of yours – a boy and a little girl, wasn’t it? Have they been warming up the pews lately?’
This is why Betty left the city. To get away from the insinuators; to give the children some air around them, to put some distance between the woman she is now and the ardent girl of her past. They don’t need the church, she’s sure of that – they have each other. Little Hazel has Foot Foot now, and Michael has Harry and the farm. Betty is aware of the talk behind her back when she comes to town – her children referred to as ‘Betty’s bastards’. If anyone ever said it to her face she’d crucify them – through the wrist or through the hand.
Betty’s old men die in batches. Dennis Popp goes first, then Bill Sickle. The children know there is a funeral because she takes her good shoes to work in a brown paper bag. Flowers come home, and fruit or cakes that have gone uneaten. Relatives give her gifts – cheap talcum powder and soap – or they give her dead men’s things they can’t be bothered taking home. Michael and Little Hazel are wary of combs with broken teeth, of faded bed rugs and pencil stubs that look well licked or as if they’ve spent time behind an aged ear. Michael and Little Hazel don’t hesitate to tell Betty that she smells bad sometimes after work.
After Bill Sickle’s funeral Betty cleans out the trunk beneath his bed. There’s half a bag of chaff in there and the crankshaft for a ’48 Holden; the harmonic balancer at the end is wrapped in a Masonic towel. There is also his dead wife’s wedding dress with a note on it, in Bill’s shaky handwriting, ‘For Betty’. Betty takes it home and puts it in her wardrobe with her good winter suit and her day dresses and uniforms because she doesn’t want to throw it out and she doesn’t know what else to do with it. It’s not as if she was a stranger to him. She was his lunchtime-wife for a good four years.
The winking owl is on the washing line again as Betty rinses her cup before bed. It looks over its shoulder to Foot Foot’s paddock behind and Betty is surprised to see it move so graciously, all the time its eyes tracking like searchlights. Tonight it lifts one claw and transfers something small to its beak. A baby mouse, perhaps, or a beetle.
Shopping after work, Betty falls in the rain. Her heels slide out from under her on the wet timbers of the verandah in front of Oestler’s Fruit and Veg. She goes down heavy, face first; puts her tooth through her lip, bleeds a lot of orange sticky blood over her uniform. Clive Oestler sees her fall and rushes out from behind the counter. As he bends over, a big dirty potato rolls out of his apron pocket and hits Betty on the head. He can’t stop apologising and Betty has to reassure him over and over again that she hardly felt the potato (it’s true, hitting the ground was much more painful). He hurries back inside the shop and carries out a stool and insists that Betty sit on it, in the middle of the verandah, while she gets herself together. Betty perches on the edge of the stool, the back of one hand pressed to her lower lip to staunch the bleeding and the other hand clasped around the potato that Clive seems to have forgotten about in all the commotion. She sits. A few people walk past and look at her sideways. She tries to smooth out her breathing. She chooses a tree over on the bank of the Gunbower to look at so she won’t have to meet anyone’s eye.
After a little while she stands and picks a wet leaf off her leg where it has stuck to her stockings. She goes inside to thank Clive, buys some tomatoes that she doesn’t need and walks back to the car without the rest of the shopping. The windscreen wipers aren’t working properly and as she drives home the sound of them scraping across the glass sets her teeth on edge. She has a strong urge to pull over to the side of the road and rest her head on the steering wheel, but it won’t do. She puts her foot down. The tyres slap through the deep puddles on the side of the