Swords and Crowns and Rings (33 page)

Here and there smashed electric light bulbs spelled out half a word over a dangling door: Mon Rep...Lingalonga...Bellev... Seavi...Cr.ter.on.

‘It's spooky,' said Jackie. Yet the sun blazed down, the sea wind was full of enlivening dampness, at the end of a side street gulls snow-stormed in a nervous spiral.

There was a pier slumping at the end of that street. It had been fenced off. There was a sign saying: ‘Dangerous. Condemned.' But the fence had rotted away, leaving a gap, and on the end of the pier was a man cleaning fish and throwing the guts in the water.

Along one side of the pier were boarded-up booths that had sold fish and chips and gingerpop, a shooting gallery, a shoot the chute which had collapsed into a tangle of grids and twisted iron, a bathhouse whose scabbed wall bore the sign: ‘Ladies Wednesdays and Fridays. Attendant.'

Stray cats sat around the man, hooking away a head or a fin, hoicking with flattened heads and convulsing sides over bones. The gulls screeched and battled amongst the offal in the water.

The man did not seem interested in Jackie's size. He nodded, saying, ‘Heard you was in town...heard you was married yesterday. Funny place to come for a honeymoon.'

‘We're going to Dovey River,' offered Jackie. ‘We're going to be picked up today.'

‘Duchess Bay's dead as a doornail,' said the man, ripping a fish from vent to gill. ‘It's like a shipwreck, a mile of rubbish on the beach. Who's picking you up, did you say?'

‘Mr Morgan,' said Maida.

‘He runs the cream boat,' said Jackie.

‘Know him well,' said the fisherman, putting his hand in the fish's belly and with one skilful tug taking out all that had made it live and breed. ‘A bit sawney. Brought up on the Nelly Morgan Lighthouse. A real decent joker, Lufa.'

‘I'll be working with him,' said Jackie. His spirits rose. He was joyfully relieved to think he'd be working with a decent joker.

About ten in the morning Lufa Morgan arrived in a rattle-trap Ford. He had left the Dovey long before daylight, he said.

Jackie liked the look of him at once. He was a young, turnip-coloured man, with sandy hair in tight crinkles over his skull. He wore a grey flannel shirt and his pants were belted with electrical flex. He climbed down from the truck, stretched, said, ‘Well, there ain't too much of you, that's for sure. You got plenty of muscle, Jack? Because them cream cans ain't featherweights.'

Lufa saw Maida shyly standing amongst their luggage on the veranda of the Royal Hotel. He pulled off his hat.

‘Didn't see you there, missus. How are you?'

‘Very well, thank you,' said Maida. ‘When do we start back?'

She gave Lufa a smile. Jackie could see that she liked him. Lufa squinted at the sun.

‘Pretty soon. You folk ready? Hope the lorry ain't too rough for you, missus. The track's wicked, part of the way.'

There was room for all three of them in the huge crate of the lorry cabin.

Not three miles out of Duchess Bay the road became a dirt droving track, following long slow grades as though the cattle mobs had marked it out themselves. The country was so dry the road was the colour of dried blood; it was speckled by stones that gave off sparks and twinkles. It was the pyrites, Lufa said.

Redgums with barkless, glowing flesh leant over dry creek-beds. Here and there ravenous sheep clustered like flies about a clotted pond.

‘We've had some bad seasons,' said Lufa. ‘Squatters all whinging. But down on the Dovey there's good feed. You'll see.'

Jackie asked how it was that Lufa had agreed to give him a job on the cream boat.

‘Well, it's a case of blood being thicker than water, you see. Mrs Jack here now, she's a Linz, right? Well, my old mum was a Schneider, and her mother was the eldest Linz girl, one of old Martin's heifers. So we're kind of cousins.'

‘Did you know he died two days ago—Grandpa?' asked Maida.

‘No!' Lufa pulled a face of shock and melancholy. ‘That's too bad. Fine old fellow, so I've heard. Well, that's the way of things. Didn't wait for the funeral then?'

‘Everything was all arranged with you,' said Jackie, ‘and Maida's brother, Hof that is, thought we'd better stick to it. He drove us down from High Valley yesterday.'

At midday Lufa pulled in the lorry under an overhanging bluff of stone, saying, ‘There's a waterhole here. We can freshen up. You two want to wander off, it's down that way. I'll get a fire going, and we'll have a drink o' tea and some tucker.'

