Down in the valley

Perlie was afraid of the dark. So she liked to sleep close enough that Stel’s ears caught her breath all night long. It was like sleeping next to a waterfall. After the old mother died, they reached a compromise. Stel moved herself into the master bedroom and Perlie slept on a cot at the foot of the bed. But Stel was fed up of being nanny to her older sister. Now that the mother was gone, she often wished Perlie would disappear too. Then she could have her own life. Stel didn’t feel that way the night the man arrived but.
Perlie could be a bit slow, so Stel explained things slowly.
‘The man will live out here with us,’ Stel said. ‘On the property.’
‘The man will live on the property,’ Perlie repeated, baring her stove-in mouth. ‘In the shed.’
She had the habit of repeating her little sister’s words exactly, just like she’d thought of them herself. In all the time since the accident, Perlie had refused to wear her dentures. Now after many toothless years she had an apple face, like a bit of old fruit going off in the fridge. Stel on the other hand was a handsome woman with a slab neck and strong tubular hands. The sisters weren’t old, but after all that time alone together in the valley they seemed it.
Stel had found the man while she was out walking. He was curled into an old hatch-back parked near a barbed-wire fence. Seeing his bare arms and legs bent into their foetal huddle was disturbing. Stel had seen birth and she’d seen death and often it looked the same: the limbs folded neatly, the head curved inward. She watched for a full minute to see if the body was still breathing, and then became absorbed by the untroubled rhythm of the torso as it inhaled, exhaled, inhaled. Then she knocked on the windowand he opened his dark eyes and stared straight into her. It was like lightning bolt. She’d never felt anything like it.
Now he was waiting outside in the garden.
‘We need a roustabout,’ she said to Perlie. ‘Someone to help with the heavy lifting.’
Perlie wasn’t up to much, apart from scrubbing things down. Cleaning was what she liked best. She couldn’t cook.
‘Help us lift,’ Perlie echoed.
What Stel didn’t say even to herself was that the roustabout might be an escape from her chaste sisterly life. Stel and Perlie were good Christian women with due respect for sanctified fornication. But that didn’t mean the unsanctified variety didn’t cross Stel’s mind.
‘We need a man,’ Perlie agreed, as though she could hear Stel’s thoughts.
So Stel gave the man some blankets for the iron bed on the verandah and showed him a room he could make his own in the back of the shed once he’d had a meal and a good sleep. The house was a timber ‘Queenslander’ with a gabled front bedroom and verandahs on two sides. It was set low on the ground, with windows and doors that no longer met. On that first night, as the man’s snores rumbled from the side verandah, Stel couldn’t sleep. She was glad then of Perlie’s little snorts and whimpers. Who was this fellow she’d let into their lives, with his skinny jeans and ‘bum freezer’?
In the morning when they woke and Stel found they had not been murdered in their beds, the man asked to use the bathroom so he could shave.
‘Bruce,’ he said extending his hand again to remind them. ‘The name is Bruce.’
And Perlie took his hand and held it quietly in her own.
‘Brucie,’ she said with her slight lisp. Her industrial strength gums gleamed. ‘Brucie.’
Perlie’s gums were up to chewing on a burnt steak, they were that good.
‘That’s enough Perlie,’ Stel said. ‘Bruce will be busy today helping me.’
‘Helping,’ Perlie agreed.
Perlie hardly remember the accident that had robbed her of her teeth but that was because she never remembered anything much. Stel did. Her mother’s anger had been one of those moments which stayed with her.
‘Couldn’t you just watch whatcha doing Stel? Just once?’
‘I was only five,’ she wanted to shriek. But her mother had a temper. And why couldn’t Perlie have stayed out of her way when she was on the swing? So at the same moment Stel knocked into Perlie she also knocked out any chance of a future away from her sister. And when Perlie, the first born, inherited the farm Stel was bitter. Perlie couldn’t do a thing by herself. Stel was going to have to do everything, as per usual.
Bruce had just the one day to ready his quarters and he set about scrubbing the walls, then dragging his iron bed and an old chest of drawers into the little room. The shed contained a few wheeled things: a battered Massey-Ferguson, an old blue Hilux with one white wheel arch and an ancient iron-wheeled sulky with leather fittings slowly retiring from lack of oil. Bruce looked out into the paddocks where fences were down and trees toppled, and then off to the distant Border ranges on one side and the Dividing ranges on the other. He breathed in the freedom that came with the lonely spot. He hadn’t had a whiff off that in the two by three metre cell he’d occupied only a month before.
On Sunday when the time came for Church, the sisters put on their hats and called on Bruce. Did he follow the God-breathed word? Yes, but for want of good trousers he said, he could not be with them that week. So Stel brought him the double-breasted striped suit their father had used to wear. She couldn’t remember her father but she did remember his suit. Now Bruce put it on. Perlie clapped her hands when she saw him.
