Book of Lost Threads

9
Opportunity and Cradletown

OPPORTUNITY WEEKES WAS BORN ON the Californian goldfields. His father, Jeremiah, was an itinerant preacher with smouldering eyes, a beard that rivalled Abraham’s and a voice that could waken the dead. His mother, formerly Miss Clementine Witherspoon, was the eighth daughter of a Kansas crop farmer whom God had previously afflicted with seven plain daughters to marry off as best he could. The charming blonde Clementine was his only hope of a prosperous old age, and Farmer Witherspoon was understandably devastated when his lovely youngest daughter ran away at the age of seventeen to marry Jeremiah.
Perhaps it was the curse the farmer sent after them, or maybe it was his daughter’s rebellious nature, but after Jeremiah’s mesmeric eyes lost their power over her, Clementine ran away again, this time to join the eclectic band of young women in Miss Kitty’s brothel. There she worked, watched and listened until she felt her education was sufficient to strike out on her own.
Before she left her husband she bore a child, whom Jeremiah insisted they name Opportunity, in gratitude to God’s gifts to all of us. Jeremiah was of a faith that believed that once a person is ‘saved’, they become worthy not only of heavenly reward but also of worldly treasures. He could not make this point strongly enough to his congregation, and they obligingly cooperated with God’s plan by contributing generously to his ministry. Jeremiah and Clementine both had a head for business.
When California became infected with news of gold in the faraway colony of Victoria, the preacher decided to take his son to a new land where the stain of his mother’s occupation would never more blight his young life. Being of a dramatic disposition, he wrote to Clementine before he left, informing her that he was removing his spotless lamb from the foul odour of his mother’s scarlet sins. There was also mention of the Whore of Babylon and the bold opinion that Jesus should never have stopped the mob from stoning the adulteress. He concluded: I remain Your Obedient Servant, Jeremiah C. Weekes. He felt a good deal better for this, and left for the colony with a light heart and a mission to convert the wicked and sustain the faithful who sought their fortune in the rich soil of the Victorian goldfields.
Young Opportunity was eleven by then, and not the appealing waif he once had been. Ungainly, his fast-growing limbs clumsy and graceless, he slouched and sulked while his father attempted to preach to men who, unlike his compatriots, could not or would not abandon themselves to the Spirit. If they came to his meetings at all, they came to stare stonily, to jeer or to laugh. Some would even pretend to feel the Spirit and stagger about gabbling in tongues, providing the small crowd with much merriment. Jeremiah hated these exhibitionists, but at least after such diversions a few people would good-–naturedly make a small offering at collection time.
However, it was not enough to support him and his boy. They spent their days working on a small claim, and the evenings passed with Jeremiah teaching an increasingly resistant Opportunity his letters and numbers.
As more families and women came and businesses were established, the canvas town reached a critical mass, and serious building began. The streets of fine shops and dwellings, the ornate town hall and the several beautiful churches for which the town is now admired all owe their existence to the gold fever. The thriving settlement was named Cradletown in honour of the wooden cradle used by miners to separate the gold from the dross. When the Cradletown Methodist church was built, Jeremiah, weary of life on the goldfields, managed to secure the position of minister. Every Sunday his rich voice thundered wonderfully, exciting fear and trembling in the hearts of the wicked and thrilling misgivings in the hearts of the faithful.
Opportunity worked soberly as a sales assistant in McPherson’s Drapery and Women’s Apparel, his bony wrists protruding from white cuffs that in turn protruded from a blue pinstriped jacket. He sold linen handkerchiefs, lace collars and cuffs, jabots and shawls, gloves and hatpins. (Mrs McPherson herself sold the hats.) Drapery would seem to be a dull job for a young man, but it had its compensations, and his time passed pleasantly enough as young and not so young women came to buy their fripperies and flirt with him in a genteel sort of way.
Two days before his eighteenth birthday a stranger arrived at McPherson’s, asking to speak to young Mister Weekes. The man had a sallow complexion and jowls like a bloodhound, but after hearing what he had to say, Opportunity could have hugged him. The stranger was a solicitor who had traced him to Cradletown all the way from San Francisco, where his mother had died of heart failure. She had left him—after expenses, you understand— the considerable sum of one thousand, three hundred and eleven US dollars, to be paid when he reached his majority.
For three years and two days, Opportunity chafed. On his twenty-first birthday, he resigned from McPherson’s. He hadn’t wasted this time, saving an additional sixty-seven pounds from his wages. Despite liberal advice to the contrary, Opportunity Weekes was ready to realise his dream.
About a hundred and fifty miles to the north of Cradletown was another goldfield town, Mystic, and bullockies, traders and disgruntled miners had worn a wide track between the two centres. Opportunity’s plan was to build a hotel at Halfway Creek, providing accommodation and refreshments for the weary travellers. After a short battle with his conscience, he decided to also sell liquor. Your mother’s bad blood, his father mourned. But the young man had his mother’s business brain, and he set about building a handsome, two-storey pub with verandahs all round and a brass spittoon in the bar.
Opportunity focused on this vision as he rolled up his sleeves and worked beside the men who laboured to build his dream. He drove them hard but paid them well, and when it was finished, they were all justifiably proud of their handiwork. The hotel welcomed its first guest in 1885, and thus began a long period of prosperity for both Opportunity and the burgeoning township.
As his business flourished, Opportunity realised that he needed help, and he proposed to Harriet Westlake, a local farmer’s daughter, as sturdy and loyal as she was plain. She accepted him, and the pub flourished as the reputation of Harriet’s lamb roasts and plum puddings spread and Opportunity mellowed into an affable middle age.
The little town that grew around the Opportunity Hostelry was named for its founder. As he became a wealthy man, Opportunity’s only sorrow was the loss of two baby girls, Faith and Hope, who had been named and christened by his father. A third daughter was born, with sad dark eyes, and having lost both faith and hope, Opportunity called her Dolour. A popish name, Jeremiah fumed as he immersed the child. It means sorrow, his son replied. I won’t tempt God again.
But Dolour was the happiest and healthiest of children, with her mother’s strong body and her father’s deep, dark eyes. Over time, the area gradually transmuted into farmland, and at eighteen, Dolour married Charles Sandilands, son of a local farmer. When Opportunity died, Dolour and Charles sold the pub and established the Sandilands dynasty in a fine house on an expanded property.
The good citizens of Opportunity had suggested erecting a stained-glass window as a memorial to her father, but the practical Dolour said that the town was named for him and that should be enough. What on earth would Father want with a window? she said.


