The Quiet Truth: a haunting domestic drama full of suspense Page 12

Whatever happened between the women, Polly left Kelly’s. I was drinking worse than ever before. It was maybe the next day I heard them both packing Polly’s things. I was no doubt drunk. I should have gotten up and stopped her. Although, I couldn’t have begged for Polly to stay in front of Olga. I was very conflicted. I wanted Polly to leave more than I needed her to stay.

  I think I knew Polly should go too before I did something terrible. I had never truly wanted Polly or her pregnancy. They weren’t part of the plan I had for my future.

  The mess of it was my fault and still I did nothing to make things better. Sadness filled me, though, when whisky didn’t and for a long while the drinking was all I cared about. Me and whisky.

  My belly burned on as I muttered to an imagined Ella and I promised her the sun, moon and the stars. It was easy to swear oaths to people who couldn’t hear them.

  31

  Charlie Quinn

  Rhonda gets off the couch to make some lunch and doesn’t turn off the recorder. Does she expect me to do it? I think about asking her. She seems angry now, thumping the items out of the fridge and sighing heavily.

  ‘I told you I was a bad man.’

  ‘You just were horrible to those poor women. You never told me what they said in their own words. Not once. It’s as if they are not important. You used those women and abused them too! I cannot stay quiet about your behaviour in this session, Charlie. I just cannot nod and smile and pretend this is okay.’

  ‘Polly left. I believe she went back to the hotel. Olga told me that she married the man her father wanted and they lived happily there. I believed that and was glad of it. She was safe. There is a happy ending.’

  ‘I will find Polly,’ Rhonda announces. ‘What was the name of the hotel? She might still be living. Cedric might have written more letters to you and she might have them to this very day. Normal people don’t destroy letters. Polly might have kept them.’

  She aims to hurt my feelings with her tone. I’ve never been normal or followed the rules of life, therefore her insult doesn’t hit its mark.

  ‘I never saw Polly again and I got no other letters from home.’

  ‘We will look into the name of that hotel and making contact with Polly.’

  ‘I don’t see why we should.’

  ‘And Olga Kelly, is it? What became of her? Why is the farm named Kelly and Tom O’Brien was the main man?’

  ‘Tom O’Brien was married to Old Mrs Kelly. I suppose she wanted the Kelly name kept on the land.’

  ‘And Olga? Where is she?’

  ‘All will be become clear in time.’

  ‘You just rattle off years of your life and expect me to accept it with no questions, with no interest in the women you’ve hurt.’

  ‘I should’ve known that you would take the woman’s side to this. I’m disappointed, Rhonda. I saw you as an objective ear. I told you I was not all sweetness and light. Why are you hostile now? I’ve told you worse things, surely?’

  She busies herself with making scrambled eggs.

  ‘What part of this is bothering you the most? Does Joe beat you?’ I ask her. ‘Is that it? Something about this story has hit a nerve?’

  This silences the whisking and she takes time to think before she whispers, ‘Of course Joe doesn’t beat me.’

  ‘He’s had an affair then? Didn’t he want Faye?’

  Rhonda doesn’t answer. I can hear Faye’s cries from the next room and it changes everything. Rhonda disappears in a flurry of annoyance to get her. When they return Rhonda is very subdued and Faye is all ready for playing. The noise of the battering of dollies off the floor is very distracting. We start to eat the meal Rhonda has made without talking.

  ‘There is something you want to say,’ I mumble between mouthfuls. ‘I know you are helping me since I got here and you’ve been more than good. I can tell that there has been something bothering you now.’

  She eats and passes bits of bread to Faye who smiles and babbles to herself.

  ‘A problem shared is a problem halved,’ I say. ‘You’re listening to me and it’s making you angry.’ I stop and wait for her to deny that. She doesn’t. ‘You’re unhappy at the way I treated Polly and Olga…’

  ‘I…’ she says, taking a deep breath. ‘It’s not that as such. It upsets me to see things that worry me in your past. That’s all. There’s something I’m ashamed of in the back of my mind all the time and I’m not sure I should say any more.’

