Aunt Jessica and the Ostrich-Tamer

They were not ostriches at all. They were emus. Like all wild things they were greedy and dignified, like Aunt Jessica, who ran away. 

Nothing could beat them. They were faster than anything, swifter than a swooping magpie. Their Iegs scrambled as they peered out of their miniature skulls. Their tails bounced like bustles as they ran, while their necks floated through the air. When they walked they pointed their toes downward. They were as elegant as two tight-laced ladies glaring savagely through their lorgnettes.

Aunt Jessica loved the emus. She brought them up as if they were her own, raised them from abandoned eggs and kept them with her when they were young.

The emu chicks slept in a basket. She sat up late by the fire embroidering handkerchiefs or knitting socks to keep them company, long after Uncle George had gone to bed.

Aunt Jessica fed the fire because its flames told her a story. She liked the red light in the darkness. She liked its hunger.

She placed the pieces of the emu’s blue-green eggs on the mantle piece. She gave them sweet milk with water, stroked their necks and smoothed their baby feathers with her tortoise-shell comb. When they were older, she nurtured their emu ferocity, let them run wild and lured them back again with sugar-coated biscuits, which only led them to suppose that there was nothing they could not have.

Aunt Jessica called them Alexander and Cleopatra, to show that she was capable of literary illusion, to establish a connection with ancient civilizations, to prove that her library had a meaning, even so far from the city, down among the scraggy Gippsland bush. She called them ostriches to conjure aristocratic hats and foreign places, so that her fingers might reach out and touch the hot smell of Africa, or the heel of a leopard as it vanished into the dust.

Alexander and Cleopatra adored Aunt Jessica. Only she was safe from their beaks and claws. The rest of us were terrified of them, even Uncle George. But Aunt Jessica knew how to  whisper to them, pout her soft lips and click her tongue so that they were lithe and willing in her arms. She knew how to turn her head so that her earrings swung, gleaming like ancient polished coals. Then their little eyes began to close and their wild greed was dulled. 

Alexander and Cleopatra lived in the back paddock behind the house among hydrangeas and agapanthas, sour plums and tamarisks. They were properly fenced in, well away from the clothesline, the wood pile and the vegetable patch. There would have been no need to have anything to do with them at all, except that the privy was in the back paddock too.

Aunt Jessica kept the emus for their feathers, for their eggshells and for other, meaner, more devious reasons.

Because they frightened Uncle George’s sheep away from the garden.

Because they hunted small children on their way to the loo.

Because they belonged to her and were all she truly had.

‘Go on. Go! You have to be quick,’ she’d say to some suffering niece or nephew, while the child cowered at the back door, putting off the moment, clinging on with his or her utmost capacity, too scared to go, too frightened not to go, until sometimes it was surreptitiously, embarrassingly, overflowingly, too late.

Why did Aunt Jessica never have to ‘go’, we wondered? Uncle George, we spied, went behind a tree, but she never attended the little wooden outhouse among its jungle of flowers and trees, its ivy and sarsparilla vines, with those wild creatures waiting to stalk you down.

On Sunday afternoons Uncle George could be found in the vicinity of the wood pile, smoking his cigar. He talked to his dogs or lent against the apricot tree counting crows. He kept the only photograph of Aunt Jessica beside his bed.

Cleopatra and Alexander—is that what she would have called her children? She had no children of her own. She growled when children spilt things, snapped when they banged the piano, hissed when they bent back the spines of her books, sniffed her perfume jars or wound their sticky fingers in her beads. She pounced on them when they grabbed her ivory hairbrush, pushed their noses into her embroidered handkerchiefs, wriggled into her strange-smelling wardrobe and rubbed against the fur and feather trimmings on her coats and gowns. Her tongue clicked hard against her teeth.

And yet, once a month on Sundays, we were sent to visit Aunt Jessica and Uncle George. He would fetch us in the trap. The table would be laid with linen and silver. She would read to us from Lord Alfred Tennyson, Jane Austen or Walter Scott. She would make us tell her about ourselves, the names of pet animals or dolls. She listened to our stories and our little games. She made us read or sing to her, or play the old piano, then sent us out to bother Uncle George.

