Butterfly Song Read online

  There are tears in her eyes when the children finish. We clap our hands and call, ‘Once more!’

  breakfast at sunset

  Thursday Island, 1992

  I wake to the tinny sound of country music blaring out of a radio. Walking to the toilet, I am stopped by a man sitting in the courtyard. He is smoking a cigarette.

  ‘G’day,’ he says as he turns down the volume. ‘You here on holidays?’

  ‘I’m here for a family thing.’ I cross my legs and arms. Someone’s in the bathroom and the man wants to talk. He is from Charters Towers. His name is Keith. Keith tells me he’s here to work on the tarring of the roads.

  ‘We come up for six weeks, go home for one weekend, then come back.’ Keith has a tattoo of a big-breasted woman in a hula skirt on the inside of his forearm. He shows me his two small birds that he keeps in a cage. Salt and Pepper, he calls them. The birds have their claws wrapped around the horizontal bars and are pecking at the door.

  ‘They keep me company. It gets lonely sometimes,’ he says, ‘but the pay is good.’ There are boots outside his room and the one next door.

  ‘Don’t you have your mates with you?’

  ‘Yeah, but they like to drink and chase women on their days off. Me, I’m too old for that. I prefer the feathered variety, and the wireless.’

  A young man steps out of the bathroom, wearing only a towel. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, covering up his chest.

  Keith cranks up a country tune as I head into the bathroom.

  The nightly tariff at the Sunset Motel includes a full breakfast, made by the proprietor herself. In the dining room, my mother eats eggs, bacon, sausages and grilled tomatoes. I sit down beside her at the red formica table.

  ‘No sausages for me, thanks.’ The proprietor plonks down a glass of orange juice.

  Mum butters a piece of toast. ‘It was good to see Granny Penny. I haven’t seen her for years. We lost contact.’ She has told me this before, but I know there are parts of the story I will never know.

  I ask her, ‘Do you remember much about your father?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ she replies, pouring chilli sauce on her plate. ‘I was very young, but I do remember the day I dropped the eggs. It made my mother angry.’

  ‘Mum, how come you never talk about what happened?’

  She does not answer.

  ‘You told me you didn’t remember. Why?’ I pressure.

  ‘I guess I always blamed myself. I thought I killed Dad because it was me that dropped the eggs that day. Then, with Mum, I was a bad girl. She made sacrifices, I was ungrateful, and that was all my fault too.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘But if we’d been good, if I’d been good – they wouldn’t have sent Uncle Tally away. I wouldn’t have had to go to live in another family.’

  I want to ask her what it was like, but the words stick in my throat. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’ It’s all I can say.

  ‘But I keep thinking – it might have been different. What if, ay? What if?’

  My mother finishes eating and lights a menthol cigarette. My breakfast arrives. I look down at the fried egg as if it has fallen out of the sky and onto my plate.

  the novel egg

  Gordonvale, 1949

  The egg weighed precious in Lily’s small dark hands. It was the colour of peach and larger than the others she’d collected. The hen, the layer of the egg, strutted around the coop, scratching at the ground, releasing the stale smell of yesterday’s rotting vegetable scraps. Cluck, start, peck, stop.

  ‘What ya got there, Lily Lily?’ Francesca took off her hat and crouched beside the child. Lily’s fingers meticulously stroked the shell. The beady eye of the hen shifted in their direction. It saw the egg and screeched, flapping its wings in a disenchanted dance towards the child.

  Appearing from nowhere, Tally threw an overripe mango in the hen’s path. A chunk of flesh ricocheted from the ground and stuck to the hen’s breast. It crooned, swaying its peaked head back and forth. Lily huddled between her mother’s legs.

  ‘Talford!’ Francesca growled at her son. ‘Stop that.’

  He ran on two skinny legs, waving a red cloth in the air. The makeshift kite cut across the blue watercolour sky and he was gone as quickly as he appeared.

  ‘It’s a very fine egg, Lily.’ Francesca steered the child out of the coop and latched the gate. ‘You know, when I was a girl of your age, I lived on Thursday Island. We had a garden and a chicken coop too, and it was my job to collect the eggs. Sometimes the hens got wild, but I learnt to grab the eggs and run real fast. That was on TI, though, a long time ago.’

