Washerwoman's Dream Read online

  Winifred stared after them helplessly, tears running down her face. ‘You have ruined my life. You have taken everything from me — my girlhood, my father, my writing, even my egg money … And now you have taken my children. You are worthless, a drunkard. I have hated you for a long time.’ She swayed and clutched at the wooden railing of the steps for support.

  He glared at her, his face livid, froth coming out of the corner of his mouth. Then he raised his rifle and pointed it at her. ‘Get off my father’s land before I put a bullet in you.’ He kicked the bag she had packed out of her reach. She stared at him, his words sinking in. He was holding the rifle steady, his eyes fixed on her, glowing like hot coals. And then she turned and ran, while he followed, pointing the gun at her until he had driven her out of the gate.

  15

  THE FUGITIVE

  WINIFRED WOKE IN THE MORNING after a fitful sleep. Her hair was damp with dew, her dress crumpled and soiled. She had no idea where she was except that she knew she had been heading west, walking until she was exhausted. Finally she had settled down under a tree in a paddock with some cattle. It had been a long night and at first the mosquitoes had kept her awake until she pulled her dress up around her ears, pulled her petticoat over her ankles, unfastened her hair to cover her face and curled herself into a ball.

  It took her a few moments to realise where she was now, and then a sharp pain assailed her as she went over yesterday’s events, knowing she had lost her children. The thought that she might never see them again went through her mind but she dismissed it. There had to be some way of getting them back. She was their mother. She had rights. It was her, not Charles, who had suffered to bring them into the world. For the moment they were safe. Mutter Barbara loved them. She would care for them until Winifred could send for them.

  Her immediate situation was desperate. She had only the clothes she stood up in and was hungry and thirsty. Her last meal had been a cup of tea and a slice of bread and cheese at lunchtime. She thought about the night before. Everyone within earshot would have heard Charles shouting. Yet no one had come to her aid. Perhaps they were glad to see her go, otherwise someone would have followed her in the waggon and taken her back to the farm. In her heart she knew that even after nine years and four children she had not been accepted — always the outsider.

  Smoke was coming from a chimney in the distance and Winifred thought about going to beg for food, but then if she did someone might tell Charles and he might come after her with the gun. She didn’t want to return to the same old arguments, the same drudgery; the nights when Charles came home drunk and forced her onto her back, when he lay astride her as she stifled a scream of rage at her powerlessness, listening to him say, ‘You’re my wife. I take what is mine.’ If she returned it would mean total submission. It was unthinkable.

  And yet she knew she had been foolhardy, thinking she could leave home without making any plans. She could go to her father, but he had abandoned her after she married. She had only seen him once in nine years. She did not even know where he was. Thinking about her plight she began to cry, rocking backwards and forwards, sobbing until she had no tears left. When she calmed down she blew her nose on her petticoat — she had no handkerchief or handbag.

  The tears proved a release and hardened her resolve to go on alone, accepting for the moment she had no way of getting her children back.

  She stretched. The sun was rising and the bush emerged from the shadows of the night, as if the world was waking up. Magpies warbled in the tree over her head. A crow flew onto a branch and stared at her. As she stood there the thought came into her mind that she had been given the gift of a new day, as if it was the first day of her life. The past was dead. She had to learn to accept it.

  The cows were ambling in single file to the dairy to be milked as she crossed the paddock to the creek. There she knelt and, cupping her hands, scooped up a draught of water which she drank thirstily. Then she laved her face and hands, the cool water refreshing her. When she had smoothed her hair and straightened her dress she made her way back to the road, planning to hail any passing vehicle for a lift to the nearest town.

  She was sitting by the side of the road later when she heard the unmistakable sound of horses, and soon a team of horses pulling a dray came into view. She ran alongside until the driver brought the dray to a halt. Holding the reins loosely he leaned down. ‘Where did you spring from, mavourneen? You look as if you’ve been in the wars.’

  ‘My horse bolted.’ Winifred tried to smile but failed dismally. ‘I slept out all night. My clothes … everything I own was in my saddlebag.’

