Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller (best large ereader txt) 📕

Julius is in the corner by the left staircase, a cigarette between his fingers, talking to a woman with her back to Jeanie, and it takes her a moment to recognize Shelley Swift with a new haircut, showing her thick neck and chunky shoulders, done up like she’s at a wedding, not a wake. Nobody notices Jeanie as she edges forwards, ready to bolt, like the dog. She grabs for her guitar and sits on the piano stool, bending her head over the strings so that no one will speak to her, and she tunes it. It’s only Julius she’s calling to. When she looks up, his hand is on Shelley Swift’s arm. Someone, Stu, gives him a glass, and he takes a swig, grimaces. They don’t usually drink alcohol at home, only on birthdays and Christmas and then just a drop of port, although she knows Julius goes to the pub, but he has never come home drunk. She plucks harder at the guitar to make him look over.

“We roamed through the garden, down the green avenue,” she sings quietly. Bridget and Kate stop talking and see her, and Jeanie lets the room and the people go out of focus. “Felt the ground start to harden, saw the sky turn its blue.” The knots of people nearest to her also stop talking and look around, shuffling backwards to give her some space. And then she is aware of Julius beside her, his fiddle under his chin. His notes carry further than hers, and the people nearest the front door quieten. She and Julius sing:

“Like a morning bird’s song

Or a light summer’s rain

Like a place to belong

That you cannot sustain

Do you know? Where, then we’ll go.”

When they finish the song there is a collective sigh and Jeanie imagines the breaths of the people, some of whom she knows have come only for the beer and the food, rising above their heads and mingling with her mother’s last breath, settling around the beams and into the cracks in the wood and plaster so that a part of them, like a part of Dot, will remain.

They start another song and Julius’s playing is looser than usual, less controlled, and his head movements more pronounced, like one of those nodding toys on a car’s dashboard. Jeanie hears their mother’s banjo like a vacancy in the music; the sparring and the blending between the three instruments is missing, her voice absent. Perhaps this is how it happens: eventually, after every activity has been carried out at least once without Dot’s presence—the potting on of tomatoes, the making of a rabbit pie, the playing of each song—Jeanie will no longer notice that her mother is gone. She isn’t sure this is what she wants.

Julius untucks his fiddle and drinks from a glass he’s put on top of the piano. Jeanie smells whisky.

“One more!” someone calls.

“Play us another, love,” says a man with bleary eyes and a Scottish accent. He leans so far towards her she thinks he might topple. She glances at Julius, who shrugs and plays a long trembling note, teasing her so that she can’t guess what song it will be until he lets it roll gracefully down into “Polly Vaughn”—a peace offering, perhaps, for arranging the wake.

“I shall tell of a hunter whose life was undone,” Jeanie sings. Her voice is smoky and melancholic.

“By the cruel hand of evil at the setting of the sun

His arrow was loosed and it flew through the dark

His true love was slain as its shaft found its mark.”

And in harmony, Julius joins in, his words running together:

“She’d her apron wrapped about her and he took her for a swan

And it’s so and alas, it was she, Polly Vaughn.”

Jeanie puts her guitar in the corner behind her and, as she turns to the room, through a brief gap between the people she sees someone beside the window, head bent below the ceiling, the dull afternoon light catching the side of his face, his body drooping as though the air inside him has been released. Rawson, she thinks. The people shift and her sight of him is lost, and when they move again a different man is there—one of Julius’s friends—not Rawson at all. Then Dr. Holloway is in front of her, saying, “Have you and your brother ever performed in public?” His voice is loud and a couple of people glance over.

“In public?” Jeanie says.

“You know. A gig.”

“We never play outside the house.”

“But you must, you really must. You’re both terribly good. Your mother told me she played too.”

Someone chimes a piece of cutlery against a glass, the room quietens and Jeanie sees Julius across the length of the table, glass and fork in hand. When the room is silent, he lifts his head, swaying slightly and steadying himself on the back of a chair.

“I wanted to say thank you.” His words are slurred, and he struggles to find them. “First off, to Bridget and Stu for helping to organize this little get-together. For the food and for the beer!” He swings his bottle and some beer foams over the lip. The people in the room raise their glasses and bottles, and drink. “My mother, Dot Seeder, was a good woman, a good and loving mother to me and to Jeanie, over there.” He gestures with his bottle towards her and she shrinks back as people turn to look. “There was always home-cooked food on the table and the fire to keep us warm. She was a hard worker and a loving mother.” Jeanie can’t help but roll her eyes and when he comes to a stop she wonders if that is it, is that all there is to say about Dot? “When my sister Jeanie and I were twelve we were up in Priest’s Field . . .”

You can’t tell them this, Jeanie thinks. This thing is theirs alone.

“When my sister Jeanie and I