Rosewood Dreaming 8

Part 3


THE LIGHTHOUSE,
THE DARK HOUSE


Chapter 21


DEATH OF A BLUE HEELER


Acting on an impractical impulse, Jeannie had got herself a pup, a blue heeler she called Monty, after Field Marshal Montgomery of wartime fame. She told Jack and his father, by way of justification, that it was a birthday present to herself, to mark her thirty-seventh year. She had almost nothing in the way of worldly goods, and in fact had never been one for accumulating possessions, but she had always doted on dogs and lavished attention on this one, tolerating its incessant desire to chew and gnaw at everything in its environment with an indulgence she seldom showed towards humans.

Old Vance did not share her attitude, however, and announced in his imperious way that the dog was a nuisance and would have to go. Jeannie ignored him, stony-faced, vehemently silent. One still, drowsy afternoon she and the children were startled by a crack like a rifle-shot, accompanied by a piteous howl of pain from the pup. Jeannie rushed to the source of the sound, the gaggle of little girls hard on her heels. She arrived on the scene in time to ward off the next blow from Old Vance’s stockwhip, which left a great red welt across her forearm. The pup had worried and gnawed the fronds of a newly-planted coconut palm and Old Vance, incensed, had taken a whip to it. Now the pup cowered, trembling wretchedly, as Jeannie clutched Old Vance’s whip-hand, incoherent with outrage.

Old Vance strode off in a huff, but within hours the pup disappeared. Old Vance and Jack went off down the hill with Monty and the old .22. They returned without the pup, but a reminder of their deed lingered for many days in the stench of a dead animal that emanated from the scrub on the farm’s lower boundary.

Jeannie’s reaction that evening was unprecedented. Heavy with yet another pregnancy, she lunged at Jack, who tried to restrain her, but she would not be silenced. She cursed Old Vance, his clan, his farm, until Jack’s patience snapped and he lashed out at her. By this time she was hysterical. Blindly she groped her way out under the mango tree and vomited in the dusk, then sat on the back steps racked with sobs, utterly inconsolable. Jack’s clumsy attempts to placate her were wildly rejected, and Anna and her sisters kept their distance, shocked out of their wits by what they had heard and seen. Jeannie kept dry-retching at intervals, sobbing alone in the dark. Nobody ate any supper that night.

The next morning the vicar appeared, apparently summoned by Jack to reason with Jeannie. But by then no force on earth could have made any difference; the damage had been done. For the first time Jeannie fully and fervently embraced the bitterness in her heart toward Old Vance and Rosewood, and toward Jack. She nourished it and felt it grow, even as the child she was carrying slipped away from her, precipitating an enforced stay in hospital. The battered little cardboard suitcase, which seemed scarcely to be unpacked after one confinement before it was pressed into service for another, accompanied her to the scene of this latest ordeal.
 
There at least Rosewood was out of her sight, so she could try to put it out of her mind, along with the way Jack had betrayed her. Faced with the dilemma of demonstrating his loyalty to Jeannie or to Old Vance, force of habit had proved too strong. Although it would be many years before Jeannie could hope to escape from Rosewood, she vowed then in her hospital bed, in a haze of loss, with seagulls wheeling and screaming at the window, their insane yellow eyes hovering in and out of focus, to leave. Leave Rosewood, leave them all if necessary. She would let nothing and nobody stop her.

Sickened and weakened after the miscarriage, Jeannie lay watching the gulls advance into focus and retreat, and envied them. Disjointedly she tried to consider options. But there was nowhere to go. Like most of the women living on farms in the district, she couldn’t even drive a car. In abdicating this right to their menfolk, they colluded in their own immobility and isolation, which for Jeannie had become incarceration. She had no money of her own, though nor had Jack for that matter, since Old Vance kept a stranglehold on the purse-strings.

Jeannie had no family either, both her parents being dead. She was driven in her daily life by an instinct to protect her children and a kind of awkward pity for Jack, deriving from the feeling that life, or Old Vance, had somehow short-changed him. The intolerable burden of the material, the physical, the sheer mass of inert matter that impeded the daily strivings of the spirit, swamped her now like suffocating waves of nausea.

‘Till death do us part…’ she reflected bitterly. But the death of what? Jimmy was dead and yet more vibrant in memory than the living. And not only Jimmy. What was time? She no longer saw the point in trying to differentiate between the artificial divisions of past, present, future. The present was the half-crazed eyes of seabirds and a high white bed. The rest was not separable into neat categories or compartments. The so-called dead infiltrated the living consciousness in such a way that she could not exclude them. Some things were part of continuous time, time lived in the head, without borders.

There were no words for her sense of outrage when she thought of returning to Rosewood. Only some elemental act, something irrevocable as fire, as burning her prison to the ground, would express the vehemence of her protest. But here she was, ironically too weak to act, too helpless. She had never felt so powerless in all her life, nor so unforgiving. She had never felt so alone. The impotence and rage were tearing at her constantly, so that she had almost forgotten what it was to attain peace of mind. Gut feelings had taken over from all other modes of being, so that she registered experience viscerally, her stomach muscles tensing in a kind of perpetual sick foreboding.  Could you call this a life?

If Jeannie had somewhere to go, something to go to, would she leave? By God she would. She would take the youngest child and leave Rosewood for ever. Later she would save the other children, if she could. But first she would save herself, before Rosewood devoured her alive. She would be no use to anyone then. She vowed to herself again, lying there in a blur of senseless pain, that one day there would be life after Rosewood.

For some weeks after her discharge from hospital she stayed in the town, threatening mayhem if she were forced to return to the farm. The means were somehow found for the rent on a small flat next to the baker’s, until the money ran out, when she was forced to relent and resume life at Rosewood. But even so brief a respite had strengthened her resolve to escape one day. And the next time, she promised herself grimly, there would be no going back.


*Blue Heelers, otherwise known as cattle dogs, are an Australian breed of dog, part dingo, bred for working with cattle.