Rosewood Dreaming 10

PART 3


LANTANA


Chapter 25


JACK PLAYS CHESS


Jack, who has entered his fifth decade but is physically little changed, has found a friend, a Russian йmigrй called Igor. In appearance Igor is quite unlike the sallow, dark-eyed, intellectual-looking Grigory of Jack’s youth. Igor is a great, blond bear of a man, a pale-eyed stranger from the north who seems to belong in a Russian fairytale with snow and ice, samovars and troikas, tundra and wolf-haunted forests. He likes to wear Tolstoyan shirts, cropped at the neck, side-buttoned smocks that seem to suit his flaxen colouring. His hero is in fact Tolstoy, count, landowner, philosopher, novelist.

Visually, Igor and Jack are opposites. Jack, long-limbed and gaunt-featured, rangy as a gum tree, with quietly intense, deep blue eyes, his patient manner camouflaging a reticent and fastidious sensibility, is like the lunar shadow to Igor’s exuberant Arctic sun.

It is not clear how they met, but presumably it was in the town, while engaged in business to do with their farms. Igor has taken over the lease of a run-down farm with mangoes and pawpaw trees, an unlikely pursuit for the son of a former Russian landowner.

Anna sees his daughter, Olga, on the school bus, wearing the brown pinafore and black lisle stockings of St. Ursula’s convent school. Olga Vinsky, as she is called, since nobody can pronounce the name ‘Vesnovinskaya’, has a round face with clear green eyes and thick, fair hair braided on either side of a neat centre parting, then caught behind at the ends to form a V. It is rumoured that Olga has a talent for the piano. Perhaps it is the only language she understands, apart from Russian, as she never speaks to any of the state school children on the bus. Anna gazes and gazes at her. She can’t help it. Olga represents another world, and seems to move in its aura.

There is no attempt made to include Jack’s and Igor’s families in the friendship that develops between the two men. In fact, nobody has ever seen Igor’s wife, and it is never established whether or not he actually has one. Only on one occasion does Jack take Anna swimming with him and Igor, at Jeannie’s insistence.

Anna pretends to splash in the shallows while she avidly observes the two men after their swim, leaning back against the sea wall where small waves slap their frilly edges. Although the tide is on the turn, the sand is not yet exposed, but by the wall the water is only a few inches deep. The plashing of the shallows against the breakwater, the cries of gulls, the boom of breakers farther from the shore make eavesdropping impossible, but Anna notes with fascination the mat of blond hair on Igor’s powerful chest and arms, and Jack’s thin, boyish body next to him. Igor, despite his frosty appearance, laughs a lot. His laughter rumbles inside his chest like thunder. Telling a funny anecdote, he claps Jack on the shoulder, then the two men rise and look about for Anna.

* * *
               
Igor is teaching Jack to play chess. Jack goes off like a schoolboy on Sunday afternoons, clutching the old-fashioned wooden chess set that has become his prize possession. Later, he tries to teach Anna what he has learned, but she is too impatient and fidgety to appreciate the different moves, or understand their subtleties and implications. Anna never quite manages to see the whole picture, and because the only time they can play is at night after tea, her eyelids droop, the moths hurling themselves at the glass of the hissing spirit lamp distract her, and she feels suffocated by the closeness of the dimly-lit room.

At the farm where Igor lives, Jack and Igor play long, leisurely chess games as Jack’s skill improves. Igor smokes a pipe, and his wintry grey-green eyes appraise Jack through the wisps of smoke uncoiling gently from his mouth. Jack is enthralled by the game’s romance. It banishes the grind of daily life. There is a steady supply of tea from Igor’s samovar, and the scrubby tropical plantation expands into a Russian estate, a gracious place, as they sit on the verandah at dusk and Igor, remote from a Russia struggling with Stalin's legacy, philosophises on Utopian themes.

Most of all he likes to talk about Lev Tolstoy, his idol. Tolstoy, he explains to Jack, had come to believe that the only art that mattered, that had worth, was art that was accessible to everyone. He aspired to a literature that was not the preserve of the privileged few, but could give pleasure to people from all walks of life. In fact, the truest criterion of art for Tolstoy was the reaction of the simple man, the uncorrupted Russian peasant. Tolstoy the visionary had said: ‘I want to tell my tribe who they are, where they come from and what they might yet be.’ The fever of excitement that these words provoke sends Jack rushing to the dun-covered bindings that denote the classics section of the local library. There he finds ‘War and Peace,’ and steals half an hour whenever he can to sit surreptitiously on a block of wood in the old, disused milking-shed and hungrily turn the pages on a whole new world. How could he have lived so long, knowing nothing of this? Why hadn’t Grigory told him?