  A strand of coal-black hair fell over Lily’s face and settled on her smiling lips. ‘For Daddy?’

  ‘We can cook him an egg for supper. Your father should be back soon.’

  Kit had been up before daylight and had gone to the river, fishing for barramundi in the ebb. Later he would hunt mudcrabs in the mangroves.

  Francesca looked toward the Mulgrave River. Clouds massed around Walsh’s Pyramid. January in Gordonvale was hot and wet. The sun rose early and set late. Just twenty-four kilometres south of Cairns, the small community of sugarcane farmers had become a town with the building of the mill in 1896. Now Gordonvale had a growing population of canecutters, South Sea, Malay, Aboriginal and Islander families, all living close together.

  Francesca noticed the intricate pattern of lines on her daughter’s small hands. The lines on Lily’s palms and in the joints of her fingers were dark, like chocolate stains. The hands were mirror images of each other. Francesca looked at them as if they were a book holding a story impressed upon the child from birth. A story that strengthened as the child grew. Her child’s hands were like Kit’s hands, Francesca thought. Kit was a man with amazing hands. Strong hands that cut the cane. Stealthy hands that plucked mudcrabs from their muddy slumber. Quick hands that once snatched pearl shells and bêche-de-mer from the depths of the sea. Crafty hands that planed the wood for furniture and carved Francesca a butterfly brooch from a pearl shell. Talented hands with long slender fingers that could ably strum the steel strings of his guitar. Lover’s hands that stroked her hair, and pressed and curled across the shine of her back.

  Lily stroked the egg with one finger. It was a precious jewel.

  ‘Okay, you can carry the eggs inside.’

  Lily’s eyes flashed like lightning against onyx. She placed the egg carefully on the top of the pile and took the basket from her mother. They walked towards the house. Lily’s tongue rested between her lips as she positioned her feet, one in front of the other, one step at a time, as though she were walking on a tightrope.

  ‘C’mon, Lil Lil, I’ll show you how to cook the egg. I’ll show you how to grow taro and yam, just like my grandmother showed me.’

  They passed the frangipani tree. Lily looked thin in her patched gingham pinafore, but at four years of age she could already reach the smooth branches of the tree. She could pull herself up the elephant-grey trunk to pluck one of the white-and-yellow etched flowers. She liked to wear them in her hair, or place them above her small ears.

  They passed the clothesline. Lily edged around the pole. A slight dip in the grass required extra concentration. She paused as her two feet met. The egg sat preciously on top of the pile.

  ‘You can do it, keep going,’ Francesca coaxed. The child’s breath was fine with each slow step. She could hear her brother playing. He had abandoned his kite and was in his hideaway underneath the house.

  They were within reach of the back steps. The sound of men’s voices made Francesca spin around like a lopsided top, her heart whirring and whirring. She saw the two Wilga brothers carrying Kit into the yard. ‘What’s happened?’

  Her sudden motion distracted Lily. The child looked up and, losing her balance, dropped the basket. Francesca ran towards Kit, one foot hitting the side of the wicker basket. Eggs tumbled to the ground and smashed.

  Lily erupted in tears. The peach-coloured eg
g was cracked and broken. She picked up the shell from the grass. The inside of the egg flowed like honey from her tiny fingers.

  ‘We were in the mangroves. Kit stepped on a rotting branch. It went in – a long way and he can’t walk.’ Jake Wilga’s arms were strong and Francesca was glad that he had been at the estuary when the accident happened.

  Kit’s breath was heavy. He bled from a deep cut at the base of his foot. The blood was dark red and soup-like. ‘I’m okay, just put me down.’

  ‘It looks bad, Kit, you must go to the hospital,’ Francesca pleaded. ‘To the markai doctor, the whitefella medicine man.’

  ‘No.’ His head and hands shook.

  Francesca knew his fear of hospitals. ‘I am with you,’ she said as the men carried him out into the street.

