The Trouble With Fire Read online

  Les listened. The past year, 1932, had been a good one for him. The herd was doing well, there had been steady rain, new grass, the peat fires appeared to have burnt themselves out, at least up Hang Dog Road. In winter, when the cows were dry, he spent time on the house. He added two more rooms, replaced the flat roof with a pitched gable. It looked like a proper home now, square and plain, but solid enough, and free of leaks. In the summer he put white paint on the walls, and red on the new roof. At the auction rooms in town he found two fireside chairs, covered in red velvet. He also bought a double bed and a chest of drawers.

  Another season was drawing to a close. Les shaved every morning, and his skin had acquired a smooth mahogany tan. The man who presented himself to the three women in Ngaruawahia was dressed in grey flannels, baggy at the knees to be sure, but clean, a checked cotton shirt, a red tie knotted beneath a black jersey. His thinning black hair was slicked above his ears with grease he’d bought from the Rawleigh’s man. When he asked for Joy at the desk, she hurried towards him from out of the lounge, where she had been waiting. The receptionist smiled and glanced down at her oval fingernails.

  Kathleen’s and Dorothy’s eyes met. Kathleen shook her head, her eyes filling with sudden tears. ‘I never did trust a man with a cleft chin,’ she would confide to Dorothy that night. But Joy was walking towards them with a resolute air, the man at her side, and he was extending his hand to shake theirs.

  They sat, the four of them, in an awkward circle on the cracked leather couches in the hotel lounge.

  ‘As you know, I’ve asked Joy to do me the honour of becoming my wife,’ Les began. He reached out in a possessive way for Joy’s small hand. Her nails were short, and the skin reddened. She had scrubbed a good many corridors in the home. But Les’s hand looked huge, engulfing hers, a forest of black hairs covering its back. Kathleen noted the rime of filth beneath each nail. There were still things he had to learn.

  ‘I have a house,’ Les was saying, ‘and a hundred and twenty acres in grass, eighteen milking cows that will be added to as soon as I get machines. You’ll know what I mean, I’m sure, Mrs Keats, coming as you do from Southland. I understand it’s dairy country, too.’

  Kathleen said that yes, she did know, and it sounded as if he was very secure, and she admired a man for that.

  ‘I run Friesians. Holstein-Friesian cows,’ he added by way of explanation. ‘I put them to a Hereford bull. I prefer them to Jerseys because you can run them for beef as well as for milking.’

  ‘I see,’ said Kathleen. ‘Yes, I do see.’

  ‘Hard work, I tell you,’ Les said. ‘It’s bloody hard work. Oh, I beg your pardon. I’ve lived alone for a long time.’

  Once they had sat down, he carefully placed Joy’s hand back in her lap. As if reading Kathleen’s thoughts, he said, ‘I’ll take care of your daughter. I can see she’s a girl from a good family.’

  Kathleen closed her eyes. ‘And what of your own family, Mr Mullens?’

  ‘My parents? Dead now. I was one of twelve, up Dargaville way. One of the younger boys, so the family farm was passed on above me. Well, that’s the way it goes.’

  ‘But you have family who’d come to the wedding?’ The words were out before Kathleen could stop them. They sounded as if she had already agreed to this marriage taking place. Yet there was still so much for her and Joy to talk about, an alternative future that could work. She saw Joy going off to Dunedin Teachers’ College, and herself with a job in H & J Smith, for which she had long hankered. Now that times were looking up, she thought it possible. From a conversation overheard in the tearoom, she happened to know that there would be a vacancy in haberdashery. In the weekends, Joy would come home to her, and she would fuss over her, and they would both save money, perhaps take a trip to see Ben in Australia. Oh, there was still so much they could do.

  The man sitting before her shrugged his shoulders. ‘There’re none of them I’d want to see,’ he answered. ‘I thought the wedding could take place as soon as the licence can be arranged. While you’re here, Mrs Keats. Perhaps at your sister’s house.’ And here, he nodded towards Dorothy. He has this all planned out, Kathleen thought. He is ahead of me by far.

  ‘Your teaching, Joy,’ Kathleen whispered. ‘What of that?’

  ‘What of it?’ Joy said shortly. Her eyes were weary, almost colourless. ‘Sooner or later I’d go to some country school and meet a nice man, just like Les, and get married. Why not now?’

