Swords and Crowns and Rings (36 page)

He was anxious about his wife.

‘Are you all right?' he asked over and over again.

‘Doctor said I'm fine,' she answered with a smile.

But she looked taut and anxious, and oftimes in the night he found her awake, silently crying.

‘Won't you tell me what's wrong? We're mates, aren't we?'

‘Oh, Jackie!' Fiercely she turned to him and kissed him. ‘Always, always.'

‘Then tell me the truth. You're afraid our baby might be like me?'

‘A little,' she said, after a moment. ‘Don't be hurt, Jackie. It's just that, if it happened that way, he mightn't be as brave as you. He mightn't be able to manage the way you have.' Then she said, ‘Now you're angry with me. Disappointed.'

‘No,' said Jackie. ‘My head's been full of it since you first told me you were carrying. But there's not much chance of it. When I was back home I read the books on dwarfism Mum got from the doctor long ago, and since then I haven't been worried. You put it out of your mind, Maida. Everything's going to be perfect.'

So he spoke to her, soothingly, like a father, stroking the hair already damp with sweat. The air shimmered in the window like burning water; the iron roof gave out kettle-drum cracks in the heat.

‘You didn't worry like this last time,' he said.

‘It never entered my head. We were such kids, silly as a tin of worms. And so many other things to worry about.'

Her spirits seemed to have lifted. She rose laboriously from their bed, coming back to kiss his forehead and say, ‘You're my little tiger. What would I have done without you, Jackie?'

The child was born without trouble in the Duchess Bay hospital, a long-limbed boy.

‘I'm afraid he'll top six foot,' said the doctor, pleased. ‘Be bossing the pair of you around in no time.'

Jackie and Maida called him Carl. He was a blue-eyed child of great vitality. Jackie could scarcely believe that he had called into being this magnificent creature, this jewel-coloured, completely new human.

Lufa Morgan inspected him with wonder. ‘Little beaut,' he said. ‘Gawd, you got the knack of it all right, Jack. What a little ripper! What a friggen peach!'

Jackie was hit by fatherhood as a man might be hit by a tidal wave. He was lifted off his feet, unresisting. He was swept away into dreams, plans, and an ungovernable protectiveness. He knew he would tear apart anyone who hurt, even threatened, Carlie. His nostrils dilated, his fists tightened at the very thought of it. Maida laughed at him.

‘Nobody will hurt him. He's got the look of luck in his little face.'

Maida was entranced with happiness. Her beauty returned.

‘My whole life's been leading up to this,' she said.

Jackie wrote to his mother: ‘Now I understand how you felt when I was born. Well, Mum, you did what you set out to do. I've got a job I enjoy, some good friends, the best wife in the world, and now Carlie, whom the doctor says will grow to more than six feet. I do thank God often, but most of all I thank you and Dad.'

Jerry wrote back of their joy in the grandchild: ‘Your mum is hanging on,' he said; ‘up and down, but she keeps her spirits. Times are not as good as they were. I don't know what the country is coming to. The meatworks are closed down, and I hear the jam factory in Ghinni is shortening staff. But something's better around the corner; we got to be hopeful.'

Jackie experienced the first six months of his son's life as a gift from heaven. Something had happened to him. All his life he had sensed that lightness, brightness existed in the corner of his eye, that sweet music breathed just outside the reach of his ear. Now he experienced these things. A passionate clarity informed his awareness of the world.

Yet the world was wicked and ugly during that half-year, the heat worsening, the stock starving. The earth shrank away from the surface, leaving rootless mats of dried grass and vegetation; rocks appeared where no rocks had been before, wreaths of gibbers, and long runnels of gravel ejected by the contracting soil.

The winter brought no rain. The pelicans wheeled over the dying river, the sun shining pink through fishless throat-pouches. At twilight the desolate note of the black swan made Maida shiver, as the birds flew high overhead to reedy bogs that still existed in sheltered mountain coombs.

When Carlie was five months old, just having dragged himself with shouts of glee to a sitting position, Maida received a letter from her mother. Her attitude towards her mother had always been ambivalent; in the first months of her marriage she had often been homesick for her, cried for her when the first child was born dead.