Reading Tolstoy reminds him of the feeling he had as a boy at Bilambil, watching the stars and the Byron Bay beacon, reassured that the world contained radiance, for here was the tangible proof, a sign and a portent of numinous things, a harbinger of hope. He had all but lost his way since those times.
 
Igor speaks of the schools Tolstoy set up for serfs on his own estates. ‘He was a humanist, you see, an aristocrat of the spirit, Jack, magnanimous of mind and heart, tormented by his soul, which longed for the simplicity that it would never have... Perhaps it is something you yourself possess, Jack, without realising... simplicity, grace... purity...’
 
Flying foxes wheel in the evening sky as Jack savours his mentor’s words. He doesn’t know what to call such approbation, he knows only that it makes him feel more complete. His is a pure heart, a gentle spirit. What his life might mean is something he has hitherto only dimly perceived; it has never seemed so clear to him before. Dominated by Old Vance, he has never quite defined or connected with his own dream. Igor seems to draw him into the light he emanates.

When Igor and Olga suddenly leave the district, even the gossips are stymied. Nobody really knows where they had come from, or where they have gone, or why. Except perhaps Jack, who keeps his own counsel. Not even Jeannie (least of all Jeannie) can extract any information. Jack is steadfast in his silence, as he has been throughout the acquaintance, refusing to be drawn on details of the house, the food, the wife. When Igor leaves, Jack packs away his chess set with his few other precious private things, his face forlorn, his thin shoulders sagging, his eyes blank slates bereft of gladness.


Chapter 26


A ROSEWOOD CHRISTMAS


At Christmas, time seemed to stand still. After the annual bloodletting prompted by poultry orders had taken place, Rosewood was becalmed among its reefs of trees. Vibrant bracts of poinciana blossom and sombre holly green of mango canopies decked the rickety old house in traditional Christmas colours, although a closer inspection revealed fermenting mangoes littering the grass, feasted on by bandy-legged, half-intoxicated lorikeets which skirmished and squabbled in the trees like monkey tribes.

What preceded the Christmas peace was best forgotten, although Anna thought she never would forget it. The same barbaric ritual was enacted every year, and indeed without it there would have been no Christmas cheer. Jeannie and Jack would agree on a number based on orders received, and the Australorp cockerels, their sleek black feathers iridescent with rainbow sheen, were selected for decapitation. Jack’s good hand could wield an axe, but his maimed one could not control a squawking, flapping chook, so the task of beheading fell to Jeannie, who characteristically undertook to perform it without flinching.

There was a distant echo of ancient, epic carnage in the grisly scene with its ritualistic precision. Preparations would begin before the dew had dried on the grass, in the interval of relative coolness between first light and sunrise. The sun exploded like a deafening gong on a stage set for action: the blackened clothes copper full of water, already simmering; Old Vance sitting under a mango tree in his khaki work-clothes and straw hat, waiting to pluck the chooks that had been dunked in the steaming cauldron. Newspapers were spread thickly on an outside bench near the clothes copper, where Anna’s younger sisters waited in readiness to disembowel the plucked birds, after Old Vance or Jeannie had incised a flap between the legs.

The hapless fowls were carried upside-down from their weed and grass-grown run, already protesting hoarsely and piteously. But it was no use. Anna usually ran to the disused front steps, covering her ears, but would nevertheless creep around to the back of the house to watch her sisters at work. In this, as in other things, she maintained her stubborn difference. Jeannie was too busy to pursue the matter further.

After the plucking, Old Vance would ignite some metho in a jam jar lid and pass the naked bodies over it to singe stray pinfeathers. Then the small haruspices scooped out the entrails with deft hands, while Old Vance or Jeannie waited to reserve choice morsels -- liver, gizzard, heart, feet, neck -- for soup. The dismembered parts were returned willy-nilly to the rinsed-out cavity, then the leg-stumps were trussed with string, ready for Jack to deliver them.
 
As soon as one batch reached the final stages, Jeannie would set off to fetch the next victims. The intestines and other unpalatable portions were rolled in newspaper and disposed of in the fire under the clothes copper, so that the smoke belched thick and acrid, turning the sun to a bloodshot eye, while the heat intensified, with the shrill of cicadas, to a crescendo.

