The red wheelbarrow
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Maria Takolander
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Maria Takolander's biography and other articles by this writer
I heard a growl, deep and low, and then a yelp. I had been lying awake – I always tried to stay awake when Dad was drunk and angry – and when I heard the noise I got out of bed, crossed the hallway and pushed open Mum and Dad's bedroom door. The light was on, and the room looked as if it was shining. Mum and Dad were sitting up in bed, the dark veneer of the bed head framing them from above the waist and the white sheet messed up around their legs. Dad's mouth was smeared with blood. It was on his teeth. He was panting. Mum was looking into her lap, where she was squeezing her left fist with her right hand. I could see her left thumb sticking out, the flesh hanging off and blood streaming down.
She wouldn't let me drive her to the hospital this time. It wasn't bad enough, she said. I got her out of bed, led her into the bathroom and started cleaning the wound with wet clumps of toilet paper. She sat on the tiled edge of the apricot-coloured bathtub in her short nightie, swaying and crying a little. I noticed her breasts under the threadbare cotton of the white nightie, and I saw that her thighs, lean and hairless, were smeared with blood. She was closer to my age than to Dad's. She wiped her nose with her free hand. She had once told me that she had cried on her wedding day at the registry office in Tallinn. Even though Dad was from the country, Mum said, she had been the naive one.
When I'd finished bandaging her thumb, I sat next to her on the tiles around the bath and put my arm around her shoulders. She stopped crying and leaned into me. It was a hot night, and my hand on the skin of her arm soon felt clammy. Even though she was looking into her lap, I could smell the cask wine on her breath. I could see the dried blood on her thighs, and I noticed a line of snot drying on the forefinger of her right hand. I thought about wetting some more toilet paper and wiping it over her thighs. I looked up and saw that the old full-length mirror on the wall opposite was reflecting everything we did.
When I helped her back into bed, the light was still on and Dad was snoring. The blood had dried on the skin around his mouth, and his face was lined and whiskery. Mum smiled up at me from her pillow, pulling the sheet over her breasts to her chin with one hand. ‘Go to bed now, my son,' she said in her accented English. Then she closed her eyes. She had long brown hair. I looked at her for a while longer and then at Dad. The maroon curtains above the bed head had come unhitched from the track in places. I flicked the light switch on my way out.
In bed, staring into the darkness of my room, I started to think about ‘The Red Wheelbarrow'. That day I had been to a first-year lecture on the poetry of William Carlos Williams. The lecturer, an American called Julian Raphael who had thinning hair and wore black-rimmed glasses, had started the lecture by reading in his heavy and careful drawl: ‘So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.'
WHEN HE WAS drunk Dad often said, ‘Every dog has its day.' In the evenings, he would sit at the kitchen table, swallowing the beer straight from one brown longneck after another. Mum drank cask wine out of a tumbler – to keep him company, she said. Sometimes they played canasta as they drank, but typically they just drank. I usually sat in my bedroom, doing homework or watching my old TV. Mum and Dad didn't talk much, but after Dad started to get drunk he liked to repeat phrases. ‘Every dog has its day' was one of them. He also told Mum, ‘You're a slut' and ‘You're an idiot.' As the evenings went on, he tended to get louder until sometimes he was screaming and spitting on the tablecloth. Bottles were smashed down on the old wooden table beneath, or sometimes thrown at the wall or on the floor.
Earlier in the year, when I started my literature degree at university, I looked up the phrase ‘every dog has its day' in a dictionary of literary quotations in the university library and found it attributed to an English book that sounded academic and that I doubted Dad had ever read. I had never seen Dad read. Among the few books that Mum and Dad had in the house were my old Jacaranda atlas from school and two fat English dictionaries. Mum kept them on top of the fridge for when she did the crosswords in the newspaper in the mornings. There was also a set of encyclopaedias that Mum kept stacked behind her shoes in her bedroom cupboard since Dad, one night, had torn some of the pages and covers from their spines.
I thought that the phrase about dogs was probably about revenge, but I didn't know why Dad wanted revenge. I didn't know on whom he wanted revenge. He never spoke about his life in Estonia. I once asked him what it was like to live in a communist country. He said it was like any other life.
Mum told me the stories that her father, a schoolteacher and a widower, had told her about the war: how his father was among the thousands deported to labour camps by the Soviets and never seen again; how the Germans brought in Jews, planning to use the Baltic countries for their extermination plans. Things were already different, Mum said, by the time she was growing up in the 1970s and '80s. When she got her first job, at the Tallinn Central Post Office in 1990, formal independence was only a year off. That's when she met Dad. She fell pregnant, they got married, and then they left for Australia. Her father had died, and she didn't have anything holding her there.
On the mantelpiece in the lounge room there is a photograph of Mum and Dad on their wedding day at the registry office. Dad was already forty years old, but his blond hair is parted to the side, and he is looking at Mum with large eyes. Mum is looking at the camera. She is half his age and beautiful.
There is another photograph on the mantelpiece – the only other one we have of Dad in Estonia – which was taken when he was younger. Dad worked as a mail carrier, and he is wearing the uniform of the Estonian postal worker. He has a crew cut, and he is squinting and pointing a pistol at an unseen target in the surrounding forest. There is a large black dog sitting on the grass next to him with its head raised, and there is a hessian sack on the ground behind.
Mum said that Dad turned on her when they arrived in Australia. She couldn't account for the change. She didn't know much about Dad's life before they met, and she knew little about his childhood. What she did know was that, like her, he was an only child. He had both parents, but his father, Mum said, was often away. She also told me that Dad's upbringing was primitive. She used the word as if it was dirty. He had lived in a house in the woods. He had slept on a mattress filled with hay. During winter, he had shat with the animals in the barn, where it was warm. It had been his job, she told me, to kill chickens for the table.