Swords and Crowns and Rings (13 page)

‘You don't want to be a bad sport,' she said. ‘The boys don't mean anything; it's just their liveliness. Look at Ellie there, he don't bite like a shark when the boys call him gammy or dot-and-carry-one. Ellie knows it's all fun.'

Jackie wanted to retort that the brothers never seemed to chaff Ellie, except for the outburst of the fat one at the table. He refrained; and he could see that the old mother was very protective of Ellie. He could not make Ellie out at all. Backward and shy, keeping close to the kitchen and the home garden, for which he seemed responsible, he snuggled around his mother like a child. The older brothers ignored him, except for a churlish sentence tossed his way now and again, but Maida, too, was loving with him. The only time Jackie saw her laugh was when she was with Ellie, her arm over his shoulder, their faces close together as though they were children.

Meanwhile, as though it were a part of his growth he could not control, Jackie's hatred for the brothers became obsessive. Reason left him. He hungered for revenge. Each morning as he awoke he was sensible of a cold lump in his belly. It was created both of dread for the new harassments the day was sure to bring, and of undigested passion.

He longed painfully to go home, to tell these clowns to stuff their job, to set out walking for Ghinni Junction and freeze on the road rather than put up with the torture any longer. Yet something iron within him forbade it. To give in, to run away from such yahoos!

The weather became colder. Nearly every morning the world was sugar-white, becalmed, so silent that Jackie jumped when his footstep crunched the ice webbed like glittering hair in the interstices of the earth. Under the sun's heat the hills raised green helmeted heads from the immaculate landscape; but in the gullies from day to day the puddles remained irregular plates of obscure glass, and mushy mud-ice clogged the watergrass in the bogs.

By night birds collected in complaining, fluffed-out rows along the rafters under the barn eaves. There were always three or four dead and fallen in the morning.

The Linzes were morose, quarrelsome. Strange undertones and cross-currents of emotion seemed to run in the house, like artesian streams. Jackie saw the drunk brother, without warning, trip the dark brother as he crossed the veranda and, when he was down, hammer him unmercifully. He heard his Auntie Eva, several times, cry out as though someone had struck her. And he saw Hof, always slow to anger, slam Ellie across the head so that the boy sobbed piteously.

Maida was often red-eyed. But, through shyness or backwardness, she would rarely speak to him, though he longed for conversation with one as young and unhappy as himself. He knew she did not dislike him and was not repelled by his abnormality. She put good food on his plate, anticipated his needs at the table, and sometimes he caught her gazing at him with her long narrow eyes that were the most beautiful slate-blue. He remembered, too, how she had come out of her humble silence to defend him that first morning, when Cockie Bailey had thought him a hunchback.

The uneasy bad temper that seemed to prevail amongst the Linzes did not make Jackie's life any easier.

‘They're leery about losing the crop,' said Cockie Bailey. ‘Their old man would give them hell. He can still lay about them with his fists, even Hof. They just stand there like dummies and take it, you know. It's their way back in the old country or suthink. Bloody loopy, all these foreigners. Any Australian would chuck the old devil down the well.'

The fruit was now marble-sized; it could withstand the intense cold scarcely at all. For three weeks now Hof had had rigged up outside the room where he slept an electrical contraption powered by a battery. It was set for frost of one degree, and when the temperature sank to this lethal level the circuit was broken and a bell squalled out an alarm. Hof went to bed in his clothes; in a few moments he was into his sheepskin coat and down in the orchard.

Jackie was grateful when Hof told him that in future he would be one of his offsiders in these arctic awakenings. He was glad because that meant he would be allowed to sleep till the midday dinner, and so avoid the abrasive company of the other brothers for a portion of the day. And he was glad, too, because the orchard on frosty nights had a theatrical beauty unlike anything he had ever seen before. To see, in the countryside's Babylonian darkness, suddenly bloom the rolling clouds of smoke, the serried trees like dancers, rose-red, mysterious! Even Hof was a pleasure to the eye, a black phantom revealed as a delicately flushed half-human creature, pink running across his moist whiskers, ebbing and flowing in his one half-seen eye.