Maida said, ashamed, that they could have brought food from Duchess Bay; but Lufa had a tuckerbox, and cheerfully said he could feed a football team.

The two young people went down the way he pointed, and found amongst casuarinas a deep green pool. The soft mud at its brink was marked with paws of wallabies, possums, even the small handprints of lizards. Jackie took off his clothes and leapt in. Maida took off everything but her petticoat. She was very modest, and Jackie had never yet seen all her body at once. She said of the petticoat, ‘It'll dry on the bush afterwards. I'll put it on again before we leave after we've had our meal.'

The water was deep and cold, bubbling around their legs as they swam, welling up out of a crack in the earth.

Maida slicked back her wet hair, tied it with a ribbon from her bodice. She looked a child.

‘Mr Morgan's nice, isn't he?' she said. ‘He'll be good to work with. A change from my brothers.'

Jackie kissed her. ‘I feel different somehow, as though everything will turn out all right.'

Lufa had a fire crackling, a billy over it on a green branch. He was holding a frying-pan in which eggs and bacon danced.

‘I'll take care of that,' said Maida. ‘You go and have a dip. It's lovely.'

‘You got a real little bush girl here, eh, Jack?' said Lufa. ‘I'll just have a rinse. Be back before the billy boils.'

In early afternoon they came in sight of the Dovey. It was a wide, bankless river, dawdling over the flats, spreading out into complexes of lagoons and swamps dappled with auburn and sallow green. Fuzzy, fawn-coloured grassland marked the cleared pasture, but the larger part of the countryside was still under bush. Scrub already delustred by summer stood in strongholds at the water's edge. Long sandy islands lay here and there in the Dovey, the diverted current showing as giant wishbones in the stream.

‘Well, there she is,' said Lufa with pride. ‘She goes right out to the coast, and if you look where I'm pointing you'll see the lighthouse at her mouth.'

‘I do see!' said Maida. ‘Tall...painted white!'

‘Yep. That's the Nelly Morgan. Named for my mum, she was. That's where yours truly was born, in the middle of a storm, and a freighter straddled on the bar, and me dad trying to get the crew off on a flying-fox.'

‘Tell us about it,' said Jackie.

‘Nope. Some other time. I gotta concentrate on getting you people down to the river and settled in your shack before dark. Have to warn you, it ain't Buckingham Palace.'

He was a simple man; the world was small for him, but he was satisfied with it. Maida, sitting between him and Jackie, her legs disposed behind the gears, could see his flat leather cheek, marked with a thousand lines as fine as hairs. He gave off a good odour of sunshine, wood smoke, and a natural man smell of cleanliness and health. She gave a long sigh of contentment.

‘Tired, missus, eh?'

‘A bit,' she replied, ‘and you better call me Maida.'

‘Too right I will, if young Jack there don't mind. So you two only been married six months, eh?'

Jackie nudged Maida. ‘How did you know that, Lufa?' he asked.

‘Hof mentioned it when he wrote. He writes a good letter, the old Hof. Couldn't read it meself, course. Never got any schooling. But I took it into Keever's and Pop Keever read it to me. Keever's is one of our call-ins, Jack, for the cream, I mean.'

‘I'm looking forward to working with you,' said Jack. ‘When do you want me to start?'

Lufa slid a teasing glance sideways. ‘Tomorrow at sun-up too soon?'

‘No,' said Jack. ‘Ready any time.'

In westering sunlight the truck drew up beside a toppling line of wire, an overgrown foot track that led to a small humpy with a tin chimney. A tarpaulin was pulled over the roof and weighted with stones.

‘We sometimes get some big blows from the coast,' explained Lufa. ‘But she's watertight at the moment.'

He bumped open the unpainted door with one of their suitcases, marched in.

‘Phew, she's stale!' He opened a window by main force, propped it open with a sauce bottle lying near by.

‘Now, don't get your tails down, kids. You'll get it fixed up to your liking in no time. There's plenty wood out the back, and a quart of kerosene. I cleaned and filled the lamps yesterday. There's matches there.'

‘You've thought of everything. Thank you very much,' said Maida sincerely.

‘I done better than that,' said Lufa with delight. He threw open the musty meat-safe. ‘I got sugar, and tea, and some condensed, and bread, and some tins of sardines and stuff.'