Once Jeannie hired Aunt Lily’s teenage son to help, having had a surfeit of beheadings. It gave her no satisfaction to decapitate chooks. They were poor, helpless creatures, content with a handful of grain and a bowl of fresh water. 
Aunt Lily’s second son was tall and gangly, with freckles. Having observed him mainly from afar, pedalling townward on his bicycle, Anna was pleased at the opportunity to study him at close quarters. Enticed from her bolt-hole on the front stairs by a more interesting specimen than Old Vance’s roses and crepe-myrtles, she found it curious that this boy should have freckles without the ginger hair that often went with them. She watched his face intently when it was his turn to behead the chooks. His skin grew paler and paler, until the freckles stood out like polka-dots. As the headless birds flapped grotesquely on the blood-smeared couch grass, and the farm dogs leapt in to sport with the severed heads, Aunt Lily’s son fled behind the mango tree and vomited on the piles of rotting fruit. Anna was intrigued. So he was human after all. He had done precisely what she would have done in his place, she thought with approval.

Wearily Jeannie paid him and sent him home, then took up the axe to continue the grisly task. By Christmas Eve, suddenly it was all over. The chickens had been dressed and despatched, the Christ Child could be born.

Sometimes on Christmas Eve, Old Vance and Jack would make a rare appearance in church, accompanied by whichever of the girls had managed to stay awake. They attended the carol-singing service that started at eleven p.m., a time when Rosewood folk were normally fast asleep.

In the week before New Year, with some money left in his pocket from the Christmas chooks, Jack liked to take Jeannie and the children to town one night as a special treat. They would pile into the old Bedford utility with a homemade canvas hood at the back, and set off down the dusty, bumpy road. In the little seaside township, fairy-lights festooned the branches of the Norfolk pines along the main street. The Ambulance and the Rotary Club ran stalls and a funfair on the grassy strip of park outside the School of Arts. The Vance children traipsed behind Jack and Jeannie from the creaking chocolate wheel to the merry-go-round. There was an atmosphere of artificial gaiety, epitomised by fairy-floss and toffee-apples.

Once they were back at the farm the darkness gathered in again, the Milky Way far, far above and faintly phosphorescent. Crickets chirred in the lank grass of the house paddock, and somewhere in the hollows at the foot of the rise the frogs croaked hopefully.

Deep in the night, under the shroud of mosquito net, Anna listened to the curlews lamenting. Why were the night sounds mostly lonely? Only the cow-bells in the house-paddock, the audible shuffling and munching, introduced a reassuring, familiar note of comfort.

But between carnage and carnival came the Christmas feast. Anna enjoyed the stasis that ensued on Christmas Day, when for a brief interval all the Vances forgot their anxieties and ate their fill of Jeannie’s stuffed roast chickens and potatoes, followed by traditional Christmas pudding in a cloth, with silver coins embedded in its fruity belly for good luck.

Old Vance presided at the head of the table, wearing his freshly dry-cleaned summer suit, his heavy damask napkin like a starched white shirt-front spread across his chest. The meal could not begin until he had said grace. Jeannie, perspiring, would join them at the table, getting up to bring second helpings, check the custard, serve the pudding.

Old Vance was virtually a teetotaller, but on Christmas Day he made an exception, pouring himself and Jack a sweet sherry or a shandy of beer diluted with lemonade, while the girls drank their fill of Jeannie’s home-made ginger beer and horehound, specially reserved for the occasion.

After the midday Christmas meal, Anna would stagger out under the mango tree, the one farthest removed from the scene of the poultry slaughter, which seldom bore any fruit, and lie on her back on the grass watching the clouds, if there were any, before going upstairs to help with the washing-up.
    
Christmas never seemed to change, but other things were about to. As Anna dried the dishes one Christmas afternoon, Jeannie, still at the sink, announced in the flat, matter-of-fact tone she used for momentous statements: 'Well Anna, you’re fourteen years old now, so you should be able to take more responsibility around here. Anyway you’ll have to. I’ve got a job at the Christian Brothers. Cooking. Part time for a start, and then we’ll see. You girls will have to help take care of your little brother in the afternoons after school, until I’ve finished serving the Christian Brothers’ tea.'

The effect this news had on Anna was strange. It felt as if the string of a musical instrument had snapped with a discordant twang, so that from now on familiar songs would sound somehow different. Slightly off-key. That was how change felt. There was a different cadence, unfamiliar notes and rhythms. But Anna also felt relieved that Jeannie could escape from Rosewood without resorting to anything desperate. Her mother seemed to have reached a point where she could never become reconciled to the way of life Old Vance’s version of the world imposed on her. It might still be Rosewood to him, but it had become wormwood to Jeannie.