And the other orchards along High Valley were each a rosy galaxy, a Magellanic cloud of ruddy fumes. Jackie would have liked to stand and gaze at them, but there was never any time.

Each tree now had its own pot, a five-quart lard pail of crude oil, which would burn for four hours before needing refuelling. Thus, from the third hour, Hof and Jackie patrolled the orchard constantly watching for guttering pots. The other offsider, who was frequently changed, for the men hated this freezing, dirty, pre-dawn job, watched the trees on the lower slopes.

As soon as Hof called Jackie, after the alarm had sounded, the boy scurried into a heavy coat, pulled a sack over his head, and lit the asbestos wick of a kindler, a long-beaked can holding an inflammable mixture of petrol and kerosene. The first few nights the mixture splashed out past the wick in fiery gouts, burning Jackie's shoes and sometimes his hands. But he soon learnt to be fast and deft, running from pot to pot, passing the long spout quickly round the inside of each, till the oil was heated to combustion point. A chain of brief whuffs followed him as the smoke arose, coiling and swelling like a malodorous genie.

It pleased Jackie that he was more skilful and faster than either Hof or Cockie. There were some things in which he excelled, and he hoped frankly that Hof would mention it at the table, let the others know that in some ways the half-man was better than a full-sized one. But Hof never did. Still, a kind of speechless, vegetative harmony had grown up between them, and Jackie was content with that.

He wrote once to his mother, telling her he was well, and could cope with the work. He said nothing about his Auntie Eva except that she was a good cook, and kept turkeys as well as hens for laying.

But even writing home was disturbing, so profound was his longing to be there. So he did not write again.

He longed for Cushie, the golden princess who loved him as he was. When he returned at six or seven in the morning from the orchard, chilled to the bone, a frozen stick in a frozen bed, he often dreamed that Cushie was there to twine herself around him, soft as velvet, warm as a kitten or a puppy, smelling so sweet he could have wept at the memory of it. For the two friends were familiar with each other's bodies. Step by step, in a natural, secret unfolding since Armistice night, when Jackie had kissed her and the piper's music had sent her half-way out of her mind, they had become in the highest sense of the word lovers, though they had not yet possessed each other.

Since they had grown up there were not the opportunities for privacy; but there was a transparent delicacy between them. They had always, by some unexamined empathy, each reflected the other. Jackie was aware, though they had never broached the subject, that Cushie was not ready for this final intimacy. The time had not yet come, though both knew it would, as the seasons would change.

During the period of Jackie's severest loneliness and dejection, he felt he could not get through the day without the memory of Cushie.

‘I love you, Jackie.'

‘For ever and ever?'

‘Ever and ever.'

One night about three the sky clouded over, the temperature rose, and Hof barked at Jackie: ‘No frost tonight. Going to rain. Get to bunk. I won't need you until smoke-oh.'

In the barn the air was tainted by a recently extinguished oil lamp. Jackie knew that the old man had been working on the coffin. When he set down his own lantern, he smelled appreciatively the fresh varnish Martin Linz mixed himself. It had the odour of new-felled trees. Jackie dragged off his muddy boots. He took a child's size, and it was hard to get boots heavy enough for his work. These were already splitting soles from uppers, and his feet were miserably sodden and chill. He left on his flannel shirt; though damp, it was warmer than anything else he had. He scrambled under the blanket, but could not get warm. He lay there wretchedly, and listened to the night birds' repining double-call, joyless, maundering, as though they hated the dark, but were doomed to it for ever. And while he lay there, shuddering, drowsy, but too afflicted with cold to sleep, he heard somewhere in the barn a sob. It came again, from high up, where the wild cats littered.

‘Who's that?' said Jackie, sitting up in the darkness.

There was silence, and then he heard again a smothered sound of a child's misery.

‘Ellie, is that you?' he called. He lit his candle, looked around amongst the swollen shadows.

There was a scramble amidst the straw above. He lifted the feeble light and saw bare feet coming down the loft ladder, a nightshirt of brown stripes, and a long plait of colourless hair.

‘Maida! What's the matter?'

She was silent, hanging her head. He saw that blood streaked her forehead and cheek; tears had bedabbled it pinkly on her nightgown collar.

