All I Want

Shayne Parkinson

Copyright © S. L. Parkinson 2010

Smashwords Edition

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All I Want

The air seems softer at this time of day, turned golden by the last sunlight. This modest patch of grass just behind the house is the highest point on our land; although that’s making no great claim, given how low the rest of the property is. I called this the Pinnacle when I was in a giddy mood one day long ago, and the name stuck, as such things do.

If I were to stand, I’d see the whole farm spread below me, a neat patchwork of paddocks wound through with the dark ribbon of the creek. I might even see a motor-car in the distance, for there are motorists intrepid enough to venture along the coast road these days, now that it’s no longer a rutted track barely fit for carts. But in this moment I’m content to sit, Tom at my side, the sea a thread of blue on the edge of the world. From here I can see a posy of white flowers, scattered petals making a halo around it, in the sheltered corner that’s never without some such adornment.

We found our way up here the very first day we walked the property. That was in 1919, just after Tom got back from the Great War. He hired a horse and gig to bring me out—I’m no horsewoman, and it was too far from town for me to bounce along behind his saddle—but we had to leave the horse to its own devices when we got to the boundary.

Every inch of flat land was swamp, and the patch of higher ground beyond it was choked with manuka scrub. A memorial to another man’s failure, it seemed. Whoever he was, he had burned the bush, trying to turn it into pasture, but the land defeated him. When the Long Depression persisted into the 1890s, he walked off the property and the bank took it for the mortgage. Tom was the first man since then to see any possibility in the place.

I was nervous of the swamp, all oily pools and black mud that sucked at my boots if I took an incautious step. But Tom picked out a path and coaxed me along, leading me by the hand. He scooped me up and carried me the last few yards. Perhaps that was a little improper in a couple not yet married, but no one was there to pass judgement.

‘All this mud, Tom,’ I said, eyeing the foul mess from my awkward perch. ‘Surely it’ll never grow crops?’

Tom was in higher spirits than I’d ever seen him. The land wasn’t dead under that stagnant water, he insisted, it was just asleep. All it needed was to be free to breathe.

‘See the colour of it. Look how rich it is.’ When I was safely on solid ground again, he snatched up a handful of the oozing black stuff and held it out for me to examine.

It smelt dreadful, and he couldn’t persuade me to touch it. But I saw it through his eyes—I saw that whole unlovely sprawl of land, and I believed him. I believed he could bring it to life.

Even the lowest of the manuka bushes reached my waist. Tom went ahead of me up the hill, snapping off branches and stamping down the weeds to make a path. Near the top I blundered into a patch of gorse, thoroughly snagging my skirt in the process. Tom’s hands were threaded with blood by the time he’d disentangled me.

The last of the scrub was above even Tom’s head. We pushed through it and emerged blinking into the light, here on the Pinnacle. The sun struck sparks from every pool of water below us, turning the swamp into a thing of beauty, and the horizon was so bright it hurt my eyes to look at it.

Tom looped my arm through his. ‘I think I’d just about buy it for the view,’ he said, his smile broad.

Buy it he did, view and all, then set to work clearing a plot and building a house. We got married as soon as he was fairly confident the roof was fit to keep rain out. We’d been engaged nearly three years by then—since just before Tom went away to the war. He had a tidy sum put by, with money he’d saved up over the years then all his army pay, and the Government gave cheap loans to the returned soldiers. It would be enough for us to live on till the farm started producing crops.

Before I met Tom I hadn’t expected to marry. A woman of twenty-seven, with a face that had never turned heads, was no great prize. Even in the city I’d scarcely ever had a man look twice at me; in a little town like Taumata, I thought I’d be fortunate to have one look once.

I’d only moved here from Auckland a few weeks earlier, as soon as I’d settled my mother’s financial affairs, such as they were. That trite description of death as a “blessed release” was never truer than in Mother’s case. It would have been a good deal more blessed if it had taken place sooner, before a woman who’d so prided herself on her elegance was reduced to needing the most intimate of things done for her, crippled by palsy and barely able to mumble out a word.

Father had sailed from England full of grand ideas of making his fortune in the Colony. I believe he must have thought New Zealand’s streets were, if not paved with gold, at least coated with a thin layer of the metal. His business success was modest, and he left no great fortune, but Mother and I managed well enough. Mother taught singing and elocution to augment her income. She’d had a fine education in England, as she often reminded me, and she passed her accomplishments on to me as far as either of our capabilities allowed.

