Swords and Crowns and Rings (14 page)

Remembering Maida then, protectiveness rushed up in him.

Yet he was doubtful about what he should do or say. Conrad, dark or drunk, should not be allowed to get away with his brutality, though Jackie had no doubt that it, too, was part of ‘their ways', like standing submissively while the father hammered them with fist or boot. Still, his present jubilance bore him up, bade him wait and see, and almost debonairly he entered the kitchen, to find that the portly Kurt and his two younger brothers had already left for Ghinni Junction. It was Saturday, and it was their habit to go to the town for stores and stay overnight, returning by starlight on the Monday morning.

‘How they'll make it through the mud I dunno,' said Mrs Linz. ‘All them slips, and the washaways. But they would go, chains round the wheels, and spare parts for everything. Nothing won't set them aside when they've got their Saturday due.'

Maida was stirring porridge at the stove, Ellie was sitting beside it with his swollen face tied up in a black stocking.

‘He's got toothache, poor dear,' said his mother, ‘I've had that stocking full of hot salt on it for an hour, and it ain't done a skerrick of good. But the boys will bring home some painkiller for it, and some gutta-percha to stop up the hole. But I know they'll be late—poor Ellie.'

Her small defeated face was screwed up as though she herself were suffering her child's pain. She could hardly keep her hands off Ellie, so intense was her compassion.

Maida, even paler than usual, clearly bore the marks of her beating. The bruises showed through her coarse stockings; the bump on her head was like half an egg. Yet nothing was said about this. Jackie presumed that it was Linz custom to ignore such signs of familial disorder.

He sat alone at the table. Hof was still sleeping, it seemed. Jackie was overcome by a diffidence that entirely silenced him. As Maida gravely brought his plate to the table, he forced himself to look at her. Unobtrusively she gave him an eloquent look, a beam of such sweetness and acceptance that he felt something melt within.

‘How did you get in?' he murmured.

‘Hof left the door unlatched when he came up from the you-know-what,' she whispered.

In the week after that, she came often to his bed. It was like madness. He was obsessed. He could think of nothing else. To resist was unthinkable. He accepted her with frantic joy, looking forward all day with unbearable impatience to the possibility of her silent appearance in the barn. He became almost impervious, as though deaf and blind, to the tedious persecution of the brothers Linz.

She had come to him when he had most doubted himself; he was flattered and grateful for her mute passion, and never queried it except once. And that time, satiated and peaceful, an idle curiosity had made him ask her if she loved him.

She had turned and hugged him fiercely.

‘I've got to have someone,' she said. ‘You don't know how I feel.'

But he thought he did, and was tender and delicate with her. Her whole body cried out for kindness; she was like a greenhouse flower, folded gently, white and sunless.

She did not know even that she was lovely in his eyes, and looked stricken when he told her, as though he were teasing her. And later in the week, when the brothers were marooned in Ghinni because of the bad roads, and when Jackie climbed through her bedroom window, he saw why. In the chilly, ill-shaped room with its immensely tall walls and damp-blotched ceiling, there was only the bed and a skimpy chest. But upon the chest stood a mirror that showed the gazer as blanched, crooked-eyed, with hair coloured like a dirty bone.

Jackie, clinging to the edge of the chest, looked at himself and said, ‘Is that how you think you look? But it's a lie. You're a lovely girl, beautiful.'

But she did not seem to believe him.

Jackie had been reluctant to go to Maida's room. He felt distaste, as though he were vulgarly invading the privacy of the Linz household. Their joyful grapplings in the barn, lit by moonlight or in deepest darkness, surrounded by the artless rural odours of timber, stock-feed and machine-oil, seemed inevitable and natural. There Maida had been a wraith, a creature of dreams, come to assuage him. But in her bedroom she was a girl with a bed of her own. He could not think why she had wanted him to see it.

But she lay warmly curled about him, saying, ‘Go on, tell me a story. Tell me about Kingsland, the train, everything.'

She listened to him as though he were describing something magical. She had never seen a moving picture, been to school or church; she had visited Ghinni Junction only three times. Once, when she was six, a cousin of her grandfather's had come to stay, and he had taken all the children to a circus that was in Ghinni. She remembered everything that had happened as though it were engraved on her brain.

‘Did your mother go, too?'