‘You don't know what she's had to put up with,' she said to Jackie, her words interspersed with long silences as though these memories were too hurtful to recall. ‘She's had a terrible life with Father. Terrible.'

Gradually Jackie had learnt that his intuitive feelings about his Aunt Eva during his sojourn at the High Valley orchard had been correct. From the day he married her Remus Linz had systematically humiliated and ill-treated her, because this was his way with all things in his power. Most of his sons had followed his lead, treating her contemptuously, not afraid to give her the flat of their hands if she was reluctant or stupid.

‘Hof was the only one to defend her,' said Maida. ‘But Father belted him within an inch of his life. Then Hof got too strong for Father, and he thrashed him.' Her eyes shone with honest pleasure at the memory. ‘Thrashed him! That's what made Pa go off to be a travelling blacksmith. But every time he came back he gave the rest of us a belting. To make up, I suppose.'

Her face softened. ‘And Ellie is good to Ma. Like a little faithful dog to her he is.'

During the years of Maida's absence, changes had occurred at the High Valley orchard. The drunk brother had been found drowned in the duckpond. Hof had married a neighbouring widow with a grown-up family, and had left the Linz property to work his wife's farm. The dark brother, after a quarrel with the fat brother, had flung out and gone to Sydney, and no one had heard of him for two years.

When early summer was on the Dovey country, Maida heard from her mother that Remus Linz had been killed in a brawl in a far-west township. His travelling forge, his horse and wagon, had been sold up to pay for his funeral.

‘Well, that's that.' Maida drew a long breath. She sat silent so long that Jackie said, ‘You can't feel anything for him?'

‘No,' said Maida. ‘When I was a kid I prayed every night that he'd die and burn in hell. But that was when I was a kid. Now I don't care whether he's dead or not. He's nothing. But there's something else, Jackie. Ma wants to get away for a while, come and stay with us, and see Carlie.'

Jackie's heart sank, but he replied cheerfully enough, ‘Well, it's no palace here, but we could make her comfortable.'

Maida put her hand on his. ‘I don't want her to come, Jackie.'

Jackie felt her tremble. ‘What's the matter, love?'

‘I just feel bad about her coming. I don't want her to come. We can make some excuse.'

‘It's only natural she'd want to see Carlie,' expostulated Jackie. ‘And what could she do to upset us? She's just a poor old woman who's had a hard life. She wasn't especially friendly to me when I was at the orchard, but I suppose she had things on her mind.'

Mrs Linz, five years away, seemed to Jackie to be an exhausted, impotent creature. He could hardly recall what she looked like.

‘I don't know why I don't want her here,' said Maida. After a little, she murmured, ‘I'm frightened, that's what it is.'

‘Of your mother!'

She looked at him pleadingly. ‘I'm frightened she'll come between us some way. Do some damage. Please, Jackie.'

Jackie thought she was unreasonable. He felt, too, a certain guilt about Mrs Linz. Though he had guessed she had every reason to be cringing and demoralised, he had detested and despised her. Besides, she was the Nun's sister; he wanted to do something for Jerry.

But it was a week before Maida would agree to her mother's coming to stay on the Dovey for four or five weeks. Even then she was tearful, reluctant.

‘You won't let her upset what we've got, Jackie? Oh, I suppose I'm being silly about it, but I'm scared. I can't explain it, but I am. I just want you and me and Carlie going on the way we are, that's all.'

‘How could anything change us?' said Jackie, kissing her. She had some secret way of knowing when he was likely to kiss her, and always contrived to be sitting or lying, so that he would not have to stand on tiptoe. Jackie could see that she thought he didn't notice her stratagem, only one of a gracious many she had devised to keep him from feeling small. So he kept her secret, and loved her the more for it.

Eva Linz had changed in the years since Jackie had seen her. Age had settled upon her like dust. Her hair was scanty, screwed up at the base of a meagre skull. Her neck and face were lined in an irregular mosaic, and she had frail little dried-up ears. From the small frame in its neat black dress came a voice that had diminished to a quack.

Mrs Linz set herself out to be sociable. She gushed over the baby and said that heat didn't bother her at all.

