Swords and Crowns and Rings (20 page)

‘I know you're a decent bloke, Jack,' he said, ‘but you got to realise not every girl would want to be tied up to you.'

Jackie cursed him savagely, ceasing only when he saw the boy's weak blue eyes brim with tears.

‘Oh, God, Ellie, don't make it worse. Clear out, will you?'

He flung himself on his face in the straw, tried not to hear what the boy was stuttering.

‘When we were kids we were always planning to run away and hide, some place, Sydney maybe, where my father would never find us. Once we did run away, and Kurtie found us, and Ma gave Maida a thrashing, not me. Maida's always looked after me. If I had any money I'd take her away and look after her and the baby too. But I haven't got nothing, I can't even read, I don't know what sort of job I could work at.'

When Jackie did not answer, he subsided into a sniffling babble, amidst which Jackie distinguished the words: ‘If only you'd take her away before Pa comes home!'

He stumbled away, moaning and coughing. Jackie just lay there, holding his hands over his ears, not wanting to hear the sounds of the world any more.

Inside him something mourned: ‘Cushie! Cushie!' and each repetition of her name was like a knife stuck in him.

‘I'm giving up,' his brain told him. ‘I'm going to do what they want.'

But twenty minutes later the stream of his thoughts was turbulently flowing the other way, and he had decided to clear out.

‘I did it before,' he thought. ‘I could have got to Ghinni by myself, but then Hof came along. But they'd follow me to Ghinni, that's what they'd do, haul me off the train. Well, I could cut across country, catch the train at the watering halt.'

Vigour suddenly filled his limbs once more. He saw himself slipping through other people's orchards, following cattle tracks, hiding himself somewhere near the siding until the express pulled to a stop. Tomorrow's express, or that of the day after that; it didn't matter, as long as he escaped from the Linz farm.

He pushed the thought of Maida to the back of his mind, refusing to allow pity or anxiety to deflect him. She had her trouble; he had his. If he had brought distress to her, she had brought it to him.

He thought, ‘I'll go tonight, as soon as it gets dark. If there's a moon I can get a good way down the road before they miss me.'

He hurried down the ladder, halted. His Aunt Eva was standing beside his bunk. He had kicked his half-packed portmanteau beneath it, but he was certain she would have looked at it. There was nothing to do but to keep on walking towards her.

‘Jackie!' she cried, false-faced. ‘You didn't come up for your dinner, and I thought, now, where's that boy? That's not like him; he must be feeling crook.'

‘No,' said Jackie. ‘Sorry I'm late. I'll have a wash and come straight up to the kitchen.'

But as he turned away, she put her little claws on his shoulders and turned him round again. To his horror she darted down her head and kissed him on the lips. It was like being kissed by a mouse.

‘There, I understand,' she said, squeezing a thin mist across her eyeballs. ‘The others are mad as hornets, Maida having her whole life ruined and all that; but I say it's happened to a thousand other young people, and no real harm done once you're married. And Maida...oh, you've got a gem there, you know, lad. She's that handy with the cooking and sewing, a real willing worker.'

‘And with my disability I'm not likely to find another like her,' said Jackie.

The old woman gave him a sharp glance, looking for mockery, but apparently did not find it, for she smiled with pleasure: ‘Ah, you're a sensible lad. I might have known my brother Jerry would bring you up to know right from wrong when you see it.'

‘I'll be up to the kitchen in five minutes,' promised Jackie. ‘Want to change my socks.'

The moment Aunt Eva bustled out of the barn Jackie rolled up a few clothes, an extra pair of boots, his shaving gear, a few personal belongings, in his oilskin coat, made a swag of it, and crept out of the half-door at the back of the barn. All seemed quiet; everyone was at the midday meal. He crouched up the hill, submerging where he could amongst the flowering shrubs, the unmowed grass. He cursed his Aunt Eva bitterly. The old bitch knew he was going to make a bolt for it; she'd have the men alerted in no time. But they'd try the road first, he was sure.

He skulked in the bushy gully beyond the grassy patch where the dead Linz infants lay buried. Straining his ears for sounds from the farmhouse, he heard at last the lorry engine struggle into life, and the vehicle rasp off towards Ghinni Junction.

