Swords and Crowns and Rings (35 page)

‘I wonder if you'll keep on loving me?' Maida sometimes said as they lay together. At first this question had amazed Jackie. He himself had never thought of Maida's ceasing to love him. He was her husband, she was his wife, they liked being with each other, one day they would have children: that was all there was to it.

‘I'll try,' he replied playfully, and was surprised and irritated to see a look of fright in her eyes.

After that the question was often forced out of her by some profound anxiety. And although he knew her recognition of love was uncertain, her faith in its durability shrivelled at birth, and understood the reasons for these things, he grew bored with her need for constant reassurance, and would escape to Lufa's artless tranquillity with a feeling of relief.

Still, he understood her need for patience and gentleness. He wished that she might become pregnant again, and in the joyful and all-needed love of a child find faith in her own lovability.

In the fourth year of his marriage, Jackie received a letter from his stepfather that filled him with trepidation from the moment it arrived. For Jerry never wrote letters; that task was left to his wife, who at long intervals overflowed into written words, and sent Jackie and Maida all the news, in a letter which invariably began, ‘I take pen in hand to tell you...'

Jerry's letter, carefully reassuring, told Jackie that his mother hadn't been too clever for a long time now, something to do with the heart, the doctor said. No cause for alarm, but it would be tip-top if the young feller could take a few days off and come home and cheer her up a bit. After all, she was getting along in life.

Jackie was apprehensive. His mother had receded into the background of his life. He was content to know she and the Nun were well, doing a fair trade at the shop, putting away a trifle, all of which he had gathered from her letters, and having the fun of Cork whenever there was half a chance.

Maida was pregnant, blooming and tranquil, soothing him with her very appearance. She wanted him to see his mother.

‘Look here, now, there's most likely nothing to worry about. But there's not a reason in the world why you shouldn't go to Kingsland and stay with her a week or ten days. She'd be so pleased it might give her the right turn in her illness. Tomorrow, now, you talk it over with Lufa. We've a few pound in the bank, and we can well afford a holiday for you.'

‘Would you come, Maida?'

But she shook her head, smiling. ‘No, no, it's you she wants; and besides, I wouldn't like the travelling to upset the little one.'

Lufa raised no objection at all. He said he would get the help of one of the farmers, or even two of them, seeing that it would take more than one good man to replace Jackie.

‘Go on,' he said. ‘Get off, you little scut.'

Kingsland station looked scarcely different from what it had been when Jackie left it five years before.

‘We got the electricity on, though,' boasted the station porter as he welcomed Jackie. A few strangers stared at him covertly, but he ignored them. With a painful throb of pleasure he went forward to meet his stepfather.

‘You old bastard!'

They wrestled each other around a little, beaming.

Jackie was taken aback to see how much the Nun had aged. He was not so old, in his early forties perhaps, years younger than Jackie's mother. Yet he was the same old Nun, brown-paper face inscribed with its ironic smile, unhurrying voice, leg a little stiff, though he said it was great, better than it had been for months.

‘They're still digging for that broken bottle, or whatever it is,' he commented. ‘Twice I let them have a go at it last year, but no joy.'

‘Mum never mentioned it,' said Jackie.

‘Stale news.' The Nun shrugged. ‘Fact is, Jack, I come to prepare you for the way your mum looks. There's been a change since the dropsy set in, and she's that swollen up. It might give you a turn if you didn't expect it.'

‘It's really bad then?' asked Jackie, feeling cold.

‘It's the ticker,' said the Nun vaguely. ‘But she could go on for years, maybe. Seeing you will be a tonic.'

She had become a thick, breathless woman, her hair coarse and brindled, cherry cheeks shellacked by disease. A mole had grown on her chin, a little black felt bobble, and her tender mouth now had no teeth in it.

The shock of this change struck Jackie such a blow he could hardly keep his face and voice unmoved. To think that this could happen in four years! Her body was immense, jelly-like, her ankles lolling like cuffs over the shoes.

‘I tell...you no...lie,' she said. ‘My bloody legs...feel...as though...they've been...put in...upside-down.'

This was the way she spoke, as though her lungs could hold no more than a spoonful of air.

