The Angel in the Old Spring Cart
Susan Sowerby
Ghost Story
I know this snippet of my diary is not an easy read. One turbulent emotion follows hard on the next, so I beg my reader’s forgiveness for a blatant crime against light entertainment. Some things must be said.
I’ve written this in retrospect, but it is as raw as the day I lived it and the reason I share it is only because of its power to uplift others like me.
This is serious women’s business, a sacred right between sisters. Many of us have experienced devastating events and some have endured unspeakable states of mind, but when we discover our power to transform adversity, we become Goddesses.
25 August 2007, the eve of a major change.
The sky is black and a moaning wind pummels my walls. He sleeps now and I feel an eerie presence overtake me. My face is wet with tears, and my hair, plastered against it. I gave him a very large draught, so he’ll sleep forever. I don’t care anymore.
I know there are ghosts in these old walls. I can hear them calling. From my crouched position on the floor, I’m staring in horror at the big oval mirror on the wall. I’ve seen a fleeting image cross its surface before, though all it reflects now is the ceiling and a bit of the encircling lintel. For me, it’s been a long slow slide down, trapped in nowhere.
My partner, Brett, is enthralled by this place; he has a great plan. He wants to restore this convict built hamlet, but he has to work far away in the mines for the money. I feel like a widow. He can’t understand how I feel - he has no idea what this place is doing to me. Wherever I turn, I’m surrounded by a hard arid landscape that offers nothing but a cruel sense of timelessness. It ignores me, and offers no identity. Phones don’t work here and that has driven away the girl who came as company. The vastness swallows me and this ancient stone house feels like my tomb. I’ve given up shouting, ‘Joanna! Joanna!’ - just to hear my own voice.
Now a desolate wind howls through the eaves and I feel settler women crying in my bones. Nothing has changed here since those days when they scratched out their crazy lives in isolation. It is as though time stands still. Tonight, I hear snatches of their voices bursting through the windy gusts, worn, craggy cries a hundred years old and I clench the razor as though it’s my saviour.
A settler woman’s bloodless presence moves in close. She’s like a spider.
Trapped now, I flutter helplessly, a frail, broken insect caught in her web. She leans out of the mirror and grins down at me, a semi toothless leer. Her hand beckons. Nothing feels real, I’m in a nightmare.
‘Leave me alone,’ I whimper, ‘I don’t know you.’
But I have no will and my fading mind is hooked and reeled into her reflection. I see the woman in an English setting way back in the roaring twenties. Through a cloud of disinterest, I watch a beautiful young “flapper” celebrating her “wings” by dancing the Charleston on the hood of an early model car. Why should I care that she was once the toast of her town? She whirls her beads and the fringes on her dress swing. Fawning suitors from the upper crust raise their glasses, but she keeps them at bay, relishing her freedom. Its fun to push for the vote, though the rich babe wants for nothing. ‘Tame porkers,’ she calls those men, ‘well fed but without substance - only good for the stock-market.’ Deep down, she’s deathly bored.
‘You won’t distract me,’ I tell her ‘I will do what I have to do.’ But she ignores my cry and keeps her pictures moving.
A handsome adventurer invades her father’s plush mansion like a refreshing storm. James Bellamy’s sense of adventure is an instant aphrodisiac for Lord Ellington’s daughter. The man has trekked through African jungles, been ship wrecked sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and has almost died of thirst in the Gobi dessert. He’s like no other she’s ever known. His deep voice resonates with the romantic echo of the unknown as he entices her with stories of far away places. When she lays her soft manicured hand on his shoulder, she feels strength beneath her fingers.
It matters little that he is almost penniless. In blind infatuation, Cassandra Ellington believes James Bellamy will bring meaning to her pampered life and she is determined to follow him to the ends of the earth. Australia is the next frontier he wishes to conquer.
With confident ease, James reaches out and plucks young Cassandra from her rooftop and her fledgling independence vanishes. The image before me changes to a cloud of flying confetti. Cassandra is radiant in her white silk, but her disappointed father stands wooden in the back ground. He will not offer assistance until his son-in-law has “made good” in the far south land. Though James is extremely proud of the fine flower on his cuff, I can see that her personal needs will do little to influence his plans.