‘Have you hurt yourself, Maida? What is it? Has something happened?'

She seemed to him the distillation of all that was forsaken, her mouth half open and turned down like a distraught child's, her eyes swollen into slits.

‘Maida! Will I get your mother or Hof?'

With that she seemed to come alive, as though threatened, and looked at him aghast.

‘Oh, Jackie, he beat me and pushed me outside and locked the door.'

‘Who? Who? Not Hof?'

From her tear-bubbling outburst he caught: ‘No, no... Con did it...Con...he was angry with me. He hit me with his belt; he said I could sleep in the outhouse or freeze to death for all he cared.'

Con? Con? Which one was it? The formidable dark brother with his inexplicable caprices, his sudden rages? The half-daft drunk brother? A cold sweat broke out on Jackie. He jumped out of bed, made Maida sit down, huddled the blanket around her. Her hands felt like stone.

‘But what for? What did you do? He must be mad!'

She only shook her head dumbly.

‘I'll go and give Hof a call. Hof will let you into the house.'

But at that she wept hysterically. ‘No, no! No more trouble! It's nearly morning. No, no! Conrad would be all the angrier if I complained to Hof. You don't know what he's like.'

‘Then you'd better get into my bed, or you'll freeze.'

Unresisting, she let him pull the bedclothes over her. Her little feet, stained at the heels, muddy-toed where she had run from the house to the barn, seemed to him to be pitiful. He could see now where purple welts were raised on her shins and calves. There was a swollen bruise across her hand, another coming up glossy blue in the hair above her forehead.

‘I could kill him,' he said. ‘I could kill the scum.'

She did not look at him, but turned her face further into the pillow.

‘Jackie—you can't stay there—it's too cold. Come and hold me.'

The boy's teeth clenched. The gall and wormwood of his sojourn with the Linz family seemed to be concentrated in this moment, when he burned passionately to avenge this ill-used girl, and knew he was impotent to do so.

‘I can't, Maida. Your mother wouldn't—want me to.'

She gave a woebegone cry, began once more to sob. ‘What does Ma care...she wouldn't open the door to me.'

Jackie blew out the candle. For a while he waited for the girl's hysteria to subside, but it did not. The rain suddenly fell upon the barn roof in a torrent; he heard it thrashing the loft windows, gulping down the orchard paths. After a time he got into the bed, drew the girl close. She was shuddering uncontrollably.

‘Go to sleep,' he said. ‘I'll warm you.'

She was so thin, so frangible, he was afraid to draw her close. But eventually her sobs diminished to hiccups; these in their turn ceased and with a sigh she slept, her arms about his shoulders, her knees drawn up in some way so that they cradled his feet. From the hairy fabric of her nightgown a faint scent arose. At first he thought in his innocence that it was from her body, that all girls' bodies were fragrant in themselves, for Cushie, too, exuded a phantom sweetness. Then he became aware that Maida had a little bag of herbs around her neck on a string, and he was touched at this fastidiousness in one whose life was so isolated and austere.

In exquisite contentment that was dreamlike even before he slept, he inhaled her warmth, her softness, her very breath, and so for the first time experienced the strange naturalness of sleeping with a woman. Sometime before dawn he awakened, and almost without his own volition, entered her body. She responded with silent passion, fiercer even than his. He fell back exhausted, not sure if he were still dreaming, and the odour of the nosegay about her throat mingled with the green fresh aroma of the varnish on her grandfather's coffin.

When, at the sound of the breakfast triangle, he awakened, she was gone, and for some time he could scarcely discern whether it had been a fantasy. But the syrups that had dried on his body reassured him; the faint stains of tear-diluted blood on his pillow brought him wide awake. Shaken and yet filled with irrational elation, he rose and dressed.

During this time he did not think of Cushie. He did not think of Maida. He, himself, filled all his thoughts.

It was still raining; the world was muddy, the ducks sailing over the fringes of their overflowing pond. In the turkey-yard, half-sheltered under the chestnut-trees, the gobbler, inflated and purple, strutted and swanked. Jackie looked at him for a moment.

‘Yep,' he agreed.