Swords and Crowns and Rings (37 page)

She sat in the rocking chair, snivelling. ‘So soon after your father's death, too. And that woman of Hof's messing around in my kitchen. How'm I going to manage with a strange woman there? It breaks my heart to think of it. I done my best for you, Maida, things being as they were, and I been hoping that now that I need help you'd offer it and not make me beg for it.'

After a silence Maida said in terror, ‘What do you mean?'

‘I got no real place of my own now, Maida. You're my only daughter. It's up to you...'

‘You want to live with us—is that what you mean?'

Mrs Linz peeped up at Maida, whose face was dead white and set. ‘I'm sorry, but we can't manage that. You'll have to go back to High Valley. There's no reason why you can't get on with Hof's wife.'

Her voice trembled on the last sentence, and Mrs Linz knew she had her.

‘Go home, Mama,' said Maida. ‘Leave us alone. Jackie and me, we're happy. Leave us alone.'

When Jackie came in from work, a little later, he found both women in a high state of tension, Maida crying, the old woman with red spotting her face, eyes sunken in her head.

‘What's going on?' he said. He was exhausted, crimson-faced and grimy from the day. He took Maida's trembling hand and looked up at Mrs Linz, who faced him down with a glare compounded of defiance and excited triumph.

‘I won't have Maida badgered,' he said. ‘What have you been saying to her?'

‘Send her away, Jackie,' stammered Maida. ‘I told you it was the wrong thing to bring her here. Send her away now!'

She collapsed into a shaking heap. Her distress was so extreme that she made retching noises. Jackie was frightened and embarrassed.

‘You'd better leave me alone with her for a little, Aunt Eva,' he said.

But his mother-in-law, excited and insolent, was out of control. Babbling and sobbing, she rocked, ramming the rockers of the chair hard upon the floor, in a repetitive, irruptive punctuation of her speech.

‘Send me away! I wouldn't be the only one sent away if he knew. You wouldn't have sent me away a few years ago when there was nobody but me between you and disgrace.'

‘Mama,' cried Maida in a strange, croaking voice, ‘don't say any more.'

The child in the lean-to awoke and began to cry loudly, and the sound seemed to excite the grandmother further.

‘Just as well the other one died before he found out!'

Jackie slapped her across the cheek. She stopped babbling instantly and said almost demurely, ‘You'll be sorry for that, Jack. You loony fool, you were taken in pretty as pie, weren't you, back there at the orchard? You were just as green as Kurtie and Con said you'd be.'

There she stopped, half-aghast, and rose hurriedly, muttering something about attending to the child.

But Maida, seeing Jackie's face, and the understanding on it, sobbed, ‘Cruel old woman, you couldn't resist it, could you? You can't stand to see us happy in spite of everything.'

She suddenly rose from the floor like a swooping candle-flame, towering over her husband. Immensely tall he thought her in that moment, with a broken face and glittering eyes.

‘It would have been better if I'd killed myself then,' she said. ‘But I was afraid of dying. And –' she added almost to herself— ‘I liked you, I wanted to marry you. I love you now; but I liked you then, I truly did.'

Jackie's throat ached so much he couldn't speak. At last, with a strangled cough, he blurted out, ‘Who?'

‘Ellie.'

Jackie turned right round and walked to the door. The air was so dry he felt the hairs on his arms turning in their sockets.

‘Ellie,' he said, in a mild conversational voice that he did not even hear, so great was the roaring in his ears. Maida ran after him.

‘Don't you understand, Jackie?' she wept. ‘Before you came he was the one they teased, because of his foot. I was all he had, Jackie, I had to do something.'

‘That explains it, does it?'

‘It did for me,' said Maida. She looked bewildered, troubled. ‘It did then. I—don't know what else to say. I had to help him any way I could.'

Her voice sounded a long way off. Jackie looked away from her. In some way her tragic face infuriated him.

‘Let me get it straight,' he said, still conversationally. ‘Let me get it straight. You were pregnant when I came to High Valley, and I was set up to save Ellie from a charge of incest, was I? I suppose Kurt and that other bastard had a great time holding it over his head.'

‘Yes.' She added desperately, ‘But we have been happy, haven't we? And we have Carlie, your very own baby. Jackie, try to understand.'