When she died I found myself at the age of twenty-seven alone in the world, my inheritance consisting of a little jewellery, a small sum in the bank, and what Mother called a refined way of speaking. And then Aunt Ella wrote and invited me to come and live with her here in Taumata. She wasn’t truly an aunt, rather an acquaintance of Mother’s from when they were girls together in England. I’d met her two or three times over the years, and living alone is an awkward business for a single woman. I bought myself a ticket on the coastal steamer and exchanged city life for that of a small town.

My aunt kept a little shop, a draper’s and milliner’s, and I helped with serving customers. That’s where I met Tom. He came in one day with a loose button in his hand, asking if I could sell him needle and thread to stitch it back onto his jacket. There were no other customers to attend to, and the book of fashion plates I’d been flicking through wasn’t holding my attention, so I offered to sew it on for him while he waited. The relief in his eyes when he thanked me made me suspect he hardly knew which end of a needle to use. He slipped his jacket off, handed it to me and perched on the tall stool at the counter while I searched for a matching thread.

In between stitches I cast an occasional glance in his direction, observing him without being too obvious about it. Brown hair, brown eyes; a moustache but no beard; of middle height and build. I judged him to be about thirty years old. A pleasant face, but not a man who would stand out in a crowd.

‘There you are,’ I said, passing his jacket back over the counter. ‘If you have any more buttons come adrift, bring them along and I’ll put them to rights.’ Some whimsy moved me to add, ‘As long as there aren’t so very many that I’m kept sewing, “Till over the buttons I fall asleep”.’

A smile lit his eyes. ‘ “And sew them on in a dream!”,’ he completed Hood’s couplet for me. Then he recalled more immediate matters, and thanked me profusely for the small favour. I had the impression he was about to speak on a subject other than needlework, but my aunt, who had no doubt heard every word, chose that moment to emerge from the small workroom at the back of the shop.

I thought she might be a little awkward about my having offered to do the sewing; Aunt Ella was inclined to take a dim view of menfolk in general, having had the misfortune to lose her husband to the proprietress of a drinking-tent on the goldfields many years before. But she was charm itself with Tom. She introduced me to him as if she were doing me a great honour, refused to take any money for the small amount of thread I’d used, and even offered to make him a cup of tea, which he declined, saying he needed to get back to the office. When she’d closed the door behind him she had a thoughtful look about her.

‘Tom Barker’s a good, steady sort of fellow,’ she said. ‘Not a drinker, which is more than I could say for most of the single men in this town. He hasn’t a lot to say for himself, but that’s no bad thing. A girl could do worse than a man like him.’

I’d have had to be a simpleton not to take her meaning, although even if I had been as desperate for a husband as she seemed to be imagining, I didn’t see what I could do about it. Well-brought up young women did not chase after men, unless they were a good deal more gifted in stratagem and contrivance than I.

But matters were taken out of my hands soon enough. Rather to my astonishment, Tom came back to the shop the very next day. He stepped up to the counter, stood clutching his hat in both hands, and asked if I’d care to go for a walk with him on Saturday afternoon.

My life was not so full of diversions that I would readily refuse the chance of a stroll with a pleasant companion. And Tom did indeed prove pleasant company. I soon saw it was reserve, not any deficiency in intellect, that made him so quiet. As that reserve slipped away, we talked of everything and nothing.

I learned that Tom had lived in Taumata for a little over a year, working as clerk to a lawyer. He claimed he’d only come here because he liked the sound of the name. I scolded him for teasing me, and pressed for a proper answer, and he admitted that he’d been looking for the opportunity to move to a farming area ever since he’d arrived in New Zealand. Although he’d grown up in a busy manufacturing town back in England, his forbears were country folk, and when Tom was a boy he’d often stayed with an uncle who had a small farm. Tom had learned how to milk a cow, and had helped at harvest time. It was clear that he remembered those days with great fondness.

