The Day They Shot Edward Read online

  Wakefield Press

  Born in Adelaide, Wendy Scarfe graduated from Melbourne University and later trained as a secondary school teacher. For over four decades she has written poetry and novels in her own right, revealing her interest in history, political conflicts and social injustice. Her non-fiction works were written with her late husband, Allan Scarfe. Writing in Australian Literary Studies, Dr Katherine Bode commented that Wendy is ‘an important and innovative contemporary author’ whose books offer a ‘difference’.Wendy lives in Warrnambool. She has three daughters, a son and four grandchildren.

  Wakefield Press

  16 Rose Street

  Mile End

  South Australia 5031

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 2018

  This edition published 2018

  Copyright © Wendy Scarfe, 2018

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from

  any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research,

  criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act,

  no part may be reproduced without written permission.

  Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, designBITE

  Edited by Julia Beaven, Wakefield Press

  Ebook conversion by Clinton Ellicott, Wakefield Press

  ISBN 978 1 74305 528 1

  Wakefield Press thanks Coriole Vineyards for their continued support.

  To the memory of my loved husband, Allan,

  and with gratitude to my daughters, Vidya, Nalini and Mim

  for their love, support and encouragement.

  Prologue

  The car drew up at the cemetery gates. Dressed in full evening dress a young man stepped out, violin case in hand. He stood waiting, listening intently to the creamy cadences of a magpie’s song and moving his lips as if identifying the notes on a scale. An elderly man carefully lifted a sheaf of red roses from the back seat and came to his side.

  ‘Maybe you should not have come here tonight, Matthew …’

  The young man shook his head. ‘Oh no, Mr Werther. Tonight it is right to remember. At times I have come here as a traveller who has walked long distances but is still reluctant to arrive. But not tonight.’

  Together they entered the cemetery, turning into the first aisle and halting before a small granite gravestone at the end of the row, a humble memorial dwarfed by surrounding marble pillars and statuesque angels. Matthew placed his violin case on the grass mound while his friend arranged the roses against the headstone and glanced at his watch.

  ‘You mustn’t stay too long.’

  Lost in thought, Matthew only nodded. The magpie still warbled. A soft breeze stirred the rose petals, and a butterfly caught on a warm air current dipped and fluted across his vision. A pinch between finger and thumb would destroy it. He had the power. Its fragility saddened him. As a child he had not understood finality. Sometimes it frightened him but always it was a surprise. In his idyllic childhood world nothing had destroyed the intensity of the moment. Remote as snippets of fancy he recalled those hot days when he dozed on grass crisped by the sun. His certainty that while he slept time stood still. That beneath their leafy canopy birds also slept, tiny ants froze in their military stance, in the stillness of the river nothing moved.

  Had surprise ceased that tragic night? Or did his understanding as a man mark that moment as his step into awareness. Maybe guilt, now fuelled by his adult sense of injustice and beauty wasted, demanded a time before and a time after the event.

  He took a folded white handkerchief from his pocket, stooped and carefully cleaned the inscription.

  ‘Do you recall, Mr Werther, how Gran said that since we only have one life we are bound by lack of experience and practice to make a mess of it? She said we are merely actors in our time and on our stage rehearsing for others a life they will not understand. I know I played a role in Edward’s death but did I rehearse it for others or for myself?’

  Mr Werther touched his arm. ‘Gran’s words were not meant for you, my young friend. The guilt has gone on too long. You were a child. Children cannot understand these things. Now Mendelssohn’s Concerto is waiting for you and you must forget.’

  ‘How can I forget? Maybe on this special night my audience will hear the sadness in great music.’

  ‘Yes, Matthew, maybe they will, but there is also exaltation and exquisite beauty. Now take your violin.’ He picked it up and handed it to his young friend.

  ‘I wonder,’ Matthew said, as they made their return to the car, ‘if Edward cared for music. I never asked him. Children know so little about those they love.’

  Matthew lay on his stomach on the bank. He felt the tug on his finger, prickling along his hand and up his arm. He tightened his forefinger under the thrust of string and lifted it fractionally above the water. It slid clear. Slowly, slowly with inching patience he drew it towards him.

  The hunter in him was shrewd, the boy fighting impatience. Resisting the urge to leap up, yank the string and flick the creature on the bank fuelled his excitement. He saw himself in this excess of energy gambling on success or failure with one rushed and careless gesture. He wouldn’t do it. He willed himself to wait.

  It was still there. He could feel the tug that told him it was there. The line joined them. They should be friends. He grinned at the thought. The line tugged again, gently like a persistent knock demanding his attention, his action.

  He waited. With his free hand he separated some dry grass from a clump and drew it across his hand. Low down, against the mud of the bank, secret, dangerous, his hand held the bait.

  He rested and felt the line tauten.

  It was still there, testing him. He pulled slightly, the weight remained steady. He inched it towards him. He could imagine this delicate knowledgeable creature with its shiny purple claws, tender antennae, and tiny watchful eyes. It would be clutching the sodden maggot. Matthew enticed some more, breath held, hand strong. It wasn’t necessary to breathe; he fought not to breathe, not to breathe. If you wanted something you could defy need. The vacuum built up in his chest, emptiness became a weight he must heave off.