In its golden years, Opportunity boasted five hotels, several sly grog establishments and three brothels; by the time it began sending its young men to the trenches, however, it had become a very proper town with three churches and a school replacing four of the pubs.
Like many small towns, Opportunity was proud and somewhat insular, sniffing ever so slightly at the brashness of Mystic and the pomposity of Cradletown. The latter was always called ‘Town’ with an implied upper-case T. The former was simply referred to as ‘That Place’. The good folk of Opportunity kept themselves to themselves, and generations were born and buried within the town’s boundaries.
The nineteen sixties saw the beginning of its decline, when the young people, no longer content to be farmers, were lured to the cities to join the counter-culture. Some stayed; some returned; but change gathered pace in the eighties, when the economic rationalists began to seriously dismantle rural infrastructure. It was then that the busy farmers and traders of Opportunity looked up and saw that their town was dying. The bank, the farmers’ co-op and McKenzie’s bakery all closed within a year, with the loss of over forty jobs. Families moved to larger centres to find work so the school failed to maintain sufficient numbers. Even church services were rationed when the parish of St Saviour’s was merged with St Matthew’s in Mystic. By the mid nineties, Opportunity no longer lived up to its name.
Most of the farmers managed well enough during the eighties and early nineties, but now, after ten years of drought, a fatal lethargy held the town in thrall. It seeped out of the mud in the dying creek. It sent out tendrils that choked endeavour. It whispered in the ears of sleepers who thought themselves safe in bed. It loitered in the dust that hung in the air, or swirled ahead of the winds that swept unimpeded across a treeless landscape. You could see it in the eyes of your neighbours. You could taste it in your beer.