That Saturday walk was the first of what became regular outings. We shared a delight in verse, and would pass quotes back and forth. We began with familiar passages we’d been taught to recite during our schooldays, and then later we took to testing each other with increasingly obscure poems, pressing on until one of us laughingly admitted defeat. Tom loved pastoral verse, though he rather shocked me by admitting to a fondness for some of Lord Byron’s works—not for the morals of the man himself, he hastened to add.

Our talk was not all of poetry, of course. Events both local and further afield could not be ignored, most especially the Great War that had by then dragged on for two long years and showed no sign of imminent victory, but we did not allow such matters to cast too heavy a pall on our conversation. We spoke of books we’d read, plays we had seen; the small happenings of Taumata; the smaller happenings of our own lives. When we did occasionally run short of subjects for discussion, our shared silences were as comfortable as speech.

When Tom returned me to the house after our walks, Aunt Ella often invited him to stay for tea. Conversation tended to be rather stilted in my aunt’s presence, but we were glad of the opportunity to put off parting for an hour or two. We soon took to walking out together on Sunday afternoons as well as Saturdays. It was on one of these Sunday walks, as we strolled along a quiet stretch of the riverbank, that Tom turned to me and said, ‘Would you like to get married, then?’

‘Yes, I would,’ I said.

That was all it took for matters to be settled between the two of us, but we knew it would be some while before we could match actions to words. It was 1916; conscription had come into law, and we knew that Tom was likely to be called up in one of the first ballots. This was not a time to be thinking of wedding gowns and setting up house together. In the meanwhile, we made the most of what days were left to us. Being formally engaged had the advantage that my aunt was more ready to leave us alone in the parlour, so kisses no longer had to be snatched in quite such haste.

Tom was called up before the year was out. I kept myself as busy as I could when he had gone, writing long letters to him, helping in the shop, and stitching away at various frilly items, as well as more practical household linen, for my bottom drawer. And when Armistice was announced in November of 1918, I joined the populace lining Taumata’s main street, and cheered along with them as a parade of schoolchildren and worthy citizens marched past.

It was well into the new year before shiploads of men began coming back from Europe. Tom was one of the lucky ones, though I had not seen it in that way when I received the telegram saying he had been injured. A stray piece of shrapnel sliced into his leg one day just a few months after he saw his first action, leading him first to a field hospital in France and then later to England, where he spent the remainder of the war in hospitals and then a convalescent home. He had for a time been in danger of losing the leg, something he did not tell me until he was safe home again. But unlike so many others, he returned with all his limbs, and without the less obvious damage one sometimes saw in the eyes of men broken by what they had endured.

He’s never spoken at any length of those days, but I know that the war taught him to value silence. Even the small bustle of Taumata was more than he could comfortably tolerate. That was what turned his vague yearnings for the countryside of his childhood into a firm desire to have a farm of his own. And that was what led us to our swampy patch of land, and the Pinnacle that watched over it.

A long, ridged scar still marks Tom’s thigh, a legacy of that wound. The first time I saw his injury the sight turned my stomach, his flesh angry red and gouged as if he had been hung on a meat-hook by a particularly clumsy butcher. The leg dragged a little when he was particularly weary, and I’ve often suspected it still pains him in the cold weather, but he was strong and able in spite of it. And the farm demanded every ounce of strength he had. Making the swamp fit to bear crops was his first task, and that meant digging drains, guiding the water down to the creek. Labour was hard to find in those days, with so many men lost to the war, and Tom dug every ditch himself, working far into the evening while the light held.

Our house was just a tiny two-roomed cottage. Tom had plans to build on later, for we fully expected to have need of more room before much time had passed. I made the cottage less plain with the tablecloths and bedspread I’d embroidered during our long engagement, and Tom showed me how to paste newspaper over gaps in the walls to keep out the worst of the draughts.

On summer evenings the kitchen was fiercely hot, and after dinner it seemed to grow even warmer, the walls absorbing the heat of the cooking fire and radiating it back for hours. From those early days we got into the way of taking our supper outdoors and making a picnic of it here on the Pinnacle. It’s a habit we’ve kept up in all the years since.

Tom’s faith that the swamp could be made fertile proved well-founded. He raised a good crop of potatoes that very first year. He took cartloads of them into town to send off to the markets, and when the money came through Tom said he felt like a real farmer at last.