  The yabby was close to the bank. He could see the sheen of its back, a shadow wrinkling beneath the light brown water. Stifled, he choked. His mouth opened, he wrenched air from space and as it exploded into his lungs he sprang to his feet, flipped the string and flicked the yabby on its back onto the bank. It scrabbled, twisted, waved claws and antennae, righted itself and slithered backwards toward the water.

  Matthew snatched at it, fingers pincer tight behind its head, and dropped it in the bucket of muddy water at his side. It struggled for a moment, hoisting itself on the backs of those already caught, and then, with a last feeble wave of its antennae, sank from view. Matthew peered into the bucket with pride but the last glimpse of the yabby, its futile protest, saddened him.

  It was a shiny day. The light shimmered hotly in the sky and the water in the flooded estuary reflected the tawny ragged gums. A mirror image of blueness stretched as far as he could see, as if trees and reeds and fallen logs grew upside down in a space lost in the deep recesses of the water. Very little stirred. Frogs and tadpoles sheltered silently under grass protruding from the bank. Birds hid in the flickering silver foliage of the trees. Only the occasional insect skittered across the water, trailing a skirt of ripples on the surface.

  He looked again into the bucket of yabbies; an eye surfaced and sank. The water was as still now as the river. But with evening the river would start again, and life would emerge from trees, banks and reeds to feed, sing and sport. He thought of cooking the yabbies, their twitching in the hot water. He
remembered ‘Clicketty’ Tonkin bringing a crayfish for supper. When Clicketty dropped it into boiling water it had screamed—a sound of high, thin agony. Matthew had covered his ears and run, and when he saw it on the table, eyes dead, claws perched over the rim of the plate, he had been sick.

  He tilted the bucket so water dribbled out. With a stick he separated and counted his conquests, categorising their sizes and ages—the heavy girthed yabby with one claw had escaped many times before. He was proud of catching that one. He tilted the bucket a little more and a couple of the yabbies slithered onto the muddy bank, confused, uncertain. They hesitated, hunched and doubtful, antennae immobilised. Then, the instinct for freedom asserted, they scrabbled backwards into the water and with a few deft strokes disappeared into the mud.

  Matthew let them go regretfully. The self-sacrifice warmed him.

  Mother would not be pleased. She would have served them for supper at her card evening, a cut-glass dish holding white flesh, each piece curled and plump like witchetty grubs, vinegar in a matching glass jug, salt for dipping, the sweet taste of fresh flesh.

  He tipped the bucket further. More yabbies disengaging themselves from each other fell onto the bank. Finally the old fat one lumbered awkwardly into his watery home.

  But Gran would be tickled, not that he had let them go but that he knew why he had let them go. She would put her arm around him and say, ‘Go on, tell me, so I understand.’ He sometimes thought she already knew but she said she didn’t. If he told her about the warmth and the trees with trunks climbing into the sky and then downwards into the river she would listen and smile and then ask again: ‘And the yabbies? Tell me why you let them go.’

  All the way home he thought about it. He didn’t think in sentences but in images: of eyes, waving antennae, shiny purple backs sinking into water, stillness, the breathing stillness of the river in which everything lived coolly, comfortably. He thought of the saucepan of boiling water, the thick steam that wet the walls near the stove, the creatures sinking into hot water, leaping and twitching, the high thin scream and the damp silence afterward.

  He reached the small sandstone house with the Cloth of Gold roses swarming up the walls and burst through the kitchen door.

  ‘Gran!’ he shouted, ‘I let them go, all of them! I let them go! They cried in the hot water!’ And he burst into tears.

  Sarah was not an old grandmother. She had been a small neat child with a plump face, her blue eyes well-spaced, a small straight nose and firm prim mouth. Her fair hair parted in the middle had been tied in two neat plaits. Now the plaits were rolled into buns over her ears and the round blue eyes wore a pair of rimless spectacles. But the general impression remained, of a compact and self-contained woman. There was no sense of frailty in her slightness, only of a lack of waste, as if by design she took up just the space in the universe she required and no more.

  By contrast, her daughter Margaret was a blaze of petulant glory from her wildfire hair to loose indulgent stride—a woman who knew her own beauty and bargained with it as often as possible. She was one of life’s ironies, the beautiful wilful frippery daughter of intelligent, temperate and loving parents.

  Both women paused in their tasks as he stopped, sobbing, at the kitchen door. Sarah was bread-making, her long black skirt and plain white high-necked blouse tented in a white cotton apron. Below sleeves rolled to the elbow her forearms were white with flour. Flour dusted the scrubbed wooden table and flitted in motes of sunlight from the window across the green linoleum floor.

  The bottle of yeast, a living presence usually crouched behind the kitchen door, bubbling and burping a layer of thick yellow froth, now rested beside the table. It continued to mouth silently foaming words, which spawned in its belly rose to the surface in soft little protests to burst fruitlessly.

  ‘Just like a lot of conversation,’ Gran had said dryly on one occasion when Matthew squatting to observe the yeast had remarked that ‘it was talking’. He didn’t understand her tartness. That something could move constantly of its own accord fascinated him.