He intended to hide there until nightfall, and then cut down through the orchard and into the next property, following its fence until he emerged upon the Ghinni road. He felt too sick with agitation to analyse his emotions; all he knew was that for the time being he had escaped. Couched in the warm grass like a scared rabbit, he watched the clouds forming their illusory landscapes in the sky, tried not to think, and so, after a while, fell asleep.

When he awakened, darkness had come. A lantern blazed in his face. He wriggled out of snatching hands, escaped, floundered down the hill towards the pink glow of the orchard and, somewhere along the seething radiant aisles, was seized by the fat brother, who had been lighting the lamps.

He was beaten so badly that next day he could scarcely move, and Hof, returned from Ghinni Junction where he had failed to find Jackie, feared that his nose and cheekbone had been broken.

‘Ain't you got sense?' he growled. ‘Don't you see that's what they were waiting for, specially Con? I'm sorry, but. And if I'd been here it wouldn't have happened.'

They put Jackie in a disused storeroom near the kitchen, where there was always someone to keep an eye on him. The place smelled of sourness and dirt, like a forgotten cheese. A basket of mummified potatoes mouldered in the corner.

For the first few days Jackie could not speak intelligibly. The pain in his face was so bad that he was glad when people went away and left him alone. He closed his eyes as well as he could—the left one seemed as though there was a line of felt between upper and lower lids—and sank deep into his own head.

He felt different, but did not know how. At first the pain was oceanic, noisy. It allowed him no time for thinking or even feeling. He longed only for it to stop.

The huge conflict of the past two weeks had gone, but he did not know why or how. An apathy that was almost tranquil took its place. Had the physical savagery he had suffered broken his spirit? He felt honestly that this was not so. The whole mythos of his childhood was studded with tales of people and animals who had dropped their bundles...men beaten by drought, turning their faces to the wall, dying by their own will. Great horses turned into shivering victims that bowed their heads and fought never again after they had been brutalised by the breaker. Women who lost one child after another and at last just sat there, silent, unweeping, unmoving—docile, perhaps, but absent for ever.

Jackie knew that the beating had not touched him, wherever he lived. And though he felt a profound shame at his abandonment of Maida, it did not gnaw at him. The abandonment had been made in self-defence. He was ashamed, but not guilty.

No, what he felt was something darker, less explicable in human terms. It was fatalism.

‘I've run out of luck,' he thought.

Some would have thought he'd been born without luck, but he had never felt that: his parents had seen to it that he didn't. But now he saw his luck as of an almost hallucinatory tenuousness, a thread beside which the spider's was a rope, and it seemed to have frayed through.

From time to time people came to look at him. His Aunt Eva: ‘Fancy running away! What a thing to do with poor Maida in such a fix, I would never have thought it of you, Jack, I thought you was a decent boy.'

Through a squinched eyelid he could see the greedy vindictiveness on her little face. Someone else getting it rough! Jackie couldn't stand the sight, closed his eye, pretended to be deaf or dead.

Later came Maida, hand soft as a dove upon his face.

‘The swelling's going down, Jackie. Does it feel a bit better? Can you speak, Jackie?'

He could mumble a few words.

‘I'm sorry, Maida. I wasn't running away from you. Just...everything.'

‘I know.'

And then one day a week or so later, when he was out of bed, and his face was looking almost human in shape once more, Hof came with a letter.

‘This'll cheer you up. From Kingsland.'

Jackie took it apathetically. His mother's writing belonged to some other world which he had forfeited for ever.

‘Aren't you going to open it, boy?'

‘I will directly.' To his helpless shame tears came into his eyes. Hof sat down, put his head in his hands.

‘Jesus, it's a mess, ain't it? This life ain't fit for a dog.'

After a while, he said, ‘Don't want you to think I went after you to bring you back. Thought I might give you a lift somewhere, and no one any the wiser.'

‘What about Maida?'

Hof shrugged.

‘One way we got both of you miserable, the other way only one. Anyway, women...'

Jackie said, ‘Supposing I married Maida, what then?'

‘Room here,' said Hof, ‘but you wouldn't want to stay here.' He added, ‘I know where there's a job going, on a cream boat on the Dovey River. There's a cottage goes with it.'