‘No, Father wouldn't let her. I think she was having a baby. He said it would be not proper. But the baby died, anyway.'

He wondered if the old woman had had many dead children.

‘Yes, four, five maybe. Father buried them up beyond the peach-trees. My mother sometimes said that he killed them, but I don't know...perhaps she was just talking. I remember when I was little, and she used to go there and cry and Ellie and I had to kneel in the wet grass and say Gentle Jesus for them. But that's a long time ago.' She added, as though it were connected in some way, ‘Father made Hof blind, you know. He hit him with a tool, I don't know what, down at the forge. It was hot, and all the water-stuff came out of Hof's eye, and then he was blind.'

Talk of the absentee Remus Linz made Jackie feel queer, as though Maida's father were some dread mythical creature. Over the weeks he had even developed a certain dread of the unknown man, and Remus often slipped unbeckoned into his mind—swollen to an immense size like a smoke-genie. Sometimes he had the fat brother's satiny skin and hair like thin straw. Mostly he took on the venal yellow lineaments of the dark brother, but big, monstrously big, reducing Jackie to a manikin.

Maida wished to talk more about her father, but he would not listen. And so they fell once more into the blissful folly. As Jackie lay half asleep between her thighs, he saw the almost imperceptible luminance of candle-light draw upon the dark the crack beneath the door.

‘Your mother...someone...out in the passage,' he whispered.

She started from her drowse. They heard shuffling slippers.

Jackie knew there was no lock on the door. If the old woman were up seeing about Ellie's toothache, she would awaken Maida to redden up the fire for hot water.

‘Maida, I've got to go...quick!'

She seemed paralysed with fright. Her thighs clamped on him like pincers.

By pressing down on her shoulders he dragged himself free. With a gasp, she seemed to come to her senses. He grabbed up his clothes, threw them out the window, and scrabbled over the sill after them. As he dropped, something growing below, a raspberry or rose cane, raked him from ankle to groin. Hideously cold, yet scalded with mortification, he shuffled on his clothes, seeing the window above him glow dimly as Maida lit her candle. He heard her call out something to her mother, but by then he was deep in the dark below the water-laden trees.

Half-way to the barn, he thought he would have to vomit. His humiliation was even greater than his alarm and anger. It lay in his belly cold as fog.

It seemed the last straw that the barn's clerestory windows showed the glimmer of Martin Linz's lanterns. Jackie cursed the old man's industry. He tried to compose his face, and, still trembling with emotion, climbed through the little slip-door in the barn's massive wagon-gates. The old man was stitching the lining of the coffin with a curved needle. He wore a sailmaker's palm.

‘Good night!' said Jackie.

Martin Linz ducked his head politely. His glance lingered on the boots in Jackie's hand, lowered to his feet, black with mud; observed, Jackie was soon to be sure, the blood drops from the thorn scratch that had oozed through his light-coloured trousers.

The boy went straight to his bunk, undressed, blew out his candle, and flung himself between the blankets. Through the stacked bags of chaff he watched Martin Linz clean and put away his tools, each in a worn red leather sheath. Then the old man sat on a nail-keg and rolled and smoked a cigarette with shaky deliberation.

‘Go! Clear out! Damned old fool!' thought the boy furiously.

When Martin Linz had finished his smoke, he put the butt in a small tin which he returned to his pocket. Then he came over with the lamp and for a while looked at Jackie, who feigned sleep.

After he had gone away, Jackie thumped over onto his face and tried to sleep. But a new wave of dismay submerged him. Suppose the old man voiced a suspicion to Remus Linz, or even one of the brothers?

‘Ah, get away,' he assured himself. ‘The old chap's gaga. He can't even remember people's names from one minute to the next. Who'd believe him?'

He could not sleep. The rain had ceased its spattering. He heard the grandfather clock in the homestead parlour strike three and then four. They'd belt the truth out of Maida, the father would thrash her half to death. As the hours passed, his sense of imminent danger increased. The father would murder Maida, shoot her partner in sin. Jackie had a delirious vision of his dead body lying in bloody mud, with the Linz brothers standing around roaring their heads off with laughter. And it was true, that corpse looked ridiculous. If Hof died and collapsed in the mud there would be nobility about him, like a fallen tree. But Jackie Hanna would look like a crumpled doll.

