Swords and Crowns and Rings (11 page)

‘Well, I thought, maybe the picking season. It would be as good as a holiday for Jack, out in the sun all day, fresh air and all. But Eva when she wrote back today says no, we could do with an extra pair of hands right now. What do you think of that?'

Jackie said, ‘Do they know? About me?'

‘Yep,' said the Nun.

Jackie grinned. ‘Right.'

The pleasure on Jerry's face increased the boy's genuine interest in this offer of a job. At the same time he felt deeply relieved that he would have to suffer no more knock-backs in Kingsland for a few weeks or months.

He would have liked to write to Cushie, tell her of his luck in getting a job, which might lead to some other opportunity as yet unguessed. But he had no idea of her whereabouts in Sydney, and he would not ask Mr Moy.

After the funeral, he supposed Mrs Moy would take Cushie directly to Mount Rosa, where the girl attended the Duchess of York Annexe, a finishing school for those girls whose families could afford the transition from the academy. These young ladies had many privileges—longer vacations, private dances, training in the more delicate social graces and the grosser snobberies. A few of them married from the annexe; others were taken for their final year to London or Switzerland to receive the ultimate polish.

But in spite of all their privileges, the Graces, as they were called by the junior school, were not allowed to receive letters from young men.

So Jackie could not write to her there, either. He contented himself with asking his mother to be sure to tell Cushie where he was, when she came back to Kingsland for the summer holidays.

He was interested and curious about this courtesy branch of his family.

‘Foreigners!' said his mother forebodingly.

Mrs MacNunn was doleful, sniffing above the frying-pan as she thumped the chops about.

‘First time away from home! How will you manage?' she fretted.

But Jackie had recovered his optimism. Something was going to happen, something positive, active. First time away from home it was, and he couldn't wait for it.

‘It'll be great!' he said to the pleased Nun.

Three days later he took the train to Ghinni Junction.

When the Nun saw Jackie off at the station he was both genial and half apologetic.

‘Don't you go worrying now, boy,' he said. ‘This is what you might call a temporary expedient, just to keep you going until something better turns up in your own line. And it will, never you fear!'

‘Jackie won't get his tail down!' asserted Mrs MacNunn, but with a quaver in her voice that indicated hers was down already.

Jackie kissed her wet cheek as she bent towards him. Their loving fear for his welfare made him put on his cockiest look.

‘Don't you worry, Mum. I'll be amongst friends. Cheer up now! What's that long lip for?'

The Nun brightened. ‘Old Eva will look after him like the Christmas duck. He'll be one of the family, and that makes a difference your first time out on your pat malone.'

On the way down to Ghinni Junction Jackie's high spirits remained constant. He felt as he had when younger, ready to take on the world. He exerted himself, as was his habit, to be sparkling, a bit of a comic, clowning a little to make his fellow-passengers laugh, and make them forget his lack of size. He was constantly abashed at his instinct to do this.

‘What am I after?' he often said to himself. But he knew very well. It was to let people know that dwarfs didn't mind being as they were, that there was no real disability in being under four feet high.

Two of the passengers had their homes in Ghinni Junction and knew a good deal about the fruit farmers up in the hills beyond the town.

So he learnt that in that hard, cobby hill country there were good pockets of farm and orchard land, which had been taken up by German or Scandinavian immigrants two generations back.

‘They was running away from some war or something,' said the elder passenger. ‘Germans, surely, wasn't they? That old bloke Sturm never spoke a word of English; and Vogt, wasn't there a Vogt?'

The other passenger remembered the Vogt.

‘Which family did you say you were going to visit, son?'

‘Linz,' said Jackie. ‘But my auntie, Mrs Linz, she's Australian.'

Yes, they both knew of the Linzes, big men, five or six of them. Never seen Mrs Linz. But that was characteristic of the High Valley fruit farmers. Close as hell about their own affairs, very tough on their womenfolk, it was said. The sons stayed close to the farm, too, brewed their own peach cider, only came to town for stores.

Jackie, sensitive to nuance, had the impression that the High Valley people were still regarded, after half a century, as foreign, full of dark old hates and unacceptable ways. He reassured himself by the thought of his stepfather's sister, not a foreigner at all, a softer, womanly replica of the Nun.

There seemed to be no one to meet him at Ghinni Junction, and he stood disconcerted for five minutes or so until an engulfing shadow fell across him, and a resonant voice said, ‘I am Linz.'