She lay in her bed that night deeply satisfied. First the death of Remus, at the thought of which a chuckle of delicious joy escaped her. So he would never be coming home again, never, never.

‘God rest his soul,' she thought: at the bottom of the sea, or a volcano, under a million tons of hot mud.

She thought lovingly of Ellie, left alone at the mercy of that woman who was now housekeeper at High Valley, for Hof had brought his wife home when his father died. But she'd given Ellie a few tips on how to manage her, the upstart.

As for the rest of the world, she was going to give it something to think about. Her life had left her with an obscure ill-will towards all things living. Her heart felt like a lump of tin. Now and then a faint scratching sound came from it, but that was all.

She had seen at once that Jackie and Maida were happy and at ease with each other, and this filled her with unexamined resentment. As the days went past, and her daughter recovered from her nervous stiffness and relaxed into the gently blooming appearance that was now natural to her, the resentment slowly turned to a profound jealousy.

Mrs Linz sat and watched Maida feed her child. In spite of everything the girl had suffered, the unspeakable days of her childhood, this was how she could look, and all because a stunted, ugly little beast of a man had married her.

‘So you're happy, dear?' commented the old woman.

Maida had flushed and turned her head, so that the pure flat plane of her cheek was all that her mother could see.

Knowing this, that the girl had found happiness, the old woman could not keep her hands off it. It was not that she hated Maida. Well she remembered when the infant girl was born, and she had wept with an objective compassion because this female child would no doubt grow up to have the same fearful life as she. Ah, yes, she had loved Maida then, and in a dark maternal way she loved her still.

But as a human being she bitterly envied her daughter's contentment, crying out in her heart: ‘Why did it happen to her and not to me? I never did anything to be punished for. I wasn't no more than fifteen when that swine Remus got to me and Father made him marry me. I never done nothing to deserve the dog's life I got.'

And so, in between looking after the baby, helping assiduously with the housework, reading her prayer-book, and being pretentiously friendly to Jackie, she poked and pried into the girl's life, insinuating, dropping hints and criticisms, only desisting when Maida began to cry.

‘But what are you crying for, dearie?' she would ask with a half-genuine concern. ‘What did I say?'

‘You know,' Maida replied, then lapsing into a long silence.

Over the cottage had fallen the most impalpable of grey shadows, the brightness dimmed, the contentment rendered paltry or fatuous. The child felt it, turning its face from its mother's breast, aware of her frightened heart. Jackie, returning to a house of silence and oppression, uneasily asked the reason.

‘I don't like Mama being here,' was all Maida replied.

‘But why, darling?'

‘She's jealous of us.'

But Jackie couldn't see it. For him love was generous and all-enveloping, sharing itself with the beholder as well as its possessor. He laughed and buried his face in her milky-smelling breasts, breathing her in like a garden.

‘She's a spoiler. She just is,' said an almost inaudible voice above his head. ‘She upsets me that much my milk's going off.'

As time went on a sense of mischief added itself to Mrs Linz's other simple but entangled emotions. To make Maida cry soothed her; to put Jackie at a disadvantage with innocent-sounding words was exciting. And he, who, since he left High Valley, had never felt his difference from other men as a reproach or shame, now began once again to be self-conscious about his lack of height and uneasily avoid standing next to Mrs Linz, lest she should say he was a little button, or ask could she reach something down from the shelf for him.

She would also lean over the child in his cot, pretending she did not know she was observed, and shake her head wistfully.

‘Ma!' said Maida, in a hard voice. ‘That's enough.'

The old woman was momentarily startled by the look on her daughter's face, but she swiftly recovered, saying placatingly, ‘I never meant you to see I was worried, love. But there, they do say boys always take after their mothers.'

‘Mama! I can see through you like a pane of glass! You ought to be ashamed, trying to spoil what Jackie and me have got.'

A thrill of adventure stirred Mrs Linz's heart, and her eyes sparkled.

‘You haven't got that much, then, my girl, if a few innocent remarks from your own mother can upset it. I don't know what's the matter with you, always taking me up wrong, reading things into what I say. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.'