‘Understand,' he said. ‘I don't think I'll ever understand anything again.'

Then he added, ‘But I do, in a way. Pity, that's what made you do it. Pity.'

He walked outside, under the trees, and sat down with his hands over his ears. The sun's last gilding on the topmost leaves flitted upwards through the blue, came to rest on high cirrus. Jackie looked vacantly at the mosquitoes spiralling over the mud-banks. To himself he said, once or twice, ‘Pity', to try to get his thoughts moving again; but nothing happened.

After a while he was aware that Maida stood a few feet away. She said, ‘Jackie, I'll go away if you like. I'll go away tomorrow and you need never hear of me again. But I have to take Carlie, because I'm feeding him and all. I don't want to go away but I will if you want me to.'

He shook his head, unable to speak. He shook it again, agitatedly.

Maida was silent. The mosquitoes whined about them, and a long time went by.

At last the old woman came to the door carrying the lamp.

‘Baby's sleeping nicely,' she said in a scared, ingratiating voice. ‘Shall I get the tea on, dear?'

Like an irresistible tide rage engulfed Jackie. It hung all around him for an endless moment in which he heard his heart gulp, his blood pump. It was like a breaker reaching up into the air, and he thought it would never fall. Then it suddenly exploded out of him. He was so helpless before it he felt that it spouted from his ears and nostrils. He heard himself shrieking curses at the old woman and her diabolical family; he felt himself jumping up and down like an ape, progressing towards her by stamping leaps.

Maida ran after him. Mrs Linz shrieked: ‘He's gone mad, he'll murder the lot of us!' and threw the lamp at him.

It hit a tree near the house, threw oil in a shower, and exploded. The fire leapt simultaneously into the dry grass and up the tree in a windy rush. It vaulted from bough to bough in a yellow flash, a sharp crackle following it like a tail.

‘Now see what you've done, you stupid old sod!' shouted Jackie, his frenetic rage dying on its feet and alarm taking its place. ‘Quick, Maida, run and get some sacks, anything, and help me beat it out. Aunt Eva, hurry over and fetch Lufa, get a move on!'

But Mrs Linz was petrified, her hands over her mouth.

Jackie seized a branch and began thrashing at the serpents of flame that glided with astonishing speed through the grass. He did not come from bushfire country; he had had no idea of the almost instantaneous combustion that takes place in dry hot air. Until now he had never seen a tree nodding and lashing until it shook from its hair fragmented masses of fire to sail about and settle on nearby bush. In twenty seconds, fires blazed in four or five places.

As Maida ran back with a sack and a doormat, Lufa lumbered up the track carrying buckets.

‘Seen the smoke. Cripes, you got a healthy one going there, Jack. Here, Maida, fill these, you and the old lady. We got to try to save the cottage. Keep throwing water on the walls.'

Maida ran back and forth. The river was so low she had to scrape the bucket along the gravel to get sufficient water. She sloshed it along the walls, and now and then over the men, whose shirts frequently caught alight from floating embers. Both were coughing and choking, eyes streaming.

‘Help me, Mama!' she kept calling to her mother. ‘You can take the other bucket.'

But Mrs Linz, white as death, could not move for fright.

The fire jumped into the tousle of bluegums beside the road; they heard it catch with a hiss, and then the trees turned into towers of tall flame.

‘My God, she's well away,' panted Lufa, flicking out a cinder that had alighted in Jack's hair. ‘Dunno if we can do any good, son. Still, you got to be in it to win it, so bash away.'

The smoke now churned all about them; as the evening drew on new blots of pink shone out, crawled and swelled in the under-bush, burst out with a roar. Further away crashing branches tossed out clouds of stars.

Out of the smoke dashed rabbits, wallabies; a tall kangaroo erupted from the darkness in an effortless twelve-foot jump, and they heard it splashing out into the river.

The men had retreated to the west side of the house. Sixty and seventy feet between it and the fire had been burned out.

‘A real good fire-break,' said Lufa. ‘We might do it yet, Jack. Long as the wind holds she'll be jake. Maida, just to be on the safe side, maybe you ought to get the young fella and your Mum down to the river, eh? And anything else you want to save if it comes to the worst.'

The man was unperturbed as ever. His broken teeth and bloodshot eyes smiled in a mask of soot. ‘Never say die, Jack.'