  ‘Can it hurt?’ he had asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But it moves.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Things that move are alive.’

  ‘Not all things. If you throw a stone it moves.’

  He sat back on his heels, wrestling with that idea, unaware that she watched him, wondering if he could think through the difference.

  ‘But I throw the stone, Gran. It moves because of me. It can’t move on its own. The yeast moves from inside like I do.’

  She put an arm about him. ‘So it does. So it does.’ And she hugged him and laughed. ‘But it doesn’t hurt, Matthew. Not all sorts of living are the same.’

  Now Matthew looked at the talking yeast from the doorway, at Gran, and at his mother who, also shrouded in a white apron, stirred a pot of jam. He sniffed the hot toffee-sweet smell of spilled sugar burnt upon the stove.

  Their arrested arm movements gave them a fixed waxy appearance, like figures caught in time later to be paraded as examples of earlier life. All the artefacts were there: the blacked wood-fire range, with heavy iron-spouted kettle at one side and red polished stonework about its base; the small narrow window with lace curtains above the sink, its single tap and wooden draining board; the central wooden table and four wooden chairs painted dark green to match the linoleum; the wooden wire-meshed door letting in a few shafts of morning light.

  A floury warm sweet gloom pervaded the room and the grey light in which the women moved, used to rooms which like themselves were merely adjuncts, the kitchen to the house and its central living areas, they to society and its important members.

  Matthew, caught in his own fragment of time, recognised none of this. His perceptions grasped the familiar. Memory had told him it would be like this. He had visualised it as he ran home. Certainly the arrangements might have altered, like flowers in a bowl can be arranged in different modes, but the bowl and the flowers themselves could not change. This he believed with all the knowledge of his nine years. And of course it would be like this always. Time was not change to Matthew: only a repetition of the present.

  Gran wiped her hands across her apron and held out her arms. Matthew threw himself against her stomach and chest so that she rocked on her feet and had to fix her back against the table.

  ‘I let them go, Gran, the yabbies. They aren’t like yeast. They stare at you and wave their claws and fronds above the water like this,’ and he lifted his hands and crooked his fingers and swayed his arms above his head. ‘And the crayfish Clicketty Tonkin brought screamed in the hot water. It’s nice and cool in the river.’

  ‘So it is.’ Sarah smoothed his hair from his forehead and smiled down into his hot anxious face. ‘So it is, nice and cool. I’ve often thought that myself on a hot day and waggled my toes on the edge. Cool and soft and kind. And you let the poor things go?’

  He gulped.

  ‘And you were glad and upset and didn’t want to choose? It was hard to let them go after you’d been smart enough to catch them?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And you didn’t want to choose?’

  He shook his head and sobbed.

  ‘Poor Matthew,’ she sighed, and rocked him against her and crooned. ‘Ah, choices are terrible things to make.’

  ‘It took so long to catch them, Gran. I waited for hours and hours and hours. And Mother wanted yabby tails for her party. But they looked so sad. If you’d been there, Gran, you’d have told me what to do, wouldn’t you?’ He clung. Next time, he was certain, Gran would save him from such agony.

  For a moment Gran stopped her rocking and her gentle indulgent smile left her face. He didn’t like it when adults changed their moods in this way. Something unpredictable had entered the room, a finger extended from somewhere unknown had touched him lightly on the shoulder in warning. Although of what he couldn’t tell.

  A second passed and Gran’s eyes refocused on him. ‘Wash your fac
e and hands and you can help me make bread rolls.’ She released him and gently pushed him in the direction of the outside laundry. With a hand on the door he hesitated and turned back towards her. His expression, without guile, was still confused, still distressed. She had not answered the question he most needed an answer for—not whether his choice had been correct, he wasn’t ready for that, but whether she would always be there to help him make his choices.

  ‘I’ll be there most times, Matthew. We’ll decide together.’

  ‘You and me, Gran.’

  ‘Yes, you and me, darling.’

  He smiled, shoved the door open and with a whoop cleared the step in a leap. Flouncing to the crockery cabinet, his mother snatched a bowl with a clattering of dishes and strode back to the stove. She stirred the jam with fierce jabs, dug in the ladle, hauled it out brimming with froth-flecked jam and slopped it into the bowl. Her carelessness left a dark trail of red stickiness across the stove and hot burnt sugary fumes smoking in the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t know why you have to spoil him. All that fuss over a few yabbies.’

  ‘It wasn’t about yabbies.’

  ‘It seemed like it was about yabbies to me. He caught them. They got away and then he comes crying to you to help him catch them next time.’

  ‘He let them go. They didn’t escape.’

  Margaret scoffed. ‘If you will believe all that rigmarole.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Margaret. Some people are troubled by decisions—unlike you. If you’d been more troubled by decisions you wouldn’t have that encumbrance on the side verandah.’

  ‘You always blame me. How was I to know? Did I have a crystal ball?’

  ‘You were warned.’

  Margaret sniffed. ‘I was young. I’m still young.’

  ‘Yes, you were young. That’s true. And so is Matthew—very young. He needs security. Let him live with the angels a little longer. His Paradise is already tainted.’