prose

A Resourceful Woman

Story 2

The airplane began to slowly descend over the city. The sky was metalic. It hung over her like the nickel plated casing of a bullet. A tin-can outfit she thought, sitting by the window, clutching her belongings, an Australian passport, four children, and one large leather bag. Maria was glad it was a short flight from Darwin, the children getting restless on long journeys. Now without her aide Madame Lim it was hard to keep track of them. Her youngest daughter Salishia, fourteen months old, started to take an interest in the man sitting next to her. He continually flapped out his newspaper and coughed loudly. The baby chuckled at the rustling movement of the paper, and clutching a page, pulled it down towards her mouth. Maria, feeling a reddening change in her face, kept saying, 'sorry, sorry, Sir!' When it got too much, she made Billy walk the baby up and down the aisle, telling him to hold her in, and to keep both her hands tight.

Maria bundled the children through the airport crowds. She thought of Alfredo for a moment, seeing him crushed for the last time in an angry mob of villagers; mainly refugees beating the air with machetes and sticks. That was 1995, before they escaped. This time he would be a hero, especially in Billy’s eyes, and she worried that her son too might take up the cause. He was old enough to watch news reports, see newspaper updates of the struggles.

Tun and Costos greeted her at the carousel.

disaster, even know a baby’s name before its christening. Often on her séance or Taro nights, acquaintances gulped, hand over mouth, dumbstruck by her revelations. Her daughter Tarwater could not understand either of these things, or why her mother made sudden jumps against a door in fright. Tarwater hadn’t spoken a word since birth. The old woman believed in the spirits, but the mysteries of the body had stumped her. The intellect was something she could lock into, and certain kinds of intelligentsia like authors and their books were especially attractive. Often Dickens, Woolfe and Eliot would fall out of her bookcase, telling her something. She tuned in to Hemmingway and Faulkner and with female authors who wrote about the daily struggles with a disabled daughter. It was Flannery O’Connor’s The Life You Save Might Be Your Own that proved real to her. She was that old woman, with no husband, trying to raise a weakling of a daughter, and like Lucynell would not give her up for any casket of jewels. No matter how many times she had called on the spirits for help, or how hard she rubbed potions on Tarwater’s arms, or mouthed words into her daughter’s thirty-year-old face, nothing came. And like the old lady in O’Connor’s story, Strawberry worried about who would take care of Tarwater after she was dry bones in a leafless ground.

In the darkness of their hotel room, with Tarwater sound asleep, Strawberry thought about her asbestos cottage back home, her aviary and nextdoor collecting her mail. She thought about her last working night, that poor woman's grieving whimper. Tun and Costos, her Timorese neighbours had shuffled their friend in that night asking for a special séance for poor sweet Maria Reinado. Maria had sat twisting her hijab, this way and that, waiting to hear Alfredo’s voice, dead now for one month.

Story 1 - Women in Dark Town

Now on their three week holiday in Dili, Strawberry never made the connection. She never read a newspaper, nor did she own a television believing that its hollow efforts interfered with the spirits. By all accounts she was ignorant of world news. On the plane, however, the passengers had been warned of the recent uprising; rebels shooting Dr Jose Ramos-Horta. Three bullets, they said, had stamped their mark, one lodging deep into his lung. The old woman had often helped young men recover from gunshot wounds. Unlawful though her operations were, they were usually victims of some criminal activity. They were tense times, hand wringing days of watching someone in pain. Her sympathetic bones feeling her own pain from a recent hip operation. The age thing terrifed her. She held the view that she was a young woman, at least in her head; still wearing seventies' spurs and jangles, her hair long slung back to her waist. She wore flowers under large shell clips, played music from an era she never wanted to leave.

'Tarwarter,' she said, knowing she'd get that sloping smile, 'we have a job to do, and you're going to help me.'

