Sunday, sunset: the air softening and sweetening; the palm trees sighing with relief. Of course the bakery was closed. The delivery van was there, at the back, but the motorcycle was gone. I tried the door which, though locked, was quickly opened from the inside, revealing the owlish face of Frieda Hoggitt. She had both a frown and a dusting of icing sugar on her lips but she crooked a welcoming finger before popping that same digit into her mouth. She sucked it, inspected it and, as we filed past her, moved on to suck all the others before brushing them lightly against her frock.
“Mood food,” she said, closing the door behind us. “I eat when I’m agitated. Tempt anyone?”
Amalthea and I both shook our heads. “No thanks, Frieda. We’re just were hoping to catch Kevin . . . ?”
“How about ‘It’?” interrupted Frieda, tilting her head in Rosemary’s direction.
“Rosemary?” Amalthea shook her head firmly. “No, none for her either. Is Kev’ here?” Stolidly, Frieda climbed onto a stool at the work table and folded her arms.
“Nope. Just me.”
Amalthea and I looked at one another. Should we head off for her place or hang about and wait? That hesitation provided all the space Frieda needed.
“Don’t tell me. I’ll bet youse are here about this mess Bessie’s brought back, aren’t you?” She fixed her eyes on me. “I suppose Bessie’s how you come to know ‘the truth’, is she?” She made little quotation marks in the air.
I shook my head.
“No. I come to know the truth because I overheard Doctor Dabney tellng Isak Nucifora that everyone knows who murdered my grandmother! And me wanting to know who is no fault of Bessie’s.”
Frieda was a big woman, tall, broad shouldered, with an impressive girth and breasts the size of pomelos. Her face was square and hatched with the faint lines of someone who laughs often and heartily. But she wasn’t laughing then.
“Hmm. ‘Who’, is it? Not ‘why’? Or maybe you learned that too while you were ‘overhearing’ things?”
I could see she was establishing the boundaries of my knowledge – whether I knew a truth or the whole truth.
“Not fully, no. But I learned what horrible thing someone in this town did to Bridie, years ago!”
Her eyebrows arched doubtfully. “Roger Dabney talked about that?”
I blinked my best ‘go ask him yourself’ look, not yet ready to share all my sources – particularly if it involved dobbing in Isak. She stared into my silence for long moments before gesturing toward Amalthea.
“And so you’ve decided to share all your new knowledge with this one, have you? With her goats and her signs and her . . . I don’ know what all! What’s her part s’posed to be in all this?”
“I have no part in it, Frieda. I’m an outsider, remember?”
“You bet I do! The question is, do you! Because here you are! Stirrin’ this girl along, I don’t doubt! Not caring that no one gives a fiddler’s fart for your opinion! It’s how people judge themselves that counts. Don’t you think?”
“I think it’s easy to hide in lies, Frieda.”
Frieda stretched out a leg and tapped her foot thoughtfully on the floor before pushing herself to her feet and stomping purposefully to the big fridge. When she came back, she plopped a cream bun on the table and wagged a cream-tipped finger in the air.
“So! Young, attractive, single woman, camping out in a little backwater town. Why, we ask ourselves! What’s she expecting to find here? A good man?” She laughed sardonically. “Career opportunities? Escape? What? What’ve we got that she wants? What’s she here for?”
I had no idea how or why we’d bounced from what I knew to what Amalthea wanted, and I had half a mind to tell Frieda to mind her own business; or better yet, to go away and let us get on with ours! Even though I was dead curious to know what Amalthea would answer.
“She likes small towns,” she said.
“Oh yeah? Now that’s curious! Because you know what this small town has to say about her, don’t you? That she’s a screw loose? A screw loose and a loose screw! They say half the men in town have been in her pants and the other half are just waiting in line! What do you think about that, Thea?”
Amalthea didn’t so much as flinch. She leaned forward and bobbed her own un-creamed finger under Frieda’s nose.