I hiss at her. ‘Get out of my head, witch. I’m beyond your woes,’ but she forces me to witness the endless nothingness of her early days in Australia, trapped in a little shack with a dirt floor, far from her moist green home. I hate to watch as the withering sun robs her of her rose petal skin, her hopes and her dreams.
‘This is not my life,’ I hear her sob. ‘This must be someone else’s! Must I who an innocent endure punishment more cruel than a convict in a penal colony?’ But there’s no one to hear.
Her anger and disappointment echo sharply inside me. My distorted voice blarts out like a trumpet. ‘I’m living Brett’s dream, but I had no idea it would be fatal.’
Without mercy, she keeps on. Her James is away droving when their three year old daughter dies of fever on that hot, still summer night. I feel her desperation when her twelve year old son succumbs to snake bite in the old spring cart on their endless journey for help. How she hates the land for its obscene lack of empathy. How she hates James for what she sees as his coldness. How can he simply get on with what has to be done? She believes he’s become as harsh as the land he struggles to subdue and even blames him for the fact that she ever loved him.
James, baffled by his demon wife, finds every excuse to go further a field for work. She knows she’s driving him away, but her grief and rage are as unstoppable as a bolting horse. I see her stagger trance-like through the days, feeding the ducks, the chooks, the poddies and pigs. Though she’s empty, every farm creature depends on her for its food, its very life.
My own G.P. blithely assured me my state isn’t serious ‘It’s only a “touch” of Baby Blues, love. Just feed Billy, look after him and you’ll be alright.’ Others say, snap out of it. Oh God!
I see Cassandra’s eyes fill with longing as she looks down the rough red track, but no one ever comes. The wild neurotic woman terrifies them, and they stay away. James does not understand her desperation, her wanting to kill or maim or die. The lumberjacks and shearers are his friends. He has other company and just keeps saying, ‘She’ll be right.’
My dread is that Billy will wake and I will have to give him another dose. I can’t leave him all alone so I’m forced to wait and see, entangled with this Cassandra creature, witnessing her wretched life.
Like me, she stares out across the flat, unsmiling landscape. As her dry heart contracts, she flees from the emptiness of her shack, screaming helplessness at the sky and the earth, wrapping the venom of her tongue around every living thing until she falls unconscious in the dust. Like me, she’s hit the bottom.
Gradually her senses return. A native flower bobs close, reflecting its blue into her glassy eye. She struggles to restrain an impulse to pulverise it with her fist. Its petals dance and nod in the breeze. She stares puzzled at the fragile miracle springing from a dry crack in the earth, born of the marriage between soil and harsh Australian elements that split tough seed pods open to release new life. In her heart, something cracks, and at last, moisture seeps in.
It takes all of her courage to face the truth, to let go of the choking grief, the image of herself as an influential society woman and most of all, the fiery resentment of loss. A flame licks out of the small opening and ignites her world. She hears distant angel voices calling thr
ough the trumpet of the tiny perfect flower. The sky, the trees, and even the dry red earth are bursting with life. An invisible door has opened in the desert’s heart. She kneels on its threshold, humbled, amazed.
Wanting to enshrine the moment forever, she reaches out, and, with great reverence, plucks the blue enamel orchid. She prays that through it, she will be able to return. I feel new thoughts flooding her mind. Is this game of life about a more perfect situation or a more perfect self? Though she feels she’s the ugly old witch who grabbed at Rapunzle’s hair, she is determined to pull herself upwards on this strand of light, a life-line thrown to her from the top of what seems to be an endless black chasm.
As I watch her, a cold trembling starts up inside me. Where’s my thread? Lost, I panic, but fascination takes hold as I see this woman press the flower between the pages of the old leather bible that has lain untouched for thirteen years. Each morning, she gazes at the flower and the text, trying to recreate that moment when she heard the angels speak with living voices. Inch by inch, she begins to redefine herself as a woman in the Australian landscape until at last she can peep into the mirror and make sense of her own reflection.
I whisper, ‘Good for you, but I’m nothing, not even a reflection.’