  Kathleen wasn’t certain that Les was nice. He was not what she would have chosen. An old saying clanged in her memory: beggars can’t be choosers.

  As if he had not paid much attention to what had just been said, Les added, ‘I’ve got a friend, a neighbour of mine, who will stand up for me, name of Percy George.’

  In this way, Joy came to be married to Les, in Dorothy’s crowded little sitting room, full of fat cushions and crocheted doilies on the side tables. The sisters had made a tray of sandwiches and a cake with lemon frosting. Joy wore a grey voile dress that Dorothy insisted on buying at Smith & Caughey’s, one that made her look more shapely. Kathleen said, ‘She’s sure to get her figure back, you shouldn’t waste the money, Dorothy.’ To which Dorothy had retorted, through tight lips, that she expected there would be more occasions when Joy would lose her shape. Dorothy wasn’t struck by Les Mullens either, but, as she said, all things considered, they could make the best of things.

  A minister came to hear the couple’s vows, and Percy was there in his suit, and wiry old Hazel, who wore a hat, the two of them acting as the witnesses. Kathleen promised herself not to give way to tears. Inside, she felt as if Joy was dying in front of her eyes, but she couldn’t show that. Joy herself looked bewildered, somehow apart from the proceedings. She held out her hand for Les to put the wedding ring on her finger. When the ring was in place she looked down at it with curiosity, seeming to wonder how it had got there.

  While Kathleen and Dorothy were clearing away the last crumbs of cake, the phone rang. Percy and Hazel had already left, and Joy and Les were preparing to go to the station to catch the train.

  The call was from the matron of the home. The people who had taken Joy’s baby had brought her back. The child had birthmarks down one side of her neck and it had to be agreed that she was a little unsightly, although pretty enough in other ways. The couple hadn’t been bothered by the marks at first, but now they were home, their friends had commented, and they’d had a change of heart. The matron thought they ought to know. They were not to worry; she had no doubt someone would take the child.

  ‘How can they pick and choose like that?’ Dorothy cried, her face flaming with rage.

  ‘Les.’ Joy was looking at her new husband with startled excitement, her eyes alight at last. ‘We can have her. The baby.’

  Les looked at her with barely disguised disgust. ‘I’m not taking someone else’s bastard,’ he said.

  Everyone stopped whatever they were doing. The silence in the room was palpable. Joy, possessed by sudden anguish, looked at her left hand. She pulled at the ring, but it was stuck firmly on her finger.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Kathleen, stepping forward and placing her hand on Joy’s arm. ‘Now stop. I’m going to collect the baby.’

  ‘You, Mum?’

  ‘Yes, me. I’m going straight to the home. I’m going to take the little girl with me. You can come and see her whenever you like.’ She looked fairly and squarely at her new son-in-law. ‘If you will allow it, Mr Mullens.’

  LATER THAT NIGHT, LES TOOK his new wife to the house he had prepared for her. He had left his old Chevy flatbed parked at the railway station. They were both silent as she climbed into the cab. There had, actually, been nothing to say on the train south. Les had made a tentative peace offering. ‘I’m sorry about the kid,’ he said. ‘You can see how it would be, can’t you?’

  Joy shook her head and looked out the window.

  ‘We need to start with a clean slate, you and me. That’s wha
t you’d decided, hadn’t you?’

  She nodded and hunched her shoulders, refusing to look at him.

  ‘Well, say something,’ he said. When she wouldn’t, he muttered under his breath and kicked the seat in front of him. ‘Frig it,’ he said.

  As they drove down Hang Dog Road, he sniffed the wind. ‘Jesus, no,’ he groaned. ‘The fires are back.’

  Joy smelled them, too. Smoke, laden with a spicy aromatic scent, like good pipe tobacco, swirled towards them. She saw the tongues of fire in the paddocks, leaping and licking, flames hopscotching between sods of earth, along the edges of deep trenches carved in the soil. In the dying light of day it looked like a scene from hell, the rushes in the swampland turned to tips of fire, ash melting away in the breeze. Later, when she had been there for a matter of years, she would learn the names of the plants that grew between the rushes: flax, wild orchids, sundew and bladderwort that consumed insects, and the frothy feather-duster heads of sedge. That night, she heard only the screams of dying frogs, thin wails of despair.