The speaker was in his late thirties, a slab of a man, gumbooted, heavy-coated. His ponderous features were marred by a long scar that dented the left eyebrow and dug into the cheekbone below a milk-glass eye. As he saw Jackie's gaze irresistibly fly to this blemish, his lips opened in an ironic smile.

‘They call me Blind Hof,' he said.

Abashed, Jackie reached up and had his hand swallowed in the giant's grip. ‘I'm Jack Hanna. Pleased to meet you.'

Behind Hof, Jackie now saw another burly figure, which in spite of its obesity gave an impression of sinister strength, a blue-eyed, carnation face wobbling with smiles, a sunny blond head with hair shaved up to the level of its ear-rims; a figure which now burst into enormous mirth, amidst which Jackie could distinguish the words:

‘My God, if you could see yourselves, the long and the short of it!'

Blind Hof said briefly, ‘This is my brother...' He said some name, but Jackie could not catch it above the laughter. Anyway, he never thought of this second Linz as anything but the fat brother. In due time, the fat brother heaved Jackie onto the back of a lorry as though he were a sack of onions, while Blind Hof picked up two other brothers, men in their late twenties, one of whom was puking drunk, and the other lean and sallow. While the drunk brother was laughing helplessly at Jackie, the dark one stared, grinning, and this seemed to Jackie to be more offensive than anything that had gone before.

So they rattled out of the town, the drunk brother rolling around, helplessly spewing over the various stores and packages that crammed the back of the truck, the dark brother staring and picking his brown teeth and sniggering, and Jackie gradually becoming more and more savage until at last he blurted, ‘Well, you got nothing better to do than to stare?'

‘Nope,' said the dark brother. ‘Never seen such a comic cuts before, so I'm taking my fill.'

Jackie, red as fire, his eyes glaring, poised for a spring; but the dark brother snatched a spanner from the deck and clonked it rhythmically in the palm of the other hand, saying, ‘You watch it, monkey man. Give me no trouble and I give you none.'

Jackie subsided, boiling; not afraid, but biding his time. His main emotion was bewilderment. In a kind of a way, these four men were his cousins; yet, with the exception of Blind Hof, they treated him with contemptuous ribaldry. He was perplexed. Seeping alarm about his prospects made his self-confidence dwindle. He turned his back on the dark brother and the snoring drunk and surveyed the countryside.

Jackie felt high in the air, isolated. The very wind that blew from the bush smelt different; larches, birch, and sycamore grew amongst the lemon orchards; the masts and spars of leafless Lombardies pierced the sky. North Europeans had settled these hills and valleys; their marks were everywhere.

The road was abominable; the scrub pressed in on both sides. Streams flung themselves down towards it, drummed underneath in rough culverts, and spouted out the other side white as soda water. The lorry moaned upwards around the bends, and Jackie was nauseated with travelling and hunger. But the journey continued, one hour after another, and he slept intermittently leaning against a bag of pollard that smelt of the drunk brother's vomit.

He awoke when Blind Hof's iron hands seized him around the middle as though he were a doll and dumped him, kindly enough, down on wet paving where dogs circled warily, men's legs were illuminated in lamplight, and smells of food gushed through a kitchen door.

‘Wake up, lad,' he said. ‘We're home. Go into the kitchen and make yourself known to your Auntie Eva.'

He took no further notice of the boy as he stood uncertainly there, but effortlessly began dragging the load off the lorry deck, first the heavy sacks, then the drunk brother's lolling body. A hand fell on Jackie's shoulder, and a new, halting voice said, ‘You must be Jack. 'Ow are you? I'm Ellie.'

He looked up to see a frail, girlish-looking boy about his own age. He had a pretty skin, and blue eyes which, through diffidence or a habit of evasiveness, did not meet Jackie's. His left foot turned in at an uncouth angle, as though the ankle were deformed. But his voice had been friendly, and Jackie was grateful.

‘I've got a bit mixed up,' he said. ‘All these new people.'

‘Yeah, I reckon so. I'm Eldred Linz. I'm the youngest of the litter. Come on in. Ma's got supper ready waiting. Come on, you must be perished. Maida reckons you're a cousin, is that right?'