  Already news of the incident had spread. Concerned faces appeared at doors or waved encouragement from front gates. Some followed part of the way, as if it were a procession. Lily trailed behind her mother. They passed the creek at the end of the street. This was where she and Tally were forbidden to go on their own.

  When they reached the hospital on Hospital Road, on the other side of the railway tracks, a doctor with red freckles and a red bristly beard inspected the wound. He applied tight bandages and plaster.

  ‘Take him home,’ said the doctor. ‘The verandah is already full and we can’t put him inside with the other patients.’ He turned away to wash his hands.

  Later that night, Kit slept. Francesca looked at his hands. The brown creases on the palms. Strong hands, crafty hands, quick hands, talented hands. A lover’s hands. These hands, too, hold many stories, she thought.

  Francesca got up to turn off the kerosene lamp in the kitchen. She stopped by Lily’s bed. The child was asleep, her long eyelashes resting like a caress on her face. Francesca picked up the remains of the broken peach eggshell from Lily’s chest. She handled each piece carefully and put it on the side table. She kissed Lily’s forehead and whispered goodnight.

  sleeping guitar

  Gordonvale, 1949

  The roof of the old house creaked in the heat, like old tin bones. In the last few days Kit had limped around with his big bandaged foot, a white elephant’s foot. After supper, he moved out to sit on the verandah. His hands shook as they rolled a cigarette.

  Tally went inside and brought out the guitar. ‘Dad, play us a song.’

  ‘Not now, son, I’m too tired.’

  ‘Oh, c’mon, play us “Old TI”.’ Tally held the guitar up. ‘Show me how to strum.’ Kit moved awkwardly and banged his foot against the guitar. The instrument emited a hollow sound, like a wounded bird. Kit winced in pain. ‘For Chris-sakes. Can’t you see I’m trying to have a smoke?’

  Francesca was at the kitchen door. ‘Tally, your father needs rest.’ She reached forward, taking hold of the guitar. ‘You go and feed the chickens.’

  Tally skulked off into the darkening yard with a bucket of vegetable scraps. Francesca glared quickly at Kit and turned on her heels. She placed the guitar back in its corner. It was the same steel-stringed instrument that had once glistened under the lights in dance halls where Kit performed with the Castaway Cruisers. The same instrument he’d played in the dance hall on Thursday Island. His father had given him the guitar for his sixteenth birthday. But Kit hardly played the guitar now.

  Kit used to sing Glenn Miller songs. Island songs too, and some in the Malay language. His father had taught him to play and sing ‘Taran Bulan’ and he would talk to Kit about the journey to the islands from the Malay Peninsula. Francesca remembered how Kit’s dark face and white teeth shone under the lights. He had won her heart with his resonant voice and charm.

  But now the guitar was missing a string. Once on the mainland, Kit was told he could not play at the town dances. The soldiers and navy officers only wanted to watch white musicians play. Or maybe some black Americans. Not a half-caste Aboriginal man. Kit got seasonal work in the canefields. He had written so many songs – upbeat dance tunes, blues, ditties, love songs – but people weren’t interested. Now all he wrote were the dirges in his head.

  On the verandah the air was cooling. The ash from Kit’s cigarette fell onto the floorboards.

  ‘Back to bed,’ Francesca said. He did not answer. His eyelids, like those of a lizard, blinked.

  the cry of the curlew

  Gordonvale, 1949

  Francesca stood and watched, waiting as the sun ebbed in orange indigo. Tally played out the back, under the looming shadow of Walsh’s Pyramid. The darkening shape enveloped the frangipani tree at the edge of the yard, sapping the light from its colours. The smell of burning cane filled her nostrils.

  Then she heard it, the scraping cry of a curlew. Heard, but not seen. She searched for the bird’s white wings, its devilled feathers, its incisor-sharp beak and rigid eye. Nothing to be seen.

  Another call. She thought for a second she was mistaken. But again the curlew screeched. The cry set a strange anguish within her that sat like a stone in her belly, cold and heavy.

  ‘Supper’s ready,’ she yelled to the boy’s skinny silhouette.

  At the table, Tally and Lily ate the fish stew and rice.

  The boy scraped his plate into the bucket. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s resting in bed.’

