Swords and Crowns and Rings (18 page)

On the reddish darkness before his eyes a face began to form, Maida's, frail, anxious. He realised that the thought of her had hardly crossed his mind since he left High Valley.

The fat brother met him at Ghinni Junction, beaming, jovial.

‘Glad to see you, son,' he said. He leant down to shake hands with Jackie. Jackie involuntarily recoiled, expecting that his hand would be crushed in a sadistic grip, but instead it was enfolded as though within the cushioned petals of a warm flower.

‘No hard feelings, eh?' entreated the fat brother. ‘Let bygones be bygones? Con and me were as full as ticks. We musta been off our heads and you can't blame poor Theo—he's half a looney.'

Jackie nodded coolly, and vaulted up onto the tray of the truck with an easy swing of his powerful arms.

‘Wouldn't like to meet you when you're out for blood,' said the fat brother. ‘Strangle a man quick as look at him.'

Jackie looked him straight in the eye, for they were now level. ‘You're not kidding,' he said.

The fat brother put on an expression of playful alarm, and climbed into the cab. The drunk brother was already lolling there, unconscious or asleep. Jackie looked through the rear window at the ruckled neck of the fat brother.

‘What's this bastard up to?' he wondered.

The lovely spring had filled the sky with swimming light, napped the hills with milky green; the parched bronze scrub of his previous visit now showed raspberry-red tips and streaks. On the eroded hillsides, knurled and ploughed by rain and water run-off, like clay glaciers, little trees had seeded and caught, prickly vines, something close and clawed with a bony yellow bloom. Late blooming orchards were everywhere.

Jackie felt a deep love for this countryside, wordless converse between his spirit and that of his country. Yet he felt the same for Kingsland, and perhaps would for Sydney if he ever got there, which he would if Cushie's granny was the fairy godmother the girl thought her. He tried to turn his thoughts to Cushie, at her posh school, spending her days on trivia, bored to rebellion...even Cushie, so soft and docile and easily scared. He longed for the time when he could be with her and look after her, and sleep in her arms every night in their own bed.

It was dark as the fat brother turned into the home track, dragging the wheel around to avoid the potholes. One of the lorry's headlights was smashed, the other a feeble lemon yellow. Jackie saw, caught in the one-eyed beam of the headlamp, a big old lizard, drab and dry as an uncleaned snakeskin shoe, with its hard, neat-nostrilled nose, and its pleasant, almost human eye fixed sideways on the light. The creature was grey, black, gravel colours.

‘I'll get him this time!' Jackie heard the fat brother shout, and the lorry swerved and roared. Jackie was shot up against the back of the cab with stunning force, and the drunk brother helplessly hit the windowscreen with a crack that nearly broke his nose.

Jackie saw the lizard trundle hastily under a rock-lily clump.

‘Are you crazy, you slob?' he yelled. ‘What a half-wit I was to come back,' he thought, holding his stinging ear as the lorry ground up the familiar track.

The kitchen, the odour of food, the darkness coming down amidst the fruit-trees, the oil lamps lit—all was the same as before, except that this time his Auntie Eva dropped her spoon and, with a mouse cry, threw her arms about him.

‘I'm so pleased you're back. I was that sorry when you went! Give us a kiss, Jack!'

Bristles poked his chin as she kissed him. He almost shuddered. Ellie was lurching around, looking pleased. He slapped Jackie on the back, took his suitcase, his coat, trying to tell him all the news at once.

‘We got a bumper crop of peaches. The old bay mare fell over the bank and Hof had to shoot her. We fed her to the pigs. Con broke his thumb, but it's coming good now. And what do you think, our grandfather is dying. Took to his bed ten days ago; he's just fading away. Want to have a look at him, Jack? He looks real funny, just like one of them mummies.'

Once again Jackie had a queer feeling that the boy was wrong in the head. He wanted to ask where Maida was, but could not bring himself to do so. She did not appear during the meal, and neither did Hof. Someone volunteered that the two of them were with the old man, washing him, attending to his physical needs.

‘Hof can understand when he speaks German,' said Aunt Eva; ‘and he likes Maida to clean him and fix him up.' She gave Jackie a meaning nod. ‘He's like a baby with regard to certain things, you understand.'