‘You shouldn't have...oh, it'll be plenty!' said Maida. ‘And we'll have to fix you up for all of that very soon.'

‘Nope,' said Lufa. ‘A little welcome like. And tomorrow when me and Jack call in at Wininnie Bend down the river he can get any extra stores you need at the general store.'

He took them to the door. ‘See there now—behind them she-oaks, that's my shack. So if any bunyips come up outa the Dovey in the night, Jack, and scare the tripes outa Maida, you can give me a whistle and I'll bring up the rabbit rifle.'

They saw the truck grind away towards the she-oaks.

‘Oh, Jackie,' said Maida, ‘isn't he kind? I never met anyone like him.' She was silent a moment. ‘But then I don't know any men except Father and my brothers, and the pickers and all...and I was never allowed to have anything to do with them.'

Jackie, too, was impressed by Lufa's naturalness and neighbourliness. He said, ‘He reminds me of my dad. I reckon that if my dad had a son of his own, he'd have been like Lufa.'

The little cottage was cranky with age and weather. When Jackie held the lamp close to the wall, he saw that it was papered with old sheets of the
Bulletin
, most of them dated long before the War. The bed was of planks laid across a box-like base, the mattress stuffed with springy vines instead of kapok. Maida brought out their blankets, made them a nest.

‘We can fix things up, just like Lufa said. Curtains. I'll make a rag mat. We can Kalsomine the walls. It'd take on that paper...Now let's have our supper.'

After the meal Jackie went outside to fill the kerosene-tin bucket with water from the tank. A gush of mud and rust, then the water ran clearly but reluctantly. He left it to trickle, straightening up and trying to still himself inwardly so that the natural voices of this new countryside should make themselves heard.

He heard the gruffly breathing ocean far away, miles away for all he knew. Closer he heard night birds, solitarily commenting on the late moon. There was also the secret sound of heavy dew dripping like sweat or blood. To the east the beam of the lighthouse fanned rapidly across the sky.

Contentment filled Jackie, something quite new and calm. This would do. It was better than what he had had since he left Kingsland so few weeks before. The turmoil would be over for a time.

He took the brimming bucket and went inside. Maida was undressing for bed, looking vexed.

‘I left my petticoat!' she said. ‘On that bush where I spread it to dry.'

‘You won't need any petticoats here,' he said.

But she would not be comforted, and at last he said, ‘Lufa goes into Duchess Bay sometimes. We'll tell him to look for it.'

She said, ‘It was getting a bit tight, because of the baby; but I could have let it out. Well, never mind, perhaps it will still be there when Lufa goes back to the waterhole.'

They snuggled around each other, the baby between them. It was as if they shared the same air, the same life-warmth. They forgot where one's skin ended and the other began.

‘We're just like two possums,' said Jackie.

‘I never, never want to leave here,' said Maida. He felt her body tremble with her intensity, but he was too far gone in sleep to answer.

The place where they lived on the Dovey had no real name, but people round about called it Morgan's Clearing. There Lufa had lived since his mother died and his father went off into an old men's home down towards Sydney. The old man couldn't write, and Lufa couldn't read, so Lufa hadn't an idea in his head whether his father was still alive.

‘But I guess so,' he said. ‘Tough as old boots, like me.'

Lufa was a lone man, completely self-dependent, unselfconscious as a stone. He lived amongst the she-oaks in a ham-handed shack that had been built by the previous owner of the cream boat. In this dwelling everything was a fraction off true, with doors that would not open and windows that were reluctant to be shut. It was a frightful rats'-nest of old clothing, rusty tools, frying-pans full of congealed fat. Every so often even Lufa got sick of it, and he lived for a week or two on the cream boat, sleeping in a blanket on the flat deck, cooking on a primus, playing his fiddle, being himself.

Then, strengthened, he would return to the shack, jam the overflow of the rats'-nest into a sugar-sack, and dump it in the deepest part of the channel.

Lufa belonged to that enormous tidal river as a reed or a black swan might belong, and when the cyclic pulse of the sea sent its sheets of silk sliding above the slack current, sometimes to overlap the low, mangroved banks, Lufa felt revivified. The spraddling jetties, the raft-like islands of the delta complex, the farmhouses half-seen through river gums and casuarinas, were sufficient of the world for him. Though occasionally he had to go to Duchess Bay for petrol and stores, he hated it. The decaying hamlet made him uneasy; it was too big, too noisy.