Washerwoman's Dream Read online

  The chooks, too, were her friends. Charles had arrived home one day with six white leghorn hens and a red rooster. Each day she let them out to scratch and forage among the weeds and grass, calling them by name when she shooed them back into their pen at night so that they would be safe from dingoes. She had matured a lot from the seventeen-year-old girl Charles had reluctantly brought home as his bride, and her resolve to leave when Fred was old enough had hardened.

  She talked to Fred as if he could understand, reading aloud what she had written, as he sat on her knee at the kitchen table, and making up stories about the Princess Royal, putting her in Buckingham Palace, a place she only knew from walking by the back gate with her father when they went to Victoria Station.

  Her corn crop was growing and her fowls were laying and she had raised some chickens from settings of eggs, giving her a new-found sense of self-worth. Every week she would rise before it was light and milk the goat, filling the water dish and moving the creature to a patch of fresh grass, then opening the door of the pen so that the fowls could forage once it was light. She would pour herself a mug of milk and then wake Fred, feed him and carry him over to Mutter Barbara before she set off for the market with her basket of eggs. Mutter Barbara would give Fred his bath, while Winifred would pour herself a cup of tea from the pot beside the stove and cut herself a slice of bread and cheese, putting it in her pocket for when she wanted to have a rest later.

  She enjoyed these early mornings just after sunrise. She felt free. And with the freedom her thoughts turned to the stories she would write. As she trudged along in the dust she would watch the green ants running up and down trees, or stitching leaves together to make a nest. Sometimes she surprised a mother quail out walking with her chicks and was moved to see how the bird gathered her young under her wings before speeding into the undergrowth. Other times she would watch a herd of wallabies bounding across the plain. Or there would be ducks swimming in the creek and skimmer birds diving down to drink or snatch insects off the surface.

  At that time of the day, before the heat drained the life out of the bush, everything seemed fresh and new. But once she reached the markets there was no time for daydreaming. Buggies, sulkies, horses and waggons would be converging from all directions and Winifred would have to keep her wits about her to get the best price as she stood by the road with her basket of eggs.

  She was always relieved when she had the money safely in her pocket, sometimes buying a little treat for Fred, like a coloured leather ball. Occasionally she bought something for herself, such as a length of serviceable material to make a dress, or some needle and thread. One of her first purchases was some red checked gingham for curtains and a tablecloth to brighten up the hut. Once she bought herself a new hat. It was a leghorn straw hat trimmed with field flowers in a fashionable sailor shape. She couldn’t resist it when she looked at herself in a piece of cracked mirror the stallholder handed her, justifying the expense because she had no sun hat and her face was becoming weather-beaten. But as she neared the farm she began to worry, hoping she could sneak it in the door before Mutter Barbara saw it and told her she was being extravagant.

  Charles returned home in October and for once he praised Winifred when he saw the crop of corn swaying in the breeze, and though he didn’t comment he seemed pleased when he entered the hut and saw the changes she had made with curtains at the windows and a matching tablecloth.

  Basking under his praise she experienced a feeling of happiness that she had not known for a long time, but it was not to last. By the time he left again in November he had begun to drink heavily, coming in late and refusing to eat the food she had cooked, throwing the plates onto the floor and once gathering everything into the tablecloth and hurling it out the door. Winifred found the remains of the cloth the next day when she went to milk the goat. The Princess Royal had chewed holes in it to get to the bread and cheese.

  When Charles left to work as an offsider to a contractor who was travelling west to sink wells, Winifred was relieved that her life would settle down into some form of routine again, and she would have some measure of peace, free from the abuse Charles heaped on her when he was drunk, and free from the demands he made on her once he was lying by her side in bed.