‘Better than Mel,’ she said. She was keen on Mad Max.
Bruce put a hand to his hair and leaned down to the hall mirror to push a cow-lick into place. In this getup a man looked a bit of alright, they all considered.
He strode to the ute and called for the keys.
‘Come on girls,’ he called, testing a more commanding tone.
‘Sorry Bruce,’ Stel said running daintily at the Hilux.
Perlie headed straight for the middle of the bench seat so she could sit beside the man.
‘That’s enough Perlie,’ Stel said as Perlie’s fingers trailed onto Bruce’s leg. ‘You have the window seat.’
‘Your hair is nice Brucie,’ Perlie said, leaning across her sister to admire him.
He’d brushed his hair with a middle part, just like the picture the sisters kept of their father on the piano.
At church there was some dispute. Was Bruce the famous murderer only just out on parole after killing his sister in a jealous rage? Or was he the Westpac Bandit, caught after a shoot-out in Alice Springs and the manslaughter of a service station attendant?
‘And how are you liking our little town?’ the Pastor inquired at the door, his voice almost drowned by the distancing coughs behind him. Unlike the Pastor, many parishioners found redemption quite uncomfortable in practice.
‘You’re amongst God’s people now, my friend,’ the Pastor said, putting one hand one just above Bruce’s elbow.
After that Bruce and the two sisters drove home to a Sunday roast. Stel had slaughtered the chook as Bruce hadn’t the stomach for that kind of killing.
‘A man can’t be perfect,’ she explained to Perlie.
‘Perfect,’ Perlie agreed.

The digestion of the entire chook and a great many roast potatoes and quite a lot of McWilliams sweet sherry led to a general view that all of them could do with a bit of a lie-down. Bruce fell face first onto the rough blankets of his mattress, almost asleep before his body thumped onto the mattress. He didn’t hear Stel’s voice whispering to Perlie through a crack in the wall.
‘Sssh, go home now Perlie. You’ll disturb Bruce. You go and have your rest.’
And he pretended not to notice as she climbed into the little bed beside him. Stel was no sylph. But she was strong and sure. She put her arm around and massaged him into life and it wasn’t long before Bruce was grunting over her as her body thumped the wall.
The old mother had complained of husbandly attentions in the master bedroom but Stel found otherwise. In fact, as soon as it was over she’d have had another go but by then Bruce was snoring. And when he awoke and the same thought came to him, it was Perlie who was there to oblige while Stel’s voice could be heard singing ‘God of mercy and compassion’ as she scraped the frying pan.
‘Bubble and squeak,’ she called from the kitchen, while Perlie crept round the side and Bruce slapped water onto his face from the outside tank.
‘Coming.’
He strode into the little kitchen and sat at the head of the table.
‘Black tea. No sugar,’ he commanded. And Stel brought it to him.
Unlike Stel, Perlie was not big. So week by week as her baby grew, the changes in her body became visible.
‘Perlie seems to be putting on condition,’ the Pastor’s wife said to Stel across the tea urn.
The comment hung in the air. Stel looked at her sister in profile and there was the telltale swelling under her ribs. She was furious. Was there nothing she could have as her own?
‘That jailbird has took advantage of the poor simple thing,’ the women said to one another.
Stel followed all their gazes to where Bruce stood in front of the ute with the bonnet up. A couple of men leaned into the engine.
‘Men!’ the women crowed, ‘only interested in the one thing.’
‘Where will the baby go?’ the Pastor’s wife asked.
She was childless and in need of a baby.
‘They’ll have to marry,’ Stel said grimly. She’d been hoping for that herself.
But this did not stop her from sharing Bruce’s bed. He might be a bit limited in other departments she thought, but not in this one. One afternoon he said there was something he wanted to try, something he’d never done but that she was the right person.
‘What?’
He picked up the tie he had discarded from church that morning.
‘Tie me throat,’ he said, ‘like this.’
He tied it into a hang-man’s noose. Then he put it over his head and pulled it upwards against his chin.
‘What’s that do?’
He explained. ‘Pull it real tight when I’m fully up like. That cuts off me air supply.’
She put her hand to her mouth.
‘I’m scared I’ll kill ya.’
‘Nah love,’ he said. ‘You got to loose it. You know. Just before.’
She was dubious.
‘Mate. You wanna try it. It’s like heaven.’
She was dubious.
‘How do you know if you never done it?’
‘On me own,’ he said. ‘Tried it on me own.’
They were lying in bed together and she could feel his excitement.
‘When do you wanna do it then?’
He looked shy.
‘Now?’
Stel remembered the morning when she found him curled into his car hatch, wondering then if he was alive or one of them lonely suicides in cars she’d read about in the Gatton Chronicle.