  Francesca looked out again. The night patrol of cane toads had appeared from nowhere. They took their positions on the grass, statues begging for the moon to set the moths in a stupor, waiting for the moths to fall and be captured in their sticky embrace. An orchestra of sounds filled the air – the canticle chant of the cicadas, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the crackling cane, the tempered bark of a distant dog – and Francesca’s heart beat, keeping time, watching time, testing time.

  Later that evening, Kit woke sweating. When Francesca went to him she saw white froth in the creases of his quivering mouth. His lips, purple and cracked, whispered her name. She broke inside, moving instinctively, as if captive to a curse.

  ‘You must go back to the markai doctor,’ she told him. ‘Let me take you.’

  She ordered Tally to go get the men. ‘Hurry.’

  The Wilgas came and carried Kit’s limp body to the hospital. The matron told them that the doctor with the red freckles and the bristly beard was not there.

  ‘The doctor will tend to him when he’s ready.’ Kit would have to wait in the bed on the verandah, she said.

  By noon the next day, as the sugar train arrived at Gordonvale Mill, Kit was dead.

  tetanus is a deadly thing

  Gordonvale, 1949

  The whiteness of the matron’s uniform had yellowed in only a year of wear, from excessive washing away of sickness.

  ‘Once the gangrene set in, Mrs Plata, there wasn’t much we could do.’ She wiped the perspiration from the back of her neck. ‘Why didn’t he come sooner?’

  ‘We came before, but we got sent home by the doctor.’ Francesca touched a spot on her face just below her right eye. ‘He stepped on a tree root in the mangroves. It was a deep cut. The doctor thought he got all of it out. But then he got sick.’

  ‘I mean, did you look after the foot properly at home?’ The matron brushed away Francesca’s words as though they were dead insects on her desk. She paused, one finger in the air. ‘The slightest bit of filth can cause secondary infection. Tetanus is a deadly thing, you know. What was the full name of your husband, Mrs Plata?’

  Francesca looked down at the matron’s large white fingers, clean yet cumbersome, as they grasped the pen and moved it across the form.

  ‘Kit Adam Plata.’

  ‘And where was he born?’ The matron pushed back a strand of greying brown hair. The pores on her nose looked like little pinpricks.

  ‘Thursday Island.’

  ‘How long were you married?’

  ‘Seven years.’ Francesca remembered the day Kit gave her the butterfly pearl shell. She wanted to breathe in the sweet scent of budding flowers, but there was only the smell of antiseptic d
rying on the hospital floor.

  ‘Children?’ continued the matron.

  ‘Two. Talford and little Lily.’

  Kit had writhed in pain on the strange bed, holding onto Francesca’s hand so tightly it hurt. ‘You must not let them take the children,’ he whispered, and his grip slackened suddenly. ‘I love you, my frangipani princess.’

  The pen continued to move down the page. ‘I’ll let the authorities know. You go home now and get some rest, there’s a love.’

  no epitaph

  Cairns, 1949

  On Saturday morning, Kit was buried in the Cairns cemetery, after a small ceremony with family and friends. He was laid to rest with only his name and date of birth and death added to the stone to identify his grave. In her small black notebook Francesca wrote: ‘My darling guitar man passed away. Although your body has left me, your spirit never will. Your song will be with me forever. You will always be in my heart. I’ll always be your frangipani girl.’

  Francesca placed the notebook in her handbag and knelt at the side of Kit’s grave. The cemetery felt so alien, with its dry cement stones derelict and exposed. Nearby was a frangipani tree. Its white and yellow flowers spilled out from under its shade. Francesca smiled and said, ‘Your frangipani is always with you.’

  floating

  Gordonvale, 1949

  Kit visited her three days after his death. Just a day after she’d buried his body in that worn suit and his old white pressed-cotton shirt. He sat on the edge of their bed, on the same sheets that his sister Penny had insisted on boiling and washing right away. Francesca remembered that tight feeling in her chest as she watched her turn the wooden stick in the copper. Francesca felt helpless and unable to speak. She was unable to move. She had wanted to do it in her own time. She had wanted one more night of lying there with the smell of Kit mixed with plaster.