What did Aunt Jessica do between the days we made our visits? What did she do when the meals were made, the washing and cleaning finished, when the chooks were fed, the garden weeded, the knitting done? Did she sit at her parlour window with Persuasion in her hands gazing out at the salted trees? Did she go to the piano to play, one lonely voice from some trio or quartet she had not heard for years?

On those long ago Sundays, Uncle George would take us for a walk or a ride ride on his big horse to look over the sheep. He never talked about people or asked personal questions, but he might say: ‘Now, do you see the way the Gully Falls with that line of trees below?  That shows it’s a place where you might find water.’

Or he’d take us very quietly along the track down by the swamp to show us a platypus. Something might flash past in a blur and he would call out: ‘Did you see that bird? That was something! A Golden Rosella. You kids want to keep your eyes open a bit more.’

I only once heard him say something about a human being. He was driving us home along the sandy road, bent over with his arms resting on his knees, as if holding the reins had made him tired.

‘Your Aunt Jessica,’ said Uncle George, ‘was a very beautiful woman.’ It was as if he was speaking about someone who had already passed away.

His photograph of her made her head seem too large. The jet earrings fell in line with her jaw. It was not fashionable in those days to smile for the camera. In any case she wasn’t the sort of person who smiled. She laughed, or she was serious. Uncle George must have desired her serious side. He kept her seriousness beside his bed in its sterling silver frame

He must have known that wasn’t all there was to her.

‘Off you go,’ she would cry. ‘Don’t look so frightened. They won’t peck you unless they think you’re scared.’

You had to trick the emus, slip through the fence quietly when they weren’t looking and run all the way to the outhouse. If you opened the gate, they pushed their heads up and stared. If they saw you coming, they galloped in your direction. If you had nothing to give them they’d peck you anyway, to see what you were made of. They liked blood. They liked the sweet blood of children. If you gave them the chance, they would peck your eyes out, one by one like lollies. With one pop your eyes would be gone, sliding down a long neck into a dark emu belly.

Sometimes we stole sultanas from Aunt Jessica’s jar while she was outside. Sultanas were our only effective weapon.

There was one moment that was worst of all. As you were sitting on the splintery seat with the hot smell of the pit in your nostrils, a shadow would pass across the cracks of light, as a little tapping sound began. Then you knew they were out there, waiting for you. Cleopatra and Alexander, as ruthless as their namesakes. Alexander and Cleopatra of the sword and asp. They were out there and they would not go away. Oh source of all terrors, all nightmares, their bony skulls, their savage beaks and fearful claws. Oh Lord, suffer the little children, let us die quickly and suffer not, we prayed.

We waiting, shaking, hoping they would forget and wander off. But emus are very patient creatures, especially when they can smell the sandwiches and cream sponge fingers from your afternoon tea.

Then Aunt Jessica leaned over the fence and sang to her emus: ‘Oh my angels. Come to me. Come hither. Come away.’

She fed them fruit and biscuits. She stroked their slender necks. At night she dreamed of them. They came to her in darkness, wrapped in their feathery cloaks. Cleopatra and Alexander, exotic and sublime. They would dress her in lace and pearl drops, dab frankincense behind her ears and carry her upon their backs, swirling up, up, up into the diamond sky.

…

 The circus came to visit. We were surprised, because our township wasn’t even a town, with only its schoolhouse and general store. There was no pub and no post office only a wooden box for the mail that came once. 

Aunt Jessica did not like circuses. She regarded them as common and irreligious. She believed they gave children a taste for things they should never want to have. 

‘Circuses,’ she said, ‘only make you unhappy.’ 

But that Sunday, Aunt Jessica had a migraine. That Sunday, she lay down with the curtains drawn. A damp cloth soaked with eucalyptus and lavender covered her brow. Her hair was uncoiled on the pillow. Her jet earrings rested on a tray beside the bed.

‘I’m sorry, children. I’m not well today. George will take you out in the trap for a drive. He might even take you to the circus.’

Uncle George did not have to be asked. When we came running out of the house, he glared at us as if he were going to do something very mean. Then he winked, put on his hat and called in the dogs.