‘Yeah?' said Jackie indifferently. He watched the disappointment momentarily relax the other's wooden face.

‘How's the old man, your grandfather?'

‘Sinking. Asleep nearly all the time. We been wiring our father everywhere, but it's hard to know where he is, being a traveller.' Hof rose.

After Hof had gone, Jackie opened the envelope, holding the letter listlessly before unfolding it. A thousand miles, a hundred years seemed to stretch between him and his home and family.

News. The Nun's bad leg. Business. Somebody dead, lovely funeral. Hope you're settling in better this time. Cushie Moy off to Sydney. Morning train, Thursday, perhaps you could make it your business to see her at the Junction as it passes through. She'll be looking out for you, always so fond of you and all. Hope you will make all effort to see her.

Jackie looked blankly at the underlining of this. He came to himself again as though someone had given him an electric shock. His apathy vanished, his face began to hurt as though a horse had kicked him. Cushie sprang alive before him, yielding, beckoning, like a lovely mirage. Hope filled him. Cushie had news for him; perhaps she already had contacted her grandmother, perhaps all the problems were solvable after all.

He continued to say to himself, bracingly, ‘My luck's not out after all. Doesn't this prove it?'

But he didn't believe it.

Still, he had to do what he could. If opportunity was there, he had to give it its chance.

He put on his boots. As he went out into the daylight he thought he saw Ellie scurry away around the corner of the barn. Keeping an eye on him, no doubt. A moment later the dark brother lounged into sight.

‘Going somewhere, little man?'

‘I want to see Hof.'

‘Got ideas, little man?'

‘Where's Hof?'

The dark brother looked at him consideringly. ‘Next time it might be for keeps, have you thought of that?'

‘I've thought of it.'

Jackie stepped around the dark brother and went on to the orchard. Some of the hands looked at him furtively, looked away quickly. He found Hof.

‘I have to go to Ghinni Junction tomorrow. I want to be there when the southbound express goes through, there's a friend of mine on it.'

Hof looked dubious.

‘I'm not asking you, Hof,' said Jackie. ‘I'm telling you, I have to see my friend.'

‘Bloody little rat,' said the dark brother, half admiringly. ‘See green in our eyes, do you? I can just see you hopping on the express and going into smoke.'

‘One of you come with me then,' said Jackie indifferently. He waited. ‘Well, what about it?'

He could see the doubt in Hof's face, a candid struggle with God knew what simple plans he had made as a solution to this crisis. Jackie thought, ‘Poor bastard!'

He said, ‘I'm telling you this: if you don't agree to take me to the train tomorrow, that's the end. I'll never marry Maida.'

‘We'll see about that, Shorty,' said the dark brother.

‘Yes, you'll see,' said Jackie.

‘Got to have a word with the others then,' said the dark brother, oafishly baffled. ‘Go on, get out of my sight, you bloody abortion.'

Jackie stood where he was. ‘I want to leave early. I don't want to miss the express.'

As he turned, he caught the queerest look on Hof's face. It struck him afterwards that Hof was going to work it somehow that he could leap aboard that train. Was that what he himself wanted to do? He didn't know. He just wanted to see Cushie once more, as a man about to be blinded might want to see the sunshine.

Later that night the dark brother looked briefly into the room where he lay, and said, ‘Sun-up, then, Hof will drive and I'll go along to keep an eye on you.'

‘Right,' said Jackie, and turned over to face the wall. He sensed the man's standing there, his ravenous desire to punish, but he forced himself to lie motionless, and after a while the dark brother went away.

‘My luck's changed, my luck's changed,' repeated Jackie to himself. ‘And whatever opportunity comes, I have to be ready to take it.'

At sunrise the dark brother awakened him, waited while he dressed, escorted him to the truck.

All the silent way to Ghinni, Jackie tried to keep his hope steadfast, thinking, ‘My luck's changed, my luck's changed.'

But he didn't believe it, and he was right. The truck broke down eighteen miles outside of the town, and though all three of them worked on it, they did not get it going until too late. Though Hof pushed the old vehicle until it shuddered and steamed, they did not reach Ghinni Junction until the express was pulling out.