The silent majority
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Melissa Lucashenko
The cemetery where Jo lived and worked was an oasis of mature tallow-woods and ironbarks, surrounded on two sides by thick scrub and on a third by the neat gardens of houses set well back from the quiet street. Dappled light fell through the high tree canopy, splashing the hillside with gold in the early and the late of each day. Ruined headstones were scattered across the three acres in regimental patches: RCs. Methodists. Salvation Army. Most of the memorials to white lives were old, and a few ancient by Australian standards, mossy and unreadable except for tantalising remnant dates or letters. In those first few months, Jo had often paused to try and decipher them, wondering whether...oc...elly, b.18...d. 1928 had been a man or a woman. Was Bain...Mc...ett lying next to his wife or his child in that double grave? These stories that had once been so important to the town, that had needed carving in granite: where were they now?
After those first months, though, Jo let the stories be. Wherever they were, it wasn't here, not anymore. And there was something about the cemetery, too – the quiet, maybe, or just the inescapable sense of mortality – that put things into another perspective altogether. After enough time among the silent majority, Jo discovered, you found yourself worrying less about tomorrow, and more about today. There are so many tomorrows, after all. How can a person possibly keep track of all of them?
Jo's previous life and its discontents had faded over time to an intermittent blur that existed only outside these few acres on the outskirts of town. What remained inside the Weldmesh fence was Jo, Ellen, their two dogs, their donger, an occasional wallaby, and a funeral or two a week to remind Jo why she was allowed to live here and keep the place looking what white people deemed respectable.
Jo put the Honda in gear, lowered the blades and got down to work in a noisy cloud of dust and grass clippings. As she mowed up and down the rows, she reflected on her life as a single parent and groundswoman. She didn't have a whole lot of visitors at work, naturally. Too many mooki there, sis, the local blackfellas muttered in disdain, and quickly changed the subject. Ah, it's not the dead that worry me, she'd reply airily, it's the living – which was mostly true, though if she was totally honest she wasn't ever in a huge hurry to investigate unusual noises outside once the sun slipped down behind the mental-health unit across the road. But those noises had only happened a few times, and so far it was always the Mullum kids trying hard to lose their virginity under a full moon – who, when surprised by Jo suddenly looming out from behind William Protheroe (1910-1967), generally showed a terrific turn of speed coupled with a mastery of Anglo-Saxon nothing short of remarkable.
Jo paused in her train of thought, wondering if Cecil John Bennett and Thomas Edward Compton had really been close enough to warrant living beside each other till kingdom come. Not that everyone in the paddock was dead, mind you. Maahnd yew! Ooh, no, no sirree. Thelma Maria Farrugia (1910-1981) was apparently only sleeping, and she was a pretty fucking sound sleeper at that, since Maria hadn't noticeably stirred in the eighteen months that Jo had been mowing around her granite monument with a six-horsepower Honda that needed its muffler looking at, if Trev at Farmcare could ever get around to ordering the bloody part.
No, the Goories might look away and suck their teeth in alarm at the ghosts, but slashing and brush-cutting and keeping an eye on which flowers needed chucking in the composter suited Jo well enough. She had her mates in Ocean Shores and in Bruns. Ellen seemed about as satisfied as any clever, artistic kid was going to get in a small country town. And if Jo missed the excitement of the band, well, all good things came to an end. It wasn't as if she'd done a lot of gigs the past few years anyway, not with Gerry around being Eeyore and dragging her into his tight white world as much as he possibly could.