“In the first place, Frieda, who she lets into her pants is her business! Even so – since you seem so interested – she can promise you, the only person in Sugar Town who’s been within a mile of her pants is her! But why let the truth get in the way of good old-fashioned xenophobia, eh? Like I said, it’s easy to hide in lies. If hiding is what people’re into!”
The two women sat facing one another for a long moment, nostrils flaring. Then Frieda snatched up the cream bun and ripped it in two. I thought for a second that she might push half of it into Amalthea’s face but, instead, she held it out between them, propped on the little upright pillars of her fingers.
“Too bad she’s an outsider, you know!” she said, her face slowly creasing into a poorly constructed smile. “I think she mighta made an almost acceptable local – with the right training and guidance.”
She swung the half cream bun closer to Amalthea. An offering.
“And I think you are part of this, Thea! Whatever you say! Just how remains to be seen!”
Something, I wasn’t sure what, appeared to have passed between them, even before Amalthea grudgingly accepted the pastry. Then, slouching wearily, Frieda began again the sucking and inspecting of her fingers.
“So . . . Bessie Crampton,” she said between slurps. “Voice from the grave, that woman, if ever there was one, eh? Poor Bridie! Be better off – we’d all be better off – if she’d kept her secrets to herself!”
She gestured defencelessness and left us a space to add our comments.
“I guess we’ll never know,” said Amalthea.
“No. I suppose not. Anyhow, Kev’s shot off over to the showground to let the old busy-body know what damage she’s done. My words, not his. Me; after I heard, I just had to get out o’ the house; find some solitude. And Kev’ was kind enough to let me come here. And where better, after all, eh? To inspect your . . . memories?” She blinked wetly and tongued a helping of cream off the bun.
I began to fidget. Kev’ could let Ned Kelly have the run of the place if he wanted to! His privilege! But listening to Frieda’s whiney self-indulgence wasn’t high on my list of priorities.
“So do we know when he’ll be back?” I asked.
Frieda looked at me levelly, sucked a last finger and gave me back my ‘go ask him yourself’ look. Then she picked up the remaining portion of pastry and pointed it toward Rosemary. On receiving an eye-rolling nod from Amalthea, Rosemary plucked it daintily from Frieda’s hand.
“She’s got nice manners, your goat.”
“For an ‘outsider’, you mean?”
“Hmph! What about the other one – the billy? Lots o’ people saw him get brained at the lolly drop. Common consensus was, that was a dead goat! Now rumour has it he’s walking around, big as life. That right?”
“Not walking much yet, but big as life, yes.”
“And it was a space thing, the meteor . . . or young Asael . . . or the two of them together . . . that did the deed? Brought that billy back?”
Amalthea sighed. “I don’t know what brought him back, Frieda.”
“No? Bit of a mystery then. Like Bessie. No telling what brought her back, either!” And finally, she seemed to tire of being evasive and unhelpful.
“So!” she said, turning to me. “Ruth! Here’s what I can tell you. We did all know who killed Grace – eventually. As you obviously do now too. And the attack on Bridie – we knew ‘bout that, eventually, too. Just nothin’ straight away. Jacob – he never actually talked directly about anything! Round ‘n’ round like a bloody dervish, but nothing clear, know what I mean? That was his way. If you didn’t get the proverbs, you like as not didn’t get the mess
age. Even when he sent Rita and Bridie away a couple months later – and you, o’ course – we still never made the connection. But when yez came back, months later and Rita carrying that baby boy, for all the world like he was hers – well! Let me tell you, no one believed that bit o’ razzle dazzle!”
“You all knew so much,” said Amalthea, echoing my own perplexity. “And yet no one actually did anything about it!”
Rosemary had finished the pastry and Frieda held out her fingers, this time allowing Rosemary to suck them clean. A long, slow breath eked out of Frieda.
“The small town way, Thea – the Sugar Town way – is to give people their space. Sometimes, ‘specially when you don’t know if what you know is true, you have to look away.”
“A little girl was raped!” Amalthea hissed. “How do you ‘look away’ from that?”
