hands. He was placing a bet with his SP bookie.
‘Knock, knock,’ Katherine shouted, straining to see through flywire down the long corridor of Pearl and Barney’s house. Pearl left both the front and back doors open to the rising and dying sun. In summer, when temperatures often went over 100° Fahrenheit, doors all over Wonnalinga stayed wide open to catch the slightest breeze. Nobody locked their doors. Pearl’s polished linoleum shone in the setting sun like a sheet of dark glass, a reminder for Katherine to wax the pub corridor soon. It looked as though nobody had waxed it since she left for Sydney.
‘Come in, we’re in the kitchen,’ Pearl’s voice was strangely high-pitched, and she spoke fast.
Katherine had expected Lillian to be drunk, but she was sipping a cup of tea. Pearl offered Katherine a fresh scone. She loved to bake, and her scones were prize-winningly famous from Port Augusta to Alice Springs and beyond.
‘Jam and cream are on the table. Put the cream back in the fridge after, so it doesn’t go off. Even in this weather, it can go fast when it’s whipped. The jam’s good. I made it myself.’
Instead of the expected female bar-banter, Lillian and Pearl sat in silence, watching Katherine devour a couple of scones. When the scones crumbled, she got flustered, but it didn’t stop her delighting in the sweet, vanilla-flavoured cream. The air around the table reverberated with unspoken words and half-told secrets. Katherine felt she should apologise for intruding. It was clearly not a good time to burden Pearl.
‘Mum, I’ll head off now. I only popped over to tell you not to worry about coming home for dinner because there aren’t any customers.’
‘Wait, I’ll come with you now, love,’ Lillian emptied her cup with a glance at Pearl.
Lillian and Katherine said goodbye and headed across the main road to the pub. Lillian looked up at the hotel sign reading ‘The First and Last Hotel, Licensees Dudley and Lillian Forster’ then turned to Katherine. ‘We haven’t done too badly here, have we?’
‘No, Mum, we haven’t.’ Lillian’s gentle demeanour was uplifting, but it left Katherine feeling a little apprehensive. Would it continue? Although Lillian drank less, Dudley had warned Katherine when she got home that her mother’s binges, when they did come, were more excessive than ever and becoming dangerous. A few weeks ago, Lillian fell asleep in bed with a lit cigarette and came close to burning the hotel down. Dudley didn’t discover it until he got up for the lavatory in the middle of the night. By then, the mattress had smouldered for hours, filling the corridor with noxious smoke from beneath Lillian’s door.
He’d dragged her to a spare room and put her to bed, all by himself, he said. The mattress was too hot to handle straight away. All he could do was douse the smouldering thing with buckets of water. At dawn, he woke one of the young stockmen, a new boy in the area who wouldn’t be a tattletale, to help him load it onto the Jeep. Together, they carted it to the dump on the other side of the railway line outside town, where the lad reported later that it smouldered for days.
After dinner, Dudley took himself off to his yippees to give ‘his girls’ a chance to catch up. Lillian and Katherine both knew he really wanted time to study his race bible.
Lillian invited Katherine to sit with her on the lawn out the back for a while. ‘Bring a blanket,’ she said, ‘to keep warm.’ Lillian spread a rubber-backed rug on the grass to keep the damp out and ants off their legs. Once they had settled, Lillian lit a cigarette, inhaled long and deep and began to speak, her voice low and deliberate. She started by telling Katherine she would always be able to count on Pearl Napper if ever she was in trouble.
‘Pearl has had a tough life. Did you know that she had a daughter called Rose?’
Katherine shook her head.
‘Nor did I, but she told me about her today. Rose was a beautiful girl who, as she blossomed into womanhood, got stuck into the grog. It was her undoing. Men who didn’t want to go with Aboriginal women went to her for sex. She was gullible. While gossip had it that she had charged the men like a prostitute, Pearl insisted she didn’t. Her daughter was too drunk to know what she was doing half the time. Of course, women, especially station women, gave Rose a wide berth but what upset the girl most was that the men she slept with ignored her in public when they were sober.
‘All Rose ever wanted, Pearl told me, was to be loved. Like all girls, Rose yearned for a husband and family, but the way the bush people treated her became too much. She hung herself on the back verandah of Pearl and Barney’s house five years ago. Today is the anniversary. Pearl had just finished telling me the whole sorry tale when you turned up. We’d not long moved from the verandah back to the lounge for that cuppa. Have you ever seen Pearl’s loungeroom?’
At the mention of the verandah, all Katherine could see for a moment was her mother’s disgrace there. How could Pearl live on the site where her daughter took her own life?
‘Take time one day to see what’s on Pearl’s mantelpiece. There’s an artificial floral display around Rose’s portrait, and the window ledge is lined with dolls and other childhood memorabilia. The wall is smothered in framed family photos of innocent days. Pearl told me that Rose was a clever child and a happy adolescent, but this country, this hard, hot outback place got to her, and that’s why I am telling you, my dear girl.’ Lillian turned to Katherine and held her face in her hands, close to her own. ‘I don’t want this country to get you like that. Please take care, my darling Katherine.’