‘I'll be...better soon,' she said to Jackie, eating him with eyes black as ever, but lost in pouches of bruised flesh. ‘Not too...well today...excited...better soon.'

Jackie felt as if the air were full of dust, the familiar roof fallen in, the chimney dry and limey, crumbling. A wild prophetic imagination conjured up for him weeds on the hearthstone, a doorless cupboard full of nettles, his mother's chair fallen in the corner, pocked with dry rot.

‘The sky takes over in the end,' remarked the Nun.

Jackie looked at him in terror. Then he realised that his stepfather had said something different altogether—something about Maida.

‘She's expecting another baby,' he said. His mother was pleased. Her toy-soldier cheeks became more empurpled.

‘A real good girl,' she gasped. ‘You...been lucky...Good kind girl...stick to you.'

The Nun and he sat up late that night.

‘How are you going to manage, Dad,' asked Jackie, ‘when she gets worse?'

‘Oh, I got the district nurse coming in now to do what's necessary to keep her comfortable,' said Jerry. ‘And Mrs Early next door, she's real thoughtful. Do you remember Mrs Early, Jack, and the way you used to skedaddle away from her into the treehouse when she was after you to give you a skelp?'

Jackie nodded, though he had almost forgotten.

‘And I'm a handy bugger myself,' went on the Nun with some pride. ‘Did you notice her hair? I curled it meself this morning with a clothes peg.'

Suddenly he pulled his lips tight, turned his face away and said, ‘Another bad spell might send her off, the quack said. Ghost! I don't know what I'd do if that happened, I tell you straight.'

He pulled himself together. ‘Well, better bank the fire and we'll get off to bunk, eh? I fixed up your old room. Your mum will be asleep. Them pills the doc gives her are like bombs. But the effect don't last.'

Jackie could not sleep. He missed Maida in the bed, and the sound of the ravenous sea running up the Dovey and knocking on the islands. Kingsland's night noises did not belong to his life any more: the long bray of the night express fleeing to Queensland, the rhythmic thump from the gasworks. He heard coughs and murmurs from his parents' room, and a few moments later heard Jerry go downstairs with extravagant noiselessness.

Jackie smiled. Good old Jerry. The best day in their lives when he stepped over the shop's doorsill. He heard the small roar of a primus below, and knew that the Nun must be getting a hot drink for his wife.

He awoke before sunrise, his first thought being of Cushie. She had been at the back of his mind ever since he knew he was to come back to Kingsland. Over the years he had never asked about her or her family; he knew nothing. Was she married perhaps? Gone away? He let his thoughts linger on her, waiting for the sense of deprivation that had stayed with him for so long. But it had gone.

From where he lay he could see the corner of the treehouse, unpainted, sagging a little. He thought he might get up and climb along the branch, see what it looked like now, that old refuge and castle of his. But he didn't really want to reawaken memories of his childhood, good though it had been. That night, Armistice night, when he had kissed Cushie in the wet grass, and the mosquitoes had bitten them, and he had felt so strongly, so purely, the first intimations of true love. That a kid could feel that way! But he had, and so had Cushie. He couldn't doubt it for a moment.

He got up and dressed quickly, putting the blind higher so that he could look out at things starting to glisten, wet pebbles, grass blades, tiny puddles like larks' eyes. Something was making a thready sound under the big tree where he and Cushie used to play houses.

‘I won't think about it, it belongs to years ago,' he thought, but just the same his eyes turned to Moys' big house across the way. He knew at once that the Moys were no longer there. The untrimmed hedge, toppled by its own weight, the gate-post knocked out of alignment, the slate roof mended with a sheet of unpainted corrugated iron...all spoke of the absence of those superior, aloof people.

Jackie felt better at once. Had he been afraid or embarrassed to meet Cushie? He didn't know, and he wasn't going to work it out. He heard his stepfather going downstairs, and he followed him, ready to turn his mind to other things.

Yet over breakfast he found himself saying, ‘Moys' place over the way is looking run-down. Lose their money, did they?'

‘Gawd, no,' said Jerry, puffing the fire into flame. ‘Come into it, more likely. Thousands, I heard, when her old pa died. He was lousy with it. Burn up, you cow!' He fussily laid a little nest of chips over the wandering tongue of flame. ‘That'll get her going. Nah, it's a boarding-house now, the old house. Been so for years, ever since the old man, Mr Moy that is, kicked the bucket.'