  By the time Fred was eighteen months old she was always tired. She was constantly chasing him around the paddocks when he climbed down the back steps, fearful that he would disappear into the long grass and be lost in the bush or wander down to the creek and be drowned. She remembered a girl of four who had been lost in the prickly pear after she had been sent to bring in the cattle. The men had searched for her through the night, until they came across her beside the creek with a group of Aborigines who had found her and fed her duck soup. Winifred had seen the mother’s anguish as she waited for news of her daughter. She knew that she could not bear it if anything happened to Fred.

  When her milk began to dry up Winifred weaned Fred onto goat’s milk, arrowroot biscuits and bread in a dish of warm milk, noticing how her breasts had begun to sag, the nipples prominent, surrounded with an aureole of matching brown. She accepted the fact that her figure had thickened, despite the hard physical work on the farm, and that she was no longer the young girl with stars in her eyes who had fallen in love with Charles Steger.

  On her husband’s infrequent visits home she was unable to avoid his advances. When he was sober he was good company and would pick Fred up and throw him into the air while the child squealed in delight. Later he would carry him around the paddocks on his back while Fred clung to his hair. She was no longer jealous when she saw them together, knowing that as soon as Charles left, Fred would turn to her again.

  Fred was two months short of his second birthday when Winifred began to feel off-colour in the mornings. At first she failed to recognise the signs that she was expecting another child, until her waistline started to thicken and Vater Carl, handing her a jug of cream when she was in the dairy, said, ‘For die kind.’ She could no longer ignore the changes taking place in her body and was filled with rage at her predicament, blaming Charles, forgetting that there were times when he had been kind to her and she had lain willingly in his arms, starved for affection and wanting him to love her as he had once done.

  As the months went by, her rage diminished. By the time she was five months pregnant she had accepted the fact that the farm would be her home for a long while to come, and she sensed the approbation of Mutter Barbara and Vater Carl, though the sisters were as hostile as ever.

  On 11 June 1902 Winifred gave birth to her second son, John Henry, to be known as Jack. Charles was home but it was two days after the birth before he came to see how she was. His brothers were also home at the time and they had taken Charles to the hotel to get him out of the way. They stayed there drinking until Vater Carl fetched them home in the waggon.

  Winifred was in bed, the baby asleep by her side, when Charles came up the steps of the hut and stood looking at her with a pleading, hangdog look. His hair was dishevelled and he had a two-day beard shadowing his face. Mutter Barbara approached him and Winifred heard her say something to him in German. She could tell the older woman was angry by the way she spoke, but Charles did not answer. Winifred motioned for him to come closer and he did so, gazing down at the small scrap of humanity at her side until he burst into tears and covered his face with his hands.

  He stayed home for three months — three months in which he got to know his elder son, who followed him everywhere. Winifred would watch them hand in hand as they walked around the paddock. Sometimes Fred would have a handful of thistles for the Princess Royal, or some weeds for the fowls. He would help his father hunt out the eggs they sometimes laid in nests away from the main pen and help him weed the vegetable garden, or carry into the house a few potatoes his father had dug for their supper.

  For Winifred it was an idyllic few weeks as she recovered from the birth, which had not been as harrowing as her previous experience. She had begun to feel more settled, a
s if this was where she belonged. Two days before Charles was due to leave to join the shearing team, where he had the job of cook, she asked him to kill one of the roosters she had raised from a setting of eggs. She plucked it and cleaned it, putting the feathers to one side until she had enough to make a pillow, hanging the bird upside down in a cool place, planning to cook a special meal as a surprise the night before Charles left.

  She set the table carefully, putting on the checked tablecloth she had made to replace the one the goat had eaten, and placing a handful of early acacia blossom in a jar in the centre. She lit a candle, leaving the curtains open so that he would see it as he approached the house. The small room was warm from the fuel stove, and the smell of roasting fowl, baking potatoes and pumpkin filled the air. The lid of the black-iron pot jiggled and steam rose as a jam roly-poly simmered. In a jug at the back of the hob was an egg custard keeping warm. Winifred had been filled with a sense of housewifely pride, remembering Mr Jackson and her pleasure in seeing row upon row of pies that she had helped to make. Now through her own efforts she was able to feed her family and she glowed at the thought of Charles’s surprise when he came in the door.