  ‘Joe is bad to you,’ I say, knowing he’s too soft to be a brute.

  ‘Of course he isn’t.’

  ‘You’re about to cry. Tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘I’ve no right to judge anyone. No right to think that I’m better than you.’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘You felt trapped. You ran or didn’t want to stay,’ she says with a stammer and pauses. ‘I can see why and I worry that Joe feels the same way.’

  ‘Joe is a good man.’

  ‘I still worry.’

  ‘About what exactly?’ I ask.

  ‘I had Faye to keep Joe with me,’ Rhonda admits suddenly. ‘I don’t want it mentioned again.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Once I am cleared up here you will have to go on with this story. It is Thursday and tomorrow evening is Ella’s interview.’

  ‘Joe said he’d find a way to get me to see her.’

  ‘And he is a man of his word.’

  I notice that Rhonda wears no wedding ring. How I missed it before is beyond me.

  ‘And he cares and provides for his family,’ I say. ‘I can see why you wanted him as a father for your child. I’m sure he’s glad to be with you both?’

  Rhonda closes her eyes and holds back some tears. It always amazes me how we take other people’s pain back to our own. This has nothing to do with Rhonda, and now I feel I should be consoling her. It does grate on the old nerves. I resume my seat on the couch after taking the noisiest toys away from toddler fists. Faye ignores me, which is interesting. She, too, has had enough of me.

  Settling into the soft fabric, the recorder still plays and I return to my cabin on the Kellys’ farm in Manitoba.

  Tom O’Brien was not a man to shirk responsibility therefore he wasn’t one to hand over the reins of the business either. He was known as Mrs Kelly’s man. This didn’t bother him. Tom was sure enough of himself to deal with that. Gus and him were at loggerheads most days about some management issue. Like I avoided Father back home, I started avoiding the disputes between them. Olga was stand-offish following Polly’s departure and I stayed away from her as she might have said anything in the heat of some big family dispute.

  It mustn’t have bothered me all that much, because I still took off on the usual drives and stayed away for months. A year passed without much incident. I was without a woman’s company, and the bottle did me. The world was in turmoil, too, with talk of another world war. With it came the rise of more reasons for men to sacrifice themselves. Nothing could have seemed further away from the prairies and I was grateful for the grasses, the wild flowers and the sight of cattle roaming free. There were fun times playing tricks on each other and horsing about like children.

  The round-up of the herds happened twice a year and these were the most tense times on any ranch. All hands were called on for the roping, branding and sorting. Tempers were high and patience was low. Gus was never good with leadership. He got very riled at the men and even though I was now a good hand on a horse and an excellent cow-poker and butcher, his wrath centred on trying to make me look foolish.

  We’d come to blows many times. Neither of us had won the fight. Both came out of the frenzied fist-throwing after a few minutes, with unnecessary cuts, bruises and bloodied noses. It was not a surprise to see us tussling in the dirt. The other men just walked over or passed the two idiots punching each other.

  My popularity was not high on the ranch either. The men resented that I still had a cabin to myself, when some of them were longer employed. I think
there was awareness of me laying with the boss’s wife. They didn’t like that I had knocked Polly about a bit either. Polly had been kind to the men who got measles, tuberculosis, or ailments. She’d nursed them back to health.

  I found it hard to make true friends, and although I’d have drinks or jokes with the men, I preferred time away on my own. For a young fellow under thirty, this was odd. For an Irishman it was even more than unusual. People don’t like those unlike themselves. I had held on to my Irish accent and way of speaking and this also seemed a bone of contention. They wished for Hammy to either be a jovial, Irish buck or assimilate quickly and become a Canadian cowboy.

  Gus Kelly and I were possibly bunched together as two pains-in-the-butt. The men put up with us, because we were both favourites of Tom’s and everyone respected Tom O’Brien.

  Tom was ageing well and showed no signs of slowing down in his work or thoughts. He could ride a horse better than any man I’ve ever known and he was fair and broad-minded. Nothing seemed to rise his anger and other large ranch owners travelled many miles to ask him for advice or to buy his stock face to face. He was considered a man of standing and a decent boss. I was lucky that he had a soft spot for me – the underdog.

