The Black Dress Read Free Page A

body. Grandfather’s lips were blue, his eyes half-open, and the water trickled from his slack mouth. I remember Papa’s face as he laid him down on the kitchen table.
    I was five. I had loved my grandfather and he had loved me but I didn’t cry. I saw Papa’s face, Mamma’s too, and thought I have to look after them. If I cry, it will be worse for them. I must be strong.
    So I was strong. All through the next two days, through the funeral (we children weren’t allowed at the graveside) and the wake. I looked after John and Maggie and played with our new baby, Alick. I stopped them bothering Mamma. At the time, I was proud of myself for not ‘giving in’ and crying. Now I know I was just fighting my grief, as even children can do.
    I couldn’t fight forever. The night after the funeral, I was lying in bed with Maggie and suddenly I realised that I would never see Grandfather again. Never. Never. That first sob racked my whole body. It does, the first sob of grief. It rises from the pit of the stomach, tearing the throat open, twisting the mouth awry—soundlessly at first, as you fight for air, then bursting out, burning, bringing the tears with it.
    My mother heard my sobs and came in to comfort me. I clung to her and we cried together, then we prayed.
    ‘You will see Grandfather in heaven, Mary,’ she said. ‘And he is looking over you, taking care of you, right now. Always.’
    I could tell that she believed it utterly. It was a huge relief. Anything my mother believed so completely must be true. Her soft hands stroked the dampness away from my cheeks.
    ‘Grief is natural, my lamb, and nothing to be ashamed of. But for someone like Grandfather, we can be glad too, because we know he is in heaven.’
    She rocked me in her arms until I fell asleep.
    Mamma needed the comfort of belief a great deal that year, because only a few months later my little brother Alick died. He was 11 months old.
    Years afterwards, when Father Geoghegan would sing ‘Molly Malone’ round the fire on a Saturday night, I would leave the room. I wouldn’t bear to hear the words, ‘she died of a fever and no-one could save her’. That was Alick. Even now, I can’t bear to think of it.
    But what do those memories tell me? Why would the Holy Spirit bring them to my mind? They are memories of the ebb and flow of life. Perhaps they should remind me that our later vicissitudes were also part of that flow, a natural thing as a fever is natural, inevitable as the will of God.

SEPTEMBER, 1847—DAREBIN CREEK DISTRICT
    In September, 1847, when I was five-and-a-half, we lived at Darebin Creek, outside Melbourne. Aunty Margaret’s husband, Sandy Cameron, had finally finished the house on Penola Station in South Australia. He had taken up a selection there in 1844 and for three years had cleared land and built a house for Aunty Margaret, while she stayed with Granny Ellen and Grandfather John, my father’s parents.
    When the house and the farm were established enough to support Aunty Margaret and my three cousins, they packed up all their things and moved to South Australia. It was a big wrench for my grandparents, and for Mamma, too. She and Aunty Margaret had been friends ever since the MacKillops had arrived in the colony, about a year after my father emigrated. By that time he and my mother were already married. Like everything else with my father, that courtship was a swift and passionate event. They were married within a month of meeting!
    Aunty Margaret had been as much a part of my life as my grandparents and we had all looked forward to Uncle Sandy’s visits from South Australia. He would arrive like a fresh wind, laughing and calling out for us children before he was even out of the saddle. He always brought something for us—honeycomb from native bees, an Aboriginal stone axe, or strange shells from the desert. He smelt of tobacco and leather and another scent, which I thought of as ‘hugeness’, because everything about him