“I just said! That part we didn’t know!” The answer came quick and sharp, like a poke with a stick. “You see? We didn’t know! An attack, we knew, sure! But what does that mean? Her boyfriend touched her up? Her daddy spanked her? What? She had no cuts no bruises, no broken bones! We followed the Reverend’s lead, like we always did! That was his job – to lead! How were we supposed to know he was . . . bloody walking in circles?”
“How pathetic!” Amalthea sneered. “You chose to follow a blind man! Don’t you dare blame him for where you wound up!”
They glared at one another, chests rising and falling as though they’d run a race.
“He preached horrible angry sermons against the town!” I said. “Surely that must’ve told you something?”
She shrugged. “He was a dissatisfied man, was your father. Even before that time! Full o’ rages we didn’t always understand. Like I said, we gave him his space.”
“Okay. You gave him space!” I protested. “But why keep the silence going, even after it all became clear?” I drew a deep breath and edged as close as I dared to breaking my self-imposed pledge to protect Isak. “After people knew about Les attacking Grandma! And then about what happened to him? I mean . . . two people got murdered, Frieda! How could anyone be given that much space? Surely the Reverend didn’t lead in that?”
She leaned back and stared at me. If she’d asked how I could know about the second murder – Isak’s murder of Les – I was simply going to challenge her to deny it. But she didn’t ask or deny. Instead she pushed Rosemary gently away with her foot and stood up.
“Just seems to get worse and worse, doesn’t it?” she said quietly. “But you have to remember, even what happened to Les was – still is – only hearsay. Nobody actually knows anything, eh? Beyond the fact that Les was a bastard of a man! But still, it’s still the best fit! And if he did what it seemed like he did, and if what happened to him was what we thought happened to him, then it was best to let that be an end to it. Because if he’d been punished like we thought, that was good justice! Good for Bridie, good for Grace! Good for Sugar Town!”
“ ‘If he did what it seemed like he did’!” Amalthea sneered. “Are you hearing yourself?”
“Les did it! Both things! We believed it then and we believe it now! And we believed there was nothing to be gained by . . . hunting out whoever took on the filthy task of dealing with him!” Obviously I wasn’t the only one opting to protect Isak’s name. “We chose to protect that person – and Ruth’s family!” she snarled, leaning into the argument. “To protect them with silence! And I’ll tell you another thing! All that’s water under the bridge! The only question you should be asking now is, what’s to be done for Bridie and Asael! Because in case you missed it, they’re in a damn sight harder place, now, knowing what they apparently know, than they ever were before, living in innocence!”
She was growing angry now; won over by her own arguments. And she was right about Bridie and As’! For all her bitter defensiveness, she was right!
“You’re wrong!” Amalthea snapped. “When wrongs go unrighted, Frieda, the water just piles up! Just eddies under the bridge! You think coddling Bridie now is going to answer for Rita? For Ruth? For Isak?” Amalthea was unrelentingly, quietly incensed and Isak’s name was, at last, out there. “You should never have gone along. No matter who you thought you were protecting! And you shouldn’t go along now!”
Frieda turned a cold eye on her, with no argument to fill the silence.
“Isak,” I said softly, seeing no need to pretend further, “says it’s still not ended, Missus Hoggitt! Not even yet! He says there are guilty people still free in Sugar Town!”
“Guilty people?” Frieda’s voice was sharply edged, tinged with refusal. “Guilty of what?”
“Of the rape! Of killing my grandmother! Both things!”
Understanding slid across Frieda’s face. She pulled her fingers out from the damp moss of her armpits and, with an audible noise, cranked herself onto her feet. For a moment she stood, looking down, as though wondering what her legs would do. Then she shuffled to the sink and began washing her hands. Amalthea, maybe thinking that Frieda was dismissing us, was electric with indignation but, before she could continue, Frieda held up a wet hand, fingers splayed. Wait.
When she finished washing, she shook the water off and propped fists on her hips.
“Les did those things. No one else. You have to understand,” she sighed, “that Isak hasn’t had a coherent thought in more years than you’ve had breakfasts! I know for a fact Masher took up that ‘other people’ story with him, years ago. If there’d been any evidence at all, he’d’ve followed it through. But there wasn’t. So it was dropped. Les Crampton raped Bridie and, in some fit of insanity, killed your sainted grandmother, Ruth! End of story. I can only say to you again – our own was hurt and our own paid for it. There are lots worse places to leave things!”
