Swords and Crowns and Rings (3 page)

The neighbour, Mrs Early, had fed Jackie and put him to bed. ‘He's been a devil again,' she said, admiringly. ‘Out in the tree like a possum. Wouldn't come in for half an hour, and not a stitch on his little rumtum but a singlet.'

The bereaved woman pulled down the blankets from the tittering, heaving heap that was her son. His sparkling eyes, the most beautiful she had ever seen in a human face, looked back at her. They were grey as the dawn, with black velvet bands around the iris, and the lashes were like a foal's.

‘The Nun's going to build me a treehouse tomorrow,' he said.

The mother, looking into those eyes, saw nothing of her sad husband or herself. Perhaps he was like her father, who had died young.

‘He says I'm a luck child,' said Jackie.

‘So you are,' cried Mrs Hanna, gathering him to her breast. The child's face struggled up to her shoulder and he said excitedly to the neighbour: ‘And I'm going to put my wee iron stove in it, and cook grapes and snails and me and Cushie Moy'll eat them.'

Mrs Hanna was aware that the Nun had every intention of courting her when the year was up. A man she had scarcely known in her husband's lifetime except over the counter, she had nevertheless heard and absorbed his history. He was gardener and handyman at the convent, and in Kingsland it was thought uniquely amusing that his name should be Jerry MacNunn.

The Nun was a large man of sixteen stone. Because of a wound inflicted during the Boer War, he limped and was often in pain. He was down and out when he came to Kingsland in the depressed years after the war. He first went to the parson who gave him a shilling and his hopes for a clean and temperate life. He saw the Seventh Day Adventists, but they were vegetarians and gave him a bag of carrots.

The Nun sat on the railway station trying to eat raw carrots and cursing his leg and his luck. He was not a Catholic, but in desperation thought he'd go to the priest. It wasn't Father Link then, but the old tough from Clare, McTigue, face speckled like a bantam hen, knuckles broken and splathered from scrapping in his youth. He was saying his Office in the windy presbytery garden when the Nun put on the bite for a doss-down in his tool-shed.

‘Never,' said he between two psalms. ‘The last time I was fool enough to let a couple of whining miseries from up-country sleep there, they got off with me hedge clippers and a grand chisel. What's the matter with you, a great lump of a man like you, that you've no job or a place of your own?'

‘I've got this crook leg,' began the Nun, already incensed at the other's brutal manner. ‘I was at Mafeking ...'

‘And so was every other bloody loafer,' snorted Father McTigue. ‘Go and sleep under the bridge where all the vagrants go.'

And he walked off into the dusk intoning. The Nun pondered a moment or two on whether to go after him and pull his biretta down over his lugs, then went vengefully away to sneak through a window into the nearby convent kitchen to help himself to some Christian charity. Fearlessly he bogged into half a leg of mutton and a loaf of bread, and was away on what was left of the steamed pudding when the lay sister returned from the refectory and discovered him. She went flying off like some wingless black bird, squawking.

In came the Mother Superior, tall, commanding, kindly.

‘What are you doing here, young man?' she inquired. The Nun stared challengingly, meanwhile shovelling in the last of the steamed pudding. The Mother Superior cut him bread and butter, made tea. Wordlessly, she poured it out, and fetched him the sugar. At the end of the meal, the desperate man rose.

‘Where's the axe and the woodheap?' he said.

That was how he started, or, as the town wits said, got into the habit. It was said Father McTigue gave the Mother Superior, Sister Bonaventure, a tongue-lashing, but she stood firm. The convent needed a handyman for the gardening and the firing, to fit new washers and clean out the cesspit. Mr MacNunn could board at the home of any one of a number of respectable hard-up widows.

As time went on, the Nun and Father McTigue became friendly in a guarded way, and even had sparring matches: the Nun, because of his game leg, standing on a handkerchief like Young Griffo the old featherweight champion, and dodging with the whippy speed of a snake every blow the priest aimed at him. Once or twice Father McTigue landed a stinger, and the Nun was not slow in returning the compliment, so that Father McTigue said Mass for a week or two with a lop-sided jaw or a nose like God's wrath.

Still, all in all, they got on well, and when Father McTigue went to his reward the Nun was one of the pallbearers, and got drunk afterwards and belted up two fellows in the pub who'd said the wrong thing.