  At the house, Les showed her to a room, furnished by a lone camp stretcher, a blanket thrown over it. ‘You’d best sleep here for the time being,’ he said. Through the thin plywood wall she heard him moving about in the next room, his shoes dropping to the floor, the rattle of a coathanger, the creak of a mattress that she supposed she would share in time.

  In the morning he was up and gone from the house before Joy woke. Outside lay a thick cloud of smoke, or was it fog? Fog was something else the receptionist had mentioned, and although she was no stranger to fog down south, the way the woman described it — the damp rising up from the swamplands, wrapping its clingingembrace around you, heat and water mixed in the atmosphere — had made her skin crawl. When she was dressed, she walked outside. Fingers of clammy fog reached into her hair and when she breathed she felt her nostrils fill with it. A trumpet of sound bellowed beside her, making her shriek with terror. Through the mist she made out the side of an animal pressing against a fence, and recognised the outline of a cow.

  She retreated inside. When she had recovered herself, she examined her surroundings. Tin dishes stood in a sink half full of scummy water. She looked at what had to be done. After an hour or two, he came back to the house, his face covered with black soot, his baggy trousers held up by braces, soaked at the hems.

  ‘I’ve lit the copper,’ she said. ‘Give me your clothes.’ He turned away from her, and let his trousers go. She saw his lean buttocks, gleaming like tallow, the way he covered his nakedness at the front with his free hand. She leant over and touched his backside and he flinched.

  This was to be the way of it: the fires, the heat, the darkness, the blackened man, her entrance into torment.

  RUTH MULLENS REMEMBERED A TIME when her name was Ruth Keats, but that was when she was a very small child. She recalled a town, far in the south, with pretty frilly-faced Victorian buildings and a water tower. The house where she lived shone with waxed furniture and a polished kitchen floor, and there was always hot water for baths. She wore new clothes and patent leather shoes. Her mother, whose name was Kathleen, called her her precious little jewel, and tucked her in bed with a big teddy bear that was the only thing that didn’t smell new. The smell was familiar and comforting, though, and at night she whispered to it as if it was a living friend. Her mother said that it had belonged to her Auntie Joy who had lived here when she was a little girl, just like Ruth did. Some day she would meet her aunt, but not for a while. It would be wonderful when Auntie Joy came; they would have such fun together.

  Ruth asked, ‘Is she your sister, Mum?’

  Kathleen hesitated. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Yes, I suppose you could call her that. My very little sister.’

  ‘When will she come?’

  ‘Soon, I hope. She works hard on her farm.’ Ruth knew about farms because she and her mother travelled through the countryside from time to time on buses, and Kathleen pointed out paddocks and cows. ‘Joy lives in a place that looks like this,’ she said, although she didn’t know for sure. ‘When you’re a big girl and go to school you can write her a letter and tell her what you’ve seen. And perhaps she’ll write back to you.’

  ‘Has she got children too?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  Not yet. Joy had written more than once to say that another baby had gone. Les wasn’t happy. I think, Joy once wrote to her mother, that it’s the work in the shed. Hazel George has told me I shouldn’t carry cream cans, but it’s part of my job. The cream truck comes along the road now, and Les has built a cream stand. We put the cans out every morning. The herd is getting bigger and bigger. We have machines now, but Les has his hands full. I’m hoping I’ll get down south in the winter, though Les gets in a mood when I talk about it. Well, that’s life. I think a bit of rest and a change of scene might help matters. I know he’s dead keen on kids. Kiss Ruthie goodnight from me.

  And then late in May of 1938 another letter came. Thanks for the money, Mum. I’ll use it for a ticket, as you suggested. Looks as if it won’t be long now. I talked to Les this morning. He said well go when you like. He’s not happy, but he knows I need a visit home. Five years, it’s been a long time. I’m being as nice as I can to Les, mind you, because I need him to take me to the train. Is Ruthie enjoying school? I can’t believe she’s started already. Oh, I want to see her with her schoolbag. Perhaps I can walk her to school and meet the teacher.