A sly look came over Tarwater's face. Brilliant! She knows the routine now, thought Strawberry. They would dismiss them at first, especially burning matches towards someone’s skin. But she had the usual plan, producing letters of praise from successful patients. Convincing the Australian army medics that she could extract the bullet swiftly from the President was going to be harder, but time was brimming like a full bucket. Better to patch up this Nobel Prize winner quickly than to lose him for all time.

Before putting her plans into place, Strawberry made one more call to her brother. She almost wished she could forget him, and in spite of previous ugly calls this time she told him she didn't want that long climb into the hills on some zany rescue mission. She was busy, in town of course, and certainly there was no automobile heading towards his village.

'I'll pay for a car,' he said. 'And bring me two cartons of cigarettes, groceries and some blankets. There's nothing up here, the rebels have taken the lot.'

'I've been told to wait three days, Craten. What about your vegetable garden?'

'I can't live on turnips. I need meat, chicken. I'm not much good at walking anymore. I've...I've put on weight.'

It had shocked Strawberry the last time she waved goodbye to him at the airport. A drifting soul, he'd grown large with his voracious appetite. In the airport lounge he drank a litre of Coke, smoked cigarettes, and scoffed a box of doughnuts. Strawberry scolded him for being such a sloth. One of the seven deadly sins recently introduced by the Pope. ‘What would the Pontiff think?’ she said, and now discussing his problem over the telephone, she added. ‘Man, I don’t know what I can do. Perhaps what you really need is a beating on that big fat rump of yours.’

It was a tricky time, especially since Strawberry felt the tension between Saturn and Uranus just after the eclipse. Here she was in a different hemisphere, with new tensions resisting her harmonious way of helping others. And with the tight security in Dili, and daily curfew from 8pm til 6am, she was already feeling restless being told to stay put. She needed a car arranged, not animals. ‘Don’t even take donkeys,' the authorities told the women. 'They will snatch them out from underneath you. Remain in the hotel.’

It was time for more wringing of her bony hands. Craten's last words of 'cigarettes' and 'chocolate' flinging themselves around in her head.

So, a little time to kill, a little bullet to lift. Strawberry patted the head of the sweetest girl in the world. That evening she rang the Colonel. Instead of talking about Craten's predicament, she indicated that she was a friend of Dr. Ramos-Horta in Australia and wanted to see him. 'Mother is going to help a panther, before that feral pole-cat,' she said, creasing her face into a wink at Tarwater.

She rooted in her suitcase for the box. Ah, that beautiful teal box, coated in sequins, dried crab shells from the Adriatic. It was full of homemade potions, tin-foils, dried chicken legs, soft clay marbles, and four blue & white evil eyes. Strawberry liked working with her evil eyes, focusing the first one straight into the mirrored image of her patient. The marijuana, grown in her home garden, was used for medical purposes she told the families. Of course, it was disguised in such a dry paste it was like chewing gum, but without the minty taste, more like aniseed. She'd slipped that in.

That evening, Strawberry May and Tarwater entered the compound with the secret code given to her by the Colonel.

Soldiers engulfed every passageway and foyer. Strawberry jingled her bracelets, waving at them. 'Get out of the way. You're like a group of vultures hanging around. The poor Doctor has no room to breathe.'

After ten minutes of laying out her karmic lines, potions from the box, and brushing Ramos-Horta's forehead with a chicken leg, the door opened stiffly. Colonel Natches stepped in, blustering, threatening the old woman with resounding accusations of hocus-pocus.

'You are devil woman. Jose never been to Perth, only living in Sydney. What kind of trickery are you causing us, devil woman?'

In the mist of false tears, the old woman lifted her suitcase, grabbing hold of her disabled daughter. 'Fifty seven years,' she said, 'and I get accused of coming from the devil. I am a healer Colonel, Sir, whatever your name is. You have no faith.'

Two men in green overalls and peaked caps marched in and descended on the two ladies, picking them up by their shirt collars, and shuffling them through the doorway.

'I want my potions, and chicken leg back or you'll rue the day you messed with Strawberry May Alcock,' she yelled, wriggling her right shoulder back and forth, from the man's clutch.

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