Katherine was in tears by the time Lillian stopped speaking. It was odd to hear from her mother that Pearl’s house was a virtual shrine to her lost daughter. How forgiving of Pearl to be kind to Lillian and her. Lillian had not been the only one to abuse Pearl’s hospitality at the stationmaster’s party. Katherine didn’t ask whether Pearl ever told Lillian what happened with Moretti but guessed not because her mother still seemed ignorant of the whole thing. How the story had not been used to destroy the Forster family was a mystery. It didn’t occur to Katherine that people might have remained silent to protect her. It remained a puzzle, too, that she was never arrested for beating Moretti. Then again, it could be that the police had silenced everyone to defend themselves. They were both pissed as farts.
Katherine wanted to hug her mother but refrained because of Lillian’s resistance to any affectionate display. Even though her mother was relaxed and open, it was not worth the risk of a rebuff.
‘There are things here,’ Lillian kept her voice low, ‘dark forces that people like us from the city cannot understand. We don’t know the rules. I think it’s time for you to think about leaving home for good, my girl. You’re old enough to make your way in the world. You don’t have to run off straight away but think about what you’d like to do. I’d like to see you get the hell out of here before... Well, I’ve said enough. Come on, time for a beer, let’s have one together tonight hey?’
25
‘Mum’s not up yet.’ Katherine greeted Pearl.
‘That’s good cos I wanted to catch you on your own to invite you to bring Aunt Evelyn and Grace to my place.’
‘Well, thank you but, why? What’s the matter?
‘You can bring them to my place any time, whether or not I’m home. Barney won’t care. Just make yourself at home. Tongues won’t wag about what can’t be seen under that mulga tree. At my place, you can relax and talk as much and as loud as you like. Also, Aunt Evelyn may want to share things that she’d be uncomfortable saying in front of others. You never know.’
It came as a surprise that Pearl knew a lot about Aboriginal people, not because of her innate curiosity, which caused her to gossip at times, but from her daughter’s friendship with Paddy’s family before she died.
Pearl sat herself down at the kitchen table, facing Katherine. ‘See if you can get your head around this. Aunt Evelyn and Paddy are brother and sister. Both are elders in the area. But, because they had different fathers, they were separated as little ones. Evelyn grew up and lives in the Aboriginal town camp in the lane behind the pub. Her father was white, so she went to school. Paddy’s parents were both Aboriginal, so Paddy’s much darker than Evelyn. He was born and raised out bush and stays in the camp outside town on the flat with other, more traditional, Aborigines. He might be illiterate, but never underestimate him. He is such a wise person and widely respected for his traditional status. You won’t know because he always wears a shirt, but his body bears the marks of an elder.’ Pearl looked into Katherine’s eyes. ‘Have you heard about the White Australia Policy?’
‘No.’ Pearl had her full attention.
‘Well, the idea behind it is to keep black and Asian people out of Australia, you know, to keep it white, but it also led to ways of categorising Aboriginal people. Aborigines in the old days were not even classified as human, not really. But, even when they were, authorities described them as a dying race. The idea that you could breed out blackness was popular and probably hasn’t fully died out. The government still sorts Aboriginal people one from the other by skin-colour, like they’re a species apart: full-blood, half-caste, and quadroon. It’s all bloody nonsense. We’re not a different species if we can breed with each other, are we? And we can. The government still thinks that white blood will purify the Aborigine — it beggars belief. You’ll sometimes hear locals call Aborigines boongs, a word they say derives from the sound of a bull-bar hitting an Aboriginal person when station people used to chase them around in four-wheel drives. Think about that.’
‘That reminds me of the first time I met William Ringer, around the time when you were showing him off as a catch for me!’
‘Oh, I am sorry about that. We didn’t know you then.’
‘It doesn’t matter now. That man strode into the kitchen trying to impress Mum and me one day, pissed as a fart. He said with pride that he’d left ‘his gin’ tied up to an old gidgee tree. I’d never heard that word before, but I guessed straight away it was demeaning from the way he spat it from his mouth. Paddy told me the gidgee is the stinky wattle tree. Anyway, I couldn’t believe someone would think they had a right to claim another person as his. His property. Like a slave, I thought. I do not like that man.’ Katherine did not confide in Pearl about the claypan incident.
‘Well, the truth is, I don’t like the man either. He’s fathered half the current generation of mixed kiddies in the school here and on his station, just like his father before him. You can ask Grace about that. Ever since the British came to these shores, Aboriginal people have been moved off their land and shoved into settlements and missions. No settler or pastoralist would have been able to get started without their traditional knowledge of the country. Yes, some people’s lives took them away from their traditional places of learning, but many, like Paddy, still carry their stories deep within their hearts. They are their stories and, that’s got nothing to do with the shade of their skin. The government doesn’t seem to get that. Nor did your Mister America, if I may add.’ Pearl smiled a curious smile that perturbed Katherine, who hoped Sharmer’s diary was hidden well enough.
