Pearl in a Cage by Joy Dettman Read Free Book Online

blowflies.
    â€˜They reckon she was with one of the chaps staying at the Macdonalds’.’
    â€˜Is it a fact that she had a baby?’
    â€˜It’s fact, all right. It’s down at Nurse Foote’s place. I was in Charlie White’s when Vern Hooper came in wanting to buy a titty bottle with the smallest teat they had.’
    Suicide was suggested. An unmarried woman left in the lurch might have thrown herself off that train.
    â€˜Someone told me she was one of Jenner’s dagoes.’
    â€˜Some of those dagoes import wives from Italy, you know. Imagine what one of them might do if his bride turned up in the family way.’
    â€˜Slit her throat as quick as look at you.’
    â€˜I heard she died of snake bite.’
    â€˜Did you see that snake those kids got down behind Macdonald’s mill. I never saw anything like it in all my life.’
    â€˜The devil’s work. I couldn’t look at it.’
    Hot sandwiches went down well with hot gossip, and there was nothing wrong with warm sausage rolls. The tea was too strong or too weak. The cream melted in the cakes. The jelly on the trifle reverted to its liquid state, but it all went down. A few remembered why they were there, though most conversations commenced and ended with the unknown dead woman. Very few strangers found their way to Woody Creek, and when they did, the locals always managed to connect them up to someone before they left. That dead woman was the first to arrive and die before any proven connection could be made.
    Ogden lunched at the wake and he listened. He spoke to the woman who had admired the brooch. She wanted to be helpful but there was little she could tell him.
    â€˜She could hardly string two words together,’ Aunt Olive said. ‘Very hard to understand. I said what a terrible day it was for travelling and she said something that sounded like, always summer. I admired her brooch and I think she said it was her mother’s. And that’s about all that was said.’
    He spoke to another dozen but learned nothing more, so he went home for a second lunch.
    At two, he placed his second call to the city and got a pommy on a bad line. All Ogden got out of him was how folk moved around during the festive season, and how long it could take before that woman was reported missing — if a report ever came in. Women died in childbirth every day. It was one of the hazards of married life. Unwed woman died every day in attempting to abort the results of their low life. Ogden was pleased he hadn’t been born a woman.
    He wasn’t too pleased about putting that coffin on the train on a day when the thermometer on his shaded verandah showed a hundred and nine, so he walked around to talk to Moe Kelly.
    â€˜I don’t feel right about loading her into the goods van, Moe, subjecting her to six hours of roasting in a pine box and maybe no one to pick her up when she gets there. We’ll bury her in themorning. I’ll get young McPherson in to photograph her, and when she’s claimed — if she’s claimed — her folk can move her where they want her. The community box will pay.’
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    John McPherson, a shy, lean and lanky lad who looked younger than his seventeen years, had an interest in photography, which his parents encouraged. He’d photographed a few babies, a few brides, his parents and neighbours, but never the dead. Until that day, he had never looked upon the face of the dead.
    His mother helped carry his equipment down the steep steps to Moe’s cellar, where he set up his tripod and weighty camera while Moe and Ogden moved the open coffin over to where they might take full advantage of the light coming in through a high window and they propped the top end of that cruel pine box on a block of melting ice. Much had melted during the last days and the cellar’s clay floor hadn’t absorbed it well. It was greasy underfoot. John McPherson watched his