He was given his old stretcher-bed in the barn.

‘You don't mind, I hope, Jackie,' said his aunt. ‘We got the bunkhouse pretty full with extra hands for the spraying.'

But Jackie was grateful to be alone. He looked at the coffin on the trestle; it was finished now. The clean antiseptic smell of tar arose from its interior. Jackie looked at the lid, at the deep-cut Gothic letters:
MARTIN OTHO LINZ, 1846–192––

Someone had started to carve the upright stroke of a figure four. The workmanship made Jackie sure that it was Martin Linz himself. He had made up his mind to die then, even before he took to his bed.

A profound realisation of some kind struck Jackie. But he didn't know exactly what it was. Some time it would come to him. Whatever it was, disturbing as it was, it was neither evil nor tragic. It was just...but he did not know what. All at once he was very tired and sleepy, and pulling off his clothes he fell into the narrow, familiar bed and in a moment was asleep.

Some time during the night he awakened briefly, and the thought ‘A king...he knows how to be a king' stood very clearly in his drowsy mind.

Next morning Hof greeted him gruffly.

‘Your back better, Hof?' asked Jackie awkwardly.

He felt self-conscious and ill-at-ease, not knowing whether to refer to his departure and return or not. But Hof was just himself, grumpy, taciturn and somehow sad as winter.

‘She's right,' said Hof.

They worked together all the morning, with very little speech between them. The frosts had slackened off, Hof said—a mercy, because they could do great harm to the fruit at this stage.

‘I'll stay till picking, maybe,' said Jackie, ‘if you need me.'

Hof did not look at him when he said: ‘Shouldn't have come back, boy. You went while the going was good. Shouldn't have come back. You got a life of your own elsewhere.'

Jackie thought he might tell him how little life he did have, how few prospects, but there seemed no point in it.

‘I'm satisfied enough here,' he said, ‘if you can keep those brothers of yours off my back.'

Hof looked as if he had more to say, but moved silently away with his bucket and spray pump.

Several times Jackie had seen Maida at a distance. He half-raised a hand to greet her, but she turned and vanished through the door that led to the covered veranda where Jackie fancied the old man Linz had his sleeping quarters.

Jackie experienced extraordinary confusion at the sight of Maida. Shyness, awkwardness, a faint sense of regret, mingled with a fugitive desire, a sharp reminder of their rapturous hours in the barn so few weeks ago. He liked Maida, and his pity for her was intensified by her drooping figure and wan aspect.

Yet what could he say to her?

It had not occurred to him to speak about Cushie, however casually, to her. Maida, and indeed his life at High Valley, did not impinge at all upon what he regarded as his real life.

He found himself dodging her, and he was ashamed that he should want to do so. But what would he do if she came secretly to the barn? He knew very well that he would succumb once more to the old lure of lust. And he didn't want to. He had too many complications in his life already.

Then it occurred to him that perhaps she was ashamed of her falling from grace. Even worse, perhaps she was ashamed of having expended herself on a dwarf. Perhaps she was disgusted with herself for being so hard-up that at last she had to come to the bed of such as Jackie Hanna.

Then his good sense reasserted itself. It was the tense atmosphere of High Valley that was making him read into happenings what was not there. Maida had not come to his bed because she was on heat. She had been beaten brutally, thrown out of the house in the dead of winter. There was nowhere else for her to go. And he, after all, had called her down from the hayloft into his bed, and he had been the one who had taken her, half asleep. She had responded, it was true.

‘And why bloody not?' Jackie asked himself. ‘I'm as good as anyone in that department, and probably better than most.'

Like Cushie, Maida had never shown any repugnance for him; she had accepted him with joy and tenderness. Perhaps, he thought with unaccustomed humility, even with love.

So, when he met her as he crossed the kitchen yard, three or four days after his arrival, he approached her with hardihood: ‘What's the matter? Don't you want to talk to me?'

She muttered, ‘Yes, yes, I do, but Grandpa...'

He saw to his horror that one of her eyes had been blackened. The bruise was now a fading yellow, but it was plain what had happened. And a small sticky scab ran across one of her downy almost invisible eyebrows.