  ‘Where’re ya bound?’

  ‘Somewhere where I can get work,’ she said, and without waiting for an invitation she climbed up beside the driver. He sat there for a few seconds looking at her. He was about her own age, with a mop of light red hair, a long unkempt beard and a pair of penetrating blue eyes. She became conscious of her bedraggled state and looked away in confusion. Then he cracked his whip and called, ‘Move along, me spalpeens,’ and the horses were on their way, clip-clopping along the dirt road in a swirl of dust.

  They continued in silence until the driver turned to her and held out his hand. ‘I’m Michael Flanagan.’

  ‘My name’s Winifred,’ she said as she took the outstretched hand, wondering whether to use the name of Steger or make up another name.

  But it didn’t seem to matter because the next thing he said was, ‘Ye hungry?’

  She nodded and he brought the horses to a halt. ‘We’ll stop here and make some tea.’ He took a loaf of bread, a tin of treacle and some tin mugs out of a box in the back of the waggon. A black billy can and a battered frying pan were hanging from the side of the dray which was packed high with boxes and bundles. ‘You look as if you could do with a feed? Fancy a fresh egg?’

  Winifred gathered some kindling and a dead branch from the side of the road and placed them in a little clearing. ‘You’ve done this before,’ her companion said, and the kindling blazed into life as he struck a match. Winifred leaned closer, trying to warm her hands. She felt cold, even though the sun was shining.

  The water in the billy can came to the boil and Michael Flanagan lifted the lid. As steam poured out he dropped in a handful of tea leaves, replaced the lid and put the tea to one side while he melted some dripping in the frying pan. Winifred’s eyes widened as he broke in twelve eggs, tossing the shells into the fire where they hissed, then blackened and disintegrated.

  ‘If you look in the box you’ll find some tin plates and a knife.’ She did as she was bid and then watched as with a deft twist of his wrist, he tossed the eggs high in the pan to turn them over.

  She cut two slices of bread and put a slice on each plate while Michael served the eggs, dividing them evenly so that they had six each. In later years Winifred often thought of that meal. It was one of the best she had ever eaten, sitting by the side of the road with a stranger and yet feeling completely at ease as if she had known him all her life.

  When they had finished he took a piece of newspaper and wiped the plates and frying pan clean, then rinsed the knives and forks and the mugs in the water left in the billy can, then packed them back in their box. With Winifred sitting beside him he flicked the whip and the dray was off again.

  She woke with a start some time later; the movement of the horses and the fact that she had not slept much the night before had made her drowsy.

  ‘Feeling better?’ Michael asked.

  She nodded and instinctively put her hands to her head to smooth down her hair, thinking she must look a fright.

  ‘We’ll kip down for the night before it gets dark. I know a place,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit off the beaten track. There’s a clearing with some feed for the horses and plenty of wood. I’ll light a fire and we can have a bite of bread and cheese and a mug of tea with a drop of whisky to keep the cold out.’ And he continued on his way until the sun started to sink lower in the western sky.

  H
e turned off the main road and made his way along a track until he came to a clearing. He brought the dray to a halt and jumped down to release the horses from between the shafts, hobbling them before filling their nosebags with chaff and pouring some water from a canvas bag into a large tin dish. Then he filled the billy can and made a small fire in a circle of stones. ‘This is my secret place. Even the mozzies don’t know about it.’

  It was dark by the time they finished eating and a chill wind had sprung up. Michael put a log on the fire and then spread a blanket for Winifred in the back of the dray, lifting out the bales and boxes so that she could lie down and putting them underneath the dray to prop it up. He spread his blanket on the ground alongside. ‘Don’t forget your prayers, mavourneen. My mother taught me to pray when I was only knee high to a grasshopper. “You can always talk to Our Lady when there’s no one else,” she’d say.’

  Winifred thought about his words as she lay looking up at the stars, listening to the sound of him breathing and occasionally grunting in his sleep. She thought about Sister Angela and Sister Beatrice on the ship to Australia all those years ago. They had talked to her about God and his angels. God … it was almost as if He had sent Michael when she was so weary from walking that she could no longer put one foot in front of the other. Thinking about it, she pulled her blanket tighter and, with her head resting on a bundle of papers, fell asleep.