He dreamed of turning the land into a dairy farm; but that, he said, would have to wait until he had built up the capital to pay for fencing and a milking shed, as well as to buy cows. Tom wanted a herd of Jerseys. He had books about dairying, neatly stacked on one shelf of the bookcase he had made for us, and he would sometimes bring farming magazines home from the general store. One magazine had an article about a farmer a little further down the coast who had a prize-winning herd of Jerseys. Tom carefully tore out the article and placed it inside the cover of one of his books.

More crops followed that first one. Cabbages and pumpkins; wheat and maize; potatoes and tomatoes. Whatever Tom planted thrived and grew.

But the land, it seemed, was the only thing that was fertile. Every month I waited and hoped, and every month hope soaked away into bloodstained rags. One can only deceive oneself for so long. By the time two years had passed, I had faced the fact that I was barren.

Early in our marriage Tom had read aloud to me from one of his farming magazines, the words punctuated by snorts of laughter, some advice given to would-be dairy farmers. Marry while as young as possible, the learned gentleman had written, and have as many children as possible, so as never to be short of workers. We were neither of us so very young, and now I had failed on both counts.

Tom never reproached me for it. But he no longer spoke of dairy herds, and I noticed that his books of animal husbandry stayed undisturbed on the shelf.

And then came the wonder. I hardly dared believe it at first, for it seemed a miracle, and how had I deserved such a thing? It was weeks before I could bring myself to tell Tom, anxious as I was not to let him suffer false hope. When I did tell him, his smile would have warmed a mountain of ice.

I waited another month before telling my aunt. She was never one to speak her feelings aloud, but I could see she was pleased for me. I prattled away about the little gowns I was going to make, and what names we were considering. Aunt Ella let me talk on for a time before interrupting.

‘That’s enough of that for now, it’s early days yet. Best not to tempt fate, my dear.’

Perhaps that’s what I did. Perhaps I tempted fate, especially when I gave that tiny life within me a name. I was convinced she was a girl from the very first stirrings in my womb. Surely only a girl would make such soft, fluttering movements, like the brush of tiny fingertips. Tom smiled and didn’t argue.

Lily, I called her. I saw her clear in my mind’s eye, fair hair and pale, translucent skin, with just a light blush of pink on her cheeks. It was foolish of me to be imagining a child with such hair, when Tom’s is the colour of dark chocolate and mine’s a sort of light brown that could never quite decide whether or not it wanted to be red. Mine’s threaded with grey now, though Tom’s is as dark as ever. But Lily, I was certain, would have long, fair hair, so white it would almost be silver.

I soon had Tom calling her Lily as well. He’d rub the small mound of my belly and ask, ‘How is Lily today?’ He picked through the best pieces of timber in his woodshed and began making what he called Lily’s cradle. And I stitched away at tiny gowns, and imagined the frocks I would make when Lily was a little older. For Sunday best, I would dress her all in white.

White was not the colour of the winter night I woke in agony. The world was blood-red that night, scarlet on my thighs and pooling in thick, dark clots between my legs. My body was one scream that echoed around the room until I no longer had the strength to cry out, and the scream subsided into low moans more like those of an animal than a woman.

When I lay still once more, I became aware of Tom, his face pale in the lamplight, blood on his hands where I’d torn at them without knowing what I did. He wrapped me in blankets and carried me through to the parlour, where he built up the fire till the logs blazed. He washed my limbs, as tender and careful at the task as a woman would have been. He heated the kettle over the fire and made sweet tea, which he held to my lips as I sipped.

As soon as there was enough daylight to see by, he went back into the bedroom and emerged with the soiled sheets cradled in his arms, then went outside without a word. A few moments later I heard the dull thud of a spade striking the ground not far from the house.

The creek was running high, as it always does in winter, but Tom offered to try and fetch the doctor, or perhaps a midwife. I shook my head. He would have been risking life and limb to do so, and I had no wish to have a stranger pawing at me; not when it was too late to save Lily. Aunt Ella told me later that I had been lucky not to take a fever. It took all my self-command not to scream at her, but I contented myself with saying that I considered luck and I to be strangers to one another.

On that cold, grey morning I wept till I was drained of tears, then wept on; dry, shuddering sobs that racked me and left my throat raw. Such a state could not endure. I lapsed into silence before the day was out. Tom made up the bed with fresh sheets and carried me back to it. I spent the next few days lying there staring at the walls, only moving when necessity demanded it.

