He indicated the two chairs in front of the desk. The chairs were shabby and he suddenly felt embarrassed offering them. Then he saw the study with their eyes: it was dark and dank. He didn’t like the study or the rest of the house, which was filled with the previous pastor’s choice of furniture. Everything felt old and tired to him, but he was too poor to replace anything. He had just got all of them seated when the screaming started. It was loud and high-pitched, like children being beaten, or a cat tormented by schoolboys. The women were shocked, their eyes wide.
‘It’s the children making a racket in the kitchen,’ he said above the noise. ‘I will just be a minute, please sit, I won’t be long.’ He heard the older sister whisper to the younger one, ‘Missus Blackmarsh says he’s a widower, left with three littlies, the oldest only three and a half and the youngest a baby still at just thirteen months.’
Reuben stood at the door of the kitchen and took in the war zone that confronted him. Wycliffe and Martha were upending bottles of peaches and sauce over baby Wesley’s head. ‘We baptise you,’ they were laughing, ‘we baptise you,’ and tomato sauce and preserved peaches poured over Wesley in a thick red waterfall. The preserved peaches and the tomato sauce were gifts from some of the women in his congregation, but all he could see was good money he would have to spend replacing the food going down the drain. His temper was already lost.
‘Wycliffe! Martha! What is the meaning of this? I can’t trust you to look after your brother for two minutes and not only are you wasting precious food but you are being sacrilegious while you do it!’
He was too harsh. Martha burst into tears and looked at him with sad, lost eyes. Tears streamed down her face making tracks in the sauce that was smeared over her cheeks. Wycliffe sulked. Reuben tore his hands through his hair. This was his life now, trying to manage the children, trying to hold a job to feed them, trying to keep his faith.
He only ever said Alice had died. He never told anyone that they had gone to Queenscliff, that he had expected it to make everything better, that she had been so consumed by disappointment that in the middle of his sermon she had got up, handed the new baby to the woman sitting next to her and quietly walked out. They had found her clothes neatly folded in a pile on the beach, her shoes sitting side by side on top, but they had not found her. Not in the days nor the weeks that came after, and he hoped that the sea had carried her back to England. The churchwomen in Melbourne had tried to help him, they pitched in and cared for the children while he arranged the funeral, but then he had told them one by one that he didn’t need their child-minding and their house-cleaning because he needed space to make decisions. He couldn’t hear anything other than the rushing of waves and needed to listen in silence and find out what should be next. Should he give everything up, write to his mother to ask for the passage home and get back on the boat?
One night he heard the children thank God for him as they said their bedtime prayers, and he knew he had to stay strong because he was all they had now. But he couldn’t pray himself and he couldn’t hear God’s voice, which was just as well because he was angry with God and sometimes with Alice. He had had enough death in the war. Why did God think it was okay to send more into his own home? Or was it the other side of God? Was it Satan who had sent him more death? Either way he wouldn’t stand for it. How could Alice do this to him? Leave him alone with the children?
So he’d written to his mother. He sealed the envelope and put it on the kitchen mantle to post the next day and just as he had the children in their coats ready to leave the house (and that alone had taken him an hour to manage) for the post office, Mister Wallace, the secretary at the Baptist Union, had opened the picket gate and walked up the path. Reuben told the children to take off their coats and go inside and put the baby in the cot while Mister Wallace told him that a church in a country town was considering him as a replacement for their minister who had finally retired after far too many years in the post.
Three days later Mister Wallace came back again to tell him that the deacons had decided on him and that he could go as soon as he felt ready. Mister Wallace told him there would be a double-storey brick manse and a regular weekly stipend. There was a public school around the corner for the children, just over the road, really, in Dana Street, and that would keep them out of his hair most days, though he had no suggestions regarding the baby.
The letter home didn’t get posted and Reuben decided this was God talking to him and looking after him. Perhaps he would forgive God and they could get on with things. He packed up the house in Fitzroy Street and packed up the children and took the train to Ballarat.
Two weeks later it was clear the decision had been a mistake. Nothing was better at all. Reuben squatted on his haunches in the middle of the catastrophe in the kitchen, put his head in his hands and cried. Even though he and the children had only been in the manse a fortnight, Martha had already scribbled on the walls of