At six Jackie fell asleep, to wake half an hour later, head thick, eyes sandpapered, when Ellie shook him into consciousness.

‘Hof's crook,' said Ellie. ‘He's got a bad back. Wants to know if you can deal with things till the rest of 'em get back from Ghinni.'

Jackie nodded. He rose and washed. The day was bright; the sun as yellow as a dandelion. His terrors of the night had retreated. The old man Martin had not in fact acted differently from his usual manner; the prospect of his and Maida's recklessness being discovered was small. Yet a deep sense of shame at his own precipitate flight remained.

As he went into the kitchen he was self-conscious and crestfallen, diminished some way, hoping against hope that Maida were not there, for how could he even look at her?

Only Ellie and his mother were there, chatting, eating their breakfast.

‘Poor Ellie's toothache is better,' said the old woman contentedly. ‘But he was up in the night with it for hours.'

‘Where's Maida then?' asked Jackie.

‘Rubbing Hof's back with embrocation. Suffers agonies with it, he does.'

‘Was it the War did it?' asked Jackie.

‘No, Hof didn't go to the War. He wasn't allowed by the authorities. He had to stay and help his father, because the farm was producing food, you see. But the next two went. Called themselves Lindsay because of the name, you see. The authorities thought it best.'

‘For a while they thought they'd intern Grandpa,' interjected Ellie with a laugh.

‘Lot of silly rot,' said Aunt Eva. ‘Been here for fifty years almost, his family all born here. Cut this orchard out of solid bush he did, him and old Grandmudda. Australian as any of us.'

‘There was plenty of ill-feeling in Ghinni though,' prompted Ellie. ‘People calling Hun and Squarehead after Dadda.'

‘Both my boys were ruined by the War,' Aunt Eva said. ‘Never been the same since.' She sighed.

‘Poor Kurtie, you shoulda seen him when he was young. You remember, Ellie, don't you? Pretty as a little cupid. Colour! You'd a thought he painted. And you never seen anything like his hair, yellow as corn-silk. I dunno. Don't seem right. And then, after the War, after he came out of hospital, he blew up.'

Jackie was bewildered.

She said tersely, ‘His wound.'

Ellie, with a sly grin, fluttered his hand downwards towards his crotch.

Maida had come in, smelling of wintergreen. Jackie was aware of her out of the corner of his eyes as she stood warming herself by the stove, but he was too self-conscious to look towards her. He was glad that the old woman was prattling on. It was probably a change for her not to be told to shut her silly mouth.

‘...a silver plate in his head,' she was saying. ‘Oh, it'd turn you up to feel this hard thing through the scalp. He shouldn't be drinking the way he does. He gets into fights, and the doctor said one tap on the head would finish him off.'

‘Gee, Ma, it's why he drinks,' said Ellie impatiently. ‘He's always hoping to wake up dead. And it's a pity the bugger doesn't.'

‘Oh, Ellie, you mustn't,' said Aunt Eva in a weak, servile tone, and Jackie felt a sudden spurt of compassion for the melancholy, half-crazy drunk brother, and contempt for Ellie, his mother's pussycat. Looking suddenly at Maida he saw that she, too, was gazing at her brother with the nervous protectiveness that so often marked her attitude towards him.

‘Jack,' said Maida. ‘Hof wants a word when you've finished breakfast.'

‘Right,' he mumbled, not looking at her. He refused more tea, brushed past her. But a few steps down the passage he looked back, to see her looking snubbed and stricken the way she looked when her brothers were boorish towards her. Ah, and pale and haggard too, for while he had turned and trembled in his bed during the night hours, she had run here and there to do the bidding of the doting mother in attendance upon her spoiled youngest.

‘Maida,' he said softly, and her face lit up as though the sun were behind it. He went to see Hof, feeling better, thinking how beautiful she was, how alone and pitiful. The thought crossed his mind for the first time: how would she get on without him, seeing, as she had said, that she needed someone?

For he knew now, without making a conscious decision about it, that he was going to leave. These people were too complicated; he could not understand them and did not want to. The Nun would be disappointed; his mother mad as a meat-axe. She would say that beggars could not be choosers and any port was good in a storm, and what other kind of job had offered itself to him? But he could not help it. The world of High Valley was unlivable for him.