And before Jackie could ask about this new name, he was escorted into a huge cavernous kitchen with a coved, sooted ceiling, hanging brass-roofed lamps, a black cooking range that filled even the far corners of the room with a comfortable warmth. The smell of food was so good, so strong, that Jackie felt quite dizzy. So it was in an equivocal, distracted manner that he met his Aunt Eva, an old woman with hair like dirty cottonwool and a small bowed frame, a woman so unlike her brother that their relationship could not be believed for a moment.

‘Maida, sit him down next to you. Maida, carry the broth to the table; the boys will be in in a moment. Maida, take Jack's coat; it's too hot in here.'

Jackie was aware that a silent, sad-faced little girl obeyed all these requests. She slipped by him, taking his coat as she went; was back in a moment with a heavy tureen of soup, which she placed at the head of the table with its ladle.

‘Sit here,' she said. Her long fair hair was tied back with a bootlace; she wore an ugly dark blouse and a skirt of unusual length. Jackie saw that she had unobtrusively placed a thick cushion on his chair.

In his heart a profound mortification struggled with appreciation of this young creature's motherly thoughtfulness. He thanked her quietly, and she bowed her head, flushing.

The brothers took their seats, Hof at the head of the table in a round-armed chair that Jackie assumed was their absent father's. In some manner the drunk brother had been restored to a facsimile of glassy-eyed sobriety. The fat brother, still shaken by snickers whenever he looked at Jackie, ate finickily. He complained of everything—the turnip in the soup, the rabbit in the stew.

Mrs MacNunn, had she been the cook in that household, would have sprung up and clouted him; but Jackie's Auntie Eva, ducking her small unkempt head ever closer to the table, replied not a word. At last Ellie said, half under his breath, ‘Leave her alone, you cow!'

The fat brother bawled, ‘I'll give you the flat of my hand, you bloody crip!' He went on abusing the lame boy until Mrs Linz began to cry, putting her hands over her frail, dried-up-looking ears, and snivelling, ‘Don't say them things to poor Ellie!'

In all ways it was a painful meal for Jackie. No one asked him about his journey, his family; he might as well have been a dog. He was so baffled and angered by the behaviour of them all that he scarcely liked to look up. So he was astonished when he observed, sitting beside the fire in a rocking-chair, his feet in a basin of water, a newcomer to the scene, an old man, eating a hardboiled egg which he occasionally dipped into a saucer of brown salt. He looked so placid, so entirely at ease with his surroundings, that the boy took heart.

The old man was the original farmer Linz, who had come from Bohemia long ago, in his velveteens, his iron-studded boots, his poverty and resolution. His name was Martin Linz, and he was Maida's grandfather. In his old age he had forgotten his English, and because amongst the younger Linzes only the older boys could speak a Hottentot German, he led a dumb, lonely life. His wife had died thirty years before; he had become a stranger in his world. It was days before Jackie knew he was a member of the family at all.

At night he sometimes came into the barn where Jackie slept, lit another lantern, and with slow, methodical movements worked away at some carpentry. The first time this happened the boy, awakened by the long sob of the saw, gave a startled grunt. The old man, eyes hidden by round, silver-rimmed spectacles, jowls gauzy with stubble, seemed like a figure from a fairytale. Jackie lay back in his shadowed pallet behind the kerosene drums pretending to be asleep as Martin Linz came towards him and, with the lantern raised, examined his face. Jackie bore it as long as he could, and then impishly snapped open his eyes and winked. The old man, surprised, emitted a sharp quack of laughter. He dropped one knotted hand almost caressingly on Jackie's head, and said, ‘
Glück
.'

After that Jackie welcomed the half-dreaming interludes when he was roused from his exhausted sleep by the aromatic whiff of new-cut wood, the comforting ancient sounds of a workman about his business.

‘What is he making, your granddad?' Jackie asked Ellie, and the boy answered, with his scuttling glance and half-stammer, ‘His coffin.'

Maida did not like to talk about it. She was afraid of mortality. But Jackie thought it was dignified and good that the old man should thus round out his long life of usefulness. Sometimes, before he went to sleep, he looked at the coffin, the interior painted with tar and already half-lined with coarse, bleached fabric like sailcloth. The lid, which had been finished with three grades of sandpaper, was satisfying to touch. The old man had already carved his name and date of birth. There was space for the death-date, which Jackie supposed one of the grandsons, Hof probably, would fill in. A cross came before the inscription, and after it was a decorative bird, which Maida told Jackie was called a
Distelfink.
It was the sign of Martin Linz's distant village.