The Nun wasn't a religious man. He thought the whole caper was a racket. Yet, when he heard of the hasty carrying-off of Walter Hanna, he said, ‘Praise be to God', having caught the expression from the Sisters. Then, in an inexplicable state of excitement, he prematurely chopped off the heads of the three young ducks he'd been fattening for the nuns' Easter Sunday dinner, thinking all the time of the comfortable woman Mrs Hanna, her hearty wailing laugh that had been so often cut off short as she suddenly recollected whose wife she was. A woman to laugh a lot and cry a lot: the Nun had a spookily dislocated vision of her putting her frizzy dark head on his shoulder and dropping tears all over his neck. He felt half-melted at the thought.

But Mrs Hanna was still in a sense living with her husband. The sorrows and disappointments of her life with him were still sharp within her; the memory of his inertia and apathy still aroused sadness but not sympathy or forgiveness. He permeated the house like the slowly fading smell of his pipe.

Throughout this dreary twilight of her bereavement the Nun sometimes made an almost mysterious appearance, mending the fence, pruning the fruit-trees and, as he had promised, building a treehouse in the fig-tree outside Jackie's window. The little boy moved all his treasures there. He could scuttle out of his window and along a branch in an instant. As well as playhouse, it was his refuge from threatened punishment.

For by the time he went to school Jackie Hanna was a perfect devil. Mrs Hanna's years of work to make the child believe that he was as good as anyone else and better than most had succeeded eminently. He was as outgoing and mad-headed as a young dog, and because of his great strength and agility always leader of his peers. At six the bulging of his forehead was more noticeable, his belly protruded a little, a certain massivity began to show in his short legs. But his hair was like black feathers, his eyes astonishingly beautiful when he lifted them to the world that moved above him.

Children his own age accepted him for what he was. Older ones, embarrassed by his difference from themselves, sometimes teased and mocked him, particularly his rolling dwarf's walk. He was quick to retaliate, seizing his tormentor around the body, digging his head into the belly, oblivious of blows and punches, and steadily squeezing. After the teachers had rescued three or four wheezing, hysterical children from his grip there was no more teasing.

Jackie had a fatherly kindness towards his chief playmate, Cushie Moy from the big house across the road. Her real name was Dorothy, but when she was three months old her father, in a rare moment of humour, had looked at the fat infant and said, ‘She's just like a little cushion!' So she had become Cushie, a name that suited her physically—for she had remained chubby, a little golden-haired Britannia—as it did spiritually, for she was easily bullied, and had an obsessive desire to be loved.

She idolised her handsome father, a man in a sincere dark suit, an important man, and chief accountant at the Bank. Her mother had been a Miss Jackaman, from the newspaper-owning family in Sydney; and the town of Kingsland was well aware that all the money was on her side. From the wilful girl who had married beneath her she had developed into a snobbish, isolated woman. Her voice was cultivated and mild, but she was not mild. Inside she was raging, and the hapless Cushie, born perceptive, knew it.

Mrs Moy thought it fitting and rather charming that her child should become a little playmate to Jackie Hanna. There was something there of a baby princess playing with the court jester. Her social sensitivity to the situation was proven when she first idly asked Cushie what games she and Jackie played under the pepper-tree or in the treehouse.

Cushie, shrinking, for almost everything she did was inexplicably wrong, said that they played fairy stories. Cushie was the princess, and was rescued from various perils by the brave dwarf. Sometimes, she added, diffidently, she worked a spell and Jackie was turned into a prince at the end, and then he too wore a crown and lived happily ever after.

‘Jackie says I'm a real princess because of my hair,' she mumbled, wary of a scolding on the evils of vanity. But her mother, smoothing a fawn eyebrow and sighing, was abstracted, remembering her own golden hair, its opulence, and the balls to which she had taken it, the crowning splendour of beautiful and talked-about Belle Jackaman. She looked suddenly at Cushie with a cat-glitter, seeing not the child but the child's father, the cause of her exile from riches and admiration.