Despite the sunshine, darkness descended on the moment, making Katherine want to light a cigarette, but she refrained. Chatting at the kitchen table with Pearl was pleasant, and she didn’t want to offend. The woman was kind to her mother, and Lillian needed that. Station people and snobs in town saw Lillian as no more than a city woman out of place even though she had grown to love the outback as much as Katherine. Pearl got short shrift from that lot too. And she’d lost her only daughter. Katherine regretted being so dismissive of Pearl with her big spectacles. It didn’t surprise her that Lillian and Pearl had become friends. Both women held their whist — as Katherine’s nana might have said — and spoke up only in safe company. A bit like the Aboriginal women Katherine had come to know.
One bright day in spring at Pearl’s place, Evelyn started talking unprompted about her family. Pearl, who had been sitting with Evelyn, Grace, and Katherine, excused herself.
Evelyn began. ‘Me and Paddy are sister and brother. Grace is Paddy’s girl, and he is Mother’s Brother to my two boys, Sam, my firstborn, and Reggie who was born to my sister. I am a mother to him too. My sister died from chickenpox soon after Reggie was born. Reggie’s father was an Afghan man, a cameleer. Old Man Kahn tried to keep the boy, but he took up with a white woman who refused to take on board what she called his Aboriginal brat. That’s why Reggie stayed with me, and I raised him with Sam. He’s my son in the Aboriginal way, but the authorities still call him Afghan, not an Aborigine like Sam, because of his father. Doesn’t matter to them about the mother.’
Evelyn laughed. ‘You don’t know how many ways that government mucks things up,’ she said. ‘Take Sam and his dog tag’.
Grace turned to Katherine to interpret. ‘The proper name for a dog tag is Certificate of Exemption. It’s a piece of paper that promises lots of benefits, as long as holders don’t speak their own language. How silly is that? It declares that holders are judged by government officials to be of good character with an acceptable standard of intelligence and development, but it really extinguishes Aboriginal identity. It forces them to break with their family.’
‘Names mean nothing,’ Evelyn interrupted testily, ‘but that tag means the government sees Sam as a white man and no longer an Aborigine. The worst thing is he can’t be with an Aboriginal woman unless she is his wife. Now, how is a man going to get a wife if he can’t be with her?’
Katherine giggled, as much to hide how she’d felt when Evelyn mentioned Reggie Kahn’s name than the older woman’s joke. Her mind travelled back to his penetrating black eyes and the way he’d looked at her when they first met at the claypan. She was jerked back into the present. Evelyn’s voice commanded silence.
‘Now, this is my story. Paddy did not go to school because, in our day, the government said it was a waste to try to educate full-blood Aboriginal children. I got my schooling because my father was a white one. Then, a generation later, we were forced to send our children to school under the threat of having them taken away. There were too many kids taken away. Today, it’s a little bit better because black, white and Afghan kids all play together at school as little ones, in Wonnalinga anyway. But it’s still tough for people working on stations to follow the rules because they’re always droving or on the move for work. Their kids can be taken away for not going to school. Everybody says our people go walkabout, as though moving around is a mental defect which is cruel. We have to follow the work that’s on offer for money, such as it is. That’s the problem. And people like to work on stations so that they can look after their country. Many carry their stories deep inside. They know their ceremonies and need to stay close to special places, to look after them. If we don’t do that, then we lose everything.’
Evelyn paused. Outside, a red and purple sunset bled across the sky. The last streaks of sunlight were streaming through the window, turning Pearl’s mustard lounge gold. The lounge room no longer looked quite like the opium den Katherine had imagined when she beat the stationmaster. Now, she could see it as Pearl’s valiant attempt to impose elegance on a harsh environment. Katherine felt great warmth towards Pearl, who had shown infinite compassion not only to her but also to Lillian despite watching her daughter spiral out of control in the humpies down the lane. Her precious child, an alcoholic, sleeping with uncouth white men for booze. Indiscriminate men who turned up to take her or any other woman in Aboriginal shelters built out of old kerosene tins beaten flat with galvanised iron castoffs or grass thatch for roofs. The only privacy afforded was behind old hessian wheat bags strung here and there. And here was Pearl, her heart as open as the desert, making space for Katherine to learn from Evelyn. Evelyn started speaking again.
‘You’ll see in the AIM hospital here, Alice Springs too, black and white people are in the same wards now. But look again. Even the best half-caste women in town, like those married to white men — which sort of makes them a bit higher up, I suppose — are still not allowed to join the Country Women’s Association even though everybody greets them in the street. People don’t talk about that. No way. There are no rules written down, but you do not see black faces at CWA stalls, do you? And nobody thinks it’s strange that there’s never been an Aboriginal face inside the hall at the race week ball. There’s no law against it. That line between black and white is a bit crooked here and there, but everybody knows where it should be when they come up against it. That’s why those boys got beaten up like they did. They stepped on the wrong side, according to the white mob, the bosses. They are still too scared to come back, my boys. Both far away now.’
Evelyn kept talking. Her mention of the claypan incident took Katherine by surprise, and she needed a moment to catch up.
Evelyn’s voice softened, and she took Katherine’s hand, rapidly changing the subject again. ‘You worry about your mum. I can see that. You need to look after her. She could lose her mind. I’ve seen that before. Nobody told you what happened to her, hey?’ As Evelyn spoke, Pearl’s words came to mind, your mother’s looking OK, considering.