“ ‘Your own was hurt’?” Amalthea blurted. “That’s what you call it when grown men tear into a thirteen year old girl and give her life back to her in shreds? Someone was ‘hurt’?”
Frieda turned to her, fists still on hips.
“Not men! Man! One man! Singular!”
The corners of her mouth twisted downwards and a couple of fat tears bowled unattended down her cheeks. I could have felt sympathy. But I didn’t. Instead, I felt like she was confirming herself as ‘one of them’. Sure, they’d supported Bridie and Asael and me all these years. But where were they when Les Crampton was beating on Bessie? Where were they when the Reverend was trying to tell them, even obtusely, that it had to stop? Where were they when a little girl got raped and her parents took her away to hide their shame? Where were they when one man’s beating to death of another was seen as ‘near enough’ to justice for the even more horrifying murder of a grandmother? Amalthea was right: the waters were still eddying.
“What do you want me to say? We were wrong? I’m ashamed of us? That we should start tearing the town apart again on the off-chance that someone escaped justice? Show me some skerrick of proof, that’s what I say! And I’ll walk to Burke and back to make it right! But for everything up to now . . . you’ve no right to judge! Neither one of you! No right at all!”
My heart was racing and my throat couldn’t seem to let enough air through to fill my lungs. Frieda slashed away her tears, as impatient with them as she was with us.
“I don’t know if you’ll believe this, Ruth, but right now I would truly turn this town on its head and shake the shit out of it if there was a single iota of a hint that we did wrong! But there isn’t! And what’s done is done! And it’s too late for tears!”
“An iota of a hint?” said Amalthea, reaching into her shoulder bag and pulling out 1999, “That’s all it would take?”
* * *
Ten minutes later, Kevin rumbled up to the back door and half an hour after that, we were all upstairs in his flat, poring over the 1999 sermons. In 1999, I was four years old, Asa’ was almost one and Bridie was a fifteen year-old mother who, like almost everyone else in town, had come to accept as truth the illusion that ours was a happy, relatively no
rmal family. That she was an ordinary teenaged girl!
In the sermons, though, we found hints and references which, to the knowing eye, showed the rottenness at the core of the illusion. An extract from Solomon seemed a clear reference to Rita’s unravelling: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.’
And after she died, the sense of despair returning. From Isaiah: ‘All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf.’
I pictured him slumped at the window of his study while Bridie sat at his desk, pen in hand, waiting for his thoughts. His wife and mother-in-law both forever lost to him as, quite possibly, was his congregation. Bessie Crampton, the beaten wife of another man – a murdered man, by all accounts – was in his kitchen. The baby of a violent rapist slept in another room. A scrawny four-year-old yammered about the house and this angelically trusting child – this beautiful, open young woman – this Bridie – sat smiling up at him, irreparably damaged but secure in his care. And somehow the jungles of Papua New Guinea began to beckon!
It was that step that most truly baffled me. I found myself leaning more and more toward believing that he must have been in cloud-cuckoo land toward the end.
“What sort of a man was he?” I asked the room at large.
“A man with demons,” said Kev’.
“Demons?”
“A demon himself, in some ways,” Frieda added. “A great preacher, no doubt! Full as a goog with fire and indignation. But in the end, men are just men. And we all know men, don’t we!” She looked at me. “Well, not you, obviously.”
I sniffed and went back to my reading. She could condescend ‘til the cows came home, but even I could see that there were at least two kinds of men in the world. Those who could do what was done to Bridie would be a certain, recognisable kind of man. Les Crampton / Sutton-ish kind of men, who were physical and violent and frightening. Not gentle men like, for example, Kevin, or maybe John Cranna.
Amalthea brought us all back from our scattered thoughts.
“Now here’s a weird co-incidence! Listen to this! The last sermon of the year: ‘And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions’!”