All that time Tom tended me, bringing what little food he could persuade me to take, and keeping me clean. Afterwards I wondered how he’d borne it, for I know he carried his own burden of grief, but he never uttered a word of complaint.

I rose from my bed on a morning of watery sunshine. Tom wrapped his coat around me and guided my hesitant steps the short distance over to the Pinnacle. In the most sheltered corner, close to where I’d planted a hedge of lavender, a small mound of earth showed where the ground had been disturbed.

‘She’ll have a fine view,’ he said. I clutched at his supporting arms and watched the lavender blur in the tears that spilled unchecked down my face.

By the time Tom felt able to leave me alone for a few hours, the creek was down again. He went into town one morning for supplies, and when he got home I could see that he had something to tell me.

‘I went to the courthouse and talked to the clerk there,’ he said over tea and scones. ‘I know you’re supposed to register babies, and then there’s laws about…’

About burials, I realised he meant. It had not occurred to me that the law might have any interest in our sorrows.

He saw the worry in my eyes, and spoke at once to ease it. ‘He said when a child comes that early, there’s no need for a death certificate or anything of that sort. He wouldn’t let me… he said they don’t register the birth, either.’

In the eyes of the world, Lily had never existed. We did not weigh down her small patch of earth with a headstone; we knew her name, and no one else would ever wish to learn it.

Others would perhaps call it a foolish notion to leave little gifts for her, but why should I care for that? I began placing tiny posies as soon as the first blossoms appeared that spring, and made others as the season offered more flowers to choose from. One morning I found grain stalks there, woven into a child’s toy in a way Tom had once showed me, a trick he had learned as a boy on his uncle’s farm. Sometimes he leaves shiny berries from a hedge, and once a trailing stem of redcurrants.

I never quickened again. My womb was only capable of that one, brief spark of life. And Tom never did get his herd of Jersey cows. He’s ploughed and planted every inch of land down on the flats. He grows fine crops, and is well-respected in the town. In recent years I’ve persuaded him to have day labourers come to help with the heaviest of the work. He built onto the house years ago, and has made it a comfortable place, with a proper sitting room, a kitchen with a smart modern range, and a verandah along the front. But he never added any bedrooms. We’ve only ever needed the one.

When I was looking for garden stakes in Tom’s woodshed one day, I found the cradle in a corner, half-hidden under a scrap of canvas. I left it undisturbed, and looked elsewhere for stakes. I’ve a magnificent garden, and during fine weather I spend much of my time tending it. Sometimes, now that the road is so much better, people arrive asking to see my garden. There are rows of flowers in all colours of the rainbow, and under the bedroom window I’ve a whole bed of white lilies. When they’re in bloom, the air is heavy with the scent of them.

Lily would have been born around this time of year. Perhaps on an evening just like this we’d be celebrating her birthday with a picnic like the one spread before us here on the Pinnacle, the last daylight filling the clearing like water in a bowl of green glass.

She’d be seventeen now, and perhaps have a young man courting her. They would not be forced to put off their marriage as Tom and I were. For surely the world will not be foolish enough ever to have another such war.

The sun’s edge is resting on the furthest hill. It will be time to go indoors soon. I take a bite of scone, and jam oozes onto my fingers. I lick them as a child might; Mother would have rapped me over the knuckles for such behaviour. It’s strawberry jam, and delicious, though I say so myself. Tom’s strawberry beds are crammed with fruit every year, and I make far more jam than the two of us can consume. I give most of it away, and sell some at the general store, but I always save a few jars to enter in the annual Agricultural and Pastoral Show. I take a modest pride in the ribbons I’ve collected there.

Tom reaches across the rug and takes the last piece of cherry cake. Although my plate still has half a scone and an almond biscuit on it, Tom breaks the slice of cake in two and offers the larger piece to me.

‘Would you like some of this?’ he asks. ‘Do you want anything else?’

A good man, my Tom, always careful of my comfort. As I shake my head, the posy of flowers catches my eye, white petals gilded by the day’s last light. The flowers last so brief a time before fading; I’ll bring fresh ones tomorrow.

‘No,’ my mouth shapes the lie, ‘I’ve all I want.’

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