A widowed mother showed up at a reclusive old woman’s gate with two children and nowhere to sleep—then told her, “You need someone to care for you as much as we need a home.”

Chapter 9

Spring came to Reefton in a rush, the way it always does: one morning the hills were still brown, and the next the whole valley had turned green overnight, as if the earth had simply decided it was finished waiting.

Elsie had her room open now.

It began with the window. Nora opened it one Tuesday to run the dust out, and the wind came in and moved the curtains that had hung still for eighteen years, and Elsie stood in the doorway and watched them move and did not ask for them to be stopped. Then the beds were stripped, one at a time, and washed, and put back with fresh quilts that smelled of sun instead of dust. The rocking horse came out of the box and stood on the windowsill. Edie’s dress was taken from its nail, folded, and laid on her bed — folded, not hung — because, as Elsie explained to no one in particular, a dress on a nail is a relic, but a dress on a bed is a girl who has just stepped out.

Ruby Fitzpatrick— Callahan — came to call it “the good room” and took to sleeping in the spare bed on warm afternoons, which Elsie pretended to disapprove of for exactly as long as it took Ruby to fall asleep. Then she would stand in the doorway and watch the child breathe, and her face would do that thing it did now, the strange and difficult thing it had never learned to do smoothly, the late-learned thing, the thing that anyone watching would have called a look of love.

The cow grew fat and placid. The yard fence, crooked as it was, held the whole summer without complaint. Nora planted a kitchen garden where the grass had been beaten bare — carrots, beans, a row of potatoes under the good soil by the tank — and Elsie, propped on her walker, shouted instructions she did not need, and Nora took them with a straight face, and Ruby uprooted the seedlings at least three times before she learned which end went down.

They heard, in July, that the Varley place had taken on a new station hand and his wife, and that the shack by the creek had been burned for new timber — and Ruby heard it too, and said nothing, and Elsie saw her leave the rag doll under the pillow before she slept that night, where the wind could not take it, and Elsie said nothing either. Some lessons needed no telling.

On her seventy-ninth birthday, Elsie asked Nora to walk her into town. It took an hour and a half each way, and Elsie grumbled the entire time, and Nora ignored her with the patience of a woman who had carried an eighty-kilo husband across a paddock, and when they reached the solicitor’s office, Elsie went in alone.

She came out an hour later, seventy-nine years old, and sat on the step of the veranda that fronted the main street and watched the town go by, and a great many people looked at her and did not recognize her, and one old man took off his hat, and she nodded back.

“What did you do in there?” Nora asked, gently, as they walked home.

“I put my house in order,” Elsie said. “It’s a small house. It didn’t take much.”

That autumn, they buried a fourth person at Reston: old man Wheeldon, who had lived alone on the far ridge and been found by the mailman with his letters still unopened on the table. Elsie went to the funeral on Nora’s arm. She stood at the grave under the ironbark tree, looked at the fresh mound, and then looked across at her three crosses, weed-free and white in the winter light, and she said nothing, but Nora saw her press her lips together, once.

On the way home, Elsie said: “I knew his wife. When I buried Bert, she was the neighbour who helped me carry the coffin.”

And then, after a long silence: “She’s gone now, and no one carried hers but the hired men.”

That was all she said about it. But that night she poured them both a finger of Bert’s bottle — a second bottle, though no one had asked where it came from — and she raised her cup to the window, and to the light burning in the shed, and to the sound of a six-year-old’s voice reciting nonsense to a sleeping baby, and she said:

“To an open door.”