Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

This morning of the death, over tea Sally made while keeping her eyes from straying to Naomi, Dr. Maddox sat at the kitchen table and spoke for a while to the girls’ father. These were very much men’s mutterings, half-embarrassed and platitudinous. Their father wore large, mute features, the same he brought to his labors. They had not yet crumbled in grief but somehow promised soon to do so.

Sally had less reason to stay in the Macleay Valley now. She was maybe a year beyond the age girls left home for marriage. Her sister had returned to her Sydney duties. Mr. Durance took sturdily to his work and employed the Sorley boys when needed. But Sally did not yet feel entitled to go. To flee would be obscene. It would be an insult to her mother’s spirit. Her sister could escape because escape was her forte. She’d managed the trick before. But while it was easy for strangers to declare Eric Durance independent—a freestanding fellow—he did not seem so rugged to Sally.

The country hospital had its own retaining power too. On the Wednesday following her mother’s funeral she found that a fourteen-year-old boy with peritonitis she was nursing had died in the night, and she believed her stinging tears were a debt paid to her mother and a sort of tax paid to the valley. So by horseback, or more often by sulky, she continued traveling in her uniform—along the broad yellow-earth road and unreliable bridge over the river—to and from the home at Sherwood. She was a figure located essentially amidst the green paddocks, one who could not glibly get away.

It was in the corridors during her night shifts that the mercy they’d given her mother took on the demeanor of a crime never to be argued away. Did I do it because I was tired? Fed up with all-day working and all-night watching? In the nurses’ cubicle at the end of a public ward which contained—with all injuries and diseases there present combined and counted—no pain such as that of her mother’s, Sally wept without consolation, since no night pleadings from an entire hospital of patients seemed to come close to the daytime pleadings she’d heard from her dead but eternal mother.

This young woman of twenty-two—or near twenty-three—years was considered by those who bothered to see her to be possessed by a wistfulness which some people thought represented that greatest crime of bush towns: aloofness, flashness. Either that, or she was a cause for sympathy. A spinster-in-training.

Then—after eight months—the thunderclap. It would alter earthly geography. It altered the geography of duty and it enhanced all escape routes. It was not the thunderclap of war—at least in the clear and direct sense. It was not the declarations of the prime minister or the news that the enemy was in Samoa and New Guinea, and his flotilla of cruisers and raiders was already at sea, or about to take to it and make the Pacific and Indian Oceans perilous. It was not the rush to make a full-blown army out of a mere framework of weekend militias. It was not a renewed awareness that the valley was numerous in Bavarian Catholic cow-cockies, now likely to be less loyal even than the Irish. It was a letter addressed to her father and her by Naomi in Sydney.

There is a call for military nurses. Unless you have sharp objections, I’ll apply. But any acceptance is unlikely. If Sally feels that she would be left without proper help, I will of course…

Recently Sally had begun to favor the day shift for its busyness, leaving the house with stew and potatoes bubbling on the great iron range fueled with the fallen branches of ring-barked trees. In her noon absence her father would eat some of this and when she returned at dusk always declared it had been top-class. It was good that he was not a complainer, that his hard-mouthed taste was not broad, and any food involving meat, potatoes, and green peas fulfilled his idea of nourishment, as long as it was served scalding. But even before the great change in the world, she had known in some secret chamber of the mind that she was readying herself for an escape, one all the more—not less—daring and reckless because it did not involve tunneling or scaling walls.

On the excuse she would be home too late from the hospital, she had started to get the Sorley girl to cook her father the evening meal. Many would see what was coming their way—the womanless homestead which would be his lot—and they would rant and plead. But Mr. Durance did not show any sign he intended that. He stated a thoughtful and unblaming awareness that in the end both the girls would go, for Naomi had already proved it to him. Neither love nor blood nor begging, he wisely and grievingly knew, could hold a man and his children under one roof and unto death. At some time the roof would change itself into a wheel which spun off the children. This month—if the occasional Herald which reached the farm could be believed—the roofs of the world had become a wheel for crushing the breasts of mothers and fathers. If Naomi could be shrugged off by this roof in the Macleay, then she, Sally, was fit also to be thrown out on a tangent over earth, and perhaps over oceans—whose scope might even reduce her crimes as a daughter to the size of an atom.

There was as well a problem she had with a farmer’s son named Ernie Macallister—about whose suitability for her and her suitability for him it seemed a number of people had already decided. She’d let herself be taken to Crescent Head to swim and once to the flickers at the Victoria. The college of women—her late mother too—had just about chosen to allot her in their minds to young Macallister like real estate. The tedium of all this frightened her.

The federal letter calling for nurses arrived at the Macleay District the same day as Naomi’s and was left in the nurses’ room by the matron in case any of her four charges felt the drag of history. Sally approached her matron and told her that she would like to apply. It would probably be for nothing. The matron was, however, English-born and ardent on the Empire and the war, and she gave Sally leave.

Sally intended to try to fit the business of potential enlistment in Sydney into two days and two nights. She sent a telegram asking to stay not at Naomi’s flat but at the more spacious Randwick house of her Aunt Jackie. She knew this would be considered by Naomi as a stringent step. That it would be correctly interpreted as resentment of the urban sister and an avoidance of the unease rising from the murderous succor they had extended to their mother. But something was rampant in Sally, something that said crazily that Naomi should not feel entitled to keep the whole of the war and leave Sally with the crumbs of a languishing peace.

In Sydney by morning and rushing by tram to Victoria Barracks, Sally entered a drill hall where other women stood half-bewildered, and filled out a form about her nursing career and her own medical condition. She queued for the interview at which she was to present two papers—her nurse’s registration and a health certificate from Dr. Maddox—to an elderly militia colonel, whose manner was paternal, and a senior matron who sat with him at a table, whose manner was dry. The pressure of unconfessed murder nudged up around the edges of the two printed forms, and she was pleased to pass them over.

Even so, Sally suspected she would not be chosen. She might make this slight and feeble move and then go back tamed for years more to the duty of daughterhood. She suspected she might in fact go back with as much secret relief as disappointment. She was willing to go back. That forenoon as she left the hall, she resigned herself to return on the following night’s coaster. The tin roof would not spin her far off and had already begun its pull inwards.