Patrick White: The Aunt's Story

From the rise above the swamp Father would aim at a rabbit scut. Theodora aimed too. She was everything in imitation, and because of this the importance of what she did was intense. The rifle kicked her shoulder lovingly. She loved, too, the smell of shooting, its serious pungency, which the wind puffed back into her nose, and which afterwards remained, sharp and flinty, on her hands. She took her hands to tea unwashed, with a sense that this was something the others could not share.

‘Perhaps after all pretty futile,’ Father once said, breaking open his gun over the carcass of a rabbit.

The voice did not immediately convey. She had bent to touch the body of the still-warm rabbit. The killing did not move her after a time, as it did at first, the blood beating in her own heart. In time, behind the rifle, she became as clear and white as air, exalted for an act of fate and beauty that would soon take place, of which her finger had very little control, it was an instrument.

Then Father’s voice bore in. ‘A pretty kind of idiocy,’ it said. ‘A man goes walking with a gun, and presents his vanity with the dead body of a rabbit.’

After the moment of exaltation, and the warm shining fur, she was puzzled, and it hurt. Father was moody, Gertie said, he had had more education than was good. So perhaps that explained.

‘It must have died quickly,’ she said.

Barely offering the words.

‘Yes,’ laughed Father. ‘But death lasts for a long time.’

And then, by the sound of his voice, she knew that they should be going.

After this, Theodora sometimes walked in the paddocks alone. Once the hawk flew down, straight and sure, out of the skeleton forest. He was a little hawk, with a reddish-golden eye, that looked at her as he stood on the sheep’s carcass, and coldly tore through the dead wool. The little hawk tore and paused, tore and paused. Soon he would tear through the wool and the maggots and reach the offal in the belly of the sheep. Theodora looked at the hawk. She could not judge his act, because her eye had contracted, it was reddish-gold, and her curved face cut the wind. Death, said Father, lasts for a long time. Like the bones of the sheep that would lie, and dry, and whiten and clatter under horses. But the act of the hawk, which she watched, hawk-like, was a moment of shrill beauty that rose above the endlessness of bones. The red eye spoke of worlds that were brief and fierce.

Theodora Goodman’s face often burned with what could not be expressed. She felt the sweat on the palms of her hands.

‘You’ve got a fever,’ said Gertie Stepper, her own dry, wondering hand on a forehead.

‘No,’ said Theodora. ‘Leave me.’

The face of Gertie Stepper was perpetually wondering, behind the tin-rimmed spectacles, under the distracted hair. She groaned beneath the weight of practical things. On her upturned hands she held the roof of Meroã. She waited for something unfortunate to happen. As it had, it did, and would. As it had happened to the late Mr Ernie Stepper, coal miner, of Newcastle, in an accident in a mine. Under marble they put Ernie Stepper, and the marble said: The bowels of the earth revolted and claimed him for their own . This saying was made up by a Mr Barney Halloran, bookmaker’s clerk, poet, and friend.

‘Yes, it’s terrible what happens,’ Gertie Stepper used to say.

It happened, or something, to Pearl Brawne.

Pearl Brawne helped Gertie Stepper in the house. She was that Mrs Brawne’s eldest girl. That Mrs Brawne did washing, and got drunk, and Mr Brawne had gone. Pearl was about sixteen, and big. Theodora and Fanny used to look and look at Pearl, at the overflowing mystery of a big girl.

‘You will find life slow at Meroã,’ said Mrs Goodman. ‘But it is up to you, Pearl, to see what you can make of it.’

‘Yes, Mrs Goodman,’ said Pearl.

She looked down.

In spite of her age, Pearl Brawne looked down a lot, because she was still shy, and you looked up through Pearl, and it was like looking through a golden forest in which the sun shone. Pearl was beautiful. Pearl was big and gold. Her hair was thick heavy stuff, as coarse as a mare’s plaited tail. It hung and swung, golden and heavy, when she let it down.

‘Oh, Pearl,’ they sometimes said, ‘let us swing on your long fair hair.’

‘Go on!’ giggled Pearl. ‘Yous!’

She laughed and reddened. In Pearl the blood ran close to the surface and often flooded under the skin. But when she was undisturbed, Pearl was white, and especially her neck, in the opening of her blouse. Pearl swelled inside her blouse, and was white and big. She rose and overflowed. There was no containing Pearl in common bounds. She was meant to swell, and ripen, and burst. And it distracted Gertie Stepper’s forehead, who always looked for the end before it came.

About this time Tom Wilcocks was working on the place. Tom Wilcocks milked the cows. He fed the pigs and fowls. On Saturday he drove the spring cart into town. Tom Wilcocks smelt of milk. He was a boy from another district. From another state, they said. He had come looking for work, and the clothes that he wore were a size too big. But Tom Wilcocks knew how to carve things out of wood. He could carve a rose and a crown on the lid of a box, and Jesus Christ in mahogany.

‘It is beautiful,’ Fanny said. ‘I shall keep it, may I? Among my things? Look, Pearl, what Tom has done.’

Because Pearl was always near. Now she scrabbled in water the potatoes that she scraped for dinner. Her red hands plunged, and glistened, and plunged.

‘Pffh! I’m busy,’ said Pearl. ‘Mrs Stepper ‘n’ me, we got the dinner. All these showin’ off things! I haven’t time.’

She shook her heavy head of hair.

‘It’s time as Tom took hisself off. Always standin’ round the kitchen door.’

Her voice scraped like the potato knife, which was blunt and black. It was unlike Pearl. She held her head on one side, and scraped. Or she bit her mouth, and screwed out an eye, out of the potato’s face.

‘What sort of things you got time for, Pearl?’ asked Tom.

He lounged and laughed, in the old green coat that hung. Tom Wilcocks was rough as bags. His neck was red and strong. The pollard had caked hard on his hard hands.

‘Eh, Pearl?’ laughed Tom.

‘You run off, Mr Cocky,’ tossed Pearl.

It had begun to be a game that you watched, the game between Pearl and Tom, and it was fun, to watch for who might drop the ball, the red, glistening hand of Pearl, or Tom Wilcocks, whose dark face was laughing up.

‘’S none of your business,’ Pearl said.

‘Won’t you tell us, eh, Pearl?’

She was thick and gold above the angry knife.

‘What killed the cat?’ she asked.

‘Bet it was Pearl Brawne.’

‘Tom is funny !’ screamed Fanny.

And he was. You laughed, you laughed. But not Pearl.

‘You run along, Mr Clever,’ she said. ‘’S none of your business. Anyways.’

‘What ain’t?’

‘Nothink,’ said Pearl.

And then it was strange. Pearl’s face swelled. It was red and bursting. It was going to cry. This made it different, now that it was a matter of sides. There was no second thought on the kitchen steps, you were on the side of the Pearl.

Tom Wilcocks pulled an ugly, winking face.

Ah well, he said, he would go and clean the harness now.

His feet slopped loose inside his big boots.

‘Why did you cry, Pearl?’ asked Fanny.

Pearl slapped the water in the tin basin.

‘Stop tormentin’ me,’ she said. ‘’S none of your business. That’s why.’

Such things were important and mysterious. They happened, and you had to accept. The face of Pearl that just could not be read. Her thick face swelled and cried. She chewed the corner of her handkerchief, on damp afternoons, when windows sweated, and the dogs crouched in the yard, their thin tails tucked between their naked legs.