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

were twelve, our father was murdered—” Julius’s voice cracks. He trails off, swaying where he stands, his chin trembling and tears falling. “Murdered, in a bloody field,” he says, barely lifting his head.

They’ve never shared what they saw with anyone and it has tied them together for thirty-nine years, and now with a little drink in him and their mother dead, Julius is prepared to share it with anyone who will listen. She is disgusted.

A man who might have been a friend of their father’s, although he looks much older than Jeanie remembers, pats Julius on the back and steers him towards a chair. Her brother resists, rolling his shoulder to remove the man’s hand.

Jeanie sees something glint under the kitchen table. She gets down on her hands and knees and, ignoring the questions from Bridget and the looks from Kate, crawls underneath. Julius is still speaking, but other people are trying to hush him now. Lying on the stone floor amongst the crumbs and dust that she hasn’t had the inclination to sweep up since their mother died is the missing poker. She picks it up and shuffles out backwards, and before she can hear any more of what Julius is saying she is out through the scullery and up the garden with Maude to the strip of bare soil. Where a gravestone might have stood, were they ever able to afford one, she stabs the poker into the ground. A late afternoon sun that is pushing through the cloud stretches the shadow of the poker across the earth, slicing the grave in two. “Where did you put the money, Mum?” Jeanie says out loud and Maude looks up at her. She goes with the dog to the greenhouse and sees the chaos she made of the tomato plants, compost, and pots. They will have to be done again. She turns a wooden crate upside down for somewhere to sit and sees that fallen behind it are her mother’s gardening gloves, which she misplaced months ago. The leather is dirty and stiff, and the stubby fingers are slightly curled and set into the shape of Dot’s hands. Jeanie slips her fingers into where her mother’s had been and lowers her face into the palms and cries, racking sobs which heave her body and make Maude nuzzle against her in confusion. The gloves become wet and the dirt smears across Jeanie’s forehead, and she weeps until her nose is full, her eyes puff up, and she hears the people leave.

12

The day after the wake Julius stays in bed all day and Jeanie doesn’t go up to his room, angry with him for adding to what they owe Stu, for drinking, for letting those people into the cottage, and for saying what had happened in Priest’s Field. She hopes he didn’t manage to finish the story. When he finally makes it downstairs, instead of picking up their instruments and playing as they would have done in the past, they talk about the agreement. Julius says that out of principle he won’t do any more jobs for Rawson, even though the few he was given were organized through the farm manager, Simons. Jeanie, holding tight to her opinion, had hoped that any work he did on the farm might have reduced what the Rawsons said they owed—if it was owed at all. Again, they return to the questions: How could money be due on a cottage that was rent-free? If the money Dot borrowed from Stu was to pay the Rawsons, why didn’t she hand it over? And where is it? They don’t have any answers. They rarely discussed money in the past and it comes awkwardly now, and they never talked in any depth about the agreement, they know it simply as an arrangement that was negotiated between Dot and Rawson a year after their father’s death—an event that was only ever alluded to, all of them orbiting an incident so horrific they were unable to shift themselves closer.

Frank died the day before he turned thirty-two. Now, Jeanie is amazed at how young he was, how much life was before him, but when she was twelve, she thought her father ancient, and wise. She hadn’t yet reached the stage where she might have challenged him or grown irritated by his views and sloppy ways. Every day of the months leading up to the harvest that year—1980—was full of chatter about the imminent arrival of Rawson’s new tractor. It was all Frank and Julius talked about at the tea table. The old one was temperamental and liked to stop in the middle of a field and would start only when Frank had spent an hour or two tinkering with it. The new Massey Ferguson was delivered too late to pull the trailers for the harvest, but it arrived soon after, together with a new plough.

Jeanie didn’t remember the tractor and plough being delivered, but she was left with an impression of them both: the top of the back tyres with their raised treads higher than her head, the shiny red body, the black vinyl seat with its wrap-around arms, and the sharp shine on the blades of the plough. Frank and Julius took turns sitting on the tractor seat, and Rawson started it up for them to admire. There was a day’s delay, some problem with hitching the new plough to the tractor, but finally it was ready to go out.

They—Frank, Julius, and Jeanie—were up in Priest’s Field ploughing the first line of furrows. Frank said that ploughing wasn’t girls’ work, but he let Jeanie come with them, telling her that she wouldn’t be allowed on the tractor. She walked in the long grass at the edge of the field, arms crossed, furious that she could only watch while Julius sat between their father’s legs, his hands on the steering wheel, whooping with pleasure. She kept up with them for a while, trailing alongside, seeing the plough’s blades slice and turn