  Charlie Quinn had plans and ambitions. He wasn’t going to be the odd, orphan Irish boy forever.

  32

  Rhonda Irwin

  When I told Charlie my secret it was shocking how relieved I felt.

  Three years ago I stopped taking the pill. I stayed quiet about it. There was no lie or trickery. Joe was reluctant to commit and I was nearing thirty. He never asked about birth control and he never blamed me when it had apparently failed. I didn’t consider it as a lie until it was me who felt trapped. Then, I floundered about what I had done to us both, and to Faye.

  ‘Rhonda makes plans and in fairness she does stick to them,’ Mother says often. ‘She has ambitions, lord love her, that’s why she gets depressed. Like, she needed published and that happened. It wasn’t a great success and then she wanted to have a family by the time she was thirty. And, well, Joe didn’t propose. Is that it, dear?’

  Thankfully, Mother hadn’t started this conversation at the dinner for Charlie. Joe always asks her to stop putting me down and she listens to him. The usual plethora of sentences are said by the time she is silenced. The quietness around things can be worse than what is said.

  ‘Women nowadays want it all,’ she’ll add. ‘In my day, you learned to be content with your lot. You waited and worked hard to find a man. Then if a healthy baby and a lovely home came you were grateful – what more do you young women want?’

  ‘Thank Christ my mother is long gone,’ Joe will reply. ‘She’d tell you that women should achieve greatness and shouldn’t give up on it just because they have children.’

  ‘She was a hippy before her time.’

  We all ignore that Joe’s mother committed suicide. Even Joe’s father does. He’ll sit alone at family gatherings and smile in all the right places.

  ‘I suppose you learned to accept things when Rhonda’s father left?’ Joe asked when Mother started the tirades of my failings just after Faye was born. There had been an explosion of anger. It had been weeks before she spoke to anyone in the family. We all knew not to mention this again. At the time, I resented Joe for provoking her. Looking back, her absence had given me some headspace when Faye was tiny and it also hid the home truths she pokes out.

  ‘I’ll never leave you,’ Joe promises regularly. Still my heart throbs with guilt. ‘Stop trying to make everything wonderful, Rhonda. It is what it is. Much as I hate to quote your mother, “we must learn to be content”.’

  Listening to Charlie these last few days, I wonder did I trap Joe and I. Was his reluctance to commit because he still loved another woman? Is he waiting on someone else to come along? I want to be the one true person who would totally fulfil him. I need Joe to marry me. Desperately. Ireland in the 1990s is still not ready for us to be living in sin. I cannot understand how Joe just won’t commit. If only we could get past this.

  Charlie talks of loving Ella yet he settled down to decades with others. Look what happened to that way of doing things. There are parallels to be drawn between the past and the present and it’s hard to fathom what to make of all of our lives.

  My cousin, Margie, has given me more information. She dropped papers and photographs through the letterbox, without ringing to say she was passing. I hadn’t heard her at the door either. I’ve been argumentative and she slinked away before there was more of the same. I’m becoming more like my mother every day and that sticks in the gut too.

  ‘Charlie is somehow connected to Ella O’Brien,’ I warned Mother on the phone earlier. ‘He’s not told me everything and that’s why he’s home.’

  ‘Huh! Rubbish. He came home to see what money was left to him. Like all those foreigners, he came back to see what he could get his hands on.’

  That was all that was said on the subject and I moved on to meeting Faye’s new childminder and how well it went. There was no point in lingering on the truth. Like the rest of us, she will learn soon enough what Ella O’Brien has to say.

  33

  Charlie Quinn

  It took me a bit of time to win Olga back into my arms. I spent many a cold hour waiting for her in the meat store. I was still butchering, and doing it well. I got more and more work packing the meat from our best animals for the homestead, surrounding neighbours, and places in the town. Olga started supplying them to fill her days and to use the new truck Tom bought for the ranch. With my arms bloodied and the stink of death around us, Olga and I kissed for the first time in a long while.