  In the morning they stopped by a creek and Michael Flanagan handed her a towel and a piece of soap. ‘I’ll light the fire while you have a bathe. Wash your clothes … I’ll lend you some duds. Your things will dry in this heat by the time we’re ready to leave.’

  Later she returned to the camp fire, her wet hair hanging loose, her wet clothes over her arm, feeling clean and fresh from the cool water and wearing the shirt and trousers Michael had lent her. He grinned when he saw her. ‘Begorra, if it weren’t for your hair I’d swear it was me little brother.’

  He took the wet towel and Winifred heard him splashing in the creek, and then he began to sing, the notes rising over the twittering of hundreds of coloured finches that were perched on the branches of a gum tree that shaded the creek.

  He came back not long after, wearing a pair of trousers and holding his wet shirt over his arm. He slung it over a low-growing bush, close to where Winifred had spread her clothes to dry. He was naked to the waist, and she stared at the thick mat of red hair that curled over his chest and sloped down his navel, where it disappeared into his trousers, which were tied with a piece of rope. Then, feeling his eyes on her, she looked away, her cheeks flushed, and put the tea in the billy can which had come to the boil.

  Later, with a mug of tea cradled in his hands, Michael Flanagan pointed across the water to where wild ducks were feeding among the bed of reeds. ‘If this was Ireland there’d be green hills that run down to the sea … and white swans. Did you know, mavourneen, there’s no snakes in Ireland? Not like this place where you pick up something that looks like a stick and it bites you and you’re dead afore you know it.’

  Winifred tipped the billy can and filled his tea cup and then her own, her grief momentarily forgotten as his rich Irish brogue carried her to his homeland.

  ‘It was St Patrick himself who drove them away. We lived in a little cottage with a dry stone wall and outside a little path barely wide enough for a donkey cart to pass. And then my da died, God rest his soul. My mither tried to manage with a few fowls and a patch of taties and a pig that slept in the house alongside of me bed. But some foul plague got into the ground … Father Murphy said it was the work of the devil and he tried praying, but ’twas no use. My little mither tried putting out a dish of milk for the leprechauns but that didn’t work either … The fowls got some disease, the pig died and the taties rotted in our little patch … It weren’t the first time it happened.’

  He looked at her and grinned, leaning across to the fire to toast a slice of bread on a stick. ‘Don’t mind me going on. My little mither, God rest her soul, said I must have kissed the Blarney stone. But when I’m on the road for so long with no one to talk to, it’s kinda lonely like.’ He looked sideways at her. ‘You English?’

  ‘I grew up in London.’

  ‘Well, it weren’t your fault, so I’ll forgive you. You never heard tell of the potato famine in Ireland?’

  Winifred shook her head and spread some treacle on her toast, brushing off the flies that seemed to have appeared from nowhere.

  They were packed up and on the road again when he said, ‘You see, the English … well the English owned all our land, but they didn’t live there. It didn’t matter a tinker’s cuss to them that their brothers on the other side of the Irish Sea were starving.’ He looked at her. She was sitting beside him in her borrowed clothes, a tweed cap he had lent her covering her hair, her shoulders hunched, a sad dejected air about her. He patted her on the shoulder. ‘I can see you got troubles of your own. Well, Michael Flanagan ain’t the one to go pokin’ and pryin’, so I’ll shut up now.’ He took a tin whistle out of his pocket and began to play an Irish jig that set the horses almost dancing along the road until Winifred began to laugh.

  ‘I had a horse once … It used to go down on its knees if it saw anyone coming along the road.’

  ‘Not the horse that bolted on you?’

  ‘No, that was a different horse.’

  ‘Where were you going when your horse bolted?’

  She was tempted to tell him the truth, but something restrained her. Instead she said, ‘Looking for work.’