  She gave Fred a bowl of bread and milk and put him to bed, then breastfed Jack and sat there to wait. Outside, the wind had risen and she thought that perhaps there might be a late frost. She looked out the window. It was a clear night with no moon and the stars seemed almost close enough to touch.

  She was still waiting when Charles opened the door and a blast of cold air blew out the candle. The fuel stove had long gone out and she had hacked a leg off the fowl and eaten it in her fingers with a piece of potato and pumpkin, then wrapped the rest of the meat in a cloth and placed it in the meat safe. She kept her eyes averted, afraid to look Charles in the face in case he became angry.

  ‘You still up?’ he said. ‘I had a bite to eat with Mutter and Vater. I won’t be home for a while and there were things to talk about … the farm.’

  Winifred did not reply. She knew he was lying. She could tell, and she could smell the alcohol on his breath. She bent and lifted the baby out of his cradle and, unbuttoning her dress, lay down on the bed and began to feed him. Charles spread his blankets on the floor, took off his boots and outer garments and lay down. Before he went to sleep he said, ‘I’ll be back after shearing. In a couple of years’ time Fred’ll be old enough to come with me.’

  Winifred did not reply, determined that come what may she would see that her sons went to school so that they could be educated and get a job, anything other than follow in their father’s footsteps with weeks of hard work followed by weeks of drinking, then arriving home almost penniless. She thought that her boys could get a job on the railways. Most of all she wanted to make sure they didn’t end up drunkards like her uncle or their father. In her heart she knew that Charles would never change. Charles would ruin her sons if she let him. She was determined to see that it didn’t happen.

  14

  THE BREAK-UP

  THE YOUNG MOTHER FELT VERY isolated that winter, shut up in the small hut with two young children to care for. She was constantly worried about what Fred was doing while she fed the baby. Once he had pushed a box over to the door, stood on it and opened the door before she was even awake. She had been frantic when she found he was missing, afraid that he might have wandered down to the creek, until Vater Carl came striding across the paddock holding the little boy in his arms. Fred had taken off the shirt he wore to bed and was naked. Sometimes he would lie down beside her while she told him another adventure in the life of the Princess Royal. She knew he was jealous of his little brother and once she caught him giving Jack a pinch. She slapped him and he went into a flood of tears until she picked him up and held him close, weeping herself from sheer exhaustion.

  She thought of tethering the child to the clothes line near the goat but was worried about snakes. Once she had seen a king brown slithering across the path to the dairy then disappearing into the long grass. Vater Carl had searched for it with his shotgun but there was no sign of it. He told her that snakes were only dangerous at mating time, but she was never sure when that was. She asked a man to whom she sometimes sold live fowls at the market. ‘Snakes is like birds,’ he said, ‘they stake out their territory. If you sees one, best not tangle with it. Ye need stout boots and a stick. Most of ’em won’t attack. Just keep still and stamp yer feet, most times they’ll go. They ain’t got ears but they can sense the ground moving.’ Even though he told her snakes hibernated in the winter, she still felt uneasy.

  She thought that if anything happened to her children, she would die. It would be more than she could endure, and she wondered where this love came from for children she had never wanted. She thought that Charles was proud of his two sons but he did not love them as fiercely as she did. Perhaps men were different. They went away and came back when they felt like it, and nothing had changed except that their children had grown.

  That year Winifred had been too busy to plant corn but she had kept her vegetable patch going, so that she was able to pick a few leaves of spinach and a cabbage and there was a box of potatoes in the kitchen which she had dug earlier. That, with eggs from her fowls, kept them in food.