‘I didn't know about that.'

‘Mum didn't mention it in her letters, eh?' said the Nun, clumsily rising. He gave his knee an accidental clout and winced.

‘Ticker went on him, I heard.'

Jackie remembered how Cushie worshipped her father; a stuck-up swine, he seemed to be in retrospect. He couldn't have been as old as all that, either. It would have hit Cushie hard.

He said indifferently, ‘And Cushie and her mother and the little kid, I forget her name, they still in Kingsland?'

‘No; gone away to Sydney. Old Moy died while Cushie was away at school, I think. Any old how, she never came back. And Mrs Moy and the young kiddy, they packed up and left like greased lightning after Mr Moy died. Get the cups and saucers out, will you, Jack?'

Jackie found it strange to be back. His life on the Dovey stood between him and Kingsland like a transparent but impassable curtain. The Jackie who had left the little town was a boy; the one who returned was a man. Yet he was uneasy. He was afraid that Kingsland would reassert itself.

His mother, sometimes for an hour or two able to speak without battling for breath, kept telling him what she called the news: how this one had died, that one had left the town in disgrace, how a marriage had turned out to be bigamous, who had gone bankrupt with gambling or the booze. And against his will Jackie found himself obsessively thinking about these people, once part of his life, and now blown away like thistledown to find random resting-places.

Tides of people, coming and going, in and out, and his mother soon to be amongst them.

‘Don't go! Don't go!' It was his heart shouting.

But she had let
him
go, and he well knew what he meant to her, more than Jerry, more than life. She had found the courage somewhere.

It was bad coming back to Kingsland, and worse leaving it. For miles Jackie could still feel the iron grasp of Jerry's hand through the train window.

‘Don't take it too hard, me old Jack,' he said. ‘I mean, if I have to wire you in a hurry. It's the wheel of life; we got to accept it.'

Jerry gave him a wink and a sideways nod of the head as the train pulled away. Jackie stared blindly into the brightening day where the trees bent into right angles and whipped upright and away, stock-ponds caught the sunrise like mirrors, and emus and kangaroos fled across endless paddocks. He was glad he was alone in the compartment.

He became aware that the train was stopping at a siding to water. Boys were running alongside it already with the day's papers, and lean-faced country women with baskets of fruit, hot scones, homemade cakes, were waiting beside the line.

One of them smiled through the window. ‘Lovely rock cakes, still hot from the oven! Like one, dear?'

As Jackie fished in his pocket for the threepence she said kindly, ‘Going back to school, sonny?'

‘Yes,' said Jackie. It seemed easiest.

Lufa and Maida met the service car at Duchess Bay. Pleased as he was to see them, Jackie was anxious for his wife.

‘Coming over that rough road! It can't have been good for you.'

Maida hugged him. ‘Lufa drove like a snail. I couldn't wait to see you. Besides, I wanted to see the doctor and arrange for my booking at the hospital and everything.'

‘The doctor! You're all right?'

‘Perfect.' She hugged him again. ‘And I bought some baby clothes. Wait till you see them!'

Lufa scratched his nose. ‘This going to be over soon, this Rudolph Valentino bit? Because I want to get home before dark.' He gave his slow smile. ‘Plenty room in the truck for canoodling, if you don't mind me being there.'

In bed that night, Maida said, ‘Must have been queer, seeing your old home again.'

‘I don't live there any more,' said Jackie. He took her in his arms. ‘I live wherever you are.'

As the summer months wore on, and the drought clenched on the country its fist of iron, Maida became gaunt, drooping with the heat. The river dwindled, dark amber with mud; dead fish convulsed, steamed, and stank on the sand-bars. At night there were unfamiliar sounds of battle on the banks as rabbits and other animals fought for water.

The shallow-draught cream boat moved sluggishly along the channel; Lufa and Jackie were often forced to lay planks along the drying mud-banks that separated them from the jetties, and manhandle the cans back to the boat. It was wickedly hard work even for fit men, and Jackie returned home each night saturated with fatigue.