Then a terrible shock comes to her with the news of Dan Winter’s young wife. It rocks the whole district and sets it buzzing like a hive.
‘Surely she’ll burn in hell?’…‘It’s bad enough drowning herself, let alone her own wee mite!’ Outrage, gossip and so much judgement fly from mouth to mouth, but Cassandra feels only an agonising tenderness for the pale young mother, so alone beneath vast Australian sky. She understands there are many settler women who share the same terrifying state of mind as Sarah Winter.
I say, ‘go away, you might care, but I’m past it.’ Still she won't give up.
In a blinding flash, I catch another glimpse of her blue flower. It’s as though she's tapping on a high window, calling for me to look up.
I witness her hitching old Gee-up to the battered spring cart and venturing out alone into the strange, ferocious land in search of women under siege. From Wilyabrup to Dunsborough, from Rosa Brook to Nannup, she learns to administer bush medicine, deliver babies and apply her own form of rudimentary psychology.
Riding so far alone in the old cart, often at night, I witness Cassandra's bravery as she faces up to her fears - her fear of herself, of the wide open spaces and of the dark enclosing bush. Blood-curdling cries of screech owls so like the sound of a mad woman screaming, echo her past. Luminous red eyes of unknown creatures peer at her from the dark. No, she cannot tame this rugged primordial land, so different from the gently rolling hills of England, but she can meet it with equal ferocity. In turn it blesses her with wildness, filling her heart with a savage joy, birthing new life and new passion in her.
Each September, Cassandra is entranced by exotic sparks of colour which eddy through the undergrowth and by the shrieking fire tailed cockatoos as they explode into the treetops. Rainbow Rosellas flash between the sombre grey gum trunks whose canopy will soon burst into bloom like unexpected laughter. Striped snakes and speckled spiders become active under the sun.
Once a whirling flood forced her to climb a tree and another time, she drove old Gee-up into a river to escape a bushfire. This land of extremes is a new love, a love that stretches her to the limit. Now that she is strong again, now that she has wrested back her independence, James pursues her as he once did. He wants to meet her everywhere and often tests the bush craft he’s learned to find her unexpectedly. There are magical nights when they lie together in the back of the old cart, when the stars in the southern sky seem within reach, and the spirits of their children feel close. Her nightmare is over, but I’m in the middle of mine.
She points to a picture of Brett on my dresser. I don’t want to look at him, but I’m stuck to her like fly paper.
She smiles, amused that James appears to have changed, but she’s shrewd enough to realise she’s the one who changed. She knows that in different and extraordinary ways, he’s fulfilled every promise she saw in his eyes when they met. Neither has the land changed, though both are loved now, as they never were before. She’s a conqueror, a dingo queen of the elements and I see her stand up in the old cart, yelling her triumph at the sky. Cassandra knows she’s no longer the spoilt darling of the soft society she despised, but a woman of substance, tried and tested, transformed in the fiery furnace of this new land.
I’m shaking now, coming apart. I feel as though Billy and I are spinning around in a paper boat together. I just can’t think. Everything is whirling. The only anchor is Cassandra’s strong hand reaching out.
Her front teeth are gone now she’s middle aged. She smokes an old clay pipe like the men and sings hymns at the top of her voice, often substituting her own amusing lyrics when she can’t remember the original score. The power of her spirit shines through like the lights of a rough opal, a mysterious new product of a land where the dark people hunt, where creatures hop and flowers wear fur.
Something is bleeding from her into me. Tears fill my eyes as I watch her sow settlements together as simply and practically as any woman would darn a sock. When Cassandra Bellamy speaks, the community jumps for even though she was too late for Sarah Winters and little Danny-Joe, they know that her constant dedication saves lives.
But what about me? My shaking is uncontrollable and the razor clatters to the floor. ‘Cassandra,’ I howl, ‘help me.’ She’s gazing down from the mirror with such compassion I feel ashamed. Now, more than anything in the world, I’m praying Billy will wake. If he doesn’t, I know what I have to do. Cassandra is assuring me that she will call the neighbours. I feel a soft breeze as her ghostly hand brushes my forehead. A strange quietness ripples through me, then, she’s gone. I collapse exhausted on the floor.