Pearl in a Cage by Joy Dettman Read Free Book Online Page B

He’d told her she was marrying him that day. She’d put up no argument, though their folk had. They’d been deadset against cousin marrying cousin. He’d argued that they were only half-cousins and half-cousins didn’t count as blood; he and Gertrude had shared a grandfather who’d gone through four wives. Vern hadn’t won that argument — or Gertrude.
    As he watched her turn to the right at the town hall corner, he sighed anew for the interference of dogmatic old men, and for the rare race of sons he and Gertrude might have bred. She’d wed a city man, and left him in India a few years later, but by the time she’d left him, Vern had been wedded to an Englishwoman with five hundred pounds a year but slim hips. It had taken him a while to get her with child, and he should have known better than to do it. Hooper infants had a bad habit of killing their mothers. A Willama doctor had saved his daughter but couldn’t save Vern’s wife.
    He’d been made a fool of in his second attempt at wedded bliss. She’d popped his second daughter seven months after the wedding, and in the time it had taken him to get a saddle on his horse. She might have given him half a dozen more — had he believed her first was his own. He hadn’t, so she hadn’t. He hadn’t touched her in eight years, hadn’t planned to touch her in another eighty, but she’d come to grief beneath the hooves of a stallion she shouldn’t have been riding, and he hadn’t mourned her.
    Joanne, his current wife, had given him a son, and for that son Vern loved her, which had nothing to do with the way he felt about Gertrude. Young love is unrelated to older love. What he felt for Gertrude hadn’t altered since he was an eighteen-year-old boy, and if he lived another forty years, it wouldn’t alter. He loved her. He wanted her. And he couldn’t have her.
    A couple of times, between wives, he’d come close to getting his heart’s desire. Amber had been the fly in the ointment each time. Gertrude put her first in everything. After a time, a man grows tired of coming in second place.
    Vern sighed, and folded himself into his car, but sat on looking down the wide dustbowl the locals called Cemetery Road.
    Woody Creek was spreading south along Cemetery Road, the younger folk preferring to see ghosts walking in the night than floodwaters creeping. If things kept going the way they’d been going since the war, that cemetery would end up in the centre of town.
    Lack of transport had a lot to do with the town’s growth. Most born in Woody Creek stayed on to wed, which may have led to a bit of inbreeding but it kept money earned in the town working for the town. The rains had been coming when they were supposed to come; the farmers were doing well, which meant the businesses were doing well. Not that Woody Creek relied on her surrounding farmers to keep her afloat. Timber had got this town growing. The railways’ order for sleepers was up each year. Timber was used in the mines. They built wharves from red gum, bridges, used it for fencing, and burned what was left over.
    Vern was making money hand over fist, as were his mill workers, tree fellers and the bullockies who dragged those logs into the mill. A lot of folk lived well off timber. The big steam-driven mills could cut more in a day than the old pit mill could do in a month.
    Uncountable tons of timber were freighted to Melbourne each year, yet barely a dent had been made in that forest. There was wood enough around this town to keep those mill saws screaming for a hundred years.

EXPECTATIONS
    A forest doesn’t evolve unless it finds the right conditions. It doesn’t ask for much, other than space in which to spread. It will stand up to years of drought — if that drought is balanced by a decent flood every once in a while. The creek, twisting through the forest like a stirred-up snake, could be