  ‘There’s a few homesteads where I drop off supplies … Most are as lean as Paddy’s pig … they could do with an extra pair of hands but can’t afford a brass farthing in wages. You’d be up at sparrow’s fart milkin’ cows, diggin’ turnips, and no one to talk to from one day t’other … You’re not hiding from the law, are you? Not that it’s any business of mine.’

  ‘I haven’t committed any crime.’

  ‘Well then, I know just the place for you, if you can bear with me for a few more days. There’s a hotel at Morven where I stop off when I’m passing … I think you’d get along right well. Mrs Dawkins, well now, she’s a fine woman and generous — she can afford to be. She’ll pay you good wages and be glad to have you. It’s hard to get a decent white woman out here. Always plenty of t’other sort. And Aboriginal women, afore you can say a Hail Mary they’re off. I don’t blame them, it’s their country and they don’t have to work for white folks … You been to Morven?’

  Winifred shook her head.

  ‘Well now, it’s a place where roads meet, with lots of folk going backwards and forwards. It used to be called Saddler’s Well after a waterhole on Hamburg Creek. It was here folks stayed when they couldn’t face going any further, and built a store or a hotel. You’ll like it there.’

  16

  SANCTUARY

  WINIFRED ARRIVED AT MORVEN JUST before Christmas 1909. Michael Flanagan took her to a hotel on the western edge of the town. She often wondered what Mrs Dawkins must have thought when she first saw her in a crumpled dress, her face burned from sitting in the open dray in the sun without a hat, her hair like a birch broom in a fit, and her fingernails broken and black with grime.

  He drove the dray around the back and left Winifred sitting there while he went in to talk to Mrs Dawkins. Winifred had no idea what he told her but later she felt it wouldn’t have mattered, because Mrs Dawkins was beside herself trying to cook breakfast for fifty people.

  The kitchen staff had run off, so Winifred went into the kitchen and washed the stack of dishes piled up from the night before and cleaned the kitchen. Mrs Amelia Dawkins, the owner of the hotel, was overjoyed and offered her a pound a week and her keep if she’d stay, and gave her five pounds in advance so that she could get herself some clothes.

  After breakfast was over, Mrs Dawkins sat with Winifred and Michael while they ate sausages, eggs, bacon and fried bread and washed it down with cups of tea.

  ‘All the rooms are full,’ s
he said to Michael. ‘I can make you up a bed in the stable.’

  ‘I’m not staying. There’s a lotta little spalpeens out west who’d wake up disappointed on Christmas morn if there wasn’t a dolly or a tin whistle in their stocking. I’ll take a couple of bottles of whisky from the bar in case someone asks me to share a slice of pudden.’ He put a pound note on the table. Then, with a wave of his hand, he went out the back door and into the yard where his horses were waiting.

  The hotel was quiet now and Mrs Dawkins told Winifred to have a hot bath. She lent her some clean clothes and led her to a little room off the verandah. ‘As soon as you’re ready, come through. There’s beds to make and the bar opens at ten o’clock, then there’ll be lunch. You’ve got half an hour,’ and she went bustling off.

  Winifred gazed around the small room with its door lock and a key on the inside, its black-iron bedstead with a white counterpane and its clean white sheets and a soft pillow. She had found a haven. For the time being she had a home. Then, thinking back to her flight from Charles and her lost children, she was overcome with grief and began to weep.

  * * *

  The work was demanding, but Winifred was no stranger to hard work and her employer treated her fairly, sharing the workload and treating her as an equal. As she got to know the town she was to discover that Morven was a big trucking centre for sheep, cattle and horses which were loaded onto the railway that travelled via Toowoomba to Brisbane. Cobb and Co passenger coaches also travelled from Mitchell to Roma in the east, through to Morven, Charleville and places beyond. There was a steady stream of people passing through, which kept Mrs Dawkins’s hotel very busy.

  Morven had a mixed population, with a police station, a school and four hotels. Aborigines camped below the main settlement, drawing their water from the dam on the edge of town. And gangs of Chinese were employed as itinerant workers to poison prickly pear, which was still a problem.