  ‘There’s something sinister about you, Hammy,’ Olga said. ‘I know I shouldn’t go near you, and that makes me want to all the more.’

  She liked the movies. She watched any film she could find. I was one of those unsuitable men women always fell for. I didn’t try to be, mind you. In those days, I never watched such nonsense.

  Olga, though, relished those clicking reels of film. Being a plain woman in the wilds, surrounded with filth and men, I suppose it was only natural for her to escape into the glamour on the screen.

  ‘You’re married. I seem to like married women,’ I pointed out that day after years of ignoring this fact myself. ‘Are you with any others like this?’

  She flung back her palm and slapped me square across the face. It stung and the knife on the counter looked interesting for a few seconds.

  ‘Of course not!’ she squealed and crunched her bosom against me. It was all very cinematic. I see that now. At the time I thought her a little deranged. She knew what I did to Polly and she provoked me by slapping me first.

  ‘None of us like Gus,’ she whispered in my ear, as if it were a secret. ‘He bought me from my family as I was one of the first English-speaking, hardy Russian women to come to these parts. He doesn’t want me working and making improvements. Tom stands up for us and I know Gus is as mad as hell about me driving the truck and making money. He’s not giving me a son, and that’s my fault too!’

  I didn’t want to point out that I had failed in that respect as well.

  ‘I wish we could live in your cabin together. Let me leave him?’

  I flung her away. ‘Are you stupid? I make good money and am paid by your husband. Do you think we’ll just move into the cabin together and I’ll stay in my job?’

  Years before, Tom’s wife, Old Mrs Kelly, died in one of the worst measles outbreaks. Gus and Olga waited for the respected Tom O’Brien to find a suitable woman to replace Gus’s mother. The Kelly name on the gate was in jeopardy. Tom was no blood to the land itself and Gus spat this at him on more than one occasion in arguments.

  With all of this in the background, when I saw Gus fall from the hay loft it was easy enough to let him die. I did not get him any help.

  Rhonda gasps, like Gus did.

  The metal plough broke his fall and possibly his back. He twitched about a bit, like
a dying animal and turned to face upwards. Running for assistance was futile and there was no way in hell I felt bad about Gus Kelly’s death.

  The mourning was fake. Few cared why or how he fell. If they did it was put down to a terrible twist of fate. Tom clung to me at the graveside. He gave me the biggest hug I ever got from a man and said, ‘I’ll need you now more than ever, Hammy. More than ever, my boy.’

  I’m smiling now as much as I did that day. I was Tom O’Brien’s boy. The fires of hell were a long way off. That hug was more than money or land. I was no one’s boy, since my own mother died.

  As Tom needed a son, the drinking subsided. I was also taken in to eat an odd meal in the big house with Olga and Tom. We would discuss the plans ahead. I always play a long game. Tom liked that I wasn’t rash and impatient like Gus used to be.

  ‘Now Gus’s mother was a true pioneer,’ Tom told Olga and I. ‘Mrs Kelly staked her claim out here as a woman and started her homestead alone, with one rusty rifle and a mangy dog. She could shoot anything from a galloping horse. It was unusual for women to be allowed to own land, and she wore breeches.’ He enjoyed the tale. I could tell by the gleam around him that he admired and revered her more than lusted after her. ‘I was like you, Hammy. Young and good-looking then, with strong arms and an energy where it mattered. She was spoiled before I met her. Taken against her will by some brute. Gus was a toddler and she needed a husband. Things were changing and it was necessary for her to make a business arrangement with a man like me.’

  Tom waited until Olga was in the kitchen to add, ‘If Olga had a child with Gus, I would have been left with nothing. Everything was down on paper. You need your own papers now, son. You need to get working on your future.’

  There was no need for Tom to tell me this as I’d thought of little else. One of the reasons I wished to be sober was to have a clear working head for the next steps in my plans. Getting proper documentation was going to be difficult and this bothered the ambitions I harboured.