In the dark crimson light they began beating along the edge of the retreating fire. ‘What about your shack, Lufa?' said Jackie, half-strangled with smoke. ‘Hadn't you better get your stuff out?'

‘No sweat,' said Lufa. ‘Any old how I got nothing worth saving 'cept me fiddle, and blankets and that, and they're all on the cream boat. Nope, if the shack goes up all I'll lose will be the fleas.'

In the cottage Maida found her mother clutching the wide-eyed, astonished Carlie. The air was roastingly hot, and the child's face brightly pink. Mrs Linz was coughing and crying. During one of the spasms her denture flew out and shattered on the stove. This catastrophe seemed to bring her back to life and she cried, ‘Me plate, me plate! See what you made me do!'

Maida shook her. ‘Mama, listen. Take Carlie down to the river and put him in some safe place. Then come back and get your clothes, some food, the blankets, anything you can carry. Mama, did you hear?'

‘Yes,' gasped Mrs Linz. ‘Carlie down to the river. Blankets...'

‘Quick, then. The men think the house won't catch, but this is just in case. Do it now, Mama.'

The old woman was galvanised into life. Looking over her shoulder as she dashed outside again, Maida saw her wrapping a blanket about the child. She herself took her place beside the men and beat along the edge of the fire.

So they worked for another ten minutes with an urgency born of desperation. They could hear the fire chewing into the forested gullies, the gun-like reports of heat-cracked stones, the screaming of trapped animals. As far as Jackie could see, upstream and downstream, the trees waved flags of flame, or swung and bowed in black silhouette against a wine-coloured sky. Lufa watched the smoke uneasily.

‘I dunno, is she turning or not? What you think, Jack?'

All at once, it seemed, the smoke rolled over them in a cloud so dense, so massive that it obscured the fire and all they could see were mute twinklings under the roots of trees. Then a wild whipping wind blew towards the river, the fire snoring behind it, blowing out long fingers of flame that seized new areas of bush, dragging blazing boughs and twirling embers in its wake.

The roof of the cottage burst into flame. Fire from the ground climbed hand over hand up the west wall. They heard the window fall in, the one on the other side blow out before the heated air, and all, so it appeared, while they watched open-mouthed.

Maida screamed, ‘I've got to see if Ma took Carlie all right!'

She bounded over the smoking ground towards the door, with Jackie after her. She had scarcely gone through the door before the roof fell in, a sheet of iron coming down like a portcullis half across the door. Jackie wrenched at the hot iron, while Lufa sped around to the window. Fire reached out of it with a curled tip. Lufa pulled off his shirt, wrapped it around his face and head and several times rushed at the window but he could not get within six feet of it. The blast from within was like that of hot iron. He thought he could hear Maida screaming, but the noise was too great, a deafening roar. Then he realised that it was Jackie screaming. Shouting, cursing, Lufa rushed back to Jackie, who was still dragging at the iron.

‘It's no good, it's no good,' shouted Lufa, and he seized Jackie by the middle and one leg and dragged him away. The little man was like a madman. Lufa had to lie on him and subdue him by weight alone.

‘You can't help, Jack. You gotta listen. No point in killing yourself too. Think of the kid!'

Jackie collapsed under him, moaning. The enormous torchlight of the burning house illuminated his hands, puffing up like cooked meat, the skin already shrivelling on his scorched chest. Lufa stood there for a moment, his head down. Then he picked up Jackie.

‘We better get in the water, Jack. No use staying here.'

Jackie stirred, croaked, ‘Carlie. Maida's mother took him down to the river.'

‘Yeah, we'll find him. Don't you worry now, boy.'

He carried Jackie to a mud-bank. As the men approached, animals jumped off it in panic, paddled and scrabbled farther out into the stream.

‘You put them hands in the water, Jack; it might help the pain a bit. Stay here now. I'll go and find Carlie and the old lady.'

‘Maida, Maida,' he heard Jackie moaning as he turned back across the mud.

‘Maida,' echoed Lufa in his mind. When he was out of sight of the man on the mud-bank he stood for a while, his head hanging, his hands hanging, trying to gather himself.

‘I can't drop me bundle now. Gotta keep looking,' he said.