  At the end of June, Kathleen wrote to ask if a date had been set. She received no reply to her letter. An odd sense of foreboding had overtaken her. It felt, in some unaccountable and indiscernible way, as it had when Joy had been in the home years before. As if somehow she had mislaid her daughter. After another week passed, she phoned the home of her daughter and her husband. The operator put the call through: 3 M, two long Morse code signals, like a frog’s dying croak. Les Mullens answered.

  ‘Can I speak to Joy?’ she asked, when it was clear no conversation was forthcoming.

  ‘Well, that’s over to you, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘She’s your visitor.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Where is she, Les?’

  ‘Staying with you as far as I know.’

  ‘When did she leave?’

  ‘I left her at the railway station a month ago.’

  ‘She never came here.’

  ‘Then don’t ask me.’

  ‘Did you see her get on the train?’ Kathleen felt her voice rising as she tried to contain her panic.

  ‘I had work to do. This is a farm, Mrs Keats. I need a spare pair of hands round here.’ He had never called her Mum or Mother, as a son-in-law might be expected to do, but then they had met each other only briefly, years before when he married her daughter. ‘I left her at the station.’

  ‘Something must have happened to her,’ Kathleen said. ‘She’s not here, I swear to God.’ Her hands were shaking so badly she could hardly hold the phone.

  ‘Oh well, who knows what Joy did. Joy does what Joy wants, if you ask me. Perhaps she’s gone off with the man from Tooley Street.’

  ‘The man from Tooley Street?’

  ‘She was making out pretty friendly with him the last time he called, if you ask me,’ Les said, warming to his subject. ‘Scones and tea, she had it all laid on for him.’

  ‘We’ll have to call the police,’ Kathleen said, and the words sounded unpleasantly familiar.

  ‘Well, you call the police if you like. You’ll look a right fool, I reckon, when it turns out she’s gone off with some man.’

  Kathleen rang Dorothy, but her sister hadn’t seen or heard from Joy in a long time. She rang Percy George, who had become vague and had trouble stringing words together. He’d lost Hazel to pleurisy the winter before, and she recalled now that Joy had mentioned that in one of her letters. He couldn’t remember when he last saw Joy. A good girl, he said, she’s a good one. Les got a gem there, even if she is on the quiet side. He took himself along the road for dinner now and then and she always had a good stew
on the hob, did Joy. The last time? Oh, he was sorry, he’d have to think about that. Kathleen saw him in her mind’s eye, scratching the back of his head, a habit she’d noticed at the wedding. Be a couple of months back now, he thought. She was talking about going south.

  ‘She didn’t mention the man from Tooley Street?’

  Not that he could recall. Fact of the matter was, he hadn’t seen a man from Tooley Street round here in a long while. They mostly paid attention to the factories these days, which was really their job.

  ‘Les says he was at the farm. He says Joy made him scones and tea.’

  ‘Well, I dunno about that,’ Percy said. ‘That’s a bit of a surprise, to tell you the truth. There was one here a couple of years back. Very natty he was, too.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have forgotten?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t forget something like that. Not the man from Tooley Street. You don’t forget them. A queer bunch of jokers. They don’t stand round having cups of tea, not them. Not unless they took a great fancy to the lady of the house.’ And here he chuckled, an old man’s grubby laughter.

  Kathleen did go to the police in Invercargill. She sat in an interview room, a little box-like room with initials scratched on the table, permeated with the stale smell of urine as if someone had peed in the corner. Because of the war, the police force was down in numbers. The sergeant who interviewed her was older, courteous, kind enough. When he asked if Joy had ever gone missing before, and she had to admit that yes, once she had gone off on her own for a bit, he bit the end of his pencil and made a note.

  Was it a happy marriage? Kathleen said there may have been some problems, but she didn’t know much about that. It was a long time since she’d seen her daughter. He made another note.

  Could she have gone off with a man? That was what her son-in-law had suggested, Kathleen said carefully, but Joy wouldn’t do a thing like that. Please listen to me, she said to him, all sorts of things happen up in that place. There was a man who’d fed his wife to the pigs not that long ago. Besides, Joy wouldn’t go away for all that time without letting her know. Not with her having the little girl and all. The little girl? So then she had to explain about Ruth. The policeman sighed and shut his notebook. They would make some inquiries up north, he said, but he couldn’t promise anything.