‘Righteo,’ she agreed.
She observed as his face bulged above her own and his breathing grew more and more strained. And she did as he asked. She held onto the necktie and watched as he went into his death ecstasy. Then at just the right moment she released the knot.
‘You are my dream girl Stel,’ he said, still groaning.
‘Am I Bruce?’ she whispered. ‘Am I?’
‘The best,’ he said. ‘I wanna do it again some time.’
‘You will,’ she assured him.
She supposed Perlie was watching. Perlie watched everything.
‘You’re not to do that thing with Brucie,’ Stel instructed her sister later. ‘Not while your baby is due.’
The wedding went ahead with Stel acting as best man and matron of honour.
‘Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?’ the Pastor inquired.
‘Lawful wedded Brucie,’ Perlie responded, to much laughter in the church.
Then there was the bridal march, and Perlie changing into her other clothes that Stel had sewn for her. But it wasn’t that Bruce and Perlie were going anywhere in particular. All that happened was that Stel moved out of the master bedroom and Bruce moved in. There were other rooms in the house, but Stel decided to go out to Bruce’s old quarters. She had come to a few conclusions of her own and didn’t plan being there too long, especially after over-hearing Bruce’s arrangements for her while they were all at church.
‘Now we’re man and wife, I’ll be doing the running,’ he boasted.
‘What about Stel?’ someone asked.
‘She can look after the baby like,’ he said. ‘Or if she don’t like that she can find some other place of employment.’
At home he shouted at Perlie.
‘Move your fat arse,’ he commanded, giving her a kick for good measure as she struggled to fetch and carry for him.
‘Prune face,’ he muttered under his breath when Perlie put her arms around him for a hug. ‘Makes me sick looken at ya.’
‘Looken at ya,’ Perlie said. But her little old face looked pained. He’d hurt her.
Sometimes at night Bruce made his way to Stel’s quarters.
‘Come on Stel,’ he whined through the timber slats, ‘for old time’s sake.’
But Stel kept quiet in her bed until he staggered away. And Perlie grew quiet too without Stel to follow everywhere and copy.
‘Cat got your tongue again?’ Bruce would yell at her silent presence as she cleaned and tidied.
‘Tongue again,’ Perlie would mimic, not understanding how this habit enraged her husband.
‘For Christ’s sake shut your yap.’
‘Your yap,’ Perlie agreed.
Just before the baby was due, Bruce shot through one night and without explanation. He left Perlie sporting a black eye and a bruised belly. She hung back when Stel saw her, not wanting to explain what had happened. But Stel had heard it all. Bruce had kicked his pregnant wife. That’s what had happened. He’d kicked her and then he’d gone outside and peed in an angry stream on the dirt.
‘Cow,’ he yelled at the unflinching sky. ‘Think you’re worth fucking. I can do better than you any day.’
There was no sound from either the house or the shed.
‘I got news for the two a youse,’ he yelled. ‘No more Brucie runnin around after youse. Not now, not ever. And that’s a promise.’
He roared the ute into action and took off in a vapour of burnt tyres, dust and rubber smoke. Stel listened as the ute whined into the distance, then she crossed to the house to find Perlie.
‘Brucie,’ Perlie sobbed. ‘He hurt me.’
But she was clutching her back.
‘I think it’s the baby,’ Stel said. She was gentle as she could be. She wanted Perlie to calm down. ‘Brucie didn’t mean ta hurt ya.’
‘Hurt my feelings Stel,’ Perlie sobbed.
‘I know love,’ Stel said. ‘But he’s gorn away now.’
‘Want Brucie,’ Perlie sobbed all the way through the birth. ‘Where’s my Brucie.’
So Bruce missed the birth of his son, and the warm sunlit mornings which followed, when Perlie lay recovering in the master bedroom and the baby curled up in his bassinet and sucked his fist. And Stel took care of the little boy washing his tiny clothes and keeping the bedroom clean. Once Stel had wished her sister would disappear. And then she had wanted Bruce to be hers. But these things hadn’t happened. Instead Stel had delivered her sister of Bruce’s baby son and it was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
‘Looks just like his Dad,’ Stel said as they took him in to church for the baptism.
Without the ute they’d gone back to using the old sulky. Bruce had done a good job of fixing it, oiling the wheels and replacing the thoroughbraces. He’d even re-upholstered the leather seats. So at least he’d done two good things in his time with them. As the two women and the baby went in and out of town Stel basked in the quietness, listening to the wind blowing through the grass and the rhythmic clops of the horse. The baby smiled and the sun shone and they were all happy as anything whatever time they arrived.
When the baby started to crawl and was calling out half words, and could even get to his shaky feet, Bruce came back. But he didn’t come back in the old ute. He came back in a brand new Pajero with a white racing stripe on its blue body.