  She put Fred to work fetching the eggs as soon he was old enough, showing him how to place them gently in a basket lined with bracken fern picked from the banks of the creek. At first he had been terrified of the rooster because it flew at him with its comb standing back and its mouth open as if it was going to bite. ‘Don’t be silly. They don’t have any teeth,’ she told him. ‘And they need sharp claws to dig in the earth and grip the perch. You mustn’t be a cry-baby. You’re much bigger than it.’ She showed him how to pick up a stick and call out ‘Shoo!’ if it tried to attack him. She felt guilty because he was so young, but she had no one else to help.

  One morning she heard a commotion in the fowl yard and ran out of the house to find a snake curled up in one of the nests where a broody had been hatching a setting of eggs. Now the eggs were gone and the hen was petrified, too afraid to move. Winifred ran for the axe and struck at the snake until the body was a bloody pulp. She picked it up on a stick, carried it outside and put it on an ants’ nest. But the incident unnerved her, even though she knew it was a harmless green tree snake. After that she told Fred to keep away from the fowl shed.

  Once Jack was old enough to be left with Barbara, Winifred resumed her weekly trip to town. Now there were two children to be minded, the sisters resented her even more because it meant they had more work to do.

  Winifred would take a basket of eggs and a few vegetables to exchange with the storekeeper for flour, tea, sugar and golden syrup, and sometimes citronella to protect the children from the mosquitoes that bred in the goat’s dish, the water for the fowls and in the pools of water left by spring rains. The children were often badly bitten and Fred scratched the bites so that he was soon covered in sores that began to fester. She made a paste of bicarbonate of soda and water to cover them and told him he looked like a snowman.

  The days when she could daydream by the clothes line or follow the wind-drift of clouds were over. When she looked in her mirror the face reflected back at her was red from the sun, the mouth turned down, tired lines around the eyes. Every evening, as soon as it got dark, she gave the children a bowl of bread and milk, ate a few boiled vegetables with a slice of bread and syrup and fell exhausted into bed, waking in the night to feed Jack and carry Fred into her bed when he had a bad dream.

  When Charles came home the routine changed and Fred would become his shadow, leaving Winifred free to concentrate on Jack and his needs. Charles being home also meant preparing a proper meal and waiting until he came home, as well as having to judge when to stop waiting and eat by herself because he had gone to the hotel and would stay till closing. She always made sure she was in bed when he lurched into the hut, stumbling and swearing as he tripped over boxes. She would lie still, making no sign that she was awake, praying that th
e children wouldn’t start to cry because it made him so angry. Once he had punched Fred because he was making a noise. The child had screamed and run to her. She had turned on Charles, ‘He’s only a baby.’ He had raised his fist at her while she stood facing him with Fred in her arms, a look of terror in her eyes, until, with a muttered curse, he flung himself out the door.

  Her milk supply had begun to dry up when Jack was seven months old and though she tried to persevere, by nine months he was fully weaned and she found herself pregnant again. It was a time when her fowls had stopped laying, the goat was dry and her vegetable garden was overrun with weeds. Overwhelmed with morning sickness she was unable to do anything but lie down, depending on Mutter Barbara to care for the children until the late afternoon when they would return with their father, bringing food from the main house. She would struggle to prepare an evening meal, retching as she smelt the bacon frying in the pan.

  She had recovered by the time Charles left to go shearing. It was a relief because he had begun to beat Fred, often for some trifling misdemeanour. And this particular day was no exception. When Charles was home he kept his things in a tin box. This included his accordion which no one was allowed to touch. When he left, he took the box with him. Winifred was in the yard doing the washing when Fred opened the box and took out his father’s accordion, attempting to play it. When she called him to help lift the clothes out of the dish so that she could hang them on the line, he left it on the floor. Later she replaced it in the box, shutting the lid.

  The two children were asleep, Jack in his butter box cradle and Fred on the floor on a straw mattress, when Charles returned home. ‘Who’s been at my box?’ he asked when he went to take out his accordion.