A year after Walter Hanna's death, the last of his clocks ran down. Contrary to his dying instructions, Mrs Hanna had never wound them. She had a superstitious dread of doing so, though each Sunday evening she had gone to the front room to sit awhile, as he had done. The clocks died one by one. The light feminine ticks, the dull clatter of the clock with the wooden works, the resonant bongs and whirrs, all ceased until there was silence in the front room except for the chime of the 400-day clock, coffin-shaped, with a mirror in its base that reflected Mrs Hanna's face as a convex orange in the corner of a distorted room.

‘Ah, shut up,' she said. ‘Or I'll give you such a crack in the kisser!' She had her hand raised, edge first, as her irascible mother had raised hers to clout her in her childhood, when suddenly the thing died. It was uncanny.

Though she knew the clock was due to run down, the circumstance of its stopping filled her with dread. It seemed like an omen. She was so nervous from the fright she had had that day that she itched all over. She took a pin from her hair and scratched her head gently, and after a while she began to breathe easier.

‘Ah, God,' said Mrs Hanna. A thought came to her. Perhaps the clock's sudden demise was indeed an omen. Perhaps it was a sign sent to tell her that poor Walter was out of purgatory and on his way to paradise. The idea fired Mrs Hanna and she had an imaginative vision of Walter, his back to her, climbing a long winding road up a hill. There he went, slowly—no, stepping lightly, towards the great rays that fanned from the hilltop as they did in the Sunlight Soap advertisement in the shop.

‘Good-bye, Walter,' she whispered. There seemed nothing else to say, so she added, ‘I'm sorry about everything.'

Enlivened by this experience, she left the front room and returned to the kitchen which needed a scrub. Wielding the brush vigorously on the drab, brittle linoleum, she puffed at a cigarette, dropping the ashes in the water and over her bosom, and in between times whistling, her heart becoming lighter every moment. Jackie was home, he was safe. He had brought Cushie home, and had stood up to Mr Moy, an important man at the Bank, without being bashful or afraid.

‘There's a jumped-up snot, if you like,' she mused. A faint trepidation stirred within her as she thought of that other snot, Mrs Moy, who was jumped-up even higher, and what she would probably say on the morrow. But she didn't care really, for Jackie had more than proved by his escapade that he had become what she had set out to make him, an ordinary tough, mad, worrisome kid.

‘But he could do without the swearing,' she confessed, making herself a cup of tea and grinning reminiscently as she did so.

Jackie and Cushie Moy had long anticipated their expedition to the hills. When they were four years of age Jackie had informed the little girl of his belief that dwarfs lived in the hills, a whole race of people like himself. He showed her pictures in his books—the black elves working at their goldsmiths' forges, outwitting the giants, helping Thor, crafting a wig of living gold for goddess Sif, after wicked Loki had snatched her bald.

Cushie and Jackie knew of no hills but Paddy's Range, the breakwind and fence about their town, gnarled, hostile hills that in the summer hung their wooded salients with smudges of bush-fire smoke, and in the winter gushed rainwater, the streams splitting the greenish-blond slopes like white veins. They looked like hills where dwarfs lived. Also the children knew that Paddy's Range was old goldmining land. The ground up there was so torn, so pig-rooted and blighted, that it was now useless for anything but lean sheep pasture, and that only in a good season.

Rarely was Cushie allowed to come to play for the whole day. On this occasion it was because her baby sister Olwyn had been ill in the night, and Mrs Moy thought she should take her to a children's doctor in Ghinni Junction, the next town down the line. Mrs Moy had not liked asking the favour, so Mrs Hanna had great pleasure in granting it. It did her good to see the posh young woman shivering a little in the chill of the unswept shop, one white lady's hand fluttering to the pearl pin that shone in the lace jabot, or nervously testing the placing of the foot-long hatpin that held a winged hat upon her ringleted pompadour.

‘Sure I will, Mrs Moy!' she said heartily. ‘The two of them will be safe as houses in the backyard.'

‘I'm very obliged, Mrs Hanna,' returned the lady, adding with an admirable diffidence, ‘I'll be pleased to er...recompense you for your trouble.'

Mrs Hanna, pushed neatly into her place, turned dark red but retorted with meretricious exuberance, ‘Never think of it. It's a poor world if one mother of children can't help another!'

Mrs Moy, thus riposted, showed no sign of it, but continued, gently smiling: ‘Mr Moy will call for Dorothy shortly after five, and you must tell him if she hasn't behaved well.'