‘Whad ya think girls?’ he called as he pulled alongside the house and leaned down through the car window to the two sisters sitting on the side verandah. ‘She’s a beauty ain’t she?’
Stel picked up the baby in his blue dungarees and dangling bare feet and walked towards the car.
‘Where’d ya get the car Bruce?’ she asked. But she already knew. The bank statements had come in and there was the amount drawn from the farm’s line of credit. Bruce stared at the baby boy.
‘My son?’ His voice was lowered reverentially.
‘Yeah,’ Stel said. ‘We named him Donald, after our father.’
The expression on Bruce’s face changed. Here was the Bruce who kicked and insulted his wife.
‘He better not,’ he said angrily. ‘He’s Bruce. Like this old man.’
When he took the baby, the little boy screamed and bit with his tiny front teeth.
‘Fuck!’ Bruce yelled, massaging his hand where the teeth had sunk in. ‘Little bastard.’
Stel moved back out to her quarters in the shed and Bruce rejoined his family in the master bedroom. When the baby cried at night and disturbed his father, Stel offered to take him in with her so that Bruce could have a proper sleep. When Bruce decreed that Perlie’s tits were for him the baby was weaned. Most things returned to the way they had been except that Stel was now mother to the little boy. And she was happy with that.
And Perlie was happy too, now that Brucie was back.
‘Brucie says … ,’ was the phrase that preceded all of her conversation.
On Sundays, Bruce ferried his wife and son and his sister-in-law to church in the new Pajero. But he no longer attended himself, disappearing somewhere else and then returning the women in time for his lunch. Instead of the baby being paramount it was keeping Bruce happy that exercised the little family most. Then Bruce started taking the baby away. They’d been seen in Toowoomba. They’d been seen in Brisbane. Stel was worried sick.
One Sunday the two of them, father and child, went off and didn’t come back for days. Stel was beside herself. Bruce drank. His ‘anger management issues’ weren’t over, or so the parole officer put it.
After three days she phoned the police. The baby had gone missing. She feared for his safety. But the child was with its father? Stel had to agree that this was so. ‘What would she like the police to do about it?’ a voice asked on the end of the line.
‘He needs his mother,’ Stel wailed, meaning herself.
Early the next morning, and before dawn, the cops drove in with Bruce’s Pajero.
‘We brought the car back for you love,’ they said to Stel. People in the district knew about Bruce’s spending sprees. They tut-tutted over his exploitation of the two women.
Bruce was in the back of the police wagon away from the screaming baby who lay in a box at the front. He was hungry and dirty and he cried like a child abandoned.
‘Drink driving,’ they said to Stel, handing the baby to her. ‘But we never charged him. Hadn’t turned on the ignition.’
Then the younger one turned to Bruce with a warning.
‘You better watch yourself mate,’ he said. ‘You’re still on parole.’
Bruce stumbled into the house without saying a word in front of them. But Stel knew from the look on his face that he was just waiting for the cops to go.
‘You’ll get yours sister,’ he hissed at Stel as the police car backed up the driveway. He went straight into the bedroom to flake across the covers.
‘You know that thing Brucie likes?’ Stel said to her sister after she knew he’d gone to sleep.
Perlie looked at her sister, tilting her head like an interested bird.
‘With the tie?’ Stel explained. She picked up Bruce’s tie and looped it into a hangman’s noose. ‘Remember this?’
She put the noose over her own head and tugged it into place.
‘Yes,’ Perlie lisped. ‘That thing Brucie likes.’
‘That’s it,’ Stel said. ‘Well when he wakes up that would put him in a good mood.’
The next morning Stel mashed banana and oats and put the baby into his high-chair. Perlie came in for breakfast.
‘Where’s Brucie?’ Stel asked, dishing up the food and watching as the baby dripped porridge from his bowl onto the tray of his chair.
‘Sleeping,’ Perlie said.
She sat down and began to eat. Stel had cooked a special breakfast: fresh ham, fried eggs and toast fried in ham fat. They ate steadily. Perlie asked for more toast. Stel opened a new tin of marmalade. Then Stel got up and picked up the baby to put inside his playpen. She sat in the old rocking chair on the verandah. A slight morning breeze blew across the onion fields, carrying their slight scent of lilly.
‘You clean up,’ she said to Perlie. Perlie was good at washing dishes. And she was good at polishing the furniture. Perlie did everything exactly as she was taught. She was good that way.
Stel stayed out of the bedroom until mid morning. Then she looked around the bedroom door to check. Bruce was there, with his head bowed forward over the tie which was still at his neck. His limbs were folded inwards.
‘Something’s happened to Brucie,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ Perlie said. ‘Something happened.’
And she went on wiping the surface of the laminex table until it shone, just the way she had been taught.