The circus tent was pegged out on the schoolhouse lawns. Here were ice creams and acrobats, dancing dogs and disappearing ladies, sequins and somersaults. Here were things we had never seen before. Monkeys clambered up silver poles and swung down from ropes onto the backs of horses. Elephants bowed to the audience and stood on their hind legs. A girl leapt through a flaming hoop.

But the one act that surprised us the most, the one trick we had never even heard of, was Oscar the Ostrich-Tamer and his Performing Birds 

Oscar wore golden earrings and false white teeth. He was like Burt Lancaster in the role of a pirate. His body was oiled so that his muscles gleamed. When he blew his tin whistle a pair of bush emus trotted into the ring. 

His Birds, as he called them, wore satin bows around their necks and bracelets on their legs. They did a little dance as Oscar played with them. They slid their little heads back and forward like Egyptian princesses. They bent their long necks and curtsied to the audience. They raced each other around the ring and stole aniseed balls from a child, then picked the stuffing out of a string of sausages, leaving only the skins. They untied Oscar’s shoelaces with their beaks while he stood upside down on his hands. 

‘That feller could teach our pair a thing or two,’ said Uncle George.

After the performance we went around the back to find Oscar. He was sitting on a folding chair next to a fire, eating kidneys and mashed potatoes on a kerosene-tin table.

‘What do you want?,’ he asked. His smell was a mixture of fried fat and bird shit. ‘You people aren’t allowed back here.’

He wore one of those dirty white singlets that men always used to wear. His emus were locked up in a cage behind him. They looked at us in the same way Alexander and Cleopatra did, sizing you up for what they could get. We must have looked scared.

‘Well come on then, kids. Give us a smile. My birds won’t bite you. They’re proper ladies, you know.’ Oscar grinned at us and made his pectorals pulsate under his skin.

‘We’ve got emus too,’ we told him.’

‘Silly cantankerous things,’ said George.

‘What can I do for you, mate’, asked Oscar.

…

How did the news come to us? Did it fall from the air onto the dusty leaves? Did dandelion sprays unknowingly fly off with the wind? Was it shaken down from the branches? Was it blown along the road from the farm, down our bush track with its spines of bracken and its treacherous soft patches of sand, until it reached our door? Did our families whisper it while we were in bed? Perhaps we inherited it in our genes, for later on we too strayed from home. 

The day the circus left town, Aunt Jessica made breakfast as usual. Uncle George went out at six o’clock to work the farm. After breakfast she fed the chooks. Then, perhaps—without any obvious precedence—, she went to use the privy. She might have gone to pick hydrangeas or plums. But when she went into the back paddock, the emus were gone. 

She knew they had not gone off by themselves. They could not jump the fence or fly away. The gate was closed. Anyway, if the emus had been let out into the bush, they would have come straight home.

There was only one explanation. Alexander and Cleopatra had been stolen.

Did she blame one of us? Did she think it was a prank? She had heard of Oscar the Ostrich-Tamer by then because we had told her all about him. So maybe she guessed immediately what George had done. 

Did she go to join them in the circus? Or did she leave to find ancient civilizations under the Gippsland sands?

Did Oscar say ‘Hello Jess,’ and take her in his arms? Did she stay with him: she with her jet earrings, he with his golden ones, living on Uncle George’s bribe with their emu brood?

Perhaps she stole her emus back and took them off into the bush to live on nothing, like three ghosts from the haunted hills.

Would she have gone anyway, leaving them all behind? Did she go to the city? To concerts and conversations, to galleries, public libraries, tea houses and shops? Did she teach children music or did she specialise in trimming hats with feathers? Where did Aunt Jessica go? What new life did she take up? She had once lived with us, and now she is gone.

Forty years later Uncle George is eighty and has moved to a flat in town. He has left the old farm house, taking with him only what he needs for himself. 

We are here to take care of things, we who were once children. Here are his leavings, her remains. For in a back room, in a cupboard, Aunt Jessica lingers. Here is the photograph that Uncle George once cherished, brown with age, still in its sterling silver frame. Her dark hair is coiled back from her face, her eyes so clear that they seem lit from within. Here is a feather stole.  Here in this little room, her old piano, long decayed. And here a cedar commode, its secret white china bowl covered in wood and satin cushions, dignified to the last possible moment before the flight.