‘They've been knocking you round again?'

Maida gave a nervous giggle. ‘That's how Con broke his thumb!'

With a kind of outraged possessiveness Jackie looked at her arms, her legs. Her legs were so welted the ridges showed through her stockings. She had a festering scratch on her forearm.

‘What for, though? Why on bloody earth would he want to...'

She said hurriedly, ‘Jackie, I can't talk. Can you come after supper to Grandpa's room? He's asleep most of the time, and we can talk. Please, Jackie, I do want to see you.'

He nodded, and went on to the kitchen.

Cockie Bailey had gone to work in the jam factory in Ghinni Junction. Jackie knew none of the other men at the table. They must have been warned against chiacking him, for they kept their heads to their plates, mumbling an occasional word to each other. The brothers, too, seemed to be putting themselves out to be agreeable to him. The dark brother did not speak, except to curse when he fumbled his food, for his thumb was still in plaster and he found it difficult to eat. The only unpleasantness was when Ellie pushed a spoon across to him, and the dark brother, seizing it with his left hand, shied it back at him.

‘Watch it, you gammy bastard,' he growled, ‘or I'll screw your knobs off for you. If you've got any.'

Ellie's childish face flushed as he bent his head towards his food. Jackie saw a movement which indicated that his mother had consolingly patted him on the knee.

Jackie thought, ‘It's no good, I can't stand these people, not even for Cushie. I haven't been here a week, and already they're poisoning me. I could kill that prick Con. I don't just want to damage him: I want to murder him.'

He was glad to escape from the table. He went first in the direction of the barn, and then doubled back along the side of the farmhouse. Light from a louvre window showed where the old man was lying. He entered quietly.

The light was so dim he could scarcely see anything but the top of Maida's head, as she sewed or mended close to the lamp. She looked up with relief and welcome as Jackie approached.

‘He's asleep,' she whispered. ‘He hasn't woken up all day. He's had nothing to eat now for more than a week.'

Jackie did not like to look at the old man, stretched like a wooden figure under a red blanket. So still! It was as though he were dead already. A faint odour of excrement came from the bed. Perhaps it was the way old sick people smelt.

The change in the old man was amazing. His brown face was muddy grey; the skull was poking through the skin. The huge old hands, docilely protruding from the frilled ends of his nightshirt sleeves, showed the knuckles and the wristbones as cream-coloured bosses. A rosary, the beads black and carved so that they looked like casuarina berries, was wound around one wrist. The paper eyelids twitched and shivered constantly.

‘Is he dreaming?' whispered Jackie.

‘I hope so,' she said. ‘Whenever he wakes up he talks of Grand-mudda.' She smiled. ‘He thinks I'm her, when she was young.'

She took a cloth and softly touched the old man's forehead.

‘He gets so clammy.'

Jackie hated being there; he was disturbed by the change in Martin Linz.

‘What's the matter with him?'

‘He's just dying,' she answered. The expression on her face was so candid, so accepting, that Jackie experienced a gush of affection. He put his arms around her.

‘I'm—fond of him, you know,' she murmured.

She had returned to her seat. Jackie stood beside her, not knowing what to say.

He felt that old Martin was engaged in some profoundly sacred and important business. It was right that he should be allowed to get on with it, without all the alien business of doctors and hospitals.

‘I'm glad you didn't send him to Ghinni Hospital,' he whispered.

‘The doctor said there was nothing anyone can do, so he might as well be here where he feels at home. He's just made up his mind to die, and so he will.'

She took up her mending again, and drew a long, uneven breath, seemed to steel herself.

‘Jackie, I have to tell you. My mother wrote that letter to your stepfather, persuading you to come back here, because I'm going to have a baby.'

Her voice was so expressionless that Jackie thought he had imagined what she said.

‘You don't mean...you don't mean I did it?'

She looked at him sombrely. ‘I don't blame you, Jackie. It was just as much my fault, maybe more, because I'm older than you.'

Jackie couldn't believe it. He wanted to laugh. He walked over to the window and indeed, to his dismay, a brief chuckle did force its way out of him. But he covered it with a cough.